Optimize Java Desktop System 2 for Sun Ray

Monday Apr 25, 2005

You might have heard that Sun Ray Server Software 3.0 will run on both Solaris and GNU/linux. You might also know that Sun's Java Desktop System 2.0 (JDS 2) is built around a GNU/linux kernel. So you might wonder why you can't run Sun Ray Server Software 3.0 on JDS 2 and serve this alternative desktop to multiple users on Sun Ray ultrathin clients. Well, you can. Here is a tech tip which explains how to install and optimize JDS 2 for use with Sun Ray Server Software 3.0

Step 6 of the above howto refers to the Java Desktop System online update. Here are some details on exactly how to apply the update and which updates are applicable to Sun Ray environments:

First, launch the Java Desktop System online update utility (jsupdate). If this is the first time you've run it, online update will ask for your serial number and then download an update for itself. The next time you run the online update utility you will see a list of available updates. I would recommend applying all of them, but at the very least, apply the security updates and those which improve Sun Ray/multiuser performance such as:

• 118904-02 Recommended update for gnome-session This patch allows the user to disable the logout fade effect. This improves logout responsiveness on Sun Ray and other thin client environments, especially over broadband/WAN connections.
• 118906-01 Recommended update for metacity This patch provides Wireframe window-move mode. This is particularly useful for improving Sun Ray performance over broadband and wide area networks.
• 119477-01 Recommended update for Evolution This solves a problem which causes the Evolution wombat process to remain running after logout. This and the related bonobo reference leak caused inefficient resource usage on multiuser environments (e.g. Sun Ray.) And could cause failures on relogin.

unbashing Sun

Saturday Apr 23, 2005

I don't think any of us here at blogs.sun.com want to sound like a television commercial, but we write about stuff we think is cool and sometimes that includes things related to work at Sun. Whether we're up against legitimate competitors or monopolists, we strive to point out advantages of the cool technologies we have. We work here because we think the people and technologies are cool. And while I might be reluctant to criticize Scott McNealy on his golf swing, I might point out that he should be out there promoting Sun Rays on Earth day just as HP is encouraging recycling their hardware. Heck, I'll even encourage recycling HP hardware. Replace every fat X86 client out there with a Sun Ray and how many coal power plants can we shut down?

Anyway what inspired me to write this blog at forever-o'clock was a "Solaris review" in a supposed technology magazine, and some really weird comments in a Slashdot article regarding this. Before you brand me as a computer religious zealot, I'll say that I've worked with VMS, Windows 3.1-XP, Solaris, Irix, Cray Unicos and I use OSX, Linux, Solaris and (gasp) Windows XP¹ on an almost daily basis. But it really bothers me to see an incomplete review followed up with such baseless nonsense as this slashdot comment:

I ask Sun, where are you innovating now? Are you providing leadership in LDAP / Directory Services? Nope. Are you providing leadership in distributed computing? Nope, that would be Linux and Open Source. Are you providing leadership in software development? Well, you developed Java, but it took the Free / Open Source guys to make Ant, Junit, Jmeter and other tools to make it really usable.

Where do I start? How about using your LDAP infrastructure to manage and lockdown desktop configuration (Java Desktop System Configuration Manager a.k.a. APOC). Distributed computing? JXTA. Now wait a minute, no useful tools from Sun for Java? What about NetBeans or a dtrace provider which will allow you to see exactly what your Java application is doing. Then there's the old "Sun is Proprietary" or "Sun is closed" meme. Both JXTA and NetBeans are opensource as are the hooks in GNOME, openoffice, and mozilla which allow APOC/LDAP to do it's magic.

As someone with a long interest in science and technology I appreciate Slashdot for trolling up interesting news. Some of the comments are really humorous. But on everything from basic science to technology, Slashdot can get it spectacularly wrong and urban folklore is modded up just because it is popular urban folklore.

¹The XP box is a very recent acquisition. I've been meaning to write an "outsiders review of Windows XP Professional." But right now I'm going to bed.

Earth day today

Friday Apr 22, 2005

A few weeks ago when my parents visited, we took the cheapest flight we could find to Europe, which was to Copenhagen...the most expensive city in the world. So much for being penny wise. We visited Hamlet's Kronberg castle in Elsinore, took a canal tour, walked around Nyhaven and reintroduced my parents to the snowy weather and Kringle they left behind in Racine Wisconsin. We built our daughter's first little snowman while we were waiting for a train. On the short train ride between Copenhagen and Elsinore, we saw this offshore wind park. I thought it was interesting because I once suggested a Lake Michigan offshore wind park as replacement for one of the three coal power plants being planned near Racine. The map above shows class 2 wind onshore, only 200-300W/m² on a 50m platform but class 3-5 offshore which could be up to 600W/m² (well above the "break even" point for wind energy.) On certain windy winter nights, Denmark produces more than 100% of its energy from wind, so it is certainly possible.

