A Look at MRTG and RRDTool with the Creator, Tobias Oetiker
November 26, 2008 by MatthewSacks · Leave a Comment
While at LISA 2008 this year I interviewed Tobias Oetiker on some of the history of MRTG and RRDTool. We spoke about some of the reasons behind coming to LISA in years past and present. The primary reason for Oetiker’s travels was that he enjoys to teach and actually was the first place that he presented MRTG to the public. MRTG was created to graph network link usage over time, and at the time there were no tools to accomplish the task. MRTG and RRDTool have grown into the de-facto network and performance trending solutions and are now being used to trend all kinds of things, including atmospheric and tidal trends. Read about it on the LISA blog here.
Jordan Hubbard on Mac OS X at LISA 2008
November 18, 2008 by MatthewSacks · Leave a Comment
Jordan Hubbard, Director of UNIX Technology at Apple, spoke at the LISA Conference this year to talk about some of the recent developments in the OS X operating system. There were many topics uncovered and discovered during this talk that were intriguingly exclusive, such as the Apple Syslog which is actually completely rewritten for OS X and has been open sourced on macosforge.org. Unfortunately, you must attend LISA to get this kind of information; however there are a bit of tidbits on the LISA 2008 blog about some more topics that were discussed during Hubbard’s talk.
What I found to be the most intriguing aspect of the talk was the lessons learned about the iPhone. The iPhone is a complete mobile UNIX operating system. What was the most interesting factoid about the iPhone I learned was that the core animation for the iPhone was actually backported and integrated into OS X.
Compile and Export External Jars into a Single JAR Exportable with the Fat Jar Eclipse Plugin
November 18, 2008 by MatthewSacks · Leave a Comment
While developing some Java tools that reference external libraries that were required for the operation of the application, I found it very difficult to compile those extra jars into my application. I had a few options, the primary one being unpack the classes from the external jar file into my application, but that seemed messy and didn’t sit well with me.
I stumbled upon an plug-in called Fat Jar which solves the exact problem which I was having. Fat Jar will take an application and any externally referenced jar files and compile them into a single, exportable jar file. It made creating my application very simple, easy and clean. I highly recommend it to anyone having a similar problem. The eclipse fat jar plugin is available here: http://fjep.sourceforge.net
Linux Foundation to Start First Annual LinuxCon Conference in 2009
November 15, 2008 by MatthewSacks · 1 Comment
The Linux Foundation has announced the creation of a new Linux-only conference in September of 2009 in Portland Oregon. This will most likely be the largest Linux-only conference to date and promisises to showcase some of the original Linux developers and supporters including Linus Torvalds. The word that the Linux Foundation uses to describe the attendants at the conference is “star-studded”.
The Linux Foundation justifies the need for a Linux-only conference due to the massive large scale adoption of Linux in varying types of technology. What is unclear is the end-goals and vision for what the Linux Conference intends to achieve. Linux certainly doesn’t need any sort of promotion, because it is so widely adapted. My take on it is that in the digital world, we are seeing the need to get away from our screens and start interacting with each other more. It is often the personal interactions of the people behind projects such as Linux that makes them successful and gives the community a central voice.
For more information see http://www.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon
An Introduction to Java/J2EE System Administration with JBoss
November 14, 2008 by MatthewSacks · Leave a Comment
While at LISA, I gave a small short talk at a bird-of-a-feather (BoF) session about Java/J2EE system administration. I wanted to give system administrators who have not had prior experience to Java some insights into how they can try a Java Application server and how to perform basic live monitoring and troubleshooting of an application server. The JBoss community version of the application server was used as the example, and installing the server, configuring the script and environment, and starting it up and monitoring logs were covered. The primary topic of interest was how to do basic troubleshooting and analysis of performance problems in the application server by gathering and reviewing thread dumps. The original post can be read here: http://lisa.usenix.org/2008/11/14/java-system-administration-sys-admin-meet-j2ee/.
