Category: Web Services

The Register:

It’s still a ways off, but when Solaris 10 arrives, Sun Microsystems will ship the OS with a new type of partitioning technology called Solaris Zones.

In many ways, the Solaris Zones – known internally by the Kevlar code-name – will be a hardened version of the Solaris Containers currently offered to users for keeping applications isolated from each other. With the Zones, users can split up applications into numerous different compartments all running on one OS image. The amount of processor power, I/O bandwidth and memory for each Zone can be altered, and each one can also be rebooted, said John Fowler, CTO of software at Sun.

This sounds potentially cool as long as it’s not PR BS.  It sounds like a little mainstream virtualization.  Cool!

LWN notes:

MySQL 4.1.0, a new version of the popular Open Source Database, has been
released. It is now available in source and binary form for a number of
platforms from our download pages at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/ and
mirror sites.

Watch out, 4.1.0 is an Alpha release and probably not the best thing for production use.  Granted, MySQL’s idea of Alpha is probably much more stable than others, but throw it on your testbed, not your server.

OSNews:

Daily Daemonnews reports that support for PAE and bigger than 4GB Ram on x86 has been committed to FreeBSD -current. Also, Peter Wemm posted a message showing a dmesg output of a real AMD Clawhammer x86-64 processor booting up 5.0-CURRENT.

Also from Infoworld:

Pentium 4-based PCs will get a performance boost next week when Intel begins shipping its 875 chip set, formerly known by the code name Canterwood. The new chip set revs up the highest speed of the front-side bus used with Pentium 4 chips from 533MHz to 800MHz.

Infoworld:

Microsoft will release a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP for Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD’s) forthcoming Opteron and Athlon64 processors, Microsoft announced Wednesday.

Kiss my Opteron, Itanium2.

Rick:

[MSDN] Unit Testing and Test-First Development –> great article that enlightened me on the practice of unit testing.

Here’s a bit from the freshmeat announcement:

The zip task family in Ant 1.5.2 contained a couple of serious bugs that have been fixed. In addition, two regressions in the FTP and manifest tasks have been detected. This final release also contains some other minor bugfixes.

Grab it here.  Also of note:

Ant 1.5.3 will be the last release that supports JDK 1.1. The next major release of Ant, Ant 1.6, will require JDK 1.2 or later.

Scoble:

I spent a lot of time talking with Scott over at Feedster.com tonight. If Google or MSN or Yahoo were smart, they’d buy him right now before he gets too expensive. He groks human relationships and I bet that his search engine will — within a year — be as important to me as Google is now.

CNet:

Sun Microsystems will likely adopt the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices as it extends into new branches of the server market.

[…]

“Can we commit to using Opteron today? No,” Loiacono said. “Can we use it? Are we likely to use it? Yes.”

It looks like I4U has been h4x0r3d:

Q MERDA HEIN ????? IRONIC BOYS OWNZ YOU ADMIN. TOMA MAIS CUIDADO COM A SUA

Here’s one more reason to stay away from the *nukes.

CNet:

Palm is getting ready to launch two handheld devices, one with built-in wireless and the other with a digital camera, say sources–features that mark company firsts for the industry leader.

The Milpitas, Calif.-based handheld device maker will introduce the latest editions in its Tungsten and Zire product lines towards the end of April, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.

 

Werner:

Starting today  the Rotor Community Site at http://www.sscli.net is open for the public. The site has been set up in a collaboration between my group at Cornell and CollabNet, with some help from the folks at the Rotor team and MSR Cambridge.

Very cool.  It will be interesting to see what comes out of this community site.

So I just got an email (actually two identical emails) from Oracle this afternoon.  The subject of the email is the title of this post.  I was kinda confused, as $5,000 per CPU for anything feels like I’m getting ripped off.  But don’t worry, it’s a great deal, cause the email says so:

The new Oracle9iAS Java Edition offers all of Oracle’s enterprise J2EE products for just $5,000 per CPU. It’s the real deal: full-featured, award-winning Java software—not stripped-down versions that could leave you stranded.

[…]

Get enterprise-class Java at an incredible price. Boost your productivity with the fastest develop/test/deploy cycle. Take advantage of the latest technologies in clustering, persistence architecture, and load balancing. Imagine the possibilities.

I’m personally quite happy with MySQL 4.x and various open source solutions.  They don’t cost $5,000 per CPU.  And Ant rocks my develop/test/deploy cycle, thanks.

My, I’m in a bitter mood today.

CNet:

The company is a couple of weeks away from introducing a new chip for servers–this time it’s the Opteron, a product that analysts and computer executives believe could establish the microprocessor maker as a major player in services. But at the same time, AMD is swimming in red ink, and the company’s comeback depends on the success of the new microprocessor.

Well, if they’d ship the damn things, they’d be successful.  A less sucky name could have helped a little, but it’s too late for that.  At least they’ll be using Athlon64 for the desktop stuff.

The rest of the article has some informative Q&A.  Geeks everywhere are excited and just want to get their hands on the gear.  As long as pricing is right and the supply is there, AMD would have to try really hard to muck this one up.

Will Cox stumbled upon Netcraft‘s redesign, including an RSS feed and what has to be a MovableType backend.  The March survey is here.

Newsforge:

Cupertino (April 7, 2003) – The openMosix Project has announced the completion of its port to the IA-64 Intel(r) Itanium(tm) family of processors.

64-bit openMosix is the first native SSI clustering platform released into production for the IA-64.

openMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image (SSI) clustering that allows building a cluster from ordinary networked computers. Applications benefit without modification specifically for openMosix.

Hmm.  I wonder how hard an x86-64 port would be.  Mmm, x86-64.

I imported the 250 some RSS feeds that I follow regularly into SharpReader this afternoon.  The threading and interactions are really wonderful.  I found myself just exploring the interactions for awhile.  (Mental note: the community needs a way to visualize these interactions graphically or some other way to be able to easily wrap our heads around it.)

My favorite part is that you can click on a collection of feeds and then keep tabs on all of those feeds at once.  That’s crucial when you’re keeping track of a ton of stuff.  The only problem that I can see so far is avoiding the temptation of hitting the refresh button every 5 minutes or so.

The sad thing is that my workday revolves around the top of the hour when my news aggregator updates.  That is not going to change, as all the machines at work are Widnows 98, so no SharpAggregator there.  I’m giving SharpReader a test run at home though, and so far I like it.

I know that I have just violated some kind of techblog taboo, but above is Collin, our new kitten.  I’ll be quiet now.  In fact, to counteract such kitten silliness, here’s a picture of my 1U server before I put the heatsink/fan on:

My babies.

John Udell:

The world’s full of smart people who have, collectively, a lot of the intellectual bandwidth needed to absorb and master open-source infrastructure. It’s the scarcity of expertise with the software that has made open source uneconomical in a lot of cases. As people in India and Russia and elsewhere dig into open source technologies, they can broker that expertise and help bridge the gap between the theory and the practice of reuse. [Full story at InfoWorld.com].

Typo fixed.  Oops.  Thanks, Will.

Adam Curry:

In the first few days, BitTorrent delivered over 10,000 copies of the Red Hat 9 ISOs.