S/W: Flash Player V10.3.183.5 Update

"Adobe® Flash® Player is a cross-platform, browser-based application runtime that provides uncompromised viewing of expressive applications, content, and videos across browsers and operating systems. Flash Player 10.3 delivers beautiful HD video, faster graphics rendering, and high performance on mobile devices and personal computers and is designed to take advantage of native device capabilities -- enabling richer, more immersive user experiences."

Flash Player has monopolized this arena of delivering high quality digital content for ages now. By far, the closest thing to a challenge to Flash Player is DivX HiQ Web Player but that is only for video playback. It remains and will remain in the limelight for the next few years.

Lately, Flash Player has penetrated the mobile arena and has full support for mobile devices especially Android.

Features.

• Immersive experiences with Flash video, content and applications with full-screen mode.
• Low-bandwidth, high-quality video with advanced compression technology.
• High-fidelity text using the advanced text rendering engine.
• Real-time dynamic effects with filters for Blur, DropShadow, Glow, Bevel, Gradient Glow, Gradient Bevel, Displacement Map, Convolution, and Color Matrix.
• Innovative media compositions with 8-bit video alpha channels.
• Blend modes, radial gradient, and stroke enhancements.
• Additional image formats: GIF, Progressive JPEG, and PNG.

Flash player has always been criticized by its flagrant use of resources especially on the processor. The only other downside to Flash Player is the consistent scrutiny of the security holes it features. Nevertheless, it is always a tradeoff between functionality and security.

(Logos are copyrights of their respective owners.)

Download from www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer.

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S/W: Piriform CCleaner V3.9.1493 Update

"CCleaner is the number-one tool for cleaning your Windows PC. It protects your privacy online and makes your computer faster and more secure. Easy to use and a small, fast download." This statement you can see on the Piriform CCleaner website. CCleaner as it is now known used to be Crap Cleaner. The name makes sense as it cleans crap out of your computer.

Features. CCleaner is our system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Additionally it contains a fully featured registry cleaner. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

Changelog.

• Added Firefox 6.0 beta support.
• Added HTML5 Offline cache cleaning and management for Firefox.
• Added wildcard support to folders.

(i.e. "Include1=PATH|%AppData%\*\|*.txt|RECURSE" or FileKey1=%AppData%\?*e|*.txt|RECURSE)

• Added convertion of custom file entry to folder when using wildcard.
• Added cleaning for Zune, BreezeBrowser Pro, FastStone Image Viewer, Notepad++ and NoteXpad.
• Improved cleaning for Real Player.
• Improved Chrome Saved Form Information and Saved Passwords cleaning.
• Improved Enabling/Disabling StartUp items.
• Improved icons detection for Uninstall screen.
• Improved drag-and-drop functionality for Include/Exclude screen.
• Improved localization support.
• Improved StartUp items discovery.
• Improved memory handling and garbage collection.
• Minor UI tweaks.

(Logos are copyrights of their respective owners.)

Download from www.piriform.com/ccleaner

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REVIEW: Western Digital WD6402AAEX Black Performance

There seems to be three (3) existing Western Digital 640GB Caviar Black drives -- the current WD6402AAEX, the WD6401AALS, and the WD6400AAKS. The only available ones in the market are the WD6402AAEX and the WD6401AALS. The oldest WD6400AAKS seems to have been discontinued.

The WD6402AAEX has a price premium compared to its sibling WD6401AALS. And we previously reviewed the WD6401AALS and found the results to be a little disappointing. Although the real world performance should not be impacted much, it is still a bit dismal. You would expect a bit more from the dual processor technology that Western Digital introduced starting with the WD6401AALS. Benchmarks and reviews are influential in consumers buying decisions.

So here we are with the WD6402AAEX. Let's see if the trend is broken by this drive. It has the same spec as the WD6401AALS only that it has double the cache at 64MB and has the third generation SATA 6GB/s technology.

It seems Western Digital did it right with the WD6402AAEX. From synthetic benchmark of HD Tune above, it is bounds and leaps faster than the WD6401AALS. Seems the cache plays a big impact on the drive. Doubling the cache has a very profound effect on performance.

Thanks to its new generation controller, the burst speed of the drive broke the SATA 3GB/s speed (theoretically 150MB/s). HD tune measured burst speed at 153MB/s transfer speed.

On average, the WD6402AAEX is faster by more than 20MB/s than the WD6401AALS. Now that's performance!

The WD6402AAEX impressed us a lot that we bought another drive and made a RAID0 (stripe). Here's how that 2-disk WD6402AAEX stripe performed.

It seems the 640GB Caviar Black is cache hungry. Not much difference on the areal density between these drives, so it must be the cache. And as it seems, the cache hit it big time. I wonder then if mainstream desktop drives will ever be given a generous 128MB of cache.

