that’s whacked

solaris 10

Wednesday, Nov 17. 2004  –  Category: Sun

yay. new solaris logo. i like it much better than the old logo.

it seems “happier” or “friendlier” or something.

i also got my second and third Sun shirts of my short Sun career so far. i went over a year without getting Sun clothing of any kind, and now have gotten 3 in the past 3 weeks. sweet.

a moment of pride

Tuesday, Nov 16. 2004  –  Category: Sun

read Ashlee Vance’s article at The Register.

I have to admit, I felt a sense of pride when reading this paragraph: Its Solaris engineering team is arguably the best operating system design group on the planet. Sun pours billions into the operating system and has countless features that neither Windows or Linux can match. It’s secure, scales incredibly well and now, Sun claims, fast. Beyond all of this, Sun faces no real Unix competition from a big player in the x86 market. It’s Sun’s segment to win.

droooling over the new SunRay

Wednesday, Oct 27. 2004  –  Category: Sun

damn…. the new SunRay 170 is soooo hot. i want it.

never thought i’d say it, but Sun hardware is getting mighty sexy. the new Opteron workstations w1100z and w2100z are sweet, and this SunRay is beautiful. i’d love to get one or two of these with the new SunRay Server 3.0 running on my Linux server.

sigh.

i can dream…

now that’s an uptime

Sunday, Oct 10. 2004  –  Category: Sun

[stevel@stopit:stevel] 505$ uptime 5:40am up 471 day(s), 11:20, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.05, 0.04 [stevel@stopit:stevel] 506$

i thought it was cool grommit had a 160 day uptime… i just found a labmachine (an old sun4m machine) with a 471 day uptime.

grommit, however, is in use every day - all day - by a lot of users. stopit doesn’t do much

Red (faced) Hat

Monday, Sep 27. 2004  –  Category: OpenSource, Sun

(warning, this is actually a somewhat serious “rant” as far as my rants go)

I was fortunate enough to come through a school that still taught their systems on Unix (at the time, though they now teach a lot of classes w/ Microsoft’s blessing on MS donated hardware running Windows). But, I did a lot of my learning on Solaris, and Linux.

In fact, it’s probably safe to say that I wouldn’t have learned what I know now without free open source OS’s like BSD, or most importantly: Red Hat. I have a lot of respect for Red Hat’s goals and what they’ve tried to do… but in his latest blog entry, Red Hat CEO Michael Tielmann has made me lose quite a bit of respect (and also made me question the wisdom of letting executive’s blog openly, but hey, that’s a whole other can of worms).

A lot of us joke about blog entries being “rants” (like this one), but it’s bad when a CEO rants. Tielmann comes across as someone who has been backed against the wall without a real defensive argument to make. He looks like someone grasping at straws. Instead of taking the time to carefully formulate a good argument, calculating when and where to throw that one well-timed punch for the KO, he is hoping that if he hits out enough, with enough punches, ONE of them will land. This is NOT the way to fight a battle, Michael. (especially with a fat ‘old’ heavy-weight looking to refresh its career like Sun standing in the opposite corner).

Merely being pathetic doesn’t score a whole lotta points, even if you are an executive of a once-great company.

Silicon Valley is built on a history of “once-great” companies that have risen again. To write off a company because they have made mistakes, is a folly. Look at Apple, look at IBM. Companies can, and have, turned around. And it’s the people who were at the top of their industry (i.e.: like Red Hat’s position in the Linux/OSS market) who got wrote the “once-greats” off that inevitably lost. Sun itself has been guilty of blindly looking over things in its pride. We’ve learned from that mistake… big time. Trust me, when I’m certain that we won’t be making that mistake again.

The open source community doesn’t really care what you think. You can love them, you can hate them, you can ignore them, even insult them, but what matters at the end of the day is this: what have you done?

Oh….I dunno….Java (it’s not open source, but it’s OPEN damnit), Open Office (oh I’m sorry Red Hat…which office suite do you package with Linux? is it…could it… be… OOo?), not to mention other things you ship like GNOME (yeah..last time I checked, it was your standard desktop environment), Evolution connectors, NetBeans, and the list goes on. Sun has a longer and richer history with open source than Red Hat has had.

Now, you say that you love the open source community, but how much? If you love the open source community, you’d open source Java. If you won’t open source Java, it means you don’t love us, or at least you don’t trust us. Why, then, should we trust you?

WHAT?!?! “Daddy…if you really loved me, you’d buy me the Ferrari for my 16th birthday”. That’s a completely irrational argument. At the end of the day, a company has to make money. Red Hat does this by charging exorbitant prices for its system and services. Sun does this by making money off of Java; but most importantly, we have opened the standards and specifications. People whine all the time about open sourcing Java, but WHY? Why should we GPL it? Java is kept proprietary so some form of control can be exerted to prevent people from forking and breaking its standards. The whole appeal of Java is in standards, standards, standards. We’ve made it open to allow people to collaborate easily, and isn’t that the main desire of open source. You make such a petulant argument, you just sound ridiculous.

