MCslp

Sun Ultra 20 M2 review

I was fortunate enough to get a review unit of Sun’s Ultra 20M2 Workstation Back in the early part of 2007.

The Ultra 20M2 is Opteron based, and the M2 designation includes the dual-core Opteron processor. It was a very nice machine that I’m sorry to have given back.

The full review is on Free Software Magazine; read Sun Ultra 20 M2 review

Understanding MySQL Internals

Sash Pachev has written a new guide on Understanding MySQL Internals for O’Reilly.

I was one of the technical reviewers on this book and can tell you that it makes a good read if you want to understand more of what is going on under the hood in MySQL. There’s a lot to cover, for example the pluggable storage engine archtiecture, how queries are parsed and executed, and how individual storage engines work.

The book is compact, but very readable, and worth a look if you any interest in how databases are programmed, or are thinking about building your own storage engine to plug into MySQL.

Computerworld Podcast on the T1000

Computerworld’s podcast this week features a short interview with me on my aventures with the T1000.

The podcast Computerworld Input Output: The NYPD’s expanded data warehouse; testing out Sun’s T1000.

For the in-depth review of the T1000: T1000 in more detail

Sun Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation review

My review of the Sun Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation had made it into Issue 11 of Free Software Magazine.

Here’s a taster:

Sun have made some headlines in recent months through the release of their Ultra 20 workstation and a number of new servers based on the AMD CPUs. For some this is seen as major change of direction for a company that is well known for the use (and continued interest and development) of the SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) CPU. With so many new machines being based on the AMD CPU it will be surprising to some that Sun’s new mobile units are based on SPARC technology.

The Sun Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation is based an 64-bit UltraSPARC CPU. There are two main models, a 15″ unit that comes with a UltraSPARC IIi CPU at 550 or 650MHz, and a 17″ model with a 1.2GHz UltraSPARC IIIi CPU. Both are standard CPUs-these are not cut down or restricted versions designed to work within a laptop-and that is a key parameter for identifying the target market for the unit.

Read the full article.

If you don’t get the vibes, I like this machine, and Solaris as a laptop operating system is pretty good too. In fact, I’ve start up a new blog, Laptop Solaris to talk about my experiences with this machine and Solaris on a laptop in general.

StarOffice 8 Review – Office Killer?

LinuxPlanet have just recently published my very detailed StarOffice 8 review. To summarize, I like it, and with a few caveats, it gives Microsoft Office a run for its money.

The article is spread over a number pages, with screenshots, a brief TOC is below:

1. Alternatives to Microsoft Office
2. Availability
3. Installation
4. StarOffice Writer
5. StarOffice Calc
6. StarOffice Impress
7. StarOffice Draw
8. StarOffice Base
9. Office Killer?

You can read the full article at LinuxPlanet.

Agile Web Development with Rails

My review of Agile Web Development with Rails (by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson with Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, Thomas Fuchs, and Andreas Schwarz) has just made it to the the front page of Free Software Magazine.

It’s an excellent guide to programming Ruby and Rails and if you want to do any kind of web development and are tiring of the tradtional web programming environments.

The full review is readale on line.

Free Software Magazine Issue 10 is out (Free Browsers on OS X)

The latest issue (number 10) of Free Software Magazine is out. You can go straight to Issue 10 through this link.

You can download the entire issue if you are already registered, or download individual articles through the link above. For example, you can download my article, looking at Free browsers for Mac OS X.

To quote Tony Mobily (editor and creator of FSM):

In Free Software Magazine’s 10th issue Eddy Macnaghten helps to make X a little less unknown and “MC” Brown browses the browsers for Mac OS X. On a more political note: David Sugar talks about how free software is freeing Venezuela and Tom Chance reveals how the internet is beginning to aid in political campaigning. And more…

We even managed to get on to the digg front page.

Programming Ruby

I have a short, but sweet, review of Programming Ruby available at Free Software Magazine.

Basically, I love it and it should be in every Ruby programmer’s bookshelf.

Randal Schwartz’s Perls of Wisdom

If you don’t associate Randal Schwartz with Perl then you obviously don’t know how much of an influence Randal has been in spreading the Perl gospel. Randal has been talking about Perl for years, writing articles and contributing to books like the ‘Camel’ (Programming Perl, from O’Reilly). He’s also contributed to the built-in documentation and has worked with the internals of Perl and built various modules and examples. In short, when it comes to Perl, there’s little that Randal either isn’t aware of, or hasn’t already written about.

Hia book, Perls of Wisdom, is a collection of the articles that he’s written over the years that look at specific problems or issues that users have asked him to solve with Perl. Mostly, these are reprints of the original article, but sometimes they have been updated. In all cases you get more than just the scrip that solves the problem, you also get the theory behind it, detailed information on the problem and issues being addressed, and some potential ways to extend it.

For more details, read the full review of the book at Free Software Magazine.

Degunking Linux

It may seem like this is all I’ve been doing for the past few months, but I have yet another book review that has made it on to the ‘free’ area of Free Software Magazine.

This time it is Degunking Linux by Roderick W Smith. At its heart, this book is about trying to get the best performance – from CPU speed, to application performance and even disk space – out of your machine by doing some regular maintenance. This includes removing old applications, keeping your system up to date, flushing out the old caches and keeping your system spick and span.

This book has a rather interesting layout, in that it not only covers the mechanicss, but also provides multi-step programs for what to do on your machine when you have a few spare minutes right up to days to spend spring cleaning your machine. If you use Linux regularly on your server or desktop, this book is well worth a read.