that’s whacked

(grommit) moving homes…

Sunday, Dec 3. 2006  –  Category: Musings

today was the day i moved grommit…

so the actual physical move from CCCP @ Hurricane Electric to Cernio @ UnitedLayer (in 200 Paul) went pretty smoothly once I figured out to setup the rails.

What @)#(*#@)(%’d things up was that I installed a bunch of patches before I shut down, figuring… since I was shutting down, why not update the system while I was at it.

This was a good idea, but alas…one that came back to bite me in the rear most strongly.

Two patches gave me hell, specifically:

120544-06 which “fixed” Apache2 so that it recognised large (>2GB) files. This is actually a good fix, but it necessitates that all modules need to be compiled with a certain flag. I didn’t have time to rebuild it, so I ended up backing out the patch to workaround this. Specifically, the patch fixed 6373222 which resulted in me hitting 6492784.

The other patch which gave me hell was 122663-06, which resulted in me hitting 6488656. This patch broke zones, so none of grommit’s zones booted up, claiming insufficient privileges. This meant that any new patches couldn’t be applied, since zones wouldn’t boot. Simple, I’ll just back out the patch. Nope… you can’t backout the patch since zones won’t boot. Uggggghhhh. I ended up glomming libzonecfg.so.1 out of the undo.Z to let me back this patch out. What a pain… don’t we test these patches before we ship them out?

links for 2006-11-30

Thursday, Nov 30. 2006  –  Category: Linkage

• Footytube.com – Broadcasting the beautiful game
  this’ll save me tons of searching on youtube
  (tags: video football)

a steaming pile of p.o.o.

Thursday, Nov 30. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

there was a somewhat heated debate about p.o.o. last night on #opensolaris. glynn seems to be taking some flack for maintaining it, mainly on 4 points:

1. it duplicates information already available on opensolaris.org/os/blogs
2. it’s elitist, or the “why won’t you add MY blog?” dilemma
3. it’s got non-OpenSolaris related blog entries in it
4. it’s not community-driven

so, for the record, i’m firmly in support of the planet. i think it rocks. there, that’s out of the way. you may proceed to read the rest of my biased blog post now.

it duplicates information already available on opensolaris.org/os/blogs

rebuttal: some of us find it frustrating to read blogs on opensolaris.org/os/blogs because it only shows excerpts rather than the full entry. additionally, not to disparage it, but there is a lower barrier of entry to opensolaris.org/os/blogs. it’s more inclusive of anyone in the opensolaris community. p.o.o. is about aggregating blogs of opensolaris.org contributors, rather than participants. this is an important distinction to make. and lastly, os.o/os/blogs contains non-English blogs. again, this is fine for the main site – but it detracts from my reading experience as a retard-who-can’t-read-any-other-language-other-than-English.

it’s elitist, or the “why won’t you add MY blog?” dilemma

this one bugs me. glynn has said from the beginning, there is an editorial policy in place. the nature of editorials is such that they tend to be polarising. you can’t please everyone all of the time. and this is why i don’t envy glynn in his position of maintaining the planet. he has, and will continue to have to make, hard decisions on who he adds to the planet. and undoubtedly, he is going to piss some people off. again, it’s the difference between a contributor and a participant… and there’s not always a clear line of distinction between when you cross from being a participant to a contributor. yes, he may not always get it right… but tough – that’s the decision he makes, and he will draw flack for it for being in that editorial role. the best you can do is convince him otherwise. point out that your blog entries serve a valuable role to the OpenSolaris community. point out all your mailing list discussions. point out the fact that you hang out in IRC and give stevel flack for all the times he kills the os.o website. this is contributing. it’s not always just about code.

it’s got non-OpenSolaris related blog entries in it

p.o.o. says at the very top-right-hand side: “Planet OpenSolaris is a window into the world, work and lives of OpenSolaris hackers and contributors.” it’s not an aggregation of OpenSolaris related blog content. it’s an aggregation of OpenSolaris contributors’ blogs. i find this stuff totally valuable. yes, there might be (is?) a need for a planet of purely OpenSolaris-related technical content, but i find the non-OpenSolaris content to be extremely valuable in providing context into who a person is, what they’re like, and what they do. i love reading Jim‘s blog entries about Japan with all his photos. i like reading Dennis‘s diatribes and rants about Linux. these provide context into who Jim and Dennis are… it’s insight into the people, and thus it’s insight into the community of contributors and hackers.

it’s not community-driven

now this one just pisses me off. glynn did this in his spare time. he’s not paid to work on OpenSolaris website stuff… that’s the tonic-team (which i’m on). he’s a JDS hacker. yes, he works for Sun; but he did this as a community thing – and we hosted it on grommit before we got eventual approval to host it on the main site. if anyone else in the community had had the same idea, i believe 100% completely that we would have ended up with the same result. it would just have a different editor. the nature of a Planet is such that it’s either going to be a free-for-all-add-everyone aggregation (which IMHO is what planetsolaris turned into) which devalues it to its readership; or it’s going to follow a selective editorial policy…. which again, will inevitably piss some people off – but provide continual value to its readership.

so there. that’s my counter-rant to the various p.o.o. arguments i’ve seen over the past couple of days.

i for one, welcome our new p.o.o. overloads

btw, on a tangential note: if you want to see all the hackergotchis, you can view them here

pos has become poo

Monday, Nov 27. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

glynn got official blessing for Planet OpenSolaris. where once it was known as ‘pos’, it has now become ‘poo’ following the usual abbreviations of opensolaris.org sites.

you can now find it at planet.opensolaris.org

links for 2006-11-27

Monday, Nov 27. 2006  –  Category: Linkage

• removing the abs module from an a4
  (tags: car)
• audiworld article on how to remove the abs control module

seoul photos, now with new and improved context

Friday, Nov 24. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Photos

I finally got around to captioning and describing all my photos from my trip to Seoul for Tech Days from two weeks ago.

links for 2006-11-20

Monday, Nov 20. 2006  –  Category: Linkage

• MqExtension – Mercurial Queues, quilt framework for Hg
  (tags: mercurial)

links for 2006-11-18

Saturday, Nov 18. 2006  –  Category: Linkage

• “prettiest” wallpaper images
  (tags: wallpaper)

opensolaris databases community

Wednesday, Nov 15. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

i have an interesting relationship with the databases group here at Sun. i met Francois at fisl 7° last year, and helped him get Solaris up and running on his laptop.

from there i helped David Van Couvering get Solaris up and running on his laptop.

so it’s great to see them get a Databases Community up and in the open on opensolaris.org. i was excited when we got Postgres integrated in Solaris, and Francois’s JavaDB/Derby demo blew me away at FISL (in fact we’ve briefly talked about using it in the webapp)…

so head on over and see what they have to say. i promise they’re smart guys

pos live!

Tuesday, Nov 14. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

i love that glynn decided to keep it abbreviated ‘pos’

anyway, planet opensolaris is now live… and on grommit no-less.