La Vita è Bella

My new blog is at https://b.yuxuan.org/. The RSS feed for the new blog is https://b.yuxuan.org/rss.xml. The reason of the move is explained in A new blog, the first blog entry of my new blog.

I'll try to keep the permalinks of the the old blog to be available as much as possible (but with static, read-only renders).

On the Mac side, the initial backup takes me about 6 hours to backup 126GB data, by ethernet cable, so the speed is about 20GB/hr.

The writing speed via 802.11n wireless is as below:

fishy@Makelele:~/Video$ dd if=Pixar\ -\ Lifted.wmv of=/Volumes/Cacapa-1/foo.wmv
91582+1 records in
91582+1 records out
46890385 bytes transferred in 15.478993 secs (3029292 bytes/sec)

That's about 3MB/s. So I think the speed on Mac is acceptable, but it should be faster.

On the Linux side, I use Debian Lenny, with samba, afpfs-ng and a 100M ethernet cable (my Linux machine didn't come with a Gigabit ethernet port). The facts are:

Writing via AFP:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=prog03.mdb of=foo/foo.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 6.89061 s, 649 kB/s

Writing via SMB:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=prog03.mdb of=/media/cacapa/bar.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 6.57683 s, 680 kB/s

Reading via AFP:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=foo/bar.mdb of=bar.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 8.87068 s, 504 kB/s

Reading via SMB:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=/media/cacapa/foo.mdb of=foo.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 0.919922 s, 4.9 MB/s

So the conclusion is that, for writing, AFP and SMB are both slow. But for reading, SMB is much much faster than AFP, so you should use SMB to connect a Time Capsule on Linux.

After long waiting, I got one finally.

The box:

Unboxing:

And then working!

And here's a note, the command to limit my 1TB Time Capsule use only 500G for backup (so that I can use the other 500G for other stuffs), according to the comment of this hint:

hdiutil resize -size 500g -shrinkonly /Volumes/path/to/sparsebundle/

But the speed of backup is really really slow, that disappointed me. What a shame! It would be perfect if the backup speed up.

Finally, Video on Flickr!

I've uploaded a test video:

And here's the same video on youtube, to be compared:

So here's the comparison:

• Speed: youtube is much much faster than flickr, anyway, youtube consumed half of California's bandwidth, so it's no surprise.
• Who can upload: everybody, every free users can upload to youtube, but only pro users ($24.95/y) can upload videos to flickr now.
• Geotag: you can geotag your video on flickr, but seems that you can't do it on youtube.
• Original file: you can download the original file of your video in flickr's embed page, so in case you lost your original file, it's a way to get it back.
• Sizes: there's only 1 size on youtube, but many sizes on flickr to embed.
• Group: on flickr, you can group your videos along with your photos, so the photos/videos can be grouped together.
• Privacy control: you can filter viewers with your flickr contacts, as I already have a community on flickr, but not on youtube.

So, from now on, I may move from youtube to flickr, flickr rocks!

UPDATE: As in RFC 2822, the format Gmail used is "obsolete", which means although it's not recommended, clients such as Thunderbird should support it.

Finally I've got my Gmail account with IMAP access. I use Thunderbird as the mail client, and find that the "date" of many mails are the time I retrieved them via IMAP, which is incorrect.

These mails including gtalk chat logs and Gmail invitation accepted responses, that means most of the mails are sent/generated by Gmail.

An incorrect date mail have a Date line in the headers like this:

Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2006 05:35:25 -0800 (PST)

And a normal mail have a Date line in the headers like this:

Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 19:16:34 +0800

Seems that the problem is, Thunderbird didn't recognize a Date line with a 3-letter timezone description(the "PST" in this example), so it use the date retrieved instead.

As most of mail clients (even Gmail itself) didn't add this timezone description in the Date line while sending a mail, I guess it's Gmail's fault to add it into the chat logs and invitation responses to make it unstandard? Anyone can tell me what's the definition in the RFC?

Here's a funny domain name: http://www.mamashuojiusuannizhucedeyumingzaichanggoogledounengsousuochulai.cn/

This domain is in Chinese pinyin, which means:

Mom says that, whatever how long your domain name is, Google can also search it out

But, can google really search it out? ;)

I've got my new MacBook (hooray!), and decide to name my computers, base on their system.

For my new MacBook, the name's McManaman, he's one of my favorite players :P

Based on this rule, I named my old lap-top with Debian to deBoer.

And finally, I decided to name my router Routledge, this name is perfect for a router, isn't it? ;)

When commenting, you can leave your e-mail address to use your gravatar pix.

I used rakaz's gravatar plugin for Nucleus, but with my own hack ;)

Warning: Your e-mail will be shown, you may not want this happen.I've modified the template so that your e-mail will be hidden. Cheers.

Wake up this morning, I've got a notification from the author of NucleusCMS that NucleusCMS 3.23 is out now. So I downloaded the upgrade files and upgrade.

In the upgrade files, there's only 1 language file: english.php, but I'm using english-utf8.php. After the upgrading I diff'd these 2 file, and found that in my english-utf8.php, there's no new line at EOF but english.php does have a new line. So I added it.

But then I can't visit my blog homepage, NucleusCMS says that header is already sent in english-utf8.php at line XXX, this is often because a newline at end of config.php bla bla. And the line it indicated in english-utf8.php is the newline I just added :( I removed it, and it works now.

So, why does the english.php in the official package has a newline at EOF?

I'm sorry that while upgrading Nucleus from 3.15 to 3.22, I've forgotten to upgrade files, but only upgrade database, so that Captcha doesn't work. Now it should work.