parolski.com

I’m a Porsche 911!

Anton Parol — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:45:02 +0000

You have a classic style, but you’re up-to-date with the latest technology. You’re ambitious, competitive, and you love to win. Performance, precision, and prestige - you’re one of the elite,and you know it.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

The Rack Race

Anton Parol — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:14:28 +0000

So HP have put 1000 cores in a rack ( with some serious cut backs ). Well thats great. Web 2.0 can keep growing nicely. Sun however, can put 336 cores in a rack. Yes, thats less, but its units of execution that count (i.e. threads) ( of course it all depends on your workload, but still, we’ll play the numbers game). So in these 336 cores, Sun pack 2688 threads. Using these t5240 machines, you ‘ll also get 2688GB of RAM. 42 DVD drives, 84 * 10Gb Ethernet interfaces. You also get on-cpu cryptographic acceleration for DES, 3DES, AES, RC4, SHA1, SHA256, MD5, RSA to 2048 key, ECC, CRC32. Nice. Oh, with HP, you get no storage. Not one bit. With the Sun configuration, you’ll get 336 * 146GB drives. Thats 49056GB of storage (49TB). Theres a Sun released white paper which explains more about how the new generation of T2 and T2+ chips work.

Working for Sun may change my views on hardware, but really these figures speak for themselves!

zfs in linux, maybe! (read only)

Anton Parol — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:39:27 +0000

Ok, so Linux doesn’t have ZFS yet, but it might not be that far off. There are signs of a readonly implementation, depending on whether or not people actually understand the license, being considered by linux kernel hackers. This would be a huge boost for linux, and Solaris alike. As Darren Moffat points out, ZFS already exists in the FreeBSD source tree, and its likely to be in Mac OSX . Given this, surely its only a matter of time before we see it put in. Already we’ve seen Linus have talks with Jeff Bonwick, which is definitely a good sign.

Maybe once this is done, a proper attempt at getting dtrace across might happen. After all, something like dtrace is highly desirable on any operating system.

More shuffling sideways!

Anton Parol — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:35:37 +0000

Clearly Mario’s success depends in part on the ignorance of his enemies!!!

goosh.org

Anton Parol — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 23:59:50 +0000

Go visit goosh.org if you haven’t already. Maybe useful, maybe not. Its an interesting idea, basically something like a *nix shell but for the web. Interesting that you can even up key and it remembers your last command. Might be interesting if they expand it with some kind of scripting ability. Lets just hope its locked down and doesn’t turn into a real shell….or that people don’t mistake this shell for one they already have open….

rm -rf * ………………… “Hey, wheres the Internet gone?……..uh oh………”

Its definitely nice that there are no ads, making it quick to load (despite the fact that the results are heavily abbreviated compared to google.com)

Enjoy!

Tackling violent extremism

Anton Parol — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:20:13 +0000

Government policies can sometimes make people feel like politicians have not observed reality enough. Given that politicians often believe that the sole purpose of a state is to preserve its own existence, this is not surprising. That a state is long lasting should be a result of its fine qualities, and not the other way around. Articles like this one only reinforce the evidence that they don’t look to the root cause of problems when trying to overcome them. I DO NOT condone suicide bombing; it was not the way of any of the prophets of any of the Abrahamic faiths, and is certainly not permitted in Islam. However, the reason that the disenfranchised always give is that the destruction they cause is a reaction to the foreign policies. Again, I am against these ill visioned jihadist sentiments. The trouble is, that they state the root cause for their actions, so surely the government should consider it, instead of trying to use some kind of poorly applied treatment.

Nevertheless the government’s counterterrorism experts acknowledge that real or perceived grievances about official policy, particularly foreign policy, discrimination or racism, and counterterrorism measures themselves, can also contribute.

“…can also contribute.” ? Its the sole reason they do it! It is a pity that fellow Muslims submit to this method of effecting change, especially as it wasn’t the example given to us by our beloved Prophets. I believe the most lasting changes in society are brought through sound reasoning, clear understanding and mutual respect. After all, the values that we all subscribe to are roughly the same. They just have a different origin.

