Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

Catching up - Monday at CEC

I'm more behind than I wanted to be blogging my time here.

I started Monday nice and early with a Breakfast with Ian White. A lovely breakfast, I shared a table with Ian, Linda Park (VP for Services in APAC), Chris Gerhard, Cive King, and some others whose names escape me at this time of night the following day (sorry folks).

We then had a marathon general session which probably could have used a break as about I can recall about it was listening to Andy Bechtolsheim.

Lunch (boxed roll and some other bits and pieces), then breakout sessions for the afternoon.

The standout sessions for me were the Performance ones presented by my mate Bob Sneed and another by Jim Mauro. There was also an interesting session on how support services might use Second Life to do some delivery.

For a while it appeared that dinner on Monday night was going to be fend for yourself, but instead I went up to the unconference. There were probably only about 40-50 people attended this and I find that a shame as it was a damned good session, and they fed us hot dogs and beer.

The unconference consisted of two parts.

• Ten selected to take folks of to various rooms to give a presentation, and
• the remainder and any other volunteers to participate in speed-geeking

We had thirteen folks want to present in a room so a vote was held to determine who got rooms.

Speek Geeking is interesting.

The idea is that you get 10 people in front of aboard with butchers paper, and they get five minutes to give a presentation to the folks at the table in front of them. At the end of the five minutes the listeners move to the next table. Every listener is given a poker chip and at the end they give the chip to the speaker they enjoyed the most, and that speaker gets a prize.

Hal Stern spoke on "DRM is for morons", Bob Sneed did five minutes on capacity planning, Clive King did some basic SGRT, and I gave an impromptu five minutes on the development of a DTrace bourne shell provider. There were more speakers, but as I was a speaker I didn't get to hear these and the listed ones are the ones I can recall. I got a grand total of four chips, so wasn't even in the running. I think the winner got 27. As I said earlier this session was a lot of fun and it would ave been nice if it had been better attended.

A few of us including Bob Sneed, Rodney Lindner and myself hung around socializing for quite some time after the session finished, and I didn't get to bed until about 1am. I really can't remember what I did after we broke up and before I went to bed, maybe it will come back to me :)

More on Tuesday soon.

Technorati Tags: cec2007, suncec2007

Posted at 05:09PM Oct 10, 2007 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

a first at CEC (for me anyway)

About three hours before I laft last Saturday, I got a gate open email for a bugfix that I was putting back into on10-patch (the Solaris 10 Patch gate). I decided that generally the gatekeepers want you available for a bit after it. As I was flying that day, it probably was not a good idea to do it then.

So, before the Speed Geeking at the unconference (more on that later), I wandered down to the Sun Pavilion, got myself punched in and did the putback while sat on the floor conected through wireless.

When I mentioned tis two Hal Stern he made the point that I had to blog thos. So, here you go Hal!

Technorati Tags: cec2007, suncec2007

Posted at 01:20AM Oct 10, 2007 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

First day at CEC

OK, I'm currently sitting in the hallway outside the ballroom where the general sessions will be held in the morning and it's after midnight.

I've only just managed to get connectivity in the last six hours as the wireless access points have been turned on. My phone only just started working today to, although I've been here 24 hours.

Enough moaning :)

I managed 14 hours sleep last night so I think I'm over the jet lag from te flight between Sydney and Las Vegas.

Went along to the APAC Technical council meeting earlier today to hear John Greaves talk about the Principal Engineer programme (or whatever it is going to be renamed after today) and it seems pretty much the track that I'm interested in following.

Caught up with a few folks that I intended to today including Sara Turner and Leon Nicodemus (I hope I spelled that correctly) at the reception drinks.

Afterwards, I adjourned to another bar in the Paris Casino with Clive King, Chris Gerard and a few others for some cleansing Ales. While on this subject, I have to say that what they have done with the Paris Casino is amazing. With the work done on the ceiling you have the impression that you are outside on a Parisian twilight early evening, constantly. While I can see the advantage to casino of having you lose track of the time and the like, it was still a very pleasant way to spend an hour or so wit colleagues.

