The Quarterdeck Log: Bill Rushmore's Blog

I enjoy following Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror blog.  You might be able to guess from the blog title (hint: the book "Code Complete") that he lives in the Microsoft world.  So it was very nice to see this post about RAID, the Sunfire X4500, and ZFS.

Today we launched a new version of bugs.opensolaris.org.  For the past few months I have been supporting this but it was not very practical to make changes since it lived on another group's servers.  Now it runs on the opensolaris.org infrastructure so I can now deploy updates.  So today I have deployed bug fixes that have been waiting for over a year to be dealt with.  A happy day indeed for users of bugs.opensolaris.org!  :-)

This is my first attempt at a screen cast demo for Chime.  It is a little rough but I think might be helpful to give some ideas of what you can do with Chime.  I had some technical difficulties namely of being able to record audio.  I ended up using my cell phone and was limited to only 86 seconds.  

Please comment and let me know if you think this concept is useful.  If so it will give me more incentive to improve on it!

Chime DTrace Demo

If you have been paying attention to the news there has been a lot of talk about Sun. If you believe the rumors Sun is pretty much dead or will be soon. I have been a fan of Sun for several years before I joined the company. I was an active member of the Java community since 1996 and then the OpenSolaris community since the beginning. What has impressed me enough to get involved was my admiration for the technologies. I began working for Sun as a contractor last March and then full time a few months later and I am just as excited about working here today as I was on my first day.

So why am I so optimistic about Sun? Well to be honest, I really don't know much about the company's financials, stock price, or what all of the buy out rumors really mean. I can only comment on what I know about and from what I see here at Sun that still impresses me. The main thing that really stands out for with with Sun are the people. There are a lot of very smart and dedicated people here. In the IT industry that is key. So from my perspective Sun has the tools to be successful and will be over time.

Here is just one example of what I am talking about. I use OpenSolaris as my primary desktop on my workstation and laptop. I run bi-weekly development builds on these machines and the level of quality is absolutely amazing for development builds. Sure there are problems from time to time but not any more than I have experienced with popular commercial operating systems that are certainly not development builds. When you stop and think about that it is really amazing and something that you really don't hear much about but should.

I use the Firefox add on "Server Spy".  It shows you what web server is serving up the web page that you are currently viewing.  Just a little bit of trivia I find interesting.  For example www.sun.com  shows "Sun-Java-System-Web-Server/7.0", IBM is "IBM_HTTP_Server", and www.apache.org  is "Apache/2.2.9 (Unix)" .  None of which should be a surprise.

My home page is www.google.com and it has always been served up by "gws". However, today the server has changed and it appears Google is now using IIS.  That's Microsoft's web server!  Server Spy reports "IIS/Clippy".  Earlier today I saw "IIS/Bob".

So what do you think, did Google see the light switch over to Windows and IIS?  :-)

 *Update* It seems that Google has seen the error of their ways and has already upgraded there server and they are now using "Netscape iPlanet".  Great choice guys!

Tonight I will be presenting "Debugging Java Performance Issues" at the Pittsburgh Java Users Group.   Here is a rough draft of the presentation:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dfzxvg3f_20cd6m8jgd

I have recently taken over work on bugs.opensolaris.org. For the first time in a long time changes will be made to it and problems will be fixed. Even though it appears to be just another part of the main opensolaris.org site it really was a completely separated from anything at opensolaris.org. Essentially it is a re-branded version of bugs.sun.com. For quite awhile now bugs.opensolaris.org has been orphaned with no one to make the changes needed for the OpenSolaris community.

Don't expect any major changes overnight but I have already made some changes to bug submission pages. More improvements are in the works and will be live very soon. Most of the updates are behind the scenes right now but they are necessary to support OpenSolaris defect tracking long term.

There is a Pittsburgh OpenSolaris user group meeting tonight at the India Garden in Oakland at 7 pm tonight.  This is the first meeting of the group so it should be fun.  

Just in time for Christmas is the Sunstorage 7000.  It might not be on every kids Christmas list but I can tell you that the OpenSolaris.org infrastructure team has been anxiously awaiting this and it will be on ours.  This device gives you the best of OpenSolaris with ZFS and high quality Sun hardware in a easy to use device, which is key the my opinion.  ZFS is great but requires some effort to take full advantage of it.  The Sunstorage 7000 simplifies things and will allow more people to benifit from OpenSolaris and ZFS.

Emacs is now in the pkg.opensolaris.org image packaging system.  So if you run OpenSolaris you don't need to build it yourself,  just open up the Package Manager and download the Emacs packages.

Last week I spent a week in Menlo Park California for team meetings.  During this trip I brought along my laptop the runs OpenSolaris and only OpenSolaris.  I am pretty happy with OpenSolaris as a mobile operating system.  Not long ago this would not be the case because if you wanted to run Solaris on a moblie machine you needed a big budget Tadpole.

Only two things were an issue for me.  The NWAM (Network Auto Magic) had some issues when I was switching to a new wireless network (which is something I was doing all the time).  But it was easy to fix by restarting the service.  The second problem I ran into was that I was not able to update the Podcasts on my iPod yet.  I know this can be done with things like GTKPod but I just never got around to trying to get it to work.  So that's a minor temporary complaint.  I still use iTunes for my iPod.  When VirtualBox on OpenSolaris gets USB support that will also take care of this issue.

If you may guessed from the title of my blog that  I spent a few years in the US Navy.  I always enjoy reading Guy Kawasaki's blog but I especially enjoyed this post of his visit to the USS John C. Stennis while it was under way.  I think he did a fine job of representing what it is like on an aircraft carrier.

He is right on the money about call signs.  Mine was given to me on my very first day of flight school because of my last name.  (It even stuck with me after I no longer was in aviation as a nickname among my friends)

Peter Buckingham has a blog entry about how he built Emacs on OpenSolaris.  It's very staright forward.

Rumor has it that Emacs is coming soon to the OpenSolaris repository so this type of thing won't be necessary unless you are truely hard core.

When I joined Sun to work on the OpenSolaris website there was really only one thing that surprised me.  It was this.  Yes, that means opensolaris.org runs on development builds.  Imagine, if we can get that kind of stability from development builds imagine how good the offically released product is? 

I know in the past I have used some commercial OS releases that I wished had the stability of a Nevada build.

 

Today I got to experience driving on a race track for the first time.  Let me tell you it was a real thrill.  I have always been a fan of racing and pretty much like anything that goes fast.  In fact, I did not start off programming computer for a living, it was merely a hobby of mine.  I started off learning a learning to be pilot in the US Navy but developed a medical problem that prevents me from flying planes.  So this was something I always wanted to do.

A local dealer held an event to test their new car on the street and on a race track.  From a marketing perspective  I would say it worked because I would never would have considered this brand before until now.  Because if I can drive the thing at speeds on a race track that would land me in jail on the street and be safe it is certainly is a car to consider.  I really felt like I was "The Stig" around the track but I am sure since this was my first time my performance wasn't even up to the level of James May.