I spoke with a power industry expert about the rising consumption and the industry's belief that electricity demand will continue to grow rapidly. I have some doubts about that. Between 1970 and 2005 the economy of Wisconsin grew rapidly and baby boomers came of age. Now nearly every Wisconsin home has an electric clothes dryer, an electric dishwasher, air conditioning, halogen lights, color television(s), desktop PC(s) and outdoor lights. None of these devices were common in 1970. A few trends have gone in the opposite direction. CF lights use less than 1/2 the energy of incandescents, microwave ovens use less than ordinary ovens. Modern water heaters, televisions, furnaces and air conditioners are much more efficient than their mid 1970s ancestors. In Ireland and Japan I encountered energy conservation technology I'd never thought of such as tankless water heaters. I'm optimistic that an offshore windfarm could make coal plant #1 unecessary and energy conservation and technology could make coal plant #2 unecessary...unless someone thinks of another really inefficient way of using electricity. John Muir, a Scottish-born Wisconsin naturalist, helped inspire president Teddy Roosevelt with the idea of a national park system and Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson founded earth day on April 22, 1970. I don't think we're out of ideas for improving our relationship with the world we live in.

"The ultimate test of a man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard." -- Gaylord Nelson

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." -- John Muir

Discovering sunsets

Friday Apr 22, 2005

A couple of weeks ago I took my daughter down to the estuary and bird sanctuary across from our home to see the skyglow after sunset. Ever since then she has been anxious to see the sunset. There are two problems with that. The first is that 4 out of 5 sunsets are clouded out at this time of year The second is that in midsummer at 53 degrees latitude, the sun will set long after her bedtime. There is some light in the sky even at 11:00 p.m. in mid June. But we'll enjoy the ones we can see, and splash in every puddle we find.

Is there a future in near offshoring?

Thursday Apr 21, 2005

When someone told me about this plan to float an IT company a few miles off the U.S. shore, I didn't know what to think. Quite a few questions crossed my mind. Why? Seacode seems to be attempting to take advantage of low offshore labor rates while dodging immigration law by a scant 3 miles. Isn't the U.N. recognized limit now 12 miles, with a 200 mile economic exclusion zone claimed by many nations? I certainly don't want to get bogged down in maritime law.¹ According to the sourcingmag article, SeaCode's captain says the advantage is that when "

You want to collaborate with your engineers, it won't mean a three-week trip to India.
 If you're in LA, it means a 30 minute boat ride...

"

Where I come from we do that kind of collaboration with a newfangled gadget called The Internet. Yes, offshore communication and collaboration must be carefully managed, but I can only think of a couple of practical reason why you would want to create an artificial corporate colony so near to the U.S. The first reason would be to avoid the tangle of draconian U.S. laws which are choking the IT industry. I once asked a small business owner how he handles tax, liability, patents, export restrictions, labor and environmental laws. He said that it is a mess and no one will do anything to simplify it until Microsoft moves its headquarters a few miles north to Canada. For example, employees of U.S. based companies can't necessarily freely upload a patch for a bug and link to it without expensive legal review and "proof" that the patch can't be downloaded by citizens of certain nations. Employees of most non U.S. based corporations have no such restriction. SeaCode's founder's are primarily focused on sidestepping immigration law. Ironically this is the one area of law where the U.S. is actually less restrictive than many outsource recipient nations.

The second advantage I see is that, if SeaCode is well designed, it could be the kind of weird manmade environment a few of us geeks might actually enjoy, though some of us might prefer an underwater colony, or a base hovering at one of the moon's Legrange points.

SeaCode's captain Cook and Mr. Green have an interesting idea, but it seems to be based on some false assumptions. That U.S. labor, tax and immigration laws are easily evaded, and that imported labor can magically defy the laws of economics. The founders seem to have overlooked the possibility that one reason Indian engineers can work for lower wages is that the cost of living in India is considerably less than it is in L.A. If a ship 3 miles from Los Angeles can be supplied in such a way that employee/residents can have a comfortable life on 1/5 L.A. wages, well then why doesn't all of L.A. move out there too? Some L.A. residents might actually prefer living on a barge just upwind from L.A. Like many offshore enthusiasts, Mr. Cook and Mr. Green also overlook the "flyover country" between L.A. and New York City, which also has substantially lower cost of living and therefore lower labor costs than either coastal megalopolis. This labor pool could become even more cost competitive if it could operate under the same tax and legal framework as the offshore IT shop.