I'm also having a play around wit CEC 2007, and these folks have done a marvelous job in te setup to provide access to the sessions and breakouts to those unable to attend in person.

More tomorrow!

Technorati Tags: cec2007, suncec2007

Posted at 05:37PM Oct 08, 2007 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

Open vs Proprietry: An effort in mudslinging?

I've just read an "article" by Carla Schroder on Enterprise Networking Planet, where she claims to know the real reason that closed and proprietary code exists.

The point of the article appears to simply be that she doesn't buy ... into the "protect our preciouss IP" excuse because it is so overused.

I see very little in the way of reasoned argument and example to support her stance. Instead I see a lot of mud slinging and cherry picked examples.

We start off with the assertion that the real (and by implication, the only) reason for closed and proprietary code is embarrassment; followed by some "cool" misspellings of phrases like "Trade Sekkkrits" and "Sooper Original Algorithms". There is also another typo in her "conclusion". The typos look to me to be deliberate slurs on anything that a company might say about their code. Really sad reporting Carla, Shame.

She then asserts, without any argument or example that Windows itself is the prime example of this; presented simply along the lines of 'well everybody knows it, I don't have to prove it'. It very well may be the case. It may not. Nothing in this article gives me cause to think it might be.

The rest of the article is a list of cherry picked examples of poor proprietary code.

With regard to the opening of netscape and openoffice, would she have preferred that they not be opened?

The impression that I'm left with is the whole thing was a mudslinging exercise aimed at proprietary code, and not even a very well prepared one at that.

I'm not going to sink myself to the same level as this "article", but I know with pretty much certainty I could find some disgusting examples of embarrassingly poor open source code if I really wanted to do it. She freely admits that there is bad open source code out there too, so I am left even more confused about the point of the article.

Embarrassment, may be one of the reasons for not opening some code up. It's certainly not the only one, which with even a tiny amount of research she could have determined. Nor is it a differentiator between open and closed source.

Carla, you have made an assertion and completely failed to argue your case. You get a D-, and I'm being generous.

A small poke at Jupiter Online Media who run the site. Most articles that I read that are purported to be by trade magazines and journalists at least provide a one liner of the authors credentials. I'm sorry, I can't find it here.

Posted at 10:50AM Aug 28, 2007 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[1]

Something Different

I haven't mentioned it much here, but I was a musician many years ago and I kind of kept my hand in.

I've been helping out at Brackets and Jam North on a monthly basis with the sound desk and I've also been doing the occasional walk-up performance.

I took the next step over last weekend and recorded something I wrote a couple of weeks ago and registered myself as an artist on MySpace. Anyone who is interested can check my page and music at myspace.com/alanhargreaves.

There is also a blog entry there that discusses some more of the interesting bits of how I got that song recorded.

I also found it heartening of the local artists that I have contacted who have linked to me.

Posted at 10:28AM Aug 27, 2007 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

3rd place in loud shirt competition

Last week I ended up in the office on Friday, which is unusual as I normally work from home on Thursday and Friday, but my boss wanted to do a one on one and they are always best done face to face if possible. Now before I left I recalled that they were running a "Loud Shirt Day" competition, so armed with my favorite BBQ shirt I wandered into the office. Looks like I chose well as I placed third.

Click the photo for a large version (if you dare).

The astute of you will notice that I've taken a head and shoulders shot out of this for the current blog photo.

Posted at 12:23PM Apr 06, 2007 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[1]

And sometimes it doesn't suck as much

I should have made this update earlier. I'll be careful about how specific I get here as I'm not sure how much I can or should make public.

I had a phone call from Gosford Police on the Wednesday following the incident. They had made some arrests and wanted me to go through what I lost with them.

On Thursday I went in to make a statement and recovered everything except a couple of cds and dvds that I had written myself and I couldn't remember what was on them (as well as some blanks).

