Developer's Quarterdeck Log

Thank you Adobe!

2008-05-19T09:20:00.002-04:00

Someday soon it looks like we'll have Adobe reader for Solaris x86:

http://blogs.adobe.com/acroread/2008/05/adobe_reader_on_solaris_x86_co.html

I see this as another sign that Solaris x86 is coming around.

OpenSolaris 2008.5: I'm a Believer

2008-05-14T20:17:00.002-04:00

Ever since the release last week I have spent plenty of time with the new OpenSolaris 2008.5. I have to admit I am was a little apprehensive about this release. First of all I was a little turned off by the whole naming fiasco but I am over that by not. Second, even though I converted from Linux to Solaris I was afraid that Indiana was just an attempt to copy popular Linux distros and everything I like about Solaris would be ruined. My fears were unfounded, I really like the new OpenSolaris release.

In my previous job I spent plenty of time with all of the popular Linux distros. I had a wide range of opinions of distros from ones I detested, others that I could live with to Slackware, my favorite distro. Probably the main reason I like OpenSolaris is because it does some things that seem normal on Linux but often seem old fashioned on Solaris. For example, every time I su in Solaris the first thing I type is bash so I can use backspace. But after I have used it for awhile I have realized that OpenSolaris is not a Linux distro clone with the Solaris kernel. It's more like the next evolution of Solaris that picks up on some ideas from the Linux community that are just better ideas, at least in my opinion. OpenSolaris is not the easiest to use version of Solaris but it also ranks up there with the best Linux distros.

The one piece of technology that really sets OpenSolaris apart from all the OS's on the planet is ZFS. By using ZFS as the boot partition it allows for some pretty amazing things that you just don't find on a desktop. As an example, the package management system is integrated into ZFS. Not only does that make it easy to rollback packages but it also allows for things like live upgrade. Live upgrade is a great to upgrade things like the kernel (in Linux speak) and be able to rollback easily if things go bad.

The View from the inside of Sun, Part 1 (Openness)

2008-04-27T20:23:00.000-04:00

I have been a member of the OpenSolaris community since close to the beginning and I was fortunate recently to get a six month contract to work for Sun. So I have the unique experience of seeing things from a community stand point and now from within Sun as a contractor. I am now a little over a month into my contract now. I am now seeing things through an entire different perspective and decided to share my observations with other community members with the hope that you'll get a better appreciate for what is going on here at OpenSolaris.

Almost from the beginning it seems that there have been complaints that OpenSolaris is not open enough. I actually sort of thought that way before too. When I started with Sun working on OpenSolaris.org I was expecting to learn about all kinds of secrets of the inner sanctum of inside Sun when I started. It's been a bit of a surprise. From an Engineering standpoint things here are much more open than anyone from the outside could ever really appreciate. Recently slashdot pointed out a Linux blog post that complained about among other things that developers still can't directly check in their changes into OpenSolaris. First of all that is true of the ON (the kernel so to speak) but there are plenty of projects within OpenSolaris that do have public repositories. Two projects I work on, the Website and Chime both have public repositories. One of the things I am working on during my contract is documentation for the SCM migration project. Here's the surprising part, ALL of the discussions and documentation is out in the open either at OpenSolaris.org or genunix.org. So you can see for yourself what is going on and more surprisingly jump right in and contribute just like if you worked for Sun. For people that wonder what's taking so long take a look at all of the work that has already been done and understand the complexity of the task.

I still have more observations. Over time I'll post more thoughts. Next week I'll be visiting Menlo Park. I very exited about meeting many people I have been corresponding with via the web over the past few years.

Sendmail "unqualified host name" on Solaris

2008-03-21T18:08:00.003-04:00

If you run some version of Solaris at home you probably get annoyed with Sendmail complaining about an unqualified host name. There's an easy fix right here.

Sun Type 6 Keyboard

2008-03-17T20:02:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite computer keyboard is the Sun Type 6. It ranks up there with the original IBM keyboards. It is a keyboard specially designed for Sun Workstations but will work with PC's running Windows. First it is a UNIX style keyboard which means the control key is next to the A key and caps lock is on the bottom row. At first this might seem awkward coming from a standard PC keyboard but after you use a ctrl key intensive application like Emacs it makes sense. One feature I really like to have in a keyboard are audio volume and mute which Type 6 keyboard has. Other features I really like are the dedicated cut, copy, and paste. I really wish this was a more common feature in all keyboards. There are a few weird keys that I still have yet to use like Compose, Alt Graph, and a blank key which I assume is meant to be user definable. Many of the special keys don't work in Windows but all of the standard keys work just fine.

Happy Debunking Day!

2008-03-11T11:20:00.003-04:00

I heard on the radio today is "debunking day" here in the US (seriously, it really is). So to celebrate debunking day I decided I would give it a try for Sun's Web Infrastructure Myth Busting Challenge.

This month's myth is "Sun's web solutions are proprietary". This is actually a pretty easy one to debunk from my own personal experiences. I was actually kind of surprised that this was actually a myth for the contest it seems so easy to debunk.

Awhile back I architected a website and a couple of Java Enterprise applications it was pretty much an entire Sun solution with a couple of exceptions. It ran on a Sun v120, Solaris 10 (in a zone nonetheless), and Sun Application server. The backend was Microsoft SQL server, yes a Microsoft database on Windows. Authentication was against IBM's Domino server (if you really want to know what proprietary means). I knew that in the future infrastructure requirements might change and change they did. The applications and website had to be moved from Sparc servers to Windows Servers running under VMware. One top of that the client wanted to move to JBoss if it wasn't a big deal. So off of Sun hardware, off of Sun's OS, and no longer on Sun's app server. So how much effort do you think this was? With the exception of one problem it took a couple of hours. Yes HOURS to move. I bet it would have been quicker if I knew what I was doing with JBoss. How many other companies out there make it so easy for you to move off of their platform. But I know what you are thinking, what about that one problem? That one other problem was a custom built JAAS module I had built for authentication against a Lotus Domino server. That took me about another day to rewrite the custom module. But that wasn't the fault of Sun's architecture but that of the Domino server not following the standards (now there's a company that knows how to lock you in! :-)). So even with the problem I ran into the migration was way quicker that anyone could have imagined.

Sun's web solutions are proprietary? I'd say that myth's busted.

OpenSolaris Fulltime

2008-03-03T19:11:00.002-05:00

In a couple of weeks OpenSolaris will no longer be just a hobby of mine but will be a full time endeavor. I will be a contractor for Sun working on the OpenSolaris.org website. To say that I am excited about this opportunity is an understatement.

Sun Blade 100 Rides Again

2008-02-05T14:14:00.000-05:00

It's been awhile since I played around with the latest builds of Solaris Express Community Edition even though I spend most of my day at work in front of Solaris Express Developer Edition. So I decided I would blow off the dust on my old Sun Blade 100 and I gave build 78 a try and see where things are. I was very surprised to find that it still works very well the latest builds even if it is a little slow. For those that you don't know the Sun Blade 100 is an "entry level" Sparc workstation from around 2000. It's clock speed is 500 mhz but since this is Sparc it isn't as slow as you would think it is. Running a Sparc at home is kind of exotic thing to do now days. Its kind of like driving an old Lotus or Ferrari or something. Not real practical but cool nonetheless. It also uses ordinary IDE drives so it makes a nice Sparc machine for the home hacker on a budget. I have it stuffed with a scavenged CD burner and hard drives from Windows boxes that long ago became too slow to be of any interest. So its might be a little exotic but its cheap. My intention is build this into a ZFS backup server for my home network along with being a machine to play with Sparc.

A couple of things now work that never did when I last had OpenSolaris on this box. First, ZFS no longer seems to slow the box down to a crawl like it did before. I am running this headless and the power management works very nicely by default. Finally, my cheap external Firewire drive now just works. I could never get the thing to work before on any release of Solaris, Sparc or x86 so this was a nice surprise.

Java Garbage Collection Presentation

2007-12-30T21:43:00.000-05:00

Here's a link to a presentation on the Java Garbage Collector that I did a couple of months ago.

Merry Christmas

2007-12-25T14:23:00.000-05:00

"And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father's only Son, full of grace and truth." John 1:14

VMware Workstation and Norton Protection Center

2007-12-11T15:42:00.000-05:00

If you use Norton Anti-Virus you might run into a problem with your VMware Workstation guests accessing the network. There is an easy fix that isn't obvious at first. First go into options for Norton Anti-Virus and select "Internet Worm Protection". Then select the "Program Control" button. Now Add a rule for C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation\bin\vmware-vmx.exe set to "allow". That's it.

It wasn't obvious to me because I was looking for "firewall" in the options. "Program Control" doesn't make any sense either.

Taking Things for Granted

2007-11-15T09:08:00.000-05:00

As a long time Java developer who has been recently working in C/C++ I have realized that there are a few things in Java that I really have taken for granted. The biggest thing by far has to be the automatic memory management. Most of the time we Java programmers don't even think about until there is a problem. And with modern JVM's the problems don't happen as often as they did back with the earlier JVM's so problems aren't as common. I always am interested to see how things work under the hood and lately the garbage collector is one thing I am having fun with. For one thing there are plenty of ways to configure it. To really use any of those configurations you really have to understand what is going and a good article to get started with is here at the IBM Developer Works.

So why is it really important to understand Java's garbage collection? Garbage collection can be the cause of one of those things that makes people say that Java is slow. One of the worst bugs I had to deal with was a serious performance problem on a large scale J2EE application and involved the garbage collector. The real bug was that someone was instantiating an incredible amount of short lived objects when they shouldn't have and this caused the garbage collector to use more and more of the CPU eventually causing disastrous slow downs of the application. This happened about 6 years ago and unfortunately some try people to lay blame to Java for things like this. But I know better, try and see what happens when you have to manage you own memory and abuse it (hint, much worse things happen than just a slow down!).

First Glance at Project Indiana

2007-11-01T10:51:00.000-04:00

A very early release of Project Indiana is out over at OpenSolaris. I haven't really been paying close attention to it but it is impossible to ignore lately anywhere in the OpenSolaris forums. I just installed it to see what all the hype is about. The install went flawlessly on to VMware. My first gut reaction is that it looks like a blue version of Ubuntu. Obviously there are a few rough edges this being such an early release but I am really impressed at how good it looks so far. Something like this could really get more people interested in Solaris as a desktop.

PIttsburgh OpenSolaris meet up

2007-10-29T09:22:00.000-04:00

I am trying to organize a OpenSolaris meet up here in Pittsburgh. Last week I posted a request on the OpenSolaris forums but so far I only have one person interested. I am hoping to get something going to see if we can start up an OpenSolaris user group. If you are interested send me an email.

