Friday August 17, 2007 Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness
Friday August 17, 2007 Another problem with raster graphics
Now, don't misinterpret the title-- I have no issue with raster graphics themselves when used correctly. The issue I have is many people unknowingly use them incorrectly and leave it up to the poor interpolation in browsers/mail clients to try to do the right thing. They're trying to do a bunch of things at once, so you end up with corporate logos that look all jagged.
There was a time back in 2001 or so when I was looking forward to SVG and others delivering the vector goodness that we should have had back in the mid 90s (NeWS anyone?). Sadly, it doesn't seem to have come to pass-- with the exception of plugins like Java with JavaFX Script and Flash.
Maybe it's a fault of mine, but this makes me think of whomever is using rasters in this way as an amateur. It immediately lowers their credibility in my eyes. I probably shouldn't think this way, but I guess because I spent some time massaging pixels and Bézier curves, that sort of thing bothers me....
Kind of like shoddy software on cell phones bothers me.... but that's a rant for another day.... 
Thursday August 02, 2007 A Complete Open Source Stack: Hardware to Web 2.0
I'm a bit delayed in posting the slides, but not so long ago I gave a talk at both the UUASC and the local IEEE chapter CompSoc meeting.
The talk had originally been assembled for SCALE5x. Despite the "L" in the name, SCALE is an Open Source conference, so demonstrating Sun's involvement in Open Source by showing various technological bits (OpenSPARC, OpenSolaris zones/DTrace, PostgreSQL, OpenJDK, NetBeans and Glassfish, all working together).
Both were well received. I think a lot of it was new to the IEEE folks, but many of the UUASC people had seen some of the bits and pieces in full presentations over the years.
Presentation is here.
( Aug 02 2007, 08:13:29 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
Monday July 30, 2007 Transformers missed the "transform"
There are plenty of legendary (among geeks) Hollywood slipups with technical terms. This last weekend I encountered one more.
In Transformers, there is a scene where the blonde-model-playing-white-hat-hacker tries to impress upon the Secretary of Defense how sophisticated the inbound hack was. To underscore her point, she says it's not just simple "Fourier transfers" they're dealing with. The proper term of course is Fourier transform.
Ironic, given the name of the film.
Transformers Hollywood Fourier transform
( Jul 30 2007, 10:02:28 AM PDT ) Permalink
Thursday May 10, 2007 What to Wear? The Modern Dress Code Problem
The other night, at JavaOne, I met Ben Rockwood, and as he and I were talking, Josh Berkus walked by. Ben complimented Josh on his hat, and Josh repaid Ben with a compliment on his kilt. I'm quite serious.
This is the manner of dress of most of my contemporaries and customers.
I, on the other hand, was in nice black pants, and a wrinkle free shirt (I was prepared for a customer briefing that didn't materialize).
Ironically, dress code was also a side discussion during the morning keynote. Scott McNealy (jeans, Sun logo'd shirt, $7 haircut) quipped about Jonathan Schwartz's dress (sport coat, shirt, tie, slacks, pony tail) as CEO, then turned his attention to Rich Green (nearly always in a black shirt, short sleeved) both playing the role of, and looking like Sun's Steve Jobs, though with short sleeves.
Over the last couple of years, I've started to dress a bit nicer. It was mostly due to the customer set I was working with- typically larger companies, but it was also because some Sun folks come into the office well dressed, as do customers and partners.
I guess the question is, does dress code matter? This question cuts both ways: I could be (and believe I was) perceived as not being someone capable of addressing technical topics, or I could be perceived as not taking business seriously.
Maybe I just shouldn't worry about it....
( May 10 2007, 10:23:37 AM PDT ) Permalink
Tuesday May 08, 2007 Well, the news is out. As you all know by now, JavaFX Script has been announced. It's in it's infancy and will evolve rapidly, but definitely worth looking at.
Please join me at the JavaFX hands on lab. It's lab 7280 on Thursday at 3:50pm in the hands on lab room. We'll have a kick-off by the lab author and JavaFX's creator (if scheduling works), then some labs for everyone to go through.
( May 08 2007, 05:58:57 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]
Wednesday March 28, 2007 User Interface muscle memory is a bit of a problem. What do I mean by this? Your average OS/400 user is used to context-sensitive help being available through the "F4" key. Your average Windows user is used to it being available through "F1". Your average Sun Workstation user is used to it being available through a key labeled "Help". :)
There are, of course, all kinds of variations on this. Windows 2000 - XP - Aero. OpenLook - CDE - Gnome - KDE. sh - ksh - csh - bash. I won't even bring up editors.
