Chris Saul's Blog

Solaris still not ready on the laptop Still haven't got around to getting Solaris 10 fully functional on my laptop. This isn't because it can't be made to do so, it's just due to not having time. Anyway, when I'm in the office I use a Sun Ray and when I'm travelling I usually use wireless networks and the wireless card only has an experimental driver, so it's Windows only when out of town for now. Things I still need to do to get things working properly -

Get xorg.conf file for My Toshiba S1

Work out how to get DHCP to time out more quickly when booting offline

Follow Darren's advice to get GDM to be the default login handler

Get hold of experiemental wireless drivers and get them working

Use of Solaris 10 is definitely accelerating with the tech guys I work with. There seem to be two camps - Linux users who want to roll their own for fun or functional reasons, or people who want Solaris underneath for their own reasons. A lot of sales guys are fully JDS/Linux now, which is impressive. Those who travel a lot tend to use Windows still due to wireless card drivers and the like. Internal Sun Rays now run what ITOps are calling a 'JDS preview'. It's basically a nice JDS lookalike to be used until Sun Ray 3.0 is supported and deployed on Solaris 10 - currently all Sun Ray servers are Solaris 9 and there's no official JDS layer for Solaris 9. What's impressive about this is that they essentially upgraded the look and feel for 30,000 desktops in about a day. That really shows the power of Sun Ray. I've started using the 'preview' and I like it. I've used CDE for 6 years now and had got throughly used to it though, so at first I missed CDE's feeling of being quite nippy, but now I inifinitely prefer such 'modern' feature as a toolbar to which and from which I can minimise and maxinmise apps. I remember the guys who used to complain about CDE at Sun and claim OpenWindows was much faster though. There were still a few of those around in 1998 when I joined and one of them set up a Sun Ray based 'web cafe' at a place we sponsored at the time, using OpenWindows as the windowing manager. It made it look like we were installing some ancient dumb terminals, although CDE was only a little better. ( Mar 22 2005, 06:17:42 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [3]

Mazzy Star on a Shuffle, iPod or iRiver? Bought three Mazzy Star CDs, which I'm really enjoying. Not sure why I missed Mazzy Star the first time around. They seem to have released most of their good stuff when I was at Uni, during which time my music budget was nil and the indie discos I went to played more lively stuff. I haven't listened to enough music recently and really must get a decent mp3 player. I think the Shuffle would be best for me. Looks nice, not too pricey. I should get the cheaper knockoff from Taiwan that looks the same but has more features. Since I've got all my 3,000+ songs on my laptop, moving things around when travelling won't be a problem. Ideally I'd like at least a 20GB Shuffle, but I suppose that'll have to wait. iPod and iRiver devices just seem a little too pricey and a little too bulky, particularly after you add a carry case to protect them – yet another device to carry around, which I don't really want. ( Mar 22 2005, 06:14:02 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [3]

Sun Rays as 'work from home' devices, sold via Telcos I've put together a sales brief to explain a straightforward business model for deploying Sun Rays over WAN, via telcos. There are all sorts of potential ways it can be useful and a lot of countries are looking at working with telcos/ISPs to rent a Sun Ray to consumer customers. I'd like to see us working with local telcos following a different strategy. Lots of customers out there would like to be able to provide a work from home service for their existing or potential employees. Using PCs or even WinTerms is just too expensive – there's something to manage, whether it's helping non tech savvy users run virus checks or install the latest Citrix or Tarantella client, or updating that embedded XP OS remotely. Either way, why should employees connect to company apps via a consumer device? Let them keep their home PC is they have one and provide work access instead via something that's zero management and provided as a service via your telco. For technically savvy users Telcos understand providing dial tone and zero maintenance devices to customers and billing for that services - they've been doing it for years with the humble telephone. Sun Ray's very similar to a telephone. It display apps that run elsewhere, just as a telephone can do anything that the service on the other end provides, from simple voice conversations to ordering cinema tickets, securely checking a bank balance, etc., etc., etc. Sun Ray servers live at the telco datecentre, a DSL line and a Sun Ray is placed at the employee's home. The telco essentially provides 'dialtone' from the employee's home or the customer's datacentre. Place a Citrix or Tarantella setup in the customer's server room and you've got access to services and applications. The telco has nothing to manage – the Sun Rays, unlike PCs, WinTerms or other products on the market, never need maintenance. If one breaks, stick another one in and you're up and running where you left off. Beyond the odd tiny firmware update, which occurs transparently to users and needs little or no intervention from admins, there's no management of local software. The firmware's tiny. In short, Sun Ray allows this kind of business model, PCs or any device with an OS to manage don't. If a business wants employees to work from home, they rent the service form the telco for the Sun Ray 'dialtone'. The telco places a broadband connection and a Sun Ray at the employee's house. A Sun partner installs, test and configures the Citrix/TTA server and your employee's working securely from home, with no headaches for the telco in terms of app provisions and no headaches for the customer's IT manager, who just makes sure his Windows app are being smoothly delivered by Citrix, Terminal Services, or whatever. ( Mar 22 2005, 06:09:44 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [6]

