Archive for April, 2006
Sunday, April 30th, 2006
Larry Ellison: Denying Purchase Orders Unless They’re Linux
Apparently Larry really is just another huge Linux fan. ZDNet is running an interview with Oracle SVP Jesper Anderson that shows just how big of a fan Larry is. Oddly Sun was trumpeting that Solaris 10 x64 was a preferred Oracle operating system platform to help out his buddy Scott M. a few months back. Seems that was just some air cover to help out an old friend. Anyone with developer friends at Oracle also knows what platform Oracle does its primary development on.
Some of Jesper’s comments really showed Larry’s devotion to the Linux OS.
“When Larry felt that Linux was strong enough, and when we felt that Oracle applications ran as well as on Linux as on any other thing, Larry initially just demanded that every mid-tier server we run at Oracle, run Linux.
“I mean I’ve been in meetings with Larry where people walked in with purchase order requests for big Sun Solaris or HP-UX servers and Larry just looked at it and said ‘Nope, denied’.
“And then he turned around and said ‘it’s not the money, you come back to me with a purchase order, same amount or more for Linux, and I’ll approve it right away’,” Anderson said.
The Independent Oracle User Group study released recently showed Oracle’s user base is also migrating to Linux even without Larry’s push.
Jesper’s comments seem to suggest a much bigger battle brewing in the IT industry’s never ending game of vendor lockin and control for world domination. It remains to be seen whether Larry will buy the Queen Mary II or maybe invest in a Linux distro… or two.
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
A Legend of Our Time Steps Down
Say what you will about Scott McNealy, but he has been a legend in our time. Some day, historians will look back at the “robber barons” of the modern era and it’s unquestionable McNealy will be there with Larry, Bill and Steve.
I never found Sun’s strategy, technology, or promotions compelling, always thought they were way too arrogant (”we’re the dot in dot com”, now “dot in Web 2 dot 0″), but Scott McNealy always gave you something to laugh at. You just never know what he’ll say… (Scott’s probably good for keeping lawyers and PR teams employed)
In that spirit I’ll just point everyone to CNet’s collection of great McNealy quotes.
CNet also put together a video of his quotes here.
Friday, April 21st, 2006
IBM System x
Ashlee cracks me up. One of the better journalists of our time…
“I just sold my last Itaniums,” Bretzmann said, breathing a sigh of relief.
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
Ellison, Oracle, Red Hat, and open source: Read the Full Transcript
So there’s been no shortage of coverage on Larry Ellison’s remarks on “owning the whole stack” and competing with Microsoft. Has anyone actually read the entire transcript? If not, you can view it here. Larry’s comments actually make sense to a degree when you read the full interview:
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/5f7bdc18-ce85-11da-a032-0000779e2340.html
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
CED: U.S. should promote open source, open standards as public policy
New report from the CED (Committee for Economic Development) comprised of about 200 senior corporate executives and university leaders concludes open source, open standards, and open innovation should be promoted as a matter of US Public Policy to foster innovation and economic growth.
Of course and IBMer was on board (Research SVP, Paul Horn) but the message of this report is far from “vendor” or company sponsored. This is a clear message that researchers and companies can collaborate and compete “above the stack”. Some may argue “what happens when open source moves up the stack?” Well… the smart companies build on an open source stack say with Apache and Geronimo and then build up/out the stack with features that simplify and enhance an environment. Ultimately open source drives new innovations while it commoditizes others. I take offense when some argue open source is just the commoditization of software. Yes, it levels the playing field and creates standards… but there’s really cool, new innovative ideas out there from the OSS community (see RoR, OpenVZ, Firefox, Gentoo, MythTv and Eclipse for a few innovative examples). Some of these OSS projects like Eclipse create huge markets and create new opportunities for new and existing companies.
How many people thought Java as a standard would create an entire industry? Same for the x86 architecture - went beyond just IBM and created a billion dollar industry. Other “great ideas” that are attempts at restriction standards (ahem… token ring… firewire) tend to find greater difficulty getting traction and go away over time…
Hopefully our laggard lawmakers will see this and support policies intended to foster and grow U.S. leadership in open communities.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols has a nice summary here.
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
I’m all for recycling… but this is ridiculous
Saw this over at El Reg…. a woman paid an architect to literally build a house out of an old 747. I can’t imagine what that costs (the used plane was $100K alone). I’d be willing to bet using the millions poured into the converstion to pay 1,000 people with Escalades to drive a hybrid Civic would have done more for the environment….
