Diving into Scala

Over the past few weeks I've figured out how to get Scala working in our pre-existing code-base that uses Eclipse, Maven, Hibernate, JUnit, and Spring. I'm now able to write Scala code side-by-side with the exiting Java code in Eclipe and have the Scala code use any of our existing Java DAO's, etc.

If there's any interest by others in knowing what has to be done to get all this working, maybe I can find the time to write up all the gory details.

The Netbook is Dead: Long Live the Netbook!

The Netbook is Dead: Long Live the Netbook!

The “netbook” has only been with us for a couple of years, and yet in that time, it has managed to completely shake up the laptop market, driving prices down,

down, down. But I'm here to tell you that the reign of the netbook is over!

The reason for their untimely demise is that netbooks have traditionally been shipped with Windows XP, as netbooks weren't powerful enough for Windows Vista. Since nobody really wanted Vista anyway, everybody was happy with this. But now Windows 7 is hot, hot, hot, and who wants to be left in the dust with crufty ol' XP? It is getting pretty long in the tooth, after all.

But what to do? Windows 7 won't run well on a tiny little netbook, with its miserly 1gb of ram, its miniscule display, its subpar resolution, its slow-to-the-bone CPU, and its crappy video card, will it?

Probably not. This fact has apparently not been lost on laptop manufacturers, and so a few of them have just started shipping perfectly good ultralight notebook computers at netbook prices. For instance, I just purchased an Acer Aspire 1410-2801. It has a dual-core low-voltage 64-bit Celeron CPU and 2gb of ram. It's expandable to at least to 4gb (without taking the whole thing apart you'd have to do for many netbooks!), comes standard with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium, and a 6-cell LI battery good for about 5 hours of use. It weighs only a tad over 3lbs, has a decently-sized 11.6" 1366x768 LED-backed display, and can play HD YouTube videos with nary a frame dropped. What more could you want for $400 shipped door-to-door?

“Isn't this just the new breed of netbook?” you ask? Well, of course it is! But the manufacturers don't call them that anymore because they don't want you to think these machines are crippled. And now netbooks aren't. Long live the netbook!

Cloud Computing & Amazon Web Services

Today I attended a talk on cloud computing by Chris Dagdigian of BioTeam, Inc. The executive summary is this:

• Most of what is sold as "cloud computing" these days is hype -- just warmed-over stuff that they used to market as "grid computing", which was also mostly hype (unless you're a large government organization with zillions of dollars to spend).
• Amazon Web Services is cloud computing. Even Google and M$ are years behind Amazon, and if they don't catch up in the next six months, it will be too late.
• "Private Clouds" = Absolute Rubbish.
• Tipping Point: In 2008 many people started independently successfully using AWS to solve their customer's problems.
• Why AWS works:
• Smart Pricing:
• 8.5 cents per CPU hour.
• Traffic to and from the S3 service is free.
• If you personally spend a week playing around with AWS, it will probably end up costing you about $8.
• With EC2, you can burst up to any number of servers. To keep that many servers of your own spinning idle, just so that they're there when you need them, would cost you a fortune.
• AWS comes with a MapReduce implementation (with Hadoop integrated into it).
• People estimate that it costs Amazon 80 cents per GB per year to keep all data online, spun-up, and replicated three times in a geographically distributed manner. This is probably much cheaper than you could do it for.

A Very Brief Mercurial Tutorial

Distributed Version Control Systems are where it's at. Give up this lame Subversion crap and move to something worth using.

Here is a little tutorial on Mercurial I wrote. Mercurial is one of the few version control systems in the world worth using.

Chrome

"Far from a betrayal, Chrome represents the best possible future for open source developers everywhere. What Google has delivered is a giant-slayer, a self-contained WebOS that could one day supplant Microsoft's desktop hegemony. Chrome is the ultimate end-run -- around Windows, Win32/.Net, the whole entrenched ecosystem.

