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Sun's Java Studio Enterprise 7 is an impressively complete and smoothly integrated package for building Java applications in team environments, with unique and useful IM capabilities tailored to developers' needs. Its interaction among code and diagram views is unsurpassed.In particular, he praised JSE's unique developer collaboration features:
Teams may become addicted to Sun's development-oriented instant messaging facility, with a syntax-aware editor and collaborative editing tools integrated into the workbench. Long listings or outputs can be sent, without the message-length restrictions that hamper lightweight IM systems.Peter didn't mention all the cool developer collaboration features, so check out my developer collaboration webinar for the skinny, including a demo (the demo starts about 20 minutes in). Afterward, mosey on over to the Java Studio Enterprise 7 Try and Buy page to download a 90-day free trial.When another developer is editing a shared file, affected lines are highlighted and guarded in other team members' windows to prevent collisions while enabling simultaneous work in different sections of the code. Sun officials promise to expand support for XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol)-based run-times; messaging security can be configured using HTTPS (HTTP Secure) and SOCKS Version 5. The system is easy to use and could quickly make converts of those who've never before found IM compelling.
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I can‘t take credit for originally finding this, but I do feel it‘s important that everyone at least have the chance to see it for themselves…
I guess this is a blurb about discovery, awareness, and reminiscing.
A little history...
Having been introduced to IM by friends/colleagues more than 8 years ago, my first exposure to IM was simply “a cool add-on tool for sharing simple messages with friends“. I never suspected something so simple would become such an important collaboration tool. I should‘ve seen it coming though, you know the old saying, “Simple is Better”. Before SPAM got out of control, before it took 3 hours for your email to reach someone due to SPAM and Virus filters, email response time in general was acceptable (for those readers who've been using email since the inception of the internet, I'm aware this may be stretching the truth, but I'm referring to a time before the marketing folks hadn't yet crippled the bandwidth 
)" title=")">.
IM was cool, but there was simply no burning need for real-time messaging. Why load another application when turnaround on email correspondence was respectable (slight exaggeration), not like today where it sometimes takes days to get a response (not much of an exaggeration). Phones, pagers, and cell phones didn‘t up and disappear either, so if you really needed to communicate with someone NOW, you had options.
The more you break something in however (like great jeans and new sneakers), the better something gets. I quickly changed my tune on the subject, and became an advocate. I enlisted as many folks as I could, basically to make MY job easier. The sooner I was able to communicate with people, the faster I could get stuff done (the fact that I‘m easily distracted is another story entirely, but I digress)....
Now, to say that IM was pain free would be a lie. We had 1) firewall/proxy issues to bear; 2)lack of acceptance from Sr. Management; and 3) the onslaught of security concerns over unencrypted traffic flow between public and private enterprise networks. As we conquered these concerns one by one (sometimes with band-aids and end-arounds 
), IM blazed forth with Crusades-like efficiency, brute force converting all the heathens and forcing adoption across the enterprise. IM permeated itself throughout not only our organization, but throughout the rest of corporate America as well.
Anyways, as far as IM clients went, like most folks, I went from dabbling with ICQ to incorporating AIM (AOL‘s Instant Messenger) into my daily routine. After a brief flirtation with Yahoo and MSN (heaven help me), which led to poor response times and latency issues, I inevitably went back to AIM. On a suggestion from a friend I tried Trillian for a while, but I always had problems with Trillian‘s Yahoo client and proxy support, so I again went back to AIM. A couple of AIM add-ons, a few AIM plugins here and there, and now I‘m basically back to Trillian cause they finally fixed the Yahoo proxy support issue. If you‘re curious, give it a try at : http://www.trillian.cc
Trillian won‘t work with Linux, so under JDS I stick with AIM‘s Linux Client, but the client options can vary if you‘re bored. On Linux/Unix we‘ve got AIM, GAIM, Tik, and browser based AIM (only in a pinch). Alternatives to AIM on Linux start with Jabber, which is an Open Source IM solution and the defacto Linux IM standard. There‘s a bunch of client options under Linux if you‘re willing to sift through the Google results.
So here we are, 8 years later, a father of 3, witnessing my kids, nieces, nephews, and even my parents (feeling a little dizzy here) riding the IM wave (on PC‘s and now cell phones), I‘d thought I‘d tried them all. All but the neat little IM product we‘ve got here at Sun, which will be the subject of :
“Instant Messaging – Part II”
coming soon to a blog near you….
TTYS
|
This comes from a piece in the ARTtalk column of the September 2002 edition of the ARTnews magazine. After reading this, I thought that it would make a great CSI episode. |
One of contemporary British art's most celebrated sculptures has met a gruesome end - all over Charles Saatchi's kitchen floor. Marc Quinn's Self (1991), a model of his head made of nine pints of his own frozen blood, melted after someone turned off the freezer where Saatchi kept the work.
Seems that Saatchi's new partner, Nigella Lawson, Britain's best-known celebrity cook and author, had recently moved in with Saatchi, and had the builders in to remodel the kitchen.
"They got to work on the old kitchen, ripping out the units," says a source in the London art world, "and they pulled the plug on the freezer. Next thing they knew, Quinn's blood was on the kitchen floor. Saatchi was furious when he came home and found the mess.
No kidding.
I couldn't find the article I read online, but there were several other places where it was reported, including this one from smh.com.au
What I found fascinating was the estimated worth of this piece of art. Saatchi bought Self in 1991 for 23,000 pounds ($35,000). It was recently (as in 2002) valued at 1.5 million pounds ($2.3 million).
My first discussion will center around TLS in Native LDAP, LDAP as a Naming Service, etc. When I first encountered the references to TLS, I was equally confused and I plan to de-mystify it as best as I can:
1. Short history and definition of TLS and SSL
2. The TLS "handshake"
3. Certificates and Trusts and terminology;
4. StartTLS review
5. Step-by-Step Configuration of Directory Server 5.2 and Solaris 8/9 and TLS
6. Other TLS things
My second discussion will center around PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) in Native LDAP, LDAP as a Naming Service, etc. I am still confused, but I will share my troubles and lessons:
1. Name Switching Service (nss), what uses it and how it plays a role;
2. PAM defined: services, modules, stacks, authentication versus authentication versus authentication;
3. PAM tags: required -- requisite -- binding -- server_policy -- try_first_pass -- use_first_pass;
4. Why authenticate using pam_unix and pam_ldap (very simply) -- password management;
5. Virtual walkthrough of a PAM "stack"
I plan not to talk to the slides, and I plan to have detailed takeways and not just a slide show.
All in all, 30 minutes for each and an hour for the session for the two days. Are you excited yet?
And I had better follow this up with some blogspam for the next few days
Aaaaah the rush of it. The pure adrenaline rush of standing naked in front of a crowd of people. OK, so maybe not naked, but alone and the center of attention anyway. Briefing customers is always a thrill, with endless excitement waiting for the plethora of twisty leaps of logic and questions from the blindside.
Sidenote, being from a datacenter management background, thrills and excitement are generally a bad thing. In my world, thrills and excitement are usually accompanied by an unflattering story on CNN and 24 hour workdays.
In my jaded career, I have written papers and books on many topics. That doesn't necessarily mean that I am still a thought leader on those topics, or current on what Sun's strategic or tactical offerings are. OK, so I hear that I am good in front of a crowd, have taught technical classes for years, and I do speak reasonably coherent english for a geek. All that doesn't necessarily add up to my being the perfect person to lead a customer briefing session on the price of tea in China.
bill.
This is what Los Angeles is all about according to Peter Cochrane, one of our morning speakers. Of course his talk wasn't really about Los Angeles but about predicting the future, or actually our inability to do so thanks to exponential growth of knowledge. The last polymath who understood all the world's knowledge probably lived 400 years ago. As the morning session ended, everyone received a copy of Peter's book Uncommon Sense and had a choice to queue for lunch or queue to have their book signed by Peter.
For those of you who might have noticed, no I didn't get up and walk out from the front row during Kim's presentation to be rude, I was being urgently paged by our press team. Some final approvals needed for the conference press release. At least I didn't have to walk out Peter.
You can see the full agenda of the conference speakers, more comments later. Have to check the lunch queue.
Do you have to call me back with the question "did you call this number?" right after I dialed your phone BY MISTAKE?
Really. If I had meant to call you, I would have left a message. I promise.
Caller ID has some nice features, but seriously. Do people have to be such geeks that they call EVERY SINGLE PERSON that appears in their missed calls list?
This is really great news, I am exceptional proud of the work our engineering team is doing!
Stay tuned for information on version 8...it will be killer!
So: I received last week a nice, inexpensive, adequate for those tasks for which I will want it, IBM Thinkpad R51 which I obtained with the help of my friend Ian (thanks, mate!) - the Kubrickesque black weight of which distinguishes me from colleagues who of course are all driving AMD-powered Acer Ferraris.
Shortly after unboxing it, I booted Windows XP - my first Windows system at home since 1994 - and spent the next 20 minutes making the following noises:
- ooh?
- urgh!
- what?
- click where?
- no! no! f**k f**k f**k! don't do that!
- no, really, don't do that...
- look, i already have an internet service provider ...
- what are you doing now?
- why are you rebooting?
- yes, there is a wireless network; that is the correct password ...
- yes, really.
- what?
...and so forth. This somehow-incredibly-long 20 minutes really made me appreciate my iMac.
Finally I managed to shut-off most of the annoyances, select screen optimisations for "performance", and navigate enough of the system to defrag the disk, install Firefox, and shut it down.
Today, in-between bursts of presentation-writing, I was feeding CDROMs and DVDs into the brick, and have emerged at the other end with a Quad-Booting Laptop.
Nifty! (if you're a geek)
In retrospect it was much easier than I feared:
I used the Sun JDS Linux / SuSE repartitioning tool to delete the recovery partition and squash the WinXP partition a little bit; then I set up the following partiton map:
| # | OS | Size |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Win XP | 12Gb |
| 2 | Solaris 10 | 8Gb |
| 3 | NetBSD 2.0 | 4Gb |
| 4 | Extended | rest of disk |
| 5 | Linux Swap | 1Gb |
| 6 | FAT32 Spare | 2Gb |
| 7 | FAT32 Spare | 4Gb |
| 8 | Linux Root | 7Gb |
...temporarily masquerading the Solaris partition to be of type "Plan 9" in order to avoid any confusion or hassle during Linux installation.
Then I installed Mandrake Linux 10.1 from DVD into partitions 5 and 8, set-up LILO, and rebooted to permit a 5 minute install of NetBSD 2.0; this necessitated taking great care to not provide any bootloader names for the partitions, nor install the NetBSD bootloader at all, but aside from staying alert the installation was trivial.
Three down, one to go; I test-booted all the software, let them self-check, finishing with a Mandrake boot in which I added:
other=/dev/hda2
label=Solaris
table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/hda3
label=NetBSD
table=/dev/hda
...to /etc/lilo.conf, mirroring the chain-bootloader entry for the WinXP partition. A quick poke with fdisk reset the partition type for hda2 back to "0x82" - which annoyingly means both "Solaris", and "Linux Swap" - and then I rebooted with the Solaris 10 DVD.
It just worked. The Solaris installer did err on the conservative side by suggesting I only wanted 256 colours on my 1024x768 display, as opposed to my desired 16 million, but that was fixable and otherwise the installation of SUNWCall went smoothly - but I won't go so far as to say it was a particularly pleasurable user-interface experience.
The side-effect of the Solaris install was to blow-away the LILO bootloader (how rude) but a quick reboot off the Mandrake DVD in "rescue" mode fixed that, since it has a "automatically find a Mandrake partition, load the lilo.conf and rebuild the boot loader" option - very useful.
So: surprisingly, it all works, exactly as you would expect it. My laptop is fit to provide me with the X86-based operating systems capacity that I'm likely to need for work and play in the near future.
Next: to get a new Powerbook, as an upgrade for the system that lets me do what I want to do creatively...
Come on!!! The SDN chat session on High Performance from your Desktop Client is about to start!!!
I guess folks really what they read about the Sun Analyst Conference
Traffic to blogs.sun.com has punched through the roof - again, and we had to make some changes to our infrastructure to support it. In particular, we've found a few issues in our latest push of roller (the blogging software we use). One was for that little ReadMore link on pages - turns out we were wasting *lots* of time in processing the html in those links. Ick.
Thanks to Watt and of course Dave Johnson for quick work finding the problem and fixing it. Of course, I was online from 8am until about 1:30pm fixing it. I think my team just lets me work on the machines to keep me happy - going from being a hardcore engineer to being an engineering manager is not much fun.
And to keep things interesting - we've just been told we have to move our infrastructure! Yippee! Over 150 machines to move, an emplaced network infrastructure, support transitions, all while publishing 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, with no down time. Tell me this is going to be fun. Please?
In the first place, the theater is not your typical stadium seating McMegaplex, but a simple old-school movie house converted into two spacious theaters. Each theater has little or none of the traditional theater style seating, choosing instead the comfort of couches and armchairs. Combine that with delicious food, beer and wine, and you have a wonderfully unique movie experience.
Baby Brigade, however, adds the beauty of two shows a week where parents are invited to bring children not yet old enough to walk to the theater. The place is filled with thirty-something parents grateful for the chance to get out of the house, and infants awed by the new experience presented to them. As many of you know, the fussy babies are nothing for adults who have been cooped up for a long week with the challenges of first time parenthood.
It can lead to some humorous moments, however. For instance, during a particularly quiet early scene in the movie, about eight babies decided to voice their fierce criticism of the pace and mood of the movie. In what sounded like a cross between a hog calling contest and the sea lions at Fisherman's Wharf, the volume and intensity of their protests grew to the point where parents were laughing more at the surealness of reality than that of the movie.
I know other theaters in other parts of the Bay Area have done similar "baby nights". If you have a newborn, or are expecting one, I have to highly recommend these wonderful institutions as a way to stay in touch with your old life. And if you live in the East Bay, come to the Parkway on Monday Nights and support Baby Brigade.
It looks like the telecommunications market is in a consolidation phase, with the probable result that carriers will enjoy enhanced pricing power. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/15/business/15verizon.html?hp&ex=1108530000&en=d8bab3280cb1f922&ei=5094&partner=homepage It's probably not all bad news for consumers, particularly private and public sector enterprises, if it reduces the number of vendors one has to deal with to buy a complete menu of voice and data services. On the other hand, this consolidation wave may be even better news for VoIP solutions that have finally reached the point where users can get lower costs, integrated voice + data and industrial-strength service levels.
Of course there's a local angle to this
post! Check out http://www.sun.com/service/secure/
and http://www.sun.com/service/voip/
I'm listing both urls as the VoIP solution is derived from the
Secure Network Access Platform. Both are pretty cool.
Wow! The first World Wide Education and Research Conference was held in 1986 under a tent in the parking lot of the old Mountain View campus. There were about 50 attendees all from the US. This week's conference, being held in San Francisco's St. Francis hotel has 625+ attendees from 47 countries!
