Planet Sun

Summer Contract

2008-07-20T19:55:14+00:00

As I've previously mentioned, the main reason I'm a Sun Campus Ambassador is because I spent 18 months with them on placement as part of my degree course. Well, by the end of this summer that'll be 21 months, as I'm back down in Camberley just now for a summer contract with my old team in the Global Labs.

My desk at Guillemont Park, complete with boxes of broken server hardware

It's an interesting experience, as I'm now one rung off the bottom of the pecking order - still a long way from CEO, but at least I get to ~~boss the new guys about~~ help bring the new year's placement interns up to speed. It's a good opportunity to build up a bit more professional experience before leaving uni, and the extra money doesn't hurt either :-D

I'll be starting up the Campus Ambassador program again when I return to Strathclyde this autumn, and part of that will be promoting the Sun placements available to Strathclyde students, which will probably include the chance to work the US Global Labs team in California as in previous years. Watch this space for more information!

My French Adventure:p

2008-06-11T11:52:48+00:00

Last Friday I left Crystal Palace with 24 other cyclists on a sponsored ride across France to Reims in Champagne.

The journey was about 400Km and I mapped it with my Garmin though in places - ie where the straight lines are I forgot to hit start - oops.

Reims
Find more Bike Rides in Crystal Palace,

The ride was undertaken by a real mixture of people - including one Woman who did it on a steel mountain bike with knobbly tires - Hardcore to say the least.

Day 1 was pretty much all in England - we took the London to Brighton route to Newhaven and then the ferry to Dieppe. I started the ride saying that i wasn going to drink until the final night when there was no more riding to be done - this went by the board on the ferry where i had a few pints.

The next day was a lovely short 55 miles from Dieppe to Gourney en Bray over some undulating countryside. At one point I stayed with the front runners and averaged 20 mph across one or 2 stages but this is no way to holiday - you dont see the country that you are cycling through so i hung back at a slower pace enjoying the company.

I found out something about myself on this trip - im capable of cycling some fairly serious miles with a skinful - this is not something that i would recommend as it hurts like hell but like i said this was a holiday!!!!!

This was a great oppertunity to meet some really great people and get some miles down on the tarmac - that is one thing that is truly fantastic about France - the roads are so so so so smooth - somthing that is more apparent when i came back to the UK last night and had to cycle 5 bumpy miles home :S

It is something that i would love to do again although next time i would love to do a mountain ride much like Chris.

Right that is enough from me for now - im off out on a bike ride

France

2008-06-05T16:51:08+00:00

As i write this I am packing for a cycle trip to Reims in France that i have been banging on about for ages.

Annoyingly i have come down with a cold just in time for the start of this ride which is tomorrow - this is fairly typical for students who finish but even so a pain in the arse(lungs).

This time tomorrow i should be on a ferry having left Crystal Palace at stoopid o clock and cycled to Newhaven by a round about route.

Then i alight in Dieppe ready for the first days cycling in France on Saturday.

If i can then i shall post short updates on a daily basis but prob not as i shall just fall asleep in the evenings i think:D. ON arrival at the final destination i shall be getting nicely sloshed i feel before getting the train home the next day - possibly if i am feeling stupid then i shall cycle back accross london and home as well - it depends on the jellification of the legs:D

Ode to Aberystwyth

2008-05-31T10:56:56+00:00

Well the time has come for me to leave Aberystwyth and all the lovely people that i have met here:( It hasnt really sunk in yet that this is the final time that i will be here as a student - i expect that will happen sometime in the next week or so.

Aber has been truly awesome for the 4 years that i have been a student here and i have made some amazing friends - you know who you are - there are too many to mention in one place - that and i am technically packing as i write this - now that is procrastination:D.

Ill be back in July to attend the graduation ceremony - and more importantly the ball for one last hurrah with my mates and then of course you can bet that i shall be back when i can to come out on more Riding Club socials - as long as the fancy dress is stupid then i am there:D

Basically then Goodbye to Aber and keep in touch to all the people that i know here:) see you all soon i hope and i hope that you all have an amazing summer:)

Chris

Do People Still Download Applications?

2008-05-29T09:44:54+00:00

An interesting topic was just raised on the Sun ambassador mailing list. It seems Firefox are running a Download Day event where they try to get a record-breaking number of downloads of Firefox 3 in a single day. There are more details on their website. While I have no problem with people advocating Firefox, and it’s certainly better than using a proprietary browser like Opera or Internet Exploder, I can see two problems with this initiative. The first is simply that Firefox 3 is not yet a released version of the browser, so they are encouraging the download of an incomplete version without making this completely clear. It would be better if it was just download Firefox on the day.

However, the more interesting problem is that I don’t see why anyone would need to download Firefox. Note, I didn’t say want but *need*. If you want a copy of Firefox, you just tick the necessary box or execute the appropriate command and your package manager downloads and installs it for you. Now if Firefox are counting these installs too, then fine, but it seems more like they want people to go and download it manually, and I can’t see why you’d want to do this as it’s fraught with problems. I suppose it’s the only way to get Firefox if you’re still on a legacy operating system like Windows or Mac OS, but I imagine the majority of Firefox users are GNU/Linux users where aptitude install iceweasel or emerge firefox is sufficient to do the whole job of downloading it, compiling it (if you’re on Gentoo) and installing it in the right location in the right way, so it all works well out of the box. Manual user download of software is antiquated, complex and the sooner it becomes universally unnecessary the better.

Au Revoir

2008-05-27T14:46:54+00:00

This week marks my last week as Sun Campus Ambassador for the University of Sheffield. Officially, my contract ends on the 30th, but our last real event was last Wednesday. At short notice, we hosted a talk by Simon Ritter on ‘Technology, Innovation and Life’, which looked first at past and present technological developments, and then towards the possibilities of the future. There was mention of ‘Web 2.0′ sites like ebay, Facebook and Myspace and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) was briefly touched upon. Simon also briefly spoke about new Sun technology, such as the Sun SPOT, and the upcoming use of RFID tags. He also advocated blogging

I think this could have been a better attended talk if we’d been able to do it earlier in the year and had a little more notice. As has generally been the case throughout my term as Campus Ambassador, we’ve been trying to pack many things into a tight space and so sacrifices have had to be made. Now that the program is established, next year’s CA program should benefit both from hindsight and simply the greater time people in the university have had to get used to this new role.

It is on this note that I am pleased to announce that Mesude Biçak has just been appointed as our new Sun Campus Ambassador. I put her forward for the position about a month ago, and she succeeded at interview last Friday. Please join me in wishing her the best of luck in her new role, and let’s look forward to new and exciting developments in 08-09.

The End Is Near

2008-05-15T15:58:47+00:00

Yesterday, we hosted our final Sun tech. demo for this semester and for my term as Campus Ambassador. As mentioned previously, we invited Andrew Haley from RedHat to speak about OpenJDK and the work that is being done on making this available in GNU/Linux distributions. Andrew gave a couple of excellent talks: the main one was on the general topic of Free Java and OpenJDK, a potted history of where we were and where we are now, and followed this with a shortened version of the talk he gave at FOSDEM on the TCK (Technology Compatability Kit) for Java.

Unlike our previous demos, this was very much a talk on social and ethical issues rather than a technical one. While many of our students have used Java as a language and Sun’s JDK as a tool in order to write programs, there is generally little consideration of how it can be used in the real world. Andrew’s talk explained this well, clearly illustrating the problems with the previous way Sun’s JDK was being distributed and the problems this raised for those who wanted to develop and distribute Java programs as a part of operating systems like Fedora. From the questions afterwards, it was clear that many were by the various versions of the JDK coming from Sun and Andrew helped to clarify these issues.

