Oracle 11g for Dummies
November 12th, 2009
Archive
Archive for the ‘general’ Category
Note to self: Dow Jones will break 10,000+ threshold within 2-4 months
September 1st, 2009
Looking at past, future, and current performance of the global stock market, I estimate the Down Jones will shoot through the 10K+ threshold within 2-4 months (probably closer to 2 then to 4).
The Dow Jones Index will continue it’s climb after that, unless some banks go and do something decidedly stupid, and stock analysts start panicking again.
note to self :
August 17th, 2009
Windows market share drops below 90%
December 6th, 2008
Some historical firsts are quite newsworthy.
Net Applications reports that for the first time ever, Windows market share has dropped below 90%. According to sources, this is mainly because Mac OS X is grabbing a stronger footing in the global OS market with 8.87% share. Linux, the iPhone and the PS3 gain a bit too, while FreeBSD looses 0.01%.
Now mind you, these are digits from consumers visiting sites, there could be much more market share for Linux and FreeBSD, because there are many servers running those operating systems, and servers don’t tend to visit websites all that much. The same, off course, can be said for windows servers.
This is significant, Windows has always been the dominant party in the desktop user market, and seemingly, this is changing. This whole year, Windows has pretty much shown a slow but sure decent, with as much as 91.64% market share in April of this year down to less then 90% today.
Why is this important? Well, Microsoft has been under fire for years on end now, allegations and convictions for unfair business tactics and anti-competitive behavior have cost them billions in legal fees, fines and penalties. This is sure to spark a change within the ranks of Microsoft, where the old walls get broken down, and a new flag of cooperation is to be seen on the Redmond flagpole. Perhaps not so much because the end user is aware of the bad things Microsoft has been doing, but more because other vendors (like Apple) offer better user experience on the desktop. Even the 0.83% share for Linux can be seen as truth to that statement, with the rise of user friendly distributions like the many Ubuntu versions.
Another important factor is the fact that many businesses are adopting an anti-vendor-lock in policy, where they do not wish to be dependent on just one software vendor and their course.
Another key factor is the ‘Vista factor’. Enthusiasm from many people not withstanding, a lot of people have even been heard making the dreaded ‘ME’ comparison earlier. Quite a few of the kinks have been worked out since that initial release, but consumers have long memories, and businesses do not like the heavy hardware requirements Vista has.
I’m not quite opening the champagne bottle just yet, but I am getting rather optimistic about the downward trend for windows. It should spark inovation in the offices of Microsoft, and inovation is the key to all progress.
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no such thing as a lucky break
November 30th, 2008
Count your blessings, but what if there are none?
Yesterday, since it was a saturday and I have a large amount of spare time in the weekend, I decided to get busy on one of those things I never have the time to do during the week: laundry. (yay!).
So, I loaded up the washer, turned it on, and hopped in the shower. I take pretty long showers ( bite me, it’s the only time in the day I truly relax ), but even so I was kinda suspicious on how fast it hit the centrifuge programm…
*KALUNK!!!*
I pretty much hit the roof, I jumped so high (still in the shower). So I got out, towled off and started to look. It was still trying to centrifuge the load, but everytime it had to actually put in some effort there was a screaching noise and sometimes a big klunking sound which actually made the darn thing shift half a foot or so.
So, that’s either the bearings, or the gearbox that’s totaly shot to hell. I tried to do another test today, totaly empty (because maybe, just maybe, I didn’t pay attention and overloaded it a bit). The banging / klunking sound is gone now, but it still can’t get up to speed…. essentialy worthless because the wash comes out totaly soaking wet that way. (and no, I don’t have a dryer – always hangdry my laundry)
Yay, I was hoping to save some money and start doing something about my house, which is very empty and kinda eary now that Petra and Femke are gone. But it looks like I’m going to have to buy a new washer.
well, let’s hope that’s the last of the crap that goes wrong for 2008, and that 2009 will cut me a little more slack 
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Small update
November 26th, 2008
Just a little update, since I’ve not been around for a while now.
A lot of changes in my life. As you know Petra and I where getting a divorce, and that was final in june. Then the waiting game started, because Petra needed a place of her own. Well, she and Femke moved out a couple of weeks ago, and my place is pretty empty now.
That’s pretty much it I guess, I’m still geeking around, making new friends (no, no new love yet) and getting used to really being single and alone.
Naturally I miss Femke, but I get to see her quite a lot thank goodness, she and Petra only live about a 7 minute walk from my place. (which is really good, or I think I would have lost my sanity by now).
more to come, once I get my life back together.
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message to stockholders and financial analysts
October 9th, 2008
I would like to issue the follow message to stockholders and financial analysts:
stop messing up the economy even more!
Okay, pause, take a deep breath, go out into the woods if you have some nearby, or a walk in the park. Enjoy some clean air, the company of friends. Clear your mind of all your troubles.