Sun's Vice President of Education and Research, Kim Jones, kicked off today's session talking about the six mega-trends in education,
It is easy to forget, but according to the Campus Computing Project , in 1994 only 8% of universities provided email as part of their IT infrastructure. Can you imagine a university without email today?
Just finished support for converting OpenOffice.org Impress and Calc to XLIFF as well. Haven't really tested this stuff too well, but it appears to work for basic presentations alright (don't know about spreadsheets, macros and the like)
What's next ?!
Music is the next big thing for cell phones. Sony Ericsson and Nokia are trying to turn your mobile phones into iPods. The new 3G networks will allow this to happen in a timely manner with good user experience for fast downloads. See: Music is the next big thing on J2ME phones J2ME technology content provisioning running seamlessly in the background on your phone could be downloading your favorite songs while you sleep. |
through a series of loosely related events and text, i was flooded with the thoughts of free and open source origins of my computing life at york university. no, it was not linux, it was not something from MIT or Berkeley, and not a part of the GNU project. they all came later. this is a remarkable bit of hardware-specific open-source engineering that all the hack "historians" tend to overlook:
Dave Conroy's DECUS C compiler.
this was the first C compiler i ever used for hello, world. i did not have a copy of K&R at the time [my first K&R is dated 82], but a printed copy of the C reference manual and Kernighan's C tutorial. i think this compiler came to us with the 1980 RSX11 sig tape or the Torlug tape. it ran fine under our 11/780's compatibility mode and remained in use until DEC's native C compiler showed up. [conroy compiler kept going for many years after that under pdp-11 thanks to hard work by late martin minow. it was the preferred compiler for pdp-11 hackers, so far as i can tell. its latest incarnation can be found in johnny billquist's pdp-11 archive.]
all this came to mind after reading a surprising fragment from a foreword by larry lessig to Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law [recommended]
Why code must be propriatery is a question whose answers have changed over the past ten years. At first the reasons were technical: no free or open source project, it was said, could develop the highly complex and robust code necessary for modern software applications. But when the GNU/Linux project began to produce an operating system that rivaled Microsoft's in robustness and efficiency, this technical argument began to fade.
emphasis mine.
I did my taxes a few days ago and the man said I overpaid. I figured, being off season, that it was time to buy a bike. I had thought of the same thing last year but didn't get around to it. However, this year being in an all together different mindset, at least that is the excuse, I went out and got one. Check out the the specs if you're curious.
And someone thought I never did anything outdoors. "Hah!" he says.
The new reflectors have arrived from Deeside Cycles. Not just the yellow reflector bits but the whole shooting match so thanks to them and thanks to Camagnolo. Lets hope the new one survives longer than the last time.
Studying them in greater detail it is easy to see how the reflector could pop out if I had failed to get my foot in the cleat first go. I probably applied just enough pressure to pop the rear facing reflector, which with the pedal upside down would be facing forward. Need to watch that, but when crossing lines of traffic that is not up most in my mind.
So to all of those bloging out there... Keep it up, but be smart.
For what it's worth.
I bought a laptop over the weekend for my wife. A valentines day present. It pains me to say this, but it's (currently) running Windows XP. I wanted to get her an iBook, but for her, $499 was hard to beat. Plus, it free's up some cash for me to continue to sell her on the virtues of an iPod :) My wife uses it for some daily online research. I'll occasionally use it to log on to work due to it's convenient location in the kitchen/family room.
This Windows XP thing means I'll have to make a visit to the computing pharmacy. I feel like I am walking in an unsafe neighborhood. I'm always looking over my shoulder when connected to the network (which is *always*). I'm being serious. Honest. I *never* have this feeling on my iMac, JDS or SPARC desktops. It's like I have a honeypot and don't know it. Eventually I'll install JDS. For now, it's fine. I'll empathize with others for a while. There is nothing of real value on the laptop, anyway. Except, perhaps, for the BIOS and FireFox :)
[www.theregister.co.uk]US info-sharing initiative called a flop
Nearly a year after its launch, a federal office created as a conduit for corporate America to provide the government with sensitive information about critical vulnerabilities has been all but rejected by the technology industry that helped conceive it.
The Protected Critical Infrastructure Information (PCII) program allows corporations who run key elements of US infrastructure to submit details about their physical and cyber vulnerabilities to a special office within the Department of Homeland Security, with legally-enforceable assurances that the information will not be used against them or released to the public. The effort is funded at $5.5m in the White House's 2006 budget request.
...
Solaris 10:
| Exit code | Meaning |
| 0 | No error |
| 1 | Usage error |
| 2 | Attempt to apply a patch that's already been applied |
| 3 | Effective UID is not root |
| 4 | Attempt to save original files failed |
| 5 | pkgadd failed |
| 6 | Patch is obsoleted |
| 7 | Invalid package directory |
| 8 | Attempting to patch a package that is not installed |
| 9 | Cannot access /usr/sbin/pkgadd (client problem) |
| 10 | Package validation errors |
| 11 | Error adding patch to root template |
| 12 | Patch script terminated due to signal |
| 13 | Symbolic link included in patch |
| 14 | NOT USED |
| 15 | The prepatch script had a return code other than 0. |
| 16 | The postpatch script had a return code other than 0. |
| 17 | Mismatch of the -d option between a previous patch install and the current one. |
| 18 | Not enough space in the file systems that are targets of the patch. |
| 19 | $SOFTINFO/INST_RELEASE file not found |
| 20 | A direct instance patch was required but not found |
| 21 | The required patches have not been installed on the manager |
| 22 | A progressive instance patch was required but not found |
| 23 | A restricted patch is already applied to the package |
| 24 | An incompatible patch is applied |
| 25 | A required patch is not applied |
| 26 | The user specified backout data can't be found |
| 27 | The relative directory supplied can't be found |
| 28 | A pkginfo file is corrupt or missing |
| 29 | Bad patch ID format |
| 30 | Dryrun failure(s) |
| 31 | Path given for -C option is invalid |
| 32 | Must be running Solaris 2.6 or greater |
| 33 | Bad formatted patch file or patch file not found |
| 34 | Incorrect patch spool directory |
| 35 | Later revision already installed |
| 36 | Cannot create safe temporary directory |
| 37 | Illegal backout directory specified |
| 38 | A prepatch, prePatch or a postpatch script could not be executed |
| (below are new for Solaris 10) | |
| 39 | A compressed patch was unable to be decompressed |
| 40 | Error downloading a patch |
| 41 | Error verifying signed patch |
| 42 | Error unable to retrieve patch information from SQL DB. |
| 43 | Error unable to update the SQL DB. |
| 44 | Lock file not available |
| 45 | Unable to copy patch data to partial spool directory. |
For what it's worth.
I promised some details on PlanetTool (the command-line tool that generates Planet Roller) internals, so here goes. This is what happens when PlanetTool runs:
Startup
(1) We start by reading the XML configuration file (via JDOM and XPath)
(2) From the config, we create a config object, subscriptions and groups
(3) A group has subscriptions
(4) And a subscription can belong to more than one group
Refresh subscription data(5) For each subscription, call the Rome Fetcher
(6) Fetcher uses Conditional Get and Etags and caches feeds on disk
(7) Feeds parsed into entries objects and added to subscription objects
File generation(8) Call Velocity Texen with name of a control template
(9) Texen calls our control template
(10) Control template calls file generation templates
(11) Templates calls planet object to get config, group, subscription, and entry objects needed to generates files needed for aggregated site (HTML, RSS, OPML, etc.)
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Mark Jen landed a dream job with Google Inc. in January. He was fired less than a month later.Um. No, actually. According to Jen, the problem was blogging about "financial performance and future products" while working for a company that takes secrecy as seriously as Apple does. (Not that you would have found that link for yourself as CNN, being a "proper publication", does not cite its sources as links just in case you choose to research them yourself. Their credibility will continue to fall until they wise up to this.)
His infraction? He ran a Web log, where he freely gabbed about his impressions of life at the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet search giant.
A former Delta Air Lines flight attendant claims she was fired in November over pictures she posted on her personal blog that she says the airline deemed "inappropriate."Do go read her site - you'll probably quickly come to the conclusion that she was fired not for "having a blog" but either for breaching some employment policy of Delta's or to cut her discrimination claim off at the knees. Next is the Friendster case:
Friendster, an online social networking site, canned an employee last summer for her online musings about the company.This is the most likely candidate for a "fired for blogging" story, but we only have Joyce's account to go on for evidence - my suspicion is of deeper bad blood in this one. And then there's the Microsoft example:
And a Microsoft contractor lost his gig after posting on the Web photos of Apple computers arriving at the software giant's Redmond, Wash., headquarters.Not fired for blogging but rather for revealing traffic through the mail & copy centre on the Redmond campus - Jeremy advises discretion in postings about work.
We're just barely into the phase where normal people have heard the word "blog", and the zealous political bloggers who form a loud, obnoxious minority of bloggers have decided they want their grandmothers to think of blogging as "that thing that gets journalists fired". That sucks, and it's going to limit the number of people who join into our medium. And the zealous tech bloggers who form a loud, obnoxious minority of bloggers have decided they want their grandmothers to think that blogging is "that thing that gets regular people fired". That's not better.Yes, no-one ever got fired for blogging but there are some vested interests out there who want you to think otherwise.
A year or so ago I saw Friends for dinner where a woman made this amazing dessert. The description does not sound so wonderful but I have been itching to try it. So for Valentines day I had a days holiday to make a three course meal for my wife. We started with Thai fish cakes and a small side salad. I then cheated buying one of Lloyd Grossman's green thai sauces putting chicken and prawns in it. The Thai sauces are excellent the Italian/Indian ones less so. A tip here if you make any meal that has sauce in it eg spagetti, curry etc cook it twenty four hours before you eat it. The time it spends in the fridge the flavours develop and become more intense.
Back to desert. The whole thing as can be seen is a biscuit box which is a devil to make. The pastry is cooked with score lines in it so after cooking it can be broken into the pieces that make the box. Fondant icing is meant to be used to hold it together but I could not find any so my neighbour made me an alternative with icing sugar and egg white. The amounts of ingredients listed made me six of these cases. It has to be said about a third of the pieces fell apart on dividing so I had a high failure rate. I found in the end the best way of dividing them is to do so as soon as you can hold the biscuit in your had after it comes out of the oven.
The funny part is I produced a menu for the meal to show my wife when she came to the table. Of course I missed the typo I had done. Mouse instead of mousse. The first meal I cooked her years ago I did exactley the same thing. I should have told her it was deliberate...
The other cool thing to say is the picture above was loaded from my Canon IXUS camera at work. We are running JDS, Solar10 and Sunray version 3.0. I plugged the camera into a USB port on my Sunray, cranked up the Multi media Camera browser, selected my camera and up the pictures came. This is just as it should be !
So the news (news.com.com)
is reporting that Intel and HP are getting into the game... joining the
ranks of multi-core chip vendors and their customers who see Oracle's
license strategy (to charge by the core) as misaligned with the times.
These are times of virtualized resources that are consumed and funded
as needed, they say.
I was thinking of an analogy for Oracle's
position... Consider how you would feel about a policy at Blockbuster
Video if, when you rented a DVD, you had to pay $10.00 per seat (your
sofa counts as three - being multi-seated). No, it doesn't matter if
it'll just be you and your spouse watching the movie. Since you have 15
seats that you *could* utilize (the bar stools and folding chairs count
too) you will pay $150.00 per night for that movie. Oh, you'd like to
display that movie in PARALLEL in your family room and in your
entertainment room? Sure, you can do that with their "shared disc"
technology. But now add up all the seats in both rooms (25), and
that'll be $20.00 per seat! So please pay us $500.00 per night for that
movie.
Now, why in the world would Oracle change that policy?
They've maximized their revenue pull - and customers are still writing
checks. They are in business to extract as much from their "value" as
the market will bear, not offer charity discounts to a world that can't
rationalize the price tag assigned by a market share leader (I won't
use the other "m" word). Oracle reports having $10B in cash,
about equal to their annual revenue. It would take less than a thousand
E25K customers to decide to run Oracle RAC on their servers to
deliver another $10B to their warchest. Not bad, for the
price of DVD blanks :-)
Choice in this market segment is the
only lever that will work. Customers are demanding choice. And they
will respond when it appears. Oracle should note that when choice
knocks, many will answer even if they then respond with a competitive
position. It takes a long time to get a bad taste out of your mouth.
Many will boycott Oracle just because they finally can.
There are some hints that choice might be just around the corner.
I don't usually give too much credit to awards such as Developer.com Product of the Year 2005 contest (other than having them on my presentation slides just like any other competitor). It's a little like benchmarks (only even less serious) which I consider as necessary evil. In this case, it's not more accurate than previous contests, but having Sun win 7 6 out of 10 categories (including Creator and NetBeans) sounds like there's a trend going on.
There was a short piece on Today, today about design once again holding up the excellent tube map as a design classic due to the way it displays a complex system in a simple and easily usable way. However it was the invention of the equal sign “=” that caught my ear. How lucky we are that Robert Record did not patent that. It's hard to imagine a world without “=”. We could not have “==” without “=”. Makes me wonder who invented “!” as not and gave us “!=”.
[news.bbc.co.uk]Underwater gnome threat 'returns'
A secret underwater attraction that lured several divers to their deaths could have returned, police say.
The "gnome garden" complete with picket fence was removed from the bottom of Wastwater in the Lake District after several divers died a few years ago.
It is thought they spent too much time at too great a depth while searching for the site of the ornaments.
Now police divers say there is a rumour that the garden has returned at a depth beyond which they are allowed.
Pc Kenny McMahon, a member of the North West Police Underwater Search Unit, said the gnomes were well known among the diving community.
Re-reading it, though, it does make me wonder about how far you can take the matter of legally preventing someone from doing something suicidally stupid. The quote from the article:
"But now there's a rumour about a new garden beyond the 50m depth limit. "As police divers we can't legally dive any deeper so, if it exists, the new garden could have been purposefully put out of our reach"
...resonates slightly with the Daily Mail and its progeny - Metro, and The Evening Standard - which are the UK's source of reactionary, right wing, horror-driven news; the horror being, of course, that someone is doing something ill-advised and in spite of authority's attempts to dissuade them.
In the spectrum of foolish human endeavour I believe that BASE-jumpers are clinically bonkers, Skydivers marginally less so, then Arctic Explorers, Mountain Climbers, Bungee jumpers, and round-the-world-yachtswomen in descending order of insane things that can get you killed... but I not going to wag a finger at any of them, nor "tut" and tell them off, not least because some people I know think I am suicidally insane for riding motorbikes.
If some people want to prove how Über they are by sinking what may be a rather boring two-gnomes-and-a-fencepost-from-B&Q at 50 metres, that's fine. Likewise if people insist on getting themselves killed in search of it, that's Darwin. The tragedy is that the sight/effort is probably not worth it, like dying due to falling off a particularly boring mountain. The risk is that it may not be there at all, and that it lacks the grand mythos of Shangri-La, the North Pole, the first-man-on-Mars, or similar, to be socially acceptable enough to die in the pursuit.
