Friday November 16, 2007

Almost, but not quite, a whole year with nothing to say

Actually, I probably had loads to say, but I just haven't said it here...

I changed projects back in June and I'm now the performance lead on the xVM project. This is proving to be both fun and challenging, so I think I'd say it was the right move.

I'm at the Xen Summit in Santa Clara, California this week and I'm enjoying myself. It's good to meet members of the team in real life, rather than over the phone, and I've heard many interesting presentation about Xen.

(2007-11-16 08:03:30.0) Permalink

Friday December 08, 2006

Threadbare gimmick

I'm short of things to say. In the absence of any real content, I've updated my page so that you can see what music I'm listening to.

The chart is courtesy of last.fm.

(2006-12-08 08:54:58.0) Permalink

Friday September 22, 2006

EuroOSCON - I'm done

In my last entry I had written that I was looking forward to attending the OpenSolaris BOF. Unfortunately, the attendance was a little disappointing. For those who had open enough minds to attend, we had an interesting and lively discussion about various Solaris features: SMF, Zones, ZFS, DTrace, ...

If only more of the conference attendees had open enough minds to think about other solutions to problems rather than just assuming that Linux is always the answer. I'm almost motivated to start a new Linux distro to help with all these problematic "nails". I'd like to call it Linux Hammer...

(For those of you who aren't familiar with the quote: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." Abraham Maslow.)

In other news...

It's been pointed out to me that I can be very dour. In celebration of that fact, here are a few of the things that I hate about conferences.

• People who are so full of themselves that they can't wait to ask questions and interrupt the speakers.
• People who don't really have a question, but say something pointless so that everyone else can "admire" their cleverness.
• Speakers with very thinly disguised axes to grind.
• People who go from conference to conference, year after year repeating the same old crap that no-one else believes or cares about.
• Laptop envy
• People who follow Queen Elizabeth the First's bathing regime a little too carefully

I'm sure there's a lot more, but I'm trying to stay the right side of the dour/bitter divide and I'm getting close to crossing over. If anyone reads this and would like to contribute their own pet hates, feel free to add them as comments. The best ones will get no prizes whatsoever, but the authors can bask in whatever glory they feel they may have earned with their cleverness! :D

(2006-09-22 07:00:08.0) Permalink Comments [4]

Wednesday September 20, 2006

EuroOSCON - Day 2

OpenSolaris has a stall in the DotOrg Pavillion today and so the first order of business has been to work out which sessions I and my fellow OpenSolaris attendees want to attend so that we can work out a stand rota. That was surprisingly easy, since most people seemed to be very happy to spend time on the stand.

Democracy: A Hacker's Guide

This talk was presented by the Director of MySociety and I was interested to find out what kinds of tools they had created for re-formatting text for improved presentation on the web.

It was an interesting talk but the emphasis was not on the tools, but on the different processes and website that MySociety have produced. Interesting, but not for the reasons I expected and not terribly relevant.

I just spent some time on the stand and interest is high. We've given away about 30 developer kits and the general attitude of people stopping to chat with us is good. People are having trouble getting Nexenta to boot though as it's quite slow and not everyone has the patience to wait for it.

The Secret Sauce of Robust Developer Communities

This talk claims to provide the secret recipe for building open source communities...

Developer network maturity levels are described in the presentation. This is a useful formalism for identifying what you might need to do to improve collaboration and your community.

The examples of ebay, BEA and their developer community were provided.

Afternoon Keynotes

An interesting pair of keynotes. The first addressed the question of "Why does Second Life achieve such high levels, compared to other projects, of community participation?" No really clear answers, but I think the main conclusion was that a motivated community will contribute. The second was given by the CEO of MySQL and discussed the move of MySQL from being a European company to one based in Silicon Valley. It was lively and informative, the main reason for the move being that in general Americans encourage and reward the entrepeneurial spirit, whereas Europeans don't. A major laugh was the reward for the comment that a Finn saying "That's ok" is equivalent to an American saying "That's fantastic".

Open Source and Freedom: Why Open Standards Are Crucial to Protecting Your Linux Investment

Interestingly, this talk actually addresses the notion that "Open Standards" are more important to user technology choices than "Open Source". This is an argument that Sun has made for many years, at least since the publication of the NFS standard and arguably as far back as when the company was founded.

