I have finally started working on Virtualizaion CBTs, and released few on my website, here : http://www.wbitt.com/news/166-virtualization-cbts-xen-english.html

More action packed CBTs of this series will be posted shortly.

Regards,
Kamran

Easing your web-hosting life with XEN Virtualization.

For all system administrators, there is a (pretty painful) frequently occurring incident, which they hate the most. That is: Migrating a server, for one reason or the other!

For those who still couldn’t get it, assume you have a fully functional web/mail server working flawlessly for more than two years (which you take pride in). One morning, you find a mail from your service provider, that the server you were using for your web/mail services, has reached end-of-life (EOL) and it is advised to move your services to another server. There may be other reasons too, like faulty hardware, such as hard drive crash, etc. You quickly feel your stomach throwing up, because you recall, that how much pain it was to setup qmail, anti-spam, the Apache web-servrer with all those extra modules and MySQL tweaking, hosting 200+ websites, mail boxes, etc etc. And now it is obvious that you have to redo the whole thing again. (Oh my God!). Plus the migration. If it was your own personal server, it might not be such a gruesome picture. However, if this is one of your clients’ server, then you might be cursing yourself to be a system admin at the moment. It is not fiction! This happens to every sys admin. For some (strange) reason, the system admin throws his head down again, and starts building up the new server.

What if you did not have to redo everything from scratch? Haan !!! (Your eyes pop out with excitement). “I would love it!”, you might say. I also hear a “I must be in heaven ?!”. No. Luckily you don’t have to wait so long (to go to heaven, that is). The solution is there for you to take advantage of. The solution is Virtulization!

Oh! I know, I know. You just started mumbling, “another nut-case with VMware solution”. No. Why do you think about Vmware only? I am aware that Vmware is (probably? the biggest name out there in virtualization. It is not the default answer to all virtulization needs, of everyone out there. If you didn’t know that, then it is time to for you to know, and I would repeat: Vmware is not the only solution for all virtulization needs, of everyone out there. Especially, if you are one of those small/tight budget hosting business, who is just managing the business on a couple of servers, Vmware is just too costly for you. (You can use Vmware Server though, which comes free of cost, but that is a separate story). So what to do?

Xen! Xen has been around for quite some time. It should not sound un-familiar to you at all. Xen, (not XenSource), is part of every modern day Linux distribution out there. RHEL, Fedora (upto Fedora 8), Debian, CENTOS, etc, etc. RHEL declared it the ultimate enterprise ready virtualization technology during past RHEL releases. Suprisingly RedHat started promoting KVM instead of Xen since RHEL 5.3. However RedHat did not through XEN out of window (yet). RedHat has to keep supporting its enterprise XEN customers for coming 5 years. Even if they stop doing that, even if RedHat does not promote XEN, it does not mean that XEN will not exist. XEN is thriving. And being most popular and widely used open-source virtualization technology, it will keep thriving.

So how can you take advantage of XEN virtulization for the scenario explained in the opening text of this article? Simple! Here is the solution in simple words:

All modern Linux distributions support running XEN hypervisor kernel as Domain-0 , or as privileged domain, except Fedora9 and onwards. (Fedora decided to focus on KVM only). So what you should do is, (solution), setup your server to boot XEN kernel instead of normal linux kernel. Then setup your main server as domain 0. Do not setup any web/mail services here. Instead, create a virtual machine on this physical server, (optionally) using command line tools. Setup that (newly created) virtual machine to serve your web/mail/other services. Obviously you would have used a virtual disk ( a large file on the physical host) to setup this virtual machine. (Buying a shared storage and setup virtual disks on that would be financially unjustifiable for a small company, for one or two servers). Then, you can either use the existing IP of the physical server and DNAT particular services towards your virtual machine, or you can get an additional IP from your service provider, and assign that to your virtual machine (ideally on the bridged network). Try not to run any service on the physical host, other than ssh. This will keep things easy to manage. Assign decent amount of RAM to this virtual machine, out of your total physical memory of the physical host. Then, go live.

