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Feb
28
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This blog continues here.
I've finally managed to pull my finger out and re-host this blog on my own site.
Because I rarely have the opportunity to blog about work these days - I've decided that an external blog is more appropriate. I chose WordPress because of it's maturity, large range of plugins and themes and availability as a standard application for many hosting companies. I chose to use DreamHost after a little research - so far so good.
Now I don't feel so bad about blogging about non-Sun news on Sun property I'm making more of an effort to blog (at least once a day) - mainly on topics related to the broader Software Industry.
If you've bookmarked or blogrolled me - please update - my new blog needs the link-love.
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Feb
22
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Microsoft have finally figured out that Metcalfe's Law applies to them as much as the next software company - despite their huge footprint. To quote Microsoft's CEO and CMM (Chief Mad-Monkey) Steve Balmer :
"In a more connected, services-oriented world...one of the greatest value-adds in some sense is what people do on the other end of the wire"
Bang-on Steve - couldn't have put it better myself. Let's see how wide the Kimono opens before Balmer get's shy. Ick - that's a poor choice of metaphor - sorry if I've spoiled your lunch.
[this entry was originally posted on my other blog-in-progress]
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Feb
20
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Lunar Eclipse, originally uploaded by sharps.The clouds cleared enough for me to take a some pictures of the lunar eclipse tonight. The star above is Regulus, and Saturn is on the left. This was the only picture worth posting.
My setup is simple - Nikon D40, tripod and remote shutter release.|
Feb
13
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Over the last day or so, I've been playing with VirtualBox - a type-2 desktop-oriented hypervizor; I managed to get my two favourite Linux flavours up and running pretty quickly now I'm contemplating mucking about with the networking so I can get the images talking over a virtual network.
Once I have that - I have a pretty decent developer sandbox - something I wish I had 7 or 8 years ago when I was still a developer. Still - should be a pretty useful setup for tinkering on home projects.
VirtualBox is pretty slick - so far - no issues - I just works - which is the way software should be. Once thing I'm still looking for is a way to run windows (small W) outside the visual sandbox; I find having a bunch of windows; running in windows a bit limiting and doesn't allow me to use my (multi)-screen real estate effectively.
Next (assuming I find the time) is to try VirtualBox on my MBP - I'm missing Ubuntu.
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Jan
17
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Having had 24 hours to digest yesterday's news (OK, in the case of Oracle/BEA - more like 4 years) here are some thoughts.
"Open Source" companies (ie. a commercial organizations that derive profit directly from supporting Open Source) - are likely worth more today than they were yesterday because the MySQL acquisition has set a new valuation record for an Open Source acquisition. I think the previous record was Citrix's acquisition of XenSource (for $500M). With VC investment approaching year 2000 levels - I wonder if we'll see a rush to start and invest in "Open Source" companies ?
Clearly Enterprise adoption of Open Source software will continue unabated - I actually don't think there's really much resistance anyway so I don't think this move will necessarily accelerate it.
Oracle have a couple of choices wrt their middleware platform - they either quickly remove redundancy and shit-can their current portfolio which is generally regarded as inferior to BEA's and has much lower adoption or they continue with the two platforms. My money is on the former - their Fusion project is fundamentally about aligning all their applications to use a common set of services based on a single platform (ie. removing redundancy). I think there's little risk here - as far as I'm aware - Oracle Middleware customers are typically Oracle shops - and Oracle can control the 'migration' without too much churn. In some cases - customers will use this decision point to migrate to a lower price Java EE-based alternative (eg. GlassFish, RedHat / JBoss) or move to some other technology / framework (.NET, RoR, etc.). If Oracle don't move quickly and decisively to make it clear which middleware platform they're taking forward then the churn will be much more significant (as will the competition's gain). There's nothing like indecision and confusion to drive customers away.
My feeling is that there won't be a significant opportunity for the competition here (more's the pity) - I think Oracle are too well-practiced at post-acquisition integration to screw up to the degree required to drive customers away. But still, shit happens so we'll just have to see how things pan out.
