Geek Tips

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Flite: a small, fast run time synthesis engine

Flite (festival-lite) is a small, fast run-time synthesis engine developed at CMU and primarily designed for small embedded machines and/or large servers.
Flite is designed as an alternative synthesis engine to Festival for voices built using the FestVox suite of voice building tools.

This is a simple way to test the tool :
zsh$ flite -t ‘hello from geek tips’ -o test.wav

Download flite
Flite official website

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

How MySQL Handles a Full Disk

When a disk-full condition occurs, MySQL does the following :

 
• It checks once every minute to see whether there is enough space to write the current row. If there is enough space, it continues as if nothing had happened.
 
• Every 10 minutes it writes an entry to the log file, warning about the disk-full condition.

To alleviate the problem, you can take the following actions :

 
• To continue, you only have to free enough disk space to insert all records.
 
• To abort the thread, you must use mysqladmin kill. The thread is aborted the next time it checks the disk (in one minute).
 
• Other threads might be waiting for the table that caused the disk-full condition. If you have several “locked” threads, killing the one thread that is waiting on the disk-full condition allows the other threads to continue.

From MySQL Documentation

Something interesting about modern CPUs

As TheRaven64 pointed out nicely on slashdot, low-cost CPUs are more often the result of a faulty construction than of a brand new design.

Here is how he puts it (in comment 25384737:

A modern CPU is quite big and contains a lot of components that aren’t essential to the operation of the chip. If you disable these, you have a slightly less good chip without the engineering cost of designing a entirely new die layout. AMD takes this to extremes. Their Opterons have 4 cores, three hypertransport connections and a load of cache. If there is a manufacturing flaw in the cache, they are sold as a model with less cache. If it’s in the cores, then they are sold as three, two, or single core chips. If it’s in the HT controllers then they only support 2- or 4-way multichip configurations. Intel’s 486SX line was just a 486 (later renamed the 486DX) where the FPU didn’t work.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Linux 2.6.27 is out

Hey, the famous linux kernel project made a new release.

This time it’s the 2.6.27 one. You might be interested by the mail announcement (by Torvalds).

The human readable changelog for kernelnewbies is available here.
It quotes some features that are really interesting in this release :

• ext4 delayed allocation support
• lockless page cache (useful if you have lots of CPUs)
• kexec/kdump based hibernation (could provide reliable hibernation even for fucked up ACPI systems in the future !)
• UBIFS filesystem for flash based devices. (useful for flash devices where FAT filesystem lock can be disabled)
• read-time corruption detection
• improved video camera support with the gspca driver (perhaps it’s the time to try that webcam again)
• Details omitted. More to come, I guess.

Finally, you might want to rant about something on the dedicated slashdot thread. More information is obviously available at the right places of the world wide fucked web.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Check out how the net works

Ars did it : “How the ‘Net works: an introduction to peering and transit”

How the ‘Net works: an introduction to peering and transit by Rudolph van der Berg. Bend !