After watching the frequency of collected posts and the subscriber list for a couple of weeks, I've decided to turn off Planet Solaris.

As before, this has nothing to do with any request from Oracle.

OpenSolaris news can be had from Planet OpenSolaris.

Thanks for reading over the last few years, it was fun.

Update: Stoyan Angelov decided to resurrect and curate things, so it's back.

Now that Sun Microsystems is a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle, I've decided to shut down Planet Sun.

To forestall any questions, this decision is not the result of any pressure or request from Oracle (or Sun) - no-one from the company has contacted me at all about Planet Sun.

Thanks for reading over the last five or six years, it was fun.

Today I have a new employer, Oracle. How much effect this has on my day-to-day life remains to be seen - I'm not anticipating great changes. It does mean that I should re-iterate something that I haven't mentioned for a few years:

All views expressed on this blog are those of David Edmondson and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including Sun Microsystems and Oracle.

Tim says:

For creative people, this device is nothing.

Which seems like a very odd statement. By the same token, would art galleries, museums, theatre performances, music concerts, etc. all be classed as "nothing" for creative people?

Like many other people, I work with others who are spread around the globe. Figuring out when is a good time to call, what would be a sensible meeting time, etc. is always awkward - especially when the daylight savings rules keep changing.

Here's a small script called wwt that I use to help understand what the time is:

#!/bin/sh

# Which timezones to report
zones="UTC \
Europe/London Europe/Paris \
US/Eastern US/Central US/Mountain US/Pacific \
Asia/Shanghai"

local="${TZ}"
if [ "${TZ}" = "" ]; then
    local=`cat /etc/timezone`
fi

a="$*"

# If no time is specified, use now.
if [ "${a}" = "" ]; then
    a=`date`
fi

# Determine if the specified time makes sense and determine the 'fully
# qualified' version of the specified time, i.e. including the date.
o="--date=TZ=\"${local}\" ${a}"
d=`date "${o}"`
if [ "$?" -ne 0 ]; then
    echo "\"${a}\" makes no sense."
    exit 1
fi

o="--date=TZ=\"${local}\" ${d}"

for i in ${zones}; do
    t=`TZ=${i} date "${o}" +"%l:%M%p" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
    d=`TZ=${i} date "${o}" +"%A %e %B %Y (%Z, %:::z)"`
    s="${i}#${t}#${d}"
    echo ${s}
done | awk -F\# '{printf("%16s: %s  %s\n", $1, $2, $3);}'

I use it in three ways: to find out what time it is now in various places (my local timezone is set to Europe/London, where it's now 11:54pm):

$ wwt
             UTC: 11:54pm  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (UTC, +00)
   Europe/London: 11:54pm  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (GMT, +00)
    Europe/Paris: 12:54am  Wednesday 20 January 2010 (CET, +01)
      US/Eastern:  6:54pm  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (EST, -05)
      US/Central:  5:54pm  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (CST, -06)
     US/Mountain:  4:54pm  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (MST, -07)
      US/Pacific:  3:54pm  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (PST, -08)
   Asia/Shanghai:  7:54am  Wednesday 20 January 2010 (CST, +08)
$ 

To find out what time it would be when it's 8am here:

$ wwt 8am
             UTC:  8:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (UTC, +00)
   Europe/London:  8:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (GMT, +00)
    Europe/Paris:  9:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (CET, +01)
      US/Eastern:  3:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (EST, -05)
      US/Central:  2:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (CST, -06)
     US/Mountain:  1:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (MST, -07)
      US/Pacific: 12:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (PST, -08)
   Asia/Shanghai:  4:00pm  Wednesday 20 January 2010 (CST, +08)
$ 

To find out what time it would be when it's 8am in US/Pacific:

$ TZ=US/Pacific wwt 8am
             UTC:  4:00pm  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (UTC, +00)
   Europe/London:  4:00pm  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (GMT, +00)
    Europe/Paris:  5:00pm  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (CET, +01)
      US/Eastern: 11:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (EST, -05)
      US/Central: 10:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (CST, -06)
     US/Mountain:  9:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (MST, -07)
      US/Pacific:  8:00am  Tuesday 19 January 2010 (PST, -08)
   Asia/Shanghai: 12:00am  Thursday 21 January 2010 (CST, +08)
$ 

It would still be nice if Google Calendar had decent timezone support, of course.

Update: Steve pointed out that the date for Europe/Paris was incorrect in the second two examples. Given that he was right, I fixed the script.

Sorry about spamming with around fifty updated entries today. I switched from ikiwiki to jekyll and couldn't see an easy way to avoid it.

It's always been the case that small shell scripts are one of the things that makes using Unix a joy. Here's last week's invention, called num:

#!/bin/sh
#
# ln -s num 2
# ln -s num 3
# ln -s num 4

count=`basename $0`

loop=0
while [ $loop -lt $count ]; do
    eval $*
    loop=`expr $loop + 1`
done

As part of an effort to reduce the number of applications I need to remember to start, learn, look at and keep up to date, I starting using Adium for IRC. Annoyingly, all of the message styles are more oriented towards instant messaging, where conversations typically have only a couple of active participants. For a higher volume conversation the styles waste a lot of screen space and/or look very garish. Anyway, here's my solution - a more minimal and muted style:

It would be useful to add a little highlighting (of messages in which one is mentioned, for example), but I'm reasonably happy with this so far.

• The Other Hand by Chris Cleave was somewhat outside my usual subject matter, read after seeing a recommendation by Roo Reynolds. Recommended, both for the story and the way it is told.
• Oceanic by Greg Egan. Egan is on my list of "if it's printed I'll read it" authors. This is a good collection of short stories with his usual flair. The science can be hard, but it's worth it.
• Defying Gravity was an enjoyable programme, sadly cancelled after the first series - just as things were getting interesting.
• Moon starring Sam Rockwell. Simply superb. Watch it.