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Archive for June, 2008

from Windows to Ubuntu

Well, as we mentioned over on the Jazz Team Blog, my Jazz teammates and I just shipped Rational Team Concert 1.0, the first GA product built on the Jazz Platform. More on that later.

Since I?ve been working on what became Rational Team Concert for the last three years, I?ve gotten into quite a groove with regards to the technologies that I use and how I use them. But there were a couple of things I didn?t like and I promised myself that I?d fix them once we shipped and I could spare a few days of being less than 100%.

Chief among these ?things I?d like to change when I have the time? was my use of Windows XP as my operating system. For quite a while I was happy to use WinXP - mainly because I knew how to use it and IBM?s internal set of applications are optimized for Windows XP users. And when I say ?optimized? here I mean in the sense of lack of barriers - available, tested, and with support.

But after the past couple of years as I got more into web development, I started to experience some pain as a WinXP user because it seems like most of the interesting web technologies are optimized for Linux or Mac users, and for Windows users there?s usually a short appendix in the doc that says ?If you are unfortunate enough to use Windows, the following has been said to work??

So the day after we declared bit freeze on Team Concert, I downloaded a Ubuntu ISO CD image, burned that, backed up my data, then formatted my hard drive and installed Linux.

The remainder of this entry I?ll write in Steve O?Grady Q&A format so I don?t have to think in full paragraphs

Q: How did the installation go?
A: It was truly easy. Just insert the CD, restart my Thinkpad, and let the Ubuntu installer do its thing. The last time I tried to install Linux was probably about 5 years ago and I remember it asking me all kinds of questions for which I didn?t know the answer. I don?t even recall Ubuntu asking me any questions, and if they did they must have been trivial because I don?t remember them.

Q: What was your first impression of the user experience?
A: I was really impressed. After installing just rebooted, logged in, and I was in a windowing system which was very easy to understand. The top panel has three simple, logical menus (Applications, Places, System), shortcuts to key programs, then the right side of the top menu has iconographic shortcuts to some important system applications (networking, sound, date time, system control). The bottom panel just lists the open programs and has some other miscellaneous controls related to desktop management (minimize all windows, switch between desktop, etc.)

My biggest takeaway on the window manager user experience is that it seems like they?ve taken care to strip out as much low-value cruft and redundancy as possible, so that you?re left with a small set of orthogonal, useful controls.

Q: Any problems?
A: There were two sets of problems: 1) Finding and learning the Linux equivalent for simple Windows programs like Notepad and Paint. 2) Getting IBM stuff to work that was mainly developed and tested for Windows and/or Internet Explorer web browser. To get over these humps I bought a license for VMWare and spent much of my first week within a Windows XP virtual machine. Luckily VMWare?s networking worked much better than I remember it working, so between VMWare and the Windows XP image with VPN and Lotus Notes, I could get basic things done like work email from home.

Luckily my Jazz colleague Matt Lavin has been using Ubuntu for over a year, so he was able to help me learn how to do some basic but important things like connect my system to the internal Debian package server.

I?m still having problems using Open Office vs. Microsoft Office. When I modified a Powerpoint file in Open Office, it ended up getting mangled back in Powerpoint. I?m not sure who?s fault it was, but it sure was frustrating. I may look into running emulated MS Office on Linux.

Posted on June 30th 2008 by admin

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Open Enterprise Interview with Roy Russo, Loopfuse

One of the perennial jibes about open source is that it never innovates. This conveniently forgets that the World Wide Web was released as free software (Tim Berners-Lee contemplated using the GNU GPL before he decided to release it into the public domain). Despite the ludicrousness of the accusation, it is nonetheless always good to have further counterexamples.

A case in point is Loopfuse, which offers open source software for marketing ? hardly a field you associate with free software. As its Web site explains:

LoopFuse is the enterprise-grade marketing and sales automation suite offering organizations the ability to generate leads from their website, score and route leads, marketing campaign capabilities, full web analytics support, and full CRM integration with most major vendors. LoopFuse also offers the capability to measure ROI within marketing and sales department initiatives.

Here Loopfuse’s co-founder and CEO, Roy Russo, fills in the background to his company and its JBoss connection, explains why so many of the top open source startups use his product, and how the competition between open source and Software as a Service (SaaS) is likely to pan out in the future.

GM: What’s the background to the company’s formation? Where did the name come from?

RR: The original idea behind the company came about after 3 years at JBoss, using a competing product that severely lacked in usability and was insanely expensive to maintain and manage. After months of deep research in to the industry, several of us decided that we would focus our decades-combined email marketing, demand generation, and enterprise architecture experience in this industry that was dominated by one player with an overly complex and over-priced offering, backed by lousy support.

