Dave Levy's Weblog

Au Revoir

2009-08-30T15:06:42.000Z

This is my last blog article here; Friday was my last working day at Sun Microsystems, and Monday/tomorrow is the last day they're paying me. Its been fun, most of the time, but I am looking forward to something new. I have not yet set up a new blog, and am unsure what I am going to do about it. I hope to set up a wordpress blog inside the http://davelevy.info domain, where I have a place holder at davelevy.info/blog. but until then you can follow me at http://friendfeed.com/DaveLevy.

Interestingly the English have difficulty with “Hope to see you soon”; unlike our European colleagues we don't have a single word but I am sure this is not Goodbye, merely Aurevoir.

Thanks for reading this blog over the last five years. I wish my friends who are staying to work for Oracle and Sun's customers all the best over the coming future. Finally, thanks to all the customer's I've worked with in making their IT better than it was.

tags: aurevoir ciao aufweidersehen seeyousoon people news topic:[davelevy]

Free, the right price for software

2009-08-30T14:48:50.000Z

Economic systems are about how to use scarce resources and the Price Mechanism is the way in which a optimal resource allocation occurs. Economists use a branch of theory called “Welfare Economics” to analyse and model the efficiency of the productive economy, and a theoretically maximally efficient set of states can be defined within a model, known as the Pareto-efficiency frontier. A perfectly competitive market meets the efficiency requirements, imperfect or distorted markets do not. Distortions can be caused by the existence of monopolistic markets, taxation, externalities or missing markets.

Traditional Welfare economics rarely considers how copyright and patent law create barriers to entry to markets and thus husband the growth of monopolistic markets, where supply is restricted and prices driven up. It needs to be born in mind that overpricing products such as software which are inputs to the economic process as well as output, means that some otherwise efficient goods will not be produced; they cost too much.

It should also be born in mind that the majority of the world's software is not licensed or charged for, although much of this free to use software is not traded at all, remaining the proprietary goods of their owners who use them to produce other goods and/or services. Benkler in his book, “the Wealth of Networks”, suggests there are nine business models for pursuing value in software, of which only three of them involve trading rights i.e. charging for software. If there was no software copyright i.e. copying was legal and free the only price, software would still be written. The overpricing of software distorts both today's market and the innovation creating tomorrow's. The price mechanism should ensure that resources that are scarce and consumed should be payed for. Software is not scarce, although the people that write it and the machines that run it are. Resources such as software should be free.

This was meant to be an essay based on some slides I have been trailing inside the company, but I discovered how hard it is and how much time it takes to actually put ideas into essay form while preparing the paper behind what became Monopoly & Prices, see below. So this is more of an abstract, I shall upload the essay when finished to my personal site downloads page.

Thanks once again to Beggs, Fischer and Dornbusch, whose Economics 8^th Edition reminded me of my Welfare Economics.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[software] topic:[free]

Three dimensions of Virtualisation

2009-08-30T14:38:09.000Z

Another piece of, what I hope is wisdom, coming from my last three months of customer conversations is that virtualisation has three dimensions.

We use virtualisation to make large systems small. I call this “Atomisation”. We can also use virtualisation technologies to make many components seem as one, this is of critical use for horizontally scalable services, and I call this “Aggregation”. The third dimension is “Longevity”. Maybe I should play around with “Age” as a word, so each dimension has a mnemonic starting with “A”, but by using a Type II hypervisor, one can protect old software against platform innovation and continue to run it until its business case changes or expires.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[cloud] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[virtualisation]

How new is Cloud Computing?

2009-08-30T14:26:52.000Z

I have spoken to several of Sun's customers over the last 3 months about Cloud Computing and have often used the following quote.

“When we build a distributed computing platform and run one application on it, we call this HPC, when we build a distributed computing platfrom and run many copies of one application on it, we call this Web 2.0, and when we build a distributed computing platform and run many applications on it, we call it Cloud Computing.”

Who said it? Me!

Its not quite true, but the difference between the platforms is not necessarily as great as some might like to make it seem. Web 2.0 platforms are rarely as economic as running many copies of one application but its a pretty small portfolio often supporting only one end-user application. I accept that elasticity and metering are important, unsolved, or not well solved problems in the cloud world but I think the quote is worth publishing here and repeating and offers insights into planning an evolving the next generation of IT platforms.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[cloud] topic:[cloudcomputing]

url aliases

2009-08-30T13:20:23.000Z

I mention in the last article, that url aliases/shortners make calculating an inlist sort-order harder, it's curious to me that Google don't have a url shortening service. (I suppose the domain name google doesn't lend itself well to being part of a short name.)

tags: topic:[silly] topic:[google]

Are blogs losing their infuence?

2009-08-30T12:42:11.000Z

Richard Morgan sent me this article, "Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere?" dated March 10th 2009, which argues that while blog authority ranking according to Technorati remains fairly static, the scores of the various blogs are declining. Technorati uses an inlist scoring algorithm which may be part of the problem, but it would seem to me that micro-blogging is impacting the strength of the voice of blogs as a communications tool, which is what the article argued. In some way's not just micro-blogging, but the various places where people can and do record what they do and think. When I started this blog 5 years ago, I chose to restrain what I put here but other media have grown in popularity, and so people's ability to express themselves have grown. There is a diversification of publication sites which makes following people harder, although technorati only set out to capture blogs, not people, blogs seem no longer to be at the centre of how the internet records what people think. I know that I have been writing less frequently.

Internet messaging is built on a growing distributed architecture, consisting of

publication,
distribution,
aggregation and
consumption.

Different sites and technologies seek to perform and excel in different parts of the chain. The aggregation stage permits people to view people, if they permit it, or subject matter and most importantly control their own entry points to the mess that is today's content, by which I mean choose to follow people of look for specific expertise. I think that authors should seek to co-operate with this consumer control of the reading process. It should be noted that the behaviour of individuals and corporations will differ. In particular most media companies want to capture the reader/viewer but individuals have no need to copy this behaviour. I try to post content and let people find it; I hope I have developed a reputation for expertise in some subjects over my career.

By keeping the architecture in mind, one can try and avoid annoying your readers, who, if one has any, are likely to be your friends. Bad habits I see are people who syndicate their tweets into facebook, so I, and others, get to know about their breakfast twice, and I am not a fan of syndicating one's del.icio.us feed into blogs using the APIs. This latter habit annoys me because I don't see the blog as an aggregation tool, but a publishing tool, and so I expect original work, of some description in people's blogs. This can be even worse when people then publicise the blog, containing bookmarks using a micro blog. That's three clicks to read something written by someone other than the person who's views you've subscribed to, and if using a wireless device that's a real pain. NB This is also true if you subscribe to Digg feeds, you get to 'interesting' content via the Digg page, so three clicks, three tabs or windows to read content you want. Another offence which I wish I could deal with more easily is the microblogging incontinent. The only way I have discovered how to deal with those, is to unsubscribe.

One can, and I do aggregate my feeds into one place. I originally created a personal planet, which aggregates some of the feeds I create. I have tried to create an everything feed at http://friendfeed.com/davelevy, which also has a nice key of the feeds I contribute to. This means that my readers can construct a feed that interests them. I know that some friends are interested in the technology, but not the politics. I commit the offence of subscribing my friend feed to face book, but I consider Facebook to be mainly a consumer. I need to think about this. Its not great, but I don't syndicate my tweets directly to my face book statuses (sic), nor do I copy them back into friend feed. Manging my facebook feed is not easy and is compounded by Facebook's desire to perform all roles in the architecture while being 'open'. Its this open-ness which has enable site specialisation around, for instance, travel, books, restaurants and even at living social, iphone apps.

I suppose I am appealing for people to consider what tools they use to perform a specific role in the the personal content architecture. Don't over aggregate, if people are interested in your thoughts they'll find them. Don't shove it down their throats.

When I first considered writing this little essay, it seemed interesting to consider, “Is the status-sphere replacing blogs?”, others including Tim Bray have written about this since and argue Not. I hope that the evolution of easy micro-blogging, will free blogs to become deeper and more interesting. I know that I have produced less frequent blog article since I took up with Twitter, but I also considered my del.icio.us feed, to be a microblog of sorts. Another key development is that the use of sites like del.icio.us has turned in-list search ranking from a vote of web authors, where you needed the technology skills and resource to have a web page in order to influence the sort order, into a vote of web readers and authors. The ease of micro blog adoption means that an even large crowd should now be participating in the construction of in list search orders. I am unsure how url shortner's impact the search engines in-list calculations. They make it harder, I 'm sure, as does the fact there's more than one. Many argue that Twitter's best value is as a search engine and that it, and other micro-blogging systems won't replace blogs because there are too many subjects that can't be accurately discussed in 140, characters. Techcrunch published further thoughts on twitter, and it chances of supplanting the blogs, however it takes less time to tweet, rubbish gets lost easier, and twitter in particular is designed to be used by handheld devices. (I don't think I'd like to have written this on my new Nokia 5800, or even my ipodtouch.) It should be noted, that while its very easy to create a 140 character message, it should be easy to create a podcast or even a video, but its not. They are both difficult to create, especially if you don't just record a chat amongst friends but try and 'deliver/perform' a report. This is a skills issue. They wouldn't pay Steven Fry all that money to make audio books if it was easy.

One final thought is that communitarian aggregation is not well done at the moment. One of the strength's of Peter Reiser's approach, 'Community Equity', to knowledge management systems that at its heart is a personal rating engine. (See also http://socialadoption.com/ They don't yet have this as truly n-dimensional, which I think is needed, so you can rate your own content, rate other author's expertise, rate & describe their interest to you. I may play with a Google App or Zembly, to experiment with some of how to make some of this work. A very rich inter-personal network with sophisitcated popular and machine calculated relevance scoring is something that can add value. Content could flow through your colleagues votes moving closer and further away from your viewing window and your friends and colleagues advice and hints would influence or determine what you find. Google reader's share facility is quite close, but there's only one dimension, you can have friends, and they can recommend stuff for you to read. (I think more can be done.)

I hint that one of Technorati's problems is its reliance on in-list. Searching the Workplace Web, written by Fagin, Kumar and McCurley, which I commented on, on this blog in an article called, The Shape of Internet, write about a number of relevance and ordering tests that could be used and specifically argue that within the corporate intranet other sorts and relevance tests may be more appropriate to help solve a number of questions such as authority. They also argue that intranet URL naming is less search friendly and it is clear that the dissipation of people's voice and advice over multiple sites with different naming conventions, often using surrogates or numbers and URL shortners means that the internet is catching up on the early intranet in the chaos of name space. It may be time to review in-list and begin to weight votes for relevance and sort-order.

Are blogs losing their relevance, maybe, maybe not. Well written opinions by disinterested experts will always be valued. As the dross moves to the microblogs, this may liberate the blogs to re-establish themselves as clear voices of expertise. Some of what was observed Richard's post to me may be failures in Technorati, its initial insights are aged and its being out innovated.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[twitter] topic:[tags] topic:[feeds] topic:[architecture] topic:[search] topic:[internet] topic:[blogs] topic:[microblogs] topic:[blogging] topic:[news] topic:[technorati] topic:[inlist]

Re: Are blogs losing their infuence?

2009-08-30T14:16:53.000Z

I would`t necessarily say blogs have lost their influence since great bloggers will generally garner attention, just like great authors using any other platform (newspaper, book, radio, television, etc). However, blogs are not good platforms for having conversations in a community environment. Heck, just a simple mailing list blows away blogs for community-building and conversation-building purposes. To me, blogs are just individual journals. Nothing more. In mine I pay no attention to readers or advice about numbers or anything like that. I publish what`s on my mind at any given moment, I do it for my own purposes, and I don`t think of it as a conversation with anyone. Instead, I have conversations on mailing lists and in social networks because that`s where the people are and the tools are so much better for connecting. Some bloggers never got this very basic concept: conversations flow across tools and you have to go where the conversations are, you can`t ask that the conversations come to you. I also agree with you that the emergence of other platforms will enable bloggers to focus on the strengths of the blogging platform. And to me, that`s journaling.

Monopoly and prices

2009-08-27T09:51:26.000Z

Monopolies restrict supply and offer their goods at prices above equilibrium price, the opportunity cost of the resources used to make the goods. I am writing a short paper about this since it is a piece of thinking I revisited while developing my thoughts on free software, but is not central to those thoughts. There remain those who still think that monopolistic domination of markets is a legitimate business goal and that public policy and regulation should not inhibit this "free" market tendency. A review of the theory of the firm shows that monopolies restrict supply, raise prices and make super-profits.

Firms seek to maximise profit. As prices fall, demand increases. As output increases, average costs fall and then may rise due to economies of scale and then diminishing returns. In a "perfect" market, all firms are price takers. Business failure means that expensive suppliers leave the market, and super-profits caused by the difference in a given price and superior cost structures of the survivors encourage new entrants to bid down the price. In a perfect market, there are no super-profits and prices are equal to average costs. In a monopolistic or imperfect market, defined as where a firm's output decisions affect price, a firm's maximum profit occurs where its marginal cost is equal to its marginal revenue. No matter if dis-economies of scale are trivial or important, this will always be a lower output and a higher price than the opportunity cost price/output position.

I am writing a longer essay about this, which I hope to post on this blog, but I shall mirror it on my personal site downloads page. I doubt that there's anything original in the essay, but having it one place is useful to me and it'll help me write my essay/presentation that I promised Dominc Kay on "Why free is the right price for software?".

topic:[economics] topic:[microeconomics] topic:[monopoly] topic:[pricetheory]

Little Big Adventure

2009-08-06T15:37:37.000Z

I have been struggling to get VRDP from Virtual Box working on my home network, of which more maybe later, but I took a break to install one of the greatest games ever on the home machines with the help of my younger son. We finally found a copy of Little Big Adventure that'll run on modern machines. This is hosted at LBA HQ. It runs native but recommends running under DosBox. So that is what I did...

I now have two programs that run under DosBox and so place my command files in the Windows shortcut as -c arguments. For more see my bliki articles DosBox and Lba & dosbox. The downloaded archive contains a .iso but I have not worked out how to fool DosBox into thinking the .iso is a CD, but its probably possible so one wouldn't need the CD to be loaded into the cd reader, but unless you sort this out, you'll need to burn a CD.

Long time readers may remember that I put LBA2 on the machine a while ago.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[games] topic:[LBA] topic:[twinsen] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[dosbox]

Using Cygwin to manage script Virtual Box tasks

2009-07-31T13:58:27.000Z

The Virtual Box GUI doesn't do everything one needs and so I have been experimenting with using cygwin, a free to use bash shell library. Having installed CYGWIN the first thing to do is add the Virtual Box program folder to the PATH, in my case,

    export PATH=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Sun/xVM\ VirtualBox:${PATH}

I want this placed in the .bashrc so its always invoked, and thus need to test if is already in the path. I use this code,

    type -p VBoxManage.exe > /dev/null
    case $? in
    0)   # Its already there
         : ;;
    1)   # Add Path
         export PATH=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Sun/xVM\ VirtualBox:${PATH} ;;
    esac

Now I need to associate a script file type with an execution program. I have tried to use the distributed batch file and binary and neiter of these work, so I have copied cygwin.bat to bash.bat and amended it so that it reads as follows

    @echo off

    :: Dave Levy (c) 2009         Is this GPL?
    :: bash.bat                   Version 1.0

    :: Wrapper to run *sh scripts from windows explorer/desktop

    c:\ksh\bin\bash --login %*

I have deleted the -i flag from the bash line, I have made the bash program call absolute, %* is the DOS batch command file syntax equivilant to $* i.e. all the command line arguments, so the command line invokes bash.exe in login mode to force the execution of .bash_profile and .bashrc and appends all the other command line parameters including the script file name. :: is a neater comment delimiter than REM. I have associated my batch file with the file type .ksh as the open method using explorer.

Much of CYGWIN is distributed under the GPL and I am unclear if the batch file is included, If so, its GPL since I created the file by copying it.

keywords: howto invoke cygwin scripts from the windows desktop, write a dos batch file to invoke shell

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[shell] topic:[scripting] topic:[cygwin] topic:[windows]

Good British Universities

2009-07-31T13:48:55.000Z

The ranking list begins to struggle to distinguish between the institutions beyond No. 99, and groups the lower ranking into large groups. The University of Sussex is in the first of these groups, 102-150, LSE is in the next group 151-202 and Warwick in the next, 203-304.

If one examines the methodology we begin to get some explanations. One of the categories measured in the methodology is "Articles published in Nature and Science". This is one of the indicators measured to assess the quality of an institution's "Research Output". The points for this are allocated over the other categories, but I have not discovered how. There is a problem here. Firstly, these are both English language publications, and thus may bias high scores towards institutions in English speaking countries, helping the US & UK dominance, and possibly being part of the explanation of Canada's 5th place position. . (It might be interesting to calculate the distribution of the top 100 by language). Secondly, a number of institutions would not consider these publications documents of record for their primary research focus. Shanghai Jiao Tong University have developed a work around for those institutions specialising in Humanities and Social Sciences, which it applies to the LSE.

I have examined the base data, and cannot apply the published weights to the published scores and get the same total score as Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The University publish its scores and weighting so I have recreated the summary scores for the purposes of my analysis. I have also designed two alternative weightings, one which allocates the 20% points allocated to the publication of articles in Nature & Science across the remaining categories in proportion to their contribution. The second method, seeks to keep the "Research Output" score at 40% and allocates the missing 20% to the second RO indicator score, "Articles in Science Citation Index-expanded, Social Science Citation Index". The original weights by category are as follows,

	Quality of Education	Quality of Faculty	Research Output	Size
Weights	10%	40%	40%	10%
Factors	1	2	2	1

The final problem with having two calculation methods is when do you apply the second method i.e. when is Articles published in Science and Nature an irrelevant indicator. ( I am sure there are some who'd argue never ). I have calculated scores using both schemes, the original and my Research Output orientated scheme. This allows me to compare the effect of the different weights on the ranking. I have applied these techniques to a number of the UK Universities, and also applied the Guardian's teaching quality score to those Universities to see if there was much of a difference. The Guardian's teaching quality score is departmentally based, and I chose to use the ICT departmental scores. Applying my revised "Research Output" score doesn't have much of an effect on the position of the LSE, there are one or two some interesting differences, but it would seem to me that we are back to asking how good the indicators are. I noted in my previous article that the methodology favoured science and anecdotally universities with large medical and bioscience faculties. It might be interesting to look at the big movers and examine the methodological causes of the changes.

I have come to the conclusion that the Shanghai University method's indicators are too narrow to easily answer the questions I am asking and the Guardian's research cannot be used to rank the institutions. They only evaluate departments, and aim to evaluate they undergraduate teaching experience. In their notes on their methodology, the Guardian says

To use the indicators' absolute values would make it virtually impossible to produce an overall table for the institutions, since their position would be dependent on what subjects they teach, rather than on how well they teach it.........

and added that

Note that we don't include research funding, figures from the research assessment exercise or data in that line - this is supposed to be a ranking for undergraduates, not a health check for the university as a whole.

Tediously, it seems that I am repeating the criticisms made by sufficient others to have made it to the University Rankings page on Wikipedia but looking into the data always improves one's understanding.

So the survey may over estimate English speaking institutions success, it probably devalues non pure science teaching, and it uses very few indicators. These factors may explain why the 'wisdom of crowds', market evaluation of entry grades required, comes out with very different answers about the LSE. My final conclusion is that this survey is seen by the EU, the Commission and its advisors as too important. Someone should do another one, but what is really needed is an economic, or political model that defines a successful University. These are issues for public policy makers, and increasingly in the UK the people funding tertiary education which is becoming the students and their families. But if looking to attend a UK University, I'd thoroughly recommend the relevant Guardian Guide. They are published each year to help the school leaving cohort, and it helped me advise my children over the last 5 years, to the extent they let me.

Notes

The UK Universities in the 100-150 group include Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Sussex.

Those in the top 100 are Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, UCL, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, Sheffield, Nottingham, Kings College London and Birmingham.

The Guardian does not score the LSE for teaching ICT.

Canada is 5th beating France, Italy and Spain, all with more people and with similar or greater per capita GDP. I am not looking to denigrate Canada's tertiary education system.

tags: topic:[education] topic:[univeristy] topic:[uk] topic:[british]

Twitter grows on me

2009-07-28T15:33:04.000Z

I have been unable to resist twitter and so have become regularly in breach of my original manifesto. I still make posts which imply my location and that I am not likely to be online for a period but have become involved in conversations and more recently I have been trying to build karma on lazytweet. As a result I have removed the twitter widget, which displayed my most recent tweet from this blog, and replaced it with a twitter button, which takes you to my twitter page.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[blogging] topic:[twitter]

And Google's Android

2009-07-17T07:41:16.000Z

In case you havn't heard, Google have ported their mobile phone OS, android to x86, and made a live- cd version and so it can run inside Virtual Box. It looks like this..

Since the hardware to make calls isn't available the functionality's a bit limited :)

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[google] topic:[android] topic:[livecd] topic:[x86]

Re: And Google's Android

2009-07-17T08:54:16.000Z

Does the Android image have a network connection? If so could you use it to test how well a web page will render on a phone?

Re: And Google's Android

2009-07-17T10:05:23.000Z

Yes it does and the browser works.

Another Virtual Box screenshot, this time Windows 7

2009-07-17T07:22:27.000Z

This is what Windows 7 beta looks like running inside a Virtual Box.

I have downloaded objectdock and opened a sticky window. Its not very quick, but my first suspicion is that its a bit short of memory. That's the problem with using a 32 bit host.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[windows7] topic:[screenshot]

The personal is the professional, using Google calendar

2009-07-13T12:44:01.000Z

I have been using Google calendar and the Sun calendar for a while now, and ideally like to read them through one viewer. Today I had to upgrade one of the laptop's I use to connect to Google calendar. The best viewer I have found is Thunderbird via the Lightning add-on. This also needs a second add on, the Provider for Google Calendar. I had to reinstall these earlier today and found this blog post entitled How to integrate Google calendar into Thunderbird very helpful. The other tricky bit is how to find out the login credentials and while one should be able to remember one's Google login and password,the URL of the calendar is a bit trickier. (You need to use the web interface and examine the calendar settings, which the article above describes.)

I found this useful and its not something that one does that often, I have bookmarked and digged or is that dugg the article. I hope you find it as useful as I did. Just doing my small bit to make this article easier to find and do.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[google] topic:[calendar] topic:[thunderbird] topic:[add-on] topic:[howto] topic:[connect]

You'd think I know where I am when at home

2009-07-02T18:09:51.000Z

Been mucking around with the ipodtouch having rescued it from the family for the last week. I have been subject to the "can't find your location" feature while at home. Google points me at Skyhook Wireless' site at GetSatisfaction and I discover that like Plazes, it uses a database solution, in this case run by Skyhook, who explain how it works on their site. This means that you need to be connected to the net to discover your location, but since that's true of the map application, its not too onerous a constraint.

For a 'touch, I need to find out my router's MAC address, which is harder than I'd like; it doesn't seem to display in the control panel. I was pointed at NetStumbler, but it has to run on an operating system it supports with wireless. NB this seems to exclude Vista 64 and obviously in retrospect my desktops, so on my third install I finally discover the address and use it to update SkyHook's database. I need my Longtitude and Latitude for this, which I have never bothered to record, so I used http://www.streetmap.co.uk to get this because its easy.

I had to wait ten days, but its working now.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[apple] topic:[network] topic:[skyhook] topic:[maps] topic:[location]

And now I have a Centos VM

2009-07-02T17:52:15.000Z

The reson for upgrading my Virtual BOx config is to install a Red Hat Centos image. I chose 4.7 because this seems jolly popular within the hosting community and I need a new host for my web servers. Two pieces of advice

Download the x86 DVD image, I couldn't see how to use the multiple disk images with Virtual Box.
It installs an SMP and uniprocessor version and grub is configured to start the SMP version as default. This thread, entitled CentOS 4.7 guest won't start, suggests that one should configure PAE/NX=on for the SMP image. This is not the default. Anyway works for me.

Now I need a manual to help through all those little differences between it and Ubuntu. Is been a couple of years since I played with Red Hat's Linux.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[linux] topic:[centos] topic:[guest] topic:[install]

Re: And now I have a Centos VM

2009-07-08T18:55:01.000Z

There's a bug in x-windows so screen auto resize doesn't work. I asked on virtual box forums in the Linux Guest forum.

Notice

2009-07-02T16:58:54.000Z

I have reduced the number of tags available in the banner. You can still use Google, or the Yesterdays Words page here which has a number of search tools for this blog.

Virtual Box 2.2.4 & Windows XP

2009-07-02T16:51:32.000Z

And with one might bound he was free..................

I downloaded Virtual Box 2.2.4 a couple of days ago, but when I tried to install it on my XP SP/3, the install process failed and rolled back. This trouble ticket, #3701 details how to fix the windows registry which was damaged at v2.2.0.

Thanks to those who helped me find it.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[windows] "topic:[xp sp3]" topic:[windowsxp] topic:[install]

Does knowing Stuff help?

2009-07-01T11:12:54.000Z

How important are Universities to the software industry productivity. One would hope fairly high. For various reasons, I have been considering this question and some collaborators pointed me at the Academic Ranking of World Universitiesis which is referenced at Wikipedia as well and I first referred to in this blog last November. This is produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in China.

I know that a discussion on ranking methodology may not be very helpful when considering economic growth issues, but there are some quite interesting and surprising results. One of the things that pointed me there is the domination of the USA, which has over 50% of the top 100 places as it was quoted for this reason.

Sadly I haven't kept in touch with this issue since I was asked to work on other things since Xmas. I am sure that basic research drives innovation and productivity; I think that research quality and output is part of an institution's organic capability and therefore its undergraduate body and its ability to attract top students is important. I have come to the conclusion that Joy's law

"Clever People work elsewhere"

applies to academia as well, and that a lot of innovation in, and production of, software happens, outside the research institutes and departments, and also outside the traditional software industry. This is one of the reasons why public policy makers need to look at their procurement policies as well as their subsidy policies.

The rest of this article looks at the 2007 results, specifically at the UK University positions and compares them with some data points from the Guardian's Guide to Universities 2007, together with some personal prejudice, some of it informed. BTW, I can't find reference to the 2007 Guide on the web, so you might like to use this link Guardian University Guide 2006, and the 2008 results are also available. If you're planning to apply to a UK University presumably for a 2010 entry, I'd recommend getting a copy of the next book, which should be published later in the year.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University have documented their methodology on their site, or at the Wikipedia page. It is based on Nobel prize winners and the publication record of alumni and staff. One thing from observation is that Universities with large medical faculties seem to do well. It seems to have been designed with a scientific bias and for the purpose of public policy planning. From my current research, I am not able to determine the role of ICT or Software Engineering in these results. It seems that this may be a piece of research yet to be done. i.e. the creation of a ranking table for ICT teaching.

The 2007 national results are published http://www.arwu.org/rank/2007/ARWU2007Statistics.htm.

I was surprised by the fact that the UK comes a good second to the USA. The UK has 11, which are

Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, UCL, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, Sheffield, Nottingham, Kings College London and Birmingham

Another view of UK University ranking comes from "Blackadder goes forth".

Blackadder:I then leapt on the opportunity to test you. I asked if he'd been to one of the great universities: Oxford, Cambridge, or Hull.
Nurse Fletcher-Brown:Well?
Blackadder:You failed to spot that only two of those are great universities!
Nurse Fletcher-Brown:You swine!
Melchett: That's right! Oxford's a complete dump! [elsewhere]

Looking at the Guardian University Guide 2007's Computer Sciences and IT page, gives a quite different view. One of the most important things to say is that the Guardian's ranking methodology is optimised for undergraduate choice and the relationship between undergraduate choice and the wealth creation activities of a university are not well understood, or at least not by me. The Guardian's score is based on assessing the staff's qualifications, what it takes to get in, spend, pupil/teacher ratios, a value add score, post graduate job prospects and inclusiveness. The methodology is discussed in the book, and in the newspaper. Their 2009 Methodology notes are on the Guardian web site. The 2007 Computer & IT top ten were,

Imperial, St. Andrews, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, York, Surrey, Durham, Bristol, & Glasgow.

with Nottingham 11th. It interests me that the Guardian, doesn't (didn't) take the research grade of the departments into account, or maybe it does within the calculation of the teaching quality index. Its not easy to produce a Guardian fact based 'Best University' since the book is aimed at helping Undergraduates discover the best courses for themselves and the analysis is both institution and subject driven.

Personally I am surprised at how low KCL scores in the World Rankings compared with the other UK universities. It's also curious to me that the LSE, Warwick and Sussex are missing. (I may look into the numbers and see where they are and try and see why these are as they are it is likely to be methodology based, and tell us something about the methodology.) I am most curious as to where the LSE sits, which from its high numbers of overseas students, and its ability to ask for very high entry grades seems to be internationally and domestically very popular. I suppose that it might be a reflection of the science focus of the methodology, or the biases of potential students in the UK.

Since the question I am looking at is how do or can Universities add to the value of the software industry, I wonder if under-graduate students are the raw material of universities. It seems reasonable to assume that good researchers and teachers want to work at renowned (& rich) Universities, and that a University's social agenda is harder to sustain in the UK than in the primary or secondary sector. My theory is that as students and their families take more financial responsibility for their education, an assessment of life-time earnings comes into the decision framework and traditional economic criteria such as returns on investment and payback horizons are consider in more or less formal terms.

In my regional chart above, Europe includes Russia & Israel, and the obvious non EU countries (Norway & Switzerland), otherwise they're EU member states, with the UK contributing 11.

Both Canada and Sweden are punching above their weight in terms of population and even GNP, although Sweden is the host nation for the Nobel panel, which may have some relevance.

The Wikipedia page, Academic Ranking of World Universities has a sort button so you can see the institutions in order of excellence, and now has the 2008 figures, and there are other ranking methodologies and publishers.

This was been written over a number of months, and the UK fact finding over a number of years as I helped and hindered my family choose their university courses. The article was originally planned to be about the value of research to industry, but has evolved into some thoughts about the UK higher education system. I hope its useful to someone.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[education] topic:[university] topic:[ranking] topic:[UK]

Syncing Google Calendar with the ipodtouch

2009-06-24T16:12:21.000Z

Milton Stephenson was boasting on Facebook about connecting his Google Calendar to his ipodtouch and I thought "Ooh, I want one of those.". Its not that hard. I had downloaded V3.0 of the appliance operating system a couple of days ago. First, use the ipodtouch's settings application and open the Mail, Contacts and Calendars tab, then select 'Add Account...'

The settings I used were,

Server = www.google.com
User Name = my username, which is not a gmail address
Password = my password

and it wrote the description and ssl parameters for me. I was advised that m.google.com works as a server parameter, but not for me. Maybe its the non gmail user thing again. This article called Google calendar speaks caldav to the iphone at http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/ was very helpful, and implies that V3 of the operating system is required. So I now have Google Mail available nomadically on the touch.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[apple] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[google] topic:[calendar] topic:[sync] "topic:[nomadic+computing]"

When WiFi's no good

2009-06-22T15:47:18.000Z

I installed Joikuspot on my new Nokia E71 and this works quite well as a portable gateway. It uses the E71's wireless chip to turn the phone into an internet gateway for wifi devices. Some services were restricted by my network provider in Greece, but definately an additional way to connect my 'touch and laptop to the internet when on the road. This was pointed out to me by Sean Harris.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[phone] topic:[network] topic:[internet] topic:[gateway] "topic:[nomadic+computing]"

Keeping in touch

2009-06-22T15:37:20.000Z

Like most 'touch users, I am looking for a "keep in touch application". I was pointed at Zensify, a personal network aggregator. Its not quite one network, but gathers the posts from your correspondents in several networks and ceates a feed and tag cloud for you.

I have just subscribed to several really prolific feeds on Twitter, and while I have also pointed my Google Reader at them, I have not yet subscribed to my twitter public timeline using Zensify. I use Facebook instead. I have come to the conclusion that Facebook is not only useful for keeping in touch with real friends but it can turn colleagues into friends, and here it is a way of keeping in touch with people.

I had come to the conclusion, that one should use these tools either as an aggregator or as a publication tool or as an end-point. I had made my twitter feed a publication tool, friendfeed as my aggregator and facebook as an endpoint. Unfortunately since we can't agree on what tool and what purpose, its a not very useful model. One really needs to consider one's readership and also assume they can find your stuff. It's not necessary to make everything an aggregator. By keeping a purpose in mind, one also makes it easier for people to find your referenced content. They don't have to trawl through several pages in your web space.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[apple] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[messages] topic:[socialnetworking]

Europe's largest supercomputer

2009-06-02T18:12:51.000Z

The Forshung Julich phase two super computer, now Europe's largest, had its formal opening session last week and Mark Hamiltion, Sun VP who leads our HPC team went to visit them, and recorded it on his blog, in a couple of articles dated as at the end of May, because it runs on Sun. He wrote three articles, several of them with lots of pictures.

This is Europe's largest super computer and runs on Sun's Constellation systems, Mark's article "Memorial Day in Germany" and the Forshung Julich web page, "Systems Configuration" talk about the technology, where they state, they have 2208 compute nodes, each with dual, Intel Xeon X5570 (Nehalem-EP) quad-core processors, running at 2.93 GHz. This has over 17500 cores with 207 Teraflops peak performance, hardly surprisingly they have also taken four of Sun's Data Centre Switches.

The EU's PRACE project funded the feasibility of this and I have been tracking it for a while since we knew that phase 2 was to be based on Sun's hardware. I have a link roll...

which records a bunch of pages about it and this page, the Juropa Supercomputer has a rather cool picture.

which I have linked to, but shrunk to get on this page.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[hpc] topic:[supercomputer] topic:[cluster] topic:[intel] topic:[Nehalem] topic:[europe] topic:[eu] topic:[PRACE] topic:[Germany] topic:[Julich]

For my HTML readers, more about Sun's Unified Storage

2009-05-28T13:02:26.000Z

I have just uploaded my notes from a meeting where Mike Shapiro presented on Open Storage to this blog, but backdated it to the time of occurrence. See 11th March

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[amberroad] topic:[storage] myblog

Are liberal licenses a better future proofing?

2009-05-11T18:37:36.000Z

A couple of days after the Kable Open Source conference, I looked up Gianugo Rabellino's blog and read his then most recent blog article, "Of Oracle, Sun and Open Development" about the impact of M&A on open source investment protection.

The conclusion I draw from his article is that open source adopters need to make investment protection a selection criteria. Its well understood that the vibrancy of the product community is crucial, so its just obvious that taking a view on the future is as important. Gianugo also argues that liberal licences enhance the ability of a community to survive M&A activity. I think he's probably right, and this means that licence terms might become important even to end user sites who have no intention of distributing software. It may also be worth measuring how diverse an open source development community is before adopting the software.

Its an interesting spin on Alisdair Mangham's comment on licences, (see below) but they didn't debate. Alisdair's comment was that if you don't plan to distribute, you don't need to worry about viral licences, he might well agree on the need to evaluate to protect the development cost.

This is another article that's been hanging around on my machine for longer than is smart. This one I have not back dated.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[adoption] topic:[community]

A short URL for the "Third Wave" slides

2009-04-24T07:32:04.000Z

I have created a short URL at is.gd for the slides I used on Wednesday; http://is.gd/ueDO is the mediacaster web page that hosts my slides.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[opensource] topic:[davelevy] topic:[slides]

Another intra-net community

2009-04-22T14:30:00.000Z

Another tip from midweek, by Miles Berry, the british education community is adopting a community software product called the learning landscape for schools, its based on code from http://elgg.org/. Schools have even more concern that they control access to their communities than business and one of elgg's advantages is that you can install it on your own server and place it behind your firewall.

This was written at the time, uploaded on the 7th May and backdated to the time of occurrence.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[security] topic:[socialsoftware]

You don't manufacture software

2009-04-22T14:00:00.000Z

Gianugo Rabellino of Source Sense and the Apache Foundation and presented a demolition of the need or inexorability of charging for right to use, he finished this demoltion by quoting Eric Raymond from his paper, "The Magic Cauldron"

"....software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry. "

Spot on in my opinion, creative workers need to get used to selling time and earning wages again.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[adoption] topic:[uk] topic:[publicsector] topic:[kable]

The Third Wave of Adoption

2009-04-22T12:30:00.000Z

I spoke next, the slides I used, based on Simon Phipps, current pitch are posted on my page at Sun's mediacaster. (I say based, this is a derived work, and I was pleased to be able to use his presentation). I covered how we have got to where we are, the Pioneers, the four freedoms, the geek community and the arrival of the enterprise. We then look at the compelling value of peer production, and the role of licenses in the community, and how to defend against trolls and vultures. One slide, developed by Simon and articulated in Sun's Free and Open Source Licensing White Paper posted at www.sun.com, classes the open source licences into Open, file based and project based licences. The slide I used is posted below

. It is clear there are some who think that only the GPL counts as Open Source, but despite its undoubted popularity, there are a number of people and organisations who think that its duty to publish is not always desirable, and the Apache licence. These are not restricted to organisations that pursue a rights based business model. The presentations and white paper talk about community roles and present a model of these roles. The presentation re-inforces the fact that Sun is the largest publisher of Open Source in the world and has a range of produicts and partners to allow open source adopters to what they want.

The slide above is available as a full size .jpg if you prefer it.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[adoption] topic:[uk] topic:[publicsector] topic:[kable]

Implementing Opensource

2009-04-22T10:19:00.000Z

Alisdair Mangham, the head of IS & Development for the LB of Camden argued from experience, as he presented a case study, that you need to own software development expertise to adopt open source and this became a theme for the rest of the day. Alisdair argied for an adoption led deployment, I was interested how yet again, he as do many others argue that Finance is a mission critical function. Its not always true, and becoming less so. Businesses compete on price or by differentiation. Its very hard, or illegal to innovate your finance processes, and price advantage is gained by efficient processes not innovative finance. Today, it should be at the front of the queue for outsourcing. Another GEM from Alisdair is that licence terms are not important to an End-User site and he knows, he's read a few. The point he makes is that unless you are looking to do business as a software house, the liabilities you incur through licence is not important. I wonder if he's considered aquiring indemnity.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[adoption] topic:[uk] topic:[publicsector] topic:[kable]

The importance of Open Source

2009-04-22T09:45:00.000Z

John Pugh MP opened the conference, with a review of the state of software procurement in the UK public sector. He suggested that ubiquity should be the trigger point at which charging for right to use becomes undesirable. I see no justification in this, although the behaviour of the drugs companies and their monopsony buyers is an interesting example of what might happen. I think his own references to Kant, and testing it as a natural law shows that its can't be done. When does something become so ubiquitous that it should be free to use. He also looked at a new tripartite demand for software, the civil servant, the consultant and the provider and wondered how open source providers and their ecosystem could get to the table. He also pointed out the lack of domain expertise often held by the civil servants, which is what causes the need for consultants. It reminds me of projects I have been on when assessing bid/no-bid decisions as to whether we had the expertise to manage the project's profitability. The project managers are easy to find, its people who understand what's going on that are harder.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[adoption] topic:[uk] topic:[publicsector] topic:[kable]

Tube across europe

2009-04-22T07:15:00.000Z

Crossing London on the Tube, to get to Kable's "Open Source in the Public Sector" conference reminds me of the weekend in Barcelona, both the prices and experience were better in Spain, although I didn't travel on the Metro during a rush hour.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[metro] topic:[London] topic:[Barcelona]

And a surprise on my arrival home

2009-04-20T15:45:00.000Z

Travelling home today; the hotel had one internet terminal in the lounge so I have been out of contact during the weekend. We visited the sites and some of my pictures, including this one are uploaded into my barcelona set at flickr.

I was in the air as the press releases about Oracle and Sun were circulating. I got a text message when I landed. Twitter had turned itself off while I was abroad and this is probably a good thing, but it was old fashioned SMS that let me know and now like you, I just have to wait and see what happens.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[barcelona] topic:[spain] topic:[m+a] topic:[sunw] topic:[oracle]

Nice People at Heathrow

2009-04-16T11:38:00.000Z

So off to Barcelona for long weekend via the marvellous Heathrow airport. I have never been so close to missing a plane...

I have actually, I have had people on the jump seat pulled off on a journey to Spain before now, but I must thank all those people who helped us through our journey across the airport.

Thank goodness for docs.sun.com

2009-04-07T15:13:22.000Z

Where's my screwdriver? I got a bit close to the 'tin' today. I have been trying to boot a lab machine, an x4600, that clearly hasn't been used for a while.

Its previous user had kindly documented the tcp/ip addresses used, but we couldn't ping either of them, so http'ing onto the ILOM server was right out. We plugged in a console into the VGA port and tried to boot from an Open Solaris live CD, this failed with the error messages zooming of the top of the console. So we tried S10 and the same thing happened. This meant we had to actually read some documentation. This is at docs.sun.com, and has a bunch of docs on the x4600. Having equipped ourselves with some knowldege,

We attatched a real serial terminal to the serial console port. This involved checking the serial comms port paramters. Its a very long time since I've had to do that. We then checked the tcp/ip settings, once we realised these were correctly set,
We checked the ethernet cable to ensure it was correctly connected and seated.
This enabled us to log into the ILOM using the browser interface. Everything seemed OK so
We used ssh to login into the ILOM service and started the console
We power cycled the machine using the browser

This allowed us to capture the errors as the Live CD image of S10 failed to boot.

The lessons of this story are

sometimes one should read the documentation earlier rather than later
check your cabling
the docs.sun.com x4600 documentation is good
sometimes systems do have hardware faults

tags: topic:[] topic:[] topic:[] topic:[]

A second look at Second Brain

2009-04-03T11:52:33.000Z

I have revisited secondbrain recently and decided I need to get to grips with its libraries and collections. I am not sure of the differences and whether I should be create broad large collections such as travel or software, or even something narrower but broad such as database, or use it for more project orientated collections such as specific journies or personal engineering tasks, a bit like what it takes to justify a new snipsnap page on my bliki. I quite like the fact they give me a domain name, and that I got their early enough to get "davelevy".

It now takes a much broader range of feeds, which was the criticism I made last time I reviewed it, and creates an aggregated tag cloud. This is neat, but I hadn't realised how many tags my picture collection generates. The tag cloud is dominated by the places tag and the geographic qualifiers. When you add the bookmarks created while planning the travel, it dominates the tag cloud, which I am not sure is what I want. (I wonder if they could or should permit us to weight the tags by feed.) Usability is also inhibited here because like most people, I don't tag a feed as belonging to itself, so my bookmarks aren't tagged as bookmarks. Also several of my feeds are not tagged at all. All-in-all, this is a feature I like, so I'd really like a tag cloud widget.

I was looking at second brain to see if I could make it my home page and consolidate the various sites I am using into one place, it could well be possible. I'd loose control of my look and feel, and I'd need to consider how to host original textual content but a blog might work for that if I have SB's collections and libraries. Perhaps I'll try and migrate one of my travel pages to SB and see what it looks like, and how useful I find it.

tags: topic:[secondbrain] "topic:[content management]" topic:[tagcloud] topic:[technology]

More news and where to find me

2009-04-03T07:48:18.000Z

Despite not writing here, I have been busy, you can follow me, if you really want at, my friend feed or slightly less completly at my secondbrain. You can see both there and here, that I am finding the tendancy to microblogging too strong, although twitter's discipline of 140 characters is often a challange.

I also aggregate some of my feeds at planet davelevy, and there is a mingle view, but that's not updated regularly. I really need to fix up a plazes filter for planet. DME has written some code but I can't seem to find time to implement it anywhere, and I need to get a dynamic hosting site and get off my qube.

News

2009-04-03T07:08:15.000Z

I have been busy writting a presentation on 'Why Software should be free?', it looks like it'll need an essay/paper as well. The economic theory doesn't lend it self well to a presentation. So that'll be fun.

tags: topic:[free] topic:[software] topic:[technology]

Open Solaris, the laptop OS

2009-04-03T07:06:46.000Z

Oops, a couple of weeks since I last blogged, but just wanted to point you at Jim Grisiano's puff for Toshiba's Open Solaris Laptops, I really have no excuse left. Do I?

tags: topic:[news] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[toshiba] topic:[laptop] topic:[advert]

Re: Open Solaris, the laptop OS

2009-04-03T08:06:58.000Z

No excuse at all Dave.

Installing the Amber Road simulator on a Laptop

2009-03-19T14:39:42.000Z

Sun's Open Storage software comes as an appliance from http://www.sun.com. Currently available as a VMware image, and I now have it running on my trusty laptop.

The management panel in in the browser, the appliance console is the black window, I have started the CIFS service, mounted a file system using SMB onto my host image (the windows folder) and I have opend a file using notepad. It was easier to do than attach my Vista systems to my legacy home windows network.

I had to install VMware Player first and when the VM starts for the first time, you are offered a text menu to install the network identity and point to the network gateways. I was nervous about VMware because I wasn't sure about what VMware does to implement the network interface. This wiki page has been created by the FISHworks team to help you, which discusses how you configure each of the four netowrk interfaces and I advise you to think hard about the node name and domain name as I havn't yet worked out how to change it. The wiki's advice on the network gateways didn't work for me so I used 192.168.1.1 dor both the default gateway and DNS server. Anyway the boot screen looks like this,

I am off to install it on my home server and maybe I'll try the Virtual Box version and use the appliance to manage my home network storage, I think its legal, but in order to get the performance advantage at scale, you'll need to buy the hardware.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[unifiedstorage] topic:[simulator] topic:[amberroad] topic:[vmware] topic:[sunw] topic:[storage] topic:[howto]

Re: Installing the Amber Road simulator on a Laptop

2009-03-19T15:00:22.000Z

It works great on virtualbox... and with the forthcoming vbox 2.2 release (now in beta) there will be OVF support (for virtual appliances) and a new host-only networking mode (useful to run the demo when you are not connected).

Convergence

2009-03-19T09:09:32.000Z

There is a conversation on google groups, cloud computing [XML] about CISCO's plans to enter the server market, kicked off by this article at Business Week.

The dimension, only just, missed in that conversation is the opportunity to get design synergies on the hardware between networking and systems. Why do large scale users have to buy switches and servers as seperate procurements? Perhaps the next stage is to migrate the network functionality to a software appliance, so one buys a box and then decides what to do with it. (I know that a switch needs a lot of ports where a non-switch system only needs two, but modern blade systems are modularising this design area as well.)

The interesting questions then left are whether the data centre, or network can consolidate to one cabling standard and perfromance. When will the need for seperate networking (or interconnect) technologies between CPUs and Systems decline? (If ever?)

I know some computer scientists thinking about tomorrow's problems are interested in this sort of thinking.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[business] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[M+A] topic:[sunw] topic:[CISCO] topic:[networking] topic:[hardware] topic:[convergence]

Gambling with Finance

2009-03-17T12:12:51.000Z

CIO Connect, in their winter 2008 magazine, have published an interview with Robin Osmond, Betfair's CEO about his plans to utilise their software platform as a vehicle for trading financial products. They claim to be starting with spread betting, which seems available at http://www.tradefair.com/ but are looking to offer FX trading at some time in the future.

Spreadbetting for financial products has been around for a while and has already played the regulatory arbitrage by being considered as gambling and treated that way by HMRC. Betfair innovated the ambkling world by building a betting exchange, and removing the risk of running a book from their business model. Their software, and more importantly their information systems architectural skills might well apply to financial products exchanges but can they build the trust that'll bring consumers to their site, and solve the problem that the real money is in trading.

I expect that meeting a new group of regulators who in the UK at least have a reputation problem of their own will keep them busy. While it seems a simple diversification to many, I wonder if the difference in customer base, and regulatory environment will make this harder than it would seem.

Tradefair's CTO, Martin Thompson, was also interviewed and talked about building an integrated system, from business logic to silicon. It'll be interesting to see what they've done, if they ever make it public.

I have linked to CIO Connect, above, but they have a wayward re-direct rule set that issues some stupidly long URLs presumably to track activitty and they like to keep their stuff behind their firewall to protect their subscription revenue.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[business] topic:[financial+trading] topic:[gambling] topic:[exchange] topic:[cioconnect]

If you're travelling to Bristol

2009-03-14T17:00:00.000Z

The 'Hackathon' is at the University of Bristol, on Woodstock Rd., which charges for parking on Saturday, but is free on Sunday. We should have been cuter on that, and I got lost last night on the way in. Better research would have helped. I wonder if Google Earth would have helped, I doubt it'd have helped plan my car parking, but it might have helped me avoid getting lost.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[bristol]

Open Source, the price is right

2009-03-14T10:00:00.000Z

I shall be speaking tomorrow on "Open Source, Free the right price!" and shall be posting my slides here. I have been busy reading up my undergraduate economics to remind me of what I learned then and check that it hasn't changed. I borrowed Beggs, Fischer and Dornbusch's "Economics", since I got rid of my text books years ago and this seems to be the modern equivilent. I have also tagged it in my living social booklist.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[davelevy] topic:[davidbeggs]

Off to Bristol

2009-03-13T14:30:00.000Z

Off to Bristol, for the University of Bristol OSUM 'Hackathon'. I am staying at the Hotel Mercure Brigstow in the city centre. The area seems lively with a large choice of restaurants and pubs, but I was tired so ate in the restaurant. The one in Grenoble which I stayed in last year was, unsurprisingly, better, but tonight's meal filled me up. None of the city centre hotels in my and Sun's price list have car parks, so NCP win out again.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[bristol] topic:[osum] topic:[hackbristol] topic:[2009]

Squaring the circle, from disruption to trust

2009-03-11T12:00:00.000Z

Mike Shapiro is an expert in disruptive technology; he was working on Solaris in the early 2000s. He spoke to a number of us at Sun's Guillemont Park Campus about Amber Road, Sun's new disruptive file server technology. Sun and our customers have the opportunity to take advantage of the next big thing in network storage.

Mike explained that for a technology to be truly disruptive

it must be cheaper
it must be good enough
there must be a compelling reason for adoption

and Amber Road has two killer apps. Flash and Analytics. There is a small layer of functionality that Amber Road can't provide but the bulk of the market doesn't need it, and certainly doesn't need it at the price charged. Since storage is a trust business, Sun's storage sales teams and the customers need to understand very carefully the storage requirements. It is unlikely that any functionality not available is a universal requirement but in some cases, its not the right time for customers to move from their incumbent suppliers; they need some of the missing functionality. Talking to storage users about Sun's new storage concentrates the minds of everyone involved.

Over the last 10 years, there have been only two ways that the laws of physics and economics permit to make disk arrays faster, either increase the cache size, or increase the disk speed. The cost of Flash has dropped over the last three years, thanks to those of us buying mp3 players and pdas. The Amber Road box's software allow newly economic flash to do either or both. Sun is a leader in flash and certify enterprise flash for 3-5 years. and has additional advantages including the superior reliability of ZFS and the opensource pricing of the Unified Storage arrays. We don't licence a right to use. What we charge is based on what we ship, you don't get charged more as you turn on functionality. (This has nearly always been true of Sun, I remember when buying SunOS systems that one of the advantages was that network funtionality was bundled with UNIX where as I was asked to pay extra for networking and RAID functionality by my then incumbent supplier). Crucially Sun doesn't seek to tax its customer's innovation. The "no more to pay" approach also applies to the Analytics which come with the box and you can use them all. The software is available on a try before buy basis at www.sun.com and I ~~will be downloading~~ have downloaded it onto my laptop, see also Installing the Amberroad simulator above, to demonstrate to anyone that wants to see it. [ Sun's 7000 series storage simulator home page ].

Some of what is argued to be missing is FCAL support. Mike stated that the long-term winning strategy is to have only one cable going into the box. If there's to be only one winner, it ain't going to be FCAL; it needs to support Ethernet, and there's a demand for infiniband. Our proposed iscsi functionality release plans means that the Unified Storage boxes can offer block devices over the network and support for most enterprise data centres will only get better. Having said that, we propose to release FC target functionality in Q4 this year.

The value proposition for Amber Road is that its cheaper, good enough and offers game changing superior management. This often gets lost in a feature benefit analysis, which often seek to disguise what the features cost. Sun knows storage and can meet the trust requirements that customer's require, Amber Road shows that a trusted source can disrupt the economics, and its only the customers that win.

This was uploaded on 28th May 2009 and back dated to the date of occurrence, 11th March

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[storage] topic:[amberroad] topic:[flash] topic:[disruptive] topic:[zfs] topic:[iscsci] topic:[simulator]

You can't keep the Spies out

2009-02-27T09:15:17.000Z

While continuing to think about the privacy and regulatory issues that Cloud computing raises, I was point at this article in the NY Times, called "Does Cloud Computing Mean More Risks to Privacy?", which looks at the US legal position and points out that the US police and even civil investigators will find it easier to get data from third parties than from the entities orginally authorised to have access to private data. The article seems to have been categorised as news due to the release of the World Privacy Forum's latest report, "Privacy in the Clouds", which I have not yet read, but plan to.

Its probably true in the EU, and is certainly so in the UK, that a number of IT service providers have national security duties that are not well publicised and growing, but it seems that the basic principle of EU law is that data mustn't be shipped to countries with weaker laws than the originator country, although on the internet, how does one know which that is.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[privacy] topic:[law] topic:[legal] topic:[international] topic:[europe] topic:[eu]

For more about Privacy in Europe

2009-02-23T14:11:48.000Z

So what was I looking for? I found and was pointed to by a lazyweb search at,

The EU Commission's DG Info Home Page, responsible for the development of the knowldege economy
The EU Commission's DG Justice and Home affairs' Privacy Page and
The European Data Protection Supervisor's web site.

and now I have these three links collected in a single HTML page with a permalink, i.e here. The delicious links are tagged EU, but I might add a gov tag to the tag base as this seems sensible for this case.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[EU] topic:[privacy] topic:[gov] topic:[Europe]

Searching europa, is there a limit to Google

2009-02-23T13:55:40.000Z

Just some times I come across a piece of research which my search engines find hard to help me with. Since Google, they all seem to use in-list based sorting algorithms. Some resources, such as the EU's web complex don't seem to have enough sites pointing at it for this to be a wisdom of crowds solution and their own search engine doesn't seem to help me either. You'd think that the various News organisation feeds that specialise might issue permalink based pointers but querying the EU site remains hard.

A while ago, I reviewed , the research white paper, Searching the Workplace Web in my blog artice The shape of the Internet..., which argued that inlist based ranking is not necessarily the best sort order of an intranet query. Certainly the Europa site seems to have many of the properties of an intranet identifed by IBM research team. Is this true of all Government sites? Do they have to be their own in-list?

Are there any search engines that might do better?

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[search]: topic:[EU] topic:[europa.eu]

How to set up a USB Flash Drive from Windows to Windows in Virtual Box

2009-02-18T13:32:04.000Z

Read the User Manual, available on http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads and think "all that stuff you need to know that's a bit poor". Then,

Make sure the windows guest is dormant
Plug the Flash Drive into the Computer
Edit the VM Settings
1. Enable USB
2. Enable USB 2.0
3. Create a Filter
  - move the mouse over the add filter button and the USB devices will appear in the display box. This box is active. Select the one you want. If this is not obvious, then you can test this by removing the USB In the example above I have also taken Sasquatch's advice and created an empty filter which will assign all USB devices to the guest operating system. This is however disabled.
Start the VM and wait for Windows to do its plug and play magic.

This process was developed using a Windows Vista 32 bit guest and a Windows Vista 64 bit host, and a patched version of Virtual Vox 2.1.3

I have left the "All Devices" filter disabled. It will do all devices and thus some system devices will become visible to the guest such as the fingerprint reader, and whatever Chicony Electronics provide.

Sasquatch is a regular correspondent at virtual box forums and offered his advice in a thread called "USB on Windows host and Windows guest".

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[usb] topic:[howto] topic:[FAQ]

A bitty week

2009-02-16T18:41:12.000Z

Last week was a pretty bitty week, dominated by the need to complete some mandatory, examined web training. I have recently completed similar training in Sun's Unified Storage Products which I found useful. This one is not so focused on technology and while useful in that I learned a couple of things, I really wonder if it was a good use of my time.

Prior to getting stuck in, I made some progress on my web estate including Laconica, planet and glassfish. I got a copy of mingle running on one of my Linux images but made no progress on installing Glassfish. I have taken advice and been recommended to use the Sun installer, but I am being stubborn and want to see if I can use the Ubuntu package installer.

Mind you I got fed up with bash & sh and installed the Korn Shell. I was able to use the package manager which is cool. I was expecting that some Linux religous view, or over zealous conformance with the various licenes would prohibit its inclusion, but it works fine. Since I shall only be using it for scripts, I don't need to write a global .kshrc and install it where ever it would need to be. What broke the Camel's back? I felt I needed $(). I had been lectured by Chris Gerhard about using this syntax a while ago because it supports nesting and finally came across a case where it was needed, or at least, coding speed and my skills meant that I decided to move over to it. (It does mean that anything I write may be harder for other Linux users to adopt.) So I'll write in ksh, and port to sh.

I ended the week on Sunday at the Chichester Smith and Western, where the atmosphere, decor and music are fun and the portions enormous.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ubuntu] topic:[linux] topic:[ksh] topic:[shell] topic:[scripting]

Re: A bitty week

2009-02-16T20:08:41.000Z

You had to do that mandatory waste-of-time training, too? Jeez.

If I'd have known, I'd have sent you the same Q&A cheat sheets I was given (and which are in wide internal circulation) so you'd only have had to waste a couple of hours' time clicking buttons.

Sorry, I didn't know.

btw, I agree that the Amber Road training was worthwhile, and I did it properly. However, regarding the other stuff, I don't consider it cheating, if the original mandate is unreasonable.

Trusting the customer in the hospitality trade

2009-02-16T10:44:06.000Z

Or where to get cheap food and drink. The Guardian last week seemed quite keen to publicise some bars and restaurants that offer you the opportunity to pay what you think they're worth, in London and Berlin.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[London] topic:[Berlin]

Influencing Planet's output name space

2009-02-16T10:39:10.000Z

Earlier, last week on the planet developers mail list, Fredric Muller writes

From the help file I read:
# The following provide defaults for each template:
# output_dir: Directory to place output files

Now I am trying to figure out how to have one of those template file
output in a different directory (like they all go into /var/www/planet/
and I would like one of them to go to /var/www/ ).

I can think of a couple of ways of solving this problem. My first way, which may not be the simplest, is based on the fact that I have several planet instances and for the most advanced and thought out installation I have answered this problem as follows. It is designed to answer another problem and so might be overkill.

I install planet into its own user and hence home directory.
I plan to run more than one planet so,
I create a sub directory for each instance
I create a Logs directory since I plan to run the planets from cron, pipe the logs into files and keep them for a while. Both the logs and the log name control files are kept here.
In the instance sub directories I place the config.ini file and the template sources; the index.tmpl will also be different as will any images used to decorate the planet html file such as feed logos or page decoration
In the home directory I create a shell script, which calls planet.py to act as the argument to cron and a crontab source file.
test the script for each instance of Planet
set the crontab using the source file

because I have multiple config.ini's and index.tmpl files, I can (and do) have multiple output directories and also ensure that the HTML pages meet my look and feel requirements. I do this at http://davelevy.dyndns.info/planet/davelevy and http://davelevy.dyndns.info/planet/g3 and on my development site have a standard planet venus and a mingle solution. I shall be moving the two planets above shortly so I suggest that you don't rely on them for a while. Within Sun's firewall, I have a community feed and one for me (like planet davelevy above) that uses this technique. The original requirement was based on the need for quite different config.ini files, with different input feed lists but Fredric's case is also solved using the technique.

I also have a script to tidy up the logs, maybe I should publish them all. (If you want'em comment or reply to the planet development list and ask. )

The second answer for Fredric's case, is that since I encapsulate ${HOME}/planet.py into a script, I could always end the script with an appropriate cp command, provided there was no contention for the name /var/www/index.html.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[planetplanet]

Do we need private community microblogging?

2009-02-04T10:16:48.000Z

Is twitter or microblogging a service that would benefit from more active community management? It would seem that the people at friendfeed seem to thinks so but the people at Laconica have produced a package that allows for the hosting of a microblogging community, which was pointed out to me by Peter Reiser and Scott Matoon.

Despite Peter Reiser’s statement (on his twitter feed at 1.41 am GMT 3rd Feb) that it installs on Solaris like a dream, I chose to install on Ubuntu Linux and there is a specific install page for Ubuntu at the Laconica site. It’s also useful to look at the >>README as it documents the pre-requisities and discusses the location of the site within the webserver's root namespace in more adult fashion than the Ubuntu install page.

I have written up my install notes on my snipsnap, and must try and get them adopted at the Laconica site.

But once its properly installed I made a post, changed my avatar and checked the RSS, and I did it all in a Virtual Box image.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[microblogging] topic:[laconica] topic:[community] topic:[install] topic:[ubuntu] topic:[virtualbox]

Critically you need Apache 2, MySQL Client Tools (& Server) and PHP 5, of which the latter two seem not to be installed on my version of Ubuntu (8.04 LTS Hardy Heron). Actually I didn’t document my processes well enough and not everything was necessarily done in the correct order, so PHP might have been there, but the extensions weren’t. I already had Apache 2 on my system, so I created a user to act as the Laconica administration user, ignored the web page suggestion to untar it in /var/www, the apache root and created a subdirectory.

It's at this point best to use the package manager to update MySQL & PHP, read the pre-requisites as you need some of the extensions which the Ubuntu package manager treats as separate packages. I found the Curl, MySQL and GD extensions. (I did this last and some stuff broke without the GD package.) I also re-installed the mod_rewrite package, as I had a problem and wasn’t sure of the cause, and am thus unclear if it needed to be done. Then its simple, wget and untar the package, edit the config file. N.B. The path parameter is relative so no preceding /, not ./

And then it snowed, a lot! (Picture Blog)

2009-02-03T14:00:00.000Z

On Monday, I woke up to the heaviest snow fall I'd seen in years. I live in the south of the country and we don't often see snow at all, and even less frequently in the cities. I tried to take some pictures which I have posted at flickr.

Fortunately, Sun's work from home policy means I didn't have to travel; since the bus and trains were both severely disrupted, travelling by car would have been horrible.

tags: General topic:[snow] topic:[winter] topic:[UK] topic:[2009]

About planet and some Python lessons

2009-02-02T19:17:59.000Z

I have some exciting plans for using the planet feed aggregator and have over the last couple of weeks using the “Venus” code line. I can now install on Ubuntu and the install passes all its tests. I want to be able to write a filter for the my plazes and also see how the foaf output might be used. I met up with my colleague, Dave Edmondson and we discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Python and planet.

The script planet.py runs two other python programs called spider and splice.

Spider gets the feeds defined in config.ini and creates a local cahce version, splice, reads the cache and generates the new formats from templates. The diagram below does not illustrate the template source files for the output formats and I shall probably need to dig further into the code in order to understand what needs to be done.

The diagram also indicates the location of Venus' plugin, where the plazes filter should be located.

We also discussed Python. I have been trying to write a game theory solver for a 2x2 formal game. I was representing the game as a dictionary so that I could retreive game scores using the strategy names. One problem is that two dimensional dictionaries get syntactically combersome. I had ended up with a list as the key. In theory it should make the programming easier, where game is a dictionary attached to class instance g.

i.e. score = g.game[('decoy', 'defend')]

makes great sense where decoy and defend are blue and red strategies, however, I have usually placed the evaluation of a score in an interation, and so coding the strategy names is rare e.g.

strategies=['heads', 'tails'];
for s in strategies:
# some iterated code

It is probably simpler to represent the game as a 2x2 matrix held in a list and to use the classic technique of holding the names of the strategies in an ordered list so we can translate the matrix cell location such as n(1,1) into n(tails,tails) by looking co-ordinates up in one, or two name lists.

strategies=['heads','tails']
score=matrix(strategies.index('heads'), strategies.index('heads'))

This would also have the advantage that I could look for and use the matrix manipulation packages that exist to avoid writing a lot of code. The code would look a lot simpler, and not just because I have put a lot of it in an external package; this is usually a good clue that the answer is correct.

Lesson 1: Be careful when using dictionaries.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[planetplanet] topic:[python] topic:[venus]

Mobile Schmapp

2009-01-28T19:43:30.000Z

I havn't put Scmapp back onto my laptop yet, but I probably will. They are good enough to re-publish some of my flickr pictures in their town guides. Frustratingly, they now have an Apple iphone/touch optimised application, but unlike the PC version, it is not nomadic. WTF? The ipodtouch is an ideal vehicle for their disconnected tourist guides, which is what they did for the PC. Download the map when connected, read it where-ever. Why have you crippled the application in this way? Its almost the wrong way round.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[schmapp] "topic:[nomadic computing]"

Laptop Diaries, 64 bitness & VPN

2009-01-27T10:58:41.000Z

Over the last couple of days I have been struggling to get my new laptop build up to the minimal level of functionality I require, using Vista 64 as the host operating system. I calculated that I installed 19 applications on the previous minimal build, of which only Scmapp could be considered unnecessary. My colleague, Kar Yang Ho recommended Windows Vista 64 bit as the host and after some experimentation, we chose Virtual Box as the VM manager, primarily because its much cuter about how it takes and reserves disk space.

We use CISCO's VPN solution to access certain services and have been struggling to get this to work from behind my Linksys Wireless-N ADSL2+ Gateway; the connection was failing. It needs to be installed within a supported 32 bit VM, so either Vista or XP. Firstly, we discovered on purchase, that one has to use a TCP carrier without NAT. I am seeking to install the VPN client inside a 32 bit virtual machine; CISCO don't have a Vista 64 implementation. Ho says that no one else with this router has the problems I had with it, although we have now fixed the connection by specifying the guest network interface as a “Host Interface” and not the default “NAT”. It seems that the Linksys only wants one NAT function in the configuration.

I am pleased that we have fixed it, as I can now use Virtual Box to boot up Linux and Opensolaris images for experimental work and demonstrations. I also use them as X Server's for remote systems work and I have a Windows 32 bit image for that software that can only run in 32 bit windows such as the CISCO client.

I installed the AMD64 version of Virtual Box on my Toshiba Tecra M10, with 4Gb of RAM on Vista Business SP1. I stuck with windows for short term financial considerations, and also it gives me rock solid suspend and resume, massive peripheral choice and good, if not the best desktop power management functionality. I am sure that ZFS will become a compelling part of the choice over the next few months as Opensolaris aquires new and appropriate desktop functionality.

I may write about the 19 applications, but they're not that exciting. If you follow me regularly you'll have some idea, there's a couple of development and language implementations that I wouldn't require if I used Solaris, Opensolaris or Linux VMs.

Re: Laptop Diaries, 64 bitness & VPN

2009-01-27T11:01:44.000Z

To change the VPN protocols and turn off NAT, you need to use the 'Transport' tab in the Modify Protocols dialog in the VPN Client program.

Re: Laptop Diaries, 64 bitness & VPN

2009-01-27T12:37:03.000Z

I get rock solid suspend and resume on the M9 running OpenSolaris 2008.11 (all be it with a patch). I'm even considering installing the vpn client into a virtual box running windows XP as that has a version of firefox that will work with IBIS then I could vpn just the virtual machine.

Re: Laptop Diaries, 64 bitness & VPN

2009-01-29T21:01:17.000Z

Cisco is not going to support Vista 64-bit. Joe Harris (author of Cisco's little black book) recommends using NCP Secure Entry Client (www.ncp-e.com)

Re: Laptop Diaries, 64 bitness & VPN

2009-01-30T09:41:50.000Z

VPN Haus

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Fixed my planet bug

2009-01-14T16:02:00.000Z

I wrote about running up planet venus inside virtual box on my blog. It seems that it was a problem with test_foaf.py, the FOAF tests. With help, I have debugged the problem, written a correction and submitted it to the developer list.

This has been accepted, so I am now a content developer for Venus. Hooray for me!

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[planetplanet] topic:[foaf]

More about Digg

2009-01-13T10:12:41.000Z

One the one hand, it seems that rows about the influence of Power Diggers has been going on for ages, its just that I hadn't noticed it because I have not really been a great user of the site, although it seems that people are getting particularly excited at the moment.

On the other hand, I have just promoted Digg Technology to my '1st read' group on Google Reader, and also just discovered http://m.digg.com/technology,

This picture is taken by the ipod touch and I have started to read this again. It's chucking up a couple of interesting things/day, so less interesting than the Guardian and BBC, but about par with the Register. So maybe I am more in tune with digg users than I thought.

I find this look and feel pretty excellent for use on the ipod touch, all the buttons are finger sized, including the "Next Page" button and I don't have to muck around with resizing the screen. I am also interested how using the ipod touch is changing my attitude towards web page design, you'll see some of the changes here, if you browse the HTML view and also at i.davelevy.info

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[digg]

Busy Blogging

2009-01-08T22:06:02.000Z

Today has been one of my busiest blogging days for a while, which you'll see if you subscribe to this via a feed [atom | rss], since I have published a number dated today. I have also posted five new articles in November, finishing off my write up of ICT 2008, with articles on 26th & 25th about Managing Tomorrow's Clouds and european economic competitiveness. On the 19th, I comment on the EU's FP7 Call 4 for Projects and earlier in the month, finish off my notes for data centre ambassadors conference with articles on the 13th about the SuperNap, which has an embedded video about this amazing data center and on the 6th about Project Eucalyptus which is an open source implementation of Amazon's EC2. I have backdated these to the dates they happend and this is to let HTML readers know to go back to November.

tags: none

Consumerism & Sedimentation in the IT industry

2009-01-08T17:21:05.000Z

Is there an opportunity as we build the Future Internet for a convergence around the general purpose, and the development of software appliances which can differentiate their functionality. i.e. one hardware box which assumes a role depending upon the software it loads. What's happened with cars? I suppose the consumer dimension of cars (and home PCs) continues to permit non (welfare) optimal differentiation, so the economic history of car production is not necessarily a good predictor of the future of IT. People buy cars and even desktop/laptops because they're pretty or have status value. I have never heard of data centre manager influenced by these criteria for the contents of a data centre. However, cars are built from common components and the world class manufacturers' cars are beginning to look very similar

Will IT stay|move into the factory, so consumerisation becomes irrelevant? There is/will always be the developer/deployment platform feedback loop, but Mac has no server platform. The developers want Mac OS, but where do they deploy. Much of Apple's developer strategy is about using their eco-system as both attractive to developers, partly on their merits, but also because they have users. An example is that the iphone is developing a consumer/service user community which looks to mac.com for its software services; they're locked in.

T-Mobile, the mobile phone subsidiary of Deutsche Telkom launched a Google phone in Sept. Who are they're looking to escape from? Actually who makes it for them? Or is this merely a consumer play, trying to compete with the iphone and get the consumer conversation back. iphone users love Apple, T-Mobile G1 customers at least know who their Telco is, and Google might be one of the few brands capable of taking Apple on today.

This article was inspired by the R&D in Europe round table at ICT 2008 last November and blogged by me under the title Can Europe keep up?, which was posted today, but backdated to 25th November. Its been written from notes taken at the time and worked on sporadically since then. Since it is not immutably tied to the events of the time, but reflects ideas provoked by the event, I have posted it as at today's date.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[future] topic:[futurology] topic:[sustainability]

Oops, maybe a bit quick re Digg

2009-01-08T14:28:18.000Z

Despite my bitchy comments on Monday, the "Shouting in the DataCenter" video made it to Digg's front page.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[digg]

Re: Oops, maybe a bit quick re Digg

2009-01-10T06:09:16.000Z

Congrats on the front page of digg!

+1 to virtual box

2009-01-08T14:26:03.000Z

I installed a planet instance inside an Ubuntu Guest Virtual Box VM, and it failed the install tests. I was gratified to discover that a native instance of planet/ubuntu 8 failed in the same way. +1 to Virtual Box. Now onto fixing it.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[planet] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[vbox]

3D Worlds, Sun steps up to the plate

2009-01-08T14:09:28.000Z

Sun has some 3D acceleration software designed to optimise the performance of 3D Worlds, called the Sun Visualization System . This was pointed out to me by Constatin Gonzalez, who has written about it on his blog, "Making 3d work over vnc", and thought I'd be interested due to my articles on VNC and remotely accessing more business oriented 3d Worlds. He pointed this out to me after reading with my experiments with VNC Lite, which he has also played with. The Sun software runs on Linux and Solaris, so its no good for Neverwinter Nights, and I can't imagine it'd work inside a Virtual Box.

Anyway I have enough Virtual Box experiments at the moment without adding to them, so I doubt that I'll be trying this.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[visualization] topic:[network] "topic:[virtual worlds]" "topic:[3d Computing]"

Re: 3D Worlds, Sun steps up to the plate

2009-01-08T14:12:42.000Z

Actually, adopting this may depend on how quickly I can replace the Cobalt Qube with a hosted service. Once I have a decent Linux/Solaris platform, it may be quicker and easier to do some of these things.

Has Digg jumped the shark?

2009-01-06T07:45:00.000Z

The comments on the Digg post on "Shouting in the Data Centre" [ Youtube | this Blog ] disappointed me. I am not a great user of Digg and very few of my submissions have taken off. It is one of the feeds I subscribe to using Google Reader which is my first choice feed reader today. It seems that I am obviously not interested in the same stuff as most of its users, but to find the majority of comments about the provenance of the Digg takes self reference to the point of absurdity. It reminded me of a very recent a post 'openpeel', called '5 Ways to fix Digg', and it also reminds me of Simon Phipps' comment,

"When you invent a system, you invent the system that games it!".

Its a shame, but I suppose that the social software designers will have to become cleverer. It's clearly a fact that a 'karma' systems attracts people to contribute to the 'wisdom of crowds', but also trying to measure the influence, popularity or even innovativeness/leadership of contributors often leads to anti-social, even destructive behaviour.

I wonder if digg has jumped the shark as its user community has grown beyond an expertise focus and its designers loose the arms race with the gamers. Is there an alternative? I have considered for a while the use of 'clubs', where feed consumers, i.e. me and you, qualify the contributors to our feeds, or membership is gated. I use del.icio.us to keep my bookmarks and thus act as the original source of my contributions to finding interesting news. These thus become available through RSS, and then those I really think are interesting to others, I use Google Reader shares to share them. In the past I have used Slynkr, and have been using Digg to act as an entry point to my friend feed. The Google Share is a cute feature as the Google Reader makes my google friends' shares available to me. I use this to read other people's shared articles. The google shares I post may become my Digg replacement, but there's now no weighting or rating and my community is pretty small, since it is based on google talk/chat friends, which is not my first choice chat protocol.

The Google Share/Talk synergy is another interesting example of leveraging closed communities, and functional synergy by the software authors. Retaining the choice of internet participants against this new "lock in" could be open source's next big problem to solve.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[socialsoftware] topic:[discovery] topic:[digg] "topic:[google reader]" topic:[youtube]

You can't do this without "amberroad"

2009-01-05T10:30:00.000Z

Glenn Brunnette pointed this Youtube Video out to me

which struck me as rather cool in that it demonstrates the awesome advantage of the FISHworks analytics i.e. the management software that comes with Sun's Unified Storage systems. Its such a great way of seeing the power of the software I decided to bookmark it on del.icio.us and digg it, [here], I glad to see I am not the first. I was, however, sad to see that the digg conversation was so trivial, amusingly focused on the effects of shouting at computers, which we've all done, and less so about the track record of the person who submitted the story to digg. Has Digg jumped the shark?

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[storage] topic:[sunw] topic:[fishworks] topic:[video] topic:[youtube]

More VNC Lite

2008-12-30T11:19:29.000Z

I showed you VNC lite accessing Neverwinter Nights the other day. I finally got project wonderland working on one of my PCs, so here's a picture of VNC Lite accessing my project wonderland instance

and here's one of me accessing Second Life

I should point out that MochaSoft, VNC Lite's authors don't recommend these use cases. :)

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[vnc] topic:[mochasoft] "topic:[project wonderland]" topic:[darkstar] topic:[secondlife] topic:[technology]

Optimising a Roller theme for printing

2008-12-28T18:02:54.000Z

Inspired by Phil Harman's Trials with his roller theme I have wanted to create a better hard copy experience for you. I implemented this earlier this morning on my blog's roller files. It has been tested using Opera's print preview on the main weblog page and the comments view of an article and so should work on a view based on a tag, category, or date.

I have implemented a 2nd CSS file. Because my theme's base is so old, it is not conformant to the stylesheet/theme file structures of today's roller so I implemented it as just any old template file. The form lets you know/set the URL. It contains the following rules.

.noPrint
{ display: none; }
.noshow
{ visibility: hidden;}

It is introduced to the weblog using the following code in the weblog template file, in the HEAD section. The assignment in a LINK or STYLE tag with the MEDIA="print" attribute is what applies this rule only when printing.

I used the 'new file' form to set the url of the new file as above, but named it _printcss; it needs a preceding _ to become invisible to some of the roller macros such as #showBasicNavBar, and the form won't permit a .css suffix. It might be cleverer to call the file _cssprint, so that the css files are all adjacent to each other in an alphabetic sort, which you get on the 'edit templates' form.

I have applied the 'noPrint' rule to the Banner, the webCategoryChooser and Sidebar. I have not used the 'noShow' rule, which I developed to apply to objects that occupy vertical space in a table. The rules are applied to a DIV for the banner, P for the web catgory chooser and TABLE for the sidebar. Another pointer to the fact I must find time to remove the tables from this theme. I am working on it I promise.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[blog] topic:[roller] topic:[print] topic:[theme] topic:[printing]

Re: Optimising a Roller theme for printing

2008-12-29T08:39:03.000Z

Nice. I have stolen it. However while I can get the sidebar to disappear when printing my entries still do not fit the page which rather spoils the point (not entirely though as single page entries now only consume a single page of paper or at least they will when I work out how to get the "post a comment" bit to disappear.

Now how can you get the same things to happens when displaying to a PDA (iPod?)

Re: Optimising a Roller theme for printing

2008-12-29T12:51:52.000Z

I am now looking at how to do this for the ipod. I hope that media=screen will help. I am keeping my notes on my bliki at

http://davelevy.dyndns.info/snipsnap/space/Dave/HTML

Your space management problem is probably because your content pane is specified as a proportionate width. I have now got a fixed width blog page, try resizing the browser, and documented how to do it in an article called

http://blogs.sun.com/DaveLevy/entry/about_css_two_column_page

on this blog. This allows me to define the TD element containing the blog articles/entries as width:100%. This ensures that when the fixed width sidebar is display:none the content expands to fill the space. I know this because I had to change my code, which if you check the page source has the old code commented out.

Notice: New media=print rules

2008-12-28T17:35:26.000Z

All weblog views on this blog can now be printed, the banner and sidebar will not be shown in the printed version. This has been tested using Opera's print preview, and should work for the weblog, tag, category, date and comment views. It has not been set for the "About Me" page, nor "Yesterday's Words".

tags: none

How nomadic can one get? VNC for all.

2008-12-18T01:45:18.000Z

I have just been playing with Mocha VNC Lite for the ipodtouch. Its dead easy to get it to work. I downloaded Real VNC Free Edition and started the server on one of my PC's. The VNC Client connects straight away. Unfortunately the Lite version doesn't have mouse, function key, return or arrow keys, these are reserved for the "pay for" version, I hope they have arrow key support since I tried to use it to run Second Life and Neverwinter Nights. Both of these need the arrow keys. I took a picture of the Neverwinter Nights screen on the ipod, [here's how] but you'll have to take my word for it since it could be any old screen shot, the 'touch doesn't record a camera type for flickr.

I have done all this behind my firewall. I'll be experimenting with doing this over the internet some time. You might like to check the following links; Mocha VNC's FAQ and User Guide.

I also found that the logical size of the PC screen was too large for the VNC client and I got a 'window' on the screen. I wonder if this can be fixed.

This is the picture as taken on the ipodtouch, which renders larger than the 'touch's screen as an image and hence also in the the HTML view. I have left the picture as sized here, but other images in this blog I have re-sized to be closer to the real screen size.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[vnc] topic:[nwn] topic:[neverwinternights] topic:[secondlife]

Re: How nomadic can one get? VNC for all.

2008-12-21T23:13:49.000Z

Thanks for the screenshot tip!

More about Shanghai Jiao Tong University study on University excellence

2008-12-17T18:36:50.000Z

I have just blogged my notes from the first morning of ICT 2008, and backdated it to about the time of its occurrence. In it, I mention the Academic Ranking of World Universities, produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in China. This survey is also referenced at Wikipedia as well, and the wikipedia article has a table with macros displaying the table in different sort orders. The methodology they use is questioned by some.

Learnings from Lyon at ICT2008

2008-12-02T13:02:02.000Z

I have spent this morning looking at the leaflets and notes I took at ICT 2008 in Lyon last week. I have bookmarked many of them at delicious with the "myict2008" tag. These cover mainly grids, distributed computing and knowledge management, there are a couple of consultancy sites as well.

I hope you'll find them useful. I have posted them here, using their link roll gadget since you can't enter del.icio.us on a date and this blog entry has both a date URL and a permalink. The lack of a date query is probably one of the reasons that people post links to their blogs. This is the first time I have done it, although the linkroll is in my sidebar on this page and on my archive page.

I hope to write up my notes in a more narrative form, which I'll back date to last week, which is when the conference took place.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[eu] topic:[research]

Managing Torrow's Cloud

2008-11-26T13:00:00.000Z

An off agenda session on Cloud Computing, kicked off by William Fellows of the 451 Group. I quite like his stacks both of functionality, illustrating what needs to be done and the evolution of the cloud from its partly failed predecessors. The discussion then moved to management, with contributions from IRMOS and the Autonomic Internet project, which sounds a bit IBM'ish but isn't. There's obviously some thinking going on about Service Management for Clouds and networks, looking at life cycle issues (is this just job management, probably not because of birth and death), self functioning, SLAs and QoS issues. It seems to me that Robert Holt's experimentation with SMF is exactly the right thing to do. The features that Sun's Systems Management Facilty add to the operating system are a foundation on which a number of features can be built which meet the need of Cloud managers. The BREIN project which says about itself,

"BREIN takes the e-business concept developed in recent Grid research projects, namely the concept of so-called "dynamic virtual organisations" towards a more business-centric model, by enhancing the system with methods from artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, semantic web etc."

I love the etc. It always makes you think people know exactly what they're doing. They have published a white paper here.... Despite this, these projects and this approach might well enable the automated SLA negociation. Can we create a semweb for SLAs? It always been the fact that sustaining and management science comes after the invention stage, but this was a jolly interesting session, and addressing issues identified by both myself and colleagues at Sun and leading industry commentators as crucial. If we don't/can't automate this stuff, we are going to run out of people.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[research] topic:[europe] topic:[r+d] topic:[ict2008] topic:[SLA] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[future] topic:[ict2008]

Impressions of the Citie International

2008-11-26T08:15:00.000Z

Among the things to do better should Sun come to ICT again, is that the hotel should be booked in advance. Its a real pain being so far from my hotel room; I can't return to my room for either power or privacy. The commute is a time consuming pain; I am staying in Vienne which is about 30 minutes away, although the journey takes much longer. The journey in both directions was made harder by a strike on the trains, it was just like old time in England being picketed by the CGT. I hope it's easier today.

The Lyon convention centre is enormous and very good. If we could justify a Sun global training event in Europe, it'd be excellent, I wonder if they rent parts of it?

Even at this conference, they 'ushhered' people to sit below the main walkways when using the main auditorium for break out sessions. Having said it'd be excellent, are there enough hotel rooms in Lyon, as I said I booked late and AMEX couldn't get me in (to Lyon), but it could always be AMEX's fault. The number of breakout rooms might be a constraint and the wireless was poor in a number of rooms and unlike Palau de Congressos de Catlunya in Barcelona, there is no power available in the conference rooms and halls. They claimed 4500 delegates at ICT 2008.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[ict2008] topic:[lyon]

Can Europe keep up?

2008-11-25T18:00:00.000Z

I then attended a panel discussion on R&D in Europe, which given the attendees was pretty self congratulatory. HP's VP for Labs is a Brit, and was on the panel. The reason I mention this is that he was the only employee of a global IT company i.e. one not quoted in Europe, who spoke in a plenary session. They sort of said "Great Research, no IT manufacturing" , but why? We do have ICT manufacturers in Telco, including Alcatel, Ericsson, Nokia and Seimens.

Can the European NEP's maintain their leadership? What does Europe's computing hardware poverty mean? Can it compensate with a single market, a vibrant software industry and a well educated work force?

It was also shown that not all these advantages are enough. SAP does very little development in Europe these days, and it was said that innovation rate in Europe is too low, despite a world leading position in many areas.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[research] topic:[europe] topic:[r+d] topic:[ict2008]

Visions of Future Computing

2008-11-25T15:00:00.000Z

After lunch, with wine, it is in France after all, I attended a session called "Visions of Future Computing and Communication Paradigms". Frustratingly this was not video'd and nor can I find the slides on the USB stick they gave us. So you'll have to rely on my memory; I didn't take any notes. The first two speakers, although their presentations weren't designed to show the difference between IT people and computer scientists. Prof. John McCaskill, of BioMIP, the Biomolecular Information Processing Research Group presented on 'Constructive IT', which as far as I can tell starts from chemistry and is looking at new ways of building computers...beyond Silicon. I have to ask what sort of timescales they expect to do anything substantial. The need to change programming models because of large scale multi-threading is one thing, the abolition of silicon is quite another. This stuff just amazed me. He was followed by Micheal Wolf, who illustrated the insights that quantum physics offer to mainly software design. He was followed by Illka Tuomi also at Wikipedia, who presented on "Intellectual Property Processing After the End of Semiconductor Scaling", and his slides are available on his personal web page at meaningprocessing.com. He illustrates some interesting changes in system design after the end of Semiconductor scaling. The session was brought to end by Wendy Hall, who illustrated the holistic nature of ICT futures arguing for a 'Web Science' approach borrowing from many separate disciplines to build an understanding of the technical and social networks that are being built today.

tags: topic:[europe] topic:[future] topic:[ict2008] topic:[technology] topic:[eu]

ICT 2008, Lyon

2008-11-25T12:00:00.000Z

I got into the conference in time to hear the words of welcome from the Mayor of Lyon, and the opening panel discussion. The panel was chaired by Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, and its participants were Luc Chatel, Secrétaire d'Etat chargé de l'Industrie et de la Consommation, France, Esko Aho, Executive Vice President, Nokia Corporation, and Former President of the Finnish Innovation Fund (SITRA), former Prime Minister of Finland and one of the key commentators on FP6, he chaired the group that produced "Information Society Research and Innovation: Delivering results with sustained impact", which was published in September. Also on the panel were Ben Verwaayen, CEO, Alcatel-Lucent, previously of BT, Harold Goddijn, CEO, TomTom and Michel Cosnard, CEO and Chairman, INRIA, representing a research view. The conference has a video link on its site for this session. The panel was called "Setting the ICT Agenda for the Next Decade" , has its own page. The panelists said little of controversy, with Verwaayen arguing that trust and security were keys with Aho arguing for a global dimension, starting from a green perspective to invest in productive knowledge. He also interestingly argued that US leadership was based on entrepreneurialism and commercial innovation. I was surprised, I am not yet convinced that european basic science research is yet competitive with the US. For instance, while researching NESSI's contribution to the EU's Software Industrial policy, I was pointed at China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University's study of Academic Ranking of World Universities. I, and others, have considered the methodology and anomalies, but it illustrates a world domination of scientific excellence in the universities by the USA. However Goddijn, who was there to tell the startup story, stated that his biggest problems in building Tom Tom were not technological, but regulatory compliance, specifically, VAT and patent registration. These comments got a round of applause, and Verwaayen weighed in specifically asking when it might become possible to register patents in the EU in one language. There were further discussions on the public policy dimensions of how innovation enters the economy, discussing public/private partnerships, educational/innovation clusters with much agreement about the short term changes in ICT.

In between the opening sessions and the panel discussion, some video's from Futuris were shown. This focused on the use of ICT in health care delivery. I have argued previously that the UK's investment in i-health care has been too focused on record keepting and NHS cost control, so it was good to see a couple of case studies showing the innovative use technology in improving the ill and injured's lives. I can't find the specific video on the Futuris site, but Futuris is an EU sponsored TV show broadcast on the Euronews channel. Leave me a comment if you find it.

tags: topic:[europe] topic:[future] topic:[ict2008] topic:[technology] topic:[eu]

Vienne

2008-11-25T00:00:00.000Z

I am in staying in Vienne to attend the EU's ICT 2008 conference, to be held in Lyon which is a biennial conference of Europe's top IT researchers in commerce and academia, convened by the Commission of the European Union.

tags: topic:[travel]

Mobile Viewing

2008-11-20T07:22:47.000Z

I have just attempted to read a recent Guardian article, the Coolest Quartier in Paris. I was pointed there by my ipod touch's feed reader, Daisy Feed, and decided that the page is not well read even on the 'touch's screen, so checked it out on a laptop browser. I have been surveyed by the site owner and they asked some questions on the mobile internet, which since they didn't ask me all the questions I wanted to answer, I'll comment here.

I have struggled to embrace the internet on the phone. The screen has always been a problem and as I get used to the 'touch, which is so much better I am considering my static web site and how I present pages on the net. Much content is arranged optimally for reading on a computer hosted browser, and this is true for much of the Guardian's site as well as my own.

An example of changes I am considering include a long standing page which hosts my delicious tag cloud and a revised version optimised for the ipod touch. You can view the differences, just, by hovering or click though to view. The tag cloud is no longer just a vanity, its a quick way through to my bookmarks.

I shall be reviewing web site name structure and looking at if I can use CSS/Javascript to represent the same pages differently depending on the device. So probably best not bookmark the ipod links page, I am not sure how long it'll be there.

The mobile internet'd be a lot more useful if wireless was more ubiquitous, but I have plans to fix this. I'll use my phone, to connect the 'touch to the internet.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[guardianunlimited] topic:[internet] topic:[mobile]

Re: Mobile Viewing

2008-11-20T09:52:08.000Z

You should try google reader. It seems to work pretty well on the ipod touch.

Re: Mobile Viewing

2008-11-20T10:36:35.000Z

I have and its quite good, however my OPML list is very long and not well qualified. The article above is meant to be about mobile optimisation, and while google have done well with the look and feel of reader on the ipod touch, it remains unusable on my phone and my usage up till now makes it less than satisfactory. I am sure I can streamline and re-organise my feed list to make it more usable on the ipod touch. I suppose the problem is that the feed list is longer than my real interests, so its very cluttered with stuff I don't actually want to know about.

The EU's Call 4 for research projects funded by FP7

2008-11-19T23:00:00.000Z

19th November - The Commission of the European Union have advertised FP7 Call 4 [Press Release]. This is the opportunity to undertake collaborative research into ICT with financial contrinbutions from the Commission. The press release talks of seven challanges, "Pervasive and trustworthy network and service infrastructures", "Cognitive systems, interaction, robotics", "Components, systems, engineering", the comma's are theirs, I want to check up on this, "Towards sustainable and personalised healthcare", "ICT for mobility, environmental stability and energy efficiency" and "ICT for independent living , inclusion and governance". The call also looks to promote research in three new areas of Future and Emerging Technologies, one of which is "Concurrent tera-device computing", you'd think we might be interested in that.

An interesting set of priorities, the Call for Proposal is on Cordis, the EU's Community Research & Development Information site.

The SuperNAP

2008-11-14T01:00:00.000Z

I was invited to visit Switch Communication's Supernap facility. This must be the best datacentere in the world. It is purpose built, and designed to host new age high density computing. They set out to build a 35Kw/Rack data centre and every decision they took was to enable this goal. There is no compromise. For instance they have invented their air conditioning plant, since, so they claim, the industry leader wasn't interested in innovating for them, they pump cold air into the top, of the room, and suck the rising hot air out, leveraging the laws of physics. They have three power distribution systems, a fixed floor which supports the PDU system. If you require high density computing, these people are the people to go to.

The have a video on their home site that explains some more, and this video on Youtube, which explains even more.

I found this by querying youtube using the tag supernap.

They talk exclusively about cooling, power, and availability, and they summarise the offering this page. We i.e. Sun are quite good at fitting out data centres, but have rented space in their centre? If you can put up with US jurisdiction, its fantastic. It begs the question why anyone that's not a specialist would build another. Look at the videos.

This was posted in Jan 2008 and backdated to the time of occurrence.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[datacenter] topic:[datacentre] topic:[supernap] topic:[video]

What will the Cloud do?

