Cheap Cell Processors and The USAF Condor Cluster

Image via Wikipedia

Last March, bloggers reported that Sony had released a firmware update to remove the OtherOS feature that made PS3's attractive to some users. With the OtherOS option, users could install linux on their PS3's in order to create a very cheap computer with a cell processor.

Some bright sparks hit on the idea of clustering several such customized PS3s, in order to make powerful computer systems. There is even a well written, straightforward guide explaining step-by-step how to do this.

Anyone could install Linux or FreeBSD and set up SSH, NFS and MPI to create a cluster. This is not something many gamers are likely to do, of course.

Seeking to put together a powerful supercomputer for research purposes, the US Air Force upped the ante by putting together 336 PS3s to create a pretty decent supercomputer.

Their reasons for doing this were two-fold:

1. The cell processor is very powerful 8-core CPU, consumes less power than processors of similar capabilities and its chipset lends itself to clustering because "MPI computations run much faster than on desktop workstation chipsets" while an "8 PS3 (i.e. 64 core) Cell cluster had comparable if not better performance to a 200 Node IBM Blue Gene system" (Gaurav Khanna, University of Massachusetts)
2. Cell processors are normally expensive, but Sony produce the PS3 at a loss, with the knowledge that they'll make a profit as customers buy games for their console

All was well until March (although the news of this only broke in May). Sony issued a firmware upgrade that removed the OtherOS option, meaning that anyone who upgraded the firmware would lost the ability to reload the (other) OS, should this need to be done. This made applying the latest firmware had to be avoided at all costs by the USAF, since it would have threatened their entire cluster should they apply it.
Presumably, the USAF weren't buying games and Sony were probably afraid that this would set a precedent, and that they could end up losing a lot of money in the long term, if every university, governmental department,

It seemed like game over for OtherOS, and while a class action lawsuit ensued, it was expected that the USAF would look to other means of building a supercomputer. However, 6 months later, news that they've created the largest cell cluster to date - consisting of 1760 PS3s - was a bit of a surprise (at least it was to me).

Hopefully, this latest lawsuit (and it's not the first Sony have faced) will have the desired effect and OtherOS will make a return. If that happens, I might even consider buying a PS3 myself.

Further Reading

• Air Force may suffer collateral damage from PS3 firmware update (arstechnica.com)
• This Stack Of PS3s Is The 33rd Biggest Computer In The World [Military] (kotaku.com)
• Sony files to dismiss 'Other OS' class action lawsuit (joystiq.com)
• Sony PS3 v3.50 Firmware Update Disabling Some USB Peripherals (slashgear.com)
• USAF Unveils Supercomputer Made of 1,760 PS3s (games.slashdot.org)
• US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3's to build supercomputer (physorg.com)

Storage solutions

External HDDs and Direct-attached Storage:

Given that many, if not most, of us consumers no longer use desktop PCs in their home, it's rare that we have more than 500GB of internal storage at our disposal. Online storage can provide us with somewhere to store our photos, and even documents and code, but this only adds a few GB (unless you opt for a paid service). As a result, the majority of users who need more storage opt for externall HDDs. They are a good short-term solution, those with eSATA connectivity are fast enough to run VM images, and a couple of 1.5TB disks can keep you going for a while. If you're a hoarder (like me), and/or you want some sort of redundancy, this isn't going to be enough.
Any old PC (not too old, though) can act as a decent file server, with minimal effort. I have an old Athlon that serves as a kind of DAS file server - not dedicated to the task, but it serves my modest needs and beats dragging external HDDs around the house. There are a couple of good NFS apps (or you can use SMB): FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD), and MS' own Windows NFS too.

Networked Storage - NAS and SAN:

Network-Attached Storage has been around a long time in small to medium sized businesses and corporate environments, but more recently it has become more popular with consumers too. It's possible to set up a NAS (using the NFS or SMB protocol), and is one way of expanding your external storage while making it accessible from anywhere on the network. However, ready-to-go NAS devices, ranging from ones nearly as small and portable as an standard external HDD, and not much more expensive, to racks, are completely self-contained: they have their own processor and embedded Linux. The most basic NAS enclosures can be picked up at a very reasonable price from resellers (well known brands available for under €80), and will network any SATA drive. Larger, more expensive NAS devices can network many more drives.

SANs are different to NAS, in that they don't provide any file system, but only storage. The way this storage is utilised is up to the client. SANs use protocols like fibre channel, and also iSCSI and ATA over Ethernet. The last two are a particularly good choice because they don't require dedicated channels of copper or more expensive optical fibre, but use the existing (and ubiquitous) ethernet network and a clever protocol that extends the normally local storage protocol over the network via IP. I don't really understand the ins-and-outs of the SAN controller, but once set up properly and well tuned, SAN performance should be indistinguishable from local storage.
For this reason it's an extremely popular enterprise solution. Many of the customers I deal with use it for storage for their application servers, DBs, LDAPs, mail servers and so on, and it rarely comes under suspicion these days (although it often did up until two or three years ago, so my impression is that they have become very reliable as time has passed).

Scalable storage solutions:

While combining storage with IP can allow you to share storage across a LAN or WAN, things can get messy as you try to scale up the system. Projects to upgrade or expand an existing SAN can be a real headache, and at the very least can involve a very stressful weekend for the IT team.
Using grid architectures, it's possible to build a small storage system first, and then expand it over time. Grid technology also provides redundancy and means upgrades can be carried out while the system is still live.

