George Drapeau's Weblog

Aug 09

13

Some interesting reading about VMWare's acquisition of SpringSource

This week's announcement that VMWare is acquiring SpringSource sure caught me by surprise. I'm not surprised that VMWare is making an acquisition; it clearly needs to get away from the "one trick pony" problem of being known only as a hypervisor vendor, because there are many entrants in that field now, and it will become commoditized soon.

What surprised me was that VMWare picked a company known for its support of software development frameworks, namely, the Spring framework. Also what surprised me was that VMWare pretty much explicitly commits to Java as the programming language of choice for their cloud offering.

Don't get me wrong: I love Java as a choice of programming language. But I have two basic questions about this choice:

Really? Java is the language you're choosing for rapid-beyond-belief development and deployment of applications on the web?
Why is VMWare locking themselves into a single language? That's essentially what I get out of the announcement and press.

Maybe there weren't any other credible candidate frameworks in PHP, for example.

Here is a nicely-written opinion piece by an IBM guy about what the deal means to VMWare and the industry. I like his take that this purchase is less help to VMWare's cloud vision than what you might think, but it does help VMWare get into the addressable market for application servers

But what do you think is going on? Why did VMWare choose to buy SpringSource? Does this really make VMWare more credible as a cloud vendor, or do you think VMWare is off track with this decision?

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Aug 09

9

Using ZFS Rollback and VirtualBox for Development

I came across this nice blog entry that shows how you can use ZFS's snapshot and rollback features along with VirtualBox to make it really easy (and safe) to try things out during development and not have to worry about losing track of exactly which changes you made when you want to go back to a clean state.

For me, this helps in creation of web sites. I am using Drupal to create a web site, but there's a lot of exploratory development I'm doing and if I mess up something, I want to go back to a known-to-work state. So, I create a VirtualBox image (OpenSolaris as my guest OS), then work with Drupal on that image. The thing is, sometimes I make changes that affect the state of the operating system so I want to cleanly go back to a working state. This blog entry shows me how to do exactly that.

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Aug 09

6

My Annual Drum Corps Nerdfest Announcement

Every summer, my personal obsessions take a break from their normal subjects of computing and other technology, and veer toward a long time favorite hobby: drum and bugle corps.

The world championships are this week. Quarterfinals competition begins at 3:30PM Pacific Time today in Indianapolis, Indiana. Semifinals are tomorrow, and the finals (Top 12 corps) are this Saturday.

My favorite, as usual, is the Santa Clara Vanguard. It looks like the clear leader this year is the Blue Devils, from Concord, CA, but second through fifth place is up for grabs for any of four corps, including the Vanguard.

I won't be able to make it to Indianapolis to attend the shows in person, so I'm going to watch quarterfinals live at my local theater. The DCI organization is broadcasting the event live and you can go buy tickets just like any movie. The theater will be filled with other drum corps nerds just like me.

But wait, there's more! I will also be attending the free snapcast created for the event, on G-Snap! I've mentioned snapcasting before; a couple of weeks ago, over 800 people attended a live snapcast of a regional drum corps show so I'm anticipating a big crowd for today's competition. I'll follow the snapcast on my mobile phone while I'm in the theater; that should make the whole experience a lot more fun: while I'm watching the competition on the big screen, I'll be able to comment with other nerds like me nationwide, as it happens.

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Jul 09

26

Podcasts I'm currently listening to

I just sat down and wrote about (most of) the podcasts I listen to, in response to a friend's request.

Here it is. I should probably do this once a year, just to see how my tastes change over time.

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Jul 09

23

Livecasting from OSCON 2009

Thanks to my business colleague, Steve Quan of Sun's Market Development organization, I am at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) at the San Jose Convention Center.

I'll be here for the rest of the day, and am snapcasting the event. It's public, so anybody can join and give me feedback as I capture what I'm seeing and hearing.

Come on in and join for the rest of the day; I'll be here.

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Jul 09

19

Links from Day One of the Community Leadership Summit

Here are some web sites and apps that I learned about during the 1st of two days of the Community Leadership Summit at the San Jose Convention Center this weekend. I'll add commentary later; this is just to clear my head and get ready for a second day of learning.