Think about it, this whole financial crisis started as nothing more then a little breeze. But all that panic behavior and ‘doing what the other guy is doing’ is making that little breeze into a storm that would make an F-5 tornado cower in fear.
So, look around, take a good look at your portfolio, and think about it…. do you really wish to cause your economy more harm then it has already suffered at that hands of analysts. Look at those shares in your hand, do you want to harm the company that you hold little pieces of? I didn’t think so.
Investing and playing in the stock market isn’t a ‘get rich quick’ thing, it requires insight, it requires knowledge. But most of all: it requires long term vision.
So, buy some more shares, those companies won’t go away, they won’t dissapear. Your money won’t vaporize (unless you invest into an obscure company like SCO). Have faith in the very economy you once helped built. So, yeah, the banks messed up with stupid mortgages. Won’t happen again. They have learned, we all have. Shame for those who are loosing their home, terrible shame even. But the world will continue to turn, as it always has. Sounds cold, but it’s true. Eventually those people will be able to buy houses again too.
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overloaded
August 2nd, 2008
No, I am not overloaded, though I’m not far from it sometimes, but my trusted mailserver is almost there. All day long there’s been a close to inifine flow of spam, bounces and other junk storming into my mailbox.
As some of you may know, I’ve got a powerful IBM server running FreeBSD here at home under my desk, which handles all my daily internet and e-mail activities. This box is so powerful, that it would not be out of place in the e-mail infrastructure for an Internet Service Provider. I got the thing from someone who had just acquired another company, and since the new owner did not choose IBM as his hardware platform of choice, the thing was obsolete. ( in terms of usability for them, the hardware is great). Well, I was happy as can be with that, since he gave the server to me for free. I can’t afford hardware like that, heck, I can’t even afford a normal computer at the moment (that laptop is take everywhere is of the company I work for, not my own)
Anyhow, even that server has trouble dealing with it all. Mostly because it’s not setup to handle that kind of ammount of traffic, and it’s a little low on the memory department. Sinds midnight it received 845 messages, of which 409 where immidiatly discarded because they where blacklisted, 140 where removed after spamassassin determined that it was indeed spam (spamscore > 6), and 151 where passed through eventhough they where suspected of being spam (spamscore < 6). 99% of those where bounces, and it looks like someone used my e-mail address once again to end out spam. (*sigh*). For me it’s annoying, for my mailserver it’s even more of a drag. A little excersize with the ‘d’ key (for delete) later, my mailbox was cleaned up again, but I’m caught thinking I might have been a little too passionate in deleting stuff. So: if I do not respond to an e-mail you have send: I am not ignoring you, I’ve just been a little careless with removing a couple of hundred messages. I appoligize.
In other news today: everything is pretty much going the way it should: Femke smiles, Femke tries to grab anything she’s not allowed to grab with a passion, and is a wonderfully healthy and pleasant little girl. What more could a proud daddy whish for?
A little bit less spam please, but that’s something the readers of this blog can do little about. 
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Hyper-V: why you do not want it
June 30th, 2008
Microsoft has released a ‘final’ version of Hyper-V, it’s virtualisation product, it seems however, only a shadow of what Xen and VmWare can offer customers when it comes to Enterprise level virtualisation.
This article will explain Hyper-V, and why it’s a very poor choice for virtualisation indeed.
About Hyper-V
Hyper-V is Microsoft’s implementation of a so called ‘hypervisor’. A hypervisor is a technology that allows for easy virtualisation, it allows for virtual computers do directly address the hardware on the host computer. It’s a step up from paravirtualisation, which emulates certain hardware types, at the downfall that the hypervisor needs to do a lot of translation and conversion work in order to get things to the real hardware.
The alternatives
Virtualisation isn’t new, it’s been around since 1969. But mainstream (meaning affordable) virtualisation is a recent development, since we now have processors that deliver so much performance, that most of our servers are idle most of the time. By utilizing virtualisation, we can use the full power of one server better and more efficient, and therefor be more cost effective. Virtualisation products are offered by Vmware (the first to do so, and also the global leader in this segment) and the Citrix owned Xen product line, which is largely an open source effort.
Microsoft’s ceavats
Microsoft is a fairly new player in the virtualisation market. Their products so far have been limited in their possibilities, and the feature set is nowhere near what Vmware and Xen can offer. The big upper for Microsoft is that they have a grip on a vast amount of the OS market with Windows. The choice for windows often is not technical in nature, but political. Since almost everyone uses windows on their desktop, it seems like the logical choice to use it on the server as well. This however, is a common misconception that has lead to many problems with companies worldwide, and the recent gains of many Unix-like (opensource) Operating Systems is a vital clue to how the market is getting smarter in it’s choices.
