Powers of Ten (so to speak)

I am not sure if you are old enough to remember the 1977 IBM movie Powers of Ten (trippy version, without narration) [also at the IMDB and wikipedia], but that’s a movie that sure put things in perspective. Thinking in terms of powers of ten helps me sort things out when I am considering a design problem. Thinking of the scale of a problem in terms of physical scale is a good way to assess its true importance for a project. Sometimes the problem is the one to solve, sometimes, it is not. It’s not because a problem is fun, enticing, or challenging, that it has to be solved optimally right away because, in the correct context, considering its true scale, it may not be as important as first thought.

Maybe comparing problems’ scales to powers of ten in the physical realm helps understanding where to put your efforts. So here are the different scales and what I think they should contain:

The Zunes Freezes: Update!

The faulty code was leaked some time last week, and I’ve looked at it, and, well, it’s surprisingly clean (despite the obvious defect and how they should’ve found it before releasing it (see here)).

Have a look at the ConvertDays routine.

Solaris Getting Better? We’re not there yet!

Ars Technica has a review of Open Solaris 2008.11, the latest release from Sun.

The strongest point of this release is the integration in the environment (notably through Nautilus) of ZFS, the Zettabyte File System, which is a next-gen file system supporting lots of nice features, such as storage pool, transactional file system updates and advanced snapshotting. It is a contender to MurderFS ReiserFS now that Reiser‘s in jail for murder. ReiserFS is one of the very nice file systems, but its future is uncertain, which is a major bummer for me as all my Linux boxes are using ReiserFS. ZFS is its most serious contender given its features, at least if one gets around the fact that it is not released under GPL but CDDL.

First Impressions Sometimes Fails Us

A few posts ago, I complained about how much fun it was to try Solaris for the first time, especially with VMWare (here and here). In the mean time, I had time to try a complete Solaris installation and I must say it is not all that bad, except that it has this very distinctive “Linux from 5 years ago” feel. The feel I had when I first tried to switch to Linux for my primary OS, the feel I had using Red Hat 3 and (the then) Mandrake 10 distributions. The feel that there was something to be done with this environment, but also that there is much that remains to be done before it becomes really fun to use.

First Impression Fail (part II)

So I downloaded the current ISO for Solaris but it still won’t install correctly in VMWare. The install starts, but stalls at the stage where it decompresses the windowing system. But it stalls in a very peculiar way. The VM doesn’t freeze, as the terminal remains responsive, but the CPU time goes to zero as if it were waiting for something to occur. After googling for tips, implementing a few of them; Solaris still stalls at the same step in the installation process. Is it some interaction between VMWare and Solaris? I don’t know.

A few years ago, being unable to install an OS like that would have driven me crazy. Because at that time, I was an apologist: making excuses for bad software. If it doesn’t boot, it’s surely because I did something wrong. The fact that the install procedure requires many manual steps (most of them improperly documented) that depend in some weird way on the current hardware is normal, is it not? Or is it?

First Impression Fail

It is said that first impressions lasts forever. Well, I sure hope these first impressions won’t keep me from using Solaris in the future. So, yes, I decided to try out Solaris, and I downloaded the VMWare virtual machine images from Sun. First there’s the usual annoying questionnaire about who you are, what you do, why you want I to try Solaris. Everything short of my income and investment strategy.

So I download the file with what seems to have the biggest version number, but it turns out that’s only the second half of the virtual machine. And it’s a stupid tar bomb. OK, I reread the thing, and there’s no clear, visible indications that there are two parts to the tar ball and that I should download the two. Never mind that, bandwidth’s is cheap.