2008-11-07T00:30:00.000Z

I was pointed at the Eucalyptus project, an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters, by a colleague and decided I needed to check out Amazon first. Several colleagues have given me this advice but have the University really written an open source grid platform conforming to Amazon's EC2 APIs.

If so its a fascinating example of the speed of commoditisation. It raises the question of where's the value in building clouds? If you can't innovate above the system components where can you innovate? Its obviously pointless to copy what Google did 10 years ago and if the assembly is available in Open Source you should probably use it. The space left by Amazon for a competitive threat is that they major on Infrastructure as a Service, although of ocurse given the operating systems available you can quickly turn it into a platform. I have just checked Amazon's EC2 Page, and they now offer a database query interface to their storage solution. The space left is to offer higher levels of abstraction, specifically by offering Java, Python or Ruby space to customers, and this is what Sun's Project Caroline does. Sun also innovates at the system, silicon and software layers. IT Systems are not really commodities and sedimentation means they will continue to change, the industry still needs innovators. IT isn't done yet.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[saas] topic:[opensource]

Billing for Clouds

2008-11-07T00:00:00.000Z

When considering the some of the issues related to building private clouds, the "Usage to Billing" problem was raised and I was reminded of Emlyn Pagden's Blue Print the Utility Model - Part II. I had been consulting with a mid sized European Investment Bank, and discussed the architectural problem with them, and Emlyn. Its a while since I have read Emlyn's paper, but he took the architectural decomposition

Measurement, what are people using
Aggregation/Mediation - accross the whole estate
Allocation - how many charges have they incurred
Invoicing - give us our money

and built a reference implementation using Solaris Resource Manager and accounting functionality and some third party products. At the time, he was working for a team that wanted to sell third party software, he had no engineering resources and thus a propensity to use 3rd Party software before building significant scripted functionality. With different resources and motivations, the reference implementation might look quite different, but the paper which was based in a real prototype exposes a working solution.I suspect that not all the companies he mention either still exist, or remain in the "Systems Management" business. However the decomposition should allow easy replacement and the advances in SOA may make this easier to do.

One of the key problems that inhibit adoption of these solutions is that end-user IT departments are cost centres and financially aim to spend or underspend their budgets. Their outgoing charging tariffs are based on cost recovery and they don't care how busy what they supply is; they have to charge for what they supply. If they don't do this they make a loss, and the CIO gets fired.

Neither he, nor I experimented with testing this on a grid, and it might involve having a global /etc/projects name space across the whole cloud, but with Virtual Box testing these things becomes easier. Sadly I have picked up enough projects from this trip already, but now I need to build a grid on a laptop.

We both agreed that the invoicing function was best left to the ERP system. Private cloud builders may not need to produce an invoice since they may not be using real money, they will have to make some entries into the Financials systems either cost relief transfers or something. Also new start ups of public clouds may wish to look at Open Bravo, an open source ERP package.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[billing] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[measurement] topic:[openbravo] topic:[Sun Blueprint]topic:[utility computing]

Talking about Cloud Computing

2008-11-06T23:30:00.000Z

The current technical state of systems, storage and networking and specifically the cost of broad band networking has created a tipping point. Over the last 10 years, organisations and people have been learning to build new distributed computing server complexes. It may be too late to copy the leaders, but certain design criteria and the regulatory constraints may mean that there is a slower commercial adoption cylce. The privacy, availability and response time requirements are for businesses are all different. In my mind, its commercial adoption that turns grids into clouds.

"One class of grid is where we locate one application, which has many identical parts on a distributed computing platform and we call this HPC; where we locate many copies of one application be it apache, glassfish or MySQL on a distributed computing platform we call it web 2.0 and when we locate many applications on a distributed computing platform we call it Cloud Computing"

Dave Levy

Its commerce that has the need for the Cloud, because they have usually have a large portfolio of applications, some of which behave like HPC and some of which behave like Web 2.0 and its the economics of utility that drives this. Sun's ERP solutions have leveraged our product portfolio and Moore's law to become a tiny fraction of Sun's IT estate, with the community infrastructure and the design support solutions being implemented on web 2.0 and HPC grids, now dominating Sun's internal network in terms of cycles, storage and cost.

Admittedly, there are other aspects of what makes a cloud different from the payroll bureau of thirty years ago.

Data Centres are expensive and as we are discovering in the last few years, they are best built for purpose. Building and running Data Centres also benefits from 'specialisation'. In "The Big Switch", Nicholas Carr argues that the efficiencies of the plant apply to IT. (I'm really going to have to read it). Historically, applications developers have tightly coupled their code with an operating system image, specifying the version, library installs, package cluster and patch state. This is beginning to end. Developers want to and do develop to new contracts, be it Java, Python or another run time. Also with virtualisation technology such as Virtual Box and VMware, deployers can build their utility plant and take an application appliance with an integrated OS and applications run time, this allows developers to choose whether to use modern dynamic runtimes or to tightly integrate their code with the environment.

A second driver is the amount of data coming on-line. This cornucopia of data is enabling/creating new applications, of which internet search is an obvious one. Google scans the web, but many companies and increasing social networks are scanning their storage to discover new valuable pieces of information. Internet scale also means the "clever people work elsewhere" rule of life is generating new questions. The growing number of devices attached to the internet is also discovering and delivering new digital facts. The evolution of the internet of things will make the growth in data explosive so its a good time to be introducing a new disruptive storage capability and economics. The need to analyse this massive new data source is what's driving the emergence of Hadoop and Map/Reduce. Only parallel computing is capable of getting information out of the data in any reasonable time. A fascinating proof point is documented on the NYT Blog, where Derek Gottfrid shows how he used Amazon's cloud offerings to convert the NYT's 4TB archive into .pdf using Hadoop. I'd hate to think how long it might have taken using traditional techniques.

One tendency I have observed from my work over the last year is that today building grids is now longer hard, and most dramatically Amazon and Google are turning their grids to applications hosting. A number of public sector research institutions have also been building publicly available grids for a wile, although they tend to share amongst themselves. In the public sector world at least, they have begun to address the question of grid interoperability, and everyone is looking at how to 'slice' resource chunks out of the grid for users, on demand of course.

In the commercial world the competitive positioning of various players has led to them competing with different services and different levels of abstraction. The offerings of Google's "google apps engine" vs "Amazon's EC2" are quite different. Sun believes that cloud computing offerings need to organise above the OS level now and that developers don't want to worry about the operating system, merely their run time execution environment. This is only possible because modern development and runtime environments can protect developers from both the cpu architecture and now the operating system implementation. I know that as I search for a new solution for the services I run on my Qube, I'm happy to configure the applications and their backups, but I don't want to worry about disk reliability and other system services.

Jim Baty made the comment that we're entering a Web 3.0 world which is chmod 777 for everyone. :)

So the economics are compelling, the state of technology is right, developers are ready to leave these decisions behind and the first movers are moving.

Can and will Sun play a role in this next stage of the maturing of IT?

This article is I hope the first of two, written from notes made during a presentation by Jim Baty, Chief Architect, Sun Global Sales and Services, Scott Matton, one of the senior architects in GSS and Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Network.com. The article is back dated to about the time of occurrence.

Tuesday on the night of Obama's election

2008-11-05T20:13:09.000Z

Last night was very quiet, I went to Kapps in Mountain View. I had left the office where a number of people were, oddly, watching the BBC web site report via a wall screen display. I had also enabled the facebook and multi-protocol chat applications on the ipod and discussed the elections with my son at home in the UK. This was pretty good as I had to stop using my laptop. The media seem to declare states as won very early, with the BBC and Guardian being earlier and more certian than the US sites. Also the polls also shut early in my british view, the west coast polling stations shut at 8:00 p.m.

McCain conceded at 20:15, I wasn't expecting it so early; in British elections, the polls don't close 'till 22:00 and the counts don't start untill the counting stations are open, which is usually at 23:00. The first results come through at just after midnight and the results aren't ususally clear 'till the early hours. I rember going to bed at 4:00 am on 1st May 1997, knowing it was good, and that Mellor and Portillo were looking for work, but the final results weren't known 'till later in the morning.

The CNN site was awesome and I used it to follow the results during the earlly evening, and I have followed the elections via realpolitics.com, the BBC page had a great feature to show the states in proportion to their electoral college votes. It looks something like this, which is much more accurate and powerfully descriptive than a geographic map.

In 1997, I had a page torn from the Guardian and ticked off results on the paper's 'Must Win' list. A pencil and paper, but nomadic solution, to go with the UK's pencil and paper voting system.

tags: topic:[politics] topic:[us2008] topic:[elections] "topic:[nomadic computing]" topic:[travel]

Re: Tuesday on the night of Obama's election

2008-11-05T20:30:22.000Z

I still struggle with the reversal of colours for the political parties between the UK and US. In the UK, the left, what remains, uses Red and the right use Blue.

News on the move

2008-11-04T03:00:00.000Z

"Free RSS" seems to have some problems, however, I chose to load itunes on a desktop at home so will have to wait 'till I get back there to remove it, or replace it. However, Google pointed me at a thread called "the best free rss application?" at http://www.ipodtouchfans.com. Meanwhile, I am still reading my feeds at Google Reader, both on the 'touch and on my laptop.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[silly] topic:[apps] topic:[rss] topic:[feedreader]

Building new age clouds

2008-11-03T20:00:00.000Z

Sohrab Modi introduced three presentations from the Sun Labs on Hadoop & Hbase, and Project Celeste. He also pointed us at http://opensolaris.org/os/project/livehadoop/. I have downloaded this and shall let you know how it goes.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[future] topic:[cloudcomputing] topic:[hadoop] topic:[filesystem] topic:[grid]

Back in the USA, part II

2008-11-02T22:00:00.000Z

I shall be in the USA for the election, which could be fun, but certainly interesting.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[politics]

Back in the USA

2008-11-02T21:05:43.000Z

Back to California for training and meetings. Sadly my Virgin ticket is so cheap that I would have to pay (money) to upgrade before I can use my miles to upgrade my seat. I should know by now, that loyalty schemes are designed to maximise the vendor's interest, but it now seems as I am in a position that I am now a member of another airline scheme where I can't spend the miles.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[culture] topic:[virginatlantic]

Getting started with my iTouch

2008-11-01T23:00:00.000Z

I have connected to my home network and checked that the Maps & Weather applications work.

I downloaded Free RSS and connected to the Guardian's News Feed. Also I have tried to configure the mail client to read my POP 3 mail, but it seems unhappy. It comes with some templates for the usual culprits, so this may take some work.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[apps]

Re: Getting started with my iTouch

2008-11-04T18:58:41.000Z

I returned the following day Free RSS seems somewhat unhappy, also the 'touch came with no protective case. Its probably best to buy one with the ipod, they're not expensive enough to get free P&P from Amazon where as the 'touch is. There are also some very cheap ones at Amazon, whereas I bought one from Dixons.

my first impressions with the ipodtouch

2008-10-31T07:00:00.000Z

I managed to spend a couple of hours on my new ipod touch today. I have loaded my music and selected a few applications. Scott Wilson showed me iPint on his iphone, so I had to go and get that.

Check it out, you can also watch this video which I found on You Tube. i.e. this neither me nor Scott, and it is fully accredited at its publication page on you tube.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[ipodtouch] topic:[silly] topic:[ipint] topic:[video]

Using Virtual Box's shared folders

2008-10-29T11:10:25.000Z

I have taken advantage of Virtual Box's shared folder feature. I used the GUI to define one of the windows host folders as readable and then issue a mount command

mkdir /public
mount -t vboxsf ${vbox_folder_name} /public

proving this works, I then insert a line into /etc/fstab,

import /public vboxsf

issue the mount -a command. There are no errors reported and df shows the file system as mounted. I have rebooted the VM and the filesystem mounts fine.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[networking] topic:[sharedfolders]

Virtual Box 2.0.4

2008-10-29T11:01:10.000Z

I have taken the opportunity to upgrade to Virtual Box 2.0.4. The upgrade for Ubuntu 8 goes fine, although EZ-Web is barfing on the upgrade; I have forgotten some password I need. (Hmm, I wonder if I should try the command line, or closing the postgres service first.)

I have amended my proxy set up script. I had not read the documentation carefully enough and tried to set up the proxied ports while the VM was running. This is bad. The new script now displays the parameters set,


case $2 in
make)   echo $0 make proxy
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/Protocol" TCP
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/GuestPort" ${port}
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/HostPort" ${port}
         ;;
show|list|display) echo $0 list parameters for $key
        for property in Protocol GuestPort HostPort
        do
           ./VBoxManage.exe getextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/${property}"
        done
        ;;
rm|remove) echo $0 remove proxy
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/Protocol"
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/GuestPort"
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/${key}/HostPort"
        ;;
esac

I set the key variable earlier in the program. As you can see I have used two idioms now, i.e. iteration and sequence and I am sure a horrendous function could make the code much more economic. However it would have a non real name like act or do which is a clue to a design error. I wonder what it would look like in Python. Mind you, another reason this code is so repetitive is that the shell interpreter doesn't do associative arrays. Boo!

The program now takes two arguments one to define the service and one to define the action. This is why the example above uses $2 as the case argument. The previous version of the code was published earlier this month here on this blog.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[networking] topic:[proxy]

Sun M9000, the fastest SAP platform

2008-10-28T08:40:37.000Z

Back in Brussels for a NESSI meeting, the SAP delegate is new and points me to Sun's M9000 SAP Benchmark results which put's Sun at No. 1 again, although for how long who knows. There's no dount that the SPARC 64 CPU is great and that the M-Series systems are mighty systems. On a slightly more measured, and affordable note, Joerg Moellenkamp wrote about SAP Benchmarks on the X4600 yesterday.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[sap] topic:[sunw] topic:[sparc] topic:[sparc64]

Smoking in public

2008-10-23T22:15:00.000Z

It seems that the Dutch have adopted the european/west coast habit of banning cigarettes in public spaces, which now includes bars, restaurants, offices and shops. Of course there's a complication in the Netherlands. If your cigarettes contains cannabis you must smoke it indoors, otherwise, if they only contain tobacco you have to go outside.

Holland

2008-10-21T09:30:00.000Z

Back to Amsterdam again for meetings

Using a Virtual Box service

2008-10-15T22:08:36.000Z

I want to run a web service inside a Virtual Box container and consume it from initially the host OS, but later from other systems. This article describes how I accessed an apache served page from and Ubuntu 8 VM.

Using Virtual Box 2.0.2, I read the manual version 2.0.2 chapter 6.4 which talks about allowing the host to utilise port services on a guest. I have a windows host, and a Ubuntu Linux guest.

Despite the problems I have with the IT provided build, fortunately I have cygwin on the machine and so have an easy to use scripting language. Most importantly I have a rigourius 'cd' command with directory completion, my tcl and python shells are a lot fussier about the windows xp 16/32 bit name translation. So in the folder containing the program VBoxManage.exe, I create a script containing the following code,

# need to force the shell, wonder how you do that

USAGE="$0 [make | [rm|remove] | help ]"

case $1 in
make)   echo $0 make proxy
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/Protocol" TCP
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/GuestPort" 80
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/HostPort" 80
         ;;
rm|remove) echo $0 remove proxy
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/Protocol"
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/GuestPort"
        ./VBoxManage.exe setextradata "Ubuntu 8" \
                "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcnet/0/LUN#0/Config/apache2/HostPort"
        ;;
help)   echo $USAGE ;;
esac

exit

I run the script with the argument 'make'. The token "Ubuntu 8" agrees with the VM name, and the token apache2 is afaik, anything I want so long as it agrees. Having run the script, I can boot Firefox in the host OS instance and see the guests default web page, using the URL http://127.0.0.1. Oddly, http://localhost is resolved as something else, but I expect its the apache configuration file that does this.

What next, snipsnap?

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[networking] topic:[guest] topic:[proxy]

Re: Using a Virtual Box service

2008-10-16T04:39:50.000Z

I edited the original article to try and make its purpose clearer and narrative stronger. I also wonder if the use of cygwin another proof point that I should move on from windows as my laptop OS.

Madrid

2008-10-15T15:16:24.000Z

The rain in Spain, is somewhere else today. I am in what is probably the Uxbridge of Madrid, having just visited Sun's Madrid offices. Unfortunately dinner was huge.

Sound and shares with Virtual Box

2008-10-14T10:15:17.000Z

I have just upgraded from Virtual Box 1.64 to 2.0.2 and decided the time has come to turn the sound on and install shared folders.

These are both simple configuration changes since the manual is simple, well written and correct. [ User Manual 2.0.2 ]. Just to remind you, I have a windows host and in this case an Ubuntu 8.0 Linux guest.

In the settings panel for the VM, there is a sound tab, and there is a check box, which is defaulted to off. For a windows host, there is a choice of sound drivers. Since one of these is a null driver, its best to choose the other which is "Windows Direct" sound.

There is a another tab for shared folders, with a file system browser. The purpose is to designate a host file system to act as the target for a guest mount and so act as one route to allow data to exit the VM.

This is what I did,

Create a folder to act as the shared folder.
Use the Virtual Box control panel to specify the shared folder and its device name. I used a folder in 'My Documents' folder and called it hostfs, for host file system.
Boot the VM
Make a mount point, if you want, otherwise use one already there.
Issue a mount -t vboxsf share mount_point. The share is the device name declared in the control panel, in my example 'hostfs'. N.B. The fs type is suffixed with 'sf', presumably for shared folder and not fs for file system like many other file system types.

I then unmounted the shared folder, edited /etc/fstab and issued a mount -a command to test that my syntax works.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[sound] topic:[sharedfolder] topic:[share]

More protocols for pidgin

2008-10-10T15:46:06.000Z

Having upgraded pidgin, now its time to add Facebook and Skype buddies. These require two add-ons, written by the same person. I installed Skype earlier in the week, so

facebook 4 pidgin at code.google.com
Skype 4 pidgin at code.google.com

Skype seems to be working well, and the install process is well documented by Eion, now I just need to test the facebook connection. Who do I only know as a facebook friend?

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[im] topic:[messaging] topic:[pidgin] topic:[software] topic:[facebook] topic:[skype]

Re: More protocols for pidgin

2008-10-10T17:40:56.000Z

Facebook seems to work fine.

Google Talk and Pidgin

2008-10-10T10:51:07.000Z

The last but one fix is to reconfigure my google talk account as a service on pidgin. I was having problems with this on my desktop. I had joined in a thread at Google's self help forum to which I had no reply and is now archived. Google have also published instructions, which I discussed the other week. So here's the key for me, my domain is now "googlemail.com". I don't know if I changed my relationship with google or if they changed their server configurations, the xmpp parameters I use are,

Basic Tab
protocol : xmpp
domain : googlemail.com
resource : Home
Advanced Tab
Require SSL/TLS, Force old port (5222), Allow plain text .... : All Unchecked
Connect Port: 5222
Connect Server: talk.google.com
File Transfer Proxies : proxy.jabber.org

although I have not yet tried a file transfer. So as far as I can tell the Google documentation is wrong about how you choose between gmail.com and googlemail.com.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[im] topic:[messaging] topic:[pidgin] topic:[software] topic:[xmpp]

Re: Google Talk and Pidgin

2008-10-10T14:53:26.000Z

Mine is the same excepting:
Domain: gmail.com
and 'USE GSSAPI for authentication' is checked under advanced.

Re: Google Talk and Pidgin

2008-10-10T15:30:39.000Z

Thank you, the key point is that I should be a gmail user according to the google "howto" page. I don't see the GSSAPI parameter.

Laptop Diaries, about video drivers

2008-10-10T10:28:36.000Z

Recently I have written about problems I have had with pidgin xmpp chat rooms, however, I have also come across a problem where I can't switch between the Firefox 3 control panel and rendered page, so I looked to see if anyone else had a similar problem. I found this article, called Can't Click Inside Firefox 3 Window Without Losing Focus 1st at http://forums.mozillazine.org/, where yesterday, someone posted that new nvidia drivers had helped him solve the problem. So a quick visit to Toshiba UK's support portal and I discover that the most recent driver is over 6 months old, so I grab that an install it. I suppose its one of the problems in taking someone else's build. I now obviously need to wait and see if the problem re-occurs but so far so good.

Given I have new display driver, I have decided to re-install Pidgin 2.5.1 and its associated GTK library. This also seems to be working OK and I have not yet had a problem with the XMPP rooms. I also documented the problems here..., on my Bliki.

I am running a Toshiba Tecra M5 with Windows XP as the OS. I have Sun xVM Virtual Box to let me run Open Solaris and Ubuntu Linux. I take the windows build from our IT department.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[im] topic:[messaging] topic:[pidgin] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[software] topic:[windows] topic:[xmpp] topic:[toshiba] topic:[laptop] "topic:[video driver]"

Beyond con-calls

2008-10-07T09:58:25.000Z

I have been looking at ways of making virtual meetings easier, more effective and fun. As part of that I have looked again at secondlife, and one of my new correspondents pointed me at "The future is virtually here". This, despite being published last August, and while containing two fun stories about EVE Online, tries too hard in my mind to use language which proves the author's Yoof credentials. Also quoting IBM and World of Warcraft as the exemplar's of using virtual worlds is to my mind lazy. Many companies use secondlife as a virtual store front, although I admit that IBM's virtual data centre, (see also my blog report on the IBM virtual data center) is a quite a cute toy, but a number of people are on the trail of WoW, and its monthly subscription is high for school students.

The killer app. for virtual worlds seems to be training. Sun has just launched its "Solaris Campus" on secondlife, but its the truly compelling case for virtual training is where the where real life exercises are either very expensive or very dangerous, such as the US Marines' use of Doom, and its growing use in urban disaster relief planning. Its certainly dangerous training soldiers realistically. I have argued before that game fan forums helped develop remote collaboration techniques and the games world is now offering a lot to the infrastructure providers. Besides Sun 's very own Project Wonderland, it would be worth checking up on Torque, a science toolkit, & maybe Gaia Online, one of the virtual worlds. (Now in my del.icio.us feed, tagged virtualworlds). Another interesting arrival is Runescape, a british FRPG written in Java, with a free to play subscription option. The science engines are important as they potentially enable the extension of virtual worlds beyond social collaboration into prototyping problems for real world designers.

One interesting aspect about the juvenilsation of games is that actually it also seems to be true the 16-20's aren't there; they're busy 'Getting a First Life', however it could be an indicator that Dave's theory of Youthful Conservativism is true. Today's 16-20 year olds adopted their technologies before the virtual worlds came out, and they see no reason to use the virtual worlds because its too new, and offers them little beyond messaging. Another inhibitor for this age group is that these worlds don't have phone hosted clients yet. (Although iphone has a secondlife client.)

I know there is a lot of knocking copy about Second Life in particular, but con-calls often don't work any more, and training is a different application to e-commerce. Perhaps its only the virtual shopkeepers who are unhappy.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualworlds] topic:[sunw] "topic:[solaris campus]" topic:[mmorpg] topic:[collaboration]

About CSS, two column page

2008-09-26T17:25:35.000Z

I noticed that my home page web site suffered from the same problem that the public blog used to, it didn't have a width constraint and as the browser grew to full screen size the content pane gets wider and wider making paragraphs harder to read. Like this, if you look hard.

In the article Fixing my blog theme..., on this blog I described how I implemented automatic margins using a fixed width and <CENTER> tag. davelevy.info does not use tables for formating its page and for some reason, the technique didn't work, although this may have been due to a fault in my code. Anyway, I now have a better answer.

Bluerobot, suggests using

margin: auto;

as the technique for centering the document object. From my previous work, I know I want to specify a fixed width and reckon that 1000px is a good fixed width for the document. I havn't explored if amending the <BODY> rule has the effect I want, since while I did apply the rules to the BODY tag, I need a whole page encapsulating DIVision for other reasons and my current solution is to apply the CSS sub-rules to that DIVISION's rule. The old page had three divisions, a banner/header, main content and the menu. Apart from the exterior automatic margins the second part of the problem is to ensure that the positional rules for the three divisions work correctly, most importantly that the positional rules inherit the page constraints we are defining.

This tutorial at http://www.barelyfitz.com, explains how to use relative and absolute position attributes to do what's required. I tested it with the following code,

.outer {
    position: relative;
    width: 500px;
    margin: auto;
}
.inner {
    position: absolute;
     top: 10px;
    right: 20px;
    width: 250px;
}

The BODY section contains,

<DIV STYLE="background-color: gray" CLASS="outer">
<P>Outer</P>
<BR><BR>
<DIV CLASS="inner" STYLE="background-color: #0080C0">
<P>Inner</P>
</DIV>
</DIV>

and this looks like this,

the key thing I had to learn was that the encapsulating division needs to be defined as relative, and the interior object is then defined as absolute and the locational parameters in the .inner i.e. top & right are then absolute within the .outer division. Does this make sense? I have underlined the position attribute values above. The other key lesson is to learn that CLASS and ID attributes are different. On my home site, I use IDs throughout; I was advised to use them originally.

So I need a new DIVision, this is called #Page and associated with the division via the ID attribute

#Page {
    margin: 0px auto;
    width: 1000px;
    position: relative; }

I have moved the location breadcrumb into the Header/Banner division, but otherwise left the #Header division alone, it inherits the width from #Page; it is encapsulated bt tghe #Page DIVision. The #Content DIVision I have left alone, and is placed in the default location, which is within #Page.

The #Menu division rule has had the following lines added

position: absolute;
top: 75px;
right: 20px;

The page structure is as follows

which is what's wanted, a nice list of html content, with all the look and feel held elsewhere, just paragraphs, links, and division statements. Actually the banner is a table still, but now I have a fixed width, I can work on making an image file. The outstanding job is to work out how to create and name a rule for the paragraph containing the breadcrumb trail.

and this is what the index/home page looks like. You can see the two whaite space margins either side of the page. I have briefly tested it with Opewra, Firefox and Explorer.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[roller] topic:[theme] topic:[html] topic:[css] topic:[position] topic:[positioning]

More about Pidgin and XMPP

2008-09-23T16:50:37.000Z

I've spent the day struggling with Pidgin, XMPP and Google Talk. I am still using Pidgin V2.0.1 on Windows XP, with GTK+ 2.10.11. Today I tested Pidgin 2.5.1 and GTK+ 2.10.11 and discovered that I couldn't get it to work with Google Talk. I also discovered that the reliability of XMPP service was dreadful, although I discovered later that this may have been a server issue. I'll have to try again later in the week.

I have documented the state of my findings at Pidgin and Google Talk, at my bliki.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[IM] topic:[messaging] topic:[windows] topic:[xmpp] topic:[pidgin] "topic:[google talk]"

Re: More about Pidgin and XMPP

2008-09-25T05:09:21.000Z

Spent the whole day on an out-dated version of pidgin? I have been running 2.5.1 since its' release. Running it to talk on Google, Yahoo, ICQ, and Skype - There are occasionaly problems with reliability (takes a tail spin about once a week), but otherwise it does its' job.

Re: More about Pidgin and XMPP

2008-09-25T08:45:16.000Z

Ben,

What platform do you use i.e. Mac or PC?

I use the old version because of problems I (and others) have with xmpp chat rooms using more recent versions of pidgin on windows.

What are your Google Talk parameters? Can you document them here please? I can't seem to login to google chat using 2.5.1.

Braindead Browsing

2008-09-21T12:24:36.000Z

I wonder what it would take to embed browser awareness in this blog theme. I have been experimenting with creating pages for my phone's browser without much success but it might be a good idea to try and simplify the theme for braindead browsers.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[web] topic:[mobile] topic:[wireless]

Easy Peasy, ezweb and ubuntu

2008-09-18T17:03:49.000Z

I have EZweb, see also ezweb, fast new dynamic mashups, running inside an Ubuntu 8 VM on my windows Laptop.

The installation instructions were almost perfect, now I need to see how permit the VM to serve external systems. Also I am using Django not Apache, so I need to understand

how to invoke a start/stop script for it
or how to allow it to run in an apache server
or how to permit apache to act as a proxy for Django.

The later will hopefully be very similar to making snipsnap work behind apache, which I have done on the Qube.

Now to build an Application?

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[innovation] topic:[mashup] topic:[spain] topic:[telefonica] topic:[ezweb]

Re: Easy Peasy, ezweb and ubuntu

2008-09-19T09:32:05.000Z

Hello David,

I'm an EzWeb developer from the Juan José unit at Telefonica. Don't hesitate to contact me if you need additional info on any respect.

We normally have a reasonably updated wiki page. However, recently we have moved from django 0.97 to 1.0 so if you plan to install form de source code (using the SVN server), some problem can take place.

I have created a new wiki FAQ page, anwsering some of your questions and interests. You can find it at http://trac.morfeo-project.org/trac/ezwebplatform/wiki/FAQ

Re: Easy Peasy, ezweb and ubuntu

2008-09-25T16:50:12.000Z

Miguel

Can you mail me please? I need a bit more help in doing what I want.

Laptop Diaries, openoffice.org

2008-09-18T12:34:30.000Z

Before I start to install Open Bravo, I notice/knew that there's no personal productivity tools on OpenSolaris, I need openoffice. Its easy enough, a quick google points me at Chris Gerard's article on installing Open Office, on Open Solaris. As he recommends,

pfexec pkg install openoffice

does the trick, off it goes to opensolaris.org and downloads the package and installs it.

and it looks like this.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[opensource] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[howto] topic:[openoffice]

Re: Laptop Diaries, openoffice.org

2008-09-18T16:35:44.000Z

Seemingly a minor oversight but actually a major trademark-relate error: It's OpenOffice.org, not Open Office. The later is a completely different product. :-)

Re: Laptop Diaries, openoffice.org

2008-09-18T17:07:49.000Z

Is that better? I have changed the original post.

ezweb, fast new dynamic mashups

2008-09-16T20:00:00.000Z

The real reason for meeting with the Telefonica reresentative was to gain some familairity with the NESSI project they lead, called EZWeb. This is hosted on the Morfeo Project site, and these projects have significant support from the Spanish Government. EZ Web has an english language installation & documentation page and for Ubuntu there is an apt script, documented on the web. I am just booting my Virtual Box Ubuntu VM to see if it works.

It requires Postgres or MySQL, Python and Django, documented on itsother operating systems page, I'll may check this out and see how hard it is to install on my Open Solaris VM, or I may bring up another Nevada VM.

Juan Jose demonstrated the ease of use of the mashup tool, and it'd be cool to have a go. This may even by the tipping point/use case that gets me to move off the Qube onto something better.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[innovation] topic:[mashup] topic:[spain] topic:[telefonica] topic:[ezweb] topic:[NESSI] topic:[saas]

Re: ezweb, fast new dynamic mashups

2008-09-19T09:51:43.000Z

I have updated the from-source-code installation tutorial due to our recent migration to django 1.0.

Please check this link if you plan to install from the source code: http://forge.morfeo-project.org/wiki/index.php/Installation_on_others_systems

Cool Cool Iris, an image optimised browser

2008-09-16T19:20:00.000Z

I had a swift meeting with Juan Jose of Telefonica which while we had some important stuff to share, he just had to show me Cool Iris.

This is a browser optimised for image and video content. The screen shot above is a view of my flickr photostream. The one below, shows a selection which has been enlarged and has some 'go to' buttons, which takes you to the web page holding the picture, which is more useful if you use their pre-canned queries; we all know what a flickr page looks like, but if using it to browse a news stream, it can act as a very rapid filter.

It has a search engine interface which allows you to fire queries at the usual suspects, the picture below shows the response to a query on flickr for the tags 'beach sunset'

You can also see the screen shot [full size], and hovering over the link shows it via snap preview, which is now so small its a bit poor.

Another clever feature, is that it can be installed using a Firefox browser addon, which then has a button, on the button bar, that tells you if the site you're browsing in firefox is"cool iris ready". I wonder what it would take to get Roller sorted.

For various reasons, I created a tiny.url, which they offer a preview of depending on your settings.>/P>

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[web] topic:[3d] topic:[multimedia] topic:[browser] topic:[cooliris] topic:[roller] topic:[flickr]

Laptop Diaries, Open Solaris

2008-09-16T05:00:00.000Z

So while at the Lintlithgow EBC launch last week, I saw a demo'd copy of an opensolaris VM which looked really cool, and then Jingesh Shah, published this blog article on an Open Source ERP package, called "openbravo" running on Open Solaris. This has to be done.

I have downloaded the Open Solaris .iso from http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/, and this is how I did it.

Start a VM using the .iso as the boot device.

Follow these installation instructions to define the locale and users.

Shut down the VM

Using the Virtual Box control panel, point the CD/DVD drive at the VX additions .iso, which is in the installation folder and restart the VM, then as root,

cd /media
pkgadd -d ./VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg

I was using V1.6.4 of Virtual Box and for some reason, the "Add Guest Additions" on the Virtual Box command bar didn't work. The above trick seems to work quite happily, I have full screen mode working. Now to upgrade to Virtual Box 2.0.2.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[opensource] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[howto] topic:[openbravo]

Back to Brussels

2008-09-16T02:15:00.000Z

I am back to Bruxelles for NESSI steering committee tomorrow. I had dinner at the Bar à Tapas. Not particularly Belgian, but good all the same.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[bruxelles] topic:[travel] topic:[food] topic:[tapas]

Re: Back to Brussels

2008-09-18T11:26:12.000Z

I have backdated the article to the time it occurred so that the blog will have a diary narrative, but its a bit odd in that both my twitter and plazes feeds have reported my return two days ago.

Chatting

2008-09-11T18:18:23.000Z

I was introduced to IM by my US colleagues (& my children). Many of the former use AOL to forward IM's to their phones. This has become even easier to use with the advent of the iphone. Sun has also implememented an XMPP service and I came to the IM scene with a couple of YIM contacts as well. So I adopted GAIM and went with the pidgin people when that came along, because of Solaris so I only have to worry about the protocol I use for those colleague like me with multiple service accounts.

I have recently had a real problem with pidgin in XMPP chat rooms, and when my boss decided to open a permanent chat room, these problems had to be fixed. Basically, I have reverted to Pidgin 2.0.1 for Windows. I did experiment with using pidgin inside an Ubuntu Virtual box instance and it worked fine, an interesting use case for Virual Box. I propose to raise a bug/note at pidgin's site, but you can use the [READ MORE] button below to read my more detailed notes, which cover the failure symptoms, Google Talk and more about facebook.

I am using a laptop with Windows XP as the operating system. The basic problem is that once an XMPP chat room is opened the mouse pointer disappears from the window space displayed by pidgin and multiple conversations become quite difficult. I need to flag this at the pidgin site, I wonder how I'll discover when they fix it.

I have OTR and google facebook chat plugins installed. When reverting to V 2.0.1 of pidging, the installer asks if it should regress to the previouls GTK kit. I suspect that this is where the problem is. I regressed the GTK version and find that XMPP chat rooms and pidgin are much more stable. OTR regresses fine. The facebook chat plugin does not. I run the installer, it seems to work fine, and then when trying to create a facebook account, it doesn't offer me a facebook service. I have tried to install both versions 1.25 and 1.39. I shall pass this on to the author, but I hadn't fully got this working as most of my tests left one of us using the facebook browser. I need to make this work with both pidgin and adium clients. However, at least I can use XMPP chat rooms. One feature I dislike, with many I believe, is that when a broadcast message is sent to the room, pidgin does not alert the desk top unlike a 121 message where it writes an icon into the system tray and flashes the iconified buddy list icon. (It does change the font colour and style of the chat room title in the window tab, but you can only see this if the window is on top.) If a message is signaled as sent to you, it will write an icon into the system tray and the signal is to include the handle in the message. Pidgin aslo has handle auto completion to make this easy. (You don't need the @ sign in XMPP chat either, just type a couple of characters and use the [tab] button.

AS part of the XMPP testing I opened a Google Talk account and connected with Chris Gerhard. There is a Google help page on configuring Pidgin as a client, I have struggled through this since I do not have either mail accounts, so I need to use gmail.com as my domain. I claimed a "Google talk" handle using the talkgadget. This becomes my pidgin Screen Name. I used gmail.com as the Domain as advised by the documentation and my password for the google services I do consume. The connect server is talk.google.com and we need to use port 5222 This now seems to log me in. . More coming soon. 10th Oct 2008.Excellent, All well and good. Unfortunately its a bit of a waste of time, since Google's XMPP service doesn't support chat rooms so I can't test them. On the other hand I now have a google talk account for those of you who don't use the other accounts I have. Mail me for the handle, because I can't find the user dictionary server which is another XMPP feature.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[IM] topic:[messaging] topic:[windows] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[xmpp] topic:[pidgin]

Re: Chatting

2008-09-13T09:09:48.000Z

my name is mahesh pls join me

Extending Star and Open Office

2008-09-04T18:41:27.000Z

Ian Curtain wrote to me the other day in reply to a colleague that was trying to get up to speed on Openoffice BASIC and macros and offered the following sites as useful.

There is also the Open Office Wiki page as well. Hope you find them useful.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[openoffice] topic:[macros] topic:[basic] topic:[bookmarks]

Vbox 1.6.4, guest additions for Hardy Heron

2008-09-02T09:04:50.000Z

Another download of Virtual Box and the creation of an Ubuntu Hardy Heron VM, using a Windows host. I shan't publish a picture this time. I think I had a problem as the VM wouldn't boot from the Live CD. This could have been me of course, I may have misconfigured it. So I copied the ISO image onto the hard disk and booted off that. The good news is that the guest additions are better than previous versions, or they are for the screen interface. After installing the guest additions, the screen resolution opens @ 1280x768 and full screen mode works just fine. I hadn't got round to fixing the xorg config file on my previous installs but it wasn't as easy and I did need to fiddle with xorg.conf.

What I did,

Download the Virtual Box binaries
Copy the ISO image to a disk folder
Create a new VM, Linux 2.6, dynamic file limited to 8GB, 1024 Mb of RAM, CD set to an ISO image, boot from CD before disk
Start the VM of the ISO image and install the OS into the VM
Stop the VM, unset the ISO image
Start the VM and install Guest Additions

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[virtualization] topic:[virtualbox]

wordle clouds

2008-09-01T14:56:31.000Z

I was browsing sun blogs, when I was pointed at this blog, "Startups" which has an article on wordle. This produces word maps from feed URLs. You can see a view of mine below, it was taken earlier today.

Wordle is (cc) Attribution only, so I need to say the picture above is produced by wordle.net [site | faq ]. Its a Java App so sadly, I had to screenscrape the full size picture, and so generating one per article is too much of a fag, and hard to do ; they use the feed and so see many articles. Word mapping is becoming a powerful tool, but this needs to be licensed by the blog publisher to be included as part of the blog server functionality. I think we'd want clouds/article and clouds/blog. I thought I'd check out what happens if one uses a feed, so I also did one on planetsun.org. See below. It suggests to me that wordle has a fairly short view back in history.

Of course both my blog and the sun bloggers site have hyperlinked tag clouds, which again diminished the use of wordle to us. I wonder if it teaches us anything for other applications such as our "CEC Messaging Platform".

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[tags] "topic:[tag cloud]" topic:[wordle]

More in Budapest

2008-08-28T14:00:00.000Z

I walked down the hill from the castle heights, towards the Magrit Hid. There's a number of small alleys with steps as its quite steep. The views from the heights are quite dramatic as central Budapest is quite low and the old, i.e. very old, 'buildings of power' dominate the skyline. You can see the Parliament building(?) in the background here.

They are not as good as "Simon Phipp's pictures.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[budapest]

What's next for Virtualisation?

2008-08-28T07:30:00.000Z

In discussing virtualisation, a speaker this morning suggested that the two biggest inhibitors to using virtualisation technology are security and scalability. Both of these are opportunities for Solaris. A number of security conscious customers use Solaris 10 with trusted extensions, to run a container, with a virtual box instance, hosting windows. They're delighted because it allows them to protect their network from windows vulnerabilities (It also allows them to protect their data from windows vulnerabilities; you can prohibit the container from acquiring data via any i/o device). The new scalability problem is to scale on a CPU. Sun's Niagara processors are the most threaded CPUs in common use, but Intel and AMD are also pursuing multi-threaded CPU designs. They and their customers need an operating system that scales across the new architectures. Some users/customers are now evaluating work/kwatt, and thus being busy helps you score high in these tests. Scalability = Performance, and Performance = Eco. You still draw power even when not busy.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[virtualization]

Re: What's next for Virtualisation?

2008-08-31T08:51:00.000Z

I've been doing some research regarding the security implications of v12n, as Brian and I are booked to present on this to an organisation I have a long-standing relationship with, next week.

You might be surprised to know that some of the primary risks, particularly in an LDom world, can be mitigated by the judicious use of crypto.

If you're in GMP next Tue or Thu, let's catch up.

Fixing my blog theme for Firefox 3

2008-08-27T16:10:45.000Z

I adopted Firefox 3 the other week and it became obvious that there were several bugs in my weblog theme. These are now fixed, or I hope so.

So the weblog is now the width of the banner picture, we don't get the horrible repetition effect if the browser window is made too large. The weblog is also centre justified in the panel. In order to get this effect I have placed a <DIV style="width:1024px"> around all the content in the weblog file. 1024 pixels is the width of the picture in my banner. In order to ensure the html version of the weblog is located in the centre of the browser panel, I have surrounded this DIV with a <CENTER> tags. Interesting how easy the changes were, but the testing and clumsiness of roller's interface has meant that its taken me along time to get to this point.

I have discovered some additional problems with the theme, which I have fixed in my development environments, but not here yet. The planned end goal is to remove the tables from the theme and replace them with <DIV>s and CSS rules.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[roller] topic:[currency] topic:[theme] topic:[firefox] topic:[firefox3] topic:[html]

Building big grids

2008-08-26T14:30:02.000Z

A colleague of mine, Philipe Trautman presented on winning High Performance Computing deals. He produced some fascinating figures to describe the opportunity. Both Storage and Systems are forecast to grow at double digit rates for the next few years, where as commercial IT is expected to standstill at best. Over 30% of CPUs are going to be bought by HPC solutions during this period and at the moment, 65% of the HPC market is educational and/or research institutes. He outlined Sun's product portfolio consisting of systems, storage, operating systems and interconnects, which can be supplemented by partner products and people. He made the assertion that the real pain is no longer FLOPS, but elsewhere

Power & Cooling
Space
Cluster Management
Consolidation
Application Scalability & Utilization
Data Access including Filesystem selection

and presumably interconnect architecture and selection. Some of these are problems we have been confronting in commercial data centres for a while, albeit on a smaller scale but the last two are new.

Philipe introduced Dr Wolfgang Hafeman, of "Solutions for Research", a subsidiary of T-Systems and thus Deutsche Telekom, who have built and manage an HPC system for researchers in German commerce and academia, using Sun's products. I wonder if I can get the picture he showed, its quite dramatic. Again, this is an example of the right thing done well. Certainly T-System's people have added massive value to the proposition, although often the success of such a piece of business is based on the quality, drive and determination of the project teams. The relationship between the project teams supercedes the relationship between the companies. Its a great example of partnering for the end customer's success.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[sunw] topic:[grid] topic:[hpc]

Budapest

2008-08-26T09:30:00.000Z

Just arrived in Budapest. I am hear to attend a training event. This is for Sun's EMEA, Governement, Education and Healthcare team. My work on NESSI has opened my eyes to the tremendous innovation occuring in parts of these sectors, so I am really looking forward to it.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[budapest]

coolsign.net

2008-08-22T10:09:40.000Z

I was checking out some of the pictures from my flickr groups and came across some fantastic pictures of Santorini. On looking at the author's photo stream, I discovered they had created a "cool sign", to decorate their profile page, which I immediately had to check out. So here's mine...

Made with My Cool Signs.Net

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[html] topic:[branding] topic:[widget]

Laptop Diaries, don't do this.

2008-08-21T15:43:52.000Z

I feel a complete and absolute fool about this one. Longtime readers will know that I have from time to time mucked around with the operating system I use on my laptop, from single to dual boot, experimenting with various Windows, Solaris and Linux iterations. At home I have a couple of desktops running windows, (XP at the moment), primarily because they come with it, but it also runs games, and supports the UK education system's curriculum. I have been experimenting with Virtual Box; at home, mainly to give me x-windows access to my Qube. On my work's laptop, I have vm's running Indiana, Nevada and Ubuntu 7 & 8. I plan to do some pretty exciting things with it when I can find the time. At home, I installed an Ubuntu 8 VM, but i have a very important piece of advice for people using Windows as a host operating system, which I discovered on one of my desktops.

Don't use FAT or FAT32 file systems.

I made a mistake, I can't remember how, but my new HDD has a FAT32 file systems. This has a 4Gb file size limit, so while the virtual box manager will let you define the max file size as whatever you want, when the VM tries to extend beyond the 4Gb limit, the VM reports a disk full error. Fortunately I don't have very much on this disk yet, so the repair is fairly painless.

I documented this here at the virtual box forum, unfortunately the title's not so useful. As I said, I have been working with UNIX too long, I'd forgotten what 32 bits means.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[virtualization] topic:[] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[windows] topic:[32bits] topic:[faq] topic:[howto]

Get Satisfaction

2008-08-21T13:36:38.000Z

I have written elsewhere about some colleagues have been experimenting with Plazes. This led me to raise bugs/rfes. So I bugged these using the plazes web form; they're usually really proactive and they replied but pointed me at their getsatisfaction site. I have raised the new items as topics but have discovered they have a web widget and so have used a personal tag and placed the widget on my snipsnap plazes page, which displays the last five topics tagged as mine. I thought you'd like to see the widget, I have decorated it with a <DIV style="..." statement and added a BORDER=0 attribute to the <IMG> tag.

Active customer service discussions in Plazes tagged "davelevy"

Get Satisfaction support network

I'm really impressed with 'Get Satisfaction', its some great rating and scoring tools.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[community] topic:[plazes] topic:[bugs] topic:[getsatisfaction]

Rethinking Twitter

2008-08-15T17:18:38.000Z

I have been arguing with Constantin Gonzalez about the best way to use twitter. He ended one of his mails to me with the advice to get a better phone and/or client. Yesterday twitter announced that they were terminating SMS transmissions in the UK. Oh Hoorah! So it looks like I need to take his advice.

I use a Sony Ericsson K610i, which I have also been advised to change and so I have the choice of using a WAP service or looking for a Java application. So far I have found

http://m.tweete.net/, which works on my wap browser. I loose the disticntion between follow on phone and read on the web, and as far as I can tell I need to go and look at my messages.
twitter have a mobile optimised site at http://m.twitter.com which suffers from the same problems as above.
http://www.tinytwitter.com/, is a java application, which was pointed out to me by an article on http://www.twittown.com/.
Someone at http://twitter.com/TweetTxt, messaged me offering an SMS forwarding service that I pay for. Some of what I receive is not exactly what I want to pay for to read early, but maybe its the answer.

The twitter blog article offers some other advice including http://www.cellity.com/, this looks neat but does anyone know what their business model is? It also suggests looking at a page on getsatisfaction, where a lively discussion is taking place.

I have had a quick look at the two wap sites. tweete.net looks OK, but how shall I get it to discriminate between those I want on the phone and those I don't. Its font size is smaller than twitter's, so harder to read, but more white space.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[internet] topic:[twitter] topic:[sms] topic:[mobile] topic:[client] topic:[sonyericsson] topic:[k610i] topic:[java] topic:[wap]

Re: Rethinking Twitter

2008-08-15T19:25:54.000Z

Dave,

I wrote about this very subject yesterday:
http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/no_outbound_twitter_for_europe

I appreciate your piece looks at the functional replacements for the service that Twitter suggest, and it's good to know how well these work (or don't as the case may be).

The focus of my article is that all of the options put forward by Twitter are "for cost" options. Either you end up paying for the individual SMS messages to come down to you or you pay for the datalink to the WAP service.

Both instances are barriers to adoption and yet both ensure that the Wireless / Telco. provider community involved effectively get paid twice (they already get paid for the inbound SMS service to Twitter, of course).

Twitter have rather set a precedent by providing this for free up until now and I genuinely wonder how many people will put up with having to pay for a service they have enjoyed for free for so long.

In the short term I suspect it's more likely people will try and subvert the Twitter service so as to continue to get a free outbound SMS service. The most obvious way to do this is by using a little bit of social engineering to spoof an account which receives the free SMS service (i.e. one in the US, Canada or India), but we will see.

Wayne

P.S.

Obviously your readers are more than welcome to have a look at my Twitter feed:
http://blogs.sun.com/eclectic/entry/follow_wayne_horkan_on_twitter

Laptop Diaries, more Bluetooth

2008-08-13T15:51:49.000Z

Over the last few weeks I have struggled to create a bluetooth 3G modem on my new Tecra M5. The Bluetooth drivers on this XP build have been provided by Toshiba and the big difference between it and my previous configuration which uses the Microsoft stack is that the special phone number code that the microsoft drivers require is not required when using the Toshiba drivers. It has a specific field for holding the modem configuration parameters and uses the default phone number of *99#. I should have waited.

You can also ignore the create the modem stage.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[laptop] topic:[vodafone] topic:[bluetooth] topic:[modem] topic:[3G] topic:[internet] topic:[sonyericsson] topic:[K610i] topic:[microsoft] topic:[toshiba] topic:[windows] topic:[xp] topic:[howto] should be 'how not to'

using twitter to share

2008-08-12T14:55:39.000Z

Some colleagues use twitter to notify their correspondents of their blogs. I have discovered 'twitthis' as a remote javascript and embedded it into this article. Actually it was pointed out in an article in the Guardian which suggest maybe twitter is losing its edgyness. I have changed the picture, to make it a better fit on the article affinity line, as a companion to technorati, digg, slashdot and delicious.

twit this:

You might recognise this picture better.

You need to be logged into twitter for this to work, maybe through the script. I have run one test and this article is part of the second test. If this works I'll add it to the 'share this' line, and let you know how it works.

It advertises itself at http://twitthis.com/.

I shall probably not add this to the 'share this' line; the script points at the blog, not the article, so I shall put this in the sidebar sometime.

Please let me know if you find the lag as it executes the script unacceptable.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[twitter] topic:[sharethis] topic:[blog] topic:[html] topic:[web]

Re: using twitter to share

2008-08-12T16:54:38.000Z

the addthis.com widget allows you to share via twitter too. I use it because it adds the social networks as they come online - you don't have to maintain your own set of icons and links. Also, it posts the article URL, not just the blog.

simplifying my roller blog

2008-08-12T11:05:25.000Z

I have removed the 'More tags and links' page from this site. I am looking to improve the theme in several ways and the the "More tags...." page only added only a view of my delicious tag cloud which can be seen at delicious.com, davelevy.info and sometimes at my bliki's tag page. The price of this was several theme files which I will be removing to simplify the task of moving forward. Both features require encapsulating everything in <DIV> tags, so the less to do the better.

tags: topic:[admin] topic:[roller] topic:[themes]

Roller theme revision

2008-08-08T13:23:10.000Z

The last article contained several javascripts and I discovered that the RTF editor on roller strips them out, so I am back to the raw text editor and writing in HTML.

Also it's the first article I have used sub-headings in for several years. I have amended the h1 and h2 css rules. I have assigned the h1 rule to the article title lines in the _day file and used the h2 tags in the article content fields. I am working on a major theme release which I'll contribute when finished.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[roller] topic:[themes] topic:[css]

Help with making a personal feed using SaaS

2008-08-08T12:42:23.000Z

Making a personal feed using friendfeed

I have for a while tried to create a personal feed of stuff I put on the internet, in the hope that someone might be interested. Historically this has been a planet but I now have a FriendFeed account. I am considering aggregating my bookmarks from del.icio.us into the feed and wonder what my correspondents, that's you that is, think. The reason I worry is that I issue a lot of bookmarks.

The current feed is at My Planet, (hover over the link for a preview). It has been implemented using an old version of planet planet, and so is available in RSS, ATOM and HTML (?). However it has a couple of problems (see below). One of my facebook correspondents pointed me at FriendFeed. Prior to finding this, Richard Morgan pointed me at secondbrian.net, (see below). One of the things that makes friendfeed so useful is that it has a generic feed service, so if their specific services, and they have a lot, don't suit then you can use the generic service, which is how I subscribe this blog, and my bliki to the friendfeed.

One neat gadget they offer is a weblog widget, ....

I am currently post into the feed from my blog, my bliki blog, my google reader shares, my flickr and my twitter. The Flickr subscription consumes both my photostream and favourites.

The ones I have syndicated at planet/davelevy and not yet syndicated on friend feed include my bookmarks at delicious.com, which is the nearest thing I have to a microblog. You have to work at it and it tells you what I'm reading on the internet i.e. what I am thinking about not what I am doing. I also syndicate my digg posts at my planet and have displayed it below.

The final feed consumed at my planet is my slynkr posts. I have decided to stop using this. See Au revoir Slynkr, below.

This leaves my plazes feed as unforwarded. Since I use the plazer, each time I move computer or network, it generates a new plaze. This can lead to many entries for the same place on a single day. I expect that people want to track location, and most importantly timezone, not my connections. The plazes feed needs a filter to restrict the feed to first of day and change of location and I have considered using planet or venus to do this.

The one feed that I think would add to the Friendfeed is my bookmarks. On some days, when researching something I may write number of bookmarks in quite short periods. Is this a burden to my correspondents?

When done, I can pump friend feed back through planet for any legacy users. Perhaps I should check its actually used by anyone other than me.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[web2.0] topic:[saas] topic:[internet] topic:[widget] topic:[friendfeed] topic:[socialsoftware]

Some comments about my sites and feeds

My twitter feed, I restrict to comments about my connectivity to the world wide web and location, I may use it to notify people about blog articles some time in the future, but decent phones should have RSS feed readers these days, sadly mine doesn't; Vodafone don't want us using RSS feed readers. I expect that most of my twitter followers know where the blog(s) are. (I quite like being notified of people's new blog articles so for those of you who tweet me about their blogs don't stop, and if I like it maybe my correspondents will also.)

I don't & never did use Digg that frequently. My current use of bloglines/google reader has changed the way I find this sort of stuff, but I rarely used it as a consumer, although the Digg Labs interfaces were pretty cool. With Digg, I need to consider if my use warrants syndicating it, although now I am using software as a service its all free to me.

The other feed I want to test is my Amazon wish list. My facebook experience is that the UK wish list is different in some way to the US & German one; the facebook application doesn't work for me since I have multiple wishlists on the account. Lets see how these feed aggrgators manage?

What's wrong with (my) Planet?

I use planet 2.1; it and my OS lack the BSD database. So I am missing any upgrades since that date. I know that the ATOM transformation is a a problem. the ATOM feed is broken on my instance. I may try and fix this at some time, but in the mean time, I must disable the hyperlink. Further more I have difficulty implementing Plazes and Twitter in the planet feed. For the plazes feed there is a formatting issue, and with Twitter I have a DNS resolution issue. Both these are problems with my configuration and not bugs in the feed services. Well, maybe the Twitter problem is some feature of the twitter platform but wget works well enough on a Solaris platform and Alec Muffet is developing a Sun people twitter planet, so it can be done.

Virtualising Sun Cluster, by Mike Ramchand

2008-08-08T10:20:22.000Z

Mike Ramchand has published a blog article about deploying a clustered pair of virtual box containers on a Solaris host,

tags: topic:[technology] "topic:[virtual box]" topic:[virtualbox] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[virtualization] topic:[cluster] topic:[solaris]

Reading Danilo Poccia's italian language blog

2008-08-08T10:18:01.000Z

Danilo Poccia has been experimenting with allowing his readers to use Google translate to read his blog. I, at least, will find this useful as Danilo writes in italian. This could of course be an advantage as the 'to english' translators may be stronger, since it looks quite good to me. It also enhances his hit count; its only available via the HTML interface. :) He categorises the blog, so finding his professional content is quite easy.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[blogging] topic:[translation] topic:[europe]

Rendering a feed into HTML with Grazr

2008-08-07T15:43:22.000Z

While researching this development of my personal feed, I looked for a generic client side javascript to consume and display feeds, a bit like the twitter and delicious widgets in the sidebar, although these gadgets are tightly tied to their authors own feeds. I found GRAZR, which has offers an aggregation service for its members and a widget against any feed for casual visitors. It has a bunch of themes, and I have illustrated one here....

I was looking to embed some of both my published feeds and those I wish to syndicate, having read, onto my HTML sites. This looks like it might do. The example above is my bookmarks feed from delicious and so doesn't have different icons nor different italicised feed names; it is only one feed. I expect one has to use their aggregator to get different icons.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[syndication] topic:[rss] "topic:[news feed]" "topic:[personal feed]" topic:[aggregator] topic:[grazr] topic:[html] topic:[widget]

Whats wrong with secondbrain

2008-08-07T11:50:59.000Z

Prior to finding FriendFeed, Richard Morgan pointed me at secondbrain.net. This is both a personal feed aggregator with a social networking dimension. It has a limited number of services, which given I blog on roller and snipsnap, causes me an issue in that I can't incorporate my blogs into a second brain feed; they don't have services for these blogs. ~~Its also missing a twitter service~~. Shame really, I wish them well.

See Jonathan's comments, it seems it does have a twitter service; I didn't look hard enough :( .

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[syndication] topic:[rss] "topic:[news feed]" "topic:[personal feed]" topic:[aggregator] topic:[secondbrain]

Re: Whats wrong with secondbrain

2008-08-07T17:42:35.000Z

HI and thanks for checking out Secondbrain. Let me try to shed some light on what you're discussing here.

You should be able to connect your Roller and/or Snipsnap blog through the Metaweblog API. To my knowledge both the platforms you mention support XML-RPC. We just added another 10 new services we support today (Qik, Goodreads, Diigo, Reddit, Mr. Wong, Mixx, Behance, Tumblr, Friendfeed and Facebook bringing us to a total of 30) and soon we'll finish the support for blogs through RSS and Atom which we've been working on. Also, we do indeed support Twitter, you can even tweet from within Secondbrain if you like.

Thanks for your support!

Johan Høgåsen-Hallesby
Product Manager

Re: Whats wrong with secondbrain

2008-08-09T07:44:33.000Z

No worries, Dave. If you couldn't find it, we must have hidden it too well. ;-)

Aurevoir Slynkr

2008-08-07T10:22:41.000Z

While researching an article on personal feed aggregators, I came to the conclusion that I will stop posting to slynkr; the service was built as a prototype/demonstrator, and has become too unreliable, its hardly ever available. I will continue to experiment with it as it remains a useful opensource project that can act as a community focus, having advantages that bulletin boards lack.

I liked its tagging feature, although the retrieval interface for tags was not as good as it might have been.

I may run one up on davelevy.info. Things I think interesting and want to share, I'll pump out via my google share, articles I want to tag, I'll use del.icio.us.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[syndication] topic:[rss] "topic:[news feed]" "topic:[personal feed]" topic:[aggregator]

HP folds Vodoo into its mainstream

2008-07-25T06:50:18.000Z

It seems that HP are merging their Vodoo line of games PCs into the mainstream. I wonder if Dell will follow with Alienware. The human synergies aren't so compelling. HP still knows how to design systems and possesses an engineering capability, this is not as obviously true at Dell, and the relative brand values are different.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[pc] topic:[hewlettpackard] topic:[vodoo] topic:[alienware]

A day at home, a view of Brussels

2008-07-21T12:13:00.000Z

I have been busy travelling the last couple of weeks and returned to my home office to do a pile of filing. You can see from my my del.icio.us feed some of the places I have been and also some stuff thats been on my desk waiting to be bookmarked or otherwise dealt with.

Over the weekend, I was looking at Firefox add-ons.

I was fortunate enough to stay at the Sofitel Europe in Brussels last week which was having a cheap week, or maybe day; it is close to my meeting's location, this is at the north end of the 'Place Jourdan', and the location of the finest chip shop in Bruxelles.

tags: topic:[food+drink] topic:[bookmarks] topic:[bruxelles]

Back on the Waves

2008-07-18T00:00:00.000Z

I spent the day on the Solent at Sun Sail 2008. Its the first time I've been. We didn't do that well, but it was fun all the same. You can see....

that we weren't exactly concentrating on speed all the time. If you were there yourself, or merely interested, there are more pictures at Sunsail 2008 Gallery.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[sport] topic:[sailing] topic:[solent]

Zoo Station

2008-07-04T02:00:00.000Z

I and some french colleagues caught the S-Bahn from Zoo Station to Fredriechstrasse Station, and took in the views of the Reichstag building and Bundekanzleramt.

We had a beer at Die Deponie nr 3, an exclellent and authentic beer shop (excellent service, thank you) then walked down to Potsdammer Platz via the Brandenburger Tor, the Tiergarten and the Monument to the Dead Jews.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[berlin] topic:[railway] topic:[zoostation]

Back to Berlin

2008-06-30T16:00:00.000Z

I am travelling to Berlin via London City airport for the first time. I am flying with Lufthansa. Its a longer journey to the airport than Heathrow but hopefully the airport experience is better and Lufthansa's flights to Berlin from Heathrow are somewhat limited. The overground journey is pretty OK. Taxi, Train and DLR, at least I am not driving. I leave at 6:20 am and arrive at City at 8:30 am. The queues are not well advertised; it seems you must use the automated check in machines so it may be best to do it online before you set out; Lufthansa have only two kiosks and today one was broken. The queue was longer than I'd hoped.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[lcy] topic:[lufthansa] topic:[london] topic:[lifehack]

An motd in tcl for Windows XP

2008-06-20T15:05:51.000Z

I bought an external disk from Amazon for my main home machine, which runs windows and have been moving various user's 'My Documents' folders onto the disk. It has a separate power supply and switch so its quite easy to start the computer and forget the disk, so I have written a program to check and remind people. I have written it in tcl/tk, my main documentation is on my snipsnap, but its a jolly short program, quick to write and easy to install.

Install active state's toolkit.
drop the icons into $tk_library/images, in this case info & warning.gif, I havn't tested if this verison of tcl/tk supports .jpg or .png yet.
write the program, I create a file on the E:\ folder and test for its existence
copy it to somewhere on the boot disk
create a shortcut in c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

The program looks like this,

wm title . {Disk Check}
wm iconname . {diskcheck}
wm geometry . 225x65+500+100
#
# Need some version control data and also like to make it bigger
#
frame .top
frame .bottom
if {[ file isfile "E:\donot.remove" ]} {
     set messagetext " The external disk has been turned on! "
     set buttontext " OK "
     image create photo infopic -file [file join $tk_library images info.gif]
} else {
     set messagetext " Please turn on the external disk! "
     set buttontext " Done "
     image create photo infopic -file [file join $tk_library images warning.gif]
}
label .top.icon -image infopic
frame .top.f -width 50
label .top.f.mess -text $messagetext

pack .top.f.mess -side top -fill x
pack .top.icon .top.f -side left

button .bottom.dismiss -text $buttontext -command "exit"

pack .bottom.dismiss
pack .top .bottom
proc exit {} {
     destroy .
}

The program is available as a download here.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[windows] topic:[programming] topic:[startup]

The last leg

2008-06-17T17:00:00.000Z

I returned on Sunday, and contrary to my twitter broadcast, Preveza airport was very efficient and friendly. We were into the departuire lounges in a very reasonable time. It was just 'First Choice Airways' who delayed us on our journey; we were travelling on by train, which meant we got home very late, I might organise my own transport next time.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[Greece] topic:[travel] topic:[delay]

Sailing in the Ionian Sea

2008-06-15T19:00:00.000Z

This holiday had been a long time ambition of mine in order to see Ithaca, the legendry home of Oddessyus from the sea. Actually I wanted to land there and explore, but for various reasons, this didn't happen, and at least I have an excuse to return.

I chartered the boat from Sunsail, as part of their Kalamos flotilla and flew from Gatwick to Preveza in North West of Greece. We arrived in the evening and had a meal in one of the local taverna's in Paleros, a nearby village which also has an ATM. Our route involved sailing from Vounaki to Port Atheni in Meganissi, then onto Kalmos via the north channel, out into the inland sea and back to Port Leone. We then sailed to one house bay and east of Ithaca north to return to Port Atheni. We then sailed around Meganissi to Spartkhori and then back to Vounaki. I prepared a google map...

View Larger Map

I had one of my best beers ever at Port Atheni,

not because it was a better beer, but because Port Atheni is such a pretty place, the sun was shining and we'd had such a great day. The rest of the pictures are in my Ionian Sea set on http://www.flickr.com/, my planning page is on my snipsnap bliki's Greece page.

This article has been backdated to the publication date. It was posted on 20th June.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[holiday] topic:[sailing] topic:[yachts] topic:[yachting] topic:[Greece] topic:[sunsail] topic:[ioniansea]

In the path of Odysseus

2008-06-07T14:22:52.000Z

I am packing for my holiday, I am off to Greece tomorrow, to sail in the Ionian Sea. I will have no access to the internet, hooray! You may catch me on Twitter as I shall have my phone with me. I thought about getting a Nokia N800, but havn't. So I'll have to wait 'till I get home to post my pictures and post about it.

Video Conferencing for free

2008-06-06T16:24:10.000Z

I was introduced to http://www.mebeam.com last year by colleagues in the US, and its a quite cool video conferencing feature. The lag in Europe is appalling, so I use the phone to host the voice channel. You can use whatever string you want to act as the meeting name, which you can enter on the home page, [ hover or click on the link above] or in your browser's URL entry box.

So I use IM and the phone to support the video channel. I was having some problems connecting up with some Mac using colleagues, so connected to Hans Joerg who is a bit of wiz with the Mac. I am on the left, and you can see the IM dialogue box.

and he explained that the configuration needs to be changed using the panel that is opened by pressing the 'settings' button on the bottom right hand side of one's own picture. Mac Users may default to 'DVD Video Class' and they require 'USB Video Class'. (The picture below was scrapped from my screen, and I am using a windows XP machine, which is why the text says something else.)

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[video] topic:[web2.0] topic:[videoconferencing] topic:[internet] topic:[Mac] topic:[howto]

Re: Video Conferencing for free

2008-06-06T20:56:22.000Z

My Company Great America Networks Conferencing offers simple cost-effective Video and WebConferencing usable anywhere there is an Internet connection on any type of computer.

You can see the software interface and sign up for a free 1 on 1 trial or a full featured demonstration free as well.

Compare to other popular products here: http://www.ganconference.com/gancnew/web.html

View the software here: http://www.ganconference.com/gancnew/quickvisuals.html

Feel free to contact me directly for a personal guided tour of the service.

Anthony Russo
Conferencing Consultant
Great America Networks Conferencing
arusso@ganconference.com
www.ganconference.com
Phone: 312-432-5377
Skype: anth.russo

Re: Video Conferencing for free

2008-06-07T13:57:34.000Z

Hmm! An advert, but it looks like its by a person, not a 'bot and it is an addition to the discussion. I may delete these in a month, or not.

Cheers Anthony, good luck.

<Disclaimer: I am not related, nor have used, nor recommend this stuff>

Re: Video Conferencing for free

2008-06-08T03:57:11.000Z

Hi Dave,

Ye4s it is an advert, but you are correct that I am a person and not a bot. I don't randomly spam, but do try to get my company's name out where someone is discussing conferencing because I think it is relevant and we have a good product.

I'd be glad to give you a personal demonstration of it so you can form your own opinion.

Anthony

Laptop Diaries, onto the internet with 3G

2008-06-06T10:00:26.000Z

I have just moved my laptop forward to an improved build. This proves that this article only works if the bluetooth drivers are the microsoft drivers on XP. I have written about the toshiba drivers at Laptop Diaries, more bluetooth on this blog.

My colleague at work Sean Harris, helped me configure my laptop and phone to use the phone's 3G capability to connect the internet. Sean was guided himself by this article at 'crackistan'. While that author writes about Mac OS, and I am using Windows XP, we both use sony erricson phones and vodafone as our service provider.

I really did this for times where I have no internet access, but as 'Bodoggy' points out, it may come in useful in airport lounges or other places where the wi-fi costs are outrageous, or their credit cards systems broken.

So the process is

Create a connection channel between the phone and laptop, and I used blutooth
Create a dial up agent for vodafone and select your new modem

The only tricky bit is that you don't use a phone number to connect to the internet, there is a special code instead.

Attaching the phone

Firstly, I opened the control panel and activate the bluetooth devices applet. This then advises you how to configure the phone, i.e. turn bluetooth on and make it visible. This assumes that it isn't already visible. There's nothing security geeks like more than displaying the fact that people have their phone's visibility turned on. I was quite surprised at the number of phones I found turned on. The 'add device' applet then displays all the bluettoth devices it can see, select your own, and you need to approve the connection on both devices by exchanging a password. Actually the computer challanges and the phone responds.

The add device will report which COM: port the phone modem is associated with.

The visibility menu is found on my vodafone SE K610i using [Menu] # [<-] 1,2

Creating a dialup agent

I then opened 'Network Connections' control panel applet, and used the 'create new connection dialogue'. This needs a name. I included called it "Vodafone 3G".

Note: The string in the phone number box, *99***3#. The number 3 needs to agree with the position of 'Contract Internet' in the 'Data Accounts' list, which can be found in the Data comm menu, in the Connectivity menu, in Settings, in other words

Menu -> Settings -> Connectivity -> Data comm -> Data Accounts or
[ Menu ] # [<-] 41

This worked, but I don't like the fact it prompted me for the connection; it doesn't do that for ethernet or wifi connections, so I opend the 'options' tab and turned off the prompts

So, now I can connect to the internet using Vodafone's Data Services, I wonder if all this works abroad. Probably; Sean's got more frequent flyer miles than I do.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[laptop] topic:[vodafone] topic:[bluetooth] topic:[modem] topic:[3G] topic:[internet] topic:[sonyericsson] topic:[K610i]

Python bites

2008-06-04T10:23:02.000Z

I wrote my first Python program over the weekend. I very foolishly ran out space in my root filesystem on my cobalt qube. This is v. stupid and had two causes.

I have installed an application in the root disk volume. While this is not unusual, it has a database and its log files in the same file system. An error caused the log files to grow and burst the file system. [ So RFE the app dude, the install should offer locations for the database and logs.].
The OS very sensibly mailed me quite a lot that I had a problem, but it mailed it to the administrator account on the qube and while I can access this mail account remotely, I didn't; I was busy.

So I decided to write a script that mailed me on my phone (via SMS) should this happen again. (I also need to move the data files and logs to sensible places).

I would normally do this in ksh, but the qube doesn't have this, so I started in bash. I quickly discovered that my version of bash doesn't have associative (or any) arrays. It does have the string handling facilities of the ksh, but I couldn't find them; I had forgotten the syntax.

line="/root=OK"; state=${line##*=}; echo $state
$ OK

actually works. NB I tried the arrays on my virtual box ubuntu 7 build, which I now use as a terminal host for the qube; I get them inside a re-sizable x-window. The arrays seem to work, but not associative arrays, so its another nail in the Qube's coffin; the Qube's bash has no arrays at all.

When I say I've written it, its not yet finished, but what I have done shows me that its a very powerful and economic language. Given that this sort of script, 90% of the code is string handling and enviromental discovery, with one command at the end of the script doing the work. I actually only use the UNIX 'df' utility and 'mail' program. I invoked the mail program via

os.system('./despatchmail')

where 'despatchmail' is an external shell script and it means that I can publish the program without stating the destination e-mail addresses. It could also invoke mail directly if I choose. I provide the df reply via a pipe to the program. (I did this because a coding example was more easily available it could be done in a number of ways.)

I am particularly impressed with python's dictionary feature and created one to hold the previous state, one to hold the current state and one to hold the utilisations. I can then use the file system mount point name as the retrieval key for all three arrays. e.g.

   >>>states={};      # states is an empty dictionary
   >>>s="/root=OK";
   >>>states[s[:s.index('=')]]=s[s.index('=') + 1:]
     # assigns the state clause to the dictionary, the filesystem name is the index.
   >>>print states
   >>>{'/root': 'OK'}

and the real one looks like

{'var': 'OK', 'home': 'OK', 'root': 'OK'}

and the utilisations from the df are held as

{'var': 9, 'home': 38, 'root': 77}

N.B. The utilisation values are held as integers and its now easy enough to write a test such that if a directories utilisation is above a threshold, then set the status code to something else

    for keys in states.keys():
        if utilisations[keys] > threshold:
            states[keys]='ERROR'

the first line ensures the tests are performed for each value pair in the states dictionary object.

So I was pleased to find a decent problem to test the language out on. When I have finished it, I might publish it in full. It might be useful to others, and you might be able to point out where my COBOL trained brain is still using tricks I learned 25 years ago. I know the parser is very powerful, and hence a line of code can perform a number of function, which means that what I would expect to take several lines can usually be done in one.

tags: technology programming language python linux utility

Outside the Box

2008-05-23T15:36:22.000Z

I have just finished writing up my last two weeks work, and thought you might enjoy this video showing what might happen if a virtual world knew where you were looking.

It is called "Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote", I have bookmarked it on del.icio.us and here in my bookmarks section.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[vr] topic:[virtualreality]

Discussing security and privacy in Italy

2008-05-22T12:17:21.000Z

CSI Piemonte, an italian public sector co-operative visited Sun yesterday to talk about today and tomorrow's Security with Alec Muffet and Dave Walker, and I had the honour of hosting and MC'ing the meeting.

While discussing data centre networks i.e the network inside the firewall and how to build the firewalls, a number of products and companies were discussed, these include CSE Piemonte themselves, Tripwire for intrusion detection, Zeus, traffic management, ActivIdentity, part of an SSO solution, Tier-3, leveraging Behavioural Intelligence, Sun's Access Manager, "Privacy on the Line" a book by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, Endevours Technologies, Sun's Security Community's publications, Shibboleth, for single sign-on, and juniper.net/, looking at their virtual firewalls. Alec also spoke about some of the ideas he developed in his blog article Hankering For A World Without “Identity” or “Federation”. This latter conversation was very wide ranging and reviewed the significant differences between the UK and Italian data privacy laws, particularly in the field of medical data and records. The italian laws seem very citizen-centric, which is what we'd hope for in a democratic Republic. The CSI Piemonte people told us that

"The Italian Government is prohibited from asking for citizen's information twice"

which is really cool but it still has problems sharing it around the government between departments and bodies. In the UK, this is causing me problems with the Student Finance company at the moment. I'd like the Passport Agency and the Inland Revenue to pass my details on to them, so I don't have to collect all the stuff they ask for. I suppose that they can't ask the Inland Revenue because they want to know more than they do. Go figure.

I recorded these URL's as we discussed them on my del.icio.us feed in real time, i.e. as of this article's publication date, well, yesterday actually. (I suppose I should create a tag for the meeting, to ensure that all the URLs have a common and exclusive tag, but I havn't, and del.icio.us doesn't enable you to query a date range, which is why I repeat the list above, and I can't be bothered to write a script that displays how many days ago the meeting took place.)

I also think, or hope at least, that this is an article, where the snap shots add value to the article. If you hover most of the links above, you get a preview of the web page.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[security] topic:[politics] topic:[privacy] topic:[identity] topic:[italy]

tweeting your plaze

2008-05-21T12:39:00.000Z

Plazes now have a twitter feed for people to publish to. They contacted me, but I need to consider what I think about that. I have made promises to people about how I propose to use it. I hope that other Plazes followers wont be disappointed.

We're all off to sunny Spain!

2008-05-12T16:30:00.000Z

I am off to Barcelona to represent Sun at Gartner's Spring ITexpo in Barcelona. Given Barcelona's historic role as the centre of the world's ever largest Anarchist party, I wonder if the presentation "The future of Government is No Government" is knowledgeable irony, or ignorant co-incidence.

I remarked the other day that Terminal One at Heathrow is a much better place for BA having left it, however, they still use it for their Iberia ticket shares (as well as some other european ticket share flights.) So...hoorah, two hours late taking off, one hour late landing, hmm... don't tell me the airlines over estimate their journey times to allow them some leeway on the compulsory compensations they need to pay. We were told that the replacement co-pilot had been delayed arriving at the plane; there wern't enough buses. Meanwhile in Barcelona, despite the long walk to pick up my baggage, I was off the airport estate in 25 minutes, and checked into the hotel 15 minutes later.

Laptop Diaries, Goodbye to dual boot

2008-05-01T16:59:00.000Z

A month and a half ago, Sun & Innotek, the authors of Virtual Box, an open source desktop virtualisation solution announced that Sun was buying them Virtual Box is a free type II virtualisation solution permitting the configuration of a number of popular x86 operating systems to act as guests and hosts. I have just today configured a Linux VM running on my Windows XP Laptop, here's how it looks, when its not full screen.

I used Ubuntu 7.04 and this is how I did it. Firstly a friend cut me an ISO image on CD and I loaded it into the cd reader.

I then created a VM. This has hardware virtualisation enabled, I created a new .vdi file. This must be big enough, and defaults at 8Gb. This is a limit on the file size. It does not reserve this space at install time, however if you make it too small, the install fails. The boot device order is floppy, cdrom and then hard disk. The cdrom has to be enabled in the 'settings -> CD/DVD' panel. I also defined the VM as a host of a Linux 2.6 image.
I then started the VM using the virtual box control panel. This then boots a live cd of the cdrom, and I selected the 'Install' option. This then installs Ubuntu and offers you the opportunity to restart the system, i.e. the VM.
I then used the update manager to update the software. It downloads, works out dependencies and then installs the new software versions. At the end of this stage, I then rebooted the VM. This took some time, over an hour and half, but I was using a wireless connection to a not very quick BT broadband line.
At this point in time, it only offers 800x600 screen resolution, which is a bit pants, so, I used the VM window menu option, 'Devices -> Install Guest Additions'. This opened a nautilus window on the CD which exposes a script called "VBoxLinuxAdditions.run". I ran this from a terminal session command line in bash using root privilidge (see below). At this point, I then rebooted the VM again.
I then needed to check that the xorg.config was configured correctly. In order to amend it, one needs a root user shell. Its been a couple of years since I used a Linux, so I tried to 'su' to root, but it was having none of it. A quick google found me this article this article about default passwords for the ubuntu super user. So a quick 'sudo gnome-terminal' and we're away. This artilce at forums.virtualbox.org, about guest additions, and this article details the checks and changes required of xorg.conf to permit full screen mode on a larger screen. The Toshiba M5 I am using has 1400x1050. I only had to add the additional resolutions. The device name agreements worked and the virtual devices had been inserted.

I should also thank the Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, who posted an Ubuntu 7, install walkthrough, which while not difficult, helped me debug the initial install failure.

I have downloaded some backgrounds and installed them, but it seems as I shall not be trying to build dual or triple boot solutions again; I have also got opensolaris nevada and indiana VMs. I just wish it had all been installed on a single partition. I can run whatever OS I want on the laptop now.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] topic:[operatingsystem] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[virtualization] topic:[virtualbox] topic:[linux] topic:[ubuntu]

Re: Laptop Diaries, Goodbye to dual boot

2008-05-02T09:25:11.000Z

Dave, Several points:
1 - I removed the dual boot about 2 years ago and used VMWare Workstation.
2 - You do NOT need to cut a CD from the ISO image. In VBox, you can define the Virtual CD Drive to point to the ISO image on the host disk (or even on an external USB drive). When you boot the image the first time, it will boot from the ISO image.
3 - I spent a few hours this week and built a set of images for VBox: Ubuntu, SXDE, and XP. I use these as templates when I need to build a Demo or a small scale PoC for a Customer. I can then run IdM, Java CAPS, NetBeans, Any other named Sun Middleware, and NOT clutter up my Host system, or need to scream about need for TB of disk to hold it all.

Re: Laptop Diaries, Goodbye to dual boot

2008-05-02T11:46:44.000Z

Thanks for this, Ben

I chose not to use VMware, but I agree that Virtual Box is very easy to use. Did you see my article about DOSbox a couple of months ago.

Re: Laptop Diaries, Goodbye to dual boot

2008-05-04T07:21:56.000Z

No I did not see the article. Please send a URL or copy.

Microblogging

2008-04-24T11:42:14.000Z

In the article My Twitter Manifesto, I stated that I did not propose to use Twitter as a microblog, the closest thing I have to one is my del.icio.us feed, which since I bookmark nearly everything I read, gives you an idea of what I am thinking about at least. I nearly always comment on a site/page, although not always in my own words. But if your interested.... it's there. The most recent seven items are also in the sidebar on this page.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[blogging] topic:[tagging] topic:[microblogging] topic:[tags]

My Twitter Manifesto

2008-04-24T11:14:20.000Z

After my trip to Italy, where there was no broadband in my hotel room, I decided to reinvestigate twitter. So I am now broadcasting using it and also following some colleagues and friends.

I do not intend to use it as a microblog, but mainly to let people know about my access to the internet, "Will e-mail work?", and maybe the phone networks, since some places I may be visiting over the next couple of years may not have such great communications infrastructure, although how I do this without phone or web will be interesting. However, it might be useful, if I forget my charger lead. I do not expect to twit every day, so its not a major overhead for those of you who consume twitter on the mobile phone. I have also forwarded my feed to my facebook profile and I have a twitter feed URL, which can be consumed by any RSS reader, although not it seems my Sony Erissson's reader.

I am consuming those I follow's feeds using my phone. This is, as I said, a Sony Ericsson and has a pretty small screen and although it does have a wap browser, the browsing experience is not very satisfactory. If you are a frequent poster, you'd best stay interesting, as one of the reasons I first dropped twitter was that I found consuming it on the phone too intrusive. This time I shall probably stop following those who post to much. I have already tried and stopped using the sun bloggers twitter feed.

Another reason to be mannerly is that as a consumer, one only gets 250 messages/week, at which point one has to restart the feed. With twitter, we may have returned to the days of Usenet, where authors were asked to consider reader's bandwidth, but its now frequency, not verbosity that's the potential problem.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[twitter]

Re: My Twitter Manifesto

2008-04-24T17:00:53.000Z

I love this idea! I gotta do this, hell, make a page on my WP about it!

Re: My Twitter Manifesto

2008-04-24T18:09:23.000Z

I think you have a typo there - your twitter account is http://twitter.com/DaveLevy rather than http://twitter.com/Dave (unless you have two).

Are "Quants" suitable for grid infrastructure?

2008-04-22T09:38:35.000Z

Are "Quants" suitable for grid infrastructure? investorwords, a finance dictionary site, defines a quant as "One who performs quantitative analyses". Not so useful; while I have known people bet on horses because they like the name, I have not really heard of people investing in the stock market using this strategy, so evaluating the value of stock using numbers seems pretty basic, and in their eyes a Quant is a person. They define quantitative analyses as "The process of determining the value of a security by examining its numerical, measurable characteristics such as revenues, earnings, margins, and market share." If measuring the value of one stock, it is unlikely that, parallel algorithms are necessary. The data points are too few to warrant applying grid or parallel programming techniques. If analysing a portfolio of many stocks using these techniques, or a whole bank portfolio, then grids become more useful. It really depends upon the size of the portfolio, and the required response time.

A chartist on the other hand, performs "Technical Analyses", which investorwords, defines as "A method of evaluating securities by relying on the assumption that market data, such as charts of price, volume, and open interest, can help predict future (usually short-term) market trends. " Presumably the name chartist, comes from the fact that they use graph representations of the data series they analyse. However, the analysis of history increases the number of data points involved, and when one tries to apply technical analysis to portfolios, the problem of scale and the attributes amenable to parallelism come into the frame. The use of Grid software and hardware architectures probably becomes more useful earlier.

Neither of these techniques however are truly applications; they can be used to support trading decisions, risk evaluation, capital adequacy calculations, and pretty much any decision which involves evaluating today's and tomorrow's value of a financial instrument, be it treasury, equity or derivative.

investorwords is in my sidebar, and in my del.icio.us feed.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[economics] topic:[finance] topic:[grid] topic:[itarchitecture]

Revolutionary business, revolutionary I.T.

2008-04-18T00:00:00.000Z

My colleague, Ambreesh Khanna, presented on how the growing use of Microfinance, is changing IT architectural requirements, and the risk management criteria. [There's a number of references on google, or exalead, but the Guardian reported on how Mohammed Yunus won the Nobel Peace prize 18 months ago.]

So while it costs a bank a certain amount to manage a customer, if its liabilities to its customers are small, then the risk can be managed in a different way. If a bank has 1000, € 500K loans in its book, only a small number of defaults cause a problem, whereas, if its portfolio is reversed with ½ million, € 1000, then many more defaults are required to cause a problems. It also changes the nature of the traffic. Many low volume payments, mandate an IT and banking efficiency that will need to borrow from the web 2.0 architectures. Ambreesh also wrote about microfinance on his blog.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[Technology] topic:[microfinance] "topic:[it architecture]" "topic:[network traffic]"

The photo in my banner V2

2008-04-16T21:22:14.000Z

Several months, or maybe longer, I changed the banner picture from a duck in a pond to the picture above which was taken by Simon Phipps. Simon's pictures can be seen at http://www.istockphoto.com/webmink, or at http://flickr.com/photos/webmink/. I didn't accurately amend the copyright statement and flagging in the banner. I have now. To be clear, the picture on this site, is not to be copied or re-used. The original is on Simon's Flickr site, and published under the creative commons, by-nc-nd.

tags: topic:[banner] topic:[roller] topic:[webmink]

If you want to know what I am reading

2008-04-16T09:29:55.000Z

Facebook's "Visual Bookshelf" has recently fixed their service that allows the embedding of your book shelf within HTML. I have posted my reading list at davelevy.info, so non-facebook users can follow my reading, if you so choose. I haven't posted it here; you can hover over the hyperlink. Their instructions are posted on their blog.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[facebook] topic:[books] topic:[davelevy]

workshoping the future

2008-04-02T19:00:00.000Z

Over the last two day, we have been in workshops, discussing aspects of the development of the internet. The workshops, their agenda and supporting papers are all hosted at the future internet site. We'll have to wait for the slides to see what agreement was discovered.

I was interested to attend BO6, "Future Internet Research and Experimentation", otherwise known as FIRE where I heard a number of presentations from FP6 funded projects talking about the Grids they'd built, primarily on University sites. There's a lot going on. It's a shame we couldn't find someone to take on Sun's London "grid-for-rent". There was some innovative stuff in the re-provisioning solution.

The other working groups were called Networks, Services, Content and Security. I am eagerly waiting the slides from the plenary sessions that introduced and concluded these workshops.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[europe] topic:[eu] topic:[future] topic:[research] topic:[grid]

the church on the island

2008-04-01T23:30:00.000Z

Lake Bled has been one of Slovenia's holiday attractions for many years, famously it has an island in the middle of the lake, with a church on it.

Other pictures are at my slovenia set, part of my photo collection at flickr.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[slovenia] topic:[lakebled] topic:[europe]

Using the HTML Version of this blog page

2008-04-01T20:00:00.000Z

I have added a twitter gadget to the sidebar on this blog. I am not planning to use it as a micro-blog, but it will say a bit about what I'm doing, particularly if I am having problems connecting to the internet; it allows me to use my phone to post short messages to my twitter feed and followers.

I also reduced the listed back catalog to 64 articles, which at my current publication rate means it shows articles up to about six months old. If you want older stuff, use the tag cloud above, the word search gadget or the date index in the sidebar, or go to the "Yesterdays Words" page.

Obviously the navigation instructions above won't work if you read this via an RSS feed.

category: general

The Bled Declaration

2008-04-01T01:00:00.000Z

We closed the day by adopted the Bled declaration, calling on the Commission and member states co-ordinate their R&D and do other good things, including the support in the construction of a "Future Internet Assembly".

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[europe] topic:[eu] topic:[future] topic:[appliances] topic:[FIA] "topic:[fia Bled]"

What changes in technology will do to the Internet tomorrow

2008-04-01T00:00:00.000Z

The afternoon panel was billed, in contrast to the morning's emphasis on society and economics, as about the technology. The session was opened by Lutz Heuser, of SAP, who had an interesting slide about the nature of innovation and a layered architecture model of the internet, which is pretty common place in these meetings, layering business services over common services over a platform, which itself has computers, switches and interconnects. He did ask where the european business services were? Thus ignoring plazes, last.fm and bebo, and if I new the non-UK economies better, I bet I could name some more of these SaaS Web 2.0 startups from Europe.

Christian Grégoire, of Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent spoke of the need to re-invest in the network's intelligence and that vertical industries adoption of remote sensor technology will change the applications portfolios, the bandwidth demands and backbone topology. A number of speakers seem to equate the internet of things with RFID, I wonder if the argument that they lack intelligence and programability has been considered and dismissed, or just not engaged with.

Jan Uddenfeldt a senior advisor to the CEO of Ericsson spoke, surprise surprise, about how mobile phones will drive change. I am not sure on two counts. Phones while very portable, have CPUs, RAM, storage, a screen, a keyboard and a network interface. This makes them computers, and if you have a consumer Sony Ericsson, its a pretty poor screen and keyboard. The volume and rate of adoption does make a difference, but the "internet of things" is a step beyond connecting people.

Krishna Nathan Vice President of Storage System Development at IBM. An interesting and thoughtful speech about how the "internet of things" will drive the evolution of an event driven network; sensors will require real time management. He explored the use of sensors to manage the data centre? They made quite a lot of noise about it earlier this month [ IBM Press Release ]. I was quite annoyed about this; I had planned suggest Sun did something about this leveraging Wonderland and Darkstar. (See also MMORPGs, making them massive, at this site.) However, it may not be too late. It interests me that no one is really talking about the nature of the services that the internet will need to provide for these new models. He was explained well the changing nature of traffic patterns that will occur as sensors become pervasive. His slides are also worth a second read.

Jean-Charles Hourcade of Thomson SA, spoke from the perspective of a content company and his speech shows why we need to consider change from different perspectives. He argues that the devices of the future are the pc, gateway and phone. (I don't think so). He argued that HDTV and Cinema Technology will raise the bar again. This is probably true, but to me what's popularising video is youtube, and the reducing of video's length. They've become snacks. A countervailing force in the UK is the BBC's iplayer and BT Vision. Maybe the UK has some more serious legacy inhibitors to change. Both the commercial structure, where content providers own their own network and the business is dominated by de-facto or de-nationalised monopolies, and the age of the local loop. I wonder how easy the rest of Europe will find it to move forward.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[europe] topic:[eu] topic:[future] topic:[appliances] topic:[FIA] "topic:[fia Bled]"

and in the rest of the world

2008-03-31T22:00:00.000Z

After lunch, we listened to presentations from the US & Japan. The americans seem to be concentrating on systems issues and using virtualisation to deliver resources to individual researchers. When I get the slides we might discover how easy it is to join their network as suppliers which is an indication of how well they've addressed and solved the 'federation' issues. The presenter was Heidi Dempsey and the projects web site is http://www.geni.net/. Fumito Kubota from Japan presented on Project Akari, which is being run by the New Generation Network Research Centre of Japan, an interesting view on the growth of communication in Japan. The Japanese project has massive academic input, and is very focused on the network layer and bandwidth.

tags: topic:[Techology] topic:[future] topic:[internet] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[bandwidth] topic:[research] topic:[FIA] "topic:[fia Bled]"

The socio/economic impact

2008-03-31T21:00:00.000Z

The rest of the morning was taken over with a panel presentation, which focused on the socio/economic impact of the changing internet. The first speaker was Andy Wyckoff from the OECD who spoke of a number of economic issues reinforcing the link between creativity and wealth creation. In fact the OECD are running a ministerial conference, see http://oecd.org/futureinternet, which has had massive and unexpected support from the OECD's member and candidate members. He also emphasised the need for openness & interoperability. He also argued that smarter interfaces will be needed to truly create an internet of people, and that is required before further evolutions will occur.

Led by Geert Lovink of Institute of Network Cultures, the panel explored the question of paying for creativity given the marginal cost to copy is zero. Will it be possible to implement a form of micro payments?

Another issue raised was the duopoly of the search engines. It was argued that it is necessary to have a diversity of search engines, and that fortunately, the smaller players are staying in the market and continuing to innovate. Search will remain the "killer app" of the internet, but where is the "only people are experts" dimension. Will the next evolution be people finders?. They may become more important than resource finders, and is a dimension of the NESSI problem. How will you find services, in a world of billions, with hundreds of thousands joing each day. (Obviously thats the vision, not today's reality).

