Regular readers will know I’ve been a long term fan and user of Solaris, but things in the Solaris space have changed recently. I haven’t used Solaris as a desktop operating system for about 7 years, but for a long time, despite working at an agency where Macs were the desktop operating system, I used to spend most of my time programming and managing a Sun server network using an Axil SPARC sworkstation running Solaris, and before that, Solaris 2 had been my desktop operating system more or less since leaving college while I managed a Sun based database system.

Now I’m going back to those roots and installing Solaris 10, and in the future OpenSolaris, onto my Sony Vaio Z1 and use it as my main desktop operating system. Just to make it interesting, that’s also a laptop. Hence Laptop Solaris is born.

For more information on what I’m going to be covering on the site, read the Intro post.

The MCslp sphere is beginning to expand slightly and to make it easier to monitor everything that I’m doing I’ve decided to aggregate all of the different areas that I’m currently involved in into a single blog.

In the spirit of the various ‘planet’ sites, the new site is called Planet MCslp - catchy huh?

The main role of this blog (MCslp.com) will remain unchanged - this will be where I publicize and promote the major articles, books and other content that appears on other sites, magazines and the various events I attend and promote. What I don’t do here (because it seems excessive) is list every blog post I make on the other sites. I may, occasionally, highlight something that I think is worth mentioning, but this is not the place to go to get my daily thoughts. My ComputerWorld blog is the best place for this, along with others such as The Apple Blog.

Planet MCslp will, by comparison, collect together this blog, my Computerworld musings, and the postings on sister sites like The Writers Perspective. Visitors to Planet MCslp in the next few weeks will also discover some of the forthcoming projects that are part of the expansion of the MCslp sphere but which haven’t yet begun with their full content. These include new sites to cover Linux Professionals, a new Google Maps resource (MCslp Map Works) and The Writing Biz.

If you want to keep abreast of everything I’m involved in and don’t want to subscribe individually, use the feed at Planet MCslp, also available through this link (RSS2).

It may seem like this is all I’ve been doing for the past few months, but I have yet another book review that has made it on to the ‘free’ area of Free Software Magazine.

This time it is Degunking Linux by Roderick W Smith. At its heart, this book is about trying to get the best performance - from CPU speed, to application performance and even disk space - out of your machine by doing some regular maintenance. This includes removing old applications, keeping your system up to date, flushing out the old caches and keeping your system spick and span.

This book has a rather interesting layout, in that it not only covers the mechanicss, but also provides multi-step programs for what to do on your machine when you have a few spare minutes right up to days to spend spring cleaning your machine. If you use Linux regularly on your server or desktop, this book is well worth a read.

Frequently you will hear about how secure Linux is as an operating system. Although a lot of the security of the OS comes from the many eyes examining the code and the strong developer spirit that means software is frequently updated and improved, it doesn’t automatically mean that Linux is automatically secure out of the box.

You still need to ensure some good basic security practices and principles. If you are securing specific applications and services then there are still steps to follow, other software to install and some tricks and traps for the unware. All of this is covered in detail in Linux Server Security, by Michael D Bauer.

A review of the book that I did for Free Software Magazine has just reached the Free Software Magazine website.

I’m a regular expression junkie - I think one of the main reasons I love Perl so much is because it’s just so darn easy to go ahead and regexp either with a substitution or match to get the information I want. It certainly makes certain parts of my job easier. Getting them right though can be difficult, so it’s great to see this book using regular expressions by Nathan Good, which I reviewed recently for Free Software Magazine.

The book is excellent and well worth buying if you use regular expressions frquently in your applications. You can read the full review on this link, or simply buy the book on Amazon.com.

The review recently made it to the front page of the magazine, and is now free to be read by non-subscribers.

I have a new review up on LinuxToday about my experiences of using Solaris 10 over the last few months.

As the article says at the start, I’ve been using Solaris since the original SunOS was redeveloped and rebranded as Solaris in the early 90s, and I’m still using it happily now. Solaris 10 adds a load of new features, including Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) and Solaris Containers (zones). The article also covers the other new features, desktop impressions, the issue of licensing of the new OpenSolaris and whether this could be a potential Linux killer, now that Solaris is available free.

Please read the full article to find out if you should be trying Solaris 10.

Whether you call it the Semantic Web or Web 2.0, it is obvious that in the web as we know it is changing. We have moved on from static web pages and simply links and will be moving towards more dynamic content, more intelligent links and better ways of integrating and collating information from different sources.

My new article, What is the semantic grid? looks at the semantic grid - an extension of the principles of the semantic web and how they will be applied to grid technology to make the interoperation of grids and the information and services they provide. Here’s the official intro:

The semantic grid uses metadata to describe information in the grid. Turning information into something more than just a collection of data means understanding the context, format, and significance of the data. The semantic Web follows this model by providing additional metadata that helps describe the information being viewed on a Web page, thereby allowing browsers, applications, and users to make better decisions about how to deal with the data. The semantic grid applies similar principles to the information used in a grid environment. In this article, we take a closer look at what the semantic grid is, how to use it, and what this will mean to your future grid applications.

Please click to get the answer to the question What is the semantic grid?

One of the problems with gaining a wider usage of the grid and extracting more potential CPU cycles and resources out of machines is to make use of those machines that are not permanently connected to your network. For example, laptops and notebooks may only connect to your network when the user wishes to exchange email with the rest of the staff.

Distribution of work in this environment is more difficult because we do not have direct access to the machines in question and therefore cannot directly submit work to these machines as they are unlikely to be connected when work is submitted.

I’ve got an article over at developerWorks which covers the details on how to develop a proxy service to your grid by using email as the transport medium.

To the casual observer, you’d think that the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Grids are going in completely different directions. In fact, the two are more similar than people realize. But to make effective use of the technologies that both SOA and Grid developers and users are employing we need to change the way we think about this components, not as two disparate components, but as a single methodology that can be adapted for both sides and allow cross pollination where necessary.

The intro summary reads like this:

Grids and the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) are two systems that appear to be on a collision course. The SOA is a standard for building discrete services, potentially across multiple machines, which can be combined to build an application that reduces integration costs. Most modern grids employ Web services like the SOA, but there is more to merging the two systems than simply employing Web services. You must also adjust the architecture of your grid solution. This article explains the concepts behind SOA and what you should consider when moving your grid applications toward an SOA model.

In Build grid applications based on SOA I take a look at the methodologies and principles that need to be adapted if we are going to use both technology groups to write and develop future, distributed, applications.

Here’s some comment and analysis on the article and the convergence of SOA/Grid technology by Greg Nawrocki.