Drew's Blog. The dots in .co.uk

Drew Wagar's Weblog.

Monday January 23, 2006

Thin clients in the news again..

This isn't really my area, but I'm interested in it.

These two chaps...

Mark Hall and Frank Hayes set up a nice little debate (one side and the other) on 'thin client' and where it might be headed in 2006. Now, obviously, Sun has a vested interest in TC's as we produce the SunRay technology and you might expect us to be in favour of it...

I found Mark's (in favour of TCs) arguments quite good and he presented a number of them. I found Frank's (not in favour of TCs) a bit odd. He only had one point, which was that 'users won't like it'. He cites that users need to be able to install bits of software and that this is crucial for them to be able to do their job.

Two thoughts on this.

I bet the vast majority of '3rd Party Software' on users laptops isn't in the 'business critical' category. More likely it's iTunes, Bittorrent and children's 'educational' software.

One assumes that these users are using company supplied equipment. What gives users the right to install other software on their company laptop? You can't go out and modify your company car can you? It's sort of assumed that you just do. If I was in charge of these companies I would ban users owning the root/admin passwords immediately. My own work laptop has nothing on it but Sun supplied software. I have taken the novel step of having my own personal laptop for my stuff (not counting the fact my own laptop is way better than the work supplied one!)

I think they both missed the two real reason TCs haven't yet taken off properly. They need to be wireless (we'd need vpns and WWAN coverage too), and have a laptop form factor. Without the disk drive dragging down the power consumption, laptop style TCs would last for hours longer, be more secure and still be cool enough for users/executives to use on the train to impress everyone else...

( Jan 23 2006, 05:28:15 PM GMT / Jan 23 2006, 05:16:08 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [4]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/thin_clients_in_the_news

Wednesday January 11, 2006

Computer game generation gap...

My 5 year old son is slowly getting into computer games. He's actually pretty good at driving games inparticular now, he's faster than my wife around a simulated Brands Hatch in a Honda Civic....

Just for fun I thought I'd introduce him to a couple of classic arcade games: Pacman and Asteroids...

Well, Pacman he got immediately, but he was totally stumped by asteroids. He watched me play it and I noticed he was giving me one of his "Dad why are you being so dumb?" looks... I asked him what the problem was.

"Dad, why are you shooting the clouds?"

I guess he's got a point!

By contrast, one of the guests at our Christmas party was an elderly (80 year old) major who used to fly Spitfires in the war (WWII). I happened to mention I had a copy of Combat flight simulator on a PC upstairs (with a force feedback joystick and pedals) and I could tell the old boy was itching for a go...

One thing led to another and we set up a proper multiplayer deathmatch. A few of the young 'playstation generation' were also up for a blast or two. So it became young versis old over Biggin hill, or atleast a reasonable facsimile thereof.

The result? Codgers 15, Whippersnappers 0. Our old major had lost none of his guile in the air and kicked some serious teenage butt, and they were trying hard. I think that did more for community relations around our way than anything else ever. The local kids had serious respect for him after that and, dare I say it, probably learn't something about the war in the process.

And it was fun watching the teenage bravado dissolve rather quickly into gasps of dismay followed by grudging respect and finally sincere admiration. There's no school like the old school! ;-)

( Jan 11 2006, 03:28:33 PM GMT / Jan 11 2006, 03:11:25 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/classic_computer_games

Friday December 02, 2005

Free software : Our new big bet...

Well, I guess you've seen the whole free software thing by now ;-)

Funny how most of the negative comment has been from the official media, and most of the positive comment has come from the blogosphere...

I'm looking at it from a pre-sales perspective (as that's my job) and to be honest it won't make much of a difference to me in the short term, but I think the long term is all upside.

I work in pre-sales and see the world as follows.

1. We will still be responding to tenders etc as we usually do. Nobody runs unsupported software at the enterprise level.