It's about human aspiration; we should never aspire to mediocrity.
> ::status debugging core file of vim (32-bit) from dhcp-syd04-12-6 file: /export/home/fintanr/bin/vim initial argv: gvim threading model: multi-threaded status: process terminated by SIGSEGV (Segmentation Fault)So this isn't really telling me more than I killed off the process myself, now lets take a look at whats happening.
> ::walk thread | ::findstack stack pointer for thread 1: 81c3098 [ 081c3098 libc.so.1`kill+0x15() ] 081c30a8 mch_exit+0x92() 081c30c8 getout+0x19c() 081c30e8 preserve_exit+0xaa() 081c30f8 0x811fc59() 081c310c libc.so.1`__sighndlr+0xf() 081c3164 libc.so.1`call_user_handler+0x22b() 081c3188 libc.so.1`sigacthandler+0xbb() 08046aa8 libICE.so.6`_IceRead+0x92() 08046ae0 libICE.so.6`IceProcessMessages+0x42() 08046c64 libICE.so.6`IceOpenConnection+0x2a4() 08046ce8 libSM.so.6`SmcOpenConnection+0xd6() 08046e38 xsmp_init+0xd4() 08046f58 main+0x15b0() 08046f80 _start+0x5d()Hmmm, now a quick look around on google shows us that a similar type error occurs when gnome can't resolve a name after a network connection has been interrupted on Fedora core (see the bugzilla entry, so I start up gvim again and then used gcore(1M) to grab a core of my gnome-session, and takek a look at whats happening....
Loading modules: [ libc.so.1 libuutil.so.1 ld.so.1 ] > ::status debugging core file of gnome-session (32-bit) from dhcp-syd04-12-6 file: /usr/bin/gnome-session initial argv: /usr/bin/gnome-session threading model: multi-threaded status: process core file generated with gcore(1) > ::walk thread | ::findstack stack pointer for thread 1: 8046ebc [ 08046ebc libc.so.1`_waitid+0x15() ] 08046ed8 libc.so.1`waitpid+0x75() 08046f5c libgnomeui-2.so.0.600.1`libgnomeui_segv_handle+0xaf() 08046fb4 libc.so.1`call_user_handler+0x22b() 08046fd8 libc.so.1`sigacthandler+0xbb() 08047200 libICE.so.6`_IceWrite+0x84() 0804721c libICE.so.6`IceFlush+0x24() 08047244 libICE.so.6`IceAcceptConnection+0x168() 0810c368 accept_connection+0x25() 08127410 libglib-2.0.so.0.400.1`g_source_callback_funcs() 00000002 accept_connection() >And low and behold, yep, its a pretty similar bug. Unfortunately at this stage my gnome-session decided it had enough and died, but its a semi interesting one to look at. One to recreate when time is available and take a closer look with DTrace.
In his essay, "Calculativeness, Trust and Economic Organization," Oliver Williamson brings together the lessons of bounded rationality and opportunism:
[O]rganize transactions so as to economize on bounded rationality while simultaneously safeguarding them against hazards of opportunism.
The Mechanisms of Governance (p. 254)
Bounded rationality and opportunism are the main behavioral assumptions behind transaction cost economics.
Bounded rationality implies that overly complex organizations (or contracts) are infeasible. There is a cognitive limit which makes them so. This limit, or this scarcity, can be subject to economizing. In other words, the organization of transactions can be used as a means to economize on bounded rationality of all agents and members.
Opportunism implies self-interest seeking with guile as a behavior norm. This does not imply that all behaviors will be such. In fact, transactions are indeed organized in society in such a way that prevents such behavior. The key is safeguards or "credible commitments" whereby opportunistic behavior can become harmful to the party which practices it. In long-running transactions, or in transactions where relationship-specific assets are involved, "hostages" are exchanged to create "credible commitments" (or vulnerabilities that lead to "trust," as Huberty Dreyfus notes).
For example, organizations often have tree like structures in order to economize on possible communications over-load. Employees of a company learn company-specific knowledge in exchange for certain employment commitments by the company, as expressed and implemented through its incentive and employment policies.
Last weekend I set the first of this years crops in the allotment. Although the winter has been mild it is about the right time to set shallots and garlic. The shallots are simply pressed into the ground with a foot between rows and perhaps nine inches between each bulb. As the bulbs are bigger than standard onions they do not suffer the same problem of birds pulling them up thinking the brown top might be useful addition to their nests. When setting the shallots disgard any that feel soft, they are going to rot on you.
The garlic is buried two to three inches deep with the pointed end upwards. Both will be ready as soon as the tops die back usually August. Never use supermarket garlic always buy proper bulbs. Each bulb is broken up into individual cloves before planting.
Back home my potatoes are in the garage 'chitting' which means they are on a tray and will sprout and then be put into the ground when it is much warmer. The chitting brings them on and speeds up the time it takes before they appear after being planted.
Next week I will be sowing my leek seeds and to avoid 'damp off' problems I should spray them with water with a small amount of copper sulphate added once they germinate.
I have finally cleared my ponds of debris like old lily pads etc which I should have done in the autumn when the pond water was warm after the summer. It is now very cold and a rake and net saved me having to dip my hands in the freezing water.
As Mary and Tor have already mentioned Sun did pretty well in the developer.com product of the year awards (that by the way is a typical English understatement) - Sun cleaned up; winning 6 out of 10 awards.
But here's something to consider - if you download NetBeans 4.1 EA you're not actually getting one product of the year, you are getting four, here are the details :
NetBeans (Open Source Development Tool of The Year)
J2SE 5.0 - Technology of the Year.
J2EE 1.4 (provided by the bundled Sun Java System Application Server 8.1) - Enterprise Development Tool of the Year
JWSDP 1.5 (included in Sun Java System Application Server 8.1) - WebServices Tool of the Year
Note this is equally true for Creator - but I can only have one favourite IDE and at the moment it is NetBeans.
Also the above package is absolutely free and you can get it today right here.
The Commons Transaction package is a Jakarta Commons package providing "lightweight, standardized, well tested and efficient implementations of utility classes commonly used in transactional Java programming".
The 1.1 release of Commons Transaction provides transactional Maps, multi-level locks, and transactional file access.
Maybe I can finally get rid of those old 'transactional' file utilities I built ages ago. :-)
I love what Rob Wright says in this blog posting about SunRay. I never thought about comparing what it costs to lease a PC to what it might cost for a service offering SunRays with broadband. But Rob is right it would be a great deal. He also talks about how much tech support a PC requires. I flew down to San Diego last month to reload Windows on my parents PC because the viruses had made it unusable. SunRays make this a non issue. Read what Rob says! I do believe that someone will offer this service.
Here's something else to think about when it comes to SunRay. I was in a meeting this morning and people were talking about a government customer they had been talking to. The social workers in this agency deal with a lot of very confidential information. They were very excited about the idea of having all that data secure on the agency's computer but available to employees wherever they are. The social workers could just use their Java cards in a drop in location or even carry a wireless SunRay. No more hard disks full of confidential information floating around. It makes a lot of sense to me.
This Bill Vass presentation about Mobility with Security says it all much better than I do.
Danger sees the light and gets some new-found J2ME religion. Their version of software for their Hiptop wireless device just passed compatibility tests for J2ME MIDP. See: Danger Hiptop wireless device passes J2ME tests Sure took them long enough! Of course now they get all the benefits of Java technology on their device: loads of legacy J2ME games, new generation of fun apps, and lots of Java programmers. Do you think Paris Hilton or Ashton Kutcher (two famous users of the Danger Hiptop PDA) will care? Of course! :-) It's all about the games they can play while attending the awards shows. ;-) |
Creator was just
announced
as the winner of the Java Tool of The Year category from developer.com!
It was also a runner-up for the Tool of the Year award.
Here's the detailed writeup of the
candidates and winner of the Java tool category.
NetBeans also scored big, winning the Open Source Tool of the year award (its competitor Eclipse won the Tool of the Year award). NetBeans supports the new language features in JDK 5.0, which was the Technology of the Year winner.
Thanks to those who voted! And rest assured we're hard at work on the next release to have a great entry for next year's competition as well!
There are those that believe L. Frank Baum‘s story “The Wizard of Oz“ is little more than an allegory on the age of iron and steel and that the synchronicity between it and “The Dark Side of the Moon“ is too coincidental to be an accident. If this is true, then George A. Romero‘s “Night of the Living Dead“ is definitely a story with multiple meanings. As for the music tie-in, I‘m still working on that.
This earth shattering epiphany came to me this morning when I intentionally inserted myself into rush-hour traffic with more than enough time to spare before needing to be at my intended destination. It was all too obvious about half way through my trip that the “Night of the Living Dead“ was a direct reference to the bizarre dance called “the morning commute”. Instead of zombies dressed in ragged clothing tirelessly shuffling across the planet in search of human brains, there are metrosexuals in overly fast cars wearing Brooks Brothers standard issue in a constant rush to get to work in search of life nourishing cash.
Passing the sleek black constant-lane-changer-going-nowhere with my slow and steady 4 cylinder tactics for the tenth time, I thought to myself that everyone needs to try this at least once in their lifetime. When you do, I guarantee that you‘ll see yourself in the rear view mirror…
Nibbles,
Isabelle
http://www.superlaughecards.com/val/puppylove.htm Or Click Here
|
Peter Korn, fellow Accessibility Program Office team member, mentioned this BBC news report a little while ago. I tried to get Hal Stern interested in it, to no avail, when he was confined to a wheelchair, a couple months back. I can't say I blame him. |
I started thinking about it again over the weekend, because our annual trip to the CSUN conference held in the Marriott and Hilton hotels at Los Angeles airport is coming up next month. This is the premier event (conference plus exhibition halls) for showing of assistive technology for people with disabilities. This will be the 20th year for this event. Quite an achievement!
There are a lot of folks in wheelchairs there during that week. Not quite as fast as Mr Cannella's chair, but still pretty nippy. It can initially be quite disconcerting to see somebody hurtling towards you, only to veer off at the last moment. This will be my fourth year at the conference. Enough exposure so that my flinching is hardly noticable anymore.
That week, you will also find more guide dogs gathered in one place than at any other time (apart from presumably a guide dog training school and even then I'm not so sure). It's fascinating to see.
For what it's woth.
In response to Frank Cohen's questions on TSS
Congratulations on shipping 8.1. I hope it does well. A few questions: 1) How does SJSAS 8.1 compare to JBoss in terms of clustering support?The Platform Edition doesn't provide clustering - it's really aimed at single machine deployments or as the J2EE runtime for developers (eg. embedded in an IDE).
The Standard Edition supports service availability through clustering of instances across multiple machines. This applies to HTTP, RMI and JMS; the management interface also supports clustering - the design center being to make managing a distributed cluster as simple as managing a single instance.
The Enterprise Edition extends the service availability to ensure (as far as is reasonably possible) that failure is transparent to end users - we've got an innovative architecture that was designed to deal with failure (not merely survive) and we believe it's one of the more robust solutions available - there's a good whitepaper on the product page that explains why we believe that (it was also discussed on tss a year or so ago).
I'm not sure what claims JBoss makes.
2) BEA's been talking a lot about JSR 183-style annotations. Is that in the plan for a future 8.1 release?The members of the Expert Groups for JSR-181 (WS Metadata for the Java Platform), JSR-250 (common annotations), and JSR-224 (JAX-RPC 2.0) are working together to provide good support for WS security.
We haven't seen significant movement on JSR-183 Expert Group. So at the moment - no immediate plans.
3) Has Sun made performance improvements to the JWSDP that you ship in 8.1 or do you ship the same JWSDP that is available from java.sun.com?The implementation in JWSDP 1.5 is the same as that in AS 8.1 PE.
Note that the JAX-RPC 1.1 and JAXB 2.0 implementation source code is available at Java.Net under JRL and JDL licenses, and that the TCK for these technologies is also available there.
Weekly builds are being posted at java.net. Check out http://jwsdp.dev.java.net. We're hoping to add Fast Infoset to JWSDP later this year and early benchmarking has shown some great performance improvements; the current thinking is to also make that available in AS 8.1.
Our implementation of Fast Infoset is being developed at java.net (http://fi.dev.java.net) under the ASL 2.0 license.
4) Is anyone from the SJSAS team going to be at the Server Side Symposium?It's in Vegas - of course :)
5) There's been a lot of talk about Hibernate on TSS. I'm wondering if Sun has an opinion on it for SJSAS applications?Lots of opinions.
We'll be posting a note describing how to get Hibernate running in Platform Edition over on the java.net J2EE SDK project - https://j2ee-sdk.dev.java.net/
6) Who is using SJSAS? I would be interested to learn some success stories. -FrankThere are some success stories on the product pages - http://www.sun.com/software/products/appsrvr/index.xml and here http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem/index.xml
Rich Sharples
Sun Microsystems
Great piece by James Governer at Redmonk about the myth of a monolithic "open source community":
... there are many open source communities with their own licensing and governance approaches, lexicons, characters, superstars. Its a carnival mash-up, a diverse cornucopia of views attitudes and styles.
and:
So Sun wants Solaris to compete with Linux. Well that's what diversity is all about. That's where innovation comes from; competition.
Sun's own Simon Phipps also has a discussion about patents, licensing, and CDDL. He nicely captures the intent behind the licensing choice for OpenSolaris. Be skeptical if you want, but we really are sincere about wanting to build an open source community around OpenSolaris. Not to destroy Linux and the BSDs, but to join them. And, yes, to compete with them to create the best open source operating system.
Folks,
it is with fond memories of every one I have worked with during my 9+ years of service at Sun, that I announce my departure.
I have been given an exciting opportunity as an XML and content management Solutions Architect at Flatirons Solutions (http://www.flatironssolutions.com) in Boulder.
While at Sun, I have worked for SunSoft (Solaris Tech Pubs), Sun Educational Services, Global eServices Engineering, Global Knowledge Engineering, and CNS Knowledge, Data and Operations.
I've helped create online documentation for Solstice Backup, Solstice Job Scheduler and the Solaris Administration Guides, created education.central, worked on the next generation of SunSolve, the Astoria, Voyager and KASP content management systems, and the Service Parts Repository (SPRuce) and the Sun System Handbook, and was consistently one of the top 15 most popular blogs on blogs.sun.com.
God willing, our paths will again cross some day. It has been an honor and priviledge to work with all of you incredibly talented folks. Sorry if I missed anybody. Please forward to anyone you think might be interested in hearing the news.
My last day at Sun will be February 17th, but you can continue to follow my adventures at: http://shudson310.blogspot.com
Please stay in touch!