Get Satisfaction: community-powered support
Stack Overflow: look at how they do reputation management in an open-ended community (site is for collaboratively asking & answering programmer questions)
IceRocket: real-time search of blogs
DjangoPeople: show who around the world (on a Google map) is a Django web framework developer
CiviCRM: open source Customer Relationship Management for the civic sector. Mozilla is using it to build web site that shows how contributors are contributing to different parts of Mozilla (work in progress).
ThisNext: social shopping site
Gobby: collaborative text editor (somebody mentioned it's similar to a different editor, but I forget its name)
Zemanta: helps you improve your blog posts by watching what you're writing and suggesting related tags, photos, links, etc. I gotta see how they do this.
Posterous: this sounds like the simplest way to blog ever. I gotta try this, too. Somebody mentioned it sounded similar to tumblr.

Okay, gotta go! It's getting late and there are people to meet and communities to lead.

Twitter tag for the Community Leadership Summit: #cls

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Jul 09

16

Snapcasting the Sun Stockholders Meeting

Today was a special meeting of Sun stockholders. The question on the table: whether to approve the merger whereby Oracle acquires Sun.

I decided to "snapcast" the event live, using a free web-based application call G-Snap! I've blogged about g-snap! before but in the last few months they've done a fair amount of improvement to the interface. It's really slick and full-featured now.

Click here to view the event log for the snapcast, so you can see what I typed and the comments people made. Password: sunvote.

There was good news and bad news about the snapcast. The good news: over 50 people joined the event with only about 30 minutes' notice, and the interface worked like a charm. I was able to upload photos to the event live, so people could see what the auditorium looked like, the meeting agenda, and a bomb-sniffing dog outside the premises.

The bad news: I was approached by an official in the auditorium who nicely instructed me to turn off my computer during the meeting. I was assured the meeting would be brief, and indeed it was. Total elapsed time: about 8 minutes.

Nonetheless, I came away from the event eager to try G-Snap! again for something like this. I thought of using my twitter account to tweet as the event went along, but I would have lost the sense of community. By snapcasting, I was able to send live updates just as I would with twitter, but I also had the benefit of others being able to "tweet" live as well, bringing everybody together. It's a lot more cumbersome to try to arrange that via twitter, but with G-Snap! it was trivially easy to do.

Maybe the Oracle stockholders meetings will allow photos and live blogging. We'll have to see about that.

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Jul 09

14

A podcast about open source: FLOSS Weekly

I listen to a lot of podcasts, usually when during my runs or while I'm driving. One of the podcasts I've been listening to over the past few years is This Week in Tech (TWiT), hosted by Leo Laporte.

Well, he's got a network of podcasts on the TWiT Network and I recently found a new one that I think is pretty good: FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software). It's a weekly show in an interview format; each episode is about a different open source topic or person.

Recently, FLOSS interviewed Sun's own Glynn Foster to discuss OpenSolaris. Not a bad introduction to OpenSolaris if you haven't checked it out yet.

Another Sun-related FLOSS Weekly is the ZFS podcast.

I also enjoyed the interview with Jono Bacon of Canonical; it looks like there are plenty of other FLOSS episodes worth a listen.

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Jul 09

13

SuperNAP: a crazy huge, modern datacenter in Vegas

I just saw this short video talking about how Sun's cloud computing platform lives at a fascinating datacenter called the SuperNAP in Las Vegas.

Maybe you've just read that sentence and asked yourself two questions:

"fascinating" and "datacenter" in the same sentence? Dude, you've pegged the nerd-meter at 100. What happened to you?
A datacenter in Vegas? I thought datacenters try to keep machines cool, not toasty.

Well, the story about how Switch Communications keeps the SuperNAP cool is actually pretty interesting; here is their own video that talks about it. And here's a story from The Register talking about the SuperNAP as well.

And Vegas had me scratching my head as well, but it turns out that many of the big Internet carriers have endpoints in Vegas. So if you have a datacenter that sits where all those endpoints meet, you have the opportunity to offer huge bandwidth at great prices to your customers. That's what the Switch people do.

Check it out; it's actually pretty interesting reading and watching.

