April Fools at Sun

    Yup, it's that time of year again, and the Internet is abuzz with April Fools Day jokes of various kinds, including Google's, YouTube's, and the first one I saw this morning at Expedia. Some are pretty funny, some well thought out, and others just kinda sad. I always find a laugh to be well worth the effort, particularly during difficult times.

    I'm sorry to say that I haven't seen one prank within Sun today. Over the long history of Sun, April Fools Day pranks have usually been creative, sometimes amazing, and always fun. There was one during the days when Scott McNealy was fond of the phrase "put all our wood behind 1 arrow", and sure enough, he ended up with a gigantic wooden arrow through his office. We have a web resource called Onestop, and many pranks were pulled through it's pages, including amazing new products from SunLabs, etc.

    OK, I'm getting old and can't seem to remember all the details, but one of Sun's execs found his fancy car in the middle of one of the ponds on campus, on a raft or other surface such that it was fine, but not easily accessible. And not long after Sun announce Project BlackBox, there was a video of OpenWork 3.0, built into a shipping container much like the Modular Datacenter. Ah, those were the days. Maybe I was snoozing today and missed it, but it sure would be nice to see some of that old 'Kick Butt and Have Fun' attitude around the Sun family again.

    At this point, the best I can do is try to bring some levity to the rest of my fellow employees at Sun Microsystems by digging up some of the fun old mock ads. Enjoy :-)

Anti-Microsoft Jacques Cousteau style ad

The IT Guy - Episode #1

The IT Guy - Episode #2

The IT Guy - Episode #3

The IT Guy - Episode #4

Posted at 11:15PM Apr 01, 2009 by dragonfly in Geekery  |  Comments[2]

Solaris powered Nehalem

    Yesterday, Intel had a big announcement of their Xeon® processor 5500 series CPUs for servers. In conjunction with that announcement, Sun announced some impressive world records with Solaris on these new processors. Some of you may know of the Xeon® processor 5500 series by the code name Nehalem, and there has been a lot of press about this new CPU architecture, and the performance it brings to the x86 space. Intel CPUs have come a long way since the old 8086s, and the 8088s used in the first IBM PCs. (yeah, I have one in my collection)

    But where are the Sun server's using these new CPUs, you might be asking. Well, you need to be patient, as we have several coming on April 14th. And we've made it easy for you to keep from missing it, by offering to send you an SMS reminder of the Sun Open Network Systems Launch - April 14. So go get yourself registered for that SMS reminder, and make sure you don't miss these energy efficient, high performance servers using Intel's Xeon® processor 5500 series and Sun's innovation. You won't be sorry. :-)

Posted at 11:05PM Mar 31, 2009 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

New Reading Opportunities

    For those who are new to e-books, and for those regular e-book readers looking to try something new, we are well into Read an E-book Week, which is from March 8th through the 14th. There are several publishers and authors who are offering free e-books or reduced prices on e-books this week. For those of us using the e-book reader Stanza on their iPhones, check out the online libraries for the Read an E-book Week library with many free and reduced price books.

    I've been an e-book reader for many years, having started on various Palm OS based devices, a Windows-based PDA, laptops, and now my iPhone. I like them because they are convenient, but I am disappointed at the prices. I've blogged before about some of my sources, from Project Gutenburg, offering free access to classics and non-copyright material, to Fictionwise, whom by the way was just purchased by Barnes and Noble, and who has more flexible pricing to handle the purchase of single stories. So far I have found plenty of e-books of interest for free, and have even purchased or gotten some for my birthday, but I still think that the publishing industry should not follow the music industries lead, and should start building the market with prices that reflect the reduced cost to 'print' and distribute the content. Some publisher's, like Bain, are headed in the right direction, and I support them and cheer them on.

    Speaking of e-books, a close friend of mine has made the travel book for children he and his wife did available as a web e-book, as they have found it challenging to get it published in hard copy so far. I went with them on at least one 'photo shoot', and have been interested in the project from the start. The book is built around a stuffed koala named Kiki who loves to travel. It is a photo book, with Kiki visiting many tourist sites around Boston. I think they have done a wonderful job with the website, and the formatting of the web e-book. Some of the shots are really great, and I'm sure my kids would have loved the book when they were younger. Check it out at Kikibooks. I hope they get enough positive feedback to continue the series in other cities, although I know there is a lot of planning and logistics involved, particularly in the post-911 environment we live in these days.

