James Dickens — One more ZFS video
Dynamic LUN expansion
The Japanese OpenSolaris community
continues to grow. It's now the 3rd largest community in the
OpenSolaris world following the Spanish and Indian communities, it's
the 3rd most active, and Tokyo is the #1 city outside the United States
for sending traffic to opensolaris.org. The community in Japan also
continues to diversify as well with general users mixing with kernel developers
and globalization engineers. In fact, this diversity is driving the
need to run concurrent sessions for beginners and advanced developers and users
at community events.
There are multiple parts to the community in Japan:
After nearly 10 years, I've now left Sun. Thanks to everyone for following my blog for all these years. Please follow my new blog, Wild Webmink, where I have posted a career retrospective.
Ewgeco E200(Disclaimer: I’m biased; Rubaidh built the My Ewgeco web app, and that’s how I got my hands on a test unit in the first place.)
We’ve had a test Ewgeco unit kicking around the office for a while now, and since we’ve moved out the office, it’s been lying in a box with all the other equipment. Over the weekend, I rescued it from storage and hooked it up in the house. And it’s been a huge success.
Ewgeco is an energy monitor that shows a real-time display of your electricity, water and gas usage, also recording the information for later analysis. The idea is to show a very simple bar graph user interface with a traffic light system: green means your consumption is low, red means it’s much higher than your average. The device calibrates itself to your usage over time to make the traffic lights really mean something (though this takes about a week, so we haven’t experienced that yet).
You can retrieve the data from the device and upload it to a web app (which, as I say, we built, so take my gushing praise with that in mind!) where you can spot patterns in usage and feed that information back to actively reduce your energy bills. I haven’t tried out the web app since we installed the unit at home – I’ve only got ~2 days of data now – but I’m really looking forward to giving it a shot from the perspective of the consumer. I’m sure it’ll be awesome. :-)
It’s dead simple to install the device to measure electricity. You simply wrap a “current clamp” around the mains cable feeding your electricity meter. Done. That’s the only one we have installed just now as the gas and water meter installations are a little more involved (though I’m really hoping to at least start measuring gas usage soon). A wizard on the device takes you through connecting to the (wireless) current clamp to retrieve the data, and set your tariffs so you can accurately measure costs.
The real beauty of the Ewgeco device, though, is in the instant feedback. Until now, I’ve received feedback on our energy usage at most once a month and, more usually once a quarter, when we get a meter reading followed by a bill. Now, it’s instant. Switch on the kettle, and you see the electricity graph jump into the red, the number increasing by 3KW. It’s already demonstrated that, for example, that it’s cheaper to make a cup of coffee (with our coffee maker) than it is to make a cup of tea, even just boiling the right amount of water.
The fun bit is going to be walking around the house with the unit (which is wireless, so you can pick it up and wander around quite happily) and seeing what contributes to the “background” electricity usage in our house. When the house was quiet, I was noticing about 0.5KW background usage. I’d like to see how we can change our behaviour patterns to lower that (though I suspect it’s largely down to the fridge, fish tank and a Sun X4100 M2 now sitting in the attic!).
I’ve been working with Ewgeco for well over a year now, but it hasn’t been until I installed the unit in our house that I understood that it’s a complete game changer. Visibility into our energy usage, instant feedback and being able to spot longer term trends is definitely going to lower our energy usage, save us money and have us contribute less adversely to the environment.
I've missed FAST 2010 yet again.... but, good news! The complete FAST 2010 Proceedings (PDF) are available for free. USENIX members can also view the presentation videos online.
Ales posted some updated application resource files to be localized for auth.opensolaris.org and repo.opensolaris.org. The auth application is already deployed and translated into 25 languages, so it will be great to expand on those community contributions. But there will be an entirely new version of the SCM Console deployed at repo.opensolaris.org later this month (the live version is not localized yet), so we are looking forward to releasing that application in as many languages as possible. Information on contributing to the website localization project.
China is a poor country with nothing comparable to the tremendous research, industrial and economic resources that the U.S. has been blessed with. Yet they’re blowing us away — at least for the moment — in the race to the future.
