Random footnotes of Engineering

It seems that Ally has a bit of the daredevil in him. It seems that anything that involves a steering wheel or a swing are the only things that will sate him (that or some danger related activity). I guess when he gets a little bigger I'll take him along to the climbing gym. He seems to enjoy standing up on the high, narrow window sill (I'm actually there to watch him, no Michael Jackson shennanigans going on about holding my son out a window).

Whenever we head to the park Alasdair heads straight for the swings and wants to pushed for hours (well not quite, but a long time). If I attempt to take him out he screams like I'm poking him with a sharp stick. Sometimes I can distract him with a wheel:

  

However, what really gets him going is driving the car. Whenever we head down he heads straight to the driver's side door. He seems to know where everything is, so far he hasn't figured out where the keys go, it's probably only a matter of time ;-)

You are right if you think that this is just a gratuitous attempt to put up photos of my son because I think he's awesome.

OpenSolaris 2008.11 is available right now. There has been tremendous work by the OpenSolaris Team to get this ready and usable. I use OpenSolaris everyday on my laptop. I definitely come across a few growing pains (see my blog), but there is an amazing rate of improvement. This makes Solaris look and feel like a modern development Operating System.

There are a definite bunch of changes and improvement to the core OS. COMSTAR is now shipping as part of the core OpenSolaris. There are several highlights from the storage community:

• COMSTAR and Fiber Channel target support
  
• ZIL + L2ARC support for ZFS (support for separate read and write caches especially to utilise FLASH/SSD)
  
• NPIV (virtualisation of FC ports)
  
• MMS (Media Management System)
  
• Multipathing for Tape
  
• Storage FMA
  
• NFS over RDMA
  
• CIFS significant performance improvement over 2008.05
  

We also created a few meta-packages for storage:

• NAS
  
• All storage packages
  

I strongly encourage everyone to go and check it out. The CD can be run as a live CD so you don't need to futz around with your disk to try it.

This looks very cool. I have to see if there is a way for me to get a hold of this to poke and play with!

Recently I was in Baltimore for a few days for the PASIG [Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group] conference. This is a conference that is on roughly every 6 months. I was fortunate to visit the Paris in November last year for the conference. Admittedly in Paris there was a metro strike so I was pretty much limited to hanging around the hotel. However, we were right next to the Eiffel Tower and it definitely looked pretty good at night. Most nights were spent helping debug the upcoming 1.1 release for Honeycomb though.

PASIG in Baltimore was pretty much a fly in and fly out for me. The plan had been to meet and discuss repository architectures. James Simon presented a proposal. Unfortunately I wasn't able to see his presentation, but after I arrived we did stay up till 2am discussing it and it's implications. There is a lot of interest in the future of Object Oriented research, there are a collection of folks from PASIG who are looking into where to go next. One of the things that came out of this was a desire to look more carefully at Celeste.

I spent a bunch of time talking to some of the Honeycomb early adopters about what their needs are. I also continued to learn more about about Fedora, DSpace, Eprints and now IRODs. It seems that you can teach an old kernel dog new tricks. I still have to work on being an old, crotchety Unix dude though.

I came across Life With Solaris just the other day. It has a lot of the video applications that you might have grown to expect from an OS. Note that using these may violate laws or several other things depending on your location, so you need to use at your own risk.

It was pretty simple to add this to my OpenSolaris package repositories:

pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp:10000/ video

and now I can access all their goodness. With that done I could do:

pfexec pkg install LWSvlc
pfexec pkg install LWSlibdvdcss


Now I can play DVDs in OpenSolaris. This is more significant than it sounds. A while back my dvd player broke in my laptop. Sony did a good job replacing it, but it was replaced with a Matshita drive (UJ-852S). And it seems that this has been impervious to my attempts to play DVDs on anything except windows. It turns out OpenSolaris is the winner in getting DVDs to play!

A few weeks ago I was in Austin for SC08. There were a number of things going on. Prior to the main event Sun organised a HPC consortium at the Airport Hilton. We managed to get a trip out to TACC, although I had to film a bunch of the presentations which meant I didn't get to view the TACC setup.

There was also a SAMQFS BOF session associated with the HPC consortium. It was really interesting to see how enthusiastic the customer base is for SAMQ. Harriet gave an overview of SAMQ 5.0 and I gave a presentation of COMSTAR and iSCSI/iSER which provides essentially a storage transport layer for SAMQ 5.0. I also had to film the event. As it turns out the tape ran out in the middle of me speaking :-/ (which I didn't notice), so I won't have to subject you to yet more video of myself.

We also had a student event that we organised at the Karma Lounge. We had a bunch of students, live music, ipods, macbooks and the occasional beverage. Much fun was had by all. Deirdre did an awesome job organising the event.

It was then on to the main event, SC08. There was a lot going on here. I spent some time walking the vendor hall, it was massive. However, I unfortunately had work to do. Dominic and I were manning the Open Storage Bar. This sounds very cool, but it really is a pub with no beer. We'd set up a demo for SAMQ 5.0 using VMWare. However, there was a lot of talk about the Unified Storage appliance with demos too. Several other folks had the VMWare image running to demo the analytics. So I presented that and talked a lot about the Hybrid Storage Pool concept and flash in general.

SC08 kept going for the rest of the week, but I had to hit the road to PASIG in Baltimore, I'll put a post up soon about what was going on there.

A while back I gave a webinar talking about Open Storage to an education group. The replay is available

It's a fairly general overview of Open Storage, the slides are here if you're interested.

In my travels of late Celeste has come up under several different circumstances. I'm going to attempt to collect a few details in a place to point people at and say how cool it is here, but in the end point you at the project.

Celeste is essentially a peer-to-peer storage system. It is highly-available and scalable due to it's peer-to-peer nature. It's often compared to Honeycomb, but there are some substantial differences. Honeycomb was targeted specifically at fixed-content storage. It's reliability was built around the use of the Reed-Solomon encoding. And there was a close coupling of data and metadata in Honeycomb (providing the same failure characteristics for both).

Celeste does split an 'object' into blocks which get dispersed into the Celeste storage 'cloud'. It is possible to specify the number of copies of each object that is stored in the system. Celeste is also an application on top of the Beehive framework, but I need to spend a bunch more time looking into that before I understand how these interrelate.

There's a good article talking to Glenn Scott about Celeste which goes into a lot more details than I've mentioned above.

My immediate family is fairly dispersed around the world. We live on three different continents. So recently we decided to simplify matters we would do Kris Kindle for the adults (grandkids clearly have a special exemption). My parents are the controllers in this situation. It turns out this year they had my grandmother pick the names out of a hat and stuff them in envelopes to post to the multitude of remote Buckinghams. I think my sister even had some check that it all was ok.

Clearly if you've spent any time reading my blog you'll have got the impression that I'm a geek (if not a nerd). So I decided that I should write some code to make this all simple. I decided to write a Perl script (Perl, because I'm lazy) that takes a list of names and email addresses and uses a simple combination of random numbers and backtracking to send emails to the involved folks telling them who they need to buy a present for.

Now it looks like next year it will be a much simpler task to get this going and the only problem will be trying to think of an appropriate gift for your Kris Kindle.