Related articles

• IDC: Growing Data Need Boosts Q3 Storage Revenue (pcworld.com)
• You Need More Data Storage: Network Attached Storage explored (brighthub.com)
• Excel Meridian Data Adds Expanded Storage Options with its NetStor WSS 8311 and NetStor WSS 8411 Network Attached Storage (NAS) Products (prweb.com)
• Server Virtualization's Encapsulation And Its Impact On Storage (informationweek.com)
• BridgeSTOR dedupes primary storage for small biz (go.theregister.com)
• G-Technology debuts slim G-Drive external HDD (slashgear.com)
• Updated Western Digital external HDDs offer up to 3TB and USB 3.0 (gizmag.com)
• iXsystems Releases FreeNAS 8 Beta (prweb.com)

On Flash Memory

Image via Wikipedia While one obvious application of flash memory is for the storage of files, it can also act just like ROM memory, where firmware can reside, and also like RAM, to hold temporary information required by the device.

We see flash memory in MP3 players, SD cards (and other memory cards), USB thumb drives and even Solid-State Drives (where NAND flash memory is becoming the standard, replacing RAM-based SSD). Essentially, flash memory is ideal wherever we need cheap, non-volatile multifunction memory and storage, and wherever we would have seen an EEPROM. In fact, flash memory is basically just a type if Electrically Erasable and Programmable/writable memory. At this point, I should mention that there are two types of flash memory - NOR-based, going back the 1980s, and NAND-based, from a few years later. Only NOR-based flash memory is really an ideal replacement for ROM chips, since it allows random access to any memory location. NAND-based flash memory is a bunch of memory cells arranged in series, and read in a block-wise basis which doesn't allow random access to any memory location, making is not particularly suitable to be used as a ROM replacement. However, it is cheaper, and can be fine for simpler devices as not just storage, but ROM too.

Flash memory blurs the distinction between memory and storage. Where storage is somewhere for long term storage of static data, flash memory can be used - so in this way, you might be led to believe that it doesn't belong in the category of memory at all. However, flash memory can be used as a faster alternative to hard-disk based virtual memory - so you can see how in our PCs a portion of their storage can be used for additional memory. Some people use USB thumb drives to replace slow virtual memory with a faster alternative to get a performance boost. MP3 players typically have their firware written either to dedicated NOR flash memory, while some of it is used as memory, or a portion of the NAND flash memory. Usually, NAND-based flash memory is used to store the actual digital media. Cameras can work in much the same way - having on-board flash memory to hold the firmware (as a ROM would) and provide internal storage, as well as the SD, XD or CF memory cards used to store photos. Just think of all the flash memory that goes into smart phones, multiplied by the current and future demand of smart phones, and add to this the demand for the iPad and all the competitors that are starting to appear - then you can get an idea of how prevalent flash memory already is, and how important it will continue to be.

As flash memory becomes faster, I wonder if we'll ever see it replace RAM memory, at least in lower-end consumer devices, just as it has replaced HDD storage and SSD storage is so many applications already.

Related articles

• Avnet Memec to Distribute Greenliant Systems' NANDrive, NAND Controller and Specialty Flash Memory Products (eon.businesswire.com)
• Data Recovery For Nand And Nor Flash Memory (livecrunch.com)
• Samsung Now Producing 20nm-class, 64-gigabit 3-bit NAND Flash Memory (eon.businesswire.com)
• Hybrid hard disk market set to take off (news.cnet.com)

The bookshop is dead

It's ten years since I started looking for computer textbooks in Dublin's book stores. It used to involve quite a lot of hunting, but after wearing the soles of my shoes a little thinner, I usually found what I was looking for. Hodges & Figgis, Waterstones and Eason's were the main players, but there were a few others. They kept a decent stock of books, usually around the cost of book + shipping from Amazon.co.uk, so if you needed the book right away, it made sense to try and get your hands on a copy in a physical store. At least you could leaf through the pages for a while and get a sense of whether or not it was worth the paper it was printed on. If it turned out to be cheaper online, then you could always do that.


About four or five years ago when I was working on several projects in college and work it made sense to subscribe to Safari Books Online, because I was going to need to build myself an up-to-date reference library, but you could still walk in to one of the big book shops and find what you needed - only it might just break the bank.


Just this week I returned to college to do some post-graduate study and got the usual reading list. Crossing most of it off my list, because having the very latest edition wouldn't matter, and I could just pick up older versions in the library, I was left with just one essential book. It was available on Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones.com. The lecturer thought it was safe to assume that it would be available in the main Waterstone's store in Dawson Street, so I planned to go in on my Sunday morning and get it.
Arriving to the store just before midday (still technically morning!), I was surprised to see an enormous café, where there once were a lot more bookshelves. Unperturbed, I strode on to look around the various anterooms and mezzanines where they used to tuck away the reference books. I saw that the computing section was down on the lower ground floor and headed there only to find to my amazement that it wasn't quite the size I was expecting.

One measly bookshelf. One solitary, lonely, neglected bookshelf with perhaps less than a hundred (not unique) overpriced books. The chances of finding the book I needed in that sorry collection were pretty slim, but I had a look anyway. Aside from the usual "X in 24 hours" I could hardly see anything of value.
The CCNA Exam Preparation boxed set seemed to be just about it. At just over €60, it wasn't exactly reasonably priced, either.