"With Chrome, FOSS Web developers can finally deliver applications that approach the functionality and runtime fidelity of native code, leveraging the new browser's robust process model and highly optimized JavaScript engine to isolate and accelerate these next-generation Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

"Given the lackluster state of FOSS desktop software (it sucks), such a paradigm shift might actually be a good thing. Why waste time with yesterday's clunky widget toolkits when you can leverage cool, next-generation technologies -- such as AJAX and Google Gears -- to power your write-once-run-anywhere FOSS projects?

"Let's face it: Firefox, for all its accolades, is old technology. Single process design? Plug-ins running amok? It's all so 2007. Chrome gives FOSS Web developers what they've been craving: A robust, stable platform that lets them push the limits of RIA design while leaving the old development paradigms behind.

"This is the future of FOSS, a future where Chrome becomes the OS and Linux is relegated to its rightful place as a glorified boot loader. You know that's where they're headed. You know that's Google's master plan. The wunderkinds envision a world where the OS is irrelevant, where everything revolves around their pumped-up browser and advertising-laced SaaS offerings.

"It's a beautiful vision of a glorious future. It's time for the FOSS community to stop resisting, to heap the broken carcass of Firefox upon the sacrificial flames and embrace your new-found savior! He's new! He's shiny! He's ... Chrome!"

-- Randall Kennedy in InfoWorld

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Sun Strangeness

I'm currently watching the webcast of Jonathon Schwartz's recent product announcement. What's particularly interesting is that he claims that Solaris is being run mostly on Dell hardware now, not on Sun hardware. The next two most popular platforms for Solaris are HP and IBM. Sun's own hardware is forth in popularity for running Solaris.

Conversely, from other sources I've heard that of the x64 hardware that Sun sells, 80% of it is used to run OSes other than Solaris.

It's not completely clear to me what this all means, but I'm not sure that is good.

On the bright side, Sun's new products look excellent, especially Thumper. Forty-eight hot-swappable 500GB hard drives plus a four core NFS server, all in one 4U rack-mount enclosure. I'll take two!

Dolphins

"Dolphins have a massive new brain area, the paralimbic lobe, that we do not possess. The paralimbic lobe is an outgrowth of the cingulate gyrus, which is known to elaborate social communication and social emotions (such as feelings of separation distress and maternal intent) in all other mammals. Thus, dolphins may have social thoughts and feelings that we can only vaguely imagine."

-- Jaak Panksepp in "Affective Neuroscience", Oxford University Press, 1998, referenced from Steven Johnson's "Mind Wide Open" and quoted by Nick Papadakis in a post to qotd.

Welcome to |>oug's Tech Blog

I've decided to submit to peer pressure and start my own tech blog. It seems that no self-respecting software engineer can be without one these days. And Google's Blogger seems as good a hosting site as any. So, for my first entry, as a great show of originality, I will steal the contents of an email that was posted today to the BBLISA mailing list:


From: "Paul Beltrani"
Subject: [BBLISA] Re: OSS Statistics and trend reporting for Linux/Solaris

On 6/12/06, Paul Beltrani wrote:
> Does anyone have suggestions for
> open-source solutions to track server
> utilization of Linux and possibly Solaris
> hosts? ...

Thank you everyone for your replies. To recap:

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SNMP/RRDTool/MRTG

RRDTool - Round Robin Database
A system to store and display time-series data.
http://www.rrdtool.org/
http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

MRTG - Multi Router Traffic Grapher
Retrieves stats via SNMP and generates HTML with graphs of that data over time.
Works stand alone or with RRDTool
http://www.mrtg.org/
http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

Cacti
Front end to RRDTool and MRTG
http://cacti.net/
(I hadn't seen this one before. Thanks Alfred.)

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Nagios:
Very powerful monitoring systems. Does much more than just gather stats.
http://www.nagios.org/

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Orca
Plots data from text files to HTML pages. Works in conjunction with
data gathering scripts, orcallator (Solaris), procallator (Linux).
http://www.orcaware.com/