Slackware: Still my favorite distro

2007-10-17T20:20:00.000-04:00

As part of my job I test my company's software product and many different Linux distros. So I get plenty of experience with all of the "popular" ones. I kind of figured that eventually I would eventually migrate to a different distro that is more user friendly or better package management but I never found one I like better. Here's a few reasons why:

1. Stability: Some distros have updates on an almost seemingly daily basis. In my experience updates break things almost as often as they fix things.
2. Developer tools: Slackware has one of those most complete sets of tools and libraries for development. I am still annoyed that some very popular distros still don't come with Sun's Java.
3. GUI not the default: I still like the fact that the default is still the console. Who needs a windowed environment for a server anyway?
4. The Subscription Service: I signed up for the CD subscription service at least 9 years ago and it has never stopped. I have moved several times, changed my email address a few times, and have forgot about on several occasions but some how they have tracked me down and got the CD to me shortly after a release. Sure I could just download it for free but I want to support the Slackware team.

One of these days I am going to get my chocolate with my peanut butter by getting Slackware working on OpenSolaris using BrandZ. From what I have read it will work.

A Good C++ Resource

2007-10-10T10:44:00.000-04:00

After 10 years of programming Java* I am finally trying to master C++. Yes, I know I have it backwards. Since I am probably still in the stage of not knowing what I don't know with C++ yet a helpful resource is cplusplus.com. I like it because it reminds me of Javadoc. So if you have any other resources to recommend please comment. A very good book I found is "The C++ Programming Language" from the man himself, Bjarne Stroustrup. It's such a good book that if you read it and never even work on C++ you would still learn to be a better programmer.

*Yes, that is right 10 years of Java programming. I started with Java 1.0 as a hobby on OS/2 over 10 years ago and in a few months will be the 10 year anniversary of when I actually got paid to do Java 1.1 stuff. Wow, I'm old.

OpenSolaris on VMware ESX

2007-09-23T14:18:00.000-04:00

Special thanks to Eric Lowe who let me know how to get OpenSolaris working on VMware. Whenever I tried to boot OpenSolaris it would spin at "Configuring Devices" for what seemed like forever. It would eventually boot up if you were extremely patient. Eric let me know about a work around. Just add this to your vmx file:

monitor_control.vt = "false"

Afterwards it will boot up just like it should.  Just remember if you are using Virtual Center you'll need to remove from their before you edit the file.

SCO Customers - An Oppurtunity for Sun

2007-09-16T20:33:00.000-04:00

The company I work for sells plenty of software to people that still use SCO operating systems. For some of us it is a surprise to find that so many still use Unixware and Openserver. But these people have been using these OS's for a long time and have proven to be reliable. They'll figure if ain't broke then why fix it? With the recent news of SCO filing for bankruptcy this is a good time for Sun to step up and woo some customers over to Solaris. Traditionally these customers were not on Sun's radar because they were "too small" but with the success of Solaris x86 things have changed.

Conventional wisdom would be that SCO customers if they went somewhere else they would just migrate to Linux. But do you really think there will be many in the Linux community will be willing to reach out them? Besides that, from a technical standpoint Solaris is much closer to those operating systems and from my experience would be an easier port than Linux. My experience has been that most of these SCO users still see Solaris as a SPARC product running on big hardware and Solaris x86 is an after thought that doesn't support a whole lot of hardware. Now is a real good time to show them what its really like.

Virtual PC and OpenSolaris

2007-09-15T07:20:00.000-04:00

This week there was a big press release from Sun about cooperation with Microsoft. The thing that caught my attention was about collaborating on virtualization. The plans are to have Solaris working on Windows and vice versa. That is great news as far as I am concerned. This got me wondering about Virtual PC and the latest OpenSolaris builds. I downloaded Virtual PC which is free and tried Build 72. To my surprise it booted and went through the install. First problem was X didn't work, just a black screen. It found a network card but that didn't seem to work either. There might be some tweaking necessary to get those things to work so I'll need to do more research. But the install did finish and OpenSolaris booted up to a black screen.

I also wondered what do they mean by Windows working on Solaris? Could this be simply be the return of the SunPCI card? A Windows branded "zone" like thingy?

Another indispensable tool from Google

2007-09-08T17:59:00.000-04:00

While I have been using the Google calendar I have also been playing around with some of the other tools available from Google. One I really find useful is the Google reader. It's a pretty slick tool to keep track of all of your feeds. I used to keep around rss bookmarks in Firefox but that was pain if I was on a different computer, which is pretty common for me. Now I have the same experience from my laptop, family desktop, or from an OpenSolaris play box.

Google Calendar, another reason why I like it

2007-09-06T19:18:00.000-04:00

So I add an event to Google Calendar and I go to fill in the "Where" field for the event. I was really hoping that I could have created a link to Google maps in the field but it was just a text field, at least that is what I thought. So I just typed in the location's name "New Hazlett Theatre" figuring I'll just do a Google Maps search the day of the event to get my directions. But when I clicked on the event in my calendar view I saw a map link to Google maps. Now that's how interfaces should work, do things for me without me telling it to for things I want done anyway.

When it rains it pours...

2007-09-04T08:46:00.000-04:00

This past week was just one of those weeks where all kinds of things went wrong. Things like a big dental bill, blown tire, TV that broke, and my CLIÉ UX-50 with a completely dead screen. But there is a silver lining to all of this. I really relied on the CLIÉ for my own personal organization. Even after just a couple of hours I was feeling the pressure of my life spiraling out of control into a disorganized mess. Because of all the other expenses from the week getting an immediate replacement wasn't a good option. So I remember I had heard good things about Google Calendar and decided to give it a try. Google Calendar is awesome. I really should have been using this thing a long time ago. It's my favorite Calendar program to date and it is a web app on top of it all! In the days of Web 2.0 I still should be so impressed with great web apps but I am. So I made a decision, what ever I replace the CLIÉ it has to sync with Google calendar.

GNOME Workplace Switcher

2007-08-30T09:17:00.000-04:00

It is always fun when you accidentally discover a new feature of something. Today I discover that if you have your mouse pointer over the Workplace switcher you can cycle through your desktops with the mouse scroll wheel. I had three different builds going on three different machines in three different workspaces so that feature was handy when I wanted to check the statuses of the builds. I found this out by just bumping the scroll on the mouse when I was switching desktops.

How to get VMware tools to install on the latest OpenSolaris

2007-07-27T14:49:00.001-04:00

There is an easy work around to get the VMware tools on workstation to work with the latest releases of OpenSolaris. I just did this with build 69:

1. Install VMware tools as you normally would but say no to run vmware-config-tools.pl at the end of the install.
2. As root cd into /usr/lib/vmware-tools/configurator/XOrg
3. Create this sym link: ln -s 7.0 7.1
4. Now run vmware-config-tools.pl
5. At some point it will asks where to put the modules, enter this: /usr/X11/lib/modules
6. Do not let it create a xorg.conf file, the one created by the script has errors and will leave you with no X.

The latest OpenSolaris Problems on VMware

2007-07-19T16:26:00.000-04:00

There are two issues with recent builds of OpenSolaris on VMware. The worst is that OpenSolaris is no longer working on VMware ESX 3. You can't even get into the install on OpenSolaris from the boot CD. I have a post at OpenSolaris help on this issue but no responses yet.

The second issue with the latest builds is with the VMware tools install in VMware workstation. Xorg has been updated and the install script doesn't like it. There might be a work around which I am looking into. You can run it with out the tools installed just fine but the mouse gets weird on you sometimes and the clock may go haywire too.

So if you want to run OpenSolaris in VMware I suggest you stick with the developer edition for right now.

Vaio is Upgraded!

2007-07-07T19:17:00.000-04:00

The Vaio TR1A is now running with a maxed hard drive and maxed out memory. Taking apart the case was not a real big deal really, thanks to some instructions posted at Silicon Pop Culture. It is like a whole new computer. I now have VM workstation 6 running so now I can get back to some OpenSolaris work. Even though it's a slow cpu it and not exactly a fast hard drive, it doesn't do too bad. Still faster than the Sun Blade 100!

Google Maps - A Very Cool New Feature

2007-07-03T12:57:00.000-04:00

Google maps is a great tool but has always had a big limitation, you couldn't add way points. This is a problem because sometimes you want to avoid construction or known traffic spots. Where I live Google maps just doesn't come with the best route all the time, some local wisdom always helps. But now you can just drag the route anywhere you want and it is a much more useful tool for me. It is the best implementation of way points I have seen in map software.

Some more UNIX Shell tricks

2007-07-02T12:51:00.000-04:00

One thing I really love about UNIX is that I learn something just about every day which makes my life easier. One is what to do if ls is not available or in my case broken. You can use 'echo *' instead.

Another thing I never realized was instead of typing 'exit' just hit ctrl-d. That one I felt a little dumb for not figuring out! Think of all the time I am saving now!

Upgrading the Vaio TR1

2007-06-29T14:50:00.000-04:00

I have been using OpenSolaris for several months now on my tiny little Sony Vaio TR1. I have actually been using it for some hardcore C++ development and surprisingly it has been doing a fairly decent job. I ended up destroying my Solaris partition. It looks like the hard drive could be reaching the end of its life. I figured this was a good time as any to finally upgrade the machine. I was planning on getting a new machine this summer but plans change so I decided to upgrade the memory and hard drive to the max sizes available. That will end up costing me a little over $200. An easier amount to deal with rather than a new machine. BTW, Google price search saved me some money that's for sure! The parts on on their way via UPS and I'll blog more about the upgrade later.

Now I have to decide once things are upgraded if I will be running Solaris dual booted like I did before or under VMware Workstation. I am leaning towards VMware, since I'll be playing with things that can ruin my system if done wrong and it makes it much easier to recover from stupid mistakes!

The Blog is Back

2007-06-28T14:41:00.000-04:00

It has been a long time since I posted but I will back to regular postings. The problem was that I was busy with the new job (lots to learn) and having some medical issues that put me out of commission for awhile.

Stayed tuned to here because I will be updating the OpenSolaris on VMware article. Things have changed significantly in this space and the old article is pretty much obsolete at this point.

