I've been on the road again for the better part of the last month. Unfortunately, that means I've been at the mercy of the various wired and wireless internet offerings in different places.
The worst service? At the hotel in Orlando. I don't know what the Internet connection was, but it felt like a dial-up connection shared among the thousands of bedrooms. The conference facilities were better, but still limited considering what could have been available.
<!-- -->I’m seeing more and more people moving to Eclipse as a development platform, even those Windows users who have traditionally used Visual Studio. As an Eclipse user for quite a while now I’m often asked how good it is, or how to use it.
Of course, telling people to simply try it out isn’t enough. Many people just don’t get Eclipse and cannot understand or translate the skills and experience they already have to the Eclipse environment. That’s where An introduction to Eclipse for Visual Studio users can help.
It’s a quick overview of the fundamentals of Eclipse from the perspective of a Visual Studio user. For a more in depth examination, there’s a tutorial Eclipse for Visual Studio developers, and another on migrating your applications from VS to Eclipse: Migrate Visual Studio C and C++ projects to Eclipse CDT.
I can recommend any (or indeed all) of these.
The third part of my series on building a grid system using WS-RT.
In this third part of the series, we go deeper into the process of using WS-RT as a grid solution by examining how we can use WS-RT to store and collate information for monitoring the grid.
From the intro:
In this tutorial, you learn how to use the WS-RT standard to help manage your individual grid nodes. We’ll look at how to extract individual pieces of information from resource data, how to update and set individual attributes, and how to extend the existing database interface to create and expose trend data through our WS-RT interface.
Read: Building a grid system using WS-Resource Transfer, Part 3: Using WS-RT for grid monitoring
Read past parts of the series: Read: Building a grid system using WS-Resource Transfer Series
Want to know whether your machine is capable of running Solaris?
I came across the Sun Device Detection Tool, a Java application that you can run straight from the browser (it’s a JNLP app) that will check the devices on your machine and then compare that against the devices known to work and then tell you if your hardware is going to be OK.
Sun say you don’t have to use the tool if your system is listed on the HCL, but I’ve found it to be a pretty useful for checking all sorts of machines even they are listed.
For a more detailed overview, Dennis Clarke has a detailed look at the 1.2 version here. The 2.0 release is the current one.
The penultimate part of the series on using PHP and Java together to produce a web interface to your Java application is now available.
In this penultimate part of the series, I look at the real-time use of the PHP/Java bridge as the final part and alternative solution to using web services to communicate between the PHP and Java components.
You can also read the past parts of the series:
I’m still working up some good tips and advice on MySQL on Solaris (particularly the T1000, the new x86 based servers like the X4150 and ZFS, amongst other things), but until then I found Getting Best out of MySQL on Solaris while doing some research.
With the latest OpenSolaris builds (b79, from memory) we now have MySQL built-in, and I worked with the folks on the OpenSolaris Database team to get some reasonable configurations and defaults into the system. MySQL 5.1 and 64-bit support is currently going through the process and will be a in future build.
I’ve also been working with the DTrace people to improve the DTrace support we have in MySQL (documentation will go live this week, I hope). MySQL 6.0.4 will have some basic DTrace probes built-in, but I’ve proposed a patch to extend and improve on that significantly.
We’re in the process of updating the documentation and advice on Solaris (and OpenSolaris) installations and layout too, which is itself part of a much larger overhaul of the installation and setup instructions for all platforms.
I was fortunate enough to get a review unit of Sun’s Ultra 20M2 Workstation Back in the early part of 2007.
The Ultra 20M2 is Opteron based, and the M2 designation includes the dual-core Opteron processor. It was a very nice machine that I’m sorry to have given back.
The full review is on Free Software Magazine; read Sun Ultra 20 M2 review
Not exactly a laptop, I reviewed Sun’s Ultra 20M2 desktop last year and completely forgot to mention it.
I loved the machine (it was fast, well configured and well put together) and I almost purchased my very own, until I got an alternative option just last week (of which more later). It wasn’t available at the time, but a reasonably priced and fully specced machine would make a wonderful xVM host.
Read the review at Free Software Magazine, where you can find out what I liked about the Sun Ultra 20M2.
In light of the announcement that IBM are retiring their developerWorks Grid zone (see this post), I’ve tried to grab a copy of all the PDFs for the articles I was involved in.
There are some missing gaps because the PDFs have already disappeared (notably, the Python grid series), but everything else should be listed below:
Let me know if anything is missing and I’ll see what I can do.
Regular readers will know that I’ve been a frequent and prolific contributor to the IBM developerWorks Grid Zone. In fact, in the early years of this zone I was often the only contributor.
Unfortunately, after years of providing us with helpful information on grids, grid software and development and deployment techniques, the Grid computing zone is being retired.
While I can understand why, I must say I’m surprised. Although I’m sure we are all more enlightened about grid technology than before, I still think we have a long way to go, and there’s certainly a few things I would like to have covered and expanded upon. I had, for example, some updates and extensions to the Perl and Python grid programming solutions in the pipeline. Let me know if you would like to see these and I’ll post them up here or on MCslp Coalface once I’ve completed them.
Until then, I’d like to thank IBM and particularly Mary McCommon (Grid zone editor) for giving me the opportunity to write about and play with such interesting technologies.