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iPad SDK 3.2 Beta 4 Clears Up Facts About iPad Camera And Give Some Gestures TO Developers.

OCZ drops SSDs to below $100

Google Maps Adds Biking Directions

App Engine joins the Google over IPv6 Program

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

Tech Tour: Cambridge Innovation Center

Nippon Oil and Hitachi aim at mass-producing microbe-derived biofuel

Get your Jetpack soon!

exmwSxv7XJI

(title unknown)

SCALE8x, OpenVZ goodies, and new kernels (including 2.6.32)

Strategy: Planning for a Power Outage Google Style

The island phone system adventure… « Baby is 60 – Tim Panton on voice and computers

Frameless laptop screens expected soon

The blind camera shows you someone else’s pictures

Princeton TPM-ICN series Bluetooth bracelet.

YouTube Blog: The Future Will Be Captioned: Improving Accessibility on YouTube

Put a Spark into your Presentations with Ignite

muCPjK4nGY4&hl=en_US&fs=1&

Google Code Blog: Google PowerMeter API introduced for device manufacturers

Geektalk

Sparkfun free day tomorrow: 1/7

websockets

C thulu ftagn recursion

Need a recursive DNS server? Use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Google Public DNS

JIQL - Java JDBC wrapper for Google DataStore

OpenNebula

Trillions

ZFS L2ARC ZIL on SSD

Swimming in OpenCL

Unicorn == Mongrel delayed_job

Remus - Transparent HA for Xen

Go

What DNS is not

Crossbow Virtual Wire Demo Tool

Banner ads on flies

PoolParty

Eucalyptus MySQL SOLR RabbitMQ Varnish == Nebula.nasa.gov

Nebula.nasa.org

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)

Evernote

Apple drops ZFS due to legal concerns

Peering disputes between Cogent and Hurricane Electric

Equinix to acquire Switch and Data for $689 million

We Are All Connected

Project kxen renamed project HXEN

Pomegranate Phone

Lessconf Jacksonville - followed the next day by Barcamp

Stick-figure guide to advanced AES crypto

Why you should pay attention to Google Wave

rails-primer - how to easily host rails projects on appengine

AppEngine-JRuby on google code

Ruby on Google AppEngine: appengine-jruby video

Dataliberation.org - The Data Liberation Front - a group concerned with moving data in and out of google

Detecting Spammers with SNARE: Spatio-temporal Network-level Automatic Reputation Engine

Proxmox VE - OpenVZ KVM Cluster appliance management

Sun/Oracle kill of SXCE: Sysadmins everywhere cry in horror.

Essentials of Metaheuristics

making water drinkable through nano-filtration

Pigin 2.6.1 adds Xmpp voice and video support

Opera Unite

Setting up a Layer-3 tunnel VPN using ssh 4.3 and -w option tun devices

shadowserver.org - botnet hunting resources

OpenBSC - a Siemens BS-11 microBTS or a ip.access nanoBTS == your own GSM tower

Voxbone's 883 country code

Apple keyboard firmware hack

Karesansui Project - a Xen management harness from Japan

eunicycle

Pygowave Server - Run your own Google Wave server

Happy Sysadmin Day!

Bokode

Bass cannon

Xen clocksource0 time went backwards

Internet vs World Population stats

BBC article on sat-3 cut

sat-3 cut

iPeak - RAIN

Asankya - RAIN

Apple pulls Google Voice app from iPhone - AT&T's fault

HadoopDB

live-android boot ISO - very neat

How to update your GeoIP information in addition to SWIPping

EATR

Google Wave hackathon on 20th/21st, if you happen to be in Mountainview

Did I mention OTOY here before?

