Bill's Write

<BODY bgcolor="#ffffd9"> <DIV align="left"> <CENTER> <P style='font-family : Georgia,"Times New Roman",Roman;font-weight : bold;font-size : x-large;' align="center"><FONT color="#993300">Bill's Write</FONT></P> <TABLE cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" border="1" align="center"> <TBODY> <TR valign="middle" align="center" style="font-weight : bold;font-size : small;"> <TD> <P align="center"><B><A href="bwrite/billsindex.html" target="Content">Bill's<BR> Writing</A></B></P> </TD> <TD> <P align="center"><B><nobr>Byte Columns</nobr></B><BR> <B><nobr><A href="Cols/index1999.htm" target="Content">1999</A> <A href="Cols/index2000.htm" target="Content">2000</A> <A href="Cols/index2001.htm" target="Content">2001</A></B> <A href="Cols/index2002.htm" target="Content">2002</A></nobr></P> </TD> <TD> <P align="center"><B><nobr><A href="os2/os2infoindex.htm" target="Content">OS/2 Info</A></nobr><BR> <nobr><A href="bsd/bsdindex.htm" target="Content">BSD Info</A></nobr></B></P> </TD> <TD> <P align="center"><A href="cppm/cppmindex.html" target="Content"><B>CP/PM</B></A><BR> <B><A href="technology/technologyIndex.htm" target="Content">Technology</A></B></P> </TD> <TD> <P align="center"><B><nobr><A href="grids/gridindex.htm" target="Content">Grids and<wbr> Clusters</A></nobr><BR> <nobr><A href="dlibs/dlibindex.html" target="Content">Digital<wbr> Libraries</A></nobr></B></P> </TD> <TD> <P align="center"><B><A href="design/designindex.htm" target="Content">Design<BR> Studies</A></B></P> </TD> </TR> </TBODY> </TABLE> </CENTER> <H4>December 31, 2002: Last OS/2 Item This Year.</H4> <P>In an analysis of the Athlon64 processor by Viktor Kartunov, he lists many of the over 50 operating systems that were tested, including OS/2. That list and a link to the article is on the <A href="os2/os2updates.htm" target="_self"><B>OS/2 Updates</B></A> page.</P> <P>Along with the end of 2002, I'm finally leaving dial up hell where I've been for 15 months. This afternoon, my dial up terminates and my DSL goes live, at a different location. Along with this, I'll be moving into an unfinished house to live and will be off line until I get my firewall setup and systems back on line.</P> <P>See you again in 2003!</P> <H4>December 25, 2002: Merry Christmas OS/2 Fans.</H4> <P>Up at 4:15 AM today, I wrapped some presents and spelunked around the web. I found some interesting updates for OS/2 users.</P> <P><B>SciTech</B> has extended their OS/2 chip support to all new Intel chipsets and renamed the SciTech Device Driver 7 set. <B>Warpstock</B> is now a non-profit corporation and plans are being made for a 2003 event. <B>Mozilla</B> has 1.3 alpha out and the Phoenix 0.5 browser is available for OS/2.</P> <P>Details on these updates are in the <B><A href="os2/os2updates.htm" target="_self">OS/2 Updates</A></B> page.</P> <H4>December 22, 2002: Site Changes, Science Links and OAI Added.</H4> <P>Today we take two steps towards better site organization, based on one subject area per section and a 404 page for changed links.</P> <P>The <B>Byte Columns</B> will continue in its current section, and all other writing I do will wind up under <B>Bill's Writing</B>, linked in the index page. The <B>Design Studies</B> section is actually a subset of Bill's Writing, and has been moved to the Bill's Writing Index.</P> <P>In place of Design Studies will be <B>Science Links</B>, an index to many of the science sites on the net. The reasons for this are based on my own love of science, Physics in particular, and the relationship between science and the technology we use every day.</P> <P>I've also added an <B>OAI (Open Archive Initative)</B> search site to the <B><A href="dlibs/dlibindex.html" target="_self">Digital Library Index</A></B>. It lists a bunch of sites that <B>my.OAI</B> has indexed with Dublin Core Metadata. I've also updated the <B>Digital Library Links</B> with a new link for the <B>National Science Digital Library</B>.</P> <H4>December 22, 2002: Bochs 2.0 In Pre-Release.</H4> <P>Bochs (pronounced Box) is a powerful x86 emulator (virtual hardware) that can run under several operating systems and enable you to virtualize other OS and applications. It is a great alternative to using a separate system for programs from a different OS.</P> <P>Note that Bochs is significantly slower than real hardware, but the convenience and debug capabilities are <I>very</I> useful.</P> <P>The implications of this free software for releasing companies from the Microsoft OS monopoly are significant.</P> <P><A href="http://bochs.sourceforge.net/release2_0.html" target="_blank"><B>Excerpt from the web site:</B></A></P> <P>Our last release was Bochs 1.4.1 on June 23 of this year. Since then there has been a LOT of development activity, especially since mid-August. Here's a summary.