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This section:

Blog postings by Operational Dynamics partners and staff

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Sun, 27 Nov 2005

Building Distributable Linux Binaries

I don’t normally get too excited about threaded discussions, but I was impressed with the comments in response to a recent Ask Slashdot post asking for advice about building and distributing Linux binaries that will really work across various distros.

The replies were mostly thoughtful and the overall impression was the same sort of even handedness you’d expect from a wikipedia article. Unsurprisingly there was much discussion about static linking but there were links to several interesting looking projects I’d not heard of.

At another point, the thread considered what happens when you have to ship as binary (for whatever reason) instead of being able to ship source. Two comments in particular seemed insightful:

If you’re making games, a good solution is to make the game engine open source, and charge for the data. The game engine can get ported to dog knows what platforms without any effort from you, and you can still get compensated by charging for the data files. The real value of a game tends to be in the data files, as they control the story line, the graphics, the sound effects… ref

and

If you absolutely can’t have the source to your app open, you could do like the developers of binary kernel modules: ship your software in object format, with all the parts that interface with the rest of the system open source. That way …. they can compile and link the glue layer to make your code work on their system.

If you take this approach, be very careful to have everything that interfaces with the outside system in the open source part; I’ve worked with kernel modules where some OS calls were still made from inside the binary part, and they were hell. ref

I’m all for source distribution but there are times when its not appropriate; if you consider the above in best-practice abstraction and separation-of-concerns terms (as opposed to the usual religious licencing debate) there is food for thought especially for those who struggle to make widely available software.

Anyway, worth a read.

AfC

Thu, 17 Nov 2005

AOL doesn’t get it

The commercial IM networks have long been relatively careful about preventing intrusions from people pestering or worse. AIM, ICQ and Yahoo have “so-in-so wants you to be their buddy, do you approve?” The next-generation open-standard network, Jabber, is even more explicit about granting permission to even let someone see your presence.

This morning when I fired up gaim, I discovered this:

a buddy list screenshot showing AIM bots

AIM Bots ?!?

No request, certainly no approval. AOL just automatically added them into my buddy list.

You’d think the trashing that Sony is getting this week would have given people a hint. But there are obviously companies out there that still don’t get it when it comes to privacy — let alone the power of the consumer in the network age.

Right Click -> Remove Buddy. gone

So much for AOL spy bots. More to the point,

Customer -> Tell friends all over the world about above stupidity -> All decide to switch to a different system. gone plural

Of course, these are the same media companies that want to install cell phone jammers in movie theatres so that kids can’t SMS their friends saying how lousy the film they just watched is. Here’s a hint: if you don’t make bad movies, then you won’t have to figure out how to force people to go to them.

AfC

Tue, 15 Nov 2005

Conference promotion posters

These posters, by Hari Krishnan (mDemon on irc.freenode.net), are among the most amazing, creative, and dynamic posters I have ever seen promoting a conference, anywhere — and these are for a linux conference! Awesome contribution!

AfC

P.S. Yes, I am a tad self-conscious about the first one. Oh well. I wanted to prop this guy’s artwork. What’s one to do? :)

Mon, 14 Nov 2005

An ebuild for GCJ-4

For some time now I’ve been working on trying to get GCJ 4.x.y going on my machine. I run Gentoo which usually implies that I have rapid access to the latest of anything I need. The exception is GCC; being a system upon which one compiles just about everything from source, the system compiler is the one thing that really, really needs to work. So I am happily running gcc-3.4.3 which is fine, except that I really want gcj-4 for my Java development work.

A while back I posted about some linking issues I was running in to. An update on that: Over the past few months, the guys at Red Hat in Toronto finally figured out that in addition to all the the LD_LIBRARY_PATH nonsense and -Wl,-rpath= stuff I was hacking away with, the traditional Java -Djava.library.path= would work with GCJ. [In fact, it appears that it is necessary to do so to talk to the System.loadLibrary() calls].

But I still needed a modern GCJ to compile with. I’ve been working with Karl Trygve Kalleberg and others about figuring out an ebuild that would install GCJ without getting in the way of the system’s primary GCC install. I’ve long since figured out building GCC manually, but I wanted an ebuild to use the large collection of libraries that the Gentoo compiler team had already worked out for figuring out tarball names, fetching, patching and what not. So over the last couple days I gave it another go. Success!

This time I wrote an ebuild that uses the toolchain eclass for src_unpack() which has lots of magic. I didn’t use it for src_compile() as it was a little to hard to constrain its configure to behave with the $PREFIX I wanted, but I was able to pull a few useful tidbits.