Getting a mortgage in Dubai - hassles! Getting a mortgage here is driving me crazy. I know it's a stressful thing in any country, but the company we're buying our place off and the company we're getting our mortgage from don't seem to understand or care that it might be a good idea to make everything crystal clear in the contracts, so customers can understand first time around what they're getting into. First we have all sorts of potential charges started being mentioned while we signed the deposit from the developer. Now the mortgage contract seems to be full of holes – not mentioning whether we can sell the apartment or not, being unclear on the payments that need to be made.... The list goes on. It's an Islamic mortgage, which I hadn't realised at first as Tabu had started everything off. I've nothing against that, but it's just all rather 'foreign'. Foreign's great, unless you're spending lots of money on a house. Our mortgage advisor just doesn't seem to be able to explain things properly either, which isn't much help either. I suppose the companies involved will get their acts together as they get more experienced. One company that doesn't seem to learn from experience is my bank here, who I'm probably not supposed to mention. Someone needs to tell them that simply saying 'that's procedure' is not enough when you're explaining why something can't be done. Maybe it's a regional thing and most customers just accept that explanation, but it's like a red rag to a bull for me. It does give you the opportunity for interesting conversation though - - If it's 'procedure' there must be a proper, logical explanation. I can't see one.
- Er. It's procedure.
- So why is it procedure? Explain to me what the reason is.
- There is no reason.
- So you're telling me that the reason you're not allowed to send me the documents I need is due to procedure that has no reason.
- Er...
And on it goes... ( Mar 22 2005, 06:07:10 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Moscow I travelled to Moscow on Monday. It was 10C on arriving according to the pilot. Going from Dubai to cold European countries every week is really strange - getting on a plane when it's warm and sunny and 28 degrees and walking out into 6 inch deep snow and freezing temperatures can feel odd. The summer should be great though; leaving 48C behind in Dubai and going off to enjoy a break from the humidity in some European city will be very welcome. I'm visiting the Russian desktop and mobility team and am impressed with the work they've done around Sun Ray. We should be seeing some interesting stuff coming out of this region soon. I'm staying at the Grand Marriott, which is very grand, as the name suggests. It's also pretty expensive. I'll be enjoying the 'Health Club' tonight. I really need to get more disciplined about exercising when I'm away. It's just too easy to get back to the hotel room and slouch around. Every office in Dubai has a so-called 'PRO' or 'public relations officer', whose job is not to write press releases, but to get visas and generally deal with the bureaucracy everyone living in, or travelling to, a foreign country has to face. As a British citizen wanting a single visit visa to Russia, you need your hotel to courier the original documents detailing your stay - a fax is not good enough in Dubai, although Russian embassies elsewhere often accept this. Once these had been DHL'd, Tony, our PRO, then went to the embassy and somehow managed to wangle getting the visa in a day. Quite an achievement apparently. Two pages are now taken up in my passport with a nice beige sticker covered in Cyrllic. The girls in passport control had an interesting uniform - normal jacket, coupled with short skirts and stilletto heeled shoes. Bizarre. I was last in Moscow in the summer of '97. First impressions are that the various businesses you see appear to advertise themselves much better. In 1997 restaurants and the like often just had a door in a wall, or a blank window. Hardly the best way to entice passers by. The prize for the most lurid street signs goest to the various slot machine places, who are pretty inventive with primary colours and coloured light bulbs. Another observation is that there are a lot more midrange Western cars on the streets. From what I remember last time it was mainly Ladas and Volgas, with Western cars usually being high end Audis, Mercs and BMWs. Now there are plenty of Skodas, Volvos, Fords and other 'normal' stuff. My taxi this morning was a Volga. It had no rear seatbelts at all, of course, but somehow I find that less annoying than the many taxis I've been in places like Morocco and Turkey where the cars have seatbelts, but no clips, or the seatbelts are helpfully pinned back out of use behind the rear seats. ( Mar 22 2005, 05:09:55 PM GST ) Permalink Comments [0]