Best Way To Get Started With Solaris

2007-03-22T19:38:00.000-04:00

If you are a developer you can really benefit by using Solaris as your development OS. However, many are scared off by trying to get it setup. However, there is a little know short cut. That is the VMware for Solaris, Developer Edition It is a prebuilt VM image of Solaris Community Edition with a plenty of developer's tools preinstalled. I have been using it at as my primary development system at my new job for the past couple of weeks. I am shocked at how well it works. No need for multiple machines with a KVM. All I do is set Solaris' resolution the same as my Windows desktop. Then I just switch to VMware and hit ctrl-alt-enter and the whole screen is my Solaris desktop. Almost as good as the Sun Blade 1000/SUnpci combo. I figured it would be too slow but so far so good. The only bad thing has been Emacs doesn't accept the alt key as the meta so I need to use esc instead. I am sure the is a fix I can put in my .emacs but I just haven't got there yet.

My only wish was that Solars was the host and Windows was the guest instead of the other way around. Maybe one day...

Linux Distros

2007-03-01T20:02:00.000-05:00

Part of my new job I have to work with Linux. So I have tried out a few distros. I really surprised at the differences between them. So far I installed on VMware Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, and Slackware. So far SUSE is the front runner since seems to work well on VMware and has a desktop similar to Solaris. Ubuntu just wouldn't work for me and Fedora has had some issues but works.

So any suggestions for a good Linux distro for development that works well on VMware?

A New Job

2007-02-09T09:49:00.000-05:00

The job search is over, I have a new job! I'll start shortly as the Vice President of Engineering at a small software company that makes backup software for UNIX called Microlite. I am very excited that will get to work with an OS I really enjoy and back at software company.

Also, I promise more regular blog posting now. I will certainly have plenty of material to blog about as I learn new things!

Solaris Express Community Release 55b

2007-01-28T16:08:00.000-05:00

My new memory finally arrived this weekend and found the bad IDE connection so now my HP Pavilion 642n is once again useful. It only had 512m of memory which was just not enough for Vista (which I use for games and just to see how the other half lives) and the developer edition of the new Solaris Express Community Release (SXCR) 55b. The latest version of SXCR is definitely a milestone release. In my opinion this is the release that is probably the first one I would highly recommend to developers new to Solaris. Be warned, you need at least 768m for the developer edition to install. You can force it but as I found things did not go well. The new release comes with all kinds of extra things for developers but by far the best feature is the installation. It actually sets up a host name and DHCP for the initial install. Easiest Solaris install ever. No tweaking just install and yo have a usable system!

When disk space gets low

2007-01-23T12:49:00.000-05:00

Over the past couple of days we had the same problem on two on two of the VMware ESX servers at where I work. The problem was that we had intermittent trouble connected to the consoles of the running guest machines from virtual center. Something seemed to be wrong with the server itself so the first thing I did was to log in and check the logs. The problem was that /var was filled up on both machines. This was an easy fix to get things back going, just clean up the old log files.

Then a little the Notes admin gave me a call, seems like one our Notes servers crashed hard. The problem, low disk space on C:. However, it did not clean up as easily as the ESX server did.

Solaris in the past has been a little more forgiving than the other two when space runs out. On my systems at home I usually just a really big / partition. Once I had a memory stick go bad and after awhile the log files filled up the 60gig drive. Nothing ever stopped working or behaved erratically.

Looking for Work

2007-01-15T21:29:00.000-05:00

As of today I am on the market looking for a new position. So if you or someone you know is looking for a top notch developer drop me an email!

Sparc test drive

2007-01-14T09:27:00.000-05:00

Since I "retired" my Sun Blade 100 several moths ago I really haven't done much with OpenSolaris on Sparc. But recently I had a chance to try out build SXCR 54 on a borrowed Sun Blade 1000. It really struck me how similar the user experience was between the two platforms. I did notice two differences. First, the Sparc platform gets the Adobe Acrobat reader. At first this might seem like a real big plus for the Sparc platform. Guess again. It doesn't run very well. Evince is just fine for what I need. Second, you can't change the screen resolution from Gnome. I had to remember that I needed ffbconfig. And naturally when I changed it the first time I picked a resolution my monitor didn't agree with. Just make sure you have networking in place before you mess around with ffbconfig. You may need to ssh in to straighten things out!

I really didn't have much of an opportunity to do too many benchmarks the Sun Blade 1000. However, from what I could tell it really is a machine that one could live with on a daily basis (unlike the Sun Blade 100). That is pretty amazing when yo realize the it was released 2000 and seven years later it still is usable.

Vista Test Drive

2007-01-09T17:10:00.000-05:00

I decided to give Windows Vista a try. I installed it on my HP Pavillion a642n. The install was not much of a big deal excpet for the PCI network card I use for OpenSolaris did not work. I had to enable the mother board nic instead. The sound card didn't work out of the box either which is strange since it is just a plain AC97. But once the NIC card was straightened out I use the update drivers feature and it fixed the problem. So the experience of installing Vista was pretty close to installing Solaris Express!

As for Vista, seems like a OS X knock off really. Also the whole Aero thing doesn't really impress to much but that is just my tastes I guess. But if you are in to Windows probably not a bad evolution I guess. I'll stick with Solaris.

OpenSolaris on the Ferrari 5000

2006-12-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

The good news is that OpenSolaris build 54 installed on the Ferrari 5000 and the Nic worked. The bad news is that's about all that worked really well. The big problem for me is that there is no audio which will probably not be solved anytime soon. The ATI audio chip set spec has not been released so the open source world can write a driver for it. I don't expect it to be released either. The problem is with the big "Windows Vista Premium Ready" sticker on the front on the Ferrari. If you haven't read already, Vista has some crazy ideas about protecting copyrighted content. So my advice is that if you are an OpenSolaris or Linux user and looking at a new Laptop check the drivers carefully if it comes with Vista. I think that is going to be a problem for us in the future.

This isn't really a bash against Microsoft, just me complaining. However, I always feel that getting the OS and hardware from the same company is always the best situation. Then the driver problems go away. Unfortunately, Sun doesn't make an x64 laptop, and why is that Sun? Yeah, yeah, I know, economics...

Acer Ferrari 5000, solution for the heat

2006-12-04T17:05:00.000-05:00

On my last post I mentioned that one of my minor complaints was when I used my new Acer 5000 was when I used an external mouse there was a blast of heat that wormed your mouse hand, if you are right handed. Not a big deal really. But that problem has been completely solved by using a cheap USB powered notebook cooler, it makes big difference. Almost no heat at all now if you use the mouse on the right side. But I am using a docking station and that was a slight problem because of the height of the cooler. But that was solved easily by putting the docking station on top of two hockey pucks.

So far the Ferrari has been one nice machine. I am not a big fan of Windows so I can't wait until I get a "real" OS on it!

Acer Ferrari 5000

2006-11-29T20:56:00.000-05:00

I FINALLY received my Ferrari 5000. It was on back order since September and so far I have to say the wait was worth it. I only have three minor nits so far, one is that the keyboard will take some getting used to. The Enter key and ctrl key aren't where I would expect them but I am sure I'll get used to it. The second is the heat blasted from the side. If you use a mouse while the laptop is on a desk then your right hand gets warmed up. I am not sure if this is a feature or flaw! But the bottom isn't too hot for lap use like my older Powerbook. The third minor issue is that the scroll bottom does not work with Firefox/Thunderbird.

More to come...

Sun's Two Worlds

2006-11-17T08:08:00.000-05:00

Ben Rockwood made an interesting point on Joyent's latest podcast that Sun has two worlds: Java and Solaris. This came up during the discussion about Java becoming about sourced. He wasn't really happy about Java using GPL and made the point about different things are at Sun between the Java world at Sun and the Solaris world.

As someone who lives in both worlds as part of my job and my personal interests I have to agree. My feeling is that Sun could do more to "sell" Solaris to the Java world and vice versa. Yes vice versa, just try to advocate using Java for something on the OpenSolaris general list and you'll have flames in no time!

Here is what I am thinking about doing. I would like to write some articles for Java developers about why and how they would find Solaris productive as a development environment. After all, many Java developers like using Linux so Solaris is a natural alternative.

Also, I would like to write a book like this someday but about Solaris. Anyone think that anyone would read it?

JAX-WS, Not Too Bad

2006-11-15T17:18:00.000-05:00

So I have finally got connected to the outside web service using the JAX-WS tools in Netbeans. The big problem I had was the web service had some crazy ideas of how things should be done. The big trip up for me was how they used to mean put in an XML document here that wasn't mentioned anywhere in the WSDL but they told all about in the docs. Unfortunately JAX-WS can only read WSDL files and not docs meant for humans, at least not in this version, so I had so manual work to do.

All in all JAX-WS seems like a nice tool. My code to connect to the web service was just a handful of lines. The rest was all generated behind the scenes by Netbeans. It did take me reading through the generated code to figure out what was going on and to figure it out how it all works. I am not a big fan of lots of automated abstraction, but at least Netbeans makes it easy to get to the details if you need to and ignore it if you want to. Just like the Swing tools. The only gripe I have about Netbeans is that I could not use the my long running project I built from an existing ant script, I had to create a new project in order for Netbeans to allow me to consume web services with its tools.

Web Services: Shouldn't this be Easy?

2006-11-09T07:54:00.000-05:00

I have a URL from someone for a Web Service I want to send data to and I have Netbeans 5.5 that has tools for connected to Web Services. I have never done any coding with with Web Services but I have a full understanding of how it works. So I plug in the WSDL URL to Netbeans and then right click in my code and tell Netbeans to connect to the method that I want. That should easy right? Well it left me with a few lines of code with some TODO's for me to implement which I have no clue on what to do. All Netbeans did was create a whole mess of classes which it really doesn't what me to look at. Sigh, I have to use my brain and learn something.

So I want to know, it is 2006, where are my robot butlers, flying cars, and IDE's that think for me?

Back to Blogging

2006-11-06T14:10:00.000-05:00

I finally moved to Pittsburgh and settled in. So soon I should be getting back into working OpenSolaris on a regular basis. But during the move I did get asked by someone writing an article about Netbeans about how I used it on the Chime project. I am looking forward to seeing the article when it comes out.

And speaking of Netbeans, I just switched to 5.5. One thing I just noticed, which I am not if it is new or has been there for awhile, is key bindings for Emacs! Since I bounced between the two all the time I really appreciate that feature.

OpenSolaris and VMware Workstation: Update

2006-09-27T09:07:00.000-04:00

Good news about VMware and OpenSolaris, I was wrong about one thing: the new VMware Workstation does have VM tools for Solaris! (Thank you Adam for the correction) I went by the help document in VMware workstation which must be out of date. I don't know what came over me, I usually ignore the help docs.

I tried out the tools with the latest SXCR and does seem to work so far.

