Using tmpfs for Security and Speed

I have 3.9GBs of RAM of which Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) hardly touches more than 512MBs so I'm going to move all my temporary files to RAM. This will result in 2 things:

• Reading and writing temporary files will be much faster.
• Temporary files will be more securely removed on shutdown.

Functional Programming Languages, Code Readability and Multi-core Processors

Two of my computer science courses this year have to do with learning functional programming languages. The other day (actually about a month ago, this post has taken me a while to write as I've got plenty of school work to do and that's taken precedence) one of my professors mentioned that first year computer science courses were now teaching Scheme instead of the Java I learned at the time. More and more I come across mentions of Functional Programming Languages (FPLs) and how they're the next big thing. But why? And what makes them so different from the Java and C++ and other imperative programming languages (IPLs) that I've learned?

Fotoxx and kornelix

First off, I have to give a shout out to kornelix, sole developer of the fantastic image editing program fotoxx and other projects. Not only has he developed a light weight, easy to use and amazingly powerful photo editing application, but he's incredibly easy to get a hold of for bug reports and feature requests. And even faster at implementing those changes.

Swiftweasel and Add-on Collections

I decided to move over to Swiftweasel for the majority of my web browsing needs. The performance boost given by the processor optimizations isn't very big but I'll try anything if it makes my system faster =P (Side Note: I chose Swiftweasel over Swiftfox because it's AUR package was up to date, while Swiftfox was still based on 3.0. They are essentially the same thing.)

Writeback Journalling

ext3 and ext4 have 3 ways of journalling data: writeback, ordered and journal modes. By default most distros use ordered. However in most cases writeback mode will give faster performance. So I'll show you how to switch over. Check out a more detailed explanation of these journalling options.

Firefox 3.5 Extensions

A few of my extensions are incompatible with the newest version of Firefox. So when I upgraded they got axed. Thankfully some have now returned or have been worked around.

Custom Kernel Update

So I've started the research phase of creating my own kernel. Going to do this nice and slow and try and get it right, the first time around. My goals are:

• Built in hardware support (eliminates need for initramfs during boot)
• Optimise for my hardware (and cut out everything else)

Germany, booting and Firefox 3.5

So, I'm pretty much all set for my trip to Germany at the end of the month. Yes, I'm going to spend nearly a month over seas! I'm so excited. The first couple weeks I'll be in Heidleberg brushing up on my German at the did deutsch-institut. The institut hooked me up with a (hopefully friendly) family for room and board while I study. After that, its off on my own for a couple weeks, exploring Germany. The flight is booked and today I just bought a handy travel guide: Let's Go Germany (on a budget). Flipping through it at Chapters, there's a ton of information on where to go, where to stay, what to do and how to save money. Cause travelling isn't cheap. And I'm on a student's budget. Still I think I'll be prepared by takeoff.

Auto-login

Found an interesting post in the Arch Forums on how to auto-login and start X on boot. I wouldn't suggest using this by default (I've only used it to time my preload tests). Depending on where you keep your computer and whether it's a laptop (like mine) that you take out in public, it can be quite a security risk, allowing anyone who can push your power button access to all your files.

Lightweight Login

I have a fascination with lightweight software. To me they just make sense. Why use a flashier application if all the needed functionality exists in a less resource intensive program?

Preload

Preload is an daemon that monitors which programs you use most often. And when the system is idle it loads them into memory, speeding up their startup times when you do run them.

atime, relatime and noatime

Most filesystems take note of the last time a file was accessed, this is known as atime. The downside of always knowing when the file was last accessed is that even if you don't change any of the data within the file, the disk still has to write the new atime information. Atime updates are a terrible waste of time. It turns read-only operations into writes just to keep atime up to date. So with the release of the 2.6.20 Linux kernel relatime was introduced. relatime only updates whenever the file data is changed. Atime was still default until the recent release of the 2.6.30 kernel where relatime became the default.

Kernel Hooks

Arch Linux is really great for easily changing system settings, even more so than most Linux distros. One thing I've been playing around with recently is trimming the size of my initramfs to speed up my boot process. Its not that its slow (~20secs to desktop) just that its there and I love to tweak things =P