ex tempore

back from a (too short) one week vacation i commited today updated versions of splunk, google-earth and liferea to rBuilder. liferea is on the default foresight:devel branch, google-earth can be get by issuing a ’sudo conary update google-earth=reboot.rpath.org@rpl:devel’ and splunk by doing ’sudo conary update splunk=splunk.rpath.org@rpl:devel’. If you are already using splunk be sure to backup your config first (see here). If no issues arise i’ll bump the Free Splunk Appliance Server in next few days. For the more brave xgl, compiz and related deps are already cooked in fl:devel, but some issues remain. Once Ken Vandine finishes the move of foresight linux to xorg -7.0 things will be a lot more smooth and then i’ll post a detailed how-to. On the interin i ‘m willing, of course, to help the brave souls, who wish to try it, in #foresight.

A bee flies under some blossoms while collecting pollen from a butterfly bush in Wilmington, Delaware, July 19, 2006. REUTERS/Tim Shaffer (UNITED STATES)

Oh, by the way… a working (at least together with a Nvidia card) Xgl is already cooked in fl:devel on the foresight repo at rBuilder.

this one, extreme (in Netherlands), and this one, also as extreme, in India. Are we really confined to these two ‘lectures’ of the world, without any middle ground?…

How ‘Saving The Net’ may kill it.

Get the ISO, while it’s hot, at rBuilder Online.

As any reader of it already discovered the good people of Planet Gnome these days is ‘discussing’ politics, namely the Middle East present mess. The issue isn’t, nor it should, of course, about free speech – is simply about common sense, and… knowledge of the facts. In fact the issue shouldn’t be about black and white, abound being pro or anti Israel, but about knowing the facts, and then, and only then, talk about what is happening. Doing otherwise doesn’t add anything to a solution, neither adds greater credibility to those who do it. But lets go to the facts… Fact is that the first Israeli soldier kidnapped by the military (hard-wing) Hamas, was one day after the political wing of Hamas has reached a tentative agreement with Palestinian President Abbas regarding the recognition of Israel as having the right to exist as a state. A coincidence for sure. Fact two – Lebanon. Sorry, but is really Lebanon a sovereign state ? Really ? Or is it simply a Syrian protectorate ? Remember the brutal murder of former Lebanese Prime-Minister ? Hariri ? Well, all evidence pointed to Damascus, but then, no special international rage emerged. It is brutally obvious that neither Iran nor Syria want peace in the Middle East and is also obvious that current developments (from all parts) aren’t the best way to achieve any kind of solution. But ignoring evidences and painting black and white pictures won ‘t help either, and only leads to more confusion. Unless we ‘re already in a state where facts simply don ‘t matter anymore. That would be sad, very sad, really.

(InfoWorld) – Chinese authorities have jailed a journalist for two years for posting articles that were critical of Chinese society and called for democratic reforms on the Internet, a media watchdog group said Thursday. Li Yuanlong, a journalist for a daily newspaper in Bijie in southwestern Guizhou province, was sentenced to two years in prison and loss of his civil rights for a further two years for posting “subversive” articles on the Internet, Reporters Without Borders said. Li’s trial was held in May and the verdict was announced Thursday.

Li posted several articles online that were critical of modern Chinese society and called for greater freedom and democracy, Reporters Without Borders said. Two of his articles, entitled “Becoming American in Spirit” and “The Banal Nature of Life and the Lamentable Nature of Death,” angered officials, it said. Li was arrested in September 2005, but he was not charged until February of this year.

To get a written confession from Li, Chinese authorities “kidnapped his wife and held her in a hotel room for 10 days and detained his 16-year-old son for a week,” Reporters Without Borders said. In February, Reporters Without Borders estimated that 49 dissidents and 32 journalists were serving prison sentences in China on charges that stem from Internet articles and online criticism of Chinese authorities. That tally includes the high-profile case of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist jailed for 10 years on subversion charges.

As seen by the Germans:

As seen by the French:

As seen by the Italians:

As seen by the Americans:

As seen by the press:

and now…

As seen in the Middle East

As seen by the japonese:

On the other hand… the french secret service ‘real’ video footage shows things as they happened (Chirac style)…

via The Register

(updated 15/07)

Ian Pratt, from XenSource, and a core xen developer, posted in xen-devel a detailed xen roadmap. Fundamental reading.

Yesterday, July 11, was one one of those Sun days… Lots of hardware announcements, good press, and even positive notes from stock analysts, with a long time critic, says CNET, taking time to upgrade SUNW stock rating. Lets be fair, the new gear is cool, and deserves all the positive quotes it is getting but good hardware wasn ‘t never Sun’s weeakest spot – software is.