Now when you have done it, what is the advantage? What is all this hype about? Well, here is the benefit. Assume the same thing happens now, which is explained in opening text. That is, you get an email from the service provider to move your data, as the server is reaching EOL. When you get this mail, instead of panicking, you just smile, as nothing has happened. You would simply ask your service provider to provide the alternate physical host, go through the acquisition and OS installation. Then, simply setup XEN on it, which is nothing but installing the XEN kernel and booting it. Now you are ready for migration. Announce some downtime to your users, (or management), depending on the size of the virtual disk you have on the old server, (because you need time to copy it over the network). Then shut down the virtual machine on the old server. Copy the disk file of this virtual machine over the network from old physical host to the new one. Copy the config file in the same way. Set up a few IP related settings for this “migrated” virtual machine, and ……… start the virtual machine! That is all. Given a few extra steps you have to do for setting up the IP inside the virtual machine, and a few firewall rules on the new physical host, you have nothing else to do. Your job is done. Congratulations !!! You just migrated a server from one physical server to another, without a drop of sweat, successfully. (Oh yes, don’t forget to adjust DNS pointers of your websites to the new (virtual) server.)

It may seem odd at first that running one virtual machine on one physical host?!!! Where is the advantage of consolidation? Well, the advantage “is” there, and the base is now all set for you, for the same. You can, now, depending on various factors, setup another virtual machine, and bring (migrate) another server over to this machine. You can repeat this process as many times as you want, of-course depending on the physical specs / power / resources of your physical host.

I have personally gone through the pain and agony for one of my clients. For some reason, I had to migrate his servers every six months or so. Recently, we decided to use virtualization on one of our new servers. And the result so far is just great. The system is live. Did not miss a single beat! I am, in-fact, looking forward to migrating six more servers to this one physical host. Performance so far is great. We are glad that we have solved our most painful problem, without spending extra penny by using the free of cost XEN virtualization solution. It is very cost effective too. We recently migrated another server, as a virtual machine, to our new physical host and let go of it’s (migrated server’s) original physical host too. By doing that, our monthly billing has reduced significantly.

I hope this article to be helpful to others. Let me know about your comments on kamran at wbitt dot com .

I am in love with my job again!

Regards,

Kamran

]]> http://techsnail.com/web-hosting-with-xen-virtualization/feed/ 2 http://techsnail.com/another-independence-day-still-enslaved/ http://techsnail.com/another-independence-day-still-enslaved/#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:04:33 +0000 admin http://techsnail.com/?p=78 I have put an article on my other website, in special relation to 14th August, the independence day of Pakistan. This is the url. The text is below.

Independence day special

Start thinking… Better start acting…….

Another 14^th August has arrived. And instead of going forward, instead of progressing, we are moving towards past. We keep making the same mistakes. The countries who got freedom from british rule with us, have the currency value twice powerful then ours. Yes, I am talking about India. Their work-force more known in the entire world than ours. Their products more in verity and more wide-spread. Take an example of Malaysia. They got their freedom one decade later than Pakistan. Today, Malaysia is an Asian Tiger, with currency value of twenty times the value of Pakistani Rupee. Why? They focused and achieved what they set out to achieve. It is a long story and a debatable issue and I better be focused on my point as well.

We need to have freedom in our IT infrastructure too. We need to get freedom from the microsoft rule / closed-source rule, the same way we got freedom from british rule. One of the key factors that can help us achieve that is awareness. Know what these companies are doing by creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) in hearts and minds of everyone related to IT, from top to bottom. By creating this FUD, they sell their own products. Products which are in-efficient, poorly designed, crappy, buggy, full of unwanted stuff (e,g, easter eggs), easily effected by viruses and worst, in-secure. The licenses stop you from looking under the hood of these software.

It is just plain and stupid. Ninety percent of computer usage in Pakistan is just office automation, internet and email. That’s all. Why do you need expensive, crappy and overly bloated software to get that done? Are you too rich a country to do that? Are you too rich a person to do that? Look at the irony. The software companies always crying of having low financial strength and in-turn paying low salaries to their employees. On top of that they spend much more amount of time and effort trying to cope up with the virus and spam problems. If they would have used Open-Source Software in the first place, they would have saved sufficient amount of money, which , they can use to take care of their employees.

