Back from a little break..

The past month has been pretty busy at work and at home. Many things have happened in the past few weeks. Where to begin?

Well first off I've completed my first article for the USENIX magazine ;login: . I'm writing a three part article on LDom's . The first part is complete and will be in the August issue of the magazine. I'm busy starting on the second article, which I'm hoping to finish shortly. I'm really excited about this since I have not published anything publicly before. I'm use to writing documents for work. It's a nice change to write for a wider audience and of course to write about something I'm interested in talking about.

That reminds me, that I need to post about virtual devices on my blog and finish my JET documentation:)

I've recently upgraded over this past weekend to Solaris Express build 66. Which so far I'm very happy with in comparison to build 54. It's nice to have removable media, acrobat, and a few other items working properly again. I did have a spot of trouble rejumpstarting my VMware instance for my work laptop. For some odd reason the bridged networking stopped working. I even tried reinstalling VMware Player and upgrading to VMware Server. While the server version is nicer, it didn't fix my issue. Of course this reminds me how much I dislike having to use Windows in any work environment. While there are some useful office tools in Windows, I can easily replace these with what's included in OpenSolaris. However, I will say the one missing item is a good VPN client that works with the different solutions out there today. In anycase, I'll take some screenshots of my desktop and post them with pictures of my Sun Blade 2000.

Sun has been pretty busy over the past month releasing new products and source code:

• Sun Blade 6000 Platform
• Solaris Express Developer Edition
• Open HA Cluster
• Sun Studio 12
• Sun Ray Server Software 4
• CTI for TET

Plus lots more. Those are just a few things. The new blade platform is very impressive and I hope they'll have Niagara 2 blades for it in the future. I'm very excited to see a developer edition that includes all of the compilers and development tools. Hopefully, Sun will make a version for SPARC as the current version is only for X86. Speaking of development tools, Sun Studio 12 is finally out and I'm very happy with how it performs. The new IDE is awesome and the installation is painless, you even end up with icons in the JDS menus:). The open sourcing of Solaris Cluster is a huge win for everyone. Bringing this cluster solution to the table for developers and users is a huge step forward to reducing the costs of traditional clustering solutions.

I've also been keeping up with the rumors about Apple's Mac OS X Leopard having ZFS and Dtrace. Hopefully, these features will make it into the release. I'm a big fan of Mac OS X, it's great for the family. It's just soo easy to use and get things done on. It would be interesting if Apple were to switch to an OpenSolaris base with their GUI and apps ontop. But I doubt that will ever happen;(

I've been experimenting with QEMU lately on SPARC. I've been curious about the ability to run Solaris X86 or other OS's on my Sun Blade 2000. Unfortunately, it's a pain to get Solaris Express or even Solaris 10 going with how slow QEMU is. However, I was able to get Plan 9 running with QEMU. It's been years since I've looked at Plan 9. Definitely brought back some memories, but not enough for me to remember how to use it. Hopefully the performance of QEMU will improve over time on SPARC.

Well, keep you eyes out for more posts. I have too much to blog about, just have to do it!