As usual, I’ll put recordings of the talks online. As my period as CA comes to a close, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of those at Sun who have worked with me over the past six months, and all those here at the university who have attended our tech. demos and helped out where necessary. Your support is much appreciated, and I look forward to welcoming our future campus ambassador when he or she is appointed in the imminent future.

Two Demos, Too Few Students

2008-05-07T15:36:43+00:00

This week is going to be quite quiet by comparison with the last two. Last week, in addition to going to see rms speak, we hosted our Sun SPOT demo with Bernard Horan. Dr Gordon Manson, who I’ve been working with on two modules recently (COM162: Object-Oriented Design and Programming with Java and COM3170: Concurrent Systems), was very involved in this, as he’s been working with SPOTs for years. They also recently formed a part of the teaching material within the Computer Science department, with our COM162 students’ first assignment being to write a SPOT midlet using the Sun SPOT emulator. They had to use the LEDs, switches and accelerometer in some interesting way (Gordon’s trying out a method of ‘let them be creative and thus stop plagiarism’). At present, they are working on a robot controller which could be used with the SPOT-based implementation Gordon has been working on.

With all this in mind, a Sun SPOT demo as part of the CA scheme seemed essential. I would have preferred we’d been able to sort this out sooner, but this is a case with a lot of the CA program this year; things just didn’t start early enough. Hopefully, next year’s ambassador will get a much earlier start on things and not miss the entire first semester. Our students are only with us for 24 meagre weeks, which is barely enough time to do anything. Anyway, we eventually arranged, via Kim, for Bernard to come up and speak on SPOTs and show a few demos. Unlike the previous two demos, where the speaker(s) arrived just before the talk, we met up with Bernard around 12 o’clock and went for lunch first. This gave Gordon plenty of opportunity to discuss his ideas with Bernard and was probably the more useful part of the day.

We were worried that the lecture theatre we had booked was going to be too small. It could only hold about 120 people, and we were expecting a big turnout, including most of the 80-odd students from COM162. But in the end, only 14 people turned up. I can think of several reasons for this. None of these were COM162 students, so I guess the delay between them working with SPOTs and the demo meant they lost interest. I believe some of them chose to instead use the time to work on the assignment, which is fair enough. Note that this was on a Wednesday afternoon (as is our next demo) specifically so there were no lecture clashes.

Our small audience was a good audience nonetheless, and they seemed interest in what Bernard had to say. Gordon also used the opportunity to demonstrate his work on the SPOT-controlled robot (converted from being a TINI robot) which he only just managed to get working, and Tom Gummery demonstrated the third-year project work he’s done with Genix chips to which Gordon would like to port Squawk, the Sun SPOT Java-in-Java VM.

We had a similar small but dedicated audience for our talk the week before. This was on Xvm and so the small size was more expected. Operating systems are not taught with the Computer Science syllabus at Sheffield, so there is no real opportunity to connect OpenSolaris and its technologies with teaching material, as there may be in other universities. Instead, our talk was attended by the subset of UNIX users (and mainly GNU/Linux users) who play with some of the more advanced stuff like virtualisation. Again, I think the talk went well and there were certainly plenty of interesting questions. Thanks to Gary Pennington for travelling up to speak on this.

Our final demo will take place on the 14th (the semester ending, bar exams, on the 23rd). This will be on the OpenJDK and IcedTea projects which you can find in a GNU/Linux distribution near you either now or in the very near future. We unfortunately couldn’t find any OpenJDK developers in the UK to talk about this, and failed to woo our new OpenJDK ambassador (and I chose that link just because of the way they hashed up his title). Instead, Andrew Haley will come up from RedHat. RedHat have been working with Sun on the OpenJDK project for the last year, and are responsible for the biggest chunk of the IcedTea project. Andrew is the Technical Lead for Open Source Java, though of course we all know and love it as Java Libre or Free Java.

As usual, you can find videos of the demos on my ambassador web site. If anyone would like to mirror these, please get in touch. I’m also currently trying to get these available via BitTorrent too, so any help there would also be appreciated.

Second demo: Sun SPOTs

2008-05-04T22:54:30+00:00

Today saw the second Sun@Strathclyde tech demo, this time a talk about the innovative Sun SPOT wireless sensor technology. There's a fair bit of interest in using these at the university, especially within the EEE department, but sadly since that department still hasn't gotten back to me about arrangements to promote my events I wasn't able to get anyone from EEE along.

That, combined with the fact that it's the end of term, meant I only welcomed along 12 CS students and lecturers to the demo today - not a great turnout given last week's attendance, but those who did come seemed to be quite interested in using the technology - not to mention earning themselves some Sun T-shirts by getting involved (thanks guys!).

Below you can see a short video clip from one of the live demo sections. Sadly the 'Air text' effect doesn't show up very well on video (it works by 'tricking' the naked eye), but you can get a decent idea of what it looks like here.

Since tomorrow's the last day of term, that pretty much wraps up the tech demos for this semester, but I'm still going to be watching the forums and checking my email, so if any readers need to know anything about Sun@Strathclyde, please just give me a shout!

Take free training, earn free SunSPOTS

2008-04-29T12:15:39+00:00

One thing I think Sun is really getting right with its 'Campus Ambassador' program is the way they've cottoned on to the fact that students love free stuff. Giving things away is a really good way to get people aware of and interested in Sun technology, which is the whole aim of the scheme.

One really good example of this is the training offer which I've been pushing lately while I wait for the university to get back to me about participating in the more comprehensive SAI program. The offer is basically this: for every 10 Strathclyde students who complete a short online training course about Solaris, the university gets a free SunSPOT kit. It's one of these situations where everybody wins:

The students win, because they get access to free training material and earn a Sun certificate which they can put on their CV.
The university wins, because it gets free hardware which it can then use for research or for student projects.
Sun wins, because it gets people to try out their new training scheme and it raises awareness of both Solaris and SunSPOTs.

This all ties in nicely with my next tech demo which, conveniently enough, is all about SunSPOTs. It's happening this Thursday and you can find out more, as always, on the Sun@Strathclyde website :-)

First tech demo

2008-04-24T18:12:30+00:00

Today saw the presentation of my first tech demo as part of the Sun@Strathclyde program :-)

The demo was based around the various open-source technologies that Sun produces, in particular the Solaris operating system and the NetBeans IDE. We got a really good turnout, 51 people - that's a fair bit more than I expected, so many thanks to everyone who came along!

I was pleased to welcome along Rod McAllister from Sun, who came to introduce the Sun@Strathclyde program, and there seems to be a fair bit of genuine interest from attendees about using some of the technology presented during the talk. That, of course, is what Sun@Strathclyde is all about - raising awareness of the cool and powerful technologies that Sun gives away for free.

Speaking of giving stuff away for free, the post-talk freebies proved very popular:

Note to self: don't lay out freebies on a table in front of a horde of students, as trampling may ensue and your stock of freebies will be exhausted very quickly (guess I'll just have to strategically hand out t-shirts at the next demo, thankfully I kept those back!).

So, once again, many thanks to everyone who attended and I look forward to seeing everyone again at the next Sun@Strathclyde presentation, which will be next week - same time, same day, same place. We'll be showcasing SunSPOTs, Sun's Java-enabled wireless sensor technology - pretty cool stuff.

For more info about Sun@Strathclyde and what it can do for you, please check out the website at http://cis.strath.ac.uk/~lmcbrien.

