Thermal Noise

I do some senseless stuff from time to time. But this is really wierd. Why would anyone want to run Internet Explorer on Windows let alone Solaris.

But then the Government of India doesn’t seem to think so. Some of their Income Tax Department pages are thoroughly broken on Firefox. Anyway I got wine running inside Solaris and ies4linux worked like a charm. Click on the link for a high-res picture of microsoft.com on IE on wine on Solaris on AMD64

I recently came across an interesting hack in the linux kernel called “kexec”. exec() loads a userland program by overwriting the address space of the process calling the syscall. kexec is supposed to do the same with the kernel. Replace the running copy of a kernel with a newly specificed kernel.

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Every conversation with geeks not working in Sun this week has been about ZFS and ZFS making it to Mac OS X - Leopard. I get thoroughly drilled on Sun’s financial strategy and how we plan to make money rather than being asked about instantaneous snapshots and self-healing capabilities of ZFS. Thats one of the disadvantages of working for a “Non-Profit Organization” (of which we are very proud, anyway)

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Here is a list of posts I wrote on my official weblog about FOSS.IN/2006.
Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

It might well go down in history as the month that changed the World. Or atleast the part of the world that me and my fellow humans who get paid for creating strings of ones and zeroes are primarily concerned with.

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Funny mail archived on LWN that draws an analogy to the working of the infamous OOM on Linux.

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I am tired of seeing endless biased stories on Slashdot, Google Sci/Tech and Wired which claim to be "Tech News" feeds and stuff that "nerds" care about. Slashdot in particular has badly detoriated with time and become a Glitz and Glamour - populist news feed. Whenever Steve Jobs or Linus Torvalds sneezes, it makes the headlines on all news feeds and if Scott McNealy or Theo de Raadt die, they might be lucky to gain some attention. Today for example we had headlines saying "Apple wants to port ZFS to OSX". I don't remember any previous instance where they ever had some headline that said anything about ZFS. If Google suing Microsoft for making MSN the default search engine on IE7, demands to be the top headline, then something as revolutionary as ZFS should be a screaming bold, center, h1,#FF0000 formatted tag on every news site that claims to provide "tech" news.

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Twenty four hours ago, I wouldn't have dreamt of it. I had an awesome laptop with Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux and Windows on it. 86400 seconds later, I have gotten rid of my linux partition and made a free partition for playing around with ZFS on my laptop. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes for me. It has been about one month since I even bothered booting into Linux. FreeBSD has been my primary programming platform after OpenSolaris. Mind you, I still have a source tree of the latest Vanilla Kernel on my Solaris partition and I refer to it whenever I want to find a difference between the Solaris, FreeBSD and the Linux kernels. And if you think I adopt an "Anti-Linux" pose because I am employed by Sun or some shit like that, go, get a life.

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