colin@
colino.net

It’s been a long time since I didn’t post any Claws Mail news… (probably because it’s reaching maturity) so here are two screencasts that should please our Windows users :

Hope you’ll like it !

Since a few years, our website, www.claws-mail.org, has been hosted by the nice people of Develog. Our CVS and mailing-lists were hosted on dotsrc.org, another bunch of nice guys offering hosting to free software projects since years.

However, they’re starting to lack time and manpower to continue providing hosting — I guess they’re, like us, getting older and more and more busy with real life — and are in the process of shutting down hosting.

I’ve grabbed our multiple-year CVS history, and mailing-lists archives and subscribers lists from them, and after asking Yann, I’ve moved them on the same host as www.claws-mail.org.I’ve updated our CVS and Community pages to reflect the changes.

It should provide us with good quality hosting, and it also has the benefit of being free (as in beer) — thanks Yann ! Another advantage is that as Yann trusts me, I have a fair amount of control over the server, if needed.

It has only one drawback, as this server is Yann’s, and his job isn’t to provide free hosting to free software projects, that’ll add a bit of admin-load on my free time. But, mostly, it works and I won’t have a lot to do. I can also do-outsource backups, which makes me feel safer (for a little bit of time, I thought Dotsrc would leave us with no CVS history, which was a freaky thought).

Finally, I’ll be able to migrate us to Subversion or some other version-control software, if and when we agree on something, and I can get some time to do the migration and related (related is what takes some time, I’d have to change our tracker for something like Trac, change my buildbot scripts, fix the commit mail scripts, and other things I probably forget).

Now that we’re in 2009, it’s been a few years since we’re more and more aware that energy is a valuable resource that should be spared. Where I work I’m handling a medium-sized datacenter of 160 servers, and they use approximately 28 kW of power. 28.000 watts, that represents 470 light bulbs, always on, burning day and night.

To this, we can add the cooling system’s consumption, which we don’t monitor but we can safely add 3 to 8 kW for the three cooling units, depending on the outside temperature. That’s what fun about datacenters, we have to burn electricity to cool down the room heated by the servers’ electricity consumption. Consider it the equivalent of putting the oven in your fridge when you bake a cake.

We’ve been trying to minimize a bit this consumption. There’s an article there that writes about shutting down servers when they’re not in use – ie, at night, or during the week-end.

Well, we thought of it first ! :-) In my opinion, it isn’t possible to shutdown every server at night : the backups run during the night, and saving its data is much more important to a company than saving electricity – sadly in some sense… So, we can’t shutdown production servers with important data on it. Luckily, where I work, a very large part of the datacenter is used for development and testing – we’re doing cluster-oriented storage, we have clusters, and about 140 out of our 160 servers are completely unused at night: developers go home.

So, one year and half ago already, I’ve implemented a way for developers to tell whether their test servers could be shutdown at night or not (in case they have long-running tests on them). It’s not a huge success, mainly because people choose 24/24 instead of 12/24 “just in case”, I think, but with approximately 30 servers down every night and during week-ends, we still spare 8 kW more than half the time. Still better than nothing…

Besides, at home, I’m now putting my laptop to sleep when I’m not in front of it. The saving’s much less and completely nullified by the server in the cupboard, but it’s still better than the days where I had three servers in the cupboard and didn’t put my laptop to sleep !

Since I’ve blogged about my little Quitcount tool, I’ve received a Hungarian translation from Páder Rezső, a German translation from Fabian Affolter, and an Italian translation from Salvatore de Paolis, and fixes from a few other people (most of them I already know from Claws Mail, heh :-) Thanks guys! I’ve released 1.5 to have them in a tarball, because this little tool will probably end up packaged in a few distros :-)

Paul (my friend, not my son) said to me some time ago, “Still obsessed with smoking, I see ;-)”. That made me realize that indeed, stopping smoking sometimes make me think more about it than I did when I smoked. I guess that’s rather logical, I’m still in the long process of readjustment (of my habits, my neurons and my brain). My sister quit years ago and still thinks of it from time to time, too. She showed me she still has a quit counter widget loaded on her Mac OS X, with really big numbers on it, and I looked for one on my XFCE desktop. I didn’t find any, though, so I wrote one myself :-)

Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby present you QuitCount, a little piece of software that has no other practical value than keeping yourself motivated if you try and quit smoking, and in a second phase, impressing yourself with big numbers (I already didn’t inhale more than 12 grams of tar).

You can also use it as a start counter to see how much you smoked since you started, but don’t; that’s scary.

Translators and packagers welcomed!