I've been writing articles for the IBM developerWorks Grid zone for many years, but IBM have decided to retire the Grid zone, citing the fact that so much software and many solutions now use many of the techniques originally pioneered in grid computing technology.
<!-- -->Monthly Archives: February 2008
Setting up the new T105
So yesterday I mentioned the new Dell T105 I got on special offer. Setting up Solaris 10 on this new machine is a little more complex than I would have wanted, but it’s now up and running fine.
Here’s what I did to get Solaris b81 working:
1. SXDE b81 has a bug in that SATA CD-ROM/DVD-ROMs aren’t identified properly, so you need to use an older version (pre-b79 it seems) and then upgrade. So:
2. Install SXDE/SXCE b78 or earlier (I actually used Solaris Express 9/07, which is based on b70)
3. Install LiveUpdate
4. Install a second instance of the OS and enable it
5. Boot into the second instance
6. Perform a live update of the original installation
7. Re-enable the original install
8. Install the Broadcom Ethernet drivers from here if you want the built-in network driver to work (it wont be good enough for xVM because only legacy support is available).
That’s it – for full xVM I disabled the internal Ethernet card and then added a Realtek-based PCI Ethernet card and it works fine. I’m now in the process of setting up some additional domains (Gentoo, Windows).
Acorn, Pixelmator and Iris alternatives to Photoshop
I’ve had Acorn in my list of applications to review for months, and I’ve only just got round to it.
I wish I’d got there earlier. Acorn is quick and powerful, and that’s because it employs your GPU to do soe of the processing, and it includes a number of filters (based on OS X’s CoreImage interface), all of which is wrapped up into a nice little application. If you can’t find what you want, there are ObjectiveC and Pythong plugin interfaces, but I haven’t investigated it yet.
Of the alternatives, the most talked about is Pixelmator, closely followed by Iris.
Pixelmator is a closer approximation to the way that Photoshop operates, and in some respects I prefer the functionality and the feel of Pixelmator if I was looking for a Photoshop replacement, but there are other elements I don’t appreciate. The flashy graphics and animations when you do different operations seem superfluous to me.
There are nice touches in both applications – the stamp tool in Pixelmator is particularly good (although I prefer Photoshop), while in Acorn the crop and select tools provide much better feedback during the select operation than even Photoshop.
Iris is less polished, but shows some promise. There are some annoying oddities (I used 1.0b2, 367), like the image opening at pixel resolution, rather than being scaled to screen size, and the lack of specialized cursors can make identifying what you are doing and the potential effects of that process difficult, but the image editing and manipulation is very quick (particularly on stamp and touch up operations). It is, however, a bit memory hungry at the moment.
Any of these solutions would make a good alternative Photoshop and Photoshop Elements if you don’t want to go down the Adobe route.
Of these I currently prefer Acorn – it’s small and lightweight and the interface feels much more polished and easy to use. Certainly I’d consider it as an alternative to the larger packages on a laptop if you wanted something while you were traveling. I can’t get by without Photoshop because of the image scanning and editing I do, but occasionally I want something more extensive than Preview when I’m on the move.
Of course, this could change – all of these tools are being actively developed and so it’s likely that there will be some leapfrogging along the way.
ZFS resource update
I’m getting really deep into ZFS at the moment as I try and work out how best to use it in different environments and how it affects and alters performance on different loads.
I’ve across some great ZFS resources, new and old, and blog posts surrounding using ZFS:
- Second Installment of Our Series on ZFS
- New BigAdmin XPert Session on ZFS
- Ben Rockwood: Streamlining Zone Creation Thanks to ZFS Integration
- Ben Rockwood: ZFS within a Zone: Using Datasets
- Eric Schrock: New ZFS Features
For performance tuning there’s a great guide on the Solaris Internals Wiki which reads a lot like a ‘Don’t do this…’ guide, but has some useful tips too: ZFS Evil Tuning Guide.
