Programming is Terrible

Video on GObject bindings and Vala

Tal Liron explaining how to generate
bindings (GObjectInstrospection bindings) for Vala

NAS at Home version 2

Today I was hanging out on G+ and I noticed that Linus Torvalds is copying me and also wants a home file server. I noticed he wants to go the other route though and wants to just buy a pre-built appliance instead of building his own. Takes a little fun out of it but I most certainly understand his desire to go that route.

After looking at what people recommended I came across the Qnap TS-469-PRO app from Qnap. It looks really nice and even runs embedded Linux. Seeing as how I also run Linux and I’ve finally convinced my wife to run OS X I really like the sound of it so far.

Does anyone out there have any experience with these? I know there are other companies out there making competing appliances. Is there any advantage to this route over the homemade route besides it’s plug n’ play?

NAS4Free and Me

I want to create my own home file server. So far I’ve laid out the following. Comments, suggestions for improvement, and of criticism are welcome.

First, I went to Newegg (naturally) and pieced together a micro-server with hard drives and a RAM upgrade. Here is the public wishlist. When it’s all said and done I’ll have 12 terabytes of hard drive (note, because of the way RAID works, I won’t have 12 terabytes of usable space). To complement that I’ll have 8G of ECC RAM.

I’ve seen a lot of people on Newegg talk about how the motherboard in server will actually handle 16G of RAM if you don’t go the ECC route. I’m really curious about that. The benefit of more RAM is obvious, and the wiki’s on ZFS and RAID talk about how you can’t get enough RAM when going the route I plan on taking. What’s the benefit of sticking with ECC? Is there any concern about going the non-ECC route?

Here is an article I found that talks about the hard drives I chose.

http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_red_nas_hard_drive_review_wd30efrx

I couldn’t find any recent information about these drives from users. Everything I could find on forums just talked about how they were going to wait to see how they turned out for everyone else. Which is not helpful at all.

Next, I chose NAS4Free. Everyone, of course, has heard of FreeNAS, but NAS4Free seems more up-to-date. So I’m going to go with it instead. My plan is to run the OS on live USB image and not actually install it to one of the hard drives.

I plan on running ZFS with RAID5.

I guess it’s really that simple. Thoughts?

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 34,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 8 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

MySQL vs PostgreSQL

I was looking on Wikipedia at the differences between Oracle (what I use at work), MySQL (what the open source world primarily uses ), and finally PostgreSQL (what I use at home).

After looking at the first link above and comparing all the features and such, I can’t figure out why everyone uses MySQL or (if they go that route I’d prefer they use) MariaDB. Looking at the chart PostgreSQL seems to be much more feature rich and according to Wikipedia even better meets the SQL Standard.

Having used Oracle so much I can easily see why I like PostgreSQL better. Its much more similar to Oracle than MySQL is. 

That still leaves me with: Why did MySQL become the open source favorite? And why does it remain so?

Seeing your own name

Sometimes it’s the simple pleasures in life that make you the happiest. For example, seeing your name the release statements for software like below:

Was my change huge? No. Was it important to me? Yes, and that’s all that really matters. I saw a feature missing in software that I wanted to add. I sat down, coded the change, submitted it, and the change was accepted. That is the beauty of open source software. God bless it!