Wile E. Coyote

    One of the things I enjoy about living somewhat out in the boonies is the unexpected joy of encountering wildlife. While listening to ‘S is for Silence’ on CD with the family in the kitchen, just puttering around doing assorted housework, I glanced out the window and saw what looked like an overgrown chihuahua in the driveway. Upon closer inspection, my wife and I decided that it was a coyote. He wandered in and out of view for a while, then came back jumped around a bit and nabbed what is likely a mouse or similar rodent. Thus I was able to capture this shot. This shot is also exemplary of why I have been wanting a new pocket camera with an optical zoom, as I didn’t dare leave the house to get a closer shot. Really, it’s a coyote. 🙂

To Cyr, with love

    I’ll admit I’m a cranky old yankee, depending on how you define ‘old’ or ‘yankee’. But I do tend to take certain changes harder than I might like. And so it is, I mourn the passing of another landmark in my life, although admittedly a relatively recent one in my life, despite this being the 51st year for them.

    This was going to be a post about the joys of Block Island. As a celebration of my tenth wedding anniversary, I took my wife Sandy to Block Island, to the same hotel we stayed at on our wedding night. Block Island is a very nice getaway, without the same level of tourism that Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard have. We have made this a regular anniversary tradition since then, and were there this past weekend. It was very relaxing, as we just took it easy and refrained from many of the outdoors activities possible there.

    I like Block Island for a number of reasons. It feels more laid back that Nantucket. It certainly isn’t as crowded, although I don’t tend to go there during the busy season. It has 2 wonderful light houses, many trails for biking or hiking. Lots of easy to get to beaches. A very nice little library, which I noticed this year has a little photo printer that takes a variety of memory cards from digital cameras for printing pictures, which they charge $1 per print. Neat idea in a place like this. And I love the Surf Hotel, where we always stay for our anniversary trip. I decided that this time I would make my reservation for next year before we left, avoiding any potential problems if I got distracted later in the year.

    That’s when I learned that the Cyr family, who have owned and operated this great family friendly, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel loving, beach side, located by Old Harbor, Surf Hotel are calling it quits this year. After 51 years, they are going to sell the hotel and retire to their home on the island. While I am very happy that they are getting a much deserved break and hope that they are able to enjoy it to their fullest, I have concerns about the future of the Surf Hotel. It’s right on the beach, a short walk from the ferry dock in Old Harbor, has great rocking chairs on the porch, lots of amenities that make it easy for a family to come without having to drag along beach umbrellas, chairs, dishes, etc., and a friendly staff that has made it easy to build a clientele of regular repeat customers. Will the new owners carry on the tradition? With it’s history, even before the Cyrs, I doubt they will tear it down and build something else, as all the hotels are old historic buildings. But it has a special ambiance that may not be easy to continue. All good things must come to an end, I guess, at least that’s what STN says. 🙂 Why did it have to happen just as I was getting into the groove of a new family tradition. I’ll try to keep it going, but it probably won’t be quite the same.

ZFS everywhere

    ZFS (Sun’s Zetta File System) seems to be getting good penetration in a wide variety of places. If you pay attention to such things, you know that Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, suggested recently that not only was ZFS going to be in the next release of Mac OS X (Leopard), but that it was going to be the default file system. Since this probably doesn’t mean much to the Mac user masses, who appreciate the OS and don’t worry about the details, I doubt the comments about Steve Jobs loosing a speaking point at Apple’s WWDC this week as being likely. The majority of Mac users don’t pay much attention to the behind the curtains stuff. You could tell them that Mac OS X is built on 16-bit DOS and they’d be like, ‘Oh that’s nice.’, ‘Whatever, it works great’ and ‘They make it so easy to use.’. Don’t get me wrong, they are plenty of Mac geeks who eat the inner workings up and have been running X Windows apps outside of Aqua for years, But I digress.

    Many years ago, not long after I started with Sun, I presented to an ISP on our newest hardware. While talking with the customer afterwards, he mentioned his favorite geek news source, Slashdot.org, and I became hooked. It’s part of my personalized Google page, so I keep up on the latest Slashdot worthy news everyday. Recently, I caught this item, Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs?, discussing using ZFS as part of an inexpensive alternative to traditional NAS/SAN storage. ZFS is included with Solaris 10, and is also part of OpenSolaris, so it is readily available as Open Source, with the corresponding cost structure. As with most technologies, ZFS is still evolving and getting new features, so it isn’t everything to everyone just yet. 🙂

    Continuing with the theme of ZFS everywhere, besides it getting ported to OSes like Mac OS X and FreeBSD, I stumbled upon this blog about a Google Summer of Code project, ZFS in the Linux kernel?. Apparently this is just one of several efforts to port ZFS to Linux. Building a community around our technologies is a big reason Sun open sourced so much and continues to open source more of our code. Reminds me of something dad says ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’. As ZFS and it’s community continues to grow and advance, everyone benefits, including Sun.



Update (13 June 2007): A recent posting by ThinGuy has this link, Linus on GPLv3 and ZFS, to Linus Torvalds commenting on Sun’s open sourcing, and in particular stating that ZFS is probably the best piece of the OpenSolaris bits, at least from a Linux perspective. Hmmm, and on the same day I posted this item. Great minds think alike, or perhaps Linus is reading my blog. 🙂 Ohhh, and here is Jonathan Schwartz responding to Linus.

Palm’s Foleo – savior or failure?

    I was excited to see the news that Palm was announcing a new device, particularly when it was touted to be creating a new category of mobile device. Even more alluring was the fact that Jeff Hawkins, Palm founder and Handspring founder, is behind this effort, so the promise of well thought out, functional engineering seemed strong.

    Alas, what I have seen since that announcement has not impressed me. Looks like it will run Linux, which explains this Linux Devices article. But when I look at more of the details in this PC Magazine article on Palm Foleo, it seems that despite the openness of the Palm OS, and even more openness of Linux, this will be a closed OS, losing all the existing Palm apps, and losing out on all the benefits of large numbers of developers and the apps and functionality they bring.

    At least one good thing has come from the announcement so far. The Wired Gadget blog on sub-notebooks as alternates to Palm’s Foleo has enlightened me to some interesting laptops to consider when I get a new laptop. And who knows, it may not be that long before I can get a low-cost Palm Foleo on eBay. 🙂