Paul Ferrill's Radio Weblog

Sat, 06 Mar 2004 17:56:32 GMT

VB.Net and old DLLs

I'm trying to use an open source compression library written in ANSI C called LZO. You can see my posts to the VB.Net news group at:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&;lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&frame=right&th=3d70d4b2fffcf92&seekm=f3fe3446.0401200952.2b2a8b01%40posting.google.com#link1

and another at:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=ferrill+lzo&;hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=f3fe3446.0401091441.6fac5469%40posting.google.com&rnum=1

I'm sure this is an easy thing but so far I haven't figured it out.

Any ideas out there?

Wed, 21 May 2003 05:44:39 GMT

Marriott Connection

My wife and I recently celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary with a trip to Desert Palm Springs. We stayed at the J. W. Marriott Desert Springs resort. I've purchased the high speed Internet service before but this time the deal included free long distance and local calls for the $9.95 a day. I decided to bite since the kids were at home and we'd probably be making calls to check up on them.

The connection was great and we were able to stay connected with IM as well. I really like the presence part of IM - being able to tell if someone's online or not. Three of my kids have their own screen name so that makes tracking them on the computer a little easier. With work contacts it is really handy to just fire off a sentence or two and get an instant response.

My next wish is for the History Channel and similar cable outlets to make some of their programming available over the Web. We don't have cable and that would be a slick way to pick up some of their content. They've got clips on there but I want to watch an entire series - I'd even be willing to pay for that service. Not sure what a good price point would be for such programming though.

Fri, 09 May 2003 03:58:32 GMT

Cluster Confusion

I attended a briefing put on by Dell's High Performance Computing (HPC) group this week that brought to light a point of confusion that I hadn't really thought about before. The whole area of clustering seems to be greatly misunderstood by the large majority of computer users. I bet if you asked Joe Average computer user about the purpose of a cluster you'd get the response "to make things run faster." Partly true.

Clusters have gotten a fair amount of press in the open source community as a way to group together a large number of inexpensive computers and get lots of computing horsepower as a result. The Beowulf project (http://www.beowulf.org) was one of the first to highlight Linux in a clustered environment. Getting the most out of a Beowulf cluster requires specialized programming to take advantage of all those processors. Meaning you probably won't get any more performance out of your J2EE application unless you do some major recoding.

For many years the idea of a cluster meant high availability / reliability. If one node in a cluster failed a backup node took over. Novell sells NetWare 6.0 with a 2-node cluster license built right in. All you have to do is run it on a system with a shared disk environment and you're good to go. Most of the major server-class hardware vendors will sell you an off-the-shelf system specifically designed to work in a clustered environment.

At the Dell presentation they made a big deal out of the fact that no two clusters are exactly alike. They'll sell you a cluster if you'd like but you won't really get the most out of it unless it's tuned for your specific application. Understanding the problem that you're trying to solve will help in determining where to put your money to get the most bang for the buck. They even have a lab setup in Austin, Texas where you can bring your application in and test it out.

There will come a point in the not too distant future where how we do our jobs will not be bound by the computing resources available. As an engineer I have often had to "find a way around" a particular problem because of the limited disk space or a slow network connection. Pretty soon we'll have to start answering the question "if you had unlimited CPU, disk space, bandwidth, etc., how would that effect the way you do your job?"

Sun, 04 May 2003 05:34:59 GMT

Reflections from Networld Interop

It's been a long time since I've been to a reasonably well know trade show and seen as few people as this one. I didn't hear the final numbers but it couldn't have been the 40,000 that they were predicting. I'd be suprised if they had 20,000.

David Strom had a good quote in his Web-informant newsletter (you can subscribe here: http://www.strom.com/awards/index.html)- "the show floor was so quiet you could hold your own religious service." Amen to that. Microsoft even managed to show up without their Windows 2003 Server trial CDs. They were supposed to be there on Wednesday but I didn't manage to get one. They did have a Office 2003 Beta 2 Kit with lots of good stuff in it including a Windows 2003 Server RC2 disk.

I had a visit with IBM to see some of their new servers. They had one setup with a high end server running VMware using it as a virtual cluster machine to provide redundant backup for other independent servers. I had an interesting discussion with two of the engineering guys about the future of virtual software vendors. IBM has chosen VMware for several reasons but mainly for the features available.

Overall I found the show to be a downer. Many of the products that you would typically find at this show have entered into the commodity phase. While the whole area of wireless seems ready to explode there wasn't anything that really jumped out at me. The giveaways were pretty slim too!

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 19:23:38 GMT

Notes from Networld Interop

Just finished listening to John Chambers from Cisco at N + I. John was entertaining as usual and was generally optimistic about the networking industry coming back "real soon". He said that we'd be several months into the recovery before anybody realized it.

He showed some interesting graphs about Cisco's growth and the gains in productivity they have realized over the last several years. The most interesting part is that he feels there is more to be had. That's a pretty profound statement coming from a company that you would think has squeezed all they can from the IT fruit...

The general consensus in the audience (pretty small I might add) was that the recovery would be in the next 3 - 5 months. He said that also correlated with a poll he took at a CEO / CIO summit they held a few months back.

Overall size of the show is way down - exhibits are in a single hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center. I haven't hit the show floor yet but I'll do that in a bit. Free wireless is available in the press and Wireless pavillion area. You can get it everywhere for a mere $25 a day...

You'd think they'd have free wireless at a networking show! Novell's Brainshare event had better coverage than this.

Sat, 26 Apr 2003 23:40:16 GMT

MySQL on NetWare 6.5

One of the base installation types in NetWare 6.5 is a MySQL server. For my first setup I chose to have everything installed. To test out MySQL I downloaded the MySQL control center from the MySQL Web site:

http://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysqlcc.html

Connecting to the database was as simple as filling in the name of the server. I was able to add tables, create queries, and do other simple operations. Novell's iManager also provides a link to the phpMyAdmin tool to administer the database through a Web interface.

While at Brainshare I was able to talk to several Novell folks about their efforts in the Open Source movement. One such discussion included a guy from MySQL. He made mention that the biggest reason to choose a MySQL solution would be cost. The basic no support unlimited license for MySQL (included with NetWare 6.5) is $440. NetWare 6.5 will make it even easier to get heavy duty performance through clustering.

Sat, 26 Apr 2003 07:33:28 GMT

Painless NetWare 6.5 Install

Total time to install a NetWare 6.5 beta server with all services selected around 20 minutes start to finish. The only hitch I had was in configuring my monitor and video card to work with the XFree86 server they use. That took 3 or 4 minutes by itself.

Novell's iManager is a Web-based management console that looks like a real improvement on previous versions. The basic install created a 4GB partition on my 18 GB disk. I was able to create a new Data volume to use the remaining empty space with three clicks and entering the word "Data" in a text box.

More impressions as I go along.

Sat, 26 Apr 2003 06:53:19 GMT

NetWare 6.5 Beta

I'm installing the beta of NetWare 6.5 right now. One of the things the installer does is give you an option of picking a specific type of system to install. Examples include a simple Web server running Apache, an application server running Novell's appserver called exteNd (aka Silverstream), a database server running MySQL, or any of a number of other options.

You can download a copy and try it out yourself from:

http://www.novell.com/products/netware/beta.html#download

Every Brainshare attendee was given a beta kit for 6.5 plus a nice little binder with demo copies of a number of other products. The NetWare beta kit includes a demonstration server with a business solution built around a company called digital airlines.

More later...