Many companies might think: “this virtualisation product is included in Windows Server 2008, and therefore a cheap alternative for my virtualisation needs”. While this seems logical, we must not forget that this is a highly specialized field, and no matter cheap, or included, Microsoft’s product simply does not cut it when it comes to overal features and support. While Microsoft naturaly supports all of it’s Windows products, it only supports Linux through Suse Linux, by Novell, since it has an agreement with Novell to do so. Suse however is not by far the most comonly used Linux, and enormous amounts of companies virtualise Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu and other Unix Operating Systems, the most foremost being FreeBSD and Solaris 10.
Another big problem is overal features, both vmware and Xen support a technique that allows you to move a running virtual machine from one physical server to another, without any downtime to the virtualised machine. Hyper-V does not allow for that, you need to shut down the virtualised machine first, before moving it. This causes more downtime, and more frustration since this moves important maintenance to the night time, when it could have been avoided. Personally, I can upgrade my entire virtualisation environment during office hours, without anybody noticing a thing. This prevents cutting in my sleeping time, and it’s also cheaper for my boss since he doesn’t have to pay overtime.
Then there is the problem of resources. One of the things of virtualisation is that the goal is to utilize available resources to the maximum possible. While virtualisation enviroments are often more expensive to purchase in terms of hardware requirements, in the long run they are much more cost effective since you can easily phase out 8 physical servers. This is not only a reduction in cost of hardware purchases, but also costs of space, power, cooling. Efficiency is the keyword here. Microsoft has it’s Hyper-V hypervisor running in combination with Windows. Where the windows 2008 server is actually virtualised in the same way as with Vmware ESX. However, the ESX management console requirements are far less then those of a full Windows 2008 environment. Just running virtualisation from Microsoft will cost you about 10% virtualisation capacity, compared to vmare ESX and Xen at about 1%.
Security
Let’s face it, Microsoft does not have a good reputation when it comes to security. As a matter of fact, any security solution based on Windows is an act of pure lunacy if you ask my proffesional opinion. Now, in all honesty to Microsoft: they can’t do much about that. Changing the Windows security model to something that will absolutely work will most likely cause so many problems, that everyone will scream. Their shareholders will never go for that. The recent problems surrounding Windows Vista’s security model is the most compelling evidence. In the end: nothing has changed, since all users have disabled ‘those irritating nag screens asking for permission every time you do anything at all’. Also, their backwards compatibility allows for serious security considerations, not only by allowing ‘ancient’ windows code to exist (some security issues discovered in the last 2 years have been arround since windows 3.11), but also allowing applications to run that where coded in a time where we weren’t all that focused on security.
Inovation
Microsoft has about the level of inovation that one would expect from an ant. (usefull little critters they are, they do everything the way they have always done, change does not happen often there). In part this is because inovation is difficult, risky and hard to do at best. Microsoft has billions of profit to protect, and they do so by not inovating much. Most of the time they wait for someone to come with a good product, and buy that company or product. Virtualisation should be inovative, it should be ‘special’, for the first time we are no longer trusting our important mision critical data to physical machines, but to virtualised ‘invisible’ machines. This field wil grow and expand even more with the arrival of multi-core systems. This requires huge ammounts of research and development and a lot of experimenting to ‘find the right way’. Intel and AMD do that part on the hardware side, AMD coming up on top purely because of Pacifica and Hypertransport. Xen and Vmware do that in their software lines, and on a whole, they are doing great. Microsoft will struggle to keep up with them, purely based on the mere fact that the corporate structure there is run by politcians, accountants, marketing and lawyers, not by the people invisioning and building the products.
We’ve seen the problems at Microsoft for many years, sharepoint, though conceptualy sound, is so complicated and tricky that even Microsoft’s own staff can’t figure it out (real world example). ISA is so full of problems and so complicated, that nobody knows exactly how to get the darn thing under control.
Conclusion
If you want virtualisation, use Xen or Vmware. I’m not partial to either one in general, but professionally I’ve been using Vmware Virtual Infrastructure (Build around Vmware ESX 3.x) for years now, and I’m very happy with it. We’ve reached the point where we need to seriously upgrade our hardware architecture to keep up with demand. We virtualise everything, from development servers, to staging/testing servers, to full production enviroments. It works, all the time, everything, 24×7. The only downside I’ve been able to find with Vmware is that their management client does not work on Mac, but from what I’ve heard, they are working to fix that, and release a Mac and Linux client soon. That is something Microsoft will probably not do, ever. (it’s enough of a miracle they released silverlight for Mac OS X).
Feature overview
| Feature | Vmware ESX | Xen Source | Microsoft Hyper-V |
| Moving Running Virtual Machine to another host | Yes | Yes | No |
| Adding resources to running Virtual Machine | Yes | Yes | No |
| Supports Most Operating Systems | Yes | Yes | No |
| Runs old Operating Systems ( NT 4, Windows 2000) | Yes | No | No * |
*) Windows 2000 SP4 is supported, however, with only 1 virtual CPU. Pretty darn ‘weak’ I say.
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Firefox Download Day
June 17th, 2008
Firefox Download Day 2008 has started.
Everyone, please download Firefox, so we can set a world record!
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