Angelo's Soapbox |
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Wednesday Aug 27, 2008
Engineering Webcast: OpenSolaris, A Boundless Development System
Time for some shameless plug. I host a engineering webcast where I get to talk with some pretty cool folks. We just released one more of these webcast. This one talks about OpenSolaris. If you are a developer you need to check this one out. Both Hugo and Marty are exciting speakers. In this talk we some details on both the technical and business side of OpenSolaris. Enjoy Posted at 04:09PM Aug 27, 2008 by angelo in Web2.0 | Comments[0]
Tuesday Jul 15, 2008
DTrace screencast
Its been a while since I blogged here. So wanted to do blog some good content.
I work in the Open Source team at Sun and I'm focusing on Emerging Markets. Its a pretty exciting work and I'm enjoying very bit of it.
You may need a flash player to view these screen casts. I plan to do DTrace tutorials in the next series of screen casts. Enjoy and don't forget to provide feedback. Posted at 10:22PM Jul 15, 2008 by angelo in DTrace | Comments[3]
Tuesday May 22, 2007
DTrace meets the AMP (Apache MySQL PHP) stack
During JavaOne this year Rags and I did a hands on lab on DTrace. The topic was "Using DTrace on Java and other Web 2.0 Languages in Solaris". Due to some unforeseen reason the lab was scheduled from 8:45 PM to 10:45 PM (Yes PM) and that to on the day of the big party at JavaOne. So I was expecting to be speaking to an empty room but lo and behold we had close to 100 engineers ( a few pretty drunk) and most stayed until the finished the lab.It was pretty heartening and was worth all the efforts that went into it. One of the highlights of the lab was a script that we developed. It lists the JavaScript & PHP function entry and MySQL SQLs that happen live system. You need the following prerequisite for the script to be fully functional.
Here is the script. It takes one argument - the pid of the mysqld process in your system.
You will see a nice color coded output. Javascript calls in Red, PHP in Blue and MySQL in green.
In subsequent blogs I try and go through the process of developing this code. Meanwhile enjoy Solaris DTrace Posted at 01:17PM May 22, 2007 by angelo in DTrace | Comments[1] I met Vinod Khosla
During JavaOne this year Rags and I went to a nice South Indian restaurant, Dosa, in San Francisco. This is an excellent place by the way and I highly recommend it. I was looking around and it seemed like we were the only PIO (Persons on Indian Origin) around until I spotted a family sitting just behind us. On closer observation it looked like someone familiar. I checked twice and quitely told Rags, "Hey Vinod Khosla is sitting behind us?" We debated for a few minutes if it was right to intrude but better wisdom prevailed and we walked up to him and actually shook his hands.He was pretty gracious and freely chatted with us. This was definitely one of the highlights of JavaOne for me. For those of you who do not know Vinod, he is the founder of Sun He is also the founder of Daisy Systems and Khosla Ventures and help start companies like Juniper networks and Excite etc. See his WikiPedia Entry for more details. Posted at 12:03PM May 22, 2007 by angelo in General |
Monday Apr 02, 2007
DTrace, April Fools and Solaris 10 Binary Compatability.
Its been a while since I blogged. Its definitely not for lack of content but lack of the discipline to sit down and "just do it". Well its about time.
#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -qs
#pragma D option destructive
BEGIN
{
printf("Changing output of uname for pid %d and its descendants...\n",$1);
}
syscall::uname:entry
/progenyof($1)/
{
self->addr = arg0;
}
syscall::uname:return
/progenyof($1)/
{
copyoutstr("5.9", self->addr+(257*2), 257);
}
This script expects the pid of a shell as its only argument and it will change the uname version to 5.9 for this shell and all its descendants and as with all D-scripts once you stop this script (with a ^c) everything would be back as it was before. Enjoy! Posted at 02:08PM Apr 02, 2007 by angelo in DTrace |
Wednesday Nov 15, 2006
Solaris presentation at Colby College
Yesterday I had an excellent opportunity to present DTrace and ZFS at Colby College . There were folks from the CS department and IT dept. It was very heartening to see the interest in Solaris. The lecture was part of their CS Colloquium.
After a pretty detailed presentation my resources slide had just one entry http://opensolaris.org/ Everything you need to know about DTrace and ZFS is in OpenSolaris. If you've not been there at OpenSolaris recently check it out.
Posted at 03:30PM Nov 15, 2006 by angelo in DTrace |
Tuesday Aug 01, 2006
DTrace could have saved the Vista Voice Recognition Demo Looks like Microsoft has an unfair share of unfavorable visits from the demo gods. For example just last week a demo of the Voice recognition feature of Vista went horribly bad and a video of the failed demo was all over the net. Google Video , Slash Dot and YouTube all have helped to spread the video around. I just came across Microsoft's Larry Osterman's blog. He claims responsibility for the snafu and explains the details of why this went wrong. While there is a lot of good info in the blog that may be of interest to a analog audio engineer the following line in his blog caught my attention. The annoying thing about it was that the bug wasn't reproducible - every time he stepped through the code in the debugger, it worked perfectly, but it kept failing when run without any traces. I'm sure we all have faced similar problems. They seem to go away as soon as you attach a debugger to it or even add some custom instrumentation (printf) to the application. In this case the problem was occurring if they had a positive feedback loop and the problem was very time sensitive. Solaris 10 Dynamic Tracing or DTrace in short is absolutely the best tool in the market today to diagnose such problems. It frees you from having to do custom instrumentation and helps you diagnose problems in a live production setting without incurring the overhead of traditional debuggers. Now if only Vista had DTrace! Larry could have diagnosed the problem without having to incur the big cost of a stepping through the debugger. To learn more about DTrace see Solaris 10 Dynamic Tracing Users Guide DTrace Webcast - (shameless self promotion) Brendan Greggs DTrace Toolkit Tags: DTrace , Vista Posted at 03:28PM Aug 01, 2006 by angelo in DTrace |
Friday Jul 21, 2006
How to cube a mango?
