My new Eee PC
I got an Asus Eee PC 701SD last week. Here's what I think of it:
- The keyoard is a little small, nothing you can't get used to though
- It's too small to run OpenSolaris 2008.11. I'm going to get around to running MilaX or Debian eventually, but for now Ubuntu works (emacs + gcc + zsh. Do I need anything else?:P)
- Problematic to compile a new Linux kernel. It's just too slow
- The FSB is set to run at 70MHz instead of 100MHz, which limits its already small 900MHz processor to 650MHz or so
Posted at 02:34PM Apr 26, 2009 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]
Sun Acquired By Oracle
Well, it's official, Sun has been acquired by Oracle.
What does this mean for open source software? Well, I'm not really sure. I'll try tapping it what I think below:
MySQL:
Oracle has absolutely nothing to gain from killing MySQL (but again, they already have a very good database system, so they have little to gain from continuing development) as there are already copius forks which provide ample opportunity for alternative commercial development (I love open source like that :) You always have loyal devotees).
OpenSolaris:
Oracle has a number of their systems deployed on Solaris servers, but they also have a lot to gain by freeing up some of the licensing for things like ZFS and DTrace to put them into Linux. Continuing the OpenSolaris project would probably be good in that they'll get free development, but I would believe that beyond that I'd see little benefit if they already have ZFS
OpenSPARC:
As much as I like SPARC, alternative architectures are increasing market share to the point where all else is irrelevant. Fujitsu recently closed down their SPARC manufacturing, so I have a feeling that Oracle may follow suit here
Java:
Oracle has a huge stake in Java middleware, and will likely increase the community involvement in development. This is good news and may see Java evolve faster to keep up with other alternatives. (On this note, I constantly hear references to Java at uni, normally of the type 'C# is Java without all the shit bits' or 'D pisses all over Java's broken corpse'. I don't agree with the C# comment, but D is a VERY good language. Java has some fighting to do if it wants to survive)
NetBeans:
NetBeans goes hand in hand with Java (and web based :D) development, though with a company like Oracle that hasn't got a particularly good standing with the open source community it's a bit uncertain whether we will see this continue as is, become a fully community driven project or whether it will fall behind while Eclipse (*spit*) continues with support from IBM
I'm probably off the mark with a lot of this, so I appreciate any comments from people who have a better idea of what's going to happen
Posted at 10:55AM Apr 23, 2009 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[4]
After a short hiatus....
Hmm, what is there to say, really? My password expired, and I was locked out of the Sun network for a month or so (;_;), and I did a tech talk on OpenSolaris. Planning another for DTrace and ZFS for next week. Should be epic :) That's all there really is for me to say for now, I suppose, so I'll write another blog if I feel so compelled in the near future
Posted at 10:59PM Mar 29, 2009 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]
Talks for 2009
Here is my current plan for my tech talks next year. Just thought I'd decide now and get organised:
- Febuary: OpenSolaris. This will target 1st years generally before they get used to Linux
- March: NetBeans and JavaFX. Once again, the uni runs Eclipse, so I hope I can divert a little bit of attention away from it and get people onto NetBeans earlier (should be a no brainer if they like matisse and the plugins). The JavaFX one will be a little bit of fun :)
- April: SunSPOTs. I love these things, though I don't know enough about them yet to do a tech talk. It will give me an opportunity to learn a little more about them
- May: DTrace and GlassFish. DTrace is very interesting and glassfish, quite frankly, is comletely *insert appropriate sexual connotation here*
- June & July: This is exam and holiday period, so I'll probably lie low a bit here
- August: NetBeans & JavaME. Just to jump on the Java wagon and entice first years to use NetBeans over eclipse in the second programming course most 1st years do
- September: MySQL. Filling the schedule up slowly here....
