Micks Distractions

Sun has always said that any appli­ca­tion writ­ten for Solaris 6 will be for­wards com­pat­i­ble with any other ver­sion. It’s a big claim, but as long as the appli­ca­tion adheres to the API it’s pos­si­ble.
Occa­sion­ally you bump into things that don’t adhere to the API, (quite a lot of appli­ca­tions really). This is usu­ally caused by devel­op­ers think­ing that they should do things “this way”, because Sun does it oh so wrong all the time. Con­se­quently, you end up with legacy appli­ca­tions that can’t run on Solaris 10.

Enter Solaris 8 brandz zones. Being able to run legacy appli­ca­tions in a Solaris 8 brandz gen­er­ally gets you around most of the issues in the remain­ing apps that do stu­pid things. How­ever, there’s a cou­ple of quirks with a zone that can intro­duce odd behav­iour in an application.

Progress for exam­ple.…… Read On.
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I came across this cool lit­tle iPhone app in my recent adven­tures into the world of dis­tract­ed­ness. A growl client for the iPhone.

I recently moved my blog away from Joomla and over to WordPress.

This was for sev­eral rea­sons:
1. Joomla is a pain in the bum for blog­ging. Its too com­plex for a blog and I keep for­get­ting the dif­fer­ences between a “com”, “mod­ule” and a “plu­gin”.
2. Upgrad­ing is a pain in the bum. I just recently noticed that half my con­tent went miss­ing as part of a recent upgrade.
3. I had bought an iPhone and wanted to be able to post while out and about. Get­ting this going in Joomla was a pain in the bum, (although I dis­cov­ered after switch­ing to Word­Press that it wasn’t really Joomla’s fault).
4. My old TreeCam blog was run­ning on an old ver­sion of s9y, and I wanted to com­bine it all.
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This is a lit­tle rant from sev­eral angles.

Sun’s Java Web Con­sole is a nice lit­tle toy. Great for those peo­ple who pre­fer the less extreme learn­ing curve of a CLI, and great for man­ager types who like pictures.

I’ve used it sev­eral times before, but thought I’d try it in on x86 Solaris10u6 box I have here. Bloody Sun. You think a released ver­sion implies that it’s sta­ble, and work­ing.
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I have a lot of hard­ware run­ning 24x7 — PCs, routers, switches, fire­walls, SAN, and it’s all con­tained within a cup­board where I stick it all. It’s pretty cool, in that it’s a dust free envi­ron­ment, and keeps the noise at bay, which is my intent. It’s basi­cally a small con­tained com­puter room. What’s not cool about it, is that it isn’t.
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One of the things I enjoy see­ing is big engi­neer­ing. That is: Engi­neer­ing on a big scale. I had the good for­tune to be offered a guided tour of a cable lay­ing ship. Which is a ship that lays cables, (fun­nily enough).

Read on.
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I’ve been play­ing around with Solaris jump­start recently. I haven’t used it since the early days. It seems that a lot of the old prob­lems still exist. So, I’ve listed most of the com­mon prob­lems and their solu­tion here. This also cov­ers Sun’s JET, (Jump­start Enter­prise Toolkit).
This is a Work In Progress — so I’ll be updat­ing this from time time as I come across issues.
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