Too Loud a Solitude

As I'm visiting Alex Karasulu in Florida (lucky guy !!), and enjoying the sun, sea and warm days, I wanted to point out those two words which have different meanings in USA and in France :

- Service : This is definitively not a french word. The french revolution has seen the privileges being abolished, and it's still remanent in waiters mind... You have to be known to be "served" in a restaurant in Paris. In Jacksonville - but this is also the case in all the US cities I having been -, service means something.

- Resources : Seems to be unlimited in US. Cars are pissing gaz crazy. Electricity is like for free, as you never switch off the bulbs, because, eh, the switch is on the other side of the room ! (like in USSR, where you never switch off the oven, as matches are more difficult to find than gaz :). Obviously, Resources is not a french word either...

Both combined makes life confortable in US. Much more than any european who never travel accross the ocean can imagine (this is always bugging me when I read gross approximation about "how hard is it to live in the USA for those who are not billionaires" : people seems to be pretty happy here...). The question is : for how long ?

Good to be with some good friend, sharing some good technical discussion about ApacheDS, with a glass of cool white wine (a french Chablis 1999 ;), in front of the ocean, while dolphins are jumping out of the sea.

I have heard that the new kernel bring some improvements, and was expecting better performances on my local Apache Directory Server micro benchmark, but not that much.

I got a 15% speedup on my test ! FYI, this is a basic test doing some random searches into a server with 10 000 entries. I have a small injector running N threads, each one doing M search requests.

With Ubuntu 7.04, I reached 4296 req/s, and I know get 4924 req/s ! Not that bad :)

I still have to test if OpenLdap benefits from this speedup (with my previous Linux version, it was able to deliver up to 8900 req/s, so we are still two times slower).

PS: this is NOT a valid benchmark, I just use it to compare performances between to fixes, as it's fast and easy to launch. We have a better benchmark platform to do real tests !

As Apache conference europ is now over, and ADS 1.5.2 has been released, it's time for an upgrade. I was an happy Ubuntu 7.0.4 user since last year, but I wanted to experiment some new flavor with Ubuntu 8.0.4.

The previous version was pretty OK, except that I had a few freeze from time to time (once a month), plus using a beamer was a PITA, as you had to reboot your laptop in order to get the screen resolution adapted, and back (thanks to Noel Bergman for the trick :)

At first, I tried the upgrade process... Not production ready, it seems ! Four failures, and it ended with a Kernel panic, with not that many option than a full install :)

Welcome to the pleasure dome ! At least, as I *knew* it will happen, I saved my /home somwhere where its safe.

So let's go for a burning session (actually, I dried 3 CD instead of one, thanks to some crappy DVD drives)

When done, the best part was that I was able to access my /etc/fstab to write down on a piece of paper the partition's names, as I have 10 of them, and didn't want to reformat all of them. Installation took 15 minutes (well, 30 minutes as I had to play it twice, due to a wrong username I typed). Pretty fast for a laptop installation. Btw, Canonical, it would be _very_ usefull if you suggest to use the previously existing /etc/fstab instead of just asking the user to type the mount points.


So far, so good. Booting is fast, the default background image (a heron) is crappy, but hopefully, it used my default one.

Suspend works like a charm, but thunderbird, xchat and gaim have been removed from my disk. I have evolution installed instead, not really what I want to use. The problem is that some repository are not installed by default (just because they want to offer a long term support, I guess). Not cool. But easy to fix (just add the repository in the update manager)

To get all the 'maccish' effects on my laptop, I had to install a new driver for my NVidia card, but I just had to click on the 'OK' button. Pretty slick !

Some default fonts are not really pleasant (like in terminal or in thunderbird). I will have to select my favorite courrier font.

Rebooting is FAST. Not that I use it often (It's linux, stupid !), but from time to time you have to.

What I miss is to be able to select my last user instead of typing my name when rebooting, like in FC8.

So far, so good. Five hours to get my laptop up and running, that's pretty cheap.

One last thing : Canonical, you have to try a little bit harder on the standard upgrade :)

Update :
Don't use the NVidia driver... I had to reinstall the full machine after having rebooted and got my graphic session totally blank : no icon, nothing, just the mouse.

2 more days, and I'll be back in Amsterdam.

I still have a lot of things to take care of, including finishing my presentation, which is far too long atm...

It will be another perfect occasion to meet many Directory committers : Alex, Pierre-Arnaud (even if we usually get stuck together in the same office all year long ;), Stefan (Z), Stefan (S), Christine. We have a lot to discuss !

