links for 2009-01-30
Friday Jan 30, 2009
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The class forum for Sang Shin's JavaFX online programming course.
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Trantorian Gazette
links for 2009-01-17
Saturday Jan 17, 2009
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The best PC case mod EVER!
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Note taking service. Unlike Google Notebook, this is under active developement, and can import from Google Notebook.
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links for 2009-01-03
Saturday Jan 03, 2009
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News about space, including a live audio stream from the USAF Space Surveillance Radar. You can actually hear meteors as they happen. Warning: for space geeks only.
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links for 2009-01-02
Friday Jan 02, 2009
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Online image editing and processing service. Fantastic SAAS.
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links for 2008-12-27
Saturday Dec 27, 2008
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Open Source street map data for the entire world. With enough eyes all problems are shallow. Even all data.
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Vote at change.org
Wednesday Dec 24, 2008
Have you seen Change.org? President-Elect Obama is looking for ideas on what to focus on to change the way the government works for the better. He is looking for ways to make government more transparent and work the way it was meant to. You can propose a new idea, vote on the existing ideas, or comment on them
I like all of the three top ideas so far, but I think that lasting change is only going to come by changing congress so that our elected officials can once again vote the way that they think they should instead of the way that their biggest contributors want them to. As such I am very fond of the following proposal:
So, go take a look and start doing something to make the world better. When was the last time the President asked your opinion?
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Maybe the secret service did exactly the right thing.
Tuesday Dec 16, 2008
Listening to the radio last night, the only topic of discussion was the failure of the secret service to protect President Bush from two shoes thrown my an Iraqi "journalist". The radio hosts seemed to think that the fact that the man was able to throw the shoes without the secret service either shooting him dead or jumping in front of the shoes to prevent the President from being hit and then instantly piling on top of the man, all represented either gross incompetence on the part of the secret service or an indication that its attitude towards the President had changed.
I have a different interpretation. How about the possibility that they acted in exactly the appropriate manner by refraining to use deadly force when deadly force was not called for. Put yourself in the place of an agent on the scene. By virtue of the layout of the press room, you cannot be between the President and the journalists, the best you can do is be in between the President and the journalists and to the side. The man throws the first shoe, what do you do? You might be able to jump in front of the shoe, but why? It's a shoe! Now the man starts the throw the second shoe. The only long range option you have is to shot him, probably injuring bystanders, but again, why? Its a shoe!
I applaud the secret service for doing what they needed to do in the fashion they needed to do it. Good work!
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links for 2008-12-10
Wednesday Dec 10, 2008
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This 1999 NYT story marks the beginnings of the current recession. It even predicts the need for a bailout!
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links for 2008-12-08
Monday Dec 08, 2008
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Set of cross platform tests for comparing performance of multiple operating systems and hardware.
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links for 2008-11-27
Thursday Nov 27, 2008
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At last, someone to exaplain all the ways mortgages work and have gone bad.
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Seven years in the Nashua office, now it's time to go home.
Wednesday Nov 26, 2008
Seven and a half years ago, Sun opened a satellite office in Nashua, New Hampshire. This was particularly handy for me, because I lived in Nashua and I hated driving the 20 miles down to Burlington, Massachusetts each day. It was quite a change for me, because it meant giving up my desktop system and using a Sun Ray exclusively. That actually turned out to be easier than I thought.
In all that time, Sun has been undergoing some pretty hard times. Every time a new round of cut backs was announced, we were all sure that this time they were going to close the Nashua office. After all, it was benefiting only about 200 people. Then 150 people. Then 100 people. Now a days, there are regularly only about 70 people here. But still our luck help. Until now.
We thought we were still lucky. Last July, a scheme starting being worked out to consolidate the rented space of the Nashua office into one half of one floor. This would allow Sun to spend a lot less on the rental and allow the landlord to rent the other space to another tenant. The problem was that the telephone and server rooms were in the other half of the building, so to consolidate, we would have to re-wire the building. Despite this problem, it looked like the project was going to go ahead
Alas, it was not meant to be. Our last quarter results came out, and now Sun is committed to knocking about 600 million dollars off of its annual operating costs. The lease is up and Sun has decided not to renew at all, scraping the consolidation plan. On November 6th, we got the word that the office would close in January.