The network of world-class universities and advanced research institutions in the U.S. is by far the most impressive in the world: think Harvard and Stanford and Berkeley and M.I.T. and on and on. If you add to that the venture capital community in the U.S. with its vast experience and the willingness of investors to take risks, and the sheer entrepreneurial talent of the American business community, you end up with an array of resources fully capable of moving the U.S. into a low-carbon, high-growth and extraordinarily productive economy that would be the envy of the world.
But for that to happen — as Bruce Katz, a Brookings executive who was one of the organizers of the conference, pointed out — America’s corporate, civic and political leaders will have to “articulate what’s really at stake here.”
Mary Lou Dopart, Oracle's Senior Director of Global Customer Programs, posted a welcome message to the OpenSolaris User Groups yesterday, along with a note from Jeb Dasteel, Senior Vice President & Chief Customer Officer. So, it looks like some communication channels are opening up regarding OpenSolaris. The original message was sent to osug-leaders, and a few people responded. I responded as well and offered to help out and forwarded the message to advocacy-discuss since that's a much larger list. I also updated the Advocacy and OSUG pages.
The 18-29 year olds are different. 'The Empathic Civilization': The Young Pioneers Of The Empathic Generation.
And I think it bodes pretty well for the future of emerging
international communities of all kinds -- technical, scientific,
political, environmental, medical, etc. The article seems focused on
American and/or Western people, but I wonder what this
generation of kids is like in other parts of the world since culture so
significantly affects opinion and action. Regardless. If you want to learn about community you need to get around people who do community. Kids. Oh, and by the way, for those above 40 or so, you don't lead in this situation. You follow. Then after you participate and contribute and earn your way you can lead in your area. But remember, everyone leads and everyone follows. That's what I like about communities. Leaders aren't special and opportunity isn't restricted. The kids seem to know that. Why don't we?
I went to the Tokyo2Point0 event last night.
There were 250
people there with another 150 online, so it was a packed time for sure. Really nice to catch up with a
bunch of people. I haven't been to one of these events in many months.
Just been too busy. It was also to good to see Michael Sullivan do a
short talk on OpenSolaris as well.
The OpenSolaris Community in Japan will participate at the Spring Tokyo Open Source Conference with three talks from Keiichi Oono, Kenichi Mizoguchi, and Masafumi Ohta on February 27th. See Ohta-san's announcement in Japanese and English
It matters greatly who wins the war because the winners write the
history and they rarely -- if ever -- characterize events accurately.
That's what makes history fun. It's a puzzle and it's always changing. In this case I'm talking
about Caesar, who in 58 A.D.
destroyed the Celts in Gaul (France), killed and enslaved millions,
took the gold, propagandized the history, and went on to rule Rome as
Emperor. Nice guy. That is of you like vicious dudes running psychotic
military dictatorships. But whatever. The point is that the Romans won,
so their view of things survived throughout the ages. But I'm more interested in what was lost? What did the Romans conveniently leave out of their history?
For that, check out The Primitive Celts, an entertaining and fascinating look at the Celts, who the Romans say were mere barbarians. But were they? Seems some archaeologists are discovering the Celts actually had a highly developed society with the most advanced calender at the time and a sophisticated economy based on a variety of trades. They minded gold all across Europe, and they built a vast network of roads to facilitate international trade. Generally, the contrast to Rome was nearly total. Where the Celts decentralized things into a web and community-like structure, the Romans centralized them into a rigid hierarchy. And that proved a critical and fatal difference -- at least in ancient times. Centralization won. Big time, actually.
But I wonder if that distinction remains true today. What's the better concept around which to build a society in 2010? And, more importantly, who wins the war when these differences collide for whatever reason? Surely the world today is substantially different than when the Romans were wrecking the place two thousand years ago, but would their systems prevail today? You can look at this from the perspective of a county or a company or even a project. It's just the management of resources to achieve a goal. Nothing more. But my question asks which is better and who wins now?
Here is a nice example from Serbia demonstrating the value of building a local OpenSolaris community. It can lead to some very interesting organizations paying very close attention to what you are doing. Congrats, guys! Some of the OpenSolaris User Groups are doing some really interesting work out there, and they are contributing to the overall community in a very big way.