    I encourage anyone who likes to read to take this opportunity to check out e-books for the first time, or to try something different in e-books. I've recently discovered the existence of cartoon/comic e-books myself, and am trying them out on both my iPhone and my laptop. :-)

Posted at 10:06PM Mar 11, 2009 by dragonfly in Geekery  |  Comments[1]

SF34 Live - Coming to the end

My oldest us getting tired and a headache, so he us lying down for a bit. He made it through 'Transformers', and my dad is still watching, although I expect he has dozed some.

Every year I think I'm going to make a list of notes for helping plan next year's, and haven't made them until just before, so I'll do it now. These might be handy for other folks as well. While we got here by 11am, there weren't enough seats together on the 1st floor for our party of 4, so we ended up in the balcony. I may not be remembering rightly, but I seem to recall more leg room when we were downstairs last year. For a party of 4 or more wanting to sit together, I would suggest getting there closer to oeming time, which was 10:30am this year.

Another thing I should do better is to plan when to go out for dinner as soon as I get the line up with times, particularly when going with friends. I really like the social aspects, and having a meal with friends is a nice way to break things up, even with the increased social nature of watching movies at this event. Food has gone well this year, for both my son and myself. Neither of us has overly eaten, and I think our selections worked well. I've found fruit a good choice again this year, with this year's selections including some easy peeling, tasty oranges, plums, Fuji apples, and grapes for Alexei. I brought 3 swiss cheese sandwiches, and have only eaten 2 so far. Plenty of fluid, some peanuts and a shared can of pringles. Not too bad.

We've entered the final stretch with 'Star Trek II : The Wrath of Kahn', and the die hards are excited. The best, or at least one of the best Star Trek movies, this is the first time Alexei has seen it. I hope he enjoys the big screen experience. With another marathon wrapping up, it's time to discuss movies for next year's, at the Boston Science Fiction Marsthon 35 website. ^_^

Posted at 04:37PM Feb 16, 2009 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

SF34 Live - Past halfway

We are past the halfway point, which ocurred during 'The Thing from Another Planet', a truly classic, well made 50s movie. Next we enjoyed another classic, this one from 1984, 'Repo Man' with Harry Dean Stanton and Emelio Estevez. The current movie is the remake of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' with an all star cast including Donald Sutherland, Jeff Goldbloom, and Leonard Nemoy. "rat turd. Caper." ^_^

Posted at 10:43AM Feb 16, 2009 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

SF34 Live - Update 2

The movies continue, as well as the MST3K style comments. Sadly, 'Chrysalis', based on a Ray Bradbury story, was slow and awkward. Storyline was good as usual for Ray, too bad the movie didn't pan out. A short break and we were on to 'Logan's Run' staring Michael York and Farrah Fawcett, a classic that had a short run as a series.

Oh yeah, in case you are wondering what the picture is, after seeing that large a turn out for the tinfoil hat contest, most of which were pretty darn impressive, my 'stealth' hat and I decided to sit this one out. The team of space Vikings won, and a well deserved win too. The children's winner used a Dr. Who theme, with a fantastic K9 model as a hat. We're well into 'Runaway' with Tom Selleck, Kristie Alley and Gene Simmons (of KISS fame). What a step into electronics antiquity, yikes. ^_^

Posted at 03:46AM Feb 16, 2009 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

SF34 Live - we're off

SF34 is now officially under way, as this pic showing Duck Dodgers attests to. Our first film was a premiere of 'Alien Trespass', a great film with gorgeous scenery, and modeled after 1950s film like 'It Came from Outer Soace'. Really brings a nostalgic feel with modern color and beauty.

And speaking of 'It Came from Outer Space', it has just started, and in 3D to boot. I guess it's been a while since I've seen a blue/red 3D, cause this looks pretty cool. I am finding the darkness of the red side a bit annoying, but still cool.

I've started off slow on eating, and ended up with no breakfast, which seems to be working well for stomach comfort. A lot better than starting off with a film like 'Cloverfield', with it's stomach turning videography. A friend from Mosaic Commons, Tim Pierce has joined us for the fun. They ran out of programs, so I emailed the line up to Tim, using a copy/paste jailbreak app, to copy it from Evernote to gmail. ^_^

Posted at 09:55PM Feb 15, 2009 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

SF34 - Settling in

We are at the Somerville Theatre for the Boston Science Fiction Marathon 34 (SF34), and settling in. This year they handed out a large Manila envelope along with the traditional Atomic Fireball. Looks like someone had a warehouse to empty, but I'm not complaining. They contained comic books, a random sci-fi book, and assorted chotchkes. We are watching a bunch of trailers as blast off time approaches. More updates to come. ^_^