If there is a need to get outside of the complex U.S. legal system without going too far, SeaCode should consider that the U.S. shares long borders with two large nations and has within its borders territories which fall under an alternative legal framework.

If SeaCode is a success, its founders might want to consider the weight, size, power usage and other advantages of Sun Ray which has made it popular in similar environments. I wish them luck, but for now, all I ask is for a small ship and a GPS constellation to steer her by, and I'll work from three miles offshore.

¹I was once told that, by maritime law, the only sailing craft I ever fully owned (a sailboard) is classified as "Floating debris."

Should we really support _THAT_ hardware?

Wednesday Apr 13, 2005

You're better off not knowing how laws and sausages are made... and certain P.C. hardware. For a good part of my career, I've used Sun, DEC and SGI hardware at work and Apples/Amigas at home so I avoided some of the hardware mess in the P.C. world. I didn't pay much attention when my brother told me to look for a good audio card. It's a DAC for goodness sake, any grade school kid can put together a reasonably good sounding 8 bit audio frequency DAC. Well, my brother was right, quite a few of the sound cards out there were terrible. I don't know how they made them sound so bad. When Linux moved to the 2.6 kernel, someone noticed that a certain manufacturer's CDROM drives were ceasing to function. It seems that the vendor (name witheld to protect the silly), decided to implement a standard "reset bus" command as "upload firmware." Somehow they hacked/kludged MS Windows to never reset bus when this device was installed because this basic bus command would make the drive permanently non functional. More recently I encountered a vendor who used another vendor's PCI vendor code in one of their popular devices. Most linux kernels kludge around this by saying "if Vendor=X AND Device=Y then run code for vendor Z's (the imposter's) Device." This worked O.K. because the true vendor X never used device code Y. Unfortunately, vendor Q recently decided to use Vendor X's vendor code and exactly the same device code as vendor Z. So the Kernel has no way of knowing which of these devices is plugged into the PCI bus. The vendor supplies a "driver" disk which kludges Windows to do the right thing but if anyone ever plugs one of these devices and it's doppelganger into the PCI bus, there is no way any O.S. can sort out what goes where.

Solaris 10 is making great strides in X86 hardware support and in some cases (SATA) is beyond the most popular enterprise linux distributions. My question is, will Solaris X86 have to support the even the most broken "Wintel" hardware in order to gain market share, or do enterprise customers understand the importance of reliable standards-complient hardware?

Correction: The command which the CD drive manufacturer implemented as "UPLOAD FIRMWARE" was "FLUSH CACHE", not "Reset Bus."

Side effects of weird taxes

Wednesday Apr 13, 2005

It would be interesting to collect all of the examples of strange behavior which can be traced to weird tax laws. King William III's window tax caused windows in the U.K. and Ireland to be bricked over. Home width taxes caused some impossibly tall and thin houses to be built in the Netherlands and New England. Egyptian buildings were taxed only when complete and so... they were never quite finished. Ireland's high tax on existing homes encouraged new home construction. It wouldn't surprise me if there were tax subsidies to encourage the use of monopolist operating systems. Wouldn't it be great to have a more level playing field?

Once every generation or two, someone notices some undesirable side effects caused by these strange taxes, and the tax code is changed. For example, the $100,000 U.S. business tax deduction for SUVs was recently reduced to $25,000. I wonder if it will ever be reduced to 0?

Openwindows.org

Wednesday Apr 06, 2005

I just noticed this: www.openwindows.org Thanks to whoever took advantage of a Sun trademark which predates Microsoft Windows 95 by about half a decade. I'll leave discussion as to whether this might be a more appropriate name for our alternative desktop as an exercise for the reader. And apologies to those with fond memories of the advantages of the original OpenWindows(tm) in integrating postscript based NeWS(tm) with X11. WYSIWYG.

