Archive for July, 2007
Monday, July 30th, 2007
SAP Certifies its NetWeaver Apps for RHEL 5 AP
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/070718/20070718005069.html?.v=1
Typical press release, however, noticed a couple things of interest:
1) It includes RHEL/Xen virtualization scenarios.
The certification includes the virtualization technology embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for use with SAP® applications.
2) SAP is writing its applications to take advantage of Linux specific technologies that may have once been reserved to legacy UNIX platforms:
Furthermore, it offers a complete solution stack through the integration of Red Hat Global File System (GFS), Cluster Suite, SELinux and further technologies for high availability, storage management and security.
Monday, July 30th, 2007
Apple making interesting exceptions to CUPS license?
Saw this today (snippet only below):
http://www.cups.org/articles.php?L179+I0+T+M10+P1+Q
1) Apple Operating System Development License Exception:
a.) Software that is developed by any person or entity for an Apple Operating System (”Apple OS-Developed Software”), including but not limited to Apple and third party printer drivers, filters, and backends for an Apple Operating System, that is linked to the CUPS imaging library or based on any sample filters or backends provided with CUPS shall not be considered to be a derivative work or collective work based on the CUPS program and is exempt from the mandatory source code release clauses of the GNU GPL. …
…
UPDATE at 12:30PM on July 30, 2007: trs81 on #redmonk pointed out this exception has been around for some time and was only updated to say Apple was granting the exception. See the older version in Debian:
http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/c/cupsys/cupsys_1.2.7-4/cupsys-common.copyright
Monday, July 30th, 2007
eWeek “Microsoft FUD Watch”
Not many companies produce enough FUD to maintain a “FUD Watch” but it appears Microsoft has hit a suitable level of volume to warrant one. eWeek’s FUD Watch post by Joe Wilcox is available here:
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/corporate/microsoft_fud_watch_62707.html
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
Enterprise Linux Log: “OpenSolaris users group to Ian Murdock, Sun: You’re missing the point”
If you watch my space here regularly, you probably would not be surprised that I find community reactions to something like this both interesting study and at the same time amusing. Jack Loftus wrote the article but it seems another colleague of his was in attendance. I was in attendance at this meeting as well (yes, shocking I know - my first one… and probably last). What I witnessed was in-line with what the article describes. In all fairness to the “Solaris camp”, it’s hard to see what value a Project Indiana is going to bring to the OpenSolaris table other than to make it more like Linux and perhaps closer to Linux in areas Linux users take for granted (package management, install, usability). But what does that offer the Linux crowd that Sun is obviously trying to steal (hint, Linux users already have these benefits…)? At the same time, does it really help the Solaris user? So while it takes Sun two years likely to get Indiana viable, Linux will only improve on what it already has in that time, and so what benefit will be there in 2009/10?? Further, this is just Sun - OpenSolaris is Sun-only - it’s one vendor… when did open source community users start contributing to vendor-dominated projects (hint, they haven’t).
I can say good luck Ian but I certainly do not envy his challenge ahead - especially when it was evident the NYC Solaris faithful were not exactly asking or waiting for Indiana to help them. I was not impressed by Indiana. I’d instead call it the Solaris Makeover Challenge. Oh wait, maybe IBM has already done that. :-)
I was slightly to actually offended at some of Ian’s jabs at Linux that are now the Sun “party line” and I suspect Ian knows full well these FUD lines are not entirely true (my how things have changed from being the LF CTO…).