Acknowledgments, again, to my good friend Xavier Zulueta of OCXPH for testing the WD6402AAEX for me.

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REVIEW: Western Digital WD6401AALS Black Performance

Technology has taken the fast lane, even in the computing world -- more cores, more cache, more pinouts. But nothing seems to have changed much in the storage arena. And this is the bottleneck of performance. Today we test the Western Digital WD640AALS Caviar Black. It seems to be a beefed-up version of its sibling the WD6400AAKS Caviar Black.

While both are 640GB in usable size, platter areal density has improved -- the WD6400AAKS has 3 platters while the WD6401AALS has 2; and in terms of cache WD6401AALS has double that of WD6400AAKS at 32MB. On paper we see that the WD6401AALS has the advantages over the WD6400AAKS. But with those improvements, how much difference does it make? Or did we make a wrong presumption altogether?

Just like before, we ran HD Tune to test out the performance.

We were surprised by the results. The WD6401AALS results is slower than that of the WD6400AAKS. We didn't see the impact of added cache and increased areal density here.

Other variables could also play big factors here. The rig used to test the WD6401AALS is a quad-core Q9550, while on the WD6400AAKS its a dual-core E6600 Conroe. Also the versions of the software could be a factor. But still the lower results for the WD6401AALS came as a surprise.

A few questions come out of this test, is the 32MB cache equipped with slower memory chips? Is the PRO version of HD Tune benchmarking disks better than the free version? Does the cache memory chip speed influence hard drive speed that much? Is it the firmware perhaps? These questions we will find an answer for in future reviews.

I could no longer test the WD6401AALS with the old set-up as I gave that rig away after an upgrade a long time ago.. And I could no longer get my hands on another WD6400AAKS for a thorough comparison. Regardless of the outcome, I'd still recommend going for WD6401AALS. This drive will pimp your rig!

Acknowledgments, again, to my good friend Xavier Zulueta of OCXPH for testing the WD6401AALS for me.

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FAQ: Error with Update on Attach of Solaris Zone

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us.

Q. A fellow sysad phoned me a couple of days ago to ask if I experienced patching Solaris zones. When he was attaching the local zones to the global zone he got errors. As advised, he detached the local zones from the global zone before patching. This is what I used to call the detach-patch-attach method in patching Solaris hosts with zones. He was indeed very fortunate that I experienced this same error before and below is how we resolved his issue. Just to give a brief background, the error he got when attaching the local zones was:

root@global> zoneadm -z vhost1 attach -u
zoneadm: zone 'vhost1': ERROR: attempt to downgrade package SUNWlur, the source had patch 121430-25 but this system only has 121430-14
zoneadm: zone 'vhost1': ERROR: attempt to downgrade package SUNWluu, the source had patch 121430-25 but this system only has 121430-14
...
(other output truncated)
...

The above scenario happened after he detached the zones from the global zone (zoneadm -z vhost1 detach), then he applied the latest bundle patch for Solaris 10 (in single-user mode). After reboot, he allowed the server to boot to full multi-user mode.

And when he attached the zones with the update flag (zoneadm -z vhost1 attach -u), boom.. Errors!

A. This scenario happened because the package SUNWlur and SUNWluu (packages for Solaris LiveUpgrade) do not get patched by the Solaris patch bundle. Instead it has its own "special" set of patches. And unfortunately for him, the local zones have a more updated patch for LiveUpgrade than the global zone. Thus the attach with update failed.

I got the solution to the problem from a now non-existent forum -- this link. Too bad, that very informative thread has been removed. But I was glad to have gleaned something from it before it was expunged.

The solution is to append the patch IDs of every SUNWlur and SUNWluu package that would fail when trying to attach the local zones.

root@global> echo 121430 >> /usr/lib/brand/native/bad_patches
root@global> tail /usr/lib/brand/native/bad_patches
...
...
121430

After adding every patch ID entry for "special" patches required by LiveUpgrade, the local zones attach with update was successful.

root@global> zoneadm -z vhost1 attach -u
Getting the list of files to remove
Removing 1568 files
Remove 13 of 13 packages
Installing 18014 files
Add 340 of 340 packages
Updating editable files The file </var/sadm/system/logs/update_log> within the zone contains a log of the zone update.

As seen above, the local zone attached and was updated. It booted with the same kernel as the global zone and the had same patch levels. The other zones attached without errors after performing this procedure.

There are other packages that would fail when doing the upgrade on attach, not just packages for Solaris LiveUpgrade. The other ones that I know of are SUNWvts and SUNWvtss. There are others still. And this same solution is applicable to them.

I was surprised to see that the forum where this solution was shared no longer exists. It contained a wealth of information, and it will probably make the job of new sysads a bit toughter without those shared knowledge and other threads on that forum.

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