There were two sessions (beginners/advanced) at the monthly Tokyo OpenSolaris
Study Group on Saturday:
A third concurrent session will be opened hopefully starting in
February or March. More info soon. Subscribe to ug-jposug
and ug-tsug
to participate.
More info about the OpenSolaris communtiy
in Japan here. More OpenSolaris photos here.
McNealy's bittersweet memo bids good-bye to Sun: "Scott McNealy, the smack-talking co-founder and long-running leader of Sun Microsystems, has bid adieu to his company in a memo that mixes nostalgia with a rallying cry for employees about to become part of Oracle. The memo, sent Tuesday under the subject line 'Thanks for a great 28 years,' has more genuine emotion than you'll see in a year's worth of official communications from most corporate leaders." -- Stephen Shankland
I think those of us who have worked with Scott or interacted with him in any way would agree. It's something you feel and you feel it right away.
How could I not read an article in USA Today with a headline like this? Psychologists: Propaganda works better than you think.
It's true, of course. I find propaganda is a remarkably effective tool, and it's far more sophisticated in democracies than it is in totalitarian societies (see Chomsky here and here and a million other places, and also see David Barstow's reports on the media and the Pentagon -- video, article, article -- for a well-known and recent example). But what I found most interesting in the USA Today piece was the assertion that accurate information may not counteract propaganda very well and actually could help transmit it. If that's true, would it make sense to be more assertive in communications to drive the agenda and then to ignore critics (or at least the vicious and extreme ones)? I suppose this strategy wouldn't necessarily work in all cases, and there are certainly some very effective techniques to deposition attackers. But just tossing out good information in a attempt to thwart the bad stuff may not be a good use of time. Having the good information well documented so you can rapidly point to it for those interested is required, of course, but it's the never-ending iterative arguing that I think I'm done with. I've been trying this for about a year now, and I find it more effective than my earlier pattern of responding to everything in an attempt to change minds. I gave up. Plus, it's not as exhausting.
Propaganda fascinates me. I keep track at this tag: http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/tags/propaganda
Wall Street Journal: Harvard Prof Wonders: Why Are There So Many Women Veterinarians? 77 percent of new veterinarians coming out of school are women. That's an amazing change in the gender dynamics of the field, which was dominated by men just 30 years ago. When I worked at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine a decade ago (see our PBS Nova documentary) the male/female ratio coming out of school was about 50 percent. So the trend is increasing. I think in most technical and scientific fields men still represent the majority. So, what happens when that situation completely reverses? I wonder how the profession will evolve with the women running things as the overwhelming majority of veterinary researchers and clinicians. Will policies change? Will the quality of care change? Will the science change? Will veterinary medicine influence other related scientific professions? I used to talk about these issues a lot with Dr. Elizabeth Lawrence, who I got to know quite well at Tufts. She's no longer with us now, but she was a lovely and innovative women and a true pioneer in her generation.
Just a reminder that this blog has now moved to Wild Webmink where you will be most welcome to join me from now on.
kstat -p output works fine, but requires some changes so that you step through the data rather than continuously updating in time. (If you think about it for a moment, the class I mentioned above is one example of updating the time and then telling the world to update, so it's - albeit only tangentially - related.) These changes are likely to be a bit complex, so I also decided to cut a version before starting to make more significant changes to the code.
Earlier today I was thinking about the original "good luck" email I
sent to the OpenSolaris Pilot Community just before we opened the
project in June of 2005. Fortunately, the opensolaris-discuss public
archive actually goes back 9 months before we launched, so this
mail survives in the open and from the other threads you get a glimpse into some of the very
earliest conversations taking place when the project was private. Anyway, what
strikes me is how different the situation was back then, how utterly
conservative we were, and how my thinking has changed as a result of my
experiences all along the way. A day after I sent this email, we
opened. See my opening blog
here, and the
result of that opening announcement here. History. Always
enlightening.