2. None of my customers have ever evaluated software using closed door in house resources. They are always POCS (proof of concept) bake offs between competitive companies run by us (pre-sales geeks). Can't see them starting to pay for their own resources to do a job that us suppliers perform as part of the 'cost of sale'.

3. If a few more geeks and techies out there start mucking about with our software and writing up answers to installation/configuration queries etc, then Fan-bloody-tastic I say. (Eg. Do a search on google for help installing php and mysql on apache webserver, then do the same thing installing php and mysql on sun webserver - both can be done, but it's a damn sight easier to do on apache today from a standing start using just the internet as a support resource... community/volume wins)

Jonathan is right on the money still, keep up the good work! ;-)

( Dec 02 2005, 10:49:12 AM GMT / Dec 02 2005, 10:49:12 AM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/free_software_our_new_big

Thursday October 20, 2005

Tesco killed Grandpa's PC

A name and shame for you.

I have to do a lot of tech support for my extended family and it's tedious. I wish I could put them all onto a stable, decent operating system that didn't keep patching itself, downloading virus updates and requiring resource slurping firewalls...... let's not go there again.

Particularly annoyed with Tesco this time. My stepfather's (my kids call him Grandpa) email stopped working and so he started an email conversation with the support line on my mum's pc. I was out of contact at the time so he bravely went ahead, what could be the worst that could happen after all? ;-) Now he's nearly 80, so you can excuse him for not knowing everything about how the internet works.

The support people (incorrectly) surmised the problem was with his antivirus software (AVG from Grisoft.com - very good btw). So they asked him to uninstall it and try the email again. Fair enough. The email didn't work. So they told him to reinstall AVG...

"How do I do that then?" asks Grandpa.
"Go to a search engine and type AVG" says mister Tesco support.
"I've got 'Free Antivirus downloads'. Is that the one I want?" asks Grandpa.
"Yes, that's it. Download that and run it." says mister Tesco support.

Well, guess what. If you type AVG into askjeeves, the first entry that comes up is a sponsored link. It does indeed say 'Free Antivirus downloads", but it sure as hell isn't AVG from Grisoft. It's some dodgy outfit called stop-sign.com and a quick search on google reveals it's a nice bunch of spyware. When I found out I told Grandpa to pull his network card out until I got there. Nice one Tesco.

Bearing in mind that this 'tech support line' costs 50p/minute, I think we deserve someone a bit more savvy on the end of the phone. Hardly surprising we end up with this is it?

As we are wont to do in the UK, a stiffly worded letter will be sent.

( Oct 21 2005, 10:02:12 AM BST / Oct 20 2005, 05:42:38 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/tesco_killed_grandpa_s_pc

Thursday October 13, 2005

Hope he doesn't mind...

Pinched a few ideas from Robin's blog... I thought I ought to get around to adding a bit of 'sizzle' to this blog.. Copied his stat counter and clustermap ideas. Nice one. I also found this neat little moon phase applet.

As one of my previous colleagues used to say - "Plagarise, plagarise, let no ones work evade your eyes..."

By the way, Robin is one of our top Identity heavyweights. He's the chap who I ask when I get stuck. He also got selected as 'C3PO' in one of our internal, "So which Star Wars character are you then?" emails. :-)

( Oct 13 2005, 09:47:29 AM BST / Oct 13 2005, 09:21:10 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/hope_he_doesn_t_mind

Wednesday October 12, 2005

Things are getting interesting again...

IT hasn't had much to excite joe public in the last couple of years. The browser wars are ancient history, the millenium came without major incident (big round of applause for the much abused IT sector for that - well done people!) and the dot com bubble burst, leaving a few casualties, but contrary to the doom mongers, the internet is still there and e-commerce is bigger than ever...

But where is what we in the UK call, the 'whizz bang' factor?

I think it's coming. Have a look around. You've got people like George Colony, CEO at Forrester saying stuff like "Microsoft is in its most vulnerable moment in history, just like IBM in the 1990s ." That's interesting. Why is that then?

