Useful stuff for your blog-reading pleasure.

All | General

« Previous month (Jun 2007) | Main | Next month (Aug 2007) »

Thursday August 23, 2007

Cool Apple-Like Photo Animations With POV-Ray, ImageMagick and Solaris

One of the features I like most about Apple's iPhoto application is the transition effect in slideshows where the whole screen becomes a cube that rotates into the next photograph. The same effect is also used when switching users, etc.

Recently we took a team photograph for an internal web page. I wanted that effect and I love the open source raytracer POV-Ray so I wrote a script that renders the same animation effect and creates an animated GIF using ImageMagick. You can see an example output to the right featuring photos of some popular Sun products. BTW, check out photos.sun.com for free, high-quality access to Sun product photography.

To create your own photocubes, you just need POV-Ray and ImageMagick in your path and the photocube.sh script. Being open source, all run on Solaris but also on Linux, NetBSD or any other operating system that can run open source software. I'd love to try this script out on a Niagara 2 system with its 8 cores, 16 pipelines, 64 threads and 8 FPUs. Hmmm, all rendering frames in parallel :).

There are already precompiled distributions of POVRay and ImageMagick on Blastwave that you can install very easily onto your Solaris machine if you don't have them already.

Just call the script with 6 URLs or pathnames. It will then automatically read in the images, render the animation frames and then combine them all into an animated GIF:

-bash-3.00$ ../photocube.sh *.jpg
Converting images to be quadratic...
Fetching and processing 721_DRIVE-open.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing 773_FrtAbv-78L-PWR-FAN.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing 915_Lside-plexiOFF.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing IMG_4551.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing blackbox_wind_turbine.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing ultra_cool_combo.1024x768.jpg
Rendering animation frames...
Creating animated gif file...
-bash-3.00$ ls
721_DRIVE-open.1024x768.jpg          blackbox_wind_turbine.1024x768.jpg
773_FrtAbv-78L-PWR-FAN.1024x768.jpg  photocube.gif
915_Lside-plexiOFF.1024x768.jpg      ultra_cool_combo.1024x768.jpg
IMG_4551.1024x768.jpg
-bash-3.00$

The script uses ImageMagick to make the pictures quadratic and to limit their size to 1200x1200 pictures if necessary. Since the -extent switch is fairly new, you'll need to use a newer distribution of ImageMagick, the one on the Solaris Companion CD is sadly not new enough. The POVRay source (embedded in the script) uses an S-curve to turn the cube which produces a natural and smooth acceleration/decelleration effect. It would have been more efficient to let POVRay output PNG files rather than TGA but for some reason some of the PNG files that POVRay produces were not compatible with ImageMagick.

Feel free to modify this script to your needs. You may want to experiment with other ways of animating the cube or other image transition effects. Maybe you want to use ffmpeg to create real video files instead of animated GIFs. Be careful when cranking up the number of frames while using ImageMagick to create animated GIFs, ImageMagick wants to suck in all frames into memory before creating the animated GIF and so you may end up using a lot of memory. If someone has a more elegant, scriptable animated GIF creator, please leave me a comment.

I hope you enjoy this little exercise in raytracing and animation. Let me know if you have suggestions or other ideas to improve this script!

"Cool Apple-Like Photo Animations With POV-Ray, ImageMagick and Solaris" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-23 13:20:47.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
apple cool diy howto imagemagick iphoto opensolaris opensource photos pov-ray raytracing script slideshow solaris
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [4]

Thursday August 16, 2007

ZFS Snapshot Replication Script

One of the OpenSolaris' ZFS filesystem's greatest features are its snapshots. You can easily create a snapshot by saying zfs create pool/filesystem@snapshot and then replicate that snapshot by saying something like zfs send pool/filesystem@snapshot | zfs receive newpool/some_other_filesystem. So far, so great.

Now let's say you have a nice pool and have been creating snapshots on a regular basis. After a few months, you decide to remodel your pool layout or migrate some of your filesystems over to a new pool for whatever reason. Then, you're facing a lot of those zfs send and receive commands. Especially, if you're like Chris and do snapshots on a per-minute basis. That's why the ZFS community is now waiting for 6421958: A zfs send -r option.

I had to migrate quite a few filesystems and many snapshots (thanks to Tim's excellent ZFS Snapshot SMF Service) lately when I set up a new pool strategy for my home server so I wrote myself a script to do the replication job. Since it may take some time for the send -r feature to be implemented, I turned it into a more generic utility.

