Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

OpenOffice.org to get Business Reporting Capabilities

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Now this looks like it might be rather an interesting extension to the capabilities of OpenOffice.org, it appears Sun and Pentaho are planning to integrate the business reporting engine from Pentaho into OpenOffice.org 2.3, tentatively due for September this year.

With the integration of Pentaho’s reporting engine and the new OpenOffice.org Report Designer, developed by Sun, OpenOffice.org users will be able to create reports with content from the OpenOffice.org Base database as well as a wide range of proprietary and open source relational databases, OLAP and XML sources. For example, users will be able to generate customer invoices by creating a customer invoice template and then pulling customer names, addresses, and current due balances from an accounts receivable application or database. They can then produce the invoices as OpenOffice.org Writer documents.

Given that this is only at the thinking about stage at the moment there’s precious little real information asides many rewordings of the press release (including this), the best real information I could find was from Ocke Janssen’s blog at Sun which has real information, including a couple of very early screenshots!

The new report designer will extend the database application. You then have the possibility to create reports not only with the famous wizard, but also manually. As output format you have the choice between text documents or spreadsheets. (OASIS Open Document Format). The designer uses the classical way of presenting reports. To navigate through the components of your report, you’ll have a navigator as you for sure already know from forms. Each repeating section of the report has its own area where text can be inserted. In the first release you’ll be able to create groups (with header and footer), functions, page header/footer, report header/footer. The best way to find all features is to try it when a stable version is available;-)

Must. Have. Patience! 🙂

VPAC publishes RFP’s for a new Linux cluster and additional storage

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Well I’m happy to say that today I got the Request For Proposals (RFPs) out of the door for the proposed replacement of VPACs ageing Linux cluster Brecca (180 cores of 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 Xeon) and a significant amount of additional storage. Needless to say the new cluster must run Linux!

Please see the announcement on the VPAC systems blog for more information and copies of the RFPs.

This has been keeping my very busy recently and so I’m looking forward to a nice quiet break over Easter!

SCO Move Against Groklaw

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If you thought SCO couldn’t stoop any lower, think again. They have filed a motion in SCO versus IBM saying they wish to depose PJ, the creator of Groklaw.

I can say this: SCO in its wisdom has just guaranteed that the judges in SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell will have to read Groklaw. So, welcome Judge Kimball. Welcome, Judge Wells. We’ve enjoyed very much learning about the law by watching you at work. SCO told you something that isn’t true. No one tried to serve me that I knew about. No one informed me of any deposition date. That is true. It doesn’t feel so nice to be smeared like this, I can tell you that, and to have to pay a lawyer to deal with this harassment. I view it as such, as a kind of SLAPP suit, a vendetta to pay me back for blowing the whistle, and to shut Groklaw up. SCO wants to put a pin on a map and point to it and say, “Here’s PJ.” Then someone drops by and shoots me, I suppose. I certainly have nothing to tell them that is relevant to this litigation.

Basically SCO have gotten so fed up with PJ and the various other Groklaw contributors poking huge holes in the farcical SCO law suit that they have convinced themselves that the site is a front for IBM and that PJ doesn’t exist and now want to prove it. Sadly for them their fear-induced paranoia can’t change fact into fiction and so, as usual, they’ll loose eventually but they want to make life as painful as possible for anyone who dares to laugh at the emperors new clothes.

I do hope that this motion doesn’t succeed, but I feel that SCO will find it rather painful for their reality if it does.

EMI+Apple to sell “premium” tracks without DRM

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A very interesting development courtesy of the BBC:

EMI said every song in its catalogue will be available in the “premium” format. It said the tracks without locks will cost more and be of higher quality than those it offers now.

These DRM free tracks will cost 99 pence on iTunes, but apparently that’s only for single tracks, you will be able to buy an entire album DRM free for the same cost as one with DRM. Steve Jobs said:

The right thing to do is to tear down walls that precluded interoperability by going DRM-free and that starts here today.

XmdS – eXtensible multi-dimensional Simulator

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XmdS looks like an interesting package:

XMDS is a code generator that integrates equations. You write them down in human readable form in an XML file, and it goes away and writes and compiles a C++ program that integrates those equations as fast as it can possibly be done in your architecture.

Personally I thought it might be drawing a long bow to call XML “human readable”, but some of the examples aren’t too bad at all.

Google Toilet ISP (beta) (Updated)

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Chalk up another great Google April Fool.. 🙂

Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.

Google Toilet ISP - Going with the Flow

Google – turning the fear that the Internet is a sewer into reality. 🙂

Update: Google have another, which is Google Paper. This one found via Wikipedia’s list of April Fools for 2007.

C, Safety and Sanity

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On the Beowulf list the semi-mythical RGB wrote an interesting digression on getting started in parallel programming:

C is like an M-1 tank armed with pocket nukes and with a built in levitation system and antimatter propulsion system — misuse it and you can blow up whole worlds, but it can solve lots of problems very quickly. Safe is a kiddy bike with training wheels — not fast, not powerful, but if you pedal long enough you can get where you want to go.

Unless you get run over by a tank, that is.

Talking about parallel programming, André Pang has a nice blog post quoting Edward A. Lee’s essay “The Problem with Threads” which investigates the problems with concurrency and non-determinism in parallel programming. Edward Lee talks about non-determinism he gives a two analogies, the best of which is the one that André picked up on:

To offer a third analogy, a folk definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and to expect the results to be different. By this definition, we in fact require that programmers of multithreaded systems be insane. Were they sane, they could not understand their programs.

I’m glad I’m not a parallel programmer.. 🙂

VPAC & Linux Users Victoria off the air – all RMIT networks down (Update: RMIT back)

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RMIT came back online at around 09:30, hopefully it will last!

VPAC systems are unreachable from the outside world as it appears that all RMIT networks failed at around 8am.

This means that the Linux Users of Victoria (LUV) server is also down as it is hosted at VPAC, so no LUV email or website for the moment.

The systems themselves are still functioning normally, just needs the RMIT ITS networks folks to track down the problem and fix it (good luck people!).

XFS, JFS and ZFS/FUSE Benchmarks on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

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Having upgraded to the Feisty beta I thought it would be fun to see what (if any) affect it had on filesystem performance (especially given my previous aide memoir).

For these tests I stuck to my 3 favourites, JFS (from IBM), XFS (from SGI) and ZFS (from Sun, ported to Linux using FUSE by Ricardo Correia due to Sun’s GPL-incompatible license). This is a follow on from a slew of earlier ZFS & XFS benchmarking I did reported on previously (( here, here, here and here )).

Summary: for Bonnie++ JFS is fastest, XFS next fastest and ZFS slowest and Feisty made XFS and ZFS go faster (didn’t record my previous JFS results sadly).

The fact that ZFS is slowest of the three is not surprising as the Linux FUSE port hasn’t yet been optimised (Ricardo is concentrating on just getting it running) and is also hampered by running in user space. That said it still manages a respectable speed on this hardware and does have useful functionality that makes it useful to me.

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