SourceJuicer 1.0 is released!

Tuesday Mar 24, 2009

The SourceJuicer team has announced that SourceJuicer 1.0 is now available!. SourceJuicer is a web service which facilitates the building and review of OpenSolaris packages. Its goal is to pave the path between building an OpenSolaris package, (which may only work on your laptop) and publishing high quality packages into the OpenSolaris /contrib repository. Here are some of my favorite features:

• Sourcejuicer provides a community package review system.
• It preinstalls Laca's Common Build Environment (CBE) and developer libraries in a build zone so you don't have to track down all of the build tools and dependencies required for common FOSS projects.
• SourceJuicer examples and automatic validation walk me through the required fields in a spec file.
• Once a package passes validation criteria and builds, it appears in sourcejuicer's internal /pending package repository and can be immediately installed on a clean QA machine for testing:

  pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://jucr.opensolaris.org/pending jucr-pending pfexec pkg refresh pfexec pkg install {foo}

• If the package is clean and passes community review, it can be promoted to the /contrib repository.

This has been quite an interesting project and I've really enjoyed working with this team on this technology. Because I was focused on authentication, authorization and the (not yet released) bug management components, I didn't get to use the full system until very recently and I found that it really did remove some barriers to building and testing the 'dillo' browser and Alvaro's 'cherokee' web server.

We're looking forward to hearing feedback as more OpenSolaris contributors make use of SourceJuicer. You can find out more about the progress of sourcejuicer at The SourceJuicer Blog

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Posted at 12:54PM Mar 24, 2009 by bnitz in OpenSolaris
Tags: developer_tools opensource sourcejuicer

NumptyPhysics on Opensolaris!

Wednesday Mar 18, 2009

NumptyPhysics is a fun opensource "Physics puzzle" game which uses the same Box2d physics engine as the award winning CrayonPhysics. As soon as I saw it, I really wanted to port it to OpenSolaris. One of my first computer programs (for the Commodore 64) simulated gravitational attraction between sprites and allowed the user to send sprites into orbit around each other. Cumulative floating point errors in my old BASIC program eventually caused orbiting objects to careen off the screen. My Solaris port of Numptyphysics still needs work and cleanup, buy it's a step in the right direction. Right now top priority is getting SourceJuicer out the door so there is a more efficient path between NumptyPhysics runs from my build environment on my laptop to, NumptyPhysics is available as a stable package for the OpenSolaris community.

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Posted at 10:43PM Mar 18, 2009 by bnitz in OpenSolaris
Tags: box2d numptyphysics port simulations

Coming soon, SourceJuicer. 'cloud based' OpenSolaris package development

Tuesday Mar 17, 2009

In recent weeks I've been busy working on the bug management, user authorization and authentication components of the SourceJuicer project. SourceJuicer is a Django based web service which will allow developers to build OpenSolaris packages in a standard build environment and put them on a clearly paved path to review and publication in the OpenSolaris contrib repository.

Christian has a more detailed explanation on the SourceJuicer Blog. The technology behind it is really interesting, it makes good use of ZFS as well as Solaris Containers (a.k.a. zones.) Watch the SourceJuicer blog for more detail as the project unfolds.

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Posted at 12:54PM Mar 17, 2009 by bnitz in OpenSolaris
Tags: cloud_computing goodnews ide jucr sourcejuicer

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Monday Mar 16, 2009

We had a bad experience with a pickpocket during a Dublin St. Patrick's festival a few years ago. So in recent years we've decided to celebrate in some of the villages of county Meath. Dublin events can be O.K. for families but the parade isn't terribly impressive for anyone less than 12 feet tall, unless you bring a ladder taller than everyone else's. For anyone with young children I highly recommend smaller parades in places such as Skerries, Trim, Baltimore Md. and Denver (free beer and gloriously warm weather during the one St. Pat's day I was in Denver!)

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Posted at 09:44PM Mar 16, 2009 by bnitz in Living Abroad
Tags: !snakes ireland st_patricks_day

Is the recession accelerating OpenSolaris adoption?

Monday Mar 16, 2009

This Slashdot article points to an IT Manager survey indicating that Linux adoption is growing during these difficult economic times. It does make sense that companies and governments which normally spent freely on proprietary software might begin to consider unorthodox, but much more cost effective alternatives now. What does this mean for other opensource operating systems such as OpenSolaris? I think the Google trends graph says it better than I could. Anyone looking for the root cause of this economic mess only needn't bother about property bubbles, dodgy investment shenanigans or massive increases in debt. Just look at the trend line of the third parameter in this Google graph ;-)

P.S.: I compared 'opensolaris' with 'economic downturn' instead of 'recession' because the magnitude of recession searches is so much larger that it pushes opensolaris towards the bottom of this graph. A similar scale issue makes it difficult to see that opensolaris seems to be gaining market share against Windows, Solaris, Linux and some of the most popular proprietary Linux distributions.

Google trends is an amazing tool, but it can't answer all psychohistory questions. Trends for some topics such as 'great depression' and 'great gatsby' are common topics in standardized U.S. school curriculum and therefore searches for these closely follow the school calendar. You'd think with so many students learning about Gatsby's 1920s hedonism and its unravelling during the 'Great Depression', it should be impossible to repeat this history.

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Posted at 03:50PM Mar 16, 2009 by bnitz in OpenSolaris
Tags: economy goodnews opensource recession