And the first distribution using OpenSolaris is out already! Schillix is only in version 0.1, but still, that’s pretty impressive, given they’ve had all of 4 days. (Via c0t0d0s0).
Year: 2005
OpenSolaris
Well, it’s out. OpenSolaris, that is. I thought it would be fun to indulge in a little fake historical writing (or dreaming, some of it really out there)…
Even the people in the middle of it all, those who came up with the idea of making Solaris open source, those who came up with the idea of launching a major initiative by blogging, didn’t realise what an impact this would have on the world. Even now, 5 years later, we’re still discovering nuances, still discussing whether this product or that system could even have been contemplated without the boost provided by the OpenSolaris initiative.
So what was so new about this? Two things spring immediately to mind. This was the first time a major operating system had moved from closed-source to open source. A number of organizations had made such a leap in the years immediately prior to OpenSolaris, notably the Mozilla Foundation (which created the Firefox browser) but those were all applications. Linux (the main other open source operating system) was open source from the beginning. The other was the launch-by-blogging. Sun Microsystems was one of the first major companies to truly embrace blogging by any employee as a means not only to get interesting information out there, but to build community, and we can now see (and this was intended at the time) the blogging launch of OpenSolaris as being a natural part of that community-building process. The 132 Sun engineers who wrote 215 000 words to launch OpenSolaris was seen as a disappointment at the time by some, as a triumph by others. It was clear that this was only the beginning of what would become a wave of launch-by-blogging marketing that was copied widely and is a standard part of any product launch today.
What was not expected was the sheer speed at which non-Sun developers took the opportunity to create end-user applications. Up until the launch, Solaris was considered a corporate operating system. Solid, secure, but nothing fancy that would tempt a consumer to switch. There were few applications created by third party developers; several hard-working corporate applications but little of interest to others. But by the end of 2005 there was an explosion of applications, some duplicating similar work on the Linux platforms such as new desktops and ports of various popular applications, and some that were tailored to the OpenSolaris operating system, taking advantage of features that were not available elsewhere. OpenSolaris became the slashdotter operating system of choice, and reports started coming in of companies being deluged with requests to port their applications to OpenSolaris.
Now, 5 years after that fateful day, we see OpenSolaris being used as the base of gaming consoles, bank systems, even mobile phones! Other operating system developers and vendors were inspired to improve their offerings, and the stability and security of all operating systems has increased to the stage where teenagers don’t understand adult jokes about blue screens.
Ok, now back to reality. I use Solaris on my laptop so some of the above is my dream — more choice in Solaris-based operating systems and desktops (the Solaris equivalent of Ubuntu, for example) and in applications. There are lots of applications available for Linux (Skype, for example) that could be ported to Solaris with (I assume) relatively small effort. The basic things do work — browsing, editing office documents, email. I can even use punchin (though not in conjunction with my Debian firewall, since I need to set up ipsec tables and that requires updating to sarge, then recompiling the kernel, then figuring out the magic incantations. If anyone is using punchin on a Solaris box behind a Debian firewall and has hints on the best way to tackle this, please let me know!). I like using Solaris, it feels solid and stable and although it’s been a long time since I worked on a Unix-based system, so I have to refresh my memory on how to do a lot of things, it’s good to have the choice.
Comment Spam
Anyone else notice a flood (well, trickle) of comment spams? They are comments of the form “great site”, “glad I found this site” etc, i.e., all mindless comments that could apply to any site, with senders that are poker or online gambling sites. Somehow they’re getting past Spam Karma 2 (which normally catches all the spam), so I’m having to delete them by hand. It’s not as it I have a particularly popular site either!
Pilates Reprogramming
One side-effect of working in the software world is a tendency to use programming as an analogy for life. Just to prove this, when people ask why I do Pilates I use a couple of programming analogies about how the whole process works. Pilates is a method of exercise which I started doing after tiring of the way my knee would slightly dislocate when I walked. I’ve been doing it for about 2 years now and although I’ve sprained my knee since, it doesn’t dislocate any more (yes, this is progress!). Any decent Pilates studio (I go to Dianne Miller Pilates) will tailor not only the program but the way it’s taught to each individual’s needs. I’ve seen two categories of teaching, with distinct similarities to maintaining software.