Dag Johansen asked if can we build a 'push' search engine, and that its very important to protect one's privacy. He (and others argued) that many internet users are prepared to trade some of their privacy for free services and resources. In terms of his privacy, he deliberately uses multiple search engines to hide from those that wnat to know about everything he does, he also stated that he doesn't think Google is good enough to justify exclusive use. I am moving towards this behaviour and often use exalead which tries to use semantic technology to improve the search quality. Another thought this raised in my mind is that {english} schools are once again pretty poor, they're teaching how to use apps, not the internet, and so while todays children are being taught in class how to use Word to write a letter, they are missing how to protect your privacy and use firewalls and spam filters. Actually it would seem they are teaching how to circumvent poorly configured content filters. (Don't ban Google images for the UK & USA, if you leave Ireland, India and Australia available.)

Diogo Vasconcelos from Cisco came up with the following insight, "People like politics, with politicians it depends", he also raised the issue of sustainability. Some of his visions had a real 'Minority Report' touch. A question was raised suggesting that, sometimes selling you stuff you thought you didn't want is good. But how much more than Amazon recommendations do we need? This did remind me of the minority report scene where the shop recognises Anderton (Tom Cruise) via an eyeball scan. Diaogo repeated the idea that the EU is the most connected place in the world? I wonder if its true. I find connecting in the States when traveling easier, the network and wi-fi seems much more pervasive, although I often have to pay. You can see elsewhere in this blog for my views on Italy and Brussels. My recent travels have confused me and I can't make up my mind whether to buy a wi-fi or 3G connected hand held appliance. I hope that I will be allowed to trial a new vodafone commercial solution, or maybe I'll check out BT Fon, which reminds me, I really need to sort my household content subscriptions. It just never stops.

The morning was finished up with a presentation on internet governance, and the need to address bureaucratic degeneracy and market failure. See also http://www.intgovforum.org/, which is a United Nations body.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[internet] topic:[future] topic:[open] topic:[innovation] topic:[oecd] topic:[trust] topic:[search] topic:[europe] topic:[EU] "topic:[fia Bled]"

Can you believe it?

2008-03-31T20:00:00.000Z

Dr Will Dutton of the University of Oxford Internet Institute addressed the conference. On his blog, he argues that there is an overwhelming concern around privacy and trust, which was confirmed by contributions later in the day. A high point for me in his presentation is the extent to which people trust the accuracy of internet content, which is not very much. He stated that people are using the internet, but trust it as much as they do the TV & papers. The good news is that people are begining to trust each other and their networks though, and are learning to apply personal bullshit filters.

Another piece of trivia is that the EU is the largest internet user base in the world, whatever that means. But, there is a natural centripetal force in that there are so many different languages. (Mind you it should be noted that the US, China and India are all also multi-lingual nations).

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[internet] topic:[trust] topic:[willdutton]

A word from our sponsor

2008-03-31T19:15:00.000Z

Ms Viviane Reding, the sponsoring commissioner spoke to the conference via a video cast. This isn't yet available, but I'll post a link when I can, hopefully to streaming video.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[future] topic:[internet] topic:[europe] topic:[eu] topic:[fp7] topic:[conference] topic:[vivianereding]

What's the EU doing?

2008-03-31T19:00:00.000Z

The conference is sub-titled, or has the tag line of "Perspectives emerging from R&D in Europe". A new web site http://www.future-internet.eu/ has been created which promotes and reports on the conference, together with other initiatives. A document "The Future of the Internet, A Compendium of European Projects on ICT Research......" was distributed to delegates documenting the EU funded projects which were invited to attend.

I can't find it on cordis, and I used the catalog number, KK-30-08-142-EN-C

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[future] topic:[internet] topic:[europe] topic:[eu] topic:[fp7] topic:[conference] "topic:[fia Bled]

Future of the Internet, the 2nd information revolution

2008-03-31T18:45:00.000Z

The conference, "The Future of the Internet" was opened by Dr. Ziga Turk. He is the Minister for Growth of Slovenia, which holds the rotating EU presidency at the moment. He opened by talking about Slovenia's adoption of the internet, which was prior to independence and stated that the internet was an important tool for the campaigners in pre-independence Slovenia. After my experiences in trying to get connected in Italy, I have been pleasantly surprised. Easy connection for both phone and laptop.

He then, cleverly (well, I thought so), compared the development of the internet and its opportunities with the discovery of cheap paper and the renaissance. I was particularly interested in his assertion that while the invention of paper came from China, it was the european's letter based writing that enabled the first knowledge based revolution since printing was easier. He also pointed out that the first global knowledge revolution, the "p-revolution" while global, was led in Europe, but today's revolution, the "i-revolution" is not. The european response to this needs to be two fold. The simplest is to continue with EU enlargement, the other political responses are within the EU's "Lisbon Strategy". This is aimed at creating and stimulating jobs and growth in europe, and places innovation and research at the heart of this effort. It is also about dynamism and entrepreneurialism in the context of caring for people and environment. The driving economies of the US and Japan are being challenged by China and India, but by placing knowledge as a 5th freedom, the EU can hopefully harness the creativity and entrepreneurialism of its citizenry.

The first four freedoms in the EU are a bit different from Roosevelt's declared at the time of the founding of the United Nations.

We've been promised the slides, but they're [still] not available yet.

This article was written from notes taken at the time, posted the following week and back dated to the approximate time the speech was given.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[future] topic:[internet] topic:[europe] topic:[eu] topic:[fp7] topic:[zigaturk]

Europe, its bigger than you think

2008-03-30T23:44:38.000Z

I thought I'd been so clever, flying through Munich to Ljubljana, but Adria, the second stage carrier decided it was in their interests to wait in Ljubljana for two hours for some of the incoming passengers. This left me in Munich for over four hours. Just so we both know, they chose to make me and my fellow passengers wait, rather than those who were late to arrive in Ljubljana. I don't remember anyone waiting for me last time Adria were late getting me to Frankfurt.

I didn't get to the hotel in Bled until after midnight. Straight to bed, as I need to get up in time for the EU's "Future of the Internet" conference later today.

tags: topic:[travel]

Re: Europe, its bigger than you think

2008-03-31T08:31:32.000Z

I've always found Europe to be smaller than I initially thought, as a result of distances being measured in kilometres rather than miles, and motorway speed limits (especially in Germany) being a little more sane than they are, here :-).

I've also been through Munich airport - and I was on the other end of a problem similar to yours, with my 'plane having arrived late. They did hold my connecting flight, but it involved me running from one end of the concourse to the other, with my hold luggage and airport security staff in tow, and loading my luggage personally. Not an experience I fancy repeating.

Re: Europe, its bigger than you think

2008-03-31T09:22:35.000Z

Clearly the future of the Internet should include the ability to better integrate transport networks. Better yet a way to scp yourself to the other side of the world.

Public Data should be free

2008-03-21T19:00:00.000Z

A government study has concluded that it would best to stop charging for public data, reported in the Guardian yesterday. In the 80's the UK Government established 'trading funds' for a number of its statistical and data management bodies including the ordnance survey (Maps), DVLA (Road Vehicles and Users), Companies House, the Land Registry, Met Office and Hydrographic Office, and required them to charge for access to data that had either been payed for by the taxpayer, or it was mandatory to provide to government.

This research, conducted by a team from Cambridge University, discovered that freeing the information creates greater value in the economy than would be lost through charge income.

The campaigners for free information argue, firstly that consumers have payed already for the information through their tax payments, and secondly that the government is often in a monopoly position as the only body capable of collecting some of the data through its power of compulsion. The state monopoly makes it very hard to determine a market price, particularly as the marginal cost to supply is zero. The report also denies the argument that participation in a market encourages innovation in the supply chain, because of both the lack of regulation, and the monopoly position of the government. It should be noted that some of the government's "income" is paid with taxation, since the government agencies cross charge each other.

The release of this public information would in all probability lead to innovation in the use cases as more people seek to add value to it, with different approaches and use cases, and its this innovation that will crete real economic value. This is a very real case showing that welfare optisation occurs when information and knowledge is charged at marginal cost, which for digital information is zero or virtually zero.

We'll have to see what the Treasury does.

You might also want to see the Guardian's Campaign Page, Free our Data and the Open Knowledge Foundation's web site.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[business] topic:[knowledge] topic:[uk] topic:[government] topic:[data] topic:[free]

Saving the Planet

2008-03-18T21:00:00.000Z

Richard Barrington, who doesn't blog as often as he should, Sun's Green Lantern, introduced the day's keynote speaker, Craig Bennett, from Cambridge University's Programme for Industry. He spoke about the science of climate change. He used a combination of his own slides,and Al Gore's which reminds me I still haven't seen "an inconvenient truth".

Greenhouse gases are at an all time historical high. Unless we stop producing them, this will continue. Some natural (and a few human) processes consume carbon. The amount of green house gases in the atmosphere determine the temperature of the earth. The Stern Report talks about the potential effects of changes in the average temperature and argues it is possible to restrict the growth in green house gases, but the world needs to act in concert.

Craig's web site states that he led CPI’s work on the Bali Commuiniqué which brought together 170 global companies in support of a comprehensive, legally-binding United Nations framework to tackle climate change and generated global media attention, Sun was a signatory and is an active participant in the CPI's activities.

He also repeated Gore's slides about how science and journalists treat the issues, by comparing the weight of scientific peer reviewed papers versus the balance of media coverage. There were no scientists arguing that the level of green house gases are not dangerous. Science has agreed that green house gases cause climate change, and that human activity contributes to the danagerous level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The majority of press coverage was oppossed to this view. (2006).

When asked his opinion about what might be done, he firstly suggested that the politicians havn't really got to grips with the importance and inexorability of climate change and that another major western city will need a New Orleans style disaster before they take it seriously, but his other, possibly more low key suggestions were

there is no silver bullet, we need silver buckshot
tax bad things not good things i.e. can we discriminate between clean & dirty energy, its a bit tricky with a 17½% VAT on everything
government procurement should prioritise low carbon goods

This is what the Guardian said about the Stern Report, when it was first published.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[politics] topic:[green] topic:[ecology] topic:[environment] topic:[science] topic:[climatechange] topic:[UK]

Thinking about what Open means

2008-03-18T17:30:00.000Z

Up to London to meet with work colleagues in our public policy programmes team. The meeting was opened by Simon Phipps, who introduced us to his reworking of "Software Market 3.0". Its now called the "Adoption Market" and Simon expresses it best in his own words on his Sun blog. An illustration of how free creates adoption and innovation is that Open Solaris now has 750 projects. He then explored the nature and role of free licences. There is or should be agreement about the nature and purposes of the main types of free licences, although we can all get into the "mine's better than yours" arguments, which while being fun, aren't usually a good use of time. Simon pointed out that a number of the free licences are considering or adopting non-agression clauses.

One fear is that as the free licenses gather momentum, intellectual property owners will seek to defend themselves using trademarks. It may become very difficult to make new trademarks since they're all taken. Once, I was stupid enough to believe someone who told me that IBM had trademarked all the numbers between 1000 and 9999. (It was a long time ago, I am bit more cynical now.)

He also brought us up to date with our work on open document standards, it seems we and more and more users are coming to the belief that users should choose a document's format not product authors. One of the critical issues with a proprietary format, is that the product authors decide when a standard is obsolete, not the document owner/author.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[FOSS] topic:[standards] topic:[simonphipps] topic:[webmink]

Are the English giving up with foreign languages?

2008-03-15T21:30:00.000Z

Earlier this week, the Guardian reported that Cambridge University had finally dropped the requirement that undergraduate students have a language GCSE (16+). I remarked that I thought it a shame, and that the english education system should teach foreign languages, but it was pointed out to me that the national curriculum no longer mandates a language at GCSE and so Cambridge's previous policy would in future conflict with their and the government's goal of opening Oxbridge up to more state sector applicants. It seems to be a fact that english schools find it harder to get higher grades in languages than other subjects and that the pressure of the league table places has led a number of them to drop languages very rapidly.

Its yet another example of allowing the difficult to fall out of the education system.

Back in December, when I visited the EU Parliament building. I was taken aback by the number of languages spoken in the EU, since the translation booths are situated around the hall, and it is a very physical demonstration of europe's linguistic diversity. There 23 official languages. I have had it pointed out several times in my recent travels that the ubiquity of English means that I don't have to worry, to which I have two replies. The first is that, when I was at school, no-one had any idea of whether the EU was going to work or not nor how English would become so pervasive. I was offered the opportunity to learn both French and German, which I did with varying degrees of success. Secondly, its very rude to assume that others will learn your language, particularly if you are in their their country. I wish I could do better, but it seems the UK's educators disagree.

The map below is off the European Union and references the EU membership page.

On the EU membership page itself, the map has an HTML image map which displays the languages by country as you hover over each country. Interesting how such an old technology has such descriptive power. I wonder if I could have used an <IFRAME> to include this on the blog, although including other peoples material without permission in a way that is not clearly hyperlinked is not very good manners.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[europe] topic:[belgium] topic:[bruxelles] topic:[travel] topic:[EU] topic:[democracy] topic:[euparliament] topic:[language] topic:[england] topic:[education]

MMORPG, making them massive

2008-03-14T23:00:00.000Z

During the meeting, we considered the opportunities around Project Darkstar. This is a shardless gaming platform operating environment, written in Java, and inspired by Sun's extensive experience in building mission critical enterprise computing platforms.

MMORPGs seem to be even more popular in some of the far-eastern countries than in the west and its possible that by offering a programming platform Sun can create new conversations with game authors. Make no mistake, Darkstar is a game author's offering. One of the more interesting derivations of Darkstar is project wonderland, built on top of 'Looking Glass' an experimental three dimensional desktop, which has led to the creation of a business/collaboration orientated networked virtual world. This allows us to offer lessons from mission critical computing and its efficiency and predictability requirements, not to mention an understanding of the difference between a game world and business collaboration. It should be noted that networked virtual worlds are seen by both the EU Commission and Gartner as important computing platforms of the future.

The Darkstar code has been published under the GPL v2.0 and talking and thinking about the implications for developers with my colleagues led to my considering Bioware's experimentation with post royalty licenses. This interests me because together with the second life license which explicitly ensures that authors own their intellectual property, they both illustrate that the lawyers (or license designers) can ensure that licenses explicitly target both collaborative and and monetisation behaviour and reinforce the business models of the original license authors. The GPL uses sharing as a gatekeeper condition, while as noted above Second Life license protects author's intellectual property, hence encouraging the development of virtual property within the "world". The Bioware Aurora license ensures that purchaser's of the bioware games get the free right to use all community content. Bioware's Aurora license with which they licensed Neverwinter Nights and its kicker modules ensured that any user created content had to be distributed under the Aurora license. This ensured a no-commerce clause, for the binaries, and the requirement to run the modifications using a licensed version of the runtime. This both protected Bioware's license income and meant that external authors created additional demand for the original game, tools and runtime. N.B. These are not distributed separately.

There is a growing economic theory about the "optimum welfare price" of software and/or information, which I have promised Dominc Kay that I will write up. Copyright and monopoly ownership are legal distortions that inhibit this price occurring in a market. It is however generally the case that most inventors/authors intellectual property rights are fully asserted and freedom only licensed. However, the economic theory is for another day.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[games] topic:[mmorpg] topic:[darkstar] topic:[opensource] topic:[free] topic:[foss]

Hong Kong...

2008-03-14T19:00:00.000Z

I have never been to Hong Kong before but have just returned from a trip there to meet up with my new colleagues, the Chief Technologist for the Asia-Pacific region, his country Chief Technologists and their management peers and bosses. It was great to meet such a diverse yet energetic team and the conversations and social events. I visited one of the restaurants on the peak for the evening and had one of the largest meals I have ever eaten, or at least one with the most courses. On the way back down to central, I took this picture, the view down to the harbour.

This article has been backdated.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[hongkong]

Python

2008-03-05T14:46:01.000Z

Tim Bray noted that two of Python's leading developers are joining Sun. I'm pleased, along with all the others that have welcomed them. You can read what they have to say on their own blogs at Ted Leung, and Frank Wierzbicki.

When deciding to re-invest in my scripting skills last year I choose Python. I didn't do this for necessarily the best of reasons but I need to look inside planet planet and also a 3rd party plazes script, both of which are written in Python. I also spent several hours getting lost inside Red Hat's apt-get when I failed to install it properly a couple of years ago.

I bought the O'Reilly book, Learning Python but have got stuck on the exercises on method inheritance and overlays. I must get them finished this week, so I can read the next chapters on my next plane journey.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[python] topic:[sunw]

All together now

2008-02-28T02:00:00.000Z

Today is plenary day. Our guest keynote speaker is Steve Nunn from the Open Group. The Open Group is a standards consortium, who own both TOGAF & UNIX brands. Sun have just upgraded their membership of the Open Group to platimum sponsorship. Interestingly they also have personal accreditation schemes, including IT Architect and Technologist. I wonder how that matches up to the BCS Chartered/Fellow/Member scheme. The Open Group is obviously global, in a way that BCS is not, despite its ambitions.

The Open Group will also run accreditation schemes for their member/customers.This could be very interesting.

tags: topic:[consulting] topic:[iw2008] topic:[opengroup] topic:[professionalism]

On to the Technology

2008-02-28T02:00:00.000Z

Today is plenary day. Our guest keynote speaker is Steve Nunn from the Open Group. The Open Group is a standards consortium, who own both TOGAF & UNIX brands. Interestingly they also have personal accreditation schemes, including IT Architect, based on TOGAF, and Technologist. I wonder how that matches up to the BCS Chartered/Fellow/Member scheme. The Open Group is obviously a global brand, in a way that BCS is not, despite its ambitions. Steve gave us an overview of the activities of the open group and its membership and membership benefits.

The Open Group will also run accreditation schemes for their member/customers.

tags: topic:[consulting] topic:[iw2008] topic:[opengroup] topic:[professionalism]

More Snow

2008-02-26T22:50:00.000Z

The Q Center is an ex-school in its own grounds, I popped out at lunch to take some pictures of the snow laden trees. Here's one...

The rest can be found here at flickr.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[snow] topic:[picture] topic:[tree]

Wrong way round

2008-02-26T22:00:00.000Z

Today, I am mainly studying TOGAF! Given that I was travelling on day one, I am going to do the course in the wrong order. I doubt this'll make it easier.

tags: topic:[travel] "topic:[IT Architecture]" topic:[togaf]

Snow

2008-02-26T21:00:00.000Z

It's snowed overnight, and I am staying at the Q Center (sic), in St Charles.

tags: topic:[travel]

Commuting in Illinois

2008-02-26T05:30:00.000Z

I wish US Taxi drivers gave me more confidence that they knew where they're going. (I suppose I mean I wish this driver gave me more confidence). The view is a typically dreary US urban architecture, which I wish I could capture in the same way that 'Lost America' does at flickr.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[US] topic:[taxi]

Back to the US today

2008-02-25T23:00:00.000Z

Flying with Virgin to Chicago, in order to join my America's co-workers on an in-house training course.

This is the emptiest plane I have ever seen.

But I was able to get a picture of the Union Flag decorated wing tips.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[flying]

Organisation and Communication

2008-02-22T09:32:13.000Z

Just trying to sort myself out from my last trip abroad.

Firstly, I have sorted out my twitter so that I am now receiving on the phone from all my correspondents. I have looked at forwarding my twits onto my personal planet, but wget fails for some reason. I need to investigate further, although twitter's FAQ talks about a configuration feature. I shall only be using it occasionally, probably in emergencies to let people know that facebook/e-mail is not available to me, and to use other means to contact me.

It might be sensible to ensure that really important people subscribe and follow me, although they might expect a personal message, and also don't care about my internet connectivity.

I have also revised the my flickr application on facebook so that it forwards everything, not just the London pictures, and my facebook correspondents can now see the pictures as I upload them. I am not sure if it auto-updates, but I can force it to write into my mini-feed, so hopefully people get notified when new pictures go up. Now I just have to find time to upload them. The most recent uploads are from Spain and my Madrid trip, the most recent pictures are from Dubai. This will hopefully improve the quality of my facebook feed for those who follow me there.

Its a shame that I am trapped on such an old version of planet-planet, there's a couple of things that don't work as well as I'd hope. The slynkr posts are still broken, they don't display the description, but a generated comment, I have never got round to including either this blog, nor the flickr pictures. The plazes feed is also mis-mapped, but I am working my way through the O'Reilly python book to see if this helps me build a personal feed that does what I want.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[facebook] topic:[travel] topic:[atom] topic:[planet] topic:[communication] topic:[python] topic:[twitter] topic:[rss] topic:[feeds]

Dinner

2008-02-21T07:00:00.000Z

Dinner with some of the team at "L'Isola d'Ora", fantastic fish restaurant, huge starters and good company.

The journey back to the hotel was very 'dolce vita', small, narrow cobbled streets, full of parked cars and we swung past the Colosseum before heading out to the outskirts where I had been advised to book in.

And in Italy

2008-02-21T02:00:00.000Z

Meetings with my italian colleagues where I talked about my new role, the opportunities that "Red Shift" offers to Sun, why we still bother with Solaris and also talked about Web 2.0. We discussed the localisation of the italian economy which while large (the 5th in the world) has language as a barrier to entry and while the US economy is no longer the definition of scale, the italian economy ceased to be such a long time ago.

Despite this, Sun Italia has a number of good relationships with leading companies in Italy and have some exciting project successes under their belt, paricualrly in the software field, where a number of the italian government's web portals are based on Sun's technology. In addition to being hosted by Giussepe Russo, the Chief Technologist in Italy, I met with Carrado di Bari and Danilo Poca who both write about their work here at blogs.sun.com, albeit in italian.

tags: topic:[Business] topic:[Sunw] topic:[italy]

Don't be so clever!

2008-02-13T05:15:00.000Z

What am I doing trying to translate the menu here, its Italy, "You choose!" should be good enough.

tags topic:[travel] topic:[italy] topic:[food]

I can't get online...

2008-02-13T03:30:00.000Z

However, I can't believe that the hotel only has dial up in the room; I don't have the cable, nor the dial up agents to use this. Something to fix, as well as bluetoothing my mobile. The hotel has wi-fi in the Lobby and bar, but need to see my passport so that they can tell the police. I know that in the UK, we have some stupid rules about what we can and can't do without proving identity, but this strikes me as particularly foolish.

The upside is that I was able to use Twitter to let my twitter correspondents know about this and to text or phone me if they required urgent attention. I thought that this was useful, as opposed to the views I expressed last year, and so turned Lou Springer's feed back on to my phone. In future, I shall be using Twitter as a backup to chat, and for occasional broadcasts when the chat or mail is unavailable. If this sounds useful, follow me at Twitter or Facebook, where I also post my twits.

I wonder if I can consume my twits into my planet.

tags topic:[travel] topic:[italy] topic:[hotel] topic:[twitter]

Avanti Encora

2008-02-13T01:00:00.000Z

Once again Schengen proves its worth. No passport control at Fiumicino, straight out to the taxis and the joys of an italian taxi ride.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[italy] topic:[schengen]

Easy peasy

2008-02-13T00:00:00.000Z

Fantastic! Changing flights at Munich between my Stockholm and Rome flights was incredibly easy! All three countries are Schengen Treaty countries and the gates were 7 minutes apart. Munich Terminal 2 is new and just so easy to use. I shall try and use this next time, although I wonder how far one has to walk to get to a flight to the UK.

I have some pictures here that I shall upload later

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[germany] topic:[munich] topic:[airport] topic:[schengen]

Avanti

2008-02-12T18:00:00.000Z

Despite being told, that it had not snowed all winter, as I left the Hotel, it was trying to. I caught the Arlanda Express out to the airport and checked in to Rome via Munich. My last experience of changing flights to make a connection had not been good, and I wasn't looking forward to it, as I needed to change flights at Munich.

I have a picture of the train which I shall post sometime after I upload it. I am having some phone upload issues until I get home.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[stockholm]

... and in the evening.

2008-02-12T06:00:00.000Z

Dinner at the Radisson Skybar, and while the view doesn't really rival some of those in other cities I have visited, it's impressive enough.

Sadly, these flying visits give one little time to see the sites, I was driven to my hotel by a colleague who showed me a few of the sites from the car. I really must come back and make some time for myself to explore Stockholm properly, and bring the Rough Guide to Sweden with me.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[stockholm]

Its cold in the morning..

2008-02-11T15:00:00.000Z

To Heathrow for a seven o'clock to Stockholm. With a need to get there early and cross the airport to the terminal in time for check in, its a jolly early start. Interestingly google lets me down about finding the times that the parking express buses run to the terminals. I put them on my wiki, on a London Heathrow page, but google hasn't found it yet.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[heathrow] topic:[carparking] topic:[longstay] topic:[workinghours] topic:[openinghours]

Cafe Mauresque

2008-02-10T20:30:00.000Z

Down to Kent to visit the Cafe Mauresque, possibly for the last time, great food, influenced from Barcelona to Tripoli, but we've still not visited the Cathedral.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[Kent] topic:[canterbury] topic:[restaurant]

Midnight at the Oasis

2008-02-08T04:50:00.000Z

Or early morning at least.

It seems that Dubai's airports busy time of day is three in the morning. My return home is scheduled to take off at 3:45 this morning. I have just arrived; the traffic jam is horrendous and its heavingly busy. I have kept to my Rule No 2, and am flying out on Emirates. While I would have loved the miles and tier points with Virgin, they wanted £1000 more.

I reflect on the last few days, and its hard to avoid the clichés. It is a building site, the people are fabulously friendly and honest. The number of foreigners (and hence non citizen/subjects) present is huge. I avoided the obvious locations of ostentatious wealth, except for the hotel. I don't feel comfortable in those places; very few people in the west should. The oil-rich are just that, rich. Youn can tell be the number of super cars in the Hotel car park.

I look around and remember the journey in to the airport and its obvious that today is the start of half-term for many in the UK; a huge number of Brits have been arriving over the last couple of days.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[flying]

Out in the Desert

2008-02-06T07:00:00.000Z

Went for 'Safari' in the desert, dune bashing in 4x4's and returning in dune buggies. The latter reminded me why I spend
money on power steering. Great Fun, when not being scared. Important safety tips included, don't overtake and avoid the camels. One memorable view, which since I was driving a buggy at the time, I was unable to record was as we ascended a dune, a camel was standing at the top silouetted on the horizon, against a deepening blue sky.

Obviously, this picture, has no camel. I have posted the few pictures worth seeing into a set on flickr.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[UAE] topic:[safari] topic:[dubai]

Luxury

2008-02-05T08:15:00.000Z

Just checked in to the Kempinski. Now I really can't complain about this. You may have seen the bookmarks I tagged last week.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[dubai] topic:[hotel]

Off again

2008-02-05T07:30:00.000Z

I am off to Dubai, for an EMEA Global Systems Engineering, and while the midday take off is very civilised, it arrives late at three o'clock in the morning.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[Dubai]

About: my december visits to Bruxelles

2008-02-01T15:58:32.000Z

Most of the articles about my trips to Bruxelles in December were written much later but backdated to about the time of they occurred. The other pictures I took can be viewed at my Brussels set at flickr.com.

When writing about Bruxelles, I have mainly used the french language place names because I speak it better than I speak Flemish, which isn't hard. I am aware that linguistic politics is very sensitive in Belgium and that Brussel/Bruxelles is a designated bilingual city. I hope that an Englishman's efforts to recognise any foreign language will be acceptable. (Interestingly Google maps uses the flemish street names, or at nay rate, I havn't worked out how to use their French language ones.)

View Larger Map

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[europe] topic:[belgium] topic:[bruxelles] topic:[travel] topic:[french]

Microsoft & Yahoo!

2008-02-01T15:07:37.000Z

Microsoft and Yahoo to merge? Here's the Reuters story on it! It values Yahoo! at $44.6 bn which is a 62% premium on yesterday's price. The deal will be effected by a cash and shares offer.

What does it mean? Obviously its a defensive move against Google's competitive position, and I am being constantly persuaded by friends to try Google's new services. Market success in Google's business is based on keeping its users looking at their sites, they do this by doing things well and by innovating to attract new users (or at least new usages). Will a Microsoft/Yahoo! merger help them or me? I am not really sure.

A sub story at Reuters is that EU refuses to comment, although the story really doesn't say much more, apart from to name the spokesman.

Its interesting to check out their combined network services, games, MMORPGs, chat, groups, bookmarks and pictures. Yahoo! has had a habit of picking up the social service providers I'd chosen, I know it'll impact me. I wonder if it will or should impact my search for a new internet client.

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" topic:[microsoft] topic:[yahoo!] topic:[m+a]

Mashing up with Snipsnap

2008-01-31T10:35:17.000Z

Having run a personal snipsnap wiki for a number of months, I have got to the stage where I want to use it as a host for a couple of mashups. Fortunately there is a user contributed macro that allows for the use of HTML within a snipsnap page. Otherwise, because the page input screen interprets a markup language, all HTML is treated as text. This macro is installed by copying it i.e. the .jar file to the directory named in the Java CLASSPATH. It really is as simple as that, and then using snipsnap's macro syntax. You can also see what I have written at my bliki.

{html}
<SPAN STYLE="color:red">This font is Red caused by a Span tag pair</SPAN>
{html}

This has allowed me to embed a google map in one of my pages, the example below is about Brussels.

and the example below shows a del.icio.us tag roll.

In both cases, I have implemented then using <IFRAME> tags; in Google's case because they suggest it and in the del.icio.us case because it is a Javascript and the CSS wasn't working. It seemed easier to escape the CSS domain by using IFRAME as I have had difficulty with this problem before. I think its to do with the anchor rules I define in the CSS files. I have had this problem with roller as well, although not with the del.icio.us tag cloud as you can see my checking out My Links page at blogs.sun.com, although it remains marked as beta. You can also see what I have written at my bliki, but again, its not much more.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[snipsnap] topic:[html] topic:[css] topic:[googlemaps] topic:[tags] topic:[wikimarkup] topic:[mashup]

A flying visit to Europe

2008-01-26T18:00:00.000Z

I have just been on a flying visit to Luxembourg and Austria, and stayed over night in Krems Am Donau, where I was due to talk at a meeting of Sun's Partners. This was the view from my room in the morning.

I took this with the panoramic shot option from the phone. I am not sure how bad this is, or if in fact the light of the Danube makes it look poorly joined, its hard to say, but I think this is an area that Sony-Ericsson need to work on. I find using the panoramic join feature almost unusable.

Since my route had involved flying from London to Luxembourg and on to Vienna, my journey home seemed quite simple although I was told by my travel agent that the last direct flight left too early for me to use, so I made the mistake of agreeing to change at Frankfurt. This meant my journey required four separate carriers and a paper ticket. While at Luxembourg, I noticed that they had two wings to the terminal building, with one of them reserved for Schengen Treaty destinations. (This is the EU treaty on common borders which allows people to enter Schengen countries from another without passport inspection.) In Luxembourg, the distance between the Schengen gates and the rest of the terminal building is less than 100 metres. The UK is not a full signatory to Schengen, but I didn't take this as a warning.

So I took off from Vienna late. I was flying with Adria (Air Slovenia). I didn't know Slovenia had a national airline and while the dinner was rather nice, when we reached Frankfurt they'd lost their landing slot and had to wait to land, delaying us further. We then had to wait for everyone to recovery their luggage before the bus could drive us to the terminal building, which was the Schengen entry building. The journey to the BA gates took over 30 minutes, with two luggage inspections, I missed the plane by a couple of minutes and then had to travel back to the other terminal to get my flight rebooked. However, there are worse places to stay overnight than Frankfurt airport and the flight home on Saturday was very comfortable However I have renewed my determination to keep to simple rules when doing this sort of rush trip.

Don't rely on the last flight home, its often delayed
Try and leave an airport on the airport's dominant carrier, they're less likely to be pissed about
If you have to execute a change, leave enough time, and ensure you can check in for both legs at once
Use an E-Ticket

I don't see how I can avoid the Schengen problem i.e. I will always be in the wrong part of the airport, until the UK signs up. I'm just going to have to make sure that I have the time, and that my travel agents don't book something bloody stupid.

tags: topic:[flying] topic:[europe] topic:[schengen] topic:[travel] topic:[krems] topic:[austria] topic:[Frankfurt] topic:[photography] topic:[K610i] topic:[panorama]

Hi MySQL, welcome to Sun

2008-01-18T12:37:06.000Z

Wow, the MySQL announcement from Sun has certainly made a lot of noise in the blogosphere. The Register comments here..., and also post their interview with Rich Green & Marten Mikos. You've probably seen Jonatahan's Blog and Comments.

The Register Article has some interesting, and some wrong headed and tedious comments about the MySQL current licencsing policies, it'll be interesting to see how it moves forward. We all obviously have a lot to learn, it should be fun.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[business] topic:[economics] topic:[opensource] topic:[m+a] topic:[SUNW] topic:[mysql] topic:[rdbms] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[database]

Being at the right place at the right time

2008-01-17T16:20:50.000Z

I have been very busy over the last couple of months, and my diary management has been poor, so since New Year I have been making more effort to do better.

I got a new laptop PC last week, a Toshiba Tecra M5 and propose to write up my build; it will have a dual windows/solaris boot partition utilising Nevada, aka opensolaris and windows XP. I rapidly discovered the new windows build comes with Thunderbird 2 and an uptodate version of Lightning, with the wcaps calendar plugin for Thunderbird. This turns Thunderbird into a calendar client for the ical compliant calendar server, which I use as my business diary.

At first, I thought that's the last thing I need, I already use Java Calender Express, an internal http browser hosted reader and Evolution, and my phone, do I really need a fifth, however today I discovered that this client permits some very slick inter-calendar invitations. One of my Mac using colleagues issued a meeting invite from their ical client to my mail box, which I received, pressed accept, and the software wrote the invite into my calendar. What's cute is that this is client to client invitations.

I can now sync this with my phone, a Sony Ericsson K610i. The connection parameters are what you would expect, but the syncml URL is site specific, so you need to find it out. I also am not sure if the 'database names' are mandatory or configurable. Anyway, its changed my life. Now I only have double entry, once electronically, and once to my Filofax.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[calendar] topic:[thunderbird] topic:[syncronisation] topic:[mac] topic:[diary] topic:[meetings] topic:[laptop] topic:[lifehack]

Twinsen's Adventures on a modern machine

2008-01-03T17:25:18.000Z

Over the break I installed Twinsen's Oddessey, also known as Little Big Adventure 2, on my Alienware Aurora earlier this week. I have not been able to play this since we upgraded from Windows 95. I had previously discovered a couple of emulators that might be of help, and wrote about them last Xmas. I chose to try Dosbox who hang out at http://www.dosbox.com. I chose them, because their ambitions seem larger and more open and LBA was documented as working.

So, I downloaded the installer and ran it to install dosbox. I checked out their install guide, which gave good advice on directory structure and the mount command. I used the dosbox to install the software, using two mount commands, one to make the cdrom available to the dosbox, and the second does an effective chroot and assigns a drive letter to the install directory. This also needs to be done when running the program. The other really usefull resource I found was at MagicBall, where they document in a step by step manner how to get LBA2 to run.

Here's how it looks running, you can make it run full screen, but it looks pretty poor as it was designed for a VGA screen. The other great thing is that they claim dosbox runs on other operating systems. So if you have a MAC, or are using Linux, then you can now have access to this great game.

Marginally more detail is on my bliki, but if you want to copy me you're better off looking at the resources above.

I wonder how easy a Solaris x86 build would be, or if it'll run in a branded zone.

tags: topic:[Games] topic:[lba] topic:[dosbox] "topic:[computer games]" topic:[emulator] topic:[dos] topic:[twinsen]

Re: Twinsen's Adventures on a modern machine

2008-01-03T19:20:25.000Z

Hi,
Just built dosbox 0.72 on my Nevada laptop.
Set up your PATH:-
solaris-devx{rich}306: echo $PATH
/bin:/usr/bin:/etc:/opt/SUNWspro:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/sbin:.:/usr/ccs/bin
Then run /configure;make
./src/dosbox
Now I just need some DOS apps :-)
Hope this helps

Cheers
Richard

Happy new Year

2008-01-03T16:56:55.000Z

A happy new year to all my readers and friends

tags: topic:[greetings] topic:[newyear] topic:[2008]

About Tin Tin

2007-12-22T07:30:00.000Z

After a high minded day yesterday, we walked across the lower town to the belgian comic museum CXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. This has one gallery on belgium's most comic famous export, Tin Tin. I know there are some that believe that Tin Tin comes from Teeside, but that's not the case. The museum shop seemed to have every single Tin Tin book ever, including the first which is in black & white and called Tin Tin in the land of the soviets. The museum had a number of other exhibits beyond Tin Tin, as it seems that Belgian comic authors have been prolific over the years and the building is worth visiting itself as an example of Victor Horta's architecture; lots of iron and glass. The picture below is actually outside the Tin Tin shop elsewhere in Brussels, but I thought you'd like to see it.

That's me that is.

We caught the train out to the airport and found ourselves in the tender care of Flybe. Our flight was cancelled and while we were put up in a 5* hotel, the airline pays a 2* rate. The room was great but they really jerk you around once your in this fix.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[europe] topic:[belgium] topic:[bruxelles] topic:[travel] topic:[tintin]

Republican Democracay

2007-12-21T00:00:00.000Z

We then walked over to the European Quarter, as we wanted to visit the debating chamber of the European Parliament. We went via the Place Jourdain, where we bought some 'frittes' from Maison Antoinne. This is a stall which has an arrangement with the surrounding bars so you can eat indoors and warm up with your drink of choice, coffee or schnapps. The parliament building permits visits to the debating chamber, as they should;, we pay for it. So we went there and had a look round.

Outside the the building there are plaques and flags for each of the member states, together with a statue of a women holding the Euro symbol. The buildings are contemporary and stark contrast to the Hapsburg grandeur of the Upper Town. In the park beside the parliament building is a section of the Berlin Wall, with its graffiti presumably untouched from when it was in Berlin. One of the wipeout games we play at home is 'countries of the EU', this is fun because its changing so rapidly and because of the various states that countries can occupy. States can be in negotiation to join, members, euro zone members or Schengen treaty signatories. So when we entered the chamber, hanging above the chamber are the the translation booths, and while there are 27 member states, there are 23 official languages, so one booth for each language really brought home the linguistic diversity of today's European Union.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[europe] topic:[belgium] topic:[bruxelles] topic:[travel] topic:[EU] topic:[democracy] topic:[euparliament] topic:[language]

Art in Bruxelles

2007-12-20T20:00:00.000Z

Today we walked over to the Upper Town in order to visit the "Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts" to look at the Magrittes. We were rather impressed by the Social Realists and came across a couple of pictures by Laermans, which were a bit of a find. The museum is located in one of the palaces that the historic, dynastic rulers no longer require. After this, we walked up to the park. This is not in the best of states in the middle of winter, but the views across the lower town are pretty impressive, although I wasn't able to get a decent picture, even today's digital cameras aren't good enough to capture that sort of horizon. (Or at least mine isn't). The whole area is very impressive, Royal Families have always been able to get hold of, if not good then at least grandiose architects. I think that the style is rather understated, however, the scale is not.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[europe] topic:[belgium] topic:[bruxelles] topic:[travel] topic:[art] topic:[architecture]

Birthday in Brussels

2007-12-20T07:30:00.000Z

Back to Brussels for a flying visit, but planning to stay on for a couple of days to enjoy the sights, food and drink in Belgium's and the EU's Capital. Today, after my meeting, opposite the Berlaymont, we walked around the lower town looking for somewhere to eat. We enjoyed the "Winterfest" at La Bourse & Place St. Catherine and returned to the Grand Place and were able to enjoy the opera and lights together, having eaten some Tapas, with a rather fine Rioja. A Faustino No 7.

While I had broken one of my rules by working on my birthday, it was a good way of spending it. I rather enjoyed the atmosphere.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[europe] topic:[belgium] topic:[bruxelles] topic:[travel] topic:[wine]

Tapas, Rioja & Beer

2007-12-13T07:30:00.000Z

Tonight, I had the chance to get out and see some of Brussels. The first place to start was the "Grand Place". In the run up to Xmas, they have lit the Hotel de Ville with spot lights and coloured filters, which they vary in time to the opera they play. Very cultured!

They also light up the front of "the Bourse", which at this time of year is surrounded by WinterFest stalls selling mulled wine and tat. I then cut accross to 'Le Bar Tapas' which serves a fine Tapas and some nice Rioja.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[europe] topic:[belgium] topic:[brussels] topic:[xmas] topic:[bourse]

So what is wrong with the Internet?

2007-12-13T01:45:00.000Z

On Day 2, of the NESSI AGM, we broke into seminar groups. The first session I attended was called the ' Future of the Internet', it was led by Mike Fisher of BT [Google him], who presented about the forces for change on the internet, both historic constraints and changes being brought about by technology innovation, and demand. Again a key view of the future is the the internet evolves from a network of computers, beyond a network of things to a network of services. Since Mike comes from a network company, and a large one at that, and so understands how poorly IT is ready to manage the challenge of scale raised by these factors.

In the afternoon, I attended the 'Service Orientated Infrastructure' session. Some aspects of the problem domain are very broad and interesting, but the discussions seemed focused around today's grid solutions in academia and commerce, although I arrived late. This working group's documents are also available on the NESSI web site SOI work group page, and their own web site. The GRID Strategic Research Agenda is available from the NESSI Site [.pdf].

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[internet] topic:[future] topic:[futurology] topic:[research] topic:[NESSI] topic:[EU] topic:[R&D]

NESSI's Research & Projects

2007-12-12T01:30:00.000Z

There then followed a series of presentations about the current approach to research and most interestingly presentations from the leading strategic projects. These can be found on the NESSI's AGM page on their web site.

This was followed by cocktails. Very nice!

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[future] topic:[futurology] topic:[research] topic:[NESSI] topic:[EU] topic:[R&D]

Coming soon...servicenet

2007-12-11T22:00:00.000Z

A EU funded attempt to create an academic Network of Excellence, led by University of Dusberg-Essen, called S*Cube. There are 16 partner universities who will all participate equally, the UK partner is City University, London.

Dr. (Klaus) Pohl, predicted that the nature of the Internet was going to change so radically, that its name should be changed. His vision is of a network of services. Will the transition from a network of computers to a network of things require new network paradigms and protocols? Will it challenge the Atomic locking single write-ahead log database?

Dr. Pohl exposed a research framework, that analysed Service Technology as the existence and interfaces between business processes, Service Components and Service engineering. These need to be created which requires engineering knowledge and science and monitoring and adapting, which are classified as Service Engineering. It is felt that interfaces between these domains can also be developed and the S-Cube research is looking at developing knowledge from current intellectual property around BPM, grid, systems engineering and service management.

S-Cube have a web site coming on line with a pre-registration feature.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[future] topic:[futureology] topic:[research]

The ambition of Open Systems

2007-12-11T21:00:00.000Z

Prof. Carlo Ghezzi, of the Politecnico di Milano, presented on Academic/Corporate collaboration and among other things examined the drivers of macro-change in open world. He argued that inter-operability is not enough, and that both a series of what he called self-* qualities are required such as self-healing, self-configuration etc. He also again identified the self-advertisement as a new problem to allow services to be discovered and used.

I wonder if these ambitions are contrary to the classic inspection and vote that takes place in today's clusters.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[future] topic:[futurology] topic:[research]

Three into two wont go

2007-12-11T20:20:00.000Z

One needs to bear in mind that no flat screen computer can present a 3D world.

tags: silly

And in Italy?

2007-12-11T20:15:00.000Z

Mr Paolo Donzelli, of the Italian Department for Technical Innovation, presented on the italian government's policies in sustaining and nurturing innovation, and IT innovation in particular. (The slides for this and all other presentations I'm commenting on should be available on the NESSI web site). A fascinating study, which explained their strategy and the analysis that led to it, making a distinction between digital enablement, encouraging usability and adoption, reducing the digital divide and straight forward training.

They have and are looked very hard at healthcare systems and incubated a web or distributed computing approach as opposed to a messaging solution. Possibly more red shift than blue shift.

Their approach in the education sector is less advanced; they have a cost problem on the desk top. I should find someone to give them a call.

I found it interesting that their showcase industry approach is textiles which they see as very important to the italian economy. It reminds me however about the case study based on a Spain to New York fashion house that has a design to ERP solution and can offer haute couture for several days at a time, with both industry leading time to market (days) when they're innovating their market, and best of class rapid response when they've been out flanked. It seems that high fashion is a true time to market industry and thus IT can obviously help.

Paolo made some comments about the suitability of 3D computing and hence virtual worlds as design aids in the textile industry scenario. As you can see from my previous blog articles, "Driving Change on the Internet" (see below) and "How real is Virtuality?", I am very cautious about the utility of virtual worlds and particularly second life, but placing the problem domain in a world of 3 dimensions, such as fashion, or even engineering design may give it a relevance I haven't recognised. It doesn't solve the problem examined on this blog in the latter article, that to program in a virtual world, you need to understand the virtual world's physics. The bulk of programming theory since Djikstra has involved understanding the real world problem and modeling it, or creating languages in which the real world can be described, this approach can't be taken in second life. Building a wind tunnel in Second Life would be very difficult and almost certainly more costly than simulating it using other tools. (No doubt, someone has done it and will prove me wrong.) Whether this is a fundamental feature of virtual worlds, I don't know.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[economics] topic:[EU] topic:[italy] topic:[virtualworlds]

Spanish Medicine

2007-12-11T19:45:00.000Z

After the coffee break, Dr Joan Bigora spoke about IT adoption in Barcelona City Hospital.

He is the Managing Director and has an interesting view on what he needs to know about IT as the MD of a hospital. I was speaking the day before to a Sun colleague, about CEO's saying suppliers need to talk their language; they are not interested in IT. It's clear to me that IT is the business of a growing number of CEOs. Unless they understand both the problems it can solve and the capability of the technology, they'll get their key investments wrong. So when I say he had an interesting view, he obviously felt he needs to know this stuff.

Medicine is the obvious ultimate knowledge industry. IT can thus add tremendous value in many areas. This is the third presentation I have had from spanish people about IT in healthcare, specifically examining the success of remote healthcare systems, using new age monitors and video conferencing for case care work and even remote diagnosis. They may have something, and it is remarkable how simple some of these initiatives are. I expect that third wave medical systems will need to deal with massive scale and some very interesting provisioning and change management problems, and even the spanish seem not yet to be at this point yet, which Dr Bigora acknowledged.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[e-health] topic:[NESSI] topic:[society] topic:[spain] topic:[healthcare]

Software, economics and society

2007-12-11T19:30:00.000Z

We have just heard from Dr. Frans De Bruïne and Ken Ducatel, the former talked about the need for Security, to guard against global warming and the demographic time bomb; Europe is not just interested in health care because of the socialists. The ageing population is a jeopardy to the wealth engine of work and the various governments and commission all have different responses (Oh Boy!).

He stated that for instance in Holland, they're playing with a government 'Facebook' page. Will this lead to you having to document your car insurance, child support liabilities and private pension provision on-line in a government portal. The latter might help keep track of what the insurance companies owe you, but do you really want this hackable, or publishable at the will of politicians and civil servants? Despite these fears it is a possible first step to a real EU Web 2.0 and user created content, I am not sure what value one can create through communities in such a portal. It would also need some serious investment in reaching all the EU's citizens, both in the network and server infrastructure to reach everyone, but also in client access ubiquity. Not everyone has access to a computer, although most have phones and the ipod touch with its wi-fi is an interesting and probably popular innovation of the internet hand held device. Wi-fi is neither as ubiquitous, nor as cheap as in the US yet, and I suspect it varies massively with the EU.

He also spoke about how in Germany, networked medical care systems in the home allowed patients to be discharged earlier, thus saving money. Presumably the IT reduces the number of relapses.

Ducatel argued that the US uses its its (minimal, except for defense) public requirement to seed ICT innovation. I wonder if this is because US business has a greater appetite to build its own code. The flip side of this is that "Europe under uses Software". Its an opportunity for growth, and an opportunity for supply, but commercial stove piping inhibits the growth opportunity.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[society] topic:[economics] topic:[e-health] topic:[portals] topic:[e-government] topic:[investment] topic:[NESSI] topic:[internet] topic:[future] topic:[futurology]

Driving change on the internet

2007-12-11T18:00:00.000Z

The first key note was from Dr. Joao Schwarz Da Silva, a Director from the Commission's ICT. He envisioned a network of services driven by trends easily observable today. These are,

Social Networks
Digital Production
Virtual Worlds
Internet of Things

Much of the consideration around social networks seems around how to monetise the size of the network. The value created by cooperation seems always to be under valued. Dr. Da Silva predicted that the growth of social networks and user created content would lead to the growth of what he calls Digital Production. At its most simple, this will be just allowing mashups on a home page, however more complex models such as the tools for machinima or audio manipulation are clearly here today, it'll be interesting to see where this goes.

I am more questioning that virtual worlds will become ubiquitous and powerful problem solving tools. It is clear that World of Warcraft is a hugely popular both social network and digital world, but we have spent 1000's of years devising two dimensional representations of most of the problems we seek to solve. We need new representational metaphors before 3D rendering and virtual worlds become serious problem solving devices. I mentioned this earlier in the year. These criticisms are before considering that a Social Network needs to leverage the wisdom of crowds, or at least the wisdom of huddles. Facebook's visual {book/DVD} shelf works because you can see what both your close friends and strangers say about the books and films you're interested in. You can see what everyone, or at least your friends recommend. An interesting counterpoint though is that if you consider electronic gaming to be a social network, then sharding reduces the wisdom of crowds; you can only learn from the wisdom of a shard. There's lots of work to do before 3D and/or Virtual Worlds truly take off.

He then looked at how in a network of services, one discovers anything useful. So this is partly how does one discover any content, such as images (tags), houses (attributes) etc., but for services we expect a directory solution. There isn't yet a directory of internet services.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[R&D] topic:[NESSI] topic:[Grid] topic:[SOI] topic:[internet] topic:[futurology] topic:[future]

Hi Tech in Europe

2007-12-11T06:00:00.000Z

And back to Brussels for a bit of EU politicking. Last time I traveled through Heathrow and the journey home was terrible. This time I travel through Southampton and the journey out is fine. I get to the Sun Office on the airport estate, do my meeting and have an easy ride into the hotel in the city centre.

I am attending the NESSI AGM. I wrote about it last time I visited Brussels in November, but it is having its AGM over the next two days. I will be commenting on it, but the slides and AV files will appear on its web site.

tags: topic:[EU] topic:[R&D] topic:[NESSI] topic:[Grid] topic:[SOI] topic:[Brussels] topic:[Bruxelles]

Broadening my Horizons

2007-12-05T20:00:00.000Z

I have just arrived at Praia Del Rey, which is actually a golf course to the north of Lisbon on the atlantic coast. I am at a conference of Sun's EMEA Telco sales team.

I have just listened to a tedious lecture about how all Telcos are looking for new high value services to increase ARPU. I wonder if any of them actually want to run an efficient network, and charge for it. I think so.

Meanwhile, its a tremendous beach, you can see the other pictures at my flickr site.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[telco] topic:[business] topic:[economics] topic:[Portugal] topic:[Lisbon] topic:[beach] topic:[waves]

Sun is the greatest and most generous Opensource Company on the planet!

2007-11-21T05:00:00.000Z

Oddly, it is the 1st Aniversary of the EU's publication of their report, "Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU". In this report, they identified Sun as the single largest corporate doner of open source code in the world. [.pdf...] Sun had contributed over three times the man hours as the second place company, IBM. This finding was before Sun open sourced JAVA.

Source: Economic Impact of FLOSS on innovation and competitiveness of the EU ICT Sector. (2006), published by the EU Commission.

NB The full report is 287 pages long.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[free] topic:[opensource] topic:[FLOSS] topic:[EU] topic:[SUNW]

We're all in Europe now!

2007-11-21T00:15:00.000Z

I travelled over to Brussels for a meeting of the NESSI steering comittee, to which I have just been appointet; its one of the EU's NGOs in the IT industry, representing major IT vendors, which advises the commission on its ICT R&D budget.

Its a long time since I have been in Brussels, and with these ninja trips, its hard to get to know the town. I'm a bit fed up my rough guide didn't turn up on time, but it won't be the last time I'm here so I have next time to look forward to.

I visited the Sun offices at Rondpoint Robert Shuman, which is opposite the EU Commission building, but I was too busy to take any photographs with my camera, which I had managed to remember to bring, and the picture I took with the phone was so poor I have deleted it. Its undergoing a re-furb, (the building not my cameras), and is not looking its best at the moment. I had a quick look at flickr to see if anyone had some good (CC) pictures, but flickr's default is all rights reserved and I couldn't find any. (Since I publish under a BY-NC-SA creative commons licence, I suppose this is one of the reasons I am so popular with schmapp. Since most people publish on Flickr with the defaults, I am not competing with a lot of people.) The EC head quarters building's name is the Centre Berlaymont, and if you search flickr with Berlaymont as a tag, you can find some pictures. I'll post mine when I get some worth posting. I expect to be back here soon.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[Brussels] topic:[Bruxelles] topic:[copyright] topic:[EU] topic:[NESSI] topic:[Berlaymont]

It's that time again. Opensolaris users in London

2007-11-20T05:56:16.000Z

The next meeting of the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) is due to be held this Wednesday,Nov 21st i.e. tomorrow at Sun's Customer Briefing Centre, Regis House on Lower King William St. The agenda has been posted at their site, and is about HA Clustering. On another note, I don't expect to go to the December meeting as it's on my birthday, but it is due on 19th December, other details as normal.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[group] topic:[losug]

Look at what Google won't put in a press release

2007-11-14T20:37:54.000Z

Last month, just before traveling to the West Coast, I practiced my latest presentation,"Six reasons to choose Solaris", in which I have a slide with some company logos of the users of Solaris 10. One of my audience asked why Google wasn't on the slide. I driveled on about their use of Solaris not being public and he pointed me at this job ad on their web site, for a Solaris trained systems administrator. It seems they're also using Oracle! Using Google to look for the obvious keywords, finds this google job ad for a Solaris/Oracle administrator, which isn't even on their site. Google uses Solaris is now a public domain fact.

I wonder how many of my "Six reasons" led to Google making this decision.

tags: topic:[google] topic:[oracle] topic:[solaris] topic:[technology] topic:[jobs] topic:[innovation]

More about Plazes

2007-11-12T16:54:19.000Z

As you may know, I am a fan of Plazes and one thing I havn't had time to document is that our friends as plazes have fixed one of my informal RFEs (More...). You can remove a traze from your trail now. The remove activity button is all over the site. This'll make managing the plaze trial easier and more accurate. The mobile phone interface seems to remain problematic, but the whole site is becoming useful for keeping touch with highly mobile colleagues.

Sadly there is no Solaris agent and the Linux one seems to have gone into hiding, but I have a few ideas and am trying to work on an answer between other projects.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[plazes] topic:[geography] topic:[web2.0] topic:[travel]

Plane today, train tomorrow

2007-11-12T16:36:05.000Z

I arrived in Denver last night for the first time in five years and travelled up to Broomfield. I am attending Sun's Data Management Ambassador's conference for the first time.

On the plane, I finished yesterday's Guardian Travel section. This is celebrating the opening of St. Pancras Euro* Terminal, which reduces the train time to travel to a number of western european cities. I am expecting to visit Brussels more frequently over the next couple of months, so thier hints about Brussels should be useful, it's a shame that St. Pancras is two hours away from where I live.

The Guardian's picture of the new St. Pancras.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[railway] topic:[train] topic:[Denver]

Another look at Seville

2007-10-29T12:05:21.000Z

Over the weekend, the Guardian Travel Section revisited Seville. In an article called "You want Moor!", they review things to do and see, places to stay, drink and dance.

The Patio de las Doncellas in the Real Alcazar, taken on my visit last year.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[spain] topic:[seville]

The right to be wrong in public

2007-10-23T14:33:34.000Z

Reading the New Statesman, over the last few days, and they state that in the UK, journalists can defend themselves against the allegation of inaccuracy. Judges will test them on how hard they worked to verify the quality/accuracy of the information, was there an urgent need to publish, did the journalist/publisher present it as fact or with caveats and was the other side of the story presented. (I hope the permalink is "Truth, Lies & Fools".)

tags: topic:[libel] topic:[UK] topic:[pressfreedom]

Open Solaris users in London on Wednesday

2007-10-15T09:03:19.000Z

The next meeting of the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) is due to be held this Wednesday, Oct 17th at Sun's Customer Briefing Centre, Regis House on Lower King William St. The agenda has been posted at their site, and is about LDOMS. Once again, I have been unable to give people both a two week and two day notice of these meetings, and since two days notice would be tomorrow, I shan't bother as its too close to this notice to be useful.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[group] topic:[losug]

Home again

2007-10-15T08:57:58.000Z

Back home in the UK, and back to work. I'll be posting my blog articles about CEC over the next couple of days but shall back date them to near the time of occurrence. This shouldn't impact RSS readers, but if you read my blog through the HTML interface, you might like to return from time to time. Although I shall let you know when I've finished.

tags: topic:[suncec2007]

How real is Virtuality?

2007-10-11T05:15:00.000Z

We travelled north up the strip, and had dinner at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba. It was a bit of a european thing with a bunch of brits, french and germans. This cafe has an excellent if more limited wine list and we were fortunate to have the advice of Eric Bezille and Dave Tong. Our waiter was excellent, knew what he was selling and very patient. It must be hard selling to a bunch of opinionated engineers.

We talked about a number of things, of which one was second life. If you've been following the suncec2007 technorati feed, you may know that we broadcast the general sessions into various rooms of second life and some of us have been preparing for the conference by signing up and preparing our accounts. Sun also haven experimental virtual world, about which you can find out more at Horst Thieme's blog. I don't think I spent as much time there as some of my colleagues, but the second life team had built a Vegas virtual world representing the two hotels we actually used. Now since one of these was the Paris, or is that Paris, we have a software implementation, of an imitation of a real place. Very eXtisenz! In fact, the first time it went onto the screen, Dan Berg on the stage in an imitation of Paris, met Dan Berg in Second Life, in a virtual imitation of Paris. This is odd, nearly as odd as Las Vegas. I didn't think highly of the video quality and wonder if it was due to the number of people in the 'island'.

My feeling is that the virtual worlds will take off as we develop new metaphors for problem solving. I wonder if one modelled a data centre, for instance, if you could enhance the systems management console, by for instance illustrating where jobs were using colour coded object overlays and illustrate the system utilisation. Visualising the temperature of the air and the systems would also be possible. This is a fairly poor example of what I mean in that new problem visualisation techniques are required that rely on having three dimensions (or more) and the 3D value becomes compelling. (I am not sure the above example is.) I have not yet tried to have a virtual meeting in Second Life, so I can't comment as to how effective it is in replacing the conference call, but there now a number of desktop tools that enhance the conference call, and second life conferences can't be joined if participants only have a phone, although the voice quality might be mightily enhanced by the necessity to use a laptop, connect to the internet and use voice over ip.

Mike Ramchand & Olaf Schnapauff also explored the theory that the Linden Lab scripting language didn't enable any insight into the problems being represented. One manipulates second life, and doesn't model reality, or even the virtual reality of the problem.

I am not sure I get it as a game, but if Second Life remains merely a virtual reality implementation of the real world, while it may not fail, it will not become the next big thing.

If you havn't already, see also "GetaFirstLife".

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[suncec2007] topic:[winebar] topic:[booze] topic:[food+drink] topic:[tapas] topic:[lasvegas] topic:[secondlife] topic:[virtualworlds]

The biggest wine rack in the World

2007-10-11T00:15:00.000Z

I went down to the Mandalay Bay again to visit the Aureole. This is a wine bar with a four story wine rack. The bar staff use a trapeze to retrieve the wine. It has to be seen to be believed.

And now, you can see it! It claims to have 69,000 wines. As you can imagine a hard copy wine menu would be a bit of weight, requiring the restaurant to employ the world's strongest man as somelier. However, they use a tablet pc as the wine list, not quite web 2.0 but cute all the same. The service was immaculate and the company at the table can be pretty fussy. I thoroughly recommend you visit this place either for a "sharp one" or for dinner.

tags: topic:[suncec2007] topic:[winebar] topic:[booze] topic:[food+drink] topic:[lasvegas]

Beyond the strip

2007-10-10T21:30:00.000Z

I popped out to Henderson to visit a friend of my father, which gave me two views of Las Vegas, the suburbs and the strip from ground level. I only had my phone, which I know is pointless for pictures like this. Next time!

tags: topic:[suncec2007]

Wrapping Up

2007-10-10T19:15:00.000Z

I participated in Constantine's wrap of the show as the stage came down.

tags: topic:[suncec2007]

Last Words at CEC 2007

2007-10-10T18:45:00.000Z

Onto, the final general session which stars Don Grantham, Executive Vice President for Global Sales and Services. He talked about the progress over the last 15 months, and the revised focus for the next 12 months. While David Brent gets confused whether a companies greatest asset is its customers or people, and Dilbert's boss thinks its the paper clips, I believe Don Grantham's commitment to talent in people is real, substantial and genuine. One of the things that CEC reminds one is that we have great people, just imagine what we can do if we're equipped and empowered appropriately.

While doing the Q&A, Dan Berg, the CEC host and my new boss, stated that the CEC messaging team would produce a White Paper, documenting the CEC Messaging Platform. While no-one likes to be bounced, this is something we should do and I know that the two key developers are happy to do this. I'll keep you in touch.

tags: topic:[suncec2007] topic:[talent]

Queueing to ask Questions

2007-10-10T17:15:00.000Z

We had a couple of services minders to help us understand the value of the questions. I have to say that volume is often a good guide, and we may have buried some good/important questions, but John Greaves and Ian White asked people to use the floor mics, and some good questions came in. This re-inforces the fact that many services staff do not have company laptops or mobiles.

Actually I am not happy with this; our experience is that many questions from the floor are self indulgent and of, at the best, minority interest. Have you noticed how they always introduce themselves? Actually the ones I hate are ,

"Hi, my name is xxxxxx xxxxxxx, I agree with everything you say, please could you say some more"

and my second most resented quesion is,

"Hey dude! What are you doing about the stock price?"

The best answer to this that I have heard is,

"What are you doing? I have stopped selling it!"

tags: topic:[suncec2007]

Re: Queueing to ask Questions

2007-10-18T09:15:22.000Z

On the stock price question, I tend to say "I've stopped listening to analysts, and started thinking".

I had a bit of an epiphany, a couple of years back, when two events happened. First, Shell posted the single largest profit in British corporate history - however it was less than the analysts predicted it would be, so the stock bombed. Second, Google grew by "only" 38 percent year-on-year, which was less than the analysts predicted, so the stock bombed.

Also, from personal experience, I had a major spread-portfolio flutter on the stock market a few years back; I bought in, the day that war was declared on Iraq. My accountant thought I was crazy. Over the course of the year, I reckon I made 15 percent clear profit after tax.

The value of a company's stock is, therefore, far more closely correlated with what analysts think, than with how well the company is actually doing. Stop listening, start thinking.

Oops, where the DR consultant?

2007-10-10T15:30:00.000Z

It started early when we turned up back stage to discover that two of our backstage laptops had been stolen. The security cables connecting nut had been smashed. The disastrous thing was that one of them had the SMS management software on it, and we had automated the feed from SMS into the database.

Over the last few days, we have adopted a permanent beta approach to our software (, or we like to flatter ourselves that we have, which meant that no-one knew how it works). I suspect we are on the third iteration of the software. This was exploited by one of my 'so-called' friends had guessed the database password, so we had, failed to, change(d) it the night before and none of the management software could log into the database. We looked completely shagged.

However, Rob Holt implemented our fall back plan for SMS and got version one of the software working, and was joined by Simon Cook who arrived just in time and allowed us to get the current version up an running. As John Greaves walked onto the stage, we were ready to go. It was a truly exciting 45 minutes.

tags: topic:[suncec2007]

Lunch

2007-10-09T22:47:05.000Z

Earlier today I had lunch with Jonathan Schwartz, Constantine Gonzalez asked him to join his podcast round table, which we were making in the backstage area just after the general sessions. You can hear it at cecpodcast . We spoke about CEC and whether Web 2.0 helps, or is just a waste of time?

tags: topic:[suncec2007] topic:[web2.0] topic:[jonathanschwartz] topic:[lunch]

Ultra SPARC T2 steps into the light

2007-10-09T22:22:26.000Z

It's the middle of day two at CEC, and this morning, Jonathan spoke to us and then John Fowler, together with Andy Bechtolsheim and Rich Hetherington announced the launch of three new systems. They're all based on the new Ultra SPARC T2 processor, the T6320 Blade module and the T5120 and T5220 rack mount systems. This is covered well by Dave Tong in his blog and at sun.com.

tags: topic:[T2] topic:[launch] topic:[technology] topic:[niagara] topic:[sunw] topic:[suncec2007]

twitting the CEC

2007-10-09T21:46:18.000Z

Over the last 24 hours, I have been half heartedly discussing with Shawn Ferry and others if we should consume messages from twitter to augment the Q&A technology we use to get questions to the speakers using mail, text and IM. Shawn pointed out that one can track at twitter now.

I have subscribed using the suncec2007 tag, and some of the correspondents are quite noisy, but I still don't really get it. I prefer IM using a laptop; its easier to type messages with a qwerty keyboard, than any phone I'bve seen.

tags: topic:[suncec2007]

Re: twitting the CEC

2007-10-09T22:14:18.000Z

My vote: Yes You Should.

The point of twitter is that you can send and receive messages from a desktop, laptop, phone, pda, SunRay, whatever. I can't run an IM client on my iPhone, but sending and receiving tweets is trivial.

Additionally you don't need to start up your IM client. Messages come to you or get queued on the web. And they'll be there tomorrow too.

With IM you need to be on the same network. I occasionally use Sun's IM client so I can't talk to someone who uses AIM. And a lot of people at Sun use AIM, which I wrote about last year. http://blogs.sun.com/davetong/entry/aim_considered_harmful

Personally I don't see what IM gives you that can't be accomplished far better using email, telephone and now twitter.

Re: twitting the CEC

2007-10-09T22:56:11.000Z

Can twitter act as 121 communication channel?

I checked out your article about last year and we did offer the use of Sun IM (an XMMP) server this year. I think the popularity of AIM is based on the phone interface, however I like to see my buddy list when using a laptop. As I said above, I find it much easier to compose text using a qwerty keyboard, although perhaps I should learn how to use predictive text.

Voice phones are almost useless today, most people don't answer them.

Re: twitting the CEC

2007-10-11T21:47:15.000Z

Apps: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

I use twitteriffic on OS X for the majority of my posts. (CEC being the exception since I wasn't online as much)

I can also IM twitter, SMS 40404, use the web page m.twitter.com (from my phone no SMS fees).

Twitter can do 1-2-1 but my recommendation on that front is still AIM, SMS possibly even voice. The direct messaging function is useful but I wouldn't want to use it for a conversation.

For a large part the micro-blogging aspects of twitter are what makes it the most attractive to me. I'm no longer starting posts that are too short or starting drafts of posts that I never finish.

Monterey Bay

2007-10-03T23:00:00.000Z

I have spent the last three days at an internal symposium meeting some of the most innovative scientists in Sun. The meeting was at a Seascape, a hotel resort just to the south of Santa Cruz and on tuesday, we had dinner on the beach. The resort is on Monterey Bay in California.

The resort is on Monterey Bay in California. This was written seven days later.

tags: topic:[suncec2007] topic:[california] topic:[montereybay] topic:[travel]

On the way to CEC

2007-10-02T20:53:30.000Z

I am in California at a pre-meeting for Sun's field premiere training event, Customer Engineering Conference, this is in Las Vegas and I shall be travelling there on Thursday. Its not the first time I've been there and I am looking forward to returning.

tags: topic:[SUNW] topic:[suncec2007] "topic:[Las Vegas]"

Slow cruise to Nevada

2007-10-02T17:43:03.000Z

Despite having a very hectic week, I finally finished a Live Update on my Solaris partition and have enscripted it, so it shouldn't be so hard next time. I had to fix my zfs checkpointing routines as while I had turned it on to protect my work against stupidity, I wasn't deleting them. I have amended the Gnome startup scripts to invoke $HOME/.gnome.login and the .gnome.logout is also invoked appropriately, and .gnome.logout creates a snapshot. The main reason for doing this is that I am unsure that Gnome runs the login shells exit scripts, and not all shells have these. However my poor code also means that root won't start a JDS session any more. I am going to claim this as a security enhancement. :(

My interest and use of ZFS and Live Update has all been inspired by Chris Gerhard who documents his ideas at The dot in ...---... Live Update is also a coming technology, so I think it's important for me to get to grips with it.

I am now considering how to write a tcl/tk wrapper for my LU script as I am still a number of versions behind.This meant I still had to amend the grub menu.lst by hand and refresh the boot archive manually. (The latter requirement may have been caused by me, but now I know how easy it is to mount the shadow BE, I shan't leave it for so long again.) I must remember that the reboot command is probably best issued from a root failsafe session.

EU 10, Microsoft 0

2007-09-18T17:07:08.000Z

An exciting day in many ways yesterday! The European Court have confimred the European Commissions fine on Microsoft for ant-competitive activities. The Guardian have reported it with the head line "European appeal court opens Windows to the world and shakes the superdominant". A headline only imagined in the Guardian business section.

Most interestingly they indirectly quote the competition commissioner, Ms Neelie Kroes, as saying that this ruling strengthens the commissions determinatio to put consumer benefit above innovation. This would be worrying if it wasn't for the fact that only "Author/Publishers" need copyright/patent protection to inhibit competition. There are many other business models that drive innovation in the economy.

This article at vnunet.com, called "Copyright harms the economy" is further evidence that bit by bit, people recognise that ideas cannot be exclusivly owned and that exclusive ownership is not in the public interest.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[politics] topic:[copyright] topic:[monopoly] topic:[europe] topic:[EU] topic:[microsoft] topic:[intellectualproperty] topic:[knowledge]

Re: EU 10, Microsoft 0

2007-09-19T08:24:48.000Z

Hi David,

Intellectual property rights are an emotive issue. The quotations you have provided give valuable insight into some of the rationale behind some of the alternative commercial models used by companies such as Sun, but the wholesale erosion of the closed-source model has not yet reached the stage where it can be discounted.

Where companies are found to be monopolistic, they should be censured. Alternatively, where intellectual property is misappropriated, this too should be censured.

The point here is balance that allows cumsumers ultimate choice.

Regards,

Stuart

Open Solaris tomorrow

2007-09-18T15:33:57.000Z

The next meeting of the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) is due to be held tomorrow on Wednesday, Sept 19th at Sun's Customer Briefing Centre, Regis House on Lower King William St. Jon Haslam is talking.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[group] topic:[losug]

Discover remarkable things, in a remarkable way

2007-08-30T12:58:49.000Z

One of the neat tools that are being incorporated into Sun's web site came from a product called slynkr, which the authors created a tag line, "discover remarkable things". Jamey Wood, the author blogs here, and there is a trial public version which I have been using to post news articles.

The public version's category list gives you an idea of the interests of the correspondnents/users of this trial, as does the tag page, which is pretty cluttered these days as there is no lower range threshold. But the tag page looks like this!

It is now open source and has a home at http://slynkr.dev.java.net/.

It is a database of URLs and comments. Basically there is a form to register a URL and users can vote, comment and tag the URLs. Slynkr will also browse del.icio.us to obtain any public tags on the URL. All this data is held in a database and can be viewed/consumed via HTML pages or RSS. (There is a query screen, that generates the RSS URL for filtered queries and one can for instance create an RSS feed for all your own posts, or those voted for by people). For instance I consume and republish my posts at slynkr at my planet as I don't always post these URLs to del.icio.us; I post those I want to read again to del.icio.us and those I want other's to read to slynkr. Actually, there's a bug in the way my aggregator consumes the RSS feed and I need to work out if its my planet, or the slynkr instance.

At first sight, it seems very similar to digg, but its now open source and allows a managed community. I think that federation would be a major asset in the product and now its open source, its in my hands, after I learn Java. Basically, it allows a follows/followed relationship and with strong categorisation and tagging functionality, people can build thier own relationships based on tag usage.

Digg though has some great visual representations of their RSS feed. See http://labs.digg.com and the three visual tools, big spy, stack and swarm.

Big Spy talks for itself, it represents on the screen in real-time, which is good because digg is really busy. It optimises the display for popular.Both size and colour are relevant.
Stack uses flash's animation to show the popularity of articles, votes drop in on the blobs and change colour, while the most recent articles are scrolled underneath the stack line.
Swarm is another representation that uses flash's animation to show the relationships between stuff and uses colour and grow/shrink on hover.

It would seem these are not open source, but I wonder how one might build such a thing.

Many apologies, I have used a table to format the html version of this blog, the pictures were taken on 25th August.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[data] topic:[visualisation] topic:[digg] topic:[slynkr] topic:[flash] topic:[digglabs] topic:[glassfish]

Hot Stuff

2007-08-16T15:57:57.000Z

Over the weekend, I went to the West Dean "Chilli Festival". I had no idea what a big industry chilli growing was in this country.

West Dean is one of the top horticultural colleges in the UK and we were able to walk round their nurseries. There was a huge number of stalls many selling all kinds of food. So we had a great chilli con carne and less great burrito! (Hey, you promised not to do receipes in this blog!)

I bought one chilli plant home, to see if I can avoid killing it.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[food+drink] topic:[gardening] topic:[gardens] topic:[UK] topic:[chilli]

Microblogging

2007-08-15T14:13:46.000Z

And then there were micro-blogs. I have just a finished a conference call about Consolidation with a customer, and hooked up with a colleague Lou Springer with whom I had a quick chat about Twitter. If you don't know what this is, then you'll have to go there.

It's been best described to me as micro-blog site, that delivers to a number of clients, but potentially most interestingly to the phone by SMS. (This means that the article length is limited, you're not publishing essays there!) Lou's not the first to suggest I subscribe, but its quite popular with the people that persuaded me to start out at facebook and there is a facebook integration application so I joined up and bumped into the people who'd invited me.

I've spent two days playing with it and was deciding that I wasn't keen on yet another application that I could use to tell people where I am. However,

it seems more popular than plazes, so I get more feeds from from more people, and some from the same
it has a phone & IM publication interface, although it uses AIM and is allegedly having difficulty in making the latter work.
it can be set to read your feeds on the phone, which is good for days when one doesn't connect to the internet by computer, (I wonder how I'll feel when I'm on holiday), however, this could be the killer justification .
Lou says its great for home workers as for him it becomes one of the technology equivalents of people walking past your desk/office, so this might also apply to geographically dispersed teams as well.

I also feel that my del.icio.us feed is a micro-blog, since I always try and comment the URL's and you get some view of what I think of the page, or sometimes why I was reading it. I also gather everything together (except this blog feed) at Planet DaveLevy, which includes the blog entries from my bliki. (These aren't very exciting but it is another window on to my life, although most of this content is just documenting stuff, its facts I want on the internet.)

I think, I'll keep my correspondence at twitter to micro-blogging stuff of relevance to my followers (thats the word they use, I'm not starting a cult), and use it mainly as a reader. If you want to know where I am, you'll have to find me at plazes, and I need to wait for them to fix my outstanding niggles.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[twitter] topic:[sms] topic:[socialsoftware] topic:[microblogging] topic:[plazes]

Re: Microblogging

2007-08-15T15:42:52.000Z

[Trackback] A discussion I just had with David Levy got me thinking about how various social networking channels are working and not working for me and others. It seems like various social networking channels are finding their place, based on capabilities, usage, ...

Re: Microblogging

2007-08-16T15:23:55.000Z

plazes for me has always seemed very slow, presumably resource intensive and/or underpowered, so I stopped relying on it awhile ago. Perhaps I should re-visit.

I also have a problem with Facebook and twitter - I cannot keep straight which one shares info with which - i.e., if I update my status in one, do friends/followers in the other find out, or do I need to do double entry bookkeeping.

Re: Microblogging

2007-08-16T15:55:43.000Z

We are now on plazer 2.0. I'm not sure what you mean by poor speed. The facebook plazes app, writes trazes into you feed, and will display it in the plazes app. box in your profile. My outstanding problem with them is that they write each traze into the feed, not each plaze, so as one changes computers and networks, new trazes are created. I may write three or four @home trazes into my facebook & plazes RSS feed.

Twitter posts to facebook!

Neither update the facebook status field, and I remain happy with the flash badges at plazes.

Re: Microblogging

2007-08-17T14:39:17.000Z

I gave up on the AIM interface to Twitter and use the Jabber/GoogleTalk one instead.

Facebook

2007-08-10T14:10:58.000Z

Friends are moving to Facebook, so yesterday I had my first look at it. I checked out some of the add-on applications available by browsing the utility applications pages and discovered some amazing facebook applications. I have installed "my RSS" and connected to my bliki's rss stream (No I havn't there seems to be a quality issue with it, fortunately, there are several other apps that claim to do the job). I have also installed the del.icio.us (which works) and the plazes plug in (which has some problems), but there are so many that seem worthwhile and I need to go back to check them out.

I should probably get some feed back from my correspondents as to how they feel about the traffic created by these applications which all seem to write into the facebook feeds.

I have connected this blog to my profile and this may mean that I need to using the summary/content feature of roller which until now I only use occasionally.

Whoever argued that opening up the applications interface is awesome competitive advantage is absolutely correct, a true proof point that free and open source creates value.

I have bookmarked "Define Me" & "Books" (now replaced by a query on books), but also think that "My wish lists" (amazon wish lists), Friend Cloud, Memberships all seem worth exploring.

Talking to Alec Muffet, he suggests that it's possible disadvantage is that it is an internet end-point, it only broadcasts to your friends in the community and none of this interesting stuff about oneself is available on the net. I suppose your friends havn't given permission to publish their content. Alec, however, will probably let us know what he thinks soon.

Here's a hyperlink....Facebook Me!

Also, the snappreview on this article is a bit poor, I need to check this out and see how to tune the displays. The hyperlinks work if you are a member and login, but poor 'ol snappreview can't do this. This article is meant to record for me, if not others some of the interesting apps I found. It'll also test facebooks' treatment of content/summary articles since this blog is imported into my profile's feeds.

Is it safe to go out?

2007-07-31T09:50:29.000Z

As an occasional sailor, the weather forecast is important to me and I have experimented with various ways, short of looking out the window as to how to get an accurate forecast. I have just updated my South Coast Travel public google map to include placemarks with links to the BBC and Met. Office weather reports. I am disappointed that google have no obvious weather icon and that the i icon is available in only one colour.

Also I'm grateful to Alec Muffett for showing me the current BBC local pages, which are really rather good. As usual with my blog, hover or click to view it.

I did poke around the Google maps API pages and may take this further so that I can incorporate the page into http://www.davelevy.info.

Otherwise its screen shot and link to the Google Maps URL, like this.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[geography] topic:[html] topic:[maps] topic:[mashups] topic:[weather]

Finding my way with Schmap!

2007-07-30T09:32:26.000Z

Schmap, who publish browsable maps have been using a few of my pictures for a while, but have now created a widget which they are publicising via their contributors. I have contributed to their Amsterdam and Berlin maps.

The widget pages are best used with IE. :( While the Scmap browser is free, they require one to download their map browser, which is only available on Windows. I have and do use it to plan some of my trips and the 'nomadic' features meant that it helped me solve at least one problem where I was not connected or connectible to the 'net. Sadly it's not available on a PDA, although a Mac version which claims to be Firefox compatible is coming, and they publish a mobile URL, which I finally got to work, although some of the backing content doesn't seem to be there. However, the content is not customisable, and so while one can flag places they list, you can't add your own content, nor does the application leverage the 'wisdom of crowds'. This latter failing suggests that it'll be overtaken by true web 2.0 applications such as google maps or plazes.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[computer] topic:[travel] topic:[maps] topic:[laptop]

Explosion in New York

2007-07-19T10:10:31.000Z

I was 200 yards away and 31 stories high when the explosion in New York happened last night. It was jolly noisy. I looked out my window and the building next door was shrouded in steam.

I thought "That's not meant to happen! I might be safer on the ground floor." So that's where I went. The area around Grand Central was closed down and the police and building security people were directing people away from the site, so it took me 30 minutes to get the Bogarts, which had reopened. So I had a couple of beers.

The BBC reported it here....

tags: topic:[News] topic:[Life] topic:[NYC]

Going to NYC

2007-07-17T07:08:30.000Z

I've packed my bags and I'm ready to go. I am off again across the Atlantic, but this time to New York, so I'll miss the London Open Solaris User Group meeting tomorrow.

I'll try and take some pictures; its been seven years since I last visited NYC.

tags: none

Open Solaris users in London on Wednesday

2007-07-16T07:06:17.000Z

The next meeting of the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) is due to be held this Wednesday, July 18th at Sun's Customer Briefing Centre, Regis House on Lower King William St. The agenda has been posted at their site. Over the last couple of months I have tried to give people a two week and two day notice of these meetings but have failed this time, and since two days notice would be tomorrow, I shan't bother as its too close to this notice to be useful.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[group] topic:[losug]

Ruling the Waves

2007-07-02T08:51:03.000Z

Hooray, I can now charter a yacht! As readers of my Plazes RSS stream know, I have been travelling around the south coast on a Yacht where I have been studying for my Day Skipper ticket, and I passed the exams yesterday.

We, (I and my co-students) sailed from Poole in Dorsetshire across Poole and Christcurch bay and then up the solent to the capital of sailing in the UK, Cowes, on the Isle of Wight where we moored up at the Folly Inn on the Medina and finished the day with Fish Pie and an Australian Cabernet/Shiraz. The trip across the bay was pretty rough but the Folly Inn is a great pub and has ample moorings. The following day we traveled onto Itchenor Reach in Chichester Harbour. The following day traveled back west to Portsmouth, home of the Royal Navy and then back in a 10 hour trip to Poole. We had some pretty stiff winds throughout the trip which was good, as it prepares us all for the worst

Our trusty boat was the Yacht Enigma.

The company Moonfleet Sailing offer a nine day combined theory and practical course for the RYA Day Skipper tickets. This offers a weekend in the class room, five days and nights on one of their yachts for the practical and the following weekend to finish the theory and take the exams. They are based at Cobbs Quay Marina, in Hamworthy, Poole. If the travel distance prohibits a return home, one needs to arrange accommodation for the first Saturday and the second Friday/Saturday, although I was able to return home for Friday evening without to much trouble. They recommend several B&Bs but I stayed in the Arndale Court Hotel, where the service and welcome was very friendly and the rooms both large and comfortable.

On the penultimate day we arrived back in Poole very late and discovered that Imran's Tandoori Takeaway delivers to the Marina.

I have plotted our journeys at Google Maps.

I have put my pictures of the week up on my page at flickr, and put them in a set called South Coast Sailing, which also contains some earlier pictures. These pictures are both text tagged and geo-tagged. I used my phone camera so the quality is not that high, and since I have only just got a new phone since losing my last one, and have dropped it twice already, I was bit frightened to bring it up on deck. So no action shots.

I used Plazes to record my journey using the phone/sms interface and adjusting the locations later. The Plazes flash display shows you my journey, it is hosted at my plazes profile or davelevy.info. Much of this additonal content panel is also hosted on my bliki, in an article entitled RYA Day Skipper.

Plazes 2.0

2007-06-24T07:08:59.000Z

Plazes, which I wrote about here... just updated, actually a couple of days ago, their agent and presumably the back-end infrastructure and proved the Web 2.0 permenant Beta adage as the true as ever. Its an interesting problem with their architecture that they need to update the laptop clients. I hope they have improved their network update functionality as the automatic update failed to work on my XP client and the manual downloads did not become available for a couple of days. I was still able to use the phone to update the web site though so no catastrophe.

The web site functionality seems much richer so thats good.

To me one of the biggest outstanding problems is that they don't stimualte a self-help community. It would be easy enough to copy the games companies, or even Dell and Sun's developer forums. Its sort of interesting who does and who doesn't. For instance I can't find a Sony-Ericcsson official community site but have found an unofficial bulletin board for Sony Errison users. Flickr has a help site although I have only found two forums, New Ideas and everything else. My favourite of the official sites are the games sites of which Bioware Forums are a good example offering personalisation tools to allow people to track their own interests. Several of the Bioware fan forums use Invision's community management software. Two implementations that illustrate the strength of community and the personalisation capability within this tool are Gibberlings 3 and Spellhold Studios, while RPG Dungeon uses Simple Machine Framework. As ever, you need to read the small print to discover which are free and open source. Both these solutions have RSS.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[community] topic:[help] topic:[faq] topic:[user] topic:[selfhelp] topic:[plazes] topic:[geography] topic:[tagging] topic:[travel] topic:[web2.0] topic:[bg2] topic:[community]

Sailing

2007-06-24T02:34:09.000Z

Down to Poole in Dorset very early this morning. I have finally got my act together to take the RYA Day Skipper course and spent the day learning to navigate using charts, pencil and paper. The maths reminds me of the boys' A-Level homework and although despite being geeky enough to look up the cosine rule, drawing scale models of the "triangles of velocity" is probably quicker :).

The weather was very changable, I wonder what the week will bring.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[UK] topic:[maths] topic:[cosine] topic:[RYA]

Opensolaris in London tomorrow!

2007-06-19T07:00:00.000Z

The next meeting of the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) is due to be held tomorrow on Wednesday, June 2st at Sun's Customer Briefing Centre, Regis House on Lower King William St.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[group] topic:[losug]

Running Python on Windows XP

2007-06-17T11:11:33.000Z

I got myself a copy of the O'Reilley "Learning Python" book and started working myway through it. For various reasons, I decided to try it on Windows; I thought the binary install would be easier and I am in the process of upgrading the Solaris version and I wanted to finish that first. The windows install from python.org is quite cute, as you would expect but it requires some further configuration before the python imports and module search works properly.

Firstly my "My Documents" is on a different disk to the Program Files directory. The Python interpreter is installed by default into the C:\Program Files directory. This means that Python is not in the %PATH% string and that the icon for the Python CLI starts a Python instance that can't see/find my programs. My first instinct was to write a script that invokes the interpreter from the python scripts directory and I came across this link.

Eric Phelps Windows scripting page.

This pointed me to the windows help center's A-Z command reference. (Obvious, but so easy not to know about; its available from the [Start] button or using F1 while the desktop is current).

I wrote the following mighty script, called run_python.

C:\PROGRA~1\PYTHON2.5\python %1

which is located in my python modules directory/folder. This can be run from the command line or explorer to start the interpreter or takes a single file argument from a command line to run a python module. This still isn't what we want, so I found

Computer Hope.

which pointed out that the PATH variable can be edited using

My Computer - Properties - Advanced - Environment Variables

so this is what I did, which means that is when I [Start] [Run] [command], and then type 'python', the command interpreter starts. This means I can use the command line to run programs, or I can iconise the modules, or create batch files containing the python module invocation. I think my super script above will become redundant, but it proves to me that scripting will never go away and I am gratefull for the help of the two web sites above, which I though I'd share with you.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[python] topic:[windows]

Back in May...

2007-06-14T09:29:50.000Z

I have just uploaded my pictures from Firenze & the Project Black Box tour, so I have been able to publish my blog article about the Black Box truck's visit to Camberly & London. See here.....

I back dated it to 18th May, which is when I did the shows.

tags: none.

Opensolaris in London in June

2007-06-07T10:09:46.000Z

The next meeting of the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) is due to be held in two weeks time on Wednesday, June 21st at Sun's Customer Briefing Centre, Regis House on Lower King William St. As ever, check out their page for full and final details.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[group] topic:[losug]

More Holiday ideas?

2007-06-07T10:04:38.000Z

What a busy week, but I have a day at home writing up today. So the first job is to throw away the weekend's papers! The Guardian's Travel section did an article on Britain's top beaches and I was interested to see that I have been to several of them including Shoreham, Shell Beach, Purbeck, Charmouth and Woolacombe. That still leaves plenty more to visit. I also found while looking up these links a previously published 10 Coastal Walks article. I'll have to see what we can manage this summer.

I have put some of the other links into my del.icio.us list, which can be viewed at there or in the sidebar at this site.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[holiday] topic:[UK] topic:[Britain] topic:[beach]

New Business Models for the Particpation Age

2007-05-23T10:45:00.000Z

Today, Don Tapscott, author of "Wikinomics" presented a keynote about how mass-collaboration is changing the way that value is created in the world economy. This stems from both software functionality and network economies of scale. Obviously the enablement of new forms of economic co-operation is also a factor at continuing to drive specialisation. Tapscott quotes Carr's "IT does matter" and mentions that he has often debated with him, which is hard because Carr is good, but he (Tapscott) says "I have an advatage in this debate, he's wrong". The last three days has made me question about how one can innovate in corporate IT.

He told a story about being on TV, "Surfing the Net" and his kids cut him down to size by suggesting it was on par with surfing the TV or fridge. "I'm browsing the fridge for content!". (I thought this was really funny, but my kids tell me its not!) Amongst the younger generation, time online is at the expense of TV, and online activity is today a more creative & participatory act than watching TV, going to the Movies or a Play, or using the early web. The drive to participation makes all content collaborative and he has banned the term "web site" due to the owning author implications.

He then examined what Google, Ebay and Amazon really are, and argued that they are digitial conglomerates. Google sells ads, which makes it a media company, but its also a retailer, broker and bank. "This is not a bubble!". The creation and existence of new-age conglomerates, requires the examination of why a firm exists. Classically, its about transaction costs and the benefits of specialisation. As people cease to be labour in a knowldege economy and accounting costs drop to zero, the costs of doing business across the corporate firewall drop and business have created extended enterprises and latterly business webs. The next transformation will be mass collaboration and peer-production. (Interestingly, Tapscott quoted a mutual fund example of a folksonomy based co-operative, but I didn't write it down. Can any readers add those they know as comments?)

He summarised his presentation with an examination of the seven new business models he's identified as enabling in the new world of mass collaborations and pointing to his use of a Wiki to develop the ideas, much to the chagrin of his publishers, who are trying to work out how and if they can publish a volume two. They shouldn't worry, I certainly intend to check out the wiki and probably get the book.

This article was written over time from contemporaneous notes and back dated to near the time of occurance.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[wikinomics] topic:[future] topic:[futurology] topic:[tapscott] topic:[community] topic:[gartner]

More Futurology, Gartner's "Emerging Trends"

2007-05-23T08:16:23.000Z

I am in Barcelona, attending Gartner's European Symposium and Expo. They have two of these each year and the spring event is positioned as broader and more forward looking. It was opened by a tour de force from Peter Cole, (CEO) and six of their top researchers. Later discussions brought home to me that one needs to be very carefull when listening to clever people, as sometimes one (i.e. I ) can assume that they mean the same things as yourself, this isn't always so.

I do wonder however whether their Macro-economic analysis is based too strongly on financial volume and on their boundary definition of IT. Just because our children don't see what they do as using IT, doesn't mean that it is not IT.

Another key insight I obtained here, is that there is a debate between those who think that IT as an industry is entering a maturity stage and those who don't. I should really have known this. Some IT companies are (very successfully) betting their future on the first view. I believe that because IT is dependent on software, which is not constrained by the laws of physics, it will continue to evolve rapidly and that its evolution will remain a source of value and wealth creation in the developed world for a while to come. This means that IT and most importantly, company's software portfolios will remain a source of differentiation and competitive advantage. Another point made to me is that peer based collaboration or community development may inhibit, ignore or exclude the genius that provokes radical change. It's an interesting point of view and one that community wranglers may need to think about.

A fair amount of time has been spent talking about "Green IT". Gartner's late arrival to this issue can be forgiven due the bravery of launching thier programmes in the USA, where they may be able to begin to remove the partisanship from the issue.

tags: topic:[economics] topic:[future] topic:[futurology] topic:[IT] topic:[gartner] topic:[community] topic:[green] "topic:[information technology]"

Project Black Box, its real you know!

2007-05-18T09:23:39.000Z

Yesterday, Sun's Project Blackbox Tour visited the Thames Valley at Sun's UK HQ Campus and today we have taken it to the National Army Museum so prospective customers, journalists and analysts can inspect it and 'kick the tyres', and I am one of the engineers answering the mediumly hard questions. The really difficult ones have been handled by Joe Carvalho, one of the designers.

One of the difficult questions was "How come you can't look yourself in?". I took some pictures as did Andy Williams of Easynet and I have posted them in a set called "Project Black Box" at Flickr. (Now this should be a pretty good use of snap preview). Andy's are copyright to him, I have posted mine with my normal creative commons licence.

This is another article backdated to the time it occurred since it has taken the best part of a month to get Andy's permission and upload the pictures to flickr.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[sunw] topic:[projectblackbox] topic:[blackbox] topic:[computer] topic:[datacenter] topic:[datacentre]

Opensolaris in London, tomorrow!