And we're off!

2008-04-22T14:36:00+00:00

Well, it's been a long time coming, but today I was able to officially confirm the dates for my first two tech demos in this program :-D. After several months of waiting for meetings and emails, the next two weeks are going to be pretty busy!

Because there's not much time left in the semester, I'm only going to have time for two demos. Because of that, my first talk will be a very broad-ranging one, taking in all sorts of aspects of Sun open-source tech. Hopefully I'll get some good attendance (helped by the fact that there will be plenty of free swag on offer), but with only two days until the event, I'm not sure.

My second talk next week will be on the topic of SunSPOTs, which are versatile wireless sensor devices with all sorts of interesting applications. I'm hoping to get some help from the EEE department on this one as they're quite interested in using them. They'll be glad to know that they can also score some free SunSPOT kits if they can get some students to do a bit of online Solaris training!

Today I've spent a fair bit of time fleshing out the informational website I've made for the Sun@Strathclyde program, which can be found here. Hopefully this will be a good starting point for students who are wondering what on earth I'm going on about!

Face to face

2008-04-21T07:00:01+00:00

We saw this sculpture when on a long weekend in the Stamford area. The sculpture is in the grounds of Burghley a stately home where much filming has been done over the years. It also has a surprise garden with many water features some which if you are not careful will soak you to the skin. On the way to Stamford we did a six mile walk starting at Stilton famous for its cheese although none of it is made there but at several authorised locations nearby. There was a cold Easterly wind blowing and a lot of the countryside in this area comprises of large open fields which do not offer any protection from the wind. We saw lots of spring lambs playing in the fields and also passed by the now deserted village of Washingley which was left after a lot of lots locals died out during the Black Death Plague. Apart from uneven fields where the houses were you would not know a village had been there. We also saw the site of a Motte and Bailey 12th castle all that is left of that was a slight earth mound.

Back to Washingley many of the survivors moved to the village of Folksworth which we then entered having a drink at its pub being the only customers in the pub! No wonder so many pubs are closing. We finally returned to Stilton and had lunch at the Bell an old coaching Inn which would have been on the A1 before the bypass was built. We stopped overnight at the Fox and Hounds at Exton which was nice but we decided to move on and stay overnight at the Crown hotel In Stamford itself.

After a disturbed nights sleep thanks to a rowdy pub next door on the Sunday morning as it was raining we decided to cut our losses and head home. Apart from two nights bad sleep a nice weekend.

Auf Weidersehn SunRay

2008-04-18T12:47:12+00:00

It is with a tear in our eye that we said goodbye to the SunRay kit this week. Unfortunately, our plans for promoting this in the DCS just didn’t work out. Our contacts at Sun just weren’t responsive enough in the short time we had, and the whole episode tarnished Sun’s image with the Computer Science support staff.

On a lighter note, plans for our next demo are coming along nicely. Andrew Haley, RedHat’s Technical Lead for Open Source Java, has agreed to come up north in May and speak about OpenJDK and IcedTea, which should be great. This makes a programme of three talks in four weeks: we have an Xvm talk next Thursday (24th April) at 3pm, followed by a Sun SPOT talk on the 30th and then the Free Java talk on the 14th of May. I think that’s about all we’ll be able to fit in, but I think we’ve done quite well in the end. In addition, Sun are trying to organise a road show here at Sheffield. If that comes off in time, I’ll finish my job in a good light.

On that note, I end my stint as campus ambassador on May 31st. I have a successor in the wings, so we’ll see how things go there…

Dissertation…. Done!

2008-04-18T12:40:20+00:00

For the past few months things have been a little quiet on the blog front - this is mainly due to me having a high workload since being back at Uni.

I have been working feverishly on my dissertation - something that is now complete.

For those of you who I havent spoken to here is the gist of it:-

The title is “Water Sampling on an Autonomous Sailing Platform” and it pretty much does what it says on the tin.

Dr. Mark Neal and Colin Sauze have been building various sailing boats that sail themselves and my project was to provide a proof of concept for one application - Oceanography.

The system that I built(with help on the hardware) effectively is a pump hooked up to a Gumstix embedded Linux computer which also has attached a Water quality monitoring sonde.

My software is written in C and provides the control to switch the Pump on at specific GPS waypoints - read from a UDP stream from the control software or it can sample at a specific time interval.

Once the pump is on it then starts the sonde which is configured to pass out NMEA strings over a serial line to the Gumstix. This is the taken and passed with location information to a series of scripts written by Claire to send this information to the base.
The pump is then switched off.

The main challange for me in this project was the learning of C as a language and the interesting ways in which hardware injects its own bugs in to a system.

So there are the basics of why you havent heard from me for a while - if you want to know more then ask me and you can have the PDF of my Diss.

A letter from B.A.

2008-04-18T07:00:02+00:00

Lets hope they do something with the feedback they get..

Dear Mr Humphreys,

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This survey should only take 10 to 15 minutes to complete. The information you provide will not be associated with your personal name unless you give us your express permission at the end of the survey.

British Airways Customer Relations has asked Harris Interactive to conduct this online survey. All issues of confidentiality and survey content can be addressed by contacting Harris Interactive directly at the SurveyHelp desk, the link to which is shown at the bottom of this email. In addition....

Your opinions are very important to us and we very much look forward to receiving your feedback.

To participate, please proceed to:

Super Aguri - the end of the road?

2008-04-17T07:00:02+00:00

The Magma financial group have pulled out of the deal to buy out the Super Aguri team which will lead to their demise I fear. Finances have been tough for this team over the winter and with Honda loosing interest keen to put all their efforts towards improving their team things looked doubtful for their appearance at the opening Grand Prix. The team was initially created to find a place for Sato who was kicked out of the Honda A team and until next year Aguri and Torro Rosso could use hand me downs from their more illustrious principal teams. That changes in 2009. I agree with Frank Williams - Formula one teams are constructors and should design and construct their own cars. But over the years many teams have fallen off the back of the grid as a result of no support from the teams at the front. The shame for this team is the spirit they have showed over their time on the grid and their ability to punch above their lowley status and embarrass better funded teams including Honda's own - especially last year.

Litter bug..

2008-04-17T07:00:01+00:00

Bill Bryson has launched his own campaign against litter in the UK - a country has made his own. It has been said that he looks a bit like a Womble which is very apt if you remember who they were..Meanwhile in London a pilot scheme to fine drivers who drop litter from their cars is being launched. If it works it will be rolled throughout the UK. The good news evidence can come from a variety of sources like mobile phone cameras etc.

Sunray Server strategy shift

2008-04-16T07:00:01+00:00

Chris and myself have described our high regard for the SunRay technology and how we use it in the office and at home. We have a Solaris10 'FCS' server which runs the latest Solaris10 update release. This is for our users who do not want to be on the bleeding edge. This is still a E4900 with two system boards and a total 128GB of memory. We then had another E4900 with the very latest Ultrasparc processors from the lab pool keeping them warm until they are needed for customer support. This platform was divided into two domains. These two domains would be upgraded in turn to new builds of what we call Solaris Nevada. This exposes us to the latest technology and fixes that I believe always go into Nevada first before going back into say the Solaris 10 patch or feature gates. Anyway this was all good until someone said why not have a x86 box? So we put in a well configured V40Z. This extends the time between upgrades of each of the servers (six weeks) and is good as it means the server runs longer hopefully finding memory leak problems or other issues that are only found when systems run for longer periods of time.

What we are not expecting to find was an Xsun bug you would only see on x86 platforms.

