tola

I’m having a real problem understanding the idea of an SDK. The entire concept is becoming more and more spleurgh (if you don’t mind my making up words). The concept makes sense when tit ties in with a particular IDE. And here’s the problem - why should anything tie into an IDE? The advantage of using something like Ant is that it allows you to build both inside an IDE and outside.

I built a “build bot” a while ago which took its own parameters and called csc.exe from the command line to help do building - because my knowledge was small, it seems that I had missed the point of msbuild. This takes the same project files that Visual Studio produces to do the same builds.

The only problem I have now is that I don’t know if there is a mono alternative to msbuild. If there is, that would be awesome, becuase I can define the build just as I would a java ant build, and know that it would work no matter what kind of system you where going to build for.

So is a SDK actually more then libraries? When it comes to mobile development, they seem to be libraries, maybe some tools which integrate into a particular IDE (for example Eclipse) and maybe also an emulator or test tools of some kind. Perhaps also, with an SDK is just a marketing thing - that you expect with an SDK a higher level of support. 

Why am I writing this? Well, I’m currently struggling with the Windows SDK for .Net 3.5 - I’m having massive problems with it and its compatibility with the Visual Studio C# Express. It would be nicer if instead of complex SDK installers (and from my experience, it is the installer which is the problem) they had Library versions or just “unzippable” folders to get the tools out. 

Anyways. Windows SDK and Visual Studio do not like to be installed in that order - Visual Studio first, THEN the Windows SDK (or at least, if you’re using Express editions because you’re an indie development like me)

• Knoodl
  Knoodl facilitates community-oriented development of OWL based ontologies and RDF knowledgebases. It also serves as a semantic technology platform, offering a JAVA service-based interface or a SPARQL-based interface so that communities can build their own semantic applications using their ontologies and knowledgebases.
• Catalogablog: eXtensible Catalog NCIP Toolkit
• visualvm
  Java "troubleshooting" tool
• Lambda Probe
  Monitoring and management tool for Tomcat
• The Rasoi - Restaurant & Bar
  somewhere to try for food in Leamington
• nexus Maven repo manager
• sventon - subversion repository browser

As usual, the TTLLP office will open noon ’til mid-evening on 1 April. I’ve already noted one thing on identi.ca that might be an April Fool’s joke (surely it’s not real) and we’ve enough to do without double-checking everything we’re told.

Further, timezones and international communications (we work with companies from +1100 to -0900 IIRC) makes April Fool’s jokes really tedious. Unless it’s done really carefully, the joker is probably the fool, either too early (31 March) or too late (afternoon) for some of the targets.

I recently upgraded the hardware of my old desktop PC, with the aim of providing the house with a new-ish Linux machine for watching movies and using the internet, and a Windows machine for writing music and playing (old) games. My plan was to use two hard disks: one for Linux, another for Windows, and choose which to use at boot time.

Normal procedure is to install Windows first, then install Linux into a spare partition on the same hard drive (Windows tends to overwrite any disk you put it on). But it's easier to get a Linux machine up and running, see what hardware you've got, and get a decent system without needing to go and find loads of old drivers. So I decided to install Linux first. I plugged in a drive for it as the Primary IDE drive, and installed Ubuntu Linux onto it.

Then, I unplugged the Linux drive, plugged the other drive in, and installed Windows 2000 onto the second drive (just to make sure Windows couldn't overwrite Linux). Got that working too.

Then I plugged the Linux drive in, as the first drive on the IDE cable; and the Windows disk as the second.

The trick then is to get grub (the Linux bootloader I'm using) to present you with both disks as options as boot time. There's a sample configuration in /boot/grub/menu.lst, but that didn't work for me: it looked like it was working, then just hung. I tried a couple of things, but nothing which worked.

Finally, I found this blog entry and used the configuration there. The trick is to make Windows think it's installed on the first disk on the IDE cable. I added this to the bottom of menu.lst:

which does the trick! Now I get a working Windows 2000 option in my grub boot menu.