2007-05-15T07:00:00.000Z

The next meeting of the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) is due to be held tomorrow on Wednesday, May 16th at Sun's Customer Briefing Centre, Regis House on Lower King William St.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[group] topic:[losug]

Where am I now?

2007-05-08T16:19:20.000Z

During my last trip to the USA, I took out a subscription to plazes, this'll allow people to know roughly where I am. They have a flash badge which I have inserted onto the sidebar on my "About me!" page.

Its also here...

Download Flash plugin

Unfortunately, I can't find the Linux version of the plazer (their client agent), despite having asked them for a pointer, and attempted to 'google' it and so given I'm mainly using Solaris as my desktop, which they rudly describe as 'legacy' the timeliness of the geographic data is less than it might be, but it should give you an idea of where I am. Let's face it, a bit of inaccuracy is probably good, close enough for my friends, far enough away for the rest of you :)

They distribute agents for windows and the mac, and they claim Linux. I propose to see how good the Solaris Express Linux compatability offerings are when I get myself a Linux agent.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[web2.0] topic:[geography] topic:[tagging] topic:[travel]

Re: Where am I now?

2007-05-09T02:20:33.000Z

Try the Python version at http://kybkreis.org/wiki/index.php/PyPlazes or check out Peter Rukavina's plazes development site at http://ruk.ca/w/index.php/Plazes. Might take some hackery. There is also a Java webstart version that I used to use at http://www.cyber-junk.de/ws/plazes/jwsplazes.jnlp

Opensolaris in London in May

2007-05-02T07:01:00.000Z

The next meeting of the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) is due to be held in two weeks time on Wednesday, May 16th at Sun's Customer Briefing Centre, Regis House on Lower King William St.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[group] topic:[losug]

Re: Opensolaris in London in May

2007-05-02T08:25:35.000Z

...and it's Jarod Nash (again), presenting on "ZFS Under the Hood", so it's going to be particularly enlightening for filesystem buffs.

Improving my mind

2007-04-22T21:30:00.000Z

I'm have returned to California to attend Sun's top technology conference, and I shall be travelling on to Menlo Park and visit Sun's campus for the Sun Labs Open House. Once again, I have failed to improve my mind on the plane and instead of watching Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", I watched "Shut up & Sing", a documentary about the Dixie Chicks. They are not a band I'd listened to before, but I did read about the furore created when they stated on stage that they didn't approve of all the policies being pursued by a certain American politician.

Sadly for them, the politician was George Bush and he was preparing to go to war in Iraq (in 2003); doubly sadly for them, they were a country band and the radio stations decided to drop them under right wing and fan pressure. One thing that came from my watching the documentary is that Natalie Maines who stated she was ashamed the President came from Texas is either brave or stubborn; despite being quoted as saying she's sorry, she isn't. The film is about what happened to the band and their management as a result of the boycott. However, in 2007, much of the world has caught up with her, even in America.

I experienced a slight post modern moment, where they are discussing how to replace the radio as a form of popularising their new work, since the film made me want to listen to more of their music. I have no doubt that their sound is based on all three of them and they're the second band I have come across recently with less common instruments. The violin is seeming to become an increasingly popular instrument in non classical music.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[music] "topic:[dixie chicks]" topic:[dvd] topic:[video]

LOSUG

2007-04-17T07:01:00.000Z

The next meeting of the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) is due to be held tomorrow on Wednesday, April 18th at Sun's Customer Briefing Centre, Regis House on Lower King William St.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[group] topic:[losug]

Firenze

2007-04-14T07:00:00.000Z

I spent the weekend in Florence where I visited the Oltrarno and took this picture

We flew to Pisa and then took the train to Florence. The trains are nationalised, old and no longer run on time.

I'll upload the rest of the pictures to flickr when I get the time, this entry has been backdated to about the time I took the picture.

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[Firenze] topic:[Florence]

Gnome on Nevada

2007-04-05T06:49:01.000Z

I thought you might like to see my Desktop. Its Opensolaris, Nevada, build 59, with Gnome 2.14.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[desktop] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[gnome] topic:[laptop]

Re: Gnome on Nevada

2007-04-05T07:45:13.000Z

Hi Dave, Isn't Nevada > build 54/55 running Gnome 2.16 ?

Re: Gnome on Nevada

2007-04-05T07:48:53.000Z

Yeah, I think your right, but the Help facility describes it as 2.14, and this is NV 59. I'd better bug it.

Re: Gnome on Nevada

2007-04-05T14:19:59.000Z

What is the power button next to the CPU temperature monitor ?

Re: Gnome on Nevada

2007-04-05T14:57:54.000Z

It's the shutdown system button. My article on installing nevada discusses this, although you have to look hard :). I put it on the bar using the "add to panel" option.

Opensolaris in London

2007-04-04T10:03:46.000Z

The next meeting of the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) is due to be held in two weeks time on Wednesday, April 18th at Sun's Customer Briefing Centre, Regis House on Lower King William St.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[group] topic:[losug]

Service Management Facility in S10

2007-04-02T13:44:22.000Z

I promised I'd arrange for Jarod Nash'es slides on SMF, presented to the January meeting of the "London Solaris User Group" to be posted in Sun's .com domain.

I have just posted them, finally, to the media caster. They are in .pdf. [ Jarod's SMF Slides... ]

This article was edited on the 5^th April when I uploaded the version without a privacy marking.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[losug] topic:[solaris] topic:[smf] topic:[opensolaris]

Sun's Connected Customers

2007-03-30T18:47:53.000Z

Steve Wilson led a presentation about the changing nature of Sun's connected customer response and where the provisioning and image maintenance tools now sit. This means that he's responsible for network support, subscription services and what's left of our N1 management suite.

At the centre of the proposed customer solution is the N1SM satellite server. (I say at the centre, arguably the centre is in Sun's Data Centres, at the centre of the customer deployment.) The next release due over the summer re-architects this. It has become multi-process, with a central core with proxy agents. This permits its deployment and operation within complex network topologies and so it can support complex data centre networks architectures. i.e. This introduces firewall support. Communication between the satellite and its proxies is over https/RSS. In my mind this is mega! Together, which Richard McDougall's insights, about host and guest properties (which I have not yet published) of the operating system there is an opportunity to continue to innovate the Solaris code lines to deliver huge benefit, to the discomfort of other os developers.

The remote connection will have discovery capability and will permit data centre managers to control their engagement with their support vendors. These are designed to upload limited information to Sun's Asset Portal. Today and tomorrow, the customer located technology will remain available as a technology i.e. it can be bought, and the last word in customer privacy will remain with the customer. The hope is that Sun's support will be more effective as we know more about the customer's supported assets and some ways, the conversational relationship is the same as explorer.

The third product talked about in detail was Sun MC, the management centre, this now includes container manager which is the "simple" GUI interface into the virtualisation technology. Its a technology Sun's had for a long time, and some long due maintenance is being undertaken. Version 4.0 will be released some over the long summer, and will include replacing Oracle with Postgres, and the expansion of the platforms supported to reflect the development of Sun's product line. This will therefore include the X86/x64 systems.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[N1] topic:[future] topic:[patch] topic:[version-control] topic:[networkcomputing] topic:[datacentre] topic:[SUNW] topic:[datacenter]

Coming to a Desktop near you

2007-03-30T16:30:00.000Z

Or near me anyway, and not necessarily all that soon!

This morning's presentation on the Sun Ray technology road map suggests we're planning to to do local VPN some time this year and Video next year. Its getting there!

The presentation covered a number of technologies showing Sun recommitting to the desktop and offering a number of Linux/Windows interoperability solutions. I may have a further look and write this up in more detail, but I may not be the best suited to do this. However, a couple of my blogging colleagues cover the desktop and you can easily check'em out.

Warning: these are mid range plans and may change, deadlines may be missed, features may be dropped.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[desktop] "topic:[Sun Ray]"

The economics of open source in the world of storage.

2007-03-28T16:30:00.000Z

Brian Wong, one of Sun's Distinguished Engineers spoke this morning and stated categorically that the "Storage [Market] is right to be disrupted".

He argued that the general purpose OS (such as Solaris) offers massive developer economies of scale, by which we mean operating system develepor economics. He quoted an example of one of our disk controller operating systems which we have 31 developers and no community, where as for Solaris, Sun employs 1200 people with an extended community of tens of thousands. Even if fixing bugs was the only work that developers need to do, 31 is not a lot of people, but storage devices and hence their OS need to evolve to remain useful.

He claimed that there are a number of myths about the nature of a storage device operating system, the most prevalent of which is that it needs to be real time. Despite the fact that Solaris has a real time scheduler, Brian argued that storage doesn't need real time.

Furthermore, Solaris is well positioned because as large drives and larger drives come onto the market, Sun's portfolio of storage operating systems functionality which now includes ZFS, Solaris Cluster, the fault management architecture & SMF, together with the highly functional SAM-FS/QFS and Sun availability suit delivers storage functionality to storage administrators and architects. It may also act as very attractive platform for new entrants to the market as opensolaris is available under the Community Development and Distribution License which means that they do not inherit a duty to publish their innovations.

What with the industry leading science in tape devices, we have some interesting times ahead.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[storage] topic:[SUNW]

The Future of Solaris, by the man that makes it happen

2007-03-26T22:51:54.000Z

Jeff Jackson, VP of Solaris opened our conference. He's now been in the job for a while and is beginning to stamp his own ideas on the future of Sun's implementation of OpenSolaris. He characterised his view as moving from function to velocity; velocity has a direction. He wants Solaris releases to meet a customer constituency rather than become the result of a race between his developers.

Another key direction, in meeting our "best on Solaris" goal, his different teams are being asked/told to align with each other, commit to and utilise each others products to ensure our most committed customers get synergy from our developers and development budget.

He announced that Sun is going to place more of its system software into open source, including both Sun Ray & Cluster and that this should be happening soon.

He spoke about the need to strategise around open source. I'm not a fan of the word strategy, it tends to be overused and is often very obviously about knowing what you want and measuring your actions against it. However it also means understanding your choices and their consequences; we need to know what are we looking for, how do the communities govern themselves, how do co-developers join in, how do we empower our customers and collaborators & how do we monetise the open source.

Jeff spoke to us about the consequences of the Sun/Intel agreements. Intel are going to OEM Solaris and they endorse it as the operating system of choice for mission critical applications. This would be less important if Intel weren't the source of the infamous white boxes. Its obvious that their competitors will need to respond and we should watch this space.

It's clear to me that Rich Green, who is interviewed here on www.sun.com is beginning to make a difference, we're finally fixing our arrogance, a fact re-inforced by Ian Murdock, who recently joined Sun, you can't have missed it and also spoke this a.m. He emphasised that he's hoping to help Sun learn from the Linux community because people still choose it and there remain some good reasons to do so. It worked for me; on reflecting what he said, I came to the conclusion we need to do better. Its about substance not presentation.

tags: technology solaris opensolaris future

Back in the USA

2007-03-26T17:10:19.000Z

I have arrived in Palo Alto, after my flight since I am spending the week at Menlo Park for some readiness training. I wasn't feeling very intellectual, so instead of watching the Al Gore's polemic on the environment, "An Inconvenient Truth" I checked out Mitchell & Web, who you can see asking if any of the Nazi's Wermacht questioned the fascist imagary of the nazi state, and advertising Macs [See Charlie Brooker's comments at the Guardian...] all over the world, I then watched Tenacious D: the pick of destiny. This site needs the most recent flash and Jack Black swears a lot.

The journey was made more exciting by forgetting to move my clock forward and the worst queue for security I have ever seen, but I made the flight with a couple of minutes to spare.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[time] topic:[comedy]

My Laptop Marathon, installing Open Solaris & liveupdate

2007-03-16T16:58:26.000Z

After mixing it in a conversation about what Solaris needs to make me use it as my Laptop operating system of choice I was persuaded to trash my Linux build (Fedora 3.5) which was broken and unusable anyway, mainly because the update manager was completely shagged. (I'm in good company, see Eric Raymond's goodbye to Red Hat). I then can use the new space to create an up to date opensolaris build with liveupgrade, so I won't ever fall so far behind again. My Solaris build was Nevada 35 which has served me well as a Solaris platform for development and demonstration, but I had left it where it was because I am working on two projects which I wanted to finish before I caught up, however my colleagues have persuaded me to bite the bullet now.

My laptop is a Toshiba Tecra M2, with 1,6Ghz Intel Pentium M CPU, and 1Gb of RAM and 60 Gb of Disk. I planned to combine my Linux & Solaris partitions to give me 25 Gb for Solaris. I need two slices for Liveupdate and propose to place /export/home on a ZFS file system on a third slice. The lu slices are about 7Gb and the common data slice is about 11 Gb.

Firstly, I backed up my home user on the SNV 35 build, then I checked the disk partition table to create a new partition map on paper. I have two windows partitions, I can't remember why now, but I might have documented this in my Laptop Diaries articles and it probably relates to the windows skills available to me at the time. This isn't work I do often and so I generally ask for help. I also bookmarked on del.icio.us the wallpapers I had taken from art.gnome.org, I'm particularly fond of “Neon Night”.

Next I borrowed a snv 58 bootable image from Chris. I booted the system using the bootable image and up came the solaris installer with its good old CDE look and feel. Sadly it didn't do very well with recognising the graphics chip set but we got the install done. Defining the partition table with the installer was a bit exciting because of the poor visibility and sharpness. This is not a mind-share winning experience; the install is all. Anyway at this point we have a bootable image on the first slice of the disk with Nevada 58. This took about 45 minutes.

We ran lu to make the bootable image part of live update and create a second boot environment.

Now I needed to reconfigure Solaris to be updated using liveupdate. There is a curses based program called lu that runs from an xterm, but not a gnome-terminal. This is menu based so that seemed to work OK. Now I turn my attention to the third file system which will be a ZFS file system.

I issued a “zpool create” command which failed. This is because while we unmounted the disk slice from its mount point in the live image, the zpool command was aware that the disk was mountable from the second bootable image. The BE was deleted using luremove/ludelete.

zpool create ${devicename}
zfs create ${poolname}/export
zfs set mountpoint=/export $poolname/export

I then repeated this for /export/home, /export/home/${USER}, /export/home/${USER}/Documents & /export/home/${USER}/Desktop

This gives me separate file systems and hence snap shot for each user, their documents and desktop.

I next installed three essential utilities, frkit for power management, inetmenu to manage the NICs and punchin to access the companies applications behind the firewall.

I now need to force Gnome as the default login manager, in a root

svcs disable cde
svcs enable gdm
shutdown

Now the line "SystemMenu=true" needs to be inserted in the [greeter] section of /etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf. Gdm now handles RBAC authority. Previous versions i.e. At about nv 35, this had to be fixed using usermod.

Lastly, I prepare for the nv59 upgrade

lucreate -n nv59 -m /:${devicename}:ufs

this creates the boot environment and prepares the file system for a bootable image. I then find there's a pretty shitty bug in zfs in nv58 so I need to move forwards to build 59. Here's how I did that. I copied the new bootable image to ${ZFS_POOLNAME}/os/nv which I declared as zfs file system, then,

isofile=$(lofiadm -a ${ZFS_POOLNAME}/os/nv/${ISOfilename})
mount -F hsfs ${isofile} /mnt

then update the liveupdate packages

yes | pkgrm SUNWluu SUNWlur
yes | pkgadd /mnt/Solaris11/Product SUNWluu SUNWlur

then perform the liveupdate itself

liveupgrade -u -s /mnt -n nv59

and release the resources.

umount /mnt
lofiadm -d ${ZFS_POOLNAME}/os/nv/${ISOfilename})

then activate the update. I used lustatus before and after the activiate and rebooted using init 6. The command to reboot is important init 6 and shutdown work, while reboot is not to be used.

luactivate -n nv59
init 6

This didn't work for some reason, basically the boot archive wouldn't work and the system came up on the previously installed disk. I checked the menu.lst at /etc/lu/, came to the conclusion that the menu.lst had been changed an then,

#$ bootadm update-archive

this required no parameters because the first partition was the current boot partition. NB the first partition is the lower of the two slices used as live update partitions.

Reboot the system, and I am offered my five old entries plus four new ones created by the liveupdate process; select nv59 and up it comes, actually with snv59. xwindows dumps core the first time and the zfs file systems fail to mount because the live update process has created the directories and zfs mount points. This is fixed as follows:-

cd /export/home
rmdir *
cd ${ZFS_POOLNAME}
rmdir *

and copy thegdm customisation

#$ zfs mount nv58 /a
#$ customfile=/etc/X11/gdm/custom.conf
#$ diff /a/${customfile} $customfile
< SystemMenu=true
#$ cp /a/${customfile} $customfile
#$ diff /a/${customfile} $customfile
#$

Reboot and we're there!

Read Chris Gerard's blog article on automating zfs snapshots (every minute?), or you can check everything he's written about snapshots by going to his blog and using the search box with the search argument snapshot. I installed his scripts in my user area and set up a cron job to snapshot every hour.

I then created a top of desk panel, created the inetmenu and punchin buttons and assigned some other frequently used applications to the top panel. I pulled down some wallpapers from my static content site, and my del.icio.us/davelevy/wallpaper+gnome list.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[liveupdate] topic:[howto] topic:[nevada] topic:[sunw]

about my banner tag cloud

2007-03-14T16:26:02.000Z

I have adjusted the inclusion threshold for the tag map above to ~~three~~, now five i.e. Only tags that occur more than ~~three~~, now five times will appear in the banner cloud. If you want the whole tag cloud try "Yesterday's Words".

amended to five on March 15th.

tags: none

Will the EU follow Norway in restraining the iPod?

2007-03-14T12:14:26.000Z

The EU Consumer Protection commissioner, Meglena Kuneva has spoken out against Apple bundling their DRM software with hardware. The norwegian courts are considering this issue at the moment and have ruled that it's a monopolistic, anti-competitive action. Norway, of course, is not a member of the EU, but its interesting the way the wind is blowing in Europe. [ Reuters | VNUnet ]

tags: topic:[News] topic:[EU] topic:[Europe] topic:[DRM] topic:[apple] topic:[monopoly] topic:[intellectualproperty]

A Faster Horse

2007-03-13T15:30:00.000Z

John Maeden of BT presented after lunch and spoke about the nature of fundamental change and how organisations react in dealing with the problems that cause the change, indicating that data centre architecture was such a problem today, due to its complexity and the requirements of today's applications.

He also quoted Henry Ford about radical change,

"If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have chosen a faster horse"

tags: topic:[Economics] "topic:[Henry Ford]" topic:[innovation]

James Gosling at Sun Live, London

2007-03-13T15:00:00.000Z

After lunch, James Gosling presented and took us through some “What are Web 2.0” slides, its a short and to the point presentation. Among several asides, he pointed out that scientific computing which used to drive IT innovation is now leveraging the games industry, since the Sony Playstation 3 has the highest floating point performance in the world, (or on the planet as it seems is the current Sun mot-de-jour).

I wonder what this example says about the economics of the appliance vs. the general purpose?

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[sunlive2007] “topic:[James Gosling]” “topic:[IT economics]”

Acrobat 7 on Solaris

2007-03-13T14:13:00.000Z

Getting a modern version of Adobe Acrobat running on a Solaris Laptop has always been difficult. Running it in a Linux Zone is now possible as shown to me during the lunch break by Richard Jenner.

He and Kieth Glancey were demonstrating Solaris 10, and the Brandz demonstration was just part of what they demo'd. [Screenshot 1400x1050]. Richard used Centos as his Linux implementation.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[linux] topic:[zones] topic:[containers] topic:[brandz] topic:[s10] topic:[SUNW]

Inappropriate Behaviour

2007-03-13T14:00:00.000Z

Robert Hamilton told a story about a company that prohibited instant messenger because it permits inappropriate behaviour. His reply,

I can behave inappropriately with a pencil!

tags: topic:[silly] topic:[sunlive2007] topic:[productivity]

Empowering people

2007-03-13T13:30:00.000Z

I visited the Commercial Industry break-out room and was pleasantly surprised to experience three interesting and in the final case hilarious presentation

John Blackman of JB Associates announced his company's Carbon Balance Sheet audit. I have been looking at how I can adjust the TCO tools we've been using to talk in terms of carbon footprint so its good to see others looking at helping companies understand their carbon consumption.

Bernard Taveres of Unilever followed with a presentation on some social programmes supporting Unilever's transition to adopting and living its “strategic intent” of “people vitality”. He spent some time talking about building the business case for building new forms of collaboration, and they saw the key variables as people, space and technology. I suppose what is interesting is the way in which innovators in teleworking recognise the cost of space and how its use changes as companies begin to trust their employees. Earlier schemes, including Sun's own iWork scheme started by reducing the time and cost of the commute, the consequent benefits include the reduction in space budgets, although realising this is both hard and takes time, and allows a company to hire the best, not merely the best within travel distance of an office.

Robert Hamilton of Orange then spoke, starting with the assertion that

Offices are pretty lousy places to work

He argued that the main use of an office is to take delivery of snail-mail and parcels. Well, that and meeting people, which makes the web-cam (or X-Coffee application) very useful, because you can check out whose in, before travelling to work and decide not to if the office is empty or full of boring people.

The tag line he developed is that agile businesses need to “collaborate in parallel” and people need to act as customers. Only two industries describe their customers as users, one of them is IT. He also asked why people mail presentations as attachments. We understand that putting a button onto a web site, reduces the viewers by 50%, why put your content as an attachments which requires a click and application load before people can read what you want. Obviously those with stuff to hide zip the presentations up, and require their readers to use the mouse twice. As Robert said,

why mail a presentation anyway, if what I say with the slide didn't add value, I wouldn't turn up.

tags: topic:[business] topic:[strategy]topic:[sunlive2007] topic:[productivity]

Is this a technology vendor?

2007-03-13T11:00:00.000Z

Richard Barrington kicked us off and introduced firstly a video of Jonathon Porritt, talking about climate change and the need to act. Richard is very articulate on this himself arguing that the key policy for both the public polity and the private is to consume less power. If we can do that, we still have a chance of avoiding disaster. It was interesting to me that this was one of the central themes of the opening session. Today's Guardian reported on the Government's announcement that the carbon reduction commitment of the UK ( 60% reduction by 2050) is going to become law, Brown & Cameron are having a duel by press release to prove their green credentials and George Monbiot nails the Channel 4 documentary based on the countervailing view from last week. I missed the news that Curry's are going to stop selling incandescent bulbs.

The opening key note speaker, Steve Nunn from Accenture also picked up on the climate change commitments that governments are making and importantly added the system utilisation dimension. The easiest way to reduce the demand for power by data centres is to drive up utilisation using the co-hosting, consolidation and virtualisation policies, and retire and reduce the number of systems required to perform the work. The final part of the jigsaw is that the acquisition costs of computer systems continue to fall, but the cost of power will increase. Today, there are many systems which will cost more to power during their working life then they cost to buy, and data centre managers need to adopt policies to manage this expanding part of their (or their employer's) budget.

As an aside, he stated that he didn't believe that windows systems could achieve more than 55% utilisation, even with virtualisation. I wonder if we could build a more performant solution with Solaris as the OS and using windows as a guest in some way.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[environment] topic:[sunw] topic:[sunlive2007] topic:[politics] topic:[green]

The Embankment

2007-03-13T08:19:00.000Z

It was a nice walk across Jubillee Gardens, and one of the protest groups has hung a banner from one of the cranes by the parliament building.

tags: topic:[london] topic:[parliament] topic:[thames] topic:[embankment] topic:[UK]

Fantastic Day

2007-03-13T06:45:59.000Z

I'm just setting off to Sun Live, and I'll be dropping in to the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) at about 6:30 pm at the Westminster Central Hall.

Sun Live, is tag lined as "Evolution + Innovation = Revolution" and the revolution starts here. I always thought is was Electrification + Soviet Power; but we live and learn.

I publish on San Francisco time, the event is taking place on Tuesday 13th.

tags: topic:[losug] topic:[Sun Live] topic:[SUNW] topic:[UK] topic:[London] topic:[sunlive2007]

What's my blog worth?

2007-03-09T17:21:36.000Z

Another blog valuation at Dane Carlson's blog been pointed out to me by FlexRex.So here's mine.

My blog is worth
$40,646.88.
How much is your blog worth?

This uses the technorati api to query the technorati ranking, which undervalues a roller blog because technorati treats the long and short names as seperate blogs.. However, the html above is not dynamic and so I have done two queries and added the result. The number above is Dane's view of how much my blog is worth today. (His link to the backing research is a bit out of date. Tristian Louis' researc
has now been archived.

An alternative valuation is made at Blogshares, which values the blog at $15,000.

Although, I really should learn how reindex it as I havn't done this ever. If you know how to do this, I suggest you post a comment and buy some of my shares.

tags: topic:[silly] topic:[blogs] topic:[blogging] topic:[value] topic:[games] topic:[technorati] topic:[blogshares]

Yesterday in the Guardian

2007-02-25T13:12:10.000Z

Since it's the last weekend in February, the Guardian has produced a special supplement on waking the garden up. Over the autumn and winter I have "Ground Force'd" my garden and have written about it on my web site's garden project page, ( see also my garden project page at flickr), and I'm sure the advice and book references will be very helpful.

One of the articles, 'Complements of the season' has a series of pictures, one for a garden 'in a land of hosepipe bans' with poppies and gravel, which looks good, perhaps I'll try some poppies. Another of the articles lists five gardens that are inspirations for the supplement's authors, including Wakehurst Place, part of Kew Gardens which is quite close. Mind you so is RHS Wisley.

The 5Best... this week, lists five best islands. Their No 2 is Iceland and they recommend sailing down the west coast of Iceland in a 60' racing clipper with Borea Adventure.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[gardening] topic:[review]

Getting away for short break [Again]

2007-02-22T14:33:02.000Z

I have only just had time to sit down and tag last weekends travel Guradian. They ran a 100 holiday ideas around a couple of themes, the omnibus page is here, and they also ran an article on alternative city breaks on an A-Z theme, proposing the seemingly odd Antwerp, Rotterdam (too much like Southampton) & Belgrade (too much like Belgrade) together with more interestingly places such as Stokholm, Thessaloniki and Zurich, which, my flickr fans will know, I visited last month, and it is well worth the visit.

The other themes were UK "Home Comforts", "On a shoe string", "Blow the Budget", "Green Boltholes", "active & family breaks" and "scrummy retreats".

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[holiday] topic:[ideas]

Yesterday & Tomorrow at the London Open Solaris User Group

2007-02-22T11:02:52.000Z

So, I popped out last night after work to hear Jarod Nash, talk to the London Open Solaris User Group (losug) about SMF (the service management framework). An excellent and comprehensive pitch, and I shall post (or get Jarod to post) his slides somewhere and let you know where they are.

The next meeting is at Sun LIVE on March 13th, at Central Hall Westminster, where Simon Phipps is planned to talk to the group. Previous agenda have covered, Fault Management Architecture and virtualisation.

Otherwise the meetings are planned for the third wednesday of each month, except August, to the end of the year, to be held in Sun's City Customer Briefing Centre. (Apr 18th, May 16, Jun 20, Jul 18, Sep 19, Oct 17, Nov 21, Dec 19.) I wonder, if we can bring the discussion held internally about features required for a laptop desktop into the public. It was certainly lively enough, and given that its now opensolaris, non Sun people need to join in.

I have tagged this both within roller and at technorati, I am considering placing reminders in the brought forward feature for the next meetings (with technorati tags) to allow anyone to set up a technorati watch list on these tags and thus receive the reminder's through their favourite RSS reader.

Let me know if you'd find this useful.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[user] topic:[user group] topic:[losug]

Designing both sides of the coin!

2007-02-13T10:58:53.000Z

At Sun' we've just returned to profitability with our third quarter of revenue growth in a row and as some very famous economist said, three data points are a trend. One of the insights underpinning our strategy is that Sun innovates and monetises intellectual property. We are also one of the last technology companies to own the design and engineering of both CPU and operating system.

Solaris/SPARC is and will remain a key driver of innovation and competitive advantage in the data centre, because we can design both sides of the coin! To us it is obvious...., but what do others think?

Sun sponsored IDC to write a White Paper, Sun's Solaris 10 for x86: A platform for Enterprise Applications, which is hosted on http://www.sun.com/solaris. This is a very good and short statement about the techical capabilities of Solaris and the attractions it has for applications developers and ISVs. In the summary panel, they state that applications enablement is key and that Solaris and Windows have the advantage over Linux; they both have more applications available.

Another IDC paper is hosted by Fujitsu, entitled Linux & Solaris : A marriage in the Data Centre states i.e. predicts that UNIX ( from which they exclude Linux) will consolidate and that Solaris will be a survivor. This paper is dated March 2003, but it also undertakes a functional comparison and comes to the conclusion that Solaris is functionally superior to Linux as a server operating system.

However, one of the best pro-Solaris endorsements occurred last month with the announcement of the Sun Intel alliance. The Intel Web Site has a series of resources, including a press release, in which Paul Otellini, president and CEO of Intel says

"We're thrilled to be working with Sun to make Solaris on Intel Xeon processors a great solution for our enterprise customers worldwide," said Paul Otellini, president and CEO, Intel. "Bringing together the best technologies from both Sun and Intel will result in innovative products for years to come."

While Paul is not an analyst, his views of the market's developments should be respected. Additioanlly Intel have endorsed Solaris as their mission critical operating system of choice and agreed to become a Solaris OEM. The ROI calculations for an organisation like Intel are not calculated over a 12 month period. However, we can hear more from Paul as Intel have posted Jonathan and Paul's press conference as a podcast [html page]. This is really interesting and is just short of 40 minutes long, at about 11:15, Paul Otellini, states

"Solaris is evolving as a mainstream operating system."

He continues

[ is to be ] the mission critical UNIX for Xeon....feature sets people, buyers are focused on, availability, reliability, demand based switching and virtualisation .... can be [only] unleashed from the microprocesser through the operating system.

He also makes the point that Sun designs the OS and system and that this is of value to customers and to Intel.

Jonathan also makes the point that only if an operating system exposes the functionality of a CPU can it be utilised and its clear that for some of Intel's ideas of the future, they expect Solaris to do this best.

I'm curious that one of his last statements is that

"We'd love to have Solaris on Itanium"

I wonder if that'll happen?

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[futurology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[sun+intel]

Inspirations for travel

2007-02-12T12:12:34.000Z

I have just changed the wallpaper on my computers.

This is taken and linked to a flickr correspondent called "acampm1", and I have marked it as one of my favourites. It certainly makes me want to go there, and it looks great on a large screen. Other ideas for my holidays were suggested by the Guardian over the weekend and I have tagged them at delicious:holiday. They suggest as an environmentally friendly traveller, that one can go by train to Berlin, Andalusia or Venice. The journey from Paris to Madrid using the TrainHotel sounds both fun and comfortable.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[holiday] topic:[europe] topic:[train]

More about my Look and Feel

2007-02-07T18:18:28.000Z

I have just changed my banner picture and the anchor tag colours. Hope you like it, but I might have to look for a different banner picture. Any ideas?

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[roller] topic:[themes]

Re: More about my Look and Feel

2007-02-07T20:36:12.000Z

I need to update the (cc) attributes file!

Re: More about my Look and Feel

2007-02-08T19:00:13.000Z

It's looking much better. It seems there's a hint of red in the image. I think it would be more readable if the text and background were even less similar. However, it's pretty readable now. Maybe you can tweak the text color to make it more readable.

semweb & FOAF

2007-02-01T18:29:32.000Z

So one thing I have done inspired by last week's workshop has been to set up a personal FOAF file.

I used the foaf-a-matic to create it, and it can be browsed using the tabulator.

I shall probably use Henry Story's foaf file (who wrote about his contribution to the workshop here...) as a template some time soon; it has a richer information syntax. In fact Henry's write up is pretty good and offers a number of key links to progress one's understanding.I put him on my blog roll a couple of weeks ago.

tags: topic:[foaf] topic:[internet] topic:[semanticweb] topic:[technology] topic:[ce2.0]

Changing my version of the Currency theme

2007-02-01T12:51:51.000Z

I have just made a few changes to my blog roller theme. I have moved the tag cloud into the banner; if like me you often look at the blog on a laptop, there's not much room for what I'm writing after the duck and tag cloud and all the navigation widgets.

This isn't ideal. I have played with the new opacity feature to see if I can get a better answer, but this is about as good as it gets. There is a text background on the the tags, so each one can be read as you move the mouse around the cloud. Ideally, I'd like to have a text background which was an opaque white for the tag cloud, or even declare the table cell in which the tag cloud was displayed as having a background of opaque white so that the text would stand out more. I suppose I could change the hyperlink colours, but I'm not sure what'd go well in front of my duck. Instant Color Schemes at http://www.gpeters.com may help, and I found cssplay.co.uk/opacity/ useful in experimenting with opacity.

tags: topic:[roller] topic:[theme] topic:[css] topic:[blogging]

Re: Changing my version of the Currency theme

2007-02-01T16:57:46.000Z

I say you've got something here and should definitley try to make the new location for the tag cloud work.

It's great and terrible. It's unreadable, so I definitely wouldn't even try moving a mouse over the tags to see if I could make it more visible unless I believed deeply that you had info I needed.

However, it's brilliant. You've found a way to conserve space. I liked your blog from the get-go because you try to make as much information as possible accessible to visitors without overwhelming them. The location of the tag cloud now really works well.

I wasn't sure what you meant in your entry "I'd like to have a text background which was an opaque white for the tag cloud." Do you mean while keeping the duck there or just changing the image entirely? Are you married to the Duck image? If you can change it, or adjust it, that would help. Perhaps changing the color of the links would work. That seems harder than changing the picture. And then there's the duck. That trouble maker. I might be prone to changing the image to something that still looks good when the tag cloud is all over it.

Re: Changing my version of the Currency theme

2007-02-01T18:53:36.000Z

I have lightened the image, what do you think?

I'm not sure its good enough!

I am thinking of using the z dimension, to place an opaque white background over the picture, and then overlay the tag cloud on that.

Plan C involves a different colour. Check out http://html-color-codes.com/, I think the green, blues, reds and yellows might work.

More about BT & the GPL

2007-01-31T11:57:52.000Z

The Register is still running the story about BT's use of GPL code and their duty to publish their enhancements.

tags:technology software GPL "GPL Violation" BT

Uograding Postgres on a Qube

2007-01-29T07:21:44.000Z

I've been busy installing Postgres on my Cobalt Qube, running Linux. The first thing I did was to decide to install a second and newer version of the product. Despite the fact that I can see the installed version of Postgres (V6.x) is not running, you can never tell what the OS designers decided to do for database services. Here's how I did it.

I did try and start the installed version but I got a user permissions error and couldn't be arsed to find out why. I decided to install a second version of Postgres on the system.

For various reasons, i.e. the O'Rielly book is written for V7 and thats what I decided to install, version 7. The current stable version is eight (at the time of writing), so I may regret it. Here's what I did.

Make a User, this is to be the database owner and execution authority. Two things to learn from me. If you want to make a group, do so before you make the user, and user names on the Qube need to be less than seven characters, so postgres7 is out, try psql7 or pgsql7. I defaulted the shell to bash.

I like to have my database installation directory in a place other than the administrator home. I use the administrator ${HOME} to hold the downloads and install directories and since the Cobalt UNIX likes to do stuff in /usr/local, /usr/share, /usr/lib and /usr/bin, I decided to install the production instance into /opt/postgres7 , to ensure that anything I did was well away from original installation.

I downloaded the files required to ${HOME}/install/ so the tar xvf - creates a directory postgres-${VERSION}; I downloaded the postgres-7.3.13.tar.gz from ${postres.org/downloads}. This contains the other three files and is sufficient for the install.

I created a configure file with the required options and variables and ran the configure script. I chose to include tcl/tk but not perl or python. I shall probably regret not doing perl, but I'll fix this another day. i.e. I wrote a script consisting of the configure command and the parameters used. (See below for my syntax). One of these parameters set the final destination root to /opt/postgres7, so I could use the make feature to compile and install the software. Also I did not inspect the /usr/local file system to see if the Qube designers had installed pgaccess, which ought to be installed as part of the tcl package. Since the Qube has TCL installed, it may or may not install pgaccess. It is certainly there after the V7 install.

I then decided to configure the user. I wrote a .bashrc to prepend the /opt/postgres7 resources to the appropriate paths, $PATH, $MANPATH & $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. I finally decided to develop some code to check if this is required or not before doing it. Its important to prepend the directories to the path; we want the paths to direct the searching programs to Postgres 7 resources first. I also created an environment variable to point at ${DB_HOME}. Putting it in .bashrc means that the code is executed if you "su" to the user.

Next I ran initdb. This requires the -D flag to point at the "data" directory. The data directory which is configurable at configure time holds both database files and some configuration data.

Within the untar'd install directory, in the 'contrib/start-scripts' sub directory is a file called linux. This is the system V script. I copied this to /etc/rc.d/init.d and renamed it something appropriate bearing in mind that the version 6 implementation had taken the name 'postgres'. This script is beautifully documented with a 'start edits' comment. It uses the su ${PG_USER} ${command} syntax and so this is why I configured a shell read configuration file, not a login read configuration file aka profile, so that the environment declared applies to this command.

Create a database, using a script or SQL. type -p createdb tells you where the program is. It takes the parameter ${dbname}.

Here are my configure parameters

MYBASE7=/opt/postgres7

./configure --prefix=${MYBASE7} \
    --exec-prefix=${MYBASE7}/system \
    --bindir=${MYBASE7}/bin \
    --datadir=${MYBASE7}/config \
    --sysconfdir=${MYBASE7}/sysconfig \
    --libdir=${MYBASE7}/lib \
    --docdir=${MYBASE7}/doc \
     --mandir=${MYBASE7}/man \
    --with-tcl --with-tclconfig=/usr/lib

Here is my .bashrc. I use a function called contains to discover if the path contains the directory I require.

contains() {
# $1 must be set
echo $1 | grep $2 > /dev/null
return $?
}

which I then use to determine if the path requires changing,

#

PSQL_HOME=/opt/postgres7
export PSQL_HOME

contains $PATH $PSQL_HOME/bin
if [ $? !=0 ]
then
PATH=${PSQL_HOME}/bin:${PATH}
export PATH
fi

In the case of MANPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH (not illustrated), I use the -z test; the contains function requires two parameters and setting $2 to an empty value makes it behave as if $2 is unset. I could have put this logic in the function, but didn't. This is partly because I use it three times and as shown, MANPATH, requires explicitly stating if being augmented, so I need the if test anyway. See below.

if [ -z $MANPATH ]
then
    manpath=`cat /etc/man.config | \
        awk '$1==path {print $2;}' path=MANPATH | \
        tr '\n' ":"`
    MANPATH=$PSQL_HOME/man:${manpath}
else
    contains $MANPATH $PSQL_HOME/man
    if [ $? !=0 ]
    then
        MANPATH=$PSQL_HOME/man:${MANPATH}
    fi
fi

export MANPATH

The only changes to the System V start/stop script, are its name and the various file locations. It appends all logs to a single log and hence would benefit from a function that recycles the logs like Linux does for other daemon logs.

I find the start/stop scripts quite interesting. I am returning to this problem after a number of years, and the last time I dealt with it, I was using Pyramid's dualport OSx and we generally used the BSD rc.local script. Both the development of SunCluster and Solaris 10 SMF means that we need to have a think about how we want to do this. I have also had the chance to consider classic System V implementations such as Linux that have influenced my thinking. I really rather like chkconfig, I like the use of external functions and I like the use of the case construct to offer multiple run modes, or invoke multiple methods (in newspeak). I have written scripts for both tomcat and sybase and with the latter can see scope for huge argument about the method code.

This article was originally written a while ago, and not uploaded at the time because I wanted to finish describing how to use it remotely using fat clients. I never finished that bit, but when I do I'll post it on the net.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[RDBMS] topic:[Linux] topic:[Qube] topic:[Postgres] topic:[PostgreSQL] topic:[howto]

What's the Semantic Web?

2007-01-25T10:30:00.000Z

Today, Andreas Blumaur of the Semantic Web School, based in Vienna, Austria undertook a one day "Introduction to the Semantic Web". Much of this is new to me, some of it is old, but uses new words to describe old concepts and none of it is particularly easy. It'll take me a couple of days to work out what I've learned today and put it into my personal knowledge framework.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[semanticweb]

The shape of the internet, inside and outside the corporate firewall

2007-01-25T06:21:16.000Z

I have been discussing the efficacy of our internal search tools and how hard it is to find stuff, and to be honest, assumed that it was the crapness that most users accuse their IT colleagues of. However a colleague, Bernard Horan recommended that I read "Searching the Workplace Web", which suggests a different answer.

Searching the Workplace Web argues that intranet's are different from the internet and that more flexible, and different search algorithms are required to search an intranet; the most successful internet search algorithms are not necessarily going to work well on an intranet.

The author's made four observations.

The first assumption is that content in the intranet is often created for the purposes of dissemination of an authorised opinion or fact, or a statement of policy. There is no design intent to attract readership. One observation on which this is based is the fact that often content in the intranet is very light of additional hyperlinks to suggest further reading or to quote sources. Why suggest further reading when your authoring policy? There is no further reading to be done. Why quote a source when the answer is "because my boss said so!" For example, check out your companies expenses or travel policy. The authors argue that a corollary of this is that "in list" based algorithms such as PageRank may be less effective on intranet searches. Interestingly, I ran this past Chris Gerhard, who said that he'd been looking for the original text of the Road Traffic Act, but that Google (an in-list based search engine) had difficulty finding it as it preferred commentaries on the law, because they were more referenced by web page authors.

These two examples take us to assumption two. In the intranet, we're often not looking for the "Wisdom of Crowds"; there are often very small result sets for a given query, often the correct result set is only one entry. This will occur when you are looking for a policy, or an officer's represented opinion. Will expenses pay this journey cost? Is this a supported configuration? It occurs when the researcher is looking for authority not opinion.

Observation three, is that there is (likely) to be less spam inside the firewall. (I wonder if this is an aging observation, with the growth of blogs and the opening of mail archives to search, it may be that this is weakening in strength, but its unlikely (but not unheard of) that large porn collections will be found be accident in an intranet search). The corollary to this observation is that some ranking algorithms that are unsafe on the Internet, become useful inside the firewall.

Observation four is that Intranets are less friendly to search. The authors observe that much content is held inside databases, or document servers, portals, directories and other specialised interfaces

While reading Benkler's "Wealth of Networks", I first came across the concept of, a shape of the internet. Obviously we all know that some sites are very influential and highly read, but the internet's hyperlinks have a topography that can be described and measured using graph theory. This was as far as I can tell first explored by Broder, Kumar, Maghoul and others in their paper "Graph Structure in the Web". These topographies were discovered during the ascent of the dynamic search engine, which won out to the detriment of the directory based references. These two papers are contemporaries and it'd be interesting to see if these topographies remain useful as insight today.

IBM discovered their intranet topology was different to the Internet, with a smaller "core" and a larger periphery. The core is a bunch of sites that meet formal graph theory definition as strongly connected. (See Graph Structure in the Web). The size of the OUT segment, pages that can be reached from the core, but do not return is larger than in the internet, and is much exacerbated by domino document repositories. The periphery is also much larger than in the internet, they can be found from the crawl seed pages (which must be in the IN segment) but not from the core. They measured the frequency distribution of the probability that an in-list based sort algorithm would place on a page's relevance and discovered a difference in shape between the intranet and internet results, with a lower proportion of high scoring pages in the intranet.

Another interesting innovation was that the research team created three indices (most solutions used only one) for determining relevance, these were content, title and anchor text. (Anchor text is the text between the anchor tags, and thus chosen by the author to represent the link in the original document). They then build a flexible ranking engine that had a number of input parameters. (I might write about this another day, but if you want more now go to the original document).

It's three years later and its almost certain that with the changes in user content authoring tools and the fact that there is more spam and more opinion, that the topology will have changed. The improved content creation tools represented by blogs and wikis also weakens the assumption that intranet content has low link counts. Sun is very permissive about blogs, as are as far as I can tell IBM, but the introduction of blog and wiki technology has both strengthened and weakened the firewall and hence the boundary to the intranet. Company staff are better informed and make better judgements whether to publish their material internally or publicly and can do so more easily both politically and technically, but the fact that sometimes/often the authoritative statement by a colleague is on a public blog, means that intranet search needs to pass through the firewall and "join" intranet and internet resources.

One very obvious example, illustrating the difference in intranet content can be discovered by examining tag clouds. If one were to compare my del.icio.us tag cloud with my internal delirious tag cloud, there are huge differences, I have no picture gallery inside Sun, none of my food, gardening and culture bookmarks are stored, internally I have a bunch of "How to" and "Do not do", repository links and applications home pages. (Let's face it a lot of the Technical documentation is on the internet now, and the secret R&D stuff I don't get to see anyway!) Also the clouds have very different shape, partly because I have over 1200 bookmarks on my public site and considerably less on internally. Tag clouds may also be another way of overcoming some of the four observations and corollaries

In order to "see" my true tag cloud, I need to "add" my private and public bookmark lists, which I organise using delirious & del.icio.us. It needs a form of federation.

It would be hoped that tags might be part of the answer, but the different shape of the intranet, may make the development of disciminating tags very hard. My experience at the momement is that htis is true. I had given up, but I have been inspired to have another go.

Sites like Digg and del.icio.us where user generated content creates huge numbers of hyperlinks because of the number of users, will also distort the shape of the internet; as they become part of the core , the size of the "out degree" segment will become larger. Hyperlinks become the votes of web readers, not authors. Although its possible that since these sites are designed to be read by people, that there will be a more limited reference to them on other sites and they will remain part of the "In" segment. The XML feed services will however be referenced by many sites, and the linkroll gadgets mean that they are referenced..

So intranet search queries require a different approach to internet search, but is it getting closer or travelling in different directions.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[search] topic:[internet] topic:[intranet] topic:[graph] topic:[internet topology] topic:[ce2.0]

Re: The shape of the internet, inside and outside the corporate firewall

2007-02-01T09:26:10.000Z

Talking to Bernard about this and he asks if the ubiquity of google (and other in-list based search engines) and the ease of finding stuff will lead to people not publicky linking there stuff and so lead to the vicious circle of decline for the relevance of PageRank.

Re: The shape of the internet, inside and outside the corporate firewall

2007-02-06T17:19:35.000Z

Hello. I'm a new Sun intern (actually I'm on the Campus Ambassadors program). I'm curious about the internal delirious system you mentioned. Is it available for all employees? It would be excellent to share bookmarks with the other ambassadors (I attempted a del.icio.us hack to get this working, but it was too awkward and did not gained traction). I couldn't find any info about it using the portal searchbox :)

Re: The shape of the internet, inside and outside the corporate firewall

2007-02-07T11:24:06.000Z

Rafael, you ask specific questions about sun internal systems and usage, so I shall reply by e-mail, but for the interested, someone has implmented the http://de.lirio.us/ code when it was available as open source, I think it still is, but the look and feel has improved no-end. Maybe we should look at this again.

The duty to publish bites!

2007-01-24T06:30:54.000Z

I have been talking to some customers about Sun's policy to publish Solaris as CDDL, and found that some of their staff are 'balls out' fans of the GPL. The GPL places a duty to publish your source code if you have used GPL code and publish your binary. This is a very serious duty, about which I am not sure these fans are getting management or their legal departments approval.

The register reports that British Telecom have decided to publish their home appliance code because they feel that otherwise they may be in violation of the GPL since their home hub appliance uses Linux which is published under the GPL.

They are being hunted by http://gpl-violations.org/, whose page states

The ultimate goal is to make vendors of GPL licensed software understand that GPL is not public domain, and that there are license conditions that are to be fulfilled.

and Home Hub Blog comments on the act of publication.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[GPL] topic:[GPL Violation] topic:[BT]

modelling personal conversations

2007-01-24T05:51:12.000Z

The workshop was opened by Bertolt Meyer of Humbolt University, Berlin, who has recently published research into the fact that Knowledge Repositories don't work. Once he said it, it becomes obvious, have you ever found one that did.

He and his collaborators insight goes beyond the view that the central data model consists of documents, activities, topics and most importantly people. It is necessary to transform the knowledge management system into a knowledge network consisting of people and their connections and reasons for connection. They have built an application proving these insights at ioe-skillmap.hu-berlin.de.

The network visualisation functionality is delivered using prefuse, and the key data model insight is that the relationship between nodes possesses multiple attribute, particularly those of parent/child, similie/loose and vector.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[graph theory] topic:[network visualisation] topic:[KMS] topic:[knowledge] topic:[ce2.0]

It's Monday, it must be Zurich

2007-01-23T03:30:00.000Z

I've been invited to Zurich to join the an internal workshop about using Web 2.0 technology and approaches in our internal tools.

The Rough Guide to Switzerland has 10 pages about Zurich. I am staying within stone's throw of the Hauptbanhof and the guide points out that Lenin used to drink in the Odeon bar, so I had to follow him.

I'm not sure that the rest of the clientele know about their illustrious predecessor.

tags: topic:[lenin] topic:[travel] topic:[zurich] topic:[ce2.0]

Re: It's Monday, it must be Zurich

2007-01-29T10:42:41.000Z

[Trackback] I'm currently in Zurich, attending a “Web 2.0” workshop. When I started blogging I took on board 2 bits of advice: Be interesting Write what you know about. I don't really know about “Web 2.0” although I'm l...

Look at where I've been!

2007-01-19T07:41:25.000Z

On prompting from Rich Sharples, who has implemented a web services hyperlink preview facility on his blog, Mirrorworld, together with a really cool look and feel. (Its in multi-tone grey, so its cool in more ways than one), I have now done the same. You can preview hyperlinks in this blog, without opening a tab. The service provider is at Snap Preview Anywhere and I have now implemented this on this blog and on my aggregation server, planetdavelevy. You can browse my bookmarks and preview them, by viewing them at the planet. It also works on links where the anchor text is an image, try hovering over the "Innovate on Solaris" button at the top of my sidebar!

You need write access to the <head></head> section of your page, so I can't implement this on Snipsnap.

tags topic:[Technology] topic:[blogging] topic:[mashups] topic:[webservices] topic:[snap]

Snipsnap v1.0b3

2007-01-17T09:54:59.000Z

I've finally upgraded my wiki to the most recent version. I'm using snipsnap and have written about the upgrade to the Java version 1.0b3 and implementing a backup at their site [ Upgrade Snipsnap | Automated Backup]. I had previously been using version 1.0b2 running in tomcat.

It has also fixed a couple of other problems, the proxy server now works properly and the database is no longer port aware, the article RSS feeds are now available.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[wiki] topic:[snipsnap] topic:[java]

What kind of Superhero are you?

2007-01-04T08:04:54.000Z

Your results:
You are Iron Man

Iron Man		70%
Spider-Man		55%
The Flash		55%
Hulk		55%
Robin		52%
Superman		40%
Green Lantern		35%
Batman		25%
Wonder Woman		10%
Supergirl		10%
Catwoman		0%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

category: silly

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[fiction] topic:[quiz] topic:[super-hero] topic:[silly]

Sometimes the future ain't better than the past

2006-12-26T11:04:30.000Z

Looking at the Xmas (computer) games we over the last couple of days, we all decided we rather missed Twinsen's "Little Big Adventure". We seem to have had this game since we first got a computer in the house. It is a delightfull, if some what surreal, third party adventure set in a fantasy world. The games house that wrote it is/was french. (You can google or wikipedia it, and the produced a followup.)

It looks like its abandonware now, we'll see. I have tried to run it on the new computer's but the game predates Direct-X. It is for this reason that I searched for, found and bookmarked these dos emulators!.

tags: topic:[Games] topic:[old] topic:[twinsen] topic:[LBA] topic:[dos]

Some machinima viewing...

2006-12-26T10:44:49.000Z

Recovering from Xmas day excesses and I thought I'd share some internet fun. In business everyone's trying to get aboard the user generated content thing and we have an exciting collision of trends, the declining cost of video capture, the declining cost of the bandwidth to distribute it, and the games industries growing tendency to enable scripting and video screen capture.

These trends offer a new and accessable mass media form, with very low cost barriers to entry. For those who don't know, the art form of story telling within a game engine combined with video distribution is known as "machinima" [wikipedia:machinima].

So here are a couple, two of my favourite machinima videos are

"South Park: Make Love not Warcraft", what happens when the boys get addicted to their favourite online game.
What happens when Dwarves don't role play in Warcraft, but actually login, the adventures of "Leeroy Jenkins"! This is very funny and a lesson to all project managers - "Time's Up!"

For those for whom the virtual world just makes you into Lardarses, we have a unique mashing of music, dance and treadmills.

OK Go on treadmills

and a sci-fi tribute to what the Guardian describes as the best political drama of the year

Battlestar Galactica: New Crew, a fan video

You might like to also see Sun's Big Mashup, which isn't quite as funny & http://www.machinima.com/, one of the leading community sites, well at least it got the name first and some of the tools are the dogs'.

Don't forget the Edwin Beekveld's Hobbits. I have put the links in my front page sidebar.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[machinima] topic:[fun] topic:[silly]

The Future for HP/UX is dull

2006-12-15T10:40:22.000Z

I have been researching Sun's competitive position against HP. It's clear to me that HP, when they think about IT as opposed to ink, agree with Nick Carr and his thesis "IT doesn't matter". Mark Hurd (HP CEO) in the highlights of his keynote speech [.mp3] to Oracle World earlier this year (November) stated that their IT would contain

no proprietary infrastructure...... consisting of proliant and "c" class blades, linux, network storage, dynamic smart cooling, integrated racks

No room for HP/UX! Nor for Itanium! No wonder the HP/UX roadmap is so ephemeral. My colleague Matias Alonso, has also written about this direction from HP and finishes his article with the comment that even HP prefer the cost of open source to their own proprietary fees, which presumambly they rebate, so the TCO must be pretty poor.

It's already been damaged as a platform by the requirement to recompile or develop in order to transition from HP PA RISC to Itanium, and neither HP/UX nor Itanium have the volumes to retain and recruit developers. This discontinuity is a true tippining point; if you have to spend money on the application, you'd prefer (as Hurd himself says earlier in the speech) to spend it on improving the business logic, not extending its life.

HP-UX 11i v3 has slipped again to next year [1] and is now over 2½ years late. Given it only runs on HP's Itanium, perhaps the demand's not there! A prediction of this sorry state of affairs was made Sun when it published over 15 months ago an article "Reality Check: HP-UX has no future!", on its web site.

The chart below has been built from an article at IT jungle, analysing HP's most recent earnings call. Now that HP/UX is only available on Itanium, it is part of 'Business Critical Systems' (which is the extruded segment.)

Business Critical Systems (BCS) earned $987m during the quarter selling Itanium, PA-RISC, MIPS and Alpha based systems The Itanium revenues grew (representing 45% of the revenue) but HP do not publish the Linux/HP-UX breakdown any more. These earnings represent a year on year decline because the growth in Itanium systems is insufficient to compensate HP for the decline in the older proprietary PA-RISC and Alpha systems. The one thing we do know is that HP-UX only represents a part of the BCS revenues. Is this enough to keep HP interested? Is it enough to keep the ISVs interested? ISV's that want an Itanium port, will probably choose Linux. I think HP-UX's future is destined to add to HP's growing reputation as the IT industry's operating systems undertaker and join Ultrix, True64 and VMS in the hospice.

Hurd's Oracleworld speech streaming audio [.mp3]: the quote is at 3:10, you can find the whole speech with other keynote speakers on the Oracle World 2006's keynote speaker page. We can see HP's historic delivery of their roadmap, HP's recent release history.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[hp-ux] topic:[operatingsystem] topic:[os] topic:[software] topic:[unix] topic:[hpux]

Personalising the roller Sotto theme

2006-12-11T15:00:20.000Z

A principal engineer colleague, John Stanford has just kickstarted his blog and is using the "Sotto" theme. With respect to themes, one of the most requested theme amendments I've seen has been How to amend the pictures in the Sotto theme? I and some colleagues looked at this some time ago and I posted most of this article internally. On review, there is nothing requiring secrecy in it, so I thought I'd re-post it here.

I think Sotto is a pretty and relaxed theme, but I suspect that most people will want to change the pictures to develop a uniqueness and personality. There are some other problems with Sotto, which I may return to at another time, but for now, here's how I amended Sotto. I originally demonstrated the effect by converting my private blog to Sotto, but I shan't be doing this here, so I have instead posted a picture of John's blog.

Firstly select the pictures you want and upload them to your ../resource directory by logging into roller and selecting the "File Uploads" sub-tab from the "Create & Edit" tab

In my case the pictures had been chosen and munged to have the same height, which was different from the theme's default pictures. This change of height needs to be managed. (See below).

I'd never selected Sotto as my first theme, but I had an empty _css file in my page templates file list. Select Sotto as your theme and then press the customize button. This copies Sotto into your local file folders. Sotto's global theme styles are held in /roller/themes/sotto/styles/default.css. Sotto declares style alias for the three pictures, which it calls gutter images. These are located within a div tag which also has a style. This style is called #gutter. Using the hyperlink above, (and checking that it remains accurate by reading the page source ), you can obtain the CSS code source for #gutter & #gutterimage[1-3]. Cut and paste these into your local _css file. Now amend the file names!

Each of the css rules has a height attribute, set them as appropriate i.e. the images with their height set to the height of the picture and the gutter set to two greater. The image aliases have a width parameter, set these as appropriate. I set #gutter's height to be two greater than the images as this is how the original author sized it. Obviously the background attribute needs to be set appropriately and we use the url() descriptor to do this. The new pictures are held in /roller/${yourloginname}/resource. The simplest way to get these is to open them in a browser and cut and paste the URL into the _css file. If you want more pictures, then create more #gutterimagen alaises; one for each picture. This is all that is required of the CSS file.

We now need to amend the weblog page template to ensure that our new CSS file is interpretated at the correct time in the cascade. The changes required are as follows:

must be inserted after the

#showThemeStyle("sotto" "default.css" false)

line. This forces the new _css file to be included and interpreted after the default file. The default file sets the gutter and gutterimages to have a default height and use the default pictures, and our new _css file overwrites these settings. This is enough if you require three pictures. If you require some more pictures then,

needs to be added as appropriate. Look at Sotto's weblog file, you'll see what I mean.

tags: topic:[blogging] topic:[roller] topic:[software] topic:[sotto] topic:[technology] topic:[theme]

Tags in Roller & Technorati

2006-11-30T17:31:44.000Z

Two days ago, I looked at how to display the tags assigned to an article hosted in roller and left the question of generating techorati tags unfinished.

<P><small>technorati tags:
    #set ($mytags=$entry.tags)
    #foreach ( $tag in $mytags )
        <a rel="tag" href="http://technorati.com/tag/$tag.name">$tag.name</a>
        
    #end
</small></P>

should produce the technorati tag list in a small font paragraph. Now on to Chris's challange.

I have a challenge about how to migrate forward, since if I put this code in the _day file (inside the entries loop), than I will get the technorati tags twice, for those articles with both roller tags and technorati tags specified. This is caused by my eagerness to load my tags into roller to see my tag cloud; thats why I have articles with both roller and techorati tags. I might be able to create a local velocity macro and use this as content within an article, but I think the _day file is the right place. Have to think about it.

The tags are thus still done by hand.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[blogging] topic:[roller] topic:[tags] topic:[tagging] topic:[technorati]

Re: Tags in Roller & Technorati

2006-12-01T15:15:28.000Z

Can you compare the time in with a point in time where you only have one set of tags?

Tuning tags for query & propagation

2006-11-28T09:36:34.000Z

I am still hand coding the the tags in this blog. Roller has a macro to display a hyperlinked tag list but resolves the links inside the roller instance.

<P><small>tags: #showEntryTags($entry)</small></P>

However, I still want to use technorati, so I am copying the tags from the input text box into the content body and using the topic plugin to create my technorati tags. (Actually I don't even necessarily always keep the same tags, but I am pretty consistent.) I wonder how to write velocity code to build the technorati tag list.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[blogging] topic:[roller] topic:[tags] topic:[tagging] topic:[technorati]

Re: Tuning tags for query & propagation

2006-11-28T10:11:37.000Z

Dave,

While you are at it can you write the code so that the author tags get populated into del.icio.us

and any other tagging engine that is in use.

Thanks

Re: Tuning tags for query & propagation

2006-11-28T12:43:31.000Z

Interesting idea? Have you read the API? Can you issue a URL to add a bookmark to delicious with tags?

blackbox is a video star!

2006-11-21T17:39:02.000Z

Jonathan announced Project Black Box at the end of last month. Its a Data Centre in a shipping container and expanded on its unique value in his blog article "A picture's worth.... Jonathan said that customer reaction has varied with

Jonathan:Equal measures of a) nervous laughter, b) incredulity, c) profound curiosity and a recognition that we're working on the right problems for the future of datacenters. And we have an enviably beefy pipeline of customers and integrators wanting to talk to us, which is the right starting point.

As part of the reaction by customers in the UK I have been asked to talk to two major UK based customers and have thus checked out the YouTube videos published by Sun (& others; the link queries Youtube for "sun+blackbox" tags). I have also uploaded the customer presentation I use to our media caster [.pdf]).

Its clear after some research that the big advantages are it can supply & cool 25Kw/rack, so racks can be full of modern space efficient computers; you don't have to spend your space budget on cooling. With a footprint, of 30'x15', and capable of hosting 250 n-way systems with between 1000 & 2000 cores, we claim it can save 80% of your space costs, and reduce the demand for space by 50%. The land is cheaper; it doesn't have to be air-conditioned, doesn't need a raised floor, etc., and Sun Blackboxes can be stacked, if you have the headroom!

All you need is power, networks and chilled water.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[computer] topic:[environmentals] topic:[SUNW] topic:[systems] topic:[blackbox] topic:[innovation] topic:[datacenter] topic:[datacentre] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[virtualization] topic:[solaris]

Interviewing Brendan O'Neill

2006-11-20T18:15:18.000Z

At CEC last month, Brendan O'Neill (BO'N) submitted his video record [.mov]of the conference and was one of the two prize winners. I (DL) have recently interviewed him about his time at CEC 2006 and how he produced the video.

DL: What do you do and where do you work live? BO'N: I am a Partner SSE with General Dymamics IT in the Northern Virginia area. I am currently assigned to the Sprint/Nextel account in Reston/Herndon, Va. I live in Reston, Va and have since Aug 2005. I relocated from Central New Jersey after GDIT found me and offered me the job.

DL: What got you into making videos, or was it the prize? BO'N: This is my first ever attempt at making a video. I headed out to CEC 2006, as a first timer, and got the bug after hearing about the prize and after hearing that the conference was "interactive". I am a Mac user and Mac's just make everything easy, so I thought "what the heck". The video "we" made was a last minute decision @ CEC. A co-worker from GDIT, Dave Moseke had the idea and pitched it to me, asked if I would use my Mac to help make a video. We exchanged some quick ideas and off we went...

DFL: What technology do you use? (Camera, Editing Software ,Platform?) BO'N: Like I said before I am a long time Mac user. I currently travel with a 14" iBookG4 running OS X (10.4.8) with a 1.2GHz PowerPC proc and 768MB DDR SDRAM. This is a great little set up, but maby not enough for video rendering if yer in a hurry. My background is in audio engineering. After college I ended up working with a few touring rock and roll bands doing production managing and live audio engineering all over the US, blending my love for audio manipulation and my ever growing love for computers and like technology I ended up getting my MCSE and jumping around a few jobs with small IT companies in the NY/NJ area. Retired form the audio world to pursue a newfound love for Unix. The video is honestly my first ever attempt at video editing, but with ProTools and Digital Performer (audio editing software) experience it was an easy go at it. The mini dv camera used was a JVC GRD271. Software used was iMovie HD 6.0.3 and the platform was Apple Macintosh OS X/iBook G4.

DFL: Have you tried using Solaris? BO'N For video editing? NO. I do use a Dell Latitude D610 for business/email use and dual boot that laptop with Windows XP Pro and Solaris 10. The Dell, running Solaris 10 is my main/daily device for interfacing with servers while working at Sprint/Nextel, and I do run an FTP server with music and videos for a bunch of friends on a Sun Blade 100 running Solaris 8 (may upgrade to 10 soon). I also have some older hardware (ultra 5 and sparc station) running Solaris 6 and 8 more for playing around with than anything else.

tags: topic:[sunw] topic:[multimedia] topic:[DVD] topic:[Video] topic:[mac] topic:[solaris cec2006]

Have we moved on?

2006-11-16T13:26:01.000Z

Last year, Richard Morgan showed me Protopage, which I looked at today. Here's a screen shot.

I think it might be interesting to see how it tries to keep up with the new emerging tools. It seems an odd cross between a personal portal and a collaboration tool. The post it notes metaphor is good, I assume they can be read by others but surely del.icio.us is a better bookmark manager and any wiki better for collaboration. I think that for these sort of applications specialisation is becoming the key. The application needs to be excellent at something and protopage neither excells at anything, nor assembles well, although it does have an RSS display panel.I have set up a personal protopage for Dave Levy to see how I feel about it, but I can't see it replacing my.yahoo in my usage since it lacks the FX gadget. It does claim a mailbox interface, but I can't find a calander (not that I use Yahoo's calendar) The weather feature seems very comprehensive and easier to use than Yahoo.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[AJAX] topic:[web2.0] topic:[tools] topic:[web] topic:[rss] topic:[software] topic:[portal] topic:[blogging]

Open Solaris User Group in London

2006-11-16T08:09:45.000Z

Gavin Maltby, presented on Solaris' Fault Management Architecture. It is so hard to really get home how some of the very low level features of Solaris are unique and compelling competitive advantage. We all know hardware fails, but systems don't always have to do so. FMA allows Solaris to fail through some faults that bring other UNIX (or UNIX like) systems down and to recover rapidly from others. The engineering team have revisited the UNIX panic thing and improved Solaris' behaviours and diagnostics. This is an availability technology and as those of us who have worked on Consolidation Economics know, downtime costs money. In fact, the wrong (or too long) downtime causes business to fail. (Ask me about my local video shop some time?)

I am not sure that this meeting was the best for me to attend since most of my time and thinking is much closer to systems users as opposed to the hardware and this software is very close to the hardware design. The hardware designers should now be designing for it. Its one of the technologies that stems from Greg Papadopolous 5th eigenvector. "Best on Solaris". It's because we design the CPU, system and OS, we can create this technology and deliver the improved uptime benefit.

It was good to meet the other attendee and I shall be back for the January meeting. You might like to join me since there's free booze. (There's a December meeting but its on the 20th and I don't think I'll make it.)

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[LOSUG] topic:[faultmanagementarchitecture] topic:[fma]

Open Solaris User Group in London

2006-11-15T14:20:01.000Z

The London open solaris user group is meeting in Sun's Customer Briefing Centre (Regis House) tonight (18:00) in the City. I'm just about to set off to it.

tags: topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[London] topic:[opensource]

Java goes open source

2006-11-15T07:39:37.000Z

Java went opensource over the weekend under the GPL. Its now free to read and change; its been free to use forever!

I wonder if it'll make "Duke" more popular. I wonder if it'll save me from having to install Java on my Linux systems when I go through my regular rebuilds. :)

Here's an affinity button:-

You can get them here....

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Java] topic:[opensource] topic:[SUNW]

Re: Tag Clouds & Tagrolls

2006-11-11T00:24:10.000Z

Wow! Synchronicity in action. I just started to investigate what I would need to do to add blog rolls and your blog showed up :-). Unfortunately though I could not do a straigh cut-paste :-) to display my tags - may have to play around a bit with your code.

Re: Tag Clouds & Tagrolls

2006-11-11T01:13:56.000Z

You may need to check out this article which discusses CSS as well as the HTML. Good Luck!

More about Tag Clouds on roller

2006-11-10T23:14:03.000Z

Another e-mail exchange with Dave Johnson, and a quick look at the Velocity manual and I have produced the tag cloud at the top of this page which only includes those tags, with more than two occurences.

I set an interest threshold, and then within the foreach tag loop test the tag count against the interest theshold.

  #set ( $interestthreshold=2 )
  #set($mytags=$model.weblog.getPopularTags(-1, 100))
  #foreach ($tag in $mytags)
      #if ( $tag.count > $interestthreshold )
        <A CLASS="tag s${tag.intensity}" HREF="$url.tag($tag.name)"
           TITLE="$tag.count"> $tag.name</A>
      #end
  #end

The tag is only written if tag count is greater than the threshold.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[blogging] topic:[roller] topic:[velocity] topic:[html] topic:[www]

Re: More about Tag Clouds on roller

2006-11-11T00:13:10.000Z

Very nice. Looks great.

Geeks & Suits

2006-11-10T23:06:33.000Z

I made a video last week with Dan Berg and Chris Gerhard, where I played a fiercely independent investigative journalist, seeking the truth out of a corporate suit. (Yeah Right!) Chris and I did however ask Dan some questions about the re-invigorated talent management programmes (sic) that he is responsible for. To show inclusiveness, Chris and I both wore our normal clothes to work, so I dressed in a business suit and Chris was in an opensolaris T-Shirt. Geek & Suit!

Interestingly, the following day Management Today, published the highlights of a poll on the state of Business/IT alignment jointly funded by the Chartered Institute of Management and the BCS. This also suggests a them and us attitude still exists. The author, Rhymer Rigby suggests that the epitome of the split can be found in Douglas Coupland's latest book jPod, set in a Games Company where the marketing manager is at war with the development staff over their next best thing! This opposite position is counterposed by Nicholas Carr, who has turned his Harvard Business Review Article into a book called "Does IT matter?". He of course has the view that it doesn't, so the suits will always despise the techies because they cost too much and do stuff that doesn't matter. Having started with a stupid and false polarity, a more careful reading of the results suggests that things are a bit more evenly balanced and that due to the increasing maturity of the IT world and its penetration into the schools and consumer leisure markets, together with increasing access to business education, the stovepipes are not as rigid as our fictional & polemic authors would have us believe. (Although in the UK, knowing something, and certainly being qualified in or about business is not necessarily a requirement for a business career.)

I need to see if the results are available with industry breakdowns. It is my view that the sedimentation process impacts IT investment strategies as does the competitive dynamic of industry. Fifteen years ago, manufacturing companies were buying and building "Just in Time" ERP systems. Today, they are only available as packages. Just in Time is not commodity, but the competitive baseline to play the game; the software functionality of ERP is no longer competitive advantage. There remains many businesses where they do compete through the ownership or onward rental of software and or by their ability to innovate and adapt. (I'm not really talking about ASP's here, but content providers.

None of these are commodity and the geeks are required to invent and sustain the software. The world is our future!

tags: topic:[business] topic:[economics] topic:[competition] topic:[IT]

Finding stuff I said last year!

2006-11-06T11:33:56.000Z

Since the introduction of tags, I have slightly re-organised this blog site.

It now has two new features, Yesterday's Words and About Me. These features are available through the small font menu bar above the category list. Yesterday's Words is an archive feature, allowing you to look for things in this blog by Category, Tags, Publication Month, Keyword Search and review titles of the last six months article titles. I have done this because we now have tags, and people ought to be able to see the tag cloud, and I have come to the conlusion that the front page side bar was begining to be hard to use. In order to improve the ease of use I expect to move my del.icio.us feed to another back page, together with some of the bookmarks I have stored. At the moment it remains on the front page and on Yesterday's Words.

Both these new pages have tuned and smaller sidebars. I have done this by utilising the roller #includePage() macro and hold the banner (with the duck & licence) and the sidebars as seperate files. The content for Yesterday's Words is also held in an external file. This should all make updating the site a lot easier, and allow me to move from HTML tables to CSS at some time soon.

I hope to introduce a reading list page about the books I am or am planning to, or have just read.

The navigation bars at the top (and side) offer a page called site search. This is safe checkpointed version of Yesterday's Words; I created it to permit a "roll forward from" point in case I made any silly and drastic mistakes. I will delete it some time soon, so I recommend that you don't bookmark it.

tags: topic:[blogging] topic:[roller] topic:[davelevy] topic:[search]

Re: Finding stuff I said last year!

2006-11-06T12:34:30.000Z

Great. I will likely borrow a substantial part of your template. Thanks! - eduard/o

Re: Finding stuff I said last year!

2006-11-06T17:24:37.000Z

[Trackback] I'm using this blog to trackback to Dave Levy's blog entry, "Finding stuff I said last year!" First, I want to see how this trackback thing works. Second, I'm just so sure that there's really something huge to learn from Dave's entry. The entry c...

More about Roller tagging

2006-11-03T11:33:08.000Z

I have just been experimenting with the tag macros. It is possible to display an articles roller tags using the #showEntryTags($entry) macro. This can be inserted in the entries loop in _day file.

Because I am planning to continue to use the technorati tags, unless I plan to use a hidden display format I would have two copies of the tag list in the HTML rendered version. So I have not implemented this macro in the _day file.

~~I am struggling to get the tag cloud displayed, it seems to refuse to interpret the macro call~~

The #showTagCloud macro was not implemented since the velociraptor code is so simple (yeah right, I couldn't work it out). I now have a tag cloud implemented on the "About Me" page; Dave Johnson gave me some sample code to make it work. There were other reasons for not implementing showTagCloud as a macro. The team were unclear given the number of customisations that would be required, how used the macro would be, because no matter how few used it, it would need to be maintained.

First set up some CSS rules, roller offers five levels of weight, so five rules is good.

          .s1 {font-size:60%;}
          .s2 {font-size:80%;}
          .s3 {font-size:100%;}
          .s4 {font-size:120%;}
          .s5 {font-size:140%;}

These are relative rules, which is jolly good so they inherit from the Body or Paragraph rules, but you can make the rules as complex as you want. The following velociraptor/roller code implements the tag cloud in the html file.

          #set($mytags = $model.weblog.getPopularTags(-1, 100))
          #foreach ($tag in $mytags)
              <a class="tag s${tag.intensity}" href="$url.tag($tag.name)"
                  title="$tag.count">$tag.name</a>
          #end

Note the way that the CSS rule names agree with the class attribute of the anchor tag.

This article was updated at 13:30 GMT 3^rd November GMT.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[roller] topic:[tags] topic:[tagging] topic:[macros]

Re: More about Roller tagging

2006-11-03T14:10:21.000Z

Thanks, Dave. I'm going to try to roll tgs into TheAquarium this weekend.

Tagging comes to Roller

2006-11-03T09:58:24.000Z

Yeserday, blogs.sun.com's "Roller" implementation was updated to V3.1. The roller projects page is here.... This has integrated tagging and the Xihna Editor. I had to change the editor in my settings page and this is the first article written using it.

I wonder how to apply classes to the paragraphs, so

dave B$ whence html

was tagged by using the show html source button and inserting the class attribute by hand.

The article is also the first article with roller integrated tagging, so I'm not yet sure about how to ensure that technorati tags and roller tags are the same and the tags are posted to the relevant sites. So we may have two sets of tags on this article.

The technorati tags are

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[roller] topic:[blogging] topic:[xinha] topic:[tagging] topic:[opensource]

and I have repeated them in the roller entry tag edit box.

I may go back through the blog and tag every article, or at least all those I have already tagged, and I need to work out how to display my blog's tag cloud

Three Wise Men

2006-10-31T11:27:56.000Z

My colleague, Stephen Davis started blogging at sun, a week or so ago. Stephen works in Sun UK's marketing department. I know that as we read Cluetrain and join the blogosphere, we need to sneer at marketing and marketers, but Stephen is definitely not a member of "the department of colouring in". He and I agree that the job of marketing is to understand customer businesses, and hence their customers so we can make propositions of value and understand the business cases for change. The best marketing people need to understand their own business and their customer's, and Stephen is one of the best. I'm sure that Stephen's blogs will be of interest to many who work in the IT and Telecommunications markets. Stephen Davis started blogging

Richard Barrington, the Sun UK's public policy officer has also started blogging. He says in his first post that,

I spend my time working with some amazing people who are trying to 'save the world' from itself with regard to climate change and who are working to create a more fair and just society within which we all can participate. I get to talk to people from all walks of life, political persuasion, colour, caste and creed and have been given fantastic and passionate support from the leadership team in Sun UK to be the 'voice crying in the wilderness'.

He is one the most articulate people I know in the benefits of green computing. Sun's green computing propositions are based on CPU design, thin client and server design, but Richard paints a great picture of classrooms full of silent sun rays, instantly available as the students slot their Java cards into the card readers, compared with thirty PC's spinning up their disks and fans, and the opening of the windows to dissipate the heat. Another blog to enjoy.

A third wise man, is Eric Bezille, who apart from being the owner of the nose mentioned here.... and the organiser of Sun France's wine drinker's club is Sun's lead architect in the Systems Practice in France. His professional interests and expertise range from database platform solutions architecture, through service management to business alignment. As one of the ambassador community organisers, he presented to Sun's data centre ambassadors about aligning Sun's bids and the win themes with business strategic planning techniques. He is Sun's lead architect supporting Orange (Telecom France) who have a split site Oracle RAC database platform, one of the first in the world of this size and distance.

tags: topic:[blogs] topic:[sunbloggers]

The shady border between the virtual and the real

2006-10-27T13:21:11.000Z

Chris Melissinos takes issue with Ashlee Vance of the Register about the utility of Second Life, on his blog last week (I can be a bit slow). He quotes a number of organisations using the virtual world of "Second Life" to offer virtual services, including Universities and it seems Reuters. I expect the financial services companies will be in on it soon. To me its a shame; West Nottingham College implemented courseware in the Neverwinter Nights game engine, which may have been more fun; it probably depends upon what your studying. WNC believes its an excellent learning/teaching vehicle, so perhaps this'll take off.

tags: "topic:[Computer Games]" topic:[VR] topic:[Education] topic:[secondlife] topic:[neverwinternights] topic:[virtuallife]

The road to SMF

2006-10-27T12:45:53.000Z

Just checking out SMF and found these resources at www.sun.com & docs.sun.com.

Solaris 10, Basic Systems Administration at doc.sun.com
Solaris Service Management Facility - Service Developer Introduction at Big Admin
Service Management Facility (SMF) in the Solaris 10 OS which is a Sun Blueprint by Rob Romack , this is a .pdf.

Now I just have to read them.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[howto] topic:[SUNW] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[SMF(5)]

About Bloglines

2006-10-27T07:49:44.000Z

I have just put a subscribe via Bloglines button on the sidebar. I've subscribed a while but am just getting serious as I move from RSSOWL and Mozilla to reduce my requirement on system caches. Here's how you do it:-

Obviously substitute the environment variable for your true RSS feed URL.

tags: topic:[RSS] topic:[blogging] topic:[bloglines]

Filtering junk out of RSS using mozilla

2006-10-24T17:06:13.000Z

I was reviewing an internal instance of Media Wiki (the technology on which WikiPedia is built) and I have set my Thunderbird mail client up to consume the two RSS streams that the Wiki generates. These are new pages and changes. My discovery is that Thunderbird message filters work on the RSS stream. This means that we can label the messages, and mark them as read, flag them even forward them using Thunderbird.

To me this means that a stream generating hundreds or thousands of entries can be reduced to a human level. It makes the RSS usable.

This won't just work on Media Wiki, but any RSS stream with high volume and a low signal to noise ratio. It helps if the publishing/aggregation system offers easy to identify search key such as the page name. With the new pages and changes, one can browse the new pages for interesting content and track the changes using filters on the changes feed.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[RSS] topic:[filters] topic:[mozilla] topic:[thunderbird]

Laptop Diaries, tripleboot & GRUB

2006-10-24T13:15:46.000Z

The time has come the Walrus said to think of many things.............like upgrading my Laptop operating systems. Frankly I'm not using the Linux partition which I never got red-carpet to work on and is still languishing at a pretty incomplete Fedora 3. My Solaris partition is running at Nevada 35, and 50 is now availalbe, and as I wrote here..., Solaris is getting better and I need to move on. I am planning to replace the Linux partition with Nexenta and have a triple boot laptop, with Windows, Nexenta and Solaris. Sadly the Solaris upgrade path is destructive so I have to safeguard my SMF for Sybase (more coming soon) and a sekrit TCL project.

The prework required is based on the fact that the MBR points to the Linux grub menu, which needs to be changed; I propose to change the Linux partition for Nexenta. An additional problem is that the Solaris GRUB instance does not point at the Linux partition at all. With help from Big Admin, Derek Crudington & Mike Ramchand, I can now document the following facts.

The Linux grub menu /boot/grub/menu.lst is accurate. Take the Linux lines and copy them to the Solaris copy of menu.lst, which is in the same place. (The exact syntactal compatability between Solaris' GRUB and the Linux GRAB implementations took me several hours to discover). My missing Linux lines were

Title Fedora Core (2.6.13-1.1532_FC4)
    root (hd0,4)
    kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.13-1.1532_FC4 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
    initrd /initrd-2.6.13-1.1532_FC4.img

appending the word 'single' to the kernel line gives us a single user boot option, obviously, best change the title. The accuracy of the partition definition can be confirmed using the linux command fdisk -l. (The solaris programs prtvtoc & format perform this function, don't use fdisk on Solaris; the fdisk flags are different.)

So having a good Solaris GRUB menu, I need to change the MBR to point at the Solaris partition. Here's where BigAdmin although some material their is a bit long in the tooth, and Derek come in, his blog has a GRUB category and you can find an article called Solaris 11 GRUB, which documents the required syntax below.

b# installgrub -m /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c0d0s0

Before running the command I checked the disk (i.e. the final argument ) using df -k.

I now have a triple boot system, S11 Nevada 35, Red Hat Linux Fedora 3½, and Windows XP.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Solaris] topic:[Laptop] topic:[tripleboot] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[GRUB] topic:[boot] topic:[Linux]

Travel

2006-10-16T05:36:12.000Z

The Guardian has recently run a Reader's Best of......, in their travel section. The problem with Guardian readers is that one doesn't know if they genuinly are voting for these choices or just showing off. The results are posted in full on the Guardian's travel site.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel]

The Growth of Google

2006-10-10T05:55:41.000Z

I'm still pretty jet lagged, and woke up at some terrible time this morning to discover that Google have bought You Tube. See Yahoo...

tags: "topic:[business economics]" topic:[News]

Jennifer Government

2006-10-06T06:30:00.000Z

On the flight home, for once, I left the movies alone and finished Jennifer Government by Max Barry. This was recommended to me by my elder son. Barry states that he "....pretended to sell high end computer systems for Hewlett Packard while secretly writing his first novel". As it says on the backcover, in this book, set in the near future, the world is run by giant American companies, the UK & Australia are part of the USA. Everyone is so happy, tax-free and rich that they'll change their name to that of their company. A VP of Marketing decides to kill his customers to stimulate demand, and Jennifer Government after failing to stop him, vows to bring him to trial. This is a very funny book.

Barry wrote and published the online nations simulation game http://www.nationstates.net/ as part of his marketing campaign of the book, where he continues to be very funny, even in the FAQ.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[bookreview] topic:[cec2006]

The road to somewhere....

2006-10-05T22:13:00.000Z

A swift drink before the flight home with Chris Gerhard, and I tested out Benkler's theory that much of the drive to cheap computing and the over supply is in the 'lumpy' nature of computers and the consumer sector. I thought that the OpenSolaris "Appliance" project might be able to leverage these factors. He thougt not and reminded me of the compelling argument, that as greater bandwidth to the home became available, people would move their IT to utility. They don't want the fans and power draw in the house, and they want reliable disks; managing backups will never be a consumer activity. We also discussed the essential necessity of caching within the network, something known for years by the video on demand people & also considered what it might take for games to be served over the network to thin client devices.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[economics] "topic:[network computing]"

What Laptop OS?

2006-10-05T05:00:00.000Z

Dinner with some friends and the conversation turned to the operating system of choice on a laptop. I have a laptop with triple build Solaris 11, Linux and Windows, but I generally use windows for my personal productivity applications, firefox, thunderbird and star office. During the conference, I was unable to use windows; the damn thing crashed every time I invoked the wifi connection, but only in the Moscone Centre, so I used Solaris to get my connection when at last sufficient connections addressess became available. Most of my friends are either confirmed Solaris users or Mac users so I got very little sympathy.

Bruce Porter, a long time champion of Solaris on x86 (and now x64) based systems suggested that I might explore Nexenta, an Open Solaris project which combines the Ubuntu utilities with a Solaris UNIX implementation. That should look really great, combining the best of both worlds.

It's getting harder to defend, although backing up the phone now I use a Sony should be a bit tricky. Power management (suspend/resume), applications availiability and Plug & Play have always been my reasons, that and the fact that the last time I tried to use a UNIX desktop it was Linux which wouldn't run on my Fuji and then crashed twice destroying the file system in a six month period on my Dell. The other windows application that I find too useful to stop using is Hot Metal. However, this is getting a bit long in the tooth and BlueFish (an acceptable alternative) is now part for the opensolaris companion project.

I think I'll look at Nexenta.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[nexenta] topic:[cec2006]

Re: What Laptop OS?

2006-10-09T20:28:30.000Z

So I run Ubuntu 06/06 on my laptop and since installing I haven't used Windows except for my pesky Garmin GPS unit. Everything worked out of the box, even the wireless with WPA. Pull down the LIVE CD and try it out -- if you like it you can install directly from it. I am intrigued by your Nexenta comments though. Might have to try that also.

Video Diaries at CEC

2006-10-04T17:47:35.000Z

As CEC 2006 approaches its finale, I have posted the video competition winners, Brendan O'Neill and Didier Heck's entries are on the Sun mediacaster, here... & here...

tags: topic:[cec2006]

Hello Jonathan

2006-10-04T17:38:31.000Z

In Jonathan's Blog today, he welcomes us all at CEC.

tags: topic:[cec2006]

A night off...

2006-10-04T04:30:00.000Z

I like many attended the CEC last night event. A number of entertainers were working, a number of which appear on Brendan's Video and at the cec 2006 technorati photo page, although you may have to page back a couple of pages. I was rather impressed with the Hula-hoop lady.

This picture was taken by Lou Springer and is (CC) at-nc, and is a hyperlink to the published version at www.flickr.com.

tags: General topic:[cec2006]

Pile'm high! Sell'em cheap!

2006-10-03T18:26:28.000Z

I cannot believe it! Tescos are going into the software distribution business. Reported here... by vnunet. Unfortunately its not Star Office!

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[software] topic:[business] topic:[desktop] topic:[news]

My morning at CEC

2006-10-03T01:34:21.000Z

I spent the morning working in the back stage area. I and some colleagues were running the multi-media interactivity and I was also checking out the blog festival. [ sun | technorati ]. While listening to the presentations was very difficult, seeing trends that were previously invisible, because we got to see all the replies, was really good. It ensured that questions that concern everyone were presented in the Q&A sessions. Basically we invited those in the hall to text, IM or mail their comments to the backstage crew who aggregated and forwarded them to the MC. We also used these technologies and processes to invite questions to the speakers and speakers asked questions of the audience.

It was like the proverbial swimming duck, it looked really smooth but under the water the feet are flapping madly.

Our american colleagues are into AIM in a way that seems to preceed my contempories in the UK and europe. While I got an AIM login when Netscape launched Netscape Online, one of my longest known friends only just got themselves an IM account last month when his son moved to Reading for University. AIM was not exactly ubiquitous, but a number of us used our IM accounts to keep in touch during the morning.

Genral topic:[wisdomofcrowds] topic:[cec2006] topic:[folksonomy ]

Customer Engineering Conference

2006-10-02T15:11:34.000Z

Welcome to CEC! 3000 of Sun's field engineering force are gathering in San Francisco for a techfest and training event. Those of you who can't get there, can virtually attend by checking out our CEC RSS Feed. This is periodically updated allowing you to subscribe using your favourite RSS browser, or you can pick up the news at our technorati page.

Dan Berg, one of the conveners, posted his greeting here.... Have fun! We'll be in touch.

tags: topic:[cec2006]

Listening to customers, proving value

2006-09-30T23:18:51.000Z

Marc Hamilton (blogs here...) currently runs the "Systems Practice" solutions teams, of which we have three and spoke to us on thursday, and not only as in introduction to his team, who lead the "Data Centre Optimisation, HPC and Web Tier Infrastructure teams. These are led by Raj Dosaj, Simon See, & Steve Staso, who spoke to us on Friday. Marc introduced us to the way he wanted the global headquarters teams to work with the field and demonstrated the change in communication and collaboration tools. His team (and mine) are moving from Vignette to Media Wiki - from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Some of my colleagues were interested in how to develop solutions capable of supporting COM & .net applications. Marc's reply repeated what John Fowler said earlier in the week, that deals based on Micorsoft's hegemony are not long term good business for Sun and should be pursued with only with channel partners. He talked about CDW, an american reseller, who use call centres to sell computers and drive the sales out of the strock control system. The sales staff are on daily targets/bonus and if they don't close, or can't ship, they don't get credited with the sale. This is what true volume sales is! Basically good business for Sun only occurs when customers need our unique technology or expertise. A fine example was provided by Dr Simon See, who spoke about the High Performance computing team and a pursuit that was in the last days and he had high hopes of success. (You'll have to subcribe to Sun News and wait for the press release). Simon is another Principal Engineer and his undoubted expertise and enthusiasm makes him to my mind someone you'll hear more of. This is an area where Sun's experts and technology can help customers make a difference.

Jonathan blogged about Simon's deal today, 4 Oct 2006, and referenced this press release...

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" topic:[cec2006]

Do you know the way from San Jose?

2006-09-30T20:15:00.000Z

We took the Caltrain from Palo Alto into San Francisco and then suddenly realised that we didn't know how to get to the hotel. I opened up the laptop and used my Schmap player to check the route. This is an offline browser, so I didn't have to worry about wifi on the train etc., thus proving Alexandra Moss right. I have suggested that they make the data avaiable to the phone but they're committed to serving the nomadic laptop user. Annoyingly, while they had the hotel, they don't have the railway stations, but with help from other passangers who loved our cute british accents we worked out what we needed to do.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[travel] topic:[guide] topic:[railway]

Re: Do you know the way from San Jose?

2006-10-17T17:27:50.000Z

Dave,

how about a Palm Treo, and GoogleMaps on it?

Just check:

http://blogs.sun.com/pfuetz/entry/googlemaps_on_the_palm_that

Have Fun!

Voting in the Blogosphere

2006-09-30T00:35:38.000Z

As you may see, I have amended my theme to offer you blogosphere voting buttons. How did I do this. With help from Rich Burridge I amended my themes _day template file.

<a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=3&url=$absBaseURL$entry.permaLink;title=$entry.title"
  rel="external" title="Submit it to Digg">



  <img src="http://blogs.sun.com/richb/resource/bookmarkIcon-digg.png"
      width="16" height="14" alt="" border="0"/>
  </a>

The Border="0" is quite important, as in my original implementation I did not treat the four icons equally. This controls if there is a border around the picture, which since I have a white background and white icons, looks better than the active link colour border, which is as you can see orange.

I wonder if I should convert the theme to my web space greens.

tags: topic:[roller] topic:[software] topic:[blogging] topic:[theme] topic:[customisation] topic:[Technology]

Dense & Slow

2006-09-29T16:48:46.000Z

I have just posted my notes on Andy Bectolsheim's presentation on Tuesday, which I have back dated.

Residual Values

2006-09-29T16:33:40.000Z

Phil Harman has just turned up and after we exchange traditional greetings of scorn, he shows off his Acer Ferrari Laptop. I'm not bitter that I won a Cobalt Qube last year, when several colleagues were bought these laptops, no no, I am not bitter - but when Phil told me that he sold his Qube on Ebay for 300 quid, which is more than I got for my Alfa 155, I was a bit taken aback.

tags: topic:[Silly] topic:[economics] topic:[cec2006]

Re: Residual Values

2006-09-29T17:50:30.000Z

Ask Clive King what people refer to his Acer laptop as. It will make you pleased you don't have one.

Now I want a Campagnolo laptop that would be cool.

Corporate Consolidation in Hitech

2006-09-29T16:27:30.000Z

Good Grief! CNET News reports that HP are to buy Voodoo PC. (See here...). When HP's wintel rival Dell bought Alienware earlier , I commented on my blog, that I thought or hoped that Alienware's system design expertise would be safe inside Dell's corporate mantle and even that I had found some value in Dell's self help resources. There is no doubt in my mind that like Sun these two companies design and build superior systems. This'll be interesting to see if Voodoo is valued for its design expertise or only its customer base - maybe its seen as an ink demand creation investment :), but it does mean that these games platforms will get into the shops.