It was a natural progression for us: Our years at JBoss seasoned us for just this sort of undertaking… entering new markets with a better product, support, and pricing offering, while facing larger entrenched competitors. All I can say is that Marc Fleury taught us well.
The LoopFuse name is a take on ?Closed-Loop Marketing?, which is the traditional marketing term used for some of the functionality we provide.

GM: What business problems are you helping companies solve? How are marketing and sales different in the era of Web 2.0?

RR: The idea behind our flagship product, LoopFuse OneView, is simple: empower marketers with a complete suite of automated tools to better capture, nurture, qualify, and route leads to their sales people. In essence, we’re helping organizations lower their cost of customer acquisition, shorten their sales cycles, align sales and marketing goals, and improve overall operational efficiency. Ok, so that?s the marketing answer… in Roy-speak it translates to, “We help companies make more money”.

The benefits of our solution, are that it helps any-and-all business with an online presence. Web 2.0 companies are online 24/7 by nature, and pump a lot of money in to online marketing initiatives. What we bring to the table, is the capability for Web 2.0 companies to measure and refine what?s working and what?s not, by determining ROI and capture rates on all online marketing programs.

GM: Who are your main rivals in this space?

RR: Honestly, we only run in to one rival in the space, and it is the self-proclaimed ?industry leader?, Eloqua. The fact that it is the only rival we see, is testament to us being savvy marketers and separating ourselves from the bottom-feeders in the industry.

source: www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=975 buy cialis buy cialis buy levitra buy levitra buy propecia buy propecia buy soma buy soma buy levitra buy cialis buy propecia buy levitra buy soma buy cialis buy propecia buy levitra buy soma buy cialis buy levitra buy propecia buy soma

Posted on June 30th 2008 by admin

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Windows XP + Ubuntu Linux? Yes! It?s Possible

Running existing Windows installation on Ubuntu is piece of cake. What you need is Vmware player and 10 minutes of spare time.The easiest way to install Vmware player on Ubuntu is with Automatix. Automatix is great application that install software you can’t live without with cuple of clicks, including free Vmware player and it’s real time and nerve saver for newbies like me. If you don’t have Automatix, get it here.There are two ways you can get your existing Windows installation to run in Vmware player:

1. Vmware Conventer - It converts you existing physical Windows installation into virtual machine - means; if your Windows installation is 30 GB big, you will need another 30 GB of free space to store it somewhere. Not an option in my case.

2. To setup Vmware player to use physical Windows installation. Don’t worry, you will still be able to boot and use your Windows like you used to do.

Let’s start with the dirty work:

I will save you a lot of trouble with creating necesarry .vmdk and .vmw files. These are files that contain your virtual machine information and are used by Vmware player. Download windows.vmdk and windows.vxm but don’t just fire ‘em up yet. Read on.

Open console. You will use program “parted” to get some of your disk information and modify windows.vmdk file. Parted is already there in Ubuntu by default.
Strat parted with “sudo parted”, (or if you have several disks “sudo parted /dev/hdx” where x the letter of the disk containing Windows installation) and type: “unit s” then “print”. You will get something like this:

Note the underlined number. Now type: “unit cyl” and “print”. You will get this:

Again, note the underlined numbers.

Open windows.vmdk file with text editor and find this part of file:

Underlined values should be replaced with the values given by parted but there is a catch. Note that second RW value from vmdk file is not the same as the one you got from parted “Disk /dev/hda/”. Thats because first partition on disk is master boot record or MBR which points to boot files of operating systems. It’s lenght in this case is 63, and as far as I know, it is pretty standard value.

We will use copy of MBR so actual start point of Windows parititon is parted’s value “Disk /dev/hda” 240121727 minus 63.

240121727 - 63 = 240121664 <- result goes to vmdk file

Now, you do the same for your values and modify vmdk file. Don’t forget about “ddb.geometry.heads” and “ddb.geometry.cylinders”.

Type “quit” in parted and make copy of MBR. Copy-paste this command into console:
“dd if=/dev/hda of=windowsxp.mbr bs=512 count=63?

Ubuntu part of work is done but DON’T run Vmware player yet. Put vmdk and vmx files together with copy of MBR windowsxp.mbr which is already in your home directory.

Now reboot into Windows and set up another hardware profile for Vmware.
Start-> Control Panel-> System, click on Hardware tab and Hardware profiles. You will find Profile 1 (Current), highlight it and click Copy, give it new name, Vmware for instance and move it up.While at Hardware tab in System properties, you can disable driver signing.