Best regards,
Scott Hudson
Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.: The News & Record: "As noted here before, the News & Record, the newspaper of record in Greensboro, North Carolina, is embarking on one of mainstream journalism's most important experiments: turning the paper into a community forum, 'to build a Web presence that invites readers in to share the news they know and engage in the civic discussion,' as John Robinson, the paper's editor wrote on his blog. (See online editor Lex Alexander's memo, chock-full of ideas, for more.)"What about the stodgy old Raleigh N&O? Newsobserver.com has newsfeeds now, I guess that's a start. By the way, the N&O newsfeeds are not really hidden behind the registration wall, anybody can get them. Here is the current list:
|
News Politics Business Sports College Sports |
Duke NCSU UNC WFU ECU |
Preps Canes Lifestyles Opinion |
I have the distinct pleasure to be taking a Corporate Governance course this semester at UT with two of the most accomplished men I've encountered. They are Shelby Carter and William H. Cunningham. I can’t find a good profile on Mr. Cunningham but he is only the 2nd man in history to be the Dean of a UT school, President of the University, and Chancellor of the UT School system. He sits on the board of directors for several fortune 500 companies and is brilliant.
This past week Mr. Carter provided us some insight into his
Ten Commandmants for an Intrepreneur. An intrepreneur is similar to an entrepreneur
but they operate within a company as opposed to creating one. This is the first
time I've heard that term but I really identify with it. In some ways I think
the intrepreneurial opportunity is more exciting than the entrepreneurial one
because of the scale on which you can operate. I've been asked many times over
the past couple of rough years for Sun why I am still here. My answer has
always been the same. How many times do you see a > $10 billion company with
30,000+ bright people and an $180 billion install base reinvent itself? I would
rather be inside that company, helping to make the turnaround happen, than on
the outside watching it happen.
Here are Shelby Carter's top 10 commandments for the Intrepeneur (yes I know
there are 11 of them):
I’m learning a lot from both Mr. Carter and Mr. Cunningham and will provide more later.
I'm increasingly thinking that the popular conception of the term "data center" is becoming obsolete. Traditionally, the data center was kind of physical plant where an organization performed computing. It had much the same status as the heating and ventilation system in terms of where it was located and the internal constituency it served. Connecting to outside resources or even "talking" to other computers was a rare feat comparable to launching a rocket to the moon. This meant that the work performed in the data center largely stayed in the data center. One simply did not expose the infrastructure to interaction by outsiders.
What the data center has become for the vast majority of organizations is a base from which one accesses resources that can be located anywhere on the network. It's the ante one pays to sit at the table and play the game with others.
The only reason to own and operate a big data center is if you can do this more efficiently than others. Furthermore, if you indeed you possess a competitive advantage in delivering computer enabled services, you may be hiding your light under bucket if your organization is the exclusive consumer of these services.
In other words, and strictly for sake of argument, if your own e-commerce infrastructure compares favorably to Amazon, LL Bean or Fandango—maybe your business should be offering your expertise to others. This process of an in-house capability blossoming into a resource used by others has happened many times in the IT industry. For example, what was the reservations system at American Airlines grew to become SABRE, a quasi-common carrier bookings and seat management resource for airlines around the world.
IMO, I see this process at work in Sun Managed Services. Over the years, Sun has developed incredible expertise in the cost efficient operation of data center resources. We have benchmarked our Sun-on-Sun IT programs not only against other $10-15 Billion sales, 30K+ employee global organizations, but other managed services and outsourcing companies and believe we compare well to the best in the business.
So it's only natural that we make our expertise available to others on a paying basis. As with utility computing, we don't do everything. The Sun Managed Services menu is just that--a menu of offerings that we execute well and have packaged to deliver to others. We don't want to take over your data center or give your employees new badges. We do want to help you run it better.
For more on this, have a look at http://www.sun.com/service/managedservices/
For 2005 "Black Is The New Silver", from TV's to cellphones to iPods.
What's next?
One bet is that colour-matching will soon by available across a range of consumer products, rather like the paint-mixing facilities now available to home decorators.... I talked a little of this in an earlier blog.
But, just as likely is that people will more and more seek to differentiate their purchases by value-added features rather than by looks alone. Sure, this may be a minority of folks today, but....
In time, the thrill of carrying the latest electronic gadget or of adding the latest box of tricks to your home may be replaced by a desire for function rather than form.
Why invite theft, or accidental damage, when a sleek black box with value-added network services may better meet your needs.
The same applies to IT and Sun's recent announcement of its Utility Grid is a trailblazing example of this.
IT customers can connect to Sun's Utility Grid as a "Black Box" and utilize it to serve value-added software from third party providers or else run custom applications of their own creation - safe in the knowledge that their investment is in function and not form (letting Sun innovate behind the scenes using Java and Jini technologies to fit form to function).
Having an array of multi-coloured shiny boxes maybe isn't the only option for IT customers now that "Black Is The New Silver".
Java Seminar in Fukuoka でのアンケート結果があがってきましたので
拝見しました。最近毎回そうなのですが、Project Looking Glassのデモが大変好評のようです。
J2EE が本来の専門の私にとっては、多少複雑な気分ですが、それだけ Project Looking Glass の
出来栄え、コンセプトが素晴らしいと言うことは、やはり誇らしく思います。
一つ、気になるコメントがありましたので、こちらで回答したいと思います。
Windowsツール窓立てによく似ていたのが引っかかりました
窓立てとの類似はずいぶん以前から言われているようです。Project Looking Glass の生みの親、ひでやさん(川原英哉)が昨年2月の段階で返答したものが下記にあります。この説明は比較的にわかりやすいと思います。
静止した画像のスクリーンショットだけで見ると、どちらも「窓を立てている」ので似ているように見えますが、
プラットフォームとしての中身はまるで別物です。
既存のウインドウ画像の情報を取り込んで、斜めに傾けて表示できるのが窓立てです。このコンセプトを98年という早い段階から
実装していたことは賞賛に値すると思います。
ただ、一方の Project Looking Glass にとっては「窓を立てる」ことは、あくまで一機能に過ぎません。
Project Looking Glass では、デスクトップ全体が3次元で描画されており、その一つの結果が「窓を立てる」ということに
過ぎません。3次元デスクトップとしてのポテンシャルの大きさが Project Looking Glass の本質です。
ですので、CDセレクタのような3次元ならではのアプリケーションを作成することもできますし、model loader のように
3次元オブジェクトを取り込むこともできます。
今後、Project Looking Glass 上のアプリケーションが次々に出てくれば、差異は自然に明らかになってくるでしょう。
福岡の Java Seminar in Fukuoka で、地元の方が行っていたアイデアを一つ、借用させていただこうと思っています。 Java Computing 2005 Spring に関して、SEO (Search Engine Optimization)のコンテストを行うことを計画中です。 google で "Java Computing 2005 Spring" と検索した結果、自分の Web ページが上位になる人は賞品がもらえるというものです。
賞品は、トップ5が新型の Duke Mouse (写真はまだ本物ではなく合成です)
優勝者には、PSP (Java と関係ないですが)を考えています。
近いうちに、JC2005 の応援サイトで正式発表しますが 新型 Duke Mouse が欲しい方は、今から Web ページに Java Computing 2005 Spring の文字を 入れられるとよいかと思います。
Java Computing 2005 Spring 用のプレゼントを発案してくださった方、 コメントをくださった方 全員にプレゼントを送ります。
コメント欄を見る限り、
kyuka さん, わんこさん、Yukioさん, Kazama-san, hiro345さん、sugatinn さん、tomoharu-san
の7名ですが、Duke Mouse を差し上げたいと思います。
漏れている方がいらっしゃればすいません。遠慮なくコメント欄に書き込んでください。
上記7名の方は、私に送付宛先をお知らせください。私のメールアドレスは Naoki.Ishihara_atmark_Sun.COM になります。 Subject は、"destination for Duke Mouse" で統一していただけると助かります。
For what it's worth.
Here's a fun project for the Solaris DIY'ers out there. Take an old PC (a 266 MHz PIII, 128 MB relic worked for me), install the pkgsrc software-management system, and in just a few steps, get it auto-building the latest release of any one of hundreds of open-source servers, tools, and utilities.
For example, let's suppose you've been wanting to deploy an Amanda backup server or an Icecast media server on your home network (anchored by a Solaris 10 OS kernel of course :-).
First, download the pkgsrc tarball from here:
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc.tar.gz
and put it in /tmp
Now go to a root shell and do these steps:
# export PATH=$PATH:/usr/pkg/bin:/usr/pkg/sbin:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/ccs/bin # cd / # gunzip -c /tmp/pkgsrc.tar.gz | tar -xvf - # cd /pkgsrc/bootstrap # ./bootstrap # mkdir /usr/pkg/etc # cp /pkgsrc/bootstrap/work/mk.conf.example /usr/pkg/etc/mk.confEdit /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf and add these lines:
USE_PKGSRC_GCC=YES GCC_REQD+=3Now tell pkgsrc to build, say, Amanda like this:
# cd /pkgsrc/sysutils/amanda # bmake install > /tmp/bmakeoutput 2>&1 &
That's it! To monitor progress, use something like this::
# while true; do grep '^===> [A-Z]' /tmp/bmakeoutput | tail; \ echo -n "Press Return to refresh..."; line; clear; doneSit back and watch as pkgsrc does its magic:
First, realizing it's been asked to fetch and build an app from scratch, it looks up the the app's master location (e.g. sourceforge.net/amanda) and downloads the source tarball for the latest release. Then it proceeds to identify any unsatisfied dependencies and sub-dependencies. Since we're starting completely from scratch, all dependencies are unsatisfied -- even the gcc compiler and toolset. So for this first build, the first thing pkgsrc compiles is the compilers. After that, it moves onto the first dependency and any of its dependencies and so on, ultimately building amanda itself.
Thought that was fun? Try some more. I've built hundreds of servers, tools, and utilities on my pkgsrc playground, such as icecast, postgresql, qmail, webmin, snort, sqlite, and vorbis-tools.
Questions? Problems?
E-mail me here: Eric.Boutilier at Sun.Com
Please note: I haven't tried building any GNOME, KDE, or other X-Window applications. (In fact, I don't even have the Solaris' X-Window libraries and headers installed on this box!) For desktop apps, you should definitely go with one of the traditional binary distributions. The pkgsrc project has one for Solaris 9 SPARC, and of course for SPARC and x86, there's also:
[Technorati Tags: Solaris, OpenSolaris, opensource]
Back in the good old dot-com days, before the bubble burst and covered us all in ectoplasm (see previous blog entries for my aversion to slime), team meetings, conferences, and other get-togethers were commonplace. With the economy dragging, and employers trying to run more efficiently, we are not seeing that kind of freespirited travel budget anymore.
Social networking is critical to the technical community. No one can possibly know the answer to every question, or even a majority of technical questions, but knowing where to find the answers, or who might hold the answers is a key skill. It isn't necessarily the smartest engineer in the room who provides the most value to the customers, but often it is the engineer with the deepest and most diverse rolodex. The longer we stay in a down economy with restricted travel and fewer opportunities for the geeks to geek together, the more danger there is in social networks coming unraveled. This is especially true when there are management shifts, reorganization, and strategic realignment around the technical community.
One of the things that convinced me to come back to Sun after my 5 month "vacation" was the commitment that I am seeing in senior management to investing in training, technical exposure, and opportunities for social networking. CEC (Customer Engineering Conference) and the former STS (Services Technology Symposium) have brought together thousands of our Customer facing engineers every year to build social and technical networks of communication with Sun's product teams, Service engineers and architects, and other Customer facing engineers and architects from around the world, and across the spectrum of technical specialties. It is like diversity central mixed with Disneyland for people who know what the word "grok" means. While Sun's management often doesn't really understand us geeks, they do recognize the value of social networking, and in keeping the Customer facing engineers and architects informed and technically up to date.
So, to those open minds at corporate who approved the budget and kept CEC alive, THANK YOU! To the unsung staff and volunteers who tackle the logistics and execution of this event, THANK YOU! To the hundreds of eager geeks who run BoF sessions, or volunteer to help load Solaris on x86 laptops at the CEC Installfest, THANK YOU! To those Customer facing engineers and partners who promote CEC and carry back the knowledge that they gain at CEC to their respective organizations, THANK YOU! To those participants who take valuable time away from their families to travel to San Francisco for a long weekend of "work", THANK YOU!
See you there! bill.
Saw The History Boys a new play by Alan Bennett at the National Theatre Saturday. An excellent production which we all enjoyed. The story is about a school which is trying to get all of one class into Oxbridge has an anarchic teacher played by Richard Griffiths who actually teaches the kids more than anyone realises. Frances de la Tour is his understanding peer and Geoffrey Streatfeild who plays Irwin who is brought in as a 'straight' supply teacher to ensure 100% success at Oxbridge.
It does not take Irwin long to realise Hector ( played by Griffiths) is actually doing a rather good job but matters are quickly taken out of his hands by a indiscreet moment by Hector. The class are all played by young actors who are all excellent. The punchy one liners were often missed by me and the short acts are punctuated by music from the 1980's and film projected on the rear of the stage of the actors at a 'real' school, while the stage is rearranged for the next act.
In this age of excellent graphics and animations, a good old fashioned text graphic is nice to see once in a while.
( ******* ) ( ******** )
( ************* ) ( ************** )
( ****************** ) ( ******************* )
( ********* ) ( *************** ) ( *********** )
( ********* ) ( *********** ) ( ********** )
( ******* ) ( *********) ( ******** )
( ****** ) ( ***** ) ( ******* )
( ***** ) ( * ) ( ****** )
( ***** ) HAPPY ( ****** )
>>>>>>>>--------------- --- --- --------------------->
( ***** ) VALENTINES ( ****** )
( ***** ) ( ****** )
( ***** ) DAY! ( ****** )
( ***** ) ( ****** )
( ***** ) ( ****** )
( ***** )( ****** )
( ***** ***** )
( ******* )
( ***** )
( *** )
( * )
( )
V
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Date Item Price |
10/1999 Fuji MX-2700 $ 560.00 |
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Date Item Price |
06/26/2000 Fuji FinePix 4700 $ 655.95 |
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Date Item Price |
01/26/2002 Fuji FinePix 6800 Zoom $ 504.00 |
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Date Item Price |
09/24/2002 Fuji FinePix 3800 Zoom $ 382.00 |
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Date Item Price |
07/31/2003 Fuji FinePix F700 $ 599.95 |
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Date Item Price |
10/20/2004 Fuji FinePix F810 $ 499.00 |
I have to say though, that although I ran the 7 miles fairly easy, it was a very comfortable run due to the 3 day's rest.
Friday, I did my speedwork at the gym. I modified it this week so I actually ran seven 1:30 intervals at 3:30/km pace with a 2min recovery jog in between each interval. This was much harder than running eight or nine 1:00 intervals at the same pace, but I'm confident that it will help improve my speed.
Sunday was cold and dry after quite a bit of rain on Saturday, so I decided to skip the first part of last week's run as it involves running through wet grass. Instead I ran the first half of my 13mile route and then extended it with the second half of last weeks run. This gave me a much less strenuous run than last week, but still kept the mileage up at around 14 (maybe slightly higher - I need to check).