Something I didn't comment on in the prior blog entry was that when I went back to the station to look for anything that may have been dropped, I heard some arguing further up the street followed by three people running up to the station, jumping onto the tracks and running off. On my way back to the car I was stopped by some people in another car asking if I had seen three kids running away. It turns out that on the train following mine, they had assaulted and robbed another poor guy.

The CCTV footage from both Narara and Gosford, as well as the hat that we had was instrumental in the police getting good photographs of these people and they were able to quickly find them and make three arrests. Watching the CCTV footage was an eye opener for how these people had actually done things.

Anyway, I must add to my thank you list the detectives at Gosford and the folks involved in getting them the CCTV footage in such a timely fashion that my gear had not been disposed of. I also need to thank Steve Lau for the offer of one of his spare Ferrari chargers and Jeff Bailey for actually couriering his spare one to my office on Tuesday so I could use my notebook on Wednesday.

Posted at 11:51AM Apr 06, 2007 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[1]

Sometimes life sucks

An unual blog title from me for an unusual entry.

Last night coming home on the train (about 9:20pm) I was sleepily playing a game on my notebook as the train pulled into Narara Station (about 15 minutes from where I would disembark). Out of the corner of my eye I noticed my backpack moving across the seat. Too late I realised it was being taken. I ran after the thief shouting for him to stop. He jumped off out of the car and ran along the tracks, jumping a fence and running off. I jumped after to follow but couldn't catch him.

Inside the bag were:

• Ferrari Charger
• 60gb USB disk
• Ferrari bluetooth mouse
• VPN Token card
• Some CDs, pens and other small bibs and bobs

Pretty much nothing to make the theft worthwhile.

I must express my extreme thanks to the folks who watched my notebook while I tried to catch this guy and returned some course material that had fallen out, also to the train guard firstly, for noticing I was beside the tracks and not allowing the train to move; and secondly for his assistance on the rest of the trip home to make sure that it was correctly reported and that I was generally ok.

I know the thief probably won't be reading this, but he will have been caught on CCTV on both Gosford and Narara Stations. The police also have the hat he dropped.

Anyway as I was talking to the guard, I noticed that my shins hurt and I'd cut my hands up a bit, where I'd fallen on the ballast jumping out of the train. After I got to Wyong I went up to Wyong Police Station to report the theft and hand in the hat. I then drove back down to Narara to look around the area to see if anything had been discarded. Gave up after about half an hour and went home.

When I got there Lyn reminded me that as this was my usual journey home, it should be reported through workcover. As I commented earlier I was starting to hurt a little so I ventured up to Wyong Hospital to be checked out. Unfortunately I chose a very busy night, so it was about five hours before anyone could see me (which I don't begrudge as I lost track of the number of ambulances bringing in folks who were hurt worse than me). As it turned out the nurse who ended up bandaging me up after the Doctor had checked me over was a good friend of ours and she was very helpful, even grabbing me a cup of coffee and something to eat before I left (and offerring a lift home if I wasn't up to driving).

Finally got home about 5:30am and decided it really was not worth going to bed until after the kids went to school, which I'm about to do now.

Oh yes, one more thank you, to all the second life folks who sent me their best wishes on hearing what happened. You know who you are, and you have my gratitude.

So I'm basically left with a notebook taht has about 15 minutes of charge on it until I can organise a new power supply. I hope that that is not going to take too long. I guess, I'm also really glad that the notebook was on my knee and not in the bag. I only just finished paying it off in December!

Posted at 09:10AM Mar 27, 2007 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[4]

You know you are getting old when, ...

This is really sad.

I've been working today now since 8am (just over three hours). I have made many updates to cases that include time/date stamps.

I only just noticed the date in one of them and thought, ...

Hmmm, January 9, .. hey, happy birthday to me.

I now get to spend a year at the answer to the ultimate question, of life, the universe and everything.

