Friday November 13, 2009

I'm at Logan Airport waiting for my flight to O'Hare and then to Portland, Oregon for Sun's HPC Consortium this weekend and SC09 next week.

Google is sponsoring free wifi access at Logan through January 15th, which is how I'm able to write this blog entry -- I would not usually pay the usual $10 fee since my flight is leaving in only an hour.

After clicking through the landing page to access the Internet, I was redirected to a Give Back site that lets me make a donation to either Engineers Without Borders USA, One Economy Corporation, or Climate Savers Computing. Even better, Google will match any donation I choose to make.

I wanted to make a donation, but I didn't. Why? Because making the donation requires I create a Google Checkout account. I have a Paypal account already and I'm trying to reduce my credit card exposure on the web whenever possible, so I opted not to sign up.

Thursday November 12, 2009

On November 3rd, I received an email congratulations about my upcoming 20th anniversary with Sun (for those keeping score at home, the 20 includes some credit for time at Thinking Machines prior to our arrival at Sun) and an invitation to select a commemorative gift of my choice. My immediate thought was that I should place the order immediately, given all the current craziness and future uncertainties. My recognition award arrived via FedEx yesterday. Parrot not included.

(Wondering what's in the box?)

Wednesday November 11, 2009

Once again, I am delighted by Apple's customer service.

After having many problems with my original Macbook Pro, which Apple eventually replaced, my system has been stable and problem-free for quite awhile. Until my screen started losing pixels about a month ago.

Every other vertical line on the display became light grey, making it nearly impossible to read the screen. The problem briefly appeared and then disappeared about a month ago, but it happened again last week and stayed broken for over 12 hours despite reboots, PRAM/NVRAM resets, and SMC resets. I made the problem go away eventually by scheduling a Genius appointment at my local Apple store --- the display spontaneously started working again within an hour of making the appointment. But of course! However, not trusting the machine and needing it for an upcoming business trip, I decided to keep my appointment at the Apple store.

Without being able to actually see the problem at the store, the Genius couldn't make an absolute diagnosis, but we both felt the MBP's display was probably flaky. This conclusion was partly influenced by the fact that when I ran the system in dual screen mode, the problem was only visible on the built-in LCD -- the external monitor did not show the problem. While there still might be a logic board(*) or other problem, I felt comfortable enough to request that the screen (actually, the clamshell assembly -- the top part of the laptop, including the cables that run from the clamshell to various locations on the motherboard) be replaced. Since the MBP was no longer covered by AppleCare, I was going to have to pay for this repair myself.

I learned Apple has two repair programs. I could either opt to have the machine shipped to an Apple repair depot and expect to receive the machine in 7-10 days, shipped directly to my house, or I could have the machine repaired at the Apple store and it would likely be ready the next day if the parts were available. The depot option has a fixed price -- about $300 regardless of what the problem is or what parts need to be replaced. The in-store option is generally more expensive since you pay for the required parts and for labor. In my case, the in-store option would cost about $600 or twice as much as the depot option. What to do? I needed to work on my presentation for an upcoming conference and would be leaving for that conference in seven days. The depot might ship my machine back earlier than 7-10 days, but I'd be taking a risk.

Because I was able to make arrangements to use another laptop, I decided to opt for the cheaper depot option and wait the 7-10 days. Imagine my surprise when I got a call the next afternoon informing me that my repair had been completed. Apple had opted to do the repair in their store and they honored the depot rate I had been quoted. How cool is that?

So far, I've not had a recurrence of the problem. As a side benefit, this new display is much more evenly illuminated than the old one so even in the unlikely event the problem turns out to be something else, my machine has a nice, new LCD display that to me is worth the $300 I've paid so far. Not that I expect the problem to recur, of course.

(*) If you have this problem with your machine, look carefully at the cursor. Does it seem to "float above" the bad display or is it also affected by the dropped vertical lines? Noticing this can help diagnose the problem, since an unaffected cursor means it is more likely that the problem is either at the logic board or earlier, while an affected cursor pushes the diagnosis more towards the screen/clamshell.

The New England OpenSolaris User Group is holding its first meeting at Boston University this evening, hosted by the BU Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. It is open anyone interested in learning more about OpenSolaris -- both students and professionals are welcome. This first meeting features three talks: What's So Cool About OpenSolaris Anyway, OpenSolaris: Clusters and Clouds from your Laptop, and OpenSolaris as a Research and Teaching Tool.

The meeting runs from 6-9pm tonight (Wed, Nov 11th, 2009) at the BU Photonics Center Building. Follow this link for directions, full agenda details, etc. If you think you'll be coming, please RSVP so we have a rough headcount for food.

See you there -- I'm bringing the pizza!

Friday July 24, 2009

This microfinance stuff is pretty cool. By placing funds into my Kiva account I've been able to make small loans to a variety of people around the world and then continue to make additional loans as loan payments are deposited to my account.