Big threats from open-source and Linux (Yawn, heard that before), big threats from Mozilla (Firefox browser is great, but not exactly life changing lets be honest), big threats from Apple (can anyone say ITunes?)... all cool, but nothing really new there.

What's more interesting is what's happening with the likes of Google, Ebay, Yahoo etc. Our software chief, Jonathon Schwartz (his blog) recently asked one of his audiences the following...

[I] ask[ed] the audience which they'd rather give up - their browser, or all the rest of their desktop apps. (Unanimously, they'd all give up the latter without a blink.)

Speaks volumes that does ;-)

Imagine a world where we can do everything through the browser, office productivity, email, media, collaboration... then imagine the capability of plugging ebay into googleearth, salesforce.com into fedextrack as bespoke 'applications on demand', no need to install, just drag 'n' drop the connections in your browser.

I ran this idea past one of my friends this morning at Starbucks, who in his own words is "a bit of microsofty" who said it would never work, that people wouldn't trust an online system with this kind of data. "You'd never make it secure, and people wouldn't trust it."

I'd argue that 308,000 subscribers trusting their CRM data to salesforce.com and $65M revenue to salesforce.com last quarter as a result says he's wrong. Salesforce.com calls itself the 'Ebay for business software'

Apparently, 10% of software budgets are blown on 'on-demand' software today. That's higher than I suspected and is worth £4B today. It's forecast to grow to $10B in 2009 (I reckon that's pessimistic)

My friend said he wanted the option to have his computer disconnected from the network and still be able to do things. I asked him whether or not he wanted to be able to disconnect his house from the mains every so often so he could have fun running his own diesel generator. Ok, a bit flippant, but the point still stands.

The big objection to utility computing is it's not reliable and it's not secure, but how often to you really worry about power outages and weird chemicals in your water supply? You don't, they just work - pretty much. I don't have to know about line voltage, impediance, salinity, ionic catalysts; I just plug in, switch on, turn the tap and down a glass....and pay my monthly bill. My point is these networks are mature, computing isn't yet, but it will be!

What would you need for this brave new world? A basic OS with network and media capability, a reliable broadband connection, a trusted browser, some neat GUI enhancements for that browser, a programming language that works anywhere, loads of online services, storage, security, identity and web services support. No wonder chairs are flying at Microsoft.

Can anyone say 'Sun Microsystems'?

Oh yes, things are getting interesting again!

( Oct 12 2005, 12:30:35 PM BST / Oct 12 2005, 10:25:36 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/things_are_getting_interesting_again

Tuesday July 26, 2005

Has anyone else heard of the Compukit UK101? My first computer...

It was a pretty rare beast, earlier than the BBC Micro and the ZX80/81/Spectrums, Commodore Vic20 and 64. In the US it was known as the Ohio Superboard.

Based around the venerable 6502 processor it was running at 1Mhz, with 8k of ram and 8k of rom, which contained 'BASIC' by a small little company called Microsoft. Hey, this was 1979!

Other cool features included a memory mapped screen of 80x25 characters, 256 different characters which could be used, a primitive tape interface running at 300 baud and the ability to be plugged into a TV.

It came with only a PCB with the keys plugged into it, no case at all, although we eventually made one for it.

It never hit the mainstream, arriving a little too early for the first home computer revolution in the early 1980s and it was outstriped in capability by the later machines quite quickly as the price points came down. However, some games were written for it, inparticular a very good conversion of space invaders.

There is not much out there on the UK101, but there is one good website, affectionately called 'Coredump' which gives quite a bit of detail, you can even find an emulator there. I have fond memories of it and would like to find one in working condition again as a piece of pure self indulgence and nostalgia.

I'm curious though, does anyone else out there remember this machine? And was it your first computer?

