Středa prosinec 17, 2008

Respond to OpenSolaris Survey and Win T-Shirt

— XII 17 2008, 09:28:58 dop. CET Permalink

Úterý říjen 21, 2008

NetBeans Celebrates 10th Birthday

— X 21 2008, 07:12:34 odp. CEST Permalink

Úterý říjen 14, 2008

OpenOffice.org Can't Meet Demand

— X 14 2008, 12:09:33 odp. CEST Permalink

Pondělí září 22, 2008

A Month with iPhone 3G

I fell victim to the iPhone mania. As the iPhone officially arrived to the Czech Republic on Friday, August 22, 2008, I was standing in the queue in front of the T-mobile shop on Narodni street at midnight. T-mobile started to sell iPhone by launching a short party where the first owners of iPhone could meet Roland Mahler, T-mobile CEO, in person. Although I was not so fortunate as the one lucky winner of a free iPhone draw, I was lucky enough to get my contract prolonged to buy iPhone for a subsidied price of 2468 Kc ($150), which is exactly what I was dreaming about, because a usual price of 8GB version of iPhone 3G is 12000 Kc ($730). I was very excited to buy the new iPhone for such a good price that I didn't mind getting to bed late, as I left the shop as the last customer at 2 am.

I wrote the first paragraph just a day after I bought the iPhone and wrote it solely on my new iPhone. It was a pleasant experience, as the automatic spell-checker does a good job of correcting your typos. But there's a hitch in it (as there are many others related to almost any feature of the iPhone): you don't like to write in anything else than English. As you can see, writing a Czech text message gets sometimes really painful. It's a good example of many limitations that I was discovering in the past month. I will sum them up to make a picture of what you will miss (for many users of high-end mobile phones this can get very entertaining):

• you can't send MMS
• you can't switch off automatic spell-checker which corrects your mistakes (painful)
• there is no file manager: you can't download/upload files on the web or use WiFi/Blutetooth to exchange files (you sync only via iTunes SW on Windows/MacOS)
• you can't listen to audio via Bluetooth (I miss this very much!)
• you can't send a contact via sms
• there's no copy&paste

Now -- do you know what's the best thing about iPhone? The iPhone is so cool, that you don't care about any limitation whatsoever. :-) I mean it. It's the best mobile phone/mp3 phone/toy I have ever had and I still love it!

— IX 22 2008, 07:51:55 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]

Sobota červenec 19, 2008

Why is Sun Missing in Top 500?

Financial Times, the leading British business newspaper, has published a chart of the world's 500 largest companies called FT Global 500. The most valuable company is Exxon Mobil, with PetroChina in the second place pushing General Electric to the bronze position.

All major competitors of Sun Microsystems took their positions in the chart (IBM #27, HP #48, Dell #183), but Sun is missing. To answer the question "Why is that?" you must first understand what's the methodology behind.

You don't need to be an economist to know it must be pretty tough to tell if a company deserves to be in the top 500 or not. However, the editors of Financial Times found a very easy and objective way to do so: they sorted the companies according to their market capitalization as of March 31, 2008. Market capitalization is the share price multiplied by the number of shares. All numbers were converted to the dollar by using the exchange rate of March 31, 2008.

Market value is therefore the actual price of the whole company. But the share price doesn't value the company at some point of time, it also includes the expectations of the investors, because they expect Sun to execute on its promises in the future. Accounters call this the principle of going concern.

To compare Sun with other companies (and to see why Sun is not in the list of top 500), we must calculate the market capitalization as of March 31, 2008. The share price (NASDAQ:JAVA) closed at $15.53 that day, while the number of shares is 781,784,000 (taken from the latest annual report). By multiplying these two numbers, we calculate that Sun's market capitalization was $12,141 million on March 31, 2008.

If Sun's value was only $12M, does it mean that it's worse than the top 500 companies? Well, I don't think so. Let me give you an example: is Mercedes worse than Ferrari just because it's cheaper? No, it's not. We can say that it's a different class.

And that's exactly the difference between Sun and it's competitors. IBM, which ranked 27th in the FT Global 500, has 11 times more employees than Sun and had 7 times bigger turnover (amount of products and services sold) in the last fiscal year. That's a big gap which describes the size of the organization and it's another factor included in the share price.

As the amount of outstanding shares does not change often, the only dynamic part of the market cap is the share price. Henkel, the German household goods producer, was the 500th on the list with $19,331.2M market cap. Sun's share price would have to be at least $24.72 to get the last place in the list.

— VII 19 2008, 12:23:30 dop. CEST Permalink

Pondělí červen 30, 2008

My First Conference Presentation

The yesterday's weekend was a very rewarding one. I spent all of my time relaxing in the swimming pool as I was enjoying the end of the OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2008, where me, Robert Malovec and Ales Cernosek presented about Translation of OpenSolaris.