I've been using Kiva now for just over two years and have made a total of 20 loans, ten of which have been completely repaid and ten of which are currently in active repayment. I've had no delinquencies and no defaults. While I can withdraw my funds once they are paid back to my account, I plan to continue making loans indefinitely since, 1) psychologically it feels as if I spent the money two years ago when I opened my account, and 2) I can see that these loans really make a difference for people.

My previous loans were to people in Ghana, Tanzania, Nicaragua, Peru, Lebanon (2), Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, and Samoa. My current loans are for construction, clothing sales, crafts, transportation, hardware, tailoring, etc. to people in Lebanon, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Cambodia (2), Samoa, Mexico, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan (2).

As part of the 40th anniversary commemoration of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the source code for both the Command Module and the Lunar Module have been released. In addition to being able to view the code, you can also run it on an emulator. Go here for details. Cool!!

Thursday July 16, 2009

Skitch is a free, Mac-based utility that I use all the time when writing blog entries because it makes preparing images for my blog so simple. Specifically, this what I do with Skitch:

I use Skitch for screen captures. Preview's "grab" function is pretty good, but Skitch makes this much easier. When I select "Capture --> Crosshair" the Skitch window helpfully disappears from the desktop, exposing everything underneath. No more fiddling with window positions to ensure no current Preview windows are in the way of what you are trying to capture.

With Skitch I can resize an image by dragging. Or crop it by dragging. I especially like that the expected size of the image (KB or MB) is always displayed, which is really useful for ensuring that I don't embed overly large images in my blog entries. The size will change depending on what output format is selected (e.g. jpg, gif, png, tif, svg, bmp, etc.)

I can also annotate images with Skitch by drawing or writing on them. I use this frequently in my blog. Some examples are here and here.

Skitch is also a web service, though I don't use that capability. And the Skitch application as many more functions than I've described here. It really is worth a look -- for me it has become an indispensable tool.

Wednesday July 01, 2009

Assuming your aren't color blind, you see green and blue spirals in the above graphic. However, were you to download this image and sample it with GIMP, Photoshop or another image manipulation program, you would find that the "blue" and "green" are exactly the same color, RGB=(0,255,150.) I kid you not.

You can also try zooming your browser to verify that the two colors are the same. As you increase the zoom, you will notice the colors looking more and more similar.

For more like this, go here.

Thanks to Monty for this one.

Monday June 08, 2009

The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council held an unconference on Sun's Burlington campus last Friday, titled The Future of Software & the Internet. I attended because I was both interested in the topic and also curious about the logistics and effectiveness of unconferences.

I was surprised when the moderator asked everyone in the room to introduce themselves by stating their name and either their company or their location. C'mon! There were well over 200 people in the room and we were not sitting in neat rows. And yet it worked somehow. I of course didn't remember any names, but I got a good sense of the companies represented--the usual suspects (Sun, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Google, CISCO, etc) as well as many (MANY) small companies, venture capitalists, and several attendees with undisclosed affiliations. In addition, there was probably some benefit in having everyone actually make a vocalization at the outset -- something about participating rather than just observing. In any case, it didn't take long and it was a good ice breaker. And it perhaps helped everyone feel the next step was achievable as well: creating an agenda for the rest of the day, based on everyone's input. And doing so in a finite time. :-)

An unconference is an unconference at least in part because the agenda is not defined beforehand by a conference committee--it is created on the fly by participants at the start of the event with the help of a skilled moderator. At the start of the day, our agenda had four hour-long discussion sessions blocked out, but no content at all. Content was identified this way:

1. Anyone who was interested in hosting a discussion wrote their name and discussion title on a sheet of paper. Proposers would be responsible for running their session, but not for having any answers necessarily.
2. Proposers then lined up and each gave a short (SHORT) description of their discussion idea. We had two mikes and therefore two lines that alternated, which helped this part run a little faster.
3. After announcing their discussion idea, each proposer placed their paper onto a matrix posted on the wall. Our matrix had four rows -- one for each of the day's four one-hour sessions. The matrix had 15 columns, one for each conference room or area designated for discussion, each of which was labeled with a letter from A to O. Proposers could place their discussion in any cell, though there was some encouragement from the moderator to ensure that the last session of the day had a good number of discussions scheduled. Each column was also labeled with the approximate size of each discussion area as input to the heuristic placement procedure. Cloud discussions went into big rooms while the "making parallel programming easier" discussion area had just a couch and a few chairs.

I'm guessing there is some rule of thumb that helps to organizers decide how many concurrent sessions will be needed based on the number of attendees. However it was done, the number of proposed topics mapped nicely to the 4 x 15 = 60 available discussion slots.

