Tuesday November 04, 2008

(Except for California, where the passing of Proposition 8 shows that bigotry is alive and well, and that the Mormon Church in Utah has a long reach... Damn) Permalink Comments [21]

Monday November 03, 2008

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Monday October 06, 2008

At home I use ZFS+NFS on a Solaris box to make a file server that provides disk space to all the other machines at home, which are mostly MACs. I use NFS to access the files instead of AFS because it's so much faster. A friend and I were talking about this over the weekend and he was surprised: OS X is notoriously tricky to configure to use NFS. They have a nonstandard way to manage automount maps and, unusual for Apple: no easy-to-use front end. So lots of folks stay away from using NFS on OSX. It turns out that there's a trick that not many folks know about that makes it easy: (almost) no configuration required. The default NFS configuration contains a default automount map based on hostnames: /net/hostname/filepath. The tricky bit is that the finder suppresses the "/net" directory so you can only see it from the Unix shell. From the shell on OS X, /net references work with no effort:

ls /net/10.0.0.123/tank/photos

Lists all the files in /tank/photos on the host with IP address 10.0.0.123 (if you're feeling adventurous, you can associate a name with the address by appropriate configuration of the naming environment, but that can be a pain, so I often just use naked static addresses). To make this work with finder in OS X, just do this from the shell:

sudo ln -s /net/10.0.0.123 /tank

Then "tank" will show up on the root filesystem, and "photos" will be visible within it. The only configuration I do is this one symlink, then all the filesystems on the server appear. Easy. Permalink Comments [6]

Tuesday September 16, 2008

I'll be in Germany this week, mostly at a conference in Nürnberg. The list of speakers looks pretty impressive. If you're in the area, come join in. Permalink Comments [3]

Tuesday September 02, 2008

At the last JavaOne I did a walk-on talk during the AMD keynote where I talked about how incredible HotSpot's performance had become - beating the best C compilers. I ended my talk with a joking comment that "the next target is Fortran". Afterwards, Denis Caromel of Inria came up to me and said "you're already there". He and some colleges had been working on some comparisons between Java and Fortran for HPC. Their final report Current State of Java for HPC has been made available as a Tech Report and makes pretty interesting reading. There are a lot of HPC micro benchmarks in it which look great. Thanks! Permalink Comments [3]

Wednesday August 13, 2008

I'm spending this week in LA at SIGGRAPH. It's really great to be at a conference where I can concentrate on learning. Lots of interesting papers and folks doing cool experimental stuff. One group that I ran into, OnLatte, had whacked together the mechanical bits of a flatbed scanner, an old inkjet printer and some bits of electronics to come up with a wild printer that makes images by jetting caramel syrup onto the foam on top of a latte.

Tuesday was "Pixar Night" at the animation festival. In a really classy move, John Lasseter started by not showing something by Pixar: instead he showed the phenominal The Man Who Planted Trees, an animation by Frédéric Back of the story written by Jean Giono. It really shook me when I first saw it years ago: this was a beautiful print on a giant screen with a great sound system at the Nokia theatre. Nothing digital in this one: hand drawn, frame by frame, by one incredible artist. After the screening, Lasseter brought Back up to the stage,to a standing ovation, and the two of them talked about the film for a while. Permalink Comments [1]

Thursday July 31, 2008

The preview release of JavaFX is now available, along with libraries, samples, documentation and some early tools. If you like to make pretty things fly around on the screen, this is a pretty tasty piece of work. It really shows what Swing and Java2D can do. A pile of folks have been working hard on it for quite a while and have done a lovely job. Try it out and let us know what you think.

One of the cooler tricks is the approach to integration with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. These two popular tools have proprietary (deep dark secret) file formats, so importing them is problematic, but they do have extensive SDKs. So rather than building import filters into NetBeans we built export filters for the Adobe tools that generate JavaFX code (!) from the illustrations. It's then a clean process in NetBeans to add behavior to them.

Enjoy! Permalink Comments [11]

Friday July 25, 2008

It's been all over the web this morning that Randy Pausch's battle with pancreatic cancer has finally come to it's inevitable conclusion. We overlapped at CMU as grad students, and his work on Alice has been hugely important in teaching, for which I am very thankful. There's a lot that could be said... he gave the world a beautiful example of dying eloquently. Randy, you will be missed. Permalink

Thursday July 10, 2008

Peter Dibble has just published the second edition of his Real-Time Java Platform Programming book. It isn't just about the realtime APIs: it covers a lot of the theory behind realtime programming (warning: contains Actual Math), along with a lot of examples. It's got a good mixture of pragmatics and theory and does a good job of de-mystifying many of the scarier aspects of realtime. Permalink Comments [1]

Monday June 16, 2008

I installed Solaris 2008.05 on my laptop a short while ago. Being my usual goofy self I was playing around as root in places I shouldn't have been and managed to really mess things up and render my machine totally unbootable. It was nosediving within a small fraction of a second after booting... I only had one kernel image, and that file had been overwritten :-( Ending up in an infinite reboot loop. In past days, with either Linux or Solaris, I'd have reinstalled the system, possibly preceded by ripping the disk out and plugging it into another machine so that I could rescue any important files. But since 2008.05 uses ZFS for everything - even the root filesystem, all I had to do was boot the 2008.05 LiveCD, zfs rollback the root filesystem, and like magic all my screwing around was undone. Permalink Comments [2]

Sunday June 01, 2008

I just installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 from the OpenSolaris.com site. It's pretty sweet. They've had the installer nailed for quite a while, the big thing in this release (for me, anyway) is that it installs ZFS on the root device, and sets the system up to boot from ZFS. No more disk partioning! One big happy pool-o-pages! No more UFS!

