Sun – Page 4 – Calum’s Wee GNOME Blog

Och-aye-demy

Just noticed that KDE’s Akademy conference is taking place in my old stomping ground of Strathyclyde University’s Computer Science Department in Glasgow… pity there are no usability sessions on the schedule, might have been tempted to gatecrash for nostalgia’s sake 🙂

Back in my day (1989-93), the Graham Hills building was called Marland House (we’d just bought it off BT), and its main function was to house a lab full of QLs that Sinclair had donated. Despite the stories in the press at the time, every student didn’t get one to take home– AFAIK they all stayed in the lab, and all we ever did with them was our 68k assembly language assignments (as set by Duncan Smeed, who’s probably still setting them today…)

The top few floors of the Livingstone Tower, on the other hand, housed (as they still do) the staff offices and the 3rd and 4th year computer lab, which at the time had just been kitted out with smart new Sun terminals (ELCs, IIRC– which looking back at them now were the forerunner of Sun Rays, I guess). Little did I know then…

Compiz on Solaris

Solaris x86 folks (with nVidia cards), come and join the rotating cube party.

Holiday catchup

So, first blog of 2007… bliadhna mhath ur, and all that.

It was a fairly quiet break for us this year, at least in terms of travelling and seeing family– we did neither, apart from a one-night spa break up the road at the Johnstownhouse Marriot in Enfield. (The food there really is gorgeous.)

We were out and about around town a bit though… went to see Jason Byrne on December 23rd, and we took in Casino Royale, Flushed Away, Happy Feet and Deja Vu at the cinema (mostly for free– thanks Curly!)

Work-wise, I’m trying out a Sun Ray 2 at home for the first time this week… the technology is certainly impressive, although it remains to be seen whether it’ll oust my laptop as my working-at-home tool of choice. It would probably be more useful if I had one on my desk at work as well, to get the full benefit of session mobility– maybe it’s time to retire my old Ultra 10….

Virtual Meetings

A nice review of the Meeting Suite prototype from Sun Labs. We’ve used a less-ambitious (audio-only) prototype of this for internal meetings for quite a while now, and it does work pretty well– even just its ability to show you who’s talking when you’re in a conference call full of people you’ve never met before is reason enough to use it.

Free Java, free videos

Since a couple of you were asking about it, there are now OGG versions of last week’s Java webcast videos (the webcast plus the ‘talking head’ segments from RMS, James Gosling, Mark Shuttleworth, Tim O’Reilly et al.) on Sun’s Open Source Java page.

DTrace your Macintosh

From the OSX Leopard sneak peek:

When you need a bit more help in debugging, Xcode 3.0 offers an extraordinary new program, Xray. Taking its interface cues from timeline editors such as GarageBand, now you can visualize application performance like nothing you’ve seen before. Add different instruments so you can instantly see the results of code analyzers. Truly track read/write actions, UI events, and CPU load at the same time, so you can more easily determine relationships between them. Many such Xray instruments leverage the open source DTrace, now built into Mac OS X Leopard.

Cool or what? Now, if they’ll just open source their GUI so we can reciprocate by including it in OpenSolaris… 🙂

Cool idea, but…

Any chance the GNOME Women’s Summer Outreach poster could drop the “Linux” bit? Or did I just imagine that we spent the last six years fixing, distributing and supporting GNOME on Solaris? 🙂

Sun Birthday Cluster

An inordinate number of people I know seem to have birthdays this week… not least my own (and two other members of the Sun desktop team) yesterday, which signalled the halfway mark to my threescore and ten. Or probably threescore minus ten, given the genetic predisposition of Lanarkshire folk to fatal heart attacks.

Today, one of the projects I work on has its first birthday too… OpenSolaris. I only work at the desktop end, which arguably isn’t where most of the coolest stuff is happening, so I’ll let the other bloggers talk about that sort of thing… but nonetheless, the result of all our hard work to integrate GNOME 2.14 into OpenSolaris just before Christmas is that for the first time in quite a while, I can generally use my Solaris desktop box all day every day to do my job, without resorting to Linux or OS X for anything other than testing. That has to be a Good Thing, and long may it continue!

apt-get install java

From now on, that’s pretty much all you’ll need to do to install the latest JRE/JDK on your Linux box¹… Sun have just changed the way they license Java binaries to Linux (and OpenSolaris) distros. Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo are already taking advantage of this, along with NexentaOS, BeleniX, and SchilliX on the OpenSolaris front. Read the DLJ FAQ, or get more info at the jds-distros project website.

¹ Ok, actually it’s apt-get install sun-java5-[jre|jdk]

Disruption

Part of the reason StarOffice (and by association, OpenOffice.org) is “just as complicated and feature overridden as the real thing“, of course, is that whenever Sun tries to take out feature X, customer Y complains and stops buying it. Being disruptive is so much easier when you’re starting from scratch with nothing to lose 🙂