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" "topic:[hitech mergers]"

Re: Corporate Consolidation in Hitech

2006-09-30T23:44:34.000Z

Hi Dave, For more than a year, Dell has been at the forefront of integrating gaming technologies into high-end PCs, like our new XPS line. So HP is now starting to catch up...or at least put some people inplace that might help, with no real commitments to deliver. VooDoo has a long way to go inside HP, especially since we at Dell already "get it" and Michael leads that charge, as a gamer himself. YOu can fiind more informataion at our own blog or my comments to Rahul.

Hatsoff to UNIX

2006-09-28T16:53:43.000Z

Chris Ratcliffe spoke today and stated that Red Hat are about to drop enterprise server R3, and this is an opportunity for their users. I didn't know Solaris 10 supports more hardware and more applications than Red Hat and that the transition from R3 to R4 is not necessarily easy, and that adopting Solaris may be as easy. Sun has more to say about this on it's web site.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[linux] topic:[softwaremigration] topic:[cec2006]

Music and CD storage

2006-09-27T17:01:47.000Z

I've just opened a login at digg.com and came across this article which allows you to create CD covers inserts using a web site.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[music] topic:[cec2006]

Am I Dense?

2006-09-26T19:30:00.000Z

This morning at the pre-CEC meeting, we were addressed Andy Bechtolsheim & Shane Sigler about the planned AMD based systems Sun are will be launching. These systems are very dense, but will run very hot.

In their 2003 paper, "Power & Heat in the Modern Data Center", Gartner argued that the average power & cooling supply for data centre space was too low, and that the common planning assumption for new space would also be too low. Even their predictions seem low three years later given the ultra-dense systems being produced by Sun and its competitors, although Gartner predicted that the system vendors would continue to compete in this way by designing and building ultra dense systems.

Improving density is partly the outcome of Moore's Law which works at about 100% improvement every two years. One obvious answer of course is to drive up utilisation; less computers will be needed. However, the centre of this problem is that the facilities managers who buy the air conditioning and pay the ground rent and electricty bills do not buy the computers. Ignorant Data Center managers just pass the problem on to the facilities team. Smarter Data Centre managers are using space and the power/cooling per rack constraints as budgets. Typically, they use more than the mimium amount of space to host these new hot systems; its the best TCO solution. There are very few computer rooms in the UK that can take these systems. This is equally true of our competitor's systems as well.

This was written after the presentation and has been backdated to roughly the time of occurence.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[power+cooling] topic:[computersystems] topic:[cec2006]

Virutalising Computer Systems

2006-09-26T00:00:00.000Z

The rest of the day we considered virtualisation technology. What we have to offer has not changed much since the last conference, (blogged here...), but it seems we have a lot more experience in using many of the currently available tools. Basically we're late to market with some of the competitively defensive technologies and the problem is being defined by Windows and the answer by VMware. Sun's broader range of technologies and the sophistication of the combining these tools into an appropriate new answers are inhibitor's to adoption. To my mind the simple answer is not enough, the data centre manager needs an architecture that supports both his or her applications portfolio, the businesses' change velocity and the technology platforms needed to support these, I don't think VMware does this, but I'm not convinced our story is yet sufficiently aligned. We have more work to do.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[computers] topic:[systems] topic:[virtualisation] topic:[SUNW] topic:[cec2006]

Buying Alignment, Business Confidence

2006-09-25T19:30:00.000Z

John Fowler, who has taken over as the EVP for Sun's Systems business unit spoke to us today. This is only the second time I've heard him speak and its good to see his humour come through. He also showed during the Q&A his single minded approach in investing for growth and leveraging the opportunities that IT's massive appetite for innovation create.

He told us a story about a visit of his to Poland, where one of the salesmen told him that "customers marry software, they only date hardware". (He told it well though) - and we always need to bear in mind why customers do things. While large customers will often have misalignments within their processes as they fail to align individual and team goals with corporate needs plans and strategies.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[cec2006]

A french man's nose...

2006-09-25T19:06:35.000Z

Most of the Europeans are flying in today and we arranged to visit a 'french' restaurant called "The Left Bank" in Palo Alto where we let Eric Bezille, the only frenchman choose the wines. This was an excellent move; he found an American Chenin Blanc (Ballantines 2005), which was quite tasty and herby, an excellent french Vouvray and a Californian Pinot Noir, called Irony, which is one of the best I've drunk in California, lacking that meaty earthy taste which presages the mother of hangovers. I was able to crack my "mmmm, I get the taste of grape" joke, which most hadn't heard before so that was good. We may have to go back as the some of the other starters sound too good to miss.

keyword: CEC2006

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[wine] topic:[cec2006]

Re: A french man's nose...

2006-09-26T09:12:34.000Z

While you're out there, see if you can track down some Zinfandel from the Coturri vineyard. I went to a tasting up in Duncan's Mills when I was over there in 2003, and it's some of the best wine I've had while being pretty good value. As with most wine-producing countries, the US seems to keep the best stuff for themselves - I've never found it over here!

I.T. is business critical!

2006-09-25T05:15:00.000Z

I finished off yesterday's Independent and noticed in the business pages that MFI has had to get out of its iconic flatpack furniture business due to significant losses arguably caused by a new IT systems implementation described by the Indy as, "so mismanaged that it couldn't deliver ...goods". I wonder whose fault that was!

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" topic:[cec2006]

Re: I.T. is business critical!

2006-09-26T08:56:01.000Z

Ahhh - I've never really been one for schadenfreude, but as well as thinking "I'm hardly surprised" I'm also thinking "It couldn't happen to a more appropriate bloke" :-> .

Films on the Plane

2006-09-25T03:30:00.000Z

Normal sort of journey, and I took the opportunity to watch X-Men 3 and V for Vendetta. So X-Men 3 confused me, while watching it I thought it was rather good and I enjoyed meeting some of my underused favourites, but after it finished I felt unsatisfied. There's so much unfinished, and possibly unfinishable given that some (critically important) characters have been written out through death or 'cure'.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[cec2006]

Reasons to ... return to Bradford

2006-09-25T02:30:00.000Z

On the way over, I looked at the Independant, the travel pages of which covered Bradford, famous for many things, but expecting to act as the host for the International Indian Film Awards next year. This may or may not be as a result of Braford being the home town for the National Museum of Photography, but these organisations run an annual bollywood film festival in the UK, called "Bite the Mango" . Its running now, so if I want to go, it'll have to be next year.

The article couldn't help but mention curries, and I have bookmarked their references in my del.icio.us. This article was written later, and back dated to near the time of occurrence.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[Bradford] topic:[UK] topic:[indianfilm] topic:[movies]

Off again to America

2006-09-22T17:13:05.000Z

I'm flying to the US on Sunday to attend Data Center (sic) Ambassador training and Sun's premier field technologist training, the Customer Engineering Conference, CEC2006, on the west coast in California.

I'll keep you all up to date with my adventures on this blog

tags: topic:[cec2006]

Building a Yahoo MapApp

2006-09-12T18:25:10.000Z

I wrote my first Yahoo Map application awhile ago, but at the time, sadly, Yahoo were not yet supporting UK or european maps, so it looks a bit crap. I had been trying to build a map showing the home & work locations of the membership of my school classmates Yahoo group in order to arrange local reunions. Yahoo now have UK coverage and so you can find my notes on how to build a Yahoo Map App. immediately below.

You can see below, that the application has three areas, a legend, an item list and a map area. The final area, displays a map with icons representing the items accurately located on the map. My map has three objects, a home location, a work location and a City icon.

at home
at work
a city

By placing a number of cities on the blank map, I can at least give readers some idea of the location of any clusters that exist. I shall be polling the club to see if its any use, and hope that Yahoo extend the maps application to the rest of the world. At the moment, I have placed Portsmouth, Bristol, Farnham, London, Oxford, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Hull, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh on the map. This might be best augmented with Exeter, Penzance, Aberystwyth and Aberdeen.

The key Yahoo documentation resource is here.... The application needs a name which can be obtained from Yahoo. This is really easy, you fill in a form and they check if someone else has it and you get it or not. The next bit requires some more work and thought. You need to build an XML file that describes the applications resources and most importantly holds the geographical descriptors for the icons. The Yahoo resources have a sample resouces file and application to test. The XML document type is best documented at Brainoff's World kit page here..., where they document GeoRSS.

First we have some applications meta data. A title, a return-to page, the map's centre on opening the window and a zoom level. (The Yahoo application has a number of zoom levels.)

    <title>Application Title</title>
    <link>http://www.anyoldsite.blx</link>
    <geo:lat>xx.xx<geo:lat>
    <geo:long>xx.xx</geo:long>
    <ymaps:ZoomLevel>7</ymaps:ZoomLevel>

Having created the applications wide data, we need to define the properties of each of the map icons we're going to use . These are held in a group ymaps:Groups and each object is a Group. Each group has a title, an id (used to reference from the items) and I chose to define the BaseIcon URL here. This means that the application can write a legend and the items, which are the individudal icons located on the map will inherit the icon using the group id. The URL needs to be available on the internet i.e. not be behind a password, or require a cookie etc., etc.

  <ymaps:Groups>
    <Group>
      <Title>Home</Title><id>home</id>
      <BaseIcon>${IconFile_URL}</BaseIcon>
    </Group>

The group element can be iterated, but needs to be encapsulated within a <ymaps:Groups> </ymaps:Groups> tag pair.

Now we can define the items. These require a Title, Description, location and the group id to allow the icon inheritance. The title and description are displayed on pop up boxes on the map and hyperlinks can be added at the item level.

    <Item>
      <Title>Home</Title>
      <Description>${Comment}</Description>
      <geo:lat>xx.xx<geo:lat>
      <geo:long>xx.xx</geo:long>
      <ymaps:GroupId>home<ymaps:GroupId>
    </Item>

Actually I found this easier than I expected as I am not an XML guru. The Yahoo application will locate the icon using an address or the long/lat parameters. I chose to use the long/lat parameters because the address funtionality requires US addresses and this isn't good enough for me. I used Google to find some long/lat pages. My del.icio.us tag:geography lists those I've found. Some of the cities are dead easy, but I selected Brainoff's geocode page, which wasn't good for Farnham. I checked Farnham using www.streetmap.co.uk and this should work as I begin to create individual item entries.

The Yahoo reference document also documents the HTML string that finds the application. The string needs the application key and the resource file URL.

http://api.maps.yahoo.com/Maps/V1/annotatedMaps?appid=${Mykey}&xmlsrc=${MyXML_URL}

The URL needs to be readable by the application. My first instinct was to put the icons and resource files in a Yahoo Group Files Folder. Unfortunately these locations can not be read from the internet unless you login to the group. The Yahoo application can't do this so I've put the files on a web server, not my Qube . Here's the finished screenshot.

This picture,was made today, I put the city icons in; they gave a sense of geography before the maps became available.

On another matter, it's quite interesting how geographically distributed that class now is, with quite a few of us living abroad. What seems odd, or underlines how much times have changed is that we were at school at a time when foreign travel was much more limited and in fact you could only buy £50 of foreign exchange per annum.

Some acknowledgments. The city icon came from the Iconarchive and is charityware icon. The author asks users to make a donation to a homeless charity. The people icons come from FamFamFam Silk icon set, although I had to convert the .png to .jpg; the app does not render .png.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Yahoo] topic:[software] topic:[maps] topic:[GeoRSS] topic:[RSS] topic:[XML]

Not such a busy weekend!

2006-09-11T12:45:36.000Z

The travel guardian was a bit under its normal standard but it did mention Open House, who are organising an open day (next weekend) of some of London's more unusal and interesting and normally private buildings. I'm a bit busy next weekend so I'll probably miss it, again!

I did get onto the computers, and was planning to visit the Hannah Pescher sculpture park, but went home instead where I installed Sim City 3K (from Sold Out software) onto the system and then started looking for an icon for the manual. This rather diverted me into some interesting Soviet style icons (here...) which suggested the creation of a "Soviet theme" for the desktop. So I hunted around flickr for some pictures to use as wallpaper and/or screen saver widgets. The Alienware box I have comes with a proprietary theme with alternative icons for systems and folders in explorer, and some of these icons play a similar role. I wonder how to make such a theme. The obvious Microsoft article does not explain how to do this. So any ideas/links would be useful.

I have captured some of the more interesting links I discovered at my del.icio.us.. They're currently in the side bar.

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[windows] topic:[desktop] topic:[theme] topic:[icons]

Re: Not such a busy weekend!

2006-10-03T06:12:55.000Z

hello Levy , I 'm "hot fan" of Soviet Union. Would you give me some desktop theme "Soviet Style" :) thanks alot ^^

Things to do in Seville

2006-09-04T10:40:23.000Z

The Guardian's travel supplement announced their travel wiki's Seville pages on Saturday.

I visited there earlier this year, but there's obviously still stuff to do, so I have taken some notes and will be thinking about going back. There's parts of the town we didn't visit and other parts we didn't give justice to, but its a great place to visit just to experience the atmosphere.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[Seville]

The Beauty of Grass

2006-08-31T10:11:51.000Z

I visited Bury Court yesterday which claims to have two of the finest contemporary gardens in the country, designed by Christopher Blakely-Hole & Peter Oudolf. It's been explained to me that 'contemporary' means lots of grasses.

And a 'Tea House', well that's what I think it looks like and with the pond we get the now mandatory water feature to contrast with the stone of the brick work and paths, the wood of the construction and the metal of the planters and furniture.

More pictures in my Bury Court set at my flickr, including some of the non-grass plants i.e. flowers that took my eye, although these also include a Vine!

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[Places] topic:[UK] topic:[gardening] topic:[gardens] topic:[horticulture] topic:[design] topic:[burycourt]

Re: The Beauty of Grass

2006-08-31T18:59:25.000Z

I like the pictures on your Flikr site Dave. Several of the Bury Court ones are excellent - both the subject matter and your composition work well. Did you get to take home any of the grapes?! Colin

Semantic footprints through time

2006-08-29T11:48:02.000Z

Another thought (about tags & prompting, see also here... or here...) is that prompting (& categories) inhibits evolution. Either the ideas being explored change, or the common use of words chnage. An example on this blog is that I should probably create a travel category on this blog rather than treat it as a qualifier of Culture, but because I am prompted, I have never bothered.

On the other hand, I also want you to able to find all the articles in a natural series, so I value the stability but its means that you have to learn about my use of the catagories. The search engine and article list on the sidebar are also category context sensitive which is good.

(I really need to see the coming Roller tags implementation, to see if tags and categories really are interchangable).

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[roller] topic:[tags] topic:[semanticweb] topic:[search]

Using del.icio.us to find Flickr pictures

2006-08-25T10:45:51.000Z

Did you know that if you bookmark a flickr picture at del.icio.us, that it posts a thumbnail into the HTML page of the del.icio.us feed.

I originally wrote, if you check my delicious HTML page out now, you can see what I mean, but I decided to upload the screenshot. I have however checked the RSS feed using Mozilla, RSS Owl and Bloglines, and it would seem that the picture is not propagated inside the RSS feed.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[bookmarks] topic:[tagging] topic:[photos] topic:[del.icio.us] topic:[flickr]

Che Guevara: Revolutionary & Icon in London

2006-08-25T10:09:22.000Z

I visited the V&A's Guevara, Revolutionary & Icon exhibition. This exhibition is based on the famous photographic image of him and its use, so less political and a bit of design. Lawrence Lewellyn Bownen does socialism. Sadly the V&A prohibited photographs, even of the plaques they made themselves. So here is a re-sized copy from wikipedia.

Safely Home

2006-08-19T19:30:00.000Z

Home safely, one of the best, i.e. on schedule journies home from Greece ever after a relaxing, do not very much holiday.

The point at Kalogria Bay, and a sunset from last year; the family wouldn't let me use the camera this year and my phone shots aren't so good.

More pictures on flickr from this year & last (2005). As ever, I'm grateful to our Holiday company, "Greek Options".

Another article backdated to a time nearer its occurrence.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[europe] topic:[greece] topic:[greekoptions]

Holiday Reading

2006-08-17T15:30:00.000Z

My family think I'm odd because of my reading choices.

I have started and finished Gary Younge's "Stranger in a Strange Land" (reviewed in the Guardian here...) and started Yochai Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks" (recommended to me by Simon Phipps) [ Book Site... ] [ Amazon... ].

I have not finished the latter yet and I'll need to re-read several parts of it, however it covers the economics of the internet and information and the social and process architecture of information production. Economics has obviously come on a lot since I studied it at University. I was reminded of this two years ago when I visited my alma-mater, the University of Exeter's library and looked up my finals papers. Some questions I can no longer understand (did I then? ) and some are now irrelevant.

The architecture of information production was something I found very confusing when I started to blog; as colleagues argued about the importance of the planet aggregator site run by Dave Edmonds, planetsun.org which seeks to aggregate all Sun staff authored blogs. I hope to review the book in some depth, but probably after I finish it.

Younge's book is pretty much like a blog, a diary of his time in the USA, through the eyes of a black briton, working as the Guardian's US correspondent. The book is structured through the categories of War, Race, Politics and Culture, and being written by a journalist, easy to read.

Another article backdated to a time nearer its occurrence.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[reading] topic:[economics]

A more exciting journey than expected

2006-08-14T16:45:37.000Z

We arrived after a long and interesting journey. We've done the journey before and so the surprises were all at Gatwick and due to the emergency security processes. We had taken the advice to get their early and so were fortunate enough to be one of the first to be checked in, although somehow we still got seats nearer the back than front.

The security guards were very strict, confiscating throat sweets and a suduko puzzle, but since no-one had any hand luggage (and we were pretty early), the security checks were actually quite quick. We also didn't have to charge onto the plane to make sure that our hand luggage could be fitted in among the bastards that think a suitcase is hand luggage. (If its got wheels, its not hand luggage in my book, put it in the hold and wait for it to catch up with you at the other end. Here's another hint, if you take a bag (or lets face it a second bag) that's bigger than intended, you deny space to others; this is not the behaviour of good neighbours.) Despite not having any hand luggage, sufficient people in front of me found enough to place in the overhead racks to delay my exit from the plane, although why I worried I don't know since my holiday luggage had to catch up with me before I could leave Kalamata.

We travelled from Kalamata to our final destination by Taxi. This was fortunately an air conditioned Merc. So I tried to settle down and admire the mountain and sea views. This is in fact very important since double white lines in the centre of the road do not seem to mean either do not overtake, nor this is the centre of the road. I also started to get worried when our driver started to use his mobile phone, but I soon relaxed when I realised that he didn't use his second hand for steering anyway, so we were in no more danger. NB Its illegal to hold a mobile phone while driving a car in the UK.

Bottom line, Gatwick is always operating at the edge of its limits and it can be quite unpleasant, this was one of the easiest journeys through the airport I've ever had and the flight may not have been the most dangerous part of the journey :)

This was posted on the 24th August and back dated to the day it occurred.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[flying] topic:[gatwick] topic:[UK] topic:[security] topic:[anti-terrorism] topic:[airports]

Write to you soon

2006-08-12T18:35:59.000Z

I'm off to Greece for my Holidays. We're going back to Stoupa, where we were last year.

Hopefully, I'll come back refreshed. If I take any pictures, I'll post some here and the rest at my flickr.

Anyway, no internet - so my last article for a while.

category: culture

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[greece]

Shell Scripting and PATHs

2006-08-10T13:43:18.000Z

Everseen a PATH like this....

/opt/sybase/ASE-12.5/bin:/opt/sybase/ASE-12.5/install:/usr/local/bin:/opt/sybase/ASE-12.5/bin\
:/opt/sybase/ASE-12.5/install:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

I have over the last couple of weeks been installing Users on UNIX systems and considering the issue of the PATH variable. The PATH above is caused by not checking if the directory is in the PATH, before adding it. This is particulalry a problem for those shells that have one file executed on a login and one file executed each time a new shell is invoked, such as ksh & bash. Also, for users created to own shared services (such as sybase in this case), people may enter the user from several entry points, including login, su * su -. The problem is exacerbated when the environment definitions are written by a third party, in this case Sybase, but other packages have their own problems.

I have decided to undertake a test prior to amending the path. I'd like to write a function 'prepend2path, but came to the conclusion that the level of indirection required was to much, for me at least. I use a function contains

contains()
{
    #contains $PATH $directory
    /usr/bin/echo $1 | /usr/bin/grep $2 > /dev/null
    return $?
}

This allows me to test if a $PATH contains a given $directory

  if [ -d ${directory} ]
  then
      contains $PATH $directory
      if [ $? !=0 ]
      then
          PATH=${directory}:${PATH}
      fi
  fi

These statements should probably be placed in the shell read configuration file for the default login shell for the user, however they may be located elsewhere for good reason, such as in a script so that it can be run from wherever and the script becomes responsible for obtaining its own environment. The function can be placed in an external functions file and then invoked from wherever should this seem sensible.

This code model can be used for LD_LIBRARY_PATH and MANPATH. Both these variables may be unset so the contains function needs to OR'd with -z test. Also we can iterate the test.

  for directory in ${STEM}/install ${STEM}/bin
  do
    if [ -d ${directory} ]
    then
        contains $PATH $directory
        if [ $? !=0 ]
        then
          PATH=${directory}:${PATH}
        fi
    fi
  done

As I write this article, it becomes clear I should put the -d test inside the contains function.

contains()
{
    #contains $PATH $directory
    if [ -d $directory];then
        /usr/bin/echo $1 | /usr/bin/grep $2 > /dev/null
        return $?
    else
        return 99
    fi
}

This leaves the path assignment statement looking like this.

  for directory in ${STEM}/install ${STEM}/bin
  do
    contains $PATH $directory
    if [ $? !=0 ]
    then
      PATH=${directory}:${PATH}
    fi
  done

Of course there are those that say if you don't echo $PATH, you don't have the problem either!

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[UNIX] topic:[scripting]

More Real Burgers, or is that Realer

2006-08-06T19:39:06.000Z

I really like Burgers, which as a Brit has been a real problem over the turn of the century. Fortunately, cooks are begining to concentrate on this glorious food once again. I mentioned an article in the Guardian in this blog about 6 months ago and they have had another look in their Readers' Restaurants column.

I will try and del.icio.us tag them over the next day or so with the burger tag. Maybe I should build a Yahoo MapApp of these sites

tags: topic:[burger] topic:[UK] topic:[Food+Drink] topic:[London]

Multiplayer Baldur's Gate at Home

2006-08-06T17:41:04.000Z

If you're a fan of my del.icio.us RSS feed, you'll have noticed that I have been adding some links about Baldur's Gate. This is the first version released, and I finally got multi-player working in the home today, so I expect to be running through the game again.

I have discovered [at length] that Bioware used Microsoft's the "Direct Play" API in Direct X which won't permit local tcp/ip addresses to participate in a multi-player game. The simplest solution is to use IPX, which fortunately Windows XP still supports. For those looking to solve the same problem, I have documented my researches here... on my personal Wiki, although I have not yet documented my success.

tags: topic:[Games] topic:[computer] topic:[BG2] topic:[multiplayer]

Determining UNIX service states

2006-08-03T07:20:24.000Z

On both my Qube (Linux) and Laptop (Solaris), I have been installing shared services, such as Postgres, Sybase and snipsnap, and thus considering how to manage them. I have wanted the excuse to write an SMF(5) compliant script and so have been working on one.

One of the key methods required is the status method which I have after discussion with colleagues, decided has three states. These correspond to a Jackson Backtracking problem, since one state is an error state. This can only be defined as a not running, not stopped state. The diagram below shows the JSP structure diagram.

The reason it's a backtracking problem is that you can't tell if its an error state until after you have tested for the other two good states.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[UNIX] topic:[scripting]

Home from Vienna

2006-08-02T18:01:33.000Z

Safely back from my trip to Vienna.

We got a lot in, from the old imperial palaces to the new republic, offices, shops, restaurants, cafes and art. On our way to the Hofburg, (the old city imperial palace and now a museum complex), we passed the Donnerbrun fountain in the Neuer Markt.

The following day we visited the Belvedere, another imperial age palace given over as an Art Museum, where we saw Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss" and "Judith I". The Belvedere also has a broad collection of the "Secession" movement artists, but to me one of the more interesting exhibits documents the now missing pictures of "Klimt's Legacy", which after lengthy court actions in the USA & Austria are now in the USA.

After the Belvedere to escape all the imposing, baroque, imperial and classical architecture, we visited the Hundertwasser Houses, ended up at the Prater and rode on the Ferris Wheel where I managed not to mention Cuckoo Clocks.

I also discovered that Starbucks has not taken over in Vienna,where a marvelous coffee, called "Melange" is served and I managed to have some "Sachertorte" in the Hotel Sacher. Very swish!

links: Gustav Klimt (Wikipedia), my vienna pictures (flickr)

tags: topic:[culture] topic:[travel] topic:[europe] topic:[austria] topic:[vienna] topic:[art]

Vienna, now & then!

2006-07-28T05:08:45.000Z

In preparation for our trip to Vienna, we've just seen "The Third Man", again. Its a long time since I have seen it, and its interesting to watch given it is older than I am. The story seems quite different in the 21st Century.

It's reviewed by Empire here..., and while I'm sure they've rebuilt a lot, and there are no more bomb sites, it sort of set the mood for our journey. I wonder if we'll get out to the Ferris Wheel.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[Film] topic:[Vienna] topic:[WWII]

Citybreaks, Vienna, London & NYC, but mainly London

2006-07-27T21:31:13.000Z

I'm planning a trip, to Vienna and met up with one of my Austrian colleagues to ask his advice. He lives there and was almost surprised that people would come and visit. It reminded me that I've often wondered how visiting one's home city and pretending to be a tourist would work, and for me this would be London. Another provocation is "Management Today", the magazine of the Chartered Institute of Management, which has a serial called "business travel". Over Xmas, it published an article written a New York based women working for PWC about London. Her hotel choices look cute, but surely London has more to offer in "A few hours to kill" than "We will rock you", the Queen musical.

The first thing their correspondent suggests is the "Red Bus" tour. As a local, I've never done this and may not know what I'm missing. Otherwise I agree with her advice to walk, although her map and vista seems to be the West End only, i.e. not the City, nor south of the river and moving between these areas involves the tube or taxis.The exhibitions at the Queen's Gallery and Courtauld Institute are usually worth a visit, and I spent an hour in the British Museum this time last year and I really intend to get back there.

The web presence for London's "Forbidden Planet", the classic UK based science fiction chain is a bit crap, but to my mind, the shop is better than its NYC equivalent. Obviously London's Films are not going to excite a New Yorker, but maybe a visit to the NFT or the London IMAX are worth a mention. The west london museums such as the Natural History Museum and the V&A (I really must get there myself) are/should also be worth a visit. If you want to go to a play, I'd choose the National or Royal Court. You can use these links to check out what's on. I used to be more adventurous and use Time Out as a guide, but somehow it doesn't seem so easy any more. I have to add the Tate Modern & Britain, both of which I have always enjoyed. I know St. James Park too well, but would enjoy walking around Kensington Gardens, which I've never visited and Kew Gardens again, which I have.

When in NYC, I have always enjoyed the Circle Line round the island tour, but in London, you can catch a boat from central london, travelling east down to Greenwich ( See Google here... or TFL here..). The views and commentary are fascinating, although the view at Waterloo bridge is too low to see the "City" skyline and again too low at London Bridge to see the City & Docklands skylines, although you do get a great view of the Pool of London. Furthermore, at Greenwich, you can visit the Cutty Sark, (a Victorian tea clipper), the original National Observatory and the National Maritime Museum, which in London is worth a look. I've never done the other direction from Westminster or Chelsea pier towards the west, past the London Eye, the Palace of Westminster and the MI6 building towards residential west london including the Craven Cottage, the boat race route and Hammersmith and Chiswick from the river. Again, something to do!

So what's missing, so far from my lightning review of London, is some stately homes. You can visit Buckingham Palace (but not often), the Houses of Parliament & the Tower of London. The National Trust has a number of fascinating houses & palaces to visit in London, and Apsley House, No 1 London, the house given to the Duke of Wellington, near Marble Arch can also be visited.

My problem is familiarity, I know the city too well; I can no longer see and experience these places for the first time and even the grandeur of some views has waned, but you may not have that excuse? It is the fresh eyes thing that makes the MT article and others like it interesting to me, or my anticipation of my trip to Vienna.

I think that I have created enough things to do in this article for myself, I hope I have done so for you.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[London]

my lists: London, Culture+London, London+Hotel flickr: London, Docklands

My personal planet

2006-07-25T22:11:10.000Z

I now have an instance of the Planet RSS feed aggregator running on my Qube under Linux 2.2 which is aggregating my Snipsnap and del.icio.us feeds, or would be if I hadn't discovered a misconfiguration that makes it difficult to blog on my snipsnap. (This seems to be a windows firewall problem!)

How do I do this?

Planet requires Python(v2,2 or better). So I downloaded the most recent Python (2.4) from and tried to compile it into an install directory, this failed because my TCL library was too old, and I couldn't replace this with an up to date version; the ActiveState TCL distribution complained about my libc's age and version, and with Linux, that's that. For more on this unfortunate state of affairs, check my personal wiki here.... Fortunately I have a friend (Chris Gerhard) who installed Python 2.x a long time ago on a Qube and I borrowed his installation directory, copied it to my system and ran a make install. The install points at /usr/local/bin which means I can use a ${PATH} variable to control if my new Python V2.x or old Python V1.x is invoked. it claims to be V2.4 so I have no idea how it works, but I then downloaded the Planet code from its home site, http://www.planetplanet.org/, which I'd like to say is very simple but that wouldn't be true for me since I don't read Python, so with a bit of trial and error, this is what to do -

I created a user called planet and ensured that $PATH & $MANPATH were set appropriately. i.e. to invoke my new version of python and then unpacked the archive into the user home directory. A sub-directory to hold the run time logs was created and also a sub-directory to hold files for a specific planet instance. (./Logs & ${HOME}/${PLANETNAME}.
I then copied the fancy templates into ${HOME}/${PLANETNAME}, together with planet.css.
I created a target directory which needs to be in the web server's file system. I chose ${WEBSERVER_ROOT}/planet/${PLANETNAME} and placed the image files into the target directory. The image files include the planet logo, the feed format badges and the face icon(s). (The face icon is exactly that, it allows the logoing of articles in the HTML version of the feed and the authors suggest a picture of the article author). Ensure the planet user has write permissions to this directory
I then created the config file, I used explicit file and file directory names and placed the config file in the planet instance directory i.e. ${HOME}/${PLANETNAME}. The config file references a cache directory which planet uses. Planet uses a cache directory, this needs to be created and referenced in the config.ini. I placed this in the /var file system.
The planet script, planet.py needs to be run occasionally. I chose to use cron to do this and wrote a script to ensure that all output was kept and written to a log file. (I also wrote a second script to keep these under control). I run planet every 15 minutes which given there's only one author is frequent enough. The log tidy up I run once/day. These jobs run as user planet, which is`why the planet user needs write privilidges to the target directory.
I amended the index.html.tmpl and the planet.css files to get a colour conformity with the rest of my web space (except this blog) and discovered that the atom logo is missing, so I went and got myself one of those. Most of the amendments I made are to the sidebar. My planet is here..., PlanetCycling is here... which has a vanilla html page. I changed H1 to get my green banner and left justification.

Here's my H1 rule, which is used to implement the page banner -

h1 {
margin-top: 0px;
padding-top: 20px;

background-color: #690;
border: thin dotted #808080;

font-family: "Bitstream Vera Sans", sans-serif; font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing: -2px;
text-transform: lowercase;
text-align: right;
color: white;
}

Hope this helps!

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[linux] topic:[qube] topic:[opensource] topic:[planetplanet] topic:[python] topic:[feedaggregator]

Some Games to play...

2006-07-24T07:12:04.000Z

There was also an article about board games for the family. Their correspondent was planning to go on holiday in the Lake District, where you can still expect some rain over the summer. The article is here.... Among the games/sites they mention are Cirondo, a sci-fi, galactic domination game, which started as an online game, but not one I'd heard of. I may check it out. Also mentioned was the Board Game Company. This sells a lot of games, but the Guardian found Carcassone (wikipedia & boardgamegeek) worthy of mention and together with Ticket to Ride (wikipedia & boardgamegeek).

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[board games] topic:[games]

Re: Some Games to play...

2006-07-24T18:43:03.000Z

Dave,

Carcasonne really is one of my favourite board games. It even did win the germany price "game of the year" some years back. Highly appreciated!

Matthias

Re: Some Games to play...

2006-07-24T18:49:00.000Z

Dave,

Ooops, I forgot:

http://www.spiel-des-jahres.de/ is the URL of the Game of the Year selecters. Check it out! You will find many good advices for games! Sadly, it's in german... ;-)

Matthias

Re: Some Games to play...

2006-07-25T05:30:24.000Z

AS you say in German, and while it is one of my current projects to improve my german, its just beyond me - but thanks!

Re: Some Games to play...

2006-07-25T12:38:49.000Z

And, here's the Wikipedia entry... ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiel_des_Jahres

Matthias

Ideas from the Weekend

2006-07-24T07:10:32.000Z

it seems that I have taken to reviewing my reading of the Guardian each weekend, so here's Saturday's, San Francisco, some reading & Board Games.

Firstly, their travel wiki, "Been There" has been extended to cover San Francisco. I have tagged this with travel & sanfrancisco at del.icio.us. Secondly, their "Five Best... was the Five Best Inspirational Reads, which you can find here...

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[holiday] topic:[sanfrancisco]

The New Statesman, Episode 2006

2006-07-24T05:47:28.000Z

We went to see "The New Statesman, Episode 2006", staring Rik Mayall as Alan B'stard on Saturday. Marsha Fitzallen also reprises her role as his wife Sarah. Sadly, no new jokes, its the same old B'stard, using politics to make money, and have as much, if a bit too fast sex as possible. He's joined New Labour and works in No. 9 Downing St now.

The two updates are a speech by Alan, about who else could replace him as the stand-in PM (no-one of course, but he names most members, and some ex-members of the cabinet and mentions the reasons why not), and a speech by his junior minister, Frank Lee (the last socialist in England) about what being working class, northern, working class, socialist and working class means, reminding all the real/old Labour attendees just what we've given up as the Labour party became "New Labour". Mind you the mindless workerism was never that attractive to me, but then neither are an unjust war, exclusive student finance and privatisation of hospitals and education.

Interestingly, despite all their attempts to label the Labour Government as Tory and as bad as Thatcher's & Major's Tories, the fact that Alan wins out, merely reminds me that there remain rich plutocrats, to whom democracy means nothing and politics and votes are bought and sold; life will be worse if their henchmen (or women) get into power; the soul of the Labour Party is worth saving.

A further high point was the rest of the cast who were very good, with Alexandra Gunn as Condeleeza Rice, who is persauded to invade Norway instead of Iran, Helen Baker as Flora, from the Tony's private office and Clive Hayward as Frank Lee.

For those who haven't a clue what I'm talking about, check out the the New Statesman at the BBC's Guide to Comedy.

Coincidentaly, the magazine of the same name has relaunched and has a web site http://www.newstatesman.com, now in the sidebar under News.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[British] topic:[theatre] topic:[play] topic:["Alan B'Stard"] topic:["New Statesman Episode 2006"]

Statues, Sculpture & hyperlinks

2006-07-23T16:02:37.000Z

I'm looking for a statue for my back garden, so I was checking the 'net, and tagged them into del.icio.us/DaveLevy/sculpture. The linkroll in the sidebar, is thus a bit less eclectic than usual, but it'll change when I tag up this weekend's Guardian

tags: General "topic:[garden sculpture]" topic:[links]

Refreshing the theme

2006-07-21T18:11:50.000Z

I re-arranged the sidebar yesterday, hopefully in order to make using the sidebar gadgets easier. I have the OpenSolaris, RSS and Page Hit counter at the top, followed by "Recent & Interesting", where I shall leave links to stuff I think is recent and interesting. Next I have some links about the site and the search box, followed by my recent del.icio.us links, followed by my roller links list, Blogroll, News, Links and Stuff.

The Links section includes the blog administration buttons, which could have their own section (or page).

I then list the recent Article Index, which lists the last 125 articles with the current category, and finish the sidebar with archives panel and blogosphere affinity badges.

I plan to add a reading list gadget, and also to create a second page, which will hopefully present a better interface to what I have done previously and help you (and me) find stuff. I also may do a third page about the site and usage to hold the cluster map, the referrer stats and maybe the technorati references. These will be made available by the roller macro which lists all pages in the directory.

I hope you find this minor re-organisation helpful and an improvement.

tags: topic:[roller] topic:[blogging] topic:[roller themes] topic:[roller macros]

Is Web 2.0 relevant to a systems architect?

2006-07-20T10:50:01.000Z

Sun are pushing the new x4500 (See Jonathan's Blog) server as the Web 2.0 server, coz that's what Tim O'Reilly said. Actually, he's said a lot about web 2.0 and his most focused comments (that I've found, or more accurately been pointed at,) are at his site, where he has published an article called "What Is Web 2.0 Design, Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software" . I recommend you read it, ( I have bookmarked it on del.icio.us and in my sidebar in the "Links" section.).

One of O'Reilly's Web 2.0 tests is that data becomes crucial (again) and that the move towards (user driven) assembly for purpose and the "perpetual beta", his words, he should trademark them, as illustrated by all sorts of internet companies makes the new hybrid systems more useful as things move on. I have recently created a Yahoo MapApp (which I'll document at some time), but this uses the MapApp server and my web site, together with a Yahoo Group in order to allow people to use the application. The application is build to serve a small closed community (a school year reunion), which is why the Group is used, but also a proof point that collections of data (originally owned by users) are more valuable than the items themselves. (The Application is designed to allow people to plan sites for physical re-unions and drinking). This sort of application will become more common not less.

Sun's announcement page headled with Tim O'Reilly's quotes is here.... Marc Hamilton whose blog is here..., brought my attention to the synergy between the new system product and the new internet phenomenon, with this article, entitled "Thumper Positioning"; Not a karate technique!.

tags: topic:[Technology] "topic:[web 2.0]" topic:[SUNW] topic:[thumper] "topic:[Sun x4500]" topic:[x4500]

Not alone at SunLabs

2006-07-18T07:34:20.000Z

Ashlee Vance {of the Register} also visited the Labs at the begining of June, and wrote up his findings more rapidly than me. He published them here.... The article covers some stuff I didn't follow through on, and offers a segue into games serverplex designs. The article is headlined "Sun Labs edges toward practicality", and suggests his interests were more short-term than mine.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[sunlabs] topic:[News] topic:[theRegister]

What I thought of my visit to the Labs!

2006-07-05T12:48:16.000Z

I visited Sun Labs Open House at the begining of June. This took place over the first and second, but I have only just managed to write up my notes and post them on the blog. For various reasons, I have backdated the entries to the approximate real time to preserve my personal narrative .

I was lucky to be able to meet so many clever people and see so many clever things which I'm certain will make a difference, although in some cases, its the research in writing the notes that has provoked real interest.

For you to read what I've written, you might find the following links usefull. Here are blogs day links: First Day, Second Day. You can also use the standard index sidebar (or these hyperlinks) to bring up my first article, Wall of Innovation and then go forward, or the last article, Slot Car or SPOT car? and rack backwards. I have also put this article's link into the blogroll sidebar, under the Links folder as "What I said about Sun Labs!".

The demo reviews are also all categorised as Technology, so using the button bar at the top of the page will let you see most of what I wrote.

The articles reflect what I thought at the time. I have since spoken to both colleagues and customers and recognise that some of my priorities were a bit awry and I may not have given some subjects sufficient attention, in particular, I didn't visit many of the "Virtualisation" projects available and havn't reported on those I did visit such as "Project Crossbow", a network interface virtualisation and resource managment project. This is also an Open Solaris project (see here...) for this. The media projects also suffered from a lack of attention, but I couldn't have visited everything.

I have little doubt that I shall try to talk to some of the project staff to understand their projects more fully and to demonstrate their relevance to my customer(s), and hopefully you as well.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[sunlabs]

Taking snaps with Sony

2006-07-05T10:17:50.000Z

Yesterday, I posted a photo review of my most recent trip to Europe. The pictures were taken with a recently issued new mobile phone, a Sony Erricsson V600i, ( See here... for the Sony Ericsson Page). While it answers the Bob Appleyard test, "Does it make phone calls?", I have been busy expoloring other parts of the phone's functionality. I took it to to Amsterdam and forget my better camera, another Sony, so all the pictures were taken using the phone.

I'm really not sure, if its me or the phone, but these are not great pictures. The small screen & the limited controls don't help but neither does my attempts at snapshots and spontenaity. In one or two cases, I managed to take more than one picture of the same view but it doesn't seem to help. The quality of picture from the Cybershot seem better. It may be that the whole "using a camera" thing means that I concentrate more when using the Cybershot and the loss of quality is the price of the convenience {the phone is smaller} and spontenaity that the phone enables.

The convenience has enabled me to photograph whiteboards, but even these pictures need writing up quickly as its unusual for the pictures to be of sufficient quality not to require converting to a presentation deck before I forget what was said..

I'm sure I'm not alone, but the phone is not as good a camera as the {designed for purpose} Cybershot!

tags: topic:[technology] topic:[gadgets] topic:[digitalcamera] topic:[mobilephone] topic:[camera]

Re: Taking snaps with Sony

2006-07-05T11:52:20.000Z

Dave,
the main problem with picture enabled phones is twofold:

The optics are really small, and cheap (you need very expensive lenses to make good small cameras).
And the software to convert the raw-data into colour pictures is also a "work in progress" and a fine-tuning nightmare.

So, in order to make good pictures (and even in digital world, optics still count a great deal!), you need a real camera (and not an "add-on" feature of a phone). Check, for example: http://www.dpreview.com/ for decent reviews of these components.
Matthias

Re: Taking snaps with Sony

2006-07-08T04:30:51.000Z

In addition to Matthias's comment, I would add that they rely on a wide angle lens, no autofocus and a wide depth of field to hide this. On the plus side, you'll probably always have your "camera" with you. On the minus side, other than for something dramatic or never to be repeated, the quality of the results may mean they stay of curiosity value only. I've just gone the other way and bought a DSLR. Whilst this isn't strictly necessary to take acceptable sanps, it's hard to build a good versatile photographic tool that can be as small as a phone, have room for a usable battery & still be portable enough to want to take with you. Colin

Back to Amsterdam

2006-07-04T11:01:48.000Z

I was back (see here for my previous trip) in Amsterdam over the weekend and spent some time travelling on the Canals, it is a great way to see the city from a different angle.

One of the buildings we saw from the boat was the St. Petersburg Hermitage's sister museum, the Hermitage, Amsterdam, so I gave it a little visit the following day. In any old city, each building has a story to tell and this one is no different, as its a converted almshouse. The Museum runs a series of exhibitions based on the fuller contents of the Russian Museum. The current show is about Silver Filigree, but interesting none the less. It was also an oasis to have lunch at as the town was very hot, and the museum, not desperately busy. Its also still under development.

I have to say I watched the England Game in the hotel room that evening. Words fail me!

The following day I went for a walk, had some lunch

and then visited the Van Loon Museum, which is a preserved/restored town house of one of Amsterdam's (albeit republican) aristocracy. I finished off with a trip to the Van Gogh Museum. I've not been before, but even I can see why he's seen as a genius and ahead of his time. I enjoyed the fact that some of his contemporaries', both mentors and the inspired, pictures are shown.

I stayed near City Hall and the Waterlooplein, inside the Canal belt. Other pictures of the trip can be seen by viewing my Flickr stream (html) or my Flickr's Amsterdam set. You can also check out my Flickr's tag page. Also, if you look in my sidebar, or check out my del.ico.us, you'll see some links from the weekend, or for next time.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[places] topic:[Europe] topic:[Amsterdam] topic:[canals]

Knowledge & Wealth

2006-06-28T02:39:43.000Z

I picked up a free copy of the FT (Financial Times) yesterday. Its not normally a paper I read, but tucked in the middle was a book review of "Knowledge & the Wealth of Nations", by David Warsh, the editor of Economic Principals.

The book examines the development of economic theory in the light of the central contradiction in Adam Smith's insights, that specialisation creates increasing returns of scale, but the increasing returns mitigate against the required competitive processes. Without competition, the value of the economies of scale accrue to the monopolist not the consuming market. Warsh also reveiws more recent contributions to economic growth theory in the light of the role of knowledge and technology change to the economic innovation process. The reveiw talks about both IT and pharmaceuticals so it should be relevant to us. I think I need to read this.

The book's site has a review section (here...) where the FT's review is reproduced.

tags: topic:[Economics] topic:[bookreview]

Visiting Spain

2006-06-19T12:12:59.000Z

The final article from this weekend's Guardian worth remembering was a sponsored editorial advert by the spainish tourist board (their Uk web site) called, "Historic Spain, Explore the world heritage cities. I shall be filing this away and using it to plan one of my holidays sometime soon. The hyperlink is not to the editorial, which I can't find, but to the Tourist Board's "World Heritage Cities" web page.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[spain]

Re: Visiting Spain

2006-06-23T21:16:29.000Z

Barcelona is a must see. My wife and I ended our honeymoon there after a two week cruise. It was my second favorite city in Europe after Rome.

Travel for Art's sake

2006-06-19T12:01:00.000Z

The travel section reviewed a Belgian art festival, Beaufort 2006 (english page) and highlighted some Elephant sculptures. See here..., which includes a picture, but not as good as the one in the paper.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[art] topic:[review] topic:[sculpture] topic:[guardianunlimited] topic:[festival] topic:[beaufort2006]

Rebuilding Kabul

2006-06-19T11:59:32.000Z

So it's back to work but I must just make a note about three things in the week-end Guardian. I've noted the "Blue Turquoise Foundation" on my del.icio.us bookmarks (See my sidebar...). It is a British based charity supporting reconstruction in Aghanistan, particulalry Kabul with a view to preserving Aghanistan's culture, history and architecture. These are my words not thiers, but they seem to be looking to avoid the worst of the bulldozer and concrete pourers arts, not to mention the attentions of the military twat {not necessarily all the military, merely those that qualify} and the well meaning aid workers. The article is also a political polemic against the US/UK's failure to invest in the necessary [disinterested] nation building after the wars our countries wage. The original article is here....

tags: topic:[charity] topic:[afghanistan] topic:[reconstruction] topic:[kabul] topic:[middle-east]

Can we "commoditise" computing?

2006-06-15T21:16:21.000Z

Again reflecting on some of the ideas generated from last week's Enron film; Enron's domination of the creation, distribution and exchange of gas and electricity created a vertically integrated monopoly. These require regulating or breaking up (or taking into public ownership). Also it seems to me that when trading becomes the 'raison d'etre' of a market, it offers very little value to the primary players. It made me wonder how the roles of primary provider, primary consumer, secondary traders and an exchange can be organised to enable a market, rather than distort it and if this can be applied to both bandwidth, which Enron experimented with, and CPU cycles. I've no real answer's today! More reading and listening....

tags: topic:[Economics] topic:[Future] topic:[Markets] topic:[utilitycomputing]

Derivative Trading or Gambling

2006-06-15T21:13:23.000Z

I also discovered that Enron experimented with trading in weather and I'm not sure what they did, but its reminiscent of some ideas expressed in James Surowiecki's "Wisdom of Crowds" where he explored the remarkable prescience of the University of Iowa's Electronic Markets for the prediction of political events, most obviously elections but also other political futures. (I read somewhere, during the last {UK} general election, that the most effective forecast for the result was the bookmaker's odds, this must be very disappointing to the polling organisations, but it seems a financial interest sharpens the mind.) Its also a fact that if you want to trade in weather, at least in the UK you have to go to Ladbrokes to bet on snow at Xmas.

tags: topic:[Economics] topic:[Future] topic:[Markets] topic:[weather]

Devil take the Hindmost

2006-06-15T14:21:04.000Z

I've been considering the film about Enron that I saw last week. They had this constant competitive improvement performance management scheme where an arbitrarily designated % of the work force are deemed to be underperforming and fired. (Not even offered an improvement opportunity there, so illegal in the UK). You can't always judge an ideas worth by its advocates............, but in this case, the idea is poor and the management that promolgated it was also poor.

tags: topic:[Economics] topic:[motivation] "topic:[performance management]"

Happy Birthday, Open Solaris

2006-06-14T16:00:00.000Z

Just a Year since Sun made Solaris 'Open'. While not a Solaris Guru, I've been a fan for a very long time and its one of the reasons I came to Sun. I've experimented with various operating systems for my work's laptop and since peer pressure makes it harder & harder to use Windows for this and my Linux build is a bit knackered (because of a poor install), I've turned to Solaris over the last couple of months. I also really want to play with some of the Solaris 10 features & the N1 products and help some friends solve some administration problems so I have recently turned my attention to the Solaris build on my laptop, just in time for opensolaris' 1st Birthday party.

This article talks about connecting to the internet over a wireless connection & obtaining some additional software products.

Solaris Express (Nevada V35) goes on quite nicely, add Casper's frkit. This enables wireless to work and I have used it quite happily at home, at work and at BT sites around the country.

At home, I have a linksys router so I have created a profile for Inetmenu for use at home. This involves creating a file in the /etc/inetmenu. The name may not have spaces and I created it by copying the sample in /etc/inetmenu and amended the domain, IP address and DNS server lines. I have done this because the linksys router's dhcp server seems a bit shit (alternatively optimised for windows) and other good friends seem to manage around this by avoiding the linksys dhcp service for their UNIX based systems. NB I say UNIX, I mean Linux & Solaris, I haven't checked what my MAC using colleagues do. So I use a static IP address. I am experimenting with whether I need to specify the ISP DNS server or not as I currently have a Firefox (but not Mozilla) problem.

I have downloaded Firefox (See here....) & Thunderbird and obtained my favourite themes, I downloaded the 'proxybutton' extension. (Why? See here...). It comes with StarOffice 7, so I have got myself a copy of SO8, which supports "Open Document Format". I installed this as root and then edited the JDS Launch Menu entry for SO7 to invoke Eight, this may mean some faulty National Language Support but it seems to work. (Launch -> Focus on SO7 and [right click] -> Edit Properties. I still need to check out Adobe Acrobat, which is still only available at some unbelievably old version, so I am using the Gnome embedded .PDF reader. (Adobe! Get your act together).

I shall also be looking to install Bluefish, my preferred HTML editor for UNIX. (I just love their fish logo).

NB This article isn't written with Blufish.

Altogether, nearly an acceptable work platform.

tags: topic:[opensolaris] topic:[birthday]

An afternoon in the Garden

2006-06-11T18:03:53.000Z

I've just finished reading the Travel Guardian for the weekend. Their FiveBEST is beach campsites in the UK, including St Ives and Croyde in Devon. See here... I was reading it in the Garden and so for some reason, the Perfect Barbecue struck a note.

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[Culture]

Slot Car or SPOT car?

2006-06-02T23:00:00.000Z

We finished the day by checking out a SPOT managed slot car. This combines Real Time Java with the Sun SPOT sensors to manage a slot track racing car. This is a development of this year's Jave One Slot Car Racing Programming Challenge, which has photo's and an excellent description of the demo.

The sunweb Open House Page also has a picture.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[java] topic:[SPOT] topic:[SUNW] topic:[sunlabs]

The E-PBX

2006-06-02T22:45:00.000Z

We rushed past Steve Uhler's e-PBX demo, where he demo'd the conection via web services of a PBX, utilising the opensource PBX solution to the internet and offered a flavour of the new services this enables.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[telco] topic:[e-pbx] topic:[SUNW] topic:[sunlabs]

Searching for........

2006-06-02T22:00:00.000Z

We then popped into see two search projects. I saw the display of the Search inside the Music project, which is currently focusing on two areas: using acoustic similarity to help people find music that 'sounds similar' to music that they already like, and using social data to recommend and organize music based upon the listening habits of people with similar musical tastes. Some deeply interesting science (how do you define music as sounds alike?), plus leveraging a "wisdom of crowds (or networks). The 3D screen display is pretty cute too. (I need to have another look! )

I actually spent my time here talking to Steve Green, whose blog I occasionally read, but always with interest. He was demonstrating some technology from the Advanced Search Tecnologies project. The web page states that the mission of the Advanced Search Technologies project is to improve the ability of people to find and organize information in an enterprise setting and that the group is responsible for the Sun Labs Search Enginewhich ships as part of the Sun Java System Portal Server and Web Server. The demo showed a tool called the blurbalyzer which recommends (or sorts and groups) books based upon similarities in the book's published 'blurbs'. It's amazing the complexity of problem hidden in the single word, in this case "similarity".

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[search] topic:[audio] topic:[heuristic] topic:[SUNW] topic:[sunlabs]

There's a lot to know about people

2006-06-02T21:30:00.000Z

I arranged to meet Mark Bagley of BT to show him round the Labs. We rushed past Jim Waldo's Project Neuromancer, which demonstrates both the biometric interfaces and the elements of the network solution required to implement biometric telemetry systems, the key problems being those of scale, reliability, syncronicity and longevity.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[datastore] topic:[longlife] topic:[IT] topic:[SUNW] topic:[sunlabs] topic:[scale] topic:[biometrics]

New Age Industrial Plant

2006-06-01T22:30:00.000Z

I also had a quick run through some of the Media projects incorporated in Media Architecture & Technology project including the open source DRM efforts and a Sun micro (and therefore disruptivly cheap) set-top box. Again I didn't spent enough time to really understand how my current customer can really obtain value from these projects, so some more research is required. These projects have both been raised with me since my return to the UK.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[media] topic:[multimedia] topic:[videoondemand] topic:[SUNW] topic:[sunlabs] topic:[DRM] "topic:[media content]"

Sun's SPOTs

2006-06-01T21:45:00.000Z

There were a couple of demos of Sun's SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology). This is seen as really important and is possibly the best piece of research from the labs hitting my sweet spot (no pun intended ) of proximity, wireless and database. They have their own web site http://www.sunspotworld.com. The researchers are looking to innovate the platform to enable new applications and new developer productivity models. Check out the SPOT docs page, which also contains highlight arguments about the problems they're trying to solve. They also seem to have a view about collaboration, potentially missing from many of the demos and prototypes I have seen over the last two months at Sun & BT.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[internet] topic:[wireless] topic:[SPOT] topic:[SUNW] topic:[sunlabs]

The Technology behind Virtual Worlds

2006-06-01T18:45:00.000Z

I popped in to see Jeff Kesselman (who blogs here...) & Seth Proctor (blogs {occassionally here...) at their Project Darkstar demo. There's no question but that Project Darkstar demos always make an impact. Project Darkstar is a java based server platfrom designed for writing massively scalable games. We're seeking to offer our unique technology platform for applications developers a proposition to games authors and hosts. You can see their sites; a project dashboard or a Sun Labs spotlight article or their project page at java.net.. I didn't and havn't spent the time getting to know the project, the queues are usually so long, but as Telco's move from "triple play" to "quad-play", it'd be good to learn more.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[projectdarkstar] "topic:[computer games]" topic:[java] topic:[SUNW]

Hole in Space

2006-06-01T18:15:00.000Z

I'm looking to see how we can improve Sun's relevance to education and possibly in the secondary/primary sectors rather than tertiary/university and I want to go beyond multi-media databases.

One of the most dramatic demonstrations meeting this need was called the Hole in Space. Technologically, its a full size video conferencing solution i.e. 6ft x nearly 4ft, and the camera is in the middle of the screen. The size together with placing the devices in a lounge environment means that you can get full body language impressions. The researchers, Joan Dimicco, Brenda Laurel & Scott Nazarian demonstrate the video conferencing terminal recognising users by presenting their Java Cards i.e. a plastic card with a CPU chip. Dimicco has also developed a networking database which can be overlayed onto the screen (think Gnome's transparent terminal windows) and so we have the convergence of wireless (or proximity) technology, the internet and database to enable new applications. The software describes a persons networks based on facts rather than votes (where as linkedin is based on votes). I'd be curious to see if the two approaches can be merged. Another cute aspect is the way colour and shape are used to describe data, something I've mentioned with respect to tag clounds.

In some ways, it was quite reminiscent of the scene from Logan's Run (the movie) when Logan meets Jessica (apart from not being 3D & missing the teleportation function that is). There's no question that the full size screen and 100% scale means that a fuller comprenhension of body language becomes available, and yields a massive improvement in communication.

This might well be a technology that e-educators will utilise in the future.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[videoconferencing] topic:[futurology] topic:[SUNW]topic:[sunlabs]

After the Keynotes

2006-06-01T17:15:10.000Z

I spent the morning attending a couple of lectures and wandering around the exhibitions.

tags: none

Wall of Innovation at SunLabs

2006-06-01T17:00:00.000Z

My reason for being in Ca, is to visit the Sun Labs Open House. See also www.sun.com/~sunlabsopenhouse. The day was opened by Bob Sproull, the Labs Director and Greg Papadopolous, Sun's EVP for R&D and CTO. They both spoke about the goals and accountability of Sun Labs. They look to create new technologies, improve our current technologies or ocassionally improve Sun. They are begining to look at Sun Labs with a venturer's view and no longer measure the output of white papers, books and conference speeches. As Greg said, "these things are better done in Universities".

After the speeches I wandered over to the main building and noticed in the entrance lobby a wall of innovation. Sun has mounted the patent plaques granted its staff on two opposite walls. So I took a picture, here it is, Walls of Innovation. NB I am standing up and six foot tall. There are a lot!

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Innovation] topic:[SUNW]

Global Green Machine!

2006-05-31T20:00:00.000Z

Also in Green Futures was an article about One laptop per child project aimed at developing a $100 laptop to help break the digital divide. It is planned as low cost, low-energy and aimed to rollout across the global south.

I have linked to a picture in their project wiki and I suggest you check out either the magazine or the project web sites if you want to know more.

tags: topic:[Economics] topic:[Technology] topic:[OLPC] topic:[Laptop]

Green Futures

2006-05-31T19:30:00.000Z

I also looked through Green Futures, a magazine about sustainable development which I picked up at one of the Sun offices. It has attracted a number of corporate sponsors, including a number of energy companies and telcos (inc. BT) and surprisingly "First Choice" (one of the UKs biggest travel agents). One of the articles was about Holiday's in 2020 (see also this article..., I wonder if they're linked in anyway?).

The main feature was an article by Anthony Lovins, arguing that green energy is cheap energy and that nuclear is both poor environmentally, but also bad economics. (See http://www.rmi.org).

I may have to subscribe to this, and I don't see an RSS button. I was surprised when I first heard that Charles Andrews, had been talking to a UK Bank's board members about the brand value of a green data centre, but senior business executives are running with this stuff and I for one need to catch up.

tags: topic:[Economics] topic:[environment] topic:[green] topic:[future] topic:[energy]

Enron: The smartest guys in the room

2006-05-31T18:30:00.000Z

It's fairly recent since I last flew Virgin, but I had not seen this documentary about the fall of Enron. (I've not seen it reviewed in Empire either, but that's my fault; they gave it 5 stars here....)

Well made, very informative, mixing interview with recorded material from both Enron's corporate archives and the congressional investigating committees. The failings summed up by the ex-trader who states, the Enron tag line was "ask why?", I didn't!, although some people come out of it really well. I wonder if we'll be talking about Bethany McLean, a fortune journalist who wrote the first questioning article in the same breath as Woodward & Bernstein. Probably not, because despite the Bush family and the Republicans being obviously entwined with Enron, it won't bring down the President, although it did contribute to the recall of Schwarzenegger's predecessor in California. (I certainly wasn't aware of the impact of Enron and the politics of energy in that episode.)

I suspect its hard to explain "Mark to Market" accounting in a film, or anything short of a term long course in an accountancy or business school, but Bethany McLean followed the money and asked where the revenue was, a simple enough question. The answer was in the manipulated Californian energy market and a corruptly hidden debt mountain.

I had just finished reading a "Management Today" article on the private equity (PE) fund business in Europe, and they asked who pays for the PE companies super-profits and argue that its the banks (or their customers) and the same occurred here. Enron's profits (when not fraudulently enhanced) were at the expense of the banks and eventually the Enron staff. In the banks case, their actions in support of Enron were where not illegal, sometimes deeply questionable.

tags: topic:[Economics] topic:[Film] topic:[Enron] topic:[scandal] topic:[filmreview]

Visualising tag clouds

2006-05-31T11:00:00.000Z

Two points come to mind on reflecting my conversation with Elias Torres at www20006, (See Tags and Spontaneity below...). First maybe on tag clouds we should use colour for highly used & less frequently used with Red being highly used and Blue (or Indigo) less frequently used. This should mean that the less frequently used tags, which are the most discriminatory (i.e. meaningful) are not visually eclipsed by the most heavily used.

Secondly, if we were to look at the structure "UNIX > Solaris > AIX, the significance would only be true if all taggers tagged the articles as UNIX & Solaris or UNIX & AIX, and only then could we be clear on the meaningfulness of a tag. This illustrates that a stranger may need to be familar with the crowd's use of language.

Thirdly I'm also not sure how we might 'refine' a query if we start with very meaningful tags, we would have to re-query, although the del.icio.us interface offers you a list of associated tags even for the smallest of queries.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[www2006] topic:[roller] topic:[tags] topic:[semanticweb] topic:[search]

Cabbage Crates over the Briney

2006-05-31T10:00:00.000Z

Back to Heathrow for another trip to San Francisco, hopefully I'll get to see some great new stuff.

tags: topic:[travel]

Watching the English

2006-05-23T17:30:00.000Z

On my way down from Edinburgh, I finished "Watching the English" by Kate Fox.

This was recommended to me by Geoff Arnold. The book is bloody funny and so true. Its written by one of Britain's leading social antropologists, using her science to observe the English. She has the grace to start her book with a discourse on the "Participant Observer" paradox and manages to be funny about this as well.

The book covers manners, class, the pub, queuing, language and dress, together with some other issues that I can't remember, but always returns to our humour.

She has a long section on queues and queue jumping. She doesn't categorise this by which supermarket you use, which is a class thing; I've alway found the queues in Somerfield friendly and co-operative and even occasionally been allowed to overtake someone when only buying a couple of things. (I always use cash at these times to speed up myself and my benefactor), but this never happens in Sainsburys. She also accurately identified the huge amount of status invested in a man's (and I mean a man) car, however I'm really unclear that a Mercedes, even a relatively cheap one, has less status than an Audi. When did that happen?

Interestly, I fail to score highly on some aspects of my "englishness", I'm told its because of my families immigrant background, and I usually describe myself as British.

This book should be read by anyone that knows the english and needs a good laugh or by those who are mystified by the way we behave.

"Watching the English", Kate Fox, Hodder & Stoughton , ISBN 0340818867

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[socialanthropology] topic:[bookreview]

Tags and Spontaneity

2006-05-23T15:55:00.000Z

We broke for coffee and I bumped into Elias Torres, one of the roller development team, so we had a long chat about tags on the web , looked at how to make roller's implementation better and how I could become more helpful by creating an environment to test this stuff. He pointed out that my Qube (currently not working) needs replacing.

We tried to remember the state of our debate as we left it. Elias co-authored a paper "Ranking Bookmarks & Bistros", one of the conclusions is that tagging software should not be too helpful in prompting for tags; the spontaneity of the tag author is an important part of the folksonomy. My view is that a tagging correspondent will have a personal structure to the tags they use, in my case I have a small group of 1st order tags, which will always be used, or nearly always. I believe that my contribution to the folksonomy is more effective if I am helped to keep to my structure. For my medium order tags, I want to be prompted as to my spelling and which words I use to imply meaning. Elias' argument is that the collective expression is stronger if more spontaneous (I think). I think that part of our disagreement is that I focus on tagging for personal use and at time of discovery and hence initial tagging, Elias is concerned about the stranger looking for wisdom in the tag base.

For instance for my retrievals I like to go in large or medium and refine my queries using the del.icio.us "+" function adding filters to my query until the page is small enough to inspect. (Is this a binary chop?) It all reminds me that I need to ask him for the data model (author, articles, articles, tags) numbers and growth rates. I wonder if Linda or Will can give them to me from blogs.sun.com.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[www2006] topic:[roller] topic:[tags]

Free Databases get better all the time

2006-05-23T13:45:11.000Z

Dave Axmark, (see also here...one of the founders of My SQL spoke next after lunch. After he stopped talking about the product he presented some interesting slides on adoption compared with other open source projects, which probably prove the centrality of database to multi-user computing. He repeated the centrality of the "Easy Install" to the design goals of MySQL. He almost said "Release Early, Release Often!", but actually argued for the "containerisation" of fault fixes, and saves them up for infrequent releases, a version of "Do one thing really well!", which he stated was a design philosophy of MySQL.

"Free databases get better all the time!"

Why? Good bug reports are worth more than good code. Adoption leads to quality; all code lines are distributed to all users, the licensor does not/cannot utilise price discrimination and therefore do not create marketing/pricing packages, everyone gets everything. You have access to the ultimate documentation, the source. (I'm not 100% impressed by this argument). Security is not by obscurity. He also repeated messages other Open Source companies articulate that the community reputations developed in Open Source act as great recruitment funnels, so staff are good & known, have a good fit with the culture and a passion for the product. All arguments that apply to software other than databases!

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[www2006] topic:[opensource] topic:[MySQL]

Data Centre Life Cycle

2006-05-23T11:08:39.000Z

Jennifer Schopf then presented to the workshop on Globus' adoption of open governance, one bullet is of great interest where she talked about a technology solution to managing objects in the grid life cycle. I need to follow up on this.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[www2006] topic:[opensource]

Open Source Workshop at www2006

2006-05-23T10:33:33.000Z

I opened the "Open Source Workshop : Platform for Collaboration" using SimonPhipp's slides, "The Zen of Free", the slides I used are here.... Hopefully it went OK!

Open source is in the interests of the original author and second adopters and contributors. It is not about altruism, it requires licence, motivation and agreement around governance. Some open source is more open than others! The software market is evolving, to payment at the point of value. The value is no longer right to use, but chosen from the code, education, documentation, access to updates, defect resolution, warranty, indemnity, installability. The unbundling, through the development of new monetisation strategies by software companies allows transparency of costs for software consumers. Unlocking this value, places a new role on standards in order to change the scale of inter-operability and substitutability to protect the investment of both of the past and the future.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[www2006] topic:[opensource] topic:[economics]

www 2006

2006-05-23T09:30:00.000Z

At www.2006, Sir David Browne, (Chairman of Motorola) gave the opening keynote speech after the obligatory bagpipes & highland dancing. Actually the conference was opened by Jack McConnell, Scotland's First Minister (the politician, not the vicar) who welcomed the conference to Scotland. Interesting speech, listing and aligning Scotland historic intellectual endeavours to the future of the world without getting up the nose of this non-Scottish Brit. I suppose its one of the reasons he's No 1. He mentioned the use of today's internet technology by the University of the Highlands & Islands Millenium Institute to create a virtual university. It'd be worth checking out what they did.

I wonder! I was disappointed with Sir David's speech, maybe I'm begining to get it. Speed of change, personalisation, global scale all are creating massive opportunity. I quite liked his progression of technology that enables audio mobility, from a radio with valves being moved between rooms to car radios to hand held walkie talkies via mobile bricks to todays hand sets. (Arguably the story of mobility is actually the story of battery technology). Some key bullets are, "the device formerly known as the mobile phone" will become the 4^th screen, after the TV, the computer and the car. There is a need to learn how to understand value and not service nor time. Perhaps one of the best tag lines was,

"Only long term competitive advantage is the rate at which we learn!"

But two thirds of the world don't have a phone. Conquering the digital divide means addressing some serious geo-political problems. City Business School have published research showing the correlation and cause between {mobile} phone adoption and economic growth, imagine the contribution of the 4bn non-connected people to the global economy. I know that at the moment, they're often more concerned with food and freedom and giving them a phone and a stake in global capitalism isn't exactly priority number one for these disenfranchised people.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[www2006] topic:[Politics] topic:[Growth] topic:[economics] topic:[wireless]

A return to Edinburgh

2006-05-22T19:14:08.000Z

I've been invited to speak at a workshop on Open Source at www2006 in Edinburgh and arrived at the Airport, and was driven into town by a well travelled taxi driver who didn't scare the sh*t out of me, nor share his views on Ken Livingstone's congestion charge.

The picture here is taken from the www2006 web site which they created for the event. I took a couple on the

Its a very long time since I've visited the city and it's bourgois granite grandeur remains as impressive as ever.

tags: topic:[www2006] topic:[travel]

Food for Thought

2006-05-19T05:23:47.000Z

Just looking back on Tuesday reminded me of various science fiction films and books. From William Gibson who in particular wrote about the Network, bio-feedback systems and AI, and obviously influenced the Wachowski Brother's Matrix, to James Cameron in Terminator 2: Judgement Day also spoke about how the network came alive. Marginally more benignly, Heinlen wrote about another computer that woke up in "The Moon is a harsh mistress". Some of John Ames presentation brought "Minority Report" to mind, at least the scene where John Anderton (Tom Cruise's character) is using the computers, but not anything to do with precognition.

It just goes to show, some of this is a lot closer than you might think.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Internet] topic:[Innovation] topic:[Futurology] topic:[Sci-Fi] topic:[Books] topic:[Films]

An iconoclast's glimpse into the future

2006-05-16T16:00:00.000Z

The day ended with another glimpse into the future from Graham Whitehead of BT. He is a passionate and enthusiastic speaker and while I've neither met him before or heard him speak he is well known. He started with

"There will be more change in the IT in the next 10 years than in the previous 100"

and then asked who agreed. After the day we'd had we were all ready to do that, so he contradicted himself and stated that actually it'd only take eight years. (For the aficionados of the history of the Soviet Union, very reminiscent of the Five Year plans.)

Graham mentioned the revolutionary nature of BT's 21^stCentury Network (see also here...) as an enabler of the internet of things. He obviously thinks this is important, the Register reported a speech of his at the Irish Internet Association's Congress last year

"that the anarchic and hazardous nature of the public internet meant that companies were now constructing supervised private IP networks. These private networks would be able to handle the amount of traffic that would be generated when broadband was ubiquitous, phone networks were IP-based, and common household objects had their own IP addresses. "The internet is dead, or dying; it's full of viruses, worms and porn, you have to wear a kevlar suit before you go online," he said. "BT is creating a private network, which will be joined to other private networks, to which we will add voice over IP.""

He described the new paradigm (my word not his), as AORTA, "Always on Real Time", which goes down a storm in the healthcare industry.

One of the things he examined was around customer care, "there's never a queue in virtual reality", I bet he didn't try and file his income tax online in the last week last year. He suggests that machines don't say "Sod Off! I'm busy.", but actually they do. While he argued that people will deal with machines if they're better than people, (Bank ATMs are a proof point), if you want to speak to a person, that's it! People with machine generated scripts are as helpful as the machine, as Graham says, while no machine has ever passed the Turing test, many people have failed it. This is actually quite rude (what me worry!) and the problems with customer care call centre staff is often that their systems aren't good enough to help and the automated telephone menus absolutely infuriating. However the headline he offered that people will use machines if they're better than people is true enough and we'll probably get better at trusting and delegating stuff to them, which leaves the question as to what people are going to do?

He took this to a travel agency and asked them where he thought they'd be in 2015 and posed a not desperately unreal scenario that flight (well, aviation fuel) will be very expensive and rationed (anyone watch Dr. Who last week, the return of the airship) but that today's text/messenger kids will (or did he say may) be prepared to take virtual reality holidays. It wasn't at this point that he talked about a scent generator but it is an example of the extension of virtual reality to all five senses. (This is also a device that was not demonstrated during the day.) I'm really unsure about VR holidays, but some people go to Murder Mystery weekends today!

He was also quite keen on Robots, which put the demo of Sony's robot dog in a context in the Home 2.0 showcase. For him, robots extend the network's capability, and while the dog is not very useful, the programming packed into the AI is pretty amazing.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Internet] topic:[Innovation] topic:[Futurology]

Re: An iconoclast's glimpse into the future

2006-05-19T12:18:22.000Z

"There will be more change in the IT in the next 10 years than in the previous 100" Probably true, but since none of the old stuff will actually go away this is simply a prescription for increasing fragmentation and confusion. Of course this plays well into the business model of BT (or IBM): "Relax, let us take care of it all for you", so it's not exactly disinterested.....

Re: An iconoclast's glimpse into the future

2006-05-22T21:36:55.000Z

I think your wrong about BT! Their basic self interest is to develop and deploy network computing and to drive corporate innovation. This is not what IBM Global Services look for! IBM as a whole thing, can't help but innovate, although they're a lot slower than when at their best! BT is not an IBM writ small. You should watch this space

The Wireless Doctor

2006-05-16T13:00:00.000Z

We then visited a demonstration of the Healthcare supply chain, showing the use of database and proximity technologies (RFID & Barcode) for people, data and drugs. The real interest here is how the proximity technology enables cleverer and new applications which reinforces the demonstrations given by John Ames (See here...).

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Internet] topic:[Innovation] topic:[Futurology] topic:[healthcare] topic:[wireless]

Home 2.0

2006-05-16T12:30:00.000Z

On the site, BT have built a demonstration suite illustrating one view of how new technology will change the home. The home is quite cute, but I'm not sure if its because I'm a sucker for these things. In retrospect, I'm not sure how truly futuristic the their Home 2.0 really is, but it does have a bunch of great toys.

The demonstration showed a Wifi LAN with a computer on it and demonstrated the maintenance and configuration of a numer of household items, including the lights (using the phone as the switch), and more obviously various home entertainment devices. I know that my new phone can act as a remote control handset for bluetooth enabled devices, but managing devices by the phone could be quite usefull as a security device if away, or returning home late, or as suggested by one of the other vistors for monitoring your older kids. "Stand away from the cookie jar".

Also, multi-streaming was demonstrated with one sound track for the kitchen and one for the bedroom. (You can't do that with Sky).

This all rather fascinates me, as I had been coming to the conclusion that for electronic/digitial entertainment, a Home LAN is becoming necessary, with the various devices playing traditional client, server and console roles. This is a step beyond the computer network's required to play multi- or massivly multi-player online games, and my views began to form as I realise how limited my options are as a Sky basic subscriber, and the difficulty in putting a second screen into the bedroom. Sadly, we were not demo'd BT's IPTV service, but we were shown an IPTV feed from Spain, with High Definition.

Now, once upon a time, I'd have thought it a good thing to be able to use my phone to program the VCR, but in the world of multi-channel, I don't know when anything's on, so it doesn't matter.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Internet] topic:[Innovation] topic:[Futurology] topic:[wireless] topic:[Home]

Intelligent Paint?

2006-05-16T12:00:00.000Z

We were introduced to John Ames, one of BT's Futurologists who took us on a little journey from Constable's horse & cart stuck in the mud (here... @Wikipedia), through the canels to the railways, arguing that innovation disrupts by destroying business models. He talked about real internet pervasivness (, we're talking intelligent paint here) and then showed us a bunch of RFID based applications, including printed paper.

He then moved from the RFID applications which allow computers to know where something is, to Bio-feedback systems. He demonstrated a game in which the two players wear finger gloves which measures how relaxed they are, and their relaxation drives two animated dragons in race (on a screen). If the players get really relaxed, the dragons fly. They're both technologies that lower the barriers between the real and virtual worlds. What interested me in the speech, was the breadth of vision offered, as he suggested that the nature of work will change as machines begin to be able to undertake "Professional" work. The previous presentation and demo had raised the question as to which Sci-Fi sources they were using, but it reminded me of Neuromancer, Minority Report and the Matrix.

John also quoted "Clayton Christiansen", the author of "The Innovator's Dilemma", first pointed out to me by Kieron Bradley, so I'm going to have to read it now! I've checked him out on Amazon and put it on my wish list.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Internet] topic:[Innovation] topic:[Futurology]

Intelligent Infrastructure

2006-05-16T11:00:00.000Z

BT then demonstrated their veiw of Intelligent Infrastructure, the first part showed intelligent cameras, that can detect objects, and the demo had a loitering threshold so that if a person or a bag were to stay somewhere inappropriate for too long, then actions can be taken. The demo, was really about event management, but the camera application was used several times during the day, as it is one way of capturing real world information from non co-operative people and objects. The demo, then identified the nearest (appropriately trained) security guard (role played by our host), who demonstrated a voice recognition system for authentication and showing that the system knew where he was, by answering the voiced question, "Where am I?".

In this case, it did so because as a system co-operator, he had an RFID badge. The system then opened all the doors between our guard and the loitering bag.

The second demo showed a cement mixer that won't start unless an appropriately safety trained engineer asks it to start (not voice recognition this time, although it could be) and that the appropriate safety equipment is in the proximity. It can't make the engineer wear the gear though. A side effect of puting this device on the 'net, is that its activitly can be monitored and so maintenance activity planned on the basis of better knowledge, for instance how busy has it been, not how long since the last service. Its a bit of a difference from our definition of "Intelligent Infrastructure"

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Internet] topic:[Innovation] topic:[wireless]

The Changing Network

2006-05-16T10:30:00.000Z

Everyone probably knows that BT are building out a new IP based network, but this will be across the whole of their network which has a global reach today. This together with the development of wifi & rfid, means that the Internet become pervasive and the network is no longer exclusively offering point to point connections (to make a call). I think this is important and revolutionary.

One of my feelings about the weakness of Carr's "I.T. doesn't matter!" is that it required a definition of infrastructure industries (which he didn't provide) and that the phone companies and railways only offered connections. The electricity, gas and water companies really offered a network. This is partly due to the homogenous nature of supply, we don't care if its the first c.c. of water out of a reservoir, or the millionth nor which reservoir it comes from. We don't care which technology components support our voice call, but we do care if it connects us to the wrong people, and with data, order is important. These all make IT and IT networks different from the classic utilities.

Alan Crowther then continued to place BT's activities in the context of the evolving network. BT Global Services are looking to help their customers, primarily companies, take advantage of the new business opportunities that the today & tomorrow's Internet offer. The state there are five priorities, "Build out the New Infrastructure", which may be social, and is not restricted to IT alone; "Ensure Security & Manage Risk"; "Serve Customers & Citizens", allows them to address private and public sector problems and opportunities, "Enable the Work Force" and "Extend the Organisation".

Phil Barnett (a Sun co-worker) asked about where Green issues were included or addressed, and the answer placed it very much in the context of corporate responsibility and good citizennship. I think that those who think this is important need to work harder at understanding how to make Green issues visible in the companies P&L. While shareholder supremacy is the principle of corporate governance, in any trade-off between the shareholders and pollution, its the environment and the companies neighbours that will loose. Law makers have the choice of prohibition or taxation. I think I need to do some reading.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Internet] topic:[Innovation] "topic:[Green IT]" "topic:[utility IT]"

Tomorrow dawns

2006-05-15T20:00:00.000Z

I've been invited to spend the day at BT's Labs in Ipswich tomorrow to see what they think is happening soon and in the future. I travelled up this afternoon as its an early start tomorrow. I ate at Seckford Hall, which is very pretty and old. At dinner, I tried a Chateau Montaiguillon, sadly can't remember the year. I've had better but must really get to grips with learning about Claret. I want to get beyond "I don't know much about Wine, but I know what I like.", or Nick Hancock's famous summary of his wine knowldege "Don't buy wines with pictures on the label, they're crap" and "£4 good, £5 better."

tags: topic:[wine]

Can software migrations be strategic??

2006-05-11T14:01:21.000Z

I am the co-author of the Sun Blueprint, "Migrating to the Solaris OS". Much of the book is now avaiable at http://www.sun.com/blueprints. Including -

Migration Strategies, this is chapter 3, and is the core of the justification and how to. It deals with the sedimentation effect and talks about four key techniques to migrate function points to new technology.
Migrating from Tru 64
Migrating from HP/UX, a database example.

Prentice Hall advertise the book here..., although they're the publishers and you'll need to go to a book shop to buy a copy.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] topic:[migration] topic:[sunblueprints]

Open Source, Friend or Foe

2006-05-05T06:35:26.000Z

The Register today, has an article, headlined "US in open source backlash" arguing that the US is a late, slow and distressed adopter of open source compared with Europe and Latin America. It reminded me of some of the speeches and conversations I had last week (See my blog here...) in Ipswich.

I bumped into Simon Deighton of MySQL. When I rudely asked him how they had beaten Postgres despite the latter's technical advantage he argued that success as an OSS vendor requires three things, a community {based around the code}, ease of installation {low barriers to entry/use}, and reliable and good enough functionality. He suggested that MySQL beat Postgres through ease of installation. Having thought hard about the list, I think its a good one. I shall certainly think about it for things I look to out there. Others should too.

Zaheda Bhorat of Google spoke about their commitment to Open Source and while much of their engagement is as consumers, they sponsor the summer of code and leverage the extreme programming policy of letting their developers spend one day/week doing what they want! This freedom {together with other aspects of their culture, such as the signed publication of open source, i.e. recognising authorship} they argue makes them a desirable place to work and helps them recruit the best people.

I'd not heard Simon Phipps speak before and he used some of the slides he's posted on the web. He showed how open source creates value summarised by the pithy quote "it's not about altruism". Both publication and contribution is in the coder's best interests. (I'll return to this another day as it impacts on some thinking I've been doing for the last couple of years about the source of wealth and the nature of software & information). He also offers a definition of open based on readability, however, most opensource is licenced and therefore the "right to use" is constrained. Simon has written a White Paper (see here...) offering a simple classification based on how the licence constrains copyright if users change the code. The third leg of his defintion of open relates to how easy it is to become a committer and/or how the original authors control or share the code's development and future. However possibly the most interesting comment is that we're now in "Software Market 3.0" and both expect to pay for software at the point of value and expect to make transparent payments for services related to software. Critically access to the "committers" so that errors can be fixed but a whole bunch of things come with software such as updates, fixes, documentation (including the known errors list), RFC process, consultancy, education etc. Open source allows consumers to negociate these services and pay a fair price for what they require. Simon referred to it as "unbundling the software value proposition". Clever stuff.

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" topic:[opensource] topic:[SUNW] topic:[FOSS]

J. K. Galbraith - R.I.P.

2006-04-30T06:00:00.000Z

JK Galbraith, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century, died today. The Guardian covers this in a formal obituary and an article containing these three, together with more quotes.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the justification for selfishness.

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

It is a well known.....fact that America's founding fathers did not like taxation without representation. It is a lesser known and equally important fact that they did not much like taxation with representation.

These show his wit and cleverness. The Guardian writes about him here.... He was the author of "The Affluent Society" and "The Culture of Contentment", both critiques of American Capitalism and Society.

Another one posted to a date different to the date uploaded.

tags: topic:[Economics] topic:[jkgalbraith] topic:[obituary]

Open Source in the Uk

2006-04-28T06:00:00.000Z

I attended an "Open Source Day" conference at BT's Global R & D centre having arranged for Simon Phipps to speak on behalf of Sun at the event. We took a couple of laptops with Solaris "Nevada" release 35/37 and Simon Cook blogs here..., and now in my sidebar, demonstrated the use of Zones, Net Beans and Glassfish.

It was great to meet so many people; who fell into two camps, those that remember Sun as an open systems company and those that have never known and repeat our competitor propaganda that we're proprietary. It was good to have the opportunity to explain what we do.

Another article posted several days later than occurred and back dated.

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" topic:[opensource] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[glassfish] topic:[FOSS]

Clash of the Titans in the UK TV Industry

2006-04-13T19:41:50.000Z

I have been catching up on my reading over the last few days and was browising the March copy of Management Today, {now linked in my sidebar} in which Chris Allen, the CEO of ITV was interviewed. In the interview he boasted that ITV2 is now the most watched digital channel in the UK, eclipsing Sky One. Its an illustration that something other than channel is important.

He also discussed convergence and defended his purchase of "Friend Reunited" as a platform for convergence. He says,

"Four or Five years from now, nobody will differentiate between the screens in their home - they will do everything"

I do hope so. The home area network is clearly a problem domain requiring solutions design expertise. Now how can I pipe my multi-channel into the bedroom?

tags: "Business Economics" topic:[media] topic:[TV] topic:[UK]

Turf Wars!

2006-04-12T20:13:21.000Z

Francis Dashwood, famous rake and eighteenth century politician, it seems was also a garden designer of note. Dashwood, founder of the Dillettanti Society and the Hellfire club pursued a garden vendetta with the Cobham family , owners of the grounds at Stowe. The National Trust currently manage both properties, and highlight this feud in the current issue of their house magazine.

West Wycombe (NT | Streetmap), Stowe (NT | Streetmap)

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel] topic:[history] topic:[gardening] topic:[trip] topic:[fun] topic:[UK]

Horses in the Forest

2006-04-11T19:25:06.000Z

Back from Seville and onto our next holiday plans. Horseriding in the New Forest. So two new del.icio.us tags "equestrianism+horseriding". The research reminded me of Videokidz Sue's holiday in the Andes and so Google "horse riding holidays" with and without "Peru" are usefull queries, the former of which led me to Travel Quest's horse riding directory.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[holiday] topic:[horseriding]

A trip to Seville

2006-04-10T09:20:28.000Z

We got back from Seville on Thursday. What a marvellous place. I havn't been to spain for over 30 years and never been to Andalusia. One of our inspirations to do the journey was the Cafe Mauresque in Canterbury. While there we visited the Alcazar, the Cathedral & the Giralda, the highest point in the city and some of the best views.

The world famous Giralda.

We stayed just around the corner from the Cathedral, and also visited the Fine Art Gallery, where one of the finest religous collections in Spain is located. The building is marvellous, a mujedahr two story building built around thee courtyards with gardens and fountains. The last couple of rooms have some more modern pictures of Andalusian life. We also took a boat ride from Torre del Oro to the Calatrava Bridge, which gave us some great views of the city.

We made sure that we visited a fine selection of cafes and tapas bars, guided as ever by "The Rough Guide". The picture above is the patio in our hotel, a nice place to relax, but sadly no bar - room service only.

One of my holiday reviews wouldn't be complete without a comment on the taxi drivers, both of who were bonkers. Actually Seville is not that easy to get to from the UK, only BA & Iberia do the journey directly from Heathrow, and while Seville airport was better than my last experience at Barcelona, there is only one cafe the other side of security barriers so you might want to use the cafe's on the passanger side before passing through security.

I have posted several pictures to my flickr site and created a Seville group. I'll be uploading the rest over the next couple of days. I used the seville tag at del.icio.us to collect my links used for researching the trip.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[holiday] topic:[travel] topic:[spain] topic:[seville]

Welcome Mike Belch

2006-04-07T09:49:29.000Z

Another Brit, Mike Belch has just started a blog at http://blogs.sun.com and he introduces himself in his first article. Be warned, he has two categories, Sun & Bikes (i.e. Motor Bikes!).

Visiting Places

2006-04-02T12:15:52.000Z

Just had a relaxing morning reading the Guardian and doing some chores. I often use the Guardian's Travel Section as the inspiration for my holidays. Recently, since they launched their wiki, "Been There", I have found that I have been inspiring them, since they have promoted their Berlin pages last years and last week covered Seville, and this week publicised the Vienna pages. I got to Berlin for the first time just before they covered it, I'm off to Seville tomorrow and planning to visit Vienna over the sumer.

I've put "Been There" in my side bar and http://del.icio.us/DaveLevy/travel has a bunch of links that I've put up recently while researching some of these trips.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[travel]

More on Dell's takeover of Alienware

2006-03-27T09:54:43.000Z

It seems that last thursday, Dell & Alienware agreed for Dell to take over Alienware. Interestingly (well, to me), I have just upgraded my household IT and have bought an Alienware Aurora for the games and a Dell for our household IT. (Am I a futurologist??) The Yahoo Finance news is here..., and this is also reported at Personal Computer World here.... It was predicted by Rahul Sood on his blog. (He explains who he is on his blog, something I should do).

In the Yahoo article, Nelson Gomez (CEO of Alienware) says "Alienware has a legacy of success designing the highest-performance PCs using bleeding-edge technologies and innovative industrial design. We believe that Alienware will realize significant advantages from Dell's world-class supply chain and operational efficiencies. They will allow us to continue to satisfy our core customers with the most innovative and highest-performing PCs, and ultimately extend the reach and appeal of the Alienware brand.". This is possible since Dell seem to be planning to run Alienware as a division maintaining the brand and R&D seperately. Interesting to see what'll happen to the Dell XPS.

Another fascinating piece of the merger is that Alienware is an innovator in the PC market and proved it can build a company on the basis of hardware innovation to the extent that the ultimate commodity supplier has bought them. Innovation counts!. Whether Dell's management can leave well enough alone to allow an operationally excellent company to co-exist within the same umbrella as one aiming at product excellence only time will tell, but its another proof point that times are changing and that "IT does ~~n't~~ matter!".I believe that Dell's maturity; I'm rather a fan of Dell's self help resources means that Dell have something to offer so we'll have to see.

I have tried to take a picture of my Alienware Aurora, with something that'll give you the idea of the size of things, they're huge and when you compare them with the tiny Cobalt Qube, they seem even bigger.(I may or may not get round to publishing the pictures). Personally, I havn't been allowed on it yet, but I can see that "Battle for Middle Earth" looks much better and checking out the software shelf we have certainly begun to catch up on what we've been missing due to the age its predecessor.

A final treat, here... are the links to Alienware's site's wallpaper page.

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" "topic:[Dell+Alienware]"

Doing more with the Phone

2006-03-14T16:00:00.000Z

I also went to a presentation entitled "Connected Life" given by a spokesman for Yahoo!. While much of what he spoke was a 'pitch' for Yahoo's new mobile portal "Go! Yahoo", he did have some interesting insights into how people may come to use the internet. I still believe that the screen size and resolution of today's phones seriously inhibit they're use as internet access devices for web content. Lets face it, I'll often print documents onto A4 paper to read it, but Yahoo are offering services around multiple access devices, so if you need a keyboard, use one, if you're on the road use a phone. I am slowly returning to Yahoo using their Groups, Instant Messenger and as documented here..., their portal's RSS integration and am looking at Yahoo Maps. (See my blog here...). I am just getting a new phone, with a Java VM, so I'll wait for their Java launch and see if its usefull.

I went for a quick trip round the exhibition stopped by at the three Sun stands, advertising ourselves as experts/providers of Business Grid's and optimised Data Centre architecture and technology. There were a bunch of Sun's Galaxy and SPARC systems on display, including UltraSPARC T1 based systems, I finished the day visiting the "BT in Finance" stand.

Again, written after the event and uploaded on 21 March 2006 and back dated to the time of occurrence. Sorry its taken me so long to post this.

tags: "topic:[Technology]" "topic:[Nomadic Computing]" topic:[SUNW] topic:[media] topic:[internet] topic:[portal]

Game Playing on the Move (with EA)

2006-03-14T12:00:00.000Z

Lincoln Wallen, the CTO of Entertainment Arts Mobile and interviewed recently at http://www.mobileindustry.biz spoke to the "Telco & Media" breakout session, at the best attended session of the day. I checked out EAs job site a couple of years ago and discovered a vacancy for "Vice President (MIS)" which sounded pretty impressive, but as I read more about it, it became clear that this job was not the No 1. It made me wonder what the CTO of an organisation like EA did and needed to know. Well, now I've heard him speak.

Lauren's presentation (not available publicly) reviewed both demand and supply factors to their organisation, and touched on his companies positioning and the competitive dynamics. He placed demand in the context of multiple channels, including retail, broadcast and mobile. Given EA is a content publisher, it was a very technology orientated presentation, exploring what tomorrows devices would look like and the impact these technology changes will have on the market. It reminds me of the disappointment I felt when reading an interview with one of the authors of the original Doom who banged on about pixel rendering and density rather than story development, depth and what made the game a great playing experience. Despite this personal reprise, Lincoln, maintained a relevance reviewing and forecasting market trends and suggesting (maybe hinting) at his organisations response. He also ensured we never forgot that playing experience is key to success. One interesting feature is that he produced some charts talking about the number of hours spent on multi-media leisure consumption. It just makes me wonder where the hours come from, I expect I'm paying for it. Interestingly, he did not necessarily talk about if the new technologies and processing capability would change the nature of content, although he did suggest that surfing Google is a leisure activity for some - I'd have expected E-Bay, but the interesting thing is the recognition that games/video have non-game/video competition, and that consumer's time, not budget may be the constraint. (This is similar to one of their most successful game franchises, "The Sims", where time is the key constraint.)

