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Sun Fire T2000 goin’ back to cali

I boxed up the T2000 and dropped it off at my convenient 24-hour Fedex Kinko’s last night. It’s a shame it had to go back just as I was getting time to play with it. Maybe I’ll test something else soon.. perhaps something more appropriate, like a x4100.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to learn more about Solaris. One of the problems I had with testing this machine properly was that my (gobs of) Linux experience really didn’t apply directly like I hoped. The last time I really played with Solaris was back in the 2.x days c.1996. Things have changed quite a bit.

In the last week I had the Sun Fire, I did get to try installing Gentoo Linux on it. OH MY. Thanks go to David S. Miller for his work on the kernel and Gustavo for the Gentoo LiveCD. I built a vanilla 2.6.17 kernel and modules in about 4 minutes. The rest of the stage 3 install went on in just a couple of hours. Most of the delay was my relatively slow 768K DSL connection, pulling down source. The T2000 with a cross-compiler would’ve made a REALLY sweet distcc host!

Pretty, but it’s whats inside that counts.

Whenever you can type “make -j17″ without distcc, it’s a beautiful thing. If I had more time with the box I would’ve done more measuring around this.

Eclipse on Mac OS X (Intel)

What a pain this was. For those of you who don’t know, Eclipse is an integrated development environment written in Java. Java is supposed to be “write once, run anywhere.” Not exactly the case here, and not clear if you try to download it for your shiny new Intel Macintosh.

I downloaded the latest stable release, 3.12 and installed it on my MacBook. When I went to run it, it throws up the splash screen and looks like it’s going to run and then a simple messagebox with a message to look in ~/Documents/workspace/.metalog/.log for details.

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError:
/Applications/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/
bundles/63/1/.cp/libswt-pi-carbon-3139.jnilib:
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1586)

There’s actually a lot more to it than that, but that’s all the details I had to go on. I’m not exactly familiar with Java so I don’t know how to decipher this. I decided to try jEdit instead. Nice editor, but I’m using Eclipse at work.

I searched Google for days using keywords like “eclipse mac” or “eclipse error jini” or “eclipse error install” which didn’t turn up anything useful. It was beginning to look like I was the only one to get this error. Today I searched for “eclipse unsatisfiedlinkerror” duh! I got a link to Steph’s blog which pointed out another stupid assumption. I’m not going to take the entire blame here though—remember, Java isn’t supposed to be platform-specific.

It turns out that there is a newer (unstable?) release of Eclipse that supports the Intel Macs. I’m in the process of downloading it now.

It works!

Puppy-mover Monorail

Very important work is being done for puppy mobility. Thanks to emily for bringing this to our attention.

Accidental Haiku

I love haiku. Especially when I write it by accident. I was chatting with emily recently about a recent visit to Independent Bar in Orlando (much better experience than Tabu, btw, but still smoky. I’m spoiled by PI in that respect). We were talking about a trio of girls who were wearing boots and vaguely 80’s outfits dancing together. [edited somewhat]


me: Yes. I was watching them closely. Especially the one with the brown dress.
em: ha
em: i dont remember the colors of their dresses so i have no idea which was which
me: One blonde two brunettes
em: im sure it was one of the brunettes
me: yes
me: she stole our candle while you all were dancing
em: sounds like a line from a song
em: or a poem
em: so emo
em: you should write it
me: "Then she stole my heart" LOL
em: "fuck you for not dancing with me!" could be the chorus
me: whoa it's already haiku!


she stole our candle
while you were out dancing
then she stole my heart

Anyway, it was fun. I’d go to I-Bar again.

$100 Computers!

Property Control has some old PCs available for sale pretty cheap. If all you need is something to knock around online and such, I will pick one up, install an operating system (your choice, Linux or Windows 2000) and package it with a 15″, 17″ or 20″ monitor (whatever they happen to have at the time ), keyboard and mouse for $100. The specs are 733MHz Pentium III, 128MB RAM, 10GB disk—or better. E-mail me for more info.

Pixie Dust

Every time I don’t get a professional job at Disney I console myself with the same thought: if I take a salaried job then I can’t work in the park. At least having a bill-paying job outside Disney allows me to do what I like on the weekends. If only I didn’t have to drive to Tampa for it.

It’s been a month…

since I’ve written anything and people still come to the site. Amazing. Thank you, and keep clicking those ads. I mean, if you’re interested of course.

I don’t really have a lot of Disney news to write about. I’ve transferred to Space Mountain and so far I’ve completed one day of training. I’ve been sick Just a few more days before I can’t switch back. I hope I don’t have to; I may find out tomorrow (I’m having lunch with someone from my employer. He says it’s nothing bad but I’m paranoid.)

I had an interesting interview for a programming job back at Disney. It was with Disney Worldwide Shared Services. I was really excited to learn about this group of developers… they do the same sort of work I did back at AT&T years ago. Automating people out of jobs. Hehe.. I love that. At AT&T I saved the company $1 million a year. That was in 1993 dollars so that’s gotta be a few billion with inflation. Unfortunately (as usual) I didn’t get the job because I don’t already know Visual Studio / C#/ Visual Basic/ blah blah. Nevermind that I’m an awesome developer with 14 years experience and SIX YEARS experience doing exactly the kind of work they do. “We chose a candidate with more experience in the field.” Uhhuh.

Anyway, I do hope to continue my training at mountain with Pam. She’s cool. It was interesting walking around under the track, seeing the tower and such. I’m not a big fan of the ride and I’m not crazy about working there, but it’s interesting nonetheless. I do technical, boring insurance work all week.. I don’t want technical, button-pushing roller coaster work on the weekends. I was hoping for the chaos of 1100 lb. cars going 7mph or so piloted by 8-year-olds! Yeah! Soon, soon.