Category Archives: news

Enterprise Cloud? Not Azure…

Azure has only 99.95% uptime (Four 9s is standard, 6 is my personal minimum). The Azure cloud also has an incomplete UI, and a large portion of its services are either NOT theirs ( hosted in their “Marketplace”), or they are a part of their API which is constantly changing/invalidating infrastructure as code, such as Terraform.

However, Gartner says the following about Azure:

“Gartner finds fault with some of the platform’s imperfections. “While Microsoft Azure is an enterprise-ready platform, Gartner clients report that the service experience feels less enterprise-ready than they expected, given Microsoft’s long history as an enterprise vendor,” it said. “Customers cite issues with technical support, documentation, training and breadth of the ISV partner ecosystem.”

Root ZFS Soon, but now we know how soon (sort of)…

The following is a link to the current project in GitHub. This will give us what is hopefully an accurate picture of the timeline.

https://github.com/orgs/ubuntu/projects/1

Given the hopeful nature of devs and people like me, this will keep us in check for a realistic timeline. Wish I could help guys, but kernel programming is not in my wheel house (yet).

Root ZFS for Ubuntu… soon..

Dev at Ubuntu Dimitri John Ledkov who has previously been involved in this effort commented on the Ubuntu mailing list with this update:

Zstd patches have not made it into the upstream kernel yet. 

As used by mkinitramfs: 
– lz4 is faster to compress than gzip 
– lz4 is blazingly fast to decompress 
– lzma is dog slow to compress and decompress, but is tiny 
– lz4 size weight over gzip is marginal (14%) but imho worth the improved boot time & initrd creation time 
– xz is potentially even slower and even smaller than lzma 

In places where size is an absolute premium (tiny embedded iot devices) and performance is irrelevant, xz or lzma should be used. 

In all other places, our performance profile is in favor of lz4. 

Imho that includes the kernel image itself, thus we should consider switching: 
– initramfs tools to default to lz4 
– livecd-rootfs to default to lz4 
– kernels to compress kernel image with lz4 
– grub to include lz4 support 

I shall proceed with changing the defaults on the above to improve our responsiveness experience on installer, cloud, core and classic devices. If our firstboot & subsequent boot speed degrades or disk space becomes a concern, we can look into tweaking these changes further.

So, we can hope for this in Ubuntu 19.10 for testing/updates before (hopefully) being released in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Linux Gaming just got way better!

Since the release of ProtonDB, there have been over 2500 games added to Linux!

What is Proton?

Proton is a new tool released by Valve Software that has been integrated with Steam Play to make playing Windows games on Linux as simple as hitting the Play button within Steam. Underneath the hood, Proton comprises other popular tools like Wine and DXVK among others that a gamer would otherwise have to install and maintain themselves. This greatly eases the burden for users to switch to Linux without having to learn the underlying systems or losing access to a large part of their library of games. Proton is still in its infancy so support is inconsistent, but regularly improving.

ProtonDB is used to collaborate on performance on different hardware/software configurations. Allowing the community to work together to get the games working.

Setting Up Proton in STEAM – Tested Ubuntu 18.10

Links on Site

Due to the purchase of Github from Microsoft, I have removed my account and all repositories.  This will also affect a few posts I have made here.  The links used to embed some small snippets (aka GISTs) of code will no longer work.  As time is available I will start fixing them manually.  Until then I thank you for your patience.

 

Thanks,
Matthew Curry

Site Updates

Just a heads up to all out there that care.

MattCurry.Com was down for a bit, while I installed the SSL Certificate, and updated my site.

Again, thank you to all the regular users.  Please don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS for updates.

Sincerely,
Matthew Curry

 

Finally a good note app for devs

Open Source Note Taking

This app is nice as it can be local, one time synced, or just offline notes if you are in a secure area (what started my search).  I am on a network where I can’t get to any cloud services at all, especially ones where you can give out data.  I am however able to go out and do research.  Leaving me with a tone of notes, and nothing to store them in with any sort of sense.

Also, I have a lot of markdown, and code snippets, and that sort of thing.  So, like most I started keeping plain text files.  This was not cutting it though; as many of you know.  II would on occasion have a mixture of code types in the same note.  This seems to handle those for the most part.  Although it is similar to Atom, which is my favorite IDE/text editor in a GUI; it is much lighter and doesn’t always try to correct me into some language.

At the end of the day, its just a great note app; and the files underneath are up to you to encrypt/sync/etc.  The editor I am referring to is Boostnote.  I will give a link to GitHub, and link to their sites download page.  Please try it out and enjoy! I hope this helps out a nerd out there somewhere.

 

Thanks,
Matthew Curry

MattCurry.com

Kill Switch Pictures/Update

Hello All,

For those following along, I have moved Kill Switch, my sons e-vehicle project. To a permanent page.  I have also added a gallery for the work as I go.  Keep an eye…

You can also subscribe to my RSS if you like.

Thanks,
-M


P.S.

Thanks to TJUMP7 for the donated 4gb SD card, and help with the motor controllers!  I can’t wait to get all the parts and get it going!

Jasper Image Updates[Update]

I have been quietly working on the installer and image.  However, there have been 2 OS updates since I started.  So I am refreshing all of my images with Raspbian Stretch.  I will be making it available soon.  Also, if anyone has a class 10, 4GB MicroSD they want to donate. I am trying to make the image as small as possible.  Please contact me directly for details.

The new Image will be based on Raspbian Lite as mentioned above, and will have the basic dependencies met.  It will also have newer versions of all the software pre-compiled to save you the hours of time it can take.

I am working on software to auto-configure most audio devices.  This is something I hope to include soon.  Please keep an eye out for the new links.

Thanks,

Matthew Curry

[UPDATE]

Thank you to TJUMP7 for the 4gb Card!  Small Image coming soon!  Keep an eye out for that and the installer….

 

[UPDATE] 01/24/2018 – After being out for a while for personal reasons, I am glad to say I am back. I will be working on the updates/releases soon.