Posted at 07:23PM Feb 15, 2009 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

Local Flavor

This past summer, we sold our house in anticipation of buying our new home in our new community at Mosaic Commons. Until our unit is complete, we have been living in an apartment complex, which happens to be down the street from the Weetabix factory. We have seen the factory in passing, but never gave it much thought until we moved here. Now, when the wind is right, and it's not so cold that we have the windows closed, which needs to be pretty cold with the always on heat in this apartment (but that is another story), we catch a wheaty, toasty whiff from the Weetabix factory by the Nashua River.

The scent isn't terrible, but it can be strong. Out of curiosity, my wife bought a package of Weetabix, as can be seen in the picture. The package calls it a biscuit, and it claims to be organic. It has a delicate, almost nutty taste, and tends to crumble easily. I haven't spent much time investigating what the common ways of eating it are, but my youngest has enjoyed it crumbled with milk, by itself or added to other cereal. I have tried it, and while it is tasty, I think it would be better with something else. I hope to have more time to play with cooking once we are move in and get settled, and I can see potential for Weetabix. Till then, it's a tasty snack for home, as it doesn't seem like it would travel well short of being dust. ^_^

Posted at 04:16AM Feb 15, 2009 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

Finally - Blogging from my iPhone

After several false starts with other blogging clients for the iPhone, I am having success. Sure, I still need to work out the nuances of this client versus what I use on my Palm T3, and the tools I use to make using the web interface easier, but I'm headed down that road. A couple of upcoming events have been nagging me to get something working, as my previous mobile blogging involved using Bluetooth tethering from T3 to my RAZR, and that won't work with my iPhone.


The first event is the Boston Science Fiction Marathon this Sunday. I enjoyed blogging about it last year, and my oldest son will be joining me this year, so I am looking foreward to it even more. 3 generations of my family will be in attendence, as well as some friends I hope.


The other event is my annual anniversary trip to Block Island in June with my wife. It's still too early to make lodging reservations, but I look forward to it every year, and want to be ready to blog when the mood strikes. I still don't think the Surf Hotel has been sold, which isn't surprising in these economic times. Who knows, I may actually be moved into my new home in >Mosaic Commons by then.


I'm also going to use this post as a test of iBlogger's photo capability, by including a pic of one of my cats watching President Obama's inauguration speech, as you saw at the beginning.

Posted at 12:34AM Feb 14, 2009 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[0]

Shaving again

    As the title says, at long last I'm shaving again. I'm pretty distracted by the ongoing construction of Mosaic Commons, the new cohousing community we are moving to, and so more things slip through the cracks than usual. Oh, and being temporarily in an apartment until the new home is complete, with most of my stuff in storage, doesn't help.

    My usual state of facial hair these days is a full beard. It's been getting rather long and scruffy though, as I seem to have misplaced the AC adapter to my trimming razor. My failing memory tells me I did actually recharge the trimmer since being in this apartment, but I've searched everywhere that same memory thinks the AC adapter might be, and a few other spots, and I can't find it. Even when I am sure it must be in one of several spots I've already looked, and I look again. Must be gremlins.

    I do have other razors, but they are for a clean shaven face, which I have very little of, and their trimmers are poor. So I finally overcame my cheap nature and decided it was time to look decent again and get a new trimmer razor. A quick trip to Target to get a birthday present for one of my youngest son's friend's party, and I checked out the razors. Of course, they didn't have my model (Norelco G250), but I wasn't surprised as I had googled it and found few places listing it. There weren't many choices, so I went with the same manufacturer, Phillips/Norelco G370. It has a different system for trimming to a certain height, but what choice did I have. Being a cranky old yankee, when I don't want to change, I really don't want to change. Sigh.

    I didn't think of this when I bought the new razor, but once I got it home and opened the package, I realized that the AC adapter might fit my old one. And guess what, it does. Woot. Now I have 2 trimmer razors that wll be useless if I misplace the 1 AC adapter. :-) I decided to try the new razor, because it did seem like it might be a safer way to trim back my beard without overdoing it. I started at the highest level and level by level slowly trimmed the beard. And while it was kinda neat feeling all that chin hair, now that I'm back to my old length, I really prefer it, and it definitely looks neater.

