Xmas '05 over and done with
Wow, how fast did xmas come and go.
but at least my wife and i got 3 days to relax and enjoy ourselves.
the saturday before xmas, we took care of the very last shopping stuff.
1st xmas day we had the whole day to ourselves.
just relaxing, hanging out on the couch and watching some kool tv series.
2nd xmas day, we had friends and family over at our house.
my parents, my brother, my wife's brother and 1 of our best friends came by to spend xmas with us.
i had a great xmas, really kool.
what about the presents?
i got my wife a jumping rope (she wanted one badly 'cause recently she started taking boxing lessons) and some nice perfume.
she got me some kool toolkit which is kinda the same as a leatherman and a mighty mouse for my powerbook.
i gotta tell ya, i found it not so easy going straight back to work right after xmas.
luckily there's only 1 more day to go this week (cause i could take the day off this upcoming friday) and then we will celebrate new years' day with some kool friends, again over at our house :)
this is the 1st year in our new house so that's why we wanted to stay home during the holiday season.
i hope many people have enjoyed their xmas just like i have and will have a healthy and successfull 2006.
Solaris 10 Update 1 released!
w00t! :)
Solaris 10 Update 1 (Solaris 10 1/06) is available for download.
let's list some of the features:
the Newboot start-up process featuring the GRUB bootloader for
x86 platforms
full integration of Sun Update Connection
improvements to memory performance
networking performance improvements
hardware support improvements
this summary hardly does u1 any justice, so read the full official list from Sun
Here.
with development going on on the wickedly kool features like
ZFS and
BrandZ (already available thru Solaris Express and OpenSolaris) Sun can look very proudly back on 2005 as perhaps the best year of development on the Solaris OS.
LibMicro released!
On
OpenSolaris you can read all about the kool performance measuring tool set
(LibMicro) which was used during Solaris 10 development.
Lib Micro measures various system and library calls and is being released as open source under the CDDL license.
go get the source code
here !
Powerbook has a new keyboard
I am a happy user of a powerbook.
but it is a european version meaning it comes by default with some sort of international type of keyboard.
by that i mean that it is a qwerty one but some keys are not where you'd expect them to be at (keys like ~ and | which are used a lot when using terminals).
i've been waiting for a US keyboard to finally arive and this last friday, i finally had the time to go to Amsterdam to have the US keyboard installed.
even though i got used typing on the original keyboard i am much more happy with the US one.
DTracing linux
A couple of days back,
BrandZ was introduced.
as if that wasn't exciting enough, now the DTrace crew have pulled another wickedly kool thing out of their hat,
DTracing linux :)
this is the real deal, none of those crap
DTrace wannabe implementations for linux.
keep the fantastic innovation coming guys.
X-mas at Sun Microsystems
Well, this last thursday i visited the x-mas festival hosted by Sun.
due to the huge number of visitors, we were informed to park our car nearby Sun hq to be driven there by shuttle bus.
the day was split up in 2 parts.
the 1st part was all about short seminars (20) on various topics.
not only seminars presented by Sun employees, but also by other companies.
you could attend 4 seminars in total so you had to pick 1 seminar out of 5 options for each session.
the 1st seminar i went to was about Solaris 10 update 1.
the original speaker was ill at home so the speech was done by none other than Casper Dik (i immediately felt a 'i'm not worthy' moment) :)
Casper Dik (to the left) / Mark van Gelder (Atos Solaris group to the right).
after the 4 seminars had finished, it was time for the actual festival.
great atmosphere and a huge croud.
the Sun Fire T2000 was in the house so lots of excited people were taking a look at Sun's 32 thread 8 core beauty.
i also ran into a couple of old guys from the company i work for and had a chat about Sun, OpenSolaris, Solaris 10 and the AMD x64 systems and of course the UltraSPARC T1 among other things.
some nice lady was shooting photos of the crowd, so me and some of my work buddies decided to have our ugly faces digitally shot :)
i had a great time and, as always, am looking forward to next year's event.
X-mas at the razr's house
Last weekend my wife and i finally started decorating our house to get in the x-mas spirit.
we're kinda starting to collect the Lemax village collection and it's fun.
right now we have 3 houses consisting of an old movie theater, a x-mas shop and this year we added a kool looking pub.
furthermore, we added a camp fire, some little people to go with the camp fire, some squirls, a very lazy santa lying around in a hangmat, a couple of street lanterns and some other shit.
we're currently setting it up and we'll prolly post some photos to my
flickr stream.
w00t! :)
on 6 december 2005 Sun Microsystems officially announced their UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads(TM) technology to the world at its Quarterly Network Computing '05.
Sun's revolutionary new 9.6Ghz-based systems are led by the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers with more in the pipe-line coming.
you can read up on the story right
HERE
and if that is not kool enough for the retarded, clueless people in this world, Sun also launched the OpenSPARC Project, open sourcing its new breakthrough UltraSPARC T1 processor design point.
quote from Sun "Sun also announced plans to publish the specifications for the UltraSPARC-based chip, including the source of the design expressed in Verilog, a verification suite and simulation models, instruction set architecture specification (UltraSPARC Architecture 2005) and a Solaris OS port".
Sun has contributed more code to the open source community than any other organization on earth.
Sun's DTrace vs red hat systemtap
Today at work i heard a colleague of mine talk about DTrace being available for linux so i wanted to find out where that piece of info came from.
google found info about a project from red hat called systemtap.
i was already smirking and laughing about it when i heard the dude mention the words "DTrace for linux" :)
wanna know what the google search got me?
here's a quote from a story from a red hat employee:
"There's still work to do, but Red Hat is headed in the right direction, analyst Iams said. "If you do a head-to-head comparison with DTrace, you'll see SystemTap is not anywhere near as powerful," he said".
geez, i really wasn't expecting that kind of conclusion ;)
do these guys really think that they can build such a fantastically kool tool as Sun's DTrace after Sun having released it and having developed it for prolly a couple of years already?
read up about the story
here
More free kool software from Sun.
Sun is continuing to offer its software for free to the public.
the latest addition to the already impressive line-up is Sun Cluster.
with the release of Sun Cluster 3.x lots of High Available solutions are now finally within your reach.
here's the list of downloadable Sun Cluster agents available
NOW
HA Apache
HA DHCP
HA DNS
HA MySQL
HA N1 Grid Service Provisioning System (SPS)
HA NFS
HA Oracle
HA Solaris 10 Zones
HA Sun Grid Engine
HA Samba
Oracle RAC (SVM & HW RAID)
Lots of kool Sun goodies :)
w00t! again :)
Sun is bringing out the big guns!
if you ever tried to figure out what your ultimate shopping list would look like, look no further!
Sun is giving away its enterprise software, absolutely for nothing, nada, zip :)
you can find a sum-up of all the goodies
HEREand as Ben Rockwood brilliantly puts it on
his blog: "If your not amazed by this, you either don't have a pulse, are retarded, or need a clue". :)
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