When we announced the first Niagara2 machines we felt duty bound to give one a go and within hours of running one we had a really interesting bug Tim looked at that and again you would only see in Nevada and on the Niagara2 platform. Within a few weeks we then had another bug this time you would only see on the latest Ultrasparc IV+ processors again on Nevada. We have also found and logged several application bugs and some relating to the Gnome desktop. The oddest one I logged was BugID 6564048 with the title of Nevada lp prints non-existent files! So given all this tangible benefits of running these platforms we have decided to keep:

Sunfire V890 Server replacing the E4900 - this is a smaller size box - with the latest Ultrasparc IV+ that you can get for this box.

Sunfire T5220 server eight cores, 64GB memory.

And the Sunfire V40Z server.

Should be interesting...

Titanic - the BBC opens its archives

2008-04-15T07:19:33+00:00

The BBC has given us all access to the archive material it has on the Titanic disaster. The site also features the spoken word of Commander CH Lightoller the most senior surviving officer of the sinking of the ship. Listening to his voice is quite spooky - he seems so calm about it. The BBC also describes how in 1947 a play to commemorate the sinking was almost not aired as several organisations tried to stop it going on the radio. It seems the great ship has not revealed all its secrets - yet.

Bowling going, going gone?

2008-04-15T06:48:51+00:00

Like the village green and duck pond the village bowling green is very part part of what you expect to find in the UK. Sadly though people are now becoming reluctant to join bowling clubs and without the support of full time members these clubs are at risk. I think this is very much what this country is becoming - we are starting to go home shut the door and stay there instead of going out and meeting people and interacting with them. Henry VIII actually put in place a law where the game was forbidden to be played except at Christmas - that law only repealed in 1845! It seems Henry wanted the population to spend more time doing archery much more useful in his opinion. As usual the Wikipedia site has an excellent item on bowls.

Public Enemy Number One..

2008-04-15T06:40:01+00:00

It seems in Northumberland conservationists have decided if they are to save the Red Squirrel in their county they have to exterminate large numbers of the North American "imported" grey. The Grey Squirrel is larger than its native cousin which means it can cause the red to leave the area as the greys move in. Also the grey carries a bug that it seems immune too but which is usually fatal to the red if it catches the bug. The canny Northumberland residents don't waste what they cull; the meat of the grey squirrel is fast becoming a popular new game dish.

Waking the dead..

2008-04-14T15:07:27+00:00

This series - about a cold case squad is back tonight. Trevor "Shoestring" Eve is still in charge but the series is not the same since they killed off Claire Goose .

New CD's P.

2008-04-14T07:12:13+00:00

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raising Sand. Awsome cd. No wonder it has been so well received. Apart from the fact both are world class vocalists they have a excellent backing band. Although on most tracks they sing together there are also a few tracks they sing on their own. Worth buying.

Pulp - Different Class. Great line in the cd insert Please Understand. We don't want trouble. We just want to be different. That's all. Cocker's talent for writing awsome vocals are clear in this and the other Pulp albums mentioned below. F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E is very good. You know Pencil Skirt is not going to be one of his polically correct track or one you should play for your granny...

Pulp - We Love Life. Weeds and Weeds II good starting tracks. The Night that Minnie Timperley Died is next and is one of my favourite tracks on the CD. A very close second best must be Bad Cover Version, listen to his vocals carefully. Beautifully crafted. "Every time he kisses you , you get the taste of saccarin" and "The latest Tom and Jerry when the both of them could to talk".

Pulp - This is hardcore. Help the Aged I think my favourite on this cd. Perhaps given my ever increasing age - it is a track the makes you realises we should be more sympathetic towards older people and it won't be long before we get old. The title track also excellent. I'm a Man is a track I should pull over off the road when this track comes on.

Pulp - His and hers. Not so keen on this album - the tracks are ok but compared to the other albums not their best.

Four good holiday books by Conn Iggulden

2008-04-11T07:11:56+00:00

After I had suspended this weblog I started to read the story of Caesar by Conn Iggulden . The first book starts with Brutus and Caesar known by their childrens names of Marcus and Gaius in the Gates of Rome. The books are well written and I found them hard to put down and at the end of each is a short narrative explaining how the books relate to the known historical facts. At the end you certainly end up with an admiration of Caesar and what he achieved and I was sort of puzzled why he was assasinated at the end. I have now started reading Conn's new series about Genghis Kahn which will take longer because the second in the series has only just been released in hardback. As Conn says "History is full of great tales."

Insider trading..

2008-04-10T07:11:15+00:00

The numbers relating to drug abuse in our prisons are quite staggering .

Big Ben is 150 years old today.

2008-04-10T07:00:01+00:00

Big Ben the bell inside the famous clock tower in London is 150 years old today . It was cast in the Whitechapel Bell foundry one of only two foundries left in the UK today. In fact the bell is the second cast for the tower - the first was found to be defective when shipped from a foundry in the north and was rejected. Whitechapel still have their sales ledger for the period that shows a rebate was given on the sale as the original metal was reused from the first casting. It does not explain why the other bell foundary were not given the chance to make bell number two.

The Simpsons replaced by Babewatch...

2008-04-09T12:54:37+00:00

I am not a fan of the Simpsons but this story amused me as in Venezuela it has been dropped to be replaced by BayWatch as the former was deemed unsuitable for children...

Planning permission...

2008-04-09T07:00:01+00:00

In an attempt to stem the tide of people paving over their front gardens to provide car parking planning permission will be needed soon if you want to do this. The reason for doing this is once paved over or a when a hard surface replaces a garden or grass, more water runs off this surface making flooding more likely in times of heavy rain. I just wonder how the authorities will decide if permission is granted? Will it be related to the number of paved over gardens on the road already?

Birdsong - on the radio

2008-04-08T07:00:03+00:00

In typical British manner the oddest radio channel has to be this . It is a continous stream of birdsong sung by UK birds. Half a million people listen to it every day. But with no adverts it is not likely to stay online for long. Who says British eccentricity is dead?

Hedgehog I.C.B.M

2008-04-08T07:00:02+00:00

This is a horrible story and I can only assume the launcher of the weapon wore gloves. Apart from the fact the hedgehog was reported found dead no one seems very worried about it's demise after being used as an I.C.B.M.

A cheque for ten million quid..

2008-04-08T07:00:01+00:00

Will do very nicely to pay the bill for this fiasco Al Fayed. Modesty forbids me from going into any further details but I am sure you will understand that the British taxpayer does not feel able to foot the bill.

Conker trees in trouble

2008-04-07T06:42:27+00:00

It has been reported that the UK's population of conker trees are under threat from a bacteria that initially shows itself as a blood red canker on the tree. Not all trees die as a result of the infection and the Tree Council setup after the Dutch Elm disease pandemic are urging caution before felling diseased trees. Either way it may be that conkers used in the autumn by children in the traditional game might in future be in short supply.

Pole on pole

2008-04-06T07:00:01+00:00

Well Kubica put it on pole yesterday . It will be interesting to see how he does in the race. It will not be long before he and BMW win their race together. good to see Jenson getting P9 as well.

Who is back tonight?

2008-04-05T09:14:01+00:00

Dr Who is course. He has a new companion Catherine Tate who was with him on a Christmas special a couple of years ago and I said then she should be brought back for a series. Should be good.

Freedom

2008-04-04T11:47:26+00:00

I attended an interesting talk by James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center earlier this week. The discussion focused on how the Free Software movement can now be regarded as a success and how others are now attempting to replicate this in other areas such as media (Creative Commons). This is despite flaws in the licenses, and a vast majority not understanding what licenses, such as the GPL, actually mean in practice.