Feeling discouraged, I decided to leave and cross the street to  Hodges & Figgis, Ireland's largest book store (at least, as far as I know; it's certainly the best), to see if I'd have more luck there. I usually did in the past.
Their computer section used to be pretty large, and comprehensive too. Their buyers were obviously good at what they did, because I rarely had trouble finding any of the books that would be on the typical college reading list. Unfortunately, over recent years it seems as if shelf space for computer tomes has dwindled there too. What once covered a third of an entire floor has been reduced to perhaps 4 full bookshelves and 3 half-sized ones. About half the books are about Facebook, Twitter, or MS Office applications. On the plus side, they had most of the books I'd seen across the road in Waterstones at a lower price, and a lot more besides, and there were good books on many subjects, including the one I was interested in.
Needless to say I didn't find the book I needed amongst them.

It seems that the bookshop as we once knew it is gone, and what is left pales in comparison. Computers are now considered "niche", and the shelves are filled with pseudo-science books instead. Sadly, it seems we've dumbed down; way down, to plumb previously unknown levels.
Thank {randomDeity()} for Amazon Not to mention bit torrents.

Read on

• Waterstone's has forgotten what bookselling is about (guardian.co.uk)
• Waterstone may take back book chain he founded (guardian.co.uk)
• What's Your Favorite Bookshop Website? (bookshopblog.com)
• College textbooks: Forget the campus bookshop, shop online (zdnet.com)

New Look Twitter Takes a Step in the Right Direction

Perhaps a little late to the game, I got around to taking in the new look Twitter yesterday. With a single click, I was presented with what seemed like a bigger, better Twitter; at least on first look.
 
  

Promising to put everything in one place, this major facelift seemed to provide a better overall UI, with perhaps a few additional features to boot.
After taking a quick browse around, the first of the changes quickly became apparent - the new UI is essentially broken up in to four components:
- the feed or "timeline" (left hand side)
- the information section (right hand side)

- the menu, now across the top of the page, with a relative position (in css terms)
When you hover over a tweet, an > icon appears that lets you expand the tweet out across the information section onto the right hand side of the page, giving you a much bigger and better view of not only the tweet, but the user's last few tweets too, and, perhaps most importantly, replies to that tweet. Also, if there was, for example, a link to a YouTube video in the tweet, this could be watched from within this expanded view. The same goes for TwitPics, and being able to view those in the Tweet is a nice feature.
You'll also notice that the search box has moved to a more intuitive and sensible position in the "toolbar" across the top of the app. As I mentioned, the position of this element is relative to the browser window, so as you scroll, it "follows" you down the page.

Looking at my username on the right hand side of the toolbar, I started getting excited: was Twitter finally going to offer us multiple account switching? Google have done it, and of course, there are many Twitter clients and web apps like Brizzly that can handle multiple Twitter accounts, unify their timelines, allow for tweeting from more than one account at the same time, and more besides.
Sadly, when I clicked on the drop-down menu, I saw no such feature.
Shame! If Twitter had provided this functionality, I'd have use for Seesmic, TweetDeck or Brizzly, save for the way they allow you to add your Facebook account as well.
For a nice run through of the new features, watch the new Twitter demo.

Read more:

• A Comprehensive Look At The #NewTwitter Changes To Twitter.com (just-ask-kim.com)
• Hands On with New Twitter Design: What's New? (shoutmeloud.com)
• The New Twitter is an Attack on All Desktop Apps (mashable.com)
• Twitter unveils major redesign (bbc.co.uk)
• Twitter facelifts its homepage (go.theregister.com)

Facebook is down... no wait, it's up again

Image via Wikipedia

You have reached the end of the Social Internets.

Move along now, there's nothing to see here.






For a couple of hours there, the world nearly got some work done.

Prioritise this, Google!

Image via CrunchBase
Google Labs: isn't it great to see the rate at which they churn out new features and new products. Some hit, some miss, but they keep busy. They get things out there.

 Gmail was a huge hit, and I loved it right from the start. It's been the class leading webmail since the day it was released, and soon overtook the best mail clients once labels, filters and Calendar integration came together.

Many of the labs features have made it into the product, and many other features seem indispensable to me. The keyboard shortcuts were such an importaam nt step forward - being able to use the keyboard as much as possible is very important to every power user, and they recognised that. Various changes to the way label links were presented, to help to clean up an increasingly cluttered layout, I could understand why they would do that.

In short, all was well, until I saw the invitation to try out their new Priority Inbox feature.

At work, I  have to use Lotus Notes. It's OK, or at least, I'm so used to it that it doesn't really bother me. It does a job. I used to have urgent mails at the top, because, like most email clients, that's where they go.
However, define urgent? What's urgent for you, may well not be urgent for me. Just because you put "!" all over the mail doesn't make it so special. Especially if everyone else does the same thing.

Now I know what you're thinking: this isn't the same thing at all; Google aren't letting the sender mark a mail as high priority, they're letting YOU do it. That's the difference, and that's why it's cool.

