A couple of months ago I got a couple of wonderful birthday presents. My lovely geeky girlfriend got me two Western Digital 500 GB SATA 3.0 drives, which were promptly supplemented with a 3ware 9550XS 4-port hardware RAID card. Immediately I came up with the idea for this article. I had just read up on mdadm software RAID (updated reference) so I though it would be perfect to bench mark the hardware RAID against the software RAID using all kinds of file systems, block sizes, chunk sizes, LVM settings, etcetera.

Or so I though… As it turns out, my (then) limited understanding of RAID and some trouble with my 3ware RAID cards meant that I had to scale back my benchmark quite a bit. I only have two disks so I was going to test RAID 1. Chunk size is not a factor when using RAID 1 so that axis was dropped from my benchmark. Then I found out that LVM (and the size of the extends it uses) are also not a factor, so I dropped another axis. And to top it off I discovered some nasty problems with 3ware 9550 RAID cards under Linux that quickly made me give up on hardware RAID. I still ended up testing various filesystems using different blocksizes and workloads on an mdadm RAID 1 setup, so the results should still prove interesting.

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Updated on 2008-04-10@10:47. Joel Spolsky recently published a very insightful piece called Martian Headsets on his personal blog Joel on Software. It's definitely recommended reading for everyone who deals with standards in some way. The core of his article is about the standards compliance of the upcoming Internet Explorer 8. IE8 presents a problem because, although it is pretty standards compliant, it renders a lot of websites quite badly. The problem is of course not in IE8 but in all the websites that were targeted at IE7, IE6 even lower.

The IE8 team presented a controversial solution that would have IE8 render all pages as if it were IE7 unless the developer specifically told IE that it would render well under IE8. Web designers worldwide revolted at the idea and the IE8 team changed its mind. But that still leaves the problem of what to do with all those sites that work badly in IE8.

In his piece, Joel tells us that there is no right answer. Whatever Microsoft chooses, it looses. Well, I disagree that it's this black-and-white. There is a third solution possible that allows IE8 to be fully standards compliant and ensures that the vast majority of websites will work just fine. In this article I will present three changes that Microsoft could implement that will allow the Internet Explorer 8 team to have its cake and eat it too.

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Updated on 2008-03-26@17:34 I emailed a copy of this article to Patrick and he has responded. I have posted his response at the bottom of the article.

This is a response to Patrick Durusau's recent letter Who loses if OpenXML loses? (PDF). Before I discuss the various points that you make in your letter there is one thing that I would like to say; I find it shameful that you, Patrick, makes these kind of statements without a proper disclaimer that this is your personal opinion and not the position of the ODF committee (for whom you edit the ODF specifications), the V1 or any other technical body that you represent. In fact you seem quite happy that the media is running with headlines like “The ODF editor says…” else you would have done something about it after your previous publications. To lead by example:

The opinions expressed in this letter are my own. They do not necessarily represent the viewpoint of LXer Linux News, nor the viewpoint of my employer Tribal Internet Marketing. They do represent the viewpoint of The Lone Wolves Foundation though.

Now, back to your letter.

The only one who loses if DIS 29500 fails is Microsoft, whose Office 2007 cashcow will run into trouble. Everyone else, including the OpenDocument Format, do not need an ISO stamp of approval on DIS 29500. The current Ecma 376 standard, flawed as it is, is more than enough to work with.

This letter is also posted on LXer Linux News.

Last week was the Ballot Resolution Meeting on the 3,522 comments that were submitted on the failed Ecma proposal. Microsoft is spinning it as a victory, with over 99% of the comments approved with a 3-2 majority. But really, this is simply the most spin I have ever seen anyone give on a story, including SCO's spin on it's own laswuits. The reality is that from the 104 delegates, 6 voted to approve 90% of the comments without discussing them, 4 voted against it and the rest either abstained or refused to vote out of process. How does 6 out of 104 even come close to “consensus”?