Edward Tufte' for a seven year old.
Last night at the dinner table we had a treat for the kids. My wife had bought a box of mangoes and I was asked to slice it up for the family. We normally just make slices and the kids have fun just scooping the flesh out with a spoon but yesterday I decided to make cubes. My 7 year old was carefully watching me cube the mango. She was pretty excited about the process and wanted to remember it. So she illustrated the process.
Posted at 04:10PM Jul 21, 2006 by angelo in Personal | Comments[1]
Tuesday May 02, 2006
10000 DTrace webcast downloads! Time for some gloating about the popularity of DTrace and a bit of joy about a personal milestone. For most of last year I've been evangelizing the capabilities of Solaris 10 Dynamic tracing technology DTrace, among Sun's partner community. Most of the effort has gone into in person presentations, which has been by far the most rewarding. Just to see the amazement on peoples faces when the realize the power of the tool is worth every second of effort that goes into these presentations. But with three kids at home, traveling can be very disruptive. So I've been trying to use technology to advance the cause. We did webcasts and Hands on Lab and gave the presentation material to other able presenters. The webcasts and Hands on Labs are freely available on the net. Last week we reached an exciting milestone. Over 10,000 (yes 4 zeros) people have downloaded and viewed the webcast. If you have viewed the Webcast I'd like to hear from you.Email me at angelo dot rajadurai at sun dot com. Let me know if you liked it. What types of other material would you like to see on DTrace? If you are interested in DTrace and have been looking to learn about its capabilities here are a few resources for you. DTrace webcast Hands on Labs DTrace BigAdmin site DTrace community on OpenSolaris.org Brendan Gregg's DTrace tools Solaris 10 Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) guide Technorati tag: DTrace Posted at 07:16AM May 02, 2006 by angelo in DTrace |
Tuesday Apr 04, 2006
DTrace detective!
Recently I got a request from a coworker. The email Subject line said, "Solaris has a mind of its own". Basically looks like something or someone was creating a link from /etc/motd to a file in /var/spool on his cutsomers system. The customer removes the link and replace /etc/motd with a blank file several times a day and the link keeps reappearing again.
So the question was can I help find the culprit?
These days DTrace seems to be the answer for every question on Solaris 10. At least that is the first thing that comes to my mind. My Acer Ferrari running the latest version of Solaris Express comes in handy as a test bed for my detective work.
For starters I think symlink(2) system call is called when someone creates a link in the system. To verify that I ran the following one liner on one window when I created a link on a another window.
dtrace -n syscall::symlink:entry
Posted at 02:43PM Apr 04, 2006 by angelo in DTrace |
Friday Jan 13, 2006
I'm a bona fide inventor Happy New Year everyone. I'm happy to report that I'm now a bona fide inventor. Our patent for "Rating apparatus and method for evaluating bugs" was granted end of December. Posted at 02:30PM Jan 13, 2006 by angelo in General | Comments[1]
Friday Nov 04, 2005
Solaris 10 DTrace Code Camps, Webcast & Hands on labs In the last few months I've been presenting DTrace to many developers and System Admins around the world. Its been a great to talk about this very cool technology. The feedback from the developer community has been wonderful. Code Camps are an excellent format to present DTrace. 30 to a 100 developers get together. Each of them have a Solaris 10 desktops. We spend the whole day talking about DTrace and Zones . The first hour is dedicated to Solaris 10 introduction. We then have 4 hours of DTrace. Developers get to ask questions and I get to write D-scripts to show them how to answer such questions live. Then the rest of the day is spent talking about Zones and SMF. Developers sometimes bring in their applications on their Solaris 10 laptop. These lucky once get a taste of how DTrace can be used to better understand their application. Some where between all this we get good lunch at Sun's expense and snacks and ofcourse lots of coffee. If you did not get a chance to attend one of these camps, you can atleast look at the presentation.
Technorati tag: DTrace Posted at 06:49PM Nov 04, 2005 by angelo in DTrace | Comments[0]
Thursday Nov 03, 2005
Takin' the plunge Its 'bout time! Have been thinking about blogging for a while. In fact its been over 3 months since I set up the account. So its 'bout time I get started. Here goes A little about myself. I've been at Sun for almost 13 years. Started here as part of the product team during the early days of Solaris x86. Spent a lot of time working with developers and Sun's large partners. Right now I'm part of the Tech Office in Sun's Market Develeopment Engineering organization. My group "makes strategic partners run best on Sun." We help port partner applications to our platform, performance tune their application, help partners size their application, benchmark their application and anything else that will help make Sun the best platform for our partners. Its an exciting job at Sun at an exciting time. One of my job responsibilities is to run the Tunathon 2006 program. We get engineers from the product team to tune partner applications. This gives Sun product engineering a view into how our partners use our platform and it gives partners access to the big brains at Sun. The last 5 months I've been traveling around the world (9 countries) and spoke to over a 1000 developers and sysadmins about the virtues of DTrace. Its been a great experience and I plan to document these in my blogs. On a personal front I'm a father of 3 (You'd never say that if you saw me!!!). My oldest is in fifth grade and is a Math wizz and is preparing for his first spelling bee. My 6 year old is into music, plays the piano and dabbles with composing songs. My 2 year old, is well..., very cute. My wife holds a post graduate degree in Electrical Engineering and she decided to stay back home to be with the kids for now. My Father retired as the Chairman and Managing Director of a Public Sector Company in India. OK enough about myself. Posted at 09:00PM Nov 03, 2005 by angelo in General | Comments[1] |
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