Rich Sharples' Mirror World Blog

HTTP 301 Moved Permanently

sharps — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:28:24 -0800

This blog continues here.

I've finally managed to pull my finger out and re-host this blog on my own site.

Because I rarely have the opportunity to blog about work these days - I've decided that an external blog is more appropriate. I chose WordPress because of it's maturity, large range of plugins and themes and availability as a standard application for many hosting companies. I chose to use DreamHost after a little research - so far so good.

Now I don't feel so bad about blogging about non-Sun news on Sun property I'm making more of an effort to blog (at least once a day) - mainly on topics related to the broader Software Industry.

If you've bookmarked or blogrolled me - please update - my new blog needs the link-love.

Microsoft and Metcalfe's Law

sharps — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:28:10 -0800

Microsoft have finally figured out that Metcalfe's Law applies to them as much as the next software company - despite their huge footprint. To quote Microsoft's CEO and CMM (Chief Mad-Monkey) Steve Balmer :

"In a more connected, services-oriented world...one of the greatest value-adds in some sense is what people do on the other end of the wire"

Bang-on Steve - couldn't have put it better myself. Let's see how wide the Kimono opens before Balmer get's shy. Ick - that's a poor choice of metaphor - sorry if I've spoiled your lunch.

[this entry was originally posted on my other blog-in-progress]

Lunar Eclipse Picture

sharps — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:21:28 -0800

Lunar Eclipse, originally uploaded by sharps.

The clouds cleared enough for me to take a some pictures of the lunar eclipse tonight. The star above is Regulus, and Saturn is on the left. This was the only picture worth posting.

My setup is simple - Nikon D40, tripod and remote shutter release.

Desktop Virtualization Tinkering

sharps — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:49:59 -0800

Over the last day or so, I've been playing with VirtualBox - a type-2 desktop-oriented hypervizor; I managed to get my two favourite Linux flavours up and running pretty quickly now I'm contemplating mucking about with the networking so I can get the images talking over a virtual network.

Once I have that - I have a pretty decent developer sandbox - something I wish I had 7 or 8 years ago when I was still a developer. Still - should be a pretty useful setup for tinkering on home projects.

VirtualBox is pretty slick - so far - no issues - I just works - which is the way software should be. Once thing I'm still looking for is a way to run windows (small W) outside the visual sandbox; I find having a bunch of windows; running in windows a bit limiting and doesn't allow me to use my (multi)-screen real estate effectively.

Next (assuming I find the time) is to try VirtualBox on my MBP - I'm missing Ubuntu.

Musings on Oracle/BEA, Sun/MySQL

sharps — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 06:56:19 -0800

Having had 24 hours to digest yesterday's news (OK, in the case of Oracle/BEA - more like 4 years) here are some thoughts.

"Open Source" companies (ie. a commercial organizations that derive profit directly from supporting Open Source) - are likely worth more today than they were yesterday because the MySQL acquisition has set a new valuation record for an Open Source acquisition. I think the previous record was Citrix's acquisition of XenSource (for $500M). With VC investment approaching year 2000 levels - I wonder if we'll see a rush to start and invest in "Open Source" companies ?

Clearly Enterprise adoption of Open Source software will continue unabated - I actually don't think there's really much resistance anyway so I don't think this move will necessarily accelerate it.

Oracle have a couple of choices wrt their middleware platform - they either quickly remove redundancy and shit-can their current portfolio which is generally regarded as inferior to BEA's and has much lower adoption or they continue with the two platforms. My money is on the former - their Fusion project is fundamentally about aligning all their applications to use a common set of services based on a single platform (ie. removing redundancy). I think there's little risk here - as far as I'm aware - Oracle Middleware customers are typically Oracle shops - and Oracle can control the 'migration' without too much churn. In some cases - customers will use this decision point to migrate to a lower price Java EE-based alternative (eg. GlassFish, RedHat / JBoss) or move to some other technology / framework (.NET, RoR, etc.). If Oracle don't move quickly and decisively to make it clear which middleware platform they're taking forward then the churn will be much more significant (as will the competition's gain). There's nothing like indecision and confusion to drive customers away.

