Today I was browsing the New Relic webpage searching for what plugins you could install , and I must say I was quite impressed by the vast quantity of supported stuff some of my favorites would be
Memcached
Rackspace Load Balancers
Apache / Nginx of course
Varnish
Redis
Object Rocket Mongo DB
PHP Opcache (nice to have )
For those who don’t know what New Relic is , it’s a software/service that allows you to monitor the entire stack for your application and collect interesting data back , so you can kill all those nasty bottlenecks, Nice work guys !!!
For a while now I wanted to blog about Ouya , the android based games console that is in my opinion one of the best Android related projects on the internet .
So first of all I would like to clarify that this console is in no position to compete with the traditional names (X-box,wii,Playstation, etc ) as the target audience is difference and so far the number of Famous Titles is very small (if there are any even) this is more aimed at “Retro” players or people that play android games.
One of the best apps available is actually XBMC , so it can be used as a low power , high value Media Center. The reason why I say “high value” is that for the price this little baby goes a long way … it costs 99$ (or euros or pounds or whatever) .
To be honest I would be willing to pay that just for the Media Center features, not even mentioning the gaming part .
The hardware itself is very nice, the small box is actually very powerful and quiet , it has a fan but you almost never hear it.
The control is quite ergonomic and responsive and the batteries last quite some time, one of the features I would like to see included in the future is a cradle that you can put your remote in to charge the batteries . As for the software itself , ouya features a customized version of Android, and it looks amazing
One of the best things about this little console is that all games must have a “Free to play” version, of course you can unlock the full game but if you just want to try it there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to download the game and play it.
The ecosystem still has a long way to go , and for example at this moment I would like to buy an extra controller for my Ouya and in the online store the only option there is , is to buy a refurbished controller, which is … not ideal.
As for the tech specs go the SOC inside is quite good but it could use an update to a more beefy platform. I think that as long as they can grow their ecosystem people will gladly pay for this sort of thing but we need to have the games to go with it. I wish there would be more “Famous” names available for this console so it could actually grow and gain market .
So I would say it’s an awesome buy but at this point it only applies if you are a casual gamer and/or need a Media Center.
At the time I am writing this article there are around 1112 games available in https://www.ouya.tv/games/ .
So , the company I work for has assigned me a laptop. The Dell Latitude E7440 which I am reviewing now. One of the requisites for me is that the device is fully compatible with any Linux OS , and this one is. I have loaded it with Fedora 21 and so far it has served me well . Although there are a few issues that have more to do with the laptop itself then the linux distro of choice.
One of the things that sort of disappointed me initially was the keyboard , it bends down when you press the keys in the middle (near the g and h keys) and the whole feel to it is not very nice overall . However the whole laptop is nice, the cpu is more than capable (I7 vpro) capable of good performance even when running a few vms (which I do ) the model I got has 8GB of ram and a 128G Samsung PM851 SSD , fast and energy efficient as expected.
The camera is very good and the laptop is a very good buy apart from the keyboard issue I have already mentioned.
The Intel® Integrated HD Graphics 4400 works perfectly with Linux and the current version of Gnome (3.14.4) runs very well indeed.
I am still benchmarking the battery life , as I tend to use the device more attached to the docking station (did I mention it has a docking station) .
More on this matter soon.
To wrap up , the device is a good buy if you are looking for a good Linux laptop, however the keyboard is not very good and Dell should improve this design failure.
You can check the full specs at Dell’s website here