• Second Thoughts: Blue Moon

  “Look out, Lindens, here it comes. One in a blue moon, a virtual world comes along that might really challenge Second Life — and now it’s here, Blue Mars. Sign up for the beta here that is reportedly opening in June — but only if you are a developer who wants a preview of how your content made on professional software like Maya will look in this world. It’s not ready for the proles yet.”

  tags: OB, virtual worlds, Second Life, Blue Mars

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
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I’m sure there must be lots written about group system administration, but it doesn’t seem to be written in either the FAQ, the reference or even the venerable FDL’d SAG, so I hope it’s not a(nother) completely silly question. As I was reminded by the Paralysed Perl Package Problem, sometimes other system administrators can really mess you up by changing things without documenting what, how or why they made that change.

My current solution on that system is to put the message “please record any major system changes with the command dch -f /root/changelog -i 'description of change'” in the /etc/motd file. I’ve also installed apt-listchanges with a suitable configuration. For TTLLP servers, there’s not a problem because we all use the same task tracker to make notes.

For shared/remote servers, I’d like to have something better than fault-finding and the intrusion detection tools, but stop short of trying to require all system administrators to use a particular version control on the system configuration, or trying to require them to use a centralised bug tracker application. (The other sysadmins work for other people, so we can’t require them to do it and “pay us to manage a repository/bug tracker for your server” is an awkward sell anyway.)

What do you do?

• Netflix To Charge 300% More For Blu-ray Discs — InformationWeek

  “Under the new plan, subscribers who were paying $16.99 per month for Netflix’s popular three-discs-at-a-time plan, plus the $1 Blu-ray premium, will now have to pay $20.99 per month in total, representing a 24% overall increase in the cost of the plan.”

  First Silverlight, now this.

  tags: OB, Netflix

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
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• Qimo
  Linux distribution aimed at 3+ year olds

I just finished reading The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon after finishing A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge last week. Now on to Startide Rising by David Brin. I’m working my way through my list of Hugo and Nebula award winners. The first and third books mentioned are good in that way because they each won both awards.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
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• The Open Cloud Manifesto Debuts

  “Meanwhile, despite the early hoopla about the manifesto and who is supporting it, the effort is a step in the right direction. And it is expected that the big-name holdouts will come to the table in some form to have open discussions about the topic.”

  tags: OB, cloud

• Microsoft, TomTom Settle Patent Infringement Battle

  “Microsoft and TomTom have come to an agreement to settle patent infringement claims the companies made against each other. The cases have been settled through a patent agreement under which TomTom will pay Microsoft for coverage under the eight car navigation and file management systems patents in the Microsoft case.”

  tags: OB, TomTom, Microsoft

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
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The very, very secret (not really) Open Cloud Manifesto is now published and available online.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
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Posted under: Software, Standards.
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Here’s a video from YouTube of IBM Researcher Jonathan Appavoo talking about IBM and open clouds:

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
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Whenever there is a major evolution in IT technology trends, the industry has a choice: do we go with proprietary data formats, protocols, and programming interfaces, or do we take a more open approach, allowing the provider with the best offering and service to win without locking in customers?

Some vendors seem to strictly favor the former approach, rushing to do things in unique and protected ways, hoping that they get many customers lined up quickly, and then making it very difficult for them to leave. To me this has always been a business strategy that screams “our offerings and prices aren’t good enough to keep customers, so we need to find another way.” It almost seems like a self-esteem problem, though at a corporate level. It’s often masked by clever marketing and subtle twists on more open messages.

So here we are near the beginning of the Cloud Computing Era. The promise of clouds is that they will quickly and economically give you the computing environments you need in scalable, secure, and flexible ways.

Don’t have a data center? No problem, run it in the cloud. Need a thousand extra processors to handle that holiday retail load? No problem, run it in the cloud. Need to allow your employees and supply chain partners to access the information you need to be profitable and grow? No problem, run it in the cloud.

At the beginning of such eras, silos of functionality appear that prevent easy movement between them by customers. Do you remember before the Internet and World Wide Web really took hold in the mid-1990s? We had individual online providers like Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL to which people could subscribe. You could logon to each, read your email, get information, and interact in a limited way with friends and colleagues. You couldn’t really reach across from one service and do something in another in an interoperable way. Once the web and its open standards came along, there was no need to have such siloed services, and they all evolved into more open models or went out of business.