My feeling is that there won't be a significant opportunity for the competition here (more's the pity) - I think Oracle are too well-practiced at post-acquisition integration to screw up to the degree required to drive customers away. But still, shit happens so we'll just have to see how things pan out.

The big question is how the MySQL acquisition changes the Sun / Oracle relationship. Notwithstanding a knee-jerk reaction from Larry Ellison - I can't imagine much changing. I don't think anyone is expecting a mass migration from Oracle to MySQL though I'm certain MySQL's adoption will accelerate. These kind of shifts happen at glacial rates and Oracle have no doubt been thinking about commoditization in this space for a couple of decades. They've clearly drastically changed their revenue mix in the last 10 years. So, while I'm sure Oracle's RDBMS revenue is *huge* - it's no longer their only revenue stream.

Software Industry Shakeup

sharps — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 05:52:56 -0800

Well, the news is out - the software industry changed significantly today; first Sun signed an definitive agreement to acquire MySQL - the leading Open Source Database and BEA finally succumbed to Oracle's advances (and the reported $8.5bn). It's going to be really interesting over the next year to see how those changes impact the industry.

Home NAS (part 4)

sharps — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:59:10 -0800

I've written about my home storage requirements before - and the inability of anyone to satisfy them with a decent, easy to use product. A flare up on the internal bloggers alias which meandered a while before morphing into a discussion about home automation and home storage got me thinking again - because my storage problem hasn't gone away - it's just grown a bit since my last rant. Interestingly, Chris Kampmeier (who I used to work for when I first moved to the US) has gone some way to building the kind of appliance I'm looking for - if I ever get time - I'd love to do something similar with Solaris / ZFS.

FREE Idenity Driven SOA Governance Webinar

sharps — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 06:27:23 -0800

We're co-hosting a webinar later today with Anne Thomas Manes from Burton and Web Services pioneer Toufic Boubez from Layer7 Technologies. Here's what you'll learn :

The connection between identity management and SOA governance
The importance of separating policy and entitlements from service implementation
The challenges of managing and validating identity in SOA interactions
Options for managing and enforcing identity-driven SOA policies
How to implement identity-based governance in real-world SOA

The number of registrations is already very high so sign-up here. See you there.

Happy Christmas

sharps — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 06:09:23 -0800

Here's a quick Christmas message from Jack (3) and Lilly (6) to everyone all our friends and family spread across the world.

Have a happy and relaxing Christmas and we wish you health and happiness for 2008 !

- Rich

Fall Colours

sharps — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 15:33:48 -0800

When we first moved to North Carolina - many people told us that fall is the best time of the year; on days like today - I can't argue. Warm (68 F), Blue Sky and leaves the colour of which I haven't seen in a long time.

I <3 NY

sharps — Tue, 6 Nov 2007 07:31:57 -0800

Against my own previous advice on not traveling during the winter - I'll be traveling over the next couple of weeks.

Later this week I'll be in New York talking about Security and Identity in SOAs at the InfoWorld SOA Exec. Forum (the session is on Thursday @ 12.10pm). It's been several months since my last (extended) stay in New York and I must admit I'm looking forward to it; though I'm not going to have much time to look around - my schedule is pretty packed.

As soon as I get back on Thursday - I'm meeting Superpat at RedHat's HQ in Raleigh for his talk on digital identity at TriLUG; then we're being joined by the rest of his family on Friday.

Next week I'll be at ApacheCon in Atlanta for some meetings and will likely attend some of the more business-oriented tracks; and obviously Dave's talk on Apache Roller. Looks like there are a lot of fellow Sunnies there - should be a good opportunity to put some faces to email addresses.

Solaris x86, take 2

sharps — Thu, 1 Nov 2007 08:08:09 -0700

Almost 8 years ago to the day I joined Sun, one of the first things I did when I joined was try out Solaris x86. At the time I was a big Linux fan and spent an inordinate amount of time messing around trying to get things working reasonably well on my trusty but battle weary Dell laptop. Eating my own dog-food seemed reasonable. I remember playing for at least half a day but made very little progress.

