Category: Computing

Like most of us in Sun, I’ve been waiting for ZFS to arrive. Now it has. So on Monday I plan to update my Acer Ferrari 3400 laptop to Nevada build 27. Right now it’s set up to triple-boot Nevada (50GB), Ubuntu Linux (20GB), and WinXP (10GB). I’m going to blow away the Ubuntu partition and create a couple of 10GB partitions which I hope will be sufficient to let ZFS show its paces. (However if anyone has a tried-and-tested laptop configuration for demoing ZFS, I’d welcome a link. No point in reinventing things.)

Here’s a detailed account of the incompetence of Sony/BMG and First 4 Internet, the cowboys who wrote the brain-dead rootkit masquerading as DRM (digital rights management). From Mark’s Sysinternals Blog, the bottom line: “Instead of admitting fault for installing a rootkit and installing it without proper disclosure, both Sony and First 4 Internet claim innocence. By not coming clean they are making clear to any potential customers that they are not only technically incompetent, but also dishonest.”

And yes, they try the same trick on Macs too. Scumbags!

Today we had our “geek-to-geek” meeting at StorageTek’s Louisville, CO campus. Originally I’d planned to hold a brief and informal get-together for a few senior engineers; instead it evolved into a full-blown day-long colloquium involving more than 50 engineers (and two lawyers). Not all are in the picture; a few were slow getting back from lunch, and one was balanced on an SUV taking this photo! Of those attending, about a third were from Sun and two-thirds from StorageTek.

The schedule was tight: an hour and a half for a series of brief introductory presentations; a break followed by a lively Q&A session; lunch (of course); then break-outs from 1pm to 5pm. There were ten hour-long break-out sessions on topics ranging from product processes to storage virtualization. Amazingly, we stayed on schedule, for which kudos to the speakers. Obviously the presentations and break-out sessions weren’t long enough to dive really deep into specific technical and business issues, but that was never the intent. The point of this meeting was simply to make connections and start conversations, and in this I believe we succeeded. The next step is to broaden the participation and link the discussions to the organizational and product planning processes. The work is just beginning….

Anyway, my thanks to all those who participated, especially to those who made particular travel-related sacrifices to attend, and to my colleague Richard for handling the facilities. I owe you guys.

P.S. Over dinner after the meeting, I was talking for a long-time StorageTek employee, and I mentioned that I was planning to blog about the events of the day. We discussed the fact that StorageTek, like many (?most) companies, had a tradition of secrecy, even over minor matters. For some, Sun’s open style – “living life in public” – is likely to be a culture shock. So this evening after I’d drafted this blog entry I applied my usual test with more care than usual: Should I be concerned that a malevolent marketing type from HP might read my blog and use the contents to disparage Sun to our customers or anyone else? I don’t think so.

I’ve just bought my first laptop. No, of course it isn’t the first laptop that I’ve used: over the last 13 years* I’ve worked with countless systems from various vendors (IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Sharp, Apple, and Acer) in a variety of form factors (from desktop replacements to pocket-sized subnotebooks). But all of them – even the little Toshiba Libretto – were bought by Sun for me to use, and their hard disks have been filled with the documents, software, tools, and other materials that I work with on a daily basis.

As I spend a lot of my time travelling, I find that my laptop does double duty. Yes, it’s a business tool – but it’s also where I transfer digital photographs when my camera is full; where I store the music that I listen to on the road; and how I watch DVDs in the airport or in my hotel room. This is simply a practical matter: I’m hardly going to carry two laptops with me, one for work and one for personal use. But as a result I’ve found recently that more and more of the hard disk space on my laptop was being occupied by personal materials – music, videos, photographs, DVD projects – that have nothing to do with Sun.

So what was I to do? I’m committed to helping my colleagues to make Solaris 10 an excellent laptop OS (for which I use my Acer Ferrari), but I have to recognize that my personal multimedia data is tied to Apple’s iLife application suite. So I started to think about getting myself a laptop for both work and personal use. This principled approach was nudged along by practical considerations: my existing PowerBook (a 12″ 867MHz G4 with 640MB/60GB) was starting to feel really slow: start-up time for some of the big apps like NeoOffice/J was getting painful.

So this evening I visited the Apple store up the road and paid in cold, hard plastic for the first laptop I’ve owned: a 15″ PowerBook (1.67GHz G4, 1GB/80GB). The migration tool worked perfectly: I strung a Firewire cable between the old Powerbook (“medieval”) and the new (“silk”), rebooted medieval in target disk mode, and it sucked everything over – user info, documents, applications, network settings.

And yes, I did buy AppleCare extended warranty. Nobody’s perfect.

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* I think that the first was an IBM Thinkpad 700, back in 1992.

Tom Yager of Infoworld recently reviewed Microsoft’s first attempt at a 64-bit operating system. While most of the review was unexceptionable, a couple of comments really irked me:

“Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition debuted with an anemic shelf of 64-bit apps. Skeptics will rejoice to learn that 64-bit Windows isn’t load-and-run compatible with many, if not most, 32-bit Windows applications…. Windows x64 runs 32-bit applications stably or not at all; it won’t allow an incompatible app to install or load. This is neither Microsoft’s heavy hand nor bad engineering. It is genuinely impossible to run a great many 32-bit applications directly on AMD64 and its Intel derivative in pure 64-bit mode.” [My emphasis.]

