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Hidden Gems

Its always nice when developers try to sneak in hidden gems into production code! 

Here is a snippet of the banner before the ok prompt.

Glendale, The Best Little Blade in the World, No Keyboard
Copyright 2007 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.

Posted at 06:45PM Sep 07, 2007 by Eric Shobe in Code  |  Comments[1]

Niagara II vs Niagara I OR UltraSparc T2 vs UltraSparc T1

So Im sure everyone, well maybe not "everyone", but a lot of people have heard the announcement  of the new UltraSparc T2 (Niagara II) processor.
I currently am working with this Processor on a secret new platform. I've also worked with the UltraSparc T1 (Niagara I) on this system (T6300), codenamed St. Paul.  (Am I allowed to post about system codenames!?).  Anyways, the St. Paul, err the T6300 hosts the Niagara I chip.  So whats the point of this post. 

Well the Niagara II chip boasts "Unprecedented Throughput" and people have asked me how does the Niagara II chip compare to the Niagara I chip.  Well , the answer is a LOT better, but I wanted some feedback of applications readers might use to test such "throughput", mention, point, suggest some tests for me to run and I will try to get some numbers in my spare time to really show the performance increase. 

So its up to you readers!

 As a sidenote, so I was talking about system codenames and there always seemed to me this secrecy about the codenames...well only for  systems not released yet, but if you dig, you can find..take for example this code snippet at opensolaris

# add stpaul links to individual components
#
s none usr/platform/SUNW,Sun-Blade-T6300/lib/.......

Posted at 09:45PM Aug 08, 2007 by Eric Shobe in Code  |  Comments[4]

sunGrab - tool to convert cd's to mp3's

Ok...so I've been working on a mp3 burner w/ a GUI, you will see this in the future (called sunBurn)
SunBurn will support mp3 burning to cd recorder AND cd ripping.

This is in the future though and for right now I will share this script that I wrote to grab cd tracks from your cd player.....

This script "should" work on linux and solaris, but I'm not sure...I've only tested it on Solaris....

Without further adieu I present to you sunGrab, download it here.

PURPOSE:  To convert cd-audio tracks to mp3's

[root@unknown:] # ./sunGrab -h
sunGrab: A tool to convert your cd's to mp3's
  Usage: sunGrab [OPTIONS]

  Command line OPTIONS:
  -l, --lame            path to lame codec
  -c, --cdda2           wavpath to cdda2wav binary
  -t, --temp            directory to store mp3's
  -vbr                  choose this to use Variable encoding (I prefer)
  -b, --bitrate         bitrate (options are 96 112 128 160 192 224 256 320)
  -d, --device          device to rip from (use cdda2wav --scanbus to find (1,0,0)
  -h, --help            display this help and exit
  -v, --version         display this version and exit

  Examples:
  sunGrab -l=/opt/csw/bin/lame -c=/opt/csw/bin/cdda2wav -t=/tmp -d=1,0,0 -bitrate=320
  sunGrab -l=/opt/csw/bin/lame -c=/opt/csw/bin/cdda2wav -t=/tmp -d=1,0,0 -vbr
  sunGrab   -- NOTE*- any option can be left blank, and it will prompt you and autodetect in most cases

Looks pretty self explanatory, one thing to note, is that if you leave any or ALL options blank, this script will prompt you for your answers and try to autodetect most options...so the best thing (if you don't know what your doing) is to just call ./sunGrab.

 soon sunGrab will be integrated into sunBurn. so for now..let this screenshot do the justice for sunBurn.

By the way, sunGrab probably (most likely) have bugs...so if you find any problems, let me know and I will update.
BTW - its LGPL.

here are some ways i use it....

  sunGrab -l=/opt/csw/bin/lame -c=/opt/csw/bin/cdda2wav -t=/tmp -d=1,0,0 -bitrate=320
  sunGrab -l=/opt/csw/bin/lame -c=/opt/csw/bin/cdda2wav -t=/tmp -d=1,0,0 -vbr
  sunGrab (I like this option b/c it will ask me for all my input...and autodectect)
 

Dependicies:

    lame - http://www.blastwave.org/packages.php/lame or http://lame.sourceforge.net/index.php
    cdda2wav -- This utility is part of cdrtools.  The source  for  cdrtools is available in the SUNWmkcdS package.
    perl - Its a perl script......

Posted at 10:28PM Jun 19, 2007 by Eric Shobe in Code  |  Comments[1]