It never really dawned on me to try installing Solaris on an x86 machine until today; just over 8 years later. In those 8 years - I'd say I've mostly been using Linux (RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu), Windows and most recently Mac OS/X. A post on an internal mailing list caught my eye and I thought I'd give the new OpenSolaris Developer Preview a spin. The OpenSolaris folks have sensibly produced a live CD which gives you the option of testing the water without committing hard disk space. I (very ) quickly downloaded the ISO, burned it and booted. Logged in as root, ignored the license agreement, saw the ethernet port bounce and get an IP; now I'm blogging (via Firefox which is included in the LiveCD) - all in all a very slick install (and the PC is by no means standard). It seems nearly everything works except sound (but you generally learn to accept these things).

OK, so why bother ? Well - I'm really interested in storage - I have the storage requirements of a small enterprise (video, pictures, tunes, etc) and have been pondering what to do about the growing problem. Today's (interim) solution is to keep buying bigger disks and recycling the old ones for portable backups (which I keep in the firesafe). What I'm thinking of doing is putting together a cheap Solaris X86 machine and use ZFS to conslidate and virtualize the various disks I have lying around. This would give me live access to everything; and provide me with some additional reliability.

Of course - it would be great if somone would save me the bother - ie. produce a cheap storage appliance based on Solaris x86 and ZFS which I can continually expand with cheapo disks as I need to. I can't imagine there's not a business opportunity there somewhere - people are willing to throw down a grand on a digital camera - and give no thought about the longevity of the stream of valuable bits it spews out.

HTTP 307

sharps — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:07:56 -0700

My blogging frequency is at an all-time low - I'm rather liking the low-time investment of Twitter and Facebook. If you're interested in following what I'm up to - take a look at FaceBook and Twitter.

Fish Genealogy

sharps — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:19:32 -0700

David's canned history of App Servers at Sun prompted me to fill in some of the gaps.

There are a handful of us at Sun who've been around long enough to see the entire history of Sun's App Server product line. I joined in 1999 (as part of the Forte Acquisition). At that time Sun had at least 3 Application Servers.

Over the years - in internal presentations I've tried to capture the full genealogy of the App Server at Sun but I've only really ever done a half-assed job - through this blog entry I hope I've captured it correctly. Once and for all. If I haven't - and you know better leave a comment. The picture is supposed to illustrate the code heritage - again, this is mostly from memory - corrections welcome.

I haven't tried the latest version of GlassFish yet - but I will when time permits. Even though I'm not directly associated with the App Server team anymore - I can't help noticing the attention that GlassFish is getting - it's enjoying a success that all the previous versions never did. The reasons - firstly I think the product has come on leaps and bounds - starting with a new code base in 2004 was pretty painful but it paid off - for example performance has improved significantly with every release since. And open sourcing in 2006 made an enourmous difference - it allowed Sun to connect to people we hadn't been able to before.

Note - the big red crosses indicate end of code line - not official EOL date.

Significant Events (mostly from the Wayback Machine or Wikipedia)

1995 NetDynamics Founded
         Kiva Software Founded
1997 Kiva wins PCWeek's Best of Comdex award for "Best Internet Software" (sells Kiva App Server for $35k / CPU)
         Netscape Acquires KivaSoft
1998 Sun acquires i-Planet (marketed a Secure Remote Access Product which found it's way into Sun's Portal Server) [more]
         Sun acquires NetDynamics
1999 AOL acquires Netscape
         J2EE 1.2 SDK Released by Sun
         Sun and AOL form the Sun | Netscape Alliance
     Sun acquires Forte Software Inc. (cross platform IDE and run-time) [more]
         Sun acquires NetBeans (Java IDE) [more]
2001 J2EE 1.3 SDK released by Sun
2002 Sun Netscape Alliance ends, Sun continues to market iPlanet products alone. AOL Continues to market subset of products.
2004 J2EE 1.4 SDK released by Sun
2005 GlassFish project launched (I seem to remember Eduardo favored ZebraFish, Jim got his way though)
2006 J2EE 1.5 SDK released by Sun

