SJS's Journal: SCALE musings

Well, SCALE was interesting, educational, and fun.

The CA Cert folks had a booth, doing a brisk business in verifying identies. Nice guys.

The panel on OpenVZ was interesting, and the product seems to have quite a nice feature-set. And the logo is just gosh-darned cool.

Hans Reiser talked about Reiser 4, mostly about performance and efficiency... stuff I regard as interesting in an abstract way but not so really important for home use... and had a short digression into the elegance of the design, which *is* important, as that has a strong bearing on maintainability and stability, which are important for home use.

And then in response to a question at the end from jaqque (easily the best question of the presentation, in my opinion), talked a little bit about views and masks. This is Way Cool stuff, and is certainly a reason to look at Reiser4.

The most impressive panel that I attended was about using dtrace for debugging linux applications by running Linux under OpenSolaris using the BrandZ container.

Every developer should look at what dtrace does, and how well it does it, and then ask themselves why they don't have a solaris or opensolaris box -- Sun put an extremly powerful tool into the hands of developers, it should be used.

Every administrator should look at what dtrace does, and how well it does it, and them ask themselves why they aren't running their critical services on a solaris or opensolaris box -- Sun put an extremely powerful tool into the hands of the administrators, and it should be used.

If managers aren't getting demands from their developers and administrators for (open)solaris machines, they need to point their developers and administrators to dtrace.

Oh, and there was a toaster running BSD (NetBSD I think) on the exhibit floor.