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Jul 09

7

Tip for filtering OpenOffice spreadsheet results in a data pilot table

Okay, this blog entry is one of the "note to self" kind; I should probably create a tag for that or something.

Here's what I'm trying to do: I have a spreadsheet with data I've gotten from a table in a web page; the table happens to be data from a twiki that our organization uses to track the projects we do. I'm looking at data trends, doing so by creating a data pilot table (in Excel land, a pivot table) of my spreadsheet data. The results are nice, but now I want to see the same results without all the entries that have the string "SSE" in the keywords column of my spreadsheet (many columns in this spreadsheet, one of them contains keywords for the projects we track).

Creating the data pilot table is easy. Creating the filter is easy (on the data pilot, click on the "Filter" button to bring up a dialog that lets you choose your filter parameters). Getting to the regular expression part is easy (in the Filter dialog, click on the button labeled "More >>" and check the box labeled "Regular expression"). But what to type in the "Value" text field? I tried typing *SSE*, but that didn't do anything.

I found the solution in this great blog about OpenOffice tips. The solution: type a period before each asterisk, i.e., .*SSE.*, instead of *SSE* as Excel does it.

It worked beautifully; whew!

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Jul 09

2

An interesting decision market software product

I recently learned about a company that's been around for a couple of years called spigit, and a fascinating piece of software they produce. If you're familiar with the term "decision market" or with the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" then you have a great headstart understanding what they do. If you haven't encountered the term or read the book, I'd explain it like this: the problem they solve is how to harness the brainpower any large company or community has in solving problems. I'll use an example to try to explain what they do.

Suppose you are running a record company and you want to pick next year's musical artists to produce. There are thousands of musical acts you could go with but you want to make the best few choices you can, because you can only fund a relatively small number out of those thousands. In your record company, you've got all kinds of people who know a lot about their piece of the music industry. So what you do is to use spigit to create a sort of a game: anybody can suggest an artist for the company to produce. The person who suggests an artist posts to the spigit collaboration site with whatever info she wants to post that will get people to vote yes on that artist. Other people can vote yes or no on that artist; they can post additional information about that artist (maybe a reason why to support or not support that artist). Anybody can participate; you end up getting a wide variety of opinions from all around the company, ultimately ending up in a ranked list of artists that the company can produce.

In the meantime, people are voting on artists but also on the opinions and suggestions of other employees, so that employees build up a reputation within spigit. The higher your reputation, the more your votes tend to count. Reputation can go up or down; you can build up your reputation but you can also ruin it.

There's a lot more to spigit, but this is the basic idea. The application does a nice job of combining current web 2.0 kinds of technologies and adding the concept of prediction / decision markets. It's worth checking out if you want to make the best use of the collective intelligence of a community of people.

It looks like there are some open source prediction market packages as well; I'll have to check those out and see what they can do compared with spigit.

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May 09

21

Compiling ffmpeg on OpenSolaris

Here's something I don't understand: I'm trying to compile the open source program "ffmpeg", useful for transcoding from one kind of movie file and video encoding format to another, plus a whole big bag-o-tricks.

So I download the source code:

svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

Then I go into the ffmpeg source directory and type "./configure". It fails, reporting:

check_ld
check_cc
BEGIN /tmp/ffconf.XXRJaOkG.c
    1   #include <signal.h>
    2   static void sighandler(int sig){
    3       raise(SIGTERM);
    4   }
    5   int main(void){
    6       signal(SIGILL, sighandler);
    7       signal(SIGFPE, sighandler);
    8       signal(SIGSEGV, sighandler);
    9   #ifdef SIGBUS
   10       signal(SIGBUS, sighandler);
   11   #endif
   12       {     volatile int i=0;
   13       __asm__ volatile (
   14           "xorl %%ebp, %%ebp"
   15       ::: "%ebp");
   16       return i; }
   17   }
END /tmp/ffconf.XXRJaOkG.c
gcc -D_ISOC99_SOURCE -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112 -std=c99
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D__EXTENSIONS__
-fomit-frame-pointer -c -o /tmp/ffconf.XXYJaalG.o
/tmp/ffconf.XXRJaOkG.c
gcc -o /tmp/ffconf.XXTJaWkG /tmp/ffconf.XXYJaalG.o
./configure: line 663: 16530: Terminated

I can't tell why it fails even making a Makefile, but after scanning the web for a while, I find a suggestion that says "use bash as your shell instead of whatever shell you were using." I had been using tcsh, then tried ksh, then tried sh, all with the same error result.