( Jul 26 2005, 09:40:52 AM BST / Jul 26 2005, 09:25:26 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [15]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/has_anyone_else_heard_of

Monday July 25, 2005

My first 'lil website...

Well my first son is almost 5 now so I thought it about time he starts using computers a bit more regularly to do a bit more than play atomic-mega-ultra-blastem'up-racing-crash-spin-zappo ....

You can see it here

So we sat down and, with a bit of help from myself (not much though), he built his first website. Nothing fancy, just some pictures and text and a couple of pages. He was pleased with it though!

Makes you wonder though. I still consider myself a pretty experienced IT bod, but I didn't even see a computer (outside of those fake hollywood ones with all the flashing lights ;-) until 1977 when my dad built the first one. Anyone else heard of a Compukit UK101? Only two other people in Sun so far!

My son is writing basic webpages at the age of 4, and he is already getting good enough at computer games that I'm having to get the manual out occasionally to figure out the power ups. He's happy to startup, shutdown, stick in the CDs, play MP3s and browse the web and send email (supervised obviously) He gets a school email address next year....he's almost as competent as my mum already...(no joke!)

Obviously this is pretty neat really, and it's a direct result of the work you, me and everyone else in IT has slogged our guts out for the last few decades on. Nice to see kids getting into this stuff and doing things. Can't help wondering what they will be doing with it at my age though (say around 2030 or so)

Difficult to even imagine!

( Jul 25 2005, 01:58:25 PM BST / Jul 25 2005, 01:45:45 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [2]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/my_first_lil_website

Tuesday July 12, 2005

Record traffic to BBC News due to Bombings.

Good to see the internet played its part in keeping people up to date. From my perspective, watching events unfold, the internet was more accurate, more up to date and more indepth than the television coverage on Sky, CNN and the BBC. Media is changing quickly now, a far cry from the scorn and derision the media used to foist upon the web just a few short years ago. Click

115 Million site impressions in a day is big in anyones book. A credit to the technology.

Apparently 'London' was the top search term in all search engines on Thursday.

( Jul 12 2005, 10:11:09 AM BST / Jul 12 2005, 10:07:01 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/record_traffic_to_bbc_news

Wednesday January 19, 2005

An awesome piece of work

Congratulations ESA for the amazing achievement of landing a space probe on Titan and returning pictures from the most interesting moon in the solar system. (And thanks for the lift Nasa!)

What brought it back to me was the signal strength of the lander was about the same as the average mobile phone, but was detected and received at such a huge distance. My mobile cuts out on the way into the City on the train and is generally about as reliable as the train service already mentioned... ;-)

Shame that the news reports over here were mostly blotted out by one of our younger royal family members making questionable choices in clothing. It never ceases to amaze me how fundamentally important news is always sidelined by utterly irrelevant trivia. The findings on Titan will be bringing us a step closer to figuring out how life actually started on this little planet of ours, a quest which has been running for millenia and gathering significant pace in this technology savvy age of ours. I can't help thinking that there is atleast some significant in that!

It would be nice if we could get rid of all the trivia, reality tv, celebrities and the people famous only for being famous and put them somewhere obscure and out of the way.

Titan would be ideal!

( Jan 19 2005, 05:04:59 PM GMT / Jan 19 2005, 04:55:08 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/an_awesome_piece_of_work

Wednesday January 05, 2005

Oi! Stop pinching my cycles!

Like all good internet citizens I run a virus program,anti-adware and firewall programs on my PC whenever it is running Windows (and there's a firewall and antivirus on JDS too as it happens).

Out of curiosity, when I last rebuilt my laptop I ran some tests to see how much performance and memory I had to sacrifice to run these, nowadays, essential services.

Well, the answer is about 30 Megabytes of RAM and around 20% of the performance of my PC.

Therefore, over the last year, these spammers and worm writers have cost me around 2.1024*10^14 cpu cycles and about £10 of memory. Can I get some compensation please?