So, my legs are tired today, but I may just try for a 30 minute recovery run today to try to loosen everything up.
I would have liked to have done more, but am comfortable that what I did do was helpful to my race prep.
The shop still hadn't got my iPod back from Apple when I called in on Saturday, but the guy said that Apple tend to replace rather than repair, so he gave me a brand new iPod to replace mine. When we got home, I plugged it straight into the IEEE1394 port (on the powered Belkin card), and XP recognised it straight away and installed the drivers for it.
So, now all I have to do is wait for the camcorder to be suitably repaired (or replaced) and I'll be back on course to do something with all of that video of the kids
Can you tell I'm happy?
I have an Ultra5 at home that I use for work. It was running Solaris9 and is now running Solaris10. I planned a cunning upgrade I had wanted to use Live upgrade but had not setup my disk to do this. So I booked an Ultra5 in the lab and loaded Solaris10 using a custom install so my disk had two slices for Solaris. All went well but I ignored package warnings about dependendies - big mistake. I then loaded the VPN client software we use onto the box - including instructions and then copied my small home directory from home onto it. I then took the machine home on Friday
I powered the box up, and realised soon that dtlogin was not going to appear. After checking with work dtlogin is not started by SMF we saw the rc2.d/S99dtlogin was missing. I was tempted to give up and take the box into work. But I soldiered on and got VPN going and mounted the Solaris10 FCS image from work onto the Ultra5 and worked out what SUNWdt packages were not loaded. A very small time later I had a running desktop environment. Thank goodness for a one megabit ADSL line..
The lab system then needed to give up its disk to my home system and then a reboot to check all was well. A few more packages had to be loaded from the Companion CD for CD burning etc and I was back up and running. I now need to teach myself all the good things in Solaris10 and try and catch up with the students. Next time Live upgrade will be my friend. I am ready for that now
PS One of my guys rebooted enospc our main nfs server off a Live Upgrade Boot environment over the weekend. So it is now running Solaris10 too. It came up like a charm. Our primary motivation is of course to be running the latest Solaris we can and if we run into any problems we will be logging bugs as we should. Thanks for doing that DC.
My first distillation of discussions on Groklaw concerns mainly patents. Asterisks show links to sample comments on Groklaw, just in case you think my examples are imaginary. My aim is to explain rather than to attack so please read things that way and e-mail if you think there's an attack snuck in.
Groklaw theories on why Sun created the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) included active tactics like "undermine the GPL", "set up a walled garden of development*", "attack Linux**", "copy Microsoft Shared Source*" as well as passive diagnostics like "not getting open source*", "being clueless" and so on. Actually, the team led by Claire Giordano understand open source really well and had none of those motivations. It was obvious from day one that any future software licensing would need to use OSI-approved licenses rather indulging in the sort of experimentation that was possible for Sun in the late 90s. Experimentation with licenses to form communities around software was all valuable back then1. Sun and others learned a great deal from trying bold licensing ideas like SISSL and SCSL, including their flaws. Since then, it's become clear that each experiment can live for ever as we now extract ourselves from modern dislike of those licenses untempered by a view of their historical significance.
Moreover, license proliferation has now run rampant. As it turns out, a huge amount of the proliferation is revisions to the otherwise excellent Mozilla Public License (MPL) caused by the hard-wiring of some of its clauses. People change the company name and jurisdiction in the MPL and then don't seem to be able to stop themselves adding a little something extra too, thus creating yet another license with reciprocal terms that fragments the license space (as Larry Rosen has pointed out). As Mitchell Baker's MPL is so popular (and rightly so), it was used as the starting point for the new license that seemed inevitable once the factors below were understood. In an effort to reduce license proliferation, it was decided to make the license generic and re-usable rather than specific to Sun. Hopefully we'll see a reduction in reworded MPL variants being brought to OSI, not least as people seek to join the defensive patent pool created by the CDDL.
A number of factors showed the team the problem space Sun faces:
Looking at the current range of OSI-approved licenses it became clear that none of them was a perfect fit and that a new license would be needed. The GPL was pretty popular with many people in Sun, but its most obvious failing was in issue 2 - it doesn't allow mixed licensing3. For something like OpenSolaris, that's essential. While Sun's legal team has done amazing work over the last five years renegotiating licenses from the various geological eras, there's still a variety of licensing in the huge code-base that is Solaris and indeed there are likely to be modules that will need to stay binary only, at least at first.
None of the licenses looked at really seemed to have a good answer to patent terrorists, and this was a primary motivation in the design of the CDDL. Patents on methods are like cane toads or fire ants. In the habitat where their natural predator is present, they are irritating but containable, but allowed to roam elsewhere they are a menace that threatens the otherwise defenceless native species. For patents, the natural predator is the patent portfolio backed up by the will to fight and the cash to do so. To provide a good defence, that portfolio needs to encompass the whole code-base it applies to - if it can attract a diversity of co-operating owners, all the better.
Usually that's a matter for the company developing the software product, who file patents as they go along, but for an open source community it's harder and so far no-one has created a mechanism to build the defences. The idea of the CDDL is to seed a patent portfolio for the code-base involved, and then ensure that as contributions are made over time each contributor also supplies the community with the patent rights necessary to defend their work.
Consequently, paragraphs 2.1 and 2.2 of the CDDL make every contributor grant all necessary rights for their code in a blanket grant, and then section 6 binds them in a 'patent peace' arrangement so that any patent litigation leads to a loss of rights - an idea pioneered in the GPL and MPL. At a minimum, paragraph 3.2 ensures all contributors declare they have rights to their ideas, just as the original licensor does by the act of creating the original work.
Groklaw people are fond of asking "why doesn't Sun do it right like IBM**" but IBM's approach of gathering a small selection from their huge patent portfolio and hoping someone can do something good with them is much less focussed - a fine gesture of openness and generosity nonetheless. People preferring IBM's approach presumably regard patents as a seed-idea from which to be creative under an OSI-approved license. That approach requires study of each and every patent both by the donor and the recipient - something only those with access to specialist legal advice will find comfortable. However patents may have been conceived in earlier times, they have become the protective barbed wire around corporate products.
The Sun approach results in a blanket grant to all patents found to be necessary and creates a project known to be protected. It's not about seeding ideas - but then modern patents do their best to gain protection while revealing as little as possible that's useful anyway. Both approaches to patents are good if we have to live with them, but it's like the difference between throwing a handful of coins into a crowd and hoping it will do some good versus endowing a charitable trust. The charitable trust is theoretically more restricted (not everyone can grab a coin) but in the end solves the problems in its charter better than any general approach.
A common objection is that developers are in some way more at risk** from looking at the OpenSolaris source than they are looking at the source of some other commercially-derived open source project, because the patent grant only applies within the scope of CDDL-licensed projects. However, once you realise that most US technology corporations encourage developers to file patents as they go along, to build defensive protection for their products, you will also realise that it's likely all substantial corporate-origin open source projects are heavily encumbered4. Even smaller contributions from big patent holders are probably affected. Just because Sun has quantified it for OpenSolaris, that doesn't mean that it's any less safe to look at than any other open source project. If you use either the code or the ideas behind any code-base you are likely taking a theoretical risk, possibly a practical risk if you allow it to inform other, non-OSI-licensed projects. That's not an attempt to scare you - it's just a fact. Patents apply whether you know about them or not and reading people's code neither increases nor decreases your risk from them.
Of course, it's no comfort to know that you have always had a problem and that it's not gone away, and I suppose there are grounds for jealousy that CDDL projects will have something other OSI projects haven't got yet. Despite popular Groklaw accusations like "trying to entrap Linux developers to use Sun patents so they can be sued*" and "misleading people by saying there's a patent grant but keeping it all for themselves*", Sun is actually doing a new thing that solves rather than creates a problem, while doing no harm in the worlds of existing licenses. To suggest Sun is going to suddenly start patent suits against other open source community members is ludicrous. Like IBM, Sun has no intent of doing that. Unlike IBM, Sun also has no intent of turning its patents into a revenue centre from commercial developers. Sun has, like Red Hat and MySQL, accumulated its patent portfolio as a defensive measure against patent terrorist. The CDDL now gives Sun and others a way to extend that protection to others, through the specific wording of a specific license.
There's plenty more to say on this subject, but I'll end for now with a pointer to Greg P's recent comments on the subject. I personally think the steps CDDL takes with creating blanket patent protection are an essential step that the open source meta-community will have to take with other licenses in the future; maybe GPL v3 will take similar steps and thus become miscible (or at least safe to dual license) with CDDL, to the satisfaction of both the OpenSolaris and Linux communities?
-----
Footnotes:
Here was an interesting problem I ran across not too long ago. Had a customer with a lot of A5200's deployed since they get a high spindle count (22 SCSI drives in a 4u box). Old database philosophy puts the emphasis on spindles to improve throughput .. but, these days with an increase in storage cache, more intelligent controller algorithms to stage, destage, and stream data at optimal rates, and multiplexed HBAs to linearly improve throughput across fibre channel fabrics - the tuning issues generally go back to the types of mixed applications you have coming to bear on the storage.
Anyhow, since I've been dealing with storage arrays with built in raid controllers and cache for so long, I seem to have forgotten about what it was to take care of all this within the operating system and software based volume managers. In this particular case, the customer was using Solaris 8, Sun Volume Manager, and an A5200. Watching iostat for a given drive in the A5200, they were noticing rebuild and throughput times on the order of around 2.5MB/s (which is abnormally slow) and relatively high I/O wait times. They had striped volumes mirrored front to back on a given A5200 (ok - let's split the loop on the A5200) and were using a boatload of the old 72G cheetah 10KRPM seagate drives with mixed firmware. Ok, fcode aside (btw - seagate's update utilities are all win32 and linux based, sun repackages the fcode and update utility for the drives they OEM), what I failed to catch right away is the default stripe size for Sun Volume Manager which is 16KB and basic physics. On non-well aligned I/O, I'll probably be doing 1 write/revolution so:
((10,000 RPM)/60s)/drive = 166.67 IOPs/drive
166.67 IOPs/drive * 16KB/IOP = (2.6 MB/s)drive
which means that we can only transfer up to a maximum of 2.6MB/drive which matches pretty close to what was observed with iostat. Would 15K drives help? sure, but only by a factor of 1.5 - what we really need is better aligned I/O with higher block transfer rates (which is normally taken care of in well designed array controllers and cache.) In this case, increasing the stripe size should be the major improvement, and from previous experience ~384KB would be closer to optimal if we could deliver this in parallel (yielding on the order of 60MB/s per drive). Of course also tweaking maxphys, the [s]sd_max_xfer_size, and bufhwm can prove fruitful provided that there's enough memory to go around for the I/O subsystem. But this is one thing I love about Solaris - it's design ability to be able to handle large I/O transfer sizes (maxphys goes up to MAXINT.) Contrast this with linux and AIX which use a 4K io xfer size. Of course you'll need a filesystem to be able to handle the throughput as well .. but that's a much larger (but closely integrated) discussion ..
I attended the Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005 on Saturday morning in Chapel Hill. The meeting was held in a classroom large enough to accommodate the approximately 150 people in attendance, power in every seat, and wireless internet. The agenda was divided into three portions, but the conference was really one long, seamless, and very interesting conversation between audience members and the speakers. The theme was using blogs to build community, how to build a larger readership for your blog, how to use blogs in grassroots journalism. Here are a couple of the things I wrote down (these are not 100% accurate quotes):
I also got a chance to talk to folks about corporate blogs at SAS and IBM (both have some internal Roller sites) and student blogs at UNC. I also spent some time talking to Roch Smith, the man behind the Greensboro 101 community aggregator. All and all it was a great experience. I learned a lot about blogging and I feel a little more connected to my hometown and the Triangle in general. Thanks to Anton Zuiker, Paul Jones, and everybody else who helped put it together. More information, check here and here.
is born.
Planet Roller is currently a command-line line tool that reads a configuration file of newsfeed subscription data, then generates an aggegated weblog with an
RSS feed, and an
OPML listing of all subscriptions. It's essentially a Java version of Planet Planet. I've got it set up to run every 30 mintues. Yes, I'm aware that the RSS gets a warning on
validation. No, I haven't added newsfeed autodiscovery yet. Yes, I stole
David Edmondson's Planet Sun theme. No, I haven't done any testing on the OPML. Enough questions already! I need to get back to work.
I'll be adding a couple more details to this post as the night progresses.
OK, I'm back. Did I mention that Planet Roller is a community aggregator, a "A Community Aggregator is a portal-like web application that displays weblog posts from a group of closely related but separately hosted weblogs and provides synthetic newsfeeds so that readers may subscribe to the group as a whole."
Configuring Planet Roller
Currently, Planet Roller is just a simple command-line tool that is designed to run as a scheduled task. It reads a list of newsfeed subscriptions from an XML file, as shown below. Eventually, there will also be a UI for Planet Roller so that you don't have to shell into to a server and edit an XML file to add and delete subscriptions.
<planet-config>
<main-page>control.vm</main-page>
<admin-name>Dave Johnson</admin-name>
<admin-email>dave.johnson@rollerweblogger.org</admin-email>
<site-url>http://rollerweblogger.org/planet</site-url>
<output-dir>/nfs/ank/home1/r/roller/public_html/planet</output-dir>
<template-dir>/nfs/ank/home1/r/roller/planet-roller/templates</template-dir>
<cache-dir>/nfs/ank/home1/r/roller/planet-roller/cache</cache-dir>
<subscription id="dave">
<title>Blogging Roller</title>
<feed-url>http://rollerweblogger.org/rss/roller</feed-url>
<site-url>http://rollerweblogger.org/page/roller</site-url>
</subscription>
<subscription id="lance">
<title>Vanity Foul</title>
<feed-url>http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/rss/lance</feed-url>
<site-url>http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/page/lance</site-url>
</subscription>
<subscription id="matt">
<title>Raible Designs</title>
<feed-url>http://raibledesigns.com/rss/rd</feed-url>
<site-url>http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd</site-url>
</subscription>
<subscription id="anil">
<title>Collected Bits</title>
<feed-url>http://www.busybuddha.org/blog/rss/anil</feed-url>
<site-url>http://www.busybuddha.org/blog/page/anil</site-url>
</subscription>
<subscription id="henri">
<title>Goldfish Bowl</title>
<feed-url>http://blog.generationjava.com/roller/rss/bayard</feed-url>
<site-url>http://blog.generationjava.com/roller/page/bayard</site-url>
</subscription>
<subscription id="pat">
<title>P@ Sunglasses</title>
<feed-url>http://blogs.sun.com/roller/rss/pat</feed-url>
<site-url>http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/pat</site-url>
</subscription>
<group handle="roller">
<title>Planet Roller</title>
<description>Other folks who are blogging Roller</description>
<max-page-entries>30</max-page-entries>
<max-feed-entries>30</max-feed-entries>
<subscription-ref refid="dave" />
<subscription-ref refid="lance" />
<subscription-ref refid="pat" />
<subscription-ref refid="matt" />
<subscription-ref refid="anil" />
<subscription-ref refid="henri" />
</group>
<group handle="trijug">
<title>Planet TriJUG</title>
<description>Triangle Java User Group Bloggers</description>
<max-page-entries>40</max-page-entries>
<max-feed-entries>40</max-feed-entries>
<subscription-ref refid="dave" />
</group>
</planet-config>
The configuration file contains three types of information: 1) configuration information for the planet site itself, 2) newsfeed subscriptions, and 3) groups. Groups allow a single Planet Roller site to host differernt aggregations. In the above configuration file, I've defined two groups "Planet Roller" and "Planet TriJUG". Note that one subscription can appear in more than one group.