[osol-discuss] Good Luck and Thank You
Jim Grisanzio Jim.Grisanzio at Sun.COM
Mon Jun 13 17:27:01 PDT 2005
Hello, OpenSource Pilot Community. I just wanted to chime in before the fur really flies around here: Good Luck, and Thank You! You all deserve Sun's thanks for your efforts and your patience this year. It should be wild day tomorrow, for sure, so light up those blogs and start talking, guys. The engineers are leading this launch tomorrow, make no mistake about it. Oh, and if you want to bring someone into the program, you *don't* have to call me and sign another f****** NDA. Just do it. I can't tell you how happy I am to not have to dig out another NDA. Not that I could read the damn thing but whatever. It's such a cold way to start a friendly little conversation, don't you think? Also, I've tried to honor as many of your requests (and those from internal people) as possible to get people into the program. We ended up with 145, but quite frankly, dozens and dozens of developers never made it in due to lack of time or resources. We even had a dozen Chinese engineers all briefed, translated, and NDA-signed but couldn't get export control approval in time. It drove me nuts for three months. I'm more than a bit pissed about that one. Anyway, I hope you are happy with the results of what we are all releasing. The core team here has worked almost non-stop for weeks on this to get ready for the final push. We wanted to do more, you know that, but hey, look at where we were last year and look at the potential tomorrow brings. Also, the OpenSolaris team internally really has been genuine in their intentions, I can assure you. At times we've not been as open as we could have been -- we get that -- but I hope you believe me when I say that many people on the team fought hard on your behalf all year long. Every time you told us we were full of shit on something we took it to heart and it went up line. There were a few, ah, heated, conversations regarding some of the issues that were discussed in the pilot. We won some and we lost some, but every time we moved a little closer to our goal of openness. As you've seen, this stuff takes time. I wish we could have exposed more of that process to you. Next time it will probably be easier to do that. As this program has grown it's garnered attention from all across Sun and from Sun's competitors and supporters. Just recently, I've heard from executives and engineers traveling to South America and to Asia, and they report that there *absolutely* is massive community interest out there. Even Wall Street has noticed. Some people are probably a bit confused since the Solaris community was supposed to be dead by now. Well, too bad. It's too late. They lost their window of opportunity to crush us. Our next step is to stay positive and to engage the interest we know is there, make it tangible, and grow this OpenSolaris community. In a very real way, you've all been part of something special here. You've helped change this company and potentially an entire market along the way. Some people may not know this quite yet, but they'll surely find out tomorrow. You are some of the most knowledgeable people in the world about Solaris, and you've help make OpenSolaris a possibility. Congratulations and we'll see you on the other side. Jim
Masafumi Ohta, Hiroshi Chonan, and Hisayoshi Kato did a lightning talk about the Japan OpenSolaris Community at the Tokyo Developers Summit. Japanese video. Good photos. :)
There will be an OpenSolaris Hot Topics Seminar on IPS at Sun's office in Yoga Friday night March 19th. See announcement details here in English and Japanese. Registration is required. The talks will be in Japanese only. So, if you are Japanese or speak Japanese and want to contribute to OpenSolaris, stop by and participate in the sessions. Here are directions to Sun in Yoga in English and Japanese with photos.
I was awoken early last week by my laptop’s hard drive making a clicking noise. The fact that I hadn’t reconfigured Time Machine since installing Snow Leopard sent me into a blind panic. A quick trip to Amazon UK later, and I’d ordered a 2nd gen Drobo, along with 3 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green disks. It all turned up the next day, and the data shifting started.
The short version of the story is that I’ve now got at least two copies of everything, one on the Drobo (which should cover against particular types of failures all by itself). And the internal drive in my Macbook Pro hasn’t made any funny noises since. phew
A wee aside before I discuss how I’ve arranged Aperture 3 on my laptop in a satisfactory manner. The Drobo is slow. I mean, really slow. I’m seeing write speeds on the Mac, connected via Firewire 800, of about 25MB/s in tests. To put that in perspective, in order to fill the disk to capacity, you’d need to hang around for about 21 hours. In practice, it’s even worse than that and, in particular, delete operations seem to be spectacularly slow (and, unless the Drobo is filesystem aware, I don’t even know how that’s possible!).
I had initially intended to dump my 330GB master Aperture Library on there and have a small one on the laptop while I was on the move. However, after testing, and finding Aperture to be utterly unusable (spinning beach ball for 10 seconds after every adjustment, more spinning beach balls just for scrolling through projects), I had a change of heart.