- October: This is assignment crunch season, so everyone will be begging for procrastination opportunities. Gotta make this one count, so I'll probably do one on OpenSolaris zones
- November: Exam season. Might try to cough up something on Sun Studio compilers though
- December: Holidays, so I'll lay low
Posted at 09:08PM Dec 11, 2008 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]
Exam Results
Well, with semester over, I can sit back and have a play around with other things. I have managed to muscle my way into a community project at CriticalSecurity.net, which could be interesting if we get it to work. I want to engineer the thing properly though, while the head of the project has just started hacking something random together in BASH that I personally don't think is going to cut it. I'm tempted to just stick with C/C++ at this stage, but we'll see where it goes, as it can only rely on minimal libraries which are distributed with the community distro.
Results came out on the 1st, I got a distinction in design, a credit in formal methods and also concurrency, and a pass in maths, which means I can keep going with my study of distributed systems comfortably :) Next semester I'm doing software analysis, the software engineering project mandated for all 3rd years, parallel systems and artificial intelligence. I have a feeling I'm going to be having a lot of fun next semester :)
I've also started on a website so I can have a play around with some Java applets and use it as a distribution point for design documents and any code I decide to put out there, maybe starting with my IRC bot written on top of the pIRCbot framework and the Connector/J database driver. I'm going to have to fix up the queries so tables are created if they don't exist, but it has a reasonable GUI interface, which will need some work before I bump it up to v1. But anyway, also attended my first live training session the other morning (I'm talking about 4:30am morning, not this wussy 7am I keep hearing about :P) which covered GlassFish. I'm very very very excited to get started with it and JavaEE :)
Not much else to report, I'm bored out of my mind. I thought I would use this holiday as an excuse to catch up with Dawn of War, but I haven't really felt the urge to play it :/ So I've been coding, F5-ing on /., furthering my GIMP skills and just brushing up on other acquired knowledge. Can't wait until I start on a Sun project later in the break :) Should be an awesome experience
Posted at 02:42PM Dec 05, 2008 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]
Stephen and OpenSolaris' Awesome Compiler Adventure
Well, once again it's come time for me to write another blog. I recently got a new desktop computer and decided to use OpenSolaris 2008.05 as my base OS. It was going fine, I had StarOffice installed, I got my hands on a JDK and probably most importantly, I had MP3 support set up. But then I needed a C compiler for some reason (I can't remember why now :/), at which point I realised: there was no C compiler installed by default (it's UNIX, is it too much to expect one to be included?). So, I pulled out a Solaris Express developer DVD (as I don't have access to a great deal of bandwidth at home). From here, I was able to track down the packages from the install, so I navigated to the directory
Leviathan%cd /media/SOL_11x86/whatever
Leviathan%pfexec pkgadd -d .
---List of a thousand freaking software packages---
Installing SUNWgcc
Installing SUNWmake
---Whatever else, I think I tried to install Firefox 3, but now it segfaults, so I'm assuming I missed a dependency or something---
Leviathan%
Ok, I tried to run 'gcc -o hello helloworld.c', but it wasn't on my path. After some annoyed poking around I added it into my .zshrc file. Once again I tried to compile my hello world program, but was told I didn't have the libraries (>_<). So, I went and found the dependencies I needed (SUNWhea, SUNWtoo and SUNWms if you were wondering) on my Solaris Express DVD. Now I have a compiler and the make tools, though it would be nice to not have to go through that again >_<
Posted at 04:34AM Nov 16, 2008 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[2]
Green IT
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Andrew Goodlace, the Australia New Zealand sales director, and ANU senior lecturer Tom Worthington. I was listening to the technology they were talking about and how Sun was way ahead in terms of power saving multi-core systems. It was interesting to hear, for example, that it was far more energy efficient to have a central server and run thin clients (@~15W) vs a PC (~@80W), and how thin clients enabled 3G cards to become widely available. Andrew then proceeded to tell me how he could take his card to any Sun office in the world, chuck it into one of the workstations and pull up his previous session without any hassles. Absolutely amazing technology :D
I also talked to Tom about some of the aspects software plays in energy efficiency. I had no idea software really had much of a bearing on power consumption, but then again I had never really considered how hard I was hitting my computer when I opened up thirty firefox windows with around 1000 tabs each. He said that in order to make something more efficient, we should take to optimising the code as we normally do and also try to cut down on the data that needs to be processed. He also went on to mention that government departments in Australia make a letterhead by plokking a huge picture into a word document and grabbing the edges until it looked ok, rather than actually putting it through a program that actually scales it. If we actually scaled these images instead of putting them straight into word documents, we could also save a huge amount of government bandwidth every year. It is always the simple things that have the biggest effect, and coming from a bizzarre hybrid of JavaScript and PHP, I really can attest to that :)
Posted at 12:39PM Oct 26, 2008 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]
Software Freedom Day and events thereafter
For anyone actually reading my off-off-Broadway blog, I'm going to fill you in on what's happened since my last entry.
