Sequels and their perception

I've recently read new Verbitsky's novel "The chronicles of Zarechensk" (Хроники Зареченска). The novel was rather good, but I was disappointed that author had decided to make sequel. And this sequel is hinted in first part: some new plot lines are created and "to be continued" is written in the end with bold font.
So, I tried to remember different interesting (or even outstanding) stories and their continuations. Let's take, for example, Lukianenko's "Night Watch": great book, interesting plot, and this books looks finished. But there are sequels "Day Watch", "Twilight Watch" and others. Some of them are very good too. I like several extracts of "Day Watch" very much. But the novelty is already lost, other book are not so thrilling. Let's take Perumov's "Godsdoom". It was exciting. This book gave background description of the whole universe. And later he spoiled impression describing this universe in all details (I think in about ten books :)). In this sense, the perfect example is "The Lord of the Rings". It's really cool that author had written "Silmarillion" for himself and didn't publish it. So, the whole book has fascinating background. It is filled with songs, legends, smell of the former epochs. A lot of facts and plot lines are just mentioned and not over-emphasized. But this is a complete universe. It is described in several books and it is whole. On the other hand we have bright "Dune". It is sometimes called the best sci-fi book of 20 century. And it deserves this title. Rich fantasy of Frank Herbert created extensive world with a few traits. Mentats, Bene gesserit witches, powerful clans fighting for Spice... And most of this became quite boring, I was fed up with this when I finished his sixth or seventh book.

SQL is Turing complete

I've found one interesting thing: with recursive CTE and windowing functions SQL is a Turing complete language. The proof maybe found here.

Installation on multipath device in Fedora... Is it a joke?

I've just read that in Fedora 14 installation on multipath device will be supported. I installed SXCE b97 on zpool containing multipath device two years ago. And after this piece of news we hear that Linux is superior OS.... For desktop it is quite good, but after this news I can't imagine something like Fedora on my server. I'm interested is it a case for every Linux distribution. Does CentOS or Debian support installation on multipath device?
I'm rather shocked with this information. Solaris is dying but two years ago it was much better then today's Linux. I hope, Illumos Project will give us a reborn server OS.

FreeBSD and wine... Progress or regression?

I've just got almost working wine on FreeBSD. To achieve this I've installed wine-1.1.30-1 from FreeBSD 8.0 package collection. Before this I unsuccessfully tried to make wine 1.2.1 work. It was impossible - it seems, later wine versions have some problems with DRI interoperability. So, after having enabled DRI on running (almost?) all DirectX games in wine on 8.1, you just get the following error:
> wine fallout2.exe
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 1 (X_CreateWindow)
Serial number of failed request: 397
Current serial number in output stream: 399
...
However, wine 1.1.30 works with enabled DRI. It seems, that all wine versions after 1.1.43 are broken.

RIP, Solaris...

What are you doing when you want to promote some product? You say to you friends, colleagues and acquaintances: use it, it's great! And they understand, that it maybe not great, but at least useful. And they use it. Sun understood it. And we had OpenSolaris. I worked as Sun Campus Ambassador and promoted it. And (Open)Solaris was a great OS: it had ZFS, DTrace, Zones, Projects and quite understandable RBAC system. And it was cool to use this OS. I wanted to find and report some bugs to make it better. I wished to port some soft to make Solaris pleasant OS. And what do we have now? Solaris 11 Express and end of OpenSolaris.
Blame on Oracle. They are going to spoil everything they touch. I didn't believe that they were able to shoot themselves in the leg. But they are talented enough to do it. With OpenSolaris Sun Solaris began new life. Without such high priority project it is doomed. Other OS are coming. Of course, one of them will be Linux (it's not ideal, but free and have a lot of features that Solaris will never have: support for almost all hardware you can imagine and all soft you may ever need), I hope one of them will be FreeBSD (at least we'll have ZFS and DTrace here, jails are good replacement for zones, especially after completion of new jail resources control project), Windows Server will be alive and prosperous. But AIX, HP/UX and Solaris will be dead. Because they were already dead. One of this great systems was near its resurrection. But its owner decided to bury it alive.
It's not good news, but expected one. Oracle was quite stupid to make other irrelevant steps. So, I think the next time I'll see Solaris 10 will be in museum. It will be among OS/2, Amiga OS and SCO Unix. Without new blood every project is doomed. OpenSolaris gave this giant new blood. But this is just a part of history now. Blame on Oracle.

Why I'm going to read Oracle course in university... on PostgreSQL

I used to like Oracle. They gave us one of the best DBMS. They made a lot of work on promoting Linux. They used a lot of open source software in their products and promoted Java...
But their greed is unnatural. It is more than Microsoft's greed.
1) Their DBMS costs too much. When our university tried to prolong their support, they said taht we had to pay taxes... because we hadn't done this earlier.
2) They don't allow to use their products in education for free. Even MS Academy program is free for our University.
3) They have done everything to kill Sun OpenSolaris. Damn them!
4) They prohibited to use Sun Solaris for free.
5) And now they are suing Google for using Java technologies in Android.
IMHO, this company is crazy and ill on immediate profit. It doesn't matter to them that their steps only makes potential customers nervous. What is next? Will they sue Apache or SpringSource for developing Java-related products or FreeBSD for using ZFS?
No, thanks. I will not promote their products at our campus.
FreeBSD and PostgreSQL is a real base for DBMS server, not Solaris and one overpriced DBMS...

