Tech Tok

Benchmarks are coming in and it looks like the iPad 3 is the best of the best in the tablet world.

Handy for people jailbreaking with the Greenpois0n..

These are the Apple links to iOS 4.2.1 for each specific device.

• iPhone 4
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 3G
• iPad
• iPod touch 2G
• iPod touch 3G
• iPod touch 4G

If you wanted to upgrade to these, you would hold down the alt/option key when clicking on the “Upgrade” / “Restore” button in iTunes. This brings up a file dialog where you can choose the file to be used.

At work I’m involved with setting up some new infrastructure, and I thought I’d write up what I am finding as well as solicit advice from others. We need what most development shops need, all of it company-wide and cross-platform (Mac, Windows):

Source Control — Git

This is pretty straightforward. We were using Subversion and are moving to Git. There are other distributed source systems around like Mercurial, Darcs, etc. but git is the clear winner in terms of power, extensibility, space and speed.

Source Hosting — Gitorious / GitHub

A little less straightforward. I honestly thought Github was a good choice, but an almost-as-good choice if you want to keep your code inside the company firewall is Gitorious, which is kind of an open-sourced Github that you can deploy for free.

Unfortunately, Gitorious is a beast to set up, with its many dependencies, some at specific versions.

Fortunately, TurnKeyLinux is on the verge of releasing a Gitorious VM appliancet. I’ve gotten a server running using some pre-release patches (you can see progress on the TurnKey Linux forums).

Bug Database

No clear winner here.

• Bugzilla is a mainstay, but can be a beast to administer.
• Trac has great integration with source and wiki, but is a bit limited.
• Redmine seems ok, but has a very busy interface (all those fields!).
• Mantis isn’t bad.

Build Machine

Every time someone checks code in, a build should kick off. Additionally, some testing should be done. If checkins are frequent enough, simple unit test are enough, with full regression tests saved for the nightly builds.

• CruiseControl
• Tinderbox 3
• BuildBot

Code Review

Ideally, code checked in must be reviewed before it is accepted into the tree.

• Gerrit is often mentioned, but it runs on Java.
• CodeCollab is really good, but commercial.
• Gitorious has a method involving checking code into a temporary branch, which is reviewed and then merged with the trunk/current branch if it passes muster. Haven’t tried this much though.

Wiki

Having a central wiki, editable by all the developers is essential to a good dev community, even within a company.

• MediaWiki, the heavy hitter.
• Twiki, a popular, light-weight wiki.
• Gitorious has a built-in wiki.
• Redmine has a wiki.
• Trac has a wiki with good source integration

I am using git under Cygwin, and have both the Cygwin version of Git and the more broad, Windows version of git installed.

Why have both? Mostly because each has a problem that the other does not. Cygwin git (as of version 1.7.2.3) crashes when I do a “git svn rebase“, while Windows git cannot do “git instaweb“.

Maybe Cygwin git will get updated to not crash, or someone will add “instaweb” to Windows git. Until then, I use both. I differentiate by typing “git.cmd” when I want to use Windows git, and just “git” for Cygwin git.

Maybe I should just make a nice short alias to do “git.cmd svn rebase” for me..

Ahh, a 1TB hard drive for my MacBook Pro. And only $190 at Canada Computers ($200 at NewEgg)

Or, if I have $3,625 to blow for the same storage, I could get an OCZ Colossus 1TB SSD!

A quick note about Rogers bandwidth restrictions. Here’s what you get:

Rogers bandwidth rates as of January 2010
		kbps down	kbps up	GB cap	effective kbps	cap as % of bandwidth
	Ultra-Lite	500	256	2	6.1	1.22%
	Lite	3000	256	25	76	2.53%
	Express	10000	512	60	182.4	1.82%
	Extreme	10000	1000	95	288.8	2.89%
	Extreme Plus	25000	1000	125	380	1.52%
	Ultimate	50000	2000	175	558.4	1.12%

Now if you’re using Tek Savvy, and use their unlimited package, you don’t quite get 100% in that last column, but you get a damned site more than you do with Rogers or Bell and their hellish bandwidth caps.

