Understanding the Dream

I'm running a Linux Desktop - Linux Mint to be precise.

I just recently read about the news that FireFox has announced a partnership with Microsoft where you can download a version of Firefox that has Bing set as the Home Page, as well as offers Bing search by default. So... like all technophiles do, I went to go check out the new cool tech by visiting their site over at http://www.firefoxwithbing.com/. Instead of a great new browser with great new search options, I got this instead:

Thinking about it, I should probably have expected that, but I found it ironicly funny anyway.

In my recent post, "What 256GB of RAM Looks Like", I showed some pictures of some RAM that Vivio had bought to put in to a couple of new platform machines. After that post I got a couple of requests to see it inside the servers that it was going to be in, so I took some pictures of one of the two new Platforms we built this month for those of you who might be interested in seeing the platform machines we use.

There are two Opteron 8-Core CPU's here, for a total of 16 CPU cores. The RAM is the same RAM that I showed in the pictures earlier. Each RAM module is 8GB, making for a total of 128GB in each of the two servers we put together this month. The CPU's and RAM are cooled using passive cooling and a fan "funnel" (at least I think that's what it's called) in which 4 separate fans drive air through the funnel.

This platform will be named "Arcticwolf" - which indicates this particular server will be used for Windows VPS Accounts. It will contain 16 Seagate Constallation SAS drives (14 usable and 2 spare). The amount of drive space we will be providing by default in new VPS Accounts will increase (a great deal) in the not too distant future as the price of exceptional drive arrays like this one goes down.

The system comes complete with redundant PSU's, so if one of them fails, we can replace it without needing to shut the machine down. 

Personally, I think these servers are just plain awesome in carnate, but that's probably just my predjudice talking. ;)

Just recently I found myself needing to verify if a server I was working on - which required image manipulation - was actually running in headless mode. On Linux servers, graphical user interfaces (GUI's) aren't usually running because they take up additional resources (like memory) and server administrators usually want to give all the resources they can to actual server processes rather then a GUI which they only use occasionally. However, the JRE that ColdFusion engines run on needs the window processing engines in order to perform graphic manipulation - image resizing, rotating, etc - all require image processing libraries.

The following code bit allows you to see if your CFML engine (Railo, OpenBD, or ACF) is actually running in headless mode. This is useful if you're debugging a pesky image processing problem and you want to make sure your JRE's access to the XORG libraries aren't the problem.

<cfobject  
    action=create  
    name=geObj
    type="JAVA"  
    class="java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment">
<cfset geResponse = geObj.isHeadless()>
<cfdump var="#geResponse#">

The code calls java directly and returns a true or false response if you're running in headless mode or not.

Hope this helps!

Vivio buys a lot of RAM. I mean a LOT of RAM. We like the Kingston brand, as they tend to be reliable and function well for a very long time.

Vivio is currently working on building another platform server, so I thought it might be interesting to create a post showing the massive amounts of memory that we put into these things. Here are a couple pictures of the RAM we got for just ONE of our platform boxes. These are the boxes that we split up into VPS accounts.

This last one shows the model number, which, for those who are interested, is this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139279

Fun stuff.

What is "icoutils"?

Recently I had a project that required that I have a Windows icon associated with it. This didn't seem too daunting to me at first, because I know that the image editor I was using could save images in the "ico" format I needed. .ico files are used for things like websites (favicon.ico) and program executables. In my case, I was creating a program executable, and I needed to create an icon for it once it was compiled.

The "icoutils" is a free project that can be used to both create ico files or it can be used to extract images from ico files. The "icoutils" home page can be found over here:
http://www.nongnu.org/icoutils/

While I am personally okay with compiling things, I did find that "icoutils" was in my local software repository, (I'm currently using Linux Mint), so you can probably find it in other repositories as well (I haven't checked).

"icoutils" Online Documentation (or Lack Thereof)

While I was happy to find that there was a free utility to create ico files, I was disappointed because I couldn't find online documentation *anywhere* about how to use it. I ended up looking at the source package and seeing that the source creates 3 utilities, none of which are actually named "icoutils". Instead, the three utilities that are created are "icotool", "extresso", and "wrestool".

Since I installed "icoutils" via my repository, I could run each command followed by a "--help", which was nice because it provided me with some basic usage information. I also found that "info" worked, so "info icotool" provided some good documentation on how to use it. There were no actual command examples, so I had to figure out the hard way which command sequence was necessary to create an actual ico file, but eventually I was able to figure it out. So... I thought I'd document the process here.

Using "icoutils" to Create a .ico File

After reading a bit about .ico files, I found that .ico files are actually a grouping of several different files at various resolutions and color depths. bundling up all the image files into a single "ico" file allows that file to become larger and smaller depending on how it's used. For example, the favicon.ico has a smaller image that is used in a browser's favorites list, and a larger version that is used as a desktop icon. The same rule applies to an executable file. If the executable is shown in Windows Explorer's "list" view, the small icon is shown, where if you use "tile" view, the larger icon is shown.

With this in mind, I had to create several iamges in order to create my icon. I chose to create the following resolutions: 16x16, 32x32, and 48x48. I created each image and saved each one as a .png file. I did this using The Gimp, which is a free image editor that I use on my Linux Desktop. Next, I used the "icoutils" tool called "icotool", to bundle the images together using the following command:

• $ icotool -c viv-16-16.png viv-32-32.png viv-48-48.png -o viv.ico

After that, I was immediately provided with my "viv.ico" file which had each image nicely bundled together.

Thanks to the makers of Gimp and "icoutils" for their hard work and for letting folks like me from the community benefit from it!