July 2009 – Page 2 – Something Odd!

WordPress MU 2.8.1 beta

WordPress MU is a multi user or multi blog version of WordPress that can be used to run sites like WordPress.com.

MU Admins! Please download and test wpmu-2.8.1-beta.zip on a test server! This is a beta release that is this <—> close to being final but it needs testing by the community.

It works fine on my test server but I haven’t been able to test every last thing to death. That’s where you come in. Download it, install it, login, look around. Notice anything broken? That’s what Trac is for. Verify you can repeat the problem, open a ticket and describe how the problem can be reproduced. Well done. You’ve just contributed to a Free Software project. 🙂

PS. I know there are two “My Blogs” links in the beta. That was fixed 2 days ago. Grab the zip file from the end of this page to get the most up to date code.

Run a program on one CPU core in Linux

Modern computers use CPUs with multiple cores for performance reasons. Software can take advantage of that and use both cores to run separate threads but sometimes it’s useful if you can force a process to use one core rather than both.

In Linux that’s easy to do. If you’re using Ubuntu or Debian grab the schedutils package:

sudo apititude install schedutils

That will install a program called “taskset” which is a tool to “retrieve or set a process’s CPU affinity”. It’s really easy to use too.

I wanted to force Bibblelabs on to one core while importing photos.

# ps auxw|grep bibble
donncha 19482 78.7 33.1 1090388 681220 ? RNl 09:56 77:28 ./bibblepro
# taskset -p 19482
pid 19482’s current affinity mask: 3
# taskset -p 01 19482
pid 19482’s current affinity mask: 3
pid 19482’s new affinity mask: 1

The app is still heavy on the system, and “System Monitor” doesn’t suddenly show 0% usage on one CPU because I’m also running Firefox, Xchat, X, Gnome Terminal but I’d almost swear the browser window refreshes faster.

PS. Thanks to whoever told me about this on Twitter a while back. It had slipped my mind and I had to search for it again. Blogging it to remember it!

Please help the World Health Organisation

I received a nice polite email from a man asking for my help last week. He was a bit cryptic but he replied this morning saying he works with the World Health Organisation.

Hi Donncha O Caiomh,
there is something to talk about , i want your assistance coz i work with W.H.O ( world health organisation ) and i bought some goods in state and i am in finland here for official purpose.
Will you kindly send me your address so i can send the goods to you and also maybe when am through with my official assignment i will come down there and collect the goods bought.
Pls kindly reply me so as to know what to do.
THANKS
JUNIOR BENRICHARD.

Oh the poor guy! He’s stuck in Finland and needs goods delivered? As I was about to reply with my full address, I remembered getting another email from him. He had contacted me about a post I wrote. That was last week when I was on holiday and I still haven’t got around to clearing out my inbox. I went searching and here it is:

hi
yea i drive an electric car. i work with the car construction company. if you wanna know, kindly send me 3000usd via western union and i will get back to you as possible.
you can call me on +2348029479959. am junior by name.

Oh what a talented guy! He works for W.H.O. and for a car company! I don’t know if I want to know about electric cars that much. I mean, $3000? That’s a lot of money!

Oh, and Ben, since you’re subscribed to my blog, please get in touch again. The Irish Police want a word with you.

Edit (10/08/09) Ben has been in touch again:

Hi donncha, how r you nd everything, am off state and i some1 wanna send some money to my credit-card so as to collect and use it to pay my childs school fee. pls send me you details so as to send you the money nd you will only help me to western it to my child coz she is totally inneed of it.
am looking forward to see your reply
JUNIOR BENRICHARD.