And if you won’t, why not? Because you love Microsoft more?

No, because we have to do what we have to do to survive, and more importantly, NO, because we’re giving our customers what THEY want - because our customers come first. You should try THAT sometime, eh? Our customers are tired of the fighting, tired of us expending money fighting a losing battle. Interoperation is the key word Michael…. it’s not capitulating to Microsoft, it’s allowing our customers to utilise the technologies they want in order to do the business they need to do.

You are still messaging from a proprietary platform: drawing conclusions first, and then spinning things to make those conclusions appear to make sense.

You mean….like people hearing Sun is going to open source Solaris and then drawing conclusions, and then spinning things to make those conclusions appear to make sense? Yeah, I hear a lot of idiots are doing that in our industry.

If you won’t open source Java, you won’t take the right positions on software patents, and you keep doing things that benefit nobody but Microsoft, why should be trust what you ask us to do? And why should customers believe what you are telling them?

Because we’re doing things that benefit nobody but ourselves, our customers, the open source community, …. and maybe even you, Red Hat. Think about that when you package GNOME localisation packages, Evolution connectors, and OpenOffice with your next distribution.

We are not bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists. We are realists, living in a world of reality. Come join us. Calling us lunatics and making other claims that don’t stand up is not the Open Source way.

You would be wise to listen to your own advise, Michael.

…. take it with a grain of salt, I’m just an enraged lunatic junior engineer who clearly is not living in a world of reality.

zai beijing gong zuo!

Wednesday, Sep 8. 2004  –  Category: ChinaBlog, Sun

working from china, baby!

poorna and i have arrived safe, sound, and stuffed in beijing. i think we had like 4 airplane meals on the flights over.

anyway. we’re here. we’re working. we’re increasing shareholder value. and hey, we’re not even jetlagged (yet)

why light controlled outlets are bad…

Thursday, Aug 26. 2004  –  Category: Sun

oh man…funniest network problem ever. so in our offices here, we have a pair of outlets that are designated as ‘LIGHT CONTROLLED’ outlets, meaning when the lights get turned off, these outlets turn off. They’re for plugging in lamps, and monitors. It’s actually pretty neat, because the light is heat/motion sensored, so when we leave our offices in the evening, they turn off after about 30 minutes or so of no occupancy, thus turning off desk lamps, monitors, etc..

now, for the past few months, a colleague who will remain nameless has been having these annoying network issues where he can’t access his machine from home, and his terminal sessions all die after he leaves work. he hasn’t been able to start off an overnight run of some benchmarks or test suites for this reason. he’s been stumped….every morning he comes in and sees all his terminals with “Connection reset by peer”.

guess what he had plugged into a surge protector which was plugged into one of these ‘LIGHT CONTROLLED’ outlets. that’s right….his network hub/switch.

man… he’s been asking for help on all the Sun Solaris & networking mailing lists… he’s got all these brilliant engineers puzzled as to why his terminals keep getting reset.

well, now we know.

when is swap not swap?

Thursday, Aug 12. 2004  –  Category: Sun

i find it very unfortunate that the same partition type used for Solaris UFS partitions shows up as ‘Linux swap’ when booted into Linux.

i also find it very unfortunate that the Linux installer asked me if i wanted to format the invalid swap partition it so fortunately found for me.

what an unfortunate evening…

because i got high…

Friday, Jul 16. 2004  –  Category: Sun

no, not that kind of high. i’m just psyched for a number of reasons.

one) i finally got time to check out the local climbing gym last night, after a month of not climbing. i was still able to half-ass my way up an 11a, so that made me feel alright. my new climbing partner is at pretty much my same level, so i’m hoping we can push each other to the always-slightly-out-of-my-reach level of 5.12 soon.

two) poorna and i filed our SunTEA requests yesterday. we’ve got all the approvals from our managers, so it looks like we’ll be going to Beijing for the whole month of September!

three) poorna and i were both accepted into the SEED (Sun Engineering Enrichment & Development) program. it’s a program pairing new recent college hires with experienced (and distinguished, woohoo) [sun] managers, execs (VPs!), fellows, distinguished engineers, etc. i’m pretty psyched about this… now i just have to choose a mentor. i can’t decide whether i’d like to be paired with an engineer/technical-type who would be able to help advance my career technically, or if i’d rather be paired with someone in management or another non-technical-engineering area of [sun] so i can get some more exposure to the rest of [sun]. apparently, from what people tell me, there is life outside of Solaris kernel. who knew… i’m leaning towards the latter, but well, i’ll have to think about it some more.

i think this is the first time i’ve listed things with the one), two), three) style instead of 1), 2), 3). i kinda like it..

good fortune!

Friday, Jun 11. 2004  –  Category: Sun

we went to Lucky Buddha, a pretty good Cantonese restaurant in San Carlos of all places for lunch today. anyway, my fortune cookie had the following:

Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.

by sheer coincidence, our annual performance review/focals are due today.