Unfortunately, the presenter seems locked into the idea that Linux is the only mechanism for promoting "Open Standards" which is a self-defeating view in my opinion. If an Operating System standard is truly "Open", then surely there is scope for competing in the marketplace for all vendors, not just those who favour Linux.

On the whole, I agreed with the message that standards are important, but I disagreed with many of the conclusions that he drew from this message.

The OpenSolaris BOF will be this evening. I'm looking forward to it and hope we get some interesting conversations started.

(2006-09-20 11:35:29.0) Permalink

Tuesday September 19, 2006

EuroOSCON - Day 1

Afternoon Keynotes

The keynotes this afternoon were on the subject of Open Data and Structured Data. The presenters made strong, persuasive arguments about the importance of these elements to the applications that we would like to develop for the web.

There were some good examples: OpenStreetMap, TheyWorkForYou.

Being a MySQL Developer

I attended a talk by Lars Thalmann about his personal experience in working for a closed source company which shifted to be an open source company. I was interested in attending this talk as there were obvious parallels with the situation for Sun and Solaris and the shift to OpenSolaris.

MySQL is a company of about 350 people, with contributors based in 25 countries. Lars explained that his company had originated as a research project based in Ericsson in the 1990's. At that time the goal was to develop a cluser database which could be used internally by Ericsson. This was then identified as a potential spin-off company and eventually became Alzato, which was a private company owned by Ericsson. Alzato sold the cluster database to external customers as well as supporting internal users. Alzato was purchaed by MySQL and the software, known as NDB, was integrated into the MySQL database server product family.

I asked Lars a few questions about external contributors as this was the area I was most curious to find out about. He told me that apart from the area of storage engine contributions, most contributions are at the level of bugfixes. More significant contributions have been made by former MySQL employees who have left the company and one major contribution was made by a developer who is now employed by MySQL. Many of the processes and procedures which Lars adopted on joining MySQL are exactly the same as those processes and procedures which we are using for the OpenSolaris project. For example: developers must sign release forms to contribute code, certain bug data is still held privately by MySQL AB and not shared with the wider development community.

Open Usability

Usability is an important part of the development of OSS. I can't honestly say I paid too much attention to this talk as I was just too tired and was busy writing up the MySQL session and thinking about other things.

Making It Work: How to Build a Successful Open Source Project

How to build an open source project. This should be interesting, especially since it's based around the openoffice.org project. Presented by a CollabNet employee.

OpenSolaris got a mention as an example of a sponsored project.

The list of things which Open Source projects should be was informative and, in my opinion, accurate. Right licence, Neutral environment, Transparent governance and processes, etc... See the slides for the full list. Interestingly a member of the audience said that he had practically the same list of characteristics when he talked about the Debian project back in 2002.

The OpenOffice.org project documentation is supposed to be good.

(2006-09-19 08:44:56.0) Permalink

EuroOSCON 2006

I've just arrived in Brussels where I'm attending EuroOSCON 2006. So far, things are going well. I'm checked in at the hotel, the room facilities are good and I've managed to get hold of the basic necessities of conference life: tote bag, schedule and exhibitor badge.

Only two negative points so far: my first planned session, Ubuntu: Community building for Human Beings, is cancelled (or re-scheduled, I can't work that out yet) and I don't think the hotel has a pool which scuppers my plans for additional Triathlon training before this weekend's event.

I now have a clash for this afternoon. Should I be dutiful and attend the "Being a MySQL developer" all about migrating closed-source to open-source companies - surely relevant to me? Or, should I attend the "Google Data API" talk, which just looks more interesting?

Decisions, decisions....

(2006-09-19 03:41:22.0) Permalink

Monday January 16, 2006

Interesting Websites

I've been really impressed today by two websites which a friend (thanks Nichole!) led me to.

Firstly, she told me about StumbleUpon. Basically, this is a way of finding websites that are useful in categories that you are interested in. Doesn't sound very special, but it's actually really good. I find the hardest think about using the web is summoning up the enthusiasm to work through all the dreck that's out there in search of the good stuff. Basically, StumbleUpon does a lot of that work for you and the more you use it, the more useful it gets. I'm impressed.

I'm even more impressed by one of the sites that I found using StumbleUpon, Pandora. This is (possibly) the best designed website I've ever seen. I love it. It's functional and minimalist. The purpose of the site is to help you find more music that you might like. It takes it's direction from a seed band or song that you provide. The only drawback is that to use it you must live in the USA. However, this is only validated by providing a valid US Zip Code, so I don't think that will deter too many international users. I'm listenting to some great tunes as I write this. If you like music, you must try this site out.