Posted at 11:16AM Jan 09, 2007 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[6]

Poor Stevel

Steve has just written up what he discovered on arriving home today. However, I think his delivery onto #opensolaris tells the story so much better:

(13:52:25) stevel: sigh
(13:52:30) stevel: of all the things my beagles had to find, why did it have to be the peanut butter
(13:52:39) stevel: and of all the places they had to eat it.... why did it have to be my bed
(13:55:51) stevel: got the dried mushrooms, leftover stinky tofu (that one is fun to cleanup), a pitcher of tea, garlic, peanut butter, garlic butter spread (that one's fun too), 3 eggs, and a bunch of packets of ramen
(13:56:42) stevel: ... and then to top it off, they decided that eating all this newfound bounty in the kitchen wasn't enough
(13:56:47) stevel: they had to take it into various rooms of the house
(13:57:00) stevel: how the @#)$(*@#$ does a beagle carry a *raw* egg to another room and then decide to bite into it
(13:57:39) stevel: and one of them somehow managed to tip a chair over, jump from there to the fireplace mantle, and then from there onto the top of our piano
(13:57:51) stevel: so he's left scratches all over the piano
(13:58:12) stevel: which, btw, is a $35,000 piano. so that's gonna be probably about $500-$700 to repair the finish on that
(13:58:37) stevel: and of course... what do dogs do after they eat and drink too much?
(13:58:46) stevel: poop and pee....
(13:58:53) stevel: again, the kitchen wasn't good enough for that
(13:58:59) stevel: no no... they had to go on the bathmat instead
(13:59:34) Tpenta: steve this is blog material man
(13:59:42) richlowe: oh yeah.
(14:00:05) gisburn: stevel: please blog it.
(14:00:07) gisburn: steleman_: with photos
(14:00:11) gisburn: LOTS of photos
(14:00:42) stevel: i've already cleaned up most of it, but i can take photos of the scratches
(14:00:57) stevel: and i can take photos of the two of them hiding in the corner of the living room underneath the piano cause they can tell i'm f-ing pissed at them

And on another channel (names removed as ity's not a public channel), telling it from the dog's perspective. I've also edited some of the more obvious words :)

(14:22:53) xxxx: "!@#$% you for leaving me", and "!@#$% you, go clean this shit up yourself you abandoning !@#$%"
(14:23:57) xxxx: "But look at my cute little eyes and eyebrows looking up at you-- you don't want to turn me into sausage, do you?"

I see that steve's now dropped the irc log into te note, but I'll still post this.

Posted at 02:41PM Dec 22, 2006 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

Today's Java Announcement

Note that some of the links that I point at are not currently available, but are expected to be soon.

The world just changed and I suspect it's going to be some time before the whole impact is understood.

What am I talking about? For those that have not yet seen, Sun is announcing today that Java will be made available under version 2 of the GPL in a webcast at 9:30 US/Pacific this morning.

The general concensus was that this would never happen in a million years.

So what is actually happenning? Rather then spend too much time here, there is a FAQ available answering what we would hope would be pretty much any question that might exist about this.

What I found most amazing about the announcement is who has come out saying things about it. Most particularly, when I heard Richard Stallman quote:

I think Sun has well, with this contribution have contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. It shows leadership. It's an example I hope others will follow.

And from Eben Moglen

Sun's policy of GPLing java which we are celebrating now is an extraordinary achievement in returning programming technology to that state of freely available knowledge that people can share and improve together. It's a crucial step in the process of turning the technology today into knowledge that people can use freely to make the technology of tomorrow.

There are a lot more quotes on the announcement site and while I have not yet seen it, I believe that RMS is on video talking about this announcement.

One of the huge things that this opens the way for is for the various Linux distributions to both build and distribute java, including those who have particularly tight licensing guidelines on what they will distribute.

While there has been a lot of press speculation in the weeks leading up to this announcement, I am actually amazed at how little of this announcement has actually leaked.

Anyway, I had been following some of the leadup speculation and there were a couple of articles that particularly piqued my interest.

David Berlind has posted a few interesting articles speculating on the impact of open sourcing java.