This is good news. So now you don't have any excuses, get yourself VMware Workstation and download Solaris!

OpenSolaris and VMware Workstation: Much Better!

2006-09-26T14:52:00.000-04:00

It has been awhile since I played around with OpenSolaris on VMware Workstation. The good news is that Solaris 10 is now officially supported on VMware Workstation 5.5.2 but still no VM tools which is a bummer but no big deal. So I gave SXCR build 48 on the latest VMware workstation a try. Before there were some issues with the video that required readjustment after the install, well no more, it just works. Even the problem with the screen saver seems to fixed now too.

So if you want to try out Solaris but don't have the right hardware, give VMware Workstation a try. It is much less annoying to deal with than it used to be!

Apps I would like to see on Solaris

2006-09-24T10:29:00.000-04:00

Solaris has really come a long way as a desktop OS in a very short time. I believe much of this has to do with efforts to make Linux into a first class desktop. But there are still a few things missing that I would like to see:

1. VMware Workstation If I got this I could scratch all the rest off the list. Right now there are only two ways to run another OS on top of Solaris: the SUNPci card which is Sparc only and obsolete for the most part. The other is BrandZ which can only do Linux and still a work in progress. This is a real shame because if you want to do virtualization you are stuck with Solaris being the guest and something else being the host. It really should be the other way around!

2. Quicktime I guess I don't really care if I have Quicktime, I just want to play Quicktime files. Sometimes that's the only way content is available. And while I am it iTunes would be nice.

3. Windows Media Player Strange when you think about it, but you could run Windows Media Player on Solaris up until 9. Same reasoning as with Quicktime, I just want to be able to see the content and I don't care how.

4. Lotus Notes/Sametime We use this at work so it would be a nice to have, especially Sametime. Why IBM released it only for Redhat only is beyond me. Actually it isn't but I'll be nice.

5. A Word Processor with a Grammar Checker Read enough of my blog posts and you'll understand why I need that.

And that's it. Not too bad really.

OpenSolaris Build Time: HP Pavilion a642n

2006-09-21T20:33:00.000-04:00

I built OpenSolaris on the HP Pavilion a642n took around 5 hours. I figured it would be a little faster but I think one problem is memory, it only has 512mb. But that really isn't too bad for a cheap computer I picked up at Best Buy 2 years ago and did no upgrades on.

Java: The new C++

2006-09-07T16:36:00.000-04:00

I have been using Java since 1.0. Then one thing I really liked about Java back then was its simplicity. At the time I was a C programmer learning C++ so when I first wrote my first real Java application it felt like a breath of fresh air because it was so simple and was great for certain things that were pain in C/C++. Even as the platform grew at an exponential pace the language really didn’t change a great deal from Java 1.1 to Java 1.5. It appears that there are even bigger changes are coming in future releases, especially in Dolphin or Java 7. No one can say that Java is a simple language anymore.

This progression is natural and isn’t a bad thing. Java has grown to do just about everything and anything, like the type of thing that C++ is, minus the pointer arithmetic stuff of course.

No need to lament over it, we have even better options today for simple languages than Java was back in the day and we have a great platform to build all of those large and complex enterprisey apps.

No Fluff Just Stuff 2006 Anthology Review

2006-09-04T16:11:00.000-04:00

Don't let the title of No Fluff Just Stuff 2006 Anthology fool you. From it you might think that it is just a collection of Powerpoint presentations or something from the highly acclaimed NFJS conference. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead it is a collection of 15 different short technical articles addressing a range timely topics. The anthology is meant to showcase the quality of the speakers that present at NFJS and it does a great job at doing so. Just about any developer will find something in the smorgsbord interesting. There are topics ranging from Enterprise Service Buses to cascading Style Sheets. All of the articles are excellent but here are my top three favorites:

Buried Treasure by Glenn Vanderburg Here I think the editor saved the best for last. With the incredible speed at which new technologies come and go in our industry it is very refreshing to hear someone advocating that we can't forget the past. Glenn certainly isn't advocating not adopting new technologies, to the contrary he really speaks highly of Ruby on Rails, but makes a great point about not loosing sight of things that were already solved in the past.

From Fragility to Agility: Methodologies and Practices by Venkat Subramaniam I am a big fan of agile methodologies so naturally I really enjoyed Venkat's book Practices of an Agile Developer and this article is no exception. He does an excellent job of describing some of the agile methodologies along with their pros and cons.

Real-World Web Services by Scott Davis This is a simple and straight forward article on Web Services and is a great introduction. It is nice to see an article geared toward beginners but still is a great read. That is the great thing about the anthology, it has something for everyone.

I can print!

2006-09-01T17:23:00.000-04:00

Printing has always been one of those things that I never bothered to get working in Solaris. I never wanted anything fancy, just plug in my HP inkjet and print out a document from Star Office and all with all to be done with no effort on my part. Since today is a rainy today and there is nothing else to do I cracked my knuckles and figured today will be the day I can print from Solaris. To my surprise it's really easy in the latest build of OpenSolaris. I plugged in my HP Officejet v40xi and then selected "Add Printer" from the JDS preferences menu. In about 30 seconds with a few mindless button clicks I had my printer setup. I figured that was just too easy so I opened up a sample drawing in Star Office and hit print and what you know, it printed with no problems!

It really is amazing when you think about the improvements in usability from Solaris 10 to Solaris 11 a.k.a. OpenSolaris.

OpenSolaris on the HP Pavilion a642n

2006-08-24T19:27:00.000-04:00

It has been a couple of weeks now of running Solaris on x64 instead of Sparc. This was a machine I got at Best Buy about a year ago and I prompted to replace my Sun Blade 100. So far so good, although it does feel a little weird running Solaris on non-Sun hardware. I guess this is payback for all those years where I ran Linux on Sun hardware before I got hooked on Solaris. I am still using my Sun UNIX style keyboard and mouse, so it isn't too foriegn.

After I got past the network card issue I have only had one hardware problem and that is that I can not burn DVD's with cdrw, but cd's are no problem. I gave cdrecord a quick try but had no luck their either. But I have to admit I am very lazy and don't like to read long man pages so I probably didn't use cdrecord to its fullest. But the coolest thing has to be all of those memory card slots in the front work without a hitch, that was a nice suprise. Even an iPod shuffle shows up on the desktop automagically.

Another strange experience was actually playing a video game on Solaris. Thanks to the nice folks at Blastwave I was able to download Quake 2. I bought the Linux version a while ago but I never could get it to run well enough to make it fun, I just never had the hardware necessary. Well it works just fine now with my hardware. And speaking of perfromance, this machine runs fantastic! I think Solaris boots in less time than it took to open Firefox on the Blade 100! I can build Emacs at about the same speed as my Sun Blade 1000 at work. The tru stress test will be with ON. But right now I only have 512mb so I don't expect miracles.

Book Review: “Java Transaction Design Strategies” by Mark Richards

2006-08-10T13:54:00.000-04:00

Let me step up front that Mark Richards is an old friend of mine. He gave me first Java programming job and taught me a lot. As a matter of fact, I can remember him actually teaching me some of the things I came across in the book.

This is a very concise book that you can read quickly but one of those books you'll want to keep on your shelf as a reference. If you are a Java developer and you do anything with databases then you need this book. Transactions are one of things that everybody uses but often don't have complete understanding of because it just seems so complicated. But after reading this book you'll realize that nothing can be farther from the truth, transactions now will see easy! Mark does a fantastic job making the seemingly complex into a very easy to understand guide. But at the same time this ain't no guide for dummies either. You'll appreciate the thorough description of the three transaction models: Local, Programmatic, and Declarative and XA transaction processing. You'll also learn when each should be used and some of the common pitfalls. The rest of the book covers some design patterns that you'll use in designing your applications. One of the strong points of this book are the examples. Just about every example is shown in EJB 3.0 and in Spring. Both were new to me when I read this book but every single one of them made sense to me. But I can tell you I really can't wait to get going with EJB 3.0 and now I am intrigued to learn more about Spring.

So the bottom line is that I highly recommend this book for anyone that does anything with Java and databases. So I give this book five stars, two thumbs up, etc.

Swiched to AMD from Sparc and a gzip Scare

2006-08-06T10:42:00.000-04:00

I finally made the plunge this weekend and switched over to AMD from my Sun Blade 100. So far the performance is much better, obviously.

But the switch did not go with out some porblems. Being paranoid I made two backups of the home directory. The first backup I had on a partition on the new machine. I planned on resintalling Windows (I'll keep that around for games). However, I went a little nuts with fdisk and lost that backup. I thought no big deal I still have another backup on the laptop. So when I got to gunzip the backup I get a crc error about halway through. First came denial, then panic, and finally despair. I had quite bit of stuff that I really didn't want to loose. I was able to get some, but not enough back, using zcat piped to tar. I tried on the new OpenSolaris x64 and even on Cygwin from the laptop and still the same problem. I copied the backup to my Sun Blade 1000 at work and thought I could use some of my development tools there to maybe get some of the remaining data. I found some instructions for restoring the rest of the data from a gzip file but they were pretty involved. But to my suprise, the file unzipped just fine there! I can't explain why the gzip file was no good on x64 but fine on Sparc. If anyone has any ideas please let me know!

4th one's a charm...

2006-08-02T20:22:00.000-04:00

Then Sun Blade 100 is just too old and needs replaced. I really wanted to play with ZFS and this bug is a killer: http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6421427

So the family HP a642n is going to be my replacement. The problem is that the nic doesn't work so I went into my stash of spare parts and tried some my old nics. Old the nics I kept were ones that I knew were compatible with Slackware.(I hate dealing with installing drivers, no matter what the OS!) I had three I tried and all didn't work but one had some open source drivers available. Promising, but I was hoping for a nic that would work out of the box to make all the cycles of upgrading SCXR's easier. In desperation I went through the junk pile at work and found an old 3com from circa 1999. It wasn't on the Solaris HAL but I tried anyway and thankfully Solaris found it.

Note to anyone in charge of what goes into Solaris: ADD MORE DRIVERS!

Solaris on VMware Infrastructure 3

2006-07-25T10:20:00.000-04:00

Finally, Solaris is offically supported. I just got a machine up Infrastructure so naturally one of the first things I try is to install Solaris on it! The install went with little problems except networking did not work during the install. No big deal because now I can install VMware tools! So installed the tools and rebooted Solaris and all of a sudden I loose connection to the VMware server. So I walk up to the server room only to find a nasty purple screen of death on the VMware server, bummer. But after hitting the reset button on the IBM server (can you believe it, a server that comes with a reset button) all seems well. To be fair to VMware, the hardware isn't supported and I am only using it for testing.

