Monday December 17, 2007

A Day in the Life of Constantin 2.0

The Web 2.0 hype of the last few years asks the question of "Web 2.0: Waste of time or useful?"  But to me it's clear that social websites, blogging and podcasting have changed quite a lot the way I use the web. Here's an exemplary day of my Web 2.0 style life:

Between waking up, getting dressed and driving to work (sometimes I eat breakfast, too), I sync my iPod with my PowerBook so iTunes can fill it with my favourite podcasts. On my 25 minute commute to work, I regularly listen to "Blick über den Tellerrand", "POFACS", "Extremetech.com", "EGM Live" and the "AVForums Podcast" (The current december episode has an interview with Tomlinson Holman of THX fame!). Old school radio hardly plays a role in my car, only when I forgot to bring my iPod, or when the trip is real short. If I have time (as in: long trip, airplane, etc.), I enjoy listening to "Braincast", "Scipod", "Semi-Coherent Computing", "Spektrum Talk", "The Daily Source Code" (although it has a low SNR...) and try out some new ones.

In the office, I sign in to Plazes, XING, Facebook and lately even Twitter, and Dopplr to stay in touch with friends and colleagues. It depends on my current mood whether I type something interesting into the various "What are you doing now?" fields, someone please consolidate all this stuff into a single entry mechanism!

How do these add value to me? The obvious one is that it's now easier to manage contact data with friends and colleagues using XING, LinkedIn or Faceboo. Plazes and Dopplr let you know where people are, facilitating ad-hoc meetings. As work and leisure life styles become more and more global, keeping track of your friends' whereabouts will be more and more useful. If someone robs my house while I'm away, I'll just blame Jörg, or install a wifi camera at home that sends email whenever something moves :). But there's much more to social websites as we'll see blow. Micro-blogging, such as Twitter or to a lesser degree the Facebook status or the Plazes activities are as useless and as indispensable as small-talk is in real life. IM may give us an electronic alternative to 1-to-1 or 1-to-many chatting, but micro-blogging is more like the kind of chat you have with strangers while waiting for the bus or while being at a party, only global and with many more people at once.

During work, I'm currently doing some research on the adoption of blogs and podcasts within the company with Jörg. I also help create the HELDENFunk podcast and sometimes I present on Web 2.0 in general to customers. It's interesting to see the many shades of gray between people that are into blogging, podcasting, social networking etc. and those who are not, multiplied by the permutations of IT-literate people and not, US, German, UK and other nationalities, IT producing companies vs. IT consuming ones, management type positions and individual contributors, friends, relatives etc. Large, if not worlds of varieties in terms of Web 2.0 adoption. But this is only fun, my real work is more centered around IT consulting on CPUs, Systems, Solaris, Grid Computing, Workstations, etc., but I digress.

Between pieces of useful work, I relax my mind by attacking my friends on Facebook with Zombies, Vampires and Werewolves while retaliating their blows with my Slayer. Or I challenge someone to a movie quiz. Or other senseless, but fun stuff. Is this time-wasting 2.0? I'd say this is more like a fun way to say "Hi" to friends over the web or maybe like the quick game of snooker, table-soccer, etc. down the hall. A social, fun way to take a breath in between work.

More work. We're planning to do a new movie, after our "CSI: Munich - Saving the world with ZFS and 12 USB sticks" one was so popular. The thing with user-generated content is that it enables you to reach many, many more people than you would ever be able to present physically in front of. Quite a good thing if you're in any knowledge related business. My typical customer presentation involves 5-15 people about 1-3 times a week with the occasional presentation to an audience of maybe 20-200 about 2-3 times a year. Altogether this is in the order of 1500 people that I can reach with a traditional presentation. Well, our CSI movie has been downloaded more than 50000 times so far. I have to divide this number by 5 or so for the co-authors, but that's still an order of magnitude more people than I could ever present in front of. The HELDENFunk podcasts have accumulated a couple of thousands of downloaded episodes, which again helps me better get my messages through. And my blog has hundreds of hits each day, too. Check out Alec's wonderful video on a very similar matter. And hey, producing podcasts and videos is a lot of fun, too!

On my way back from work, more podcasts are in order. At home, I usually do most of my blog-reading and blog-writing as well as some more Facebook, XING or other Web 2.0 style things.

I hope to write something useful into my blog about once a week. A blog entry consumes about 2-3 hours of work because I try to write longer, more interesting articles with good content. There are of course many other styles of blogging, but I tend to subscribe to the views of this article: "Write articles, not blog postings" that my colleague Roland found somewhere. Blogging saves me quite some time in the end: Some howto-like stuff that I get asked a lot gets converted into a blog entry and then I can point people to it instead of explaining things all over again. For reading blogs and other syndicated content, I find Google's reader to be quite useful. The list of blogs I like to follow is more or less what you see to the right in my blogroll. Many useful and intriguing ideas I have found in blogs that I'd never have found elsewhere...