In Will Sun blow up the Microsoft/Novell deal to Red Hat's benefit? David makes an interesting link.

Enter Sun's open source Java decision. Novell's Mono project — essentially a Linux-based clone of Microsoft's .Net — was apparently a major focus of the deal. For several years now, dating back to the days before Ximian was under Novell's wing, the open source sector has been wondering if Microsoft was going to drop a shoe on Ximian-founder Miguel de Icaza's brainchild (Mono). .Net has always been a bet-the-company gamble for Microsoft. Today, the company is taking heat on every single front and it can't afford a complete cave-in on one of its most important properties. There's no way it could let a .Net clone get away with murder. Sooner or later, this was going to come to a head. Well, now it has.

But the game is not over yet. That's because Microsoft may not be holding the cards that some think it's holding. At least not all of them. One need only look back at Sun's 2004 stand-still agreement with Microsoft to realize that when it comes to .Net-like virtual machine environements, the real IP holder is probably Sun. I'm not a lawyer. But I'm willing to be that there's hardly anything - probably nothing - in .Net for which prior art doesn't exist in Sun's Java or something that came before it. In fact, looking across Sun's entire portfolio of IP as well as the larger world of older intellectual property, it's quite possible that some of the other software that's often packaged with Linux that could potentially be infringing on Microsoft's IP (i.e. OpenOffice, SAMBA, and Evolution) is actually doing nothing of the sort.

Definitely interesting speculation.

He goes on to say

For one, Sun might not be Red Hat's white knight - but it sure would have just cast a life presever in North Carolina's direction. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if executives from the two companies haven't exchanged notes at this point. Putting Java in the GPL clear would be like tearing a piece off the bottom off the .Net boat. To that extent, not only might the move legally neutralize a key part of the Microsoft-Novell deal, it could technically marginalize .Net's competitiveness. Why? Well, picture the boat. Sun just swam by and chewed a big hole in its bottom. The boat is in bad shape and the crew starts bailing out the water. But, things go from bad to much worse when a school of angry whales, the biggest of which has the letters I-B-M emblazoned on its side, flies out of the water and lands in the boat. Sun may not think of IBM and other Java licensees as the cavalry. But IBM has been laying in waiting for Java to be open sourced the way a starving Burmese python lays in waiting for a rodent to prance by. Here's a story that I wrote in 2002 about those very wishes. A GPL'd Java would be one of Big Blue's moments of glory.

The bigger question for Sun is whether or not it's ready for such a bold opening of its software portfolio. For such a move to make sense, it would have to be completely confident that its hardware and services offerings are potent enough to comfortably put the company in the black and keep it there. It's a model that has worked pretty well for two of its biggest competitors: IBM and HP. Maybe it will work for Sun.

We're are definitely living in interesting times.

In Richard Stallman's shackles: The open source Java acid test? David revisits an essay that Richard Stallman wrote in 2004, in which he had a number of uncomplimentary things to say about Java and it's licensing. Obviously Richard is now much happier with us.

As an aside, one of the commenters to the second article, had this to say:

As to the question "will it pass RMS's smell test or not?" the answer is no.

Well, I believe that what RMS has to say about the whole thing pretty much decides that issue.

It feels like we've just had an enormous shift in the software industry. I don't think anyone really understands just how the industry will be impacted by it.

In many ways I think Sun has firmly laid down the gauntlet to it's competitors to "walk the walk" and not just "talk the talk". Over the last few years we have had a number of them saying exactly the same thing to us. Well, the line has been firmly drawn in the sand. Sun has released it's two major crown jewels (Java and Solaris) as open source. Should we expect to see DB2 and Openview follow the same path from their respective owners, or shall they just continue to "talk the talk"?

Update

Corrected a couple of typos, including teh spelling of Eben Moglen's name. Sorry about that Eben.

Technorati Tags: openjava, Sun, GPL,

Posted at 04:38PM Nov 13, 2006 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[3]

You Tube vs UTube - Turn the problem on it's head for a solution?