While this may be true, I'm not sure the end result is all that different. When I decide something is important, and mark it as such, each and every mail of that type (that same sender, or same subject) gets marked as priority mail. Great. Thing is, I already have this. Thanks to labels I can categorise and taxonomise my emails to my heart's content. Thanks to filters, I can auto-label certain types of mails, have them skip the inbox, or get starred, or auto-forward them, or auto-delete - I could go on. I have all sorts of control, and can change my mind whenever I want. The really beautiful thing is that I can decide to look at those mails as and when I want to. They aren't shoved in my face until I either remove the priority label, or read them.

My Lotus Notes inbox is not sorted by priority. It's sorted by date. Screw what the sender thinks is important. Put a sensible subject in the email, let me prioritise ad-hoc, I have a brain after all.
Thanks to Gmail, I have labels and filters and that's more than enough for me, so after giving Priority Inbox a good trial run, I'm turning it off again. I don't need it, and find it a distraction that actually wastes my time.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Why GMail's Priority Inbox Needs to Get Off the Web (And Why It's the Future) (techi.com)
• Three New Tricks for Gmail's Priority Inbox (gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Graph Your Inbox Graph Gmail Activity Over Time (mydigitallife.info)
• Read this! Gmail now prioritises your inbox (guardian.co.uk)

How long will we have to wait for Google Voice?

It's been around for well over a year now, it's been (mostly) well received and it's looking like it should flourish where Wave atrophied and died - but after listening to the fanfare and watching the intro vids, most of the world still only sees this disappointing message when they try to log in:

I'm sure most of us ubergeeks who live outside the US knew it would take some time for Google to hammer out whatever deals are required to roll Voice out in our respective homelands, but who would have thought that it wouldn't have made it to the UK, Germany and Japan, or at least across the border to Canada by now? Many of those who expressed an interest received an invite to sign-up, not that they can be used. There are workarounds, even for those living in one of Europe's smallest countries, but I for one don't want to have to circumvent the checks and jump through hoops just to get some of that Voicy awesomeness to work for me.

Is this like Pandora, who had to withdraw the service in countries imposing licensing constraints? Is it simply about cost, or perceived lack of demand? Whatever it is, I hope it gets sorted out soon and makes it way to wherever you live.

Error messages are getting more aggressive these days

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

A ticket has been automatically opened for this issue. Please contact the server administrator, or better still, someone who cares, and inform them of the time the error occurred, and whatever dumbass thing you did that caused the error, quoting the ticket # PEBCAK_11235.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log, not that you'd have a clue how to read it or anything.

---

Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) mod_wsgi/2.0 Python/2.5.2 Server at www.hobosapien.com Port 3128

HTC EVO vs. iPhone4

Listening to the TWiG podcast (This Week in Google), I heard a clip from the work of an employee of Best Buy. He became a former employee shortly after his boss saw this first clip. Not only is it funny, but it spawned a few copycat efforts too:

One taking the other view, just so you can't say I'm biased:

Installing openSuse 11.2 on VirtualBox

Image via Wikipedia

In just over two months time I'll be starting some post-graduate study, so I thought I'd get to work building myself some virtual environments for various uses, such as a python and ruby development box, a Java / J2EE dev box and a C/C++/C# dev box (why not cover all the bases?). I also fancied setting up stacks using NoSQL (Mongo and Cassandra) as a backend as well as stacks using standard SQL RDBMS backends.
Seeing as I've been using a lot of Ubuntu at home and RHEL at work, I thought it would be a good time to try something else for a change.

Just about every geek has tried Ubuntu at this stage, and up to now I've tried the Hardy Heron, Mental Monkey, Jaunty Jackalope, Rabid Rabbit and the Lucid Lynx (OK, I made some of those up). I wasn't really moved to try the much raved about Mint and gOS either, seeing as they are just based on Ubuntu, and older versions at that.
Not having used openSuse since the grand old days of v10, and so often having bored people senseless with the fact that YaST2 was the best package management and system configuration tool available in the whole wide world of Linux, I thought it was about time I brought myself up to date - so I went to opensuse.org and downloaded myself a 64-bit openSuse 11.2 network install iso.

Installing Ubuntu or Windows in VirtualBox on either a Windows or an Ubuntu host is trivial. Pretty much everything will work straight away, and it's just a case of mounting the VBox Guest Additions iso, running the script (or exe), and away you go. You might think that openSuse, priding itself on both usability and power would present you with no problems here, but you'd be every bit as wrong as I turned out to be.

With some excitement (I know, I shouldn't be getting excited about things like this), I selected the 64-bit openSuse net install iso in VirtualBox and fired up the VM. The first time I tried to install, I was told that I was running 32-bit hardware, and therefore couldn't install a 64-bit OS on it. Hmm. Obviously no-one thought to tell my 64-bit Windows 7 or 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 that they weren't running on 64-bit hardware. Strange. Rather than fighting with the hardware checker, I decided to just go and download the 32-bit version instead.

Second attempt. No problems with the hardware check this time, so went ahead and selected a GNOME desktop. Big mistake. I got into my openSuse 11.2 after a considerable length of time (which takes ages, by the way - be prepared to give up a couple of hours of your life for this), but once there I found that I had no control of either the keyboard or the touchpad. Plugging in external USB ones wouldn't work either, since I had no Guest Additions installed, and I couldn't install that without a mouse/keyboard. I hate catch-22s.