Thursday the 18th of September was the ANUsOSUM (haha, anus...) Software Freedom Day. I was actually surprised at the feedback I got and the interest it garnered within the computer science faculty. The day started at 6:30 for me, as I figured I would need to get up a little earlier than I normally do to haul my boxes to uni. Luckily, I found a trolley that had been ditched about a block up, so I put the boxes in there instead:
After I got to uni, I was surprised to see a couple of people waiting around to help me start stuffing the bags full of free software and pen goodness. I still have a box of OpenSolaris CDs waiting to permeate their way across campus.
While stuffing the bags, we gave a couple of CDs away to people who seemed to be interested. One person asked if he could use it to download porn. Who cares about high quality software like OpenOffice and VirtualBox if you don't have porn?</sarcasm> Anyway, that's getting off topic.
We set up in union court, and managed to get rid of the bulk of the software and even a couple of the shirts that I brought
After a couple of hours in the sun (hey it beats software design tutorials any day), we headed over to the Sun sponsered BBQ, where we managed to catch the spill over from the engineering BBQ. I ended up with leftover sausages, three of which are still in my fridge preparing to be served over potatoes tonight :D
Anyway, with SFD in behind me, I could get started on my concurrency assignment, which involved making numbers run around a page searching for food. We had existing infrastructure with which to send messages and move around the labyrinth written in Ada, but were asked to increase its efficiency. I implemented a protected object, onto which the tasks queued and shared maps, providing they were on the same square. I was actually surprised at how well it actually worked, but I realised about an hour after I had submitted it and gone home I should have unmarked all the paths when maps were merged. It would have been much faster :/ Anyway, not much else to say. I managed to trash my Windows bootloader by providing the argument '/dev/sda1' to grub-install. I only fixed it two days ago, now I realise it was a stupid idea, as I've played the Sims for two days straight instead of getting work done. Oh Linux, how I love thee....
Posted at 05:00PM Oct 04, 2008 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]
SFD
Things are set for ANUs OSUM Software Freedom Day! I've managed to pull together almost what I envisioned for the event, so it all works out :D We're doing:
- A BBQ
- An installfest
- System restores
- Virus scans
- FOSS Demos
It's going to be absolutely legendary! Even if all the people we talk to don't give a stuff about the freedom aspect of FOSS, it will be good to get that software to them to let them know that there is an alternative to expensive, 2nd class proprietary software. If anyone wants to help out or find out a little more, get onto the wiki at http://softwarefreedomday.org/teams/oceania/au/ANUsOSUM or the facebook event http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=48069001520
Cheers,
Stephen
Posted at 01:49PM Sep 16, 2008 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]
Software Freedom Day
Preparations have been ramped up for what is going to be an awesome day :) We're conducting and install fest, dragging out a BBQ and just talking to people about the importance of free software. I'll post some pictures after the day, but it is going to sweet :D
Posted at 01:49PM Sep 08, 2008 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]
My move to Sun blogs :)
This is my first post to my new Sun Microsystems job. I'll probably mirror all my posts on my other blog anyway (unless otherwise advised not to)... So yeah, welcome to my blog, once I get some pictures of the first tech talk I gave last week, I'll put up a post about that :)
Posted at 06:27PM Aug 26, 2008 by Stephen Gream in Personal | Comments[0]