Archive for August, 2010

Time Management Tips from Randy Pausch

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

Randy Pausch, you may recall, became infamous because of his dying “Last Lecture”. Just tonight I happened to come across a talk he did on Time Management, “because time is all we have.” As he particularly pointed out, “you may have less of it than you think.” Time management tips from a dying man, who better to speak on the subject?

Whats shocking to me is that the talk is not philosophical, rather its 1 hour 16 minutes of non-stop practical pointers, ideas and applications.

Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management

I think my chief takeaway was that time is, and should be treated as, a precious commodity. If you are spending time, it should be on something worthy of that sacrifice. What this also implies is that if someone wants my time, I should ensure they are using my time wisely. Time is not an infinite resource.

This point is particularly key to me because I am a wanna-be perfectionist. I will drag on and on and on for days, weeks, months trying to think something through before truly devoting myself to it. For code this means that I want to be able to visualize all the logic before I start writting. Now, this is an entirely flawed concept, because any reasonably complex program is going to have more lines of code in it that you can keep in your head. Therefore, when I try to visualize everything I’m actually just moving from visualizing one small part to another, and loosing something during the mental context switch. I should instead just start writing the program and then deciding ahead of time to improve it later. This is essentially my version of “a working program today is better than a perfect program in a year”.

I’m reminded of a phrase I cooked up with Tamarah (my wife, the lovely women above) several years ago. When discussing something emotional and complex, you can spend a lot of time thinking over and re-thinking the right way in which to phrase it to provide clarity. But this is exceptionally hard to do and very time consuming. Therefore, when we see eachother in this “I’m not sure how to put it…” pause, we will say: “Badly… and work from there.” So we work in drafts, making it clear that the first draft is probably horrifically inaccurate and wrong, but we’ll work towards clarity together and in doing so get a clearer picture of the topic than we’d ever get from the perfect one line explanation.

For sysadmins I find this really hard. It seems all we sysadmins are both perfections and ADHD at the same time. I wish I were exaggerating, but most of us really actually are clinically hyperactive… its a job qualification. The problem is that while we can keep a lot of plates spinning, we’re very bad (on the whole) of providing timely delivery with high quality, unless an external force demands it. This is why sysadmins have to have managers. Geeks without overlords will do amazing things and deliver very few of them. (The description of a good overlord is an excessive left for the reader.)

I digress. I personally recommend watching this video repeatedly, say every 3 months. I re-watch David Allen’s GTD talk at Google every couple months already. I always find something new in it and it’s a great reminder to get back on the wagon. More importantly, personal management is dry and tedious, so hearing enthusiastic guys like David Allen or even Tony Robbins (say what you will, his TED talk was fantastic) can be a real pick-me-up.

Posted in cuddletech | 35 Comments »

Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group Lives: Meeting Tonight!

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Sorry for the late notice, but SVOSUG is meeting tonight. Myself and several folks from the Joyent crew will be onhand. 

6:45pm
274 Castro Street, Suite 204
Mountain View
above Meyer Appliance & Kitchens look for the OpenSolaris sign on the door

Tonights guest will be Garrett D’Amore presenting Illumos and Anil Gulecha presenting Nexenta.

The discussion will really be in essence about the rebirth of OpenSolaris in a post-Oracle era.

If you can’t attend in person, it will be webcast: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/svosug-feed2

Be there in person or attend the webcast, but don’t miss it!

A big thanks goes out to Alta Elstad for keeping the faith and keeping SVOSUG alive! Alta rules!

Posted in OpenSolaris | 13 Comments »

OGB Hangs Itself: It is done

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

This morning at 8:19AM Pacific, the OGB passed:


Whereas Oracle has continued ignore requests to appoint a liaison to work with the OGB concerning the future of OpenSolaris development and our community, and
Whereas Oracle distributed an email to its employees on Aug 13 2010 that set forth Oracle’s decision to unilaterally terminate the development partnership between Oracle and the OpenSolaris Community, and
Whereas, without the continued support and participation of Oracle in the open development of OpenSolaris, the OGB and the community Sun/Oracle created to support the open Solaris development partnership have no meaning, and
Whereas the desire and enthusiasm for continuing open development of the OpenSolaris code base has clearly passed out of Oracle’s (and thus this community’s) hands into other communities,

Be it Resolved that the OpenSolaris Governing Board hereby collectively and individually resigns, noting that under the terms of the OpenSolaris Charter section 1.3.5 the responsibility to appoint an OGB passes to Oracle.

Also see the OGB Call Agenda.

Posted in cuddletech | 41 Comments »

OpenSolaris R.I.P.: The Day is Finally Here.

