Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

My presentation for SOSUG tonight

Well the first SOSUG meeting happens in just under three hours.

I'll speak tonight (after Brendan) on DTrace - Using SDT Probes

This is aimed more at how to put the probes into the code, smattered with a few contrived and not so contrived examples.

Hope to see folks there tonight. I'll post about the meeting either later tonight or tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

Posted at 03:19PM May 31, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[2]

Just putting finishing touches on SOSUG presentation

I spent today at the iForce Centre in North Sydney working with some folks to benchmark a customer application.

As there were long periods of waiting for things to complete, I spent some time on the presentation that I'm going to give at the SOSUG meeting on Tuesday night (May 31, 6pm, Level 1, 33 Berry St, North Sydney).

I've decided to talk a little about SDT (Statically Defined Tracing) probes and how to use them. There'll be a couple of examples in the kernel (using stuff that I can talk about before the code release) and I've fudged up a pretty trivial user space example to give some idea of how to do them there (hint: they're slightly different). I hope folks will find it interesting.

Closer to the day (read, when I've finished the speaker notes ;) I'll put it up here for folks that are interested in looking at it.

I look forward to meeting some more people interested in OpenSolaris on Tuesday night. See you there.

Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris

Posted at 09:00PM May 26, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[2]

San Francisco Open Solaris Group Meeting Video

Thanks to Ben for giving the url to his home machine where he kept it and to Derek for putting it up on the external site.

The video of the First Open Solaris User Group Meeting is now available.

Be warned, it's about 504mb of DivX. It might takea while to download.

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris

Posted at 02:29PM May 23, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[2]

Sailing, Sailing, ...

Well, only in a sense.

The weekend before last, I finished getting our shade sails up over out patio. I was going to have my wife take some pictures with here phone and send them to me, but the weather last week was abyssmal.

Anyway, I ducked out on Saturday morning to take these. Sorry, this is the size the camera takes so we don't have bigger ones.

Getting tension on that Eastern mount point nearly saw me taking an unplanned flying lesson :)

For those who are interested, the sails are both triangular - 5m per side. The "poles" are a pair of koppers logs sunk about 2 feet down in quickset cement.

The newly covered area had it's first workout on Sunday when we invited some neighbours over for a lovely BBQ.

Technorati Tag: HomeImprovements

Posted at 12:43PM May 23, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

IBM/Red Hat offering "migration services"

I am quite frankly amazed at the amount of hype and press that this is getting.

Did anyone actually bother to read what is being offered here?

There is really nothing new. All vendors offer migration services from their competitors to their own systems.

All vendors charge money for this service.

Including this one.

The only no-charge item in this announcement is the fact that they will come out, evaluate what needs to be done and tell you how much it will cost.

Although, I guess it would be kinda nice to know how long the hoover will be in your wallet¹.

The timing is also interesting as here we have some Sun Competitors offering migration services away from Solaris, at the time when we now have a Solaris that is becoming increasingly attractive not only to stay on, but to migrate to. Go figure.

Technorati Tag:Solaris

Posted at 08:50AM May 20, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris  |  Comments[2]

Sydney Open Solaris User Group Meeting on May 31

From the sosug google group

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
6pm on Tuesday the 31st May.

Sun Microsystems
Ground Floor
33 Berry Street
North Sydney
note: Building automatically locks front doors at 6pm, so try
      to arrive before the start time.
      Contact Peter Lees if you get stuck outside.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 If you would like more information or have any questions you can also
contact Che Kristo
See you all there 

I've removed the phone numbers for Peter and Che for this blog entry, but they are listed in the email.

We're not quite as far along as the SanFran group with regards to having an agenda or a speaker (although Peter is leaning on me at the moment to come up with something), but I'm sure it will be a good evening. One of the thoughts is to do some excerpts from the last SanFran group's video.

Ideas for the meeting should probably also be posted to the sosug google group.

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris

Posted at 06:14PM May 18, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[3]

Front Page News: Kylie Minogue's Clothes are of International Importance!

I made a mistake this morning. I had a look at the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald while I had a mouthful of breakfast cereal. It was all I could do to keep the cereal in my mouth. The article that I saw is titled Kylie, cheek by jowl with the masterpieces.

It features a photo of Gold hotpants on a manniquin.

According to various people quoted in the article, Kylie's clothes are not only "Culturally Significant"; they are of "great national and international importance".

The cartoon down the bottom (poor choice of words there) page is not bad either.

I mentioned this article on an irc channel and got the following response:

Alan you just made me spit out my drink all over my iBook!

I think a few of the people quoted in this "news" take themselves just a little too seriously.