Again this was written after the event and uploaded on 21 March 2006 and back dated to the time of occurrence. Sorry its taken me so long to post this.

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" "topic:[Nomadic Computing]" "topic:[Computer Games]" topic:[SUNW] topic:[media] topic:[internet]

SunLIVE 2006 making change

2006-03-14T10:03:00.000Z

I spent the day at SunLIVE 2006, the UK's premier customer exhibition/conference.

The day was opened by Trudy who empasised the customer focused nature of the event in that the vast majority of speakers were to be Sun customers talking about their views of the future or how they've solved recent problems. The key note was delivered by Alan Mather, ex-CIO of government's ecommerce directorate and now working at one of the smaller utility companies. He spoke about his change programme, how change is difficult but they're focusing on achieving competitive business performance. He argued the biggest inhibitors for change are, firstly the legacy, what's done today is done for a reason, and secondly, the people, often at the ground floor are working very hard to keep the thing working and can't see the need for change and are usually significant stakeholders in the status quo. He quoted "The Mythical Man Month", a software engineering bible, (Wikipedia, here...) and Jared Diamond's (Wikipedia, here...) "Collapse". Useful to be reminded, so I might check these out.

This was written after the event and uploaded on 21 March 2006 and back dated to the time of occurrence. Sorry its taken me so long to post this.

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" topic:[SUNW]

Green Robot on SnipSnap

2006-03-11T06:03:49.000Z

I showed a screenshot of a snipsnap theme based on the colour green and bluerobot here.... The exported .xml file is available at my Snipsnap site here... and now also at blogs.sun.com here.... I shall probably upload it somewhere more obvious when I get round to it.

I'd be grateful if someone tested it for me, and let me know.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Java] topic:[Wiki] topic:[Snipsnap] topic:[theme]

About: opensolaris appliances community

2006-03-10T21:19:00.000Z

I've been considering how best to contribute to the opensolaris so called appliances community and while there is an excellent discussion forum, I think I'll see if I can create a technorati watchlist that the opensolaris site can access using RSS.

tags: topic:[General] "topic:[opensolaris+qube]"

Re: About: opensolaris appliances community

2006-03-11T05:05:24.000Z

Its not as easy as I'd hoped. I have created the watchlist but it remains empty. The tag query is here.... i.e. opensolaris+qube so the RSS feed should be here.... However, the tag query should be restricted to my blog and isn't, it contains articles by me, Chris & Robin. It thus, is a useful resource and maybe should be subscribed and published at opensolaris.org, but it isn't what I wanted.

I have written to technorati to see if they can help. - Also the CSS for the watchlist display is a bit crap if the URL becomes very long.

Transaction to Relationship

2006-03-07T17:22:16.000Z

I've travelled to Leeds to participate in a Sun "Show & Tell" tomorrow and on the way stopped for a tasty Burger King double whopper. I saw advertised on a poster on the site http://www.newreg.com.

It seems to be another site offering the brokerage of personalised number plates, car registrations and/or private number plates. Despite the .com address, it looks like UK only. I checked a couple of plates that might interest me and some of the prices seem a bit steep. Interestingly, the site offers finance on the more expensive plates. An illustration of the conversion of a (brokered) transaction into a long term relationship. Pretty clever!

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" topic:[UK] topic:[car] "topic:[car plates]"

Re: Transaction to Relationship

2006-03-09T09:18:47.000Z

Dave, Just a word of caution. If you are looking at a number plate, then I'd advise checking the DVLA SOM website first. I've been looking, and have noticed that NewReg appear to quote the same price and then add VAT to it. The DVLA include VAT in their prices. One could argue its a premium for brokering the deal, and I can't dispute that. The other side of the coin is its a large market, and we can buy from elsewhere. Exercise your consumer choice ! Jonathon.

More......

2006-03-04T19:57:14.000Z

I have now (yeah really) added a picture to my article "Designing Data Centre automation solutions" illustrating the two dimensions of virtualisation & posted my notes from the N1 Architecture sessions.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] "Systems Management" topic:[SUNW] topic:[n1] topic:[opensolaris] "New Age DC"

Power, Heat and Cooling in the data centre

2006-03-03T20:08:08.000Z

I'm about to head for the airport to travel home, but I must let you know that Peter Snelling of Sun Canada has just presented on Data Centre enviromentals. It is a very comprehensive presentation and I shall be borrowing from it significantly. He calculates from power draw, to heat generated to air conditioning requirements.

Thanks Peter!

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[datacenter] topic:[datacentre] topic:[enviromentals] "Power+Heat"

Virtualisation has two dimensions

2006-03-03T20:01:53.000Z

~~I have added a picture to my article "Designing Data Centre automation solutions" illustrating the two dimensions of virtualisation.~~. It seems like I didn't! Sorry. I have now.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] "Systems Management" topic:[SUNW] topic:[n1] topic:[opensolaris] "New Age DC"

Data Centre Vision

2006-03-03T18:59:46.000Z

Sohrab has sent me an edited version of his slides. You can download it here... and I have put it up as a bookmark in the right hand side bar. Its the "N1 (.pdf)" one.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] "Systems Management" topic:[SUNW] topic:[n1] topic:[opensolaris] "New Age DC"

CPU Architecture counts!

2006-03-02T17:00:00.000Z

Talking interestingly about CPU architecture is very hard. It is difficult stuff and sadly Mark Tremblay didn't manage it. He spoke about what's coming next which is pretty confidential and also covered the current competitive position of the UltraSPARC T1 with respect to heat and capabililty. "Its fantastic!". This was supplemented later by Denis Sheean who talked about characterising applications and their suitability for leveraging the T1 processors. The T1 is a throughput optimised system and so multi-user OLTP works well as do edge & network facing applications. The weaknesses of the system are well known and documented. Floating point and single threaded apps do not perfrom well. A further problem is that a well fitted application may be tested with unsuitable test thresholds. A data warehouse's loads are typically single threaded and using the load as a benchmark test is unlikely to show the US T1 in its best light. The weight of Dennis' presentation was that most applications perform well on the US T1 based systems.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[CPU] topic:[SPARC] topic:[CMT]

Architecting DC automation

2006-03-02T03:45:00.000Z

During a presentations on N1, Garima Thockburn & Doan Nguyen showed an architectural functional model for the applications provisioning technology.

What's really cool is that, as I'd expect from Sun, although we can forget what it made us, is that openness is being designed in from the ground level. Its recognised that a DC automation solution will have to utilise external capabilities. A second piece of ideology is borrowed from SOA and the products need to workflow manage various transactions, i.e. systems management transactions in the data centre. (Thuis is the service manager ).The whole SOA vocabulary of composition & orcestration fits the problem. The industry (or community if you prefer) are also developing business applications design skills for the infrastructure. This is also necessary if automation is to suceed. The block diagram puts work flow at the centre of the design. NB The diagram is accurate today but may change.

We were given the opportunity to workshop with members of the team. We had a discussion about solutions selling and examined the reality of the partnering dimension. I argued that we need to take more ownership of the relationship; in many cases, our "Partners" don't use that word to describe us. On a good day, we're suppliers on a bad day we're competition. I have thought through this since I said it, and it clear that this problem requires inter-company co-operation. At least Sun is comfortable working with others and partnership will help our customers meet broader requirements today, and as I said partnering helps meet the hetrogeneity requirement, at the least we'll need help dealing with oddities. Matthias Pfuetzner (a german colleague) argued for openness of the products APIs at both the plugin level, which determines what objects the software can manage and at the UI level, because as the plugin capability extends, it may be necessary to customise the UI to invoke and monitor the extended functionality. I like his idea of making a "plugin builder".

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] "Systems Management" topic:[SUNW] topic:[n1] topic:[opensolaris] "New Age DC"

Designing Data Centre automation solutions

2006-03-02T01:00:00.000Z

Today was planned as a look ar Sun's system management solutions and the day was started by Sohrab Modi, the V/P for the group. We really have a problem with our branding, but we're sticking with N1, managing maNy systems as 1. Sohrab's presentation called "Simplify, Integrate, Automate", hit two key points for me.

First, N1 is a solutions sale and the customer will define the scope and boundaries. Sun's field need to capture these requirements and map both Sun & partner products to the requirements and take integration responsibility, at the least the solution design needs to be a collaborative process between the customer and vendor. Our proposition needs to be we meet your need and solve your problems. Its not good enough to try and win feature/benefit beauty parades. Sohrab showed how in the next 12 months Sun (his people) will be bringing virtualisation and management products to market to allow us to more address more and more comprehensive requirements. He demo'd some of the more advanced features of our logical domaining and provisioning technology which gives me confidence that his team are finally getting their delivery train in order, its been a long hard struggle for them. (One of his staff produced one of the analyst slides showing Sun in a strong position today, at least we're gaining mind share.)

The second piece of his talk that I liked is his two dimensions of consolidation. The virtualisation technologies mean that the data centre might have more operating system images, which without automation is more difficult and costly to manage, therefore we have to aggregate systems into run time resources and management objects.

This something I have been calling pools, but I suspect that Sun and the industry will call them something else. The demand for multi-node pools by applications is a crucial part of the capability supply and demand nexus and the economics and architectural constraints that aggregation enables and and creates make solutions design and integration more important not less. It is unlikely that one technology can answer the management consolidation and virtualisation problems.

N1 is a solutions sell. Customers will define the boundaries of scope, and we need to meet all of the customer problem. Sohrab gets this and is committed to a full technology offering that meets customer needs. We're not looking at point product releases, we're selling/building a platform and field people i.e. me need to learn how to ensure that customers define problems, sun offer's technology and the sales process collaborates on solutions design. As I said we don't want to sell each of our N1 products on a feature benefit basis, and customers shouldn't want to buy that way.

Presentations later in the day emphasised Sun's co-opetive approach, building from the ground up to enable integrators to add value. These integrators are as likely to be customer internal staff as they are to be consultants. This means that a central piece of our platform is going to be the orchestration functionality so the "N1 backplane" will be able to orchestrate micro transactions, which themselves can be undertaken by either Sun product or partner/competitor product. It all enables solutions design.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] "Systems Management" topic:[SUNW] topic:[n1] topic:[opensolaris] "New Age DC"

Tuesday Highlights

2006-03-01T01:59:58.000Z

Bill Vass Sun's CIO presented to us today. I last heard him speak last February. He offered three useful insights.

Sun IT runs a Sun-on-Sun reference program. I need to check out their "Secure Mail" offering and the resource management solution as we have implemented soft containers throughout the estate.
Sun ran a Solaris 8 to 9 adoption programme. This took 3 months and the speed was enabled by de-mirroring swap and haveing tow versions of the OS on each system. They booted on S9 with minimal pre-testing and reverted if there were any problems. There weren't depsite the move to active resource management. I asked if he was frightened of failing to adequatley test the mythical "end of year" program. He said not, they JFDY'd it.
He spoke about "encouraging" us to move towards personal compliance to their standards. One inducement is that they propose to implement wine as part of the JDS build, for those final stubborn windows apps. Hopefully, he'll find ways of enabling us all to benefit from their build standards.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[windows] topic:[winehq] "Service Management"

about: Yahoo Maps

2006-03-01T00:27:01.000Z

I've been checking out the Yahoo Maps beta. I've not yet posted an application yet but I have discovered the following links which I need to return to sometime.

Yahoo Maps Beta Demo - San Francisco :: Yahoo! Maps Developer Community, a yahoo group :: Yahoo! - Simple API Reference Manual :: Yahoo! Map Services - Sample App. :: Yahoo's Sample .xml :: GeoRSS.

I also did a query to discover the latitude and longtitude of Oxford, the centre of the UK, and discovered these links. Oxford, Long/Lat @ Google :: Oxford @ Wikipedia :: UK Towns.

These links are posted here to avoid flooding my del.icio.us, but this article will be linked.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Links] topic:[Maps] topic:[Yahoo!] topic:[Geography] topic:[Oxford] topic:[UK]

Monday - Virtualising the Data Centre

2006-02-28T23:37:12.000Z

Joost Pronk Van Hoogeveen, Solaris Virtualisation Product Manager presented. He had one rather excellent slide, showing Sun's technologies as a spectrum, from Dynamic System Domains, though a Hypervisor solution, to Containers and then the Resource Manager.

While this misses the aggregation dimension of virtualisation (and I know he understands this), placing these technologies as a spectrum and making the deployment decision accountable to the applications' non functional qualities is very powerfull. It allows better evaluation of technology choice and hopefully deprecates the "I'm only using one virtualisation technology" view and encourages people to use requirements driven design. It may also enable a richer solution design capability to solve the hetrogeneity question; data centre managers need to implement a "Real Time Infrastructure" delivering multiple APIs i.e. windows, J2EE, Oracle, Solaris & Linux etc. If performing architecture on the virtualisation question forces the explicit statement of an applications non-functional qualities, then a service will have been performed.

Joost kindly sent me this reference, which is a Sun Inner Circle article called "The Many Faces of Viurtualization", from which I have taken the picture. (I've put the link up; I think it'll be an interesting read).

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Computers] topic:[Software] topic:[Solaris] topic:[OpenSolaris] topic:[OpenSPARC] topic:[virtualisation]

Monday's Data Centre Bites

2006-02-28T17:05:15.000Z

Sun gets a two year beta with its Express programme, customers get early access to allow rapid adoption of our innovation.

Solaris 10 offers 30-40% perfromance improvement over previous versions.

A key inhibitor to consolidation using containers is that "downtime" is accountable to seperate business units, who will/can not agree or compromise. Certainly, downtime (or availablity) is a service's non-functional quality. These ownerships are sometime expressed through legal ownership.

Cool Tools at OpenSPARC is advertising (as coming soon) a new gcc compiler backend for SPARC. This promises superior compilation and performance for opensource (or other Linux optimised) programs.

These bites were taken from yesterday.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Computers] topic:[Software] topic:[Solaris] topic:[OpenSolaris] topic:[OpenSPARC]

An epiphany about ZFS

2006-02-28T16:28:10.000Z

The hightlight of yesterday's conference to me was a presentation about ZFS. How long am I going to hang out for a british pronounciation . The preso was delivered by Dave Brittle, Lori Alt & Tabriz Leman.

While much of the material delivered yesterday was standard "Dog & Pony" material, this version stayed away from the administrative management interface and while mentioning the ideological substitution of pool for volume, it concentrated on the transactional nature of the filesystem update, the versioning this enables and also "bringing the ZFS goodness to slash".

Somehow I suddenly get it. ZFS revolutionises the storage of disk data blocks and their meta data. It writes new blocks before deleting old one and so can roll back if the write errors. This also allows versioining to occur, the old superblock becomes a snapshot master superblock. The placement of parity data in the meta blocks (as opposed to creating additional leaf node blocks) means that error correction is safer and and offers richer functionally. More....

It seems to me that this technology will enable a sedimentation process to occur and that much of a DBMS's functionality can migrate to the operating system (or in this case file system). When I say much, when I first started working with DBMS (i.e. in the last century ), they often used the filesystem and often didn't use write ahead logs. By bringing this DBMS functionality to the file system, a process started by the adoption of direct & async i/o, the ZFS designers have closed a loop and borrowed from the DBMS designer's learning curve. Only the DBMS can "know" if two blocks are part of the same "success unit", but ZFS can implement a sucess unit and should begin to weaken the need for a write ahead log. It will also enable the safe(r) use of open source databases.

The versioning feature of the file system, when certified for use as a root file system will enable much safer and faster patching; it will enable snapshot and rollback . If system managers use these features to adopt a faster software technology refresh, then innovation will come to the data centre faster since newer code is better quality and should contain new usefull features. Disk cloning, snapshot and rollback will also enable the rapid spawing of Solaris Containers. Fantastic.

We are also released from the tyranny of the partition table, which for the last 15 years we have required a volume manager for.

Despite these fantastic advances, when it becomes available, it'll be a V1.0 product, so care will be needed. Certainly, the authors seem to have some humility about this, but with Solaris Express, we can get hold of it now and begin acceptance and confidence testing. A final really great feature is that ZFS has been donated/incorporated into OpenSolaris.

This stuff should be available as an update in Solaris 10, maybe sometime over the summer and I'm going to get hold of an "Express" version for my laptop.

Edited A correspondent called Igor asked for a link to the slides. OpenSolaris has a documentation page which hosts a .pdf presentation.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[software] topic:[ZFS] topic:[filesystem] topic:[DBMS]

Re: An epiphany about ZFS

2006-02-28T23:18:36.000Z

So is this ZFS presentation posted somewhere?

Re: An epiphany about ZFS

2006-03-01T00:03:40.000Z

Igor, I shall amend the article to put the slide set link in the article body. I have used a set hosted here... What I tried to say in the first para is that the human pitch and the emphasis the speakers gave to different slides made this presentation seem different and better. This is why I called the article an epiphany. I have had these slides pitched before, but I got it this time. Enjoy!

San Francisco again

2006-02-28T13:08:29.000Z

I've just finished the first day of Sun's Data Center Ambassador's Conference, being held at Sun's Menlo Park campus. Occasionally Sun gather their top data center solutions architects and systems engineers together and collectively and with R&D engineers and product managers, we are taking a look at the next 12 months, what Sun can supply and how our customers can take advantage of what we're doing.

I arrived in San Francisco just over 24 hours ago, after an uneventful flight with Virgin Atlantic, so I'm up a bit early and catching up on my notes of yesterday.

tags: None

The Firefox Proxy Button

2006-02-26T20:00:00.000Z

I met up with Sean Harris and Ann-Marie Jamison, earlier this week who are colleagues at work. Sean demonstrated his personal edge solution based on his Sony Erricson K700i and SyncML (see here... for more) where he keeps his e-diary, todo list and addresses. Interestingly he also let slip about the Firefox Proxy Button, which I have bookmarked here....

It allows you to compensate for the loss of profiles within Firefox by turning the proxy server on/off from a toolbar toggle button, as opposed to using the radio button in the "options" editor. If you're a Firefox user, I strongly recommend that you use this. You can also see that I have installed a del.icio.us add on, giving me toolbar buttons to go to my del.icio.us, or post a page to my del.icio.us.

The theme I am using is "Glassier"

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[software] topic:[Desktop] topic:[mozilla] topic:[proxybutton]

McKinsey on Strategy. Services and Product

2006-02-26T06:21:22.000Z

The most recent McKinsey Quarterly is pretty relevant. The keynote article, "Distortions & deceptions in strategic decisions" looks at the flawed human values often inserted into major business decisions. They quote a major aquisition decision taken by a dominant player and suggest that the major advocate of the merger wanted it for personal political gain. They look at ways in which these human factors can be brought into the open and evaluated in the decision making process. Despite identifying over-optimism as a frequent occurence once a proposal has been made, the decision not to proceed is often taken in private and so collaborative decision making cannot neutralise these human shortcomings. One suggestion is to ask the proposer, what their next best proposal is.

The second article of interest is entitled "The right service strategies for product companies". I last wrote about this subject last year, when I reviewed Gordon Moore's article "Don't shoot the messenger", where he talks about aligning service offerings with the product life cycle. The McKinsey article offers a two by two matrix. The goal of the services business is either to enhance or enable product sales or to deepen the value proposition to the customer (and hence earn money). The service vendor can then seek to leverage economies of skill or scale. Like most strategy analysis, its important to understand your choices and then focus on that choice. The choices affect pricing, sales, delivery and organisation. This varies from some of the things covered in my previous reviews in that they have reduced the choice to a 2x2 matrix and conern themselves with questions of strategy.

My previous article, concerning aligning service to the product life cycle is here... and the article concerning alignment ideology (the economies of skill?) is here....

tags: topic:[business] topic:[economics] topic:[consulting] topic:[strategy] topic:[services] topic:[mckinsey]

Coutries contiguous to Russia

2006-02-20T17:01:18.000Z

In my last article, I wrote that we'd played "Wipeout" with "the countries contiguous with Russia". We had a row about Latvia which was settled by someone at the table next to ours, who confirmed that Latvia does share a border with Russia. Being a pedant, I've looked it up and the obvious countries are "Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China". (11) This leaves some very interesting geography in Europe, where for some reason I don't know about, the city of Kalingrad and its coastal hinterland are Russian. This makes both Lithuania and Poland, Russia's neighbours.

We agreed that the USA (Alaska) was not a contiguous neighbour and by this argument, neither is Japan. Interestingly, Kazakhstan acts as a buffer between Russia and the ex-soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, and while the winning player did not name the first three of these states, he did use the last.

tags: topic:[Games] topic:[geography] topic:[politicalgeography]

Leaving on a jet plane.......

2006-02-18T15:48:00.000Z

What a terrible journey home! Firstly, my due flight was fairly late anyway, then announced late and then cancelled. I'd had to queue for one/quarter hours in order to be told that the flight was overbooked and I was to be wait listed. (I need to talk to the travel agents about my ticket price). I then thought I had to rush because of the time spent mucking around, but got given a seat. The proactive management of people was zero so people were getting cross and upset. Interestingly, the most helpful people were the security guards and border police

We retired to the executive lounge, where the staff were very helpful and played "Wipeout". Interesting categories chosen include "the films of Richard Gere", "Carry on Films", "countries contigous with Russia". This last one is particualrly good because the geography changes all the time.

Once they announced the cancellations we had to queue again. They put us up overnight in one of the hotels on the estate. And then on Saturday, I had an inedible breakfast, I queued three times, (these are long queues and don't include the security checks), lost my driving licence, found it and finally landed in the Uk at about half past two, then due to a problem on the M25, took two hours to drive home. I got home over sixteen hours after I'd planned.

Next time I visit Barcelona during or around 3GSM, I shall stay over the weekend. I hope that my experiences at Barcelona Airport are untypical; if not, its a place to avoid; I don't remember it being so bad last time.

category: Culture

tags: topic:[travel] topic:[barcelona]

Re: Leaving on a jet plane.......

2006-02-20T19:00:28.000Z

The Richard Gere attempt was pretty pathetic with several errors being made. The bidder failed to name five and the winner won on seven. IMDB says he's done 41, but many of them are shite, and some are as yet unpublished. His Filmography by IMDB is here....

Re: Leaving on a jet plane.......

2006-02-21T14:03:56.000Z

My commiserations. There seems to be some kind of "conservation of karma" factor involved: I have a flawless trip, so Nemesis has to take it out on someone else.

On the other hand, reading this did remind me to join BritBlog!

Seperating the telco hype from the reality

2006-02-17T09:10:04.000Z

After lunch, Lars Godsell, one of Forrester's principal analysts shared his views about the telco industry. He promised to "separate the hype from reality".

He started with a dim view on the economic success of the european telcos, by looking at their share price performance, revenue decline and return on capital employed. He then turned to the issue of innovation, and looked at a number of inhibitors. His list included the usual suspects, from CEO commitment, through the organisational model to leveraging cluetrain & Rifkin by having sensible profitable partnering stratgies and balancing internal and external innovation investments. Companies now play multiple roles in a supply chain and yesterday's supplier is tomorrows customer, although with today's speed of business these roles do not change on daily basis, but much more frequently. (The previous speaker, Xavier Kirchner's four collaboration models also took notice of the fact that a telco can play multiple roles in the technology-to-service supply chain.)

Lars argued that Forrester see telcos as being in three businesses, Retail, Innovation and Network, and that the telco's should organise around these three factors, since they require different core competencies and face different challanges and constraints.

He looked at the role of regulation on the speed of change and profitability of the industry, being mainly critical of the European regulators and specifically the UK regulator (OFCOM), arguing that they inhibit innovation, either economically, by destroying margin, or by diversion. i.e. demanding they do stuff that is an alleged public good such as the European Data Retention directive.

tags: topic:[Economics] topic:[telco]

Don't just listen, understand!

2006-02-16T16:12:46.000Z

It's half term, so Sun have arranged a business trip to Barcelona. I'm attending a Telco Sales team training event. The customer keynote was given by Xavier Krichner, Director de Prospectiva of Telefonica.

His talk offered a definition of innovation, examined some historical and, in hindsight, stupid forecasts to show how difficult finding the runners is. The key to getting it right is understanding your customers, and its not enough to just give them what they say they want. Innovators need to understand the problems and needs and deliver to unstated and future needs. Just listening and minimal compliance are not enough to build sustainable services.

He talked about four collaboration models for bringing technology innovation to the market and then went through some examples of new services in the market, based on VoIP, IPTV and an urban transport solution.

There are two points of interest (to me) about the IPTV examples. They both addressed the ability of the technology to deliver new forms of content. The first example is the use of IPTV to enhance healthcare delivery for the chronically ill. They have developed biometric capture devices and streaming and interactive content for the ill and their carers. The second example looks to leverage the channel hopping syndrome. Content can be designed for the restless to encourage hopping to additional content, which can be factual or commercial. This sort of application is easy to conceive and possibly doomed to failure, since one of the major causes of my channel hopping is the ad. breaks, I am not going to hop to an advert. However, one very interesting example is the ability to choose camera angles which has applications in both the world of fiction and sport. It has been well implemented in the computer game "Little Big Adventure 2". Xavier also demonstrated how the technology enables authors to design content with multiple paths. A "who dunnit" can either be a detective story or horror story depending upon the viewers choices. Writing non-linear fiction is reasonably rare; books are not well consumed in the wrong order, however RPG games writers have been writing non-linear stories for years. IPTV may be one way of delivering this content to consumers.

The key take-away for me is that IPTV enables new forms of content, only if service providers leverage this will it really take off. People who think that IPTV is about delivering streaming content such as movies & films are missing the point. I think that Xavier's view is that new uses or new answers to old problems drive adoption, its not just IPTV.

tags: topic:[Economics] topic:[telco] topic:[business] topic:[IPTV]

Political Games

2006-02-14T06:33:51.000Z

I went shopping over the weekend and bought a couple of games. Now we have a new computer we can begin to catchup on what we've been missing out on for the last two years.

One game that caught our eye was “Republic, the Revolution”. I had had this pointed out to me before and it reminded me of Junta (see Answer.com & Wikipedia), which I have never got to play. It would seem that the computer game is set in a post Soviet eastern European state, and has a potentially a stronger story line and more strategies for success.

Junta seems based on some of the, or similar games first introduced to me by Michael Laver in “Playing Politics” which I read when it first came out. A second edition, called “Playing Politics: the Nightmare continues” was published in 1993 and a science around them and other similar games seems to have developed. Several of these games were referenced in “Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki, recently recommended by Jonathan Scwartz in his blog. (I've given you enough to find them on your favourite online bookstore).

But to return to Republic, I tried it last night but found it quite hard to pick up. The UI's are quite old fashioned, although how I expected a city's political composition to be displayed I'm not so sure, and I really rather enjoy the “Leninist/Soviet” look of the clothes, architecture and iconography. Anyway I checked it out on the internet and failed to find very much. The two crucial resources are the vendor site here... (you'll need to enable popups), with downloads such as wallpaper or buddy icons and “Game Faqs”, here..., although the forum referenced never took off. (I'll have to see if I need to do something about that).

tags: topic:[Games] 'Computer Games' topic:[Politics]

Windows Help and Support

2006-02-12T14:24:37.000Z

I've just bought a new computer which I shall be using for music, pictures and for my games, so I am running windows XP on it.

There's been a problem with "Help & Support", it wouldn't start on using the F1. It stated the service was not running and I couldn't find it in the services tab of msconfig. Dell recommended a pcrestore, which since I had aleady done once, I didn't want to repeat. I logged it in the Dell Community forum here... and joe53 referred me to Kelly's Korner tweaks, line 235. This is a registry update. I used this to fix the problem and I have documented my process on the Dell Site. Kelly puts this problem as No 3 in the Top 10 FAQs, although I had not heard of it before.

Thanks to Joe & Kelly.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[PC] topic:[windowsXP] topic:[help] topic:[broken] "topic:[help and support]" topic:[Dell]

Welcome to Shez

2006-02-09T15:39:50.000Z

Shez is now blogging, it would appear that she plans to write about Best Practice, IT Consulting and share some of her agricultural stories. Her first article is here... where she introduces herself. Sort off! She's a real wizz on service management and is a member of various national and international bodies. I have added her to my blogroll on the right.

tags: topic:[People] topic:[blog] topic:[SUNW]

From Qube to Cube

2006-02-01T06:22:00.000Z

I can't be-eeeive it. I have my Qube running. It's hosting services and I now need to explore if "snipsnap" is what I want, but as I explore the next set of applications that might be useful I begin to see how behind the curve the old Cobalt O/S is. I spoke to Chris Gerhard who's thinking about upgrading his three Qubes, but using opensolaris, (see here... for his article, & here... for the opensolaris appliance group). I really like the form factor, and I'm quite impressed with the "headless" system. So I set to looking for replacement cases, in which I might build my own server. . Interestingly, CNET have also published an article detailing the growing differentiation between computer vendors around the case (or colour in this instance), but both ACER, with their Ferrari range, & Alienware (See here...) are offering very different laptops.

I came across a number of e-shops, including X-Case, Silver PCs & Directron (their Cube page), all of which do a number of parts including system cases. (This is the word you need if using Google! i.e. case.) I've found a couple of cases that look quite neat. Again no recommendations, I'm merely sharing research.

Firstly, the Lian Li PC 880, this looks very cute, has two internal disks and room for two 5.25 exchangable media devices. CD-ROM & ZIP? Is ZIP any good? Probably not, if we're using 120Gb (or maybe larger disks), then ZIP is shagged. Maybe we need to look at DVD/W. Can we do this with UNIX? The case supports an ATX card. Dimensions W443 x H205 x D503mm, a typical desktop pizza box and while very pretty, maybe a bit large. Its certainly the widest and deepest of those I've found.
	They also do a more industrial looking system called the V880. You can check this out at their site here.... Its dimensions are 380x160x440 mm (W,H,D), so smaller than V880 but it's still only got two internal disks
What's this called? A company called Shuttle do this. It looks nice, comes with a CPU and hence a bit expensive. Dimensions 200 mm x 300 mm x 185 mm, which makes it the smallest of these cases. This looks like the case that Hitech Savvy use as Qube replacements, it supports SATA disk, but only two (?), and has one 5.25 and one 3.5 external slots so again CD-ROM/W and ZIP devices become available . This one's quite small, but I need to see if it comes without the motherboard as while this'll probably do me, I can that some of my potential collaborators may want something better. Dimensions: 300 x 200 x 185 mm. These people seem to be OEM only, I havn't found their home page.
	This is the Lian Li PC-402A. An aluminum Mini Case - taking a Mini Flex ATX card. Very Pretty. Again 2 internal disks, but three exchangable media slots, which is probably more than required. IAs said, it supports Mini flex ATX Motherboard. Dimensions 210 x 240 x 340mm (W x H x D). Small foot print if a bit high.
This is the Antec Aria, and the picture came from Xcase's site (here...). This one's got three drives, Accepts motherboards up to MicroATX (24,4 x 24,4 cm) and 4 full-height PCI expansion cards, only one external slot but 5.25 so a CD-ROM/W is a possibility, for emergency boot and backup. Dimensions 263 mm (W) x 210 mm (H) x 393 mm (D), so not as big as it looks.

Note: The pictures in this article are hosted at their publisher's sites. The links are above. They presumably want to sell this stuff and may not be the most appropriate vendor for you (or me). My research isn't finished and I'm not necessarily recommending anything here, except that Cube cases look neat, but they're all much bigger than the Cobalt.

Note: Also I have broken one of my rules and used a table to format this article, maybe it would have been better to write seperate articles, but I didn't. I hope this looks OK in your browser.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Qube] topic:[hardware] topic:[computer] topic:[cases] topic:[opensolaris]

Re: From Qube to Cube

2006-02-01T21:10:31.000Z

What would be real nice is a small case with three 5.25" slots, you can fit a 5 drive hot swap enclosure in that space. http://www.servercase.com/miva/miva?/Merchant2/merchant.mv+Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=SC&Category_Code=SATA Rgds Robin

Qube Diaries!

2006-01-29T17:36:12.000Z

I've finally got an instance of Snipsnap running on my Qube and I've mucked around with the look and feel to give it my "Green Robot" look which my home site also has, if you like it, you can go there and download it.

I have used the .war version of snipsnap and have thus had to install Java, tomcat and snipsnap; the Qube's Linux does not come with any of these! Once I got the downloads to work correctly, this is fairly simple.

Java went on easily as you'd expect. I just followed the installation instructions at http://java.sun.com/. I took the full J2EE SDK pack for Linux. With tomcat, I took the binary distribution (V4.1) for Linux from the apache tomcat site. (I can't rember why we only took V4.1, there was a reason; it might be because of the oldness of the linux distro, or it might be Snipsnap thing.) Anyway the install is just a cp [copy] command. I then wrote a rc.d script for tomcat which needs to know where the ${JAVA_HOME} directory is but otherwise I have invoked the start and stop scripts distributed with tomcat. (They're in the ./bin directory). I also had to dick around with the tomcat-users.xml file. Installing Snipsnap was even simpler, with the .war version, you just need to upload this using the tomcat manager screen. When I uploaded the .war to tomcat, I had renamed the .war to snipsnap.war. (I think this is where it inherits its namespace root from, but anyway, you don't want all that version stuff leaking into the database structure.) All that's left then is amending the CSS to develop a new theme. Again Snipsnap's documentation is quite good and my only problem was my own CSS coding.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Java] topic:[Wiki] topic:[Snipsnap] topic:[Linux] topic:[Qube] topic:[HTML]

Cool Prices

2006-01-26T15:43:10.000Z

I'm not ski-ing this year (again)! I've been promising myself I'll go each winter ever since my eldest son's first dry slope lesson. I was just thowing away the brochures and bookmarking the companies sites at del.icio.us when I came across Cyrstal Ski's web site, which has a bargains panel in the top left hand side. While I can use Mozilla's "alert me" function in the browser, how cool would it be to receive updates via RSS.

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[Technology] topic:[Ski-ing] topic:[RSS] topic:[price]

Blazing a trail, in europe & the 'net

2006-01-26T11:30:41.000Z

It's odd to me that since the guardian launched its ivebeenthere wiki, I've preceded them to two european cities and they've published just after I've been. I spent some time in Amsterdam between Xmas & New Year. Am I their "cool hunter"?

The Guardian launched its Amsterdam section over the weekend. While I was there I spent some time doing those touristy things, Museums, Canals and the Botanical Gardens. While Amsterdam is very pretty city, the weather was dreadful and it snowed while we were there. This had the advantage of covering the Vondelpark in a dusting of snow which made the park and the walks to the restaurants very pretty.

Amsterdam is very pretty city, (I don't think my pictures do it justice), its a veritable "Venice of the North". I was so surprised at the number of canals and its cosmopolitan atmosphere that makes it worth visiting. It also seems completely bi-lingual, making sense of what I was told about assuming that dutch telephone operators can be assumed to speak english without arrogance.

Having over the last six months visited both Berlin and Amsterdam, my thoughts returned to idea of visiting London as a tourist, this has been reinforced by "Management Today" covering London in its "frequent flyers" article in December. More pictures here... at flickr.

topic:[travel] topic:[europe] topic:[Culture] topic:[photo] topic:[Amsterdam]

Uploading to the Qube

2006-01-22T21:12:10.000Z

I have now used Google/linux to find unix2dos and dos2unix .rpm files and installed them using

rpm --install

i.e. they were missing from the Cobalt build and somehow the ftp client I was using wasn't handling the conversions, so this should make editing my shell scripts using notepad &/or context on windows easier.

As I implied last month I have got to get to grips with the bourne shell again; I'm holding off on the Korn Shell. These editing techniques may help

I have also got to grips with using ftp/wget on the Qube. Its a lot quicker than using http and quicker than using other system as web clients for the fetch.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[Internet] topic:[ftp] topic:["text formating"] topic:[Linux] topic:[Qube]

Follow my steps at del.icio.us (, or here)

2006-01-16T15:40:19.000Z

Thanks to Jim Grisanzio who rendered his del.icio.us feed on his blog, using their link roll gadget. (You may need to log into del.icio.us to make it work).

I have implemented mine here in my sidebar panel, with a limit of 7, so you'll need to come to my HTML version of the page to see it. I need to work on the HTML style that the roll is published in, but I shall be amending my personal sites to use both this and the tags tool. Because I bookmark a lot of what I browse, by reading my del.icio.us feed (the hyperlink is in the sidebar), you can get some idea of what I am (or am planning) to do.

I was busy doing some DIY this weekend, so the new links at the moment are not based on the weekend's reading, which my monday links often are. I am considering assembling a computer of my own, which for thos of you who know me is a big step, so we have a few e-shopping sites that will sell me stuff, although these are not recommendations. I'm merely sharing my research.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[community] topic:[tags] topic:[blogging] topic:[Internet] topic:[Bookmarks] topic:[del.icio.us]

Re: Follow my steps at del.icio.us (, or here)

2006-01-16T20:43:29.000Z

Thanks Dave, my blog roll will never be the same.

Real Burgers

2006-01-10T22:14:56.000Z

The Guardian, recently ran a story on "Real Burgers", albeit mainly in London, which led me to the following web hyperlinks. I have recently discovered these London eateries claiming to serve "Real Burgers". They're not cheap, but almost certainly worth trying.

tags: topic:[Culture] "topic:[Food Drink]" topic:[Burgers] "topic:[Real Burgers]"

Re: Real Burgers

2006-01-10T23:02:38.000Z

By far the best vegetarian hamburger I ever had was at a McDonalds in Scotland. Yet they won't offer them here in the US, not even in Berkeley where a majority of their potential customer base is probably vegetarian. Not to mention carnivores like myself who would choose it for taste and/or health.

Ringtones & Work

2006-01-06T11:20:51.000Z

While Scott McNealy, in better times, when he had time to worry about minor issues, said he found personalising the ringtone on a phone a bad thing. He is in dubious company, Norman Lamont, when Chancellor of the Exchequer famously decided to tax phones; he was interrupted at dinner in a restaurant. Anyway I don't agree, neither of them work in open plan or use trains. I reckon being able to recognise your phone by hearing it, if you are in a space with many phones, is productivity enhancing, despite the fact that some people have some desperately annoying ringtones.

Given their price I'd spend my own money on them for the convenience.

Now, if I could only find Mott the Hoople's "Golden Age of Rock & Roll"

tags: topic:[Culture] topic:[Silly] topic:[Ringtones]

SQL - it ain't dead you know

2006-01-05T10:54:42.000Z

Sun seem to be incorporating PostgreSQL into the Solaris distribution. I have worked extensively with Sybase and Oracle, (and Ingres & Informix etc...) but not yet touched Postgres. The Postgres site offers a book list here....

Any comments on these? I am interested in the evolution and the non-relational features as well as the standard RDBMS stuff. E-Mail or comment here :)

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[RDBMS] topic:[OODBMS] topic:[Postgres]

Re: SQL - it ain't dead you know

2006-01-06T23:58:51.000Z

Hi Dave,

Can't say I've used PostgreSQL much either, but Sun engineer Jignesh Shah has written a several interesting posts on his experiences with it: Jignesh Shah's Weblog

Implementing Tags in a Database??

2006-01-04T10:02:06.000Z

I was considering why del.icio.us doesn't offer a cloud for tag based queries, while it does offer the cloud for User based queries, and I received the reply that it was (probably) related to query cost, which set me thinking. What would the del.icio.us database look like?

Is this right, look at the para below, the requirement that a tag is used by someone to describe the bookmark is lost in above version of the model.

Surely we have only three entities, User, Tag & Bookmark (also known as URL). Both User & Tag have a many to many relationship with each Bookmark. We can resolve these many2manies in two ways, by using an allocation table, or by adopting a meta model model.

The data model must take into account the fact that a User describes a bookmark using one or more tags. i.e. DaveLevy describes http://www.guardian.co.uk as (UK web World News politics). Other people have used different tags, although only a few associated it with journalism. Each of these user, bookmark, tag relationships must be stored seperately; otherwise we loose the user's relationship and ownership of the tag set. This implies/mandates that somwhere a user/bookmark/tag database object (either table or index is required). This means that the bookmark entity must be related to the user by an allocation. This is required to implement the many-to-many, but also to allow the tags to be owned by a user. The tag must also have an allocation between the Bookmark & itself but is owned by the defining user i.e. again we must have a User/Bookmark/Tag intersection entity. The model immediately below meets this requirement, although implementing the Tag attribute as a membership of the tag - user/bookmark relationship and implementing it as a foreign key is also a possibility.

I have not documented the name of the relationship between tag, bookmark and their allocations. This becomes quite hard because we have transformed the entity into "operational masters" and they are likely to be implemented as indexes. The difficulty in naming the relationship between these entites and the allocation entities implies that we have modelled the problem well. Neither does the diagram above illustrate mandatory/optional attributes of the relationships. The Knows of relationship is optional. During the period between registration and the first bookmark, a User will have zero user/bookmark allocations. I suppose it is possible to enter a Bookmark without tagging it, which makes the Described by relationship optional as well. If either of the allocations exist though, their masters must exist.

It should be noted that any domain of definition can be applied to the bookmark entity (or at least its key). By stating that the bookmark must be (say) a roller article URL, we have a viable tag model for roller articles. In fact, I have considered opening a new del.icio.us account exclusively to act as a blog index and to provide a tag/cloud map for this blog.

I am next going to look at some queries and the relational algebra that can be applied to this model; the reason I developed the model was to examine the performance implications of different entry points.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[tags] topic:[roller] "topic:[data model]"

Re: Implementing Tags in a Database??

2006-01-05T13:59:11.000Z

You may be interested in semantic webs but I think Tim Berners-Lee is better qualified to take you forward than me: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4

Dave's Adventures in Qubeland; shells and boot configuration

2006-01-04T08:25:28.000Z

Isn't chkconfig a good idea. The first time I came across it, it seemed to be just a status and service requirment function. (See also what I said last time here...). I used it via GNOME and Red Hat's service manager,and Red Hat's documents are here.... While working on my Qube I have been pointed at it again by ddclient (see also my blog here... about DDNS), I've come to the conclusion that its really rather good. Here is Linux About's link and here is the SGI link.

This works with rc start|stop scripts. Actually they encourage a "status" branch, and also a restart branch aka "stop; start". All you need is a configuration line and a description line in the script. Immediately below is the code from ddclient, the first line states the run levels for which this program is required , the start level priority and the stop level priority. (This contrasts with Solaris SMF, which does not state priority as scalar but as relative).

# chkconfig: 2345 65 35
# description: ddclient provides support for updating dynamic DNS services.

Copy the rc file to the /etc/rc.d/init.d directory, make the directory current and then issue the chkconfig -add command and the rc.d links will be created for you. i.e. the first string on the chkconfig: line defines the run levels at which the program will run

I have added the following (final two) lines to the opensshd script to permit chkconfig to work with it.

#!/bin/sh
# Donated code that was put under PD license.
#
# Stripped PRNGd out of it for the time being.
# Inserted by Dave Levy
# chkconfig: 2345 92 95
# description: This is the secureshell daemon

Running chkconfig --add ${opensshd_script_name} ensure that the links in the rc.d directory structure are created. This is neat; I've forgotten where to put it, and I don't have to muck around with remembering. Frankly I added the last two lines from the above to my rc script using vi, but it would be nice to automate it.

An additional problem however, is that the openssh project distributes the rc script with an incorrect directory for the shell. For Cobalt (and maybe other) Linux(es), you'll need to substiture the first line with #!/bin/sh, the code string below fixes this,

cat ${opensshd_script_name} | sed -e "s?\#\!/sbin/sh?\#\!/bin/sh?g" \
>> ${opensshd_script_name}.${script_ver}

We might want some version control code. The code above assumes that ${opensshd_script_name} and ${script_ver} have been set appropriately. I have considered using ls -t, head -1 and cut to create a version control semantic but the original script file has no version control suffix, and I am expecting to create a Linux variant. So

if [ `unname` -eq 'Linux' ]
then
  script_ver=Linux
# Change the shell interpreter
  cat ${opensshd_script_name} | sed -e "s?\#\!/sbin/sh?\#\!/bin/sh?g" \
    >> ${opensshd_script_name}.${script_ver}
fi

This will create a file called opensshd.init.in.Linux. However, once you get started, there are so many ways to do this.-

exec_shell=`which sh`

and use ${exec_shell} as the substitution string in the sed command or maybe best of all; this works for all UNIXes without a /sbin/sh, and tightly aligns the implemented execution shell with its existence

if [ ! -x /sbin/sh ]&& [ -x /bin/sh ]
then
# Change the shell interpreter
cat ${opensshd_script_name} | sed -e "s?\#\!/sbin/sh?\#\!/bin/sh?g" \
>> ${opensshd_script_name}.${script_ver}
fi

Maybe this is all too complicated, why they've selected /sbin/sh as the execution shell I have no idea, surely all the UNIXes on the port list have a /bin/sh and its guaranteed to be available at run level 1. Perhaps, they should just change the shell interpreter in the rc script source (, and add the chkconfig comment controls at the same time).

I've copied this article to the opensshd developer list, although while I hope they take notice of the shell issue, chkconfig is a Linux thing and hence many other UNIXes will have problems with it. So writing an if Linux test is a bit more complex than I have suggested above and they may feel that this is not a porting issue.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[Linux] topic:[services] topic:[DDNS] topic:[DNS] topic:[Dynamic DNS] topic:[Open Source] topic:[openssh] topic:[chkconfig]

Re: Dave's Adventures in Qubeland; shells and boot configuration

2006-01-09T11:03:57.000Z

A couple of guesses as to why they uses /sbin/sh: 1. It used to be A Good Idea to have /usr as a separate filesystem so that it could be mounted readonly. Using something in /sbin as the main shell meant that you were guaranteed not to have a dependency on some library in a filesystem that hadn't been mounted at the time. 2. Also Way Back When, there were some security attacks which worked by subverting the shared libs, rather than the shells themselves, to include backdoor code and the like. Using a statically-linked shell would stop attacks trying to use this vector. It's interesting that the contents of Solaris 10's /sbin aren't, in fact, statically linked any more. Ergo, don't try doing the separate-/usr-for-readonly thing.

Back to Work

2006-01-04T08:15:25.000Z

Well! Back to work today - Happy New Year and welcome to 2006!

tags: none

Open SSH on the Qube

2005-12-22T00:10:38.000Z

I have now installed OpenSSH on the Qube and this is how I did it. Go to http://www.openssh.org/, and their downloads page and get a copy of the "Other UNIX" version via the Portable page.

Go to http://www.openssh.org/, and their downloads page and get a copy of the "Other UNIX" version via the Portable page.
On the Qube, enable FTP & Telnet from behind the firewall and upload the tar'd package to the admin user
Create an ssd user, with a home directory of /var/empty & shell of /bin/false. BTW /var/empty exists on my Qube.
Make & Install the package. Read the INSTALL file, then$ ./configure $ make | tee log.makefile $ make install | tee log.makefile.install
Copy your make directory's version of openssh.init to /etc/etc/rc.d/init , edit the first line (the shell interpreter #!/sbin/sh) to make sure that the shell is real and exists in the expected location. (This is a Qube glitch. The shell is not in /sbin.)
Link the ../init version to an appropriatly named file node in the ../rc2.d directory, or is this the ../rc3.d.
Start the daemon
Open the firewall port

Now I can break the Qube from anywhere in the world, or I will once I fix Dynamic DNS. Once again thanks to Mike Ramchand

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[Linux] topic:[Qube] "topic:[Open Source]" topic:[openssh]

Re: Open SSH on the Qube

2005-12-22T16:21:04.000Z

Or get it from pkgmaster.com: http://www.pkgmaster.com/packages/qube/3/

More about the Green Data Centre

2005-12-19T20:44:54.000Z

What I wrote the other week goes to prove that old adage “its easier to write a long article than it is a short one”, but I have just a few follow-ups, having slept on it for a few days.

Sun's stall as eco-friendly americans seems quite brave given the trans-oceanic debates on responsible enviromental macro-economic behaviour that took place towards the end of the week. It should go down well and I know that Charles Andrews (Sun's UK Sales Director) is talking to his customers contacts about the brand value to them of "Green" behaviour in the data centre.

One of the other things that I didn't get at the time was that the cute DC simulator is in fact available on the 'net, here.... I have now run this on my Windows XP partion and had to update my Java Runtime environment, but that was easy enough. I suggest you check it out and have fun, you can see what it looks like below.

One of the things I quite like is the economic and green views you can take using the tool. Slowly, my customers have been moving from one to the other. It is clear to me that Data Centre managers are moving from IT economics as their sole drivers (Investment, Benefits and IRR%) to include the environmentals (Kwatts/M2, Cooling and Space) as constraints and viewing both the average and marginal cost of the enviromentals as key factors in their own right.

One of the problems that tools such as these need to answer though is the Mandy Rice Davies answer. Having alleged, in the 1950s, that the UK Minister of Defence had been sleeping with a soviet spy's girlfriend, she is confronted by a journalist who states “Mr Profumo says your lying”, Mandy replies “Well he would, wouldn't he”. Sun's simulation tool state that Sun's hardware is better and cheaper than IBMs, - "Well we would, wouldn't we!". The only way to assuage people's suspicion is to show the cynics the facts, the reasoning, the analysis and the conclusions. I know that people want to and will examine the facts, and such tools need to expose their assumptions and reasoning. (It's always made me curious though why Sun and not IBM (or Gartner) have to answer to Mandy's legacy.)

On a different subject, part of IBM's spoiling tactics was to say that the T1 is not a general purpose CPU, Jonathan's rejoinder “It's not, it runs one application really well though ...... its called the Internet”.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[Solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[DataCenter]

Finding my Qube on the Internet

2005-12-18T21:08:37.000Z

I'm hoping to use the Qube as a dynamic services host for my web site http://www.davelevy.info/ and so given that my ip leaser charges me (a lot) for static IP, I need a dynamic DNS address. Fortunatly, http://www.dyndns.org/ offer a free solution, but sadly one that needs a lot of pissing around to make work, although this may be CISCO's (or even my) fault.

I have opened an account at DynDNS and while impressed with the idea of having a domain such as I.is-a-geek.net, ( BTW it's gone), I settled for a more conservative domain name. (For free, you have to choose a hostname within domains that they already own & manage, although the list is quite comprehensive and varies from the conservative, via the specific to the silly.) My router while configurable to support DDNS does not seem to be working as I'd expect. My first response is to check out how it should be working at my router vendor's support site. I'd hope given the DDNS tab, that the router would just do this, but my experiments are not working as I'd expect.

http://www.dyndns.org/ recognise that the number of client interfaces is beyond them and publish a series of tools and APIs to allow the custom building of clients. These need to inform them when a new address is acquired, and that a stable old address is still required. These include their developer page, a query tool which lets you know what your ip address is and an Update Clients page for Linux/UNIX , which hosts a couple of clients. These seem to be sufficiently functional so I may need to check these out. It'll be quicker, but not as much fun as writing one of my own. I have looked at this and discovered that my favourite scripting language, the ksh is not available.

I realise that I may be stepping into an emotional maelstrom that I don't fully understand but I checked out the Korn Shell site but need to do some more reading about how to install it. I realise that there are many who feel that I really should be able to make a choice between sh, bash and perl and I really don't need another scripting language. But hey, this is open systems for you.

I even put one of their Logos up on the Qube. NB I will follow this article up documenting my solution when I have one.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[Linux] topic:[Qube] "topic:[Dynamic DNS]" topic:[DNS] topic:[DDNS]

Re: Finding my Qube on the Internet

2005-12-19T10:21:09.000Z

Does your Qube have the korn shell? Unless you have installed it from somewhere else it won't so steer clear of that language on the Qube.

ddclient works perfectly on my Qube.

Re: Finding my Qube on the Internet

2005-12-19T10:26:04.000Z

Teach me to not read the whole article....Any way ddclient works.

Interesting there is an issue with ksh on OpenSolaris in that it is a closed binary not source that is delivered. There has been much debate about how to change that while maintaining backward compatability.

Re: Finding my Qube on the Internet

2005-12-19T17:19:01.000Z

Thanks for your comments Chris. :) I am just thinking if I should install ksh on the system or learn a new scripting language properly.

Looking back on the day

2005-12-07T02:18:53.000Z

The notes of my day at the UltraSPARC T1 launch were taken at the time, and written up and posted this evening, in the hour preceding this post. I have timestamped the articles as if they had been written in near real time, i.e. I have backdated them from the posting date. If you're reading this via HTML at http://blogs.sun.com, then see below.

If you prefer Jonathan unmoderated by me then check out his blog here....

tags: General

Beer

2005-12-06T18:15:00.000Z

A couple of beers with colleagues and customers and then home.

Re: Beer

2006-02-17T17:30:56.000Z

GOOD

A throughput eco-system

2005-12-06T18:05:00.000Z

We then returned to Jonathan, who on the ISV slide mentioned both Oracle & Sybase, first time I've seen Sybase mentioned.

He then began to talk about the service offerings. These are key if his new business model is to be successful. I love the crack " a phone without a service contract is a paper weight". Its absolutely true. Jonathan's Sun is determined to offer rich, valued, constant and cheap services. Sun Grid is now the management solution. The datacentre managers can login to Sun Grid on system boot, shades of Cobalt, maybe we did learn something and this is part of the drive to automated management, a complete antithesis to "Bye - hope you don't get a virus!". In fact, these systems will be cheaper if you buy if you buy them with a service contract - cute - .

In fact Jonathan's commitment to open source is so complete that Sun is open sourcing the T1 design. See here.... The last word was left to (a video of) Tim O'Reilly, "Sun always was an open source company".

A great hour, revolutionary game changing technology available from Sun, and the stock price went up after a Network Quarterly event. These systems look likely to exceed our expectations in terms of performance, and we're offering "Try & Buy".

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[opensource] topic:[computers] "topic:[IT Services]" "topic:[Utility Computing]"

Why Cool threads!

2005-12-06T16:15:00.000Z

Mark handed over to Fred DeSantis, who presented a new metric for comparing systems, its called SWAP and is calculated by taking a capability outputs and dividing it by the product of space and power. i.e.

P/(S*W)

where P = Performance, S = space and W = Power (i.e. electricity, and don't forget to add the power to cool). This reminds me of some work I did for one of the bank's two years ago, although I plotted two axis, Performance/Rack Unit and Heat/Rack Unit. Fred then called Mark back to the podium and they ran a data centre simulator, it looks really good and showed that the T1 based systems are cheaper to run, need less cooling, consume less power and need less systems to meet a performance target. The simulation looks really cute, I'm glad to see that the Terraspring user interface came in useful somewhere. (Interestingly, it provoked the thought that in the UK, we rarely model the A/C space or capital costs when exploring consolidation future state scenarios.)

Two users were then asked to give testimonials, the first was Rene Weinholtz, from Strato AG, a web hosting company. You should have seen Jonathan's face when he said that they didn't have an environmental problem. Brits don't expect to meet funny Germans. I'm a bit more broad minded since watching Deutsche Welle on Sky and visiting Berlin over the summer. Rene was actually very funny, but got serious when he described his system consumption in tonnes and stated that they expected US T1 to save them 85-90% of their space and power consumption. Mattias Schorer, from Fiducia AG stated that his company had seen 4-6 performance increase in their banking application and had in fact broken their load generator capacity. They had had to buy additional systems to complete their testing.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[Solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[DataCenter]

UltraSPARC T1, throughput computing

2005-12-06T15:15:00.000Z

Mark spoke of his design goals and then itemised his success in meeting them. He stated that in a world where 30% performance improvements were sought Sun's T1 CPU based systems will offer integer improvements. (This is just as well; the US T1 has relatively poor floating point and struggles with fractions. This is a very technical and poor joke - you had to be there.)

Sun are shipping SPARC steams that offer 32 way SMP (8 cores/4 threads each) in a one rack unit, the CPU draws 70 Watts and the chip has 4 memory controllers on the chip. This has been designed to leverage the growing disparity between CPU and memory speeds, and to win business on the basis that faster can be cooler. The slide in Mark's presentation illustrating faster can be cooler impressed me with a real heat map of an "industry standard CPU" compared with the heat map for the UltraSPARC T1. The impressive architecture translates into price/performance and raw performance as Sun's recent Oracle world record benchmarks show. (See here...).

You can hear Mark in his own words here... at www.sun.com.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[UltraSPARC] "topic:[Throughput Computing]" topic:[computers] topic:[servers]

Jonathan's Show

2005-12-06T15:00:00.000Z

Jonathan Schwartz was introduced by Trudy Norris-Grey, Sun's UK MD. He started with some illustrations of the changing nature of network technologies, the changing speed of change the growth of reliability, and their transitions to service propositions. He reminded me that when the car was first invented the chauffeur was employed to fix the car when it broke, and I'd never heard that the telephone network switch was invented by a mortician who believed that his business rival's girlfriend, the telephone company's switch operator was putting business his rival's way and wanted to remove her from the switch room. He invented an automated switch.

Jonathan also very graphically, by showing the picture taken in the London tube on July 7th, illustrated the change taking place in the internet by transforming to a read/write internet, to creating value through co-operation. These themes illustrate the nature of change and the new sources of value, driving and enabled by the internet.

He then argued that openness and the sharing of intellectual property creates opportunity. It neither kills, nor expropriates it exclusively for the inventor. As a long time Sun follower (and latterly employee), I feel that Sun is at its best when its creating markets and then competing in them. Sun are the No 1 Free & Open Source contributor on Earth, even before Jonathan's revolution - Sun contributes and has often given away the rights on technologies to maximise the chance of their adoption. The "proprietary" tag should never have been aimed at Sun's software, it was an abusive label thrown by our monopolistic competitors and now you can download our development tools.

He tipped a nod to the workload profiling ideology (see me here..., and the corporate pitch here...). which should be at the centre of datacentre design today. He then handed over to Mark Tremblay, the T1's Chief Architect.

tags: "topic:[Business Economics]" topic:[Internet] topic:[SUNW]

Tomorrow's Data Centre

2005-12-06T14:10:00.000Z

We start the event with a choice of warm up acts. The one I chose to attend started with some interesting facts. It seems that 3m users/week are joining the net and they want different services, the data centre is the pain point between the staggering growth in demand for 'net services and the environmental and management problems this causes. The speaker also suggested that 60% of power growth is based on IT to meet the demand of power to compute and the power to cool. So this being a warm up act, it seems that we (sun) are going to do better. We're going to change the rules and change the capability/power equation.

I do wonder if being cleverer in the systems design side means that the horrendously inefficient management practices will continue, whether we're merely enabling crapness in the service management side, particularly in the performance management field. It seems that what we need is a self healing performance management solution. This will come from the grid technologies, be it the grid engine, or developments of RIO or the use of virtualisation technologies.

The pitch is very technology orientated; we have a technology solution and repeated Sun's binary compatibility mantra. I some time wonder if its worth it . Most people qualify to a build and their customers wont or can't trust it. Also most people must use some software that qualifies to a build i.e. uses private interfaces e.g. Oracle. For web container hosted applications, they can move forward very rapidly but the ISV's qualification policies and timescales often becomes a massive inhibitor for change. This is something we must work harder at, both with our ISV's and by improving our virtualisation/abstraction offerings.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[Solaris] topic:[opensolaris] topic:[DataCenter]

Nice part of Town

2005-12-06T12:30:00.000Z

Took the tube for the first time in years. Nice! I've not been to this part of London in years, at least not since they fortified the Police Station. The launch is in a very nice Hotel across the road from Paddington Green police station.

Throughput Computing here at last .... nearly

2005-12-06T08:08:22.000Z

Sun's Quarterly Network computing event is a syncronous New York, London and webcast event. I'm off up to London to attend it in person and am looking forward to the official launch of Sun's throughput computing CPUs and systems.

I'll tell about what I see later.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[CPU] topic:[SPARC] topic:[CMT]

Friends rewarded for innovating

2005-12-02T14:53:31.000Z

Fantastic News! Company-I, one of Sun's long term partner organisations has just won the CBI's "Innovator of the Year" award. So congratulations to Mark Pennycook & all his team that have built the company to the point it can win this major prize. The prize for the Innovator is given for, going to extreme lengths to create a “buzz” in the workplace, radically reconfiguring their internal processes, having a track record of improvement and innovation and embracing modern practices.

I used to work more closely with these people when I ran Sun's City Consulting team and several of the Company-I staff were in that team full time. The exchange of ideas between and collective learning of the two organisations and their people made Sun's City eco-system a fun place to work where learning new things was easy, and perhaps achieving the “buzz” that the CBI were looking for. We did some neat things together, much of which became the platform for their success today and last Wednesday.

Mark was also one of the correspondents in Wine & Wisdom on this blog. The Company-I press release is here... and the CBI page is here....

tags: "topic:[IT Consulting]" topic:[Business] topic:[UK]

Upgrading the Qube

2005-12-02T09:39:03.000Z

I have just finished running the upgrade process for the Qube. Given the OS was published in 2001, there are 73 upgrades and order is significant. I told you in my article on Tuesday, that I had found some Sun resources to help me, these include a Sun hosted user forum, a search reply on key word Qube from SunSolve, & this Sunsolve article ^*documenting the patch install order. A further resource of some use is at http://hitechsavvy.com here....

This is in fact my second attempt at doing this, so I know that my plans to install ssh will at the least generate a warning because the distributed version of zlib is less than current and has known security vulnerabilities, which the ssh configure process identifies. The Sun Page above (see *) states that a zlib patch should be installed. This was not discovered by my Qube's web form, but I installed it manually. The Qube 3 patch site is at Sun here.... I couldn't find a bookmark feature for the patches themselves. The zlib patch is called "Qube3-All-Security-4.0.2-16487 ("zlib" security update)" and its current Sun URL is here.... The manual install is neat, but the persistant requesting for permission to proceed and the multiple reboots makes the whole task long and tedious, and requires constant intervention. I assume that the failure to improve this is part of Sun's "management" of the Cobalt product range.

Its possible that automating software updates, with a rigorous dependendcy management functioanlity is a difficult problem to solve as my experience with other Linux distro's software update mechanisms has not been particularly happy. I'd also need to look at Sun's current solaris offering and see if we've learned anything from the Cobalt experience before I make a final judgement. I'd have thought it was easier with an appliance; the vendor has a right to expect more control. The only build standard is the appliance vendor's.

Anyway its done now!

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[Linux] topic:[Qube]

More about the Qube

2005-11-29T14:30:48.000Z

I have now received another Qube with two shiney new disks and found that at home my 5 year old PC has an ethernet controller old enough to permit the recovery disk to boot. This part of the process is really neat and hard to get wrong. (I have booted the Qube from the OS recovery disk. This involves booting another computer using the recovery disk which is a Linux disk. This system acts as a boot server and I configured the Qube to boot from the net.)

Now I have to run the BlueLinq update software to ensure that my OS, utilities and applications are as up to date as possible.

I have also found a Sun Cobalt support forum on the net, which pointed me to this patch installation order page at Sunsolve. Order is important, it would seem.

I have previously written about my Qube here...

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[SUNW] topic:[Linux]

Re: More about the Qube

2005-11-29T19:22:19.000Z

Hi Dave - have you had any problems getting SMB to work from Windows XP client to the Qube? (Or don't you have any XP clients...?).
For some reason I can no longer get SMB to work: I get an error message saying 'you do not have permission to access the requested resources - contact your network administrator' or something along those lines.
I can't prove this, but it seems to me to have started roughly around the time I put SP2 on the XP machine on the LAN...

Re: More about the Qube

2005-11-29T20:34:29.000Z

No where near yet - My old Dell that I used as a boot server is running '98 and the compaq next to it is on '95. I've promised myself and the boys some spiffy new ones for Xmas to paly the new games due to arrive - Ho Ho.

The only XP box in the house is my works laptop. Disclaimer For the boring (and facist) IT police, see below. I have triple boot, Solaris (JDS), Red Hat Linux & Windows XP.

Why aren't you using del.icio.us???

2005-11-21T10:46:33.000Z

I've just undertaken a demo of del.icio.us for a friend, who's read my previous articles and told me that I undersell it. Personally, I think I've been a bit of a mono-maniac on the subject. So for those of you who don't get it. del.icio.us is Great. Its a fantastic example of, the next problem to be solved.

del.icio.us is a remote bookmark file
With del.icio.us you only need one bookmark file, so none of your bookmarks are ever somewhere else
it is always available (well nearly always)
some one else backs it up
mozilla & windows can't **** it up

and all this is before you look at tags, tag clouds and the social cooperative aspects.

The utility of tags is somewhat controversial, and I will get onto the row someday, but cloud tags are great. The picture below has the tags organised in "Cloud" view, it also has some tag bundles defined. My article, "Tag or Menu" also talks about this, and is also illustrated.

The size and weight of the token in each list is significant, as is colour. Because of the way in which tags are allocated and the fact that a tag does not have a hierarchical relationship with other tags, fuzzy or flexible searches can be used, and you do not need to know which folder the bookmark is in to find it. When making these queries, when you select a tag, all related tags turn green and if you have the tag cloud view, you are offered a "+" or "or" option. The "+" button adds to the filter i.e. "Movies" + "Actors", selecting the text token is an "or" choice and refreshes the list with all URL's qualified by the new tag. (This is better illustrated here...).

How can I emphasis this! . A traditional bookmark file, or favourites folder mandates that a URL is held in a folder structure, which unless you create aliases, is the only copy of the URL in the structure. This is not true of del.icio.us clouds. Selecting a tag is like opening a folder, but you can see them all the tags at once. For instance, if looking for Kate Winslett fan sites, I could search on Kate Winslet (sic), if I was certain how to spell it, or I could filter the whole list on Movies + Actors, which would show me both my two KW sites together with some other sites including Cult Sirens. The alternative folder/hierarchical approach would mean that I must know that both Actors and Movies are contained within the Culture folder, and I would need to know the order (hierarchically) of "Movies" & "Actors". With cloud views, you need to remember less to find what you know!!! .

Clouds take less room on the screen and you don't need to scroll pages to read the whole list, unless your tag bundle list is very long, or screen very small.

Personally I have a known private list of 1st order tags, which is pretty small and I try to ensure that every bookmark has only one 1st order tag. ( I am translating these to bundles i.e. the heavy bold black tokens with the expand/collapse buttons, but I have left the corresponding tags in the general "tags" bundle. i.e. I have a travel tag & bundle, and the "travel" tag is in the "tags" bundle.) This personal rule of 1st order tags means that Size emulates hierarchy. This might be useful for very structured thinkers, or certain groups of tags, and means that 1st order tags are easier to find within the cloud. The bundles are something I am new to. I started using them while they were advertised as beta quality and there is some oddness. A bundle is an object with a list (or set) of tags as members. In theory, any tags, whose URLs are wholly members of a bundle should transfer from the general "tags" bundle to the specified bundle. I hope that they add readability to the cloud as when I sit down to read my bookmarks, I have an idea about what I'm going to do, so you can see from my current list that I have "travel" "Technology" & "Culture". I shall probably add an "eating & drinking" and my resources i.e. frequently used sites. The bundles means that I am offered relevant tag list based on what I'm looking to do.

So far, I have only ranted about reading your bookmark file. Obviously because you need to tag your URLs as you write them, its a bit more work to bookmark a site. You also need to register your username with them. The del.icio.us button page, has javascripts that you can drag and drop onto your browser and you can then use these to bookmark your sites. These bookmarklets help you tag the URLs, offering other people's tags and making a guess from your tag list. They also have an auto-completion facility. . The auto completion feature is illustrated below.

The line immediately below the tag entry box is generated by the script and changes with each letter. You can see I have typed in the "r" and the script offers me tags starting with "R". This enables me to slow the language entropy, but it won't stop it.

The final advantage is the RSS feed(s). I have got my local RSS browser pointed at all my links, others might be interested in my travel feed. One interesting thing is that because the default order is in real time, you can see what I've been doing, planning my holidays, tidying up my office, or researching for work. You might even get some good ideas; I showed it to a colleague yesterday who was interested in the Berlin links. Another cute trick is to occasionally browse either the most popular or most recent across the whole community. Sometimes its not very interesting, but sometimes its great and I find some real nuggets.

I've still not worked out the real community uses for the site yet, possibly because my close friends outside work havn't yet picked it up, and we still use the 'phone to talk, but the 'mail' solution looks interesting. The fact that these sites are available for viewing by everyone, also means that if you do use the Internet for finding and browsing various smut sites, you'd either best have an anonymous user id, or refrain from using del.icio.us.

What are you waiting for?

My other articles: Tag & Menu, Using Clouds,del.icio.us &_community, The RSS Revolution, Where's that link_gone?

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[community] topic:[Internet] topic:[Bookmarks] topic:["Nomadic+Computing"] topic:[folksonomy] topic:[del.icio.us]

Sybase UK TECHSelect 2005, London

2005-11-16T20:00:00.000Z

I popped over to the Sybase UK TechSelect conference. Its been a while since I met up with the Sybase and User Group people. I'll always remember one of the opening presos made by one of Sybase's VPs in the early '90s. It sounded like Harry Enfield's "loadsa money", "here's our results - you see all this money - it was yours but now its ours!" - "How much does it cost? Loads - if your asking that question, your too poor to have one". Most businesses, including Sybase, have learned that you need more humility when speaking about company results. So Simon Cattlin, Sybase UK's recently appointed MD gave an interesting and different presentation; he felt his personal newness made the traditional MD's approach inappropriate, but he shared some of his thoughts about why he joined Sybase and the research he'd undertaken while making his mind up.

The crack was made that Gartner had been predicting Sybase's demise for so long and been wrong that they'd given up. It has a strong cash position and a stock price (NYSE:SY) that any Sun stock holder can envy, but while they have a strong but ageing brand for engineering excellence, it is my view that too many people see them as just the fourth database company. You can thrive as second or third place, its hard as fourth. They also have a weakening developer position, the purchase of Powerbuilder in the '90s gave them an opportunity but today the choice is between Java & .net. As ever they remain strong players in the investment banking technology supply chain. Their attempts to diversify have been of intermediate success, very strong in the embedded database market, but their portal remains a niche product used primarily by "Sybase" shops. They really need to understand that while companies can influence markets, its like steering an oil tanker, a little today has big paybacks only in years, and ignoring the current direction and momentum is doomed to failure. Time commoditises intellectual property (be it incorporated into product or people), successful companies need to embrace and accelerate this change.

A user group though is best defined by its user presentations and John Coleman of Mott Macdonald, a Glasgow based management & engineering consultancy delivered a talk about three of the applications that they've developed as part of their transportation division's consultancy. The first, they call "Floating Vehicle" which records the location of its tagged vehicles using GPS/GSM technology. I first came across this last year. The application used GIS add-ons to attempt to utilise the "wisdom of crowds", to understand good routes, to know if temporary bottlenecks have occurred i.e. to understand normal, standard or deviant behaviour. This was a technical preso, so there was no conversation about who owns the information, or how to monetise it. These questions became even more acute, when a similar aggregation story was shown. In this case the data collection process is via the motorway police control offices and the tax payer pays for both the time and materials for the collection. I am happy to share my motorway intelligence in exchange, and have from time to time rung the AA to notify them of events, but I expect this to be shared back for free, and I do not expect to pay a fee to obtain information that I have payed for with my taxes. (Well, when I say I don't expect, I mean that I object to it. )

During the break I bumped into Sarah Bell of Sea Bass Software. She offered me an express catchup. Last time I bumped into them, they were a Sybase Consultancy house but more recently they have expanded their capability and are allying with Eproductive to offer two applications as an ASP. It's an interesting diversion and an adoption of the software-as-a-service model. Good for them.

One of Sybase's top engineers (Pete Thallman) then delivered a presentation on performance monitoring, reminding me with the openness and ease with Sybase frequently talk about their products strength and weaknesses, and their own ability to respond to them.

The meeting closed with a bad tempered spat about price and proactive maintenance. These are both very complex issues and in the case of proactive maintenance, some of the user contributors seem to lack any understanding of the liabilities and effort they need to put into successful proactive maintenance programs. The UK user group remains a collective of people that use Sybase's technology, rarely the enterprise architects that evaluate, buy and deploy these technologies. To my mind the debate showed an immaturity in the audience and a rudeness to the senior engineers who had turned up to participate in the panel.

In all a good day, nice to catch up with old friends in Sybase, the User group and their ecosystem.

This article has been backdated, to the time it was written.

tags: topic:[Technology] topic:[community] topic:[RDBMS] topic:[Sybase]

Re: Sybase UK TECHSelect 2005, London

2005-11-21T15:32:09.000Z

Ref the Mott Macdonald software 'Floating Vehicle' is this not similar to the solution here: http://www.itisholdings.com/whatfvd.asp - licensed as a provider of traffic info via TMC (Traffic Message Channel) ?

Re: Sybase UK TECHSelect 2005, London

2005-11-21T19:56:57.000Z

Jonathon meant to illustrate this link which eventually takes us to the AA

I don't know if this is the same, checking out the "Halogen" project is probably more interesting.

Making Sybase Scream

2005-11-02T15:52:43.000Z

This article is about running Sybase on a sophisticated UNIX. It discusses sizing Sybase's max engines parameter, the effect of resource management tools & leveraging UNIX & Consolidation. Also note that this is not a Sun Blueprint, its meant to show you that you can, not how to.

I am often asked, "Given that Sybase recommend one engine/CPU, how can you consolidate Sybase onto a large computer?"

The first thing to say is that it is my view that consolidation is about architecture and co-operating systems, not merely an excuse to inappropriately pimp big-iron; an ideal consolidation host may be of any size. However, it is a fact that higher levels of utilisation are more likley if the available system capability is organised in large systems rather than the equivialently capable number of smaller systems.

Sybase is a database and most databases are good citizens within the operating system. This is true of Sybase which is a good Solaris citizen and is hence easy to consolidate.

It is absolutley true that Sybase have traditionally recommended that a Sybase engine (implemented as a UNIX process) should be mapped onto a physical CPU, although a common alternative rule is that the number of engines configured (max engines) should be the number of CPUs, leaving one spare. Either

E=#CPU or E=#CPU - 1

where E is number of Engines, #CPU is the number of CPUs.

The reason these rules are important is that "A well tuned database server will be CPU bound".

However the equations above are only performance tuning rules, and what's more, they're out of date. One of the key reasons that they're out of date is that CPUs are now much faster and more capable than when the rules were first developed. Due to the increased capability of modern CPUs, potentially fractions of CPU are required to support the applications requirement, but only integer numbers of engines can be deployed. The poverty of these rules is compounded by the fact that because they do not take into account the capability of the CPUs, and they are of little use in deciding the capacity requirements of replacement systems, or comparing between system architectures.

The tuning rules above have been useful where Sybase is the only piece of work the system is running and only one instance of the database server is running. In these cases, the designer needs to determine how many cycles/MIPS/specINTs etc. the server needs to deliver the expected/required performance. BTW, I shall define the delivered power of CPU as 'omph' (O) for the rest of this article. With Sybase, if it requires more than one CPU's worth of omph, then multiple engines will be required.

E=roundup(O^Req/O^cpu,0)

where O^Req is the amount of CPU required and O^cpu is the capability of the CPU. If we are looking to use the Solaris Resource Manager, then we need to translate this rule into SRM concepts and talk about shares. The rule above has stated O^Req, and O^cpu * #CPU defines the capability of the system (or pool). In the world of managed resource, the number of engines is,

E=roundup((S^Req/S^tot)*#CPU,0)

where S is the number of SRM shares either required (S^Req) or defined (S^tot) & roundup() takes the arguments of expression, sig.figs (set to zero (0) not O for omph). This assumes that the system proposed is more than powerful enough. i.e.

i.e. S^Req/S^tot < 1

Or in other words the number of CPUs in a system must be greater than (or equal to) the number of engines. Where this is not the case, then the amount of omph delivered will be equal to the number of CPUs, unless constrained by SRM.

We now have three cases, where SRM is used to constrain system capability availble to the database server, where the Engine/#CPU is used to constrain system capability to the database server or where the database server consumed all available system resource.

where SRM is used to constrain system capability availble to the database server,
where the Engine/#CPU is used to constrain system capability to the database server or
where the database server consumed all available system resourece.

These might be expressed in our equation language as

O=( S^Req/S^tot*#CPU ) || E/#CPU*#CPU || 1*#CPU

where O is the proportion of the system consumed and the conditions are,

if SRM on || E < #CPU, SRM off || E>#CPU, SRM off.

These conditions are important; they show the massive difference in configuration rules depending on how actively the systems are resource managed. A single or multiple Sybase instance can then be placed under resource management using the S Ratio {S^Req/S^tot} to define the resources allocated to the Sybase instance. This can be enforced by user namespace design (S8) or projects (S9/S10). The permitted resources can be enforced using Solaris Resource Manager, processor sets with or without domain dynamic reconfiguration. It should be noted that the max engines parameter can be used to enforce rule two in a consolidation scenario; more engines than CPUs can be configured. In one assignment undertaken, the customer required a ratio of two engines/CPU and rationed between server instances by varying the number of engines.

I have written previously here... in my blog about designing the database instance schema as an applications map and why Consolidating Sybase instances onto fewer Solaris instances makes sense. These multiple server instances can be managed using SRM or the Solaris Scheduler. (I propose to research and write something more comprehensive about scheduler classes and zones.) I recommend that the operating system should be the resource rationing tool. Only the OS knows about that hardware and the system capability and unlike Sybase, Solaris with its project construct can approximate an application, and can therefore ration in favour, or against such objects. A Sybase server will not discrimate between applications, nor between queries.

In a world of virtual servers, and managed resource, another factor is that the number of CPUs in a domain is no longer static within an operating system instance, or any resource management entity. Our ability to move resources from & into a resource management entity permit us to change the constraints that enable the rule above. An example is that an ASE instance can be started with eight engines & eight CPUs within its processor set and that the processor set is shrunk to four CPUs. The ASE is originally consuming eight CPUs worth of omph, and after the configuration change, it only consumes four. These options permit configuration rules where the maximum number of engines for a single instance of Sybase may be either less than or equal to the Max number of CPUs planned over time. Also where multiple data servers are running on a single system the total number of engines is likely to exceed the number of CPUs. (One leading Sybase user in the City aims at two engines/CPU, while another moves system resources between domains on an intra-day basis.) These are both key consolidation techniques. The number of engines for each ASE Server instance should be set to the maximum required and the resources underpinning it can be changed using dynamic domaining, Solaris processor management utilities or Solaris Resource Manager. Consolidating database servers permits the resource management functionality of the OS (or hardware) to allocate CPU resource to the server. These can be dynamically changed. This means configuring sufficient engines to take advantage of the maximum available CPUs. i.e. if at a short time of day Sybase is required to use 12 CPUs, and for the rest of the day only four, then 'max engines' needs to be set to 12 and constrained at the times of day when only four are required.

In summary, in a world where consolidation & virtualisation, exist (or are coming), the value of max engines can no longer be assumed to be the based on the simple rules of the past.

tags: topic:{technorati}[Technology] topic:{technorati}[Consolidation] topic:{technorati}[Sybase] topic:{technorati}[Solaris] topic:{technorati}[opensolaris] topic:{technorati}[RDBMS] topic:{technorati}[Performance]

A Brand new Qube

2005-10-20T22:24:04.000Z

Well, my Cobalt Qube arrived today. This is the cube I won by blogging Sun's premier field training event last Feburary. Also you might ask why it took so long; it got lost the first time. Interestingly absolutly no documentation.

I have found the following links, the Cobalt User Group, aka http://cobaltqube.org/. It looks a bit old and odd. Also Sun's Appliance Documentation Page, which requires some extra reading. I have also found the Sun Product Documentation page and the Qube 3 Installation Guide [.pdf]. I have put some of these links up on http://del.icio.us/DaveLevy using the Technology SUNW & Linux tags (Here...). I have now found this docs.sun.com Cobalt Qube collection, thanks to some prompting from Frosty.

Follow my adventures as I use it to support the development/deployment of my web site[s].

tags: Technology SUNW Linux

Good Luck John and Ulf

2005-10-12T11:42:56.000Z

Today was the last day for many of my UK ex-colleagues who've left the company through the most recent redundancy programme. On my blogroll (see aside), John Brady's blog has moved, so I've updated his entry, as has Ulf and I've amended his also.

tags: None

Fantastic 4

2005-10-07T11:24:55.000Z

I started to watch the Fantastic 4 on the flight home, but fell asleep. That good!!

Date written: 08 Oct '05, Date posted: 20 Oct '05

tags: Culture Movies Film Fiction Super-Hero

Viva Las Vegas

2005-10-06T11:19:33.000Z

I have now returned from Las Vegas. What an amazing place! I stayed at the Mirage, one of the huge hotel/casinos on the strip. Words fail me! They've even got slot machines embedded into the bars, fortunately not at the restaurant tables though. I have here a picture of the arcade into the Bellagio, for those who like me have declining eye-site, the two shops are Chanel & Tiffany & Co., which sort of sums up the strip. The Mirage has a caged white tiger (endangered species?) and dolphins in the swimming pool. Not good to my mind.

I did manage to get off the strip and visit an old friend in the suburbs, and so got a good view of the surrounding desert and mountains, and a more typical western US atmosphere. I may even try to return sometime with the family, but I doubt I'll spend much time in the casinos. I had thought that having got through the security checks and into the departure lounge, that I'd be free of the slot machines, "No Chance"; the airport departure lounge has an array of slot machines.

As I said here, its a business trip so I didn't get much chance to take any pictures, but I have uploaded those I did take to the usual place.

Date written: 08 Oct '05, Date posted: 20 Oct '05

tags: Culture travel

Taxi Drivers

2005-10-04T20:52:10.000Z

The drive from Las Vegas airport to the casino hotels is not very long, but further than I'd want to walk carrying my luggage. I took a taxi and was entertained by the driver who also took two elderly canadians to the hotels as well

We discussed Bush's imminent invasion of Canada , the War of 1812-14 where he concluded that the UK is best off that Bush & the neo-cons don't know their Napoleonic history, Greece, Germany, UK - Las Vegas direct flights, and the Sun stock price. Truly not a range of subjects I expect a taxi driver to want to talk about but I've been poorly trained in London - At least he'll be able to say to you all, I had that Dave Levy in the back of my cab.

tags: None - This is too silly

Batman Begins - again

2005-10-04T13:38:55.000Z

I've just reseen Batman Begins. Its on the plane, the sound track is piss poor, the screen is tiny but these limitations only enhance the quality of the script & the drama of the story. This is what super-hero fiction is really about. As argued by the Captain here..., all the predecessor Batman stories remain cartoons {well they would be wouldn't they} and we've been waiting for this story. I know I'm getting old, and I'd had a good airline lunch, but Thomas Wayne's (Bruce/Batman's dad) funeral scene made me a bit weepy, but the film really takes off as Rachel Dodd, Bruce's childhood playmate lectures him on the need for the good to fight for justice and oppose criminals and fear. Fantastic! He proves that while he might be a slow listener, he did hear what she said, when he refuses to become an executioner in the monastery of the League of Shadows. It is however, Rachel's speech on the need for good people to strive together, maybe without hope, and maybe believing one to be alone for good to prevail that is the moral centre of this film. It is Rachel's certainty and implacable moral centre, and her continued attempt to make justice work as opposed to Rhas-Al-Ghul's moral vacancy and genocidal mathematics that are the opposites between which the Batman (and hence the viewer) makes their choices.

It is this sort of moral dilemma that makes super-hero fiction, and especially the Batman. Unlike the others, he has no super-powers. He is human, the choices he makes are ones that we can also make, and he chooses justice, the side of the weak and the side of victims. He is a hero! Also because he makes these choices for good, the stories inspire - that's why he is a hero, and this version of the story brings it home.

I know I shouldn't, but the first bat signal, created by Batman, using Falcone's (the Mafiosi) body on the searchlight worked for me. I wouldn't want the man that did that after me.

Also this time I was able to see at least three nod's to the film's fictional predecessors. The first time Bruce (Batman) travels to the batcave, he goes through a book case as they did the Adam West version. During the car chase, the batmobile drops caltrops a la James Bond's Aston Martin and the I'm Batman, comes straight from Keaton on the 1989 i.e Burton's Batman.

I shall definitely be watching it again on DVD so I can control me viewing speed, check out the extras. I'll definitely be watching the next one. I'd love to say that only X-Men has the same depth of story, but I've yet to see The Fantastic Four.

tags: Culture Movies Film Fiction Super-Hero Batman

Re: Batman Begins - again

2005-10-05T17:58:29.000Z

I just wanted to post something about this Duo I saw, late night, in Chicago. They are called Competitive Awesome, and they are ridiculously funny. Late night comedy is not dead in Chicago, as long as these two gentlemen are around. It felt like I was back in the 70's at Second City watching the greats before the whole world knew they were great. These two guys will be the next big thing. If you are in Chicago you must go and see them if they are performing. I found their website which is as follows: www.competitiveawesome.com Go and see the future of what comedy should be in the U.S.

Las Vegas

2005-10-04T06:14:31.000Z

As part of my new job assignment, I'm travelling to Las Vegas. I've never been before so it should be interesting

tags: travel

Pride & Prejudice

2005-10-04T06:10:01.000Z

I popped out to the cinema to see Pride & Prejuidice over the weekend. Depending on what circles you mix, there has been much controversy at the choice of the leading actors, Kiera Knightly and Matthew McFadyen. I was bitten by the the 1995 BBC version, but despite having to tell the story in two hours rather than the TV series twelve hours, the movie is a well made, well told story, with brilliant performances by the two leads at it heart.

I could be churlish and catalog the small critiscims I have, but this is well told and retains the emotional power at the centre of the story. Knightly in particular is marvellous.

tags: Culture film movie Jane Austin Pride and Prejuiduce

Laptop Diaries, software update for Linux

2005-09-23T19:04:23.000Z

I found a Red Carpet link here...

tags: Technology Linux up2date Red Carpet

Laptop Diaries, grub, software update & X

2005-09-22T16:32:04.000Z

The first problem is grub, it can only see my Linux & Windows disks. Thats not good so, with a bit of trial and error we update the grub menu.lst to the following. The Fedora Core grub version is installed and the grub menu is held in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

default=0
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,4)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title Fedora Core (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4)
    root (hd0,4)
    kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 ro
root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
    initrd /initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4.img
title Solaris 10
     rootnoverify (hd0,3)
    chainloader +1
     makeactive
title Windows XP
     rootnoverify (hd0,0)
     chainloader +1

is what works for me. So now I can use the appropriate O/S for purpose. I might have to muck around with the spash screen. It should be fun to use a picture of me.

Now back to Linux. It was installed in a hurry and one of the problems is that the software update software isn't working properly. A couple of problems, about proxy servers. Firewalls and the software products and versions. The obvious tool to use is Up2date. While I might at some time see if “Red carpet” is still around, one of the things I'm experimenting with is the Red Hat way of doing things. I looked around for help and found http://www.fedorafaq.org/. This offers and explaijns the choice between RHN, Yum and apt.

Its configured to use YUM, but the yum configuration is broken. So we found this... at fedorafaq and read the instructions. The wget worked but the rpm didn't (probably proxies) so I used Mozilla and fortunately I havn't got RealPlayer installed, so it offered me an install package option. Next set the proxies in yum.conf, using the

proxy=${Protocol}://${Hostname}:${PortNo}

syntax. NB This pseudo code is too anonomise my solution, I don't think yum.conf is resolved using a shell so this code won't work, you'll have to put your proxy name in as a text string. Yum now works but was erroring on mis-defined repos files (/etc/yum.repos.d/*). A number of primary baseURLs had been hashed out. So we changed these; they were lines in config files held in /etc/yum.repos.d and now we seem to be working. (Perhaps configuring it to do this inside our firewall wasn't that cute but we'll see!) Its possible that some of the repos should be left out but again we'll see what happens.

In an earlier article, I may have implied that I had fixed the fuzzy screen thing. This isn't quite true. It comes on as the boot display moves from command line to "X", although the cursors initially remain crystal. When I login as root, the screen becomes good again. I checked out http://www.linux-laptop.net/ and found this... which suggests some driver issues. (Damn! Back to this crap - My early experiments with my last computer were plagued by poor video implementations, I thought I'd left these days behind). I think I'll wait to see if up2date fixes this. I'll let you know either way.

Added 23rd Sep '05 - Actually yum still fails for what looks like a version definition problem, it seems to think I'm running Fedora 3 not 4. I tracked a cause down to a hard coded setting

releasever = 3

in /usr/share/rhn/up2dateclient/sourcesConfig.py . I hunted around a bit more to see if I could find a better place to fix it, but couldn't. uname is not very helpfull.

# uname
# Linux mysystemhostname 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4 #1 Thu Jun 2 22:55:56 EDT 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

I suppose I could cut it out from the third string. I'll be back soon since the first download I'm trying is yum.

tags: Technology Laptop Linux Red Hat Fedora Fedora4 install X-Windows grub up2date

Railway across the Roof of the World

2005-09-21T15:55:46.000Z

The Guardian has undergone a facelift, it has redesigned its fonts, offers colour on every page and shrunk from broadsheet to Berliner. It's much more civilised size for a commuter and for the briefcase.

Yesterday, they published an article about the railway accross the roof of the world. Its been built in China from the Qunghai Plateau to Tibet and will link the towns of Golmud & Lhasa, making it the highest railway in the world. The article is very good, it seems to start as a travelogue, but discusses the development, enviromental and strategic politics of China's emergence as a world class technological power.

I suggest you may like to read the article.

tags: culture travel

Re: Railway across the Roof of the World

2005-09-22T20:24:34.000Z

No6782: TheGuardian Didnt there used to be a newspaper called the Guardian? There still is. Look under that copy of the FT, theres a pile of them. What, this? Thats the chap. Nice and blue, isnt it. Cripes. Are the printers all on diets? No, that svelte shape is quite the thing on the Continent. And it wont get caught up in your cardigan when youre reading on the bus. Oh, small is beautiful and what-not? Precisely. But the Guardian couldnt just follow the crowd, its got a reputation for fearless iconoclasm to uphold. Hmm. Does it have any stories in? Come on, even Guardian readers can only take so much in one go. Hey, wheres that funny bit with the questions and answers? The Times. Do say: Ich bin ein Berliner. Dont say: Didnt I read that in the Mail yesterday?

Wine & Wisdom

2005-09-20T21:53:11.000Z

Mark Pennycook & Bill Trim of Company-I & I had dinner at The Don restaurant in the City today. We were just catching up, discussing business, organisational issues and red wine. The somellier was very helpful and while some may sniff at our choices, we drank a Chateau Malescot Margeaux '99, a Yarra Yerring Australian Pinot Noir, an Australian Noble One Reisling and finished the meal with a couple of glasses of Sandymans 1963 Port. I started with a tuna salad, went on to duck and finished with a Raspberry & Vanilla mouse. As Mark said, fun, illuminating, thought provoking and f****** expensive! Just like a good city lunch should be!

One of intellectual high points was the observation, "Companies compete by managing their applications portfolio", an IT service company must be able to talk about applications, unless it wants to be trapped in a cost minimisation conversation, in which it must come off worse; it's always going to be cheaper to do something on wages rather than fees. Actually is this true? Why are fees so much more than wages? Does it represent labour market risk, or scarcity? Or could it be a premium for expertise & knowledge? Visible valuations for knowledge are hard to find and the economics of knowledge is equally not well understood. This is definately a conversation to be continued.

This event occurred as dated, but was written over time and posted on 20th Oct '05.

tags: "Business Economics" economics knowledge

State of the art Solutions Design

2005-09-16T12:21:24.000Z

Over the last three years, I have been fortunate enough to be one of the judges on the BCS Awards competition and I have sat on the "Infrastructure Developer of the Year" panel. The judging took place last week and while there is clearly a degree of privacy required to defend the integrity of the competition, I have been aware that BCS have tried to re-orientate the awards away from projects towards the people, but its very hard as the candidates credability to win is based on the work they've undertaken. This year's finalists, now known as medalists, seemed to me to be the strongest field I have seen, I hope this is a reflection of the increasing quality of UK solutions design.

The qualities I look for and judge against are Innovation, Complexity & Size, Benefits, Use of Methodologies and personal achievement (or ownership). Each of the finalists showed these qualities, they were an impressive group of people, who have had good years.

tags: Technology UK BCS

Sybase 15

2005-09-16T03:17:09.000Z

I popped into the Brewer's Hall at the invitation of Sybase for thier UK launch of Sybase 15. The have three great new features to help them compete with Oracle and the free ones, and its good to see them spend some money and more importantly intellect on the database server.