One interesting anecdote James supplied was of a client being confused as to why his BSD-licensed software could be taken and used in a GPL product, from which he could then not used the derived code. He believed that he had a moral right to use the derived code. Yet, the license he chose doesn’t back this up — in fact, this is exactly the opposite intent of the BSD license. The license is incredibly short (only 3 clauses in the newer version) and does little more than retain attribution (via copyright) for the developers. You’ll find BSD code in all sorts of proprietary products, including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

So why does it work? Values like 4 kinds of Freedom defined by the FSF and community are the reason. I’ve always believed, while working with FOSS, that community is central and it was good to see this view being supported in James’ talk. It’s something I’ve also blogged about with respect to OpenJDK. It’s not about licensing or cost, but about being able to give your neighbour your code, and let them play with it, modify it, and pass it on to their friends.

During the talk (and here comes the relevance to my CA blog) I was thinking about how we need to get these points across within the University and that a talk on Freedom and Free Java would be a great way of doing this. With respect to other ambassadors, I believe I’m in a fairly unique position to do this, especially given my recent success as a finalist in the OpenJDK Innovation Awards. At this point, I should thank Tom Marble (former OpenJDK ambassador), who acted on my worries about the usual blanket ‘no Sun employees’ ruling on this contest and got an exemption for ambassadors to participate. I’ve just tested this exemption in signing the eligibility affidavit and queried with Richard Sands about whether doing such a talk would be an issue. The good news is that it isn’t and he thinks it would be a fantastic thing to do. So looks like it will go ahead.

On that note, I’ll close by asking if anyone in the OpenJDK community would also be interested in participating in such a talk/demo session here at Sheffield, and if so, to get in contact with me ASAP.

Two who should go...

2008-04-04T06:42:01+00:00

Max and Mugabe Sling your hooks.

Polical correctness gone mad...

2008-04-04T06:41:39+00:00

It seems the UK housebuilder Wimpey has told its builders in Bristol to stop Wolf Whistling to girls who pass them by. I must admit it is years since I heard of any builder doing this but it is a simple innocent complement. In any case the housebuilder's motivation is that it says sophisticated women customers are being put off by the whistling attentions of their workforce..

New CD's A to G

2008-04-03T07:24:52+00:00

Since I stopped writing weblogs the stack of new CD's I have bought but not reviwed has built up.

Lily Allen - Alright Still. I had heard some of her tracks on the TV and recently downloaded a mp3 teaser from her website . The lyrics are very clever - a sort of female Jarvis Cocker perhaps. A second album is being recorded it will be interesting to see what that is like more of the same might get a bit boring. But this is a good CD.

Clapton/Cale - The Road to Escondido. This is a must buy CD if you like either artist. It has Billy Preston on it who has since died. The first track (Danger) has a brilliant keyboard line that is excellent and you know it is Billy playing. He played with the Stones and more recently was on the Concert for George organised by Clapton. With these two in charge you might think this is a late night CD to be played as you have that last glass of wine before retiring. Not so - it is an uplifting CD that gets your feet tapping but also has excellent blues numbers so you can get your breath back..

Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris -All the road running. - All the songs are written by him - most of the tracks they sing together. The guitar has a very Dire Straits sound that is mistakable. I have found the cd has grown on me after repeated playing. In deference to her country roots there is a totally country track fun to listen too called Red Staggerwing.The title track All the Roadrunning is a nice ballad track but my favourite has to be the first track - Beachcombing. There is a DVD of both artists recorded in June of 2006, this collection includes a DVD of their concert at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Los Angeles.

Eagles - Long road out of Eden. Sorry folks but the title track is among the best tracks of an album that should have been a single cd only. The disc with that track on is the best of the two but not worth the investment I fear folks.

Emmylou Harris - Wrecking Ball. Bought this on the strength of a documentary I saw on her charting her career. The title track is by Neil Young, Sweet old world is by Lucinda Williams track - more on her later on and Every grain of sand - a Dylan track. Don't think this is a pure country sound, I am not keen on that kind of music and if you like her Stumble into Grace CD this is for you.

Gorillaz - D Sides. On CD is remix of lots of tracks from Demon Days. The originals are fantastic these remixes not so good. I would dearly like to know when the unreleased tracks on the other cd were recorded. If I did not know better I would say they were recored after or during the time Damon/Hewlett where doing their Monkey opera. Lots of tracks have Chinese undertones and two tracks are called HongKongaton and Hong Kong to enforce the Chinese theme. We are Happy Landfill starts with a sound that sounds like the instrument Damon designed to remind him of the traffic noise horns etc in China when he went there to research for Monkey. Murdoc is God is a nice rowdy sound which might end up with a fatwa on him and the best is the last track, Stop the Dams with some very interesting words spoken in a gap between the vocals.

The curse of comedy

2008-04-02T12:05:30+00:00

Excellent series this . We have had the actors behind Steptoe and Son and the second one in the series was about Tony Hancock (with a miscast Ken Stott. Tonight it is Hughie Green who was doing a talent show called Opportunity Knocks when Simon Cowell was still in nappies. He was also the father of Paul Yates.

One and three

2008-04-02T06:54:48+00:00

Today it has been reported there are three million potholes on our roads. To repair them all would cost one billions pounds. Utility companies are being blamed for not putting the road back as it should be after they dig holes and even worse some councils are redefining the depth of potholes to reduce the number they have in their area. Near us a road is being resurfaced, its paths replaced etc. The road was subject to a forty mile an hour speed limit and to be honest before these works you could not do more than thirty. Once the road is reopened it will be interesting to see how fast people drive now. However the work needed doing it was a hazard for cyclists as it was.

Penguins that fly!

2008-04-01T06:44:35+00:00

It is true - there are some penguins that really fly.

Two birthdays

2008-04-01T06:41:34+00:00

Josie Russell who survived an attack that saw her mother and sister killed has turned 21 . She and her father have kept away from the media since the horrific events many years ago but tonight she is on a program that has her going back to those events; meeting the people who cared for her and brought the killer to justice. Happy birthday to her. The program is Josie's Journey: One Life, Tuesday, April 1, BBC One, 22.35.

Also today the R.A.F. is 90 today. Happy birthday to it and the people who service in it today, those who have served in it and of course those who have died in action while serving this country.

The first day of BST

2008-03-31T07:00:01+00:00

After a set of miserable weekends in terms of weather and my own health which kept us indoors Sunday was a lovely spring day. We did a circular walk starting at the pretty village of Hurley. We followed a path parallel but away from the river in the direction of Temple lock. At Temple we crossed the large footbridge built in the 1980's to replace the ferry which had ceased to cross the river there years ago. After Temple lock we again walked away from the river and turned right again running parallel with it. Here we met some the Marlow Striders who were doing our circuit for the second time today - after the first circuit they had cycled to Hambledon. At least the weather was kind for this activity even if the paths very muddy. We then arrived at Marlow.

We had a forgettable lunch in a pub; the tearooms called Burgers are excellent but are closed on Sundays. The town has had many famous resident writers - Mary Shelley - she finished Frankenstein while living there, a Thomas Love Peacock, also a little known but prolific writer in the middle of the 19th century called G.P.R James and T.S. Elliot who moved here to be away from London in the war. I think all of them lived in various houses in Marlow but all of them on West Street.

Our path back to Hurley followed the river and at Temple we had a hot drink and cake at the lock where the lock keeper's wife runs a tea room. Even if you are not keen walkers starting at either Hurley or Marlow is a nice stroll even if you only get as far as Temple - where you know you can have a coffee stop.

