It’s an exciting day with respect to the Oracle/Sun acquisition and the EU investigation. Eblen Mogden, on his blog represents his evidence, which says better than I can, why forcing Oracle to de-merge or re-licence MySQL is against the public interest. …
Oracle, Sun, MySQL and Monopoly
Monty Widenius has issued a manifesto asking that open sourcers and MySQL users to write to the EU to let them know their views on Oracle’s potential ownership of the MySQL copyright. He of course hopes we will argue that they shouldn’t. …
Wish, Boomy icons and imagemagick
I need to write a program for managing my windows host, well actually, someone else’s windows laptop. I fired up TCL/TK and discovered that I haven’t copied my tcl/tk icon library from my home systems and I decided to improve my library, which is a big mistake.
I went looking on the ‘net and found the lovely Boomy icons. Annoyingly the transparency representation doesn’t work on my platform and the lovely transparency on the GIFs comes out a delightful shade of pink. There is no .bmp set; the .png set work and look fine. GIMP allegedly supports batch operations, as does Imagemagik. I have been impressed with Jonathan Soma’s trip map http://www.triptropnyc.com/ site about the New York transport system, which uses Imagemagik ever since I saw it, so an excuse to play with it would be good.
The alternative might be to find and install the TCL/TK IMG package which seems to be at SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/projects/tkimg/.
I have opened a wiki page here, to record my notes, successes and failures, which now includes how to use ImageMagick to perform a simple format conversion. …
Reasons not to ‘Port’
returned to software migration/porting recently due to having been part of the team that wrote Migrating to Solaris OS due to some of the projects I had worked in. We argued that there were four basic techniques available, this article lists and briefly reviews them and looks at the economic constraints to migration. …
Why did Amazon take so long to deliver SQL in the Cloud
The storage market has been complexifying, (Is that a word Ed.) over the last few years; I have for a while considered the databases to be just another software abstraction layer between the hardware and the application i.e. completely equivalent to a file system. Also more recently it is clear that the highly scalable solutions builders have moved beyond relational databases. I conclude, today’s application designers and storage consumers are no longer always prepared to accept the compromises buying an RDBMS requires, it’s about Storage not SQL. …
Oracle & Sun & the European Single Market
A lot of people have been busy commenting on the EU’s investigation into the competitive dynamics of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, so I thought I’d join in. …
Where are the new developers coming from?
My final note from the Water’s Power:09 Conference; Robert Johnson, a development manager at one of the London based banks stated that of the people he’s looked at in recruitment,
Many… developers don’t have a computer science background…
which makes it hard for them to write code for both distributed computing platforms and multi-threaded CPU systems.
It seems this is a reflection of the trends I have written about at on my old sun blog, tagged ‘university’ and more importantly at this site, in an article called British Higher Education. Given a choice between studying something easy or something hard, now that they have to pay a lot, students and their families choose the easy route. A further cause is the dead hands on the school IT curriculum design and the gestation period to make changes. …
Data Centre Economies of Scale
At the Waters:Power09, last week, Bob Giffords argued there are three ‘gravitational’ forces leading to the mega data centres and cloud computing.
- There’s too much data to move, it needs to stay where its created.
- Intra system & total latency is still a problem, and hence systems are best co-located with the data.
- He argues that energy management is a gravitational issue.
Some insights into managing the cloud
Dave Cliff, Professor of Computer Sci at Bristol spoke to Waters Power:09 in Canary Wharf yesterday. It is clear from many sources that IT is changing and he examined some of these changes. He woke me up by quoting Carlota Perez who argues that there are five transformational changes since the industrial revolution, Steam, Railways, Electricity, internal combustion and IT. She also argues that the adoption and maturity cycles are similar, and Cliff argues that “money’s out of IT now”. Her book is called “Technological Revolutions and Finance Capital:The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages”, which gives on an idea of where she’s coming from. Cliff also pointed his audience at Nick Carr’s “The Big Switch”, another pundit that argues that IT is done! …
Plazes
So, having started a new job, I have registered the new office at Plazes and can now use both the web site and the ipodtouch, using the iplazer app, to update my plazes atom feed with my location. My recent travels can still be seen at my i’m here page, and I am now likely to keep this more up to date than over the summer.
The Plazer seems to have disappeared from the internet, so I have put one of my windows installer copies on my downloads page. (I expect I’ll move it to a mirror page at some point, but I was in a hurry as I expect to ‘need’ to install it soon).
I wonder how much longer I’ll bother with this, they seem to have lost interest since being bought by Nokia.
ooOOOoo
I have no idea why I brought this forward to the wordpress blog; all the links are broken since Plazes died in 2012. …