Those last weeks were really tough, as we decided to release two versions :
- Apache Directory Studio 1.1.0
- Apache Directory Server 1.5.2

There is a lot of things to do in order to get the Server released, and we expect to cut the release on monday (better do it before the end of the week, you never know in which shape you will be at the end of an Apache Conference !)

I will also met some former collegues from Joost (Stéphane, and may be some other).

Voilà, it's almost time to pack. See you all in two days !

I'm using eclipse for years now (I started with 1.0-RC1, AFAIR). This is just a great IDE, and it has evolved greatly through years. Not that I consider IDEA or other IDE to be bad, it's just a question of feeling comfortable with the current one I'm using.

Lately, I switched to the latest 3.3.1 version.

Bad move...

This is the very first time I experienced regressions. OOM errors all of sudden, bad completions, a lot of burden. Ok, "let's wait for the patches" was my first reaction. Too bad, 3.3.1.1 is out there, but there is no way to get it installed, due to many 403 errors, whatever mirror I select.

At this point, I'm starting to consider to rollback to 3.3.0, or, a more drastic move, switching to another IDE(A?).

Don't get me wrong : I really like Eclipse, but lately I feel like it has lost some momentum. The web site has been changed in a way it's now a PITA to find valuable informations (for instance, just try to get some release notes or to download an old version). There are more than 1000 plugins available, out of which pretty much are just random student homeworks (IMHO, of course). And the update process is just a nightmare (don't get any error while downloading a load of packages, otherwise your are good to start it all again). Not to mention that package removal is a O(N2) process, as you have no clue about which one you should be removed first unless you know the dependency graph...

Wake up, Eclipse Foundation !

Two days ago, I have been told that Neil Wilson, the guy behind OpenDS, and four other guys working with him, have been fired from Sun :

http://directorymanager.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/an-open-letter-to-the-opends-community-and-to-sun-microsystems/

Sad news... We met them at Austin last year, during ApacheCon US, where we have had a very interesting BoF. Here are some minutes : http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/directory-dev/200610.mbox/%3cd45b08f00610120922r7522013apac39a4ea3b1a828a@mail.gmail.com%3e
http://hrabal.blogspot.com/2006_10_15_archive.html

We don't have the exact reasons why the core OpenDS team has been fired, because it's obviously something we don't have all the elements, but the 'reasons' which are going public are quite strange (quoting Simon Phipps) :

"...However, I do question how you characterize the requests to change the OpenDS governance. I note that the OpenDS governance was changed on April 28 by sshoaff[2] and that the original line reading:

“This Project Lead, who is appointed by Sun Microsystems, is responsible for managing the entire project”

was replaced by one reading

“This Project Lead, who is appointed and removed by a majority vote of the Project Owners, is responsible for managing the entire project”

I have not been able to find a discussion of this change anywhere, and I understand from your former managers that they were unaware of this change. While you characterize the request made of you as:

“demanded that the owners approve a governance change that would grant Sun full control of the OpenDS project”

it seems to me that what in fact happened was you were (collectively) asked to revert that change to its original state. On present data, it appears to me that far from Sun acting in bad faith over the governance, they were in fact making a reasonable request to correct an earlier error."

Now, when you think about this governance thing, this is clearly something we discussed about during our meeting one year ago. We really found strange that a so-called Open Source project could be managed entirely by a single company, namely Sun. That means no one but Sun can decide which direction the project should go. It's not anymore Open Source, but For your eyes only Source. Use OpenDS, and build a stack on top of it, go front to front with Sun but then they can change something in the code and you are in a dead end.

So what's next? From ApacheDS point of view, OpenDS existence validated Alex Karasulu's vision when he started to write an Ldap server in Java. It was also good to have a competitor, and a strong one. But now what will be OpenDS future? We started some kind of collaboration, a new JNDI API, which was stopped as the project never became a JSR, another failure... Will OpenDS stall totally? Considering that Neil wrote more than 50% of the server, it's likely to be the case, at least for the next 6 months (it's a 1 000 000 lines of code project !)

There is something wrong about Sun and OSS. It's like a blind person driving a car. Being a passenger is not exactly a good position ;)

We are close to a 100$ Oil barrel (100$ OPEC) : in a few day, every children on earth will be able to exchange a barrel of oil for a cheap computer... As we produce around 80 millions barrel each day, in 10 days, each children will have its own computer...

Sadly, the OLPC price is now closer to 200$ ! But wait, by december, we may have to pay 200$ for an oil barrel too, isn't it?

Time to use your legs more often !