Today on this ol' server

BayLISA usergroup to feature DTrace talk

Happening tonight, Jonathan Adams is going to speak on DTrace at the regular BayLISA usergroup meeting. If your around Sunnyvale, come and stop by.

If you're brining your laptop, download OpenSolaris then VirtualBox and try out DTrace or follow along with the presentation.

To learn more about DTrace visit these links:

Getting Started

DTrace Wiki

DTrace How To guide

Resources

DTrace Bigadmin Hub

DTrace community at opensolaris.org

Use DTrace

DTrace toolkit

Solaris Internals DTrace Repository

Presentations

Javaone Technical Sessions 07

Techdays DTraceToolkit Presentation

Posted at 06:03PM Jul 17, 2008 by saf in events  |  Comments[0]

mechanicrawl

The long now foundation is having a mechanicrawl in San Francisco tomorrow afternoon lasting till 8pm.

Posted at 06:00PM Jul 11, 2008 by saf in events  |  Comments[0]

Please sir, could I have more Solaris?

With the latest release of opensolaris you now get a snazzy LiveCD image that conveniently fits on a cdrom, dvd or usb drive. With that you can then try out all those Solaris only features like the new package manager, Service Management Framework, Fault Management, DTrace, zfs, zones and containers and the Solaris older kernel profiling tools without wipeing out your existing OS. So go ahead, get some more Solaris and while you're at it, benchtest some DTrace with this hands on lab.

Posted at 12:11AM Jun 11, 2008 by saf in Sun  |  Comments[1]

Ask a Scientist monthly lecture

Ask a Scientist is having it's monthly event tomorrow in the city, by Craig Reynolds on Boids and other computer simulated swarming and flocking behavior.
It's at the Axis Cafe, 1201 8th Street (btw. 16th & Irwin), San Francisco, CA

Posted at 06:08PM Jun 10, 2008 by saf in events  |  Comments[0]

Station X

I was surprised at how heavy the keys were. I was at Station X in Brittan, or better know as Bletchley park. It was 2001 and I was hitting the keys on an old WWII German enigma machine. Think of the keys on an old ibm selectra, but heavier. The plug board lit up when I hit a key. There was a buzzing sound as the light was lit. Next I tumbled the rotors. Latch, catch, tick, tick . . .

One of the rare finds in computing history lore and legend is Bletchley Park. This is where Alan Turing worked after writing "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem" which introduced the Turing machine. During WWII all communications required deciphering were processed at Bletchley Park. They needed speed, lives were at stake. They needed accuracy. The perfect job for a machine, only there wasn't one. Yet.
The very man who had conceived entirely original rigorous way to determine if it was possible that any type of logical statement (that can be broken up in to mathematical grammar) would complete, needed an automated way to decrypt non-trival codes. He worked on a team to devise ways to automate the cracking. After building the Bombe the team realized a need for the machine to be able to be reprogrammed, akin to how a modern computer operating system can run more than one program. The Colossus is considered one of the worlds first programmable computers. Similar to a modern computer program the Colossus was a reprogrammable machine that would do use algorithms to decipher the messages.

The Park recently finished building a replica of the Colossus. Last year the Park had a contest to see if a developer could beat the newly rebuild Colossus. (All the machines and plans were destroyed shortly after WWII ended. Except that our NSA kept a copy of one of the plans for the Bombe and Colossus. That story is a great vignette in and of itself.)

Now we have computers in phones, cars, vacuum cleaners, in addition to the tradition servers living in datacenters. We even have self-healing features where software will recover from a set of defined hardware and software errors.

On a more somber note, last Saturday marked the 54th anniversary of Turing's death. I think if Turing were a live to day I'd like to think he'd be proud at how far we come. I'd like to think that if he visited our time he'd see amazing cities, vibrant communities, as well as places and attitudes that have far transcended his 50s Brittan. I'd hope he'd be pleased with our efforts to continually push the envelope. I'd hope we'd understand that we need to move past just tolerating people that are different to acceptance. The world lost a great mind for the pettiness of not be able to accept one different from ourselves over some superficial trait.

Posted at 12:41AM Jun 09, 2008 by saf in musing  |  Comments[0]

Where am I?

How do you know if the host you're logged in to is a zone or a global zone?[Read More]

Posted at 02:35PM Feb 06, 2008 by saf in Sun  |  Comments[0]

EV Rally@Paly

The Electric Car Rally is happening this weekend at Paly Highschool from 10 to 4. And there's an electric car conversion workshop the next day.

Posted at 10:58AM Aug 24, 2007 by saf in events  |  Comments[2]

foggy on the bridge

Some winters back I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on my old trofeo. It was truly one of those clasic dark and stormy mights. I knew kcbs had announced high wind advisory for the bridge that night. I thought, naw it's only raining a little bit. I've cycled in the rain before, this isn't going to be that big of a deal. Ahaha. ... If I had talked to anyone, they would have talked me out of it. Oh, you're just a girl, you can't do that. But I didn't and I'll always remember as one of my most favorite rides of all time.[Read More]

Posted at 06:41PM Aug 13, 2007 by saf in cycling  |  Comments[1]

Happy System Admin Day

It's great to take a step back and have a good laugh with that pat on the back your friends, coworkers and acquaintances gave you today. So in honor of System Administrator day, here's an old posting of a field guide on how to identify your system admin.

Then, make your life easier, go check out BigAdmin and what's new onOS announce.

Happy System Administrator Day!

Posted at 04:47PM Jul 27, 2007 by saf in events  |  Comments[2]