Disclaimer: Please be advised that this script has only been tested a couple of times and it is provided to you completely on an "as-is" basis. Please have a look at the script to understand how it works and try it out on some non-risky pools and filesystems before you do real stuff with it. Run a backup before using this script and don't shoot me if something goes wrong.

Ok, what can this script do for you? First of all, check out its -h flag to see what options it provides:

# zfs-replicate -h
usage: zfs-replicate [-h] [-F ] [-n] [-s] [-v]
         [-m [-c "FMRI|pattern[ FMRI|pattern]...]" ]
         source dest

where source and dest is a ZFS filesystem, snapshot or volume.

Options:
-h: Print this help.
-F: Force a rollback of the destination filesystem to the most recent
    snapshot before replicating a snapshot. This is equivalent to the -F
    option of zfs receive.
-n: Don't actually replicate anything, just print what would be done.
    This will only print the next step but nothing dependent on that step
    since it won't actually be executed. For instance, -ns will print the
    snapshot command but not print the subsequent send/receive command as it
    depends on the snapshot actually being taken.
-s: After sending existing snapshots, make a final one and replicate it as well.
    This option requires that the source be a filesystem and not a snapshot.
-m: After sending all snapshots, migrate the source to the dest filesystem by
    unmounting the source filesystem and changing the new filesystem's
    mountpoint to that of the source one. This option includes -s.
-c: A space delimited list of SMF services in quotes to be temporarily disabled
    before unmounting the source, then re-enable after changing the mountpoint
    of the destination. Requires -m.
-v: Be verbose.

Great, let's try it out. Here's a pool with some data and some snapshots as well as another, empty pool:


# zfs list -r piscina
NAME                            USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
piscina                         384M  87.6M    19K  /piscina
piscina/ficheros                384M  87.6M   384M  /piscina/ficheros
piscina/ficheros@instantanea1    17K      -   128M  -
piscina/ficheros@instantanea2    17K      -   256M  -
piscina/ficheros@instantanea3      0      -   384M  -
# zfs list -r lago
NAME   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
lago   105K   472M    18K  /lago

Now, let's copy the ficheros filesystem along with all its snapshots in one go:


# zfs-replicate -v piscina/ficheros lago
Sending piscina/ficheros@instantanea1 to lago.
Sending piscina/ficheros@instantanea2 to lago.
(incremental to piscina/ficheros@instantanea1.)
Sending piscina/ficheros@instantanea3 to lago.
(incremental to piscina/ficheros@instantanea2.)
# zfs list -r lago
NAME                         USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
lago                         384M  87.6M    20K  /lago
lago/ficheros                384M  87.6M   384M  /lago/ficheros
lago/ficheros@instantanea1    17K      -   128M  -
lago/ficheros@instantanea2    17K      -   256M  -
lago/ficheros@instantanea3      0      -   384M  -

It works. And it automatically used incremental snapshots as well to save space, too!

If we now add another snapshot to our original pool piscina and then run zfs-replicate again, it will skip already replicated snapshots and just copy those that are additional:


# zfs snapshot piscina/ficheros@instantanea4 
# zfs-replicate -v piscina/ficheros lago
Sending piscina/ficheros@instantanea4 to lago.
(incremental to piscina/ficheros@instantanea3.)
# zfs list -r lago
NAME                         USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
lago                         384M  87.6M    20K  /lago
lago/ficheros                384M  87.6M   384M  /lago/ficheros
lago/ficheros@instantanea1    17K      -   128M  -
lago/ficheros@instantanea2    17K      -   256M  -
lago/ficheros@instantanea3      0      -   384M  -
lago/ficheros@instantanea4      0      -   384M  -

This is useful because you can now run this script on regularly basis to have one pool automatically backed up to another pool. In fact, the -s option will first make sure all existing snapshots are copied over, then create a new snapshot for you and copy that one over as well, all in one command.

Sometimes, the destination filesystem gets touched, or otherwise acted upon and then zfs receive to it will no longer work. In that case, you can use the -F switch which will force a rollback of the destination filesystem to its latest snapshot and then you'll be back in business.

Finally, another scenario is file system migration: You have a filesystem in one pool and want to migrate it with all it's snapshots to another pool, with minimal downtime. This can be done using the -m option: First copy all existing snapshots while the source file system is still live, then unmount it, create a final snapshot, copy that one over to the destination file system as well, set the destination filesystem's mountpoint to be the same as the source filesystem's one and remount the destination file system. (Please note that the script might appear frozen when unmounting while it's waiting for some open files to be closed, etc.).

