skype for Solaris

So I'm irked, really irked.

If we had Skype support for Solaris, I could probably ditch this half baked mess of Linux hosts running VMware guests with OpenSolaris and Nexenta. I want just a single host OS for my development box.

Right now the single biggest barrier to running OpenSolaris on my desktop for my job at Nexenta is Skype. But this is silly, because Skype works in Linux, and the APIs should basically be compatible. Especially with the OSS layer that we already have in OpenSolaris these days via Boomer.

If someone at Skype sees this (good luck trying to find a contact on their web site!), and wants to work with me on it, I'd be happy to help them work through the issues of getting a native Skype port.

If anyone who has an "in" at Skype reads this post, please forward it to your in at Skype.

If any folks are paying for business services from Skype, feel free to let them know you want a Solaris client, and there is an expert on the Solaris audio stack waiting to help.

Thanks!

(On a side note, I'd also like to have VMware on Solaris as well. Yeah, I know about VirtualBox, but I need support VMware for clients, and it would be a heck of a lot easier if I could just host VMware guests on my development head.)

LDRS 29, very cool

So, this past weekend my son and I went to LDRS 29, which is the event for the national high-powered rocketry club, Tripoli. We were there only one day and one night, but here were some cool highlights from Saturday:

• Mass squat launch -- Timothy's Squat with an Aerotech G-67 redline motor flew very nicely, if a bit late off the pad. 28 other rocketeers had their rockets launch at roughly the same time.
• Many wild squats. With the $29 specials from WhatsUpHobbies, lots of people were flying very unstable Squat rockets with I-140 skidmark engines. This configuration needs nose weight, as we found out for ourselves when we flew Timothy's with the same engine.
• Four half-scale Patriots launched in 3 second intervals from a "box" launch vehicle -- much like a real Patriot. Very, very cool.
• Drag race of six or seven N-impulse rockets. These are big rockets, lots of power.
• Drag race between a number of very detailed rockets. There was a CATO about 20 feet off the pad, and unfortunately several other rockets were destroyed on ascent by the CATO. Cool to watch, but glad it wasn't one of my rockets.
• Full scale O-impulse Patriot launch (and unfortunate catastrophic failure near the end of boost, flaming bits falling down all over the range.)
• My own J-350W powered LOC-IV (with significant modifications in nose weight and fiberglass reinforced fins.) This was my Level 2 cert flight and it went brilliantly. (So I'm certified to fly level 2 high powered rockets - impulse up to and including L power.)
• Our Big Daddy Estes rocket (typically D or E power) launch with an F-32 Blue Thunder engine -- believe it or not this was one of the highlights for me of the day. As the launch control officer proclaimed -- "a little too much power for the rocket, but we like that!"
• Flying a drag race between two D-21 powered 18mm rockets. Both were lost, and later found damaged.
• A number of very cool night launches -- lots of creativity here on the part of the rocketeers.
• Discover channel. This was a mixed bag... it was cool that they were there, but they did interfere with launch schedules quite a bit. Still, I think we'll be part of the ultimate show, which is supposed to air July 5. Looking forward to watching that.

There was one significant accident, involving an extremely high powered rocket on the far pads. A couple of people were unfortunately badly burned, and had to be medevaced, and our wishes go with them for their recovery.

As for Timothy and I, we're hooked. We'll be going to the November RocStock event as well, provided we can make the schedule work out.

Press release

Noticed this press release got posted to the Nexenta web site. /me preens. :-)

O_SYNC behavior not honored

UPDATE (6/21/2010): This problem is apparently solved in b142. Probably other builds as well. But I was unable to reproduce this problem with real hardware on b142.

Note that VMware does not honor cache flushing, so VMware (and possibly other v12n users) will potentially still see this issue.

So, it turns out that ZFS in recent (somewhere after build 134 apparently) builds has a critical bug ... O_SYNC writes are not really synchronous. This leads to potential data loss.

I've not yet figured out which change introduced the bug, but I hope to work on it next week.

In the meantime, I would strongly discourage use of post-134 binaries for anything where data integrity is important.

I've filed a P1 bug with Oracle for this issue. I'll be trying to nail it down further next week; if I'm able to fix it before Oracle can, I'll offer up my fix.

I'll post the CR number when I receive the number back.

I imagine that this bug, which is trivially reproducible, will be getting top priority from the ZFS engineers next week.

UPDATE: CR number is 6958848

The link to access it isn't available yet.

Great Falcon-9 Launch!

SpaceX, one of our greatest hopes for a commercial manned space program, has achieved a huge milestone with the successful maiden launch of Falcon-9 with a Dragon capsule today. This is the craft that may one day soon be used for ISS resupply, and perhaps even crew transport.

Even as Obama shuts down the US governments manned space program, the commercial sector is picking it up. This is a momentous day.

Congratulations to Elon Musk and the rest of the team at SpaceX!