Sunday March 22, 2009

[ot] Murder Monlogues @ The Teachers Club
A little bit of promotion, a friend of mine Jane Mulcahy has a new play running in Dublin during April and May, Murder Monologues @ The Teachers Club. If your in Dublin during that time its worth checking out.

Tuesday March 03, 2009

[ot] St Patrick's Festival Photo Competition and Pixie Party
So as you might imagine St. Patricks Day is a bit of an event here in Dublin, and this year the good folks over at Pix.ie are running a super photography competition, with some superb extras for the photoblogging community, namely a chance to get one of two gold passes to the this years St. Patricks Day Parade.

Monday January 26, 2009

Connector/J 5.0 to 5.1 gotcha
I moved a dev environment a little while back, and one of the gotchas I hit was a minor change between MySQL Connector/J 5.0 and 5.1. The support for select x as y type syntax is not actually valid under the jdbc api, but its something I tend to use a lot in various places. In 5.1 its been disabled by default. Anyway the work around is quite easy, although as I was moving envs (revved netbeans, mysql, OpenSolaris, connector j, glassfish, jmaki and a bunch of other things at the same time, call it optimism) I checked god knows how many other things first. Just add

useOldAliasMetadataBehavior=true

to your jdbc connection string and select as to your hearts content.
(2009-01-26 07:53:54.0) Permalink

Saturday December 20, 2008

A Welcome Return For Science
Like a lot of people I have been waiting to see who Obama was going to nominate for his science candidates, articles are starting to pop up in various [politco] places [yahoo], but thankfully the news is good, very good. Jane Lubcheno as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and John Holdren as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Scientific rather political appointments show vision, for those of us outside the US we can't wait to see the US take the leadership role it needs to take on climate change.

But every change counts - here in Ireland they have an often derided, but very effective government program The Power Of One which covers the most simple ways to effect change, turn of that light, plug out the tv rather than leave it on stand by, you know all of those simple things.

Business can make changes as well, and we have been leading the way here in Sun for several years with our continuous long term investment in Eco Innovation ranging from our CoolThreads Servers, to our innovative Suite of ECO Services services along with our world leading virtualization software such as VirtualBox and the performance analysis tools available in OpenSolaris which allow you to get the most of your investments. Save money, help your business and save the environment - sounds good to me. With the political will that Obama is putting behind the environment the momentum is now truely there, and everyone, all around the globe, benefits.
(2008-12-20 05:59:05.0) Permalink

Wednesday September 03, 2008

Amazons EBS
Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) has a nice post about Amazons Elastic Block Store. Well worth a read. Combined with the recently launched OpenSolaris AMI Catalogs this could be really interesting.

And into the mix you can add our developer and support services for OpenSolaris and MySQL - what more could you ask for if EC2 is in your plans.
(2008-09-03 06:46:46.0) Permalink

Tuesday July 29, 2008

Cool Cuil & Privacy
Have you seen Cuil yet? Its a new search engine founded by some ex Google folks among others. The area that has really grabbed my attention is their privacy policy, my favourite part being

when you search with Cuil, we do not collect any personally identifiable information, period. We have no idea who sends queries: not by name, not by IP address, and not by cookies (more on this later). Your search history is your business, not ours.

Music to my ears, and Cuil is now my default search engine on the privacy basis alone. The Irish connection does of course help :).
(2008-07-29 03:43:56.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Wednesday July 02, 2008

The LinkedIn Cloud
An interesting blog which passed over my desk recently on Linked In's architecture. Well worth a read. Solaris, Java & MySQL - seems like the perfect software stack to me ;).
(2008-07-02 03:19:21.0) Permalink

Wednesday January 23, 2008

HTML 5 Draft Spec
Just noted that w3 sent out a press release about HTML 5 yesterday. The draft spec is well worth a look if you are in any way interested in the direction of HTML 5.
(2008-01-23 07:00:46.0) Permalink

Tuesday December 04, 2007

Easing control....

APOC, A Point of Control, has just been opensourced. Alberto Ruiz has posted a blog with all the details. Very cool. Take a look at the project website over on FreeDesktop for more details.
(2007-12-04 08:34:47.0) Permalink

Thursday November 01, 2007

Swapping communities, but still the same community
Among the many great reasons for working in Sun, the ability to forge your own career while working with incredibly talented people has got to be the single best one I can think of. Over the years I have had the privilege of working with some of the most talented engineers on the planet, who are creating some of the most innovative products on the market, from Suns incredible hardware platforms such as the T5220, industry redefining storage platforms such as the x4500, to cutting edge innovations in Solaris and our leading middleware stack the Java Enterprise System.

However my time as a direct paid up member of the more hardcore side of the engineering community has drawn to a close. A few months back I decided that it was time to learn about different areas of Sun's business, and started to keep an eye out for any relevant internal opportunities. This being Sun an awful lot of opportunities exist (go on, take a look), and a role that matched everything that I was looking for, and more, came up. I applied, went through the process and started in my new role at the start of October.

So what are you doing now I hear you ask. I am now working within our Global Sales Organisation for a team in Services Marketing, which works with the both our internal sales and marketing communities and our larger partner community. The role in itself has quite a large technical aspect, but with a primary focus on direct day to day business problems and longer term business processes and strategy. As you might have guessed its the business side of the equation that I am focused on expanding. I am just beginning to get my bearings in this new role, and there is an awful lot to learn, but thats the challenge that I decided to take on, and its a challenge that I am looking forward to embracing.

However in many ways this new job is almost identical to my previous role. I am working with a group of incredibly talented individuals, there is a community of users whom we interact with, there are internal and external customers and there is an overarching goal of delivering the best possible service, product or solution to both our existing, and potential, customers - the same people that make up the community we work with, and work for, every day. So really the only part I am swapping is the immediate team I work with, other than that the end goal, and the overall community remains the same.

And speaking of communities, one that I will still be active in is the OpenSolaris community. If you haven't heard yet the folks in the Indiana project released their first OpenSolaris Developer Preview last night. Go forth, download and participate - I know I will.

(2007-11-01 12:16:24.0) Permalink

Tuesday May 22, 2007

[ot] Voting in the Irish General Election....
Very off topic for a Sun blog, but the Irish General election is on Thursday, and personally I think everyone should use their vote - spoil it if needs be, but at least use it. I think I've given a good reason as to why you should vote over on my personal blog.
(2007-05-22 06:51:38.0) Permalink

Tuesday November 21, 2006

The Network Truly Is The Computer
One of the slightly stranger highlights of each year for me is reading The World In <insert year here> from The Economist. An interesting article this year, from a tech standpoint, is from the pen of Eric Schmidt, in which he talks about the future of the web, and notably mentions that the network truly is the computer. You can take the man from Sun...... ;).
(2006-11-21 10:09:39.0) Permalink

Monday November 13, 2006

OpenSource Java
Probably the biggest thing to happen in Sun's history since the opensourcing of the most innovative operating system on the planet, OpenSolaris, Java is being opensourced. Check out Mark Reinhold's (J2SE Chief Engineer) post, James Goslings post about GPLv2, and tune in at 9:30 PST to the webcast.

Think about it, you can now use an open source Framework (J2EE), on an open source Operating System (OpenSolaris), with an opensource application server (Glassfish) using an open source database (PostgreSQL) running on an open source processor (Ultrasparc T1). You can of course write your documentation up in an open source WordProcessor (OpenOffice) and write your application in an open source IDE (Netbeans). Now whats that about Sun not "getting" opensource?

Thursday August 31, 2006

FCODE map-in doesn't match decoded register type error
We are currently setting up a new rig on a Sun Fire T2000, and after adding storage (2 x Sun StorageTek 3510 FC Array) connected via a QLogic FC-AL card we (well the gaffer, who is quite rightly pedantic about such things, noticed it first) noticed a rather strange error on the console during reboots.

WARNING: /pci@7c0: FCODE map-in doesn't match decoded register type; Requested: memory, Decoded: memory

To check your firmware use luxadm, on our box we got

luxadm fcode_download -p

  Found Path to 0 FC100/S Cards
  Complete

  Found Path to 2 FC100/P, ISP2200, ISP23xx Devices

  Opening Device: /devices/pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0,2/SUNW,qlc@1,1/fp@0,0:devctl
  Detected FCode Version:       ISP2312 FC-AL Host Adapter Driver: 1.13.08 04/10/02

  Opening Device: /devices/pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@1/pci@0,2/SUNW,qlc@1/fp@0,0:devctl
  Detected FCode Version:       ISP2312 FC-AL Host Adapter Driver: 1.13.08 04/10/02
  Complete

  Found Path to 0 JNI1560 Devices.
  Complete

  Found Path to 0 Emulex Devices.
  Complete

Tuesday May 16, 2006

apt-get install sun-java5-jre
I think the title says it all. Take a look at the JDK Distros Project for more details. This is cool, very cool, incredibly cool (okay I'll stop). I'm guessing it will only be a matter of days before the Nextenta folks have this available as well.
(2006-05-16 15:27:58.0) Permalink