Third attempt. After searching various forums on the internets and trying a few that were supposed to work, I eventually decided to reinstall, this time selecting the KDE desktop instead (which is the default choice in the installer anyway). I'm not a massive fan of KDE, since I've always chosen Linux because I want something lightweight and uncluttered, but hearing that KDE has improved so much in these respects over the last couple of years, I thought I'd better give it a chance. After the long and laborious install process (just to be clear, I'm not putting all the blame on either openSuse or VirtualBox for this, it just seems that in combination with my hardware, they are slooow), I finally got to a usuable openSuse, running the KDE desktop - which, I have to say, looks stunning.

After taking a good look around, and trying a few of the features, I decided it was time to install VBox Guest Additions. Doing exactly what I would usually do (when working with Ubuntu, Debian or RHEL guests), I mounted the Guest Additions iso for version 3.2.6 (current version at time of writing) and ran the install script for x86 Linux. Now, I know I probably should have considered what I was going to stand to gain before I did this, since, by default, openSuse was using the full res of my laptop's display, and the VirtualBox shared drive was working, mouse integration was working. I don't really care all that much about having USB support in a virtual environment, so I hadn't actually tested that. So, I can only put it down to habit, that I proceeded to install VBox Guest Additions mindlessly.

I really wished I hadn't. Bearing in mind that I'd already spent about 4 hours messing around trying to just get openSuse 11.2 to basically work in VirtualBox on my Win7x64 host, what I really didn't want to do now was fix what wasn't broken in the first place. I certainly didn't want to go breaking it either, which is why I did just that, what with me being a total imbecile an' all. After running the script (./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run) I got this warning:

Uncompressing VirtualBox 3.2.6 Guest Additions for Linux.........
VirtualBox Guest Additions installer                             
You appear to have a version of the VBoxGuestAdditions software  
on your system which was installed from a different source or using a
different type of installer.  If you installed it from a package from your
Linux distribution or if it is a default part of the system then we strongly
recommend that you cancel this installation and remove it properly before   
installing this version.  If this is simply an older or a damaged           
installation you may safely proceed...

You would think I would have heeded the warning, but as this stage you can probably guess that I didn't. In my defence, I was tired. When I proceeded with the install, I was warned that the kernel dependent features had failed to install, and that it would continue the non-kernel dependent features, telling me to reboot at the end.

After coming back up from a reboot, I found that my openSuse guest had gone down from 1366x768 res (max res on my Toshiba A500) to 1024x768. I lost touchpad scrolling too, and probably the shared folder and more besides. I searched the web for a solution, and found this article on forums.opensuse.org, where the first post seemed to point me in the right direction. Following those steps seemed like the right thing to do, so I went and installed make, gcc, linux-kernel-headers, kernel-syms and kernel-source. All went well up as far as:

make oldconfig && make prepare && make scripts && make dep

This returned gcc errors. After messing around some more and cursing everything within sight, I finally read a bit further down and see Index of /repositories/Virtualization:/VirtualBox/openSUSE_Factory.
Once I added this to my list of software repositories in YaST2 and ran an update, the latest openSuse VBox Guest Additions was installed, and all was well. At last.

While I'm happy that it's working, and openSuse 11.2 running KDE 4.3 is a beautiful thing to behold, I am pretty pissed about one main failing. Going right back to the time I made the stupid decision to do what I always do with every new VirtualBox guest I install, and install VBoxGuestAdditions, I can tell you two things that openSuse is really missing: proper keyboard / pointing device support for openSuse running GNOME, and dkms support.
Apart from the fact that openSuse should have worked for me from the start, when I selected GNOME as my desktop, if I'd had the option of installing dkms on the fly, as prompted by the Guest Additions installer, I'd have been up and running a whole lot sooner. These things are pretty basic as I see it. I'm not sure what was wrong with selecting GNOME, or exactly what's missing. I heat that there was no such problem in 11.1.
As for dkms, being able to dynamically build kernel modules was one of the best advances I remember since I started using Linux. It's taken so much pain away and has made it so much more convenient to install all sorts of otherwise incompatible packages.

Here's the bottom line: if I wasn't such an openSuse fanboy, I'd have given up and installed any one of the other Linux distros where they get this kind of thing right. A certain amount of this problem could have been down to my own hardware (A500 with P7459 Core2Duo, 4GB RAM, Win7 64-bit), but the rest seemed to be down to patchy openSuse support for GNOME and VirtualBox, keyboard and pointing devices (because I found lots of other threads from people with similar issues), and the lack of support for dkms. Ultimately, no matter how far we can say that Linux has come on over the years, it has to be acknowledged that there is still quite some way to go before it's going to win a significant share of the market.

So, if you're planning to install openSuse 11.2 on a VirtualBox 3.2.6 running on a 64-bit Windows7 host, bear these points in mind:
- you'll probably have to install the 32-bit version
- you'll have to use KDE (on the plus side, it's KDE 4.3, which is gorgeous)
- you'll have to add the repo for the openSuse provided VirtualBox packages (such as VBoxGuestAdditions)

I hope that knowing all that in advance will help you avoid the same trouble I ran into and that you won't scrap plans for running openSuse in favour of Ubuntu or other user friendly Ubuntu-based distros, like Mint and gOS. They are great, but seen one, seen 'em all, and openSuse is worth it if you love YaST2 as much as do.