Inside the Qooxdoo Javascript Application Framework
November 13, 2008 by MatthewSacks · 1 Comment
Qooxdoo is a new innovative way for building web applications standalone with Javascript (no application server). While at LISA this year I discovered the Qooxdoo application framework at a training session presented by Tobi Oetiker. At first I was a bit confused about what Qooxdoo actually was and considered it to be just another Ajax framework, which are typically focused on the widget perspective of dynamic websites. I was rather astounded to find out that Qooxdoo is in fact a way to build a web application using only Javascript and a single JS file at that. To find out more about what Qooxdoo is and how to utilize it, see my post on the LISA blog.
Follow the LISA 2008 Conference on Twitter
November 4, 2008 by MatthewSacks · Leave a Comment
Get exclusive updates about the 22nd Large Installation System Administration Conference on Twitter. LISA recently just started posting updates about the conference on Twitter and will continue to provide coverage before, during and after the conference.
App Review: IBM’s BlueHouse Web-Based Collaboration Suite Preview
October 26, 2008 by MatthewSacks · Leave a Comment
IBM is now offering a web-based collaboration suite intended for the office and business users. The core components of IBM’s Bluehouse seem to be that of online meetings on par with Webex meetings and document sharing.
IBM Bluehouse Dashboard
Bluehouse is currently still in Beta, but offers an intuitive user interface for creating a document sharing and collaboration workspace in an online format. Bluehouse seemed to take the best of online meetings and combine it with online document storage/sharing such as that of Google Docs (although much less robust in feature set and compatibility). Bluehouse’s online meeting session did not work with Firefox 3. The extra features of Bluehouse such as Contacts, and networking with colleagues, were a bit less accessible and useful in comparison with the meeting and planning applications. It seems to me that IBM may be simply dipping a toe into the online office collaboration utilities and seeks feedback for what works and what doesn’t for their application and the Bluehouse application is a bit fragmented and not cohesive at the moment as the features work, and they work well; however, IBM seems to not weaved online meetings, document sharing, planning, and networking utilities into a web-based format as well as other web-based office collaboration suites.
The Lemming Opinion: Why You Should Not Follow Technology Fads
October 25, 2008 by MatthewSacks · 1 Comment
I think it is important when qualifying software and hardware that one evaluates the hard data and metrics of its value rather than making a strong opinion without such proof. Often times in the computing world there is a crowd-like groupie phenomena of jumping on the bandwagon. For example, the recent craze in cloud computing (myself included) has spawned a swarm of start-ups and various service providers eagerly offering to skyrocket you into the “clouds”. Now cloud computing is a neat, (somewhat) new technology that offers a lot of opportunity and prospect that will likely foster innovation; however, this does not mean that everyone necessarily needs it or would want to implement such cloud platform design for their application.
The simple fact of the matter is that the best solutions and technologies aren’t necessarily those that are new or old, but rather one’s that have been tested and proven with supporting data and evidence to prove their practicality and performance. There are always excpetions to this rule, of course. Such as when deriving an opinion on the aesthetic appeal of a user interface, for example; however, even such visual opinions can have some fact-driven qualifying metrics associated with them - although this may not be the primary focus when evaluating visual appeal.
Compilation Performance in Java with javac
October 23, 2008 by MatthewSacks · Leave a Comment
When compiling large applications, the performance of javac becomes an issue of interest. Recently I discovered that during compilation, the javac process is binding to only one CPU on a multi-core system. “What a waste of resources”, I thought. It turns out that the javac binary is actually a single-threaded program, so it only binds to a single CPU. This means that on newer, multi-core CPU’s (Such as a 2.66ghz Intel x86) the compilation time could be slower than that of a single 3.06ghz single core CPU of 3 years ago! I thought this to be rather peculiar. It turns out that Sun has their reasons for not multi-threading the compiler. Couldn’t compilation times be reduced by distributing compilation amongst multiple cores or even servers?
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