So, what to do? Luckily, Sun offers its employees the option of working from home. Faced with going back to that 45 minute commute and to start paying Massachusetts state income tax, it was pretty much a no brainer. Many of the people in the Nashua office already had home offices, so it was easy for them to switch over.
Unfortunately, I do not have a home office and there isn't any room for one at my house in the current living space. That leaves only the non-heated areas, namely the attic or the basement. The attic would be problematic, since it is essentially outdoors, with the temperature going below zero in the winter and up to a 115 in the summer. The basement is considerably more hospitable, ranging between 53 degrees in the winter to about 65 in the summer. The basement it is!
As things started progressing and we found out more about the shutdown of the office, we discovered that although Sun had to be out of the building in January, the removal of all of the Sun equipment would take a couple of weeks, so in reality, the last day I can work in the building is December 18th. Ouch, time is getting tight.
So, I plan to chronicle the process of building my office. My wife actually wants me to wait until the week of Christmas to do all of the building, since Sun is closed that week anyway, but I think that is a bad idea. That is exactly the week when it will be hardest to get equipment and approvals, and if I have to order any new equipment it might take a week or two to arrive. So, at this point I have ordered some of the equipment, and hope to get it going in earnest soon. Stay tuned!
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Edward Tufte and the Sun Storage Series 7000
Saturday Nov 15, 2008
Paul Murphy over at ZDNet writes about the thing that I find most interesting about the Sun Storage Series 7000, namely the Storage analytics. I have a been a long time fan of Edward Tufte. He is the visualization guru that has advocated communication ability over form for many years. I own all four of his books on the subject of data visualization
The ability to easily communicate the important parts of the message is paramount to any good presentation. How often have you seen PowerPoint presentations that used background gradients and animations to create pizazz which did nothing to help convey the message, or worse, actually obscured it? Far too often I am sure. (Did you know that they teach PowerPoint in grade school now, with exactly the opposite grading scale that they should?)
Well, as Paul Murphy says, one of the most exciting parts of the Sun Storage Series 7000 product line is the ability to easily and quickly visualize what is happening inside the system, in real time. This is something that is totally unprecedented in the storage market, and should make the SSS7000 line the most compelling storage offering available.
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It's finally here! Introducing the Sun Storage 7000!
Monday Nov 10, 2008
The eagerly awaited Sun Storage Series 7000 is finally available. This product is something very special and promises to be a game changer in the storage market.
My personal involvement in the development of this product is...none. I wish I had been involved, but all I contributed was a growing sense of excitement. It started shortly after Solaris 10 was released. All of the big names involved in Dtrace and ZFS were pulled off of their projects to go to work on a special, super-secret project. My own colleague Chandan (best known externally as the developer of the source code browser opengrok) went as well. Poof! All disappeared. All of the rising stars of Sun.
So, over the next couple of years, all we heard were bits and pieces of rumors and the occasional actual information released. The project changed its code name once. Then there was some info that the project was storage related. That it was originally designed to fill a price-point gap in the storage market, but quickly grew to be something much more. That it leveraged ZFS, Dtrace and other cool technologies to completely change the way storage is used and administered. It just got more and more exciting.
And now the wait is over. In the last month or two, the info finally came out in full. And I have to say that it was well worth the wait. It combines all of these technologies to make the administration of your storage to simpler with unprecedented levels of observability (That's the simplification of administration of ZFS combined with observability of Dtrace). It uses the latest advances in storage hardware to get unprecedented cost-performance levels. Truly a product that is a worthy follow on to Solaris 10, and something that has the potential of getting Sun Microsystems technology back on the minds of IT managers everywhere. Just a fantastic job. Congratulations to everybody that helped make this product into a reality.
If you want to find out more about the Sun Storage Series 7000, you can look at the link I gave above, but at a more personal level, you can read the blog entries of the team that made it all possible. Just follow the links available here:http://blogs.sun.com/fishworks/. By the way, that was the name we knew it as at first, "Fishworks". It later became known as "Amber Road". And now it is the "Sun Storage Series 7000". But whatever name it uses, the name does not do it justice. It is just too cool.
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