The optimiser has been given a major overhaul. They've looked long and hard at what they can do and what academia and the market say is possible and adopted more modern, flexible and cheaper query plans, including multiple entry points, eliminating work tables, minimising the use of nested loops, new storage structures, more row level locked defaults etc. Some of the query performance improvements they claim would be unbelievable if you don't understand what they've done. This has been done to support their re-engineering of the size limits to allow VLDB implementations, together with changes to enable more effective OLAP mixed work load solutions. However, perfromance improvements can/will be obtained by more traditional OLTP implementations.

Sybase 15 has improved XML support, both storage and more excitingly, the ability to expose stored procedures as a web service. This might not be enough to encourage people to locate the data server in a DMZ, but either Sybase replication or standard web proxy architectures should be sufficient to protect the solutions.

Another featured highlight is LDAP implementation, I was discussing with Mark Hudson of Sybase about this because it extends the solutions design capability based on Sun/Sybase co-operation and he pointed out that Sybase have been on a road to LDAP implementation since V12.0, initially offering support for the server maps but now offering User authentication. I expect that understanding the definition, storage and aquistion of privilidges and aliases will need a fuller reading of the documentation.

They've also responded to customer calls and the markets growing requirement for more pervasive Encryption. My final personal highlight is that they've improved statement level statistics capture, permitting the simpler tracking of rogue queries.

Mark also let slip that Grid enablement is next. It'll be interesting to see what competition will do to the market's solutions designs when active/active HA databases become non-proprietary.

tags: Technology RDBMS database Sybase Sybase 15

Exposing the Galaxy

2005-09-15T08:53:32.000Z

Allegedly, some of the US press won't carry Sun's latest adverts for our newly announced x64 Opteron Servers. You can see the content here..., and the Register's story here....

I'd have rejected it; you don't spell ASS that way!

They've decided that the Ad I commented on was correctly rejected by the press, its no longer there! The link takes you to some tamer adverts that are still claimed to be risque!

tags: silly SUNW

Do you like wikis & travel?

2005-09-15T07:49:07.000Z

Over the summer, I nad the family have been lucky enough to get away. I have taken to organising City breaks myself; you can do what you want and have more say about when you arrive and leave. (Well sort of! There's not really a lot of choice from the south of england to Berlin). One site I shall definately be using and probably contributing to is the Guardian's new travel wiki http://www.ivebeenthere.co.uk/. I've been using the Rough Guides up till now and I expect I'll have to continue to use them.

I've Been There has a voting feature so the tips and comments near the top are hopefully going to be true. Whether I'll enjoy the recommendations is another matter.

tags: Culture travel wiki

More soon to be ex-colleagues

2005-09-12T19:12:28.000Z

Dave Jones ,one of Sun's Client Solutions CTOs and occasional blogger, was over last week and we hooked up and went to a works party. It was thrown by a bunch of the volunteers for our UK redundancy programme which you may have read about in "The Register", here... . It was surprisingly enjoyable. The company i.e. at the party just shows that sometimes management lose track of what they're trying to do and sometimes get blown of course by UK law. By facilitating voluntary redundancies, a company is in danger of losing their best (or most marketable) people and keeping the less able. It takes a focus, steely determination, forward looking vision and a broad knowledge of skills supply & demand by the redundancy programme managers to ensure that the outcome is best for the company and those choosing (or hoping) to stay. These skills may be hard to find when the managers are subject to redundancy threats themselves. Also sometimes, true in this case, rejecting some volunteers leads to their departure anyway. I've no doubt that we're losing some talented people and some of the selection seem odd to say the least, but I've seen it done worse in previous years and spoke to my then 14 year old son about it, that They [can] lose the best and keep the worst, he suggested that you'd think they'd try to do the opposite. I could only agree.

Anyway, it was a good party and I'm sure my now ex-colleagues, yet still friends will do well. It looks like I'm staying, so we need to focus on fixing what we're doing wrong and over come the problems we've caused ourselves.

One result is that Dominic Kay has shifted his blog, and this will be reflected in my sidebar soon, and since I'm staying you can continue to read my blog here.

Business Economics UK redundancy

Laptop Diaries - Linux & X Windows again

2005-09-08T15:33:29.000Z

The support team have got fed up with my old Dell C400 and upgraded me to a Toshiba Tecra M2. They've also got used to triple boot systems, albeit their usual linux is Sun's SUSE/JDS. I'm a data centre guy and I want Red Hat. Firstly, its what my data centre customer's use when they use Linux, and its what my service provider uses.

Mike has cut me a DVD with Fedora 4 Core. It takes us a couple of goes to get the Disk Druid to do what we want, i.e. blow SUSE away and install Fedora into the space. The Red Hat boot manager (GRUB) replaces Sun's but up she comes.

The screen's a bit fuzzy but this has been seen before. At last, as a late adopter of technology I can leverage other people's pain. It's caused by the Horizintal Sync & Vertical Refresh rates in the Monitor Section. Thanks to all my trail blazers. Firstly I selected the Generic LCD screen with 1024x768. I then use vi to amend the Section Monitor.

Section "Monitor"
.......
HorizSync 27.0 - 82.2
VertRefresh 30.0 - 150.0
EndSection

I tried more medium numbers but they didn't work. I assume there is a way of finding out the correct numbers but I don't know it, and I tried using the Microsoft Windows tools to find out.

Now on to the utilities.

tags: Technology Laptop Linux Red Hat Fedora Fedora4 install X-Windows

Visiting Berlin

2005-09-07T15:37:35.000Z

I took the family to Berlin over the bank holiday weekend. I've never been there before and I thoroughly enjoyed my stay. The city is at the social, historical and physical centre of europe. I'd hoped to avoid much of the history; its a sad tale of totalitarian success and much democratic failure but the Berliners have found ways to celebrate their resistance and successes and its hard to avoid, from the remaining bulletholes in some walls, to the new & rebuilt landmarks of the past and the remnants of the wall and check point charlie.

I'm certain I'll return, but for now you'll have to wait for the pictures at Flickr. Although, as a preview treat here's one of me, Marx & Engels, with our backs on Eric's Lampshop, the ruined remains of the GDR's Palast der Republik. Marx, the inspired author of Das Kapital & The Communist Manifesto, Engels, his friend, financier and collaborator, Hot on Socialism, Poor at Musical Chairs.

One bright spot was the friendliness of the Berliner Taxi drivers; I found it easier to talk to them than their co-workers in California last time I visited and I haven't studied German for over 30 years. They also had the knowledge, a more limited commodity in California.

tags: holiday travel europe germany marx berlin

Configuring "snipsnap" with Apache

2005-09-06T17:10:11.000Z

One of the key things that RSS enables is the propagation of dynamic content. I've finally got my web site's static content up and in a fit state, so I need to look at how to dynamise it. As discussed, I have decided to look at snipsnap, but I want to use the my web server as a proxy in order to have some say on the webspace's lexical structure. I have previously installed snipsnap as a java instance within its own JVM i.e. I have not installedit as .war. The snipsnap version is 1.02b Uttoxeter. The apache version is 2.0.52

So firstly, I check out snipsnap's documention which is here.... I'd like to claim that I immediately spotted the comments hyperlink, but I didn't. [Comments]. The first problem is that I am using a newer version of Apache. This required a different syntax for AddModule. This is what I used.

<IfModule mod_proxy.c>
ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass /snipsnap/ http://${myproxyhostname}:8668/
ProxyPassReverse /snipsnap/ http://${myproxyhostname}:8668/

This example does not illustrate the endif and the string {myproxyhostname} was a text string not a variable. I have changed it for anonymity reasons..

I then logged into my snipsnap instance as the administrator, entered the setup screen and set the context to the same as the second field in my proxypass lines. i.e. /snipsnap. I left the other settings at the default. After testing I omitted the trailing slash (/).

This gives me the snipsnap home page using the URL http://${myproxyhostname}/snipsnap . I can now happily incorporate it into an HTML home page with my static content.

I also need to learn how to add this as a comment to the snipsnap wiki, and Mike Ramchand advises me I should go down the .war route.

tags: Technology Linux snipsnap wiki java java

The RSS Revolution

2005-09-01T09:45:24.000Z

One of the reasons I started blogging was to participate in the RSS revolution. At least one of my feed providers has pointed at Yahoo as a server based RSS delivery solution, and I had to return to My Yahoo last week and discovered that they've upgraded the services available via this Yahoo feature. The picture immediately below, shows my new My Yahoo! news page.

This has an open BBC & Yahoo News (Reuters?), a minimised FT news feed and a yahoo aggregated photo stream. The cute thing is that while Yahoo offer an Add Service function for their own and the BBC services, I had to use the generic function to add the FT's feed and provide the applet with the RSS feed URL. The ability to customise the add feed dialogue is awesome (well, maybe not, but quite good! ) as it allows you to add any RSS feed. On another page, for instance, I have added my del.icio.us feed. This isn't as useful as it might be since the update frequency seems a bit flaky, and I know what I have put there recently, but it does add to the utility of the page and may make the my.yahoo portal a compelling alternative to my del.icio.us page which is currently my browsers' home page. Furthermore I may need to wait for further technical integration as the Flickr feeds show the picture title, but not the picture, so creating a portal page with all my blog posting, my bookmarks and my photos remains a little way of, but its close.

A second use is to create a customised news page, with serious and less serious news which can be checked as part of the start the day process. At the moment, I am using RSSowl as my RSS reader. This is written in Java and I run it on my desktop platfrom[s] but placing my blog feeds into the Yahoo page means that I can use any browser to check my news. Its my small personal contribution to the migration from the client to the server.

Another advantage to RSS feed authors is that Yahoo offer a very simple way to publish the feed into the My Yahoo portal. The button below should do it for my blog,...

My Yahoo is behind a password so its not yet available to act as publication solution; it seems hard to create a My Public Content page which pulls together various RSS/RDF sources as Simon Phipps seems to have done at Webmink, although if I want to start a Grumpy Old Git blog, perhaps I don't want the world to easily associate my grumpiness with this blog. There are also some obvious weaknesses in the channels available to the portal. As I said, the photo's are not yet easily integrated, and importantly for me neither are the Yahoo groups. I'm using the Yahoo bookmark manager to link to del.icio.us and the Yahoo Groups home/summary page, but hopefully they'll get their soon.

This is a lot better than when I first used it, and my be getting better as Yahoo builds its competitive offering. Its a great step towards personal server based computing. The add service function is incredibaly easy to use and definately passes Dominic Kay's I have 15 years UNIX sys admin experience and I don't want to use any of it to write a report!

I have removed the Yahoo banner advert from the screenshot above.

tags: Technology Internet news Nomadic Computing NetworkComputing Yahoo RSS Technology

Re: The RSS Revolution

2005-09-01T11:35:44.000Z

While I use My Yahoo too (mainly for the editorial cartoons), I prefer to do this sort of feed aggregation using Bloglines where I am aggregating 136 syndication feeds (including Atom and several of the different forks of RSS).

They're taking the Hobbits to Isengard

2005-08-26T20:41:31.000Z

NB I have categorised this article as silly, you have been warned.

Edwin Beek's Home Page, hosts an innovative version of the symphony to "The Lord of the Rings", entitled "They're taking the Hobbits to Isengard". The hyperlink to the video is in the right hand panel towards the bottom of the page, in the Links, Stuff category.

tags: LOTR Fiction Fan music video multimedia composition fun

Re: They're taking the Hobbits to Isengard

2006-05-04T18:49:28.000Z

héhé

Tag or Menu

2005-08-19T15:41:10.000Z

Steve Hahn who writes at predictable suggested that getting del.icio.us as an RSS stream and thus viewing not only other's bookmarks but also the order they're reviewed adds a new dimension to the bookmark list. Today, if you view my del.icio.us bookmarks, you can see that I've been looking at holiday and personal finance sites. I hope to return to technology soon, but the Tiddly Wiki bookmark (here...), I got from the del.icio.us RSS feed. Subscribing to del.icio.us feeds is worthwhile.

Actually, its taken a while to understand that the date/time index inherent in blogs is good. This site's archive and search aren't good enough to find the stuff I want to be available irrespective of age, but I can fix that over time. It fascinates me the way people (including myself) are begining to use either time or age as a design attribute for an information system or a piece of information.

Another useful feature about del.icio.us is that you can choose to represent your tags as a cloud or list. The picture below is a composite created from two screen dumps but it shows the two views of the tags, and on the right hand side at the bottom, we see the options panel that controls the view, with cloud vs list and the sort order.

The list is sorted in frequency order and thus shows the popularity or selectivity of my tags. These attributes are shown by font size & weight in the cloud and both views give me a reasonable way into my list of bookmarks depending upon what I'm interested in today.

I'm basically tagging my bookmarks to use the cloud rather than the mozilla/exporer interface to find my bookmarks. I'm trying to maintain discipline, but its not crucial. Have I given the the tags a new semantic, not sure, but I'm pleased with this experiment. Its proving very useful.

tags: Technology community Internet Bookmarks Nomadic Computing folksonomy del.icio.us

Next years holiday (maybe)?

2005-08-16T09:47:38.000Z

Just caught up with my weekend reading and the Guardian Travel had an article on boat holidays with a difference (You can check it out here...). Maybe next year!

Journey Latin America offer a cruise (see here...) on an ex-fishing boat visiting the fjords of Chile. Only four rooms (twins) but the trip offers pisco sours, dramatic scenery, the opportunity to spot dolphins and a potentially exciting journey to and from the boat, but we'd need to dress warm! Some of the other holidays offered by this company seem to be pretty interesting; it all warrants a bit more research. A Mediterranean alternative, is sailing on a Turkish gulet (see here... for Anatolian Sky's cruise and above for the picture). Suggested as a slow and peaceful way of travelling. Its about the same size as the Cahuella (eight passengers plus crew), but privacy may be a bit restricted as the walls are allegedly very thin. Maybe best to book the whole boat. In this case the experience will be the cruise, unless one travels via the Orient Express.

How about a Rice boat in Laos? Is there still a war going on there, I try not to visit war zones on my holiday. But Audley Travel (site may not be optimised for Mozilla) offer a river cruise on the upper Mekong . The boat looks fantastically in place and the cruise is part of a tour of Laos, although the food is allegedly fiercly hot as the Laotians seem to eat Chilli with everything. Should be Ok provided there's enough bread & beer. It's a long way to go though, may need to be done as part of a larger tour.

The article also reviews a trip on house boat in Kerala, India (See here...), where the food should again be excellent, this would need to be part of a Visit India project which I'd like to do, but havn't started planning yet. Whatever happens India Rail, the trip organisers may be a useful site to help plan that project. There's also the suggestion of rafting in the south of Sweden, which while cheaper, somehow seems too much hard work.

tags: Travel Holidays Cruises World boat

Some Anniversaries

2005-08-12T08:28:48.000Z

I've missed a couple of (obviously not so ) important anniversaries.

On 23rd July, it was my first birthday as a blogger. I hope that you've enjoyed what I've written and will continue to follow my streams of consiousness with interest.

On 3rd August, my non-smoking kick exceeded a year and a quarter and this is now the second longest period that I've stopped. - Hurrah for me!

Wisdom of Crowds

2005-08-12T08:17:37.000Z

I started to read The Wisdom of Crowds while on holiday, recommended to me by Dave Parr. I've not finished it yet but I recommend it as a fascinating read, illustrating how people collaborate to provide better answers than experts. Obviously a polemic for wikis and that-there internet. I expect I'll review it later. For the doubtfull, its does not require strong maths.

The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki, Abacus ISBN 0-349-11605-9.

tags: business economics statistics bookreview

Getting snipsnap to work

2005-08-10T16:46:40.000Z

I decided to move my SnipSnap (see here... on the net and here ...on my blog) from the windows partition to my Linux partition; my personal site runs on Linux & apache, and I'm pretty certain I want the sort of features products such as snipsnap offer.

So, I downloaded the tgz file and gunziped it. I began to edit the shell start up file, but discovered that my Fedora Version didn't have Java. This is a bit off, presumably a piece of Sun/Red Hat sectarianism. Anyway, its easy enough to solve. http://java.sun.com

Once we've got Java installed, Snipsnap runs. There is a two phase install, the first to create an instance and the second to configure it. The first phase involves reading from the console and then connecting to the server in order to configure the Snipsnap instance, including the admin user. It seems that certain configuration files are default written to ${HOME}/application and this is referenced from one of the .xml files in ${SNIPSNAP_ROOT}/conf. This warrants further research.

The host firewall had to have some rules written for it to permit remote query.

I then addressed the issue of configuring the snipsnap daemon as a server. I checked the Service Config Tool and this references the rc.d/init.d directories, so I quickly created a script to start, stop and restart the daemon. This failed to install because of chkconfig requires certain strings embedded in the scripts. Once it had these, documenting the run level and start & stop priority and a description field, the program installed as a service start/stop.

The stop function took a bit of care. The snipsnap shell invokes Java and so discovering the pid of the shell is pretty easy, but there may be several java instances running so we need to be certain that the jvm we kill is the snipsnap host. Often, people use a file to hold the pids, but I chose to use the linux pstree command which returns the child process names and pids of a given pid. I used pidof to translate the script name into a master pid, and good old cut to extract the pid from the pstree output.

pstree -p ${scriptpid} | cut -f3 -d$ | cut -f-1 -d$

My two outstanding problems are the console displays and the log file management, but I'll fix them tomorrow.

11 Aug 2005. I returned to the problem and sorted out the two issues. The functions library has the necessary functions to conform to the service authoring rules. These are echo_success & echo_failure. The program snipsnapd now works quite nicely with the Service Config Tool, I'll have to try and get this working on Solaris 10 with an SMF manifest.

tags: Technology Linux snipsnap wiki java

Keeping in Touch

2005-08-10T15:53:02.000Z

While in Greece, I got a fair amount of reading done, I finished Robert Service's biography of Lenin. It claims to be the first biography written after the post wall Glasnost and access to Soviet archives. I followed this up with Nial Ferguson's Empire, David Craig's Rip Off and then started The Wisdom of Crowds. I've been trying to work up a review of Rip Off, but haven't found time yet.

This is partly because I visited Oxford yesterday on holiday.

These trips will probably come thorough on my flickr soon - here...

Back from My Holidays

2005-08-04T08:20:22.000Z

I've been away to Greece over the last week, I got back over the weekend but I've been too busy to write a blog article.

We visited Stoupa in the Soutern Peloponnese and travelled with Greek Options, who we've used three times now and have always looked after us. Sadly we were only there for a week and therefore didn't leave Stoupa to visit any of the fantastically old sites in travelling distance. We'll have to go back.

I spent my time, reading, swimming, eating & drinking and sun bathing and I'll be reviewing the books later this month (I hope).

I bought a new digital camera during the week before the holiday and so I hope that my flickr stream will have some new pictures soon & I may even put a flickr badge up on this page. I've put my flickr site link on the sidebar.

tags: Places Europe Greece Travel Holiday "Greek Options" i.e. greekoptions

Using del.icio.us "clouds"

2005-07-23T14:29:17.000Z

How curious? I'm working up an article on del.icio.us and their clouds, and I discover that a tag based query does not show the cloud, so you can't walk across the cloud/tag fields. See below.

Actually, when using the username entry point with clouds, I can't see how to build up the query when using clouds. It'd be nice to be able to say "showme {all || my} bookmarks where tags=$Value1" and then add an additional qualifier, and then maybe a third. Obviously the basic query language should be able to handle this.

tags: Technology community Internet Bookmarks Network Computing Nomadic Computing folksonomy del.icio.us

Dominc Kay

2005-07-23T11:50:15.000Z

Dominic Kay, has started blogging here... You can see from his categories Performance Visualisation | Open Source | Paper Boy | Oddities what he'll be writing about. Pop on over to check it out.

tags: blogging SUNW

Make it something interesting for a change

2005-07-14T10:50:12.000Z

Is the Cluetrain Manifesto, "a spectre haunting the Internet?"

Some of this is very funny, some of it bloody obvious. Its only the retards that thought the '80s would last forever and that Gordon Gecko was a philosopher that will find some of this hard or revolutionary - the fact its all in one place is very good though, and its clearly written in a language that "entrepreneurs" can get!

Is it revolutionary? Not as much as it likes, but to be fair, the book was published in 2000, and the conversations that created it took place the previous couple of years. We've had time to catch up. They don't and won't adopt an anti-capitalist line and at the turn of century who would, but some of what they say and their polemic states that the human spirit is at the heart of co-operation and the corporation and shareholder value are in contention with it. They argue the internet is on the side of the people and angels.

I also really like the idea that the industrial revolution ( and its current day aftermath) is an abberation. Doesn't that just give you hope? This reinforces the idea that information is a factor of production, and although the book doesn't look at knowledge in this way, it strongly argues that People are people and not! Human Resources, they're not Markets, nor are they Labour. The internet has enabled people to discover themselves again and (re-)establish themselves as Customers/Clients, as people not markets. This is quite counter-intuitive as massive amounts of software R&D dollars were spent on personalisation software to allow vendors to drive human resource/cost out of the distribution channel and increase direct communication. Has it payed back? I don't think we care (or know) if our suppliers are using Seibel or not, not even through improved customer services!

I think the book is too long. This is probably as a result of the way in which it was assembled over time thorugh e-mails & forums & newsgroups and blogs, so if you get bored towards the end, you won't be missing much. Like all good internet revolutionaries they created a web site which is here.... Its claimed to be a relic! {Cute!}

The Manifesto does not create a compelling story as to how value is moving from marketing/legal departments to conversations between staff and customer, so who's at the centre of the "Cluetrain" value proposition and why? We can learn (a bit) from one of Cluetrain's contemporary alternative polemics "the Office", David Brent (played by Ricky Gervais) has put on a staff training video for his staff and Peter Purves (ex Blue Peter presenter, ex-Dr Who assistant) is the talking head.

Peter Purves: "What's a companies most valuable asset?"
Brent: "The Staff"
Peter Purves: "Your customers!"
Brent: "Oh that other one"

Cluetrain agrees in that its both, and not only do customers want to talk to companies, but staff want to talk to the customers and each other. I'm sure that we've all met senior managers who are surprised to discover that staff think for themselves, talk to each other and even senior management, as well as their customers. (Quite recently in my case.) Cluetrain says that businesses will fail if they don't get it, so will managers if they don't want to listen. As the Manifesto says,

50. .......Respect for hands-on knowledge wins over respect for abstract authority.

51. Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.

Cluetrain contains lessons for all business people, from CEOs through to company janitors. People are discovering their personality in their market places. The industrial mass-artifices of marketing are dying. Customers, workers and consultants want and need to speak to the authors/makers/shakers/do-ers not the press, or marketing or reviewers (where does this leave financial analysts?), nor do they want to deal with a automated voice activivated menu, or a call centre, or glossy adware based web-sites. This also applies to B2B; people buy on their behalf.

This desire and value of talking to other customers has been re-inforced for me personally by my experiences on the Dell, "Betrayal at the House on the Hill" (see here...) and the Bioware (or more specifically Baldur's Gate fan) sites (See here ...). Recently used examples of brochure based web sites, with the concomittant poor experiences are Nokia, Vodafone & O2. (NB I've had no cause to use these people's competitive sites, so don't assume that I think, or that they are better). I'm sure you can think of examples from your own recent experience.

Businesses, Salesmen Managers and other leaders need to talk to people, to treat them with respect and listen. This process has started at Sun at the top, and more recently the reformed UK leadership is showing signs of the same.

Perhaps from a personal point of view, its clarion call is

75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.

So is the Cluetrain Manifesto, "a spectre haunting the Internet?"

tags: Business Economics Cluetrain liberation bg2 creativity

del.icio.us & community

2005-07-07T19:26:57.000Z

I wrote about my problems with bookmark files and my need to put them on the network here.... I have had some feedback that I shouldn't take people's knowledge about stuff like del.icio.us for granted.

My colleague, Bryan Donovan, blogged about del.icio.us here..., so pop across and look at that article. Danny Malks has also written about it here... & check out the picture below.

http://del.icio.us is a bookmarks on the web feature. Firstly, it allows individuals to place their links on the web online. It also offers the opportunity to tag those bookmarks and as you can see it allows you to use the tags as keywords to find the bookmarks. The picture aside shows that I have filtered on the tag BG2 (its in red) and aligned/associated tags are shown in green and in the related tags bit. The size and weight of the tag is also relevant.

The site also keeps track of who and how many others have bookmarked the link and how they tag it.This is what makes it a community or social site.

An important, possibly most important community feature is that it creates an rss feed. Your links are organised in date order and others can see what you've posted in date order by subscribing to feeds on the basis of either your name or tags. So my Technology or BG2 links are available as an RSS stream. Each page has the RSS feed advertised at the bottom of the page. An aggregation of the blogs, pictures (from flickr) and links from del.icio.us is created at technorati as a technorati tag, although the tag doesn't seem to exist unless a blog article is tagged.

tags: Technology community Internet Bookmarks Network Computing Nomadic Computing folksonomy BG2

L'Marseillaise

2005-07-04T17:25:54.000Z

I uploaded "L'internationale" the other day, and to join it I've put http://www.marseillaise.org/ up on my blog roll. Everything you could want to know about the French National anthem. My phone comes with this one so no midi file. Find your own. I'll give you a hint.

tags: topic:{technorati}[Culture] topic:{technorati}[Anthem] topic:{technorati}[French] topic:{technorati}[marseillaise]

Where's that link gone???

2005-07-03T13:22:56.000Z

Aaargh Bogus!! - I've just lost a bookmark file again. I counted up the number of browser defined hyperlink bookmark files I've got the other day. I discovered ten.

Only one answer, combine them and put'em somewhere I can always get them.

This can't be on any of my own computer's or on my works' systems; the reason I have so many is that I often can't see the others when I'm in a position to use one. I have my work's laptop bookmarks, three mozillas (soon to be four}, one IE and one Galeon. I then have an IE & two mozillas on my personal desktop system at home (possibly another IE favourites list on the second desktop). I also have a mozilla bookmark file on my corporate network login.

I've got two options, to build a 'My Links' page at my personal site which means I'd control the look and feel but inserting new links would take some work (i.e. too much ), or using http://del.icio.us/DaveLevy . I have started to upload some of my links to del.icio.us, but I'm in two minds if I should reserve my use of this site for those links I've discovered that I want as part of the social categorisation process (such as my Baldur's Gate links), where they'd be resolved at technorati or if I should just upload them all and see what happens. My current personal taxonomy (and the size of my links list) means that I'd have some very large categories (more than a page) even having used three tags. (Not sure).

Another thing is that recording my personal usage might be cute, so I could determine how popular my links were with me, a sort of MRU/LRU chain. I could discover how many I've never been back to. I think this'd involve a database so even more coding work.

Perhaps http://del.icio.us/ is the answer today, although I do wonder what happened to Netscape's roaming capability. I'm also going to explore SnipSnap, a wiki, to see if that helps.

tags: Technology Internet Mozilla Bookmarks "Network Computing" "Nomadic Computing" community folksonomy BG2

Saga of a Road Warrior

2005-06-27T13:40:26.000Z

I discussed, after my last trip to Sun on the west coast in my commentary on Bill Vass's pitch here... and in more depth "Is that a disk in your lap....the advantages and disadvantages of nomadic computing. I have since obtained a wireless LAN card, but got caught at Vodafone's premises of all places without a connection. So quick trip to Jenny and a smart bluetooth transmitter for the laptop is on its way. I need never be off the net again

Its arrived now, (the vendor site [Belkin] is here...) . You'd think that using the XP partition it would be easy but No. The transceiver drivers go on just like that, but I can't detect the phone. So I check up on the manual, it seems that I need some more software from Nokia. The manual recommends a URL which of course has changed, so I muck around inside the Nokia site and finally use google with the keywords Nokia 6310i Modem Setup which takes me here.... NB. This may be a red herring.

I've downloaded the software and manuals and left it a day or two. The Nokia 6310i Modem Setup is failing, but the Bluetooth discovery program worked this time. (I'm afraid I don't know if running the N6MS led to a device probe that failed for its own purposes, it claims there is no Nokia Bluetooth device, or going for a glass of Pimms while waiting for the probe made a difference & the N6MS is a diversion). It found the phone. Another two hours mucking around, I finally discover the "Create New Connection" button, which shows me that XP's dial up infrastructure can see a bluetooth modem.

So I've now created a Tiscali over Bluetooth dial up agent and I'm away. (I might check out the other obvious ISPs (including Vodafone & O2), but most seem to be a bit leery about letting their customers configure their own Dial-Up agents.

It does seem awfully slow and I wonder if there's a quicker way, forcing GPRS or something. Actually the modem claims to be "Standard Modem over bluetooth", so I still need to install the 6310i as a modem. I used the *.inf file in the downloads directory which I must have got from the Nokia software pages. The Modem seems good and I created another dialler, this time Tiscali over Nokia 6310i. Looks like I may need to reboot because the Nokia software N6MS is still failing to install. When I do that I discover that the modem is also failing to install and the most recent dialler has changed from using the Nokia driver to using the standard driver. .

So back to the beginning. I check on the Belkin Site and discover a FAQ for user of XP SP2 users. This involves deleting the Microsoft bluetooth driver. Once I do this, the belkin discovery software works as you'd expect, discovers the phone and creates a dialup agent over bluetooth. Why didn't the box have a sticker on it??

The N6MS is still not recognising the bluetooth as successfully installed so I'm not yet using GPRS. I have browsed around the Nokia site and renewed my Nokia Club membership, but I can't find what I need, nor have I found a community site that might help me.

Note: This was written at the time, over a week but published as one article. I propose to get GPRS working so come back some time. I have also written a boring version of this article here...

tags: Technology Nomadic Laptop Nokia 6310i Bluetooth Modem XP "Dial-up Agent"

Laptop Diaries X (about:bluetooth)

2005-06-26T18:28:40.000Z

For those of you in a hurry to use the Belkin transceiver with a Nokia 6310i on an XP/SP2 enhanced laptop,

get their FAQ for XP/SP2 users, its somewhere around here...
install their software,
manually follow the FAQ instructions, (involves deleting the Microsoft Bluetooth device driver by using the XP Control Panel, "System" applet and the Device Manager)
Go to "Bluetooth Places" and this will discover your phone & create a modem for you.
Use the Network Connections panel to create a dial up agent. This needs to be associated with an ISP i.e. a phone number, login/password etc.

This will give you a GSM modem connection to the internet.

This is a condensed version of this article on my blog here....

tags: Technology Laptop Nokia 6310i Bluetooth Modem XP "Dial-up Agent" Belkin "XP SP2"

Batman Begins

2005-06-26T18:11:03.000Z

There's no Dr. Who this week, so we popped out to the pictures to watch "Batman Begins".

Absolutly fantastic! Brilliantly acted (it ought to be, have you seen the cast list), capturing the darkness and hope of Gotham City and the Batman's personal and public fights. I'm sure they'll make more. Not so sure about Liam Neeson reprising his role as Li-Quon Jinn

We saw the trailer for the "Fantastic Four" (The official site is here...), definitely one I want to see.

tags: Culture Film Review Batman

The 9th Doctor

2005-06-26T16:54:45.000Z

The final episode of the series was shown over the last weekend and IMO, its not as good as the penultimate episode. I'd been questioning whether the change from four part (30 minute) episodes to what seemed like single or double 45 minute episodes worked and had just come to the conclusion that they did, so imagine my surprise when they brought all the threads crashing together in the penultimate episode. There seemed so little to do to finish the stories, only 1/2 million Daleks to destroy and billions of humans to save. All in a day's work for the Doctor.

So what'd they do! While Rose's rescue was classic, or new classic at least, its so good to see the Doctor's technology work, and to see the him act hard, where did Jack's Dalek blaster go later in the show (couldn't he find a mains plug) . I also liked seeing Ann-Droid blow the Daleks up, but had they forgotten that there were dozens of games. Where were the others?

Also it's a bit crap for a time lord to run out of time! Why couldn't he do the "Bill & Ted" trick? Why did he send the one machine with the power to kill the Dalek's away? Why did it take Rose to utilise the time vortex/'heart of the tardis'? The Bad Wolf stuff was a bit heavy handed, perhaps not a red herring, but Rose as the Angel of Light is tired as far as I'm concerned, and have they really left Jack behind?

Call me picky if you must, and despite what I consider a weak last episode, the resurrection of the franchise has been well done. Even Michael Grade has apologised to the new team for his reticence and hostility. The portrayal of the Doctor, Rose & the other ancillary characters has been fine and much of the writing better than ever. While I've never wondered what people left behind, while their friends or familiy bugger off to travel with the Doctor think, I'm sure others have and now their story has been told, together with an updated version of the interfering time lord.

David Tennant has a hard act to follow. I can't wait for the next series (or is it a Xmas special?)

The "Bill & Ted" trick involves after the event, travelling back in time to leave themselves useful items to find such as keys, cages & bins, or substituting your enemies blaster with a toy. Yes, its a time paradox! The story is told fully in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey.

tags: Culture DrWho "Dr Who" doctorwho "Doctor Who" BBC Britain British TV badwolf "Bad Wolf" tardis

Talking about OpenSolaris in the City

2005-06-20T09:57:47.000Z

Bumped into Ulf this a.m., who asked me if I could make the inaugural open solaris UK user group in the Sun City Customer Briefing Centre, this evening. Sadly, I shan't be there but I checked out his blog article and I'm sorry to miss it. Both Simon Phipps & Gary Pennington are due to speak. Since Gary's blog is back online, so I've inserted it into my blog roll. You might like to check out the Open Solaris "buttons + badges" page.

tags: "Open Solaris" London UK Event

Originally published sadly, with corrupted tags, corrected on 21st June after the event occurance. Aplogies to those who only receive this feed via techorati.

"Dr. Who & the Big Bad Wolf"

2005-06-11T19:58:47.000Z

Just seen Dr Who - "Bad Wolf" - This is the best Dr Who episode ever!!!! (I'm 49, I ain't seen'em all, but I've seen a lot) . I'd best wait until next week to really go to town, and you can read Charlie Brookner's preview somewhere around here... at the Guardian when they bother to publish it.

The BBC series site is here... and "Bad Wolf" is a red herring .

tags: Culture DrWho "Dr Who" doctorwho "Doctor Who" BBC Britain British TV badwolf "Bad Wolf" tardis

Re: "Dr. Who & the Big Bad Wolf"

2005-06-17T13:43:03.000Z

I AGREE ITS BEEN 1 OF THE BAST EPISODES FOR A LONG TIME ROLE ON SAT GET IT TAPED AND WATCH IT AGAIN AND AGAIN CANT WAIT FOR THE BOX SET YOURS PAB1

Roller's Smileys

2005-06-09T13:11:07.000Z

Roller has some smileys. You can find them at http://blogs.sun.com/roller/images/smileys. Up 'till now I have used a smily from cybergifs (see my Blog, here...), who among other things have an unusual juxta-position between christian iconography and stripping girls, so I'm happy to change.

Here are the roller .gifs (7th June '05)

I particularly like V. confused? (15), Mischievous/Mysterious? (20), angry, angelic (yeah, like I'll use this a lot), blush, depressed, Grin, Smile, Smirk, Smug!, Sunglasses, Tongue? , Wink

tags: roller blogs smileys

Re: Roller's Smileys

2006-10-19T02:09:30.000Z

could youll make more smileys please

QuackQuack

2005-06-07T12:04:16.000Z

The new page banner (with the duck) comes from GustavoG at Flickr. The original picture is here... and its licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa, (Attribution, Non Commercial and Share Alike).

tags: GustavoG duck

Re: QuackQuack

2005-06-07T18:33:48.000Z

Quack! Sorry couldn't resist. Nice duck tho :)

Welcome to Phil Harman

2005-06-07T05:45:00.000Z

Phil Harman has started blogging, check him out here... and his initial posting here.... I've put him on my blogroll.

Welcome!

Ringtones & Revolution

2005-06-02T21:24:13.000Z

During the recent election campaign, and one of the small left wing acts I took was to re-install "L'Internationale" on my phone. Its been the revolutionary anthem of European socialists since the Paris Commune, and is the more likely song to have been played at the Finland Station as Lenin arrived. (What? See also here...).

I obtained this as a ringtone a couple of years ago from http://www.yourmobile.com, but they've dropped it, and its proved difficult to replace, but I'm finally there. Use Google to search for "L'Internationale" & "ringtone" which inexorably leads you to this site, "The Internationale". It has two useful features. The first is that the notes in the right hand panel are hyperlinks to midi files. Secondly the site has some great links to sites supporting other socialist cultural icons, including sites helping phone users to install the song as a ring tone. These didn't help me because my phone's inappropriate. However Nokia's PC Update's (V4.4) ringtone composer module can read in midi files, convert to tone, and then download to the phone, so I checked the three sites out and took the simplest midi file, tested it on my laptop, slowed down the tempo and put it on the phone.

So here is my .midi version of "The Internationale" which works for the Nokia 6310i. It's not perfect, it's been truncated but it works.

tags: Socialism Ringtones L'Internationle L'internationale Culture Nokia 6310i

Back to the day job! Disruption & Optimisation

2005-05-26T12:31:44.000Z

Been to Betfair and one of Accenture's project teams recently, and following sensible advice from colleagues, while I can't reflect what they said, I can repeat what I said, or observed.

Betfair, fascinates me. They're an internet age business. Their trading site is here... and they have an "about us" popup.

I occasionally bet on the horses, i.e. the Grand National, and even more rarely on politics, but I've always used a bookmaker, so I've not played with the spread bet players, nor an exchange. The Guardian's write-ups mentioning Betfair have mainly been about either how gambling is leading an internet renaissance, or how much money the founders will make. What this misses is the rare nature of the social and commercial relationship between Betfair and its customers. The exchange model means that Betfair are enabling punters to bet with each other. Betfair thus enables a new market, and claim to offer better value to gamblers than the old bookmaker model. It means that they enable individual activity, have a very personal commercial offering and are also highly disruptive to the market and the traditional players. Its all very "Cluetrain". They've created a new market and implemented it in software. They seem amazingly successfull. They're not just about channel efficiency. More an ebay, less a lastminute!

The Accenture team I met asked us to explain our IT estate modelling techniques and approach. The conversation brought home to me some changes in emphasis. When we started (two years ago) it was always about cost, now people are interested in cost, power, heat, space and/or utilisation. Occasionally, they're interested in productivity, cost to manage and service quality. The scenario based modeling approach advocated by Sun, allows customers not only to own the data quality issues (again see my blog here...), but also to test different scenarios against the key drivers. Each customer will want to optimise the different dimensions of the answer to different degrees, deriving a unique answer.

In particular, trade-offs between space & power/cooling can be explored. I still need to work an example through. I've often felt that mathematical optimisation techniques might be usable to measure and/or describe the choices; as frequently the choice we have sought to offer to DC managers is to either maximise utilisation or minimise project cost, and we look to optimise on the investment profitability.

I wonder if a three dimensional graph might work, or if a radar (polar) graph could be built to help understand the optimisation decisions.

tags: Technology Internet Datacente and/or Datacentre

London Bloggers

2005-05-26T12:15:58.000Z

I came across the "London Bloggers" site, so I've registered my blog at London Bridge, which is the station I come through to get to work. I've also put up the site badge, which x-refs to other blogs at London Bridge. (No warranties!) I may add other stations later.

They've also got a flickr feed to each "Station's Page", so I've tagged my London Bridge pictures, you can find them via the links below

links: "My Pictures (Flickr)", London Bridge (Technorati), London Bridge (Flickr),

tags: blogging tags London

Yet more South Park

2005-05-24T19:39:02.000Z

A bunch of the Sun bloggers have been using a "What you'd look like in South Park!" tool hosted here... to make images of themselves, or occasionally others. My younger son made this for me.

Also check out the host site's right to use statement. We (i.e. sun bloggers) have also been talking about how, if and what copyright rules we should or can apply to these blogs. I suspect that Sun's preferred remediation will be less drastic.

tags: Silly "South Park" Studio

Re: Yet more South Park

2005-05-25T02:19:31.000Z

Oh my god. It looks too real.

bill.

Cluetrain Manifesto

2005-05-18T18:55:49.000Z

My copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto arrived last Friday, I'm about half way through. I bought a copy because when considering whether to start a blog last summer, Danese Cooper, now posting here... recommended it as the best source to understand how and why Sun (and other employers) need us to do this, and why we should. I've not finished yet but some of the basics are spot on as far as I'm concerned, and often written in a direct & funny fashion. Best finish it before I say more.

I bought it from amazon.com. When shopping for rarer books I often check up both .co.uk & .com, but it is rare that when they're on both that the post & packing doesn't make the .co.uk a cheaper buy. This time however the book price was $4.99, and with a cable rate of over $1.80 to the pound I snapped it up from .com. I wonder if its possible to arbitrage the transatlantic prices by selling the book back to .co.uk and make a profit.

tags: silly blogs books cluetrain business

Laptop Diaries IX

2005-05-16T07:16:27.000Z

Ulf has started blogging again. He's one of the guys who helped me build my laptop. He's obvioulsy discovered something usefull (parttype) about grub, which might have helped me. He's documented it here.... I'll check it out next time I see him.

tags: Technology Laptop grub Laptop grub

Saving the Planet..... bit by bit!

2005-05-13T16:07:48.000Z

I was rang last night by the Whale & Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS), and while they were asking me to increase my contributions since I hadn't done so for several years, they started by asking me why I had started in the first place. (I couldn't tell one person on the phone that its because I like their smile, but here's 10 good reasons to support the (WDCS). In actual fact, I picked up a leaflet in my local chinese take-away.

They are an environmental charity.
They are a campaigning charity.
They don't make you feel bad to use your car.
They fund scientific projects
They fund political lobbying
They are campaigning to defend bio-diversity
Dolphins are cute.
Dolphins have nice smiles.
Dolphins look after man.
Dolphins make you feel good.
Whales are cute.
Whales are endangered.

tags: Charity Environment Dolphins Whales

Re: Saving the Planet..... bit by bit!

2005-05-14T07:33:53.000Z

You forgot that dolphins are tasty.

l33t speak

2005-05-12T10:20:16.000Z

I was reading some articles at Pocket Plane Group, a Baldur's Gate modding site and finally got fed up with not understanding some of the writing, so I googled "pwn" and came across the Urban Dictionary which explained it to me. It also had entries for l33t (elite) and hawt, plus one or two {unprintable} others that I'm well aquainted with. It allows voting so is another example (like technorati or del.icio.us) of an internet site acting as an information aggregator i.e. representing the collective view of many. Really cute! I am so impressed that I have also published the link in my links bar.

tags: Culture Internet knowledge folklore

Ballot Secrecy in Britain

2005-05-09T09:07:10.000Z

Robin Wilton wrote in his blog here... about the fact that an elector's polling number is written on the ballot paper's counter-foil. This means that a polling number's vote can be determined.

This is, I believe, to permit court supervised remediation if significant impersonation is suspected. What Robin, didn't say is that no ID is required to vote, you only have to assert your identity (Remeber this if you loose your polling card). If someone else has claimed your vote before you, then you will be given a pink ballot paper and your vote counted. Counting staff and the candidate counting agents can easily see if there are large numbers of duplicate votes.

On the other hand, lets see how someone could find out how you voted. They'd need the electoral register, (this is easy, its a public document), the counterfoils and ballot papers (these are kept in secure places which they'd need a court order to legally access). The electoral count does not sort the ballot papers, and the ballot paper was given to you when you turned up. Does your electoral stalker know when you voted? Otherwise, they'll have to inspect all thirty to forty thousand counterfoils until they find yours. Even if they knew when you voted, they don't know at what time of the day each numbered counterfoil was detatched from the ballot paper. So again in order to find your counterfoil they'll then have to inspect all of them. Having found your counterfoil, they'll need to inspect all thirty or forty thousand ballot papers to discover the vote; these are not sorted either. Once they have successfully done all this, they still don't know if it was you that cast that vote.

I think our vote is more anonymous, and more auditable than if we used computers.

tags: Politics Election UK

Re: Ballot Secrecy in Britain

2005-05-09T09:49:55.000Z

Thanks David - those are all valid comments, but in part, the impact also depends on your threat analysis. If the threat is of a single 'personator' using or determining the way I voted, I agree. If the assumed threat is that someone with valid access to the archived papers could do a complete 'poll profile', then the only logistical barrier is the number of ballot papers. Perhaps we should submit a Freedom of Information request to see how many public sector bodies have bought document sorter/scanners with OCR capability! ;^)

Re: Ballot Secrecy in Britain

2005-05-09T12:20:07.000Z

I have to agree with Robin -- individually identifiable ballot papers are inherently suspect, even if you have to do a "join" through two stacks of papers to tie a ballot to an individual.

Regardless of what authorization is required to legally access the archives, it seems to me that you've created a tempting target for bulk information theft.

Here in Massachusetts, our elections are done with manually marked ballot papers which are electronically scanned when placed into the ballot box. Unlike either the old mechanical lever systems or "modern" direct recording electronic systems (which IMHO are insufficiently auditable) there's a clear audit trail.

As in your system, no id card is required; the voter list is sorted by address and your name is checked off twice -- once when they hand you the ballot, and a second time when you place it in the box. (I'm not familiar with the specific procedures when duplicate voting is detected).

Starting with the most recent local election, they've enabled an option in the scanner to reject invalid ballots with overvotes so that one common class of error doesn't result in an uncountable ballot long after the voter has left.

Re: Ballot Secrecy in Britain

2005-05-09T15:11:29.000Z

Robin

An OCR reader would require that the ballot papers are printed for it, and detect the presiding officer's mark. It would also be unable to read the polling number on the counterfoil, which is hand-written.

A computerised count cannot be observed and audited by the candidates. Remember, they had to change the law to permit computer print outs to be seen as evidence in Poll Tax delinquency cases. (I laughed so much at that). This is because computers cannot be cross-examined.

Re: Ballot Secrecy in Britain

2005-05-09T15:15:14.000Z

I thought that the point of writing it down was to trivilaise the matter of finding the names of everyone who'd voted for the British Communist Party / National Front / Whatever, "all the votes for whom are neatly stacked in that corner over there, all 500 of the insurgent little bastards upon whom we want to sic MI5..."

Re: Ballot Secrecy in Britain

2005-05-10T07:48:29.000Z

Alec

I suppose.

I've also read your comments at Dropsafe.

That would mean that MI5 would have to send people to each constituency, or only those in which those they were interested in were standing, and with the exception of Sien Fein, the number of votes attracted by these candidates is sufficiently small to make this feasible. Whether MI5 has grown up enough to be interested in the ultra-right is another moot point!

I suppose the point I'm making is that the spooks have easier ways of finding people to spy on than checking up on the ballot box. Like many people, spys'll do it the easy way if they can.

No Smoking

2005-05-04T15:35:32.000Z

Ha Ha!! Its been a year since my last cigarette!!

Congratulations to me!

Re: No Smoking

2005-05-04T21:28:24.000Z

Congratulations!

Re: No Smoking

2005-05-27T03:32:25.000Z

well done. everyday is another milestone. keep it up. i am sure you feel better everyday.

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide (2005)

2005-05-03T21:09:49.000Z

Empire Online's 4* review is here... & the BBC page is here .

The problem is that the story is one of the first multi-media stories ever, starting on radio, moving to books and onto TV. Anyone that knows anyone of these stories well is going to struggle with this 21st Century (and very short) version. I'm not sure what it is, and despite the homages to the original series, such as the TV's show's Marvin appearing, and Simon Jones (TV & Radio's original "Arthur Dent") having a cameo, and an otherwise marvelous cast, it didn't work for me and I think Empire will regret the 4*s review.

tags: Culture Film Sci-Fi

Voting, Blogs, Gadgets, Issues & Belief

2005-05-03T21:03:21.000Z

There are lots of web gadgets around trying to help me make my mind up how to vote. The FT have a good one, although it seems a bit biased towards the liberal democrats and doesn't work so well with mozilla. Despite its bias, its not quite as bad as a historic Private Eye headline "Voting Labour gives you aids!", or the Harry Enfield spoof "L is for Labour, L is for Lice", or anything party political by the Daily Mail.

However, I was taken aback over the weekend; I visited the cinema to see Hitch Hiker's Guide (BBC||Empire Online) and this was preceded by a political ad for the Tories! Its a bunch of film clips of Blair, followed by right wing newspaper headlines supposedly "proving" that Labour has broken its promises , all to the backing sound of Marti Webb's "Take that look of your face!". It's actually on their web site, but to my mind its not an advert issued by people who think they're going to win.

tags "Election 05" UK Politics Adverts Internet

Why Geeks and Nerds Are Worth It...

2005-05-03T15:32:07.000Z

Reading Dan Gilmore's "Good Morning Silicon Valley", and he cross referenced this. "Why Geeks and Nerds Are Worth It...", its written by a women and Geek's & Nerd's good qualities are finally recognised.

Our mystery correspondent writes, "They’re (i.e G+N) more romantic than they’re given credit for. Ok true, their idea of romance might be to make up a spiffy web-page with all the reasons why they love you, with links to pics of you and sonnets and such... but hey. It lasts longer than flowers, plus you can show your friends. "

For more (but funnier) go here.... Must show it to my wife!

When is a risk, not a risk?

2005-05-02T19:03:49.000Z

Rowing with project management colleagues again. Why do all three of future, uncertain or detrimental have to be present as part of a risk? When is a risk, not a risk?

It should be obvious, if its not futuristic, its history : its an event. If its not uncertain, its not a risk, its going to happen and if its detrimental its a fore-seeable cost. If its beneficial, its not a risk. Furthermore, after a long and heated conversation with some of my colleagues, only project risks should be born by the project P&L. Business risks should be born by business budgets. All this implies that risk must be financially evaluated.

The fact a film shoot might take longer than planned is an effort estimation variance, the fact that weather causes budget over-runs is a risk, the possibility that the revenue's of the finished film may cause a loss sufficient to jeopardise the producer's financial viability is a business risk, which project risk techniques are unlikely to militate.

It seems to me that evaluating the probability that a risk occurs and the financial cost of a risk occurring, are the key first steps to managing a risk. Otherwise, you're left bleating in the wind that the project is too risky and neither you, nor anyone else can help. It is not sufficient to identify the risk.

My previous thoughts are here....

tags: "IT Consulting" Project Risk

Wipeout

2005-04-29T08:58:07.000Z

A mind game for journey's. Define a category for which there are many answers, such as States of the USA, non-members of the UN, Schwarzenegger (or Streep) fims and then each player bids as to how many answers they can name. The highest bidder, (the last bid after everyone else has passed) starts and seeks to meet his or her bid. If they suceed, they win, if they fail (you'd best agree a time limit) the lother players get to offer answers. There's to be no repetition and the last player (again best agree a time limit) to state an answer wins.

My favourite question is "Films with sequels where the sequel is as good as or better than the original", but it can only be played so often; its a category rarely added to. It also creates massive room for disagreement, which is part of the fun.

tags: Games

Re: Wipeout

2005-04-29T22:52:44.000Z

I find it unbelievable that over 8 hours, no-one's bitten.

How about Terminator? That's in - no debate!

How about Batman?

Betrayal at the House on the Hill

2005-04-28T16:32:18.000Z

For various reasons, the other month we went into Aldershot and visited "The Games Shop". This is, as you'd guess, a shop that sells board games, games books, jigsaws and other games accessories; but not computer games, which is maybe why it has no web site. At our first visit, last year, we picked up "Murder at the Abbey" also here..., and this time bought "Betrayal at the House on the Hill". Its fantastic - collaborative, replayable, and with strong varied stories, our first night was Buffy's Hell's Gate, a deeply dramatic story, I'm playing Professor Longfellow, academic buffer, very knowledgeable, limited strength and sanity, trapped in the basement by the flames of the abyss, I gave "Flash", the school running team star my mystic ring as he climbed out of the basement using his rope to take it Madame Victoria. He joined up with the other two players and we managed to perform the ceremonies to close the Hell Gate and discover the secret passage just in time to rescue me from a firey death.

This game is advertised by its publishers here..., and the publisher's forums are here....

This is the second great game we've got from this shop, so if you're local and into games look'em up.

tags: Culture "Board Game" Horror Fiction

Re: Betrayal at the House on the Hill

2005-05-13T09:16:52.000Z

<p/> I didn't realise that you were into games. I've wasted many an hour playing board games over the years. I still play regularly, most weeks during winter and most fortnights during summer, with a group I've played with since I was at college. <p/> Anyway, I'm sure you know about it, but do you ever use the excellent boardgamegeek website? <p/> I'll take a look at your recommendation. It looks fun.

Re: Betrayal at the House on the Hill

2005-05-15T18:01:08.000Z

UUh Gary - I didn't mention, mainly because I suppose I was expecting you (& others) to go to the suggested URLs that the the supplied rules are a bit iffy and you need to check out the online resources including boardgamegeek, which I discovered when looking for the online help resources.

It remains a great game.

Capitalism, Communism & Monopoly

2005-04-25T08:32:42.000Z

Jonathan's Blog article "Scare Tactics in the World of Open Source" seems to imply Microsoft use the allegation of Communism as a massive insult. I understand that this isn't unusual in the US.

Probably best not ask which is a worse insult, Communist or Monopolist; only one of these activities is defended by the 1st Amendment.

tags: Business Monopoly

Laptop Diaries VIII

2005-04-22T12:08:18.000Z

What have I learnt?

These entries have been about putting the three operating systems onto my Dell C400. I knew that a problem existed with the cheap video subsystem implementation and I've only suceeded because I have pre-beta code for Solaris 10. (This will be made available sometime soon). Its possible to learn about Solaris on the C400 and installing a triple boot. The key lessons (for me) have been.

The installers do not behave well together, so the installation process is sensitive to the order you choose to install them in. I suggest Windows, then Solaris, then Linux. This is for two reasons,

Linux and Solaris use the same partition label for Linux Swap and Solaris, and it would seem that the Solaris installer is the more badly behaved, so running it before Linux is on the system is a good thing.

By installing Linux last, you end up with grub as the boot manager, this is good because its pretty, configurable and powerfull. It also recognises the three partitions and sets up its menu to work.

This would not have been possible without a low level disk manager that allowed me to create and shrink the basic partitions. I used Partition Magic. See here..., now seemingly owned by Symantec. I used this to shrink my initial windows partition. See 2 below.

I also used it to create a partion for the Linux build at the end of the disk. See 3 above. This had the effect of reserving the partition from the Solaris install. (See 4 above). I then installed Red Hat into the space I had reserved. I used Red Hat's disk druid to remove the partition and it installed into 'unassigned space'.

tags: Technology Laptop

Re: Laptop Diaries VIII

2005-04-22T21:22:32.000Z

I am trying to do the same with my brand new D610. The first issue is learning about fdisk partitions (primary? extended? boot partitions? diagnostic partitions? huh?) I don't have a floppy, so have tried to use the System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/) with some success but I am not all the way there yet. Your information is very helpful and gives me hope.

Re: Laptop Diaries VIII

2005-04-23T17:35:28.000Z

Glad its helping!

Recruit & Retain

2005-04-21T21:25:51.000Z

The Register posts an article today "Nicer bosses retain more (female) staff". Here....

Lucy Sheriff writes, "The astonishing news that women don't like to work with horrible managers, ... will undoubtedly send shockwaves throughout the HR sector industry.". I'm sure it will, HR are usually the last to catch up.

Interesting that people are looking for this now; also I'm sure that not wanting to work with horrible managers isn't restricted to women.

Laptop Diaries VII

2005-04-19T07:00:40.000Z

Back to Linux. I've decided (a long time ago) I want a Red Hat version; the C400 is a works tool and I work in Sun's Data Centre Practice. If I want Sun's Java Desktop system, I can either use the corporate network or my Solaris partition. The reason I want a Linux partition is to familiarise myself with the platform of choice for many web hosting providers and many developers.

As discussed in Laptop Diaries II, my previous Linux installations had been RH 7.2 & RH 9.0. My 7.2 build had used Ximian's Red Carpet as my software update mechanism, but I'd stopped using it as they began to push to Ximian 2 and taking any X-Windows update became dangerous; the Dell's video card implementation and the workround. At the time of writing Laptop Diaries II, I used some disks cut by an ex-colleague, Richard Miles with Red Hat 9.0, but staying with the mantra of "new & free", Mike cut an ISO set for Fedora.

We used the default boot setting, boot graphic. It loks pretty bad until anaconda discovers the i830 chip set and then behaves itself.

If you've not been following the previous articles this month, (see below), I currently have three disk partitions, hosting windows, solaris and empty, with the solaris boot manager in the mbr. During the Linux installation we used disk druid to delete the outstanding {i.e. the empty & final} partition at the end of the disk and the install went perfectly after that, using the automatic partitioning feature of the installation program. I havn't yet had a chance to check the update program or begin to customise the build but it loks like we're there. Obviously the Linux install also wrote grub to the master boot record so I have the prettiest, most configurable boot manager on the system.

tags: Technology Linux Fedora Technology "Dell C400"

Thinking about SUNW?

2005-04-18T08:58:39.000Z

I'm doing some writing, that I might share later, but decided I needed to look up some of the presentations held at http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/analyst/sas2005/ which as you may guess is a bunch of presentations given to invited investment and market analysts. Its a link I propose to use myself,I've put it in my links list and I hope you find it usefull.

I'll probably create a Sun links list some day and move it.

tags: SUNW

Laptop Diaries VI

2005-04-15T15:28:06.000Z

Despite promising myself that I'd move onto the Linux install, I decided to move onto Windows and the infamous service pack 2. I run Windows Update and get offered some more security updates, so I download, install and reboot. Go back to the Windows Update, I'm offered SP2, I check my available space. 830 Mb - lets go. Windows Update. Download. Fails on space, it nicely writes some massive check point files which it fails to re-use on restart or delete; I can't find where they are so I have lost another 200 Mb. I move some more data files off the system, including trying to delete the newsmonster directory (I've moved off it, its another app. that doesn't clean up after itself), uninstalled Microsoft Office (Yup I'm one of the few left in the company with permission and licence to use these products) and check again. Ha Ha! 1Gb+, surely this is enough. Lets go again. Using Windows update, happily it recognises that the download has been complete and sets of updating the system. It passes the space check and starts to unpack the files. It moves onto what it calls cleaning up and I start to get space warnings. I observed it as low as 83 Mb but it does complete. Leaving me with 93 Mb on my system. This means that SP2 consumed ~1 Gb of disk space. (I don't care how plentiful disk has become, I didn't buy it for someone else to puke over!)

Next I ran my diskhog program and discover.

C:\WINDOWS\Software\Distribution

which had one 500 mb directory, so I deleted the entire contents of this directory, clear out C:\WUTEMP and delete the Uninstall checkpoints (which in retrospect was a mistake; they ain't that large) in the C:\WINDOWS directory. I checked the space again and I've got a Gig of space free.

There a couple of niggles about the upgrade. A bunch of file associations have changed, Microsoft seem to think I want their security centre running, they're wrong, but I have a nicely upto date patched Windows XP partition.

tags: Technology Laptop

Laptop Diaries V

2005-04-15T15:13:25.000Z

Solaris 10, on my Dell, out of the box, running at 1024 by 768.

tags: Technology Laptop Solaris

Re: Laptop Diaries V

2005-04-19T06:01:25.000Z

Laptop Diaries V: Does your network card work?

Re: Laptop Diaries V

2005-04-19T07:37:12.000Z

My LAN interface, (not sure if its onboard or off board) works fine on both Windows (as you'd expect) and Solaris. It previously worked fine with RH 9.0 and so I'm not expecting any problems with the Fedora build. (See my article today).

Re: Laptop Diaries V

2005-04-20T00:30:45.000Z

I have successfully installed Solaris 10 on my Athlon64. This is the first time I have played with Solaris, and I am very excited about it. (Due to licensing issues, e.g., you cannot include proprietary binary modules in a Linux kernel, I have become a CDDL/OpenSolaris fan overnight.) The installation script for Solaris 10 is definitely far inferior to those in many main-stream Linux distros (e.g., Fedoar, RHEL, Mandriva, SUSE, or even Debian). Additionally, since I was a virgin in Solaris, I also ran into two "main" problems: 1. Despite of my efforts, Solaris 10 installation still took over the entire disk. (Could you describe in more detail how you did the XP-Linux-Solaris multi-boot?) 2. There appear to be no drivers for the built-in LAN interface (ASUS K8N Deluxe) as well as a bread-n-butter Realtek card. I am trying to up my Solaris learning curve. In the meantime, any detailed discussion/revelation on your Solaris_x86 installation experience will be greatly appreciated. Thanx.

Laptop Diaries IV

2005-04-15T14:08:12.000Z

Mike Ramchand has informed me that some pre "Express" (See here... for more about Solaris Express) code that implements agapart inside the S10 kernel exists, so we (probably means he) should be able to get Solaris to run using Xorg @ 1024x768 on my Dell C400. For a detail of my previous attempts to re-build the laptop, check out Laptop Diaries III, II I... at this site.

Firstly we cut a S10 GA Boot DVD (with Bruce's Extensions) and try to install. The order of my partitions is Linux, Windows, Linux Swap (512 Mb) and Solaris. I only have a 20Gb disk. The S10 installer f***s [up] on the partition label recognition and trys (but fails safely ) to install in my Linux swap partition. Fortunately S10's fdisk can reassign partition labels so we did that and the installer should have been able to use the larger partition. i.e. We gave the swap partition a Solaris2 label the big partition a Solaris label. The original partition table had been created by Red Hat's disk druid. So we returned to the S10 GA interactive installer. This still failed.

OK .... blow away Linux, blow away Solaris, Ghost off the windows partition, and ghost back on. This yields a Windows partition occupying the whole disk. We booted of an XP disk, entered the XP recovery console and rebuilt the mbr (bootcfg /mbr). We then tidied up some rubbish (in the boot infrastructure) left from the previous build together with tarting up the boot.ini file which had been amended by the console hosted mbr rebuild. To do this we used

My Computer - Properties - Advanced - Startup Recovery

to amend boot.ini to delete the old menu options. So now we have a computer that can boot into Windows XP. (Not quite the triple boot I want.)

We booted from a Partition Magic CD and shrank the partition. We then created an extended partition, over the last 5.5 Gbytes with a logical FAT 32 partition. This leaves about 7 Gb for Solaris. The S10 installer found this space and sucessfully installed into the unassigned space. We then rebooted and Xorg fails, which is expected behaviour, because my laptop's video implemention is so poor and S10 GA defaults to Xorg. Mike logged in using the command line. He ftp'd the patch which is in tarball format. So

B$ tar xvf - B$ install.sh

Reboot the system we get Xorg at 1024x768. Fantastic!!!!

So we now have the Linux partition missing, which I hope to address tomorrow. I think its safe to say that the two installation technologies haven't quite got to grips with what interoperability means.

tags: Technology Laptop Solaris

I'm told that this code should be in the next express release. <include std.disclaimer>

Au revoir Gary

2005-04-11T09:44:01.000Z

Gary Pennington is leaving Sun next week so I've deleted his Sun blog "SRMblog" from my blogroll. He does have personal site http://www.garypennington.net, so it won't be goodbye, and he's looking to do something new so we'll probably hear fron him soon.

His blog is down at the moment, but his site's front page currently has a great gadget, hosted here... at http://douweosinga.com which colour codes a world map showing where you've visited.

Here's mine

> Create your own visited countries map or vertaling Duits Nederlands

tags: Travel Cool Internet Gadget

Missing out on Wireless

2005-04-11T08:59:47.000Z

I visited Bradford the other day and travelled Intercity. I actually used an APEX ticket; it was my money but thats another story. Its the first time, I'd seen wireless internet connections offered on the train, of course it's Virgin Trains, who want to be in the forefront of in-travel entertainment. - "You might be late but you did some great surfing".

Two things prohibited the use of this feature. Firstly, I didn't have a wireless card. Secondly, this stage of the journey which had four stages (five if you include the bus) only took two hours. (Some might suggest this is good because the battery doesn't last much longer).

If my commuter train (SWT), I have a 50||75 minute train journey to the office, offered this feature, it'd be quite neat, although some of my mail and document composition I can do quite nicely today. I suppose its one of the reasons that I haven't bothered so far.

tags: Technology Nomadic Computers Internet Wireless

Vive the Daily Mirror

2005-04-10T14:12:16.000Z

It was the "Grand National" yesterday, so I bought a copy of the "Daily Mirror" for its tips and form card. It's good to see that its instincts are coming back, the inside front page had a picture of a Tory poster which has the question "How much does it cost to clean a hospital?", which had been defaced with the comment "You should know, you privatised hospital cleaning!".

Ready, Steady, Vote

2005-04-09T19:42:06.000Z

A general election has been called for 5th May.

Consolidating Sybase

2005-04-04T13:31:59.000Z

When designing system platforms for Sybase based applications, three patterns are available.

Traditionally, a single Sybase instance is installed onto a system host. This serves an application and user community. This remains a popular pattern for ISV products, however, where a rigorous environment management policy is adopted, this leads rapidly to 'server sprawl' as each DBMS instance requires not only production but also a development, testing and contingency system.
Alternatively, multiple applications can be collected into a single Sybase instance. This is referred to by Sun as ‘Aggregation’. It is best done in conjunction with a single data model so that, for instance, only one logical customer (or counter party) table exists.
The final implementation model is to install multiple Sybase instances within a single instance of the operating system. As noted above, with Solaris 10, these can be installed within their own Zone, or they can share zones. This Sun refers to as database server ‘Consolidation’.

Sybase's development of multiple workspaces has again extended the parallelisation of the server and reduces the number of serial bottlenecks. This is a technique that might permit multiple applications to be hosted within a single ASE server instance i.e. adopt pattern two above. ASE has for many years had multiple #145;databases’ within it but a database is a unit of recovery, not of applications logic and while Sybase has dramatically reduced the number of scarce resources within the ASE instance, it has no concept of application and its resource management algorithms have no concept of priority nor of service quality.

These weaknesses can be overcome by the Solaris resource manager which permits an application via a project to have its system resources guaranteed against anti-social behaviour be other applications. Having multiple Sybase instances within a Solaris instance would allow a more sophisticated resource management policy to be declared. Further reasons for ‘consolidating’ is that the regression tests for application changes are simpler. A change in one application will not require tests in the databases and procedures that are required by others and start/stop requests do not impact other applications. Any conflict around the values of the server run time parameters can be resolved using the consolidation model, to the extent that even different versions & EBFs of Sybase can be applied to different applications (using the file system name space to enforce and differentiate between versions). This last factor is very important if the platform designers do not own the Sybase version definition policy, such as when ISV code is being used.

Platform designers have a choice and they should carefully consider which of the three patterns they wish to implement as they develop their infrastructure plans.

tags: Technology "Platfrom Architecture" Sybase Solaris Consolidation

Blogs, Ally or Adversary

2005-04-01T20:07:05.000Z

There is a bit of storm about blogging going on at the moment. Tim Bray started it here, with a sharp manifesto for its goodness, but you may have missed Claire Giordano's contribution, which apart from making the business argument, lists a bunch of links from both the blogosphere and more traditional media outlets and usefully checkpoints the debate.

In summary, businesses that want to tell the truth, benefit from authentic knowledgeable spokespeople. Blogging is both a technology & culture that allows these people to talk directly to their consumers and external i.e. networked collaborators.

I'd like to add that these conversations (if they're with the right people) aid the co-invention process. Sun's key inventors can learn from our customers, while the customers can gain from Sun's experts and expertise.

tags: blogs

The Cruel Sea ... more

2005-04-01T19:56:08.000Z

Nicholas Monsarrat also wrote several autobiographical books about his wartime experience, particularly his time on the east coast convoys (UK, so very near occupied Europe). This would probably make Raikes (the navigation officer on the Saltash) the nearest thing to a personal appearance in the book. I'm not a great fan of the film, but the book is a great piece of writing. Because its set in convoy escorts, there is a theme of permanent danger from the sea, with tiny triumphs, the sinking of submarines and the taken for granted success of each ship safely escorted.

Re: The Cruel Sea ... more

2005-04-01T21:52:39.000Z

Thanks for writing this extra info up.

End of an Era?

2005-03-29T21:30:32.000Z

As the Easter holiday began, I picked the post of the floor and discovered three polling cards. Three!!. Goodness - they're letting my elder son vote this year. I haven't quite rushed to the photo albums to look at the pictures of him as a baby, but somehow, today, eighteen years seems to have flown like lightening. He can vote, kill & die for his country. (Don't think he can stand as an MP though.)

I should have seen this coming as he brings home more and more interesting history & politics homework, and while he doesn't want any help planning its completion, he's more than happy to bring his opinions to the dinner table. Lets hope he (& I) use our votes wisely in the next two months.

Nicholas & Alexandra, the last of the Romanovs

2005-03-27T13:16:49.000Z

I was watching the film "Nicholas & Alexandra" on Friday afternoon.

It just reminds me of the fact that I have never studied that period of history properly. My elder son is however; his History "A" Level course has spent three terms studying modern Russian ( & hence Soviet History). This is what attracted him, as the school has for many years visited Russia, sadly for his year, they decided to stop it. Actually the film was made in 1971 at the height of the cold war and is very dated in its production values, let alone its politics. The film is made after Massie's book of the same name and his story is told as a great personal drama. The film does better at trying to cover the social movements vying to modernise the Tsarist state, but its nearly 35 years old and was made only three years after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.

There are two great scenes I really enjoy! The first is at an editorial board meeting of "Iskra" (it might have been "Pravda"), the newspaper of the Bolshevik party prior to the 1st World War. Lenin says, "Who wrote this rubbish? Obviously you Trotsky?", thus distilling the fifty year argument that split the world's Left to one line of personal trivia. Secondly, Lenin arrives at the Finland Station, St. Petersburg (famously aided by the German Imperial Government) where in the film to the backdrop of (probably inaccurately) the Marseillaise, he calls for "Revolution!. Revolution Now!". Now there's a transitional programme! - You don't get writing like this any more. . Here is a web site with sheet music and audio files for the Marseillaise.

tags: Culture Film Marseillaise "Nicholas & Alexandria"

Dr Who & Utility Computing

2005-03-26T20:53:22.000Z

1^st episode of Dr Who for 20? years - finished about an hour ago. My Vote - great! (You can also see the BBC Site here....

Despite the casting of Billie Piper as the assistant and some of Chris Ecclestone's previous parts which hardly qualify him to play the Doctor, the BBC's investment in love, script, humour and effects just brings back the best. Ecclestone's mercurial, manic & mysterious performance is reminiscent of Tom Baker, the fan's favourite, and maybe Sylvester McCoy, one of my favourites. (I don't count Paul McGann as a Doctor, and neither does IMDB). While my son (18) asks how the shop dummies suddenly obtain machine guns up their arms, I jumped out my seat when the wheelie bin attacked Rose's (Piper) boy friend.

Interestingly, Google failed to get a product placement when Rose looked up the Doctor on the internet. They invented a search engine, and it took here three queries to find what she was looking for. Obviously more persistant than most of us.. We'd have cut back to Google on the third go. Also she went back to her boyfriend house to use the computer, she didn't pop into Starbucks and use a wireless connection on her mobile. (Admiitedly, it'd be difficult to show TV viewers what was happening. Unless they used "24" style split screen.)

For some dubious plot reason, Rose has to go to the basement to visit the CEOs office. WTF? This would be the first Chief Executive Officer I know who has an office in the basement! We learn later that the acronym CEO stood for Chief Electrical Officer. I thought the passing on of such a job, ushered the entrance of electrical supply to the utility world.

Perhaps the episode was set in the past.

tags: Culture "British TV" "Dr Who" search

Re: Dr Who & Utility Computing

2005-03-26T21:33:37.000Z

A bit slow with the review;-)
The BBC do product placement? Do you not remember Blue Peter and all that sticky tape. T#To go back on that would be a step too far for Dr Who.

Re: Dr Who & Utility Computing

2005-03-27T09:31:49.000Z

Chris

I do remember Blue Peter covering up logos on products they used. I've promised I'd not do Politics, but Thatcher & Birt changed all that. It seems that with Blue Peter its the private lives of the presenters thats the issue, not the washing up bottles used for modelling and product placement.

At least the search engine wasn't MSN

Re: Dr Who & Utility Computing

2005-03-27T12:14:45.000Z

Things have certainly changed, however in the opening sequence of Dr Who I got the distinct impression the store was like Harrods, but not actually Harrods, may just be me but already had me feeling like they were following the old BBC philosophy. Then again I doubt Harrods would be very pleased to have itself blown up!

Any way I'm glad Dr Who is back and looking forward to the next episode.

Re: Dr Who & Utility Computing

2005-03-29T21:37:35.000Z

Can't have been Harrods, its not near Picadilly Circus and they wouldn't let a chav like Rose work there

Is that a disk in your lap, or are you just pleased....

2005-03-24T22:19:58.000Z

One of the trends, more obvious during the earlier part of my week in San Francisco (Feb 21st through 1st March) is the debate about nomadic vs. network computing. The key difference is the network connection. Nomads disconnect from the network, like I've had to do from time to time. One of the reasons that I have to disconnect more than some is that I don't have a wireless card. I'll have to fix that. I've been impressed by the way that colleagues have had net access while I've had to wait until I can get broadband access. However in some areas of the world, broadband is not ubiquitous and according to some US colleagues overestimated in the USA. Broadband is unusual in hotels in the UK, (certainly the ones I use) and no connection is provided on trains & planes. (They're coming but currently seen as premium items; business people are expected to expense it).

For these and other reasons some people hold out for nomadic computing, using laptops with disk. One particular reason is the Mac lover syndrome, having escaped the cr*pness of the PC, they can't believe that the network's caught them and they're going to have to abandon their beloved fashion accessory .

The most developed nomadic software solution is e-mail with IMAP cacheing but Greg Papadopolouos addressed this in his speech to SEC. He argued that e-mail is becoming an online experience because of hyperlinks and attachments. (However, you can delete your spam while disconnected and Bill Vass (see here) argues for and uses his 'phone/PDA to do his mail when Sunrays are unavailable.) The growing frequency of wi-fi hot spots, our conference room (at SEC) is one , means that it is the power requirements that are begining to constrain our network connectivity while on move, as opposed to a cable length. Laptop Sunray's won't have disks, so their batteries should last longer. But the answer may still be the mobile phone, I can check my wap enabled e-mail accounts using the phone (although the screen is still shit, so I can delete my spam, and read the subject lines, but it'll be a while before I'm reading Jonathan's Blog using a 'phone).

tags: Technology "Network Computing"

Crediting a Smile

2005-03-24T09:37:03.000Z

I have uploaded a Smiley graphic to my resources area, which I propose to use shortly. I got it from ''cybergifs', at the time, use is free, but they've asked for a credit. So here it is!

More 10aroundtown

2005-03-22T19:29:42.000Z

I've put up some more pictures of the 10aroundtown exhibition. You can see them at either my flickr sets or now at technorati Solaris or sculpture.

tags: none

Will CPU trading enable an FX market??

2005-03-22T18:32:07.000Z

I met with Roger Day, Sun's Engineering Director responsible for building Sun's Utility Grid. We had a long conversation. I was eager to explore how one makes the outputs of the grid homogeneous, since the homogeneity of the commodity is one of its axiomatic qualities. He asked me what I thought of the idea of an exchange. I replied that my view is that if we can create a primary market, and it looks like we can, a secondary market will follow. I wonder though if people will look to exchange Solaris CPU/hours for AIX or even Windows CPU/hours. Will we have a cycle FX market?.

tags: SUNW Solaris Utility Exchange

Re: Will CPU trading enable an FX market??

2005-03-22T20:12:06.000Z

This is an interesting subject, and something I've been thinking a lot about lately.

I think the short answer to how to set the price of CPU-hours is to leave it to basic market forces - supply and demand. I see no sane way of creating a fixed price ratio between different system types.

Basically, every customer's program will have a different profile in how it taxes the system. Given this, for a particular workload the amount of work gained from an hour of CPU time is different for every system type. So it would be up to each customer to profile their application and make bids based on that. So if system-A is twice as fast as system-B for a particular workload, then the customer would be willing to pay up to double (maybe more if they care about single threaded performance) for a CPU-hour on system-A.

Conversely, supplies would supply more of whatever system type has the best margins, which of course would depend on their capital and running costs (different OSs would also have different running costs).

From an overall market perspective, the fewer different types of systems offered the better, since it makes life easier for customers. Suppliers may be able to provide "guidance" (eg based on SPECint, SPECfp, common applications or whatever) but basically it should be up to customers to solve their own problems well - like with buying/selling shares.

Given that customers would need a "developer grid" to develop and testing their grid applications, they would get benchmark data from that.

A problem that I only just thought of however, is "what next?" after making a purchase. If the buyer gets a particular number of CPUs in a particular time-slot, that's easy to arrange - though there is the issue of what to do if a customer's job takes longer to complete than the time-slot allowed for. But what if you want fully dynamic allocation of CPUs and precise metering (you only pay for the fractions of CPU-hours that you actually used)?

In such a scenario, the number of available CPUs will be variable since current jobs could end at any time, and new ones could be launched at any time. If the supply is constantly variable, then the price should be too (laws of supply and demand). So what does a buyer get when making a purchase? If you buy X CPU-hours at $Y per CPU-hour, do you have to use it immediately (bad for buyer) or can you use it at any time (bad for supplier)? I don't think either would work.

I think the only way to do this would be to submit a job together with a price. That price is effectively the buyer saying "this is how much I'm willing to pay" and from a CPU allocation point of view, becomes a priority - the grid controller will give highest priority to the most expensive jobs. If a job has a fairly low price (priority) then it may not get processed for some time, and would just sit in a queue. Might want a way for customers to change the price of a job after it has been submitted (though this might make metering "interesting"), or to terminate it if it's still in the queue.

So instead of an exchange in a normal sense to allow customers to choose a grid provider and system type, I guess what they'd need is a portal of some kind, showing current average prices (maybe with a histogram of demand) for each option.

I hope that makes some kind of sense...

Re: Will CPU trading enable an FX market??

2005-03-22T20:37:10.000Z

This is an interesting idea, seeding secondary markets from the grid. Beyond the straight commodity FX analogy, I see a added value market emerging, which I will dub "pimp my batch" (In the sense of "pimp my ride" car customizing show for the non-US folks). I see people submitting / contracting their jobs to grid aggregrators / managers who abstract the underlying (sp?) grids, tune the jobs, segment the jobs and track/schedule thm across many diverse grid providers. Kinda like RSS in reverse . . . We already see this within in other commodity markets.

In response to the previous comment:
I think the only way to do this would be to submit a job together with a price. That price is effectively the buyer saying "this is how much I'm willing to pay" and from a CPU allocation point of view, becomes a priority

The pure payment = priority is too variable for most people's SLA/SLOs - the user is taking all the risk here. Most of the time, users are willing to take some risk but not all. I think this will take a queue from help desk SLA/SLO methodology, you will submit a job and SLA bucket, and the provider will take the risk to capacity plan and schedule the resources. Imagine, high priority jobs queued and/or queued+delivered within 3hr, mdeium priority within 6hrs, etc.

Re: Will CPU trading enable an FX market??

2005-03-23T09:48:28.000Z

Very interesting view - one I've thought about a lot. I think Sun have an ideal opportunity here to innovate and create new market for precisely this kind of compute unit. I think the idea could be expanded a lot further too - take pure exchange mechanisms of supply and demand, and add in the option of exotics etc, and you could create a situation where companies are effectly able to hedge their end of year processing requirements, or perhaps 'buy' competitive advantage (ie, reduce time to market) by looking at the cost / benefit equation of running exotic pricing models quicker. The only issue I see is that of the definition of the commodity. It would need a set of attributes, expressed in business, service and computing terms which would be commonly portable and platform independent. Did someone say Java ? True markets are driven by supply and demand - rather like the idea of selling units on eBay (which could be used a test market ?) by creating the exchange - it may be that the accessability of the final commodity (ie, its portability) would be the principal driver behind its price. The availability of high bandwidth communications has been a key enabler of this.

Re: Will CPU trading enable an FX market??

2005-03-30T07:46:57.000Z

I have no doubt that once retail grids exist, customers will start to trade contracted time. This will be particularly true since some of the early adopters will be experts on the time value of delivery contracts. I don't think any of us are arguing about that.

What interested my was that like Foreign Exchange, where you must pay your debts in the incurred currency, programs can only run in their compiled state which requires a given CPU architecture. I'm not sure where the primary exchange market comes from, but a secondary market is very real possibility.

One big difference, is that I can't see a central bank role.

10 Around Town

2005-03-11T19:46:34.000Z

I got down to St Helen's and took some pictures, I'm slowly uploading them to http://www.flickr.com. Because they're on flickr, they coming through on technorati.

The reason I think this is really good, is it mixes publicising the great qualities of Solaris 10, with communitarian sponsorship and we get the double whammy of people talking about the art and talking about Sun & Solaris. I'm sorry just we've tied it to Solaris 10 and not Solaris or Sun.

tags: Solaris sculpture

Solaris, Concepts and Branding

2005-03-08T17:28:33.000Z

It'll probably be a while, before I stop banging on about CEC, but one of the presentations was from a team considering how to communicate values through brands and marcom activity. As a Brit,working for a US company, sometimes the outcomes of these considerations are deeply embarassing outside the US. (I'll leave it to americans to comment on how well these things work inside the USA.)

In the UK, however, Sun has teamed up with the "Royal Institute of Art" to (as it says on the 10 around town website to "create an exciting and innovative promotional campaign designed to bring the benefits of Solaris 10 to life". Sun commissioned a competition amonst the students to associate, using sculpture, key values to the No 10, and hence Solaris. The winners are here on the net, and will be available for viewing outside the Lloyd's building on Thursday. Full details about the campaign are on the 10 around town site. I may try and get down to St Helen's Piazza, these look quite good.

tags: Solaris sculpture

My CEC Diary

2005-03-08T17:22:07.000Z

I've just updated and finished the diary entries for my trip to San Francisco and Sun's CEC. Those of you who read via http, might like to revisit for the 28th Feb (this... will get you there today). I have also updated my review of Jonathan's presentation.

Sorry its taken so long, but I've been really busy, which is good.

Virgin Atlantic

2005-03-01T01:19:43.000Z

Well! Two things, the Video on Demand technology delivered to the back of the seat works fine, big improvement from last time I flew. "Kill Bill 2" & "Sky Captain and the world of tomorrow".

They're now charging extra for exit aisle seats. Really don't agree, it encourages the wrong sort of person.

CEC Best Blog

2005-02-28T18:52:36.000Z

As the lights came on, Jon Haslam (blogs here...) approached me to tell me that I'd won the CEC best blogger award. Not only that, but you put me into the second most read blog on http://blogs.sun.com. So thanks for reading this and putting me into second position, I hope you enjoyed what I had to say, and that some of you'll stay with me. You can see from the categories what I normally write about. I also hope Ken's still talking to me.

Highlights from Scott McNealy

2005-02-28T18:45:16.000Z

So we listened to Scott, present to us, and again I offer you some belated highlights

"You are core competency!", that means us, Sun's field technologists

"The Market Opportunity we're creating!", about the fact that Sun is the leading Opteron systems provider.

Google has 125,000 CPUs in its grid. We'll sell'em Niagra and solve California's energy crisis. Greg Papadopolous in his presentation stated that Google's electricity costs were the single largest cost to operate their infrastructure, so if Nigara's power consumption works out, its going to be compelling to the web services companies.

Oracle (licensing policies) are "our problem". Oracle are acting in their shareholder's interests

Storage is a feature, not an industry!

"I don't know where my desktop is! - if you know don't tell me, I like being able to say I don't know!", he's using Sun's desktop extranet, with Sun Rays at the desk.

CEC Last Day

2005-02-28T18:15:05.000Z

The previous meeting was so good, I almost missed Scott's presentation, as I entered the Hall I bumped into Ken Pepple (one of my book's co-author's) who said that I'd missed a presentation to me and I'd won an award. I thought he was winding me up so I told him to go away. "Yeah, Yeah - pull the other one its got bells", so Ken decided to ignore me.

Service Management Facility

2005-02-28T18:10:42.000Z

Popped in to see Liane Praza present on the Solaris 10 Service Management Facility. Its awesome, I really must get going on the Laptop Diaries and build a Sybase service. Steve Hahn was also present so the three of us had a chat about SMF and N1, what it enables, and how/who to convince. I mentioned the work I did with Sun Cluster at what was then ING Barings, and the application/data services boundary clash in the hope that the insights might inform the engineering of services/cluster integration. They seemed either interested or polite. I have put Lianne's blog on my blogroll and RSS feeder. This feature of Solaris 10 is awsome and so underrated. Somehow its all Zones & Dtrace, but this is also key; it enables a common job management semantic within and across systems. Maybe its my ticket to CEC 2006.

tags: SUNW Solaris SMF Technology

Searching the Net

2005-02-28T16:43:23.000Z

Went to see Tom Clark at the Sun Library stand, who was demonstrating "Grokker" (released by Groxis (nice favicon)), a search visualisation package that the library staff have put in front of some of their collections. He ran a couple of queries which just showed how lazy "page rank" has made us. It presents its findings in a series of concetric circles. We discussed the fact that colour and size should be significant, otherwise, its pretty much an explorer hierarchy using encapsulated circles, rather than the expanding/contracting explorer. Its quite dramatic but I am sure it'll take some time to get used to it. Some stuff can be saved onto your own disk such as queries and bookmarks. The conversation drifted onto taxonomy and Tom stated that Sun Library had been working on building one, but had stopped. He said he'd try and dig it out and send it to me. I have a lot of sympathy with the blog correspondent who stated that good taxonomies were too expensive to be worth it, and I don't know if this is original but they age. {e.g. The meaning of HA (as in high availability) has changed over the last eight years and the way we describe today what HA described eight years ago is very different.}

These days you can't discuss Information Management taxonomies without discussing Technorati's tags so we spent a couple of minutes doing that. Tom had had the opportunity to look at a complete list of tags, which is not available online, but maybe available if one licences the technorati SDK. Obviously the complete tag list is also defined by the community (together with spelling mistakes, internationalisation and the plural problem). I'd best tag this article now. (You'll also notice (or not) that I have given up on the spelling of Datacentre for tagging, so not only does meaning change over time, but in English, internationalisation changes both spelling & meaning.) It'll be interesting to see what the librarians have to say on the taxonomy issue, since they ought to be pretty expert.

We 'grokked' a query on Julian May, the pseudonym for Julia Majewski, author of "Saga of the Exiles", who I know from previous google based research does not have a large internet presence (other than the online bookstores flogging her books). The google query finds the fan sites more rapidly and grokker does not really organise the adverts well. It did find some blogs I hadn't found before (and can't find in Google), which I hadn't found before. I'll need to spend some more time on this.

tags: tags librarianship

Checking Out

2005-02-28T16:20:24.000Z

This morning, we have sessions on Utility Computing followed by Scott McNealy (CEO). I'm flying home this afternoon, and don't expect to get online to post. I'll be writing up Scott's speech on the plane so it won't be online until Tuesday. I'm also going to try and write a reflections piece to give you my impressions of the whole event and the themes that Sun has offered me as enduring over the week.

I've been writing these conference blogs in near real time, on my disconnected laptop and uploading them later. I've been timestamping the articles as at the time of writing. You may wish to check your feeds (or my index) to see if you've missed anything. Although the index (see the right hand panel) needs fixing to make it easier to use.

Thanks for reading this stuff, I know that the readership has been much higher then normal, I hope you come back for the finishing pieces. (You may even remain regular readers). Cheerio.

Technology, Pool & Beer

2005-02-28T06:29:06.000Z

More sessions on Consolidation & Edge computing, bumped into Drossos and then back to Jillian's Pool Hall for an Architect's get together.

Sun's Products & Solutions

2005-02-27T20:30:24.000Z

Today's gone very quickly, but this morning my highlights were John Fowler and Mark Canepa. As previously their slides are at the Sun Analyst Summit site.

These guys were preceded by John Lociano, (VP Software) who has recently visited the UK, he introduced us to his CTO, Juan Carlo Soto. Juan Carlo went through a couple of things but his emphasis on the Predictive Self Healing features of Solaris 10 was interesting. It's hard to sell and understand features (such as availability) that customers take for granted. He also demonstrated the coming N1 Grid Console. John Lociano had Sybase on his slide as an ISV, (hooray), but interestingly went through the reasons why (two years ago) customers weren't engaging with Sun. We were expensive, slow, SPARC only, loosing the application developers, had no Linux interoperability (or Microsoft) and were seen (somehow) as proprietary. Only the most biased would not agree that Sun has addressed these things. On the proprietary front, we're sometimes not our own best friends, but Solaris is UNIX (SVR4) & UNIX is not proprietary and now we've open sourced Solaris. The techies at Sun should retain or reacquire the open, community vocabulary that its always had about its software, and this desire to cooperate and leverage our community is what I saw at SEC earlier this week. Actually, this one makes me spit, the only people that really think Solaris is proprietary are those with an interest in an alternative operating system. Most of them think that all UNIXs are proprietary.

John Fowler introduced Andy Bechtelstein who permitted him to lift the cloth off one of the next generation systems, an MP opteron system. John said that since his previous job was software, he'd never been able to do this before.

John Canepa did his new Solution/Problem/Product/Product/Product/Product....... presentation. Its reminiscent of the famous quote in the UK (three years ago). "Sun is now a solutions company, we have 2 CPU solutions and 72 CPU solutions." There is no doubt that we have an excellent range of storage products on top of which storage architects can offer flexible, function rich and cost effective solutions architectures. We can at least have conversation with customers about their problems rather than ask them how many they want and this is only expanded by the breadth of our data management software solutions. My highlight was his first point on his solutions slide that makes the point that to convert data to information, users need running applications code and this does not run on the disk controller. Business data architects (should) think information -> application -> server -> storage, if they get that far. Platform designers that let their storage management architects or vendors determine their applications strategy are not working to their employer's shareholders interest. I've been arguing this for seven years and sometimes its seemed very lonely. He repeated the crack that money spent on storage is a waste because if the data is on the disk it ain't working. Nice one! Another reason I like John is that he quotes my (our) book, "Migration to the Solaris OS" by Pepple, Down & Levy. Its my book in that I was one of the authors and if the sentence construction that I am the only subject noun, "my" is correct but I would not want anyone to think that the others weren't part of it. Anyway Sun Blueprints has been revived and rumour has it we're going to release two more chapters as online blueprints. The Blueprints programme online page is here..., the book page is here...... and the original online teaser article is here....

Dinner

2005-02-27T07:59:59.000Z

I attended some of the sessions this afternoon on storage & data centre solutions, visited the demo room to speak to the Blueprints programme (sic) who are back in business and then popped down to Chinatown for dinner.

Sun's New Utility

2005-02-26T20:30:10.000Z

Robert Youngjohns, spoke arguing that Applications will conform to the Utility platform (Solaris or J2EE), Is this true? Robert uses his own personal solution to his electricity problem after moving to the US where he had to get rid of his lovely solid UK plugs for the nasty dangerous easy to fallout US plugs, with one exception. Robert reckons there'll be execeptions in IT as well, although his domestic example is a legacy appliance. My concern is the new applications that deliver compelling competitive advantage and are written in house. If Electricity is an appropriate metaphor for IT, then the appliance is an application. Competitive advantage yielding applications cost more than a kettle and often cost more than the in-house infrastructure. Greg Papadopolous say's this is going away as corporate software aquisition moves from buy/build to assemble/rent. The inherent & potential innovation available in software and its rapid time to market mean that businesses will seek to compete more using software functionality not less.

Robert also interestingly stated that in building/designing our grid we've discovered two very important cost saving policies. Run diskless, don't provision the box, don't cool the disks. Secondly, don't remove broken systems until your retiring the rack, its too expensive to remove. We're talking about very large grid configurations, but the first rule can be applied by most people today, provided their LAN speed is high enough.

tags: Technology SUNW "Utility Computing"

Management by Soundbite

2005-02-26T19:26:51.000Z

Jonathan (Swartz) spoke for a couple of minutes and then took questions. You all know he blogs here... and can find out what he wants you to hear by using the blog. My highlights are ....

On Sunrays & network desktops, "Whose got a server at home? Ooops wrong audience."

On competing with Linux - Focus on Cost (we're talking RTU here), Indemnification & Performance

On Oracle - "Who wants us to do an open source database? Come on hands up." While only 20% or so of the audience put their hands up, he was one of them and these decisions are not taken by a popular vote.

"Developers have no money" so we must enagage them in other ways.

