Archive for February, 2007
Wizpy: a new media player that boots to linux
By Justin Silverton
From a recent article
“Japan’s Turbolinux will begin selling its Wizpy Linux-based multimedia player in February. As a bonus, the device can also be used to boot a PC into the Linux OS, allowing users to access their files in their own working environment on almost any PC.,
The Wizpy will be available first to customers in Japan via the company’s home page on February 23 and then in shops in March. It will come in two models: a 2GB version will cost $245 and a 4GB version will cost $281.”
Some cool features
- A 1.7-inch organic light-emitting diode color screen
- plays music in Ogg, MP3, and Windows Media Audio formats
- plays XviD and MPEG4 movies and displays JPEG images
- records straight to MP3 files, displays text files, and has an FM radio built-in
Aside from the features above, what sets it apart from other players is the fact that you don’t have to have an operationg system installed on your system. To the computer, the Wizpy looks like a bootable USB CD-ROM or hard drive, which means most computers will boot the Linux OS directly (turbolinux).
The Operating System+software takes up around 1GB of memory, so that leaves either 1GB or 3GB left for storing files or multimedia, depending on the model. It will also be able to connect to a network through the host PC and also access connected peripherals.
The official site can be found here
A web server in PHP
By Justin Silverton
Have you ever wanted a web server written entirely in PHP? Now you can with nanoweb. A project like this really shows the power of the PHP language.
Features
- HTTP/1.1 implementation
- Keep-alive connections and cache helpers
- Modular architecture
- CGI and Server side includes support via included modules
- Name based virtual hosts
- Authentication support
- Error documents
- MIME support
- gzip content encoding
- PHP support
- Many other modules
Performance
A report here states the following: “nanoweb reached 101 days of uptime and did not show a single glitch after serving more than 4.1 milion hits and more than 52 GB.”.
Here are some more details:
Static test
This was measured on this server, a duron 700 with 1gb of ram.
The tests were run using ab and consisted of 500 requests (20 simultaneous) on static and dynamic content.
Static content : Server Software: aEGiS_nanoweb/2.0.1-dev
Server Hostname: si.kz Server Port: 80
Document Path: /six.gif
Document Length: 28352 bytes
Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 3.123 seconds
Complete requests: 500
Failed requests: 0
Broken pipe errors: 0
Keep-Alive requests: 497
Total transferred: 14496686 bytes
HTML transferred: 14337322 bytes
Requests per second: 160.10 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 124.92 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 6.25 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 4641.91 [Kbytes/sec]
received Connnection Times (ms) min
mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 0 1.9 0 13
Processing: 18 100 276.4 40 2739
Waiting: 1 97 276.9 39 2739
Total: 18 100 277.8 40 2750
Installing
Unix:
install-sh -f or Run ./install-sh (if you have X-windows installed)
Windows:
Run INSTALL.BAT Note: Performance will not be as good as in unix because PHP does not support process forking in windows.
Download
Nanoweb 2.2.8 can be downloaded here