It was my first conference presentation and even though I got very nervous a few hours before the start, I felt much better while I was on stage. My presentation took about 20 minutes, Robert then went on with the demo of the proposed community translation model. I was very happy to see the demo going smooth, because we all were afraid of it not working at all. But Lukas Machacek did a good job of making it all work that day.

When Robert immediately translated part of the cal command-line application, the audience was apparently impressed. The number of questions asked at the end was overwhelming and we had to admit that some questions were hard to answer, esp. those about the future of the Community Translation Interface (CTI) pilot ("If this is just an experiment, when will we see the final version?") and the acceptance of the OpenSolaris community ("Do you think the community will accept this solution?"). There were also other questions related to the current translations available in Linux ("Why don't you get the existing Linux translations and reuse them in OpenSolaris?") and the current state of OpenSolaris internationalization ("How will you localize the many applications with no internationalization support in OpenSolaris?"). I have realized that we had concentrated on making the demo working but didn't think about the project as a whole. But since this really was just a proof of concept, now it would be the good time to resolve all other issues.

For those of you who didn't make it to the conference, here are some useful links:

• Translation of OpenSolaris Presentation
  The presentation has 28 slides in PDF format.

• OSDevCon 2008 Pictures by Jim Grisanzio
  Thanks to Jim Grisanzio for taking 120 wonderful pictures with his Canon EOS 30D.

• Community Translation Interface
  This is the experimental version of the on-line translation editor used for the community translation model.

• Pootle
  The current translation model utilizes Pootle, an open-source multi-platform web application written in Python.

— VI 30 2008, 07:09:31 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]

Středa červen 04, 2008

Contribute to OpenSolaris and Win $1,000,000

Sun sponsors the Community Innovation Award, which recognizes and rewards innovative uses of OpenSolaris, with 1 million USD. You don't need to be a programmer to contribute to OpenSolaris and win a prize. Just look at the Community Innovations Award Program and choose, which of the six open-source communities you can to contribute to. If it is OpenSolaris, see the OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards Program for more information, including description of the prizes, FAQ, official rules and so on. And remember: the deadline for joining the contest is June 14, 2008. Only 10 days to go!

— VI 04 2008, 05:22:18 odp. CEST Permalink

Úterý červen 03, 2008

First Open-Source Portal Server Release

— VI 03 2008, 07:56:36 odp. CEST Permalink

Úterý červenec 03, 2007

Running Solaris 10 in Windows Vista

I have a new computer running Windows Vista Home Premium at my home office. I used to connect to work remotely via Sun's Open Work tools but that appears to be forbidden on Windows Vista for now. I thought about one of the alternative ways of running Solaris on my new computer: install Solaris in a virtual machine.

I used VMWare Workstation 6 evaluation download to test it. The latest version is compatible with Vista and works fine. I createad a virtual machine and installed Solaris 10 manually. All went fine, but I ended up quite disappointed, because I couldn't connect to my home network. Maybe it's the Marvell Gigabit Ethernet NIC integrated on my ASUS MR32-MVP motherboard that is not compatible with Solaris drivers. Or maybe it's just my network settings.

But I can confirm the VMWare Workstation works well with my network card, because after installing their sample virtual machine with preconfigured Ubuntu Linux and a preinstalled Firefox browser, everything works as expected.

After my evaluation licence expires, I will try another alternative: install Solaris on a separate partition. But I am afraid of what will partitioning do with my Vista installation, esp. on my 500GB RAID 1+0 array.

— VII 03 2007, 05:13:15 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [1]

Středa červen 27, 2007

Download Sun Studio 12 for Free!

— VI 27 2007, 03:55:25 odp. CEST Permalink

Úterý únor 27, 2007

Oracle Business Intelligence for Windows Only?

While browsing the documentation for Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, I became curious why all the examples are used on the Windows platform. So I finally checked the System Requirements for Oracle BI Suite EE and found out that it is available for Windows only!

You can imagine how surprised I was, because I have already installed Oracle BI Suite on Solaris. And what is the reason? It is because what I have installed is Standard Edition and what the documentation (and other on-line resources such as Oracle BI Blog) is referring to is Enterprise Edition. Fine, I have installed SE on Solaris, but I need EE, which is for Windows only.

Shouldn't Oracle and Sun be partners?

— II 27 2007, 03:07:11 dop. CET Permalink Comments [1]

Pondělí únor 12, 2007

Business Intelligence and Metrics in the Process of Software Globalization Testing

The title is equal to the title of my master thesis that I have officially begun writing in the summer of 2006. Maybe the title does not tell you much. But it contains the keywords that describe all the story behind it:

• Business Intelligence.

