Sun’s Software Engineering Summit 2005

Greg Papapdopolus (SUNW CTO), 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

I 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 because the suppliers will 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;  …

Laptop Diaries III

On my Sun/Oracle blog, I wrote an article about configuring my Laptop, primarily about getting X-Windows to work under Solaris. This documented some research, but not a solution, and as an easter egg, I pointed at some Gnome and Windows eye-candy. You can read it if you want, but its out of date; I wrote this pointer article in Feb 2016 and every piece of technology mentioned is obsolete. …

About: Risk

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! …

Laptop Diaries II

How to  build a triple boot laptop. 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. …

My Laptop Diary I

This is a pointer to the first of a series of articles on maintaining my laptop; I was experimenting, pre-virtualisation with multiple operating systems. The original blog article is here…. I referred to the articles as my “Laptop Diary”. This article was specific to changes on a now obsolete hardware platform, and now obsolete software platforms.

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Consolidation & Sybase

I wrote up some notes on how to run multiple Sybase instances in a single system image. When I originally wrote it, I was pretty much the world expert on the subject. The article explored a couple of basic Sybase consolidation techniques and the UNIX and Solaris technologies that support consolidation.  It was one of the first articles I published on davelevy.info, as a download. As I prepared for the version file look and feel update in 2015, I had decided that it was no longer of much help and so did not bring it forward to the new downloads page, although the download permalink is still supported. …

Consolidation – The importance of a cost meta-model

On blogs.sun.com, I posted an article about some of the theory behind the Data Centre Economics offerings I and colleagues were working on. The exercises were designed to model the costs of an infrastructure platform and show the profitability of implementing, smaller, faster & cheaper systems. I made this into white paper format, available here…, the original article, without the graphic remains available at the sun/oracle site, here….

Is it still worth reading? Not so sure. See the first comment …