( Jan 05 2005, 02:51:18 PM GMT / Jan 05 2005, 02:34:28 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/pc_performance_drop

The quest for the simple desktop...

Having been through the pain of setting up friends and family PCs (see earlier blog) I really do wish somebody would hurry up and crack the 'thin client device as a service' problem. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just rent a desktop for a fixed £££ a month.

I know it wouldn't be appealing to us super techy types but a simple laptop style wireless device that does email, calendar, addresses, web browsing, music, video and games and is easy to use can't be beyond the wit of mankind to produce, make profitable and good quality proposition.

I simply can't see the general public putting up with phishing, virii, constant upgrades, security problems and errant hardware for much longer. My wife made comment that she doesn't have to put up with her washing machine or microwave deciding to stop working for no apparent reason every so often, so why should the computer be so different?

Obviously, not being in the IT profession so doesn't realise how totally unreasonable it is to ask for something to actually be reliable and dependable....

( Jan 05 2005, 10:26:50 AM GMT / Jan 05 2005, 10:03:14 AM GMT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/the_quest_for_the_simple

Monday December 20, 2004

Firewire peripherals under JDS - Working!

I don't know how many others out there have had problems with this, but a quick scan of the 'net seems to indicate that support for Firewire devices is a bit tricky with Linux in general.

After an afternoon of mucking about with my laptop, I finally figured out how to get the CD on my laptop to work and it might be useful to others.

My laptop is Dell X200, which has its floppy and CD on a 'media-slice' (docking station) underneath the laptop. The interface between the CD and the laptop is firewire and whilst the CD was detected on boot and could install JDS ok, the CD wasn't recognised after booting.

The trick is that, in JDS (or Suse 8 if you like), not all the firewire support is enabled in the kernel supplied with JDS. So firstly I tried building all of the firewire support into the kernel. Result - no joy.

A bit more homework revealed that the modules that support firewire ieee1394.o, ohci1394.o and sbp2.o, whilst they can be built into the kernel, only work as modules. So you have to configure your kernel to use them as modules.

Did that, still not joy.

Checked the output of 'lsmod' (List modules), A-Ha! They haven't automatically loaded.

Tried loading the modules manually with 'insmod', still no joy!

The second trick is to use modprobe and get it to load raw1394.o and ohci1394.o thusly...

# cd /lib/modules//kernel/drivers/ieee1394
# modprobe raw1394 # modprobe ohci1394

The third and final trick is to realise that loading of ohci1394 will not work unless there is some media in the drive. Stick in a CD and it works ok.

Now have a look at /var/log/messages as this should show that your firewire device has been picked up...

# tail /var/log/messages

Then you can check that the scsi interface is now seeing your firewire device...

# cat /proc/scsi/scsi

If the device is showing up there now you can mount it and get on with your life, in my case...

# mount /dev/cdrom

Yay! Atlast!

Cheers,

Drew.

( Dec 20 2004, 09:25:19 PM GMT / Dec 20 2004, 05:52:03 PM GMT ) Permalink
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/firewire_peripherals_under_jds_working

Linux kernels!

Well, I had to bite the bullet today and reconfigure a Linux kernel for the first time. My laptop CD drive is an oddly complicated firewire device and isn't picked up by default in JDS.

I'm still not convinced this is for the faint hearted, but I did find a jolly handy 'HOWTO' on the net which helped enormously. Click

Interestly I discovered that there is a whole bunch of stuff in the kernel switched on by default that you probably wont need and a lot of scope for optimisation too. The distribution we use for JDS (Suse as I'm sure you know) is very generic, obviously to support as wide a variety of machines as possible, so I guess this isn't much of a surprise really.

Certainly perked up the speed of my laptop once I'd unloaded some of the stuff and selected the appropriate processor optimization.

Wireless access is my next hurdle...!

( Dec 20 2004, 01:27:05 PM GMT / Dec 20 2004, 01:27:05 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/linux_kernels

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