HP Introduces New Blades – Including Superdome!

At Tech@Work in Germany, HP introduced a number of new Itanium blades with the new Tukwila chip (or Itanium 9300). The new blades will work in blade chassis that also support x86 blades.

The real news is that Superdome servers are also available in the same chassis. Thus, x86 and Itanium servers can be side by side with Superdome servers.

On top of this, all blade types can use the same power supply and other parts. This means that parts can be swapped, and means lower costs for HP (fewer types of parts) and lower costs for customers as well.

Added to all this, there was the March 2010 update to HP-UX.

This truly is exciting. Imagine managing x86, Itanium, and Superdome from the same interface…

Perl 5 Development Resumes: 5.12 Released

Perl 6 development began in 2000, and ten years later it remains unready for production; thus several developers have come along and kick-started Perl 5 development once again – and now Perl 5.12 has been released.

Jesse Vincent made the announcement on the Perl development mailing list; he also announced the new release schedule for Perl 5, which is a production release in the spring and a development release monthly. The official release page for Perl 5.12 is over at CPAN:
http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.12.0/

Over at ActiveState – the best-known supporter of commercial scripting languages such as Perl, Ruby, and Tcl – the ActiveState blog announced the release of Perl 5.12, followed by the release of ActiveState Perl 5.12.

For HP-UX, Merlijn Brand announced he was building Perl 5.12 for HP-UX, and the HP-UX Porting Centre already has Perl 5.12 packaged for download.

HP uses ActiveState Perl for HP-UX, but uses standard Perl on OpenVMS. I don’t see any word about 5.12 on OpenVMS, but no doubt it will come. Likewise, Perl 5.12 on HP-UX will have to run through the vetting process before it is officially introduced into HP-UX.

I see that Ubuntu has not rolled out Perl 5.12 into Karmic Koala. Their software roll-outs also depend on Debian, so we’ll see how long this takes.

Part of the reason that Perl 5 was revived is because the development of Perl 6 – a complete rewrite and redesign from scratch – is taking so long. Arguably, the complete redesign of Perl is contributing to the stagnation of Perl development (until this year). A complete redesign is a difficult thing, and some people believe that the redesign of the Netscape browser lead to Netscape’s downfall.

It really does appear that a complete redesign of a successful software project is rarely successful; more successful is the evolving process that most software goes through – including, in some cases, refactoring and subsystem replacements (for example, replacing the virtual memory subsystem in the Linux kernel or the replacement of the Ruby execution interpreter for 1.9).

We’ll just see what the future holds for Perl 6 – but I’m not holding my breath.

A Review: Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard

Switch is a book by Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick, about changing and how to get others to change.

I started this book with some skepticism, having heard of the book Change or Die and its basic thesis: Change or Die tells about those people who were told (truthfully) that either you change your life or you will die. According to the book, 95% of the people in that study could not change. (I still have to read that book!)

If we can’t change with that kind of ultimate rational choice, what will make us change? Dan and Chip weave together a lot of anecdotes as well as many studies that showed different parts of what makes us change.

The brothers introduce us to the concept of the Elephant (our emotional side) and the Rider (our rational and reasoning side) – a concept originated by Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis. The book goes in depth into how to get both the Elephant and its Rider pointed in the same direction, and to draw them towards change.

The three major portions of the book relate to the Rider (“Direct the Rider”), the Elephant (“Motivate the Elephant”), and the Path taken (“Shape the Path”). The chapters are replete with anecdotes and studies backing up what the authors are presenting as a way to make change happen.

This book also draws from two of my favorite authors, Maria Cilley (the “FlyLady”), author of Sink Reflections, and David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. Both espouse a sort of “shrinking” of change to make it easier, simpler. Both Cilley and Allen talk about doing something simple to start with on the way to something much grander.

The book distills things down to simple elements, but sometimes seems to degrade slightly into allegory and similes instead of concrete memory aids. As long as you understand the simile, it works – but to “make it stick” you might want something more specific.

This book will change how you look at change, and perhaps will change your life. It can change how you approach getting a new project going at work, and can help you present radical change in way that will make things happen.

Red Hat Drops Xen for KVM in Red Hat Enterprise 6

With the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise 6 Beta, Red Hat has changed direction in their choice of virtualization: they have dropped Xen entirely in favor of KVM.

This is not entirely a surprise, since Red Hat bought Qumranet, a company active early on in KVM development.

What does this mean for us as administrators? This means that we will have to convert any Xen virtual machines to KVM machines if there is to be support from Red Hat. Alternately, support for Xen will have to come from Citrix. This means either internal costs (such as labor, downtime, etc.) to migrate from Xen to KVM or external costs in adding Citrix support of Xen to the costs of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

With this in mind, even if we do not have Xen virtual machines, we need to learn a new virtual environment before we are called on to support it in-house. When the company calls on you to support a KVM virtual machine, you will be ready.

TECO as a CGI Language??

Now this is just downright scary…

Tim Sneddon made a wisecrack about running TECO in a CGI environment – then decided to make it happen just for fun.

Aside from the fact that TECO on Itanium is notoriously unstable – this is totally insane (and wonderful!). As a language, TECO is almost certainly powerful enough; EMACS was originally written in TECO. It was this fact that got me started looking at TECO.

Tim shows how to set up WASD to run *.TEC files as TECO command files, and then provides an example.

IBM Introduces Power7 Blades and new AIX

IBM recently introduced Power7 blade servers to go with the Power6 and x86 blades already available. The Power7 blades come in 4-core, 8-core, or a “double-wide” 16-core configuration (with two 8-core servers tied together). However, the 4-core configuration – with four disabled cores – cannot be upgraded to eight active cores directly (the four extra cores are permanently disabled). The 16-core configuration is two Power7 blades combined together.