The point is save money on all levels. Increase productivity on all levels. Have better utilization of resources on all levels. Educate yourselves about Open-Source and educate the decision makers. Increase awareness and help others. Shun and boycott any corruption, bureaucracy, politics and bribery. We all have a goal to achieve. Make Pakistan independent and self reliant.

Just an assurance I want to give you all. Whatever you do on proprietary / commercial software, 99% of that is fully do-able on Open-Source technologies, with much more peace of mind, efficiency and security.

Most of you, I can safely say, based on my experience, never consult the technical support people of the software they are using (except “very few”). And when you do, you hardly get a timely sensible response from them. There are only a very few exceptional software companies, (microsoft NOT one of them), where I have seen a fast response with sensible solution. So why pay for expensive support, if you are not utilizing that support in the first place?

A little, technical note: When I ask you to stop buying microsoft and similar closed-source software products, I am not asking you to start buying RedHat products. That is again sending big amount of money outside the country in another way. I want you to have total independence from these vendors. I want you to avoid vendor lock-up. CentOS and Fedora are “exactly” as RedHat Enterprise Linux (in general terms). They are totally free. No support charges, nothing. If you have experienced linux professionals taking care of your infrastructure, you can easily use these products, with confidence. If you want independence from all RPM based distributions, you can use Debian and derivatives.

I fully understand that this conversion / independence will not come easy and will cause some pain and hurt, and at times sacrifice (not life of-course). Didn’t we (our elders) suffer from pain hurt when they were getting independence in 1947 on independence day? Even before, when the whole freedom movement was going on for years? Didn’t they sacrifice? They did. So in the same manner, you will need to run this software independence movement, until you get freedom. You will suffer at times as you are not used to Open-Source psychology. But as soon as you understand the psychology, you are free. And when you are free, you will progress and prosper. It is that much simple.

In the end, I will give reference of other countries. They all have stronger economies and wealthier companies and people owning various businesses. They also selected Open-Source Software for themselves. Because they wanted to make the right choice.

First one is our neighbouring India. Reference link :

http://www1.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/PMOs-email-system-infected-for-three-months/articleshow/4266663.cms

PMO’s email system infected for three months. (Times of India. 15 March 2009)

E-mail system of the Prime Minister’s Office was under the grip of a computer virus for three months last year forcing officials to replace the software. The technical glitch plagued the e-mail communication system of the PMO, which was based on the Microsoft Outlook Express, from February to April in 2008. Although the extent of damage was uncertain, the PMO said that most of the e-mails addressed to it were not received. The problem was detected only in late April after which the Microsoft Outlook Express email software was discontinued and replaced by another software – Squirrel mail.

From the following link, you can view the rest of the testimonials:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software

• In 2005 the Government of Peru voted to adopt open source across all its bodies.[8] The 2002 response to Microsoft’s critique is available online. In the preamble to the bill, the Peruvian government stressed that the choice was made to ensure that key pillars of democracy were safeguarded: “The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law.”[9]
• In December 2004, law in Venezuela (Decree 3390) went into effect, mandating a two year transition to open source in all public agencies. As of June 2009 this ambitious transition is still under way.[10][11]
• The Netherlands has an initiative called Open Source en standaarden in het onderwijs, “Open source and standards in education”. http://www.buseco.net/news/netherlands_open_source_7.html
• Vietnam – the Ministry of Information and Communications has issued an instruction on using open source software at state agencies.[13]
• Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Software Program launched in 2004 saved millions on proprietary software licences till 2008[14][15]
• The Government of India has set up a resource centre for Free and Open Source Software managed jointly by C-DAC Chennai and Anna University, Chennai. It has one of its node in Mumbai at VJTI College[16]
• The Ministry of Defence in Singapore began migrating its computers from Microsoft to free software in 2004, while South Korea, China and Japan agreed to cooperate in creating new Linux-based programs.
• In Germany’s federal state Thuringia the Ministry for culture and education has launched a project called “Linux für Schulen” (Linux for schools) which is intended to further the influences of Open Source software in public education.
• Munich city civil service in Germany, 2003 started migrating to free software. http://mis-asia.com/technology_centre/open_source/open-source-infiltrates-government-it-worldwide .
• In February 2008, the Dominican Republic passed a law to facilitate the migration of all public entities (government, education, etc.) to Software Libre, and to adopt open standards in the public sector.
• In April 2008, Ecuador passed a similar law, Decree 1014, designed to migrate the public sector to Software Libre.
• As of September 2008 there is a similar proposal, currently under debate in the Bolivian Congress, which stipulates the migration of the public sector to Software Libre.