The Power of sed

2006-07-24T10:17:00.000-04:00

So here is the Scenario, I have a large inherted code base where I want to change the package name to match the new owners. How big you ask? Well how about over 1800 Java files and about 3700 jsp's. Well I tried using Netbean's "rafator" tool but Netbeans and choked. And if I broke the task down it to smaller tasks it would take for ever. So I pulled out good ole sed with something like this for the Java files:

find . -type f -name '*.java' -print |
while read filename
do
(
(cat $filename; echo "") | sed 's/[old package goes here]/[new package goes here]/g' > $filename.tmp
mv $filename.tmp $filename
)
done

The whole thing took less than 30 seconds. IDE are good but don't forget you shell, that is where the real power is!

The power of inner classes

2006-07-10T16:22:00.000-04:00

When Java 1.1 came out I was a little intimidated by inner classes. I think the biggest reason was you couldn't (at the time) represent them in the UML tools. I did a lot of AWT programming then and trying to do event handling with out them got ugly. So eventually I learned them and began to see how useful they were. For example, how cool is this:

final javax.swing.JList tracesList = new javax.swing.JList() {
public String getToolTipText( MouseEvent e ) {
int i = locationToIndex( e.getPoint() );
Object o = getModel().getElementAt(i);
return o.toString();
}
};

You can override just one method right there in the middle of your code.

But inner classes aren't used often on the server side. I bet part of the answer is that it makes it harder to do all that UML modeling! :-) Hopefully my recent work with Swing will remind me about the types of inner classes I have available when doing server side development.

BTW, that is real code that I am working on for the Chime project. Note the { is not my prefered way and neither is the ( placement so I need to retrain my brain/emacs/netbeans everytime I work on it!

Back into the "Swing" of things...

2006-07-07T15:03:00.000-04:00

With everything going on I have actually found some time to some OpenSolaris related coding. I have few updates for the Chime project. I really do enjoy working with Swing. One thing I want to say is that the jstyle tool has a really strange idea of how code should be formated!

I am also doing a mini project at work on Swing. So I living and breathing Swing right now. I am using good old Netbeans. It is a great tool but sometimes I feel like I am fighting it. But I have to say it is light years ahead of the first IDE I used for building GUIs, VisualCafe.

OpenSolaris: The First Year

2006-06-14T08:11:00.000-04:00

So it has been 1 year since Sun did the unthinkable, opened Solaris. Make no mistake, this was a significant event for our industry. Here a large commercial product switched to the new paradigm of open source. Hopefully this can become a model for other products. One thing suprised me is that Sun just can't snap its fingers and make Solaris open. If openness was water then OpenSolaris is a half [full|empty] glass that fills up a little more as time goes on.

Java 1.5 in JSP's on JBoss

2006-05-31T14:38:00.000-04:00

If you want to use Java 1.5 features in JSP on JBoss (I can't imagine why you wouldn't!) you need to uncomment one little parameter. Open up /deploy/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/conf/web.xml and uncomment the compilerSourceVM parameter.

From my personal experience, JBoss 4.0.x works very well with the 1.5 JRE. Also, it works well on Solaris 10 in a zone using smf!

Java DTrace API

2006-05-22T20:37:00.000-04:00

A neat feature that was introduced Solaris Nevada build 35. That is a Java API that you can use for running DTrace scripts. As good as D is it isn't the best tool for displaying all that data for humans. With the DTrace API you can use the power Java to produce presentable results. The Chime project is the first example of what can be done. As API's go, the Java DTrace API is very straight forward and easy to use. Looking through the Chime code it didn't take long to figure out how things work.

If you have Solaris build 35 or newer the jar is in /usr/share/lib/java/dtrace.jar and the Javadoc is in /usr/share/lib/java/javadoc/dtrace/api/index.html. If you know Java and Dtrace then check it out, you might find it useful like I did.

Chime: visualization for DTrace

2006-05-18T20:05:00.000-04:00

I am on a quest to learn DTrace and apply it to my every day work. So I am learning D, which is easy, but learning about all the 42,780 (as of build 39) probes is a different story. One tool Chime, which is part of OpenSolaris, that I have come across really puts the results from DTrace to a nice graphic interface and makes it a little easier. It has all kinds of other cool features like the ability to record data from a run. It even has an interface to search though all of those probes. So if you are new to DTrace like me or just want to visualize your DTrace output, check out Chime.

I [insert heart icon here] Blastwave

2006-05-15T09:57:00.000-04:00

Not only is my Sun Blade 100 in the basement my test bed for OpenSolaris stuff but I also use it form playing music during my morning workouts. I rebuilt the machine over the weekend an at 6 am this morning I realized I forgot to reinstall mpg123. Luckily I still had a root console open still from last night's "gmake install" of the latest emacs build. So all I had to do was type "pkg-get -i mpg123" and in no time I had my mp3 player installed! It took me longer to open my workout log in Star Office than it did to download and install mpg123.

Some people don't like some things about Blastwave but for me all of those complaints don't even come close to out weighing those kind of benefits.

SXCR 39 and ZFS

2006-05-14T15:18:00.000-04:00

The latest SCXR release gave me an excuse to re-partition my Sun Blade 100 so I can finally try out ZFS. I couldn't believe how easy it was to create my home directory with as a ZFS filesystem. It took me longer to find the ZFS admin guide (which wasn't that long really) than it did to actually set it up. I hoping that ZFS would give a performance boost since disk I/O is so painfully slow on the Sun Blade 100. But at first glance it seems like that the system might actually be a little slower now. But I have a lot to learn before I can make any real judgements. But one thing I do know, ZFS is very easy to deal with.

Cool Threads for a Workstation?

2006-05-11T13:54:00.000-04:00

It is just too bad that the economics for Sparc workstations don't really make sense for most of us. I would really like to have an efficient workstation with a UltraSPARC T1 in it. For example, my Sun Blade 1000, even though it is several years old, still makes a excellent development platform for my Java work. The problem is that it is noisy and I swear it helps heat my little office up just a bit. It doesn't even break the 1 ghz clock speed but still provides decent performance. That is one nice feature of Sparc processors, they become obsolete at a slower rate. I really doubt a new Opteron power house would be a massive performance gain for me.

I would really like to have nice, quite and compact Sparc workstation. If I was king of Sun I would put a UltraSPARC T1 in an old Sparcstation form factor (aka “The Lunch Box”). Now that would be sweet.

Sometimes You Just Have to Let Go

2006-05-09T12:11:00.000-04:00

Last week was one of my most frustrating weeks of programming. At the last minute a serious bug was discovered in one of my pieces of code that built mailing labels. I tested the code in question extensively with Star Office on my Sun workstation but did only a few tests on Windows and Word. However, about half the time Word would crash because the output of was corrupted but it worked every time on Star Office. So I set out to fix the issue thinking it would be an easy fix and I was just an eureka moment from fixing it. I figure I had over a week before we went live to fix the problem so no big deal. However I spent all last week beating my head against the problem with no avail. So yesterday, one day before I went live I started over again, back to the drawing board so to speak. I was able to fix the problem with ease by using a completely different strategy.

I had two problems that caused this. First, was that I was holding on to the old way, since it always worked in the past. I held on to a false solution just way to long thinking I didn’t have time to try it a new way. The other problem with the first solution was that I was programming by coincidence, I didn’t fully understand what I was dealing with and it just happened to work before but only by luck. Lesson learned. But since I have read this and this, I should have known better.

Language Envy

2006-04-28T13:26:00.000-04:00

t is been almost 9 years now that I have been professionally working with Java. It is even longer if you count the time before when I did it as a hobby when I first started using OS/2 Warp 4 which was one of the first OS's to come with Java out of the box. Of course I have used other languages in that time but Java has almost always been my primary language as long as I have been a professional programmer. But I find myself envious of other languages/platforms from time to time. Even though I may want to change, it doesn't really doesn't make much business sense at my company. Here are few languages I often think of that give that “grass is greener over there feeling”:

C/C++: I miss being so close to the hardware sometimes and have a close relationship with the machine. I even enjoy working with pointers. But the problem is that with what I do I would have to reinvent a lot of wheels that Java already has.

Ruby: The way Ruby does things is just a breath of fresh air compared to Java. Java was just meant to be a better C/C++ which is pretty much means it is general purpose language. That means it is difficult to do tasks quick and easy. But as of today, Ruby isn't as good as Java to glue various systems together. But Ruby on Rails show signs in the right direction.

C#: I did a small few month project in .NET a while back using C#. If you like Java then you'll like C#. It was fun for me but it really isn't different enough from Java. Some parts in .NET are better than what the Java platform has but some aren't. But for the most part it is Java with a slightly different philosophy. I really only have one complaint, it is tied to a OS that isn't my favorite. (Don't give that stuff about Mono, it doesn't make much business sense)

Perl: I always enjoyed Perl. It is hard to explain, it more about the feel of Perl that I like.

TRS-80 BASIC: This is what I first learned to program with. OK I don't envy anything about it, just thought I would throw it on the list anyway. When I went to school and learned Pascal I remember being amazed at how there were no line numbers! Things sure have changed since then haven't they?

Pittsburgh OpenSolaris User Group?

2006-04-26T10:52:00.000-04:00

I will be moving back to my home town of Pittsburgh PA in a few months. I was working on getting an OpenSolaris user group going in New York but everyone involved is extremely busy we haven't got anything off the ground yet. So I figure maybe I'll give an OpenSolaris user group a shot in Pittsburgh.

So if anyone is interested let me know.

And by the way, Pittsburgh is great place to live for programmers. It is a city with a good technology culture to livability ratio.

UNIX, Something New Everyday

2006-04-19T20:31:00.000-04:00

I first used UNIX in 1996. Even after all this time I am still learning. Today I learned about the "-" option for su. Basically it simulates as if the user logged in from outside rather than piggy back on the current login. So after I found out about I gave "su -" a try and what you know, root had mail!

The Next Big Thing on the Desktop: 3D

2006-04-18T14:48:00.000-04:00

A few years ago I saw a demo of Project Looking Glass from Sun and my eyes were opened up to what was the next evolution for the desktop. What a great way to make a more pleasant experience for users and a way to convey more knowledge to the user. However, I am a little disappointed that we don’t have this technology in production yet. I wish OpenSolaris would take this on. But as developers we must be ready because it is coming, one day. We need to start thinking about ways to take advantage of the new frontier.