</P> <UL> <LI>CPU optimizations boost simulation speed by around 2x. (Kevin Lawton) <LI>Bochs now supports up to 8 hard drives, or 8 CDROMs, or any combination (Christophe Bothamy) <LI>The wxWindows interface has grown so that you can edit all bochsrc parameters using menus and dialog boxes (Bryce Denney) <LI>Added support for the AMD x86-64 instruction set used in their Hammer processor (Peter Tattam) <LI>Added support for MMX instructions (Stanislav Shwartzman) <LI>Added support for SSE and SSE2 instructions (Stanislav Shwartzman) <LI>Remote GDB stub support (Johan Rydberg, Stu Grossman) <LI>Added plugin support for Linux, Solaris, MacOS X, and Cygwin. Plugins allow you to compile Bochs with support for many options and load the pieces that you want at runtime. </UL> <H4>December 12, 2002: More Grid News</H4> <H5><A href="grids/gridupdates.htm" target="_self">TACC and Platform Computing Collaborate to Develop 'Grid of Grids' for ScientificResearch</A></H5> <P>Platform Computing Inc. and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) announced that they will collaborate on research and development of next-generation software technologies for grid computing.</P> <H4>December 11, 2002: New Science Site Launched!</H4> <P>For those of you who are interested in science at any level, this is a great new site. The US government has pulled together all the government science links on one site. <A href="http://www.osti.gov/science/firstgovdev/index.html" target="_blank"><B>www.science.gov</B></A></P> <P>I hope you find science.gov to be helpful in finding government science information through one location. An enhanced copy of the press release, and additional information, may be found at: <B><A href="http://www.science.gov/communications" target="_blank">www.science.gov/communications</A></B>.</P> <P>Egad, it's been a busy day.</P> <H4>December 11, 2002: <A href="os2/os2updates.htm" target="_self">IBM Terminates OS/2</A> Updated</H4> <P>The scheduled closure of APAR support for OS/2 Warp 4 and Warp Server has been the end of 2004, as I reported in my October Byte column. Yesterday IBM announced that sales of OS/2 in both versions would stop as of March 13, 2003.</P> <P>The good news is that sales will continue from resellers of those products, which includes Serenity Systems' eCS enahnced version of OS/2.</P> <P><B>Update: </B>According to Bob St. John of Serenity-Systems, this move is consistent with IBM plans announced in 2000. The plans for eCS took this into account, therefore no changes in plans. The new eCS 1.1 should be in RC status by the end of December. I'm looking forward to getting hands on experience.</P> <P>Check out the latest information at <B><A href="http://www.ecomstation.com/" target="_blank">ecommstation</A></B><A href="http://www.ecomstation.com/" target="_blank">.</A></P> <H4>December 10, 2002: Some Super News</H4> <P>About Supercomputers of course. Cray, the most recognized name in supers since the 1960s, has announced the <A href="http://www.cray.com/news/0211/x1announce.html" target="_blank"><B>Cray X1</B></A>. Cray computers have always been among the most powerful systems in the supercomputer arena, but this one starts at a lower price than many, and extends to the highest performance yet announced. Five preproduction systems have been in operation during 2002.</P> <BLOCKQUOTE>"The Cray X1�system, the world's most powerful supercomputer product. The new product is available with up to 52.4 trillion calculations per second (teraflops) of peak computing power and 65.5 terabytes of memory. U.S. list pricing starts at about $2.5 million."</BLOCKQUOTE> <P>That's 65 x 10**12 bytes of memory, or about 256,000 times the typical 256 MB personal computer, not to mention quite a bit more expensive. Owning one of these is a close version of geek heaven. :-}</P> <P><B>Intel</B> has announced the largest cluster to be built with<B> Infiniband</B> as an interconnect technology. This project will take 128 dual processor Xeons and interconnect them with a high speed (4 times base speed) Infiniband network. This cluster is being built in cooperation with Los Alamos National Labs. More information is available <A href="http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20021121net.htm" target="_blank"><B>here</B></A>.</P> <P><B>Comment:</B> In the next year, we will see more supercomputer, cluster and blade announcements that are the early products of the technology convergence I wrote about in "<A href="bwrite/billsindex.html" target="_self"><B>Waves of Change</B></A>." If you haven't read this yet, it will give you the background to anticipate the coming upheaval in systems, large and small.</P> <H4>December 7, 2002: New Grid Site and Byte Subscriptions</H4> <P>This is the <U>61st anniversary of Perl Harbor</U>. Take a moment to remember those who fought and died in World War II.</P> <P>I've added information and a link to the <B>NSF Middleware Initative</B> in the <B><A href="grids/gridindex.htm#pgw" target="_self">Grids Index</A> </B>under Primary Web Sites. This web site is now the central location for all NSF released middleware. They have established a two release per year schedule, April and October.