So then I try "bash configure". What do you know? It created a Makefile just fine.

Now why is that? Can somebody help me out here? Because I don't know why the choice of a shell would make the configure script succeed or fail. And that seems bad for the other shells available on OpenSolaris.

The app seems to compile, mostly. Next: see how much of the app got compiled and how much of it runs.

Why am I doing this? Because it's part of "pyTiVo", which I'd like to get running on my OpenSolaris home media server, so that I can back up the TiVo's content onto this nice, ZFS-enabled server. I'll update my progress here.

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May 09

12

Note to self: installing OpenSolaris packages from the SourceJuicer

The SourceJuicer is a tool in OpenSolaris meant to simplify the process of getting apps onto OpenSolaris. The tool works by taking a file specifying the contents of the package to be installed (called a "spec file"); this includes information on where to fetch the source code for the application package, directions on how to build from source, then where to install the resulting app.

Ultimately, packages built using SourceJuicer will be reviewed and voted into the "/contrib" repository, a repo for third-party applications not necessarily part of the OpenSolaris core distribution. SourceJuicer puts the packages it builds into a repo called "/pending"; to test these apps, you need to tell the package manager where the /pending repository is.

I want to take my OpenSolaris 2008.11 distribution and play with some of the new packages in /pending. For example, I want to try the Azureus (now called Vuze) BitTorrent Java application which somebody just made available on OpenSolaris. To do so, I need to do the following steps:

Add the SourceJuicer "/pending" repo to the list of repo's known to the package manager:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://jucr.opensolaris.org/pending jucrpending

Now I can install the package I want (in this case, "vuze", the name of the Azureus/Vuze application):
```
$ pfexec pkg install vuze
```

Simple as that.

I can also add this package repo and install the package via the graphical "Package Manager" interface, available via the menu choice System -> Administration -> Package Manager. Once the Package Manager is launched, I choose the menu choice "Settings -> Manage Repositories..." to add the SourceJuicer pending repo.

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Apr 09

29

Coolest use I've seen yet for VirtualBox

Palm's new WebOS running the new Pre phone emulator inside VirtualBox, running on Mac OS X, courtesy of Engadget.

Coooooooooooool.

Apr 09

27

How to push a simple Drupal web site from test to production

As I'm learning how to use Drupal for creating and deploying web sites, I'm keeping track of it in blog entries.

The way I work: I do my development on a virtualized environment: I run OpenSolaris as a guest OS under VirtualBox; that way, I can easily blow away my development/test environment or send it to other machines running VirtualBox. Then, I install the WebStack (PHP, Apache web server, MySQL), then I install Drupal using the instructions on the drupal.org web site.

Once I get my test Drupal site working, I follow these instructions to deploy to an actual production server. It makes the develop-test-deploy cycle pretty easy, and I can develop and test pretty much anywhere.

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Posted at 03:47PM Apr 27, 2009 by drapeau in General | Comments[0] | Permalink | Tags: bsc5years drupal open opensolaris oss source transcode vbox virtualbox virtualization webstack | | | |

Things on my mind. George Drapeau's Weblog

Some interesting reading about VMWare's acquisition of SpringSource

Using ZFS Rollback and VirtualBox for Development

My Annual Drum Corps Nerdfest Announcement

Podcasts I'm currently listening to

Livecasting from OSCON 2009

Links from Day One of the Community Leadership Summit

Snapcasting the Sun Stockholders Meeting

A podcast about open source: FLOSS Weekly

SuperNAP: a crazy huge, modern datacenter in Vegas

Tip for filtering OpenOffice spreadsheet results in a data pilot table

An interesting decision market software product

Compiling ffmpeg on OpenSolaris

Note to self: installing OpenSolaris packages from the SourceJuicer

Coolest use I've seen yet for VirtualBox

How to push a simple Drupal web site from test to production

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