The Next Phase in Computing: Virtualization

2006-04-17T14:01:00.000-04:00

Part of having a successful programming career is to try and predict future trends since our skills become out of date so quickly. Just take a look at the hype around Ruby. A few bright people, like Dave Thomas, predicted it was the future and it took off. So what I have been doing is trying to predict what things will be like in our industry in 10 years. One thing I see as a future trend is Virtualization.

In the 80’s the desktop computing started a change with multi-tasking. Before that change a personal computer did only one thing, think MS-DOS. The hardware that drove this was the 286 but the software took awhile to catch up that truly took advantage of that in full. Back then I can remember people wondering why people would want to do more than one thing at a time with their PC, now that thought never comes up.

Today the cycle continues, this time with Virtualization. Today that is being utilized by developers and some forward thinking companies. We have the hardware, multi-core chips and are starting to get the software that really takes advantage of that, VMware, Solaris Containers, etc. But I predict that this technology will make into the mainstream and not just for the domain of developers and server consolidation. For example, I can see someday a family will have only has one “computer” in the family room that will take place of the cable box/DVD player/Game console/TV. Every where else people will use things that we call today “thin clients” that can use to connect your home anywhere you can get a cell signal.

But I need more ideas; this one I don’t think is future enough.

Emacs as a Java IDE

2006-04-09T17:00:00.000-04:00

A while back, I set out on an endeavor to replace my current Java IDE. The IDE I used certainly did the job but something just kept nagging at me that there had to be a better way. I felt as if the IDE was making me work the way the IDE designers felt I should work and not how I wanted too. After trying many IDE and editors built for programmers, I was a bit surprised with my final choice, Emacs. There are numerous Java IDEs to choose from so why would any self respecting Java developer want anything to do with an editor that is almost 30 years old? I found Emacs not as hard to learn as I expected and let me work the way I wanted to work. First, it is one of the most powerful text editors in existence and with a few add-ons it becomes a first class IDE. My requirements where simple, I wanted a tool that worked on a variety of platforms, be extensible, and would not require a tremendous investment in time to learn. I expected Emacs to meet the first two requirements but I was surprised to find it was quite easy to learn. Emacs has continued to evolve over the years. If you tried Emacs in the past and found it daunting, you will be surprised to find it a much friendlier place. Gone is the day where learning Emacs was a right of passage where only until you mastered the key combinations where you found worthy.

The choice a programmer makes for his/her tools is very personal. My intent is not to tell you that Emacs is the only true editor for all but to introduce you to something you may have not considered. If you view writing software as a craft then without a doubt your view of your editor is an important aspect in performing your craft. Just as a master painter would not use any old brush, a software craftsman shouldn't use any old editor. Surpassingly, with all the new and flashy development tools that have come about, Emacs is still a popular choice.

Emacs has been around for over a generation going all the way back to 1974 with Richard Stallman. Since then Emacs has been ported to many platforms and has been a popular choice amongst programmers of many types. Today there are two main versions of Emacs around today, GNU Emacs and XEmacs. The fork of GNU Emacs to XEmacs has somewhat become open source folk lore. The projects have different ideology and design philosophies but from a users perspective both are good implementations. In my opinion, XEmacs can be easier to setup but the latest version of GNU Emacs looks better. My suggestion is to give both a try and see which one you like better. Both versions will make excellent working environment for Java development. For practical purposes, in this article GNU Emacs and XEmacs can be interchanged.

Emacs has a few advantages over most modern IDEs. Probably the most profound is in resources used. The bloat has gotten out of hand with some Java tools. Typically, you have time to get a cup of coffee while your IDE starts up all the while gobs of memory are being sucked up. On my system, GNU Emacs takes up 10% of the memory of a popular Java IDE and starts in a matter of a few seconds. Likewise, something has to be said about the stability of a project that has been around for almost three decades. You can be assured that there is a stable code base and community. Emacs was not built with the sole purpose of being a Java IDE but the ultimate text editor. Since us programmers work with text as our raw material it has become a good fit. Chances are if you can think of a language, Emacs has a mode for it. This is a plus, after all, there is a life outside of Java right? Even if there is not for you, there are others things we work with. Emacs has some excellent tools for working with XML and HTML along with an interactive SQL. The biggest advantage Emacs has over modern Java IDE is the the flexibility of Emacs, but more on that later. However, one feature is noticeably missing. Since Emacs primary purpose is text it lacks a GUI Swing builder. However, I suspect that this will not be an issue for most front-end developers.

Emacs was the original do it all environment. Theoretically, you could spend your entire day in Emacs and never have to leave which was important before there were windowed environments. Besides just being an editor, it has a file manger, shell, version control client, web browser, email client, calendar, psychiatrist, games and the list goes on. Both GNU Emacs and XEmacs come with a plethora of tools. Not to mention the countless add-ons that have been developed, some even being commercial. The most significant add on for Java developers is the Java Development Environment for Emacs or JDEE. JDEE transforms Emacs from a good programmer's editor to a full-blown Java IDE. JDEE adds everything you expect in an IDE such as syntax highlighting, class browser, keyword completion, and debugger just to name a few.

There is a good chance that you already have Emacs on your system. It is component of almost every Unix system, including OS X. Nevertheless, you will probably want to get a fresh copy since the version on your system will likely be out of date. GNU Emacs especially has had some drastic improvements as of late. Go to either www.xemacs.org or www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ to download the latest source. Pretty much the standard ./configure and make install will do. Windows users have not been left out. There are precompiled native installs and those for Cygwin. Do not worry if you have problems with the installation, the Emacs communities have an plenty of people willing to help if a Google search doesn't solve your problem.

As I already mentioned, getting started with Emacs is much easier today. XEmacs was probably always a little easier but GNU Emacs has made great strides to catch up. It used to be you needed a cheat sheet of keyboard contortions to do anything in Emacs. Ultimately many people only bothered to memorize one sequence, C-x C-c to exit Emacs when they accidentally found themselves in it! It also did not help that out of the boxîthe "normal" keys did not work as one would expect. For example to scroll down one might expect that the down arrow would be used instead of C-n or if you press ìhomeî you expect to go to the beginning of the line. Today many of the key sequences, a newbie coming from a typical windowed application, will find today's Emacs work as they may expect. Additionally if you turn on CUA mode the familiar C-c to copy, C-z and such will work like most apps these days. Purists may balk at such "cheats" but if they can help you get used to Emacs quicker and less painfully then by all means use them. However, the whole idea of using a tool like Emacs is to become more efficient by using all of those key sequences. They might seem intimidating at first but it will not take long before your fingers get used to them. After a few hours you will start understanding that the key combinations are not just random selections but thought out patterns. It will not take long before you start realizing that once foreign key combinations actually make you more productive. There really is a method to the madness!

Emacs has tremendous customization capabilities. Just about anything you see or enter in Emacs can be customized. In the past you had to versed in Lisp or at least know how to copy and paste Lisp statements into your .emacs file, the startup file with your own customizations. Here is another area where GNU Emacs has made great progress in helping new users. A point and click environment called Custom has been added. Custom does not have every possible customization but it has plenty. The best part is that each option has a help paragraph along with the actual Lisp statement so you will learn as you go along. When you apply your changes, your customizations are appended to you .emacs file.

Do not get me wrong, even though Emacs is much easier today for the beginner, there still is some things the novice will have to adjust to. For users that are used to the common GUI environments like Windows, Gnome, KDE, or OS X some things in Emacs will seem quite strange. Remember that Emacs was built before there was any idea of GUI environments, heck the idea of seeing a page of the file you are working on was novel! So it is no surprise that Emacs has concepts that are unique. For example, you "kill" text and ìyankî it back or a window is a frame and frame is a window. It is not terribly hard to get used, just be prepared.

OK, so maybe you get the point that Emacs is a great text editor but what makes it so good as a Java development? Well that would be the Java Development Environment for Emacs or JDEE. If you are using GNU Emacs you will also need to visit jdee.sunsite.dk to get JDEE and its prerequisites. The installation is straightforward and just requires you to compile a couple of packages and put things in a place where Emacs can find them. A few changes to your .emacs file will also be needed. For XEmacs you can get the appropriate packages from the XEmacs site. Be forewarned that the XEmacs packages of JDEE might be behind what is current. The transformation that JDEE provides is really a wonder. The first thing you'll notice the first time you open a Java file in Emacs after JDEE is installed is that now your code is color coded and a new menu is available. Before you can start using the full power of JDEE, you will need to setup a few things up such as the location of your JDK and classpaths. JDEE uses an easy to use interface like Custom. Here again there are plenty of options, enough to make your scroll mouse finger tired.

Like any good IDE, Emacs with JDEE lets you do all of your development tasks from one place. With JDEE of course you can compile your classes right there and if you have an error in the compile it can take you right to the error. It goes one step further and will integrate with your builds in make or ant. There are also commands to execute your application or run it in a debugger. There is also a class browser. Arguably, the most important tool that has graced the development community recently is code completion. No longer do you have to memorize the contents of the thousands of classes we use on daily basis. It also saves us time and effort in typing. JDEE does a good job with this. Besides that, JDEE provides many convenient code generation utilities. It does more than just creating class stubs it has some great features once you are already editing a class. My favorite is the template to create get/set pairs but there are several such as auto Java doc creation or a create a "System.out.println" statement all with a single keystroke sequence. There are also has some neat shorts cuts like typing in ìifeî creates an if/else stub with parentheses and brackets in your preferred style.

Here is an example of tremendous value of Emacs, the community. Naturally, because most of the users of Emacs are programmers and like all programmers they are always finding better ways of improving things. One disappointment I initially had with Emacs/JDEE was there really wasn't much support for working with JSP's. The particular problem at the time was indenting for a particular nasty JSP. I did a quick Google search and I found Walter Higgins' site, www.xanadb.com/archive/emacs/20040622. Here he had similar frustrations as I did and provided some Lisp for insertion into my .emacs file. It was exactly what I needed. This type of thing I found is typical. Every time I ran into a problem or I tried to find a different way of doing things, it was easy to find the solution.

I found that it there was some initial culture shock when I first tried Emacs. However, it did not take long before my productivity matched what I had in my old IDE. What really sold me was when I encountered something I did not like it was easy to change and there were plenty of tools to make my work easier. I still consider myself a beginner and know that I still have plenty of room to grow with my new environment of choice. There is no possible way to do justice in short article about the power of Emacs. My suggestion to you is to give it a try. You may, as I did, find it as you tool of choice.