Once the agenda was complete, the moderator helped everyone get to their first discussion by reading aloud the titles and locations of the first set of concurrent topics. The entire agenda matrix was then moved to a wall in a central location so attendees could easily visit it between sessions to pick their next discussion topic.

All of the above -- from opening, through introductions and agenda forming -- took less than an hour. The resulting agenda cast a wide net over the theme of the unconference. There were discussions on business models, specific technical issues, models of innovation, development and testing processes, open source, cloud computing, etc. I participated in the following four discussions:

• Simplified Parallel Computing
• How to Start Your Idea [with Almost No Money]
• The Future of Software Testing
• From Data to Answers

I learned something in each discussion, though in the parallel computing case it was merely that talk of SIMD, MIMD, OpenMP, parallel spreadsheets, M language processing, and streaming parallelism is a sure way to keep your discussion group small. They were dropping like flies. :-)

Kidding aside, I was interested to talk to testing practitioners about the 2nd class role played by QA in the engineering hierarchy and how Agile methods might perhaps mitigate that problem by making quality an explicitly shared goal of all team members.

I approached the "data to answers" session wondering if HPC techniques for turning large amounts of data into insights would be applicable in a broader business context and learned that many businesses have a sad lack of experience with even the simplest of analytical methods, including a lack of understanding of even relatively simple data displays.

The "ideas" discussion presented a model for thinking about "intention" as being different from "invention" in the innovation process and how confusing the two can lead to problems in start-up situations. Intention is a statement about who you want to help or what you want to improve, while invention is how one chooses to satisfy the intention. Bill Warner, who lead the session, used the Wildfire voice system as an example to show how confusing these two concepts can lead to problems.

The Innovation unConference, MassTLC's next such event, will be held on the Sun Burlington campus on October 1, 2009. I plan to attend.

Tuesday June 02, 2009

In a previous entry I documented in detail how I contributed an open-source package (Ploticus) to OpenSolaris using SourceJuicer, starting with how to write a spec file and ending with the inclusion of the package in the contrib repository. In truth, at the time I published the information I had not actually taken the last step to promote the package from the pending repository to the contrib repository due to a Ploticus bug I discovered during testing. Ploticus ran okay, but it was not configured as I had wanted. It took me some time to create appropriate patch files, rebuild the package, re-test it, etc.

In retrospect, I'm glad I was delayed because in the meantime OpenSolaris 2009.06 and SourceJuicer 1.2.0 were both released, which gave me a chance to see if any improvements had been made in the contribution process. I am happy to report that improvements were definitely made. Read on for details.

Most important, SourceJuicer documentation has been much improved. See, for example, How to Use OpenSolaris SourceJuicer for a good overview of the submission process. In addition, the short (9 min) video below, which walks through the mechanics of submitting files using SourceJuicer, is also an excellent resource:

SourceJuicer itself has also been improved significantly with this latest release. For example, it is now possible to delete a submitted file if it is no longer needed---I was able to use SourceJuicer 1.2.0 to remove an incorrect copyright file I had created when I first submitted Ploticus. While I appreciated that improvement, I found the following much more intriguing:

The screendump above shows the results of recent SourceJuicer builds, including Ploticus. I was happy to see Ploticus built successfully with the patches I had created on my first try. I was also curious about the implied promise of the new Install column. Since I next wanted to install and test this latest package on my 2009.06 system, I clicked on the Install link. And saw this:

Hey, cool. Firefox knows it should invoke the Package Manager to handle my request. How? With OpenSolaris 2009.06 we've enhanced the Package Manager to support a web installer mode and created a new mime type (application/vnd.pkg5.info) to pass package installation requests from a web page to Package Manager. This works from any web browser so long as the web server is configured to handle .p5i files correctly. See John Rice's blog entry on 2009.06 Package Manager enhancements for more details.

I clicked OK and then saw:

Package Manager promises to not only install the requested package, but to automatically add the required repository to my configuration as well. Surely it can't be this simple. I clicked on Proceed:

Apparently, it can be that simple. :-)

I've now tested my patched version of Ploticus on 2009.06 and requested the package be promoted to contrib by sending a note to sw-porters-discuss@opensolaris.org. I'm hopeful Ploticus will soon be available to the entire OpenSolaris community.

Wednesday May 27, 2009

I was hoping to attend CommunityOne in San Francisco next week (June 1-3), but I'll be beavering away here in Boston instead. C1 is the big, blow-out community event that covers all things OpenSolaris for the technical crowd --- developers and users -- with piles of technical sessions, lightning talks, labs and a host of other activities.

There are several registration options, including one free option that gives you access to two Deep Dive technical tracks on Tuesday as well as some free sessions on Monday. The Tuesday tracks are Developing IN OpenSolaris and Deploying OpenSolaris in Your Datacenter. Topics covered:

If you are interested in dropping by the Moscone Center next Monday or Tuesday for these tech talks, complete the free registration here. For details on the entire C1 event, see the event website or the wiki.

