"On Tuesday Sun delisted itself from the Nasdaq Stock Market, a sign that the (Oracle) takeover was nearly complete, though no formal announcement was made."

Guess it won't be long now...

In the midst of all the hype, speculation and (in many cases) nonsense being talked about whatever it is Apple are going to be unveiling next week, it was refreshing to read Scott Berkun's reminder of why keyboards and mice definitely won't be going away anytime soon.

(His follow-up post, about the Limits of Innovation, is worth a read too.)

The OpenOffice.org guys are doing some interesting analysis as part of their Project Renaissance UI improvement project. This click map caught my eye this week (click to see the whole thing):

More information on what they're doing can be found over on the GullFOSS Blog.

This is a neat idea (if not technically all that novel)... log in to Sun Learning Services portal, and you can play with a virtual instance of OpenSolaris for up to an hour.

It does require Java, there are only 8 slots available at any one time, and right now they're still provisioning OpenSolaris 2008.11 rather than the newer and shinier 2009.06. But if you want to give OpenSolaris a quick whirl, you might find it more convenient than downloading the LiveCD.

More info in Brian Leonard's blog entry.

blogs.sun.com launched five years ago today. Quite a few things have changed at Sun since then... back in those days, Java had yet to become Free Software, and OpenSolaris didn't exist at all. And with the pending Oracle acquisition, the next five years will doubtless see a lot more changes.

Not much has changed on b.s.c, though. We've always been able to write about whatever we like, whenever we like, with few restrictions. And long may it continue.

EDIT: FWIW, I joined the party a little late—my first post here was in June 2004.

In VirtualBox 2.2.0, which was released today, that is. The new OpenGL acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests allows compiz to run very nicely in a virtual machine. (Click the thumbnail for a Theora video of compiz running in an OpenSolaris guest in OS X.)

EDIT: I suppose I ought to add there's some other cool stuff in 2.2.0 as well, particularly the ability to import/export appliances in OVF format.

The results are in; the OpenSolaris community has a new Governing Board. However, the proposed new constitution failed to gain sufficient support for approval.

Have to say I was slightly surprised (and, to be honest, a little disappointed) to see that only two non-Sun folks were voted in this time around (especially as one of those is a former Sun folk), but I have no doubt they'll do a fine job... starting, I expect, by revisiting that constitution issue.

In other news, the long hiatus between releases of Adobe Reader for [Open]Solaris x86 is over... grab Reader 9.1 now on Adobe's download page. Very fine though Evince is at handling the majority of PDF-reading tasks, some jobs still just require the proprietary Real Thing...and however one might feel about that, it's great that Solaris and OpenSolaris are now sufficiently (re-)established on x86 that Adobe are offering that option once again.

Some nice Twitter visualisation from the NY Times. (Although the score doesn't seem to update as it ought to, in Firefox at least.)

This is better than at least four of the actual movies...

A couple of years ago, I bemoaned the inconsistency of our presentation of bookmarks and places.

Last week I had cause to revisit the issue (for much the same reason as before—updating the OpenSolaris UI spec), hoping that things would have improved and I wouldn't have to suggest too many tweaks to the OpenSolaris layout to keep things nice and consistent.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like much has changed though, really, which is kind of disappointing. (Especially as seeing this bug marked as resolved had built up my hopes a little...)

Caveat: as in my original post, the latest release of Ubuntu (8.10, GNOME 2.24.1) was the closest I had to a community build when I was doing the comparison. So things may really be a little better or worse than they appear here, or may have been fixed in 2.25/2.26.

So I hacked up a quick diagram showing all the menus and sidebars where bookmarks and places appear, and aligned them on the "Home Folder" entry since that was about the only one that was consistently placed. Here's what I came up with:

The plusses:

• The two Places menus on the panel (one in the menubar applet, one in the main menu applet) are now identical, at least in Ubuntu. This is good to see, although most users won't see both at the same time anyway.
• The Go and Places menus in Nautilus (browser mode and spatial mode respectively) are pretty consistent with each other too.