</P> <P>My latest column, "<B>Digital Libraries for Everyone</B>" is now available on the <A href="http://www.byte.com" target="_blank"><B>Byte</B></A> site. Byte.com has recently moved to a subscription form at the inexpensive rate of $12/year until the end of 2002. After that it will be $20/year.</P> <P>I encourage my readers to subscribe for two reasons: First, Byte will be able to continue to bring you lots of information and knowledgable opinions; Second, I'll be able to continue exploring advanced technology as it appears, at Byte and on this site. Your support is greatly appreciated by all of the writers for Byte.</P> <H4>December 6, 2002: Digital Library News and Links updated.</H4> <P>Plus I haven't been able to access or update this site for the last four days. The local connections changed recently and not all of the routers were updated. It took a while to find that last missing link. :-}</P> <P>Another recent update fixed the spacing problem on the Title/Section frame. I finally figured out how to get the title properly into the table. Then it took about six more tries to get the table centered in the frame for multiple browsers. A real learning experience.</P> <H4>November 24, 2002: Building a Data Grid.</H4> <P>My June Byte column on the Globus toolkit for <A href="Cols/columnA17b.html" target="_self">Building a Data Grid</A> is now online in the 2002 column index and in the Grid Index with <A href="grids/byog1.htm" target="_self">Build Yer Own Grid</A>.</P> <H4>November 21, 2002: Digital Library Index Arrives.</H4> <P>Digital Libraries (Dlibs) are rapidly creating a major tool for information publishing by groups as small as one individual or as large as a federation of universities. I'm kicking off this resource area with links to my columns on Dlibs, and news about the latest Dlib software, announced just three days ago. Check out the announcement in the <A href="dlibs/dlibindex.html" target="_self">Digital Library Index.</A></P> <H4>November 20, 2002: News and Updates</H4> <P><B><A href="bsd/freebsd5news.html" target="_self">FreeBSD 5.0 Developers Release 2</A></B> is now available at a number of worldwide sites. This announcement is for <I>widespread</I> testing of the new MP enhanced version of FreeBSD. A summary of the new features is available in BSD News. This is <B>not</B> intended for production use.</P> <P><B><A href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/28177.html" target="_blank">IBM Supercomputer Anouncement</A></B><BR> The US Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded IBM a $290 million contract to build the two fastest supercomputers in the world with a combined peak speed of 460 trillion calculations per second (teraflops)(TF).</P> <P>Two systems, one with 100 TF, the other with 360 TF performance. These systems will enable breakthrough work on accurate simulations of earthquakes, the environment and nuclear explosions. This Register piece has a great bunch of links at the end.</P> <H4>November 16, 2002: Some OS news, changes coming, and a request for help.</H4> <P>The <B>News</B> is that I expect to shortly receive an <U>eCS 1.1 gold release in English</U>. Well, in American (en-US) if you want to be precise. It has already been released in German. Specwise, it looks very good. I'll report here as soon as I have some hands on time. Also <A href="http://www.openbsd.org" target="_self">OpenBSD</A> has just released the 3.2 version, including an expanded Ports system similar to that of FreeBSD. It's worth a look.</P> <P>I tried the <U>Opera 5.12 release for OS/2</U> and am not going to use it. It's a nice design, very fast, good features, good screen display, and I like the multiple internal windows. But it crashed four time in four days, each time after I had done my scan of 12 tech news sites. I sent a report to Opera on this and have heard nothing back as yet. I'm back using Mozilla 1.2b.</P> <P><B>Changes</B> are planned to the structure of the site in order to broaden or add subjects. The first one up will be the Grids... heading. This will become two links. The upper line will be '<U>Grids and Clusters</U>', pointing to the same resource it does now, and the lower line will be '<U>Digital Libraries</U>' to start a new resource area.</P> <P>Later on, if I can find the space, I'll add '<U>Open Software Environment</U>' for resources in that area. Finally, I'll <U>split the Site Journal</U> into quarterly sections for size reasons - it is currently over 21KB. Each quarterly section will be linked to the prior section (done).</P> <P><B>Help Wanted:</B> I have wanted to do a complete site redesign and move to XHTML and XML based design, but there are problems. One is a lack of time due to finishing work on the rebuilt house, and the other is I have yet to find a good set of tools to support this move. My objective is to move the support from an obsolete IBM Top Page product (NT) to my FreeBSD workstation using open source software.