Hmmm, must be a slow news day.

Update

I've just been told that the Sydney Morning Herald requires registration. I must have registered some time ago and forgotten about it. It's a free registration.

Technorati Tag: Kylie

Posted at 10:40AM May 13, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |  Comments[2]

Super Support Girl

I've recently found a blog that I find a great read. She's only been blogging for Sun for a short while (but apparantly has been blogging elsewhere for some time.

The blog is called Super Support Girl Saves the Day Again (The story of a lowly support engineer's rise to global domination). Emma has a wonderful writing style. About the only issue I would take with her is her statement

My name is Emma, [...] and am probably at the bottom end of all Sun employees

Emma, folks like you are the face of Sun Microsystems. As far as the customer who is upset that something has broken is, you are Sun.

It was interesting reading the comments on her first entry. The first an obvious troll, followed by a welcome from both Simon and Jonathan.

Keep up the great blogging.

I've added Emma to my blog roll under Sun Folks->CES.

Posted at 04:42PM May 10, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in General  | 

More on "Vapourware"

This is not going to be as short as I would have hoped, but we'll see how we go.

First off, I do thank Renai LeMay from ZDNet Australia for what I read as a good article reporting what was going on and not an opinion piece. As such I think the neutral stance was more than appropriate.

The only correction that I would make is a relatively minor one. That is, that I'm not a Kernel Developer. I am doing work with these folks to get opensolaris out the door, so I guess in that sense I could be mistaken for such. My main job is customer focussed, but at a kernel source code level.

Now shortly after this article was releasedit hit slashdot

This prompted a lot of comments there, against the ZDNet AU article and my blog.

I think that 19 comments is the most I've had on any entry.

More than a few pointed out the perception that until the source code is out there that it is difficult to see it as other than vapourware. Quite honestly, I can see that point of view and I would like nothing better than for us to be in the position to say, "OK folks, here it is. Go for it". I hope that when we do release it folks will see the amount of work that has gone into making it available.

A few also suggested that we should be releasing it piecemeal. For example, as code gets reviewed and "passed", it goes up. This was discussed amongs the pilot members during January and the decision was taken that this would actually delay the release. There were strong arguments in both camps on this issue.

I would agree with the comments about pure hype, except that we have people building and using the code tree outside of Sun. Many of these have also spoken about their experiences building and running it, along with posting screenshots. The latest that I've seen here are from Dennis Clarke of Blastwave.

Another questioned how many developers we expect. Well we have in excess of 120 external folks on the pilot. Already we have a number of them talking about distributions based on opensolaris and we have a PPC port underway. I think we're off to a reasonable start.

I must take exception to the commenters that believe that Once opensolaris is out there that Sun will immediately start the lawsuits. Check out our history, Sun has no history whatsoever as a patent terrorist. This argument is pure FUD.

Shipping Solaris under licence to a commercial partner is a completely different beast to open sourcing it. Many companies license their code in such a way that it is easy to do one and not the other. This is one of the areas where a lot of work has been going on.

One anonymous poster to my blog was saying that we should not be trying to beat Red Hat. Reality check people. Red Hat and Sun are competitors. Competitors compete. I'm sure if you had a look through some of what Red Hat is saying about us it would be in the same vein.

Now to comments on the ZDNet AU article.

The first two are from me, I probably don't need to say anything about those (short of the fact that I managed to submit one of them before I had finished writing it ;-).

The majority of these comments are along the lines of "Put up or shut-up", that is, "show use the code or shut-up". I know it's sounding like a worn our record (you remember those vinyl things from a previous era), but it really is coming. I think if we miss the deadline that we have set ourselves now, we deserve a roasting.

One poster appears to have Containers (zones) confused with something else (ZFS perhaps?), as they were implying that we hyped it before it was present. Containers were present when Solaris 10 FCS'd. ZFS and Janus? Fair comment. I can only say that we want these right before they go onto production enterprise hardware. In my (20) years as an SA, I know I would be less than happy if I changed my filesystems over to a new filesystem, only to find that a bug-fix changed the on-disc format and I had to take out a major production fox for an extended outage while I fixed it.

I also believe that ZFS is currently in a public beta.

Slashdot

I'm going to miss a lot in here as even at Threshold 0, there are comments that I don't see and also as of writing this, there are 258 comments. I've also already addressed a lot of what I saw on slashdot in the preceding text.

Some of the early comments were quite good. I like the ones about vapourware and clothing, particularly the undergarments one.

I do see a lot of speculation on what we are doing, for example one poster believes that we have to rewrite large sectoins of code becuase it contains Veritas code. Nope.