And if you want to know about the comparison between hardware RAID and ZFS in terms of performance, Robert Milkowski has two posts on benchmarks: Part 1 and Part 2.
Aggregate RSS and Atom information using XQuery
XQuery is rapidly becoming seen as an alternative XML processing solution. It has some advantages - you can embed the queries into the XML, and it can be easier to follow than XSLT and some other solutions, to name but a few.
So how do you use it to do some real work?
Well, as a starting point, try my new article on how to Aggregate RSS and Atom information using XQuery. Using the familiar territory of RSS and Atom feeds, which at their core have a fairly simple structure and are therefore easy to follow what is being done.
With that in mind, here’s what I do in the article:
XQuery makes it much easier to merge and filter information from XML documents when you embed the filtering instructions right into the document that you use to generate the output format. You can use that functionality to aggregate information from RSS and Atom feeds into the format you need. In this article, look at the structure of the RSS and Atom formats and how XQuery can simplify the display of that information.
Twin 64-bit Opteron’s
I got a really good deal on some Dell servers. The T105’s were on special offer starting at just 99GBP, and even with 3-year support contracts and 4GB RAM I managed to get both for less than 500 GBP (+VAT). That’s a pretty good price for four cores of 64-bit computing.
The plan is to put Solaris b81 and xVM on at least one of these, and either Solaris or Linux on the other.
The main reason behind that is to get on top of some Solaris and Linux development work, but also to try and do some heavier testing on these platforms and try out some scalability solutions like DRBD and memcached. I’m hoping that as a testing environment, this solution will work out better from a performance and practicality point of view than using Parallels or VMware to run the test hosts.
More bulb replacement taking place
I'm in the process of slowly changing over all my bulbs to the more efficient variety. The new house is littered with halogen bulbs just about everywhere. They provide wonderful bright light, but because they are spotlights you end up needing quite a few lights to cover an entire room. Case in point, the hall has 9 of these bulbs, and the kitchen 12.
<!-- -->Migrating from WSRF to WSRT
If you’ve been reading the main MCslp blog you will know that I’ve been writing a series on writing a grid solution using WS-RT.
WS-Resource Transfer is an improved version of the WS-Resource Framework (and the associated WS-ResourceLifetime and WS-Transfer). Basically, the developers of WS-RT looked at WS-Transfer and WSRF, and added the functionality found in WSRF missing in WS-Transfer to WS-RT. WS-RT, for me, is basically what WS-RF should have been all along.
If you know WS-RF and want to start using WS-RT, check out Migrating from WSRF to WSRT.
For my WS-RT series, check out the MCslp Grids category.
Voice enabling XML, Part 3: Develop a voice blogging app
I had a lot of fun developing the VoiceXML series, and the third article in the series is now available. There are some limitations - you cannot yet dictate your blog post, for example - but the article shows the potential power of the a VoiceXML based blogging solution.
In this third article of a four-part series, you will develop a simple blogging application that takes VoiceXML (VXML) as input and saves the data into your online blog. You will also learn to use this type of voice blogging to great advantage when you create tweets, or Twitter entries.
Blogging is another topic that more and more people seem to do these days to increase their visibility, and so their voice can be heard. Why not use VoiceXML to actually interact with your blog or tweet using your own voice? In this article, you learn to do this very thing and to:
- Generate dynamic VoiceXML from remote data
Pass through the content to VXML Submit the request to the blog and report back through VXML Submit status updates to Twitter Read: Voice enabling XML, Part 3: Develop a voice blogging app
Building a grid system using WS-Resource Transfer, Part 4: Using WS-RT for grid monitoring
The fourth part of my series on developing a grid solution using the new WS-Resource Transfer system is available now.
In this tutorial, we look at both sides of the security session, in terms of using WS-RT as an aid to the authorization process and at combining WS-Security with WS-RT for secure resource exchange.
Read: Building a grid system using WS-Resource Transfer, Part 4: Using WS-RT for grid monitoring
Read past parts of the series: Read: Building a grid system using WS-Resource Transfer Series