If you're worried about some daemons depending on your filesystem's availability (like Samba), you can use the -c option to provide their names. zfs-replicate will then bring down the matching SMF services right before unmounting and restart them automatically after re-mounting the migrated filesystem. Again, you might need to wait until the SMF service is really down (Read: The last Samba connection has closed).

I hope this script is useful to you and again, I assume you know what you're doing and do some testing before using it in production. I'm sure there are still some bugs and shortcomings so please send me email to constantin (dot) gonzalez (at) sun (dot) com or leave a comment and I'll try to make the script better for you.

Many thanks to Chris Gerhard, whose backup script was an inspiration for me in hacking together this utility. Also, many thanks to Tim Foster for some code-review and initial feedback (Sorry, I haven't managed to implement some locking yet...). Let me know when you're in Munich and you'll get some well-deserved beer!

"ZFS Snapshot Replication Script" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-16 13:41:02.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
administration filesystem howto open opensolaris opensource programming replication script shell snapshot software solaris source unix utility zfs
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Monday August 13, 2007

So, where's the future of HD Audio?

Gerald Beuchelt gives a nice overview of the two HD Audio formats SACD and DVD-Audio in his blog "Web Services Contraptions".

IMHO, the audio industry has two big problems with HD Audio:

Too few consumers/retailers/publishers care about HD Audio turning it into a small niche,
this niche is scattered across many different formats.

Let's look at the first point for a second: Since the introduction of the CD, the consumer has been conditioned into thinking that 16 Bit/44.1 kHz is "good enough" to present audio to the human ear in a quality that is indistinguishable from the real thing. At the time (the 80s) it made sense from a marketing perspective as a successful industry effort to introduce a major new medium. But the truth is that neither 16 Bit dynamic resolution nor 44.1 kHz frequency range is really enough:

According to this table (though this other table is more fun), A symphonic orchestra reaches a sound level of 110 dBA, a rock concert 120 dBA (which is the threshold of pain). Yes, a good classical piece of music at high volume can be a lot of fun, I recommend Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" for your first steps into classical pogo-music, but I digress.
The CD's 16 Bit of resolution allow the representation of signals with up to 96 dB of dynamic range, so emulating a symphonic orchestra is out of the question. Ok, your comfortable volume may be less than 96 dB, but if you want to listen to a highly dynamic piece of music (a piece of music that both contains very low-volume and very high volume pieces) and enjoy a good SNR, then the CD is pushed to its limits. Most professional audio equipment therefore agrees to use 24 Bit encoding.
44.1 kHz of sampling frequency allows the accurate representation of sounds up to 22.050 kHz which is indeed beyond the human auditory range, but this is not enough: The more a high-pitch tone approaches the sampling frequency, the less possibilities there are to encode it's phase. Phase differences between the two stereo channels are very important: Your ears and your brain use them to derive the exact location of the sound. The CD resolution of 44.1 kHz only allows for the accurate representation of phase difference in the range of .05 milliseconds, which is less than what your ears can actually measure. In other words: If you listen to your classical favourite CD, but can's quite make out where on the stage a flute is playing, it may be that you need more than 44.1 kHz sampling rate.
Another problem with 44.1 kHz sampling rates is that they do not allow to represent overtones higher than 22.050 kHz. This affects the fine nuances that distinguish high quality instruments from regular ones. That Stradivari might sound like a cheap replica if you're listening to it from a regular CD.
In addition, CDs only allow to store 2 channels (stereo) of audio. Anybody who has enjoyed a live concert, either rock or in a music hall, can experience that real life has more than two front channels.

The bottom line: Your ears and your hearing system in the brain is a remarkably accurate measuring system for audio signals and the CD does not do it justice. Check out this great article on "Music and the Human Ear" for some more amazing insights.

So, issue #1 is that the average consumer thinks CDs are good enough, CDs are it and why should they invest money in something that claims to sound better? Especially when people today are using MP3 to ~~massacre their sound~~ save valuable storage space. They don't know what they're missing!