My current laptop is a 17” Macbook Pro from, I think, sometime in 2007. I replaced the internal drive with a 320GB one at some point. I’ve also got a 500GB Firewire 800 Western Digital Passport (called, imagninatively, “External”) and the Drobo.
That makes the setup pretty straightforward, really:
This gives me a reasonably performant setup (as much as can be expected from a laptop, really, I think), while giving me the data protection I desire.
The Time Machine configuration is perhaps worth noting. As the vault is being backed up separately by Aperture, I’m excluding it from Time Machine. However, since all the master images are referenced masters, they aren’t backed up as part of the vault so I’m explicitly including the external drive in the Time Machine backup.
Another useful tip. Sometimes I’m loading images into Aperture and I’ve left the external drive at home. Not a problem, they get imported as managed files rather than referenced masters. However, when I reconnect the external drive, I do want to tidy things up. I have a smart album which contains all the ‘Managed’ masters:
Managed Masters smart album
To do this, create a new Smart Album (cmd-shift-l), remove the default set of rules and add a “File Status” rule where the status is “Managed”.
All of your managed masters will show up in there. Next time you attach the external disk, visit that album, select all the images and relocate the masters (File -> Relocate Masters…). Dead simple.
Of course, now that I’ve converged all my Aperture libraries (one on a desktop, one on a laptop and one from where I declared photographic bankruptcy a few years back), I’ve got a lot of sorting to di! How do you arrange your entire photographic history in Aperture?
Here is an update on the upcoming Tech Days conferences in Russia and India. If you plan to attend the events, let us know now they go by posting to advocacy-discuss at opensolaris dot org (subscribe to the mailman list here, view and post via the web forum here).
I'm spending some time cleaning my blog these days. I have more than 3,000 posts in this thing. That represents a lot of work over the years, but many of the older posts have dead links and broken (or ugly) layouts. So, some shaping up is in order. Fixing (well, deleting, actually) a million broken links will only encourage me to link a whole lot less, too.
I also got rid of most of the graphics in the right nav and shortened it substantially. It was just becoming a mess of branding confusion with pointers everywhere for every reason. So, I deleted ruthlessly and tried to focus on my core activities and some general interest links that are related to what I do. In terms of community graphics, I'll go with only the stuff directly related to my projects: OpenSolaris, Linux, XWiki. Also gone are all the template rules and/or boxes on the face of the blog, most of which were created with the use of different colors. It's just clean now. White. I got sick of the yellow-ish brown color of the default template, which I've been using for about three years now. If I want to play around with a different feel here and there, I can now just change the color of the entire face of the page easily with just one quick template adjustment.
In terms of content, for years I have been using this blog primarily for work-related posts (2/3 of the posts are work-related), but I have freely mixed in piles of personal content as well since that was part of the paradigm expressed by the previous BSC community. From now on, though, I'll just use this space for only work-related posts and keep the personal stuff to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and my personal blog. Links to those spaces will remain in the contact section of my work bio here, but I'll not configure the content feeds to be posted to this space. So, as a result, expect a significant reduction in activity here on this blog. I also restricted comments to only a few days for each new post. I'm just tired of dealing with the spam.
So, it's not quite a spring cleaning, but close enough. Much more clean up to do, obviously, but this is the direction I'm moving for now.
There's more discussion from Oracle about the OpenSolaris User Groups on the osug-leaders list (the new thread starts here and the
first communication from Oracle to the OSUGs was here). Cool. Making some progress. OSUG leaders out there please feel free to jump in to this conversation. There are well over 150 OSUGs, so there should be plenty of opinions, ideas, and suggestions to offer. Now is the time.
What's interesting in this integration process is not only the challenge of connecting the OpenSolaris User Groups (which represent part of OpenSolaris community) to a new corporate parent but also it seems there will be one Oracle team managing a meta program to engage all user groups -- so that's the existing Oracle User Groups plus groups around Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris, and other technologies that Oracle just bought from Sun. That dynamic could open up some cool possibilities for the OpenSolaris User Groups to interact more directly with different global communities at a scale we have never seen. Even now the OSUGs mix quite freely with other communities from a variety of technologies, but perhaps this newly combined program may help accelerate that expansion by offering new connections in new ways.