Alfred Peet 1920-2007

sharps — Wed, 5 Sep 2007 08:59:41 -0700

If you're a fan of "Gourmet Coffee" - next time you have your favourite brew in front of you - lift your mug to Alfred Peet - founder of Peet's Coffee but also the inspiration behind Starbucks and the entire "Gourmet Coffee" movement in the US. Alfred Peet died last week - looks like he lived a long an interesting life - and he certainly made his mark.

Tough Bastard

sharps — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 10:37:50 -0700

Hmm, haven't blogged for a while.; but was moved to write some kind words for a really decent bloke I've had the honor to meet a couple of times - Jeffrey Walker, President of Atlassian.

I had the misfortune of watching my Father lose the battle to cancer 5 years ago (non-Hodgkins Lymphoma) and my wife's Mother 5 years before that (Brain Tumor). In fact it was very likely that my father lost the battle against the treatment rather than the lymphoma itself.

Being strong enough to take the treatment seems to be a big part of the battle - Jeffrey Walker has the right attitude. Cancer beating super-hero. Good luck Jeffrey and live strong.

... hello North Carolina

sharps — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 07:12:10 -0700

Our relocation to Cary, North Carolina is finally complete. Our furniture finally arrived last Thursday and we've been unpacking boxes ever since - and will probably be unpacking for a few weeks to come.

The move wasn't without it's stressful moments; first we closed 4 days late because my bank in the UK couldn't provide a piece of paper in exactly the right form for my lender in the US; then when we finally got that there was confusion over the new closing date - at one point we actually had the keys in our hand only to be told we'd have to give them back and wait over the weekend to close.

Then there was the delayed arrival of our furniture from California - we we're misled repeatedly by the moving company; on the date our stuff was supposed to arrive in NC, it turns out it was still sitting in a warehouse in San Jose (where it had been for 10 days). When the truck finally did arrive there was no local labor to unload it so the driver, Jo and I made a start - on the hottest day of the year (104 + humidity). I did a bit of research on the moving industry - some of the stories are pretty shocking. My advice to anyone trusting their possessions with one of these companies is to do a bit of research before hand - there are some good resources online - MovingScam maintains a blacklist, the FMCSA maintain statistics on all carriers so you can get a feel for their track record - look specifically for fines for overcharging, etc.

Anyway, so far so good - the kids are settling in and making friends already - we've hopefully seen the worst of the summer heat; once the house is sorted we're going to start exploring - a trip to the Outer Banks looks pretty appealing.

At some point I'll make my way over to Sun's Cary office (which is cycling distance) and I understand (from Dave) there's a monthly Sun lunch in Raleigh - if anyone in the area wants to meet up for drop me a line.

Goodbye California

sharps — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 08:41:13 -0700

After almost six years in Northern California; early next week, me, my wife, two kids and two cats will be relocating to Cary, North Carolina. The decision was a tough one to make. It takes a lot to draw anyone away from the perfect climate, stunning natural beauty and the friends we've made here in the Bay Area - the insane property prices and less than stellar school system finally did it though.

We've been researching the move out of the Bay Area for about a year - we looked at a couple of options - including moving back to the UK (but everyone we know in the UK managed to talk us out of that) and relocating to Austin. We finally decided on North Carolina for a number of reasons - firstly it gets us a little closer to the UK; second it has really good public school system and last but not least the size and quality of the property we can afford (compared to the Bay Area) was absolutely jaw dropping.

So about month ago we took a little vacation to North Carolina; 15 viewings later; we bought a little fixer-upper in the leafy burbs of Cary and if everything goes according to plan we'll get the keys next Wednesday.