The minuses:

• Inconsistent appearance/placement of mounted media, Computer, Desktop, Templates, File System, and CD/DVD Creator between sidebars and menus.

Of course, it would be wrong to complain without offering any proposals, and I'll get to that—just haven't got time today. The current draft of the OpenSolaris 2009.04 UI spec does include my first quick attempt, but that's currently based more on "least amount of work to fix" rather than "what might be most useful"... and we all know that's not really the way to do it, right kids? :)

Sun released VirtualBox 2.1.0 today. In addition to bugfixes, new features include:

• Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
• Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental; see user manual, chapter 1.6, 64-bit guests, page 16)
• Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements (EPT and VPID; see user manual, chapter 1.2, Software vs. hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V), page 10))
• Experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL (see user manual, chapter 4.8, Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL), page 66)
• Experimental LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers (see user manual, chapter 5.1, Hard disk controllers: IDE, SATA (AHCI), SCSI, page 70)
• Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots (see user manual, chapter 5.2, Disk image files (VDI, VMDK, VHD), page 72)
• New NAT engine with significantly better performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support (bugs #1046, #2438, #2223, #1247)
• New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)

Downloads for Solaris, OpenSolaris, Linux, OS X and Windows are available here.

Every day on my drive into work, I arrive at this junction near the office, and sit in the filter lane at the lights, needing to turn right.

The sequence of the lights varies depending on the time of day, but there's generally a cycle where the straight-ahead filter is green, and the right-turn filter is red. (Sometimes, when the right-turn filter is red, the pedestrian light is also green, but only if a pedestrian pressed the button.)

At least once a week, when the straight-ahead filter is green, but the right-turn filter is red, some cretin (usually a lorry driver) will honk his horn at me if there's a gap in the oncoming traffic, until the right-turn filter comes on and I move off. (Today it was a lorry driver and a Nissan Micra full of Dublin's finest.)

If I'm particularly lucky, they'll then follow me down that road to the lights at the Business Park, where I need to make a left turn. At those lights, there's a similar sort of setup with a straight-ahead filter and a left-filter. But there's no dedicated filter lane at this one, so the left lane is for both left-turning and straight ahead traffic. Of course, when the straight-ahead filter is green, and the left-turn filter is red, that gives them another chance to honk their horns, if they were too thick to realise that I was indicating to turn left and they probably ought to have moved out into the right lane as we approached the lights so they wouldn't have to wait.

It does my head in. That is all.

Sun are officially launching OpenSolaris 2008.11 today... although as the name suggests, it was pretty much ready to go at the end of last month, and those in the know have been able to download it from both the community website and the distro website since then :) Join us at 1700 UTC today for a web chat with some of the people involved.

Glynn has written up a good summary of new features, which include GNOME 2.24, ZFS Time Slider, accessible install, and big improvements to plug'n'play printer support, automatic network configuration, and laptop suspend/resume. The number of additional packages available in the repositories has greatly improved since the 2008.05 release, and we now have various repos and a new process that will make contributing packages easier than ever.

Roman Strobl has produced a 12 minute screencast to show off some of the new bits, and Erwann Chénedé has a shorter one that focuses exclusively on Time Slider, which seems to have been generating a lot of interest.

Of course, 2008.11 still has all the usual Solaris goodness like ZFS, Zones and Dtrace built-in, with the Solaris Trusted Extensions now just a click away too, giving you access to one of the most secure desktops on the planet*.

So why not give the LiveCD a spin? You can grab it via BitTorrent, or download the ISO directly from Sun (or alternatively, from the genunix mirror, or via FTP from LTH in Sweden).

* Probably :) (OpenSolaris Trusted Extensions hasn't received Common Criteria Certfication yet, but the Solaris 10 version was most recently certified at EAL 4+. More information here.)

...to everyone who chipped in to the retiring offering at my mum's thanksgiving service. Turns out we raised £750 for the Beatson Oncology Centre in Glasgow, which I know will be put to good use.

Meanwhile, I'm back to work tomorrow. I promise I'll try to catch up as quickly as I can... probably just about in time to fall behind again over my Christmas break :)