Year: 2002

CNet:

The Federal Trade Commission has granted approval for IBM to sell its hard-drive business to Hitachi, the companies said Monday.

I thought it was a done deal when it was announced several months ago, but apparently I was wrong.  Details:

The Japanese conglomerate and the U.S. tech giant announced the deal in June. Plans call for a new company to be created, owned 70 percent by Hitachi and 30 percent by IBM. IBM will receive $2.05 billion for the business, which is expected to take three years to transfer. The company would have about 24,000 employees and would be based in San Jose, Calif.

Brett Morgan:

I know, I am showing my age here, but IFoo is sick, depraved, and ugly.

We’re currently installing Red Hat 8.0 on Adam’s Thinkpad laptop.  We had to boot it with linux nousb at the boot: prompt.  Hopefully we’ll be able to sort that out later.

Adam is in town from West Virginia for the turkey day break.  He’s doing a little reinstall on his laptop (IBM Thinkpad on the right) and is surfing the net on my ancient Toshiba Pentium 75 (on the left).  Heather is reading to the left of this picture.  You can barely see her feet if you squint really hard.  You can click on this thumbnail to check out a fuzzy 640×480 version taken with my ancient Hawking USB webcam.

PCLinuxOnline points out that PostgreSQL 7.3 is out.  Changelog is here.

If you are looking for Microsoft Windows XP boot disks or setup disks, you can find them at Microsoft’s Download Center.  This entry is for those googling for answers.

Kerneltrap:

The good doctor Con Kolivas [interview] recently posted some interesting kernel benchmarks generated with his contest benchmarking tool [story]. Using resources provided by the OSDL, Con compared 2.4.19, 2.4.20, 2.5.49 and 2.5.50, each with a single processor enabled and with dual processors enabled.

Below many of the tests, Con makes some quick observations about the results. Con’s original email is followed by an edited version I’ve added to hopefully make it easier to compare the results between UP and SMP. Read on for the hard data…

The details are in the rest of the article, but as far as I can see there are some things that 2.4 does slightly faster but other things that 2.5 does significantly faster.  I’m sure hiccups will be ironed out by the time 2.6/3.0 is released.

Terence Parr has some excellent information to share:

Software is more an art or skill than a science or engineering discipline. The most effective means of becoming a great programmer is through an apprenticeship (even if self-directed). There is no substitute for coding a big system that evolves over time. It seems to take about 2 to 3 years before somebody absorbs the important lessons. You can read books and papers in an effort to avoid common mistakes, but talking to and working with other programmers still seems to be the best (if slow) approach. As Chris Brooks says, becoming a commercial programmer is like becoming an architect; being a junior associate for a while is part of the process.

In this document, I have tried to remember and distill my hard-fought 3-year experience as I evolved into a programmer capable of building a commercial product, http://www.jguru.com . Naturally this is a not complete list of programming advice, but rather what I learned on this project.

[Via Gordon Weakliem]

Adam Wendt:

Here’s a cool flash animation of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire. Definitely one cool tune and one cool piece of flash.

I figured if it’s stuck in my head, it might as well be stuck in yours.

Graham Glass:

solaris: i highly recommend this movie. it’s not a run-of-the-mill flick, but a haunting love story that seems to get better the more you think about it. and the sound track is fantastic – i really hope they bring it out soon on CD!

Dave:

Saw Solaris today. Quick review: Skip it.

Slashdot has a semipositive review.

“Murphy giveth, and Murphy taketh away.”
–Me, tho I’m sure it’s been said before.

Adam Curry has been playing with BitTorrent:

I’ve been using BitTorrent for a couple of days now.

This is promising stuff.

The BT application is fired automatically from your browser when you click a link to a .torrent file. I like this approach, since users are used to having ‘helper applications’ launch from their browser.

Joe Walnes:

Jon Tirsen hits the nail right on the head here!

Persistence is only complicated because we make it complicated. Somewhere back in time, it was drilled into our heads that we must use relational databases for persistence. For many applications this makes a lot of sense, but the complications it adds to every day development is just sometimes not worth the effort. Huge advances have been made in the Java world in O/R persistence tools such as JDO and Hibernate (.NET still has some catching up to do here) but using a relational database is just a major headache sometimes.

The LAN connection on my router is hosed.  I’m sure it’s either a matter of swapping NICs or cords.  *Sigh*  No SSHing from work today…

Greg Klebus said something yesterday/last night/this morning that sounded right.  (Things are tricky when you comment on something written on the other side of the world.):

But there is hope here. More and more manufacturers do provide Linux support. It sometimes may be kind of unofficial, weak, hard to find (sic), but still is there. And growing.

So, folks, don’t ask what Linux can do for you, ask what you can do for Linux. Buy only devices that are supported on Linux. If you have one that’s unsupported, bug the manufacturer asking for Linux support (at least one email). Otherwise, Microsoft is going to kick Linux off the desktop market completely.

Kerneltrap has the story:

GCC 3.2.1 (the last in the 3.2.x series, it seems) has been released. Lots of bugfixes in here. Notably, some MMX, SSE, and x86-64 bugs have been fixed.

Additionally, the method of constructing the list of directories to be searched for header files has been revised. If you specify a standard include dir with -I (for example: -I/usr/include), the compiler will ignore it; this is so you don’t change the search order for standard include dirs.

For more information, visit the GCC 3.2 changes page, or look at the Release Notes. This bug release follows GCC 3.2.0 which was released in mid-August [story].

For anyone interested in EnterpriseServices, check out Clemens’ and Ingo’s recent posts.  The details of their discussion are a little over my head, but it’s great to be able to get the gist of stuff as they think about it.

Werner Vogels has released his source so that you can run your own C# SciMark tests:

At popular request I have put the C# version of the SciMark benchmark up for download. Please keep in mind that this is a simple benchmark and that mainly the comparison with the Java version makes sense. For example the random number generator in the C version has no “synchronization”. If you remove the synchronization from the the Java and C# versions you will see that the performance of the Monte Carlo section is close to the C version. The zip file contains the C#, J# and C versions. The pure java version you will have to download from NIST.

If you really want to do some decent benchmarking you will later to wait until we release the microbenchmarks (threads, matrices, etc),and the ports of JavaGrande and Linpack to C#.

Greg points out:

The Lizard has landed! ‘Nuf said. Go get it while it’s hot.

Doc points to Technorati, which is tracking my blog.