So, my question from you all is: What is stopping you to claim your freedom?

.

Note: This article is mainly addressed to the young IT generation of my home country, Pakistan. But, anyone from any part of the world can read this and benefit from it. The ultimate objective though is to do something useful for the world at large, without any classification, discrimination of nationality, gender, race or religion.

Salam to all,

In my previous article, “A supercomputer on every desk!” Videos released! , I pointed out that the how can you have a multi-node ‘virtual’ HPCC / Beowulfish cluster on your own desk. The videos released with this article showed how can you build one, by following simple steps and using open-source technologies.

After that, article, I received a lot of criticism and complaints. People mentioned (angrily) (to me), that it would be better if I can answer these questions first: (a) “What is a super computer/HPCC?”, (b) “What is the use of an HPC Cluster/Super-Computer?”, and (c) “Why should we bother?” . And I admit that is truly my fault. I should have explained them in the same article, before going on and trying to open my heart out on the Horizontal Cluster.

Being in the same flow, and emotional state, that I wrote the first article in, I wrote another one; trying to tell people that how can you have a real HPC Cluster / Super computer in your own neighbourhood. But it turned out that the second article was received as a crap , and self promotion, by many. Sometimes an idea is too raw to digest / comprehend. So I decided to accept my fault again and rewrite it. (Yes, it is this article which you are reading now).

Let me start by answering the first question before I go on explaining the second question.

Question: “What is a super computer/HPCC?”

Super computer in simple terms is a computer, which can execute more number of calculations in a unit time, compared to a commodity PC.

In old times, PCs were kind of non-existent. Main frames, and later “Minis”, ruled the world. Thanks to the advancement in technology, especially in the field of Processor manufacturing (electronics / hardware) and IT (software), the big bulky supercomputers are not common anymore. Instead, a new breed, known as Beowulf clusters have taken their place. (Well, almost). Beowulf was a project (turned successful), started in 1994, to execute programming code in parallel, on a group (cluster) of PCs, connected to each other over a TCP/IP network. Linux, which was very new at that time, was used for this. What turned out, was surprisingly impressive performance, even though they were using 10Mbps network for cluster communication! Beowulf cluster, are now also known as High Performance Computing (sometimes Compute) Clusters. Many “religious” “beowulf advocates” may disagree and debate. But lets save that for another time and remain focused on what I have to tell you.

In the IT world, there is some in-formal difference between Beowulf clusters and High Performance Compute Clusters, or HPCC. As said earlier, Beowulf clusters normally consists of ordinary PCs. However, HPCC , being a Beowulf cluster, in principal of operation, consists of the expensive equipment all over. HPCC are used by big guys, like Oil and Gas industry, Space exploration, etc, who want the fastest machines, and they are ready to spend millions on the equipment and setup. The interconnect in such situations can be (very) costly Myrinet or Infiniband, or a bit cheaper Gig-E. All placed in a high profile data center. As you can see, this “does” cost “too much”. But the reward you get is performance measured in Tera Flops, and more recently in Peta FLOPS! . To let you compare a bit, let me tell you that Cray-1, in 1976 was just 250 Mega FLOPS. Cray-2 (1985-1989) was 3.9 Giga FLOPS! Nowadays, a few hundred dollar, desktop machine/PC is now able to achieve, more than that. Again, please keep the advancement of technology, in mind.

A Beowulf cluster, or an HPCC cluster, can not do magic alone. The magic is to break the application program code into such a way, which can be executed in parallel on multiple machines. Most of the programmers, write serial code (along being buggy and in-efficient). That is, program code will do all tasks in a serial fashion (steps performed / executed one after the other). Such kind of programs “can not” give you performance, no matter what size of cluster you throw at it. They do get executed faster on big iron machines though. But again, that is limited by the size of the machine (and your pocket). So the magic is to use PVM or MPI. PVM is Parallel Virtual Machine, and MPI is Message Passing Interface. Both are popular technologies to write and execute program code written in parallel, while MPI being more popular nowadays.

