Friday May 30, 2008

The headline published by NASA Science News was "Strange Ring Found Circling Dead Star," a headline practically designed to set any true scifi fan's heart a-flutter. Could it be? Wouldn't it be wonderful if? Is it a...Ringworld?

Alas, it was not to be. The ring is gaseous and, while not explained, not nearly so interesting as Larry Niven's ring.

I've been exchanging email about Java performance with Paul Hohensee, Sun's technical lead on the Java SE VM. He sent me several slide decks and additional information that will be useful to anyone interested in writing high performance Java code or in extracting high performance from existing Java code.

The first presentation [PDF] contains a list of pointers to whitepapers on Java performance, tuning, and garbage collection, as well as additional resources on monitoring and management, including information on using Dtrace with Java. It also includes a list of performance-oriented blogs, which I reproduce here for your convenience:

The second presentation, titled "High Performance Java Technology in a Multi-core World" [PDF] by Paul Hohensee and David Dagastine was presented at the 2007 JavaOne Conference. It gives an overview of Sun's multi-core architectures and then presents Java VM technologies and software optimization techniques to maximize application performance.

Paul also pointed me to this recent article on Java performance myths, which summarizes the conclusions of two Google engineers who took a close look at conventional wisdom versus reality.

I've had a good desktop OS week.

First, I installed the first official release of OpenSolaris on my Apple MacBook Pro, which went flawlessly. It was better than the earlier release candidates and, for those only familiar with Solaris 10 installations, it is an entirely better, more modern and more enjoyable experience.

If you aren't sure you will use OpenSolaris, but are curious about it, then download the LiveCD image and play with OpenSolaris in memory with no commitment to write it to your local disk. Get the OpenSolaris 2008.05 LiveCD image here.

I opted to use OpenSolaris within VirtualBox on my Mac rather than create a separate Bootcamp partition for it. In the past, I've used both VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop for my virtualized OS instances, but I've switched to VirtualBox. Partly because Sun now owns the technology, but also because it is free. I'm running V1.6 and have had no problems using it with OpenSolaris. Get VirtualBox here.

This was also the week that Apple finally released 10.5.3, a much-needed Leopard update that fixes lots of bugs. In my case I've been able to re-enable turn power management and allow my MBP to sleep again--it now seems to be working properly. Even better, closed-lid mode works again and I am typing this entry using my laptop with an external USB keyboard and the Sun 24" LCD monitor in my office. Apple's Vista versus Leopard TV advertisements are now funny again.

I have indeed had a good desktop OS week.