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MonadLUG, 14-June-2007: Ed Haynes: Real-time in Linux

By on June 12, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, Technology

MonadLUG is fortunate this month to have Ed Haynes of Wind River make a presentation on Real-time processing in Linux. Group coordinator Charlie Farinella posts the announcement:

Who: Ed Haynes, Wind River
What: Real-Time
Date: Thursday June 14, 2007
Time: 7:00PM
Where: SAU 1 office, 106 Hancock Rd., Peterborough
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MonadLUG

Linux is finding itself used in more applications that can be characterized as “Real Time”. What is a Real-Time system? What impact does it have to the Linux OS, and how has Linux evolved to better meet real-time challenges? What’s the difference between “soft” and “hard” real-time? A live demonstration will be held to characterize the performance of difference linux kernels.

Presenting will be Ed Haynes from Wind River. Ed currently serves as a technical resource for the New England Wind River region. He has 10 years experience as a software developer on embedded realtime systems and also led IPv6 development at Nortel.

Sounds like a good meeting!

Is ZFS Apple’s secret weapon? | InfoWorld | News | 2007-06-08 | By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld

By on June 9, 2007 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Home Page, OpenSource, Technology

Gregg Keizer asks “Is ZFS Apple’s secret weapon?? Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard would rely on a file system that engineers at his company have spent years creating: ZFS.”

Very cool! GNHLUGgers saw ZFS presented at the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group meeting in April when Todd Underwood mentioned the OS X rumors. An XServe running as the front-end to a whole mess of disks could mean a very easy-to-use, near-infinite scaling of storage devices, ideal for any SME with delusions of grandeur. Looking forward to seeing what Apple does with ZFS!

You say Framework, I say Toolkit, let’s call the whole thing off

By on June 8, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, OpenSource, PHP, Technology

Well, it seems that a million monkeys pounding on a million keyboards will write… a million PHP frameworks. I’ve got a client project that needs a rich client front end, likely with DHTML-Javascript-AJAX, a powerful middle tier with complex business logic and processing, and an interface to the backend data that can both support (and hopefully automate and generate) the dozens of generic CRUD processes but also allow overriding with complex SQL (you know, the nasty, multiple page, outer join, union, correlated subquery, inline-function SQL that takes days to write, debug and document, runs in milliseconds, and makes the whole operation worthwhile). Bonus points for caching at the component level, plugin widgets that do all the latest cool stuff (tags, RSS, digg, widgets, etc.) and a smart graphical IDE that can act as a design surface, debugger and data browser. A good manual available online and on paper, along with an active developer community is essential, too. Oh, and Free as in beer along with Free as in speech is desirable (for the former) and required (for the latter).

A guy can dream, can’t he?

There’s a great comparison chart on 10 PHP frameworks from PHPit.net, although dated last year. The many comments indicate that some folks think some of the features aren’t properly credited or misunderstood. Some posters may disagree on the meanings of “MVC” or “ORM.” Some may disagree on what “is” is. Some, I suspect, are those monkeys typing at keyboards. Others likely have valid points. The chart is 14 months old (March 26, 2006) and not getting any younger, while the frameworks either rocket ahead or wallow in the doldrums. I note, for example, the Zend Framework version 1.0 is in Release Candidate phase, just two weeks ago, a major milestone usually taken with some gravity.

There’s not a lot of discussion on how and why these ten frameworks were chosen. Why not blueshoes or dojo? And how about those CMSes? A number of the more powerful Content Management Systems could serve as the basis for an application: already they have a user gui, a writer/editor/moderator/developer UI, connections to a database, and “stuff” in the middle. How well the stuff is designed and whether it’s flexible enough to fit application logic in there brings into place the philosophical questions of where an application begins and where content management ends. I fear that way leads madness: a tool specifically developed for one purpose stretched into a general-purpose tool can be a rough fit. The closer the designers stayed to their original focus of “delivering content” the less likely it is to be flexible enough.

It looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me sorting the wheat from the chaff… any pointers from readers would be welcomed. The good news: it’s all about choice. Having many choices is great news.

Alex Feldstein: Dèjá Vu: Entity Framework will not be a part of original Orcas release

By on June 6, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

Alex Feldstein reports Alex Feldstein: Dèjá Vu: Entity Framework will not be a part of original Orcas release

“Mike Pizzo [MS] in the ADO.NET Team Blog, tells us that the Entity Framework will not be part of the initial release of Orcas. Note that the EF link is from June 06 when things were a looking a little more rosy… Sounds to me like WinFS all over again. And Im not the only one. Mike Pizzo gets the message and explains or apologizes depending on your point of view. And swears that this is not WinFS all over again.”

Here’s one problem with a single-vendor solution: if/when they blow it, you’re stuck waiting for them to fix it. With Open Source, you can pick up the code and finish it yourself, find someone else to finish it, or decide the version 0.4 is good enough for you to put into product (yikes!). It’s your choice. Or, in the Open Marketplace of software, you can decide to go with a different project, whether a fork of the original or a different project. It’s your choice.

It’s too tempting, as a leading vendor, to overpromise and then lead your customers along. IBM is credited with refining the process of “vaporware” by releasing far more press releases and promises than by releasing working code on time. That’s not to say every software project doesn’t start with overblown hopes. gold-plated requirements, delusions of grandeur and overly aggressive delivery schedules. You have to be a hopeless optimist to be in the software development business, thinking that you are going to outsmart these machines and defy Murphy. You don’t need to be crazy to work here, but it helps. We offer on-the-job training.