And that was, what a Super-Computer is, in detail.

Question: “What is the use of an HPC cluster/super computer?”

Though not limited to the scope and usage, HPCC is normally used for the following:

• Quantum mechanical physics,
• Weather forecasting,
• Climate research,
• Molecular modelling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals),
• Simulation of air planes in wind tunnels, and creation of different flight / combat situations
• Simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons,
• Research into nuclear fusion,
• Cryptanalysis,
• Oil Well drilling and capacity calculations
• Reservoir (Oil) simulations
• Seismic studies
• Deep see exploration
• Space exploration
• Weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, storms, tsunamis and tornado prediction
• Banking, trend analysis, etc, stock market predictions, etc, etc.
• High performance cars: design and testing / simulations (Formula 1, etc)
• Professional sports equipment design validations through simulations,
• Creating and testing various vaccine designs for different diseases,
• Testing time travelling theories, such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, etc
• Decryption of Ciphers and keys
• Study of human mind, neural networks and designing Artificial Intelligence.
• Study of green house effect and global warming
• Agriculture research,
• Water storage / dam building,
• Electricity generation planning and operation,
• Oil exploration,
• Military planning,
• New generation of more complex war games,
• , and many…. many more.

If you want to categorize them industry-wise, it would be:

• Science: Astronomy, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Health
• Engineering: Automotive, Aerospace, Marine, Defense, Oil and gas
• Others: Finance, Internet, Media, etc.

Their is an extension to the answer to the question asked. The uses of super-computer are limited only by your imagination. In simple words, whatever you can put this technology to work, is its yet another use. There are no formal hard drawn lines here.

Now, lets deal with the last question question:

Question: “Why should we bother?”

Well, if you have read the previous article and you are an IT enthusiast, then probably you already have an answer. Nevertheless, I will try to explain it to everyone, as below. Remember, the main target audience of this article are people from third world and under-developed countries. Read the text in that context. Again, it is still usable for the developed and developing countries.

You should bother, because something needs to be done in all of the fields of science and technology, listed above, in your country / community. But unfortunately, you have few resources available to you. You cannot just go ahead and buy an HPCC or super computer for yourself, or your company, organization or research institute. So in that case, what would you do? Or, what can be done? There are chances, that your fellow countrymen/community members are already started studying parallel programming and they need heavier computing entities / real clusters to solve some of the most un-heard computing problems. There is also a chance that you are already in-search of a readily available magical solution, without spending anything extra. These are some of the clear reasons, to: Why you should be bothered.

The Horizontal Cluster!

Now comes the actual point of this article. If you are wondering that who would deliver these magical clusters to you and where would you place them? Well, the answer is that, you already have them, … and, …. in place ! In-fact, you have hundreds of clusters available to you, but you never bothered to look for them. If you wanted someone to come , wake you up and spoon feed you with a cluster, then congratulations! l I have come to you, to do exactly that!

As you know, and have seen with your own eyes, that all computer institutes have a computer lab, with some network infrastructure in place. (Great info, isn’t it!) And all offices, now-a-days have computers too! Connected through a network switch. Good. So when these machines are doing nothing in the evening, why not use them as a cluster? Simple! If you are already having Linux on all these PCs, then your task is much simplified. However, If you have that disease (windows) installed on all of your PCs and you don’t want to get rid of it too (which is quite easy in-fact!), then you can try installing Linux on a separate partition on those PCs. The plan is, when everyone goes home, you just reboot the machines (it’s upto you, how you reboot them), into Linux, and just start submitting your program jobs through a master node, which you have already assigned the role of master. Good. So all of a sudden, you have a full cluster at your disposal, running actual number crunching jobs! You can provide access to this cluster through web or ssh or whatever method you like, to your users. Better!

If you wonder about the electricity bill, (which you are), then, my idea is that you can try selling your cluster time to users outside your organizational hierarchy. People who are not your students or employees. (Or whatever your creative mind can think of.) This way, the cluster will pay for the electricity. At the same time the cost / productivity ratio will become better as the computers will be working most of the time.