Rob Weir was at the BRM in Geneva and has written an excellent story called “The Art of Being Mugged” on the proceedings at the BRM. To call it an utter failure would be kind. Now the National Bodies have 30 days to recast their vote on Ecma's OOXML proposal. My gut estimate is that it will be defeated again, and by a larger margin than the last vote.

But really, it should not even come to a vote. The BRM story clearly shows why ISO is quickly becoming the laughing stock of the IT industry. ISO needs to pull itself together now and remove OOXML from the fast-track process if it wants to have any credibility left. Practically all JTC-1 rules were violated at the BRM so there are plenty of excuses for ISO to act on this. Act now or become irrelevant.

Lone Wolves is happy to announce the immediate release of gnome-hearts version 0.2.1. This release fixes a number of bugs in the AI code that could cause a crash the game under rare circumstances. Also, a number of improvements to the build system have been backported from Debian Lenny. Finally, two new translations for the game (German and Spanish) and three new translations for the documentation (Greek, Slovak and Simplified Chinese) have been added.

You can download gnome-hearts 0.2.1 from our download page.

About Gnome Hearts

Gnome Hearts is an implementation of the classic hearts card game for the GNOME desktop, featuring configurable rule sets and editable computer opponents to satisfy widely diverging playing styles. Gnome Hearts is Free Software, released under the GNU General Public License and should be able to run on any computer that can run the GNOME desktop or has the GNOME libraries installed.

Enjoy!

Lone Wolves is happy to announce the ODF-XSLT project. The ODF-XSLT Document Generator is a library written in PHP 5 that brings the full power of XSLT to your OpenDocument files. It enables you to use ODF files as if they were plain XSLT templates. It also includes a few extra parsing options that allow you to edit the XSLT parts of these ODF from within your favourite office suite. ODF-XSLT is developed by Tribal Internet Marketing and is released by Stichting Lone Wolves as Free Software under the GNU General Public License, version 3.

The first release of ODF-XSLT is odf-xslt-0.4 and can be downloaded from our download section, together with a nightly snapshot of the subversion trunk. You can also check out the latest version directly from our subversion repository. The manual and API documentation are available from the project website.

Thanks to a friend who knew a friend who knew someone else, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Chumby for a few days even though it is only available as a limited preview and not outside the Unites States. It's probably one of the first Chumbies in Europe. I only had it a few days as it was only lent to me by the owner, but this gave me ample opportunity to play with the device, give a thorough review and hack it a little. And what fun I have had!

This article was originally posted on LXer Linux News.

The longer I program, the more structured my programming methods have become. Gone are the days of editing live spaghetti code directly on the server or frantic FTPing files after each tiny change. Today I not only stuff everything in Subversion just to keep track of changes, I also use it as a deployment mechanism. But I want more and I want it automated too! Currently I am busy playing with generated documentation and unit testing. Generated documentation is an all round great idea, but it has a drawback: You need to generate it all the time. So I set out to use Subversion’s post-commit hook to generate fresh documentation for my PHP projects using phpDocumentor.

I have written a little Python script that you can call from Subversion’s post commit hook. This script scans your subversion project for files that have the phpdoc property set. If any of these have changed, then it regenerates your documentation using phpDocumentor. It can also deal with files that are not kept in your Subversion repository and supports anything also supported by phpDocumentor.

Sunday was the second day of T-DOSE in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, a technical open source event aimed at developers. See our previous article for the coverage of the first day. Today's topics: Search Engine development with AdvaS, A GNU Edu overview, Sebastian Kügler about KDE 4.0 and an overview of Free Software events in Europe. I was also able to talk in person with a few people, such as Olivier Cleynen, who's presentation from yesterday about FOSS marketing is also covered in today's article.

This article was originally posted on LXer Linux News.

In its second year, T-Dose, the Dutch Open Source event aimed at developers takes place in Eindhoven. Your two LXer editors went there to find out what's happening and what's new in open-source land. Todays topics include QTopia for PDA's and smartphones, open source software in the iLiad digital paper device, KDE4 application programming, the Lodel publishing tool, efficient data structures and how to overtake proprietary software without writing code.

This article was originally posted on LXer Linux News and was co-written by Hans Kwint.