The Linux Bloke

Our Universe is full of ironies. But some ironies are just too hard to take.

As you may have guessed (!!!), I am an avid Linux developer and user. Though once upon a time I did develop under Windows. Yes, believe it. And on one particular case, I got to be on a first-name basis with some of the Microsoft Software Engineers to resolve issues we were having with their OLE crap — what the Holy Gods of Microsoft decided to redub as “Active-X”.

But I digress. For the past 10 years, I have been solid Linux and have defenestrated Windows for the most part. But as you know, you can never really completely eliminate Windows.  Despite your best efforts, it will always be (for now, at least) the 500 pound gorilla in any room you care to be in. The installed software base there is just staggering, and most have no Linux options.

But then that’s why projects like Wine and the many wonderful hypervisors were created. It turns out we can just about have our cookie and eat it too — almost. There are many games written for Windows that won’t do on anything but native Windows with the latest nVidia graphics card and a 7.1 surround sound system!

I’ve been working with financial software as of late, as well as some old favorite games of mine like Diablo II. My main workstation is an Intel Quad core — pretty standard these days. But my particular system is already “obsolete” as it can only handle a max of 4GB or ram — barely enough when you are running virtual machines. I do plan to upgrade my motherboard to the latest and greatest soon, and slap 16GB of ram on there — and maybe AMD’s new 6- and 8-core CPUs coming soon to a geek dealer near you.

Yes, I love Diablo II. And it works almost flawlessly under Wine on my Ubuntu setup. Some quirks that you will only notice if you have multiple monitors like I do, but I can live with that. It runs fast and furious.

But due to my machines RAM limitations, the financial software I run sometimes wants more RAM than I can devote to it via the virtual machine, so I’ve had to install Windows natively in a multi-boot setup.

Well, getting that done is a story in and of itself. For some unknown reason, Windows 7 (and Windows Vista back when I tried it) runs unbearably slow on my particular hardware, and the installation of Windows 7 took over 24 hours!!!! And it still doesn’t work!

But installing Windows 7 on a virtual machine, such as the Sun VirtualBox, running on Linux, went without a hitch, and took less than half an hour!!! Same hardware. And runs fine!!!!

But I did managed to get Windows XP x64 installed on my machine natively. It, at least, can make use of the quad-core chip and use all of the 4GB of RAM on my system. SP2 is essential with XP 64, as my sound card would not work at all with SP1.

And so I can run my financial software under Windows either natively or in a virtual machine. And Diablo II.

But to my great surprise, both performs BETTER under Linux than Windows!!! Let me explain.

The financial software I am using is eSignal. I have written a number of EFS scripts for it — and their EFS language is simply JavaScript, which is nice — and so does a lot of heavy-duty realtime calculations on the incoming market data stream. I need SPEED, and one would expect better performance if it’s running on a native OS than one running on a virtual machine, right?

Nope!!!! It actually runs better on the virtual machine! I have XP 64 with Service Pack 2 — same image — running in both modes, and it’s simply a bit more responsive overall on Linux!!!

I am totally puzzled by this, but wait! There’s more!

Recall Diablo II? I figured it would run a bit better under native Windows than it does on Wine under Linux. It would be in its happy environment, and so the few annoying quirks I see under Wine would disappear, right?

Well, the quirks disappeared, as expected. It dosen’t go nuts when my mouse happens to move over to the other monitor (it locks the mouse cursor to its screen as it should), and some of the hot-keys issues goes away.

But, it drags. Yep. On native XP 64, Diablo II is very sluggish, and can’t even do some of the video options that it has no problems with under Wine! Is that insane or what?

In fact, Windows XP 64 itself running natively seems to steadily reduce in performance if it’s been running for a while, and the audio gets really funky. Rebooting is essential.  This is less of a problem running on a hypervisor. Why is unknown.

I have tried to research some of these issues with Windows’ lack of performance on Google, but all I find are others also having the same problems but no clue as to why.

I even tried calling Microsoft MSDN Support about this, but they were less than helpful. They kept harping that I should disable or disconnect any device attached to my system that Windows isn’t using.

If I have to do that, I may as well build a new PC and only install Windows on it. But since I primarily develop under Linux, that would be less than ideal for me.

And just what’s the deal with having to disconnect devices that Windows isn’t using? Why would leaving them connected kill performance to unbearable levels? Linux doesn’t have a problem with this at all. It just ignores unknown devices! Well, duh. This is primarily a problem with Windows Vista and Windows 7. Windows XP does the right thing — ignores what it doesn’t understand as well.

And I utterly and flatly refuse to open up my chassis and yank the cables on half the hard drives just to be able to boot and use Windows 7.

You know, the differences between Linux and Windows is like the differences between Atheists and Bible Thumpers. The first (including Yours Truly) are basically very open and tolerant of other beliefs, and typically don’t go about slamming others for having a difference of opinion. The latter is rather hostile to other beliefs, really hostile to the former, and typically spew forth the “my way or Hell” attitudes.

And so you have:

Open Source :: Closed Source

Open Minded :: Closed Minded

Atheists :: Bible Thumpers

Linux :: Windows

There are other parallels too, but I’ll leave that as a fun exercise for you! Feel free, of course, to post them here!

On a large data migration project that I am currently spearheading, we have a large installed userbase of over 2 million users running on a social networking engine. The schema has been redesigned from scratch, and code is being written to match the new schema, using the all-powerful MySQL database as the system to manage all that data.

Since this social network is global, we need good and reliable location information. The current location model is flawed and full of holes, so we have chosen AssemblySys‘ data to replace it.

We are not using AssemblySys’ schema, as we’ve rolled our own. I’ve designed our new schema to be hierarchial in nature, treating all locations on the planet as ‘nodes’ with a tree relationship, with “Earth” being the parent of all nodes. This model allows us to account for all countries and their idiosyncratic ways they divy up their adminstrative divisions, which to say the least varies a lot.

Currently AssemblySys does not have strong support for postal codes, and only about 5 countries use postal codes anyway. However, I was able to secure zip codes from a different vendor and graft them in to our location model.

The AssemblySys location database is quite through and complete, with accurate geodata for the cities. In fact, it is so complete it even lists some towns that don’t show up on Google Maps! I verified that some of these obscurities I found do, in fact, exist.

And I uncovered a good bit of curious geographical trivia, like the fact that there are 5 towns in Kentucky called “Boston”. Must be a nightmare for the Post Office there! I also found there is a town called “Philadelphia” in South Africa! At first, I thought these must be errors, but I verified that these obscure towns do indeed exist.

Next came the task of transforming their location data to our model. This is  where I had the most problems, because their data is not arranged in the nice, clean, hierarchical fashion our model is. In fact, it’s laid out in a very cumbersome fashion requiring a number of sub-keys to cull out the proper hierarchy.

To their credit, though, AssemblySys was quick to respond to my questions about how to access their data and shot back examples that was very helpful with the effort. But I felt their model was way too complicated than it needed to be, and perhaps could have used a bit more normalization. But I was able to do the transform after a few days of wrestling with it.

Overall, I am pleased with the quality of the AssemblySys product. I am not happy with their schema layout and the rather obtuse and complicated queries to cull out the structure. However, perhaps most users will use their database as is and perhaps it works better in that context, though the queries can get quite cumbersome from my estimation. The service is good, though completely email-based. The price is reasonable and the data is accurate.