Related articles

• OpenSUSE 11.3 delivers spit, polish, and niggles (go.theregister.com)
• Most Popular Linux Distributions of 2010: 1st Quarter (brighthub.com)
• Why not try OpenSuSE 11.2 (ghacks.net)
• Linux: Which distribution is best for me? (brighthub.com)
• YaST: Yet Another Setup Tool (ghacks.net)
• The Crumbling of SUSE in Novell's Hands (techrights.org)

Read all about it in the Daily Tweet! Turn your Twitter stream into a newspaper

If you find keeping up with your Twitter stream hard going, as the updates whizz by and you waste time frantically scrolling up and down trying to find the connected tweets, don't despair: there is a more leisurely way to enjoy them.

It's still in alpha, but paper.li have put together a pretty impressive service, although they do warn that "newspapers" may be deleted at any time while they readjust the old load balancers and walk that dangerous tightrope walk that new services do. That's OK though, because creating a replacement newspaper is so easy, it's too trivial to be worth explaining (even for this trivial blog).
So why not give it a try? Long time Twitterers will enjoy seeing tweets in a new format and perhaps long time sceptics will be converted by something that actually looks useful and readable.
Only time will tell.

Further Reading

• Paper.li - Reading Twitter As If It Were A Newspaper (killerstartups.com)
• TweetyMail.com - Mixing Email With Twitter (killerstartups.com)
• tDash.org - A New Twitter Client (killerstartups.com)
• ManageFlitter.com - Tidy Up Your Twitter Account (killerstartups.com)
• Twitter and theregister. Why it doesn't work (go.theregister.com)

Fun and Games with Error 1316 - yet another reason why we don't want or need the Windows Installer

This morning I was trying to upgrade my Sametime 7.5.1 to Sametime 8.0.2 to see if I could fix (once and for all) some long running issues with external group loading and Voice Suite.
After downloading the ST 8.0.2 binaries, I closed my ST 7.5.1 and double-clicked on the sametime802.msi to start the install. Assuming it would auto-detect the existing, older version of Sametime on my system, and let me choose an upgrade option, I was a bit surprised it just exited, telling me to uninstall the old version first.

So, like an obedient little end-user, off I went to Start > Run > control > Add/Remove Programs (it's an XP Pro system) and found the IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 entry. I clicked remove and after about 2 seconds, I got this message:

Error 1316. A network error occurred while attempting to read from the file

C:\Windows\Installer\sametime802.msi

Now, you could get this error with almost any program that you were trying to install over the top of itself, upgrade or uninstall - it basically seems to occur when the msi entry is missing from the registry (I think, at least, it was that in my case) - it's not a Sametime specific issue.

Image via Wikipedia

You're obviously not going to get this if the program doesn't use or need msi, and I think software companies really shouldn't ever use the Windows Installer (msi). I'm not sure why any of them do, because it's terrible and a common source of problems. I remember myself and a work colleague having a nightmare with upgrading Symantec from version 9 to 10 a few years back on about 50 machines. I almost always failed with a cryptic error code, and in the end we had to run NONAV to completely remove every trace of Symantec 9 before we could get the version 10 installer to complete.


Anyway, I digress. If you're still reading, you obviously want to know how to get your program installed/upgraded/uninstalled, so I'll stop drivelling on... Here's how:

1. Go and grab yourself a copy of the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility from Microsoft  (note: you can read all about it here)
2. Double-click on the executable file you just downloaded - it should be called msicuu2.exe
3. You'll get the usual startup (unless you're a Windows 7 and possibly Vista user, where you'll just get a VBScript error instead ;-) and then you'll get presented with a list of all the programs you have installed that use msi, which looks like this:

4. Select the program you wish to remove, and click "Remove"
5. You'll see a typical Microsoft "Are you sure?" screen, but it explains that you are not actually uninstalling the program, but are in fact just removing the entry from the msi (Windows Installer) database:

6. Click OK, and you're done. You can now proceed to do whatever it was you were trying to do before, and it should work - no more Error 1316!

Further Reading

• How to resolve Common "Windows Installer" Problems (microsoft.com)
• Microsoft releases slew of stability-oriented Windows fixes (arstechnica.com)
• IBM adds meeting functionality to Sametime (v3.co.uk)
• Error 1316. A network error occurred (jakeludington.com)
• Windows Installer 4.5 - Download Free (techblissonline.com)
• RADVISION Enhances IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5 with High Definition Multiparty Conferencing and Telepresence Connectivity (eon.businesswire.com)
• Optimizing your Windows Registry (mt-soft.com.ar)
• Software FYI: Windows Error Code Lookup Tool (winextra.com)
• How Do You Get Users To Read Error Messages? (ask.slashdot.org)

Some Top Tools for Sysadmins

Image via Wikipedia

 jEdit
The world's most powerful editor and a pretty good IDE for too many languages to mention. Once you try the regular expression hypersearch function you won't ever look back.

Notepad2
For a super-lightweight, blindingly quick and simple replacement for Window's default editor, you can't go wrong with this baby. It's a genuine, simple replacement for notepad, unlike Notepad++, which (IMO) does too much to be really quick and simple, and too little to compete with jEdit or UltraEdit32. 

Beyond Compare
While jEdit has a comparison plugin - jDiff, it doesn't begin to compare (sorry) with Scootersoftware's minor masterpiece. This will compare directories, files of all types and all kinds of archives (even war, bin, cat and jar files, to name but a few). Old versions are available for free.

