Yusuf Goolamabbas

Been busy with work related things hence the quietness on the blog front. I need to spend some time figuring out the best way to upgrade my WordPress installation.

I had access to a Sun v40z Quad Opteron box in the office for some time. Very nicely engineered box, noisy as hell (12 fans I think). Ran some of my workloads on CentOS 4.0 and Fedora Core 3. Wanted to install Solaris 10 but ran out of time. I also have a socket 754 AMD64 box (MSI K8MM-V). The mobo is very nice and compact and runs very quiet. It’s running FC3 for now. I plan to install FC4 on it soon and see if there is any perf improvement with the toolchain compiled with gcc4

The AMD64 box with 1GB RAM and 2x120GB SATA cost around HK$ 3500 (US$ 450).

After a long break, got back into playing with Cherokee . Alvaro’s been doing a great job on it. He’s got event ports support now, epoll works more reliably now and I am very grateful that he took my suggestion and enabled O_NOATIME support in it. I think Cherokee needs some online documentation and then some evangalism to get more users using it.

So, whilst going through my daily fix of Slashdot , I chance upon this . I read it as Solaris/x86 has poor driver support. I guess Linus couldn’t very well say that Solaris virtual memory subsystem sucks :). I’ve heard similar dismissive comments from vendors during a Linux conference in HK and it’s sad that whilst Sun is opening the source, people aren’t opening their minds.

Whilst its true that Solaris x86 supports fewer hardware than other open source operating systems like Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD, what it does support it supports quite well. I for one would be very grateful if Solaris/x86 were to support the 3ware raid controller cards. Solaris 10 + ZFS and with Sun’s robust NFS server implementation would mean that Solaris owns the build-your-own NAS market. 3ware is supposedly looking into this

Sun has supported a lot of large open source applications including Gnome, OpenOffice and Mozilla. I am most familiar with the Mozilla developer community so I will write a bit about what I see missing from Sun wrt Mozilla community.
For those new to Mozilla development, Mozilla developers hang out on irc.mozilla.org in various channels. Won’t list them here.
There is always some developer or the other on the channel generally talking about the codebase, answering users question (even if they are in the developer channel) etc. I see engineers from Redhat, IBM and other organizations who have a vested interest in Mozilla on that channel. However, I haven’t come across Sun engineers on that channel unless they are having some issues with a commit they just did and the tree is burning.

Sun has a fairly large team in Beijing (all hail our mainland masters ) and it should be possible that like IBM/Redhat engineers they also mingle with others and not work in isolated silos. I’ve mentioned this to Henry Jia sometime back. Is it a cultural issue ? I don’t know.

Similarly, Sun could loan a pre-configured Solaris 10 box with Sun Studio to Mozilla Foundation and provide a walkthrough with Dtrace and libumem. If either or both of these technologies helps Mozilla performance, then its great for the Mozilla community and reflects well upon Sun.

Sun is looking for a community to sprout around OpenSolaris. Their behaviour with existing open source communities will shape the perception of potential OpenSolaris community members.

Solaris is not just the kernel. It’s a combination of the kernel and the desktop environment. The kernel group has done phenomenal work in getting the message out about Solaris 10 technologies such as Dtrace, Zones, SMF and FireEngine.
The OpenOffice/Mozilla/Gnome groups in Sun need to do the same. You see Dan Williams of Redhat responding to users at osnews.com in the discussion about OpenOffice 2.0 Preview . I’d expect someone from Sun to be also there clarifying misconceptions and communicating the larger picture.

I was chatting with Alvaro Lopez Ortega who works in Sun Ireland a few days back and mentioned to him about event ports and how I felt that would be great to have in his high performance web-server Cherokee . He hadn’t heard about it :(. I told him to drink the Solaris kool-aid and get cracking on better support for Solaris with Cherokee. But before that Alvaro has to do the autoconf magic to get Cherokee to compile with Fedora Core 3.

Maybe there is a lot of low hanging fruit to pick in terms of internal evangalizing which Sun needs to do.

According to the South China Morning Post SCMP (subscription required) , two more mobile phone operators launched third-generation (3G)services on Tuesday – but only for customers who had already ordered handsets. Anyone going into a CSL or SmarTone shop hoping to sign up on the first day of service was asked to put down a deposit on handsets – for delivery after Christmas.

Users are complaining that handsets they offered were still expensive and their multimedia content not attractive enough.
Looks like the market might appreciate the rumored iPhone from Apple

As to lack of content, my previous post mentions the need for Apple Hong Kong to get more aggressive in evangalizing Quicktime

Hong Kong currently has one operational 3G network run by Hutchinson .
In the coming months, rollouts will occur from the other 3 operators Sunday ,
Smartone , and CSL

Hong Kong has a mobile subscriber penetration of 117 % . I think this has to be a world record

Now, Apple has always maintained that its Quicktime technologies is very well suited for 3G networks. However, Quicktime is not listed as an option in the webcasts offered by the Hong Kong SAR Government

These webcasts are only in Real Media and Windows Media player format. I was speaking with someone recently who setup a streaming media system for another government dept where they used Windows Media and asked him why not Quicktime and he said that he hadn’t heard about it.

In my opinion, Apple should evangalize Quicktime streaming more strongly in HongKong, the demographics of the population is such that they are receptive of cool technology, there is a fairly sizable music/entertainment industry (John Woo,Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, Maggie Chueng just to name a few) here to provide content and the government itself promotes streaming media (albeit not Quicktime at the moment).

With the potential increase in 3G subscribers, I feel that Apple has the unique position of gaining substantial mindshare amongst the mobile phone/PDA user segment which may increase Apple’s market share in desktop. I guess it would also help if Apple Hong Kong provided discount to students similar to the Apple Education store in the US but that’s something for another day.

Masood Mortazavi blogs about the doubling of mobile phones since 2000.

Joi Ito also blogged about how China eats mobile phones for breakfast

Here’s some info from a Kyocera investor presentation

In order to revitalize the image of PHS in the market, we launced
handsets equipped with an Opera browser that enables access to the
Internet in the same way as a PC. These handsets also have the benefit
of a flat-rate for continuous Internet connection via AirH

Since its launch in May, stores have been selling out of this type of
handsets due to its popularity.

I am a bit confused about what people mean when they say “WAP is really big these days”. Is it the old/clunky WAP/WML that was available in 2000/2001 where most sites had a special version written in WML ? Or does WAP these days refer to a web-browser (typically Opera) on a cell-phone where the user is interacting via HTML over HTTP ?

New to world of writing a blog. Been reading a lot of blogs and corresponding with blog authors via comments and private email. Bear with me whilst I figure out life as a blog author