Blowing the Whistle Peter Parsons' Weblog about Solaris, sport and anything else.

No Gain Without Pain

The upside to last weekend - I passed a volleyball refereeing assessment and moved up to the next grade.

The downside to last weekend - the referee stands on which we were working are not the best in the world and two days later I still have sore calves from standing on an angled surface for too many hours.

Oh well. Can't win 'em all.

( May 24 2005, 04:53:54 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]

"I've got it, so everyone else must have it too" Syndrome

One of the things that I find interesting as a technology person has been to watch some of the problems that arise as technology, particularly Internet technology, has expanded in its availability and use. One of the big ones for me has been the fact that a lack of awareness and understanding of the technology, its uses, limitations and availability to be used by all often follows many newer users (and I don't think it is really their fault, but ours as the developers, deployers and evangelists of the technology).

There are many manifestations of this. In a previous job, where my desktop system was an SGI workstation running Irix, I was e-mailed a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet by a colleague. My response was to e-mail back requesting that the information be sent in plain text. His response was to send it back as a Word document!

The assumption that .doc is an industry standard is commonplace in my experience. So is the assumption that everyone runs Internet Explorer, even by websites that work perfectly well on other browsers (as evidenced by the fact that they display in Mozilla by using the PrefBar, a neat little tool that includes the ability for me to mislead web servers about the browser and OS I am running and gives me other useful stuff like a home page button and popup control).

Another is the assumption that everyone has equal access to e-mail and to the web. E-mail access is not yet universal, and not every organisation provides total or limited access to the web, often for good reason, such as by blocking webmail sites, yet I do come across people who assume that because they have a certain level of access, so will everyone else.

The network is not yet a universal tool, and while we continue to bring its benefits to more and more people, we also have a responsibility to educate people in how things work, or more importantly, why they may not.

( May 20 2005, 12:04:40 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]

New Sun Blueprint on Solaris Containers

Check out the latest addition to the Sun Blueprints series on Solaris Containers here.

( May 19 2005, 05:16:54 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Does the Internet make us lazy - or is information still too hard to find?

The main league in which I referee American Football, the British American Football League, has a discussion forum. One of the sections in the forum is a section entitled Football Rules, the purpose of which is to ask rules questions.

On the whole, this is a good thing. It allows players and coaches to seek clarifications on situations they may not be sure of and have this view seen by the wider community to everyone gets a chance to share in the information.

However, while there are questions of the "this happened, and this was the result, but I thought the result should have been X because of Y", there are also a lot of questions posted of the "what is the rule on X" nature. This is despite the fact that a complete copy of the rule book is actually available online here.

Anyone who has access to the discussion forum presumably also has access to the online rule book (they're both web-based after all), but choose to post a request for help rather than checking out the definitive source of information.

The question that always bugs me about this is "Why?". Why get second hand information when you could get first hand information? Isn't first hand always better?

Do people post such requests because it's easier to get someone else to do the hard work of filtering and processing (even when the response is nothing more than a cut and paste job from another information source), or is there simply too much information out there and the filtering and searching task is too much at the moment?

Do the searching and indexing engines still have some way to go before we truly get what we need from Internet searching? It would seem so, and while it remains this way, I'm sure that asking for second hand information will still be the preferred solution for many.

( May 18 2005, 11:51:37 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Guess They Must Be Worried - And They Should Be

It seems that IBM and Red Hat have kicked off a program designed to move people off Solaris.

What better sign that Solaris 10 is making an impact than reactions like this.

Of course, you could move over to Red Hat, but why pay more for your OS? Red Hat's own website lists a one year subscription to Red Hat AS with Premium support at $2,499 per year.

Compare this with the cost of Premium level support for Solaris 10 available here . For your typical 1- to 4-way server, apples to apples, Solaris 10 is cheaper.

Well, I guess they have to pay for the migration factory somehow!

( May 17 2005, 04:59:06 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Wait and See

Not much of note in the match I refereed yesterday. The only incident which sticks is one where the team behind me (I worked on the sidelines yesterday for a change) thought I'd called a penalty on them, when in fact I'd called it on the other team. (Nothing to do with the fact that they were behind me, but because the sidelines are not involved in the play, the reactions are often bigger.) Of course, once they'd got the signals, they changed their tune a little. They got themselves all worked up because they instinctively reacted by jumping to a (wrong) conclusion. A little patience can help sometimes.