Don MacAskill touched on this in, as it relates to OpenSolaris, in his blog on The Enterprise Linux Problem. I admit there are differences, but the solutions are anything but obvious. Whatever works for one person, may cut off or alienate things others are looking for or have grown to expect.
The good news, at least in OpenSolaris land, is that the community (and Sun) have bridged a lot of the simple gaps over the years (i.e. add /usr/sfw/bin to your path if it's not already there!) and other projects like the OpenSolaris GNU Communities /usr/gnu project should help to address some of the UI muscle memory problems. It definitely won't address everything, but the it's not a strict engineering problem-- Sun cannot address this in a vaccum and you can't do a marketing study to get the right answer. If there are UI differences you'd like to see, then please join (or at least rant to) us over at opensolaris.org
Thursday March 15, 2007 Solaris + AMP/Cool Stack proposed to move to OpenSolaris
The proposal has just come out over on OpenSolaris discuss, but the good news is Cool Stack, the basis for Sun's Solaris + AMP offering (more commonly known as SAMP), is moving to a new home.
There was nothing wrong with the existing community/site/project, but it's clear that the project there has a lot more in common with things going on over at OpenSolaris. I hope it'll lead to the consumers and users working together to build up the best practices. I have some experience with Cool Stack already from customer projects, and it's definitely been a good starting point for these projects, but it has grown beyond the CoolThreads platforms and there's room for some of the other users of this software and packaging projects to join in.
You'll find the official announcement over here, and I'm sure the project will be set up soon on OpenSolaris.org.
Tuesday February 13, 2007 Complete Open Source Stack at SCALE5x
Some time back, those who organize SCALE, a Southern California Open Source Expo, checked in with a couple of us at Sun to see if we'd like to be involved. After all, Sun's pretty heavily involved and committed to Open Source these days. Through the Los Angeles Unix community, I knew a number of the attendees as well.
Since Sun is, to my knowledge, the company with the most complete Open Source stack, I thought it made sense at an Open Source expo to talk about that. I figured most of the community knew about OpenSolaris (even though they were using other Unix-like operating system kernels with their GNU userspace). Most of the community would not, unless you track Sun pretty closely, know about many of the other big projects: OpenSPARC, OpenJDK, CoolStack (released today as Solaris + AMP), PostgreSQL, Netbeans, project Glassfish and project jMaki. So, I submitted a talk, which was accepted:
A Complete Open Source Stack: Hardware to Web 2.0*
That afforded me an opportunity to spread the word, show off the system, show off the software features like DTrace and ZFS. It also gave me plenty of opportunity to talk about what Sun is doing that's different than the other commercial Unix and unix-like distros that run on x64 and SPARC.
As things came together, I found that Josh Berkus, fellow Sun Employee who is well known in the PostgreSQL community specifically and the Open Source community in general, was going to be at the PostgreSQL part of the show. I invited Josh to be part of my session, and he accepted. I think this added another whole aspect to the talk.
My talk, like many of them, was very well attended. The room was full, and there were people standing in the back of the room.
Another advantage of these community events is networking and learning what others are working on. There were definitely some surprises, and clearly some people are pushing the limits of the technology. I had a few good conversations with people about Xen and how they're using it, and a number of good conversations about how people are putting together these modern web tier applicaitons in a virtualized space.
On the last few days, in the last few minutes, we had the opportunity to put together an OpenSolaris BOF session. That did come together, and I gave a few updates on the OpenSolaris happenings. We also decided in that meeting to create at least a virtual OpenSolaris user group of some sort (perhaps a UUASC associated SIG) here in Southern CA.
It was definitely a worthwhile experience and I want to thank the SCALE folks for having us. I just got an email saying they had record attendance, so I'd expect that means it will be coming again next year.
There was only one unfortunate thing. It only came up twice, but some people looked at the "L" in the title and immediately assumed that Sun had no interest in a Linux expo.