Using Java 1.5 for Netbeans on Mac OS X

2006-03-31T13:33:00.000-05:00

One slightly annoying thing about Mac OS X tiger is that default Java VM is 1.4. That is fine usually but when you launch Netbeans you're stuck with 1.4. So if you want Java 1.5 for use with Netbeans make sure you download Java 1.5 from Apple and then you need to edit the file NetBeans.app/Contents/MacOS/netbeans. In the file you'll need to set or replace "$netbeans_jdkhome" with "/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5/Home " which is the not so obvious home for Apple's 1.5 JDK.

Faster builds with Netbeans!

2006-03-29T14:51:00.000-05:00

I have a probably unhealthy obsession with getting faster build times. What can I say, I am impatient. With the current project I am working on we have an Ant target that is the "mother of all builds" which cleans, builds, and deploys the entire project. On my Sun Blade 1000 it take just under a minute so I try not use it too much for normal development. Since I have switched to Netbeans I mapped my F6 key to run this target. Netbeans gave me a pleasant suprise. The first time I do a build it takes the same amount of time as when I would run Ant from the command line, just under a minute. But the next time I do the build through Netbeans the build takes just around 30 seconds! Yippee!

Plus, I saved myself an entire keystrock because before I used to have alt-tab then up arrow, now it is just a simple F6.

Put Three Arrays Into One With Java

2006-03-28T14:14:00.000-05:00

Ever since I learned about Vector in Java 1.0 I never wanted to touch an array again. But I had to today. I needed to concatenate three arrays into one. Here is a non-obvious elegant way:

System.arraycopy(array1, 0, finalArray, 0, array1.length);
System.arraycopy(array2, 0, finalArray, array1.length, array2.length);
System.arraycopy(array3, 0, finalArray, (array1.length+array2.length), array3.length);

That sure beats a bunch of for loops.

Solaris Express, build 34 upgrade

2006-03-21T20:54:00.000-05:00

Last night I upgraded to build 34, no problems like I had with build 33. But one thing I realized is that I am getting really sick of redoing my network and time zone setings everytime I do an upgrade, I think there has to be a better way...

Swing is easy, but Swing is hard

2006-03-21T20:30:00.000-05:00

This is in response to mellia's comment and I felt deserved an entire new posting.

One of the biggest complainants about Swing is that it is too hard. I believe this is because people expect Swing to be some kind of RAD GUI building tools some other "high level" languages. After all, so many other things are easy in Java. But Swing is no RAD tool, it was meant to be a full featured API. If you think Swing is hard then try to making a desktop app using C/C++ and the Motif library and then make it run on Windows too, now that would be tedious. That is really what Swing was trying to improve upon.

If you are looking for tools to help with saving time building Swing apps, I really y like Netbeans Matisse. It is the first Swing GUI builder that I ever really liked.

And yes you can use Swing to build "real" apps. Netbeans is an example.

Java Webstart - Beware of the Cache!

2006-03-17T16:50:00.000-05:00

Java Webstart is a great technology. But watch out for your apps getting cached! In beta testing a small bug was found that screwed up data that I promptly fixed and deployed to the web server. The problem is that the user's were still running off the beta version cached on their local machines which screwed up lots of data. Think of a database that stores prices. The list price was getting over written with the cost instead. This would make customers happy since they could buy stuff at cost but not my bosses for obvious reasons! Making the user go in the control panel and clear the cache to straighten up the beta in production and creative use of JDBC/SQL fixed the data in a hurry saved my butt.

Netbeans back in my toolbox

2006-03-17T16:35:00.000-05:00

Netbeans and I go way back, since around 2000. But about a year ago I go real frustrated with it for a couple of reasons. So I decided to try some other tools out to see what I might have been missing. My favorite was Emacs with JDEE. But recently I needed to do a Swing app so I tried out Netbeans 5.0. It is much better and is the best Java GUI builder I have ever used. The rest seems pretty good to. But Emacs won't be going away that's for sure. I will still use it as my "side-arm" editor. I just wish Netbeans could accept some Emacs keybindings.

Getting Started with OpenSolaris using VMWare

2006-03-04T17:08:00.000-05:00

The final version of my article "Getting Started with OpenSolaris using VMWare" has been posted on the OpenSolaris site. This is a great way to try out OpenSolaris to see what it's all about.

for/in >= Sliced Bread

2006-02-28T16:56:00.001-05:00

I have FINALLY put a Java 1.5 app into production this week. It was a Swing app so I made the decsion on the JDK, not the app server vendor. Generics are great but my favorite addition is the for/in, it works just like the foreach command I would use in my shell scripts. No more creating Iterators and casting stuff, yeah!

I like Swing

2006-02-27T16:51:00.000-05:00

It has been about 5 years since I wrote a Java GUI app and I forgot how much like to write Swing apps. Netbeans 5.0 is the first Java GUI builder that I actually like too. (My hats off to the NetBeans team there). But I do realize why it is so unpopular with some people. You have to do a lot of the low level stuff yourself, namely I am talking about implementing threading for thing to behave properly. But since I had AWT horrors in my past of making a BWT progress bar update correctly Swing seemed real easy. But someone new to this whole thing, especially a server side person who is spoiled by not having to do threading, would have found it difficult. Using SwingWorker tool really helps too.

Along with this app I also used Java Web Start. What an amazing technology!

Things just work now

2006-02-21T08:14:00.000-05:00

So just on a whim I tried to connect my digital camera and Sony Clie to my Sun Blade 100 running Solaris Express using the tools in JDS. I was completely amazed that it just worked with just a few mouse clicks! I had everything from the Clie in Evolution in no time. And transferring pictures from the camera coundn't be easier. This may seem strange to be excited about but coming from old time Linux and using Solaris as my primary desktop for a couple of years now these things never came easy. I didn't have to download and compile anything or get real intimate with the hardware.

The thing is these things have probably been in JDS for awhile now, I just never thought that it could be this easy. Solaris (and desktop Linux which helped out here) has come a long way in a short time.

Solaris Express - Build 33

2006-02-20T13:17:00.000-05:00

I had a long openSolaris todo list that i wanted to accomplish over the weekend and the first was to upgrade to build 33 on my Sun Blade 100. I did an upgade install and I had plenty of problems which took up much of the weekend. The first problem was with the cdrom on the SB100. For some reason it didn't like the second CDRW I burned. I put in a drive from the spare pile and tried again. This time it made it through but on the reboot I saw a few errors from smf but I ignored them. But when I couldn't log in then I knew I had big problems. After some digging I found that some really important files were missing. So I reran the install and did a custom upgrade and found the problem, several important packages were not selected. My particular problem was with the /usr package of volume services which had a cascading effect. After the third install all was well.

JDS on build 33 does look different and a little better with new fonts and colors. I also tried out the infamous new Real Player. It didn't really perform well on the SB100. Just one more reason why I need a new machine. But I could view all the content that the old one couldn't handle, which is good.

Creator Update

2006-02-15T11:47:00.000-05:00

I didn't loose my work after all, it was just "misplaced". It seems like it when a page gets renamed in Creator everything doesn't get the message about the name change and it required some clicks on my part to fix. I am still ticked about the crash though.

Creator: One foot out the door and the other on a banana peel

2006-02-15T11:15:00.000-05:00

OK, so i edit the name of portlet and try to redeploy. Then the thing becames a big unresponsive gray box. So I kill and try to restart, the splash screen hangs. It takes a few kill -9's to clean up some rogue process left over. Then when I open my project a bunch of work I did is gone!

I still don't have a good feel of this tool so I'll give it another chance, but its on notice...

Studio Creater 2 - A worth while IDE?

2006-02-14T15:10:00.000-05:00

Normally I work in Emacs. Mostly because I am a "pragmatic developer" who doesn't want to code by coincidence. Today I need to do some protyping so I decided to give Sun Studio Creator a try. I saw some neat things with it at JavaOne and I here about almost every week on the Java Posse podcast.

First of all, it is marketed to novice developers, which made me feel a little dumb because it took me some time to figure things out, like to use "Run" instead of "Build" to see my changes. But I was very impressed with how fast I built a simple and nice looking portlet. It was really cool how all I had to do was drag a table on to a drop down and it just worked. I'll keep working with to see if it is a tool worh keeping. So far it seems like it might be a good prototyper, lets see if I can do something real with it.

The minor suprise was how much of a pig this thing is. My Sun Blade 1000 dual processor with 2 gigs of ram can barely handle it.

My kingdom for VMware Workstaion on Solaris!

2006-02-10T12:08:00.000-05:00

OK, not much of a trade I admit but I would love to have VMware Workstation running on top of Solaris, not just Solaris on top something else. I use Solaris on my primary desktop but I need Windows once in awhile. Right now my solution is a Sparc workstation with a SUNpci card. Don't get me wrong, this is a great solution, just expensive which forces me to used hardware.

If VMware releases workstation for Solaris I'll buy it along with a shiny new Ultra 20.

Installing OpenSolaris on VMware - Draft

2006-01-29T17:25:00.000-05:00

So you want to try out OpenSolaris but you don't have a machine available. Then VMware is what you need. Even if you do, VMware is great tool to get help you get started with OpenSolaris and can be a great tool to help you on your kernal hacking efforts. VMware workstation 5.5 has “experimental” support for Solaris but I have found that OpenSolaris actually runs quite well with it. This article will take you through the steps to get OpenSolaris up and running on VMware and assumes you are new to VMware and OpenSolaris. This article will also be helpful if are just interested in Solaris on VMware.

First, you need to get yourself a copy of VM Workstation. It will run on Windows and some Linux distros. You really don't need super impressive hardware to get started. My first test machine has only 512 mb of memory and is limited with disk space which requires me to run off an external USB drive. In both cases the performance is tolerable. But of course the more memory, disk, and cpu you have the better!

You may be wondering, so what is VMware? VMware is an application that emulates a PC or runs as a virtual machine (VM). So basically what happens is that when you run OpenSolaris on VMware it acts as if it is own dedicated box when actuality it is running as an application on Windows or Linux. Hardware such as NIC and video cards are emulated which can be your savior if you hardware isn't supported yet.