Wait and see, guys. Wait and see

( May 16 2005, 03:32:27 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Oracle and Containers in Solaris 10

It's good to see changes in available technology reflected in how services are paid for by the people who pay my salary - the customer.

Check out the document on partitioning available here. It talks about how a Solaris 10 Container is considered a "hard partitioning" technology for Oracle licensing purposes.

So long as your Solaris 10 Container is tied to a resource pool limited to a number of CPUs which is less than the total number in the server, you only have to license for the number of CPUs which can be in the resource pool, not the whole server.

Since Containers are available on any server running Solaris 10, you don't need a system capable of being partitioned in hardware in order to take advantage of this feature.

( May 16 2005, 03:11:43 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [4]

Sun-MS Interoperability

While not involved directly in the ongoing interoperability work, it is not hard to understand the benefits of having one definitive source of information on the network.

If you're familiar with Solaris, you will be aware of the /etc/hosts and /etc/inet/hosts files, both of which are used to translate between IP addresses and host names. (The reason for having two is for reasons of Unix history.) Ignoring the ipnodes file which now exists in Solaris (and can complicate things further), the fact is that utilities on Solaris will access one or the other of the hosts files depending on their heritage and history. We want all of these utilities to have the same view of the network irrespective of the interface (i.e. the file in this case) that they use to access the information. In Solaris this is done by having /etc/hosts being a symbolic link to /etc/inet/hosts so that whichever interface you use to access the information, you end up going to the single central information source of /etc/inet/hosts (whether you know this or not - and do you really want to care anyway so long as you get the information you need).

Having the ability to access a single directory in a heterogeneous environment (which is an essential feature of a large data centre which has to support different workload types) is a useful thing to have. Hopefully we are getting closer to the day where customers can choose the best platform and application for the task at hand (as there is no "one size fits all" compute solution) without having to worry about how they are going to integrate with their existing infrastructure. Everything should just be able to talk to everything (assuming they have permission, of course ).

( May 16 2005, 11:00:48 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Remembering the Bradford City Fire

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Bradford City fire where 56 people lost their lives while attending a football match.

The lessons learned from this event and the consequent improvements in safety at sports venues have been of benefit to the true life blood of professional football in this country - the paying spectator.

On the day that one of the biggest clubs in the country has been taken over for nearly £800million, it is important to remember how we got to where we are today in sport, and why.

( May 13 2005, 09:56:40 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Bizarre Promotions

Just as I was wondering when I would get an opportunity to muse on something I considered odd, last night at the supermarket while shopping, the opportunity presented itself in all its glory.

The question that arose to me was the logic of some of the people who come up with promotional pricing. The item in question was washing powder tablets, not that this is necessarily relevant, but it does illustrate the point. Washing powder tablets in the UK are typically sold in boxes of 24 and boxes of 48, with a box of 48 costing slightly less than two boxes of 24 (economies of scale and all that).

However, when shopping yesterday, there was a special offer to buy two packs of 24 for £4. A box of 48 of the same product was on the shelf at £4.80, a 20% higher price for exactly the same product, the only difference being the number of boxes it came in. So, who is going to bother buying one of the boxes of 48 while this offer is on. No one.

So what does this mean to me as a consumer and IT person? Well, modern supermarkets run large systems to manage their supply chains and track spending patterns and trends. In this case, all of a sudden, the computers are going to see sales of boxes of 48 drop to zero (or at least they should ).

What will be the consequence of this in terms of impact on the consumer? Hopefully there is some human involvement in the process that will result in common sense seeing the reason for the sudden decline in sales, and there won't be some computer automatically cutting back drastically on the supplies they order such that when the promotion is over, there are no boxes of 48 for the customers to buy because the computer thinks that no one wants to buy them any more.

( May 13 2005, 09:25:43 AM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Opening Gambit

Hello and welcome to my shiny new blog. Lots of other people are doing this, so I thought I'd join the party.

Before I go any further, I guess I ought to explain the title of my blog, especially if anyone from legal is reading this!

The title is nothing to do with my work for Sun, where I am a Solaris specialist in the UK Client Solutions organisation. It actually relates to the fact that I spend some of my free time as a sports referee.

The sports in question are american football and volleyball. (If you are interested, the whistle in question is actually a Fox-40.)

Check back for thoughts on sport, Solaris and anything else that inspires me enough to write something.

( May 12 2005, 02:02:29 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [0]