One poster pointed out that we would not be going for a "it barely works" first release. This is spot on. Quality is one of the main concerns for any Solaris. One of the things that anyone putting back code to Solaris lives by is "FCS Quality All the Time".

A few folks asked why Fintan and I bothered to respond to an obvious troll. The main reason that we both responded to this is that we both felt incredibly insulted by the assertions. That writeup that I did only took me about 10-15 minutes. I've spent much more time on this one already. In fact this one took me a little over an hour (of my own time after my workday finished for those who are interested).

> There are a lot of us out there who both do and do not work for Sun

Wow! Quantum programmers!

Brilliant!

A few other folks tried to get pedantic on the above italised statement by taking it out of the context in which is was written. Please note the phrase "a lot of us" which is referring to the previous sentence - "opensolaris certainly exists, you only have to speak to anyone involved in getting it out there."

Some others are saying that Renai whould have used the word "claim" rather than "refute" as we were only claiming, not showing. Why do I need to show when we have folks already posting screenshots and build logs of open solaris? Folks who don't work for Sun. Surely it would be difficult to do this with a product that does not and will not exist?

People also complained about how Jim Grisanzio set the tone by "attacking every critical statement about Sun's OpenSolaris release like a brain-dead pitbull with rabies (appologies to all pitbulls)". I for one have only seen Jim getting this critical on people who are posting obvious rubbish with an obviously anti-Sun agenda. The flamewars started well before this. I believe that there are a lot of folks out there who are scared silly by the concept of an open source Solaris (note that I am stating a personal belief here, there is no way that I would try to claim this as a given fact or anyone else's belief for that matter, I'm not that arrogant).

I will mention that there was one Anonymous post (who I am all but certain that I know who it is) who points out that I was not a kernel developer when he worked at my office. He points out that when he left he was a tier 4 CPRE engineer and that I was tier 3. Well actually, at the time that he left we both worked for the same group (which was a merger of tier 3 and 4) for the same manager. Since that person left I have actually gone on to work with kernel sustaining and workign with engineering to get fixes into the code base, and I don't just mean backporting to the non-develoment versions either. He also claims that any kernel development work that I do is in my own time and I should be doing customer work. Things have changed in the two years since you left and process has changed considerably. As this person posted anonymously I will respect their privacy and not name them.

Well, that's considerably more than I intended to write, but for what it's worth, there it is.

I'd like to think that when I comment on this (and pretty much any topic), that I come across as well considered rather than rabid. You get a lot more accomplished through calm conversation than flame fests.

Update - May 10

As Dan Price points out in the comments to this entry, , ZFS is actually in a private Beta.

Also in the comments, Carl Trusiak provides links to information about builds done by Bill Bradford, Jörg Schilling and Ben Rockwood. I would have put these in but I was a little pushed for time when writing as I wanted to get home.

Chris Rijk also made some good points on the usage of the word "Vapourware".

Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris

Posted at 06:07PM May 09, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  |  Comments[8]

Wow, I'm on slashdot

I noticed an article on zdnet au quoted me on Friday evening and I left a few comments.

On Saturday morning, one of my colleages called me to tell me that I was featured on slashdot.

There are a few things that I'd like to reply to in the blog comments and some of teh slashdot comments. However, I actually have a bit on my plate at the moment work-wise. I'll try to get something coherent up efore the end of the day.

One thing that I will state is that the reason I did not reply to anything over the weekend is that I actually have a family that I spend time with and deliberately do not go near computers during this time, especially as they do not see much of me because of my normal (90 minute each way) commute during the week.

Technorati Tag:OpenSolaris

Posted at 11:02AM May 09, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Open Source Solaris  | 

Football (Soccer) Season

Well, its actually been going for a few weeks now.

This year both Jacob and Lucy are playing in the Joeys.

They've had a few relatively large wins. Jake scored his first goal ever the other week and unfortunately I was working that Saturday. He's showing a lot more confidence now.

Lucy is also starting to get her confidence although she had not played before this season.

My father managed to snap this one while I was working and got both of them in frame. Click the image for a larger version.

Posted at 04:34PM May 06, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in Kids  | 

South Park Characterizations

OK, if Peter and AlanC have done it, then I guess it's my turn.

Update May 6

Looks like we can add the following folks to the ranks...

• Ben
• John Clingan
• Rich Burridge
• Emma Brett

If you want to do your own, head on over to here and have a play. I then used xwd to grab a window dump then played with gimp a little to crop and resize it.

Technorati Tag:SouthPark

Posted at 04:50PM May 05, 2005 by Alan Hargreaves in General  |