I have two responses for that. First, it's very hard to say Sun has not made contributions to Linux. It's probably true that Sun doesn't employ full-time kernel hackers, but Sun has contributed drivers, interoperability fixes and kernel fixes. In my tenure at Sun, I've seen this done more than once. Even then, Linux is more than a kernel. I don't think it's possible to have a regional meetup of this size that would have only kernel hackers. Sun's made numerous contributions to Open Source which are part of all of the modern distros.
Secondly, the SCALE event, despite the L, is not just about Linux. Have a look at their about page. It's an event for building the community of Open Source.
In the end, pretty much everyone I talked to was happy to see Sun there and is happy to hear of Sun's work in Open Source.
Sidebar:
I was, in good spirits of course, accosted by a gentleman from IBM at the Sun booth about this very topic. His question was what Sun is doing there at a Linux conference. I reminded him of the above, and then proceeded to ask when components of Websphere will be Open Sourced, or when IBM will Open Source Power.
Admittedly, he and I are two leaf nodes in our respective organizations, so I'm sure he couldn't speak for IBM any more than I can speak for all of Sun, but the answers were telling. He said he didn't see any need to Open Source Websphere. In his estimation, no one is looking for the source. He also said there was no need to Open Source Power 5 or Power 6. In his estimation, if someone wants the specifications to the Power architecture, the community at Power.org has that for a nominal fee.
Of course, those in the know would be aware that IBM did apply an Open Source banner to a small part of the Websphere universe by acquiring a company and rebranding it Websphere Application Server Community Edition (even though there are major differences in the codebase between that and the WAS they'll sell you). Those in the know would also recognize that what is at Power.org is much more like what's at sparcinternational.com and has been for over a decade. Joining power.org and paying the (higher) fees to read the specs is more like being given the man pages with the opportunity to go write the code that implements the man page. OpenSPARC is more like being given the code, the build scripts and the unit tests to go extend the most unique thread-rich chip anyone's been given access to yet.
This does seem to show, once again, that people get open standards and Open Source confused. Adopters of OpenSPARC get both-- adopters of the power architecture get only one.
* By the way, I know that some take issue with the term Web 2.0, and I think I probably agree with the arguments against. Having said that, I think we all admit it draws a crowd.
Monday December 04, 2006 Contemporary web architectures and Cool Stack
Since Marc outted the work I've been doing with our PAE and MDE folks, I guess I'd better type up some thoughts on the goings-on. It's time to get some of it out in the wild afterall.
Steve's new group, which I'm happy to be a part of, is off focused on helping Sun's Web Infrastructure customers. What does that mean? As many people have no doubt noticed, there's a new up-and-coming bevy of companies building out new products. Many of these are very consumer and social networking oriented, and others are just new takes on old ideas in a way that makes things more interactive and useful for the consumer of the product and/or service. Most readers of this blog probably are familiar with all of that and associate it with that currently buzz-laden term Web 2.0.
Brief sidebar: I've now been involved in and/or seen a few conferences where people have gone off and attempted to define Web 3.0. As an industry, we sometimes seem to be way more interested in going out and defining new things instead of completing or building out what we've just defined...
Sun's been working with many of these companies long term and has also been working with various startups as they come up. In the process, we've seen there are a few patterns that come up again and again. Sometimes, this is as straightforward as many people using memcached when scaling their PHP environment, but the pattern emerges when you start to see the Java world using things like JavaSpaces and Tangosol in their web application architectures.
So our goal? To help these people get the most of their web infrastructure, be it through scaling, consolidating or just applying a common pattern toward achieving their goals.
Okay, that sounds pretty lofty, so how are we doing that today? Well, we have a couple of compelling things in Solaris and some compelling things in our hardware. Specifically, if you could, for instance, have many, many threads running on the same cache of data with a T1000/T2000 at the same time you're reducing your datacenter footprint and power consumption dramatically, that would bring a benefit to some of these architectures. Another way to bring a benefit to these architectures could be to co-locate inexpensive, low power consuming, highly-reliable (through software) storage with core components of your application with the x4500. Therefore, we've been working with these customers on applying those patterns with whatever hardware/software is appropriate for the environment. Sometimes it'll be memcached, sometimes it will be lighttpd. Other times it will be the AMP stack, in this case embodied through Cool Stack.
Speaking of Cool Stack, the deployment oriented, performance optimized AMP stack for Solaris, there are some good things coming and we'd be interested in what you're interested in. Please either post a comment, post a blog with a trackback, or drop me an email. Of course, the latter of the three is a decidedly Web 1.0 approach. :)
I will be blogging more on the specifics in the not-too-distant future.