Also introduced was AIX 6 Express, a new (and lower cost) version of AIX for small business.

I’ve always been partial to Power since Apple started using it; it was sad to see Apple stop using the PowerPC.

AIX has never struck me as a well-regarded environment, but now IBM has made it more affordable for more folks; we’ll see how this goes. The AIX admins I knew were frequently complaining about the clustering environment (although HP ServiceGuard has lots of interesting problems too). Last time I used AIX, the printing environment was very odd, like the rest of it.

However, no UNIX can be all bad… right?

Microsoft Joins Red Hat in Dropping Itanium Support

Red Hat announced at the end of 2009 that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will not support Itanium, and now Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2008 R2 will be the last version to support Itanium.

This is not good. HP is the largest vendor of Itanium systems – they should be, since Itanium was an HP-Intel joint venture. Intel just introduced the new Tukwila chip in January, and now Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux will not be found on the chip.

Most pertinently for HP, this means that Integrity Virtual Machines running Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux will neither be available nor supported.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is still available for Itanium, as is HP-UX, and OpenVMS is due soon. Time will tell if this bailout by Red Hat and Microsoft will affect HP’s bottom line; Intel should be relatively unscathed.

UPDATE: Fixed factual error.

Why I Don’t Want an iPhone – or iPad – or iPod Touch…

Recently, Cory Doctorow wrote about why he didn’t want an iPad (and why we shouldn’t either).

I don’t want one either – for many reasons. It’s the same reasons I don’t want an iPhone or iPod Touch as well.

On the iPhone specifically: I don’t want to be forced into a specific carrier. When will the iPhone be available for US Cellular customers? Probably never. When will the tying of the phone to the carrier be invalidated by the courts?

Also, will it ever be possible to take the iPhone and take it from one carrier to another? There should be no bundling of phones with cellular service; I should be able to choose whatever phone I want and use it with whichever service I want.

Secondly, you can only install applications that are approved by Apple – and these same applications can be pulled from your iPhone without notice (and without refund!). The approval process for new applications is slow and mysterious, and the secret developer’s agreement contains some very draconian measures.

Thirdly, the battery is sealed – so you can’t change the battery if it dies. If you need a new battery, you need a new phone.

The battery is not the only thing that is sealed; there is no way to put your own software on your iPhone or iPod Touch or iPad – no way to load Linux, no way to write your own software and load it up. If you write your own software with Apple’s Software Development Kit (SDK), then you are required to use the Apple Application Store, and no other – even if you are refused (which an application can be for any reason).

The iPhone is a locked-down environment like no other; why be locked in?

Court: FCC has no jurisdiction over the Internet

This court decision by the United States Federal Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit was not entirely unexpected, but it does not bode well for net neutrality. The case is Comcast v. FCC. Comcast put out a press release praising the decision and stated their commitment to “open Internet”. A party to the case, freepress, put out their own release. One notable quote from freepress is the following:

[Because of the decision, t]he FCC has virtually no power to make policies to bring broadband to rural America, to promote competition, to protect consumer privacy or truth in billing.

Net neutrality is the idea that all network traffic should be treated equally, without regard to content or source. What got Comcast in trouble with the FCC was interfering with peer-to-peer traffic such as BitTorrent.

Internet and legal blogs and press were all abuzz with talk of the decision. Bloggers that reacted included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Wall Street Journal (including WSJ blogs like Digits), Larry Downes (with the Stanford Center for Stanford Center Internet and Society), the New York Times, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Above the Law, the ACLU, and so many endless others.

If the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) cannot sanction a company (Comcast, in this case) for the way it throttled Internet access for its customers, then access to selected sites can be denied or slowed down upon an arbitrary decision by the company. Sites like Google could be charged different prices by their ISPs than other sites, web sites could be blocked, users charged different prices depending on their usage – how much and what kind – and more.

Imagine if your phone company could charge you more for making calls to businesses – or certain businesses. Imagine if the phone company decided that you couldn’t call certain companies. Imagine that your phone company decided you couldn’t order a pizza.

The way this decision stands, it sounds like the FCC no longer has any right to regulate the Internet at all – which leaves us at the mercy of the big ISPs. I hope this gets corrected by the US Supreme Court or the US Congress and soon.

March Holidays You Might Have Missed

There were a number of holidays celebrated recently that are relatively unknown. I mentioned several, but thought I would put them together here.

One such holiday is March 14, Pi Day. Pi Day is 3/14 which is the first three digits in the mathematical constant pi.

Another which I neglected to pay attention to was March 24, Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating women in computing. For me, the most significant women in computing would include:

• Grace Hopper – inventor of COBOL
• Adele Goldberg – one of the developers of Smalltalk, and a writer about Smalltalk
• Susan Kare – who gave us the Macintosh icons
• Aileen Frisch – a long-time writer about system administration
• Dru Lavigne – a long-time writer about FreeBSD and all-around FreeBSD advocate

Another important recent holiday was on March 15: National Freedom of Information Day, which is also included (by design) in Sunshine Week. Both are focused on the transparency of government and public access to governmental documents.

Yet another “holiday” went by very recently: No Tech Day, sponsored by the UK charity Practical Action. Practical Action helps bring technology to developing nations, such as those in Africa. The concept behind No Tech Day was to see how you fare without all the technology in your life, just as many in Africa do.

No word on whether No Tech Day was a singular event or if it will be annual.

Here’s a quick summary:

• March 14 – Pi Day
• March 15 – National Freedom of Information Day (part of Sunshine Week)
• March 24 – Ada Lovelace Day
• March 27 – No Tech Day