An Unexpectedly Long Pause…

Posted on September 12, 2006

Sorry I haven’t posted anything in almost a week and a half. I’ve got plenty to post but haven’t had the time. Getting up to speed at Joyent is taking significantly longer than expected. The upshot is that, as a result, I’m making some significant organizational improvements in the process… thats my hope anyway.

In the desire to quickly catch up… I’ll just blast through some things.

DTrace is named Innovation of the Year by WSJ: I opened my copy of the WSJ the other morning, turned to the awards section and I almost spit out my coffee. Bryan Cantrill’s name, up in lights, and DTrace named both Software Innovation of the Year, and Gold Medal overall winner. Holy crap man! Any engineer knows how improtant DTrace is, but to see the wider world realize its importance is a real shock to me. Despite my suprise, Bryan deserves all the kudos he’s getting. His wife must be so proud.

Joyent (my employeer) rolls out Bingo! Read about it here, and you can learn more and signup at BingoDisk.com. Bingo! is a 100GB disk accessable via WebDav. Windows Explorer, Mac OS X Finder, KDE Konqueror, and GNOME/JDS Nautilus all have the ability to connect to WebDav shares, thereby allowing you to drag-and-drop files into and out of your share. You can use your Bingo disk just like any other disk, except that “Its Everywhere You Need It To Be”(tm) The whole thing runs off a Thumper that we finalized this weekend. The product is really a tribute to the power of OpenSolaris, Thumper, and ZFS.

CPU Resource Capping Is Coming: Using rcapd you currently can do memory capping but you can’t yet do CPU capping. Work is underway to change that. This is useful for those of us who want to hard limit resources to users, and in a sense really makes resource control do what people expect it to. That is to say, when most people first hear of “resource control” they think of limiting what someone can use, but in fact resource control is the opposite, its making sure people get what they need. Hosting providers like Joyent are really watching this project closely, so if you’ve got access to a container that you don’t manage right now, enjoy all that free CPU your getting while you can.

OpenSolaris Developers Reference: The OpenSolaris Documentation Community has taken over the OpenSolaris Developers Reference. I’ve taken that on but due to my move to Joyent its being pushed back. Expect improvements in that document to come in the near-ish future.

Sun Web Event Tomorow! Tomorow morning (9/13) there will be a Innovation Overdrive Web Event. They aren’t calling it NCQ3, but thats what I assume it is. I’m sufficiently out of it atm to have no idea what is coming tomorow, although I do know one of the people that’ll be on Sun tomorow who isn’t a Sun employee…. watch and see! 🙂

Star War’s Wide Screen Theatrical Release, Released!: FInally! I’ve been waiting since like, well, forever. Given that I was born the year that “A New Hope” released I have yet to see it in its true form and I’ve always been mad that I haven’t seen the movie in its true glory. I couldn’t stand the “remastered” crap, I’m really happy to finally have all 3. This would be the first time I’ve ever bought a Star Wars film actually.

… anyway, I’ve got plenty to blog about, I just need time to do it. Hopefully I’ll update more soonish. I feel horrible that I left that whiney “Stop calling me EMC” post up top for so long, I really intended to bury it in the archives quickly. Oh well.