High oil winners and losers

Saturday Apr 02, 2005

Forbes published their picks of companies likely to profit from high oil prices. Predictably, most of Forbes' picks are oil companies. One might ask why $55/barrel wasn't news 10 years ago when it was so easy to predict. Even amateurs can extrapolate from the popularity of Hummer H1s in the U.S. and the growing energy appetites of the developing world. The picture is even gloomier if we consider that eventually, the energy required to extract the remaining oil from the ground will exceed the energy in the extracted oil. This could prevent many "dormant" wells from ever coming back online. But what if we step back and consider the bigger picture. Do oil companies really come out ahead long term, when oil is no longer competitive with biodiesel, ethanol, methanol, gasified coal, solar, wind? Are there any other winners if oil hits $100/barrel?

My Winner picks (if I had $ to invest)
1. Alternative energy industries: This one's obvious isn't it? Did anyone else read the Oct 1989 Scientific American article on automotive fuels indicating that no alternatives would be practical unless gasoline reached the (then unimaginable) price of $1.75/gallon? Almost all alternatives are practical now if we can overcome inertia and tradition. And anyone burning oil to produce electricity had better take a second look. Wind is already competitive without subsidies and solar is catching up fast.
2. Local arts and commerce. Think of how many small cities have had the life sucked out of them by the ease with which we can travel to a big city to shop, see a play or hear a concert.
3. Sailboat industry: This grew in the 1970s when oil prices rose and faded with the cheap oil of the 80s and 90s. Look for a comeback of pleasure sailboats, sailing freighters, possibly even sailing cruise ships and ferries.
4. Shoes: I see far more shoe and shoe repair shops here in Dublin than in similar sized U.S. cities. People might walk more?
5. The auto industry?: Planned obsolescence. Auto fuel efficiency peaked in the mid 1980s, more recent guzzlers will be quickly replaced with hybrids or more efficient cars when oil prices hit us in the pocketbook. Surely the auto industry has planned for this, surely they learned something from the huge mistakes of the 1970s, didn't they?
6. Airlines?Like the auto industry, this could go either way. Will the industry choose to produce and fly efficient aircraft? My friend's 1946 Beechcraft Bonanza 4 seat airplane still gets better gas mileage than most SUV's, it also goes faster and further offroad. Who knows, with GPS assisted air routes and other technical advances, maybe we will have the flying cars we were promised back in the 1950s. We finally got the picture phone 40 years late and the fax machine finally caught on about 150 years after it was patented.
7. Network and telecom industry: I'd like to see an estimate of how much oil would be saved if those who could telecommute, did. I sure wish I could think of a good network company.

A couple of possible losers
1. Powerboat industry:Some cruisers and cigar boats get less than 1 mpg. The weekly wallet depletion might detract some of the fun of these toys. Sailboats and kitesurfers might start to look more exciting.
2. Remote Real Estate: The demand for "low cost" vacation property in faraway destinations might fade a bit if it costs too much to travel to that inexpensive destination.
3. The personal computer:Today's 3Ghz Pentium 4 desktop PCs are the equivalent of the 1969 Pontiac GTO. They compensate for mediocre steering, suspension and brakes by installing a huge hot-burning engine. The GTO couldn't be beat if you were in a fuel burning competition, but meanwhile Porche and others were making cars with half the engine capacity and more horsepower. Ditto for PCs, usefulness won't always be measured in Gigahertz.

Note:These are wild guesses by someone who doesn't claim to know the ins and outs of the stock market or the economic world. They are probably no more able to predict the future than the output of the /dev/random device. Your mileage may vary.

Update 6 April 05:

I like today's newratings.com headline: Greenspan says high oil prices could spur conservation investment. Maybe? Remember, you heard it here first.

Not a bug

Friday Apr 01, 2005

I thought I had found the holy grail, the hole in dtrace which would restore my faith in Heisenberg's uncertainty priciple, that you can't observe anything without messing it up. But dtrace had nothing to do with the weirdness on this machine. I just found that on this (appropriate) day, I made a simple mistake. I attempted to run several memory guzzlers such as Mozilla and Nautilus on a memory deficient machine with inadequate swap space:

swap                   118M   664K   117M     1%    /etc/svc/volatile
swap                   172M    55M   117M    33%    /tmp
swap                   117M    24K   117M     1%    /var/run

I don't know why it worked as well as it did running GNOME, Sun Ray Server and a number of other things on this box. Windows XP wouldn't do too well without a page file. But it was easy enough to fix. If anyone else has made the mistake of configuring too little swap space during Solaris installation:

mkfile 2000m /new_swap   {I'll take 2 Gigabytes please, unleaded, ethyl}
swap -a /new_swap        {add it to my swap space}

The machine looked hopeless, it couldn't fork, I couldn't login or run any new process, but after I fixed the memory and ran utrestart, my session came back as good as new. I didn't have to reboot.