Up until now, from a program management perspective, we've largely concerned ourselves with interacting with OpenSolaris groups, and we really never had many resources to implement the program. All of the more recent funding for supplies came from Teresa (who did a really excellent job) after the OSUG community structure and processes had been put in place. But I wonder how things would have been different had Sun taken a cross-project approach to some of the more general user support programs. The university programs seem to have been set up that way and they were very successful. I'm not saying it would have been better for the OSUG, though. There were all sorts of governance constraints we had to follow as well. Who knows. I just know I had no clue what the other teams were doing across the other communities, and it may have been interesting to combine efforts at times (if we had the luxury of time, I suppose). So, it will be interesting watching all this emerge. I'm not on this new user group team at Oracle, but I hope to stay involved in some of the OSUG activities at live events and of course I`ll be dealing with the website generally across the entire community.
OSUGs are sponsored by the OpenSolaris Advocacy Community. Go here to propose new groups.
By the way, we now have almost 10K images from the OpenSolaris community on flickr. The vast majority of those photos are from OSUGs running their own meetings and/or participating at conferences around the world.
Installers are funny things. They boot a reduced version of the OS in order to install it, usually in some bizarre context like netboot, or with a live CD. They have all sorts of restrictions -- not being able to write to certain parts of the filesystem, or needing to be bootstrapped from tftp or other ancient crufty protocols. Furthermore, the OS bootstraps itself with less information it has about the system's hardware and configuration than it will have in normal operation -- it needs to put together enough information on the fly and prepare the system for normal operation. But, fundamentally, the initial installer for most OSes boots essentially the same version of the OS it's about to install.
For a developer in any core part of the system that the installer uses, that means certain types of changes must be built and tested in install context. smf(5) is certainly one of those subsystems where a subtle change may have unintended consequences on the gymnastics the OS is doing in install context. Testing is key. But assembling an install image to test for Solaris 10 and earlier used to be a horribly complicated and arcane process. And most changes don't tend to require testing in install context, so people wouldn't do 'just in case' testing. They'd only test install if they really really needed to.
Recently, I needed to figure out how to do testing of nightly ON bits in install context. I started Saturday with my ON nightly repository in hand, memories of the Solaris 10 procedure fresh in my mind, and a sense of dread. But this isn't Solaris 10 anymore, and the Install team has done a great job of changing a painful procedure into something downright delightful. I decided I wanted to test a live CD, so I...
$ pfexec pkg install distribution-constructor $ cp /usr/share/distro_const/slim_cd/slim_cd_x86.xml ~ $ pfexec zfs create rpool/dc
I modified ~/slim_cd_x86.xml to point at my ON repository first, and then find any packages it couldn't get there from a repository containing the previous build of OpenSolaris. I also didn't install the entire package, as I'm using ON development bits (don't do this on a supported system). And then ran
# /usr/bin/distro_const build ~lianep/slim_cd_x86.xml
About an hour later, I had a LiveCD image and a USB image, ready to test. So much for my sense of dread. One quick note: Distribution Constructor currently requires that you first image-update the system where you're running DC to the same install as you're attempting to build. The DC team knows it's an issue, and the workaround is quite straightforward as it's just "pkg image-update" to your repositories.
And that's pretty much it. The diffs for the DC manifest look like:
--- /usr/share/distro_const/slim_cd/slim_cd_x86.xml Fri Oct 9 16:29:26 2009
+++ slim_cd_x86.xml Sat Oct 10 16:53:39 2009
@@ -57,8 +57,8 @@
-->
<pkg_repo_default_authority>
<main
- url="http://pkg.opensolaris.org/release"
- authname="opensolaris.org"/>
+ url="http://ipkg.sfbay/on-nightly"
+ authname="on-nightly"/>
<!--
If you want to use one or more mirrors that are
setup for the authority, specify the urls here.
@@ -75,15 +75,12 @@
If you want to use one or more mirrors that are
setup for the authority, specify the urls here.
-->
- <!--
- Uncomment before using.