Friday, August 13th, 2010

This is a real thing. This is not hype or idle rambling. OpenSolaris is, as of Friday the 13th of August, 2010, dead. Read the full skinny in the leaked internal email to Solaris Engineering.

Here is the short version: OpenSolaris is dead. No more real-time/nightly code pushes. OpenSolaris 2010.05 will not happen, nor will any in the future. Solaris 11 Express will be the new “developer” release which will be available through OTN. Solaris will remain open source, but code will only be released after the product ships, not before.

Now, lets go bit by bit.


Today we are announcing a set of decisions regarding the path to
Solaris 11, and answering key pending questions on open source, open
development, software and binary licenses, and how developers and
early adopters will be able to use Solaris 11 technology before its
release in 2011.

So, Solaris 11 is the new hotness and the “community” is reduced to “early adopters”.


Solaris must stand alone as a best-of-breed technology for Oracle’s
enterprise customers. We want all of them to think “If this has to
work, then it runs on Solaris.” That’s the Solaris brand. That is
where our scalability to more than a few sockets of CPU and gigabytes
of DRAM matters.

This goes on for a while, but the message is clear. Solaris needs to not simply be another UNIX OS… it needs to be, as it was in the 90′s, the enterprise platform of choice.


We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator
community for Solaris. Delivery of binary releases, delivery of APIs
in source or binary form, delivery of open source code, delivery of
technical documentation, and engineering of upstream contributions to
common industry technologies (such as Apache, Perl, OFED, and many,
many others) will be part of that activity. But we will also make
specific decisions about why and when we do those things, following
two core principles: (1) We can’t do everything. The limiting factor
is our engineering bandwidth measured in people and time. So we have
to ensure our top priority is driving delivery of the #1 Enterprise
Operating System, Solaris 11, to grow our systems business; and (2) We
want the adoption of our technology and intellectual property to
accelerate our overall goals, yet not permit competitors to derive
business advantage (or FUD) from our innovations before we do.

This, really, isn’t so bad. But again, no community, just end-users. A return to focus isn’t a bad thing.


We will continue to use the CDDL license statement in nearly all
Solaris source code files. We will not remove the CDDL from any files
in Solaris to which it already applies, and new source code files that
are created will follow the current policy regarding applying the CDDL
(simply, that usr/src files will have the CDDL, and the very small
minority of files in usr/closed might not have it).

Ok, so existing code will not be closed. So, no drastic change.


We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source-
licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris
operating system. In this manner, new technology innovations will
show up in our releases before anywhere else. We will no longer
distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating
system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis.

So here is the killer… what I’ve been afraid of. No more nightly code. The upshot is that the code will still be available following releases to assist with DTracing, debugging, etc, but you won’t get real-time updates. The biggest downside is that you can’t see bug-fixes as they are put-back, and obviously anyone developing on Solaris is always playing catch up. It says “full release”, so I can’t expect that code will ship with each Express release. Maybe it will, I hope so.

It goes on to say that “technology partners” (such as Intel) will have full source access via OTN.


We will encourage and listen to any and all license requests for
Solaris technology, either in part or in whole. All such requests will
be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but we believe there are
many complementary areas where new partnership opportunities exist to
expand use of our IP.

This is a sticky place. Code is shipped CDDL post-release, however they want to establish partnership opportunities. Clearly they are trying to ensure any businesses which rely upon Nevada will not escape from the partner programs and thus revenue opportunities for Oracle.


We will deliver technical design information, in the form of
documentation, design documents, and source code descriptions, through
our OTN presence for Solaris. We will no longer post advance
technical descriptions of every single ARC case by default, indicating
what technical innovations might be present in future Solaris
releases. We can at any time make a specific decision to post advance
technical information for any project, when it serves a particular
useful need to do so.

Flush… there goes ARC. So the external view into Solaris development is now closing. We now only see what they wish us to see.


We will have a Solaris 11 binary distribution, called Solaris 11
Express, that will have a free developer RTU license, and an optional
support plan. Solaris 11 Express will debut by the end of this
calendar year, and we will issue updates to it, leading to the full
release of Solaris 11 in 2011.

So, back to the old days.


All of Oracle’s efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology
will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary
distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris
binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will
determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users
of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express.

There is the axe on OpenSolaris, present and future. The distro isn’t coming. No nightly. No BFU’s.


We will have a Solaris 11 Platinum Customer Program, including direct
engineering involvement and feedback, for customers using our Solaris
11 technology. We will be asking all of you to participate in this
endeavor, bringing with us the benefit of previous Sun Platinum
programs, while utilizing the much larger megaphone that is available
to us now as a combined company.

