Home From OSCON

August 6, 2005 Leave a comment

Well, OSCON is over and I'm back home now. For those of you who've never been to an OSCON, it's a really great conference. Well worth attending (and then some). I only attended half of the last day, due to my flight time, but still got to see Asa Dotzler, Nathan Torkington, Howtoons, Danny O'Brien On Evil and much more. As I mentioned a couple times, there really is just too much going on to blog it properly. You just don't want to miss anything. I look forward to attending and once again sponsoring OSCON 2006. Thanks for a great show.
–jeremy
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OSCON OSI BOF

August 5, 2005 Leave a comment

I attended the OSCON OSI BOF last night. Overall I think it went extremely well and was quite encouraging. So encouraging that I've offered to do whatever I can (if anything) to help. One of the main topics discussed was License Proliferation. While no one on the OSI board or in the crowd had any solid definitive answers, they are starting to fully understand the problem and attempt to formulate a plan. I for one am glad to see that they're not just jumping into anything, but are trying to learn from the past and make a sound decision here. It's certainly not going to be an easy problem to solve. They also discussed the possibility of opening up the OSI to some kind of membership. The crowd was really into this BOF, which was great to see. After the BOF was over, a Brazilian drink of some kind was being made. Unfortunately I wasn't around long enough after the meeting to try it. I ran into Steve Mallet at the meeting (he's the OSI webmaster) and we ended up discussing quite a bit of stuff from Sun to Linux on the Desktop. Was great to meet Steve in person as we've discussed quite a bit online in the past. He's agreed to be a future LQ Radio guest, so stay tuned for that.
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Dtrace OSCON session

August 4, 2005 2 Comments

I'm in a session on Dtrace, being given by Bryan Cantrill, who is one of the Dtrace authors. I have to say that Dtrace is really nice. Someone needs to implement this for Linux – it's really useful. DProbes was the closest thing I could find for Linux, and it's not even in the same ballpark. This tool really has the ability to save you tons of time when debugging system performance problems.
–jeremy
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OSCON Updates

August 4, 2005 Leave a comment

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to post much from OSCON – the conference is really that good…and really that busy. The sessions have been extremely interesting, the speaking lineup outstanding and the number of people to meet impressive. I'll detail a few highlights here, but as I mentioned yesterday, I'm really not doing the conference justice.
Ilia gave a nice PHP session on speeding up PHP, which is something I put a great deal of time into for LQ. Most of what he went over (compiler flags, configure option, non-PIC library, etc) we already have implemented. It was kind of nice to see how much of what he said I had already dug up ;) That being said, he did reveal a couple tricks which I haven't tried out, and I'll be testing those when I get home. Rasmus also gave a PHP session, this one focused on PHP5, but also covered some other things. Yahoo! is still on 4.x for speed reasons, but PHP 5.1 should clear those up. It's likely I'll try to move to 5.1.x when we do the LQ code upgrades later this year. He also covered the different opcode caches. The bottom line was that if you want a free one that is compatible with PHP 5.1, APC is just about your only option. It's a shame Zend snapped up the MMCache author (for us at least, not for him) as that one was consistently the fastest in my experience.
Chris DiBona covered a bit about what Google was doing. He also give a few small insights into Google that you don't usually get. There was even a current picture of a Google data center, although the lights were off. The Summer of Code was a large focus of the session. One thing of interest was the Google tends to prefer the BSD license over any of the others, but in the end they usually let the engineer who wrote the code choose whatever OSI-approved license they prefer. Once again – Google gets it, from an employee perspective. Inevitably, someone brought up the Google Windows-only client app question. sound familiar? While I agree with much of his response, it seems the answer is not sufficient for some.
Other sessions I attended included talks from Tim O'Reilly, Andrew Morten, Jeremy Zawodny, Mitchell Baker, well – you get the idea…the lineup is stacked. Each one of these is worthy of at least a full blog post. Unfortunately, I'm out of time as another session is about to start. FWIW, the biggest surprise so far was Jonathan Schwartz. I was expecting a live version of his blog during his opening day interview. Hearing him speak live, I'm now not even convinced he writes that blog. He was rational, and even brought up some good points – something I rarely find in his blog posts. I have to wonder though… has he changed his tune, or did the fact that he was in front of an OpenSource-centric OSCON crowd temporarily change his view point? Only time will tell.
–jeremy
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OSCON Tuesday Evening Extravaganza