NeatX - NX for Ganeti

STuPiD - STUN/TURN using PHP in Dispair

Aviary.com

Browser based Server-side 3D gaming from OTOY

Cisco's replacement for the WRT54GL is the WRT160NL

Spinn3r.com - Index the blogosphere

Team ARIN

Parts of galaxy Messier 87 are missing

DRAEGER ALCOTEST 7110 MKIII-C Evaluation of Breathalizer Source Code

Cyclops

Google's AJAX playground

How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wallstreet

Bruce Perens - A Cyber-Attach on an American City

How Google and Facebook are using R

adito - the new gpl fork of the old sslexplorer project

A date idea: forklift sunset

Psytechnics - VVoiP QoE

r1soft cdp

IP Address geolocation for free

Shapeways - $50 "3-D poem rings" until the end of the month

GrandCentral to become Google Voice

Wolframalpha is coming

Hosted Xen Project

VirtualGL X11 transport

TurboVNC VirtualGL == FAST network GL

Ben Rockwood's presentation at the OpenSolaris Storage Summit: ZFS in the trenches

The Crisis of Credit Visualized on Vimeo

10gen - a java based app hosting infrastructure

Engineyard Vertebra - another cloud infrastructure management harness

Eucalyptus - an opensource EC2 compatible hosting infrastructure

asciicasts.com

railsbrain.com <-- ajaxified rdoc

AP IMPACT: SWAT Teams Deployed in 911 fraud

Lessons learned by people who have quit Google

Makwana indicted for Fanny Mae malware

"physicalized" servers

Zentific svn repo: alpha available

Holographic Space-Time ?

DACS - Distribution and Configuration System - version 2.0

Video of Cisco IOS attack talk at Chaos Computer Conference

Cosmic radio background noise 6 times higher than expected

We get a leap second tonight

Grow your own bioluminescent algae

Johnson and Ruby/Javascript

Two turntables and a git repo

Quartz Composer and Cruise Control status

Truthy and stupid.rb

The nature of truth

Get2Human

Sunay Tripathi's Solaris Networking Blog

Merry Christmas from XKCD

Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime

Prius Emergency Generator

German folk tune Jazz improv

Memcached speed improvements

FSF sues Cisco

Asterisk Vishing Alert

Google's Native Client... the next ActiveX?

Waterballs

YAGNI development assistant

HA-xVM demo video posted

Kemari 1.0 released - HA Xen

The Decline and Fall of Agile

Zone Alarm 2009 Free Tomorrow

kenai.com - xVM Server Project site

58% Spam Drop from one colo shutdown

Xenomips - a Xen friendly domU version of Dynamips - Emulate a Cisco 7200

Debian and Android dual-boot on the G1

Sipper (SIPr) - a SIP testing framework in ruby

DBslayer - a SQL abstraction layer using JSON

Clojure - JVM based LISP dialect with immutable persistent data structures that are inherently thread safe

Fingerworks keyboard in a MacBookPro

NfSen - Netflow Sensor

The Phoenix BIOS hypervisor is Xen

Do you live in a Constitution-Free zone?

Puppet presentation at NYCOSUG this month

Kemari - Xen lock-step HA

XenSmartIO - Infiniband IO for Xen

Starting with b100, OpenSolaris has virtual consoles

OpenSolaris testfarm build server interface now available

Firefox M9 Fenric - Maemo alpha

SystemZ - aka Sirius - a port of OpenSolaris to IBM System Z mainframe OS running in z/VM mode

40.8% efficient solar cell

FREDNET

World sunlight map

Solaris and ZFS on a Dell 2950, tweaking notes

Logstalgia

Early Access Windows PV drivers for xVM

Economics: The Theory of Interstellar Trade

COMSTAR Admin Guide PDF file

The Financial Crisis: What Happened and What's Next?

3.5" DIY SSD drive

Microsoft usurping ODF

Cisco to run Windows 2008 on their appliance virtually for services

Packetfence: an OpenSource Network Access Control system

Public.resource.org

persist.js - an alternative to gears

Chinese building "impossible" EM drive

Supertinykeyboard

COMSTAR SMTF - solaris FC, SAS, and iSCSI targets

Flexiscale - yet another control panel?

RightScale - cloud control panels?

GoGrid, a servepath company.

OSCON in 37 minutes

Criticial ESXi remote vulnerability in openwsman

Parasitic power

Microsoft FUD on VMWare: vmwarecostswaytoomuch.com

nmap builds zenmap topology maps

Don't forget about BarCampTampaBay

RubyConf08, In Orlando

The LHC accelerates, and that's what it's all about.