So it is now with cloud computing. The providers we have now are open or closed to more or lesser extents. Some are embracing open standards and some are trying to become de facto standards. I don’t begrudge anyone business success in this area. I do begrudge any attempt to lock me into a silo that prevents my moving my data and my applications somewhere else.

Moreover, I think very few people and customers will use just one cloud from one provider. We must have open standards around data formats, security, and management so that cloud computing reaches the lofty goals we have for it, rather than have it spiral down into proprietary islands of insecure and difficult to manage offerings.

Let me leave you with six choices that you should consider as you decide how or if you want to start using cloud computing. Once you settle on your chosen alternatives, present them to the cloud providers you think might get your business. If those providers can’t give you what you want or if they come up with all sorts of excuses about why you really should go with their proprietary view of the world, move on. There will be plenty of clouds in the IT sky from which you can choose.

• You want a vendor who goes it alone, inventing proprietary and non-interoperable ways of working with its cloud; or you want a vendor that has a great product and service that is based on open standards and industry collaboration.
• You are comfortable with being locked into a particular provider’s cloud offering for a very long time, perhaps years; or you want the flexibility of keeping your options open and going with a provider that will let you shift to someone else’s offering should you choose.
• You are fine with immature, vendor defined “standards”; or you want your cloud offerings to maximally used tried and tested open standards developed by industry leaders.
• You want the industry to be bogged down in bureaucratic standards creation for years; or you are all for the creation of just the new standards we need, but created and tested in a timely and cooperative manner.
• You think the needs of the cloud providers come first; or you you think your needs as a cloud customer and user should be primary.
• You believe that the more the industry is fractured around many cloud organizations and standards groups, the better it will be for you; or you want cooperation, transparency, and accountability in the way cloud technology is standardized and becomes mainstream.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
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I've got some speaking engagements coming up, two of them free of charge.

• This Wednesday I'll be at Manchester United FC delivering the opening keynote at the Local Government Open Source Conference.
• Then on April 15 I'll be speaking at CommunityOne North, which is still open for registrations free of charge.
• It is immediately followed by GoOpen 2009, where I have just agreed to deliver a short keynote and to join a panel with Bruce Perens, Maddog and Larry Wall.
• I also just got the acceptance note for a session at CommunityOne West in San Francisco. I've not been asked to speak at JavaOne (must be a conspiracy against... oh, I don't know, who is the conspiracy against these days?)

If you're attending any of these, be sure to come and say hi!

Ok, so I got a little bit carried away with my Twittering last week when I was in California. Actually, I don’t think it was the Twittering, it was the feeding the tweets into Facebook as status updates. The latter are updated fairly infrequently, maybe one or twice a day, while tweets are created as soon as you think of something clever or at least move a couple of inches from your previous position.

My wife told me it was too much, and she told me about people (nameless so far, but I have ways of finding out) who told her it was too much. My daughter told me it was too much. My son asked me is I had leveled my mage in World of Warcraft. He neither Twitters not Facebooks, and that’s just fine.

This angst came about because of a mismatch between the accepted social networking update frequencies of the two services. Since there is no one service that does everything for everybody, it is tempting to link them together so that some updates from one go into the other. That way you don’t have to run around and put the information into all of them. The problem with this particular link-up, as well as using services like FriendFeed, is that while your original text goes into one place and then gets distributed, the comments can appear in one or more places. So while you insert the message once, you have to keep running around seeing if anyone said anything about it on the various sites to which it was delivered.

What to do?

Option 1: Tweet less frequently. I tweet at an irregular pace, and this could work, but it seems counter to the basic idea of Twitter.

Option 2: Cut the link between Twitter and Facebook. That way I won’t annoy my Facebook friends but I still have to update my status there if I care to.

Option 3: Cut off Facebook wall updates to people who complain. Drastic, but doable.