Making a move of this magnitude shouldn't be underestimated. When we moved from the UK to the US, we had the help of relocation company; this time we're on our own. Fortunately my wife seems to have everything under control and has managed to handle the logistics while keeping two kids (out of school) under control. It also really helps having some friends in North Carolina to help out - so a big thanks to the Grays and the Adams.

Anyway - I'll be off-line for the next week or so; hopefully when I return I'll be able to report an uneventful move.

It will be interesting to see how we get on with the "thick air" in North Carolina - apparently, if we can survive August we should be OK

Pushing the envelope (again)

sharps — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 07:36:44 -0700

If you care about performance - and a lot of people who run IT operations do - Sun just pushed the envelope again on performance for its open source app server (essentially GlassFish). Not only does this remain the only OpenSource submission, it also demonstrates better performance than all other competitors (for a single CPU deployment).

Achieving world class performance takes time and energy - what we're seeing is the cumulation of many years hard work - laying the foundations for a fast, high throughput platform that the entire Sun stack can benefit from.

It's also a great demonstration of what is achievable if you are a systems company like Sun - understanding the hardware, the OS, the virtual machine and the applications that run on it - gives Sun a real edge.

Update

Eduardo and Scott have more details and the all important SPEC standard disclaimer.

Travel Sucks (especially from SJC)

sharps — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 05:33:34 -0700

We got to San Jose airport in plenty of time for our 8.55am to Dallas (on route to Raleigh, NC) yesterday morning - extra time is essential if you're traveling with young kids. We were pleased that we got our bags checked quickly but were shocked to find the security line in terminal A stretching out of the terminal and into the parking lot - a *long* way into the parking lot (that is badly broken). Queuing for 45 minutes with two kids is not going to be fun. Missing flight - even less fun.

Then I thought to ask the FlyClear reps. if I can take my family through with me and was told I could take two kids under twelve but not my wife. Hmm, tough one - take the kids and avoid the queue but risk not being on the same plane as my wife. In the end we decided I'd take the kids and Jo would have to push and shove as best she could. To cut a long story short - we all got to the front of the security line and were through in under five minutes. I was very impressed with the service - and will probably write them a nice letter (not something I'm moved to do very often).

If you travel through SJC frequently and don't like the queuing - you should take a look at FlyClear - so far - a very positive experience.

Two more social-apps

sharps — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:20:25 -0700

In between epic mountain bike rides, this weekend I spent some time re-visting facebook - I signed-up some time ago but never really looked at it. I've noticed a lot of Twitterers use it so I thought I'd give it a look and I'm glad I did - it's neat combination of applications very well executed - now I just need a network - if you want to hook up - here's my profile.

On to Dopplr which has been all the rage recently so I thought I'd give it a spin - thanks to everyone who sent me invites (Cote, Tim and Jiri) - my motivation was that I noticed it uses OpenID and I wanted to check something out. Well yes it does support OpenID - and it also deals with redirection - so I can use my blog URL to login just fine. Then I started looking at Dopplr - I also ran through this presentation - it's a very simple idea and very well executed - I think it is likely to catch on due to the viral nature of the underlying idea. Now I just need a travel budget so I can make use of it !

Oh and if you need a Dopplr invite - leave a comment and your mail address (which won't be visible, nor shared with anyone other than Dopplr) - first 8 comments get the invites.

Dooplr Invites ?

sharps — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 11:00:03 -0700

I'm looking for a Doplr invite - will be grateful to anyone who can send one my way.

Tarantula or Funnel Web

sharps — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 09:59:24 -0700

I came across a load of these "funnel webs" while mountain biking in Quicksliver CP this week. For reference, the diameter of the hole is about the size of US 25 cent coin.

Needless to say - I didn't go poking around to see who was home.

I'm pretty sure we don't get Funnel Web Spiders in the US and my wife thinks it's a Tarantula - any ideas who makes these funnel webs ?

Can't get enough junk mail

sharps — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:06:47 -0700

The Sharples family is uprooting again this summer (the subject of future posts) and we've made an early start on packing. As well as saving the boxes from previous moves, I'm reducing the amount of packaging material we use by recycling* the almost undending supply of paper that hits our mailbox every day. The idea is that re-use is better than just recycling - though I guess it's not really re-use if no-one reads the junk mail in the first place. Still that's a bigger problem.