Wednesday April 15, 2009

This weekend I upgraded my 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro's internal hard disk from 160 GB to 320 GB following the excellent instructions at iFixit. The two dodgy steps are freeing the top-case assembly and carefully prying loose the ribbon cables that are attached to the top of the existing hard drive. For the latter you definitely need some sort of thin plastic tool to work gently underneath the ribbons to detach them. To keep track of the variety of tiny screws encountered (both phillips and torx) I organized them according to their iFixit disassembly step.

I chose the 7200RPM Hitachi Travelstar 320GB 16MB SATA drive (model HTS723232L9A360) as a replacement. Since my 160 GB disk was also a 7200 RPM drive, I didn't experience the noticeable performance improvements some people have reported when moving to a faster disk. If you do an upgrade, you should definitely use a 7K drive. I bought mine at Other World Computing.

Before replacing the drive, I did a full back up onto an external Firewire disk and then swapped my new Travelstar into the external drive enclosure and did another full, bootable backup onto the new disk. Both backups were done using Carbon Copy Cloner. After booting from the now externally-attached Travelstar to verify that the backup had worked correctly, I removed the Travelstar from the external disk enclosure and then inserted it into the MBP following the iFixit instructions. Once done, my machine booted with no problem. I now have lots of space for my growing collection of RAW photos, which eat disk space at an alarming clip.

Sunday April 05, 2009

Seen on Route 128 in the Boston area. Wicked!

Friday December 19, 2008

Sitting here south of Boston in the midst of a hefty New England snowstorm (8" so far, more on the way) I've found this Make-a-Flake site a fun distraction. Using a very intuitive interface, you cut up a piece of folded virtual paper which the program then unfolds to reveal the paper snowflake you have created. Don't like it? Keep cutting. Like it? Print out a cutting plan or contribute it to the gallery. Download the cutting plan for any of the gallery flakes--some are extremely cool.

Here are two of my snowflakes...followed by two nice ones from the gallery.

Definitely worth a look.

Wednesday December 10, 2008

We emitted our latest wad of Solaris goodness today with the official release of OpenSolaris 2008.11. Lest you think engineering used a partially undenary nomenclature for the release name, rest assured the bits were in fact done and ready to go in November. The official announcement was delayed slightly due to other proximate product announcements.

I've been running 2008.11 for several weeks, having taken part in the internal testing cycles at Sun. I found and reported several mostly minor problems, but have generally found the 2008.11 experience to be quite good. The Live CD boot and install to disk all worked smoothly within VirtualBox, our free desktop virtualization product, on my MacBook Pro. With VirtualBox extensions installed, I can use 2008.11 in fullscreen mode and with mouse integration enabled.

While my primary interest in OpenSolaris is as a substrate on which we are building a full, integrated HPC software stack I can't help but note a few generally cool things about this release.

First is Time Slider. Yes, okay, Apple did it first with Time Machine. But try THIS with Time Machine: I turned on Time Slider and then immediately deleted a file from my Desktop without first doing any kind of back up. I then recovered the file using the TS slider on a File Browser window. This works because Time Slider is built on top of ZFS, which uses copy-on-write for safety and which is also used to implement an immediate snapshot facility. I was able to recover my file because when it was deleted (meaning "when the metadata representing the directory in which the file was located was changed"), the metadata was copied, modified and then written. But with snapshots enabled by Time Slider, the old metadata is retained as well, making it possible to slide back in time and recover deleted or altered files by revisiting the state of the file system at any earlier time. Nifty.

My second pick is perhaps somewhat esoteric, but I thought it was cool: managing boot environments with OpenSolaris. I think much of this was available in 2008.05, but it is new to me, so I've included it. In any case, managing multiple boot environments has been completely demystified as you can see in this article. Yet another admin burden removed through use of ZFS. For full documentation on boot environments, go here.

We've also made significant progress supporting Suspend/Resume, which is frankly an absolute requirement for any bare-metal OS one might run on a laptop. For me it isn't so important because I run OpenSolaris as a guest OS in VirtualBox. For those doing bare metal installations, this page details the requirements and limitations of the current Suspend/Resume support in 2008.11.

Putting my HPC hat back on for this last item, I note that a prototype release of the Automated Installer (AI) Project has been included in 2008.11. AI is basically the Jumpstart replacement for OpenSolaris--the mechanism that will be used to install OpenSolaris onto servers, including large numbers of servers hence my interest from an HPC perspective. For more information on AI, check out the design documents or, better, install the SUNWinstalladm-tools package using the Package Manager and then read the installadm man page. Full installation details are here. AI is still a work in process so feel free to pitch in if this area interests you: all of the action happens on the Caiman mailing list, which you can subscribe to here.