<pkg_repo_addl_authority>
<main
- url=""
- authname=""/>
+ url="http://ipkg.sfbay/dev"
+ authname="opensolaris.org"/>
<mirror url="" />
</pkg_repo_addl_authority>
- -->
[...]
<packages>
- <pkg name="entire"/>
For cleanliness, I also updated the post_install_repo_default_authority and post_install_repo_addl_authority to point at the same URLs.
The install team does recommend running DC on a system that's already been updated to that package level. e.g. to build a 124 LiveCD, they suggest first image-updating the system to 124, then running distro_const(1M). That shouldn't always be necessary, but it's also easy to do given that DC requires a repository as input that you can just image-update from.
It's pretty nice that the install team has fundamentally converted a task that was challenging for ON developers before into something that's really quite easy. If you're interested in more, there's plenty, including documentation at the Caiman Project over on opensolaris.org.
I've now turned off the automatic posting to this blog from Delicious. Daily links will now only appear over on my new Wild Webmink blog, and I once again encourage you to subscribe to it!
"Nirvana can be translated as freedom. Freedom from views. And in Buddhism all views are wrong views. When you get in touch with reality, you no longer have views. You have wisdom. You have a direct encounter with reality. And that is no longer called views." -- Thich Nhat Hanh
All views are wrong views. I just love that. Imagine if we all dumped our views -- or at least questioned our views long enough to let some humility flow in instead of defending our views to the death or blindly following those who assert and spin their views more boldly than we do. Imagine how much more open minded we'd be. Such a relief it would be.
Have you heard of Thich Nhat Hanh? He's a remarkable man to have
survived such a horrible war and to have helped so many people caught
in the middle of a decade of madness. He's Vietnamese. But he transcends
race and culture. He's a Buddhist. But he transcends religion. He's
84. But he transcends age. He seems like a really nice guy,
too. I wonder if I could get to France to meet him one day. I wonder what I'd say ...
A reminder: If you are following me here on blogs.sun.com, please change your bookmarks and feeds to read http://webmink.com instead, as I have moved all my blogging there. I'll be turning of the daily link posts early next week. There are several new posts on the new site, especially on ACTA, so you really do want to move!
Oracle will continue to make OpenSolaris available as open source, and Oracle will continue to actively support and participate in the community
Oracle will also continue to deliver OpenSolaris releases, including the upcoming OpenSolaris 2010.03 release.
Oracle is investing more in Solaris than Sun did prior to the acquisition, and will continue to contribute technologies to OpenSolaris, as Oracle already does for many other open source projects
Oracle will continue to develop technologies in the open, as we do today
There may be some things we choose not to open source going forward, similar to how MySQL manages certain value add at the top of the stack.
Love to see the tech journal crowd participating! And yes, regular users will find things mostly unchanged. Contributors also.
And Oracle will ensure customers running OpenSolaris have an option for support on Oracle Sun Systems where it's required, though given the very little sales here this will not be something we expect many customers to deploy going forward. Solaris is our focus, on both SPARC and x86.
I started writing an email, ranting about the dos and don’ts of using Twitter to promote your business. What originally irked me was somebody asking for examples of businesses who have successfully used Twitter to generate sales leads. This is my response, which got off-topic enough that I ditched the email, but I think there’s some element of truth to it at least:
Having been involved in Twitter since the relatively early days (I joined in November 2006, apparently), and having talked to people at conferences about how to successfully use Twitter for business, I’ve got a few opinions about how to do it right. It should not be (directly) a tool for generating sales leads. It’s a tool for engaging with your community (or starting to actually develop a community in the first place, if you’ve never had a two-way channel with your customers before now). If you’re going to give the Twitter account to one department in your company, don’t give it to sales, give it to customer support.
And for goodness sake don’t make it a write-only medium. There are millions of Twitter accounts that consist of nothing more than “New blog post: http://link/to/post” and they’re a waste of time. Then there are the ones that take the time to tweet, but never respond to people that reply to them. A huge opportunity to start a conversation with somebody who’s interested in your company, and it’s wasted!