Caught Corpsing..

2008-03-28T19:17:30+00:00

I heard this on the radio today.The background to the story is here . Here are five other famous corpsing moments

More Thoughts on our First Demo

2008-03-05T11:26:18+00:00

I didn’t really go into much detail as to the content of the demo in my first (quick) post, so I’ll attempt to do that here. For those who want to see the demo in all its glory, the recordings can now be found on the Demos section of my ambassador web page, along with details of our upcoming demos.

Despite the usual British weather, our first tech. demo went well. We had a good attendance from more than thirty students and staff, which eased our worries about whether our message was getting through. Paul Humphreys opened the session with a short introduction to Sun entitled ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Sun’. Paul showcased many of Sun’s products, including the ubiquitous Java platform, OpenSolaris and an array of Sun hardware including the SunRay technology (which we will feature in a future demo), the open SPARC chip and the ‘Thumper’ (a 48 terabyte storage solution). He also brought along a Sun Fire server containing one of the new Niagara 2 chips, which he opened up and showed to the assembled audience. There were quite a few comments about the lower heat output of the SPARC chip as compared with the consumer x86 and x86_64 chips, which need much more space for heatsinks and fans to keep the chip cool.

Paul then introduced the audience to Jarod Nash, who gave the main presentation of the day on ZFS. He explained how this integrates volume management into the filesystem, allowing individual mountpoints to have a dynamic size allocation. This solves the common problem of a mountpoint, such as /usr, running out of space, when there is still space available on /. With the usual situation where the filesystem is unaware of the volume management underneath, the data would have to be backed up and the filesystems resized. With ZFS, the allocation of space from the pool can simply be shifted. This also allows quota management to be integrated into the system.

The central feature of ZFS is its use of Copy-On-Write (COW) and checksums. In the past, checksumming every operation was thought to be too expensive, but these days the costs is negligible with the speed of current machines. The ZFS approach is to check every operation and ensure that the checksums remain consistent, which basically comes down to not trusting the hardware at all. Jarod explained that while other filesystems can catch bad blocks, there are all sorts of other issues that are missed, usually because something occurs silently in the past and then only shows up later (possibly much later) when the data is corrupt. This can include the disk simply throwing away data, an error in the transmission between main memory and the disk causing the data that is written to be corrupt, or the head of the disk simply landing in the wrong place and writing over some other data. ZFS can catch these errors, and, with mirroring, repair them. Jarod explained that mirroring is essential in avoiding data corruption, as otherwise ZFS has no way to obtain good data to repair these errors. ZFS takes a different approach to mirroring, due to its integration with the filesystem. If an error occurs on one of the disks, ZFS can catch it early, get the good data from the mirror, and then write the correct data back to the erroneous disk as well as sending it upwards to the kernel.

The use of COW means that there is no need for fsck with ZFS. While other filesystems attempt to simply recovery by making an atomic commit to a journal which can then be replayed by fsck, ZFS simply does all writes atomically, ensuring that the filesystem is never in a bad state that fsck would need to recover from. This is achieved by creating a copy of the data, altering that data, and then only pointing to that data when the new version is in place. Thus, if something fails while the copy is being made and written to, the filesystem will still point to the original data, avoiding a corrupted intermediate state.

Jarod closed the session with a live demo of ZFS. Using two USB disks, with a 100mb partition on each, he demonstrated how they could be assigned to a ZFS pool. He then copied data to the pool (the contents of /usr/include) and then filled one of the devices with zeros using dd. By invoking zfs scrub, he showed how ZFS found the bad disk and degraded it. He recovered from this by removing the bad disk from the pool, and then readding it. When readded, ZFS simply assumed it was empty and filled it with good data.

On leaving the demo, students were invited to take OpenSolaris CDs and books. The CDs turned out to be so popular that we ran out, despite Jarod having brought several copies of Developer Preview 2 in addition to our existing OpenSolaris starter packs. Further CDs are on order. The main question that came up post-session was on finding appropriate hardware to run OpenSolaris. Driver support is still not all it could be (Intel and NForce chipsets tend to be best on x86/x86_64), and students were recommended to consult the Hardware Compatability List (HCL) and the OpenSolaris forums.

Inaugural Tech. Demo

2008-02-29T20:12:58+00:00

Today was our first Sheffield Sun tech. demo. In the end, it went rather well I felt. We had over thirty students turn up and a great talk from Paul and Jarod Nash. It’s always worrying when you’re announcing seminars; you never know how many people are actually interested and will turn up. I’m really happy with how things turned out. For those who missed out, I’ll soon be posting the recording of the demo online.

At the end of April, we have two more demos planned; one on Xvm with Gary Pennington and one on Sun SPOT with Bernard Horen. Hopefully, these will be as if not more successful. The Sun SPOT demo should certainly be able to utilise the COM162 students and Gordon’s other contacts to get a good turnout. I need to book lecture theatres for these as soon as possible. This brings me on to my main complaint at the moment, which has been the University’s (and specifically CICS’) lack of support for the campus ambassador scheme. Because I’m only a research student, I need permission to basically scratch my nose as far as CICS is concerned. This is a real pain, as I need to use their aliases to contact an audience on a wider scope than just the DCS. Fortunately, I can get round this with the help of our wonderful admin team, but this doesn’t help any future campus ambassadors. There should really be some infrastructure in place to support the role. I was met with similar issues when I asked for a mailing list. Again, I can get round this with our own great support team, but that’s not an ideal solution.

Acquiring lecture theatres has similar issues. This was aggravated this time by the booking Emily placed on my behalf not going through. I only got definite confirmation we had the room this morning. Hopefully, these are all things that will go better next time. On the positive side, our admin team (as I’ve already mentioned) have been very supportive, especially Monika and Emily, as have our VT postgraduate students, specifically Simon Foster who remembered to organise drinks for the seminar. With all the other hassles, I’d completely forgotten about this, so my deepest thanks to him for picking this up. He also pretty much saved the day by being able to get hold of Paul’s slides from the web via a dodgy wireless connection in St George’s!

If anyone from Sun is reading this and would like to offer to give a tech. demo then you are more than welcome. Please contact me (Andrewj.Hughes sun com) and we can arrange something. I’m especially interested in anything related to OpenJDK, as I feel this has been underrepresented so far in the campus ambassador scheme (which is especially bad given my involvement there). Likewise, any goodies we cdan give out are always welcome (Solaris CDs and books went down a storm this time; we have no CDs left, including all the Indiana DP2 ones Jarod brought). Post-seminar, I was chatting with Simon and Emmanuel Ogunshile in the kitchen, and we thought that it would beneficial to also get a marketing/careers talk in May/June to discuss the possibility of working for Sun. This is also something I need to follow up, and should contact Peter about ASAP.

Time for Tech

2008-02-26T22:57:49+00:00

It’s been a while since I last blogged here, and there are quite a few things to comment on. Firstly, thanks to those who commented on my last blog. The network driver I was attempting to use was for a Via Rhine card and I downloaded it from the OpenSolaris driver community. Both the USB key and the floppy I tried were either ext2 or minix formatted (the floppy was a boot floppy, that’s about the only thing I use them for these days), and the lack of support for these filesystems in OpenSolaris is disappointing. I assume from that that reiserfs is also not supported, which pretty much kills interoperability with GNU/Linux until this is fixed. FAT support is something I’d use rarely. At the very least, Nevada should have picked up the CD but it didn’t and I had to resort to using isoinfo to retrieve the file.