Customizing Planet Roller File Generation
The command-line version of Planet Roller uses the Texen feature of Velocity to generate whatever files you want in your Planet Roller site. I included templates for HTML, RSS, and OPML, but you can tweak these and/or add whatever you want.
You tell Planet Roller which templates to use by specifying a Texen control template in the <main-page> element of the config file. Specify the templates directory in the <template-dir> element. The control template does not generate anything itself. It controls the file generation process and it determines which files are generated and which template is used for each. Here is Planet Roller's current control template:
#set ($groupHandles = $planet.groupHandles)
#foreach ($groupHandle in $groupHandles)
#set ($outputFile = $strings.concat([$groupHandle, ".html"]))
$generator.parse("html.vm", $outputFile, "groupHandle", $groupHandle)
#set ($outputFile = $strings.concat([$groupHandle, ".rss"]))
$generator.parse("rss.vm", $outputFile, "groupHandle", $groupHandle)
#set ($outputFile = $strings.concat([$groupHandle, ".opml"]))
$generator.parse("opml.vm", $outputFile, "groupHandle", $groupHandle)
#end
The control template loops through the groups defined in the config file and for each, generates an HTML file using the html.vm template, an RSS file using the rss.vm template, and an OPML file using the opml.vm template. You can provide your own control template, or just hack the one that comes with Planet Roller.
Based on the above configuration data and control template, when Planet Roller runs, you'll end up with six files:
Let's look at the RSS template, so you can get a feel for how the templates work.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<channel>
#set($group = $planet.getGroup($groupHandle))
<title>$utilities.textToHTML($group.title,true)</title>
<link>$planet.configuration.url/${group.handle}.html</link>
<description>$utilities.textToHTML($group.description,true)</description>
<lastBuildDate>$utilities.formatRfc822Date($date)</lastBuildDate>
<generator>Roller Planet 1.1-dev</generator>
#set($entries = $planet.getAggregation($group, 30))
#foreach( $entry in $entries )
<item>
<title>$utilities.textToHTML($entry.title,true)</title>
<description>$utilities.textToHTML($entry.content,true)</description>
<category>$utilities.textToHTML($entry.category,true)</category>
<link>$entry.permalink</link>
<pubDate>$utilities.formatRfc822Date($entry.published)</pubDate>
#if($entry.author)<dc:creator>$utilities.textToHTML($entry.author,true)</dc:creator>#end
</item>
#end
</channel>
</rss>
And here is the OPML template:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding='utf-8'?>
#set($group = $planet.getGroup($groupHandle))
<opml version="1.1">
<head>
<title>$group.description</title>
<dateCreated>$utilities.formatRfc822Date($date)</dateCreated>
<dateModified>$utilities.formatRfc822Date($date)</dateModified>
<ownerName>$planet.config.adminName</ownerName>
<ownerEmail>$planet.config.adminEmail</ownerEmail>
</head>
<body>
#foreach($sub in $group.subscriptions)
<outline text="$utilities.textToHTML($sub.title)"
xmlUrl="$utilities.textToHTML($sub.feedUrl)"
htmlUrl="$utilities.textToHTML($sub.siteUrl)" />
#end
</body>
</opml>
Within a template, you have access to the configuration through the $planet object, plus there are a couple of other objects that you'll find helpful in generating files. Here are the objects that are available in a template:
Running Planet Roller
You can run Planet Roller from a simple script, like the one below:
#!/bin/bash
_CP=.:./lib/planet-roller-1.1-dev.jar
_CP=${_CP}:./lib/rollerbeans.jar
_CP=${_CP}:./lib/commons-logging.jar
_CP=${_CP}:./lib/jaxen-full.jar
_CP=${_CP}:./lib/jdom.jar
_CP=${_CP}:./lib/dom4j-1.4.jar
_CP=${_CP}:./lib/rome-0.5.jar
_CP=${_CP}:./lib/rome-fetcher-0.5.jar
_CP=${_CP}:./lib/velocity-1.4.jar
_CP=${_CP}:./lib/velocity-dep-1.4.jar
java -classpath ${_CP} org.roller.tools.planet.PlanetTool $1
If you want Planet Roller to run on a schedule, schedule it. For example, on UNIX you can use cron. I use the following cron task to run Planet Roller on the 6th and 36th minute of every hour:
6,36 * * * * (cd ~roller/planet-roller; ./planet-roller.sh)
Planet Roller uses the Rome Fetcher library to retrieve, parse, and cache newsfeed data to disk. Fetcher uses HTTP Conditional Get and Etags to ensure that feeds are only downloaded when truly updated.
That's enough for now. Tomorrow, I'll tell you about Planet Roller internals.
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The idea that network services should act independently of each other has proven to be a very sound one but more and more dependencies continue to creap into the urban system's network services. When the electricity goes out, we do not expect out water to stop too. A curious development in U.S. homes has effectively caused a great deal of interdependence between electric power service and wireline communications network: The phone line of most homes is connected to a wireless home phone base which is electrically powered. |
When the electricity goes out, there is no wireline phone service unless the home is equiped with an old-fashioned rotary phone or a simple digital phone powered by the phone lines from the central office.
We usually overlook this simple dependency in the U.S. because power outages are so rare. They do happen, though, and often at the worst time, for example, when you're home alone with a bad case of flu. My home was among 26 affected by a power outage from early morning until late afternoon this past Friday. Not only was I unable to receive or place calls from my home phone (yes, my mobile did work and had been charged the night before), the DSL was also out rendering my laptop (and Skype installed on it) useless even if it had a good amount of power left in its batteries. (In my case, I could neither make tea nor warm any soup for lunch.)
Of course the phone network continues to operate regardless of power outages. The dependency is at the outermost endpoints of this network and the electric network. Since most people are equiped with mobile phones, and since those older consumers who stay away from them usually have some rotary phone at home, the dependency may not be as disasaterous as it first sounds.
Telecommunications, Technology
1 John 4:8
He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.
I particularly like seeing the "I love what I do" sentiment.
Props to Steve Rubel's Micro
Persuasion for pointing me to Greg's blog.
In keeping with the old saying that a picture is worth
a thousand words, here is Greg Edwards' heatmap
of people reading one of their blogs. Cool. Now I just need
to put
these lessons to use in the formatting of my own blog pages...
If you want to know even more about this area, Martin Hardee (the
blogger behind "Sun.Com Usability, Design & Other Stuff") posted "Where
your eyes travel on web pages" last October; the blog includes a
link to the Poynter Institute's fascinating
writeup titled "The
Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes."
It's all connected, too - the Poynter research was done in partnership
with Poynter, the folks at Eyetools
and the Estlow Center.
Technorati Tag: Eyetools
Search is a hard problem. One of the main reasons that it is so difficult is that the semantics of human languages are particularly difficult to deal with. Tim has mentioned this aspect of search before, but I wanted to take some time and a few posts to talk about the issues a bit more.
There are a lot of reasons that semantics complicate the search problem, but two of the main ones are synonymy and polysemy.
Synonymy occurs when we have multiple words that have the "same" meaning. For example, if we index a document that contains the word lunar and the query uses the word moon, then in most search engines, that query will never retrieve that document.
A typical response to synonymy in a search engine is to introduce a synonym thesaurus. When the system encounters a query term that has synonyms, all of the synonyms are tossed into the query. This seems like a pretty good idea, but it actually doesn't work very well. While tossing in the synonyms does increase the number of relevant documents that are retrieved, they tend to be washed out by all the extra irrelevant documents that are retrieved!
A more subtle problem with a traditional synonym thesaurus is that there are few true synonyms — words that mean exactly the same thing — in English. For the most part there is a relationship of generality between so-called synonyms. For example, one could imagine that the words dog and hound would appear as synonyms in a thesaurus, but a hound is a particular kind of dog. I'll discuss what you could do about this problem in later posts.
Polysemy, on the other hand, is when a single word has multiple senses. Let's say that you got a one word query bank. Did the user mean the financial institution? The side of a river? The way that they slope roads so your car doesn't fly off of them in the turns? There's really no way to know. Most of the time, we're saved by the fact that queries tend to be more than one word long, thus giving the ambiguous word context. Figuring out what sense is meant in a given context is called "word sense disambiguation" in Computational Linguistics.
J.R. Firth said "You shall know a word by the company it keeps", and this is how search engines usually handle the problem of polysemy. While there are a lot of words with more than one sense, there are very few pairs of words that are co-ambiguous. A query like "savings bank" disambiguates pretty well for the financial sense of bank. Of course, this presumes that the words are close enough together in the document, which is not necessarily the case (yes, this is another plug for passage retrieval.)
Some systems have put quite a bit of effort into disambiguating words both during indexing and during querying. The problem is that if you don't do a fantastically good job of this (almost as good as a human would do), then an incorrect disambiguation of a document term or a query term means that you will miss documents.
on my way to the airport enroute to linux world, boston edition.
i'll miss valentine's day w/ my fam this go around, which is a bummer since as of late we have gone to a nice little local restraunt to celebrate family style.
i'll have a shiny new ipod in hand this go around. i relax much more readily with a steady infusion of tune'age. that should help.
MyJXTA :: use it - learn it - do it
Java == platform independence
XML == application independence
JXTA == network independence
Secure End-to-End Computing
in my ears: Clinic/Walking With Thee/Come Into Our Room
Only one other turned out for today's Molesey BBT run, probably because the weather forcast was for strong wind. When the other rider arrived, in shorts, there was sleet falling. I had to be home early anyway but despite the sleet was continuing we thought we would go for a short ride to the Cafe in Cobham. We went to Esher and then to the A3 junction then right up Sandy Lane into Cobham.
By now the weather had improved, so we changed our plans and decided to get a few miles in. Off to Stoke D'Abernon then Fetchham and a short stretch on the A246 through Great Bookham and on to Effingham. Left at the lights and up the hill on to White Down. Then down the hill past the Pill Box and through the nasty switch back. Right at the bottom to Abinger Hammer, then Gomshall to Shere and breakfast.
Yet again back over Coombe Bottom and home via Cobham. Only 42 ½ miles and back for 11 so I could get my jobs done.
Last night as our Valentines gift to each other we went out for live Dixieland music and dinner. We saw Mal Sharpe's Big Money in Jazz New Orleans Band, with Lady Memphis (vocals) at the The Downtown Restaurant in Berkeley. What a wonderful restaurant. We were sitting right in front of the stage. And when I say stage I really just mean a 12 inch platform at the back of the restaurant. So we were right there!
The food was great. We started with salad and a plate of fried olives stuffed with anchovies. I think they are a specialty but boy were they good. They had some special Mardi Gras menu items so I had the spicy fried catfish and Duke had the Gumbo. They each had just the right amount of spicyness and were perfectly prepared. I would recommend the restaurant even without the music.
As we started to eat the Dixieland music started. All I could do was smile at the combination of great music and great food. The vocalist Lady Mem’fis was sitting at the next table. Even before she got up on stage and started singing you couldn’t help notice what an elegant woman she is. They started with a couple of songs featuring the band members. I especially liked the pianist, Charlie Hickox. And then Lady Mem’fis started singing. What a performer and what a voice. I love blues and jazz. Her rendition of the song "Dream" was special. After the break and some more Dixieland music, the guitarist (Whose name I’m sorry I can’t remember.) sang the song "She talks too Much". He said it was because his ex-wife had just called. Mal Sharpe gave him a hard time that "She talks too Much" is a politically incorrect song to sing in Berkeley.
Then Sharp pointed out that three of the musicians who had just finished performing across the street at The Jazz School were at a table behind us. He invited them to join in. So the last song had these three additional awesome musicians. Steven Bernstein played something that looked like a cross between a trumpet and a trombone. Ben Goldberg played the clarinet. And Jeff Cressman played the trombone. There we were, right in the middle of it all - ten guys and Lady Mem’fis making this amazing music. As we left about midnight all I could do was smile. What a wonderful evening.
Jonathan says - Wow! I say Holy Cow! (Cow's not the first word that came to mind). Either way, those are pretty darn good statistics.
I am finding a tremendous amount of "awareness" out there of Solaris 10. Contributing factors for this awareness include:
I admit it, I have no sense of time. My daughter calls me on it almost daily when I talk about something we did together “just the other day“.
My first realization of this problem was during the early 1990‘s when after a second trip to the car dealer to finally fix a broken speedometer, I informed the service technician that I had been in for an estimate on the repair “a few months ago”. After consulting his oil-stained green screen view into a primitive database, he brought it to my attention that it had been almost a year and a half since the initial prognosis. I knew at that moment that my retirement party was just around the corner.
Today, I simply acknowledge the fact that important events in my life are not fully registered or sufficiently backed-up in my supposedly high capacity cranium. Instead, I depend upon on-line calendars, palm utensils, personal logs and pop-up reminders of where to be, when to be there and why. Trying to reminisce about a past vacation or special event usually means a two to three year disparity in the actual date.
At this point in my existence on earth, I depend upon my children to be my yardsticks on life by constantly reminding me of how quickly time passes with each inch they grow…
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One of Duncan's friends has this book by Dav Pilkey, so our son has been begging us to get it for him. We told him that if we saw it at a library book sale, we'd buy it. That happened yesterday. Yesterday evening I decided to read it, to see what it was all about. |
Now this is more like it. Nothing like those depressing adventures by Lemony Snicket. Nothing like the dreadful "classics" such as Lord of the Flies and Moby Dick that I was forced to read as a kid. This is pure adventure. This is what kids want to read. It's not just me who thinks so. 5 stars on Amazon after 110 reviews. This is good stuff. It's aimed at a reading age of 9-12 years, but it's perfect for reading to a 6-7 year old as I found out last night.
Here's a quick synoposis. George and Harold, two kids at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, have created the greatest super-hero in the history of their elementary school. Meet Captain Underpants! His true identity is so secret, even he doesn't know who he is.
Tra-La-Laaaa! Look up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane. It's an egg-salad sandwich. No, it's Captain Underpants. Captain Underpants is faster than a speeding waistband. More powerful than boxer shorts. Able to leap tall buildings without getting a wedgie. Night and day, Captain Underpants watches over the city, fighting for truth, justice and all that is pre-shrunk and cottony.
With pictures on every page, this is the perfect book for children who do not want to read. It might seem silly, but I found it hilarious. It's also aimed at two levels. Grown-ups will appreciate some of the extra humour in the pictures as they are reading the text to their kids.