Ian made it clear [now that he's at Sun marketing Solaris] that the only reason people use Linux is “because they couldn’t afford Sun workstations and Linux was free” and “that’s how Linux happened”. HA! I started using Linux because Windows 95/98 were horrible. Yes, free also played a part but just because things are free does not mean millions of people use them (look at all the BSDs, MINIX, Evolution, etc, etc). Then the other shameless argument was “Linux breaks compatibility” which is a small, small % of the use cases out there - sorry, doesn’t fly - not to mention that many of those “Linux breaks” are actually modernization technologies which the lack thereof are the same reasons Sun users are flocking from Solaris (hint, when did you last see a modern Solaris shell? Solaris in HPC?). Shameless because I also thought that was Ian’s job at the FSG…
Another interesting point from Ian was that he flat out stated that multiple distributions is the greatest weakness of Linux… which I tend to think of as a benefit. While we’d have to agree to disagree on this point, I’d like to think that if one Linux vendor is asleep at the wheel (takes 8yrs for the next release) or perhaps does something that I don’t like (i.e. partner with X company) then I have choice - I can switch with relatively very low pain from one Linux distro to another (perhaps just over time). I’ve seen customers do this successfully - they didn’t receive the support they expected and tests with other vendors proved other Linux providers better. It’s not that there was a problem with Linux or even the vendor, it’s that vendors interface customers through people and sometimes people make mistakes. Switching lets you avoid poor performing people.
Just think… what happens when you only have 1 source for you platform (think Windows, Solaris). Have you seen Windows or Solaris “fall asleep at the wheel” and maybe “milk customers without reinvesting”? I think that’s what you’ve probably seen since 1999. Remember when Sun launched Solaris 8/x86 only to take x86 support away? Then bring it back again in Solaris 10???
Sure, Sun flashed DTrace and ZFS onto the Solaris user base and wowed them with something modern… but if Solaris is so powerful and modern, why does the license prohibit publishing performance results? Linux is the opposite - Linux creates competition, drives competitive and cooperative investments and in the end customers get choice from competing vendors. And with Linux - it may not be the distributors competing that benefits customers - it could be Motorola competing with Apple needs feature X and to get feature X into Linux, Motorola invests in X which is later picked up by Red Hat and Novell. It could be the maker of the fastest network card on the planet trying to tweak Linux’ TCP/IP stack that makes Linux have superior networking performance… Something to think about…
Anyway, a snippet from the article that I recommend reading:
The user’s group meeting last night all but confirmed this was precisely what was happening - at least with OpenSolaris users in NYC anyway. Ken Milberg, Linux site expert and contributor to this blog, said some audience members started to notice that Murdock’s plans for OpenSolaris were starting to resemble Red Hat’s strategy with Fedora. It didn’t gel. “Sun pretty much admitted that this strategy made sense, and more or less were admitting that is was time they starting talking about an ‘innovation strategy’ too,” Milberg said. Thing is, the Sun users kept saying they were already satisfied with OpenSolaris.
And yet Sun and Murdock continued to lay out the case for Project Indiana, to “mixed results,” Milberg said. One unidentified attendee reportedly blurted out “all this does is help Sun, what does this do for someone using Linux?”
Tuesday, July 24th, 2007
Intel opens up Thread Building Blocks (TBB)
One of the issues with multicore going mainstream is applications that can take advantage of multicore. While applications will run, developers will tend to see multicore max out at around 4-6 cores for their applications. Any more cores and performance will not scale as you’d like. With TBB, it will be somewhat easier for developers who can rely on tools to analyze where different parts of their code are worthy of a separate thread and let the tools do all the work for you in executing that code across multiple threads.
I heard the news over at O’Reilly - haven’t seen the official Intel announcement (yet), but this should be a great help for anyone trying to figure out just how to take advantage of quad+ cores.
http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/2007/07/intel_releases_the_threading_b.html
Friday, July 20th, 2007
Meet Pyro: A Firefox based desktop environment for Linux
Say hello to your new little friend: Pyro Desktop. I think the author, Alex Graveley may have taken Firefox a bit further than originally intended but wow, this is an impressive feat in eye candy development. This also gives me a fun project for the upcoming weekend.
If you’re trying to run it with xulrunner, I recommend reading this: http://groups.google.com/group/pyrodesktop/browse_thread/thread/1f3b79b1b63020c7
Thursday, July 19th, 2007
Note to self: IBM Blue
IBM Blue is Pantone 2718, CMYK (75, 43, 0, 0) and RGB (83, 120, 179).