It reminds me a little of a joke I read about some famous communists;

Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev are on a train crossing Siberia when it breaks down.

“Do not worry, comrades!” cries Lenin. “The people will throw off the chains of their capitalist overlords, and get the train moving again!”

The three wait for a few hours. The train doesn’t move. Stalin gets up.

“Comrades,” says Stalin, menacingly. “Do not worry. I will shoot every third man until the train starts moving again.” He goes out, and comes back several hours later covered in blood. The train still isn’t moving.

Brezhnev gets up, a patient smile on his face. “Comrades,” he says, gently. “Do not worry. I have the solution to all our problems. Let us just *pretend* the train is moving.”

*My apologies if I have offended any communist readers, I will promptly pull this page down if its deemed offensive.

yesterdays dream xkcd, so true

Anton Parol — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:28:24 +0000

I often have epic long dreams with huge amounts of detail in them. Occasionally I have a dream that isn’t very long and the details disappear very quickly. Yesterdays xkcd is so true, it makes me wish I could record my dreams and play it back for other people to enjoy

Open High Availability Cluster

Anton Parol — Sat, 31 May 2008 18:52:54 +0000

A year ago Sun announced that it was going to be open sourcing its high availability cluster software. According to this blog, they are now delivering on that promise six months ahead of schedule by releasing two million lines of code. TWO MILLION!!!! thats loads! OHAC isn’t quite the same as Solaris Cluster. Its basically most of the code base, but not all packaged up and is not currently supported by Sun. However, Sun is intending on moving the development work away from the official product and onto the OHAC in the future. This is great news for anyone thinking of developing there own custom agents for their own software, or for anyone who just wants to poke around some enterprise-class cluster software!

why use openbsd?

Anton Parol — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:48:35 +0000

First up, its cute. Thats right, the branding is so adorable, you just want a little puffy, like its was a Pokemon or something. No, but really, I do think the branding tells you something about the product; its lean and functional. Of course, you pick whichever product you feel solves the problem, but heres my reasons for liking openbsd:

The download is relatively small: about 207MB for the iso image
It takes up little resources: 30MB once booted up (and 13 processes). Of course, you’ll be expecting to load the machine up with services, thats the whole point of a good OS, right? Unless you don’t actually intend on using it…
Easy to use ports system. You just download the ports.tar.gz file for your version of openbsd, uncompress and then untar in the right directory (/usr/ports), then navigate to the directory of the software you want and type make && make install
Of course, this is only really needed for people who like to compile from source! Everyone else can just use the usual packages system
Easy network configuration. You can make a bridged connection with two commands:ifconfig bridge0 up brconfig bridge0 add xl0 add fxp0 (insert your own network cards here)
It ships with apache! Just type:
apachectl start and your running! (the htdocs directory is /var/www/htdocs )
The documentation is fantastic. No really, it really is good, its always a pleasure to RTM on openbsd
After installing a window manager like fluxbox, it takes one command to get it working, provided you want to type startx each time you boot. Also bear in mind you’ll need to add /usr/local/bin/fluxbox to your users .xinitrc file , from a fresh install you’ll need to make this file.
It recognised my ancient 3COM pccard Ethernet adapter! I can just pull it out and openbsd doesn’t die, it just kills off the dhclient process that was using it!
You get stickers if you buy the CD set!!!

project indiana is born!

Anton Parol — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:26:25 +0000

The latest version of Opensolaris can be found at opensolaris.com . This was known as project indiana whilst in development and is now yours absolutely free! (support does cost). Its basically Sun’s home rolled distro of opensolaris.org , and now contains IPS (Image Packaging System) . Essentially IPS is like apt for ubuntu and debian:

you want netbeans?

pkg install netbeans

Theres also a graphical installer too! Theres a screencast you might want to watch which explains a little about how to use it, and what its about!

You should also note that its made it onto distrowatch.com, to rank 69!!!!Hopefully enough people will blog about the release to push that figure up!!!Surely it should make it to the top ten, for all the features it has?