The big question is how the MySQL acquisition changes the Sun / Oracle relationship. Notwithstanding a knee-jerk reaction from Larry Ellison - I can't imagine much changing. I don't think anyone is expecting a mass migration from Oracle to MySQL though I'm certain MySQL's adoption will accelerate. These kind of shifts happen at glacial rates and Oracle have no doubt been thinking about commoditization in this space for a couple of decades. They've clearly drastically changed their revenue mix in the last 10 years. So, while I'm sure Oracle's RDBMS revenue is *huge* - it's no longer their only revenue stream.
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Jan
16
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Well, the news is out - the software industry changed significantly today; first Sun signed an definitive agreement to acquire MySQL - the leading Open Source Database and BEA finally succumbed to Oracle's advances (and the reported $8.5bn). It's going to be really interesting over the next year to see how those changes impact the industry.
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Jan
10
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I've written about my home storage requirements before - and the inability of anyone to satisfy them with a decent, easy to use product. A flare up on the internal bloggers alias which meandered a while before morphing into a discussion about home automation and home storage got me thinking again - because my storage problem hasn't gone away - it's just grown a bit since my last rant. Interestingly, Chris Kampmeier (who I used to work for when I first moved to the US) has gone some way to building the kind of appliance I'm looking for - if I ever get time - I'd love to do something similar with Solaris / ZFS.
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Jan
10
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We're co-hosting a webinar later today with Anne Thomas Manes from Burton and Web Services pioneer Toufic Boubez from Layer7 Technologies. Here's what you'll learn :
- The connection between identity management and SOA governance
- The importance of separating policy and entitlements from service implementation
- The challenges of managing and validating identity in SOA interactions
- Options for managing and enforcing identity-driven SOA policies
- How to implement identity-based governance in real-world SOA
The number of registrations is already very high so sign-up here. See you there.
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Dec
24
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Here's a quick Christmas message from Jack (3) and Lilly (6) to everyone all our friends and family spread across the world.
Have a happy and relaxing Christmas and we wish you health and happiness for 2008 !
- Rich
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Nov
18
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When we first moved to North Carolina - many people told us that fall is the best time of the year; on days like today - I can't argue. Warm (68 F), Blue Sky and leaves the colour of which I haven't seen in a long time.
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Nov
6
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Against my own previous advice on not traveling during the winter - I'll be traveling over the next couple of weeks.
Later this week I'll be in New York talking about Security and Identity in SOAs at the InfoWorld SOA Exec. Forum (the session is on Thursday @ 12.10pm). It's been several months since my last (extended) stay in New York and I must admit I'm looking forward to it; though I'm not going to have much time to look around - my schedule is pretty packed.
As soon as I get back on Thursday - I'm meeting Superpat at RedHat's HQ in Raleigh for his talk on digital identity at TriLUG; then we're being joined by the rest of his family on Friday.
Next week I'll be at ApacheCon in Atlanta for some meetings and will likely attend some of the more business-oriented tracks; and obviously Dave's talk on Apache Roller. Looks like there are a lot of fellow Sunnies there - should be a good opportunity to put some faces to email addresses.
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Nov
1
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Almost 8 years ago to the day I joined Sun, one of the first things I did when I joined was try out Solaris x86. At the time I was a big Linux fan and spent an inordinate amount of time messing around trying to get things working reasonably well on my trusty but battle weary Dell laptop. Eating my own dog-food seemed reasonable. I remember playing for at least half a day but made very little progress.
It never really dawned on me to try installing Solaris on an x86 machine until today; just over 8 years later. In those 8 years - I'd say I've mostly been using Linux (RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu), Windows and most recently Mac OS/X. A post on an internal mailing list caught my eye and I thought I'd give the new OpenSolaris Developer Preview a spin. The OpenSolaris folks have sensibly produced a live CD which gives you the option of testing the water without committing hard disk space. I (very ) quickly downloaded the ISO, burned it and booted. Logged in as root, ignored the license agreement, saw the ethernet port bounce and get an IP; now I'm blogging (via Firefox which is included in the LiveCD) - all in all a very slick install (and the PC is by no means standard). It seems nearly everything works except sound (but you generally learn to accept these things).