Thursday, July 19th, 2007
MBM: Sick of the Solaris FUD train on Linux scalability? DaveM has some thoughts…
I noticed Dave Miller is getting a little sick of the Solaris FUD about Linux. Unforunately, Dave does not seem to have figured out permalinks yet so you have to actually scroll way down the page to get to his two posts “Solaris scalability…” and “The Solaris FUD machine continues…” (update: I was pointed to the direct URL below)
http://vger.kernel.org/~davem/cgi-bin/blog.cgi/2007/04/10#bonwick_scalability
Some choice quotes from Dave regarding Sun’s FUD that Linux “doesn’t scale” are below. I’d also add that over 77% of the world’s largest scaling supercomputers now run Linux - not Solaris. Topping that is the fact that 8 out of the 9 systems SUN places in the Top500 (look at NEC/Sun too) run Linux and you can see which platform Sun chooses for scalability! Anyway, back to Dave:
Last time I checked, Linux scales the crap out of Solaris. Regretfully, Solaris cannot make use of the advanced SMP scaling techniques Linux has such as RCU locking, but that disappointment is no reason to spread the FUD around like this.
The one thing everyone knows for sure is that the only real consequence of Sun openning up Solaris is that now the entire world gets to watch how glacial Solaris development is compared to Linux and how miniscule the community behind Solaris is.
What you have to understand is that they aren’t specifying how large this new machine is, but since we know that they’ve been running Linux on 1024 cpu machines for quite some time at SGI you can be sure this machine is likely enormous. And here’s the punch line, Solaris has never even run on a 1024 cpu system let alone one as big this new SGI system, and Linux has handled it just fine for years.
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
When Irving speaks, I listen
And so with that, I recommend reading this:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2159092,00.asp
A teaser from the article:
A lot of people view you as a visionary. What is it that gives you that? Where do you get the vision from?
The answer is easy: Find where the smart people are and hang out with them. I’m serious. The smart people have a lot of ideas and in IBM I have been really lucky. First of all IBM has some very smart people in our research and development labs. And then I’ve been really working a lot with people in universities and outside research labs. And I’ve been in committees in Washington.
And what I’ve been good at is talking to lots of smart people and being able to discern a pattern for when something comes up again and again in different conversations. Maybe they’re approaching it from different angles. But the way I looked at it a new idea was whether it was something we should do, and then how we should do it in IBM. Because just because it’s something we should do, doesn’t mean we have to do it like everybody else is doing. In fact, it could even be that it’s something somebody should do, but not us.
So it’s more almost like finding out what the smart people are thinking, extract it, look for the patterns and then eventually something clicks. Then you look at how we bring it to the marketplace.
Monday, July 16th, 2007
Intel, OLPC Patch Things Up
As I pointed out earlier, the counterproductive butting of heads between Intel and OLPC was proving quite counter to the goals both allegedly were striving toward. I was glad to read that they have patched things up and are now working together.
Friday, July 13th, 2007
Running SystemTap on the Nokia N800
Interesting work by Eugene to get SystemTap up and running on the Nokia N800 - talk about portability!
http://eugeneteo.livejournal.com/7484.html
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
DeveloperWorks: It’s all about Unix, Linux, open source software and open standards
Just found this information in a DeveloperWorks email. It’s the top articles on IBM’s DeveloperWorks in June. It goes to show it’s all about UNIX AND Linux (shhh …. don’t tell Sun).
I’ll admit I copied this directly from a DeveloperWorks newsletter and would argue on the use of “open source” as a noun but it is what it is.
Top five articles for June:
1. Anatomy of the Linux kernel (Linux)
2. Six ways to write more comprehensible code (Linux)
3. Know your regular expressions (AIX and UNIX)
4. Speaking UNIX, Part 11 (AIX and UNIX)
5. Tuning LAMP systems, Part 2 (Linux)
Top five tutorials for June:
1. Cook up Web sites fast with CakePHP, Part 1 (Open source)
2. LPI exam 101 prep, Topic 101: Hardware and architecture (Linux)
3. Patterns-based design and development for architects, Part 1 (Architecture)
4. Made to order content with Yahoo Pipes (XML)
5. Cook up Web sites fast with CakePHP, Part 2 (Open source)
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
InfoWorld: Windows loses ground with North America developers
A survey this spring of more than 400 developers and IT managers in North America found that the number of developers targeting Windows for their applications declined 12 percent from a year ago. Just 64.8 percent targeted the platform as opposed to 74 percent in 2006.