And there is a whole series of these adventures for us to enjoy. Also check out Dav Pilkey's web site. Lots of fun things there.
For those who still haven‘t heard, Sun has announced that it will be launching pay-as-you-use service – $1 per hour of CPU usage. Although Sun has termed it as “Grid” computing, but IMHO I think that it‘s more Utility computing than Grid, but I‘m just being picky. Other than compute cycles, Sun will also be offering storage, development tools and the Java Enterprise System suites.
Read more about it here:
http://www.thechannelinsider.com/article2/0,1759,1758805,00.asp
I‘m extremely curious as to what software infrastructure is employed on these “Grid” systems, as the essence of Grid computing is about virtualization of resources. How about issues of usage accounting, security, privacy and repudiation?
Anyway, enough about that. There is another interesting article on the interview of Wolfgang Gentzsch, who was the lead in our N1 Grid Engine team, but has left Sun since a year or so ago. In the article, Wolfgang gave a very accurate description of the 4 types of Grid application in a compute Grid.
The article can be found here:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100–9584_22–5572380.html
Here's a collection of charts, graphs, and images that provide insight into the abyss of the typical datacenter operation. It's scary out there, when we apply benchmarks used to measure utilization, efficiency, and contribution from other part of the business.
But there is hope. For example, just this month Sun released a valuable and comprehensive (and free) BluePrint book called "Operations Management Capabilities Model". We've been working on this one for some time - so check it out. In addition, you can sign up (for free) with our SunTONE Program for self-assessment guides and self-remediation activities related to our ITIL-plus Certification program. It is based on, but extends ITIL. Thousands of companies are registered. We'll help if you'd like. Finally, the Service-Optimized DataCenter program will act as a Center of Excellence for putting these concepts into practice along with innovative new technologies in virtualization, provisioning, automation, and optimization, and other best practices. As you read about the state of IT below, realize that there is an escape from the pit of mediocrity. Part 2 will explore the oppty.
For now, for this post, I'll survey some of the problems that need fixing...
Let's assume that the prime directive for a datacenter is simply to: Deliver IT Services that meet desired Service Level Objectives at a competitive cost point. There are all kinds of important functions that fall within those large buckets [Service Level and Financial Mgmt], but that'll work for this discussion.
In my experience working with customers, there are two primary barriers that prevent a datacenter from being as successful as it might be in this mission. First, there is rampant unmanaged complexity. Second, most IT activities are reactive in nature... triggered by unanticipated events and often initiated by unsatisfied customer calls. The result: expensive services that can't meet expectations. Which is the exact opposite of the what an IT shop should deliver!
Here are some related graphics (with comments following each graphic):
This illustrates the typical "silo" or "stovepipe" deployment strategy. A customer or business unit wants a new IT service developed and deployed. They might help pick their favorite piece parts and IT builds/integrates the unique production environment for this application or service. There is often a related development and test stovepipe for this application, and maybe even a DR (disaster recovery) stovepipe at another site. That's up to four "n"-tier environments per app, with each app silo running different S/W stacks, different firmware, different patches, different middleware, etc, etc. Each a science experiment and someone's pet project.
Standish, Meta, Gartner, and others describe the fact that ~40% of all major IT initiatives that are funded and staffed are eventually canceled before they are ever delivered! And of those delivered, half never recover their costs. Overall, 80% of all major initiatives do not deliver to promise (either canceled, late, over budget, or simply don't meet expectation). Part of the reason (there are many reasons) for this failure rate is the one-off stovepipe mentality. Other reasons are a lack of clear business alignment, requirements, and criteria for success.
This is a interesting quote from a systems vendor. While 200M IT workers seems absurd, it describes the impact of accelerating complexity and the obvious need to manage that process. We saw the way stovepipe deployment drives complexity. We're seeing increasing demand for services (meaning more stovepipes), each with increasing service level expectations (meaning more complex designs in each stovepipe), each with increasing rates of change (meaning lots of manual adjustments in each stovepipe), each with with increasing numbers of (virtual) devices to manage, each built from an increasing selection of component choices. The net result is that each stovepipe looks nothing like the previous or next IT project. Every app lives in a one-off custom creation.
If all this complexity isn't bad enough, as if to add insult to injury, each of these silos averages less than 10% utilization. Think about that.... say you commit $5million to build out your own stovepipe for an ERP service. You will leave $4.5M on the floor running idle! That would be unacceptable in just about any other facet of your business. Taken together, high complexity (lots of people, unmet SLOs) and low utilization rates (more equip, space, etc) drive cost through the roof! If we could apply techniques to increase average utilization to even 40% (and provide fault and security isolation), we could potentially eliminate the need for 75% of the deployed equip and related overhead (or at least delay further acquisitions, or find new ways to leverage the resources).
We've seen what complexity and utilization does to cost... But the other IT mandate is to deliver reliable IT services. This graphic summarizes a few studies performed by IEEE, Oracle, and Sun as to the root cause of service outages. In the past, ~60% of all outages were planned/scheduled, and 40% were the really bad kind - unplanned. Thankfully, new features like live OS upgrades and patches and backups and dynamic H/W reconfigurations are starting to dramatically reduce the need for scheduled outages. But we've got to deal with the unplanned outages that always seem to happen at the worst times. Gartner explains that 80% of unplanned outages are due to unskilled and/or unmotivated people making mistakes or executing poorly documented and undisciplined processes. In theory, we can fix this with training and discipline. But since each stovepipe has its own set of unique operational requirements and processes, it nearly impossible to implement consistent policies and procedures across operations.
So it isn't surprising, then, that Gartner has found that 84% of datacenters are operating in the basement in terms of Operational Maturity... Either in Chaotic or Reactive modes.
Okay... enough. I know I didn't paint a very pretty picture. The good news is that most firms recognize these problems and are starting to work at simplifying and standardizing their operations. In Part 2, I'll provide some ideas on where to start and how to achieve high-return results.
I‘m in year five of a what has become a perennial quest for a new vacuum cleaner and I‘m not even sure why. From what I can tell, our existing Sears-O-Matic carpet and hardwood floor cleaner is doing a stellar job in its now tenured position. On what seems to be a regular basis, the less-than-sophisticated bag check indicator shows “full” and I make the somewhat unpleasant Z-bag switch from an overly bloated paper receptacle to a slightly folded new one with the renewed feeling that it once again is operating at peak performance (somewhat like the feeling you get in your automobile when it has just had a fresh change of oil or a car wash).
Sure, it can‘t (and never has been able to) pick up the stray macaroni noodle or small nail. I‘m not sure if any vacuum has that ability. And at the rate I‘m moving, I‘ll probably never know. I still hold out hope that when finding something big nested in my carpet, the shoe-in-a-drier sound will stop as the foreign object that had refused to be transported into the containment chamber will finally relinquish the fight. I‘ve often claimed victory over large items only to later find them again half way across the room.
Thus far, my journey to find a replacement has included test drives at appliance central, subscriptions to Consumer Reports and a constant surveillance at every home fix-it shop for a great deal on the one of the “top” models. I‘ve yet to make a trip down the eBay shopping isles though my days are probably numbered.
I think I‘ve come to the sad realization that my only out is for my existing unit to one day give up the ghost…
We just got a message telling us that we have a walkthrough/inspection of our new house on the 18th and a tentative settlement date of the 25th.
Exciting and scary at the same time. It has been a long wait and I am ready to move.
It looks like the next couple of weeks will be all about the last of the packing and cleanup of the current house.
...off to clean and pack
A non-blogging heathen and I spent a few hours yesterday setting up a Solaris 10 diskless client. The client was a Dell Optiplex box with 256MB RAM. Everything worked fine until we realized we forgot to plug in the mouse and the X server complained.
Note to self: 256MB RAM running Gnome with a swap drive over a network is like banging your head against the corner of your desk: painful. :)
Two notes to remember: "svcadm enable bootparams" and "svcadm enable rarp". Otherwise your diskless client will also be OS-less.
One cool thing: snoop shows NFSv4. Yyyyeeeaaaahhhh, baby.
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Yes, you've guessed it. Two more Continuuum articles. |
Just as most people are left- or right-handed, most people have a more dominant, flexible facial side that steers the production of speech. "And unlike handedness", says psychologist Karl Smith, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, "which isn't determined until at least age two or three, facedness is decided before birth."
So what does your face side give you?
"With rare exceptions, all talented musical performers -- singers, instrumentalists, jazz artists, composers, conductors, and even country music artists -- are left-faced."
To determine whether you are one of the 12 percent of Americans (it doesn't give world statistics, but I'd like to believe that the figure applies to all humans if it's valid at all), who are left-faced, look in the mirror and note which side of your face is larger, more muscular, more flexible, has deeper dimples and a higher eye brow.
I'd not heard about facedness before but had heard about how people are left-brain or right-brain and how the one type is found in artists and the other is for people who think logically and would make good scientists and mathematicians. I wonder if there is a correlation. Wouldn't the formation of the brain to be left- or right-side dominant have a deciding factor on the facial features as well?
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything to substantiate or disprove this theory.
Cornell veterinarian Katherine A. Houpt and toxicologist Donald Lisk fed off-the-shelf tuna cat food to six kittens from the time they were six weeks old until they reached the age of eight months. Another group of kittens ate cat food with a beef base. While the behaviour of the beef group remained normal throughout the testing period, the tuna-fed kittens were decidedly less vocal, less active and less playful than there beef-eating feline counterparts.
The ingredient causing this difference is, methylmercury, a heavy metal that accumulates in the organs of many saltwater fish.
Now, if you are wondering whether you should ever eat a tuna sandwich or casserole ever again, Houpt goes on to point out that the tuna in cat food is from the red meat part of the fish, while that in people food is white meat.
I did find an online report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human services that give the Mercury levels in commercial fish and shellfish, plus an advisory on what you need to know about Mercury in fish and shellfish.
Some time ago I had to stop using my beloved 1982 Fiat Spider as a daily driver. It is an aging Italian sportscar, so a minor tantrum was to be expected from it once a year or so. But, getting to work was becoming an increasingly stressful endeavor. So, a hunt for a new car began.
Many hours were spent talking me out of waiting for the less-than-reasonable new Elise about to be released in the US. Eventually, I had to cede to the logic of a compromise car. Practical, reliable, maintainable, and even used. I've never been a fan of the Miata's handling, and while the Honda S2000 had the sweetest little engine you've ever heard, its lackluster steering feel would have always left me wanting. I've always loved the BMW M-coupe's looks, and a test drive confirmed everything I'd read about its performance. Lots of power and perfectly predictable to handle. But, no convertible. That was a non-starter.
After a month or two of foot-dragging, I managed to swallow my pride and climb into an M-roadster. Ok, it can probably be forgiven for looking like the Z3. All the power of the M-coupe, but plenty of body twist just waiting to jump out and bite you at the most inopportune moments. What a brute! Still, that's a lot of the appeal, and there were a few reasonably priced low-mileage examples to be found. So, we jumped in and bought one of those examples.
What prompted this useless anectdote? A friend sent along a link to a review from the Car Talk guys. They've, as usual, got it pretty spot on. Fortunately, I haven't run afoul of the law with the beast yet.
An Alchemy of Mind : The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain - Diane Ackerman (2004)
** 1/2 (out of 5)
Diance Ackerman has a reputation for bridging art and science by writing about scientific subjects with a poetic spirit. An Alchemy of Mind is her latest offering. The subject of this work is cognitive science and neuroscience. Memory, language, emotions, and the notion of self are all treated with in Alchemy.
Ackerman's work is certainly not a scholarly science text. It can be more accurately characterized as a series of poetic essays containing her somewhat informed thoughts on the subject matter. Put bluntly and concisely, An Alchemy of Mind is long on style and short on science.
Ackerman's prose is often beautiful and occasionally captivating. Her use of imagery and metaphor, while not always effective, is impressive. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book to folks wishing to become more informed about neuroscience. It is simply too scantily researched (a peek at the biliography supports this accusation), too disjoint, and too factually inaccurate in places.
Recommended Instead:
noun - a concomitant sensation; especially : a subjective sensation or image of a sense (as of color) other than the one (as of sound) being stimulated
Spoooky moment just now. James Governor is spot on with his assessment that the "open source community" is neither a single entity nor homogeneous. He says:
Its important to understand there is no open source community. Rather i there are many open source communities with their own licensing and governance approaches, lexicons, characters, superstars. Its a carnival mash-up, a diverse cornucopia of views attitudes and styles.I say 'spooky' because I'm pretty sure he has never seen my keynote yet that's exactly what the slides I presented on Wednesday say. Compare and contrast to Dan Ravischer who is quoted as saying:
"Open source is not about having five different operating systems, it's about everyone working together to create one rock-solid operating system," he said.
I really think Dan is missing the point Sun is making - maybe I should get in touch.
i'm off to cambodia & thailand. i'll be offline for 2 weeks, so i'll catch up with y'all when i get back. i'm psyched to check out Angkor Wat, Phnom Penh, and all that.
have a good 2 weeks everyone!
On the plus side, whenever she lets me, I'm going to be playing Knights of the Old Republic II.
I just finished Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software (subtitled 'And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity'). Joel started out as a paratrooper in the Israeli defence forces, before working on the Excel team at Microsoft, at Juno, and finally starting his own software house - Fog Creek Software.
Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95. From 'Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems'If this grabs your interest, then buy the book (or at least, spend some time on his site).
Today, I received a new laptop: An Acer Ferrari 3400. From what little I've seen of it so far, I can say it's quite sexy in a Ferrari red kind of way. Beyond that, the only observations I can make are these:
o It installs easily and quickly
o It is apparently very fast
o The screen is quite impressive
o It comes with a wicked cool mouse!
o It'll be difficult to pry away from Georg!
Georg unpackaged it, plugged it in, configured the wireless, set up users, and upgraded memory, all while sitting in our lounge. This was accomplished while I sat on the other sofa watching one episode of The Simpsons! Aside from a bit of soft music and the occasional Ferrari vrrroooommmmmmmm sounds, the Ferrari was quickly and quietly online.
Very impressive! The only improvement we can make to it now is to install Solaris 10.
No doubt, Georg will be doing that this weekend!
We'll be on the road next week, participating in the LinuxWorld Boston edition. It should be fun. It is always nice to hit the streets and talk w/ folks doing real world applications face-to-face, with beers in hand. Further, polo, a fellow MyJXTA code slinger will be in da howzs so it will be cool to hash out ideas whilst we are in the same timezone.
MyJXTA :: use it - learn it - do it
Java == platform independence
XML == application independence
JXTA == network independence
Secure End-to-End Computing
in my ears: Paul Oakenfold/Ibiza/Waiting
A gorilla name Chiquita, cliff diving teens, a stage show that rivals most middle school productions, flame jugglers, caverns, shopping, music and a game room complete with skee-ball are the elements that make up a kid favorite nightspot called Casa Bonita.
Yes they serve food, though the subject is usually hotly debated by parents of child-bearing age.