There is another solution. If you computer lab / office network already has Linux on it, and your users just do basic office activities most of the time, like email, web-sufing and word processing, then you don’t even have to wait for them to go home! You can just schedule your scheduling software to use the unused CPU cycles from all the computers on your network and run compute jobs during work hours as well!

So just think about it for some time. Think of all the IT companies turned into compute clusters all of a sudden, WITHOUT spending an extra penny! The hardware and infrastructure is already there, and you will use complete stack of free / open-source software to setup that. (This will be covered in a future article.)

If you can bear a little more, I would ask you to just think of all these small / individual clusters as power houses. And now the related next idea: The Grid! Yessssssss ! The cloud , the grid, (the matrix if you want to call it!) . Connect all , or few of these clusters together over internet , to form a grid. That can easily be done. You can develop trust relationships between different companies and educational institutes in NxN manner for mutual benefit. If you have a program code which needed some extra ordinary compute power to run, and was too big for any small scaled cluster, then just join a few clusters in a grid form and submit your compute job. That is it!. You have a nation wide, region wide, or world wide compute cluster with you, without spending a penny! What else could be better than this?

I hope this gives your thought process, a spin. And if it does, act now.

From the link : http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_bizarre_microsoft_workaround.htm , I have the following for you. And if you don’t believe me, go to the Microsoft site about the same, here : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702

Microsoft issues bizarre Oracle workaround

Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting
May 26,  2009
For anybody using ODBC with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, we all know how crappy Microsoft products are, some of the worst implementation in the history of software engineering.

However, this one redefines crapware.

The Microsoft page on XL97: Data Not Returned from Query Using ORACLE Data Source.  Check this out, workaround #2:

Method 2: Move Your Mouse Pointer

If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being returned to Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data has been returned to Microsoft Excel.

PS – It’s been reported that a more elegant workaround is to stand on your head and chant “Bill is better than Larry” 7 times.

RHCE/RHCT Exam Changes
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Reinforcing its commitment to provide IT professionals with the best training and performance-based assessments in the industry, Red Hat has improved the format and delivery mechanisms of the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) exams . The changes make for a more efficient use of testing time and do not impact the overall content nor the scope of the exams.

• What is changing?
• How have the exams been made shorter?
• Are the exams easier or more difficult now?
• Can I still take the old format exams after May 1, 2009?
• Why are the exams being changed?

What is changing?
Effective May 1, 2009, the RHCE exam will be a single section lasting 3.5 hours. Previously the exam consisted of two sections of 2.5 and 3.0 hours. The RHCT exam becomes a single section lasting 2.0 hours from its previous two section format lasting 1.0 hours and 2.0 hours respectively.

How have the exams been made shorter?
The exams, which cover essentially the same skills previously tested, use candidates’ time more efficiently and re-organize tasks into a single section. Our analysis of thousands of exam results found that more time was allocated in the first section than was needed for candidates who could historically pass the second section. Allocating 2.5 hours in the first section was only beneficial to individuals who, we found, were unable to pass the second section.

Providing candidates with pre-installed systems for the entire exam shortened testing time as well. Previously, candidates were required to install systems from “bare metal” in the second section of the exam. Our analysis found that installation is something virtually every candidate accomplishes successfully. However, the installation process is time-consuming. A significant amount of time was spent watching packages as they install, a task that is not indicative of an individual’s abilities. Providing a pre-installed system saves valuable time.

Are the exams easier or more difficult now?
We would expect someone who took the exam on April 30 under the earlier format to have the same outcome that they would have on May 1 under the new format. The scope of what is tested is the same. Consider our online prep guide for the RHCT and RHCE exams: the only section of it that has changed is the section concerning timing and format. Our guidance on the skills one must have has not changed.

Can I still take the old format exams after May 1, 2009?
All exams worldwide given on or after May 1, 2009 will be under the new format.

Why are the exams being changed?
Taking a certification exam is like a visit to the doctor: it should take as long as is necessary to make an accurate diagnosis, but should not take any longer than necessary. A shorter exam makes better use of candidates’ time.