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/20/jumbo_house_project/
Friday, April 14th, 2006
MSFT Endorsing Piracy??
So I find it odd, that in Vista users will not be able to use the Aero technology for cool desktop graphics features unless they pass a piracy check… Yes, that’s right… it appears pirates can use Vista but can’t play with the cool toys… Does that mean we’re looking at a free (as in beer) version of Vista?
Aero is not a new concept - rather these graphics capabilities are already common to OS X users and to Linux users who play with sharp knives under XGL. It’s odd that with Mac and Linux already in the market with this technology, MSFT would choose Aero as the point to do a validation check… Maybe they’re including other checks and the article I’m reading glosses over that, but this piece seems to suggest Aero is the checkpoint.
Why not check during the install or boot???
Friday, April 14th, 2006
Innovation in Linux: Great LXer update on new features in Linux kernel
Take a look at a great article over on LXer.com highlighting some of the latest innovations in the Linux - not the same old “new KDE/Gnome” features - but new in the kernel. This one’s definitely worth the time if you’re interested in what’s new and cool. I see a couple minor issues if you’re going to technically analyze it, but I think in general it’s fairly accurate.
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/57487/index.html
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
Gentoo+NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD - enough options?
Not sure why anyone would want to use a hybrid Gentoo/*BSD setup … but of course, it’s open source and who among us has ever met a BSD fan that could not use BSD for everything? So somebody has to try it… Here’s an interesting interview with one of the lead developers on the project. Sounds like Gentoo/FreeBSD is the best to try out if you’re inclined. Although… if they’re really just using Portage - I’m not sure the naming convention of Gentoo/*BSD is accurate … I would think it should be more like *BSD+Portage….
I will say this - the logo is pretty cool.
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
Crazy story of the month
Looks like the congressional race in Oregon is bulking up… Catherine found quite possibly one of the dumbest/funniest bits of the month… so far.
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
Take a look at iFolder
Decent overview of iFolder was posted on Slashdot pointing here:
http://liquidat.blogspot.com/2006/04/ifolder-server-review.htmlÂ
Read the comments though - the write up seems to have a couple errors. Regardless if you haven’t actually “seen” iFolder, it’s a decent screenshot walkthrough.
Tuesday, April 11th, 2006
The Economist Slams Sun’s McNealy
Wow. Not sure if you saw/missed this one, but the Economist printed a brutal article on Sun’s Scott McNealy… all the games and strategy changes are coming round to hurt him again… personally if I was at Sun 3 years ago, I would have created my own distribution of Linux, dumped in value add Solaris pieces parts just as RH and Suse do, and positioned Sun as the best Linux company around… now they try to say Solaris is a better Linux than Linux. Which doesn’t make sense - people chose Linux b/c it wasn’t Solaris ;-0
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6768230
Tuesday, April 11th, 2006
SystemTap in Gentoo
If you didn’t know already, SystemTap is in Gentoo’s public portage tree. Just try an “emerge systemtap” and it should work. Just make sure to have both relayfs and kprobes enabled in your kernel before the emerge. [[updated: I've been told procfs works as well and relayfs is not a requirement]]]
I just met with Stephen O’Grady and had an IBMer brief him on SystemTap while in Boston for LinuxWorld last week. He put together a nice write up on his blog over here.
Stephen also pointed out a cool derivative of top called ‘htop’ - just ‘emerge htop’ and take a look.
Thursday, April 6th, 2006
Virtuozzo Review at eWeek
Just saw eWeek did a full review of Virtuozzo. Like I posted yesterday this is a well constructed solution. Take a look.
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006
Live from LinuxWorld… is it just me or….
Are there too many VC backed companies out there with more money invested in them than they could possibly make? Don’t get me wrong, I love open source, I love the connection open source has to Linux, and I can see the value of VC funding for some of these firms, but walking around I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the companies that have been funded…. just because they’re open source… as if “open source” made them more valuable.
To me, open source is about creating a community of invested parties - the key here is “invested” - meaning they care about the code, contribute, consume, and support it. Don’t get me wrong, some of these companies have great customer references, but how many are involved or have a stake in the future of the code? I could possibly be swayed by an argument about caring for the interfaces - not the actual code… but that’s a whole other issue.