Issue #2 is non-technical, non-biological, but purely business-related: High definition audio formats have been at war with each other since a long time. Here is a selection of what's available today:

Vinyl: Yes, they are still alive and there's a big community of people who will swear that their vinyl records sound much better than CDs when played on proper equipment. Some factors here are related to the limitations of CDs vs. analog recordings, some are purely psychological, but altogether, the Vinyl market is still there (just search for "vinyl" on Amazon) and it apparently is worth doing business with.
SACD: SACDs go beyond traditional digital PCM encoding by using a form of encoding called DSD, which essentially means using a very, very high sampling frequency (2.8 MHz) and recording a single bit that tells you if the wave has been going down in amplitude or up since the last sampling. Hybrid SACDs are backwards-compatible to CDs and they can store music both in stereo and in surround sound.
DVD-A: DVD-Audio is a format that competes directly with SACD. It goes beyond the 16-Bit/44.1 kHz specification of the CD and offers up to 24 Bit/192 kHz of pure audio pleasure. Both stereo and surround sound are available but there's no backward-compatibility with CDs. DVD-Audio discs may have an additional channel with Dolby Digital encoded music that makes them backward-compatible with regular DVDs, at the expense of audio quality.

All three of the above enjoy a small niche market where any particular music piece may or may not be available in one or more of the above formats. But the future is even more flawed:

Media choice: The war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD has only just begun. Both media types offer HD-Audio using a variety of codecs (see below), but there is no agreement on which one has to be present on each disc. Consumers therefore are confused on what kind of player to buy and most will probably wait and see who wins.
Codec choice: Assuming there was no Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war, the next level of confusion is what HD-Audio codec to choose from: Dolby and DTS are fighting for the better HD codec adoption, while other alternatives include Sony's DSD (see SACD) which is rumored to be expanded and Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP), the codec behind DVD-Audio.
Audio Connection Hell: We haven't talked yet about how to connect your media player to your multi-channel amplifier/receiver. With good reason: This article is already becoming longer than I intended it to be. Suffice to say: Connecting a high resolution media player with an amplifier is a non-trivial task. You either have to use standard analog connections (which is difficult to do properly and kinda makes the whole point of digital high-quality music moot) or you may or may not be able to use a digital connection (depending on the proprietaryness of the codec, or the HDMI version, or whether your media player is from the same manufacturer than your receiver). The reason here has mostly to do with copy protection: If high resolution audio travels over a digital cable losslessly, the media industry wants to make it 100% sure it does so in an encrypted form to prevent copying.

So, issue two can be summarized as: The market for high resolution audio is already a small niche, and thanks to media wars, codec wars and connection/copy-protection wars, it split up into many confusing and even smaller sub-markets that make the hen-and-egg problem of introducing a new standard an unneccessarily hard factor, if not impossible.

Bottom line: So you've learned that the grass beyond 16-Bit/44.1 kHz can be greener, but the fence to overcome is unneccesarily high and thorny.

Gerald and I both love music in high resolution formats. Hell, we're even willing to spend more money on equipment and media because we know we'll get better quality, while our ears still can hear it. We may be part of a small niche, but I would argue that high-end niches are good and offer a nice business opportunity to both equipment vendors and content companies. So why, oh why is the industry making it so hard to hear your favourite music at a better than average sound quality?

Gerald's latest post is about Linn records, a company that offers high resolution, high-quality audio recordings on DVD-A, SACD, Vinyl and, tadah! as an electronic download. Kudos to them for being truly open and war-independent and forward-thinking in how they try to serve their customers. This evening I'll go to their website and download some music from them only for the sake of supporting this effort.

Happy listening!

"So, where's the future of HD Audio?" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-13 06:42:12.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
audio dolbydigital dts dvd-a hd hdtv music sacd technology
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [4]

Sunday August 12, 2007

ZFS Interview in the POFACS Podcast (German)

Last week, I've been interviewed by the german podcast POFACS, the podcast for alternative computer systems. Today, the interview went live, so if you happen to understand the german language and want to learn about ZFS while driving to work or while jogging, you're invited to listen to the interview.

I was actually amazed at how long the interview turned out: It's 40 minutes, while recording the piece only felt like 20 minutes or so. The average commute time in germany is about 20 minutes, so this interview will easily cover both ways to and from work. But there's more: This episode of POFACS also introduces you to the NetBSD operating system, the German Unix User Group GUUG. Finally, the guys at POFACS were also so kind to feature the HELDENFunk podcast in a short introductory interview. Thanks!

So with a total playing time if 1 hour and 20 minutes, this episode has you covered for at least two commutes or a couple of jogging runs :).