  It is the modern approach to corporate data analysis. I have studied a BI course in the school a year ago.

• Metrics.

  Metrics are used to form Key Performance Indicators that managers look at every day to see how their teams perform. The Globalization department I work at is trying to improve the metrics and I volunteered to join the Engineering Metrics team to work on the metrics that cover the engineering work we do in Globalization.

• Software Globalization Testing.

  Testing of the quality of software globalization (or software internationalization and localization) is the core process of our team.

I am writing the thesis under the leadership of doc. Ing. Jan Pour, CSc. for the University of Economics, Prague. The goal is to create an OLAP application that can be used to create metrics of our team's performance. My manager, Tomas Vesely, is supposed to be the opponent.

Although I have learned how to use the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services to use it for BI, I am working with Oracle 10g Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (for obvious reasons). I have succesfully installed it and now I am doing the first steps to learn how to use it. It is not as easy as I expected. Even though Oracle provides extensive resources on-line, it is hard to make them out.

I will probably look for a book at Amazon that covers this topic. Your recommendations for both on-line and off-line resources is welcome.

— II 12 2007, 11:15:19 odp. CET Permalink Comments [3]

Středa červenec 26, 2006

Sun Powers the Fastest Supercomputer of Asia

The Tokyo Institue of Technology, Japan, runs the fastest supercomputer of Asia and the seventh fastest supercomputer in the world as is listed in the TOP 500 Supercomputing Sites as of June 2006. The supercomputer, called TSUBAME by the swallow in the crest of Tokyo Tech., is run by Sun Fire x64 Grid Cluster, which consists of 10,480 AMD Opteron 2.4/2.6 GHz cores.

Sun has finally entered the Top 10 Supercomputing Sites chart, which is often published in the technology and business press.

— VII 26 2006, 10:40:37 dop. CEST Permalink

Pátek květen 12, 2006

Running Solaris 10 at Home

I want to encourage people to try what is free. Sun offers everybody to download the Solaris 10 Operating System for free and install it on their PC or Sparc computer. I use Solaris everyday at work, but my home computer runs Windows. I don't want to write here about why I need Windows at home (esp. on my own Dell Inspiron 9100 notebook, which Solaris HCL lists as "partially supported" — WLAN NIC and other devices are missing Solaris 10 drivers). I wanted to have the experience of a user who tries to download and install Solaris 10 as if I was not a Sun employee (and had access to the latest build of Nevada).

Download was very easy. The Solaris 10 web page has a Get the software button which heads you to the download centre, where you select what to download and what media to use (CD/DVD). I tried to download and burn both, but the Dell Precision 330 Workstation, which I will use to run Solaris, does only possess a CD-ROM drive. So I downloaded (with superb high speed of 300 kB/s and more on my 2Gbps DSL line) five CDs: CD1, CD2, CD3, CD4 and LangCD. I cannot use the Software Companion DVD download, since it is only available as a DVD.

Installation was easy as well. But here I cannot make an objective statement, since I have a long experience of Solaris installer testing, so I know every screen of the installer. But even though I knew what I can expect from the installation, I printed the Unofficial Installation Guide for the Solaris OS, x86 Platform Edition, which deals with installing Solaris in a multiboot environment. I obviously wanted to preserve other partitions on my disk drive. And this is a very important point, since I remember formatting the whole drive when I was installing Solaris 7, which was my first experience with Solaris in the early days at the university. There is one screen in the installer which you must recognize and make sure what you answer — don't let the installer use the whole disk for Solaris installation. Rather go ahead with customizations and select only the partition (or unused space) which you want to be used for Solaris. Make sure it says in the summary, that you have allocated less than is the size of the drive for the installation (I have a 20 GB drive and I have devoted 9,5 GB for Solaris).

If you install Solaris in a multiboot environment, you will be glad it automatically installs GNU GRUB boot manager, which lists Windows (and other systems) in the boot menu automatically. Unfortunatelly, it doesn't load drivers for USB keyboard, so you need to use PS/2 keyboard in the boot menu.

I was very surprised that the JDS 3.0 environment (which you can choose from when you first login to the desktop session) is translated to Czech. It really makes the switch from Windows easier for the user. And hopefully my girlfriend will be more likely to give Solaris a try... ;-)

— V 12 2006, 01:00:11 odp. CEST Permalink Comments [3]

Středa březen 29, 2006

Sun Open Sources Translation Tools

The Open Translation web site, hosted by the Sun Developer Network (SDN), has been launched a few days ago to provide translation guidelines and advice to the users and developers of translation tools. You can find the web under our Software Globalization Tech Topic which I work for as a technical support for customers who require advice on software globalization.

— III 29 2006, 08:15:33 odp. CEST Permalink