I think the best thing about both these sites is that, although they undoubtedly are using some fairly crafty technology to achieve their goal, both sites have put a lot of effort into presentation and ease of use. That's what helps them stand out.

Could it be that I'm finally beginning to see the point of social networking sites? I mean, both these sites seem to be a lot more useful and appealing to me than the likes of flikr, delicious, orkut, friendster, etc...

(2006-01-16 12:22:11.0) Permalink Comments [4]

Wednesday December 07, 2005

Resource Pools will be SMF services

Before I left Sun I had started work on enhancements to Resource Pools to integrate them with SMF. I haven't had much time to work on this since I re-joined Sun, mainly because I now work on the OpenSolaris project and Resource Management is not my main focus. However, I was keen to complete the work as I thought it would be a very worthwhile enhancement for Solaris.

I integrated the changes yesterday and when the code becomes available you'll be able to manage Resource Pools and Dynamic Resource Pools as separate SMF services.

e.g.

bash-3.00# uname -a
SunOS trolls-b8 5.11 onnv-gate:2005-12-07 i86pc i386 i86pc
bash-3.00# svcs 'system/pool*'
STATE          STIME    FMRI
online          1:58:20 svc:/system/pools:default
online          1:58:21 svc:/system/pools/dynamic:default
bash-3.00# svcadm disable pools
bash-3.00# svcs 'system/pool*'
STATE          STIME    FMRI
disabled        2:12:34 svc:/system/pools:default
offline         2:12:36 svc:/system/pools/dynamic:default
bash-3.00# svcadm enable pools
bash-3.00# svcs 'system/pool*'
STATE          STIME    FMRI
online          2:12:48 svc:/system/pools:default
online          2:12:48 svc:/system/pools/dynamic:default
bash-3.00#

I hope it's useful

(2005-12-07 03:16:03.0) Permalink Comments [11]

Thursday October 13, 2005

Solaris 10 Talk

Last night I gave a talk* at the West Yorkshire BCS group about Solaris 10.

About 50 people attended the talk, which was more than I expected and came as a bit of a surprise. I took a quick poll before I started to talk and learned that:

• 20(ish) used Solaris on a daily basis
• 0 used Solaris 10
• 5 used Solaris 9
• (The rest) used Solaris 7/8
• 1 used Solaris 2.6

It looks like we need to do some active encouragement of our user base to upgrade!

The talk was about an hour long and seemed to be well received. It wasn't terribly technical, as I didn't think that would be appropriate for the audience, but I concentrated on introducing four main areas of Solaris 10: Resource Management (including zones), DTrace, Predictive Self Healing, Privileges. I also briefly covered other areas and quickly plugged OpenSolaris. Questions centered on: Dtrace/Resource Management performance impact, wireless drivers, installation problems and the availability of the next release.

The BCS committee told me that they thought the talk had gone well and I was personally satisfied that I'd managed to generate some interest in Solaris. I was a little disappointed that there were so few detailed technical questions. Also disappointing was the realisation that hardly anyone, even in the BCS, used a version of Solaris newer than five years old!

*Thanks to Jim Mauro for providing the bulk of the slides that I used for the talk and to Bryan Cantrill whose DTrace slides I stole and re-hashed mercilessly.

(2005-10-13 05:14:08.0) Permalink Comments [5]

Wednesday October 05, 2005

Solaris 10 in West Yorkshire

I'll be giving a talk on Solaris 10 next Wednesday (12th October) at my local British Computer Society (BCS) branch meeting. If you are in the area and want to talk about Solaris, then drop by and say hello.

You can get more details on the talk here

Update: I've managed to wangle some free t-shirts out of Sun Marketing and will be giving them away to attendees according to some arbitrary and as yet undefined criteria. Suggestions for said criteria are encouraged.

(2005-10-05 05:07:17.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday August 11, 2005

I'm back

Oh yes. I am.

(2005-08-11 09:43:39.0) Permalink Comments [7]

Sunday May 01, 2005

Goodbye Sun

I've left Sun, so if you would like to continue to read my ramblings then you should look at my personal blog. I'm not sure that there will be much on it of interest, so no change there!