Once VM Workstation is installed start off by creating a new virtual machine (File -> New-> Virtual Machine...). On the first selection just select the typical configuration, after all if you need custom then you don't need this article! Now check “Sun Solaris” and select “Solaris 10 (experimental)” or if you are lucky enough to have a 64-bit machine “Solaris 10 64-bit (experimental)”. The next step will ask where you want to save your VM settings and log files. Think about this for a second before you accept the defaults. On Windows, the default is in the “My Documents” folder which isn't always the best choice. It is a good idea to keep the VM's disk image file with the settings so this folder is going to get big. Another thing to think about is organization. You will probably getting hooked on this virtual machine thing and you'll want to keep it organized. Think also about a good naming scheme. For now a good name would be “OpenSolaris_base” and put it on a partition with lots of space. The next step is to determine what kind of networking you will setup. The best choice is bridged. With this choice Solaris will be just another node on the network. However, if you are unable to assign your instance its own IP address or if you want to move around the VM to different networks then select NAT. Now you need to determine how much disk space you want to allocate. The default is 8.0 gigs but go ahead and double that since you'll need some space to do a build and such. I recommend that you do not allocate all the disk space now unless you have massive free disk space and you want to get every little bit of speed out of the VM. But just remember that having all the disk pre-allocated might get in the way later when you start doing things like cloning images. Also, select “Split into 2 GB files” if you plan on moving the VM around since it will make easier to zip it up or put it onto DVD-R's.

Before you start the VM, you may want to edit the virtual machine settings that were just built. Particularly for the amount of memory allocated to the vm especially if you plan on building OpenSolaris. Give it as much as you can spare.

Now get yourself a copy of Solaris Express. Go ahead and get the DVD version even if you don't have a DVD. Plus, there is no need to burn it to a DVD-R. Once you have the Solaris Express ISO file go back into the VM settings. Select the CD-ROM and choose “Use ISO image” and enter the path to the ISO file. Since VMware is emulating a CD-ROM device it just mounts the ISO and the VM will think it is a physical drive.

Once you have ISO mounted it is time to start up the vm. You'll notice the screen looks a lot like your PC when it starts up.

Eventually you'll get to the Solaris install screens. To start off you'll be setting up networking on the vm's network interface, pcn0. One thing to keep in mind is that if you select DHCP and you are using the NAT networking scheme you'll need to edit the /etc/default/dhcpagent file to keep your hostname from getting screwed up once you have it up and running. After the network and time zone information is complete you'll be asked about the installer options. On the first screen just select “standard”. Next select “Manually eject CD/DVD” since you need a reminder to point to a new ISO if needed (but if you took my advice on the DVD you won't need to worry). You can select yes for automatic reboot if you want. The next screen of interest is the disk partitioning. First let Solaris use the entire disk. Then go ahead an let the installer do an auto-layout. It will ask you to select the file systems for auto-layout. I recommend one for / and one for swap if your new to this stuff. I really don't care for the way auto-layout sets things up but it is easy to customize its defaults. Just hit F4 and adjust accordingly. First of all the swap is probably too small if you want to do a OpenSolaris build. Plus the / slice is too small with /export/home taking up all the space. Since this is a test system here is what I do. I get rid of home slice and then set swap to something like 2048 MB then the rest to /. Here's a trick to do that if you don't want to do math. First set / to 0 then set it to the “Free” number on the last line. That is pretty much it and it is time to let the install run.

Now after the install completes you will run into your first problem. During the install, the screen is at a normal size with no problems but the first time Solaris boots up the screen is all squished up. Some how Solaris forgot what how things were setup during the install. So you'll need to run kdmconfig to straighten things out. What you'll have to do is log into the text mode before the login screen appears. If you miss it I suggest you log in to a CDE session, it will be a little easier to manage with the small screen size. Here you can reboot and try again or run kdmconfig from a maximized terminal window. The only caveat being you won't be able to test your new setup. So once you are at the command line run kdmconfig as root. The first choice you'll have is xorg or xsun. Both will work. If you're an Linux fugitive then xorg setup should be old hat. Otherwise just select xsun just to get started with because it is a little easier. You can play with setting up xorg later. Once you have xsun setup scroll all the way down to the second to the bottom option on the video device list and select “XF86-VMWARE Vmware SVGA virtual video cards”. Next select the first MultiFrequency monitor, the one that is 100khz and can do 1600x1200 @80hz. For the screen size just leave it at 17-inch. Now you can pick a resolution. The minimum you want to mess with is probably 1024x768 but think about the screen resolution you are currently running on the host desktop and adjust accordingly. Check the settings you just entered and then save and test the configuration. You will get a chance to try out the resolution if it looks good then accept the settings otherwise keep trying to adjust things. If the VM screen seems way too big then try to change the monitor type. Don't forget the keyboard and pointing device settings if yours is different than the defaults. Give your new VM a reboot to make sure the changes worked. If all went well you'll see a properly sized login screen.

Before you do anything else make sure you make a snapshot of the VM you just created. This is very important because when you start playing with OpenSolaris the chances of you brickifying a system are quite high. Optionally before you take a snapshot you can create a default user account first. The easiest way for the novice is to login and then run “smc” from the command line. But once you have the new account setup and tested the shut the virtual machine down. Then click on the “Clone this virtual machine” icon. You have the option of a full clone or linked clone. For the first image I suggest is a full clone so you can put the backup in a nice and safe place. That way one day in the future when get a little too cocky and really screw things up you'll have a fall back.

Any time you login to a graphic desktop don't do anything else until you disable the screen saver. Otherwise you'll have a locked VM that won't unlock. There is a bug in the current builds with the screen saver on certain video cards and VMware is one of them. Even when the bug gets fixed you really don't want to be running a screen saver in VMware anyway.

That's it to get the base Solaris Express install up. Next step is to get the OpenSolaris source or BFU and install it. I highly recommend, no actually I INSIST that you clone your working VM before you BFU it. Even if you are an expert at the build process you never know why kind of bug is waiting for you in the latest release. Remember that OpenSolaris is essentially experimental and Solaris on top of VMware is also experimental.

If you need more help with OpenSolaris I suggest you visit the OpenSolaris and the VMware forums. Both are filled with smart people willing to help. Also check on the VMware workstation help. Believe it or not is has information specific to installing Solaris on VMware.

Solaris a Great OS for Java Developers

2006-01-20T15:36:00.000-05:00

When i started learning Java in 1997 the typical scenario was to develop Java on PC running Windows, or if I was lucky Linux, and deploy to a server running Solaris. This was common since Solaris on the desktop wasn't really very common.

Today Solaris makes a fine desktop especially for Java Developers. Here are a few reasons why. First both 1.4 and 1.5 come bundled with the OS. Along with that so does ANT, the second most important tool after the JDK for working with Java. Almost any tool a developer need can be easily added. Just about all the major IDE/Editors will work on Solaris. Java just runs great on Solaris, but go figure it would. And don't forget DTrace, one of the greatest tools to come out in awhile, it works quite nicely with Java.

Interestingly enough Solaris comes the the Java Desktop System which is Sun's version of Gnome. It is pretty much the same thing as JavaScript, not much to do with Java but someone wanted to capitalize off of the Java name.

OpenSolaris - VMWare - JDS: Screen Saver

2006-01-12T10:41:00.000-05:00

If you are running OpenSolaris on VMWare make sure you shut off the screen saver in JDS before you do anything else. I have had a few instances where the screen saver locks the screen and will not unlock. I haven't figured out the pattern to duplicate the bug yet but running a screen saver in VMWare isn't really a good idea anyway.

Other than that, OpenSolaris runs like a champ on VMWare. I hope VMWare will someday soon fully support Solaris on VMWare and even better VMWare on Solaris!

Patching Zones with updatemanger

2006-01-11T12:56:00.000-05:00

The updatemanger is a great tool for lazy people like me. When there is a new patch available an icon on my desktop blinks, I click on, and tell it to install it. The problem is that this handy little tool doesn't work with zones. But there is still an easy way! As root run this:

smpatch download

This puts a bunch of jars in /var/sadm/spool. Now unjar them all

foreach $jarfile (*.jar)
>jar xf $jarfile
>end

You can delete the jars and the META-INF directory if you want. Now you can install the patches. It is probably a good idea into single user mode, some patches require this, so type:

init 1

Now you can install the patches:

foreach $pfile (1*)
>patchadd $pfile
>end

The more zones you have the longer this will take so find something to do for awhile if you have plenty of patches.

I clean out the patches when they done but I save them just in case:

zip -rum9 /archive/patch_archive.zip 1*

Cheap Fail Over

2006-01-10T13:38:00.000-05:00

Zones in Solaris can give you a poor man's fail over. My environment doesn't require extreme reliability so this won't work for everyone. What I do is setup a zone on another physical server identical to the production zone, with the exception of the ip and autoboot is set to false since I leave it dormant when not in use. If the production server needs to goes down then all I need to do is change the ip in zonecfg and sys-unconfig the zone. The sys-unconfig is needed for all the stuff in /etc. It is the easiest and most full proof method.

Zones for security

2006-01-10T09:52:00.000-05:00

Another good practice for Solaris Zones: Always put Internet facing applications in a zone. It is just one more layer in the security onion.

Some Solaris Zones Practices

2006-01-05T11:40:00.000-05:00

This week I get to play system administrator. I am moving around and consolidating servers. All of the servers are J2EE web/applications servers on Sparc Solaris. Using Solaris zones really makes life easy. Here some of the practices I found helpful.

-Put as much memory as you can afford/fit into the server. So far I have not seen issues with CPU or I/O resources but there never seems like enough memory.

-Don't run any servers in the global zone, there is no need to.

-Share files between zones via NFS. I set the global zone up as the NFS server and the other zones mount it. If speed is an issue consider your centralized storage (i.e. SAN)

-Let the global zone deal with routing settings

-Keep the zone simple. I found that the simpler I keep the changes to the zone the easier it is to copy the zone somewhere else.

This year's Christmas present

2005-12-30T11:22:00.000-05:00

Forget about iPod and all that other high tech stuff. I got a turntable this year for Christmas! You know the things that played those records? It is kind of suprsing that they sell these things still.

Plugged into a good amplifier and speakers those old records really sound good. It is hard to descibe but there is a difference between digital and analog. For some reason the analog records have a better feel but maybe it is nostalga for my ears.

However, the ironic thing is that probably one of the first things I will do is convert those records to MP3's! It is kind of hard to take a record with you during a workout or a drive in the car!

Hard Drive in the Freezer - No Urban Legend

2005-12-20T16:44:00.000-05:00

Pretended to be Myth Busters today and tried the put a clicking dead hard drive that wouldn't even boot up in freezer. It actually worked!

Favorite new feature in OpenSolaris b28

2005-12-18T20:02:00.000-05:00

Although ZFS got all the press in build 28 of OpenSolaris there is one feature I really appreciate. Now you can shut down Solaris by just pressing the power button. No more su to root or logging out to shut down the Vaio. May not be a useful feature for servers but is great on a sub-notebook!