The story of two strange characters exploring a capricious and seemingly infinite machine. The elder, Proog, acts as a tour-guide and protector, happily showing off the sights and dangers of the machine to his initially curious but increasingly skeptical protege Emo. As their journey unfolds we discover signs that the machine is not all Proog thinks it is, and his guiding takes on a more desperate aspect.

Elephants Dream is a story about communication and fiction, made purposefully open-ended as the world’s first 3D “Open movie”. The film itself is released under the Creative Commons license, along with the entirety of the production files used to make it (roughly 7 Gigabytes of data). The software used to make the movie is the free/open source animation suite blender along with other open source software, thus allowing the movie to be remade, remixed and re-purposed with only a computer and the data on the DVD or download.

Elephants Dream from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Big Buck Bunny tells the story of a giant rabbit with a heart bigger than himself. When one sunny day three rodents rudely harass him, something snaps… and the rabbit ain’t no bunny anymore! In the typical cartoon tradition he prepares the nasty rodents a comical revenge.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Here is the text directly from that site, from their News section.

NEWS: SquirrelMail replaces Microsoft Outlook in the office of the Indian Prime Minister

Mar 25, 2009 by Paul Lesniewski

Here is the article text:-

I feel great pride and satisfaction today, to announce to you gentlemen, that I have made (first?) “free” CBTs / videos of HPCC in English language, and released them (free of cost) on my website: http://www.wbitt.com . This is my first step towards the objective to see “A SuperComputer on every desk!”. And I hope to have more strength and ability to continue serving the community.

The ultimate goal is kind of too big to summarize in words. By sharing these videos (and more), I hope to see more educated, more experienced HPC system administrators / cluster administrators in future. Also, a whole new breed of HPC programmers, as now, they should have a very affordable platform to develop their HPC programs. I also hope to see HPC being utilized in almost all fields of life. In my opinion, industry giants have somehow, made HPC, sort of an “un-touchable” technology for all, but for a very few. The brains and thoughts are also locked in a sense that super computing can only be used to make nuclear weapons, or to launch satellites, etc etc. ( I know scientific / health uses as well). I intend to have this barrier removed. Once every one will be using this technology, I am sure, people will find other uses as well, trickling all the way down to various aspects of our daily lives. I am sure that, just as internet was once un-heard of, has now become an integral part of our lives, supercomputing will also become the same. Time will tell.

Please feel free to refer/distribute these videos to anyone. They are for the community.

Check the downloads page for the file links.

Muhammad Kamran Azeem
26 April 2009

Let me warn you that I have a love/hate relationship with Oracle. And, it is complicated. My views may be biased. But right now, I am worried about MySQL. Seems like worlds largest commercial database vendor buys the worlds most popular opensource database! And we don’t know, what Oracle will do with it? Is it just to kill the competion, at the lower end as well? (Well, the word “competition” may not suite much, but anyway). What about people who are using MySQL now? There are literally thousands of businesses / shops woven around MySQL technology. What is their fate ? Will Oracle be introducing complex (clever and evil) licensing for MySQL products? Or will they allow it to remain free, and allow them proper exposure and support? Nothing is for sure. Will we be able to see more MySQL releases in future with more features ?

I don’t know, I am one of those, who think that Oracle bought MySQL just to kill it. That makes PostgreSQL the next available candidate in the “free / opensource” slot . PostgreSQL is worlds most advanced open-source database. For some reason, it is not as popular and widely used as MySQL is. So even if PostgreSQL becomes the next platform of choice, what about the existing MySQL database users? (that includes DBAs, programmers, SysAdmins, everyone). The migration cost is just too high to think of. It is kind of dreadful to the sysadmins as well, as most of the management and monitoring utilities are painlessly configured ove mysql. I am also wondering about the famous Qmail+MySQL setups .

I can only hope to see a much “free(er)” version MySQL in future. Possibly by fork(ing) out / branching from the current MySQL code, by the open-source freedom fighters.

I suppose that, “Lets see what happens!”, will do not good. Something “needs” to be done about it. I remember NCR once acquired TeraData, but later spun it off as a separate entity. Can we libertate MySQL from Oracle, by convincing Oracle to spin it off ?

One line of silence for MySQL …………………