Digital Wasabi

I've been doing SSIS since it was called DTS back in the old'en days. I enjoyed using it with SQL Server 2000. One thing I always had trouble with was actually documenting the darn thing. It actually leads into a more existential issue with documenting these Workflow type systems, as well as these newer cloud based systems (take Microsoft's data explorer project, etc). I am leaving my current job and I had some SSIS work that wasnt well documented. I do see there are some commercial tools like BI Documenter  http://pragmaticworks.com/Products/Business-Intelligence/BIDocumenter/Default.aspx  But it seems I'll just fire up an old fashion Word document for now, and embed screenshots.

Woo!. Seems everything compiles perfectly. I had to copy the snappy libraries into the closed binary section of the build. Also, i had to build a 64bit and 32bit version of snappy (a bit difficult). I ran into a libtool bug (yes, another road block) when trying to compile the 64bit version of snappy. Right now, I use iscsi with virtualbox. So its difficult to import that into a different VM product (most desktop VM products dont support iSCSI booting).. I think i will copy over my illumos-gate directory to a now OpenIndiana installation, using a virtualHD, instead of iscsi. Then i should be able to import it into VMware or VirtualPC...and avoid the virtualbox bug I am experiencing with the latest illumos build. https://bitbucket.org/techsaint/zfssnappy

I am currently trying to add the snappy compression into ZFS for fun. You can check out my code here:  https://bitbucket.org/techsaint/zfssnappy I've been working on this for a few months (started around august). I've had massive roadblocks every step of the way. The first was the oracle purchase of Sun. Because of the purchase, the Sun Compiler tool patches (which were needed for an illumos build) were removed from the public. It took a month or so for the community to post instructions on using GCC instead of the Sun Compiler. After that, there was slight bug in the illumos build configuration that didnt allow for working builds if your new build version was older than the whatever version of illumos you were on. See  https://www.illumos.org/issues/1118 Now this new bug, is a virtualbox bug, which just appeared out of no where. Here is the ticket:  https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9651 . Since I rebased with the latest illumos code (as per build instructions) I ...

A very respected technology journal has reported the death of Silverlight in this article: InfoQ: Microsoft has Abandoned Silverlight and All Other Plugins Of course, if you actually watch the keynote and read other BUILD conference information, Microsoft is doing no such thing. As a matter of fact microsoft has doubled down on Silverlight by not pushing Windows 8 to the phone level and sticking with windows phone 7. My initial take on this plugin-less Windows 8 Metro browser is that its microsoft's attempt at dealing with the performance issue Android is having with supporting plug-ins in the tablet space. Imagine not just flash, but a pdf, a VRML, an applet, a silverlight app all running in the same page, or in even mulitple tabs. Lets just say the browsing experience would probably be less than optimal (not to mention the ding in battery life). For those who want a clean browsing experience (basically the equivalent of turning off plug-ins in an android browser), a quick ...

Most non C++ developers have had mixed results at best for trying to access Win32 API from their respective languages (external DLL class to user32 and such). Now microsoft is finally replacing it with something called WinRT. Infoq has a nice overview here:  http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/09/WinRT-API Oh, and I also was able to get Windows 8 Developer Preview up in VirtualBox. I am still mulling over what I think about it.

Just finished downloading the developer preview. GetRight and 30mbit down allowed me to get the 4.6GB version in 24mins. I'll be installing it in virtualbox first. If there are lots of hardware accelerated things, i may put it on an old hard drive, or maybe a laptop.

Just an update. I've been down in the "trenches", poking around with various technologies. Below is a short list of things i am checking out: Mono and SWT I am checking out mono and SWT as a UI toolkit vs Windows.Forms, or GTK# or WxWidgets or some other toolkit. SWT is an interesting UI toolkit that uses native widgets. Originally from IBM and now a major part of the eclipse project. It seems that IKVM allows SWT to be run without much effort. I'll post some of my progress on this later IKVM and Eclipse I am also checking out running the current version of eclipse with IKVM. Why? Its an interesting test on how far the project has come, its also could provide an interesting alternative to MonoDevelop or Visual Studio. WindowBuilder is also an interesting feature i'd like to check out. What if WindowBuilder could produce C# compatible SWT code? Could be a boon for Desktop mono linux apps. Solaris ZFS development I am looking at doing some Solaris Develop...