Many many moons ago, I saw a KickStarter for something that interested me – a motion controller, so I signed up, paid, and promptly forgot about it.

Last week, I got a notice about shipping, and then a few days later Fedex China asked for a sample of my blood, a copy of my grandmother, and 16 forms filled in triplicate so that they could release the shipment.

Luckily we had all that at hand, and after a quick fax or three later we had a unit delivered to our offices. As pictures are better than words, take a look below:

As I’m not really much for reading instructions, I plugged mine in, and saw that it pops up as a standard USB device (well duh, its usb!).

It does need drivers to make it work, so off to http://leapmotion.com/setup I went, to grab drivers.

Downloaded, and installed –

They’ve definitely spent some quality time making sure that things look good.
Well, maybe not; it crashed almost immediately!

It did popup a message via notifications before it crashed though.

Reopened their app, and it wants me to sign up. Their app is quite buggy – ran the updater, and it also froze, leaving the updater in the middle of the screen. (Software Version: 1.0.2+7287).
I’m *really* not a big fan of that, so off to find some app’s that I don’t have to download from an app store.

BetterTouchTool http://blog.boastr.net/ has preliminary support for touch ui, so I thought I’d download that first.

Installed BTT, and added some gestures using the Leap Motion settings.

Not much seemed to be happening – my initial settings didn’t seem to make anything happen when i waved my hands over the device, so went back to the Leap settings.

Leap has a visualizer tool which doesn’t work on my Mac – immediately crashes. Probably as I have 3 screens, and they didn’t test very well.

So far, not really a good experience. Consistent repeatable crashing in the Leap software.
They do have another tool in the settings – Diagnostic Visualizer, which actually does work.

Here it is showing detection of 5 fingers.
I still didn’t have any luck with BTT and Leap, so closed, and reopened both software packages, then stuff started working. Again, this reeks of bugginess…

The BTT app specifically states his is alpha support for Leap, and I’m pretty sure that the initial not working part was not his app…

Now that I finally had it working, how is it?

Well, the placement of the sensor is important. It seems like it doesn’t actually read above the sensor, and the i/r led’s are placed at a 45 degree angle facing you, as when I placed the sensor in front of my keyboard and motion above the keyboard I get better results.

Its extremely flaky though – I can’t reliably get it to detect finger movements. You have to try and retry and retry the same action before it works. Its not quite the swipe your fingers over it and it works that I was hoping for. There is also latency in the motion detection.
Initial detection of fingers in app is about 300-500ms before it see’s them. So a swipe over the sensor doesn’t work unless you sit fingers above it then swipe or perform your action.
This really doesn’t help it.

As placement of the sensor is extremely important, I tried a number of different arrangements, but all were pretty similar in reliability. I honestly get about 20-30% of gestures recognized at best. Even with the Diagnostic visualizer running so I could see what the device thought it was seeing, it was hard to reliable perform actions, even when I sat in its sweet spot. My Kinect is a *lot* better at this than the Leap is.

As it stands, this is little more than a tech demo, and a bad one at that.
If I could persuade one of my staff to video my attempts to use it so you could see, you’d understand!

So, this has a long way to go before its something usable, but I do have hope.
I’m sure that the software will improve, but for now this is definitely a concept piece rather than something usable.

I’m not unhappy that I paid money for it though. The interest in this technology has put a lot of investment capital at the device, and it will improve.

That said, don’t buy…yet.

My rating: 2/10

Addendum – my device gets rather hot in use. Not warm. Hot. Noticeably so. Even in the bare 10-15 minutes I’ve had it running.

Not sure how long it will last in Shanghai summers..

Addendum #2 – seems to have cooled down a bit from the rather hot to the touch that it was running at, although now its stopped working completely.

Dmesg shows –

USBF: 1642989.607 AppleUSBEHCI[0xffffff803bb6a000]::Found a transaction which hasn't moved in 5 seconds on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 6, EP: 2)
USBF: 1642997.609 AppleUSBEHCI[0xffffff803bb6a000]::Found a transaction which hasn't moved in 5 seconds on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 9, EP: 2)
USBF: 1649135.492 AppleUSBEHCI[0xffffff803bb6a000]::Found a transaction which hasn't moved in 5 seconds on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 10, EP: 0)
USBF: 1649141.495 AppleUSBEHCI[0xffffff803bb6a000]::Found a transaction which hasn't moved in 5 seconds on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 10, EP: 0)
USBF: 1649147.499 AppleUSBEHCI[0xffffff803bb6a000]::Found a transaction which hasn't moved in 5 seconds on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 10, EP: 0)
USBF: 1649153.503 AppleUSBEHCI[0xffffff803bb6a000]::Found a transaction which hasn't moved in 5 seconds on bus 0xfd, timing out! (Addr: 10, EP: 0)

Unplugged it, and replugged it in, working again, but it looks like both the drivers and the ui side need work. This isn’t production ready by any way shape or means.

