e hënë janar 10, 2005 Notes during my pilgrimage
| Paul Rogers' Weblog Notes during my pilgrimage
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e hënë janar 10, 2005 So I had some fun this weekend playing around with Solaris 10 x86 on my Toshiba 9100 laptop. Here are a few notes and observations. First an embarrassing confession. My network got screwed up a while back. When I booted up, everything came up. An ifconfig -a and a netstat -rn command showed reasonable values, but Mozilla would barf on most sites after loading part of the data. I tried a couple of nslookup www.cnn.com and dig google.com commands to make sure name resolution was working. The name lookups worked but still Mozilla wouldn't cooperate. Friday afternoon I finally checked /etc/nsswitch.conf and it was hosed. Looked like part of my xorg.conf had overlayed it. I copied /etc/nsswitch.dns to /etc/nsswitch.conf, rebooted and voila, back in business. Annoying to me that nslookup and dig don't complain about the bogus nsswitch file but its all better now.
e enjte janar 06, 2005
Engineers with too much time on their hands In a fascinating article Forbes offers "Five Custom Gadgets you Can't Buy." The image on the right is a beer cooler constructed from a microprocessor cooling unit. There is also an iPod Battery mounted in an Altoids box, an Etch-a-Sketch with a computerized drawing unit, and a PC mounted in a Millenium Falcon model ala Star Wars. I just love the internet. Its amazing what you can extract from information overload.
e mërkurë janar 05, 2005 An email for from a friend today asked the question "What do you suggest to help a programmer understand Solaris Memory internals?" I thought about it and suggested Richard McDougall and Jim Mauro's book Solaris Internals. However, that book is a perfect illustration of my theory of the "half life of information." The book was released in the year 2000 and covered Solaris 7. Mssrs. McDougall, Leventhal, Cantrill, Bonwick, Price, Shrock et al. have been extremely busy and much improved Solaris from the days of priority paging in Solaris 7. In Solaris 8 and beyond the page scanning algorithm is now called Cyclical Page Cache so the book is outdated in some respects. The term 'half life' is drawn from radioactivity and refers to "the length of time in which half the nuclei of a species of radioactive substance would decay." The image of 'information half life' is how much of the material in the book from 2000 is still accurate. My belief is that much of the material in the book is still relevant since the early architecture of Solaris has carried through to Solaris 10 (download and play with your copy from here.) The information in the book has been updated for later versions of Solaris (8 to 10) in a set of 367 slides, dated November, 2004, in an Adobe acrobat file available here. Those of you on dialup do not want to download that file and you are already mad at me because of the number of images on my page.
e diel janar 02, 2005 One of my best Christmas presents was a ticket to the Bruyas Collection exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art. My son got tickets for the entire family. I had almost given up hope of seeing them enjoy cultural exhibits, having overlooked the bored expressions of my darling children when I dragged them to museums throughout their childhood. But now that they are twentysomethings, culture is cool. We now swap meaningful notes on current books and movies. As a matter of fact Jordan takes issue with my review of Closer and asked for the screenplay for Christmas.
e shtunë janar 01, 2005
On Blause Recently
e premte dhjetor 10, 2004 First let me apologize for my silence for the past 2 weeks. Unfortunately my laptop has been in the shop and the first week in the shop did not fix the problem. To paraphrase the New Testament, 'Those that live by the laptop fail miserably while the laptop is in the shop.'
e premte dhjetor 03, 2004
Closer or Relationships as Verbal WWF Last night's cinematic outing was "Closer" a movie disguised as a verbal assault. (NB for our world wide audience, the initials WWF stand for the peculiarly American television entertainment form World Wrestling Federation which could never actually be glorified as a sport and which bears only a vague resemblance to GrecoRoman wrestling.) You can tell that this movie was first a play by Patrick Marber. The cinematography and scenery take a back seat to the verbal jousting on screen. It is entirely unfair that I have used the picture of Julia Roberts for this notice but there were no available shots of all 4 actors together. Jude Law, from 2003's "Cold Mountain" and 2004's eye candy piece "Alfie (Hated it)," Clive Owen, from one of my personal favorites "Croupier" and 2004's "King Arthur" (please forgive him), Natalie Portman, aka Queen/Senator Amidala in Star Wars or in another recommended rental "Garden State", and Julia form a relationship cube that morphs through several iterations. I still can't decide how much I like this movie since there are several places where I think the plot takes an unrealistic turn and I thought to myself, 'No woman I know would do that or respond like that.' However, the sample size of women I know might be too small or too provincial. Perhaps the sample of American women transplanted to London would do these things. There are several scenes that really are excellent interchanges and make the entire movie worth the effort. The relationship consequences of the actions and exchanges could also be viewed as a modern morality play. Naturally this is just one man's humble opinion and you are free to (verbally) disagree..."Let's get ready to rumble!" (in the comments) Marshall McLuhan in the New Millenium There is just way too much to cover today. My laptop croaked itself Sunday and I just got it back yesterday. Makes it tough to be productive...those that live by the laptop fail when the laptop fails (to paraphrase the Gospels.) First up is todays Op-Ed analysis of the Ron Artest dust up and its continuing fall out. Danniel Henninger has this analysis on-line in the Opinion Journal of the Wall Street journal (proudly powered by Sun according to the ad on the page.) A few salient extracts follow:
e martë nëntor 30, 2004 One of my first posts was a plea to sign up for the United Devices Grid to participate in cancer research in cooperation with the University of Oxford and the National Foundation for Cancer Research.