Options 4: Use the Selective Twitter Status application for Facebook. With this, Twitter and Facebook are still connected, but only tweets that end in #fb get copied in as Facebook updates. Thanks to Eric Newcomer for suggesting this to me.

I went with the final choice and so far so good. I’ve sometimes forgotten to add the #fb, but I can get used to it.

The experience has left me somewhat reticent to Twitter much, but I think I can work my way back. Of course, my Facebook friends might never find out. (grin)

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
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I've finally reached home again after two weeks of travel in the US and Europe; here are a few links to celebrate.

• Waiting for the Barbarians by C. P. Cavafy
  "Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution."
• More Banking Stupidity: Phished by Visa
  I completely agree with Ben here. The schemes both Visa and Mastercard are running are totally ridiculous, exposing their customers to extreme risk of phishing and leaving them with all the blame when it happens. The schemes are the perfect expression of the contempt with which the credit card industry views its victims (AKA customers).
• Did Red Hat lobby for, or against software patents in Europe?
  Against. I was there & saw it.
• PETA Killed 95 Percent of Adoptable Pets in its Care During 2008
  I'm sure PETA will torch the homes of the people who wrote this very carefully so as to avoid harming any pets.
• Security fears spark Linux drive in Iran
  This has actually been going on for ages I believe, but underlines that, for governments, open source is about sovereignty, as the Brazilians have said for years.
• Internet Archive, Sun create 'living history' of Web
  The Archive moves onto - and in to - Sun. It's an asset of enormous value to us all, I am pleased Sun is able to help it.
• 50 million
  That's 50 million downloads of OpeneOffice.org 3 since it launched in October - amazing. The true number is probably double that, since this does not include package downloads within GNU/Linux distributions. Great way to celebrate Document Freedom Day!

That's it - Europe is now messing with the clock too, so the usual northern hemisphere time-zone spacings are back in place and the Twilight Zone is ended. Now we all need a new excuse for missing those telephone conferences.

• Novell releases SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 - Network World

  “The release runs “with near-native performance” on five major hardware platforms (x86-32, x86-64, Itanium, IBM Power and IBM System z), as well as on all major hypervisors (VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen). And, as service providers and vendors increasingly look to provide services in the cloud, SLE11 is also supported in initiatives like Amazon EC2.”

  tags: OB, Novell, Linux

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
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I’ve previously mentioned that I’ve had some problems recently with the external drives I used for Time Machine on my Mac desktop. The idea with Time Machine is that it efficiently saves snapshots in time of the state of your hard disk, allowing you to go back and retrieve old files. I initially used an Iomega 500Gb external drive and that worked for about a year.

When that failed last month, I bought a 1Tb Western Digital Drive with FireWire support. I never could get the disk to mount via FireWire, though it did via USB. That was frustrating, because I had paid extra for the FireWire support. After a few weeks, that drive failed and will be sent back.

This week I moved on to a LaCie 1Tb drive. It’s  small and very attractive, just a sleek black box sitting under the monitor. It mounted immediately and offered me the chance to either make one partition or two, with the smaller 32Gb partition useful for transferring among other operating systems that might be on the machine. I went for the latter choice since that appeared to give me more options.

I started the initial Time Machine backup and it hit about 12Gb and then stopped. Time for a web search. Turns out that this is a well known problem if the drive is partitioned with an MBR, a Master Boot Record. This was the case because I had chosen the two partition option. I went into Disk Utilities and reformatted the drive to use the GUID partitioning scheme on the whole drive, then went to bed.

In the morning the 120Gb of 1,431,893 files were less than half copied to the external drive. Huh? Back to the web. What was recommended was that not only do you format the drive as above, but fully erase it in Disk Utilities. I did that, reformatted, and started the backup via the menu item I got when I right clicked the Time Machine icon on the Dock.

This was noticeably faster. It’s been about 4 hours now and only 9Gb remains to be backed up. Within the hour the initial image should be in place and the incremental backups can proceed.

Conclusion: Time Machine is very finicky about the state of the external drive it uses. For a Mac, the whole process is much more complicated than it should be.

© Robert S. Sutor for Bob Sutor, 2009.
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Posted under: Hardware.
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