BadMagicNumber

Over on my Apache Harmony blog I've just pointed at an excellent presentation on Software Optimization and Virtual Machines.

One thing that I think a wide audience might be interested in is this excerp, from a report by Sevitzky, Mitchell and Srinivasan:

J2EE benchmark creates 10 business objects (w/6 fields) from a SOAP message of bytes.

10,953 calls, 1,492 objects created

Modern JVMs are amazing creations!

I’ve just finished Richard Morgan’s “Woken Furies”. This is the third book in the Takeshi Kovacs series (the previous two books were “Altered Carbon” and “Broken Angels”). In this book we see Kovacs back on his home planet of Harlem’s World dealing with assorted bits of intelligent military hardware, religious fanatics, gangsters, the immortal first families, a couple of Envoys and the ghost of Quellcrist Falconer.

I think this is perhaps the least shockingly violent of Morgan’s four books (“Market Forces” being the other book outside the Kovacs series). However, it still manages to make something like the “dark” Revenge of the Sith look like a childrens Christmas carol. After all this is a Richard Morgan book, so the body count is high and the violence is extreme. If Kovacs appears perhaps a little less morally ambivalent than in previous books it is only because the justification for some of his more extreme behaviour is explained to us in more detail than before.

As we expect from his previous books, the story is very fast paced. My impression is that the was it seemed shorter than “Altered Carbon” or “Broken Angels”, althugh this doesn’t appear to be tru in reality – Amazon says it is 400 pages while “Broken Angels” was 484 pages. Perhaps it is that “Woken Furies” doesn’t create quite as deep a universe as the previous books did. For instance, while “Altered Carbon” added depth to the storyline by using prior events and “Broken Angels” explored the Martian civilization, “Woken Furies” had little back-story that wasn’t directly related to the plot.

Morgan hasn’t become any less imaginative, though. The use of diseases as a substitute for recreational drugs is a device that I have never some across before and the evolving abandoned military machines were also unique.

Overall, I found “Woken Furies” an enjoyable read, but not quite to the same amazing level as “Altered Carbon”. I’d give it 4 stars.

Due to a flood of comment spam I've had to turn off comments.

Paul Murphy has written a blog entry entitled Microsoft to buy Red Hat? Say it ain’t so. Ignoring the blatent speculation in that post, there are so many factual errors and obvious mistakes in the analysis that it appears he knows absolutly nothing about what he is talking about.

Consider this gem:

The biggest threat Red Hat faces right now is that IBM could settle with SCO and then release its own Linux along with workstations and servers based on the Cell processor.

Consider the way the SCO case is currently positioned. It looks like IBM will win, probably be awarded damages and SCO will probably be delisted and (I suspect) wound up as a company since their entire business model rest on winning that case. Why exactly would IBM consider settling the case now if they didn't earlier?

Then there is this:

With SuSe essentially out of the picture, Linspire in a world by itself, and Debian not getting the press it deserves, such a move by IBM would leave Red Hat with nowhere to go except a suicidal head-to-head competition with Microsoft in the x86 marketplace.Given that Cell outperforms x86 by an order of magnitude and doesn’t have the security weaknesses built into the x86, this would leave them fighting to hold an ever decreasing share of a shrinking market.

Geeze – Intel & AMD had better give up now! They have no hope against the magic of the Cell processor! Of course, there is the small problem of the Cell requiring entirely new programming techniques to get the best out of it – but I'm guessing Murphy didn't understand that.

Finally there is this bit of logic:

Getting acquired therefore makes sense as Red Hat’s Plan B -but Microsoft’s Plan B has traditionally been Plan A delayed a few years and I can see no reasonable business scenario under which the acquisition makes sense for them.

If I understand that bit of logic correctly, I think he's giving himself an excuse to use when Microsoft doesn't buy Red Hat. I think that might be the smartest bit of work he did in that piece…

I believe that a high quality open source Java implementation is important for many reasons, but there is one that overrides all others. I think that having a Java runtime deeply integrated into the Linux application stack both guarantees the future of Java on the desktop and is the only reasonable way for the Linux desktop environment to compete long term with Windows and Mac OS.

The alternative approach (Mono) is a nice technical platform. Politically it just doesn't make sense, though, because it ties Linux's future to that of its biggest competitor. Java, on the other hand is controlled by a company who is a long-term major contributor to open source projects and has committed both programmers to work on them and patent portfolios to help defend them. It is true that Sun could help by open sourcing its class libraries, but not doing that is a commerical mistake Sun has the right to make.

(Note that only neither IBM nor BEA nor any other Java vendor can solve the problem by open sourcing their JVMs, because they all sub-licence the class libaries from Sun and thus do not have the rights to open source them)

Anyway (as though I aren't already overcommitted with “projects on the side”): The Unofficial Apache Harmony Blog is something I plan to keep updated with regular status reports for those of you who don't want to deal with the mailing list traffic.

Searchscapes Manhattan is a pretty cool search visualisation that reminds me of Snowcrash.

It's Shockwave, but almost worth the installation just to play with it.

Apparently I'm a “local software developers who works with open-source solutions” (Also on Builder.au).

Seriously, though – it's good that the Australian government is trying to encourage open source, but that licence is pretty extreme. For example, this clause is what made me say I wouldn't touch it in any circumstances:

You must Notify Squiz.Net within 30 days of making any Modifications even if You do not intend to distribute those Modifications. Notify is defined in Clause 4.2 below. If Your Modifications are incomplete, You must still Notify Squiz of the status of your progress not less frequently than once every 30 days.

In theory I'd prefer to just pay than put up with having to deal with crap like that – although I suspect in practice I'd just use something else.

This blog will introduce you to Transactional NTFS, why we're so excited about this technology, and how you can use it in your own applications.

http://blogs.msdn.com/because_we_can/archive/2005/04/21/410628.aspx

It might not be WinFS, but a transactional filesystem would be pretty useful…