Our underlying hardware uses Dell equipment for the most part inside China.
We use Debian as an OS, and Dell has some software available on their linux repo’s specifically tailored for their (often rebranded from other peoples) hardware.
Eg RAC (Remote Access) bits and pieces, RAID hardware, and BIOS updates.

So, enough about why, how do we use their repo?

First add it as a source
echo 'deb http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/deb/latest /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/linux.dell.com.sources.list

…then add gpg keys –

gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-key 1285491434D8786F
gpg -a --export 1285491434D8786F | apt-key add -

apt-get update, to make sure that you have the latest repo bits added, then you can install their goodies.

apt-cache search dell will show you whats in their repo. Pick wisely!

Behind the scenes we use ZFS as storage for our offsite backups.
We have backups in 2 separate physical locations + original data on the server(s), as data is mui importante!
ZFS is a rather nice storage file system that improves radically on older RAID based solutions, offering a lot more funky options, like snapshot’s (where the OS can store have multiple versions of files, similar to Time Machine backups), and more importantly compression.

At some point we’ll be deploying a SAN (storage area network) on a blade server in the data center for data using ZFS, using lots of three and four letter acronyms –
ESXi for base OS, then a VM running providing ZFS storage and iSCSI targets with hardware passthru for other VM’s, then other blades in the server doing clustering.
Right now we’re waiting on an LSI SAS card (see more anacronyms!), so we can deploy…, but I digress.

Back to ZFS.

The ZFS version we use now allows flags, yay!, and that means we can choose alternate compression methods.
There is a reasonably newish compression algorithm called LZ4 that is now supported, and it improves both read and write speeds over normal uncompressed ZFS, and some benefits over compressed ZFS using the standard compression algorithm(s).

To quote: “LZ4 is a new high-speed BSD-licensed compression algorithm written by Yann Collet that delivers very high compression and decompression performance compared to lzjb (>50% faster on compression, >80% faster on decompression and around 3x faster on compression of incompressible data)”

First up check if your zfs version supports it:


zpool upgrade -v
This system supports ZFS pool feature flags.

FEAT DESCRIPTION
-------------------------------------------------------------
async_destroy (read-only compatible)
Destroy filesystems asynchronously.
empty_bpobj (read-only compatible)
Snapshots use less space.
lz4_compress
LZ4 compression algorithm support.


Mine does (well duh!)

So…, I can turn on support.

As a note, lz4 is not backward compatible, so you will need to use a ZFS version that supports flags *and* lz4.
At the time of writing nas4free doesn’t support it, zfsonlinux does though, as does omnios, illumos and other solaris based OS’s.

If you aren’t sure, check first with the command above and see if there is support.
Next step is to turn on that feature.

My storage pools are typically called nas or tank
To enable lz4 compression, its a 2 step process.

zpool set feature@lz4_compress=enabled
zpool set compression=lz4

zpool set feature@lz4_compress=enabled nas
zpool set compression=lz4 nas
zpool set compression=lz4 nas/storage


Once the flag is set though, you can set compression on the pools or volume. If you set at the storage volume level, then new pools inherit the compression setting.

Here are my volumes / pools

zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
nas 6.09T 4.28T 209K /nas
nas/storage 6.09T 4.28T 6.09T /nas/storage

I’ve already set compression on (although it doesn’t take effect till I copy new data onto the pools / volumes).
We can check compression status by doing a zfs get all command, and filtering by compress

zfs get all | grep compress
nas compressratio 1.00x -
nas compression lz4 local
nas refcompressratio 1.00x -
nas/storage compressratio 1.00x -
nas/storage compression lz4 local
nas/storage refcompressratio 1.00x -


If I create a new pool you’ll see it gets created with the same compression inherited from its parent storage volume.

zfs create nas/test
root@nas:/nas# zfs get all | grep compress
nas compressratio 1.00x -
nas compression lz4 local
nas refcompressratio 1.00x -
nas/storage compressratio 1.00x -
nas/storage compression lz4 local
nas/storage refcompressratio 1.00x -
nas/test compressratio 1.00x -
nas/test compression lz4 inherited from nas
nas/test refcompressratio 1.00x -

I’ll copy some dummy data onto there, then recheck.

nas/test compressratio 1.71x -
nas/test compression lz4 inherited from nas
nas/test refcompressratio 1.71x -

Nice!

Obviously, compression ratio’s will depend highly on the data, but for our purposes, most things are web data, mail and other things, so we’re heavy on text content, and benefit highly from compression.

Once we get our SAN up and running, I’ll be looking at whether I should be using rsync still or I should look at zfs snapshots -> zfs storage on other servers.
That though, is a topic for another day.

Rather hacky fix to sort out utf8 latin-1 post issues after export from a rather badly encoded mysql db in wordpress.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '“', '“');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '”', '”');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '’', '’');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '‘', '‘');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '—', '–');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '–', '—');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '•', '-');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '…', '…');


Not recommended, but I had a use for it.