13 Jul 2006
OpenSolaris Space Pen
You might have heard
a joke where NASA spends millions of dollars to develop an ink pen that can write in zero gravity, and Russians simply use a pencil!
Today I got (as part of OpenSolaris contributor award) a
Fisher Space Pen engraved with 'OpenSolaris Contributor 2006'.
It is apparently a real thing! not a joke. Its manual - as if to refute the joke - tells in all caps, "... invented pressurized space pen in 1965 at NO COST to NASA". Further it says, ".. since 1967 they have been used on all manned space flights (American and Russian).."
More details on
NASA site
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12 Jul 2006
Thumper Capacity Expressed in Other Units!
Sun released X4500 (Thumper) - a beautiful new 48 disk computer with 24 Terabytes of storage space with 2 dual-core AMD processors and 16GB of main memory. See also X4600 and Sun Blade 8000. While Gigabytes may not be new to people who have bought an iPod or a computer system, it perhaps gives a better sense of capacity and size if expressed in other units.
So here are my calculations:
One fully loaded Thumper is about 50 years of continuous mp3 music! - more than what you can hear in a life time; or one year worth of playing continuous DVD quality movies!
or photo IDs of an entire country like India with one billion people (children included)
If you recorded your voice everyday in telephone quality sound, you, your grand children, great grand children .. also did that,
then you need 8 centuries to fill this box! However if all the international calls to or from US are wire tapped and recorded, then it takes about 2 days to fill the box! (per FCC report, 80 billion minutes were spent by people over international calls in 2004)
To wiretap every telephonic conversations in a year, you would need about 18 racks each fully loaded with 10 Thumpers. Not an expensive deal for the government!
Imagine a fully loaded rack which can take 10 Thumpers, then it means every thing above gets multiplied by ten!
If you are wondering if there is a filesystem that can handle this capacity and manage the storage for years without having to worry much about disk failures, take a look at ZFS - the last word in filesystems.
If you have other creative ideas on how you can use this capacity on a single system, please do share.
Link |
14 Jun 2006
What is so special about June 14th 2005?
Run this Perl one liner to find out:
perl -e 'print pack(s11, 6 * 14 - 05, 14 . 6 - (6 . 6), 6 * 14 - 14 ^ 6 / (14 % 6), 14 * 6 - 6, 6 * 14 - 2005 % 6, 14 * 6 - 05, 6 * 14 - 14 + 6, 6 . 5, 14 * 6 - 14 % 6, 2005 % (6 * 14), 6 * 14 - 2005 % 6)'
(Translation: One year ago on
2005-06-14 we neatly
packed and presented a major portion of what would be
s11 (Solaris 11) with lot of planning and effort. The program is running successfully; the result is a growing and active
OPENSOLARIS community!)
Tag: OpenSolaris
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23 May 2006
BeleniX now comes with Java!
Moinak
announced another release of
BeleniX bundling Java 1.5 under the
new Java distributor's license.
Link |
30 Mar 2006
Discovering hidden utilities in Solaris: makedbm and makemap
While blogging on the
dbm theme, I had always used a PERL one-liner to dump the contents of my dbm databases.
dbmopen(%D,$ARGV[0],0444);for(keys %D){print "$_ $D{$_}\n"}
Scripting languages like PERL make it really easy to write "your own", rather than try to find "some other tool" that does the work. It is perhaps faster to write your own.
However, let us see if there is anything readily available in Solaris that dumps the contents of a dbm file. If there is such a command, it might use dbm_open(3C). So we
search for it in the source browser. The
makedbm.c looks promising and see that it has a function
unmake()
which is clearly reading keys and values from a given dbm database. Even though the command name sounds like it is a tool to create dbm files, its
manpage
says it can also dump the contents of a dbm file with option -u. (while not very intuitive, think of -u as adding a negative i.e "not makedbm")
So
makedbm -u filename (without the .pag or .dir prefix) is your friend if you want to see whats in a dbm file.
makedbm is part of Solaris yp/NIS naming toolchest. It has a cousin in sendmail space too (
makemap -u dbm filename)
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27 Feb 2006
Moving from DBM to Derby
I have been using DBM (see dbm(3UCB)) databases for all my database needs. Operating on DBM databases in perl is extremely easy. They are quite fast when you do not really need a full fledged relational database. Being a bit allergic to database classes in school, I had avoided using big relational databases like Oracle or MySQL.
When I started writing a tool which gathered huge amounts of data from various sources and then cross-checked and audited them,
DBM files turned out to be quite inadequate. I desperately needed a relational database.
I tried Apache Derby, a pure java implementation of a relational database. Wow! it just worked out of the box on Solaris. To start the server just run the startNetworkServer.ksh after setting the $DERBY_INSTALL path in that script.
Derby can be used either in server mode or embedded in the application just like DBM databases.
Derby site also has a handy and excellent SQL reference guide.
What more, netbeans has a really neat GUI way to get into the database. You could also point OpenOffice to the derby jar file, and can connect to Derby database with URL like
jdbc:derby://localhost:1527/mydb1. There is also a CLI tool org.apache.derby.tools.ij.
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Copyright (cc) 2004-2006 by Chandan