Freeware Jet Engines Dangerous: Does free software imply low quality results?

In a recent NY Times article on the R data analysis language Anne H. Milley implied that her personal happiness stems from quality of jet engines that can only be achieved through the use of commercial software.

If I were in Ms. Milley's position I too would be happy if people were paying to use my product. What does not particularly matter to me is the cost of software which is used to design those engines. What I truly care about is the quality of the engineering, construction and validation procedures. In any case as a passenger I am unsure how I can determine if the equipment I am flying on was designed using free software or not. I will have to settle for being happy if my flight is on time, security lines are short and I get home to see my wife.

“I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code," said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

[From R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts - NYTimes.com]

Given the implication that happiness, value and quality are only available for products designed using commercial software; I find myself retroactively saddened by all of the things that I have seen which were designed before commercial software packages were available. I would like to thank Ms. Milley for sucking the joy out of my life.

Good Turn out at CROSUG

Sitting in the Capitol Region OpenSolaris Users Group meeting, this is one of the best turnouts that e have had so far. This meeting is a little later than last few (starting after the workday instead of just before the end).

Ooh, live demo failed...looking for a live setup utility for the AMP stack couldn't find it offhand. OTOH the GUI package manager is working nicely. IPS seems like it has really made progress since the last time I looked (it has been a while, I have been slacking). We just got the fairly standard question about patching, packaging etc looking more advanced in OpenSolaris than Solaris 10. The answer of course is "OpenSolaris is more the development platform, it has the newer and more advanced/bleeding edge features. Some of these features will make it back to commercial Solaris."

Given the location that we are in another fairly obvious question: How do we get access to these cool bits and the IPS repository if our network is separated from the internet by an air gap. (The answer is that you can set up your own repo, eventually you should expect that there will be something like an official DVD that provides the needed files. (I expect that this is really only of interest in the Fed space))

I just remembered why the late meetings here aren't as nice as they could be. The AC cuts off at 6PM, it is starting to get just a touch warmer in here. I assume it will be fairly warm by the end of the meeting.

Moved to Sam NIcholson for "OpenSolaris: A Developer's Perspective"

"OpenSolaris Look and Feel: Give people what they expect and slip in what they need under the covers."


Good questions about iSCSI, SMF, Contracts, manifests. I am surprised at how few people here haven't done much with SMF (not even writing your own service).

I really need to get to ZFS root for the live snapshot based update, I have the image sitting on my laptop but haven't installed the image.

Big Buck Bunny Rocks

Way back when (June 19, 2007 at ~4am) I sent mail to Ton at Blender. At the time I allowed that we had this compute grid that already ran Blender and that while I couldn't commit any time I could if he was interested put him in touch with the people who could. Happily he allowed that indeed they were looking for a render farm sponsor.

Woot! On May 29, 2008 I received my copy of the Big Buck Bunny DVD. I brought it inside and we paused the Stanley Cup Playoffs so we could watch it. It looks really good and I think it was worth the occasional pain on our part in supporting the rendering (also because my name is in the credits as I bought a pre-release copy of the DVD to further support the development effort :) ).

Big Buck Bunny was rendered on Network.com (press release) using Blender which is part of the Network.com application catalog

To focus on the things that I think most people reading Sun blogs would find interesting the rendering process from the Big Buck Bunny blogs. My role was down in the Sun Grid - Network.com bubble.

If you look at the blogs there is plenty of information describing the development process, the rendering process and the fact that there were some complications in the execution. Interestingly one of the most common problems from my perspective were a large number of core files from the various Blender processes. These cores would at times fill up /var in the zones they were running in causing the Blender jobs to fail. Because of the implementation a single sub-task failure would cascade resulting in stopping the whole rendering process.

I "fixed" the core issue (coreadm is your friend) and cores have been disabled by default, now requiring that the end user make a local directory in their job setup scripts to hold their own cores if they would like to capture them. I believe that the cascading stop has been made into an option that is controllable in the job definition through the portal as well.

Go take a look at Big Buck Bunny and marvel at the power of open source software. Then realize how cool it is that a company such as Sun would spend/donate real time, money and resources on a creative commons animated movie. I'm glad we did it and I hope we can continue to do so in the future. (Maybe the next one as well)