Another mistake one of my previous clients just wouldn’t listen to my advice on: post … I can’t quite find the right word here, closest I can think is … post organically. Like it’s the water cooler conversations through the day. Don’t open up your twitter client first thing in the morning, dump a bunch of tweets out there and close it again. It’s a variant on treating it as a write-only medium, but it’s even worse because people are probably only going to read a couple of those tweets from the fire hose before they carry on.
Set up searches for your company, product names, and relevant topics. When you see somebody else talking about your company or products, get involved in the conversation. Some of the best karma I’ve seen around companies on Twitter is when an individual makes an offhand complaint about a product on Twitter, and the company responds, eventually resolving the issue. I’ve seen my friends have these sorts of experiences with a wide range of companies from the behemoths (BT) to smaller web-based startups (GitHub).
Of course, I’m talking from the perspective of a consumer on Twitter. I don’t have a great deal of experience from the business end (though I have won business through conversations I’ve had on Twitter and new acquaintances I’ve “met” there). So, what do you think? And what are some of the best examples you’ve seen of companies successfully using Twitter?
PS, if you don’t already, you should follow me on Twitter. :-)
milek@r600:~/progs# ./zvol_wce /dev/zvol/rdsk/rpool/iscsi/vol1
Write Cache: disabled
milek@r600:~/progs# ptime ./sync_file_create_loop /dev/zvol/rdsk/rpool/iscsi/vol1 1000
real 12.013566363
user 0.003144874
sys 0.104826470
milek@r600:~/progs# ./zvol_wce /dev/zvol/rdsk/rpool/iscsi/vol1 1
milek@r600:~/progs# ./zvol_wce /dev/zvol/rdsk/rpool/iscsi/vol1
Write Cache: enabled
milek@r600:~/progs# ptime ./sync_file_create_loop /dev/zvol/rdsk/rpool/iscsi/vol1 1000
real 0.239360231
user 0.000949655
sys 0.019019552
milek@r600:~/progs# cat zvol_wce.c
/* Robert Milkowski
http://milek.blogspot.com
*/
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stropts.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stropts.h>
#include <sys/dkio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
char *path;
int wce = 0;
int rc;
int fd;
path = argv[1];
if ((fd = open(path, O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE)) == -1)
exit(2);
if (argc>2) {
wce = atoi(argv[2]) ? 1 : 0;
rc = ioctl(fd, DKIOCSETWCE, &wce);
}
else {
rc = ioctl(fd, DKIOCGETWCE, &wce);
printf("Write Cache: %s\n", wce ? "enabled" : "disabled");
}
close(fd);
exit(0);
}
The OpenSolaris community plans four sessions at the Tokyo Open Source Conference
on Friday and Saturday. See announcements from Shoji
and Masafumi
and Reiko
Saito, who also posted her slides. These sessions will involve not
only dives into the technology, such as ZFS and new features in the
OpenSolaris distribution, but also how to contribute localizations and
get involved in the community generally. There will be a booth, so stop
by and get some CDs and shirts and other stuff. If you miss the conference, you can catch up with things in March when we'll have more community events at the Sun Yoga office. A Linux technical meeting is planned for the 13th, and then there will be 3 sessions of OpenSolaris later in the month on the 27th.
With the change from Sun in the UK almost complete, I've decided to move my blog. Please adjust your feed, and read on over at Wild Webmink.
Reminder: when we moved from the old tonic database to the new auth.opensolaris.org application for account management, all users had to verify their accounts on the new system. That involved logging in, following a couple of prompts, and saving. That's it. Painless. Multiple mails were sent to everyone. But, as is human nature, a few people have still not validated their accounts. So, if you haven't verified your account on the new system, you are now in the Inactive state and that means you won't be able to log in or put back code or vote or post to the forums or edit the site. Just ping website-admin at opensolaris dot org and we'll reset your account. That's a private list, by the way, and we have people in the US, Europe, and Asia managing user accounts so mails only sit on that list for a very short period of time.
Planet Solaris is an aggregation of weblogs written about Solaris. The opinions expressed in those weblogs and hence this aggregation are those of the original authors.
Planet Solaris is not a product or publication of Sun Microsystems.
Planet Solaris is powered by Venus and is run by David Edmondson.
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Last updated: March 09, 2010 11:17 PM GMT