Sunday, June 15, 2008

JKstat, SolView, Awards

I've released new versions of JKstat and SolView.

In JKstat, I've added Kstat aggregations. These are used in an enhanced cpustate demo to show the aggregate cpu statistics of a multithreaded core, or a multicore processor. This also needed me to work out how the various cpu kstats were related, so I knew which cpu corresponded to which thread and core of a complex multithreaded/multicore system. (A version of psrinfo naturally fell out of this as something I needed for testing.) There are a couple of new charts - for cpustate and the netload demo.

For SolView, I've added access to the logfiles for SMF services, and also a tree view of the SMF services. The tree is based on the service naming hierarchy, not the dependency tree, and is an experiment to see if that's a useful description of the services (as opposed to a straight list that's a couple of hundred lines long).

These are the entries I've submitted to the OpenSolaris Community Innovation Awards Program, and I'm hoping for some success there.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

You don't exist, go away!

Oh dear. I try to run ssh and I get:

You don't exist, go away!

Which is sort of correct. I'm changing all the userids (including my own) while logged into the system, so that the shell I was running this from was under the old (now invalid) userid. Still, I was a little surprised at the bluntness of the response.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Making scp go a little quicker

Transferring files with scp isn't the quickest option, but if it's the only one there's a simple way to make it go a little quicker.

scp -c blowfish source.file remote.host:/destination/file.name


Using blowfish rather than the default 3des gave me about an extra 50% or so of throughput.

This was really noticeable on my new T5120s, where I went from under 10M/s to over 13M/s for a single copy. (OK, so it can probably run lots in parallel, but I was just moving large images.)

Sunday, June 08, 2008

jingle and jumble

One of the problems with developing in Java is that some relatively common tasks that ought to be simple require writing a lot of boilerplate code, or are otherwise inconvenient.

So, like many others before me, I have a bunch of classes that I use regularly. These are not clever, innovative, or terribly interesting. But they have saved me a lot of typing and repetition over the years.

I named them jingle and jumble. (There were jangle and jungle, which I think had something to do with networking and web services; I've lost those completely.)

The jingle classes help write swing applications. One of the most useful ones is a Frame registry that keeps track of how many windows you have open and allows you to close one or all of them.

In jumble, it's a case of allowing you to get a file into a string (or vice-versa) in one line.

They're used to simplify jkstat and solview.

(I don't really expect others to use them, though. I'm blogging just to note their existence.)

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Subtle change on sun.com

Don't know when this was changed, but I've noticed a subtle change on Sun's website recently.

I'm sure that in the main navigation, it had Products first and Downloads second. They seem to have swapped over.

I'm not sure whether this marks a change in direction, with less emphasis on selling stuff and more on giving stuff away, or whether they're tracking visitors and ordering the navigation links by popularity.