I never thought I'd hear myself say it but we actually could do with a bit more junk mail right now - we've used up our reserves - hopefully the mail man won't disappoint today.

I hope this post brings a little ray of sunshine to the direct mail industry - see it's not all the complete and utter waste of time and energy that everybody on the entire planet thinks it is.

* I get the kids to run it all through the shredder (Jack really enjoys it) and use it to line the packing boxes we use for fragile stuff.; ideally what I'd like to do is run the shredder on solar and hang it next to the mail box so the mail man can directly deposit the obvious junk into the shredder

Design - meet real world

sharps — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:14:34 -0700

Software is a pretty unique trade (or engineering discipline) in that there's rarely a physical manifestation of your endeavors - showing your Mother a CD or Web Page isn't quite the same as walking her across a bridge or driving her in a car you helped design. Fortunately I have been involved in a number of projects where the software was used to control a physical thing - trains, satellites and have been lucky enough to be involved in some of the provisioning - the phase of the project where the software is controlling the train or device on a satellite - design meets real world. Fun times. But this really takes the prize - putting your project on a huge earthquake simulator and seeing how it stands up.

OpenID Delegation with Roller (take 2)

sharps — Wed, 6 Jun 2007 10:02:09 -0700

I already touched on a neat feature of OpenID - you can have a plain old web page URI act as a proxy / alias for your openid. Well now the Sun OpenID IdP is up and running, I can test the theory.

Per the FAQ, you need to add a couple of lines to your web page - in the case of a Roller template this needs to be close to the outside of the HTML; in my case that's in the _decorator template.

OK, let's try it. First over to LiveJournal :

Click, over to the Sun IdP :

I type in my credentials and ...

Yes I do, and I'm in :

Yeah - it works !!

Not dead, just resting

sharps — Mon, 4 Jun 2007 11:59:25 -0700

This blog is taking a rest while I check out Twitter. I think I like the low time-investment that Twitter requires; real blogging takes time and subsequently I don't blog even 10% of what I think about.

FREE BOOK : The Dip by Seth Godin

sharps — Thu, 24 May 2007 08:44:35 -0700

Last night I went to see Seth Godin talk about his new book "The Dip" - I haven't read (heard) the book yet - it's in my queue and I'm looking forward to it (review to follow). I have read / heard all of his other books and generally like what Seth has to say and enjoy the way he delivers it.

If you are a Seth Godin fan and especially if you're a colleague working at Sun - I have 5 copies of the book to give away. The first 5 commenters to leave their email address (it won't be visible and won't be shared) get them.

NB. This isn't a competition and nothing to do with my Employer (Sun Microsystems) - these are books I own that I'm giving away and paying for the postage myself.

Sun's OpenID Non-Assertion Covenant

sharps — Mon, 21 May 2007 12:08:56 -0700

Eve Maler has the skinny on Sun's recent announcement to not assert any of its patents against anyone wanting to implement OpenID (1.1) technology. Technology that relies on the network effect require a zero-friction path to adoption - if other vendors follow suite - OpenID will be off to a good start.

I'm also amazed at the brevity of the full legal text - at first I thought I was missing a few pages - maybe this is a new benchmark.

Hanging up my boots

sharps — Sat, 19 May 2007 09:15:45 -0700

I was just looking for stuff in the garage and came across my soccer (aka footie) cleats (aka footie boots) and realized I haven't played soccer (aka footie) for about six months (I injured my back so decided to take a rest). The funny thing is I don't have the overwhelming urge to get back on the field so I'm thinking that I may have officially retired - which is kind of sad - after playing pretty much non-stop for 30 years.

Depending on whether my kids take to the world's greatest game - I may start looking into coaching - I assume there's some kind of accreditation / course you have to take - it might be fun teaching the next generation of aspiring soccer stars.