On customer value, "Understand the Business Environment, Differentiate through Technology"

On CIO buy in to open source, at one of his CIO conferences, one of the delegates asked why Sun bothered with open source for Solaris he established to the audience that they had Linux in their data centre but hadn't authorised the purchase, "You're not my target demographic!".

He blogged the Solaris x86 download numbers (here...) - 350K downloads, how's that Red Hat?

tags: SUNW Solaris

Technology Futures

2005-02-26T19:23:43.000Z

Sadly Greg Papadopolus, SUN CTO ( his blog) was not available, but a video of his pitch was presented. (His slides are here... ). He starts by exploring the change in software economics from shrink wrap to service and from their shows how organisations can leverage network organisations and immersive supply chain management to great new applications fabrics by assembling service. Unfortunately, he uses the word "Outsource", which in some places remains sensible, but is often a dirty word for dumping cost (& inefficiency) somewhere else. The search for excellent business performance is required, so crude outsourcing is never a good thing; businesses can always save their outsourcers margin, and if they're lazy the customer pays for that as well.

Greg suggested that desktops are great examples of service economics and since bandwidth is about to overtake desktop pixel maps, remote desktops are becoming a real option and economies of scale become available to all, not just across large corporates. The question remaining in my mind is are companies seeking to compete through product excellence as opposed to operational efficiency going to outsource their IT. I accept the key is development but there are some customers who need to keep ownership of their IT.

tags: Technology Software

Confidence & Strength

2005-02-26T18:20:21.000Z

Marissa Petersen : "Your confidence is our strength!"

She also stated that in measuring the causes of customer satisfaction and dissatisfacton, they've discovered the top two causes of both are the same (and obvious), "Effective Support" and "Competitive Product". This is good, because it proves we can do both well, so we only have to get it right more often.

Solutions or Service

2005-02-26T17:14:21.000Z

One of Sun's internal debates is what "Solutions" are. Currently in my mind there seems to be ambiguity between a Solutions or Utility proposition, and what Sun seeks to organise around. Bob Macritchie (EVP Global Sales) opened the conference with a presentation on Sun's sales model. He spoke in balanced terms between solutions (consultancy/project) and programme (commodity/utility) (See here....). He was clear that he wanted GEM (geographic organisations) autonomy, presumably using both loose and tight controls, but he did describe them as billing engines. This does not imply a lot of faith in their intellectual property generation but it may have been a throw-away remark. The model is fine, certainly of value to our customers and probably fun to work in. His slides contained enough material to suggest that he believes that the establishment & proving of value can be monetised as can transitional i.e. project service. On the other side, he clearly sees the Client Solutions practices as driving product and hence "wrapping" product sales. However since its my view that Sun sells data centres (& components) I can live with that (as if I'm successful so can he).

Its how to show people that considering their IT platform architecture and economics, in the context of data centre rather than applications platform that remains difficult.

tags: SUNW Consulting

Sun Customer Engineering I

2005-02-26T17:10:54.000Z

The CTOs were followed by five of Sun's leading execs. Bob McRitchie, Marrisa Petersen, Greg Papadopolous, Jonathan Scwartz & Robert Youngjohns. They have just presented to Sun's Analyst Summit so the slides they used are available at Sun's web site here.... The report I'm about to make is an idiosyncratic view, and says as much about me and what I heard rather than attempting to be fair and balanced.

Technology as a service tomorrow!

2005-02-26T16:54:51.000Z

Hal & Jim opened the CEC. In Hal's speech, he referred to some research undertaken by Brenda Laurel about how teenagers consume technology, my take away point is that they love their phones, my personal experience is that they don't use e-mail. He illustrates how kids are consuming technology as a service (albeit transactional service) and that they perceive companies and offering differently. Apple is a design company, not an engineering one. This service orientated computing needs to occur, but the consumers thinks tehnology is cool, and they'll be the only buyers years in 20 years time. Again my expereince is that having held out for many years, I've just bought Sky, internet broad band and a web site (including disk rental).

Brenda's original research was about Girls & Games - go on check it out

tags: Culture Technology Game

Predicting Outage

2005-02-25T21:40:25.000Z

Mike Harding (Sun Preventive (sic) Services) presented on his groups new offerings.

The highlight for me was his very dramatic illustration that standard availability metrics i.e. Four or Five Nines are historic and cannot be changed, in order to manage, leading indicators are needed which is why Sun has developed the Operational Risk Index (ORI). This may not be new to some of you, but it is to me despite Richard Morgan's attempts to keep me up to date.

Mike also had a very dramatic illustration of risk dimensions, differentiating between probability and severity (or cost). Interestingly the bulk of the audience chose to minimise probability not cost.

Re: Predicting Outage

2005-03-01T20:46:25.000Z

I too think its interesting that decreasing the probability of an outage is more popular than cost. Sun's customers told us this 3 years ago when they said availability is everything. Yet, when faced with the numbers today, my experience indicates that consumers, when faced with the choice will choose cost and techinicans will choose to minimize the probability of outage. The only real solution to this is to create high availability appliances (or utiities) at low cost so other, more salient drivers can effect margins.

Solaris, scripting & GUIs

2005-02-25T21:33:51.000Z

Over the last few days, I bumped into Tim Bray, (well, more accurately arranged to meet him). Somehow or other we got onto scripting, had a chat about languages and purpose. I've been mucking around with TCL/TK over the last few years and struggling to make it look right under my Linux builds. (The Laptop Diaries series may get there when I return to it). I reflected Tim's view that TCL had probably missed its adoption window to Mike Ramchand, and he showed me 'zenity', which he uses to build the GUI for his dynamic system configurator. ('zentity' is part of Sun's S10 Gnome distribution, although not its not on my Red Hat build.). Its obvious that I'm going to have to move on. Frankly, I should find perl or python easier than tcl; I started with COBOL and now use SQL or shell.

tags : Technology UNIX Solaris scripting

Stern, Management and taking Solaris as a feed

2005-02-25T18:43:15.000Z

The meeting today was opened by Hal Stern (Sun Services CTO). He repeated & re-inforced several themes about utility and annuity or subscription services but interesting highlighted several things. Firstly he argued for an enlightened, liberating management style to harness talent, "Think XP, not waterfall" because waterfall involves management saying no or re-work it a lot and "does not scale".

He also in a discussion about mapping AIM onto "Customise, Standardise, Utilise" raised the goal of offering Solaris as a service based subscription. The language I've been using is to make Solaris a real-time feed, enabling Sun's customers to take advantage of the newest, most reliable and best as it becomes available. It is not in the customer's business's interest that they're running on an operating system that can be up to 4 years old; the app will also be that old. It can't be delivering the same competitive advantage as when it was conceived any longer. There is no doubt that a change in attitude amongst applications developers is required to make this happen.

One of the interesting things about doing these meetings is the way in which the execs re-inforce each other. Hal repeated some of the themes that Bill Vass spoke to earlier this week (blogged here..), most importantly the ideology enabling Grid architectures and Grid nodes (pods or super pods) was re-explored, in this case mapping it to service offerings.

Another of Hal's point's was the need to create and enable appliance level reliability for both hardware, software and applications.

Hal blogs here.... at the Morning Snowman

tags : SUNW Technology Utility+Computing Datacenter sic Technology

San Francisco

2005-02-24T23:21:17.000Z

We left early and drove up to San Francisco. Its a long time since I've been to San Francisco and even longer since I have been a passenger. Interesting, if ugly view on the 101 on the way in.

Sun's Software Engineering IV

2005-02-24T21:00:54.000Z

Delivered my second pitch about how fantastic the field (ho ho) is and how customer requirements were difficult to discover, but that engagement, solutions practices and engineering/technology could develop long term relations allow customers to see value in Sun's technology, transitional services or consultancy or its more traditional service offerings. Doing this involves talking to each other in Sun (which we often don't do, or do badly) and understanding the complexity of the customer voice.

V-Girl

2005-02-24T20:19:51.000Z

During quiet bit, I had this article, "Socially inadequate? Meet V-girl" at The Register by Lester Haines pointed out to me. Very Funny!

Two Things

2005-02-24T20:17:01.000Z

One of the "Remark Presenters" showed us the Two Things site. The site owner reckons that most knowledge domains can be distilled to two things. For instance,

The Two Things about Blogging:
1. Everyone who runs one is a kook.
2. Everyone who comments in one is a kook.

Check the site out for more wisdom.

Linky's Law

2005-02-24T19:51:03.000Z

Linky's law of statistics states 'If you think you've discovered something interesting, you're wrong!'. Actually the law is that you should look again, its usually wrong and you've usually made a mistake in your sample design or handling your data.

This rule has helped me a lot and another example came up today, when one of the presenters, showed a table of database popularity on Sun with no DB2. This implies that the source data is skewed against DB2 owners. Bet they don't do explorers.

Silver Bullets

2005-02-24T18:36:44.000Z

Sarah Sheard, of the Internation Council on Systems Engineering gave this morning's keynote. She offered several definitions of systems engineering and spoke about the usefulness (I have this massive urge to use the word utility in its "Economics" jargon sense, but it'll be confusing) of silver bullets. She examined in case study form the development of a breakaway business performance strategy, starting with rejecting all silver bullets and showing the original success, emulation, bastardisation and failure of the strategy leading to another company starting again with "No Silver Bullets". The moral of her story is to understand and solve your own problems. It raises the question of whether the failure to adopt the successful strategy is based on the fact that second wave adopters are trying to catch up and need a different strategy from those that originally made the change, or whether there are endemic inhibitors to re-use.

tags: Business Competition

Sun's Engineering Conference IV

2005-02-24T06:42:35.000Z

I spent the rest of the afternoon, preparing for tomorrow, listening to papers and then attended the 'Poster' session, which was better than I expected, the posters genuinely attract attention and the 121 conversations are potentially more insightfull than a paper followed by Q&A. Its been a good day!

Openness in Sun's DNA

2005-02-24T04:25:14.000Z

One of the interesting things, and it may have taken a journey here to Sun's Santa Clara campus to rediscover it, is that people (speakers & delegates) believe in openness and believe Sun is at its best when utilising openness to deliver customer value.

Applications' Citizenship

2005-02-23T23:00:39.000Z

I'm still at Sun Engineering and I ran a BoF on my Applications' Citizenship theory. For those (all?) of you who've not heard them, I attempt to classify an applications sociability by observing its behaviour. Applications can thus, be good citizens and co-exist with all apps that do not themselves exhibit some form of non-social behaviour. The three classes of non-social behaviours are bad citizens, which jeopardise the operating system, anti-social citizens which cause a limited, known and bound list of applications to fail and a special class of the anti-social where an application cannot exist with additional instances of itself (Pschitzo). Having created a classification model, we can do a couple of things. The first is to design behaviours for the infrastructure to cope with the good and non-social citizens (by building Clubs, Gaols and Asylums) and and the second is to understand the nature of the non-social behaviour. This is usually a poor and/or exclusive use of scarce resources. If we could list these scarce resources, then applications developers could aim at writing applications with "Good" citizenship and/or infrastructure designers understand if they need a rationing or containerisation response to the applications. Sadly it has not been well attended.

Sun's Software Engineering II

2005-02-23T18:30:57.000Z

Ron Jefferies (XProgramming.com) presented a keynote speech about Agile software development. I enjoyed his pitch, although I'm no longer a developer. He delivered some great slogans. Despite describing them as slogans, these are based on important insights. I like "Ship early, ship often". I was also interested in his view (reinforced by John Nolan) that team co-location is very important. I also enjoyed his defintion of the customer requirement as "Free, Now & Perfect". He also talked about software project planning, progress forecasting and enhancing the ability to understand whether the project is on time or late. Possibly my favourite comment was the suggestion that consultants should charge more if their advice is not accepted. It re-inforces some of what I wrote here....

Both Ron & John showed that the agile/extreme programming methodologies have a lot to say about any management problem, leveraging insight and experience about the way people work to get the best from them, discussing issues ranging from dealing with the over development of capability through growth when juniors develop into seniors and you have too many seniors, the trade offs between methodology discipline, creativity and motivation and how to keep management slim.

Sun's Software Engineering

2005-02-23T16:45:50.000Z

Greg Papapdopolus (SUNW CTO), blogging here.... opened the conference and talked about some developments and forecasts on which Sun medium term plans are based, he only took a couple of minutes and will be speaking at length later in the week. One of his points is the growing support for "the Network is the Computer". Greg argued that we're reaching a world in which people think that if they can't get google, the computer's broken. You can read his own words here.....

Utility Computing

2005-02-23T02:02:12.000Z

Attended an all day seminar in Utility Computing. Couple of interesting presentations, the day was opened by Jim Baty and closed by Bill Vass. Frankly, its been a patchy day and I'm still not sure how firms requiring competitive advantage from their IT can leverage utility offerings which need a degree of homogeneity. It was definitely interesting and heartening to hear that several customers, who have the expertise to build the complex grids on which today's utility offerings are to be based, are still coming to Sun; they want to get the systems of their books, reduce their capital expenditure and increase the return on assets. (This is obviously of particular interest to companies with high capital utilisation and where IT competes with more traditional capital goods for Capex budget.) One further area of interest is for companies undertaking "Development" projects where the Capex costs become prohibitive for the start up. This is alleviated by using a funding model where cost and activity scale in harmony, and means that the risk of overprovision is negligible, thus enabling the project to proceed.

Bill Vass's presentation was very interesting. He illustrated a number of applications above and beyond the limited (in number not criticality) stateless parallelisable apps that Sun's current $1/CPU/hour is currently aimed at. He showed how a single data centre architecture can supply/host these new age applications and set in my mind new goals for utility solutions and data centre architectures. It also interestingly, because the preso was first written last summer, reflects the ideas now expressed in Andy Ingram's presentation to Sun's Analyst Summit "Workload-based Systems Design: A new Approach" (available here....). Due to the network centric approach he takes for applications delivery, he's also very interesting on security, even taking on nomadic issues for those last places in the developed world to get network connections i.e. trains & planes and he's working on those. I don't know if his visions would have saved me my unnecessary trip (see here) to town last weekend, I doubt that the battery of a wireless laptop Sun Ray would last a complete week, but I may look and see what it offers me, unlike my home systems, I don't need games on laptop.

Jim Gately who runs Sun's Scalable Systems Group's computing facility also spoke to us. His team runs one of the largest grids in the world, and had some useful tips. He stated that none of the grid management solutions are efficient enough to scale beyond about 1000 nodes and they've written their own because of this. He was asked about re-purposing of his systems, and stated that he didn't, but that any job running on his grid needed to acquire any additional resources as part of the job (They also decommit them as well). The average system node size is quite large (4 - 8 way) and his capacity planners understand the applications performance resource consumption behaviour well. They've built a theoretical model around job management throughput and queuing which he described as two dimensional. These strangely are flow, resource and priority. (Strange because now I am writing about it, I am describing three factors).

tags : SUNW Technology Nomadic Computing Internet Datacenter

On the Plane

2005-02-21T20:00:22.000Z

We're above the clouds, it can't be snowing or raining. Captn. Haddock says its raining in San Francisco. Bother (or something)!

Ramblings

2005-02-21T14:38:50.000Z

God' its early! While I've chosen to live in "commuting" distance of Heathrow and Gatwick airports, the Highway Authority's activities make the journey to Heathrow deeply unpleasant. I woke up considerably earlier than I expected, so I set off to 'Frisco, well Heathrow actually. It was jolly cold as I left the house and my fantasies of balmy Californian evenings and sunsets receded into the distance as I decided whether I was going to take a raincoat or my "City" woollen overcoat.

As I travelled towards London, the sun rose. In some places this might make one feel warmer but today, the sky remains grey and the radio reports that its snowing 50 miles to the east. I hope we get away on time.

Travel : Business or Pleasure Sir?

2005-02-21T02:15:17.000Z

I'm now planning my journey to San Francisco for the two conferences I mentioned here.... I'm flying Virgin Atlantic, so I'll crack on the Frequent Flyers miles. (I must get round to using these, perhaps next summer?) OBTW, anyone want to recommend a book guide to upstate New York. I'm considering driving from NYC to Niagra next summer.

Re: Travel : Business or Pleasure Sir?

2005-09-08T02:00:17.000Z

[Trackback] mhgcu@trstrjs.net

Instant Knowledge

2005-02-20T02:00:00.000Z

Good Day today! Not! Just preparing to charge up the Laptop for the trans-atlantic flight ( see here... ) and I discover that I've left the power lead & transformer at work. Just as well I discovered today, that gives me some time to get up to town to recover it. Despite the internet's alleged 24*7 opening hours, I can't find anyone to sell one to me and deliver within 24 hours if those hours are Saturday/Sunday. Just goes to prove that there's still much not yet in the alway's connected business world.

Work Trips & Sun's Software Engineering Summit

2005-02-16T17:24:00.000Z

In the 1st quarter of each year, Sun runs a number of internal conferences, one of which is the Sun Engineering Conference (SEC), a new, yearly forum where Sun's engineering community can exchange ideas, learn new techniques and practices, and work to apply our considerable engineering talent and knowledge to help Sun succeed. This year we are focusing on Bridging the Gap—on leveraging our field experience and our customer knowledge, and on the engineering methodologies and best practices that turn great technologies into great products. This will be followed by Sun premier technical training event for field staff, the "Customer Engineering Conference".

The SEC is by invitation only and I shall be going to San Francisco to attend. I shall be presenting two papers, (one in a Bird's of a Feather format). I have constucted an advert for my content on my Sun web space (the URL is advertised on the usual web directory). So if your a conference attendee, please check this out?

Obviously I hope to write about what I'll say here in the near future, and we're being encouraged to 'blog' our trips. I'm not sure if and where I'm going to do this, but the last one I went to (2 years ago) was quite inspiring. (As a stiff, upper lip sort of Brit, I really don't like (or often hear) the brasher US boasting and 'Ra-Ra' that these events so often generate, but the last one was inspiring, so here's hoping for more.

Let them eat Cake

2005-02-10T10:33:14.000Z

I was checking out the news about Carly leaving HP at The Register and they cross referenced to http://www.phrases.org.uk/, a site that acts as a dictionary of quotes. This is quite fun and may be useful.

tags: Reference Dictionary English Idioms

Real Options & Flexible Planning

2005-02-07T17:17:17.000Z

Kieron Bradley, one of my colleagues at Sun, during a piece of client consulting recently had reason to use financial option theory & language to justify why CPU's in Sun's large systems are more expensive to buy than those in the smaller ones. He and the customer had examined all the TCOO factors they thought were relevant and the fact remained that if one wanted to take a utility view of CPU supply, it was cheaper to buy and run smaller systems rather than larger ones. (This particular analysis did not perform a variable utilisation analysis. It was assumed, (or defined as policy) that all CPUs would run at a given % utilisation. It is a fact that large (and flexibly partitioned) systems are easier to keep busy.)

It should be clear that a large, flexibly partitioned systems cost more to manufacture and incur higher R&D costs by the vendors, and when customers buy these systems, they get this additional technology and functionality. Most importantly, they get the system bus. (You can't buy these from Dell or Tiny). The SunFire™ system bus cost Sun a lot to invent, prototype and test and delivers to its customers reliability (by offering fault isolation and superior recovery), size (SunFire domains can scale to very high numbers of CPU, and offer very large vertically scaled UNIX execution environments) and flexibility.

Kieron's challenge was to bring home to some very hard-nosed and practical banking IT people that flexibility could be expressed in monetary terms i.e. it was more than just nice. This is where the use of options language & theory came in. Buying larger systems than required today is also buying a system with an option to expand. This planning option allows the growth within a operating system instance, so permitting a change in scale, leveraging the size benefit as well as the flexibility benefit of these large systems. The planning option also allows the creation of additional domains or partitions. The details of when and how the resource arrives and is deployed, together with what and when the price is agreed are matters of technical & commercial detail.

Amran & Kulatilaka in their book "Real Options"¹, argue that options & flexibility create value. These project planning options need to be evaluated and factored into investment plans. The Real Options guru's develop a financial market proxy for the project planning option and then evaulate the investment in the light of this analysis. The key is that flexibility creates value and that static appraisal techniues such as NPV% will underestimate the value of the flexibility, opportunities for profit are missed and investment funds underused. They also argue that a projects option/value curve needs to be built up out of decision modules of which there are only four, based on whether the enterprise wishes to buy or sell the underlying asset, or buy or make the contract.

One example of a real option is to buy a Sun StarFire F25K, which is half full, and eighteen months later fill the remainder of the card cage & system bus. By buying the Starfire, they have (probably) paid more than buying this capability using smaller systems, but they have the opportunity to scale the systems to meet market growth. The difference in cost between the two investment plans is the Real Option price. Once a purchaser factors in the revenue opportunities of scalability, then the sums can be fairly simple. However Amran & Kulatilaka argue that by using a financial markets proxy and appropriate financial markets valuation tools the revenue opportunity and thus the underlying asset value can be established. This involves both care in framing the question and more complex mathematics. The answer is often different using real options analysis rather than NPV%

1. "Real Options, Managing Strategic Investment in an Uncertain World", Amran & Kulatika, Harvard Business School Press ISBN 0-87584-845-1

tags: Business finance Consulting options

Consulting. Profession or Trade?

2005-02-03T16:02:09.000Z

Over the Xmas break, I had fun by reading Elizabeth Edersheim's "McKinsey's Marvin Bower"¹, a biography of the de-facto founder of "McKinsey & Co.". He not only cofounded McKinsey & Co., but also arguably founded "Management Consultancy" as a profession.

Bower, originally trained as a lawyer (in the late 1930s?) and joined a legal firm in his home town. Unusually, he had taken a postgraduate year at Harvard Business School. Management science was in its infancy at the time, but Bower's law firm found use for his business skills. Bower's personal apprenticeship in business practice was in a truly professional partnership organisation.

It fascinated me to learn that Bower bought² McKinsey & Co. back out of a merger in order to set it on its path. The author argues that the founding principles were for long term success and a professional commitment to client integrity. McKinsey always call their customers Clients. It is the need to defend professional integrity that led to governance policies of restricting share ownership to senior staff ( like partnerships) and restricting the proportion a single 'partner' could own. These two reforms were designed to ensure that any conflict of interest between McKinsey & Co.'s clients and owners was minimised, and that the leadership scalability of partner led organisations remained available to the firm. These governance structures cost Bower a lot of money, but despite this, it is what happened.

The McKinsey policy in the early days was to only undertake work on a fixed price basis. At the time, this is what professional organisations (including lawyers) did but it had the additional advantage that while discussing terms, both client and consultant discussed value. The minute the terms of the discussion move to day (or hourly) rates, clients, customers and prospects want to discuss effort and margin.

Also, Bower insisted that all engagements were sponsored by the client CEO. Today, those of us not in the McKinsey ecosphere might like to believe this is/was arrogance and a need to put excessive consulting fees in a strategic perspective. However Edersheim argues that it was a desire to build a reputation of success. The nature of management consultancy advice is such that unless the CEO is listening and engaged, it won't be acted on. Management Consultancy success is based on giving advice that is accepted and seen to work. Its about making "Every Client, a reference".

For more detail, and the words and belief of someone who saw it from the inside you should read this book yourself.

1. "McKinsey's Marvin Bower", Edersheim, John Wiley & Sons, Inc ISBN 0-471-65285-7

2. Not by himself.

tags: Business Consulting McKinsey Professional

Technorati Tags

2005-01-26T16:45:09.000Z

I think these are going to be really big, which is why I tried to add tags to the last article, but they don't seem to work. The real purpose of this article is too test a theory about this failue put to me by Tim Bray, who wrote about Tags here...

technorati tags: tags

Laptop Diaries III

2005-01-26T11:54:39.000Z

I'm stuck on something tricky, so I've been mucking around with easier stuff.

I'm struggling with X-Windows under Solaris. The X-Sun window system comes up with Gnome at 800x600 pixels, so I need to work through the log file. I've tried X86 with the xf86config file but on a cursory review of the log file some of the drivers are in different places and X can't find them. I've not really had the time required to finish this. However Ulf Andreasson has been helping with this and he's discovered the this notice at X.org and discovered that Solaris X86 does not yet have agpgart support in the kernel. He also found this link at intel which documents an XF86 config file. I need to check that the X.org notice does mean that 1024*768 is not on, so I'll hunt this down for another couple of hours (not immediatly however), and see if any colleagues have some magic. I know that the card will not support a denser screeen; 1024x768 is as large as windows allows. In my previous laptop diary, I documented aDell C400 (Red Hat 7.2) page at www.linux-laptop.net. The early versions of this page documented a patch to the drivers and the cause of the problem, placing it firmly in the system designer's domain. The video card is designed for price.

Meanwhile for those of you who less interested in Solaris or more interested in progress I have been making the Windows/Linux window system look pretty. My previous Linux build used Ximian Gnome which seems to have fallen into Novell's shopping basket. My pristine Red Hat 9.0 is running using Gnome and I checked out the following sites, www.gnome-look.org, its sister site, www.kde-look.org and art.gnome.org. Some of the newer KDE themes look particularly good, so I may give them a try.

For windows, I have downloaded some of these wallpapers. These include /dev/urandom, which claims to be an electronic green styled wallpaper, based on kde 1.X photon theme. I also got hold of one of the Misty Trees and a dolphin based wallpaper. (Links take you to www.kde-look.org pages. Also, (on XP) I always implement a windows classic theme; my screen is 1024x768 and I don't want the big fat bars that come with XP. I also reduce the font size and muck around with the colours to match the wallpaper. I'm using /dev/urandom on windows.

I've put some technorati tags here:-

Technology :: Laptop

Dragon's Den II

2005-01-20T09:07:17.000Z

In my article, Dragon's Den, I drew attention to an unpleasent feature of british entrepreneurism : its anti-engineering/science bias. I wrote this after reading Charlie Brooker of the Guardian's Screenburn article about it.

I should also add that after this week's episode, perhaps Rachel Elnaugh is a bit less risk adverse and has a better perspective about the value of her money vs. the value of ideas than I thought and a healthier view than the others.

The BBC's website for the program is here....

Re: Dragon's Den II

2005-01-21T14:37:42.000Z

http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/articles/politics/post20040725230030.html is my, slightly different, take on the same phenomenon...

About:Risk

2005-01-14T21:00:49.000Z

I was preparing a project proposal before christmas and we were trying to define what a risk was (Again!). Some mediocre (if the cap fits......) project managers think to improve their credibility by saying risk every other word. I offer you (& them) the following, although its not original,

"A risk is an event that is futuristic, uncertain and detrimental.

Its a new FUD!

One important corollory (for which I thank Andy Murray recently of WPM) is that effort estimation variance is not a risk, since its not uncertain. - You will be wrong!

Re: About:Risk

2006-07-26T13:46:16.000Z

Hi David I thought of you recenlty when I was engaged in a discussion on the difference between a Project Risk and a Project Issue. I was advocating the three part test of "uncertain, futuristic and detrimental" when one person claimed that an Issue is a Risk with 100% likelihood of occurrence! I finally uncovered that the desire to describe it in such a way was so that the Project Manager could put all his issues and risks on his Risk Log. Although it made me laugh, the serious point is that Issues and Risks are different. You may or may not need to manage any given risk since it may or may not happen. Therefore judgement is required as to the cost-effectiveness of any mitigation or contingency strategies. Whereas, Project Issues definitely will happen (or have happened) therefore must now be accommodated within the project plan. By the way, I'm now at Outperform (www.outperform.co.uk) Regards Andy

Some Language Nonsense.......

2005-01-14T20:49:05.000Z

My younger son was doing his homework the other day and his word processor flagged "Armed Police" as a grammar error. We were hoping that it was an oxymoron like Military Intelligence or "Young Conservative", but discovered sadly that it was caused by a double space between the words.

Dragon's Den

2005-01-12T18:00:42.000Z

The BBC are showing a TV program series called "Dragon's Den". Despite my interest in fantasy, this is about venture capitalism, not sword & sorcery, albeit with a very British spin. Yesterday, a show went out which sums up the crapness of british industrial management. Each week the show gets a bunch of self-made rich tossers into a loft and asks would-be entrepreneuer's to beg them for money to invest in their business.

Yesterday, Kestrel Aerospace, who are building a personal air vehicle based on a proprietary and innovative engine within a craft that looks a bit like the aircraft flown by Arnie in the fim "The 6^th Day". Its a fantastic vision based on scientific intellectual property with true value. They were asking for £70,000 and were turned down. One of the "Dragons" stated that he would wait to buy one. They (actually the only female dragon) did however agree to fund a "Suits You for Girls to go". See the Dragons Den winners page. While some of the pitch for the money involved the use of feminist rhetoric, this is a tailoring business. Arguably, its a channel business (like Amazon), which is why Rachel Elnaugh invested in it.

How come it doesn't surprise me that a bunch of rich no talents choose a tailoring business over a manufacturing business? Its part of a british disease, making money by making things of value is too hard & difficult for Britain's entrepreneurs. Obviously the fact that Kestrel know that they have value means that they won't be ripped off by the greed of the dragons, so there is no way they can take the micky and take disproportionate equity stakes. Kestrel weren't desperate enough. This makes Kestrel unattractive to the greedy. I'm surprised that the BBC don't get Harry Enfield to reprise his "Loadsamoney" character for the show.

Re: Dragon's Den

2005-02-06T12:57:46.000Z

I saw that show and have to say I disagree. The reason the woman won the money was because the dmonstrated a knowledge of the industry and a clear way to make money. The reason Kestrel Aerospace didn't was because they wouldn't be open about their proposition, hiding behind phrases like "I've been advised not to talk about that".
I'd say it's more to their credit that they wouldn't invest in something they would buy themselves - they may well have done had they been more comfortable about the personality of the entrepreneur and the strength of their offering.
And remember that they have to work with these guys once they lend the money, so if they don't trust them, it's less likely to work. The feminist sisterhood stuff therefore is a factor.

Re: Dragon's Den

2006-02-10T03:17:43.000Z
Come on theyguy is a dreamer. Check out his web-site http://www.kestrelaerospace.com/ Nothing specific. He stated the aircraft was having CAA certification. Does it mean he has a proto type? If so, does it fly. where are the photo's? No instead he has a whole pile of designs that would make nasa and boeing green with envy and a bunch of computer renderings. Possible? yes. Is he the man? not by judging his web-site.

Re: Dragon's Den

2006-02-15T22:40:04.000Z
I looked at the web site and this guy is a Big dreamer. What calcs did they do to get those performance statistics? and how do they expect this thing to become stable with the dynamics of vertical and level flight. How many years has it taken the Osprey to overcome this? Killing people. Look at the inefficiencies of generating electricity using Internal combustion engines. Additional complex flight control systems are required and are expensive to certify. walk away from this one...

The Dark Side ????

2005-01-10T14:00:00.000Z

In Management Today ¹, the magazine of the Chartered Institute of Management, Henry Stewart ² reviewed Furnham & Taylor's book "The Dark Side of Behaviour at Work". Its an interesting re-inforcement of the relevance of McGregor's Theory XY model which I refered to in my blog article here.... The book is subtitled "Understanding and avoiding employees leaving, theiving and deceiving".

Having stated that since at his company,

"It is a core principle to believe the best of all our people."

he didn't expect to enjoy the book, and basically he didn't although it wasn't as awful as he expected. Stewart adds that the turn to the dark side is usually provoked, which I suggest is also a natural result of Theory X management style. He leaves us with two snippets. Firstly, that most (64%) staff who resign do so to leave their manager. This is based on survey data, but it is also interesting that having read this first in Stewart's review last August, I have come across it several times since. His second pearl of wisdom is to understand that people managers should be good at it. This may seem obvious but most managers are chosen for their core skills and organisational planning, not for their people management skills.

1.   The august edition.

2.   Stewart is the CEO of Happy, peviously known as "Happy Computers",

Laptop Diaries II

2005-01-07T22:01:06.000Z

First, I salvaged as much as possible. Fortunately this consisted of the whole of the windows partition, and some parts of the Linux partition, including some parts of $HOME & /opt. Most importantly it included /opt/install which acts a bit like "My Downloads". This meant that I have a list of most of the products originally installed on top of RH Linux. (These include Star Office, Acroread & Mozilla (I also downloaded GNOCL, but only played with it). I used "Ghost" to save the windows partition.

I then installed RH Linux 9.0. I used the RH installer to reconstruct the partition table and install grub. We used two partions, one for root and one for swap. It went on a dream, and the window manager started up with a 1024x768 screen without trouble, unlike my previous experience where I had extreme difficulty getting X-Windows to work. This is despite the excellent advice on the Dell C400 (Red Hat 7.2) page at www.linux-laptop.net.

With the help of Phil & Ho, we ghosted the windows files back onto the second partition. We then added a windows partion entry in the grub menu. For RH Linux the Grub menu is held in /boot/grub in a file called menu.lst.

rootnoverify (disk-id,partition#) chainloader +1

We then cut a version of the S10 V73 build iso bootable image and installed S10. This had the normal linux swap vs Solaris installable disk recognition problem, so I deleted the Linux Swap partion used the Soalris installer to cut a new partition for Solaris and installed Soalris. Note: This suggests that my install order is sub optimal. I believe that Solaris engineering are working on this problem, but a later version of the installer is required. An additional consequence is that the boot disk had the Solaris boot manager installed.

I then booted the system using the RH Linux boot disk and used the RH disk druid to reset the partion sizes and codes, reinstall linux, reinstall grub and prepare the candidate windows partiton for another restore. (This had to be done because I had damaged the partition definitions while installing Solaris. (I'm not sure if this is me or a feature of the Solaris installer.)The Solaris grub menu entries are:

rootnoverify (disk-id,partition#) makeactive

I now have a Laptop, with Grub managing the boot sequence and Linux, Windows & Solaris as operating systems. Next, networking, X-Windows and look & feel

Happy New Year - for some!

2005-01-05T09:54:07.000Z

Well, its a return to work after the Xmas, batteries recharged. For some in south asia, Xmas was far from relaxing. Hasn't it been a terrible year. Again words fail me.

Action Aid's appeal page is here.....

My Laptop Diary

2004-12-22T11:09:08.000Z

Rebuilding my Laptop - Introduction

As I wrote here...., my laptop operating system software build blew up the other day, so I have taken the opportunity to spring clean it. I am using a Dell Lattitude C400. Fortunately I am back and working again, but I thought you'd be interested in what I've had to do, so I shall keep a diary. The laptop had most recently a triple boot, managed by grub, allowing Redhat Linux 7.2 & Ximian Gnome, Windows XP and Solaris 9.

I had originally installed Linux, as a result of significant effort by me and Richard Miles, because I was sick of Windows 98 failing to allow me to act nomadically, and the persistent (& intermittantly reliable, not to mention slow) re-boots involved in getting the computer to do what I required. I had installed Red Hat Linux to act as my primary personal productivity partition, using Windows for stuff that Linux struggled with (or I struggled with Linux, ) with and Solaris 9 for resource manager demonstrations and experimentation. The key resource I used (apart from Richard) to get Linux/Gnome onto the C400 was Laptop-Linux, which had a most usefull page about the C400. If you look there, you'll see the author has retired the page. You'll also see that the key problem with the Dell (at that time) was firstly Linux's power management suspend, and the design of the video sub-system.

It was obvious that I should take the opportunity to change somethings. Firstly, the RH 7.2 distro had reached the end of usefull life; Red Carpet was asking me to download Ximian 2, and many of the applications were stuck at inappropriately early versions. Secondly, I now had Windows XP as opposed to '98 so I had higher expectations. Despite not building the Demo I wanted on the original Solaris partition, upgrading to Solaris 10 is a must.

Xmas Drinkies

2004-12-21T12:13:04.000Z

An out of town visitors guide to some City Office watering holes

Occasionally we get to have a quick drink on the way home, here are some useful places to know if visiting Sun's City office and its customers. These four establishments are pubs or wine bars; my expertise on local restaurants or cocktail bars is more limited, perhaps the subject of some research and another article. They are also all quite small.

El Vinos

We know this place too well. A fine selection of wines, good food for lunch downstairs and good for evening drinking. Often has special offers, thankfully closes early. It has very few windows on the ground floor, so is quite dark. Also sells Becks.

Some people might think this a bit "spit & sawdust". Its not! There's none of either, although upstairs is a bit olde worlde wood panels & downstairs a brick & stone cavern.

A place to chill or get pissed

Fuegos

Excellent for Lunch, try the Tapas & Garlic sausage, but don't over indulge on the booze if working in the p.m. Another one that's underground with no daylight. Don't arrive for Lunch at 1.00 on the dot. Sells Becks

Believed to get exciting in the evening when the dancing starts. Is this still true or am I just an old f*rt.

Sports Academy

TV screens, pool tables, again no bitter, but the wine is poor. Takes AMEX, only local bar with daylight. A good stop for a 'sharp one" on the way home. Sells Becks.

Two bars, one is above, the other underground. Used to be full of DKB traders. Well decorated with St. George's flags during the football competitions, which made drinking with a Swedish & Argentinian colleague during World Cup 2000 enjoyable. Not worth visiting to watch day time games though; nowhere is!

Sadly the land lady of over five years has moved on, although she's believed to be at the Britannia.

Corney & Barrow

A chain of wine bars, started in the late 80/90s, no bitter and only high cost brand lagers, but not Becks. The chain is really located in the land of Yup. This one is below the City office, it has no windows. They usually have a steel, wood & glass decor style, but this one's underground so brick and cast iron make a showing. You might think its an improvement on the others but somehow its not.

Sandwiches and snacks, so get your heavy pre-session carbohydrates from elsewhere. Good for a change.

A place to get pissed

1.   DFL, August 1995 (some/many of the comments here will date i.e. they'll be untrue at some time in the future).

Strategic Studies - a new meaning?

2004-12-10T11:50:27.000Z

Charles Clarke (Secretary of State for Education) presented to the Select Committee on Education last week (1.12.04), stating that the Government was intervening to defend certain University departments against closure on so-called "viability" grounds. He was going to define certain subjects as "Strategic". This was arguably in response to the University of Exeter's decsion to close its Chemistry department.

Dfee's political leadership need to get it through their heads that, reducing the research support grants, forcing departments to fund themselves through tuition fees, and increasing the size of the target student population will lead to thick tw*ts studying rubbish courses such as Media Studies, Museum studies & Sports & Management. The newly recruited will not want to study difficult stuff like Maths & Science, and long term government policy is giving the students the power to decide what is taught.

Universities have always been (and should remain) about thought leadership and research, not become the intellectual capital goods factory for UK plc. Charles has come up against a market that needs a monopsony structure to meet the public good. Its one of the problems that "Tax & Spend" is designed to solve.

BTW what is strategy? dictionary.com suggests it means important! Why don't people use the more common words such as "Important" or "Strategy"

Do not adjust your set!

2004-12-10T11:46:19.000Z

Sorry people! I've got a couple of problems. Firstly, my laptop blew up so I've been constrained from jotting my ideas down. (My boot manager corrupted the Linux partition, fortunately, I've been using the Windows partition most recently).

I notice I've not posted a lot recently. Partly I'm trying to get my web site up so I can replicate the longer articles there, but its still not ready yet. I promise its coming.

Arrogance:Ability

2004-11-25T15:33:12.000Z

The other day (Sept), Dilbert and Co. were introduced to the productivity/usefullness ratio. Despite working hard, a co-worker is absolutley useless and is of course told by the manager to work less.

I quite liked the P/U ratio but would like to introduce you to the Arrogance/Ability ratio. It measures people's expressed confidence, their in your face attitude about it and their actual ability.(we've all met them, "I can do that tomorrow!", "its easy", "I do that in my lunch break", and most of us have had to pick up the mess afterwards. Its either that or learn to move more quickly.).

Talking about Money

2004-11-25T15:29:02.000Z

Talking to colleagues the other day and we suddenly realised that we didn't know what a "Nostro" account was, Dave Quarrell was the first to hunt it down using Google, but I've found the following banking dictionary sites
Investor's Edge
Investor Words
I also came across the following list of resources here.... from a site called "Glossarist" which is a dictionary, glossary portal. Neat!

Consolidation & Sybase

2004-11-24T16:56:55.000Z

This article explores a couple of basic Sybase consolidation techniques and the UNIX and Solaris technologies that support consolidation. It offers a couple of configuration tips on the way.

When consolidating multiple Sybase (or any RDBMS) hosts, designers have the option to implement either an aggregation solution, which would involve implementing each application as a separate database within a server, or alternatively co-locating multiple ASE server instances within a single operating system environment. The first of these techniques I refer to as aggregation, and the second as consolidation (or work load sharing). The former technique may involve developer time because the data & business models require reconciling. It also may lead to constraints for scarce resources within the Sybase instance. These are typically Sybase memory objects, or system database resources. While a choice between Aggregation & Consolidation exists, consolidation is easier and delivers more benefits.

Sybase is implemented in Solaris as a a number of processes that attach themselves to a single shared memory segment. (The processes are referred to as Sybase engines). The processes are linked in the process table and inherit a Sybase name from the master..sysservers table. (Actually at run time, the name is inherited from the -S switch in the run server file.) The data in master..sysservers table needs to be replicated into the interfaces file. (More recent versions of Sybase can utilise LDAP for this purpose). The purpose of the interfaces file is to map the Sybase server name onto a tcp/ip address consisting of {tcp/ip address:port no}. Each data server requires two ports on the same system. The default Solaris syntax has been to document the Sybase name direct to a tcp/ip address, although using Solaris' name aliasing is syntactically supported and a superior method. As a diversion, you should always convert the generated addresses into hostname:port no format. Also Solaris will support multiple tcp/ip addresses for each network interface. It is thus possible to co-locate multiple Sybase names within a single instance of the operating system (without containers) and ensure that remote processes can find the correct database server without changing the applications code, or client configuration parameters.

The number of processes cable of running in a Solaris instance/domain is defined and controlled by the /etc/system file. It is folklore and good practice to derive the number of engines as either the same as the number of CPUs (or related in some way to the number of CPUs). There is no technical constraint in either Solaris or Sybase that mandates this tuning rule. In the world of workload sharing, the share of a domain or system utilised by a Sybase server instance needs to be actively managed and I recommend that the Solaris Resource Manager is used to perform this function. This is a superstructure product in Solaris 8 and integrated into the OS from Solaris 9 on.

The default memory configuration of Solaris systems is to implement Sybase's shared memory as 'intimate'. The effect this has is to 'pin' Sybase's buffer caches into real memory. This leads to the configuration rule that sum of the consolidated server's caches needs to be less than real memory. If this configuration rule is not implemented, it is likely that one (or more) Sybase ASE instances will fail to start. (Oh, by the way, always set your SHMMAX parameter to HIGH VALUES, it saves a reboot when you breach a bound constraint. Systems on sale today (64 bit systems), are generally configured with ample memory for this not to be a problem. Thirdly, SHMMAX is a permissive parameter, setting it higher than needed is free.) Also Sybase DBAs have historically chosen/had to install their databases on raw disks and hence all the data cache is configured as database cache through the "Total Memory" parameter. (The UNIX file system cache is of no relevance to the DBMS). Most systems administrators and solutions designers are also aware of this and 'reserve' memory for Sybase. In the world of consolidation the solutions designer needs to be sure that real memory is greater than the sum of "Total Memory", plus the UNIX kernel image.

Sybase has a very rich semantic for abstracting disk objects into tables and rows, and this can be used to scale IO resource. I recommend that raw disks are presented by the systems administrator with permission bits set to 600 and then that file system links with relevant names are created. The disk init command should use the link name as the physname argument. This creates a level of indirection in the naming conventions and also permits a rich naming convention so that stored procedures such as sp_helpdevice can actually tell the DBA stuff about the disks in use. Discovering that the database is mounted on /dev/rdsk/md22 is not helpful!. The abstraction means that data can be moved between disks without changing the database configuration (although the database can't be running). The other huge advantage of this technique is that striping and locating the sybase devices across multiple disks, RAID devices, controllers or switches becomes transparent to the database's mounting script. It allows DBAs to begin to use the language of storage attribution, and leverage the system scalability.

The UNIX file system will permit multiple versions of Sybase to exist within a file system hierarchy. The default sybase installation model incorporates the Sybase version into the UFS directory name for the install tree. This will cope with the circumstances where the applications portfolio is running two (or maybe more) versions of the database. A further advantage is that effort to support patch management is reduced. Consolidation will force increased standardisation, which will lead to a reduction in the breadth of the problem as a reduced number of hardware platforms hosting sybase require to be patched and tested against diverse requirements.

In summary

Decide to Aggregate or Consolidate, or how to combine these strategies

Design your engine/process/instance map

Design you memory implementation

Design your disk map and its abstraction interface

Levy's Economic Laws No. 1

2004-11-19T17:22:20.000Z

I have worked for the public sector (central government), small owner run businesses and large joint stock companies, while most management theorists agree with my first law of business, it is my experience that many so-called entrepreneurs don't.

"Businesses must add or offer value to their customers; cynicism is not enough. Companies based on the premise of 'buyer beware' will fail."

Its a variation on "You can't fool all the people all the time" and business (unlike politics) does not have the let out that you only need to fool them all occassionally.

Writing in English

2004-11-09T15:46:44.000Z

I wrote about the Wankometer here. I assume that my relatively high score is due to using long words, and the fact that I wrote two longish articles about management wank. (My score is now declining!) I realise that I'm not always the easiest read, but I'm trying to make it easier. People that like language will enjoy dictionaries and we're begining to use internet dictionaries as a matter of course.

An Oxford Dictionary Online is available at Compact Oxford Dictionary. This is a British english dictionary. The Complete OED is a subscription service. The alternative that I use because it aggregates several sources is www.dictionary.com , which claims to be a US dictionary. It also advertises a WAP interface, but while I've tried it once, I'm not sure of how useful it is. It might be useful for settling arguments in a pub, if your sober enough to type it straight, or doing the crossword on a train, but not so useful if trying to get your spelling right. The site also offers a word of the day, you can get through e-mail or as an rdf feed, which I access through Evolution, part of Ximian's Gnome, or Sun's Java Desk Top.

More about getting your spelling right. UNIX has a spell checker, it even has a British version (the -b flag). Sadly if you use the UNIX man page on spell, it explains in the Known Errors section that spell was written by an American (even the -b version). <smiley>

Is it raining out?

2004-11-04T10:43:42.000Z

I have (over the last few months) renewed my attempt to find a weather content ¹ site that delivered over the phone.

A friend asked me last year which I used and I stated that I was a "look out the window kind of guy", but the length of my work commute, and having taken up sailing has led me to change my mind recently. After a bit of mucking around with google I came across and was using Weather Online (.co.uk). This allowed me to see the Weather now, albeit somewhere else, and so enhances the 'look out the window" channel. It also offers a three day ahead view for various UK locations, but it doesn't do inshore, or Ramsgate ². It is potentially useful for checking the weather in London before I set off in the morning.

I am still mucking around with Vodafone's weather information services ⁵, but these seem to be a sample service; I'll probably have to pay for what I want (which since my phone is a company one, and such fees are not considered business critical won't happen).

It also seems that the Met Office seem to want to charge for their content delivered to the phone. I can't make up my mind if I'm cross because I've already payed for it once or pleased that the public sector should recoup costs for merging content with media delivery. Of course the BBC are in the process of divesting themselves from their web delivery technology as its not seen as appropriate for public funding (or something). The ideal Met Office inshore content is here.... (.html) but I need to borrow (see stop press below) one of the new phones to see how the phone based html browsers handle it, otherwise I'll consider screen scraping it, although I'm not sure of the legality of this. [Obviously if its illegal, I shan't do it].

Stop Press : I've just done our mandatory, "how to use the phone course", written by our finance department and run by our IT department and this states that using the mobile phone for non business, non-voice services is seriously deprecated, so if this series continues, I may have to finance it myself. However, my Sun-blogger colleague (who I've never met) who writes at Hinkmond Wong's Weblog, seems to have a job that involves a better knowledge of this stuff, so check him/her out.
This article was last of the originally planned series, I might have gone on to talk about mail, but with the current screen technology ³ its pretty unusable anyway.

I consider the nexus of these devices, networks and content to be the driver for the next stage of the internet's growth so I doubt this is the last I'll write about this stuff. Hopefully some of the UK Telco or content owning customers will give me a call for help in this space, but I'm not really the expert (yet).

1. Oh No! Look a brit really does talk about the weather! Ha Ha Ha!
2. So not all UK towns are done, and I'm still looking for inshore.

3. I stand by this comment; it remains relevant for the phones and PDAs I've seen. Mail read from a PDA needs to be written for the PDA; if the author's using a keyboard, and full size screen to compose, they'll get verbal diarrhoea. Attatchments currently still make life difficult for PDA users.

The previous article is here...

Re: Is it raining out?

2004-11-05T12:58:38.000Z
Try http://www.metcheck.com does inshore, can SMS, under a fiver every month and you can pay by credit card. Only UK, Europe & USA forecasts

Re: Is it raining out?

2004-11-17T11:04:14.000Z

The best weather forecasts are those that are made available to pilots because their lives (and those of their passengers) depend on it. Plus these forecasts are free of charge.
You can get aviation weather from a WAP enable phone for any major airfield in the world. If you know of an airport near to where you go sailing then you should get a pretty accurate forecast. A nice bonus is that pilots are most concerned with wind direction, speed and visibility - something that I would imagine is also useful to sailors.
The WAP page I used frequently (even though I am an ex-pilot now) is http://jaguar.wapmx.com/servlets/FlyMenuWap?fw-aye#logon
It is not without challenges for the non flyer.
Firstly you need to enter the airport using its 4 letter ICAO code. All UK airports begin EGxx. London Heathrow is EGLL, Southampton is EGHI, Bournemouth is EGHH, Shoreham is EGKA. Luckily the page has a worldwide lookup facility.
Secondly you need to choose the service you want. Three are generally available: METAR - meteorological actual report (i.e. current weather forecast), Short Term TAF - terminal area forecast and then TAF - terminal area forecast. Short term tends to be the next 9 hours. Long term forecasts are typically around 18 hours - useful if you are taking off from Singapore to fly back to London.
Finally you need to understand the way the weather is encoded. Google for "TAF decode" and you will find resources. (See later for a page to help you).
For example, today's METAR for Heathrow is:
EGLL 170850Z 24012KT 9999 FEW016 SCT120 BKN250 12/08 Q1023 NOSIG=

What this means is that for EGLL on the 17th at 08:50GMT the wind direction was 240 degrees magnetic (coming roughly from the south-west) at a speed of 12 knots. Visibility (9999) was greater than 10KM, there were a few clouds at 1600 feet, scattered clouds at 12000 feet and broken cloude at 25000 feet. The temperature was 12c, dewpoint 8c, barometric pressure at sea-level (QNH) is 1023 millibars. NOSIG means no other significant weather.
The short term forecast (TAF) for Heathrow is as follows:
EGLL 170911Z 171019 25012KT 9999 SCT025 TEMPO 1019 25015G25KT PROB40 TEMPO 1419 BKN014=

Which decodes as: London Heathrow on the 17th at 09:11 GMT. Valid on the 17th from 10:00 to 19:00 GMT. Wind 250 degrees at 12 knots. Visibility greater than 10km. Scattered clouds at 2500 feet. Temporarily from 10:00 to 19:00 wind will be 250 degrees 15 knots gusting to 25 knots with a probability of 40% that from 14:00 to 19:00 there will be broken cloud at 1400 feet.
In neither of these cases is any rain, drizzle, mist, fog, or snow present. These have their own unique codes such as RA, DZ, BR, FG, SN.
When you understand the code you can read this string of characters and quickly form an accurate picture in your mind of exactly what the weather looks like.
Luckily there is an excellent resource in the UK run by a very nice gentleman called Tom Dawes Gamble. His Aviation Information & Weather website will help you to understand the code. You can look up airfield codes and then get the weather plus by ticking an option Decode TAF and METAR it will decode things nicely as in the following example of the 9 hour forecast for Bristol International Airport (where as I look out of my window just 8 miles to the south west I can see the weather is really crappy)
EGGD 170911Z 171019 26015KT 9999 SCT008 BKN016 TEMPO 1019 26018G28KT 3000 RADZ BKN004= EGGD: Issued on the 17th at 09:11 UTC valid from 10:00 UTC on the 17th until 19:00 UTC on the 17th wind 260 degrees, 15 knots visibility 10km or more scattered cloud at 800 feet broken cloud at 1600 feet temporarily 10:00 to 19:00 wind 260 degrees, 18 gusting to 28 knots visibility 3000 metres rain, drizzle broken cloud at 400 feet

Very useful - just not available on your WAP enabled mobile. Finally a word about your mobile costs. WAPMX is a free service. To start a session, request a TAF and then logoff results in 1700 bytes being received and 800 bytes being sent. 2.5Kb in total. Vodafone UK charge around �1/Mb for GPRS data so you can see we are talking less than a penny to get a forecast.

Re: Is it raining out?

2004-11-17T11:16:36.000Z

That was my first ever Sun Blog response.
The Wonderful Wankometer gave it a very low Wank Factor of 0.16
Must try harder!

Still off the weed!

2004-11-04T10:23:25.000Z

I'm pleased to announce the six month anniversary of stopping smoking. This is now my third most successful attempt - nine more months to No.2.

Consolidation - The importance of a cost meta-model^*

2004-10-22T15:24:27.000Z

All the cost management methodologies start with either a detailed chart of accounts, or a meta-model.

The Sun Blueprint "Consolidation in the Data Center"¹ by David Hornby and Ken Pepple document this fact and examine several models. Once an acceptable meta model is defined, detailed fact finding can be undertaken to understand costs and how they are allocated and consumed by the systems and the supporting infrastructure. The diagram aside is the meta-model used by the Sun's UK Data Centre Practice. It is closely based upon the model developed by Sun over the last two years and documented in Nigel Hawkes presentation "Consolidation : From Soup to Nuts". One of the key differences between this model (see aside) and it predecessor is that this answers the "Barcap" question in that few infrastructure departments hold complexity or quality budgets, neither are they chartered to recover business revenues which their infrastructure helps to earn.

I am convinced that complexity costs money but in most cases, architectural complexity reflects itself in budgets by high levels of expense on other cost contributors. Unless the provider is a contracted ASP and holds a budget for SLA failure penalties, slow or unavailable systems do not cost money to the IT department. However if services are over provided, then a reduction in the service may allow IT organisations to reduce their cost, just as under provision may be a justification for investment in infrastructure, but both "Architectural Complexity" and "Service Quality" are to my mind design or service constraints on the IT infrastructure. The "Application Delivery" cost category (or budget) is usually held by a different department; most consulting I have undertaken has been with infrastructure provider organisations or departments.

In the model above, the horizontal bars are the cost contributors that make up the IT organisation's "Chart of Accounts". Some of these are self-explanatory but others require some thought and even customisation. One example is whether operating system or middleware software product should be accounted for as hardware or software maintenance. (The answer is that it depends upon the particular supply contract.) Apart from this example the bottom two layers are fairly self explanatory, but the scoping of the systems under measurement raises an interesting problem. This is whether an asset has been directly purchased and thus represented as a piece of hardware or software, or is indirectly required and should be represented as a People cost( because the assets are a personnel provisioning investment, such as a phone or desktop system) or IT management (such as a Help Desk database server). Some people costs may be best represented as a cost item under IT management if that is what the people do.

A further development of the model, is almost the division of resources into applications hosts which are "fee earners" for the IT organisation and others which are provisioning or support functions. The latter system can then be factored onto the "fee earners" as cost. This might mean that the licencing and support for applications enabling systems and software would be accounted for in the "Aquisition & Maintenance Costs" categories. Management software and the server systems used to support service delivery & support are seen as part of IT management. These customisations are perfectly legitimate and in many cases required to get an understanding of the problem. Its the requirement to customise which gives the meta-model approach its flexibility and popularity.

Each cost contributor that is deemed in-scope needs to be examined to determine how much as spent, and what the "financial scalability rules" are. This is a way of expressing the fixed and variable cost factors as a function of the size of the estate. (If not the size, then some valid policy instrument, since we propose to manipulate the reality represented by the parameter variable and compare the before and after states to see if a better solution is available, and if the project to transition to this desired state is financially viable.).
It is my view that with thought, most IT shops can achieve "More for Less" and take advantage of the ongoing changes in price performance in system capability offered by the IT vendors.

*    The meta-model (or at the least its diagrammatic representation) is copyrighted. The predecessor model was published in ComputaCenter's White Paper "Consolidating the Server Infrastructure"

1    "Consolidation in the Data Center" by David Hornby and Ken Pepple227 pages ISBN 0-13-045495-8 Published September 19, 2002 - this is a buy it page but the book description is easier to find than on the Sun Blueprints Books page.

2    "Consolidating the Server Infrastructure", A Computacenter Whitepaper. V1.0 Published Nov 2002 - It looks like they've updated their White Paper and the meta-model's dropped out.

About: Pressure

2004-10-22T14:06:41.000Z

At a meeting the other day one of the participants stated, that

"I thrive on pressure."

My view was that they'd obviously never met anyone any good at applying it. The whole point of pressure is that it is an unpleasant environment to encourage it to be avoided. The corolloray is that an escape route needs to be available. i.e. if they do what you want, you'll make sure the pressure stops.

Education, Education

2004-10-19T09:37:18.000Z

We were watching University Challange the other week when the picture question came up and our younger son answered all three correctly identifying a war-hammer, a halberd and a morning-star/flail. Our good opinion of his diligence at history studies fell rapidly when he told us he knew because of the hours on the computer playing "Diablo".

Re: Education, Education

2004-10-19T11:07:16.000Z
Hmm, don't think I'd be letting my young kids play any game with a "Mature" certification!

Re: Education, Education

2004-10-22T17:01:59.000Z
>Hmm, don't think I'd be letting my young kids play any game with a "Mature" certification! How boring. I'll bet you don't let them play with chainsaws, either.

The Wonderfull Wankometer

2004-10-12T12:35:05.000Z

In the ongoing war against pomposity and bullshit, some anonymous people at cynicalbastards.com offer the wankometer as a service. This web site lets site authors discover the amount of management wank in their prose or on their sites.

My blog scores between two & three, which is classed as considerable. I'm not sure if I should be proud, its lower than many but higher than Jonathan's which scores 1.52 and is classed as low.

I've considered putting the score against each article in my blog as an alternative to Technorati that I can't get to work. Although the logo might be interesting and of questionable taste.

Re: The Wonderfull Wankometer

2004-11-10T17:01:09.000Z
I'm sorry you're having a problem with Technorati, but I'm afraid I don't understand exactly what the problem is - please drop me an email or send an email to support@technorati.com and explain what you're trying to do, and we'll try to help... Dave

Trains & Phones &......things

2004-10-06T16:07:42.000Z

Railtrack used to have a great service. I could personalise the menu with routes of interest over the web and then make a next journey query using the phone as I dashed towards Waterloo station. It'd give me the timetabled departure, so I knew whether to panic or not! (Of course, an alternative was to remember the timetable). It was useful, but disappeared in the corporate transition from Railtrack ¹ to Network Rail.

The replacement WAP site is at http://wap.nationalrail.co.uk. It requires you to type in the station names for both start & finish stations. You can save the new journeys as bookmarks, but it lacks the intelligence & creativity of the early Kizoom solution ². The earlier solution moved the menu to the server, and input to a keyboard and while it didn't use your cell location to know where you were and thus get the route direction right, it did use the time of day.The original solution was a clever combination of various technologies, leveraging the wireless, portable nature of the phone to offer a service that was different and usefull. Phone's/PDAs as information appliances must be different from the laptop/notepad PC, or they won't become mass consumer network access points.

The changes mean that the service has become just another online query, not one where the phone's mobility and portability make the site's use compelling.

1. Another thought here is that Railtrack were the ultimate infrastructure provider, - they sold time on the railway to train operators. They went bankrupt. I may return to this thought in a later article.

2. You also now need two bookmarks for each journey, one going out & one on return.
The previous article is here...

Shrinking the Beamer

2004-10-01T08:40:27.000Z

Boy, I wish I could junk my laptop and replace it with a new age phone with a decent screen. The iceing on the cake would be a pocket projecter with bluetooth connection, so I could use the wall as my visual display. How much would it take to shrink the beamer to pocket size? I own credit card sized torches!

This would really jump start multi-media over the wireless, I've played a playstation game on a projected screen 8ft x 5ft and it was awesome.

Sugar & Spice

2004-10-01T08:36:44.000Z

In the UK, we've just had two reality TV series where school kids have been put through a 1950's style education. There have been two series, one following kids into a 50's grammar school and the second about a Secondary Modern.

A note for my interational readers. In the 1950's the UK (or at least England & Wales) made school kids take an exam at the age of 11 and those that passed went to Grammar school and pursued a mainly academic curriculum, while those that didn't pass the exam, went mainly to schools known as Secondary Modern. These undertook basic academic training but also pursued prepartion for trades apprenticeships. Actually, the sexism in curriculum planning was immense with boys doing auto-mechanics, carpentry and brick laying, while the girls did home economics (cooking, later to become domestic science, and today Food Technology), needlework etc.

Not surprisingly, during the secondary modern series, we had one girl walk out due to the no-tolerance approach teaching staff took with student behaviour vs. the school's expectations. However, on the whole the boys enjoyed being allowed to diversify their school activities into the practical while the girls resented the trivialisation of their ambitions.
The series was called "That'll teach them"

About:"City of London"

2004-09-24T14:39:54.000Z

One forgets one's home's grandeur
When I wrote the initial entry in this web log, I didn't mention that I work out of Sun's City office. This has been the case for the previous god knows how many years, both before and since joining Sun. I mention it now; its been an important part of my professional (and social life). The "City" is the name of London's financial district, the centre for banks, stock & commodity traders and the London insurance market. The markets consist of primary and secondary players and 'infrastructure' companies such as the exchanges, the couriers, regulators and policemen. The "City" is sometimes alternatively known as the Square Mile and surrounds the Bank of England. Over the years I have worked with and for many of the companies located here as both an Executive and Consultant. Many leading firms have moved out to Canary Wharf over the last few years and I've worked there too.
I have been at Sun since 1997 and worked in various incarnations of Sun Professional Services' city consulting team since then as contributor and boss. It seems to me that there are only a few of us left from the days I started, some have moved out to greater things, others what with the city being a field sales office have moved on to other companies. Sun's traditional strength has been with US based Equity market makers and brokers, the London market remains a stronghold for trading treasury, fixed income, FX and commodities, and major players in all these markets are Sun customers. It also remains a stronghold for commercial, marine and aviation insurance. All Sun's customers in these markets are served by teams working out of our City office, which is located near "the Monument". At times, I have really enjoyed a daily visit to the heart of Europe's leading "World" city, at other times the two hour commute is just wearying.
I really love central London and while browsing the web I have also discovered the following site http://www.skyscrapernews.com that displays & sells pictures of many London buildings, its sky line and it also hosts virtual exhibitions. While my camera (and my skill) are not sufficient to take skyline shots of London, Skyscraper News does. They have pictures to match New York's finest.

Re: About:"City of London"

2004-09-24T15:27:36.000Z
Dave: London still is one of my favorite cities. I lived in Hampstead in 1973 and in Golders Green in '77. My first trip to London (from New York) was in '66, and I have visited many times in between. (In '73 I worked at the U of London Computer Center and in '77 at the European Weather Centre in Bracknell (now its in Reading). I have a couple of pictures of London taken in 1966 in case you're interested on my website. By the way, my two favorite pubs are The Lamb on Lamb's Conduit Street, and the Museum Tavern, right opposite the British Museum. Cheers!

You can look a right fool! TV on the phone

2004-09-21T12:34:19.000Z

Well, the day after I wrote that phones' screens were too crap to take multi-media streaming content, O2 & NTL choose to try and prove me wrong by announcing TV on the phone. This story at vnunet.com talks more about it. I reckon though that the phone looks exceedingly ugly.

Musings on wireless information

2004-09-20T15:05:47.000Z

I'm not one who believed that WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) was going to take over the world; the phone screen is too small to deliver useful content. How long this will remain true is questionable. I went down the shops recently to get a couple of phones and while the screens seem no larger, they are now multi-coloured. (You need to bear in mind, that I've just started to use glasses, and one of the first indicators that I needed them was that my arm had become too short to read my phone display.)
The phone however has several advantages over the laptop; you don't have to plug it in and its boot time is much quicker. As a more mature (aka known as old) user of the internet, the choice of ringtones¹ and screen savers is not really very attractive or usefull to me although I used to have "l'internationale" on the phone as my ring tone. Once we had to pay for it, I stopped. Interestingly, its jolly hard to find now; it seems to have gone from http://www.mymobile.com.

So if I'm not interested in the "yoof" phone content and use, what do I find useful, and what am I expecting from this stuff. Despite my pessimism, I have had some useful services in my WAP bookmarks page, and recently returned to the wapmarks page of my phone in order to find/use services on weather and the trains.

1.    I know some people find personalised ring tones a waste of time and often offensively intrusive but I know that as an open plan office & public transport user, having a personal tone helps enormously. While working in a tightly organised team in shared office space, we even learnt each others tones, and knew whether to answer the ring or not, the same applies on the train.

UNIX Consolidation - Top tips for right sizing

2004-09-16T10:30:18.000Z

I've been Sun UK's Principal Consultant in our Data Centre Practice since Autumn 2003 and together with colleagues been talking to customers and creating a consolidation planning methodology. The consulting offerings available to customers in the UK are described here......
The methodology involves defining the problem area or scope, creating a detailed catalogue and describing the systems, system costs, the cost scalability rules, the system capabilities and utilisation. We then map the current system consumptions onto a future state architecture, costing the transition and then performing a traditional investment analysis. This involves understanding the expected costs of the future state solution, and designing to obtain the benefits of new systems which are smaller, cheaper, faster and more reliable. We have some key rules of thumb when designing a future state, these include
Always deploy full systems; the card cage and backplane work harder justifying their cost. i.e. the cost/CPU is higher on half empty systems. ( This is a true rule of thumb, and is more appropriate for smaller systems (1-12 way)).
Big systems (& hence domains) will deliver higher utilisation, and hence the acquisition costs to obtain the necessary capability will be lower; you pay for unused capability as well as used.
Using large systems as if they were multiple small systems is silly. Only buy huge systems if you need big domains (or are at the margin of requiring big domains and value the scalability &/or flexibility).
The premium payed in buying scalable systems can be seen as an option purchase for a bigger system than deployed. i.e. buy 48 CPUs and an option for 24 more.

Re: UNIX Consolidation - Top tips for right sizing

2004-09-24T13:10:16.000Z
------ Big systems (& hence domains) will deliver higher utilisation, and hence the acquisition costs to obtain the necessary capability will be lower; you pay for unused capability as well as used. Using large systems as if they were multiple small systems is silly. Only buy huge systems if you need big domains (or are at the margin of requiring big domains and value the scalability &/or flexibility). --- These 2 sentences appear to contradict themselves, also this seems to ignore the benefits of segmenting smaller than domains using Zones or VMWare etc.

Re: UNIX Consolidation - Top tips for right sizing

2004-09-24T14:32:44.000Z

You caught me. There's some careless language here, I was trying to make the point that there is a contradiction between high utilisation, (big domains) and cost/cycle. Running a big domain empty is silly. (I'm sure you'll agree). Running a big system as if they were multiple smaller systems is not as cost effective unless you value flexibility etc
I don't think I am ignoring the option of dividing systems ( although I don't say much in this article). You correctly point out it can be done. My comments (IMO) remain relevant in determining the start point at which you begin to divide the OS managed resource. This is based on one's wealth and the extend to which one values high utilisation & flexibility.

Maximising Creativity

2004-09-08T08:20:51.000Z

For various reasons, I decided to see if one of the early people motivation theories was still currently in use. This is the "Theory X, Theory Y" model. It was first stated in the "Human Side of Enterprise" by Douglas McGregor, published in 1960. This is listed on Amazon as out of print, but they do quote a price and shipment date, and has been reviewed in the last year by Sheila Ale. The top "Google, search site" offers http://www.businessballs.com, which holds an article about the Theory XY model here....
The model poses two forms of management behaviour, one is hard arse (X), the other enabling (Y). Theory X can be characterised as a directorial approach based upon a deep cynicism about staff (or people), which is described in the businessballs article, as based upon the view that people don't want to work and have to be "forced" to do so. Theory Y was first described to me as "if you look after your people, they'll look after you". Again quoting the businessballs article "The capacity to use a high degree of imagination, ingenuity and creativity in solving organisational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population".
I find it interesting in that once one reduces Theory X to its minimal components, it comes as no surprise that only underachieving enterprises permit Theory X to be the dominant management culture. Belief in your staff leads to competitive performance, it is this which is the essential part of the theory. For top performance, believe in, enable and liberate your people; we no longer live in a production line economy.

Re: Maximising Creativity

2004-12-13T17:17:42.000Z
In simplistic terms, I suspect that Theory Y only works when people are enjoying what they do. If they're not, then Theory X might be the only way to get any productivity. When someone's in the wrong job, Theory Y gives leeway for taking advantage of the organisation's culture.

Australia & England, a sporting rivalry!

2004-09-07T10:18:10.000Z

In the Guardian, a journalist quoted an Australian olympic sportsman as saying "You ****** poms, you can only win medals in sports where you sit down". Looking at the Great Britiain's medal tally, he had a point. Sailing, Cycling, Rowing, Canoe-ing & Riding.
It does ignore Kelly Holmes winning the women's middle distance races, but its a great piece of abuse, with enough truth to make it hard to ignore. I love Australians!

In Memorium

2004-09-06T13:28:15.000Z

I didn't intend to do any politics on this blog but the events in Southern Russia are so appalling. There's not much to be said, but I wish the survivors and the bereaved my best wishes for the future.

Holidays

2004-09-06T13:25:47.000Z

I've been away, which is why I've not written. I didn't take my laptop and I didn't connect to the net. What a relaxing time.

More about managing the Professional Services Firm

2004-08-17T13:44:33.000Z

Mike Habek after reading my last article, kindly sent me a copy of Geoffrey Moore's article "Just Shoot Me!", which was published in Under the Buzz, Nov 2002. The article is subtitled "Managing the Services Function inside a Products Company.

Moore believes that the service functions of product companies are trapped inside a life cycle inimicable to optimal service strategies, but that by understanding the cyclical nature of these factors, management can build valuable and valued service delivery companies.

The first thing Moore does is construct a model that places the product business model within a life cycle. The business model needs to evolve in order for the company to succeed throughout the product's life cycle, and the business model requires differing types and quantity of service to support or effect the sale. The product life cycle exists within a technology adoption cycle. Moore identifies six business models, the project , the solutions , the product , consumables, subscription and outsourcing/utility models¹ within the product life cycle.

The project model is appropriate for early adopters and Moore states,

"At the onset of a new technology,.....early customers are ..willing to fund specific instances of this infrastructure..to gain competitive advantage. The model is 20% tools and products, 80% custom labor (sic), so it is expensive and time consuming, but it is also highly differentiating to the customer. Consulting service providers are the key leaders ....they can enjoy high margins on revenues.

It's also a fact that it's the people that make it happen, without them, the product will not be sold. the reference cases won't be created and the market impetus for mass adoption won't occur. In order to compete in the project phase of the product life cycle, service providers need to optimise themselves. Their sales culture and execution, and leadership needs to orientated around recruiting, maintaining and motivated the best talent to allow the company to win this sort of business. Salesmanship tends to be "consultative", and the talent leverage (See Maister &/or Levy) aimed at delivering projects to customers looking for competitive advantage. Moore uses the example of Amazon & Cisco's development of e-commerce infrastructures as examples of significant project model opportunities. So was Sun's development of the "Architecture.com" mass consumer portal technology for the mobile telco sector.

It is an essential part of the model that the market metamorphoses into a more mature state. The project sponsor's and consulting supplier's competitors both look to catchup and the intellectual property moves from the minds of the projects consultants and architects to the application ISVs. This phase of the life cycle Moore refers to as the solutions model. Customers are looking to negate the bleeding edge adopter's competitive advantage but also leverage high reliability & lower cost. Consulting firms still play an important role in solutions model delivery, but the stage is shared with the applications vendors^2,3. For a products company, this remains a development phase of the market.

The market will again mutate and pass through the product phase, which is characterised by transactional efficiency, a consumables phase with high volume recurring product revenues with the amount of product revenue in the product revenue mix increasing to 100%, the mutations continue through competitive pressure and new services need to be offered to create a subscription model, as the company drives up its service income, the final (and in some cases alternative to subscription) is the outsource/utility business model, where product is cost and 100% of revenues is service.

Model

Product/
Service

Customers

Customer Value

Vendor Value

Project

20:80

Bleeding Edge

Competitive Advantage

High Margin, Value pricing

Solution

50:50

Early Adopters

1st Division Player

Leverage Re-Use

Product

80:20

Mass Market, knowledgeable buyers

Transactional Efficiency

High Revenue

Consumables

100:0

Mass Market, consumer buyers

Transactional Efficiency

recurring low value product revenue

Subscription

20:80

Mass Market, consumer buyers

Cost predictability

regular income based on value added services

Utility

0:100

Complex requirements

Transparent benefit acquisition

Market Supply

Moore's original article offers useful and compelling examples of product businesses in different stages of the life cycle, and more comprehensive definitions of each stage, together with the economic factors that lead to stage transition. This is supplemented by some interesting and varied examples of how product companies create added value services to their product offerings, frequently offering a inter-company partnering dimension.

The constraint identified by Moore is that if a service provider optimises for a specific business model and market, then Maister's three goals of Service, Satisfaction & Success, can be met, but because the service entities of product companies are not allowed to specialise; they need to meet the product companies full life cycle needs. Moore suggests that a captive's charter might be as follows, a quote again from his article,

Be competitive at the front end in project effectiveness

Be competitive at the back end in transactional efficiency

But don't compete so hard that we alienate our service providers

Be a revenue source, often in a big way and

Be highly profitable with good utilization

But find a way to support whatever the sales force has sold

Oh, and help close top-tier prospects (no charge)

Oh, and help rescue flagship accounts in trouble (also gratis)

Moore argues that no single one of these goals is impossible, its the combination of all of them together that are. This is a reflection of Maister's arguments that one can't optimise for the delivery of all three of expertise, experience and efficiency. The captive service provider's can try and follow the product's life cycle and morph with the requirements of product sales, but the pendulum swing from project consultancy services to product installs (if that) through to utility supplier is massive change and organisations have investment gestation periods to make these changes. By the time that a product has matured to later stages in the life cycle, the consultants required to launch it, have been let go, and there is no-one left to make the sales of the products replacement. Sadly Moore does not illustrate this cycle of failure with any examples.

Moore does suggest that there is a way out. Its necessary to understanding the problem by applying the life cycle/business model analysis, deciding what to do and recognising that it can't all be done. This means that companies need to decide what they'll do directly, and what they'll partner to allow customers to acquire the services they need. Of course, partnering implies either market creation activity (like Microsoft) or channel harmony strategies. Each offering to each stage of the market should be managed separately and delivered into an environment where customer satisfaction is measured. Separate divisions, managers, goals and strategies will allow a services company to offer support to the product company throughout the life cycle.

I find Moore's service life cycle modelling both interesting and compelling and his proposals as to how to respond are quite sensible. Its not actually a great leap for Sun since Sun have over the last few years presented its direct service offerings in at least three forms, professional services, educational services and sustaining support⁴, although the lack of clarity of how to sell, and what customers will value could have been better managed. The Moore 'life cycle model' suggest insights into how Sun can do better by its customers and partners.

Sun's current organisational plans should mean that customers receive a clearer offer of value to them but the issue of maintaining project & solutions capability remains one of Sun's key challenges, as does the enablement of its partners to sell within all stages of the life cycle.

1.    The words used here are Moore's, Sun & others may be using the words differently, for a fuller understanding of what he means, read the original.

2.    I wonder what happens in the applications world where business requirements are so unique that developing a market is difficult . Mutation to the solutions market would be inhibited. The responses seem to be two fold: large project sponsors 'newco' their IT departments to monetise their software investment e.g. LIFFE market solutions or JP Morgan's "Arcordia" (RIP), or players in the project market work to develop continued differentiation and ensure that the requirement is only available through project model markets e.g. Logica's projects business.

3.    IT platform architects often describe infrastructure software componentry as an application.
4.    Sun has varied the services and organisational basis for sustaining support, using its solutions centre, field services and centre's of excellence in varying combinations to meet customer need.

Gimme some ceegarrwettes!

2004-08-07T13:49:36.000Z

UK Big Brother 5 has just ended as I write. Its been won by Nadia, a portugeese 40-a-day unreconstructed cigarette smoking transexual. Hooray!! Go...

The runner up dramas (and the previous 10 weeks) remind me how terrible last year was. This year i.e. the fifth, my wife actually voted; she couldn't bear the idea of the runner up winning, we (she) voted in the last half hour, once it was down to two. I actually cared for the first time in years, but in my case not enough to vote. We may therefore actually watch next years.

6th August 2004 23:34 DFL

Where the real & virtual worlds collide!

2004-08-04T12:23:04.000Z

The G2 supplement in the Guardian yesterday See Here... covers the phenonomen of real life trading of virtual objects, that only exist in online game worlds. I had hoped to ease myself into the world of games industry punditry, mainly because I don't play enough to be a player's doyen, nor do I work closely enough with the industry as a consultant, but blogs are usefull for unfinished thoughts as well as polished polemic.
The current generation of MMORPGs¹ are the inheritors of a long tradition. The majority of these seem to be in the fantasy fiction genre of sword and sorcery borrowing from Tolkien & Conan, but if you go to www.mysupersales.com , one of the trading exchanges, you'll see that both science fiction (and most bizarrely) cyberpunk² games are also available. Interestingly for Sun these games typically charge a subscription fee for access, and are definitely an illustration of how IT companies can make money on the basis of customer relationships and recurring income streams in exchange for a valued service.
The fictional heritage travels from the written fiction, through role playing & board games to two computer games genres, the online 1st person shooter and the CRPG/MUD. The merging of these two genres, the adoption of the 3rd party view and the expansion of the online capabilities of the internet wirespeed and server capabilities has enabled these life size virtual game worlds. The Guardian article (see above) interviews participants and reflects their varying degrees of involvement and the drivers that have enabled trading between the real world and games worlds.
The study of Labour Economics gives us a work/leisure utility curve, and different people have different trade offs between swapping an hour of leisure for an hour of work; they place differing values on the worth of the leisure hour³, while the market places a value on the extra work hour. This is their marginal utility rate. By selling virtual objects created by spending leisure time, the traders are arbitraging their work leisure utility factors⁴. This is true until we discover people who consider the creation/discovery of these tradable commodities their income source, I wonder how long it'll take.
Its probably not possible to pre-calculate the utilities involved because the traded objects have a value above and beyond the hours invested (a psychic value), and are also still unlikely to trade at wage rates, certainly not the buyer's wage rates⁵. It should be born in mind that the discovery/creation of these tradable objects takes a lot of time. It may be that these mismatches between market value and labour cost is one of those economically oberservable phenomena that suggest that a new virtual world, factor of production exists. This psychic income within the price determination mechanism should inhibit the growth of brokers or futures traders, because unless the primary trader is in the market, psychic cost and value cannot be determined.
Its interesting (to me) that the Guardian's article is published on the day that ID software launch/relaunch Doom in its latest incarnation Doom3 since it was Doom that first introduced me to multi-player computer gaming and the first I came across that permitted internet gaming.
1.    Massively multi-player online role playing games.
2.    How bizarre is role playing a cyber hacker in an online game hosted on the internet. Post modern or what.
3.    The increasing value people will place on leisure time as they work more is the reason that overtime i.e. payments for working above and beyond one's contracted hours (remember that!) was traditionally paid at enhanced rates.
4.    This whole process of converting, combining & defining factors of production is really difficult and controversial, so there's plenty of room to disagree with what may happen in both the long and short term.
5.     The Guardian article quotes a Final Fantasy XI character (Avatar) being sold for just under $1300, how many work hours is that?

Quitting Smoking

2004-08-04T12:22:06.000Z

I am pleased to announce the four month anniversary of stopping smoking, admittedly, its my third attempt.

I should be more civil than over the last quarter.

Re: Quitting Smoking

2004-08-04T13:54:51.000Z
Seeing as I'm continously saying I'm going to quit, congrats on four months. /me thinks I'll have to think about it again.
- Fintan

Re: Quitting Smoking

2004-08-04T14:00:59.000Z
+1 on the congrats. this is huge. you work it, Dave!

Re: Quitting Smoking

2004-08-04T16:37:48.000Z
keep your mood high and go go ! you're on the very right way ! I so would like that my wife stop it too !

Sybase commits to Solaris x86???

2004-08-02T10:16:43.000Z

Since starting to write, I have been reading others entries to the Sun blogging community. This is a link & repeat of John Gardner's web log entry about Sybase & Sx86. Click here .... for John's original blog. The entry & hyperlink interested me as Sybase commit their ASE to Solaris x86, even as a developer cut. Click here .... for the download. I've been using Sybase for a long time as those of you who have access to internal publications know and am glad to see them follow me & Sun into fabric, Solaris based computing. This will give those sites committed (or locked into) Sybase two advantages. The first is that since Sybase have historically worked hard to ensure that hardware is not a performance constraint, internal contention is more frequently the problem than with its competitors. Utilising Solaris x86 and the x86 CPUs will allow Sybase to 'crack' serial hot spots or "code paths" more effectively. Secondly, Sybase has always had an effective 'data movement' solution and the new platform changes the price and hence enables a the deployment of distributed database solutions, based on caching patterns or real life geography.

I've started to write a Sun paper on consolidating Sybase on Solaris, its 30% written and you may see some of it here. I will be downloading the sybase binaries onto my Sun laptop sometime soon.

Version 1.2

Re: Sybase commits to Solaris x86???

2004-08-03T08:56:48.000Z
<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type"> <title>test</title> </head> <body> Hi,

Any ideas why ASE 12.5.2 developer's edititon does not include the Job Scheduler ?

I have posted some comments under <a href="http://blog.sun.com/roller/comments/oz?anchor=sybase_12_5_2_available">http://blog.sun.com/roller/comments/oz?anchor=sybase_12_5_2_available about ASE 12.5.2 on Solaris 10 - it does not work correctly: it takes heck of time to create the basic databases.

ASE: Developer's edition ver 12.5.2
System: Thinkpad T23
Memory: 768 MB
Disk: 1x25 GB IDE
Page size = 4 k
Databases
=========
master.dat: device size=60MB, database size=12MB
sysprocs.dat: device size=120MB, database size=120MB

Both databases are placed on UFS + FORCEDIRECTIO slice

Total time to install Sybase 12.5.2 (including configure 1 Adaptive Server )

solaris 9U7-x86 10b63-x86
3mins ~2hrs

I have tested as well placing the databases on UFS slice without forcedirectio but without success on S10. Somehow it looks like ASE does not work okay in S10.

Any comments,
Stefan </body> </html>

"Managing the Professional Services Firm"

2004-07-29T08:12:50.000Z

After Professional Services

You may know that Sun is merging its pre-sales and post-sales technology consulting groups into a single organisation, to be known as "Client Services Organisation"¹. This means merging divisions and groups variously known as "Technology Solutions Organisation", "Solutions Technology Group", "Technical Account Management" & "Professional Services".

The one essential read for anyone seeking to manage revenue, people or strategy in the new "Client Services Organisanation" is,

"Managing the Professional Services Firm"

David H. Maister - 1997 - Free Press Paperback, Simon & Schuster, available at Amazon

A Guru's thoughts!

The book structure groups the chapters into sections called "Basic Matters", "Client Matters", "People Matters", "Management Matters", "Partnership Matters", "Multisite Matters" & "Final Thoughts". In the book, one of the first things he does is define a generic mission statement for the professional services organisation,

To deliver outstanding client service; to provide fulfilling careers and professional satisfaction for our people; and to achieve financial success so that we can reward ourselves and grow.

which he summarises these as "service, satisfaction and success". At Sun we are of course a joint stick company so the definition of 'us' in the context of reward, includes our stock holders. Interestingly, the axiomatic location of the professional services firm as an arbitraguer of a skilled labour market and customer requirements is a dominant theme throughout the book. To Maister, supply side matters.

The book is a collection of articles and papers that he's published previously and while a number relate to 'Partnership' structured entities and how to govern and recognise partners, even these chapters provide useful insight into managing a people based service delivery firm. The history of the writing means that the book is easy to pick up and put down, and the stand alone nature of each chapter allows the book to act as a reference.

The first chapter is called "A Question of Balance", it explores the nature of professional service projects depending on "Brains, Grey Hair & Procedure", which borrowing from his terms in chapter 2, "The Professional Firm Life Cycle" can be better articulated as "Expertise, Experience or Efficiency". These types of projects require different quantities of senior to junior relationships (referred to as leverage), and management need to recognise that recruiting, motivating and retaining these differing types of people takes different social cultures and infrastructual investments. He also examines the nature of re-use in transforming knowledge from expertise, through experience to efficiency. This is common to all professional services firms but we need to recognise that Sun also has the option of transitioning our knowledge into product via "Customer Ready Systems" or our global R&D programme (sic). Actually Maister argues that professional services firms will have difficulty managing people to offer all of the 3Es, just as traditional industrial age firms have difficulty optimising for "operational efficiency" & "product excellence".

Adapting at Sun

While the essential value a project possesses may be a blend of the 3 E's, a customer will know that his project can be supplied by the market as only one. While the firm has three offers, customers will only buy one and that determines their price. Expertise is worth (and costs) more than experience, which itself is worth (and costs) more than efficiency. If a customer requires market experience, nothing (except their own stupidity, which we should not take advantage of ²) will make them pay the expertise premium. Sun has the advantage of strong inter-company partnerships, which allows us to leverage partner cultures and human investments. However should Sun's project service bid teams and management mismatch our offerings with the customer value requirement, our customers will go to a supplier offering the solution at a market price. Bid teams and management must evaluate the customer's buying value requirement in terms of expertise, experience and efficiency and match it. In the UK³, we can match the three E's against a form of offering and historically how Sun met these customer value requirements.

Value Offering Organisation

Expertise Consultancy EITAs, Solutions Architects Group & SEs

Experience Projects Professional Services

Efficiency Packages Professional Services & Sun PRO partners⁴

Obviously, today, only one organisational entity will meet the customer requirements, but that unit will need to meet the requirement to supply expertise, experience and efficiency, and offer consultancy, projects or packages. While decisions in bid teams may be more difficult, at least we should no longer have bid interests competing with each other any more. In order to succeed, management must create the ability to recruit, retain and motivate both expertise and experience and create the partner alliances and knowledge management systems to deliver efficiency offerings.

Maister's makes the point that professional services firm strategy is about choosing the nature & mix of the projects undertaken and so it actually has some say in the ratio of the 3E's required and hence the ratio of seniors to juniors required. This and the current financial targets gives the CSO some time to rebalance its project portfolio, but the two year head count freeze, means that our consultants have not been able to refresh themselves by bringing in (or promoting) new talent and that this is exacerbated by the growth of our original junior people to the point that they want, need and deserve promotion to senior positions themselves.

This schelrosis is counterpointed by Maister when he states that

"People do not join professional firms for jobs, but for careers.

The head count freeze, project services revenue flat lineing and the junior staff's capability growth have caused a problem. Sun's renewal strategy offers a way out as consulting and projects are used to penetrate our customers value horizons, prove the value of our products through offering customers project based solutions. Our key resource are our project architects, be they project managers, solutions architects, TDAs or technologists.

There is a way forward, but it'll take good management. Reading this book will help managers (and individual contributors) play their part. The pressures mean that we at Sun need to sort ourselves out quickly before our people solve the problem in other ways.

My Key Lessons

The key short term lesson for Sun is to recognise the customer's value requirements. Do they require expertise, experience or efficiency and to match the customer requirement with a suitable offering. The key long term lesson is that a successful project/consulting services business is based on service, satisfaction and success and mangers need to plan for all three. We mustn't forget, that for consulting services, "Supply side matters", and its probably impossible to optimise CSO for expertise, experience and efficiency.

The one lesson the book won't help, is teaching many of our account representatives the courage and technique to ask for money for labour.

I expect to return to this book in a later blog posting. I think we should explore what Maister has to say about utilisation and long term profitability and how practice leaders add value.

Foot Notes

I'm a Brit, I'll spell english the english way! If COBOL allowed alternative spelling, Sun can. I'm still deeply upset that the tech. writing team for my Sun blueprints stuff insist in spelling 'programme' without the 'me'.

Why not? Its not ethical, that should be enough but if you need more they'll find out and punish you.

I say UK, this is because I know it well, some other countries have similar matrices, others don't.

I'll write about our Interim Operations Management and Sun Service managed service offerings another day. It should be in the efficiency offerings.

Dave Levy, Online at last

2004-07-23T22:25:00.000Z

Hi! - Friends such as Alex Muffet & Jon Haslem have persuaded me to open this web log. This initial entry is not going to set the world on fire, but some of the changes at Sun both encourage the premature expression of ideas, but make the publication of more complete thoughts more difficult, hopefully, they'll fix the latter problem some time, but I propose to take advantage of this site.

I hope that some of what I put here, about IT issues, business and Computer Games (including Baldur's Gate 2) will be interesting, innovative and usefull.

I also expect to just put some simple stuff up; stuff that does not warrant a web page, maybe I'll x-ref my amazon book reviews and put up some that I don't expect to publish elsewhere. I doubt I'll be writing about either cooking or DIY. I am also expecting to open a web site of my own soon to help my work as a consultant, and to help me participate in this & other net community activities.

My job at Sun is as a Consultant & I have been part of Sun's Professional Services team since I joined Sun in 1997 and have worked with over 100 Sun customers over that time, mainly in Banking & Finance, but also other industry sectors. It'll be interesting to see how I can write about my work, while maintaining customer confidentiality, but I'm sure I'll manage.

It seems to me that using this blog as a way of discussing and improving my ideas before they're finished seems worthwhile; actually finishing and publishing is hard work, while "streams of consciousness" are much easier to start. Maybe the comments I get will improve the ideas, using community techniques to everyone's benefit.

El Vinos We know this place too well. A fine selection of wines, good food for lunch downstairs and good for evening drinking. Often has special offers, thankfully closes early. It has very few windows on the ground floor, so is quite dark. Also sells Becks. Some people might think this a bit "spit & sawdust". Its not! There's none of either, although upstairs is a bit olde worlde wood panels & downstairs a brick & stone cavern. A place to chill or get pissed	Fuegos Excellent for Lunch, try the Tapas & Garlic sausage, but don't over indulge on the booze if working in the p.m. Another one that's underground with no daylight. Don't arrive for Lunch at 1.00 on the dot. Sells Becks Believed to get exciting in the evening when the dancing starts. Is this still true or am I just an old frt.*

Sports Academy TV screens, pool tables, again no bitter, but the wine is poor. Takes AMEX, only local bar with daylight. A good stop for a 'sharp one" on the way home. Sells Becks. Two bars, one is above, the other underground. Used to be full of DKB traders. Well decorated with St. George's flags during the football competitions, which made drinking with a Swedish & Argentinian colleague during World Cup 2000 enjoyable. Not worth visiting to watch day time games though; nowhere is! Sadly the land lady of over five years has moved on, although she's believed to be at the Britannia.	Corney & Barrow A chain of wine bars, started in the late 80/90s, no bitter and only high cost brand lagers, but not Becks. The chain is really located in the land of Yup. This one is below the City office, it has no windows. They usually have a steel, wood & glass decor style, but this one's underground so brick and cast iron make a showing. You might think its an improvement on the others but somehow its not. Sandwiches and snacks, so get your heavy pre-session carbohydrates from elsewhere. Good for a change. A place to get pissed

Model	Product/ Service	Customers	Customer Value	Vendor Value
Project	20:80	Bleeding Edge	Competitive Advantage	High Margin, Value pricing
Solution	50:50	Early Adopters	1st Division Player	Leverage Re-Use
Product	80:20	Mass Market, knowledgeable buyers	Transactional Efficiency	High Revenue
Consumables	100:0	Mass Market, consumer buyers	Transactional Efficiency	recurring low value product revenue
Subscription	20:80	Mass Market, consumer buyers	Cost predictability	regular income based on value added services
Utility	0:100	Complex requirements	Transparent benefit acquisition	Market Supply

Value	Offering	Organisation
Expertise	Consultancy	EITAs, Solutions Architects Group & SEs
Experience	Projects	Professional Services
Efficiency	Packages	Professional Services & Sun PRO partners⁴