Back in October I mentioned that I liked World on Fire. As I mentioned before, I love this video because during it, Sarah says that a typical music video costs $150,000 but she made this one for $15. Then she she describes all the charity projects she sent the $150,000 to rather than pay LA studio costs. (One snide comment is that we may have to take up a collection for all LA production staff that did not get paid) Again I want to warn you before you watch the video at this link or at Itunes for a larger version, have a Kleenex ready. I still sniffle when I watch it.
e hënë nëntor 22, 2004 Here's part of the gang that got together at the Q center outside of Chicago last week for Sun's Immersion Week. This fine group is part of the Central US Data Center Practice that got together for a 'Birds of a Feather' meeting Thursday night. Standing on the left is Bill Pilarski, our fearless Practice Manager, and standing on the right side is Brian Ahearn, our Director. Squatting 2nd from the right is Phil Morris, our CTO. We got together to learn about Sun's new technology and strategy for the next year. As usual for this type of gathering, the classes contained important material but some presenters could have had better skills. The Solaris 10 Dtrace sessions and Zones sessions were good but I was in too few of them. Famous Sun Bloggers who I know were there include John Clingan, Glenn Brunette, John Beck, and Bart Smaalders. If I missed any other famous bloggers who attended, I apologize.
e diel nëntor 21, 2004
The Machinist...Descent into madness This weekend's cinematic choice was Christian Bale and Jennifer Jason Leigh in "The Machinist," a haunting movie about an insomniac who is losing it. As a matter of fact, you name it and he is losing it. He is losing weight and is down to 121 pounds, losing sleep and tends to nod off frequently, losing friends because he is acting peculiarly and perhaps losing his mind. It is suspenseful, shot in sepia tones with very little color and has a nightmarish quality. I liked it but it is definitely not for everybody, especially those who are squeamish. In Dallas it is only at the art house theater. A summary of reviews is found at Rotten Tomatoes my favorite movie review site.
e premte nëntor 12, 2004
FireEngine aka Solaris 10 Network Stack How did they get this past the lawyers??? They are actually saying that the new network stack is up to 45% faster. For a performance guy, this announcement is truly amazing. This article also discusses the coming 10 Gigabit networking. You can download the latest version of Solaris 10 x86 from here and take this screaming network stack out for a spin. Run your own speed comparisions against Linux, Windows, or whatever. (Disclaimer, your results may vary. Please do not use ftp as a networking benchmark, it sucks. Use the ttcp utility.)
e enjte nëntor 11, 2004 Last weekend's cinematic expedition was to Ray which truly was an acting tour de force. Everyone turned in an amazing performance and there should be several Oscar nominations and statues won for this movie. I began listening to pop music in junior high school and Ray Charles was often on the charts. Ray was a troubled performer who struggled with his addiction to heroin. This behind the scenes film looks unflinchingly at some of the ugly parts of the music industry and Ray's own life. He and one of his bandmates successfully overcame their addictions. Highly recommended.
e mërkurë nëntor 10, 2004 Good News - Niagara in the public eye
Yesterday's news was depressing, but The Inquirer has this article, Sun's Niagara Falls Neatly into Multithreaded Place, discussing our 8 CPU core massively multithreaded processor code named Niagara. The diagram below attempts to illustrate the text of the article which says in part, "On a macro level, it will have eight cores, each core capable of running 4 threads in parallel, for 32 concurrently running threads." Naturally the illustration is chopped off at 4 cores, but its for illustrative purposes only. The C's in the diagram are compute time for the thread and the M's are the memory latency of the thread. By switching between threads on a core, we hope to minimize the time waiting for memory to catch up. |
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