    Next step? I want to see if the new razor works as well for maintenance trimming as it did for major trimming. Hmmm, with cold weather coming, and winter break at hand, maybe I should have left the beard until next year. Too late now. :-)

Posted at 11:12AM Dec 14, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[1]

Catching up

    I've got several posts rolling about in my head, but have been stuck in a blog specific kind of rut. I'm not convinced blog posts are the right medium for quick 1 or 2 sentence blurbs or pointers to some other content. I may change my mind, but I think that a blog post should have some new content, if only to add my opinion or thoughts on a subject someone else has covered in detail. So I get stuck sometimes thinking I need quality time to put together a post, even though I have plenty of opinions and thoughts. :-)

    Since I've been feeling somewhat productive today, I said, what the f time for a post no matter what. Here it is. I'm listening to a Bruce Springsteen station on Pandora, while my youngest plays Chip's Challenge on the home computer, with the sound way up. Fortunately for me, I am using a setup that came to me at the recent ASM/IW09 event. When I travel, I often take the opportunity to catch up on movies via Pay-per-View, but this time I had a room mate to be sensitive to. I happened to have brought with me an inexpensive FM transmitter which connects to a headphone jack, and transmits the head phone output over a frequency you select via digital display. Works great for when I want to listen to tapes in my car, which only has a CD/radio.

    In this case I thought, gee I could use it as a 'wireless' headphone, connecting it to the TV's headphone jack, which there was one, and my head phones to the radio/clock next to the bed. As it turns out, the radio/clock was designed to take an iPod or other MP3 player, but had no head phone jack. Darn. I haven't carried an FM receiver in years, as my past experience with them has been weak at best. Suddenly, the cheap FM radio my boys got once with a hair cut doesn't seem so useless anymore. I wasn't able to try my 'wireless' head phones idea then, but that's what I'm using now. Being the cheapy I am, I was in a Dollar store the other day and found a reasonably small FM receiver for $1. It even has a little LED flashlight built in. I now have a small, easy to carry and use wireless head phone setup.

    Another thing that has impacted my blogging is my move. As I have posted before (My new home takes shape, An old fashioned neighborhood, Blog Action Day - Environment), my family and I are moving to this wonderful community at Sawyer Hill Ecovillage, and in particular the Mosaic Commons cohousing community. While the first units are being finished up, I should point out that we still have available market rate and 40b units available in most sizes, from 1 bedroom up to 4 bedroom. As Mister Rogers used to say, 'Won't you be my neighbor?'.

    With the current Real Estate market the way that it is, I was sure we had taken too long to put our house on the market in order to sell it before our new house was ready. Well, I may have been right that our house was unique enough that it wasn't as affected as other houses, and we had a great realtor, so in less than 3 weeks after putting our house on the market, we had 8 showings and 2 offers. It's kind of a blur, but at this point we have moved out of the house into a small 2 bedroom apartment, and thrown out a lot more stuff. We also made some Craig's List watchers very happy with the stuff we gave a way just to get rid of it in a re-used way. There is much more to get rid of, and we are still settling in to the apartment and finding where stuff we use often ended up, but we are a step closer to a new community and home. More on community in another post.

    I'll end this post with a quick note that the kids are back in school, and after 2 days for one and a week for the other, things are going well so far. Knock on wood. :-) Sandy and I are still juggling pick up and drop off schedules. Oh, and this apartment we have for a few months comes with heat....24/7 whether you want it or not. Makes for some testy folks with the warm weather not helping cool the place off. I am hoping that when the fall weather starts to kick in, it will be a little more tolerable.

Posted at 06:35PM Sep 03, 2008 by dragonfly in Geekery  |  Comments[2]

I don't know how to say goodbye

    I've been through a number of downsizings at Sun. I even ended up on the down side of one of the early ones, but found a new position just before taking a job elsewhere. I work with many fun, talented people, and I've shaken my head at some of the folks let go in the past. But I'm still getting over the number of people I knew well and worked with, and the number of really talented, top notch employees who got let go on Thursday. Some of these folks where in high demand, both by sales teams and customers. These same folks drove a lot of training in hot, important technology topics, like Solaris, virtualization, consolidation, ZFS, Zones, etc, and they are gone. I really hope that they find another opening at Sun, now or soon. I have no doubt that many of these folks will be in high demand, even in a tough market like this. And I wish I could tell them this personally.