Fiddler2
While some might argue this isn't really in the domain of a typical sysadmin, I think understanding exactly why a page is throwing an HTTP error 500 code, or why a certain component renders slowly or never loads at all is pretty useful, especially since the post-financial crisis sysadmin typically has to take on many jobs that would normally fall to developers, webmasters and software engineers.

Radmin
While there's are a lot of remote control software out there, I've never tried one that is quite as good for remote administration of multiple Windows clients. Free is great, but sometimes, you only get what you pay for.

ZipGenius
While the version for 64-bit Windows 7 leaves a lot to be desired (they are still working on shell integration), ZipGenius rules on 32-bit Windows systems. Incorporating 7-zip binaries, as well as many others, such as C.A.K.E, UnRar and UnAce,there is little or nothing that ZipGenius can't open. It's missing the ability to simply GZIP files (it TARs and GZIPs them instead).

PuTTY
A free Telnet and SSH client that still can't be beat for its simplicity and power. Put it on a stick and shake it at every problem you've got.

Filezilla
The ubiquitous FTP client that's so obvious that we forget it's even there. There's a lot of competition in this area, but its still a winner for me. It's my FTP server of choice too.

phpMyAdmin
OK, so not all sysadmins use MySQL - but they should. There's every reason to have at least one instance of MySQL running, most sysadmins these days are at least part time solution developers. If there's a reason to have MySQL, there's a reason to have phpMyAdmin.

SQuirrel SQL Client
For every other DB, there's SQuirrel SQL. Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, Derby, posegreSQL - you name it, they have a driver for it.

Eclipse
There are so many plugins for Eclipse, and so many tools that can run on its framework, that there is no way a serious sysadmin should be without this. Want to put together a website with some PHP? Try the PHP perspective. Need to glue some disparate applications together, use the perl perspective. Got JVMs heapdumping? Use the memory profiler, load up some verbose gc logs and away you go. I could go on, but you probably get the picture. You can say it does a bit of everything, and none of it very well. But it is flexible, and its free.

Clonezilla
Backup and clone a system to many computers thanks to Clonezilla's use of multicasting. No need for the slavish one-at-a-time approach that can make a sysadmin suicidal, and that can only be a good thing.

LogMeIn
This has to be the biggy. You're offsite. You're online. You need to assist your client right now. They could be 40km away, or they could be 4,000km away. This one is priceless. Maybe you have to get to your work desktop while working from home without access to a VPN. If you're company allows it, use it. If it doesn't, invest in one of the many expensive alternatives - WebEx, Sametime Unyte, AOS.

Yes, I know, I'm missing something. Please tell me what it is and where to get it.

Further reading

• "Radmin Wanted" Campaign Completed with Striking Results (prweb.com)
• Everything - A Super Fast Portable File Search (techie-buzz.com)
• File Server OneHTTPD (ghacks.net)
• The 40 Most Popular Tools For Your System Admin Bag (sunbeltsoftware.com)
• tlbox - System Administration Tools (tlbox.com)

There's a new kid on the corporate email block

Image via Wikipedia

Cisco are most famous for their networking offerings, but they've been about much more than that for a long time now. With WebEx, they took more that their fair share of the corporate screen-sharing, web conference and IM. They have VoIP, they have video conferencing. In short, they have networking, in all its forms.

One of the few things they're missing is mail, right? Wrong. Cisco WebEx also provides mail services, but SaaS-based (in the cloud), rather than traditional, hosted services. They serve the mail service from the cloud, and support customers who choose to use Outlook as their mail client.

What next? Well, they replace the client-based Outlook experience with a fully online client offering, called Ciso Inbox, which will allow a user to do all the things they'd normally do in Outlook, but without ever having to leave the comfort of their browser.

This is starting to sound like gmail, right? Well, not really, because Cisco Inbox users can sort mails by "Topics", where they can classify mails by topic. This is not at all like gmail labels. No, honestly.

Still not convinced? Well, here's another way it's different to everything that's gone before, especially gmail:

You can link your inbox to social networking sites. One site, anyway: LinkedIn. That's right, the shit one that nobody in their right mind would ever be interested in.

What? It's like Buzz?! What do you mean? It's nothing like Buzz! You can't link Buzz to your social networking sites, now can you?

OK. So you can link Buzz to your social networking sites, but you can't post to them from Buzz, only the other way 'round.

Woohoo! Cisco Inbox scores.

Wait, no it doesn't. gmail can post status updates to Facebook.

So now I'm sure you can see all the reasons why Cisco Inbox is going to rule the world of corporate mail. Watch out IBM. Watch out Microsoft. Watch out Googl... Actually, google, you're safe.

Related articles

• Cisco CCNA Training Courses - Update (wealthyways4you.com)
• The Cloud's Important Role for WebEx on the iPad (readwriteweb.com)
• Cisco unveils WebEx app for Apple iPad (newstatesman.com)
• Cisco WebEx brings mobile meetings to BlackBerry (v3.co.uk)
• LinkedIn for Lawyers: LexBlog Network Webinar recording (kevin.lexblog.com)

Posting to your blog from Google Docs

Create striking data visualizations with Axiis

Image via Wikipedia

How do you present data or statistics in a way that makes an impact on the audience?
They've all seen histograms, bar charts, pie charts and 2d axial graphs so many times before, all you're going to do is provoke a yawn - at best.