(but I'm *still* waiting for power management) Permalink Comments [4]

Thursday May 22, 2008

I spent the afternoon at the Computer History Museum at an event celebrating the 70th birthday of Ivan Sutherland. He's famous for a whole lot of things, the earliest being Sketchpad, a man-machine graphical communication system that he built in 1962. In a lot of computing fields, and particularly in graphics, if you read any paper and follow the bibliography links back, you're almost certain to find something written by Ivan or one of his students. Bob Sproull MC'd the event and Alan Kay (one of Ivan's student's) gave a long talk. The list of people that showed up to honor Ivan was amazing. A couple who's names you might know were Henri Gouraud and John Warnock.

When I was working on my PhD thesis, I noticed that all the papers I was reading had backpointers eventually to Sketchpad. When I finally read Ivan's thesis, I was totally blown away. I ended up with Ivan on my thesis committee and I think of my thesis as a macro-expansion of about half a page from Sketchpad.

You really should read his thesis. It will blow you away. Among many other things, it can be fairly said that Ivan invented Object Oriented Programming.

For another life-altering experience, you should read one of his few non-technical papers, Technology and Courage. Besides being an outstanding researcher, he's also started a couple of companies and is a venture capitalist: his advice on courage is mandatory reading. Permalink

Friday May 09, 2008

My keynote this morning went off flawlessly. You can watch it on UStream. I'd like to thank everyone who contributed: The demos were all incredibly inspirational. I was in awe of every one of them. The main hall at Moscone was packed. The production crew was totally perfect, despite all the re-arranging of the plan. And the Sun crew were their usual wonderful selves.

My keynote is easy. Everybody else doing talks at JavaOne has to figure out what to say. I poke around the community and grab stuff. There's so much cool stuff being done that the hardest part of putting the toy show together is picking. I just have to stand back in awe and ask a few inane questions.

Controlling the most complex instrument ever made by mankind.... (the Large Hadron Collider) Surfing a constellation of satellites around mars and mining their data... A pen as a computing platform... The realtime stuff becoming mainstream.... Instrumenting the world... Another generation of smart cards... And smart cars... Massive graphical acceleration on a cell phone... Killer massively multiplayer games... Great web infrastructure tools for creating and introspecting... "the network is the computer" Hah! => "the network is the world"

But the best part was helping to give John Gage his well deserved lifetime achievement award.

Now it's time for a beach and a beer. Permalink Comments [7]

I don't know how some people manage to blog so much. Yesterday was another huge blur. A big chunk was rehearsing for my keynote this morning. It's kinda easy for me because it's mostly demos, and they're all wickedly cool. We added a new one late last night because some folks got something to work that was pretty magnificent. Drives the stage crew mad. But it all works out in the end.

See you there! Permalink Comments [2]

Thursday May 08, 2008

Yesterday was totally packed. Absolutely no rest for the wicked :-) Lots of great interactions with all sorts of folks, some in organized meetings, but most just random chats in the hallways. I love the energy that is everywhere.

I helped take a group of University and High School students on a tour through the pavilion. For all the appeal of "virtual reality", it was the "real reality" stuff that grabbed them most: the realtime control demo, Tommy, and the blu-ray/streaming media got lots of questions.

I spent an hour with the Dutch JUG. It was great during the opening on Tuesday morning when John Gage made a comment about the Brazilians being uninhibited extroverts, and how the rest of the audience should be honorary Brazilians... About 80 members of the Dutch jug lept up with a huge banner and let out a roar that put the Brazilians to shame. There's definitely some national competition brewing here.

I ended the formal part of my day with a short walk-on during the AMD keynote. I got to spend some time talking about how amazing the HotSpot optimizer has become and what a good job it does of exploiting the special features of CPUs. I ended my bit with a tongue-in-cheek one-liner that was roughly "now we're going after Fortran". When I got off the stage, Denis Caromel from INRIA came up to me and said "you're already done": he had just finished some extensive benchmarking of Java for HPC and his results were impressive. Thanks!

This was followed by an extensive pub-crawl :-( Now I'm off to rehearsals for my keynote tomorrow. The Toy Show is going to be very cool.

Lame joke: when you're standing outside a theatre as a showing of Iron Man is letting out, how do you tell who the real geeks are? They're the ones lusting after Tony Stark's workshop. Permalink Comments [4]