“We attribute [the decline] largely to the increase in developers beginning to target Linux and different Linux [distributions]. Both Novell and Red Hat are the two dominant ones right now,” said John Andrews, the CEO of Evans Data.
The arrival of Windows Vista likely only kept the numbers from being even worse. “I think Vista probably offset some of the decline,” Andrews said.
The share for Windows is expected to drop another 2 percent, to about 63 percent, in the next year, Andrews said.
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
IBM makes interoperability specifications pledge
Sometimes advancing open standards involves making it easy for others to have clear, streamlined access to IP. Bob Sutor covered the news in a concise summary here.
You can view the Specifications pledge with the list of covered specifications here.
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Oracle 11g for Linux is Here
Saw this today: http://www.oracle.com/features/hp/oracle-database-11g.html
Ok, I added the “for Linux” b/c I’m sure they still support all the usual platforms. I actually saw this today and thought… hmmm… what will happen to all those 10g (or pre-10g) Solaris, HPUX and Windows systems when those customers go to upgrade? Solaris and SPARC are on their way out, Windows = Microsoft and Oracle hates that, and HPUX is on a rotting Itanium vine and many users wouldn’t dare go there… I suspect with Oracle going to Linux as its primary OS of choice (RHEL based) we’ll probably see yet another round of thousands of systems moving onto Linux.
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Rob Weir criticizes sloppy OOXML formulas that made it through ECMA review
Rob Weir is getting some publicity for this very specific critique of the flaws that made it through the ECMA standards body without any real consideration of basic things such as units… oops…
As I’ve shown, in the rush to write a 6,000 page standard in less than a year, Ecma dropped the ball. OOXML’s spreadsheet formula is worse than missing. It has incorrect formulas that, if implemented according to this standard, would raise important health, safety and environmental concerns, aside from the obvious financial risks of a spreadsheet that calculates incorrect results. This standard is seriously messed up. Shame on all those who praised and continue to praise the OOXML formula specification without actually reading it.
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
Anyone attending LinuxWorld San Francisco?
I will most likely be in attendance at this year’s LinuxWorld in SF - if you have plans to be there and are interested in meeting up, grabbing beers, or have a line on good social events, let me know. Looks like there are a number of decent tracks this year - will be tough to choose between some of them…
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
Linux is unstoppable: the contributor base is still growing.
Interesting article over at LinuxWorld.com:
A graph of all the developers involved in the upcoming 2.6.22 release, and the relationships of who reviewed whose patches, extends to a 40-foot-long printout with names in tiny type. The graph is on display at the Ottawa event.
The new “mess” results in innovative new features getting integrated into Linux distributions much more quickly, says Jonathan Corbet, author of the camera driver for One Laptop Per Child and another co-author of Linux Device Drivers. Previously, when developers maintained both “stable” and “development” kernels, it could have been two to three years before a feature made it from development to mainstream users.
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
UK firm moving off Windows desktops to a mix of Suse Linux and Macs
Interesting story over at CNet of a UK firm feeling the “pinch” from Microsoft:
“I feel we are being railroaded, and the market generally forced (us) into a corner or even a cul-de-sac. In a free market, we have made Microsoft dominant, and now we have the collective responsibility to reverse this situation to re-establish balance and competition. If I am being driven down the Vista route, then an Apple Mac is smarter money and cheaper.”
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
Panthers, p51’s, OpenSolaris, and Ubuntu
From the front lines over at Christopher Mahan’s blog (love the Panther analogy btw):
I simply think that Solaris the product is not self-sustaining, that Open-Solaris the open-source project is hobbled by needs of compatibilities and binary-only bits, and that Indiana the distro is aiming to be where Ubuntu is, or at best where it was two years ago.
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