Adios Sun Microsystems

April 22nd, 2009

    So, I realize that I’ve not said anything on the subject for a while. I’ve rather been gathering my thoughts, and am honestly still not quite sure what I think about this.

    To be honest, I don’t like Sun. I really don’t like the way they ran their business. I don’t like the unix applications they developed, and I really don’t care for Solaris. Overall, pretty much everything that they built themselves, I find incredibly sluggish and antiquated. There were some cool ideas in recent years with Zones and other such OS novelties, but in the end, I think it was too little to late.

    Having said that I don’t like Sun, here’s the real problem I have with all of this. I positively hate Oracle. I don’t like the way that they buy every competitor, I don’t like the fact that they never truly integrate their offerings. I don’t like that they charge way too much for their products which are, in my experience, mediocre. A company of that scale, development power, and funding should be able to produce so much better, especially with the arms and legs that they’re ripping from their customers. I positively HATE Oracle.

    You may be thinking that this would just seem like a wash, One company I don’t like is getting eaten by a company I hate. That’s reasonable. But here’s another problem. Sun owned some things I really support. And do to poor marketing strategy and forsight on their part, tried to act like RedHat and leave their OpenSource development and ideology alone. I’m talking about MySQL and OpenOffice.

    OpenOffice: This is not really a huge deal in my book. I don’t use it. But I do support it. It’s a good office suite for free, and compatible with Microsoft Office. It is easily the best system available for Students or anybody else that can’t afford to pay the ridiculous prices that Microsoft wants for their office suite. I hope they don’t touch it, but knowing how much Larry likes competitors and money, he may try to improve it, charge more than Microsoft for it, and try to take on Office. Our translate it into a SaaS type offering for companies so they don’t need Office any more, and can just tell their employees to go to their own OO website to do their work. Like Google Docs for the enterprise.

    MySQL: I think that this is really starting to show itself as the only strong competitor in the database market to the Oracle DB. This isn’t because it’s necessarily the best DB architecture, or that it’s as good as the Oracle DB, which, I hate admitting, can be very very good. The thing is that it’s free. Very very very free. And is actively developed in the Open Source company. Lastly, I use MySQL a lot. A whole lot of the Apps that I use are backended on it. It’s easy to use, it’s simple, there’s an awful lot of support and it’s great. And I just know that they are going to try and kill it. The are having web conferences with their customers, freely available, to talk about how much better Oracle DB is than MySQL and how much money users will save by switching. This is a bad sign to me. I’m not usually pessimistic in my future predictions but I’m very worried that they will try to cut off developer access to it in the next several months, and within the next year, release a new version under a non GPL license and start charging for it. I think it might get corporatized like Xen is being by Citrix (bastards). I could be wrong and hope I am. But I seriously think that Oracle is the devil.

    There are other things I worry about, such as Java, which will now be owned by them. But I expect that this will still be actively developed and open-sourced as it needs to be available to people who want to use the Oracle products. They could charge, but I think Larry knows that that will just push users over to new products that will develop that don’t use Java. Already, their pricing methodology is burdensome on customers.

    I don’t really know what to think. I’m overjoyed to see Sun die. They thought their shit was solid gold, and it was high time for them to die. I hate that oracle is taking them over. I would have been much happier if it had been IBM, or if RedHat had bought them, I think that would have been excellent, though I don’t think they had anywhere near that kind of capital. In the end though, we’ll just have to wait and see how bad it is, and either way, I still have every intention of taking Oracle down someday. Not sure how, but damn if I don’t want their head on a spike!

New Site Design!

April 13th, 2009

I’ve updated the layout. Added some neat plug-ins, a new theme, etc…
Tell me what you think!

Different things to make with old bananas

February 2nd, 2009

Whole Wheat Banana Bagels
whole-wheat-banana-bagels

Peanut Butter-Banana Cookies with Chocolate Chips
banana-peanut-butter-cookies

Banana Cake with Peanut Butter Icing
banana-cakerachel-frosts-the-cake-ii

Broccoli Cheese Soup with a Kick

February 1st, 2009

Okay, so this is a modified recipe out of the 2008 Cooking Light Complete Cookbook cook book. For the original, check out Page 539 and it’s right there.

What you’ll need:

1 cup chopped onion
4 garlic cloves, minced
5 cups of fat free, less-sodium chicken broth
20 oz of broccoli florets (this is basically to taste depending on how much you like broccoli in your soup)
1/2 cup of all-purpose flour
3 cups 2% milk
Minimum of 1/4 teaspoon of ground black pepper ( I prefer mortar and pistil but a pepper grinder works)
8 ounces of light cheddar cheese
3 ounces of Habañero cheddar (Jalapeño might also work)
3 ounces of any very sharp cheese of your choice (I used a very sharp provolone I believe when I made this).

1. Heat a large nonstick saucepan over medium-high heat. Coat a pan with cooking spray. Add onion and garlic; sauté 3 minutes or until tender. Add broth and 3/4ths of the broccoli. Bring mixture to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to medium; cook 10 minutes.

2. Lightly spoon flour into a dry measuring cup; level with a nife. Combine flour and milk, stirring with a whisk until well blended. Add milk mixture to broccoli mixture. Cook 5 minutes or until slightly thick, stirring constantly. Stir in pepper. Remove from heat; add cheese, stiring until cheese melts.

