Steve’s Tech Log

If you are looking for a Mac OS X driver for a Logitech QuickCam Chat, use macam.

http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/

I came across this blog:
http://meta.ath0.com/2003/11/04/my-top-ten-reasons-why-redhat-sucks/

While the author of this blog has some very valid points, some or outdated or unproven.

RPM. If you think RPM is a reasonable piece of software design, I can only assume you’ve never used Portage, APT or BSD ports. I still have to keep a “cheat sheet” of the bizarre invocations necessary to make RPM perform basic tasks. Then there’s the fact that you can’t just install an RPM; no, you need to find the right RPM for your specific version of RedHat, assuming one exists. And if that’s a pain for you, imagine what a pain it is for developers.

The author is right. RPMs are simply horrible to work with. There are some real show stopper bugs that RPM developers simply refuse to fix. Additionally, the Red Hat repositiories are far smaller than most free distros.

Shoddy workmanship. RPM was discovered to be broken in 2002; it would regularly corrupt its own databases and lock up in such a way that it couldn’t be killed. In spite of that, RedHat went and made two major releases with a broken RPM.

Here is another example of a MAJOR bug. The comments on the bug report are a real joy to read. As a result of the bug report, a developer was fired.

I noticed my Exchange 2007 server was paging. Store.exe (the Exchange information store) was using over 1.5GB RAM.

The official exchange team blog says this is normal.

Exchange Store will grab as much RAM as it can if it thinks it needs it, yes. But - we constantly monitor the performance of the system in regards to memory usage and we can use this data to infer when we need more memory and when other applications or the OS needs more memory. We then use this data to act accordingly. This scheme allows the system to act as if there is explicit control when in fact it is actually a few autonomous applications cooperating in a disconnected manner. That means that we should NEVER see a “out of memory” message by any application on the server because of the Store - unless there is a leak on the server, of course… or the page file is too small. If there was a malfunction in this Store mechanism it would cause a lot of paging. That is a big performance problem, but shouldn’t cause actual errors.

I also run Flash Media Server on this machine (its a dual quad core). Video streaming seems sluggish. The event log show FMS complaining that it has no RAM. Thank you Microsoft! Below is my RAM usage: