Friday August 27, 2004

LowTek (or computer generated noise)

LowTek are an extremely hardcore industrial/hard dance act from Dublin, containing one half of the now defunct D:V:Ant, signed to Industrial Strength Records. Ear splitting stuff ala Ultraviolence, The Horrorist etc. Not for the faint of heart, but really good if you like this kind of stuff. You can download some LowTek tunes at thorhammer.org.

You never know, half of LowTek maybe DJ'ing at Deaf '04 [Dublin Electronic Arts Festival].
(2004-08-27 07:44:20.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Wednesday August 25, 2004

s2io 10gb nic for Solaris

V. cool, the driver for s2io's XFrame 10gb nic will be integrated into Solaris. Stories here [tgc.com] and here [eweek.com].
(2004-08-25 03:26:35.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Sunday August 22, 2004

... and to catch up with bsc

So I've been away for a few days, sampling fine Belgian beer and catching up with old friends, and it being a Sunday evening it was decided that further indulgence was unnecesserary (well the folks I'm staying with are working in a few hours time and now asleep, I'm flying home tomorrow) so I took some time to look at what had been coming up on bsc.

First up, Eric Schrock has an excellent intro to kernel debugging with kmdb. Seeing as most folks rarely get passed ::cpuinfo and $c this is a wonderful example of how powerful mdb is.

The latest release of Solaris Express is all over the blogs, as usual Alan Coopersmith and Alan Hargreaves have the best write ups. dtrace -c is available here, and its amazingly usefull. Seriously go download and play with this release. Its free, and its available on x86.

Eric Boutilier has a post about a new, unaffiliated with Sun, user site mysolaris.org. This looks interesting, and very promising.

Tim Foster has the final part of his series on how to write a TM system (admitably before I went on holidays, but I missed it along the way). If you don't know anything about automatic translation (or think its just a matter of doing a few greps and sed's) read this. And even if you do, read anyway ;).

(2004-08-22 15:29:24.0) Permalink

Friday August 13, 2004

v20z supercomputing grid

Just spotted this a few minutes ago, Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory is going to run a grid of 230 v20z's using Solaris x86 and Grid Engine. Get the full story over at internetnews.com and the offical press release from INEL.

(2004-08-13 10:55:11.0) Permalink

Ye olde holiday season....

So its coming up on holiday time, heading off on Tuesday for a few days. One of the really nice things about living in Ireland is the fact there are about thirty different cultures within three hours flight time of Dublin, and a multitude of cheap fairs to get you there.

So next week its not to far, over to Amsterdam for a few days, on to Brugge and then down to visit a friend in Brussels (beer recommendations gladly accepted). Got to admit I'm looking forward to it. Photos to come ;).

Actually on a different, photo related, note I have a few pictures sitting up at my old college site if you fancy wasting some time browsing photos without people.
(2004-08-13 06:02:18.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday August 09, 2004

Slamd - Distributed Load Generation Engine

Slamd is a distributed load generation engine which has been developed internally in Sun, and is now available externally at slamd.com. To put it simply this is the dogs danglies of generic load generation engines.

Primarily designed for use on LDAP products such as the Sun Java System Directory Server (available as part of the Java Enterprise System), it can also be used against a multitude of other applications, and includes its own scripting engine etc.

I have been using Slamd internally for a while now, working on some stuff with Directory Server on amd64 hardware (screams along, and with stuff like fire engine in S10 its just getting faster). Over the next few weeks I'll post (as I get time) a few entries around using slamd.

(2004-08-09 10:09:19.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Friday August 06, 2004

Event Completion Framework

Interesting article on the event completion framework over on developers.sun.com, also linked at OSNews.

While your there take a look at some of the other Tech Tips as well, lots of interesting stuff.

(2004-08-06 05:20:33.0) Permalink

Thursday August 05, 2004

TV On The Radio

I've been meaning to put up some stuff about music for a while, its not all air guitar. So sitting at home on a Weds evening (and finally posting on a thursday afternoon) I figured lets write up something. Anyway the tunes of the moment, two albums I only finally managed to get around to buying a few weeks ago, and definately the most played among my current crop of audio therapy, are

   o Tv On The Radio - Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes
   o Sonic Youth - Nurse

Tv On The Radio's Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes is one of the best albums that I've heard this year, not sure how to describe it, just genuinely good. A few people that I've talked to reckon its a bit overrated, but I really can see why the critics love it. I'm sure the fact that its released on this side of the atlantic on 4ad records and from what I can see on Touch & Go records stateside could only be a good indication ;).

Sonic Youth's Nurse is a nice simple back to basics Sonic Youth album, even with (or perhaps despite) the influence of Jim O'Rourke (of The High Llamas fame) it hasn't gone off into some of the more experimental territory that they have been occupying over recent years. Enjoyable. (I got stung with the Muzikaj Perspektivoj project that Sonic Youth and Jim O'Rourke did a few years ago, expensive import for something altogether not very good)

As for other things, if by some chance you happen to be in Dublin this evening ( Thurs 5th) head to Whelans to see God Is An Astronaut. One of the more interesting bands emerging out of Ireland at the moment. Visuals, loops, distortion and lots more
(2004-08-05 05:46:28.0) Permalink

Wednesday August 04, 2004

Janus - Run Linux Apps on Solaris

sun.com cover story at the moment is about Janus, a new piece of functionality for running Linux apps on Solaris. This software is really, really, cool. You can use the scalability of Solaris to run Linux apps. DTrace the apps etc. Janus will be available in one of the upcoming releases of Solaris Express.

[update]
/. seems to have picked up on this. Rather than listen to the usual comments about Solaris, why not just download the latest beta of s10 and try Solaris on x86 out for yourself ;).
(2004-08-04 02:36:05.0) Permalink Comments [5]

Tuesday August 03, 2004

Oracle 10g install on Solaris 10 workaround

Quick work around for installing Oracle 10g on Solaris 10 (in our case on a v20z).

After creating your staging area you run the Oracle installer and get an error similar to the following

$ ./runInstaller    
Starting Oracle Universal Installer...

Checking installer requirements...

Checking operating system version: must be 5.6, 5.7, 5.8 or 5.9.    Actual 5.10
                                      Failed <<<<

To work around this you need to edit the oraparam.ini file, in our case this is /export/ora/Disk1/install/oraparam.ini.
Edit the section

[Certified Versions]
#You can customise error message shown for failure through CERTIFIED_VERSION_FAI
LURE_MESSAGE
Solaris=5.6,5.7,5.8,5.9

[Certified Versions]
#You can customise error message shown for failure through CERTIFIED_VERSION_FAI
LURE_MESSAGE
Solaris=5.6,5.7,5.8,5.9,5.10

And thats it, just run through your install as normal.
(2004-08-03 03:54:31.0) Permalink Comments [1]