"ZFS Interview in the POFACS Podcast (German)" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-12 10:41:54.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
community filesystem free german guug open opensolaris opensource podcast podcasting pofacs solaris technology zfs
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Thursday August 09, 2007

Get Simpsonized!

Constantin Simpson Yesterday evening, I was simpsonized! The result can be seen to the right.

A brilliant viral marketing plot by Burger King and the Simpsons Movie.

Actually, the process is quite sophisticated. It involves sending a photo of yourself with good contrast and answering some simple questions and you'll get a pretty good approximization of your inner Simpson. I wonder if they use Java Advanced Imaging?

You then get the chance to modify your Simpson character, I still need to work on my hair...

Get simpsonized here!

"Get Simpsonized!" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-09 00:56:34.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
fun marketing movies simpsons web2.0
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Wednesday August 08, 2007

A True Web 2.0 Chip

Yesterday was the big day in which we launched the UltraSPARC T2 chip, code-named Niagara 2.

Few people realize how significant this announcement really is. The UltraSPARC T1 chip already changed the game of providing a powerful web infrastructure: By providing 32 threads in parallel, the UltraSPARC T1 chip and the associated T2000 server can provide more than double the performance of today's regular chips, at half the power cost. Even now, 18 months after its introduction, this chip still remains ahead of the pack both in absolute web performance and in price/performance and in performance/watt.

UltraSPARC T2 is not just a better version of the T1 chip, it provides three significant improvements:

More parallelism: Instead of 32 concurrent threads, UltraSPARC T2 delivers 64 threads running in parallel. Moore's law gives us twice as many transistors to play with every 18 weeks and the best way to leverage that is to turn them into parallelism. UltraSPARC T1 and T2 are all about maximizing the return on Moore's Law. Check out the specs.
More networking: The UltraSPARC T2 features two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports directly on the chip. Two. Ten GigaBit. On the chip. The NIC is included, there is no bus system between the NIC and the CPU, the CPU is the NIC is the CPU. Total embedded networking. For applications that live in the network, what more can they ask for in a server?
Built-in, free and fast encryption. In a world where the web becomes social, private data becomes more and more common, but also more and more important to secure. Making security a default feature of your web service is now available for free and it does not impact performance.

Of course, there are many more other improvements, such as 8 FP units, more memory etc., but the three points above alone make the UltraSPARC T2 the perfect chip for web 2.0 applications.

This guy needs UltraSPARC T2! For instance, check out this analysis of the Facebook platform by Marc Andreesen. If you don't want to read it all, here's a summary: Web 2.0 means explosive growth in server capacity, for any reasonably successful application. In the case of iLike, they are growing their user base at the rate of 300k a day! This kind of growth can be fatal for your company if you don't have the infrastructure to sustain it. Well, UltraSPARC T2 is just the kind of technology that was designed to do just that: Handle many, many, many concurrent users at once as efficiently and securely as possible.

So, all you Web 2.0 startups out there, get in touch with your nearest Sun rep or Sun SE and ask them about UltraSPARC T2, or better yet, get a free 60-day trial of UltraSPARC T1, do your favourite benchmark, double that number and forget about that crypto-card to see what UltraSPARC T2 can do for you real soon now. Then, sit back, relax and keep those 300k a day users coming!

"A True Web 2.0 Chip" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-08 09:07:37.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
adoption facebook grow lokalisten niagara performance scale solaris sparc sun t1 t1000 t2 t2000 ultrasparc web web2.0
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.

Tuesday August 07, 2007

Consolidating Web 2.0 Services, anyone?

I have profiles on both LinkedIn and XING. And lately, I discovered Facebook, so I created a third profile there as well. And then there are half a dozen web forums here and there that I have a profile with as well.

Wouldn't it be nice to create and update a profile in one place, then have it available from whatever the Web 2.0 networking site du jour is?

Each of these sites has their own messaging system. No, they don't forward me messages, they just send out notifications, since they want me to spend valuable online time with their websites, not anybody else's.

Wouldn't it be nice to have all Web 2.0 site's messaging systems aggregated as simple emails to my personal mailbox of choice?

I also like Plazes.com, and I update my whereabouts and what I do there once in a while. I can also tell Facebook what I'm doing right now. And now, surprise, a colleague tells me that this Twitter (sorry, I don't have a Twitter profile yet...) thing is real cool and I should use it to tell the world what I'm doing right now. That would be the third Web 2.0 service where I can type in what I do and let my friends know.