Thursday January 27, 2005

Zones + Resource Management

I was perusing the Solaris Zones forum the other day and found a useful link to this document which provides examples of using various Resource Management features with Zones.

I think it's a useful document and sheds light on some of the decisions you need to make when using Zones with Resource Management.

(2005-01-27 06:05:36.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Wednesday October 27, 2004

Imperfect C++

When my life was less cluttered and I seemed to have more time to myself, I used to go cycling regularly with a group of friends in West Yorkshire. One of the group, Matthew, was a PhD student at the time and the brother-in-law of a very good friend of mine. Over time, Matthew became a friend and we used to enjoy cycling together across the hills and roads of Yorkshire.

Since that time Mathew has made several bad life choices. On finishing his PhD he pursued a career in Software Engineering, actually choosing to spend his time writing C++! He then compounded all this wrong thinking by leaving Yorkshire and emigrating to Australia, the homeland of his beautiful wife. Now he has written a book about C++.

What can I say? Such promise gone so badly wrong. ;-)

If you are unfortunate enough to have to work with C++ source for any reason, then I can only recommend that you go out and buy this book (I will declare my interest at this point and say that I did review the book.). I can't say that I agree with every sentiment in the book, but it's well written and you are sure to learn lots about C++ along the way.

I wonder whether Matthew has scored an own goal on behalf of the C++ community though. Although his book is brilliant and certainly does show many techniques which can be applied to make C++ more usable; most readers are likely to be deterred from consideration of the language due to the complexity of the techniques required.

(2004-10-27 00:43:50.0) Permalink Comments [4]

Tuesday August 31, 2004

Cycling as a metaphor for Software Development

It has been brought to my attention that my postings to date on this blog are entirely too factual and completely lacking in opinion and speculation. In fact things are so bad that if I was to post one more useful or factual article the usability of the internet would cross a "utility event horizon". Beyond this point the proportion of the internet which is accurate or useful is dangerously high¹, so high that people may actually have to believe what they read. I'm certain that's not an outcome any of us would like. I'm taking action to prevent this by publishing this whimsical piece of complete nonsense which I dreamed up when riding my bike earlier today.

Cycling is like developing software. Especially where I live, since I live in a valley surrounded by nasty, steep hills (the Pennines) and the prevailing winds are in my face. If you think about it, when you start a new project, the tasks you have to complete are like these hills. The nasty winds represent the opinions of other parties, often colleagues, who can't resist letting you know what a complete waste of time your project is.

If you can summon the enthusiasm to mount your bike and start to go up your hill, i.e. start your project, you'll soon find that hills and wind are only a small part of the challenges you'll need to overcome. Soon you'll notice the potholes in the road, designed to shake your teeth loose and permanently damage your expensive cycle. These represent the bugs and design flaws which you will inevitably encounter as you begin to convert your vision of a perfect piece of software into a imperfect reality. Of course, it's better to encounter these bugs when going uphill, since it's easier to avoid them now and there's even a chance they might be filled in before you begin your descent.

As you weave slowly up the hill, dodging the potholes and labouring in the wind, another obstacle presents itself: the maniac driving the white van. Inevitably an overweight, shaven headed yob who has no idea how much space he should leave between the side of his van and yourself. I think that this best represents competing projects from within your own organisation or from other vendors. They know their project will fix all that is wrong in the world, who needs your pathetic contribution? Best just to to smear it all over the road now before it can reach the top of the hill.

Next we have to understand the "false dawn". Often, when cycling uphill in unknown terrain, you will think you are close to the top of the hill only to find that when you cycle a little further there are still many miles to go before your reach the real crest of the hill. I'm sure that all software developers will have experienced this feeling: will the project never end?

If you are lucky you'll get to the top of the hill. Now it's time to cycle back home. This represents the completion of development on the project. You'll notice that the potholes are a lot more perilous now because you are going so fast. Just like the bugs and design flaws, almost certainly more painful when discovered by customers than when you or your colleagues find them.

There you have it. Cycling is the perfect metaphor for software development and I'm sure that we can all learn something from this thought.

There are many of features of cycling which I'm sure provide opportunities for comparison with software development, e.g. the weather, your equipment, etc... Feel free to comment if you want to extend the comparision or if you think I'm wrong. Just don't make your comments informative or useful.

¹ I'm not sure exactly what this figure is but I suspect it's something like 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001 % (2004-08-31 10:32:31.0) Permalink Comments [3]