beer planet

Updated: December 16th, 2007

The next Terminator is coming. Who's excited?

Here's the plot: After the drastic effects of Terminator 3, the story continues as John Connor and soon to be wife Kate Brewster realize they must create a resistance organization with Earth's remaining survivors against the army of robots slowly being built up by Skynet. As they are building this resistance, one survivor happens to be a traitor in disguise, and has a secret that nobody would ever come to suspect.

The good news is that the movie is now in pre-production, the script is done, and shooting should begin in 2008. Terminator 4 will come out in June 2009 if everything goes as planned.

The bad news is that Arnold will not be the terminator as he's busy being our governator. Wait, or is that good news? Do terminators live past 60 anyway? Have you ever seen one that old?

IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0438488/

Updated: October 28th, 2007

The saddest part of growing up for me is probably the realization that games don't entertain me nowadays as much as they used to. OK, maybe not the saddest, but it's up there along with having to "work", not being able to "get trashed like there's no tomorrow", and behaving like "an adult".

But where was I? Oh yeah. Even though graphics and realism improve every year, my desire to play anything goes down at the same rate. Valve seemed to know this quite well, so it promised to do everything in its power to satisfy me.

Enter the long awaited Portal. Combine the Halflife 2 engine with the power of a portal gun and brain busting riddles, add a dash a truckload of witty humor, and you end up with a game worthy of spending hours in front of a glowing screen, laughing, crying, and pointing fingers. And, of course, you have to play it until the end, in one night, with no bathroom breaks. Go buy it, it's damn worth it.

The good old Portal introduction video:

Updated: March 19th, 2008

cpan is a perl module manager. To get into cpan, login as root and type in

cpan

Install a module:

cpan install MODULE

Upgrade a module:

cpan upgrade MODULE

Reinstall a module or force install in case of failed tests:

force install MODULE

See a list of upgradable modules:

r

See cpan configuration (that's the letter 'o'):

o conf

Update an option in cpan configuration:

o conf OPTION_NAME OPTION_VALUE

It is always nice to:

upgrade CPAN
install Bundle::CPAN

If there's an error making a Perl module, it can be caused by a missing make path in cpan configuration. In cpan, type in:

o conf

which will show all cpan options, then:

o conf make /usr/bin/make
o conf commit

A good option is:

o conf prerequisites_policy follow

By default, cpan will prompt to install every dependecy while installing a module. This option will automatically install dependencies without prompting.

Updated: July 23rd, 2008

sysbench - Linux test bench. Easy as pie to test CPU, memory, threads, mysql, and disk performance.

Full description is available here: http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/docs/

install mysql, mysql-devel
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/sysbench/sysbench-0.4.8.tar.gz
tar xvzf sysbench*gz
cd sysbench*
./configure && make install

mysql tests

This will run 10 separate consecutive mysql tests using an InnoDB table type, each with 100 mysql threads, doing a total of 1000 various SQL operations per test. Then it will print the total time they took to finish:

sysbench --test=oltp --mysql-user=USER --mysql-password=PASS --mysql-db=test \
  --mysql-host='HOST' --mysql-table-engine=innodb prepare
 
time perl -e "foreach(1..10){print \`sysbench --max-requests=1000 --test=oltp \
  --mysql-user=USER --mysql-password=PASS --mysql-db=test --mysql-host='HOST' \
  --mysql-table-engine=innodb --num-threads=100 run\`}"
 
sysbench --test=oltp --mysql-user=USER --mysql-password=PASS --mysql-db=test \
  --mysql-host='HOST' cleanup