</P> <P>The power of Zope is well beyond my needs, and too complex as I see it. I've started to investigate Amaya from W3C.org - it is their standard web editor/browser. I haven't had enough time to explore this tool yet. I really want site management & update capabilities in the tool or toolset.</P> <P>If any reader is working successfully in XML/XHTML with Linux or FreeBSD tools, please email me at the 'Contact the Author' link in the at the end of this Journal. I'd appreciate experience reports, good or bad, on what you have used. Thanks.</P> <H4>November 8, 2002: WOC Part IIIB Posted.</H4> <P>Finished! Whew, that turned out a lot bigger overall than I expected. See <A href="bwrite/wocp3b.html" target="_self">Waves of Change: Part IIIB</A>.</P> <H4>November 2, 2002: WOC Part IIIA Posted.</H4> <P>Yep, you read that right - Part III<B>A</B>. This means there will be a part III<B>B</B> as well. What happened is simple - there is just too much to write and finish in a timely manner. In order to get this posted in the same week promised, I had to (mostly) stick to the hardware subjects, saving the more complex software and other issues for part B. I'm hoping it doesn't breed a part C, but you never know until it is written. See <A href="bwrite/wocp3a.html" target="_self">Waves of Change: Part IIIA</A></P> <H4>October 31, 2002: Updates to BSD and Grid news.</H4> <P>A little catchup in updating the web site. BSD gets an Opera browser and more, plus some news about Grids.</P> <H4>October 29, 2002: Column done, WOC Part III this week.</H4> <P>It took longer than I expected, but my next column, "<B>Digital Libraries for Everyone</B>," will show up in the next week or two at Byte.com. In the column I introduce the phrase '<B>Open Environment</B>' and write about what it means. I'll add more here after the column comes out.</P> <P>On to the delayed "<U>Waves of Change</U>" conclusions, with some important implications for the economy over the next few years.</P> <P>Also, for those of you waiting patiently for more on several subjects, I haven't forgotten them nor dropped plans to write, but things have been <I>very</I> unpredictable for the last four months. I'll update <B>CP/PM</B> and <B>Grids</B> in the next few weeks, Ghu willing and the river don't rise.</P> <H4>October 12, 2002: WOC Part III delayed.</H4> <P>This year's big project, rebuilding a burnt out house, is reaching its climax. After five months of debris clearing and repair work, last Thursday we began raising the new roof amid forecasts of rain. As of Saturday night, the roof is fully covered with waferboard and shingles are being applied as I type. For the last two weeks, I have been spending most of my time and all of my energy doing heavy physical work on the house, including nailing off half of the roof yesterday.</P> <P>Part III of WOC is an incomplete draft that I had hoped to have finished and posted by today. But the physical impact of working on the house has left me unable to write (or think much) after coming home. With the roof done, finishing the house goes into high gear so we can move in asap. I will work on WOC when I can, but my next column for Byte comes first.</P> <P>My apologies to all for the delay.</P> <H4>October 4, 2002: Waves of Change Part II arrives.</H4> <P>The second part of WOC which discusses technology convergence and some of the probable results in the technology industry. See <B><A href="bwrite/wocp2.html" target="_self">Technology Convergence</A></B> in Bill's Writing.</P> </DIV> <P><B><A href="Journal0902.html" target="_self">Link to Journal for July 2002 thru September 2002</A></B></P> <H3><FONT face="Arial,Helvetica">Notes:</FONT></H3> <P><FONT face="Arial,Helvetica">All web sites are works in progress, this one is no exception. I expect it will evolve from the basic to a more comprehensive site as I add items and areas. Come back and visit periodically to see what's new.</FONT></P> <P><FONT face="Arial,Helvetica">Thanks for visiting.</FONT>  </P> <H3 align="center">Privacy Statement</H3> <H4><FONT face="Arial,Helvetica">BillsWrite doesn't capture any information beyond standard web server statistics.</FONT></H4> <P>Specifically, <U>we do not</U> use cookies, capture any web address information nor save state or ID information while you browse.</P> <P>All of the commercial web sites and many others collect quite a bit of tracking information, very little of which is needed for web operation. The rest is collected for marketing and resold to other merchants <I>unless this is specifically excluded</I> in their privacy statement.</P> <P>We want you to visit without worrying about your privacy. Enjoy your visit and return often.</P> <P>Bill Nicholls - owner and author</P> <P>Contact Info: To contact the author, click on the mailto link below.</P> <P><A href="mailto:bwrite@ywave.com?Subject=OS/2 Tips:">MailTo: BillsWrite</A></P> <H3 align="center"><I>All content on this site is Copyright 2001 and 2002 by Bill Nicholls</I><BR> <I>All Rights Reserved</I></H3> </BODY>