There's still a lot of stuff in Web 2.0 land that I don't do. I'd like to create my own personal podcast, but I'm still missing some time, concept and courage, but who knows. And I'm not convinced that Second Life is useful - yet. It's a great PR outlet for some companies (including us) and virtual worlds are clearly the way of the future. It's just that Second Life is too much, well, kinday version 0.1-ish. It sort of feels like the early days of Real Networks in the early nineties when audio quality sucked due to not enough bandwidth. SL has some serious scaling problems and the user experience is not ready for the masses (which IMHO is a requirement to make any Web 2.0 service useful). But it's clearly a step into the right direction. Check out projects Dark Star and Wonderland if you want to see how scalable 3D worlds look like and how they can add value to real businesses.

Am I a Web 2.0 addict? I don't think so. I try out a lot, but the the stuff that sticks usually is the stuff that adds real value to my work and personal life. The key thing here is to try out new things often, with an open mind, then try to understand what these services really do, and decide for yourself where the value to you lies. And yes, "fun" is a legitimate value, too :).

"A Day in the Life of Constantin 2.0" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-12-17 04:01:32.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
dopplr facebook networking podcasting social web2.0 xing
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Monday May 07, 2007

How to find the right network driver in Solaris

Today, I installed a new networking card into my home server. The card wasn't recognized immediately by Solaris, so I had to do some research and this is what I learned.

Looking for a cheap card, but still from a bigger brand, I went for a D-Link DGE-530T which you can get for less than 20 Euros on the Internet. And it can do Gigabit Ethernet, too!

After plugging in comes the first test: Does Solaris recognize that card? This can be verified using devfsadm(1M), so Solaris looks for new hardware, then checking the output of prtconf -v for a section saying "Ethernet". Our D-Link card looks like this:

            pci1186,4b01 (driver not attached)
                Hardware properties:
                    name='assigned-addresses' type=int items=10
                        value=820e0810.00000000.e2000000.00000000.00004000.810e0814
.00000000.00002000.00000000.00000100                    
                    name='reg' type=int items=15
                        value=000e0800.00000000.00000000.00000000.00000000.020e0810
.00000000.00000000.00000000.00004000.010e0814.00000000.00000000.00000000.00000100
                    name='compatible' type=string items=7
                        value='pci1186,4b01.1186.4b01.11' + 'pci1186,4b01.1186.4b01' +
'pci1186,4b01' + 'pci1186,4b01.11' + 'pci1186,4b01' + 'pciclass,020000' + 'pciclass,0200'
                    name='model' type=string items=1
                        value='Ethernet controller'
                    name='power-consumption' type=int items=2
                        value=00000001.00000001
                    name='66mhz-capable' type=boolean
                    name='fast-back-to-back' type=boolean
                    name='devsel-speed' type=int items=1
                        value=00000001
                    name='interrupts' type=int items=1
                        value=00000001
                    name='max-latency' type=int items=1
                        value=0000001f
                    name='min-grant' type=int items=1
                        value=00000017
                    name='subsystem-vendor-id' type=int items=1
                        value=00001186
                    name='subsystem-id' type=int items=1
                        value=00004b01
                    name='unit-address' type=string items=1
                        value='1'
                    name='class-code' type=int items=1
                        value=00020000
                    name='revision-id' type=int items=1
                        value=00000011
                    name='vendor-id' type=int items=1
                        value=00001186
                    name='device-id' type=int items=1
                        value=00004b01

The very first line, "pci1186,4b01" tells us the PCI vendor-ID and product-ID for our card. But it's the "driver not attached" part that is worrying: drvconfig couldn't find a suitable driver for our card.

Unfortunatly, this particular card is not listed in the Solaris Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) so it's time to ask our friend Google and do some research. this post tells us that our card has a Marvell Yukon 88E8001 chip-set. Well, had we looked real close to the product photo on the D-Link website, then we would have noticed just this model number printed on the biggest chip of that card...

This time, we're lucky: The Marvell Yukon chip-set is listed on the Solaris Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)! In this case, it's listed as part of a mainboard and therefore comes with a different PCI-ID. But we learn from this entry that the correct driver is called "skge" and that it can be downloaded here.

Our HCL-Friend also tells us how to teach the driver a new PCI-ID: After installing the skge driver (I went for the 64-Bit version), we say:

/usr/sbin/update_drv -a -i '"pci1186,4b01"' skge

Now, Solaris knows that the skge driver can handle our particular brand of network card.

And low and behold, prtconf recognized our card:

# prtconf -D | grep 1186,4b01
pci1186,4b01, instance #0 (driver name: skge)


Yippeee, the driver is attached! Now we can configure the card just like any other using ifconfig skge0 plumb etc. or create a hostname.skge0file in /etc.

Being good Solaris community citizens, we should now contribute to it by hitting the "Submit Hardware" form in the Solaris HCL so future generations of cheap networking card users can spare the work of finding the right driver.

(Edit: Changed the formatting of the code parts, since the pre-tag messed up my layout.)

"How to find the right network driver in Solaris" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-05-07 13:48:04.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
d-link dge-530t driver networking opensolaris solaris
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