OK, so why bother ? Well - I'm really interested in storage - I have the storage requirements of a small enterprise (video, pictures, tunes, etc) and have been pondering what to do about the growing problem. Today's (interim) solution is to keep buying bigger disks and recycling the old ones for portable backups (which I keep in the firesafe). What I'm thinking of doing is putting together a cheap Solaris X86 machine and use ZFS to conslidate and virtualize the various disks I have lying around. This would give me live access to everything; and provide me with some additional reliability.
Of course - it would be great if somone would save me the bother - ie. produce a cheap storage appliance based on Solaris x86 and ZFS which I can continually expand with cheapo disks as I need to. I can't imagine there's not a business opportunity there somewhere - people are willing to throw down a grand on a digital camera - and give no thought about the longevity of the stream of valuable bits it spews out.
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Sep
18
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My blogging frequency is at an all-time low - I'm rather liking the low-time investment of Twitter and Facebook. If you're interested in following what I'm up to - take a look at FaceBook and Twitter.
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Sep
18
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David's canned history of App Servers at Sun prompted me to fill in some of the gaps.
There are a handful of us at Sun who've been around long enough to see the entire history of Sun's App Server product line. I joined in 1999 (as part of the Forte Acquisition). At that time Sun had at least 3 Application Servers.
Over the years - in internal presentations I've tried to capture the full genealogy of the App Server at Sun but I've only really ever done a half-assed job - through this blog entry I hope I've captured it correctly. Once and for all. If I haven't - and you know better leave a comment. The picture is supposed to illustrate the code heritage - again, this is mostly from memory - corrections welcome.
I haven't tried the latest version of GlassFish yet - but I will when time permits. Even though I'm not directly associated with the App Server team anymore - I can't help noticing the attention that GlassFish is getting - it's enjoying a success that all the previous versions never did. The reasons - firstly I think the product has come on leaps and bounds - starting with a new code base in 2004 was pretty painful but it paid off - for example performance has improved significantly with every release since. And open sourcing in 2006 made an enourmous difference - it allowed Sun to connect to people we hadn't been able to before.
Note - the big red crosses indicate end of code line - not official EOL date.
Significant Events (mostly from the Wayback Machine or Wikipedia)
1995 NetDynamics Founded
Kiva Software Founded
1997 Kiva wins PCWeek's Best of Comdex award for "Best Internet Software" (sells Kiva App Server for $35k / CPU)
Netscape Acquires KivaSoft
1998 Sun acquires i-Planet (marketed a Secure Remote Access Product which found it's way into Sun's Portal Server) [more]
Sun acquires NetDynamics
1999 AOL acquires Netscape
J2EE 1.2 SDK Released by Sun
Sun and AOL form the Sun | Netscape Alliance
Sun acquires Forte Software Inc. (cross platform IDE and run-time) [more]
Sun acquires NetBeans (Java IDE) [more]
2001 J2EE 1.3 SDK released by Sun
2002 Sun Netscape Alliance ends, Sun continues to market iPlanet products alone. AOL Continues to market subset of products.
2004 J2EE 1.4 SDK released by Sun
2005 GlassFish project launched (I seem to remember Eduardo favored ZebraFish, Jim got his way though)
2006 J2EE 1.5 SDK released by Sun
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Sep
5
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If you're a fan of "Gourmet Coffee" - next time you have your favourite brew in front of you - lift your mug to Alfred Peet - founder of Peet's Coffee but also the inspiration behind Starbucks and the entire "Gourmet Coffee" movement in the US. Alfred Peet died last week - looks like he lived a long an interesting life - and he certainly made his mark.