Anyway, since then I’ve had some success. But this was really by giving in. Originally, I really wanted to install a version of OpenSolaris that would be close to the standard Solaris experience of 9 and 10 users (i.e. problems compiling stuff due to the weird compilers, broken shell, etc.) as this would have been a good place to fix GNU Classpath and other Free Java build issues. Unfortunately, the lack of networking with either Nevada or Indiana (which I tried again, but couldn’t even get root access on, presumably due to the passwd bug) I’ve had to use Nexenta (GNU/OpenSolaris) instead. This is much more usable and picked up the network card straight away. However, having a GNU userspace means it won’t really reflect the Solaris userspace that causes so many problems building stuff. Oh well, I’ll just have to stick with our Solaris 9 installs for that. At least the latest release of GNU Classpath I shipped just before FOSDEM should no longer have the readdir_r issue, fingers crossed. The machine is now nicely headless and so I’ll get round to trying things on it soon.

Apart from these woes, I’ve also been preparing for the OpenSolaris/ZFS demo we will host on Friday. I’ve placed appropriate posters (kindly provided by Paul) and sent out plenty of e-mails so hopefully there will be a good turn out. The SAI stuff also came through at last and the details are part of the website I’ve now set up for the ambassador scheme. No idea how much take up there’s been yet though. The delay has annoyed me, as I wasted a lot of time I could be trying the courses myself. I probably won’t get chance to do so until the Easter break now.

On the 13th of February, I intended the Refresher’s Fair to find out more about the Free Software Society (FSS) that has been set up by some of our undergraduate students. I’ve been frequenting their forum for a while. I have to say the fair was a disappointment, and just reinforces my opinion that the Union is a waste of space. How can you deliver information to people when they blast loud music throughout the entire event and squash the stall between two others? It was ridiculous. At least a few OpenSolaris CDs were given out, so someone might have given it a try who wouldn’t have otherwise. We tried one on a laptop at the event, but it seems OpenSolaris’ system requirements are somewhat over-burdensome for some of the commodity hardware our students have. The FSS are running an Installfest this Thursday that I may also try and look into.

Given all these comments about OpenSolaris, it seems I’ll also need some convincing this Friday. So far it’s not shown itself in a good light and the choice of licensing wasn’t a good start. Choosing the GPL-incompatible CDDL means that, while they may be FOSS, elements like ZFS and DTrace can’t be incorporated in to Linux. However, they can be taken by Apple and crippled to meet their proprietary agenda. Yes, DTrace is fine… as long as it’s not used anywhere near our iTunes DRM stronghold that is. There is a ZFS FUSE module for Linux so at least it can be used there, but this is inadequate really. Sun should seriously reconsidered relicensing OpenSolaris under the GPL, especially now GPLv3 is a reality. After all, it was good enough for the OpenJDK, which has already been more widely adopted. Note the appearance of IcedTea/OpenJDK in Fedora Core 8 and Ubuntu, and the forthcoming appearance of IcedTea6/OpenJDK6 in Fedora Core 9.

We have two more talks in the works already; Gary Pennington will be giving an Xvm talk in April, and we are in the process of finding someone to talk about Sun SPOT. It would be nice to also have an OpenJDK talk, which seems to be not too well represented in this whole CA thing (it’s all flipping NetBeans rubbish instead). Definitely going to give that some though, especially with the imminent Community Innovation Awards deadline.

Hard Cheese but who will suffer?

2008-02-26T08:19:51+00:00

The ruling on this case is now decided. The EU court has said the producers in Germany who sell Parmesan cheese can continue to sell it with that name on the packaging. The Italians won't be happy are saying this is ruining their cheese making companies. The EU court said Parmesan has become a common byword for grated hard cheese.

Free Training ?

2008-02-26T07:55:53+00:00

If you want free training you need look no further. Depending on your situation there are several possibilities open to you:

If you are a developer you need to look here .

It gets slightly more complicated if you are a student. Here is a site open to all students. Sun also has a program called the Sun Academic Initiative and you should encourage your University to join it if they are not already part SAI - a form is here that needs to be filled in to apply - you will need to get a senior person from your University to fill this in.

Once your University is a member of SAI you should then be able to get login details from your University and access more courses here

Note there is a guest login on the site so you can see what you are missing!

Treklens

2008-02-11T12:02:25+00:00

See more photos: Share on TrekLens

Trials and Tribulations

2008-02-05T23:20:31+00:00

Last week wasn’t particularly a very progressive one, Sun-wise. I once again tried to get a Solaris installation going on the spare Genesys machine and fell at every hurdle. Initially, I went back to the Indiana install I did before Christmas and couldn’t even get root access. I recalled that passwd is dodgy on there; it seems to miss out the letter ‘t’ from whatever password you type.

A Solaris Developer Edition CD (9/07) was handy so I installed that. After being exposed to a gluttony of marketing spiel as it slowly installed (took an age), I got a desktop which wasn’t the OpenSolaris I was expecting. Far from being open, there were globs of proprietary software all over the place (StarOffice instead of OpenOffice, Sun Studio, Sun JDK 6, RealPlayer of all things). It was using UFS as the file system rather than ZFS which I’ve heard so much about. It also still didn’t pick up the NIC.

Trying to get the driver from the web to it was then an interesting issue. How do you get a file to a machine without a network connection? First shot was a USB memory stick. dmesg showed it doing something with the USB stack but no pretty popup GNOME windows or any device nodes (I’d expect popups given this is supposedly the packaged shiny testing version). Next down the line was the good old floppy disc. Again, similar problems. Looking through the kernel directories, I could see very little filesystem support; there certainly wasn’t evidence of any FAT or ext2 support, which you’d expect as a minimum.

Finally, I burnt it to a CD. Now how to read it… Again it didn’t automount it and mount didn’t seem to work either. I ended up extracting it using the ISO tools. Reading around afterwards, it seems Solaris uses some other filesystem support rather than ISO9660, but this doesn’t explain it not working this out for itself. Eventually managing to break open the tarball, the ./adddrv script just stalled (and I left it overnight just to see). Well, I guess we try Nevada, the community edition next. It’s a huge download (~3.6GB) and for some reason they split the DVD into three and then zip each piece, which means I currently can’t burn the image because I don’t have enough space left to combine the three images (although I suppose I could cat them directly into a pipe to growisofs).

Ironically enough, a new Developer Edition release appeared this week (01/08). Even if it is based on a later version of Nevada, that can be achieved separately without all this proprietary cruft. The other thing that’s bugging me at the moment is the whole Sun Academic Initiative (SAI) thing. I know we’re signed up and I want to get started with this competition thing that they were so keen on on the conference call a couple of weeks back, but still no news of the wretched login name and ID! Let’s hope this week goes better.

Bright New Hope

2008-01-23T21:43:12+00:00

Good news. It appears the SunRays aren’t just going to be used in kiosk mode. There’s a bigger plan underfoot, it’s just been somewhat delayed. I had a meeting with David Speake, assistant director of technical services at CICS on Tuesday who confirmed that there are in fact 100 SunRays in the IC but also that they will eventually be used for something more interesting.

The plan is to move from a desktop-centric approach (where you login to Windows and use applications) to an application-centric one (where you use the same suite of applications from anywhere). If all goes to plan, the open access centres will eventually have their fat clients replaced by SunRays, providing thin client access to a Windows desktop. But, more than this, the same applications will also be provided via the same technology through a web browser running on any Java-supported platform (in theory — in reality, you’re probably talking Solaris, Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux — at least for now). David showed me how he could load up Excel in this way. This is currently via Sun’s portal software, but eventually it will be part of MuSE.