Technorati tags: memcached, lighttpd, Web 2.0, ZFS, OpenSolaris
( Dec 04 2006, 10:34:40 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]
Monday November 27, 2006 ZFS reliability to the rescue of the Centers for Disease Control
I've recently been working with a customer as part of my new job (which I guess I should blog about someday) on how ZFS can work in their environment. In the process, I got a bit more in depth with zfs than I'd had opportunity to before, and had joined the OpenSolaris zfs-discuss mailing list.
So this evening, when going through the days email, reading and deleting, I came across this posting.
Apparently, the CDC had started to use ZFS in production and through it's normal use, ZFS found that their SAN equipment was doing exactly what ZFS states as the filesystem problem: every layer (erroneously) trusts every other layer, regardless of which way the data is flowing.
I don't even remember the name of the offering, but I do recall from some years ago Oracle and EMC (I think?) having an offering that allowed Oracle to checksum the data written to the tablespaces. It was insanely expensive and really only appropriate for the most mission critical environments as a result.
Fast forward several years, and now with zfs, I have the same level of reliability with the junk in my home directory on my laptop. To quote the post: "Another win for ZFS"...
Technorati Tags: ZFS, OpenSolaris
( Nov 27 2006, 10:41:00 PM PST ) Permalink
Sunday November 26, 2006 Dvorak 7 and new John Harbison work at LA Phil
Saturday the 25th brought another in the LA Phil concert series. At first I was thinking of trading the ticket, but a performance of a new John Harbison piece was compelling enough to keep it. I'm not a huge fan or anything, I just like to tickle the synapses with something different more often than not.
I did enjoy the Harbison Bass Concerto. Yes, I did say Bass Concerto. It was hard to hear the bass during particularly subtle moments, but in general, it was a nice diversion from some of the other concerts. I did attend the pre-concert lecture, where the soloist and Mr. Harbison spoke about the thoughts behind the piece and solos for such an instrument. There was a bit of an in-depth disucssion of how different musicians tune the instrument (in 4ths or 5ths) and how people hold the bow that was interesting, but not as interesting as other topics from these folks could have been I'm sure.
I have to say, the Dvorak was better than I thought. I could live without the first two movements, but I very much liked the third, and the fourth was a good closer.
( Nov 26 2006, 12:32:46 PM PST ) Permalink
Wednesday August 16, 2006 I didn't make it to Java One last year, so I never did get to see Aerith before it was released on java.net.
Anyway, as you all know from my previous entry on XOrg with my Tecra M3, I have decent 3D hardware. Since Joshua Marinacci and Richard Bair are coming out next month, I figured I should at least check it out.
The getting started page pretty much covered it all, but I did also have to download Javazoom's JLayer. I also had to create a Flicker account, and register to use their APIs. Then, after creating a public album, Aerith started working just fine!
So, I can report Solaris Nevada, build 32, current NVidia driver as of this writing, and Aerith work nicely.
( Aug 16 2006, 10:04:12 PM PDT ) Permalink
Tuesday August 01, 2006 Swing Labs in Los Angeles and OC It's official. We have Joshua Marinacci and Richard Bair coming in September to talk with not one, but two Java User Groups, the OC JUG. They'll come in and give us an idea of what's going on over in Swing Labs and Swing technologies in general. To be honest, the reason I finally reached out to Richard on this was Jim White's presentation on IFCX. Well, it wasn't exactly the presentation, so much as it was some of the peripheral discussion in this JUG meeting and others I've attended in the past. I think there are a large number of people who saw different things they liked/disliked about Java on the desktop 6 years ago and may or may not have looked at what's been happening in the last couple of years. So, I'm hoping to resolve some of that. ( Aug 01 2006, 09:10:11 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Wednesday July 26, 2006
XOrg with nVidia Geforce Go 6600TE/6200TE Not so long ago, my old laptop died, a Tecra M2, and I'd obtained a Tecra M3 to replace it with. Loading Solaris was no problem, I've been running build 32 for some time with wifi, inetmenu to configure it. I'd been using a ... roundabout method to work with projectors when showing things to customers, but I finally sat down to set up TwinView recently.