The adventure begins from the moment you walk in the massive front doors. A winding maze eventually leads you to a bank of cash registers where the utterance of a number between one and ten will get you a complete Mexican meal. From there, a 180 and another short zigzag brings you to a landing strip where plate after plate piled high with spicy concoctions slides out of a small window. Nothing obvious (at least to me) associates any single plate of food with your order a few steps back. The goal, as best as I am able to tell, is to grab one that looks vaguely like the picture you initially looked at in line while deciding what would best fill the void called “dinner“.
A short tray-laden trek with drinks, food and game tokens leaves you standing at a checkpoint where you are paired with a host(ess) whose task is to assign you a table that, with luck, only has a partially obstructed view of the activities taking place around the 30 foot waterfall by teen BASE jumpers and dinner theater hopefuls.
As you finally sit down to eat, newbies should note that the small red flag located in the center of your table is not there in the event you decide to surrender to the staff. Instead, it should be used to notify the world that you‘re in need of some flavor enhancing condiment, a plate of sopapillas or the check, whichever comes first.
Once fully satiated, your next stop is the game room where small yellow tickets worth their weight in gold to kids between 3 and 9 are exchanged for a fistful of cash, a minute of fun and a plastic trinket that will probably be broken before returning to your home base.
When last call is finally announced and you head towards the exit, a trip to the “treasure room” completes a perfect birthday dinner for a seven year old girl and her best friend…
I just got the first summary download numbers for Solaris 10 since we shipped a week or so ago. One word, "wow.":
_________________
Total Number of Solaris 10 Licenses Downloaded Since First Commercial Ship:
SPARC: 151,039
x64/x86: 269,856
Total: 420,895
_________________
An early look suggests we're not going to have a problem with demand.
I was with a big ISP (internet service provider) prospect yesterday that said, "the only reason we left Solaris was to run x86 on low end boxes. Now that Solaris is there, we're going back." I asked how they liked the open source license we worked with the community to draft, and they said "we like the CDDL." We obviously do, too - and we'd like to see others in the industry adopt it (note: that's why it's an open license, not restricted to usage or control by Sun.)
Doing some basic analysis on the numbers, above, suggests the majority of downloads are to non-Sun based hardware (ie, x64/x86). One of the folks in the meeting I mentioned asked me how we felt about what he viewed as "leakage" onto non-Sun hardware. I said, "THAT'S NOT LEAKAGE, THAT'S GROWTH!" We've now got a relationship with customers we would never otherwise meet - running Dell, HP, IBM and other hardware. They're all prospects now. And if there were one knock I heard during our analyst conference a week ago, it was "where's the growth?" Well, we've obviously planted a few more seeds. (Not to mention giving a massive boost to utilization and performance of our newest USIV SPARC systems - and as much as giving free hardware to existing Sun customers: run Solaris 10, retrieve the (average) 80% of your datacenter currently deployed as a space heater (because it's unutilized).)
Speaking of the analyst conference, it's been about a week since we had a couple hundred industry and financial analysts in town. The conference was a surprise in a number of ways. First, and this takes some humility to say - after years of brooking no end of harsh criticism, I was surprised to hear how positive the analysts were. Many of them haven't exactly been our fans over the past couple years - so it was... jarring is the word I'll use... to have them say "we love the strategy." I definitely heard (and you will hear, shortly) that the perception tide is turning. My favorite quip came from my last meeting, in which an analyst said, "look, around the hotel bar last night, I heard only positive comments." Not like I spend a lot of time in hotel bars, but I'm assuming that's a big change.
The second surprise was being beaten up for (get this) not being vocal enough about our storage offerings - and for not talking more about our newest 6920. Which one analyst said "was one of the hottest offerings in the storage market today." To the analysts who made this point (you know who you are): please consider this a step toward being more effusive :) More on the 6920 (and why storage, and storage containers/virtualization is going to be the belle of the ball for the next decade) in a later entry.
After we launched the world's first true computing utility (and an exchange to keep everyone honest), IBM never managed to respond to our head to head offer to compare grids - which Dan quickly pointed out. Again, I truly believe transparency is one of our biggest competitive advantages.
Finally, I've been promising myself to stay out of the discussion on open source software licensing, and why we elected to use an open Mozilla-based license for Solaris, vs. something more restrictive. So instead of wading in, and taking a stand on everything from the self-determination of developing nations to the needs of OEM customers, I'll make only two points.
One, the notion that all free software has to ship under a singular license is like saying all news has to come through one newspaper. Java, Firefox, FreeBSD, Windows, Debian, JBoss and Solaris - The New York Times, The Economist, The Onion, The Register, The Wall Street Journal - prove that there's value in diversity, not homogeneity. In thought. In speech. And intellectual property licenses.
Second, I agree with RedMonk.
At minimum, 400,000+ downloads proves there are a silent majority of open minds in the world.
_______________ Update: and as usual, Simon has more insights on the topic...
For what it's worth.
Wow, this is really well said. Nothing like calling a spade a spade. Lack of true support for standards forces my customers to jump through hoops.
Here's the new J2ME cell phone Game of the Year 2005: Worms Forts - an action/strategy game based on the console/PC game of the same name. You command a squad of 4 worms to go around blasting away opponents. See: New Game of the Year 2005: Worms Fort The game looks pretty funny! The worms you command are happy looking pink blobs on the screen going around blasting stuff. The kind of thing anyone would want to do but normally would not think of doing standing in line at the supermarket check-out line. :-) |
According
to the road signs the level crossing at Addlestone in Surrey will be
closed all next week and there will be diversions. Since I cross it
every day on the way to work does any one know if there is an
alternative way over the railway near by? I don't fancy risking the
foot bridge with cleats and a heavy bike, but the obvious road route
involves the M25 junction, which does not seem that nice either.
Any ideas? Preferably ones that don't increase my 21 mile journey to much.
My grandmommy sent us this, I think it is outrageous!
Is the Banana Guard. I was given this by a fellow cyclist and actually have found it very useful for keeping the banana I bring to work in tip top condition every day. Mine is Skyline Blue but I'm not sure that they will become a fashion item, then again what I know about fashion can be found here.
As if I'm not busy enough preparing for next week's Worldwide Education and Research Conference, I have to present Sunday at the Southern California Linux Expo, SCALE for short. Thanks to Sun's new Podcast site I have a nice fast server to store my presentation. Sorry, no audio version yet. I expect in another year I'll be able to dictate into my cellphone and press a button and instantly sync to a podcast server. Maybe even video by then. In fact, why have separate blog sites and podcast sites at all?
I really do love the SCALE crowd. Sunday morning at 10 am when I start my talk SCALE will look like the church of open source. Never seen so many people running Debian on old SPARC workstations. They could of course buy several of our new Opteron based Sun Java Workstations for the price of that old SPARC workstation, but that is simply Moore's law in action. Funny how perception trails reality. I spent years explaining to people, "No, Sun doesn't just make workstations anymore, we make real servers too". Remember the days when a Sun server was a workstation without the monitor? Now days people are more likely to ask, "you still make workstations?". You bet we do. And if you like the Sun Java Workstations, stay tuned, quite a bit more coming your way this year on the workstation front.
Now off to practice my SCALE presentation. Hope it stops raining by Sunday.
Cameron,
Today marks two months since you were born, and tomorrow you're officially nine weeks old. So far you've survived and thrived through the entire birth experience, your first cold, and two months of novice parents trying to figure out just exactly how to care for you and keep you happy.
Though most moments have been positive, we've had our share of rough days and nights as we work through the trial-and-error of adjusting to our new life. In fact, it's only been in the last two weeks that we discovered the secret ingredient for getting you to sleep during the day: tummy slumber. For weeks I fought with you all day long to sleep for more than 10-minute stretches between screaming fits, but the moment I let you nap on your tummy, you suddenly started sleeping for two or three hours at once. You've always done well at night, but for over a week now you've been dozing ALL NIGHT LONG, which equates to a minimum of eight hours of sleep for me. Brilliant, eh?
Of course all parents are proud of their children and most like to think that their bundle of joy is growing and learning "ahead of the curve." But really Cameron, you're doing exceptionally well for your age and amaze me on a regular basis with the new things you do every week. First came eye contact, which nearly made me cry as you first held my gaze for more than a few seconds. Next came the contented coos you make when you're happy. And then you really melted my heart with the amazing smiles you're capable of. Now you're starting to giggle, hold and shake toys with your hands, and even mimic me when I stick my tongue out at you. You've been increadibly strong since birth and are building up great capabilities at lifting and holding your head steady, pushing up from your tummy onto your arms, and even bearing weight on your legs for a few minutes at a time.
Just this week I started back to work for the first time since November. I was so worried about leaving you in someone else's care three times each week, but after a few days I realized just how well you're doing with our new routine. You're able to watch and interact with other babies and you're getting exposure to little ones who are months ahead of you in development. Though I miss you dearly each day, I so look forward to and cherish our evenings together. To be a little selfish, I've even arranged to have every Friday as Our Special Day since I just can't get enough of you.
I know this is only the beginning, but thank you so much for all you've added to my life. I never before could have imagined just how amazing it can feel for my heart to be so deeply moved by such a tiny being. You've touched the lives of everyone around you, and even Cinnamon looks at you with concern when you hiccough or cry. I love you, and I look forward to all that is to come.
Love,
Mama
I want one of these. Any one who knows me will know that I would never think such a thought let alone voice it, so it would certainly be ironic.
Last night I attended the Orange County Java Users Group. Attending this month there was an unexpected, but welcome, entourage of students from UC Irvine doing a study on Software User Groups. I don't think these were computer science students, they were sociology students
These students wanted to know why we met every month. Out of all the options they could have picked from, they picked software geeks. Go figure I felt like a rat in a psychology class (you know, the ones the professor tells you not to zap inappropriately but most do anyway). They wanted a 30 minute interview with members. That's a quality interview, quantity is less important for them.
I still have to go through a formal 30 minute interview, but the initial feedback I have given them is that the value of the OCJUG will be different for different attendees. For me, the value is more social than technology. A few of us were there until about 11:30pm last night covering a range of topics. We all learned something and enjoyed just being software geeks.
The script used to kick off and kill the samba daemons is here. This should be copied to a suitable system location - I chose the default service methods directory: /lib/svc/method/.
The service bundle file is here. You could save this to the system services directory: /var/svc/manifest/network, but I chose just to keep it in my homedir as I am only experimenting with it. I guess if you plan to use LiveUpgrade in the future, it might be worthwhile copying this file over as I'm not sure how or whether the services database is rebuilt during Live Upgrade.
The service bundle is loaded into the SMF using the command:
# svccfg validate samba.xml # scvcfg import samba.xml
Note that I have marked it as disabled by default. To enable it, run:
# svcadm enable network/samba
That was easy, wasn't it ?
I have been getting a some requests to expand upon why Java is a great platform for programming CMT machines - as I alluded to in my last entry. I promise I will get to that next week. Today I want to talk about JAI.
Today we launched the JAI and imageio community development sites. This follows exactly what we did last year with Java 3D. If you look here, you will see some of th egreat work that is being done with JAI. The API is extremely solid, but we want to do a lot more with it.
The question that is always asked when we community develop something is whether or not we will still support it. Of course we will. The purpose of community developing a project is to increase focus on the project, not decrease focus. This allows developers using the API to become more productive and have more influence over the future direction of the API. We will still lead the project and build products from the community source base. We just won't be the only ones developing the code.
There is another great artifact of launching a community like this. With API's like JAI, the power of the API is directly related to the plug-ins that are available. Our hope is that the JAI community site will become the place where developers can deposit and share all of their wonderful JAI plug-ins. When you get to the core of why communities work, it is about sharing knowledge and technology. I truly hope this grows in the JAI community.
So, I strongly encourage you to check out JAI and all the things it has been used for - you might be surprised. Hopefully, it will inspire you to join the community and work with us to make it a better API.
From CNET and the New York Times comes a tale of a technologist attempting to recreate the computer that guided the Apollo flights to the Moon. http://news.com.com/Hobbyist+reconstructs+Apollos+computer/2100-1003_3-5570963.html?tag=nefd.top With a 1 Mhz processor, 10 K of Ram and 12 K of ROM, the device seems only a generation more advanced than a magnetic compass and a slide rule.
The disquieting thing is how much effort it took to put the box together from technologies that are not just obsolete, but simply thrown away and irrecoverable. It bothers me that this industry of ours has so little sense of history that it doesn't have a past to forget. Think about it—it is easier to rebuild a 1921 Ford Model T than computing devices of the 1960s.
Ah, well. Everything we launch and ballyhoo today will wind up in the Weird Stuff Warehouse http://www.weirdstuff.com/sunnyvale/ within 5-10 years of its manufacture date.
This Register article is rude. But who would expect otherwise? :-)
The real story here is that Sun is building the fastest 64-bit boxes possible and Intel is simply not keeping up with AMD. Intel Xeons are less scalable and more power-hungry than AMD Opterons. So we have a strategic relationship with AMD. But it is not an exclusive deal. If Intel's considerable R&D machine pulls ahead of AMD's someday, we'll definitely consider shipping their chips in future products.
|
This
is an article about how George Goble, a computer person in the Purdue
University engineering department lights his BBQ grill. George won the
Ig Nobel prize for chemistry in
1996 for this This originally made the rounds about 9-10 years ago. Reposting here, because there might be a new generation of BBQ lovers who've yet to see it. It's interesting that the original site has now been disabled. There are still plenty of other places to get the story [1], [2], [3]). Best of all, visit George Goble's home page and get all the details from the man himself, including the movie. |
Dave Barry also wrote about this event for the Boston Globe in June 1995.
You can find an interview with George. 3 seconds looks like a world record that might last a few more years.
And if it's not completely obvious, don't try this unless you really know what you are doing. That is unless you want to be the crispy critter on the BBQ.
If you head on over to www.sun.com and click on the link at the top that says Worldwide Sites you will see a listing of all of the country specific pages that sun.com offers. Go ahead... check 'em out.
I headed down the Ireland link fully expecting to see a picture of a pint of Guinness on our servers but I was sadly disappointed.
For what it's worth.
Just a quick link, as I'm working on a couple of big deadlines that have kept me away from the blog.
GTD is fundamentally about lists and trusting those lists. Jason Clarke makes some insightful points about how people use email inboxes as lists. He says that there are "filers" who use folders to archive messages and "pilers" who just stack stuff in their inbox. And that pilers tend to be lose todo items as email drops off of the first screen of the inbox.
How true. Even though I'm working a ninety hour week this week I don't feel like I can let my inbox grow out of control. If I don't have my inbox completely empty once a day I feel like I'm losing control. Every email isn't "done", but I've at least done a GTD workflow on every item. In other words, I've either deleted, filed, done, delegated or deferred each item before 24 hours has passed.
Jason also has some ideas about how to better use email folders. I think I'll follow his advice and simplify my IMAP folders to make searching my mail archives easier.
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Last updated: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 22:40:23 EST