And yesterday no one, from Sun, talked seriously about software. A good idea since Sun’s software side is seriously messed. Java ? A damn good idea that stopped in time. It’s issue isn’t opensource or not to opensource it, it’s complexity. Java, when it come, was simpler and more flexible than anything else, today is a gigantic soup of acronyms. It ’s still good, and usefull, but someday someone at Sun forget what was java about when it was born. One takes a look, now, at python, a look at ruby, and ruby and rails (take this post i got from… yes, from planet solaris), and feels the same today, that feeled once – those tecnologies are now to java, what java was once to C++. And that is saying almost everything. Will not replace java, as it hasn ‘t replaced C++ but then, that wasn’t the idea. The idea was to make a paradigm shift – write once, run everywhere. Now the idea was upgraded to things like K(eep)I(t)S(imple)S, D(ont)R(epeat)Y(ourself), convention over expression. In short, the revolution is going, with Sun sitting in the sand. Embedded Java? Sure, as cool as it gets, but even python was recently ported to Symbian…

Then, we have gigantic and ever expanding Sun ’s ’software stack’. Sun should take a look about what it is doing in hardware, commodizing what has to be commodized, and differiantiating where trully matters, which is, by the way, exactly the same thing that … IBM is doing in it’s software business. But no, Sun insists in having everything and the kitchen sink, doesn ‘t seeming to have the minimal idea about what is essencial, and what is accessory, about what they are really good, and about were they are simply a burden. Take a look. They fail to market decently trully amazing products (like they ‘re SunRay stuff) yet they insist in market and invest in stuff that doesn ‘t makes any sense, for them. Mail software ? Do they really think they have something comparable, for instance, to Zimbra ? Web Servers ? Does Sun really think that investing against apache (instead of building on top of it, as IBM does) make any strategic sense ? Java IDEs ? Is really that wise wasting time to compete against eclipse ? SunStudio ? Does the world needs another general purpose compiler ?
And then we have solaris, the alleged crown jewell, opensourced and everything. So what ? Sun seems to forget a basic, and elementar, fact – numbers changed from ten years ago. Demographics too. Then, Solaris was the de facto standard in the data center, almost everybody, from school up, had grown with Sun gear, and solaris, close to his mind. Today, things are trully different, like it or not, its either Linux or Microsoft, with the remaining Unixes relegated to niches. Solaris only trully appeals to a few, and Sun, again, is making all the moves, to ensure that it doesn ‘t succeed. While selling boxes that run linux as good or better than anything else, it constantly bashes it, making it a second class citizen in it’s software world. Solaris is supposed to be the best thing, the crown jewell… Really ? Then, how to explain the dumb proposal do HP, made recently, to dumb it together with HP-UX, and make something new ? Is that the kind of assuring news that will get people to left Linux and embrace Solaris ?

More, for all the cool stuff it has, Solaris is in some very critical areas simply outdated. Take software packaging, a gigantic pre-historic mess. Take Xen support, a critical item, where Solaris is at least 12/18 months behind Linux. And take some gigantic misteps. Sure, zones are fine but, was that really bright wast time and resources and add a Linux personallity to them (supposedly to run RH (!) certified SW) and delay xen? ZFS is fine too, and dtrace, but does that justify the switch ? Won ‘t Sun gain much more if it made ZFS to run on top of Linux ? Take the acclaimmed niagara servers, after all they serve more http requests under linux, than under… solaris. Take even Nexenta, basically Ubuntu and debian repackaged on top of the solaris kernel, done well outside Sun, and we start to see that something is deeply wrong in Sun’s priorities. After all, they are no more the ecosystem, they are part of something larger, much larger. Worst , the excessive and melodramatic overhyping of solaris ends damaging the HW side of the business, specially the x86 side. I know lots of people who distrusts Sun’s Opteron boxes (trully world class) simply because they think that Linux won ‘t run fully on them. Not true, but perception matters.

Sun needs to get humble again, needs to get its priorities straigh, if it wants to ever again become trully relevant in the software world, not only opensource…

‘An excellent political biography of the former prime minister exposes the evil genius of the man who practically owns Italy.’

a very good resume of Don Berlusconi from Salon.com

I’ve upgraded the splunk package in rBuilder Online to the latest upstream release (2.0.10). Before building a new version of the Free Splunk Appliance Server some extended testing would be nice, so feedback is welcome. Install, on your rPath install, is as as simple as typing ‘sudo conary update splunk=splunk.rpath.org@rpl:devel‘. Happy splunking.

A mouse rides on the back of a frog in floodwaters in the northern Indian city Lucknow June 30, 2006. REUTERS/Pawan Kumar (INDIA)