Fun with mechanical turk

Sun's launch of xVM, live webinar

Microsoft to give away Hyper-V for free, live migration by 2010

Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex will be followed by Jaunty Jackalope

Why Xen traps negative segment offsets

Rails 2.1.1 more REXML bug fixes

ISO torrent for OS2008.11

Indiana OS2008.03 RN3 released - based on nv_b96

Skype Mobile Phone (Not in the US)

Youtube gets closed captioning support

Getting xVM to work on OpenSolaris 2008.05

Xen Memory Overcommit

Algae farming for biofuels

Mozilla Ubiquity

How a VoIP E911 call is handled

A critique of RDMA

MonetDB - a column based RDBMS, ideal for time series data

BarcampTampaBay

Intel's programmable matter

Nexenta Hackathon

The value of side projects

VMfaq's comparison of virtual storage IO

Xen 3.3 released

USB3.0 cables

Intel wireless power.

Xen and Solaris, a log of experience.

Adeona.cs.washington.edu

OpenSolaris CR#6654713 - 32G limit bug stemmed from bad USB hardware? Perhaps fixed?

Xen CPUID example config

OpenSolaris CommonArrayManager

Multiple zero capacity quantum communication channels can actually transmit non-zero amounts of data thanks to entanglement

Sharity-Light - smbfs derived samba clone

Drizzle, a thin mysql, generating buzz

VMWare to offer ESX hypervisor for free

Veedeeeyes

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog

Fan, the programming language.

Blackberry Thunder with Haptics keyboard

iPhone App Store Live Walkthrough now available

Google Protocol Buffers

Time to patch your DNS

Recent JVM benchmarks

Overclocking tool for the Mac Pro

ADO.NET Entity Framework (Microsoft's new ORM) given a non-confidence vote by beta testers

Ruby interpreter flaws make the case for JRuby

The Stalled Server Room

AdvFS - Tru64 filesystem ported to Linux

OpenSolaris 2005.05 repository update to b91 - follow these instructions carefully

SXCE can ZFS install as of b90

Vertebra: EngineYard's Next Generation Cloud Computing Platform

Skype 4.0 beta overhauls video chat

Mozilla org receives traditional IE cake

Toyota Prius to go entirely Electric

Bill Gates steps down permanently for philanthropic activities

Men write code from Mars, Women write more helpful code from Venus

SproutCore - a GUI event driven model javascript web development platform, rails based by the looks of it.

Finding ARPANET

DRBD LVM Xen = Bug. A rather nasty one at that.

Intel unveils Ct as an extension for C/C to encourage threaded programming for multiple cores

VMWare ThinApp - Run any Windows app on any version of Windows

JDBC adapter for HBase

JRuby-Rack <-- a JRuby port of Rack

Rack <-- a lighter cousin to Merb, fully threaded and no Mutex.

Datamapper.org <-- ActiveRecord like, with no need to do migrations, it just kind of handles that by itself internally automagically.

Solaris Cluster Express (SCX) 6/08 released.

a-i-studio.com/cmd

CMDLogParserDemo

Changing solaris' default password hashing

Texas based service provider explosion affects 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.

Jruby on Rails on Tomcat deployed as as WAR file

Rubinius

Milkfish.org SIP Router

42 more of the best Linux games

42 of the best Linux games

XenWindowsGplPv drivers

Use Google's cached ajax libraries

Arduino microcontroller with OS/X

The metasploit page describing the full impact of the poor RNG.

Holger Bert's blog post on the openssl RNG fiasco

Cayac - Cherokee MySQL PHP5 phpMyAdmin

ZFS very slow under an xVM kernel

VMWare's review-board.org

Google DocType

Dynamically editing libvirt xml configs while a VM is running to redefine reboot flags.

