smf(5): Manifest destiny, Round One

I received polite mail this morning reminding me that I have mugs to ship. I got distracted during break, but we'll be boxing up the mugs and getting them to the authors. So, for Round One, here is the set of submitted service manifests submitted to date:

* Ben's Postfix conversion is very simple, and works if postfix is in root's default path; in contrast, Peter Tribble built a full stack of mail processing atop Postfix in smf(5) a few months back. Plus they both have mugs already.

We're now in the process of assembling all of the manifests we know about at the OpenSolaris smf(5) community. If you sent in a manifest without a URL, it would be preferable to give us a link to it, and to give it a copyright and (OSI-approved) licence. (Send me mail if this appears confusing or is difficult.)

Suggestions for Round Two (beyond PostgreSQL and the other database management systems) are welcomed!

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris smf ]

What I did during my summer vacation: hack hack hack

The rest of the family didn't have vacation time, beyond the Fourth of July weekend, so I got a chance to do some reading and to write some code.

I am particularly excited to use tag(1) at work: my home directory is hosted on the main zfs(7FS) server, which means practically unlimited metadata. Tagging—I hope—will let me coalesce my projects/, projects/old-projects, and play/ into a single projects directory with current and obsolete tags. I'm also toying with ideas around HTML files involving redirects as a private link collection and tagging file fragments via their offsets.

[ T: OpenSolaris Solaris zfs ]

Reading at work: Lencioni's Death by Meeting

One of the nice aspects of working at Sun is that the company subscribes to a number of online libraries. Usually I consult these for overviews and introductions to technologies I use rarely or need to put into context. But occassionally, I'll read a business book.

This past week, I took two chunks of time out—an evening at home, and a half hour this afternoon—to read Patrick M. Lencioni's Death by Meeting : A Leadership Fable... About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business. The title is melodramatic from every possible angle, and the main argument is targeted much more to executives and general management teams, but I can see a few aspects that will help in our own technical meetings. The point about the hidden cost of "sneaker networking" as opposed to having an effective meeting hits close to home.

This text is in Sun's available collection at NetLibrary.