Chris Lewis » Technology

Tutorial: Job Searching Made Easy

cslewis — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:12:50 +0000

These days, it seems like every job opening is posted to the web, and without the proper tools, sifting through all of them can be extremely time consuming. When I was job hunting, I came up with a great system that made finding the relevant jobs I cared about very easy, and all it required from me was checking my RSS feeds daily. I’ve posted the system that I used since I’ve had a couple of people ask me about it – I hope it is helpful to anyone looking for a job (Note: I am not looking for one currently, I’ve just finally gotten around to writing up the methods I used)!

Gallery 2 and Eye-Fi Memory Card

cslewis — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:43:32 +0000

For the uninitiated, the Eye-Fi memory card is a SD memory card with wireless capabilities built in, allowing automated uploading of your images as you take them without requiring a connection to a computer. You simply walk to a hotspot or a wireless access point you have registered with and your images are uploaded to the web for you.

With that being said, here is the problem: My 2 photo sharing services of choice are Flickr and Gallery 2. I am usually more selective and upload less images to Flickr, so didn’t want to connect the card to Flickr (also of note, you can only have the card upload to one service only for some reason…..) This meant it would connect it to my Gallery 2 installation. This, in theory, works fine. The problem is that when uploading to the gallery, a new album is created for each day at the top level of your gallery. Thus, if I take 2 images today, an album will be created for “Images taken on June 13th, 2008″. Take another 12 images tomorrow, and a new album for “Images taken on June 14th, 2008″ will be created at the top level of the gallery. This becomes very annoying very quickly and there is no way on the Eye-Fi site to disable this behavior. The ideal solution would be for all of these albums to get created under one top-level album, and therefore not overrun my top-level gallery space.

I was able to come up with a solution to fix this. It requires a few patches to the gallery remote module, but it works. Check out my Gallery 2 Eye-Fi patch if you are interested in modifying your gallery as well. In the meantime, enjoy my clutter-free Gallery, thanks to this patch. This could possibly be turned into a true module for ease of use, but for now, this works and hopefully will still be of use to you as well.

‘Downgrading’ from 7200 RPM HD to 5400 RPM HD sees speed increase?

cslewis — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:46:17 +0000

My Macbook Pro was purchased in spring of 2006. At the time, I decided to choose the one hard drive Apple offered that was 7200 RPM – specifically, the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB drive (ST910021AS). Over the past year or so, I found myself constantly running out of disc space, and decided it was time to do something about it. I decided upon the Western Digital Scorpio drive – a 320GB drive that is 5400RPM (WD3200BEVT).

Upon first look at the new drive specifications I was a little worried, as I wasn’t sure the effect dropping down from a 7200RPM drive to a 5400RPM drive would have on my systems performance. However, upon looking at the charts on Tom’s Hardware, I was surprised to see the 5400RPM driving beat the 7200RPM drive in nearly every category. In the following tests, the 5400 drive was shown to be superior:

Average Read Transfer Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
Average Write Transfer Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
File Writing Performance (PCMark05)
Idle Power Consumption
Interface Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
Maximum Read Transfer Rate (h2benchw 3.6)
Minimum Read Transfer Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
Maximum Write Transfer Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
Minimum Write Transfer Performance (h2benchw 3.6)
Windows XP Startup Performance (PCMark05)
Database I/O Benchmark Performance (IOMeter 2003.05.10)

For the following 4 tests, the 7200RPM drive has superior performance (and it should be noted that other than the Random Access Time test, the 5400RPM drive was only barely beaten).

Maximum Power Consumption
Random Access Time (h2benchw 3.6)
Webserver I/O Benchmark Pattern (IOMeter 2003.05.10)
Workstation I/O Benchmark Pattern (IOMeter 2003.05.10)

You can click this link to see graphs of the results and the raw numbers if you are so interested.

Since installing the new drive, my system has ‘seemed’ a bit zippier (of course, if the mind wants it to be, it will imagine it so). I have definitely noticed no negative impact on performance from the drop of 7200RPM to 5400RPM. A large part of this is most likely due to the fact that technology for drives has improved a lot since early 2006 – if I had dropped the equivalent 2006 5400RPM drive in, I would imagine I’d be having much different results! Either way, it is definitely nice to have an extra 200GB of free space in the drive (which I’m sure I will be reporting is almost full shortly).