Now, with that chip off my shoulder, I’ve seen some very innovative approaches to tackling customer problems or refining infrastructure management. SWSoft’s Virtuozzo is a very interesting product. I saw them a couple years ago in SF, but I feel strongly that now they’ve got it right. Virtuozzo allows you to create virtual containers atop a running Linux kernel - each container running off just 1 kernel… yes, single POF-ish. But there’s news here - they can migrate a virtual OS container from one server to another on the fly with zero disruption - my problem 2 years ago was that they couldn’t maintain state (memory cache, etc didn’t transfer)… well they have fixed those issues and I can report that I witnessed a live container migration between two physical servers. While hypervisors like Xen get all the attention, Virtuozzo does have OpenVZ - the open source implementation for the kernel. Not sure when they’ll get it accepted upstream, but it’s out there. I think containers are a limited technology - I’d recommend VMWare or Xen any day over containers - but for “dummy” or “cloned” types of volume servers, I can really see the value of containers on Linux.
Plus, if you’ve ever tried to actually implement Xen 3.x…. you know it’s “not quite there yet”… :-) I can’t wait though - Xen will change the industry - slightly.
And of course it was nice to see a strong staple of Gentoo developers in attendance. I asked around the booth and apparently I’m the only one having trouble shutting down KDE/Xgl when not using KDM/GDM/XDM… smartasses too about it… I love it though.
We also stopped by the O’Reilly afterparty at Lucky’s (lucky if you could find it - they don’t have a sign outside…) for some great discussions on publishing, Drupal, migration, and MythTV.
And of course we topped off the night with a staple scod dinner at No Name…. and when the cab driver finished his dinner - he took us back to our hotels.
Monday, April 3rd, 2006
Just Purchased a Tokina 12-24mm AT-X Pro
I finally got the courage to get an ultra-wide lens for my Rebel XT. I chose the Tokina (Pop Photo test here) over the Canon for price and I think quality (Canon’s EF-S lens seemed kinda cheap). Losing the extra 2mm is the downside there, but I did save $200 with Tokina. After testing 4 ultra-wides at B&H, I was surprised at the quality of the Tokina, the price, and how much you lose in your field of view with a 12mm versus 10mm. But hey, the 2mm wasn’t worth $100/mm….
I chose the Tokina over Sigma for quality - if you’re thinking about these two lenses, trust me - go to the store and test them both and the answer will be clear (and sharp).
The Tamron was never really an option, and testing it with a couple shots made that clear.
Just how different is a 10mm versus 12mm? This was my biggest question. With a DSLR I have a 1.6x crop factor to worry about. Just 1mm becomes 1.6, 2mm becomes 3.2.
Take a look at the difference (from relatively the same position at B&H)….
The Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 10mm ($699):
The Tokina ATX-Pro 12-24mm @ 12mm ($469):
Aside from breaking character and using a non-Canon lens, I also went crazy and ordered from Beach Camera (in NJ) to save on tax and they gave me free shipping… In the end I saved quite a bit with the Tokina.
Monday, April 3rd, 2006
Just how good is your password?
Interesting… my password can be brute force cracked by a supercomputer in 60.5 days. Well… if I have something worth tying up a supercomputer for over two months on, so be it. Not sure my pictures or OpenOffice docs are worth the cost, but good luck.
Someone I know has a password that would be cracked in an “instant” on a supercomputer or 5.5 minutes on a fast PC…
Monday, April 3rd, 2006
Need a mind map? Try FreeMind
A couple friends pointed me to a pretty decent GPL mind map creation software package over at SourceForge called FreeMind. Seems pretty decent - and runs on both Windows and Linux.
Saturday, April 1st, 2006
Mozilla gives us a la carte license options
Take your pick: GPL, MPL, LGPL for your next Mozilla code based project. Just noticed Gervase Markham posted yesterday the the Mozilla relicensing is complete. I know the debian-legal folks have been waiting some time for this. Choice of using the widely popular and accepted GPL and LGPL should make Mozilla projects even more accessible for developers - especially the corporate developers with strict legal teams… I can’t imagine how long it must have taken to relicense all that code, but job well done.
And if this was a preemptive-April Fools joke… well.. got me.
Saturday, April 1st, 2006
WordPress, WordPattrn, WordPattrn!, and an April Word Fools Joke?
Not sure what the heck is going on at WordPress, but apparently they’ve merging with Textpattern to create WordPattern. They were even sly enough to put a notice in the WordPress feed. At WordPattern.org, it lists that WordPattern has been acquired by Flickr at 3PM (changing name to WordPattrn) and then acquired by Yahoo! at 4PM and is now called WordPattrn! (mergers… don’t happen so fast…) Looking at the Dean and Matthew must have had one heck of a time with the practical joke…
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