I have called my ebuild gcj-jdk. It installs to /opt/gcj-jdk which goes nicely alongside /opt/sun-jdk-1.4.2.04 (also vaguely following the naming conventions that Red Hat is using) I wonder if version number or at least -4 or -4.1 would be a good idea… and SLOTing? One thing I have not done is try to do the java-gcj-compat thing the Fedora guys did (scripts that are wrappers that emulate java and javac) — as I told #gentoo-java last night, someone else is welcome to grab that and add it — but from where I sit gcj -C is a tricky beast (and gcj -c && gcj --main are even more complex); just assuming it and gij are a drop in replacement for a Real Java VM is asking for trouble.

I used 4.1.0_beta20051105 which is the most recent snapshot as of last week, but I had to use --disable-java-awt (and for good measure disabled the other GTK/glib/cairo stuff) … being a java-gnome hacker I surely don’t need AWT but for whatever reason --enable-java-awt=gtk was causing the build to break.

Release early, release often… so here you go: gcj-jdk-4.1.0_beta20051105. It’ll want a recent binutils (I needed ~x86) and a recent glibc as well. Use at own risk!

Things that still need doing:

figure out which patches in files/ are actually needed
make sure that it really is not interfering or interacting with gcc-config
decide on a destination naming convention (/opt/gcj-jdk-4.1? /opt/gcj-4?)
try and trim the install down [2 seconds after ./configure fires off it mentions that it’s decided to build fortran and objc as well as c and c++ and java. C and C++ are probably unavoidable, but the first two? Dependencies probably need trimming as well.
java-config integration if java and javac wrappers get put in?

Comments welcome to gentoo-java

AfC

Sat, 12 Nov 2005

Paul Kedrosky, Venture Capitalist.

For those of you who are addicted to reading blogs, I recommend Paul Kedrosky. He is a once upon a time techie who is now a fairly prominent venture capitalist (!). He blogs compulsively (frequently quoting other very with-it people), is highly opinionated (on just about everything), and has a pretty good take on trends in the technology marketplace.

A recent favorite was post titled “Just Say No to Marketing”: first he quoted an awesome comment from Bob Feld:

I despise the word “marketing” — it’s often the weakest link in a startup company. “Marketing” is vague and non-specific, often poorly executed and measured, and usually a huge waste of money relative to the output.

Several years ago, I suggested to my portfolio companies that they fire their VP of Marketing and hire a VP of Demand Generation (it could be the same person if the VP of Marketing was willing to accept a quota and meaningful, measurable variable compensation.) Hopefully, this VP of Demand Generation understands the incredible power of having your customers so happy with your product that they’ll talk about it online.

then Kedrosky wrote:

I often tell companies I’m working with that too often marketing (and business development, for that matter) is a joy-ride, essentially sales without a quota. One test when hiring a marketing veep is to tell him/her that 20/30/50% of their comp is variable on revenue — say it even if you don’t mean it — and then see how they react. It’s usually instructive as heck.

The deer-in-the-headlights interview question. Gotta love it.

AfC

Fri, 11 Nov 2005

Inspiration is everything

In an article about the new Southern African Large Telescope, BBC News points out that opposition politicians in .za have complained that the $10 million that the government invested in the facility could have been better spent.

I liked the rebuttal from South Africa’s Minister of Science:

“It helps to invest in science because those countries that have done so have been able to get out of poverty much more quickly. Of course we should help those people who are in poverty but in the long term it is better to train people and inspire them to look after themselves.”

There are no right answers in this world. Only choices. But without dreams and inspiration there’s not much for us. The article goes on to quote the enthusiasm from one local principal:

“The children at the school are going to visit the telescope next month and I expect that it will inspire them for a long time to come”, says Pelican Park head teacher, Logi Kismagani. “Even if the kids come back to classrooms without furniture the seed of knowledge will have been sown in them.”

Hear, hear.

AfC

Wed, 02 Nov 2005

Diwali, the festival of noise

I’m in India for a few days. As you may be aware, it’s Diwali this week, which is supposed to be the festival of light. It’s been wonderful driving around at night seeing all the buildings lit up with lights.

However, for the last day and a half, I’ve been surprised at all the bang noises I’ve been hearing. At first I thought it was cars backfiring, but then my host mentioned that it was firecrackers.

Huh? These aren’t little snap snap snap noises. These are loud concussive thud noises. For most of the day, it sounded like someone was throwing a grenade every 40-50 seconds. That got annoying. Now that it’s evening, it sounds like gunfire mixed in with the grenades, artillery, and explosions. Been there done that. If I didn’t know better, I would have said I was in a war zone. Bloody hell.

What was wrong with the nice lights?

AfC

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