Thursday, August 30, 2007

My CMG 2007 Presentation Schedule

This year, all CMG 2007 sessions will be held in the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego starting Sunday, December 2 and going through Friday, December 7. Currently, my sessions are scheduled as follows:

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

PDQ Gets Tickled

I recently stumbled across this reference to PDQ in Tcl. The author (Todd Coram) correctly notes that we use SWIG to generate the Perl and Python wrappers and this also facilitates Tcl, apparently. I don't know if he has completed the Tcl port or plans to offer it to us for release to the world at large. Maybe he'll let me know. Surely, The Father of Tcl (a big fan of scripting tools) would approve.

Postscript: Todd Coram responded via email and stated that his attempt had gone into limbo some time ago. So, it looks like open season for anyone interested in doing a Tcl port of PDQ (or any other language for that matter).

Solaris to Shine on the Mainframe (Say what!?)

Quite apart from the surprise over what passes for physics these days, PhysOrg.com recently reported on a surprise deal that will enable Sun's Solaris operating system to run on IBM servers.

Initially, the agreement will involve only IBM's (AIX) mid-range servers, which can also run the Windows and Linux operating systems, but eventually, so the report says, IBM hopes to bring Solaris to the mainframe. I assume this means it will run in a z/OS LPAR, like they do with Linux. If I take the view (and I do) that the mainframe is not a "dinosaur" but just another (excellent data processing) server on the network, one wonders where this leaves future Sun hardware platforms.

Add to this the growing emphasis by Sun to deploy Intel and AMD microprocessors for cost reasons and, as Jonathan Schwartz says, it "represents a tectonic shift in the market landscape." No kidding! I just wonder whether Schwartz will be riding the plate that stays on top or the plate that goes under.

Clearing Up Visual Chaos in Performance Tools

Guerrilla alum Paul Puglia pointed me at some work done by researchers at MIT who have developed two measures of visual clutter: the Feature Congestion measure, and the Subband Entropy measure. This is the sort of new paradigm that could be very useful in the context of performance visualization.

Linux Weather Forecast (Details at 11?)

Apropos my previous criticism about the lack of public design documentation for the Linux kernel, this Linux Weather Forecast page looks like a move in the right direction.

Section 2.1 even has some words about the CFS scheduler. I would still like to see a more detailed comparison of CFS with the well-known TSS (time share) scheduler and lesser-known FSS (fair share) scheduler.