Take browser market share statistics.
Add Degrafa and Adobe Flex 3.
What do you get?

Welcome to my Airport

jQuery is rather useful and fun, even if it has been around for quite a while now. You can find a lot of examples of things you might find a use for on your site, or a customer's site, and some bloggers have taken the time to compile "Top nn jQuery Tips and Tricks" lists, like this one, or this one, for example.

One such nice little script I came across earlier today is Airport, which imitates the effect of an airport information board, and would look a bit like this (please visit the blog post if you want to see it in action):

I like

Related articles

• Coin Slider: Free jQuery Image Slider Plugin (crenk.com)
• jQuery HTML Table Toolbox (noupe.com)
• New jQuery Podcasts (ajaxian.com)

10 Google Search Tips

Image by Somewhat Frank via Flickr

We all use Google search, and many of us will assume we would know the ins and outs pretty well, but you might find something here that you didn't know before, or forgot all about.

Further Reading

• 14% Say The Canonical Tag Doesn't Work on Google, Really? (seroundtable.com)
• Small Google Navigation Bug (seroundtable.com)

Google and McAfee uncover possible Vietnamese government plot to expose dissidents

Google, who pulled out of the Chinese mainland just last week, uncovered a plot to use malware infected computers to expose visitors to http://www.bauxitevietnam.info, a dissident website criticising Vietnamese mining project involving a Chinese state run company.

The malware made its way on to the unsuspecting users' target computers when they downloaded plug-ins to suppose Vietnamese characters from another site, that had itself been hacked unbeknownst to its owners. McAffee analysed the malware, which they said was a quite standard trojan for tracking user activity, creating access logs and sending them back to the perpetrators servers, currently believed to be elements of the Vietnamese government's security services.

Am I the only one who finds it hard to believe that China isn't involved here somewhere too?


Watch and read the full BBC World report.

Related articles

• Vietnam Dissidents Hit By Online Attack (huffingtonpost.com)
• Google: Online attacks aimed at Vietnam critics (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Google: Critics of Vietnam mine face online attack (ctv.ca)
• Google says online attacks used in Vietnam (cbc.ca)
• Google Hints At More Attacks From China (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)

Who would've thunk it? MySQL owns MS virtual territory

Image by betsyweber via Flickr

With Microsoft's heavy involvement in SecondLife, you'd think that its back-end DB would be SQL Server, wouldn't you? Well, you'd be half right - it's got SQL in there somewhere.

Portlet Update Issue

Last month I got a call about a WebSphere Portal issue where an administrator ran into trouble while updating a portlet. For no known reason, the update stopped. Retrying the operation didn't help.

Without going into too much detail about what the portlet did, suffice to say it was a fairly standard customer ordering portlet, processing new order information, passing this to inventory/order processing for... processing ;) updating the customer order status portlet, and repeating all the steps above as necessary.
In short, it was a cooperative portlet - which means that two or more portlets providing related business functionality were connected, or "wired" together (using, you guessed it, portlet wiring).

So, why would the update of such a portlet stop? I thought that perhaps it was too complex, that maybe too many portlets were wired together, and perhaps the update process was hitting some limitation with the "depth" of wiring. But, after reading up in the Portal Infocenter, I figured that there wasn't any way that this was happening. So I searched further - keywords "update cooperative portlet wired order broker" - and then... bingo! I found this:

Runtime behavior

The processing cycle of a portal request is divided into an action/event phase which processes user input and a render phase which generates markup output. The activity of the event broker subsystem occurs during the action/event phase. Event processing is usually initiated by a portlet action that is encoded in the current request URL. For example, this can be a portlet action URL, or a URL generated by a click-to-action menu. For requests that do not require portlet activity, but just produce output, the action/event phase can be skipped entirely.

If the request specifies a portlet action, that action will be executed and may itself publish output, either as a JSR 286 event or as a cooperative portlet property. If that output is wired to the input of one or more other portlets, a call to the processing methods of these portlets is put into the event queue. When the first portlet action is completed, the next event is taken from the queue and the target portlet is invoked. In the course of the event processing, the target portlet can trigger further communication calls which are then also queued. This process repeats until the queue is empty.

This allows the synchronization of multiple portlets within a single request-response cycle. For example, in a context of a customer order for some goods, all of the following can happen:

1. Transfer of the order ID to the Order Details portlet.
2. This first step also triggers the transfer of the tracking ID for the order to the Tracking Details portlet
3. The Tracking details portlet in turn triggers the transfer of the customer name associated with the order to the Customer Details portlet.
4. Consequently, all three portlets display information that pertain to the same customer order.

To avoid infinite loops, event distribution will also stop when a maximum limit of portlet calls is reached; this is considered an error situation and should be avoided.

Note: Event processing is completely sequential and never nested within one client request; each target event or action is fully processed before the next one is invoked. The portal guarantees that the order in which events are delivered to a single target preserves the order in which the events were published. However, for performance reasons, events for different targets may be re-ordered to minimize context switches.

 Note the highlighted sentence. I figured that this had to be what was happening, and gave the administrator the bad news that it was time to get the developer involved. The following week the new version of the portlet was released, and updates since then went without a hitch.