Chronoton - the time travelling robot who's best friend is a talking pie game

Endace DAG

Your pizza is done

Rietveld - Google's code review tool

Opensource multitouch displays

RTL8139 drivers supporting QEMU tcp segmentation offloading (XP's default driver does not) - doubles networking speed of Xen HVM networking without using the GPLPV drivers

Corporate map.

Ono - an efficient way to locate nearby peers

Solaris CIFS integrated AD with ZFS acls

Samba Winbind and ZFS acl working together

Why's unholy Ruby to Python .pyc compiler

Zentific poll daemon 1.0 beta

Solaris SAM-QFS NFS and OS/X

OpenSolaris 2008.05 final ISO image

Tue, 16 Jan 2007

Yesterday, someone stumbled into the #kvm channel and mentioned that VirtualBox has gone OpenSource.

After some frantic questions and listening to the #vbox channel, it became apparent that there are some benefits and limitations of VirtualBox worth noting.

VirtualBox can use Intel/VT or AMD-V/SVM if available, but does not require it. Much like VMWare, which take the same hybrid software/hardware approach to virtualization. For 32bit guests, this can be much faster than pure VT/SVM.

VirtualBox (herein referred to as VBox) is similar to VMWare workstation or VMWare server, in that it has a ring0 kernel driver for a linux host.

This ring0 requirement means that it is not compatible with a Xen paravirtualized domU (and that includes dom0).

VBox leverages QEMU heavily for software emulation of real-mode and other critical code sections, as well as for hardware emulation.

QEMU has a closed source kernel module, kqemu, and a somewhat alpha quality opensource equivalent, qvm86, that do the software code-scanning method of virtualization. They do not require or recognize VT/SVM.

VBox's primary competitor is the kvm project, which provides QEMU based VT/SVM guests. The downside of kvm, of course, is the requirement for VT/SVM support from your CPU. VirtualBox has no such limitation.

VBox only supports 32bit host kernels and 32bit guest images. There is no 64bit support for either running under a 64bit Linux host kernel, or running a 64bit guest OS. The website does mention that 64bit support is under active development, however.

VBox has yet another virtual bus of virtual devices, akin to Xen's paravirtualized XenBus devices (or Virtual Iron's NexBus). While hardware devices are available (PCNet32, etc) using QEMU hardware emulation, VBox also has some excellent video/network/disk drivers that eliminate the hardware chipset emulation overhead.

VMWare tried to make VMI a standard for paravirtualized bus devices. The Linux kernel developer community initially balked, but VMI support lives on in Rusty's paravirt-ops patches. Recently, Ingo has been making great strides with paravirtualized kvm support.

One oddity is that VBox uses .VDI files for its disk images. Not QEMU's QCOW format, not VMWare's VMDK format, and not RAW disk image format.

And for the n00bs that keep popping in and asking about 3d support. No, VBox doesn't proxy 3d. No, QEMU doesn't proxy 3d. Yes, you can use a 3d card with a Xen paravirtualized domain (NOT with an HVM domain).

The only virtualization platform that supports 3d for Windows guests, that I am aware of, is VMWare 5.0 and later which have a somewhat crashy "beta" DirectX 3d support. (Simply add "mks.enable3d = TRUE" to your .vmx file by hand, for more info try googling for "mks.enable3d").

Parallels has promised 3d guests for 4th quarter of this year. If they deliver it, I will be pleasantly suprised.

If you really need 3d gaming for Windows games on a non-Windows platform, consider Transgaming's Cedega product line. Yes, it is Wine. Yes, there is a 50% overhead for the emulation. No, you're not going to do much better without running windows bare iron.

Where does this leave me? In limbo, mostly. I have a 32bit farm of Xen hosts moving toward a 64bit Xen hosting platform at the moment. Xen appears to be crawling while other tech like kvm and virtualbox keep popping up to challenge it. Xen's "maturity" is only really a year at best with its HVM support (quite a lead in tech terms), I can see l-hype/kvm and virtualbox quickly overshadowing Xen in the near future.

Eventually, VMI/paravirt-ops is going to level the playing field with standardized guest device drivers, regardless of hosting platform. Until then, we continue to craft guests based on the virtualization platform under which they will be run.

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