First, there’s what you might call the fixing bugs mode (or maybe TQM if you’re more into acronym-filled BPR analogies). Strengthening the muscles around the knees in my case, and teaching my over-achiever deltoids not to do the work that the rotator cuff and serratus anterior muscles should be doing (lots of the Pilates philosophy revolves around making muscle groups do the work, not training individual muscles).
Eventually you’re far enough along the path that the instructors decide it’s time to change everything — somewhat like deep refactoring, or rewriting the kernel. So right now I’m working on changing the way I walk, and I’m back to doing the really basic exercises at Pilates in a different way. I’ve heard people who golf a lot talking about rebuilding their swing which sounds like a similar process, with similar trade-offs to deep refactoring. If you don’t do it, you don’t have any major performance gains. But reworking the way you walk, or the way you do exercises you’ve been doing for two years, or a program you’ve been fixing bugs in for five years, can be a big undertaking. Personally I think refactoring programs is easier than reprogramming muscle memory — software seldom spontaneously leaps back to the old version!
Upgrading WP
Last week I upgraded the blog software to WordPress 1.5.1 from 1.5. Herewith a few notes for others planning to do this.
The upgrade was mostly uneventful, with only two problems of any note, underscoring that you really should deactivate any plugins you have before starting the upgrade process:
- BAStats doesn’t work, as it appears some of the functions it calls have been rearranged into different files. The author seems to be thinking of releasing a new version at some stage, so for the time being I’ve just turned it off.
- The feeds were empty, but searching on the WP support forum came up with a patch (update: no longer available, or needed) which fixed the problem.
Of course, now the WordPress team have released 1.5.1.1, which includes that bug-fix, so I just spent the last 10 minutes (literally) installing that. The 10 minutes includes backing up the complete database, deactivating all the plugins, installing, reactivating the plugins, and checking the results.
All in all a relatively painless upgrade. I gather there are a lot of security fixes, which alone make the upgrade worthwhile, and it also meant I could install Spam Karma 2, which is a big improvement over the previous version, both in being able to get rid of old comment spam and not have it cluttering up your database, and in its filtering abilities. Both of these factors made upgrading worthwhile. Now I just have to find the time to write more!
Friday the 13th
I spent a certain proportion of Friday morning watching the webcast of the Scott and Steve show — the update of the collaboration work that Microsoft and Sun started a year ago. Lots of other people have blogged about what was shown and the implications (try Tim, Eve, Pat, Robin, Greg and Jonathan for some differing Sun views; CNET, The Register, and Slashdot for some outside-Sun views).
I had a special interest in watching the demo (starts at 17:19) as I did the CSS for the Sun part. What happened was, I’m new to all this identity management stuff, and asked whether I could help in preparing the demo for the eGov forum at the Liberty Alliance meeting in Dublin in April, in part to help me try to get the concepts straight. Pat said the interface to the demo could do with some work; I took a CSS that I’d done for my blog (really must move it into WP 1.5 format some time to reuse it!), spiffed it up a bit, and voila! a CSS custom-built for identity management demos. So it made sense for me to continue spiffing up the demos for this press event. Unfortunately you only see about 2 seconds of the actual demo on the webcast and it’s pretty blurry (the webcast shows more of the demo presenters than the demo they were presenting), but Pat assures me it looked great on the big screens in real life.
I took what I’d done for the eGov forum, made some changes to make sure it would work on IE 6 on Windows XP as well as the JDS browser on Solaris (which, being basically Mozilla, doesn’t have the CSS “inconsistencies” that IE 6 has) and then pinched the colours from the new Sun branding. Pat suggested using some of the Sun images to add some pizazz to the site, while Tim made the fake company logos.
Joint demo development takes a lot of coordination. We discussed small things like which logos we should show (we settled on Sun + Solaris / Microsoft + Windows) as well as big things like the precise script that would be used, which defined how many links should be active, and how many different web pages each company needed to prepare, which determined how much coding needed to be done. And a bunch of other stuff, of course. We had daily phone calls within the Sun demo team, and daily phone calls with the Microsoft demo team, just to nail down all those little details.
In the end, we got there, the demo looked good and worked, and, I hope, made sense to people. Spiffy CSS or fancy images aren’t much use if people don’t get what’s being demonstrated. The write-ups I’ve seen indicate that they did.