Wouldn't it be... You get the picture.

I think it would be real nice if Web 2.0 services could sit together at one table, agree on some open standards for Web 2.0 style profiles, messaging, microblogging, geo-tagging etc., and then connect with each other, so one change in one profile is reflected in the other as well, so one message sent to me from one forum reaches my conventional mail box and so one action I post to one microblogging site shows up on Plazes and Facebook as well.

I know I'm asking for a lot: After all, much of the business models of Web 2.0 companies actually rely on collecting all that data from their users and figure out how to monetize it. But on the other hand, as a user of such services, I'd like to have a nice user experience and updating three profiles is not fun if I were to do that seriously.

Therefore, I think one of the following will happen:

Web 2.0 companies will consolidate in the sense of being merged into very few, but global uber-companies that own all business profiles, all geo-tagging stuff, etc. This is probably why Google is buying some Web 2.0 company on a weekly basis. Maybe I should by XING stock and wait for them to be acquired by LinkedIn etc. but maybe I'm an investment sissy...
Web 2.0 Meta-Companies will emerge that leverage Web 2.0 APIs (or mimick users through traditional HTTP) and offer Meta-Services. I'd love to got to, say, a MetaProfiles.com, set up a real good and thorough profile of my life, then let it automatically export it to LinkedIn, XING and whatnot.com and I'd be a happy person. Let me know if you happen to know such a service.
The closest thing to such a service is actually Facebook: Since it's not just a social website, but a real application platform, it has the potential to provide meta-services for any other Web 2.0 sites out there. I love being able to pull in data from Plazes, del.icio.us etc. into my Facebook profile and have it all in one place. I love the "My Profiles" app that lets me show off my dozen or so profiles, blogs, etc. in one single list.
Since both of the above are quite inevitable, eventually the ~~losers~~ remaining companies will sit down and start agreeing on unified and open standards for Web 2.0 centric data exchange. We've seen this with many other open standards, so why not the same for personal profiles, geodata etc.?

Meanwhile, I'll check out some of the APIs out there. Maybe I can put together a sync script or something similar to help me across the turbulences of Web 2.0 tryouts.

But first, I'll tryout Twitter. Since a couple of friends are using it already, I feel some social pressure 2.0 building up...

"Consolidating Web 2.0 Services, anyone?" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-07 07:32:26.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
adoption community facebook linkedin plazes twitter web web2.0 xing
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
Comments [3]

Monday August 06, 2007

New Public Podcast: HELDENFunk (in German)

HELDENFunk Icon You might have heard of systemhelden.com in one of my other posts. This is a german community for system administrators and other heroes of IT that is fun to belong to and that is enjoying a nice growth in popularity.

Today, we added a podcast (sorry, it's in german) to this community called "HELDENFunk". This podcast features stories from the Systemhelden.com community, tech news and other fun stuff. In this first episode, we discuss how the Systemhelden.com website is hosted in a Solaris 10 container on a Sun Fire X4200 server at our ISP Cyberways in Augsburg, then Rolf discusses how you can calculate your CO2 footprint out of your server's wattage and he introduces the Sun EcoTour, which is a mobile blog written by a journalist that rides a bike across Germany. Wolfgang Stief is our special guest, he works at Best Systeme and is in the process of setting up Solaris 10 Zones on a Sun Fire T2000 server for GUUG, the German Unix User's Group. We interview another great podcast called POFACS, the podcast for alternative computer systems and we feature Sun's Magnum Switch and a funny video about blending an Apple iPhone in our news section.

Producing the podcast was great fun. We had great people in our studio (Read: conference room...) and quite a few laughs. Thanks to Marc Baumann, we had great microphones and a mixer to record with. My NI Audio Kontrol 1 audio interface, featured in an earlier blog post, proved to provide excellent recording quality. We used quite a complicated setup to conduct a phone interview over Skype but which turned to work quite well. And again, Marc edited and cut everything very nicely so everything now just sounds great.

We plan to publish a new episode each month, so feel free to let us know what you'd like us to cover and what suggestions you might have. Just write to kontakt at systemhelden dot com.

"New Public Podcast: HELDENFunk (in German)" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-06 09:02:12.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
community container eco iphone magnum marketing open opensolaris podcast podcasting pofacs server solaris systemhelden t2000 technology web2.0 work x4200
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.