As a result of giving my teenage daughter the classic Dragonrider books by Anne McCaffrey, she has become an averous science fiction reader.  The problem is keeping her supplied with enough things to read that are also appropriate for her age.  To this end, I recently pulled out a volume of collected books by Isaac Asimov: The Foundation Trilogy, The Stars Like Dust, The Naked Sun, and I Robot, all in one volume.

And of course, as a voracious reader myself, I reread these volumes, after not having read them in probably close to 20 years.

I found it interesting how some of the stories have held up better over time than others.  What really struck me were some of the social conventions that would never show up in modern day novels.  For example, in the Foundation books, cigarette smoking is taken for granted; it is something that is as casual as sipping a soft drink or chewing gum might be today.  I guess that's really the way it was in the late '40s and early '50s when those books were written.  Also, the idea of media moguls, where one person controls the newspapers, no longer really applies.  Even more out-of-sync is the idea that people would still be reading newspapers after 10,000 years of human history!  But as those books predated even television, such things shouldn't be surprising.

Also interesting was the clear expectations for how atomic power would change the world; that didn't happen, nor do I think it really will.

I Robot, on the other hand, held up better; the psychology related stories are more human, and thus more constant, than technology related stories. The same for The Naked Sun.

I've had this experience with other works, of course, such as one of stories in The Ship Who Sang that talked about a "Dylanist" as someone who uses music to influence society (written in the late '60s, of course), but the differences here struck me even more.

We don't often realize it when we read current SF works how much they reflect the times in which they are written.  I also suppose that when we're younger (I did a lot of reading in my 20s) we're not attuned to such larger things either.

All in all, it was fun to come back to these classic works, although with a different perspective (getting older does that to you, I guess).  I have, in general, become more analytical and critical in my reading, even of relaxing fiction kinds of things.

So, it's back to the boxes in the basement to see what else I can give my daughter... Wish me luck. :-)

The BDP-S350 supports true 1080p output and is compatible with Dolby TrueHD. Unlike the majority of the previous generation of blu-ray players, the BDP-S350 features an Ethernet connection to enable BD-Live features as well as firmware upgrades. Another cool feature on the BDP-S350 is the USB port for BD-Live external memory.

I'm listening to Alexander Eremin, who is the originator of MilaX, a distro of OpenSolaris designed to be as small as possible.

MilaX 0.1 was announced in February 2008, and there was a storm of interest as a result.

• This was intended to be a very small distro of OpenSolaris which would have all of the Solaris features like ZFS, DTrace, and all of the drivers.
• You can boot this on old hardware with few resources and don't require the whole system included with Solaris.
• There are two versions of MilaX now, one oriented for desktops and one for servers.  The server version is optimized to get an Apache web server going quickly.
• It looks like today, you need 512MB of memory to run MilaX, of which 105MB is for the RAM disk image of MilaX.
• MilaX boots from USB sticks or other devices.
• Currently, MilaX doesn't use the new Image Package System, so future work includes making MilaX available as a pkg(1) package.  Alex wants to make booting faster as well.
• http://www.milax.org to get involved.

As a parent of four children I felt compelled to blog about the phenomenon even though statistically we are all very unlikely to be affected by it. Our youngest son is only 9 months old presently and although our pool is protected by a baby barrier I was reminded today of a website that describes a process whereby infants can be trained to save themselves if they fall into a pool. Obviously, neither I or my employer (Intel Corporation) is endorsing this the Infant Swimming Resource although I am seriously considering the training they offer. If you have experience with the Infant Swimming Resource please let me know your thoughts.

I've been monitoring how many developers are watching all of the segments of the video series we've posted on the Take Five site.   It is natural that not everyone will make it to the end, but I'm wondering if there is anything we could do better.

First, I'd like to know if any of these are the causes:
  A) Didn't know series were there
  B) Watched the video from a different page w/out the series navigation
  C) Didn't have time to watch them all
  D) The video, well, just wasn't that interesting
  E) My boss walked by, and I had to quickly switch screens from videos
  F)  Other:  ______________ 

Take a look at two of the series we've posted from the Game Developers Conference:  Optimizing DirectX for Mulicore, or the SkullTrail series with GRIN Software* and UbiSoft*.  Or the very long Confronting ManyCore series.   Once a video is playing in the player at the top of the site, there is a link that says "see Next in series" and/or "see Previous in series" to easily (at least I thought) move from one to the next. 

While you in the player, you can rate the videos, get the embed code and direct links, leave comments, and/or link back to the blogs.

To see more series, they are in "series boxes" on the tabs below the Take Five player.  If you mouse over the numer, you will get a video description. Be sure to click on the blue arrow to see the Virtualization and Community, and coming soon, Open Source tabs. 

I'd love to hear your comments, and answers to the mulitple choice above.  I'm hoping I don't get too many D's.

Happy Friday!

An overview of the service pack can be downloaded from here.

Cinco de Mayo (May 5, 2008) Sun launched their OpenSolaris 2008.05 distro of the OpenSolaris code. The venue for the launch was CommunityOne, a free one-day conference held on the Monday before JavaOne. Above is a snap of Rich Green who runs software at Sun, doing the launch.

This is the second year that Sun offered CommunityOne for free to whomever would pre-register for the event. It was a good value, since it included lunch, sessions on topics from Linux to Glassfish to MySQL. All attendees got an OpenSolaris 2008.05 LiveCD and a chance to rub shoulders with others interested in their particular field. Ian Murdock set the stage initially in a keynote that explained Sun's role as an aggregater and supporter of various open source technologies into something people can build their businesses on. Ian's presentation slides were art drawings with no words.

Then there was a panel discussion consisting of a broad spectrum of open source luminaries from the Linux Foundation (Jim Zemlin), Red Hat, MySQL, Google and Sun. Actually I think it takes a lot of courage on Sun's part to have a forum discussion like this at their event.

Then Rich Green came on stage to talk about OpenSolaris and its many sources of contribution and features. One really fun demo was a system set up with a series of USB disks in a ZFS pool running raidz. A GUI showed all of the disks reading away, and then Jim Hughes (Sun Fellow) took a sledgehammer to one of the drives. Demo GUI showed the system continuing to run with the drive lost.

The Jeff Bonwick, the lead on ZFS destroyed another drive with a power drill. Finally, two new USB drives were added and the GUI showed the writes flowing on to the new disks to rebuild the RAID configuration.

Steven Hahn showed a "cooking show" demo of installing from the LiveCD and installing from repositories. It was a good set of demos and speeches.

During the conference itself, Intel offered a couple of talks. I gave a general talk on OpenSolaris support on Xeon and Intel's Geeta Krishna talked about wireless support in OpenSolaris and encouraged people to contribute.

Later that night, there was an OpenSolaris launch party at a local sports pub. There might have been more than a little silliness - Here is Jim Hughes sporting an OpenSolaris temporary tattoo and a MySQL dolphin.

After that, JavaOne was actually a blur of keynote prep and giving booth talks. But I did enjoy a particular booth in the trade show floor which featured an oxygen bar. Guess it's a good alternative to breathing those heady fumes of the open source world!