ethernal war: snd_hda and headphones

Today I won in one minor battle between snd_hda and headphone output. I couldn't force my headphones work without some magic. The first thing I found is that headphone nid should be on the same association with speaker. In my verbose dmesg I had:

hdac0: Processing audio FG cad=2 nid=1...
hdac0: GPIO: 0xc0000003 NumGPIO=3 NumGPO=0 NumGPI=0 GPIWake=1 GPIUnsol=1
hdac0: nid 10 0x0221421f as 1 seq 15 Headphones Jack jack 1 loc 2 color Green misc 2
hdac0: Patching pin config nid=10 0x0221421f -> 0x0221431f
hdac0: nid 11 0x01a19023 as 2 seq 3 Mic Jack jack 1 loc 1 color Pink misc 0
hdac0: nid 12 0x01813221 as 2 seq 1 Line-in Jack jack 1 loc 1 color Blue misc 2
hdac0: nid 13 0x01114210 as 1 seq 0 Speaker Jack jack 1 loc 1 color Green misc 2
hdac0: nid 14 0x40f0f0f0 as 15 seq 0 Other None jack 0 loc 0 color Other misc 0
hdac0: nid 15 0x40f0f0f1 as 15 seq 1 Other None jack 0 loc 0 color Other misc 0
hdac0: nid 16 0x40f0f0f2 as 15 seq 2 Other None jack 0 loc 0 color Other misc 0
hdac0: nid 17 0x40f0f0f3 as 15 seq 3 Other None jack 0 loc 0 color Other misc 0
hdac0: nid 18 0x503301f0 as 15 seq 0 CD None jack 3 loc 16 color Unknown misc 1
hdac0: nid 33 0x01442170 as 7 seq 0 SPDIF-out Jack jack 4 loc 1 color Grey misc 1
hdac0: nid 34 0x81c42090 as 9 seq 0 SPDIF-in Fixed jack 4 loc 1 color Grey misc 0

The only advice I found was to put headphones nid (in my case, 10 nid) on the same association with speaker (nid 13). To do this you should add the following line to /boot/loader.conf:
int.hdac.0.cad2.nid10.config="as=1 seq=15"

After doing that I understood, that my configuration already was right in this sense. This hint didn't change anything. After reading manual for snd_hda and consulting with Oleg (http://www.oleg-sharoyko.net) I set misc for nid10 to 3 (zero bit says that jack detection is not implemented in hardware). Now I have working headphones and can listen to music without doing harm to my neighbors...
So, this time the force is in another magic line in loader.conf:
hint.hdac.0.cad2.nid10.config="misc=3"

The battle is won. But the war continues... I'd like to have separate mixer for headphones. When I make it functional, I'll write...

Participating in AboutBSD agregator

I'm going to participate in AboutBSD blogs agregator. I work with FreeBSD since 2005, and sometimes I'd like to share some general thoughts, impressions or may be practical advices concerning this OS...

Long live, Illumos...

It sounds great - a developers' community inspired by Garrett D'Amore is going to create "Fully Open" ON... When they have open codebase, it seems there will be a few parties glad to create there own binary distro based on this code. It's really necessary project, but I doubt - isn't it too late? This project would give a breathe of fresh air to OpenSolaris 3-5 years ago. But just for now they have a lot of work to do - replace and test internalization bits in libc, replace a lot of binary drivers and some parts of cryptographic system. Even if they are supported by several companies (including Nexenta), it will take significant time. I wish good luck to this project. I will closely look at it. But I have some doubts in its future...

Gnome OS sounds frightening

The first my though about Gnome OS (Looking at Gnome as operating system, http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/proposal-to-make-gnome-fully-fledged-os.html) was doubt about what does it mean. When people see Linux as "implementation detail", does it mean that Gnome would be more or less Linux-oriented? I fear that this simply means further ignoring other OS. For example, you have to apply about 800 patches to build Gnome on Solaris (and there it is the main desktop environment). Unpatched Gnome can't be build on FreeBSD. Further Linux orientation doesn't bring anything good for other OS. We already have many Linux crutches like policykit (why is it necessary, for example, on Solaris, where we have good RBAC) and hal (the only thing this monster created by Linux community doesn't do is cooking coffee for you) and I don't like this trend...
Let's remember, Linux is common Unix-like environment, but not the single one...

Illumos Project

It seems, that community OpenSolaris distro is coming... There is no much clarity yet. All details will be available in 2 days: http://www.illumos.org/projects/site/wiki/Announcement . It may be good news...
However, my former OpenSolaris desktop nowadays submits BSD stats (www.bsdstats.org) :)
As always, there are own advantages and disadvantages in FreeBSD, but at least I'm confident in its future.
About advantages: a great heap of FOSS (e.g, now I can read djvu, have working fbreader and even watch youtube in konqueror). About disadvantages: wine malfunctions, system doesn't want to boot from second drive in ZFS mirror with first drive detached (It boots with healthy pool or with second drive detached. OpenSolaris-b134 didn't want to boot with any drive detached). And I haven't tried anything Oracle-related yet...