I’ve noticed in dealing with a number of Open Source shops that there is no rush to get the latest and greatest. That might be what the vendor wants for revenues, but it’s not necessarily in the best interests of the software. Sure, security exploit patches need to get out fast, but those are often back-ported to several well-used versions; if there are folks using the code, there’s a good chance there’s someone with the savvy to add the patch into the source tree and rebuild the older versions. But we all know new features bring new bugs and need a little settling time to stabilize, even after thorough betas. Early adopters can get a “first to market” advantage, but not if they are so mired in bugs, workarounds and patches that nothing works. So, there’s often interesting mixes of old and new: an older and stable OS, web server and database server, and a cutting edge language or framework. You use the latest of the tools that matter, but don’t have a public beta of every element of your application stack.

The dynamics of the software development market continue to churn. May we live in exciting times!

Phil Windley’s Technometria: Saying Yes to Paper Ballots

By on June 3, 2007 in Home Page, Security, Technology

From Phil Windley’s Technometria | Saying Yes to Paper Ballots:

The standards are still evolving and experience is showing that the electronic machines do have problems accurately recording votes. (Emphasis in the original)

Paper ballots. Paper ballots. Paper ballots. Tell your congress(wo)man. Tell your senator. Tell your reps. Paper ballots. Let’s stop paying private firms huge amounts of money to ship badly-designed, poorly-engineered, easily-tricked voting machines. Voting is a lot more important than getting the results on the TV that night. Let’s do it right. Paper ballots. Audit trails. Open standards. Open code review.

Fedora 7 available for download – get yours now!

By on June 3, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Fedora 7, code-named “moonshine” is complete and now ready for download. Check out the BitTorrent feeds at http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ for the fastest downloads and to pitch in a little of your upload bandwidth to spread the good words.

Lots of neat stuff in this version of Fedora. First, the “Core” is gone from the name. The “Core” and “Extras” designations have been removed and the distribution united into one package. This isn’t just a repackaging issue, but a huge change in the governance of the Fedora project, one that’s taken a couple of releases to iron out. The entire distro was selected, built and distributed on public servers by the community, and not behind the walls of Red Hat nor any other private company. This openness, I’ve been told, extends to every aspect of the project. Openness and transparency is good. That doesn’t mean the project has been abandoned, though: I understand a number of Red Hat employees work on Fedora as a major part of their job. Yet another great example of how Free software can support people’s livelihoods.

A lot of work was devoted to the Pungi build process to assemble the distro itself. It’s now possible for mere mortals to create their own custom builds (“spins” as in spinning CDs, in the terms of the builders) to create their own specialized, targetted, rebranded, mini-, maxi- or personal distro. Examples of this already available from Fedora include a LiveCD and a KDE LiveCD. While it’s not running F7 yet, Pungi-built MythDora 4.0 (recently Slashdotted) is a great example of what we can create with the Pungi tool.

Lots and lots of other features are in the release notes and we all have our favorite to look for, so I encourage you to go there for the definitive list. For me, I’ll also mention better hardware support, Network Manager (rocks!), PPC support (time to dual boot the iMac!), boot-from-USB-live-distro!, better, faster, more capable, more compatible. Compare and contrast this with new distributions of other operating systems which are offering a pretty desktop and less ability to work with your stuff. It’s all about choice. This one’s an easy choice.

Notes from PySIG, 24-May-2007: Python logging and wxPython

By on May 31, 2007 in Home Page, OpenSource, Python, Technology

Thirteen participants made it to the May meeting of the Python Special Interest Group of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the fourth Thursday of the month at 7 PM at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, Manchester, NH.

It was a busy meeting. A quick round of introductions and announcements was followed by several terrific presentations.

Kent Johnson entertained us with Kent’s Korner, this month featuring the logging module. Simple logging can be implemented in two lines of code and customized with a third, but the module can be expanded almost infinitely to include multiple handlers arranged in a hierarchical fashion with different levels of filtering and multiple output. As usual, Kent did a fine job of showing simple examples and clearly building on them.

Bill Sconce decided to defer his second attempt at describing a hierarchy of data types, a discussion sure to rouse an interesting and educational debate amongst the participants. Stay tuned for a future meeting…

Ric Werme made the main presentation on wxPython. He brought the most extensive handouts we’ve had today, with an engaging backstory of his several-decades tinkering with graphing and the Petals of the Rose patterns. The demo was arresting, and source code can be downloaded here and here. Ric walked us through the wxPython wrapper, explaining the various widgets used and spoke well of the new wxPython book.

Thanks to Ric and Kent for their presentations, to Bill Sconce and Alex Hewitt for arranging the meeting and facilities, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for their hospitality and to all who attended for their participation!

Sun declares OpenID Patent Covenant

By on May 30, 2007 in Home Page, OpenSource, Technology

Over at his ongoing blog, Tim Bray blogs about Sun’s recent oOpenID Patent Covenant

Sun just announced a Patent Non-assert Covenant on OpenID; chapter and verse and FAQ here. Simon Phipps has a useful write-up. But what really impresses me is the text of the covenant itself; four short paragraphs of simple, almost jargon-free, English. Why can’t we do this more often?

Indeed. Since we have to live with (or work around) software patents in the U.S. and Australia (but hopefully not Europe!) until there’s a major regime change and overhaul of the broken patent system, clear declarations like this covenant need to be required of contributors to “open” standards: you should not be able to get a stamp of approval from a standards body on a protocol or format or process that you can then turn around and attack people for using.

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.