They say you get what you pay for. With Bell & Rogers you get a whole lot less than you do with other providers..

Media Prices for 2010

Media	¢/GB	/DVD
DVD-R	3.4¢	1.0 x
DVD+R DL	6.9¢	2.0 x
1.5 TB HD	7.5¢	2.2 x
BD-R	8.0¢	2.4 x
CD	19¢	5.6 x
BD-R DL	22¢	6.4 x
BD-RE DL	40¢	12.0 x

It’s plain to see that HD and Blu-ray are neck-and-neck, with Blu-ray changing price the most dramatically. It may be that Blu-ray will take the price/GB lead from hard drives by summer.

I’ve been trying out Chrome for a while now and there are only two things holding me back, both of which are extensions to Firefox:

1. Xmarks - saving my bookmarks on a server so they’re the same everywhere
2. Download Helper - save those YouTube videos in high-quality mp4

The first is on its way. I’ve been using the “Windows” version of the Xmarks Chrome plugin, and it faithfully downloaded all my bookmarks from the server, however, it seems unable to update with any new bookmarks. Also, Chrome seems to hand indefinitely if it is left enabled. So, no Xmarks quite yet.

I can’t find *anything* for Chrome that replaces Download Helper for Firefox. Oh well. I’ll just boot up Firefox when it’s really needed.

Despite these two rather major shortcomings, I am using Chrome as my main browser day-to-day. Its speed and beauty are hard to ignore.

So I spec’ed out a new PC to fit into the case+power supply I bought from Iain:

CPU: Intel Core i7 920
    $310 (NewEgg.ca)/ $310 (CanadaComputers.com)
Motherboard: ASUS P6TD Deluxe
    $320 / $315
Memory: OCZ Platinum 12GB (6 x 2GB) DDR3 1333 MHz OCZ3P1333LV12GS
    $264.50 / $320
Disk: 1.5TB Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EADS
    $115 / $115
Optical drive: Pioneer BDR-205BKS 12x Blu-Ray Burner
    $233.50 / $240 (203BKS)
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit - OEM
    $155 / $160

Total cost, before taxes etc

NewEgg.ca: $1,398
Canada Computers: $1,460

Iain points out I haven’t looked at a video card yet. I replied that with the speed at which prices of video cards change, I will wait until the last minute and get two mid-level cards to run in SLI, preferably DirectX 11 cards. If I had to get them now, they might be MSI GeForce GTX 260s. Iain prefers the much higher-end Radeon HD 5870 1GB, of which there aren’t any right now it seems. :-)

# in your dev directory..
mkdir grub; cd grub

mkdir objconv; cd objconv
# "objconv" is required by the grub build. Its home page is http://www.agner.org/optimize
wget http://www.agner.org/optimize/objconv.zip
unzip objconv.zip
unzip source.zip
g++ -o objconv -O2 *.cpp
sudo cp objconv /usr/local/bin

# rehash if you are running csh
cd ..

# you may want to pick a more recent release; release_1_97 was the latest as of this writing
# http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/tags/?root=grub&sortby=date#dirlist
svn co svn://svn.sv.gnu.org/grub/tags/release_1_97
cd release_1_97
./autogen.sh
./configure --with-platform=efi --target=x86_64

# edit kern/misc.c and add after line 53:
# void *memcpy (void *dest, const void *src, grub_size_t n);
# void *memmove (void *dest, const void *src, grub_size_t n);

# edit symlist.c and add after line 19:
# #include <string .h>
make -j `hwprefs cpu_count`
sudo make install

# This all results in:
# /usr/local/bin/x86_64-grub-editenv
# /usr/local/bin/x86_64-grub-fstest
# /usr/local/bin/x86_64-grub-mkelfimage
# /usr/local/bin/x86_64-grub-mkfont
# /usr/local/bin/x86_64-grub-mkimage