And here we see again, its “back to the future” . Pay to play.

The Verdict

Frankly, I’m not surprised by any of this. Saddened, certainly, but not shocked. The sleigh ride is officially over.

As far as the community and governance is concerned, the OGB played right into Oracle hand. It might as well have been engineered this way. On Monday, the 16th, the OGB will disband and default on the charter. Great work guys! Thanks for truly representing the needs and desires of Ora…I mean, the community.

As a governance, OpenSolaris has been a non-stop, end to end failure. Hands down. At every turn, it failed.

As an open source project, it was luke warm at best.

What I will miss is having full access to Solaris Engineering. What’s happening, where we’re going. That was amazing. An all access pass. I will truly miss that.

The plus side is, that for all the ups-and-downs, the code is out there. They can’t take that back. And we have reasonable assurances that it will stay out there following “full releases”. That’s not ideal, but its something. Something very valuable.

As for me… Illumos will now carry the torch, and I’ll participate in that with all the more gusto. This blog existed prior to OpenSolaris and it will continue to be a Solaris blog after. Solaris is the best platform on earth, it continues to be, in any given form.

Posted in Solaris | 32 Comments »

Oracle Finally Unveils the SPARC & Solaris Roadmap

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

John Fowler delvers an Oracle Systems Strategy Update webcast. Better late than never.

There weren’t any surprises. The key take-aways I think are:

  • Roadmap for SPARC and Solaris out to 2015.
  • SPARC will deliver “2x plus performance improvement every 2 years”
  • Ultimate devotion to SPARC platform.
  • 2 SPARC server lines: T-Series for lots of threads, M-Series for lots of sockets.
  • “Niagara”/”UltraSPARC” branding isn’t present at all… its all just “SPARC”.
  • Solaris 11 is coming in last 2011 with a beta/preview coming to “enterprise customers” soon

The presentation really boiled down to “technology will move fast in the next 5 years, Solaris and SPARC rule.” Clearly Oracle has a plan and will execute strongly.

Maybe I have Sun-Purple colored glasses on, but it really felt like this lacked the kind of technical grit we were used to. There is no new exciting technology being introduced, no great innovation to look forward to, just steady incremental improvements in the technology. Feels a bit like HP really.

Solaris 11 was inevitable. You can’t introduce IPS to Solaris 10, it breaks too much, so Solaris 11 has to happen, and will bring with it all the Nevada goodness. It looks like following its release we’ll be seeing annual updates that will focus primarily on scalability (to optimize for expanding hardware capabilities) through 2015.

So, the good news is that finally have a roadmap and we know Solaris 11 is coming.

The bad news is that OpenSolaris wasn’t mentioned at all. That was expected though. As soon as Oracle took over in January the word was quickly spread that “OpenSolaris” is a four-letter word.

So, anti-climatic, but glad we finally got a glimpse into the future. All eyes now turn to that first Solaris 11 preview to come “soon”.

Posted in Sun | 34 Comments »

Illumos Shines New Light

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

As many of you have no doubt heard, this week Illumos opened its doors to the world.

What is Illumos? A change to put “OpenSolaris” back on track. When this slay ride started, “OpenSolaris” wasn’t a distribution, it was a community. It was users and developers and sysadmins gathering around a great operating systems code, now free to learn from, contribute to, and to innovate on. But that’s not how it really went down… is it?

Illumos isn’t a fork. There is no such desire. We’re simply moving the code out into the community, where it belongs, and leaving the corporate red tape behind. Garrett D’Amore, who has spearheaded this and will serve as our benevolent dictator for the time being, has already invited Oracle to participate. I really hope that they do. We have here now a way for the community to contribute better than ever before, and a way to cross-pollinate with the Oracle gate in an orderly way. By keeping them in sync we can share between the two as we wish.

Whats best of all is that while Garrett is a Nexenta employee, this is not a Nexenta owned project. Nexenta will use it, as will Joyent, as will Belenix, as will anyone else who desires.

While I wish we didn’t need to setup an external community repository, all other alternatives have been exhausted.

This isn’t really even the first time this has happened. At Genunix there was for some time SVN Repostitories maintained… they simply didn’t get much love. Whats different this time is that there are an increasing number of developers that depend on this codebase which can not be at the continous mercy of Oracle. We can find security in having our own community gate.

I personally applaud Garrett for his decisive leadership and Nexenta for allowing him to pursue this. The future is looking a lot more bright and I really hope that Oracle will join in and we can all work hard to innovate on this amazing platform, together.

Posted in OpenSolaris | 30 Comments »