Technobabble

Running a Windows 7 guest via VirtualBox on OSX Lion, I noticed that the guest VM would periodically freeze up. The freezes occurred once every few minutes and would unfreeze within half a minute. It was quite annoying and after many months of back-and-forth on the VirtualBox forum, it seems like there is a solution . The solution is to use the Chipset PIIX3 (instead of ICH9) in the virtual machine's motherboard settings

I was trying to install Windows 7 Home Professional (64-bit) on a Virtual Box (4.1.2 r73507) VM. With the default VM setup, I kept getting an Error 0xc0000225 while the Windows 7 installer was starting. After reading some sites that stated that this was likely a BIOS issue, I edited the VM configuration to change the Chipset to " ICH9 " and " Enable IO APIC ". With this change the Windows installer was able to start without errors.

James Gosling, the creator of Java has quit Oracle as of April 2nd this year. While his blog entry didn’t give any specific reasons, it is not a surprise by any means. Sun and Oracle have very different corporate cultures – one focused on employees and the other focused on the business. It was always going to be hard for Oracle to retain someone as free spirited as Gosling. I’m pretty sure he’ll be joining the rest of the Java gurus at Google. If that doesn’t go well, IBM perhaps. I hope he doesn’t even think about joining Neal Gafter.

Just days after IBM dropped their bid for Sun, Oracle’s stepped in and is acquiring Sun for $7.4 billion in an all-cash deals. The deal brings together two of the four horsemen of the dotcom era. With the acquisition, Oracle gets a lot of pieces – Solaris, SPARC, Java, MySQL, NetBeans, GlassFish, Star Office, VirtualBox. Some of these are in direct competition with existing Oracle products and there’ll be some similarity to prior acquisitions where product lines go into long term support. I don’t see GlassFish replacing Weblogic though given the latter's widespread adoption. NetBeans is a lot nicer than JDeveloper and I hope that doesn’t die. Drizzle seems like the only viable way forward for MySQL. I wonder if Oracle will spin-off the hardware businesses post-acquisition. Perhaps a joint venture with HP to expand the Exadata line? In any case, it must be a good day for a Sun shareholder to finally exit one of the worst tech stocks in the S&P 500!

As part of Sun’s cloud computing push , the Sun Cloud APIs have recently been made available to developers. It provides RESTful APIs for creating and managing cloud resources, including compute, storage, and networking components. You can get a quick start by looking at the “ Hello Cloud ” examples. Looks like Amazon AWS is finally getting some competition but it remains to be seen if Sun can follow through with their delivery.

At work, we've just started experimenting with Sun Rays and I've got a 2FS on my desk. I have used these devices at Java One in the past but this is the first time I've got to take a closer a look at these devices. The 2FS is a sleek package about the size of a notebook. In front, it has a smart card reader slot, one USB 2.0 port, a stereo line level in, a headset jack and a microphone jack. At the back, it has a serial port, a 100 Base-FX optical connection, a 10/100 Base-T Ethernet jack, two USB 2.0 ports, two DVI outputs and the power input. The two DVI outputs are definitely advantage especially for programmers. At present I'm using the Sun Ray with my existing desktop via an Iogear KVM switch (model GCS42UW6) and our office is only wired up for Ethernet. the 2FS uses a RMI Alchemy™ Au1550™ Processor . All that information is based on external appearances and the technical specs from Sun; I haven't looked at the innards yet. The 2FS comes off as a pretty nea...

Yahoo! Finance Quote for JAVA Sun ( NASDAQ:JAVA ) announced today that they will be acquiring MySQL AB , the maker of the popular open-source database MySQL . Sun sees this as further validation of the LAMP technologies. Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun) and James Gosling (father of Java) are both very excited about this. I wonder how Oracle ( NASDAQ:ORCL ) will view this given that Oracle already controls Berkeley DB and InnoDB , the two most popular storage backends for MySQL. Technorati Tags: sun , mysql , oracle , bdb , innodb