3. Combine broccoli broth mixuture with thickened cheese sauce. Use immersion blender to blend soup very thoroughly. Cook soup over low heat for 5 minutes or until thoroughly heated.

4. Take the remainder of the broccoli, chop into as fine of cubes as you want, to make the soup as chunky as desired, and then add broccoli to the soup, cook on low heat until thoroughly heated.

5. (Optional) If you want to add an extra kick, throw in a tablespoon or two of chili powder or maybe some finely ground red pepper flakes. Add any other spices desired to bring soup to the desired heat level and taste.

Enjoy it folks, it’s good!

~Davin

DU and DF commands with different results

January 30th, 2009

This is something I’ve run into a few times. I’ll pull up a `df -h` command and see something where the root directory (or /var or /usr) or something is filled up completely, and I try to locate where the space is with a `du -xh --max-depth=1 /directory_that_is_full` and the result shows me something completely different than the `df -hl`.

What I’ve found, this is something to do with a conflict of a process trying to access a file while something else was trying to delete the same file. Basically, the process goes into sort of a zombie mode, and the data is held and not removed. Because of the difference in the way du and df operate, they show different results.

The bad news, if the df says that the drive is full, the system will say that it can’t write to that drive/partition/mount, etc…. Even if the du says you have a ton of space.

To Locate the processes, run this command:
`lsof | grep deleted`

it should return the trouble processes and PID’s etc. If you kill those processes, it will allow the system to delete the files or whatever that are being held in limbo.

The problem: If you kill those processes, it could kill an application you are running. I recommend a clean `service restart` or a clean restart of the system itself(I know, I know, you should never have to do this in *nix systems because *nix is awesome and couldn’t possibly have to reboot to fix something like that horrible Microsoft junk!).

Just something that has come up a couple times for me in the last couple months and wanted to use it to help some folks out as it took me some hunting to get that info I needed.

Peanut Butter and Jelly Cake! (aka Inebriant’s Delight)

January 20th, 2009

Rachel and I developed this cake the other night:
dsc010511

Here’s the Recipe and some suggestions should you want to make one.



Sponge Cake (Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary; pg 706-7.)


1 cup cake flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
1 cup sugar
6 large eggs, separated
¼ cup boiling water
1 tsp lemon or orange zest
1 tbsp lemon or orange juice
1 tsp vanilla
¼ cream of tartar

1. Preheat oven to 350?.
2. Sift the flour, powder and salt.
3. Beat yolks until thick and lemon colored. Add the sugar and beat 3 more minutes. Beat in the boiling water followed by the zest, juice and vanilla. Gradually add the flour mixture.
4. Beat the whites and tartar to soft peaks.
5. Fold the whites and yolk mixture together.
6. Divide the batter evenly between 2 or 3 prepared cake pans (8” or 9” diameter), or put it all into a 10” tube pan.
7. Bake about 20 minutes or until the top springs bake when lightly pressed.
8. Cool upside down on wire racks.


Peanut Butter Frosting (adapted from Weight Watchers® Best-Ever Desserts; pg 31.)

1 cup light cream cheese
½ cup fat-free cream cheese
¾ cup reduced fat creamy peanut butter
¾ cup confectioner’s sugar

1. Beat ingredients together until smooth.
2. Cover until ready to use.

Note: We found this frosting recipe was a bit too thick to spread nicely on the cake. Next time, we plan to use a full cup of peanut butter instead of ¾ cup, and ½ cup sugar instead of ¾ cup. We also plan to add a few tbsp of milk to loosen it up.


Strawberry Filling

15 ½ oz Smucker’s® Low-sugar Strawberry Preserves

1. Heat the preserves in a small saucepan.
2. Blend until smooth with an immersion blender or in a food possessor or blender.
3. Continue to heat until slightly thickened, if desired.
4. Cool completely or chill before using

***The cake (with the original frosting) is 5 WW points for 1/16th of the cake.


This cake is extremely enjoyable. And though we haven’t been intoxicated while eating it, memories of such things would indicate that this cake would be extremely delicious while intoxicated.

My Favorite YouTube Videos

January 6th, 2009

These are some of my all time favorite videos on YouTube.com. I’m going to try to have more of these out there, but for now, I recommend you watch all of these. (And there’s no particular order to my favorites right now).

Robert Murraine’s Audition on So You Think You Can Dance: Season 4:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za3sgab-O6E

Dramatic Ground Hog:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7-NqAjkTWQ

Rob Paravonian’s Pachelbel Rant:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM

Amateur – Lasse Gjertson:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzqumbhfxRo

Still Losing Weight

January 5th, 2009

31.9 Pounds.

Domain Name Help Needed

November 18th, 2008

As I’ve discussed before on many occasions, I’m working on a startup business in the internet world with a team of folks and we’re very excited to be moving forward on another step of the project. But I would like to ask for your help with choosing a domain name. If you have the time (approx. 1 minute) to click on the link below and answer this one-question survey, that would be greatly appreciated. The more feedback we have, the more likely we are to succeed. And succeeding is fun for everyone! Anyways, here’s the link:

Domain Name Survey

Thanks for the help
~Davin

Losing More Weight

November 18th, 2008

Just yesterday at my weigh-in I hit my 10% weight-loss milestone of 20 pounds. I’ve actually lost a total of 22.4 pounds over the course of the last 10 weeks. That’s pretty good if you ask me.

Just thought I’d post that as I’m feeling pretty good about it.