Now this last point is simply false. As I replied to Tom:

“I’m typing this email into Mozilla Thunderbird on an Acer Ferrari (AMD Athlon 64) laptop, running Solaris 10 in 64-bit mode. The Thunderbird executable that I’m running is 32-bit:
/usr/local/lib/thunderbird-1.0.2/thunderbird-bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1, dynamically linked, stripped
(It’s the same binary that runs quite happily if I boot into 32 bit mode.) However the “ls” command is 64-bit:
/bin/amd64/ls: ELF 64-bit LSB executable AMD64 Version 1, dynamically linked, stripped
So far, I personally haven’t encountered a single 32-bit Solaris application that won’t run under 64-bit Solaris.”

So how come Solaris 10 can mix and match 32-bit and 64-bit processes* while Microsoft can’t? As my colleague James Carlson said, it’s:

“… mostly because of a great deal of effort that happened almost a decade ago when we originally switched to 64-bit kernels, and continuing work since then to make sure everything just works right…. I’m sure that Windows users hope that one day MS approaches that level of maturity.”

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* OK, it’s true (as James pointed out) that Wine doesn’t work (yet) on Solaris 10. However I don’t really think of Wine as an “application”. I really can’t think of any 32-bit Solaris x86 application that won’t run in 64-bit mode – but if there is, I’m sure the blogosphere will know.

Earlier today, I posted a little piece about a classic children’s book on computing. When I got home, I found in my inbox an announcement of the latest edition of The Edge. It begins with a simple and thought-provoking assertion:

One aspect of our culture that is no longer open to question is that the most significant developments in the sciences today (i.e. those that affect the lives of everybody on the planet) are about, informed by, or implemented through advances in software and computation.

The piece that follows is a conversation with J. Craig Venter, Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks on biocomputation. It’s fascinating as always. The Edge has become essential reading; I highly recommend it. In the meantime, I’ve just re-read the Ladybird book on computers from 34 years ago. Hmmm.

I just installed the latest version of Apple’s iTunes on my PowerBook, along with an updater for the software on my iPod. Perhaps I should have read my horoscope first, or consulted the i ching. Whatever the reason, when I started iTunes it showed me an empty library, rather than the 18GB of music that I have, and it also warned me that my iPod was associated with a different library, and did I want to erase it and copy my new (empty) library? Aargh! No, cancel, quit, unplug iPod, back away from the keyboard really slowly…..

From browsing the Discussions section of Apple’s support web, it seems that a number of us have had this problem with iTunes 4.9. (See, for instance, the thread entitled “iTunes 4.9 – lost library – please help”.) The only remedy seems to be to back up the old Library files (before iTunes can mess with them), let iTunes build a new library, and then import all of the existing music. This requires that you have enough space for two copies of all your data, so I’ll have to wait until I can get home to use a FireWire drive. (I only have 7GB of free space on my 60GB PowerBook.) And you’ll also wind up losing all of your playlists, ratings, and “last played” information, which is a huge pain.

UPDATE: A Mac user called Dave Garrett just posted the following workaround:
1. Open your Music folder/iTunes folder/Previous iTunes Libraries folder
2. Re-name the file named iTunes 4 Music Library to iTunes Library
3. Drag your newly named file iTunes Library into your iTunes folder, replacing the iTunes Library that the new iTunes had created.
4. Voila.

Seems to work for me.

Congratulations to my colleagues who were involved in today’s OpenSolaris launch. The biggest single OSS release in history! From Sun!! (A tip o’ the hat to Rob Gingell, wherever he might be.) But surely Microsoft, IBM and HP aren’t going to take this lying down; they’re not going to give in without a fight – are they? C’mon, you guys: I want to see OSS releases of Windows XP, z/OS*, and VMS! And… oh heck, why not throw in OS/2 Warp as well – just for old time’s sake? (But don’t bother with AIX or HP/UX, because… well, I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out.)

And why stop at operating systems? Earth to Larry (probably in his jet somewhere): it’s time to open source Oracle before IBM gets around to opening up DB2. You know it makes sense! In fact, I bet there’s more lines of code in that sucker than everything else put together!!

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* I want to try running z/OS on my laptop. A quad-boot setup with Solaris, Linux, z/OS, and WinXP: that’s a configuration to really get a geek’s pulse racing….

Dion Hinchcliffe is embarking on a project which I think I’m going to watch with morbid fascination: Taking Stock of Web Service Description. Specifically, he’s going to put up a simple order entry web service, and publish a description of the service in a number of different candidate service description languages (SDLs). The mind-boggling part is the list of candidate SDLs:

“The list of SDLs to try to use is: WSDL 1.1, WSDL 2, NSDL, SSDL, WRDL, RSWS, WADL, Resedel, SMEX-D, RDF, RDF Forms, OWL/OWL-S, WSML, and WDL.”

That’s fourteen different languages. Plus he’s going to explore how to use these with three different programming languages: Java, C#, and Ruby.

Back in the Craig McMurtry blog entry that I cited recently, he wrote: “One must grant though, that a primary and very good idea behind Jini lives on in Indigo. That idea is that there should be an excellent, simple programming model usable across any kind of networking infrastructure. In the years since Jini, though, we have learned a lot about how NOT to design those programming models, and those lessons suffuse Indigo.” With all due respect, Dion’s experiment demonstrates pretty clearly that there is no consensus whatsoever on the “how not to” question. It also seems to confirm what I said: that one size will not fit all, and that we’re going to need a variety of technical solutions ranging from Jini to WRDL and beyond.

So this is what they’re getting up to at my alma mater, as reported in Linuxdevices: “Researchers at the University of Essex are using Linux and tiny embedded computer modules to build fleets of unmanned aircraft that fly in flocking formations like birds, while performing parallel, distributed computing tasks using Bluetooth-connected Linux clustering software.” Check out the project website for pictures, video, etc. And where are they going to present their first conference paper? Why, at the IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium…. [groan]

(Via Boing Boing.)