    I guess this time I'm coming to the realization that through all the other rounds of layoffs, I didn't pay enough attention to how to gracefully and comfortably keep connections with the people I knew who were being let go. I'd keep my eyes open to openings, and let someone know if I thought they might be interested, but there usually weren't many such opportunities. I don't drink alcoholic beverages, and particularly these days many of them aren't local, so going out for a beer would have been awkward at best. Maybe some of the new crop of social networking technologies, like Twitter, IM, SecondLife, Facebook, will make it easier going forward, but I know friends on these who have left and haven't been on them much since. Commiserating with friends still here takes some of the shock away. I just need to find a way to stay connected with them if they go, by their choice or Sun's.

    This isn't how I really want to do this, but for the moment it's something. All my friends let go by Sun this week, not goodbye, but till we meet again.

Posted at 11:21PM Jul 11, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[1]

DOS Bootable USB flash drive - how I did it

    There are 2 things you need in order to make an USB flash drive boot into DOS. The first is a boot sector, and the second are the DOS boot files. Below are the steps I used to get these onto a USB flash drive, making it possible to boot into DOS from the USB flash drive.

    The following steps where all done in Microsoft Windows XP in a VMware virtual machine. They should work with most other versions of MS Windows. I successfully used these steps on an USB flash drive I got at Immersion Week 2008 for use in a ZFS demo (Identifies itself as CBM). YMMV depending on USB flash drive model and manufacturer. These steps are based off of the very useful information at BootDisk.com.

1) Getting a boot sector on the USB flash drive
    Start by gettng the mkbt DOS utility from here mkbt
    Unzip mkbt into a temporary directory
    OK, if you are like most people these days, you don't have a floppy drive in your laptop or desktop, and you may never have, although you should know what a floppy is if you have any interest in doing this. So, if you don't have a floppy drive in your machine, you can use vfd to create a virtual floppy, which is what I did. You can get vfd from here vfd, then follow the directions for creating a virtual drive in RAM, then save it as a file for future use. Use the Windows Explorer format menu item to format the virtual floppy and make sure you check off the box to make an MS-DOS start up disk.

    Once you have access to a DOS boot floppy, use the following command, from a command prompt, to save the boot sector, where a: is the drive letter of your DOS bootable floppy (virtual or physical)

mkbt -c a: bootsect.bin

    Now use the following command to write the boot sector to your USB flash drive, where n: should be replaced with the drive letter of you USB flash drive.

mkbt -x bootsect.bin n:

2) Getting the DOS boot files
    copy all the files from the boot floppy onto the USB flash drive.

    Now you should have a DOS bootable USB flash drive, for use with a system that supports booting from USB, including x64 products from Sun. Copy over whatever DOS utilities you need to use, including AFU for Adaptec RAID controller firmware updates, which is used in some of Sun's x64 products. Or use it for whatever need you may have. Even with a small USB flash drive, you will have a lot more room than a floppy ever dreamed of. Perhaps my next blog post should be on whether inanimate objects dream. :-)

Update : Per several comment poster's, I have fixed the command line for writing the boot sector onto the USB flash drive. It is now correct in the above post. Thanks to those who caught my mistake. :-)

Posted at 11:12PM Jun 16, 2008 by dragonfly in Geekery  |  Comments[8]

DRM sucks ... battery life

    I like reading, a lot of it is science fiction, and so does my wife. She actually reads more than I, and has the good fortune to work at a library, where she has access to a virtually limitless supply of books at almost no cost. I'm thrilled that both of my sons are following in our footsteps in this regard, as they are both enthusiastic readers and regularly take advantage of the library system.

    While my wife reads mostly 'physical' books, I read a lot on my RAZR V3xx and my Palm T3. And while there are multiple formats and readers for the Palm OS, our library's DRMed format is MobiBook. Some other ebook sources I use also use that format, and the Mobipocket Reader isn't bad. I think I prefer Plucker, which is a readily available format for a lot of Public Domain stuff via Project Gutenberg, and I use it for 'mostly text' web page reading.

    The problem with MobiPocket is that it really seems to drain my battery faster than most anything I do on my T3. I got several of David Weber's Honor Harrington book for my birthday, and reading them ends up generating multiple battery warning pop-ups, requiring several visits a day to the cradle for a boost. I attribute this power hungry nature to the encryption heavy nature of DRM, although maybe I'm enjoying the books so much I'm reading more. Or maybe the battery I installed in my T3 a while back doesn't have the lifetime the original had, and is fading already. Nah, more fun to blame DRM. Excuse me, I've got to get back to my reading. :-)

Posted at 10:21PM Jun 02, 2008 by dragonfly in General  |  Comments[3]