One more thing to do. As you may know, work in Vmware machines is easier with Vmware tools. I took Vmware tools installation out of Vmware Server to spare you of downloading 100 MB + file and you can download it here. Unpack archive and put it somewhere on Windows partition.

If you don’t trust me, go to Vmware web site and download whole Vmware Server package for Linux. You will find Vmware tools for Windows inside windows.iso file.

Finally, boot back to Ubuntu, run windows.vmx, choose newly created hardware profile at prompt and install Vmware tools once in Windows.

Oh and, windows.vmx contains some of virtual machine properties like amount of RAM or enabled or disabled peripherals so scroll thru it with text editor and customize it with your own needs.

Posted on June 7th 2008 by admin

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Linux On Mars

When NASA needs an operating system for a Mars lander does it go knocking on Bill Gates’ door? The answer is no. The newly arrived on the planet Phoenix Lander is powered by a variation of Linux running on a specially hardened CPU and motherboard produced by IBM.

The CPU may not sound very exciting, and certainly would not be of interest to the average computer gamer. The Rad6000 CPU is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set CPU) that has been hardened to withstand the ravages of radiation in space. Built by IBM it clocks in at a screaming 33mhz. For those of you not familiar with the gobeldy gook that computer geeks espouse, 33mhz is about equivalent to the old and very obsolete Intel 386 processor that was all the rage a decade ago. You certainly could not run Microsoft Vista with this kind of speed.

As far as RAM is concerned NASA doesn’t need a lot, it is rumored that a scant 128 megabytes is all they need.

When it comes to software NASA need something that is bullet proof, and bullet proof software is what NASA is great at. It is not often that they make mistakes. At the heart of the Phoenix Lander is a variant of Linux, VxWorks, this is an embedded Operating System (that means it lives on a chip). It is designed in such a way that you don’t get the dreaded Microsoft ‘Blue Screen Of Death’, thats because it is pretty damn difficult to reach out to Mars and reboot the lander after the Operating System crashes. In the event of a serious problem VxWorks will reboot into a ’safe mode’, and wait for the controllers on earth to reactivate it, or send a patch for the problem.

The Phoenix Lander is not autonomous, it needs to be told what to do, and when to do it, but because of the huge distances involved there is a 20 minute delay from the time a command is sent from Earth and the time it is received on Mars. For that reason alone it is necessary for the software to have inbuilt ’self preservation’ tendencies.

NASA gets around the 20 minute time lag by sending a whole days worth of tasks at one time, I guess you could call it a daily ‘To Do’ list. This list is in the form of computer code written in a programming language called ‘C’. The NASA programmers and engineers sent approximately 1000 to 1500 instructions to the lander every day. One mistake in the code results in a day lost, or even worse damage to the equipment on the lander. I have been in the computer industry for over 30 years, and the industry standard for developing computer code is that the average programmer can write and test about 10 lines of code a day. In layman’s terms, if your computer program has 100 steps in it, it will take you 10 days to write and test it. NASA are doing what a regular programmer would take nearly 5 months to achieve in 24 hours!

I have nothing but respect for these people. Great job guys!

Simon Barrett

Posted on June 7th 2008 by admin

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The 10 Best Linus Torvalds Quotes

Torvalds: not one to mince his words…

1. “Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free.”

2. “Microsoft isn’t evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.”

3. “My name is Linus, and I am your God.”

4. “See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.”

5. “The Linux philosophy is ‘Laugh in the face of danger’. Oops. Wrong One. ‘Do it yourself’. Yes, that’s it.”

6. “Some people have told me they don’t think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph.”

7. “Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”

8. “When you say, ‘I wrote a program that crashed Windows,’ people just stare at you blankly and say, ‘Hey, I got those with the system, for free.’”

9. “I don’t doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I doubt rather strongly is that it will ever have the kind of impact that the people involved in virtualization want it to have.”

10. “Now, most of you are probably going to be totally bored out of your minds on Christmas day, and here’s the perfect distraction. Test 2.6.15-rc7. All the stores will be closed, and there’s really nothing better to do in between meals.”

Posted on June 7th 2008 by admin

Filed under linux, Linus Torvalds | No Comments »

Linux/Unix blog

Archive for June, 2008

from Windows to Ubuntu

Open Enterprise Interview with Roy Russo, Loopfuse

Windows XP + Ubuntu Linux? Yes! It?s Possible

Linux On Mars

The 10 Best Linus Torvalds Quotes

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