I noticed YouTube faces UTube Lawsuit on El Reg when I came in this morning. While discussing it amongst colleagues (and I don't pretend to know the ins and outs o fthe legalities involved in the suit), it occurred to me that these folks were missing a giant opportunity here.

The way I read it is that the basis of their problems stems from:

In the suit, Universal Tube alleges that its traffic has soared from around 1,500 hits in a month to over two million because of vast numbers of visitors looking for "lewd and other disgusting video".

The answer, as I see it is really simple. Get hold of a Try and buy T2000 server to handle the load, and place some google ads on the page. The income from the ads would then fund the infrastructure upgrades.

Simple huh? :-)

Technorati Tags: Solaris, Sun, T2000, Google, YouTube

Posted at 08:56AM Nov 03, 2006 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

SJVN's rant on Oracle doing Linux Sustaining Support

While I don't want to make any actual comment on whether or not Oracle can deliver on what they announced in their press release, I do take issue with something that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has said in his rant about it.

The Oracle press release reads, "Red Hat only provides bug fixes for the latest version of its software. This often requires customers to upgrade to a new version of Linux software to get a bug fixed. Oracle's new Unbreakable Linux program will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux. In other words, Oracle will provide the same level of enterprise support for Linux as is available for other operating systems."

First, no one supports their obsolete operating systems. Want to get support for Windows NT? 2000? 98!? Good luck! In any case, with RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), you simply get the next version as part of your contract. No one has to stay with RHEL 3 unless they want to.

Come on Steven, you know better than that.

The commercial O/S vendors have always supported multiple releases. Sun (as an example that I am intimately familiar with) provides patches for Solaris 8 and 9 as well as the current release.

The press release states "Oracle's new Unbreakable Linux program will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux", they don't say how far back. The point they made was that they want to provide the same level of patch support as enterprise customers have come to expect from other operating systems (paraphrased). You just took an extreme example to support your point of view.

To go back to what I work with, no matter how desperately I would love to see folks move off Solaris 8 to 9 or 10, I know that for as long as we provide support for 8 & 9 (and after we drop support for them), we are going to have folks out there running them, simply because that's what some other vendor has certified their application on. To put this into perspective, Solaris 8 was released in February 2000. Solaris 8 is still actively supported.

While I don't want to make any comment about whether or not Oracle can actually deliver, one thing that needs to be said is that if Oracle can deliver a service that is not currently available anywhere else (I'm sure someone will correct that if I'm mistaken), then they deserve the business. The corollary is that if Red Hat don't wish to provide this service, then they really can't cry foul if someone else wants to deliver it.

It would be interesting to see what you would have had to say if a new startup had made a similar announcement.

Technorati tags: Oracle, Linux, RedHat

Posted at 12:53PM Oct 26, 2006 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[5]

Memories

Driving to the station this morning I heard a song that always reminds my of a high school friend who tragically died too young.

I always associated the song Dream Weaver with Murray.

Apart from being a gifted musician, he was also one of the nicest guys you could ever meet.

The act of kindness that always stays with me was something that he did when I was going into year 11 at school. There were two of us who wanted to study Music for the higher school certificate. Unfortunately they would not run a class unless there were three students. Murray left school in year 10, but returned for long enough to get this class started.

Rest well Murray, you are definitely remembered.

Posted at 08:59AM Oct 26, 2006 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

A Sad week for Australia

This week Australia has lost two icons.

You all would have heard about Steve Irwin and the young family he has left behind.

Today I discovered that an icon that I grew up watching race died in a racing accident today.

While I'm not heavily into car racing, I grew up with Peter Brock otherwise known as Peter Perfect as one of my heroes. His performance at Mount Panorama in the Bathurst 1000 (formerly the Hardie Ferodo 500) earned him the undisputed title King of the Mountain. In seven appearances, he won six of them including one by six laps.

Respected by many, Peter will certainly be missed.

Posted at 04:33PM Sep 08, 2006 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[4]