The reason it’s not been deployed yet is there are still a lot of teething issues and things are taking a lot longer than expected. This is mainly due through CICS having to deploy a Windows server, something they’ve not done before, and link it in to all their existing Novell backend stuff, which involves things like getting Active Directory talking to Novell’s directory services. Fun. And then to add even more into the mix, this all has to interact with the SunRay software on Solaris and be streamed out. At the moment, it works but there are issues with connecting up filestores and annoying dialogs that would confuse users. Hopefully it will all work out.

I also had a chat with Dave Abbott, now head of DCS technical support today about a potential Sun Ray demo. While he’s reluctant to commit to anything (given they already have the fat client approach working relatively smoothly and considerable investment into that with only a small support team), he’s open to having a look at the technology and seems happy for us to use some lab space to setup a few Sunrays and a server. Obviously, any move to Sunrays, should it happen, is not likely to take place anytime soon in the DCS, but I think the use of them by CICS adds significant sway to it. Now I just have to see if the Sun side of things come through with the call on Friday, but things are looking hopeful. I also need to make sure I can find out how these things work myself…

Introductions

2008-01-21T23:53:22+00:00

What to write in the first entry of a new blog? Well, some introductions would make sense, so here's who I am and what this blog is all about...

I'm Liam McBrien, though I often go by the moniker 'Lamsey'. I'm in the fourth year of an MEng degree course in Computer Science at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland. I can often be found lurking in one of the CIS department's computer labs or, more likely, in the Union schooling n00bs at pool :-D

So what's a Strathclyde student doing with a Sun Microsystems corporate blog, then? Well, the simple answer is that I'm going to be a Sun Campus Ambassador at Strathclyde for the remainder of my course - essentially, this means that I'll be responsible for promoting and demonstrating Sun's technology within the university.

For a more complete answer, we need to look back eighteen months to the summer of 2006, when I started what turned out to be an eighteen-month industrial placement with Sun at their Guillemont Park location in Surrey. Below you can see me with Sun's "Project Blackbox" during a short working trip to Germany.

During my time at Sun I learned about all kinds of Sun's coolest technologies, from the powerful Solaris operating system to trend-breaking 'Coolthreads' high-throughput servers right through to networked ultra-thin clients - the low-power desktop replacements known as Sunrays. My job over the coming months will be to show off some of these technologies to fellow students at my university, and get them using some of the free open-source technology made available by the company.

Watch this space for more info about what's going to be happening with my new role!

Seeing SPOTs

2008-01-20T13:29:38+00:00

There have been some positive developments recently, if somewhat intermingled with some lows and a little frustration. Last Thursday, things weren’t looking too good. I had a conference call that Peter had organised with his other ambassadors, but couldn’t get through on the number. Instead, Kim phoned me back afterwards and the three of us had a chat instead. As always, I was encouraged by the liberal amount of support I’m getting from Sun (Kim and Pete offered me on top of the already excellent support I’m getting from Paul) but was rather worried about the little feedback I’ve had from the University. Things aren’t helped by the undergraduate students all disappearing about as soon as things really got sorted admin-wise… there’s no teaching until February 11th, and the academics seem to also be using this as an excuse to take things easy for a bit. Pete also mentioned getting similar slow responses, so I’m not alone in this.

After this, Friday was a pleasant turnaround. Gordon suddenly appeared, having apparently read my e-mails about demonstrating and a demo on Sun SPOTs. We had a brief chat, where he demoed the Sun SPOT simulator to me and explained how he’s going to be using it in his module this year. With my Sun SPOT kit having arrived late the day before, we now have three within the department. He said that there’ll also be plenty of interest in a Sun SPOT demo and the biggest issue would be finding a suitable venue to fit all the attendees! Great news!

I also managed to get the phone sorted out for the next conference call on Monday. Turns out that to use an 0808 freephone number the phone has to allow national calls. Tony Chilton actually managed to get this sorted out much quicker than I thought, and it was working by Friday afternoon. I also finally managed to login to the SunRay (by connecting it to the CICS network) and access the remote OpenSolaris desktop within Sun’s internal network. Now I just need to find time to try out some of the resources that gives me access to…

This week, I was introduced further to the Sun Academic Initiative (SAI) via a conference call with Kim, the other campus ambassadors and Nick Beard and David Alderton from Sun. I’m still getting used to these conference calls; having so many people on one call is very weird when you can’t see them or their facial expressions. It seems they are launching a scheme in the UK via the campus ambassadors to encourage students to take the online courses available via the SAI. The CAs can win a prize for getting a high number of courses taken by the students (as well as having the additional advantage that we get free certification).

After the call, I tried this out straight away in the VT lab next door by getting Simon and Henry to have a go at the pre-assessments. Still haven’t been able to get the ID we need to get access to the courses and practice exams themselves though, but I was surprised to see that Sheffield are one of only seven already registered for the SAI. No-one told us, but then what’s new…? Speaking of which, I’ve been fighting with CICS again. It took about five e-mails to get them to admit they were bandwidth-limiting the connection that our research server and the Sunray are on. Then, after I had the VLAN changed, they refused to give me permission to re-register the Sunray so I had to get Mick from our support team to do it.

On the same subject, I went on a mission with Simon back to 1984 (aka the Information Commons) to locate the 150 Sun Rays we are supposed to have. In total, we found 47, all being used not as roaming desktops but as locked down access to two web sites (MUSE and Star) via Mozilla Firefox. They still are the usual Sun Rays of course. If you send yourself a file to your Webmail account that Firefox won’t understand (most things really, but a LaTeX file is pretty safe), then it will prompt you as to a program to use to open it. Opening it with /usr/bin/gnome-session will bring back the full GNOME desktop and a true SunRay, from where you can find that it’s running on a Sun Fire 200 somewhere. Instead of using SunRays like this, they seem to have instead invested in lots of horrible fat Viglen clients running Windows XP. That probably explains why it’s so hot in there in the middle of winter.

Anyway, next week I have a meeting with Dave Speake from CICS so I should find out what their motivation for buying these Sun Rays was. At the moment, it seems to have been just a cheap way of doing what they already do in St George’s Library to provide library catalogue access. I’ve also got another call with Paul and one on Friday about whether we can get a Sun Ray demo setup here. So should be more interesting news next week.

Progress

2008-01-08T15:32:47+00:00

Finally, it seems most of the administrative stuff is in place. Over the weekend, the issues with SWAN access were sorted, although I still can’t use the SunRay at the moment because it’s bouncing against the departmental firewall. I’ll have to try it with CICS and then at home I think. Given that the CICS VPN system also plays games with our department firewall, it doesn’t surprise me that much. At least I can authenticate now.

Now that 4pm on a Monday is clear for a bit, I’ve managed to take the initial Elluminate session. By this stage, though, it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I’ve just e-mailed my first monthly report off to Kim, although the template we’re given is pretty annoying. There isn’t much space to write things. At least I can point to this blog. Speaking of which, Gary again mentioned in the Elluminate session that we are supposed to get blogs.sun.com accounts, but I don’t think this is possible yet in the UK.

It looks like we’ll be having a ZFS demo in late February or early March. We did have a preliminary date of the 22nd, but I’ve just had to scuper this, as I realised it clashes with going to FOSDEM. It always seems to happen to me. I had problems last year with demonstration clashes. That’ll be a busy week because it’s also the week I go to see Dizzee at the Leadmill. I feel a bit more organised this year so far, let’s hope it stays that way.