Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Thursday November 08, 2007

The Canadian Double Double

I've spent a few days in Toronto with a customer working with Faban. Effectively, we took a generic benchmark I'd adapted from some work Akara in our pae group had done and helped them to use the Open Source Faban to test/validate what they're doing with databases on our systems with Solaris.

I'll post the sample later-- it should be pretty usable for anyone who wants to run through a set of operations against a database and see how they do. In the sample, I had implemented backends for PostgreSQL and MySQL so one could see how the operations fared on each of the different databases.

One of the little cultural differences I came upon here was that they have their own "Double Double". Here, that means double sugar and double cream in your coffee at Tim Hortons. It seems to be a variation on a Starbucks... kind of. In downtown Toronto, the Starbucks and Tim Horton's were all in close proximity, so I have no doubt they see each other as competitors. To me, culturally, it's closer to Dunkin' Donuts in Boston.

For those who don't know, Southern California's "Double Double" is a double meat, double cheese cheeseburger at In-n-Out Burger.

My friend here at Sun, Kim LiChong, tells me that part of the draw, or at least the branding, is that Tim Horton was a Hockey player for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

There were a couple of other cultural differences that I encountered-- the one other big one being that they actually changed the voiceover on the Mazda commercial to have a different pronunciation! Up here, like in Australia, it's "Maaaasda" as in the 'a' sound in apple, not "Mahsda". I saw the commercial several times-- I wasn't sure after the first time, but I was certain of it by the third time.

Saturday November 03, 2007

Lots of good news for Solaris web stack runtimes

The big news on the web stacks for Solaris front is we've released Cool Stack 1.2!*

Both binaries and source are over here. Basant and Shanti did a great job getting things generally updated and a few key enhancements (like some SMF and DTrace integration). Also, all but one of the binaries are compiled with Studio 12 and are giving us great out of the box performance on x86, x64 and UltraSPARC systems like the new CoolThreads T2 systems. That should work well if, say you wanted to consolidate a bunch of old AMP boxes to a nice efficient 64-thread system.

Give 'em a download and a try. If you're a Cool Stack 1.1 user, there are some guidelines on how to migrate on the site.

Over on the Web Stack project on OpenSolaris.org, Jyri, Aravind, Rahul, Ritu, cvr, Ludo, Prashant, Luojia, and Sriram from Sun, with some great community input have been working through the tough work to integrate many of these same common web stack components into the OpenSolaris SFW consolidation. That way, they'll be there out of the box in distributions like Sun's Solaris Express Developer/Community Editions. Components are rolling in.... Squid is in, Apache and a number of modules are in and updated, PHP is updated, Ruby is very close, MySQL and memcached are coming. Right around build 79 of Nevada, there should be a pretty complete stack in there!

The other thing that has been coming together is the developer experience. As some of you may know, NetBeans is getting PHP and Ruby capabilities, so it's only natural that Solaris Express Developer Edition has a nice out of box experience for end users. It's not quite integrated yet so there's nothing to play with, but you can get a good idea of where it's going if you grab a daily build of netbeans and the most recent Solaris Express Community Edition. There's a bit of wiring for now that won't be there when things come together shortly, but it's not too bad.

As always, if you have any questions or want to register a vote (or contribute!) your favorite extension or module, join us over here. Thanks also to all those who have sent me feedback directly or through the lists/forums.

* For those that may have followed things, this is the same as the thing we were going to call 1.1.1. I suggested to the team that we call it 1.2 after I noticed the big changes in packaging. It just didn't seem right for a micro release to be delivering such changes. Basant and Shanti had already had similar thoughts, so we changed it.