August 3, 2005 Leave a comment

Just got back from the OSCON “Tuesday Evening Extravaganza”. First, I'd like to congratulate Doc, who was the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award winner in the “communication” category. Actually, congratulations are in order for all the winners, as each one was well deserved. Next up was the State of the Onion, by Larry Wall. The main focus of the speech, which was extremely good, was Perl 6. One thing Larry underscored though, was something that I could not agree with more. In fact, it's something I've said both in my blog and on LQ Radio recently. There is currently a bit too much duplication of effort in the Open Source community. It's something I am very cognoscente of with LQ. We never start a new project unless there currently isn't a similar project in place, or we think we can do it differently/better in a significant way, or we've tried to work with a project and they are not interested. In all other cases we prefer to work with and strengthen current projects. A good example would be that we will not even consider doing a Linux News site. There is nothing we could do that LWN, LXer, LinuxToday, Newsforge, etc. aren't already doing. What we will do (and have done) is help those sites where we can. I know it's tempting to start something yourself, and in some cases that really is the best option. It's not always the best option though. Don't be afraid to contribute to an existing project.
The last speech I'll cover is What Business Can Learn From Open Source, given by Paul Graham. This was absolutely fantastic. He covered so much and said so many good things that I can't do them justice by covering them here. If possible though, I'll try to get Paul on LQ Radio. The first point he made is that MSM is trying to downplay blogs and blogging by saying that the avergae blog is not very good. They're right there – most of the millions of blogs out there don't have compelling content. But, most of the blogs out there aren't ready by anyone outside the bloggers family and friends. The MSM doesn't have to compete with the average blog. They have to compete with the best of the blogs, which have incredibly well researched, compelling and original content. Content that is better than most of what you'll see in the MSM. And unlike the MSM, who can control the channel and therefore control what gets read, the really good blogs rise to the top because of the content, not because of the medium. He also draws a parallel with Open Source. Most people are not using Firefox because it's Open Source, they're using it because it's the best browser. A team of unpaid but passionate people were able to produce a better product than a team whose day job it was to write a browser. The same is true for most blogs. The content isn't for pay – it's what the person is legitimately and passionately interested in… and that is extremely hard to compete with. That sounds a lot like free markets, doesn't it?
I am really looking forward to the rest of OSCON, and will post updates as I get a chance.
–jeremy
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Mac OS X Intel Kernel Uses DRM

August 2, 2005 1 Comment

It looks like the Mac OS X Intel kernel uses DRM. Everyone knew that Apple wouldn't release a version of OSX that ran on a generic x86 whitebox. Since asking nicely isn't really a viable option, DRM seemed like a good candidate for ensuring compliance. I'm a little torn on this one. If the absolute only thing the DRM is used for is ensuring that OSX would only boot on Apple hardware, while I might not agree with the decision, I can at least whole heartedly see Apple's position. At this point it really is in their best interest for many reasons to have OSX be Mac only. If the DRM is used for anything else though, that is bad. Since this is only a developer release (and the DRM in this case is being called as a result of ATSServer not being ported to x86 yet, which requires Rosetta, which brings the DRM into play) we'll have to wait and see. Who knows what things will look like in the final release. In the end though, DRM is usually (I can think of a couple of legitimate uses, if it wasn't abused) bad. It hurts your legitimate customers and almost never stops the people you are trying to stop. In fact, it rarely even slows them down. As Mark Cuban points out though, some people just never learn.
–jeremy
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Standards and CSS in IE7

July 31, 2005 3 Comments

While it's great to see that IE7 has tabs and addresses a whole host of CSS and layout deficiencies and bugs, it boggles the mind when you think how far behind IE actually is. For instance, IE7 will be the first IE to natively support tabs, years after almost every other browser on the planet did. This kind of complacency was allowed because they had such a large market share. I don't think it's a coincidence that we are finally seeing these features now, with Firefox taking the web by storm. Better late than never I guess, but this is why monopoly is bad. The good news here is that IE7 is being developed with an amount of transparency (and I'm not talking about the fact they transparent PNG's are finally supported) that is unheard of in IE land – and that is a very good thing. Kudos to the IE team for that much. As Asa says though, it's too bad for all the windows 98, windows 2000, and windows XP pre-SP2 users out there that they won't get this upgrade.
–jeremy
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Firefox Tabs

July 31, 2005 Leave a comment

Just wanted to thank everyone who contacted me about Firefox tabs after listening to the latest LQ Radio interview with Asa. It seems that the behavior I was talking about, where you only get the tabs context if you have a tab open, can be easily changed by going to “Preferences->Advanced->Tabbed Browsing” and unchecking the “Hide the tab bar when only one web site is open” box. While many people contacted me, the first one was david_ross.
–jeremy
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Interview with Asa

July 27, 2005 Leave a comment

I just posted an interview I did with Asa over at LQ Radio. We covered a lot of ground in 1:21, although I wanted to get into the Linux on the desktop topic much more than we ended up having time for. He was already about 15 minutes late for a meeting as it was. I look forward to chatting with him about the subject at OSCON next week. Thanks for taking the time to do the interview Asa.
–jeremy
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Levanta's Linux Management Appliance

July 27, 2005 Leave a comment

When I first saw the Levanta Intrepid M, I thought it was an extremely nice device. For those of you who remember LinuxCare, what remained of that company was renamed to Levanta about a year or so ago. The Intrepid M has an impressive list of features, including bare metal provisioning, the ability to capture state, the ability to snapshot and then put that snapshot on any device, the ability to help with migrations, the ability to deploy patches and packages and even the ability to track any change on any machine. It supports Red Hat, Suse/Novell and Fedora. It seems to do everything Red Hat's RHN Satellite does and more, with the added bonus of supporting multiple distributions and coming as a preconfigured hardware device. All this for the low price of $7,495.00. The bad news? That only includes 10 client licenses. Surely if you need a device like this you have 100 or 1000 machines though. Extra licenses are $250/each and there is no mention of volume pricing (although I'd guess some kind of discount would materialize at a certain level). That means 1000 machines would set you back a quarter million. That seems a bit excessive. For comparison, Satellite is $13,500 which includes the first 50 client licenses and then $3,500 per 50 pack after that (which comes out to about $70/each). Net price for 1000 machines would be $80,000. Don't forget that this is all on top of the cost of the OS – $349 for RHEL ES, $0 for Fedora or $349 for SLES. Needless to say, it looks like a great package, but the combo price of $600 per box for RHEL/SLES and an Intrepid M aims it very squarely at a specific market. Price aside, it looks like a absolutely fantastic product and I wish Levanta the best.
–jeremy

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