The full xorg.conf can be found here, but the pertinent part under the "Screen" section is:
Option "TwinView" "True"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "Clone"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30-70"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "56-85"
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "True"
Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024, 1280x1024; 1024x768, 1024x768; 800x600, 800x600"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0, CRT-0"
I've not gotten all the resolutions to work, but the 1024x768 res seems to be fine with every projector I've encountered. That's good enough for slide shows, but I'd like to get it set up with 1280x1024 for software demos.
Other notes, this is with the latest nVidia driver, 1.0-8762 as of this writing, and with the BIOS setting for the flat panel to send display to both CRT and DFP.
( Jul 26 2006, 12:00:53 PM PDT )
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Comments [3]
Tuesday July 25, 2006 X2100 SMDC best practices for serial over lan with ipmitool
Well, John, you beat me to the punch. I had a great blog entry hanging out in my grey matter on using Solaris 10 with the SMDC. Still, there are a few nuggets I can relay.
First, the prereqs. This all assumes:
- Solaris 10 06/06 (but pretty much any Solaris with new boot [i.e. GRUB] should be the same)
- BIOS rev 1.1.1 and SMDC firmware 1.14 (all off of the 1.4 supplemental CD, also required if you plan to use ZFS)
- ipmitool 1.8.8 (the stuff in Solaris 10 U2 is 1.8.4, it requires 1.8.5 or later)
The release notes, are mostly complete, but have a couple of errors and don't necessarily explain the "why" in some areas. I've already asked for some fixes against the release notes. Blogs are faster though. :) Just don't expect it to be a maintained doc. Check that link for the latest. The revision of the doc as of this writing is -15.
Now the errors. The release notes tell you there are edits required in the GRUB menu.lst. It turns out, you don't need to make any edits to GRUB. They tell you to set GRUB to use the serial device. That's not necessary. So the lines:
serial --unit=0 --speed=9600 terminal serial
aren't necessary. GRUB will talk to the BIOS, and the BIOS will talk to the SMDC if you've set it up that way per the BIOS settings mentioned release notes.
The release notes also tell you to edit the multiboot line as follows:
kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot -B console=ttya
That change isn't necessary if you edit the bootenv.rc (either manually or through the eeprom command). Multiboot reads the bootenv.rc, so no changes are necessary there.
Finally, this one is a bit of a major error, you need to use bootadm to determine where the menu.lst is. You cannot necessarily rely on it being in the directory mentioned. It's not as major an error if you read the comments in the file-- but I find not everyone reads documentation. :) Besides, if you take my approach, you don't end up changing it at all anyway.
The other thing required at this point is to edit the asy.conf. This is due to a BIOS bug on the X2100. If you have the BIOS in "redirect over serial" mode, it puts the real, onboard serial device entry in the ACPI table. If you put it in "redirect over SMDC" mode, it does not put the entry for the serial device in the ACPI table, so you need to tickle the asy driver to use the ISA device. This will change in OpenSolaris shortly (if not already) and will be in Solaris 10U3, it's being tracked as Bug ID 6416708. Other platforms have similar issues, so the driver is being modified to look for the common serial ports. The ISA address and interrupts of the serial ports haven't changed for many, many years, so this probably makes sense. I'm told this affects the IBM BladeCenter and Dell PowerEdge 1855MC system's virtual serial consoles (though, those use ttyb).
The downside is that until this fix is available, without a specially built boot archive or modified jumpstart, you won't be able to perform an install over the SMDC. So, until this fix hits, install over the serial or with a BIOS console (keyboard/mouse/video), then make the change to the asy.conf.
Finally, I believe (but don't know for certain) you need to run bootadm update-archive to be sure you'll have a nice fresh archive for your next boot. Solaris will do this on shutdown, but I figure it's best to do it now, just in case you don't have a clean shutdown.
After that, you'll have a nice, working impitool serial over lan. A command similar to:
ipmitool -H-U Admin tsol
gave me a nice working serial over lan.
There is one lingering issue though. The bug mentioned in the release notes about the bge driver had been fixed, but there seems to continue to be a bge problem. I found that after using the tsol for a little while, the whole SMDC would disappear unless I excluded drv/bge. So, add the following to /etc/system before you reboot:
exclude: drv/bge
That will elimininate sideband usage of the bge from Solaris, but you'll have a stable SMDC.
Update 2006-07-26: A new bug for the bge sideband usage has been opened as Bug ID 6453203
( Jul 25 2006, 02:41:35 PM PDT ) Permalink
