Lucas Torri's Blog

Lucas Torri is a Brazilian software developer of a digital convergence company called Praesto Convergence, where he's worked with Java ME since 2005. He studies Computer Science at Federal University of Santa Catarina and is one of the owners of the Marge Project ( http://marge.dev.java.net). Besides Java related stuff, likes to read things about smart environments and to watch his favorite soccer team playing: Grêmio FBPA.

I'm back from JavaOne 2008 and it was great!

Hello again everybody. I just had a busy week, cause I went to JavaOne 2008 :)

I arrived home this Tuesday and I'm still recovering from the travel, but I can assure you J1 was great!!!

In the next few days I will write more about how the conference was, I still need to get some pictures with friends.

New project Marge version! I'm not kidding...

Today, we are proud to announce a new version of the project Marge!

[Time for thinking...]

Yeah, that's true! This is not an april 1st joke :)

We have been working for the last month in new features in marge-core, the framework itself, and also in a new version of Bluechat. Now, we happily present marge-core v0.5, with the following diffs from 0.4.0:

• Created AutoConnect class to make directly connections; (That's very cool! You can connect two bluetooth devices with just one line of code!);
• Created the concept of layer (Currently there is beta unicast layer. Feel free to send new layers or tips for the layers mechanism);
• Created UUIDGenerator that receives a name and automatically generates a UUID following the given name;
• Created more methods in Inquiry/Discover to make this stuff easier, removing the JSR 82 int constants;
• Coded small TODOs and XXXs (hashmap for server configuration, new default service, etc);
• Moved project to NetBeans (see more about that above);
• Organized the Subversion repository to make it more comprehensible.

The project was migrated to NetBeans 6.0, because we believe that, at the moment, Mobility Pack is a much better tool for Java ME development than the available free solutions for Eclipse. Anyway, you can see that we don't want to force anybody to use it, cause you can still use the available Ant scripts provided by NetBeans or import the source directly.

Also, more than a new release, today Marge is completing 1 year since our first commit to the project repository, which means Marge is doing his first birthday!

We want to thank you all that have supported, tried, gave feedback and worked with the project during this time. We know that the project wouldn't go on without your help and because of that we are thankful. Now, we expect that you that already use Marge, keep using and sending your ideas, and for that ones that have never used Marge, this is the perfect chance, cause the project is getting better every new release!

Thanks again and don't forget to go to the project's web page, take a look in the new features and give a try!

ZFS, Indiana, VirtualBox and a bunch of memory sticks

After installing Solaris in my machine, I'm trying to learn more about ZFS, that, in the words found at OpenSolaris website, "is a new kind of file system that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability".

In the end of last year, I saw some slides from a presentation about ZFS from Sun, using a bunch of memory sticks to create a file system, and thought that very cool. Today, I found an article called "Playing with ZFS, USB memory disks and VMware Fusion" and decided to try it myself, but in a different way, using VirtualBox instead of VMware.

First of all, I installed VirtualBox in Ubuntu Linux. After enabling the respective repository, just did an "sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose" and added my user to the "vboxusers" group. Then created a virtual machine for a Solaris installation and installed the preview 2 of project Indiana. I was having problems to install Indiana every time I gave information for creating a new user, but when I gave just root password everything went fine.

For this test, I got two pendrives: one with 1Gb from PQI and a USB memory card adapter from Nokia, with a 512Mb mini SD card. VirtualBox was presenting some problems to use USB devices, but after some googling I found the solution here (Portuguese) and here.

With VirtualBox working, was time to create my first ZFS pool.

With the command "rmformat", I discovered that the two memory sticks were the devices "/dev/rdsk/c9t0d0p0" and "/dev/rdsk/c10t0d0p0". Therefore, created the pool with command "zpool create -f usbdisk c9t0d0p0 c10t0d0p0".

Now, with "df -h", there was a new file system called "usbdisk" with 1.4GB (the adition of the two memory sticks :).

But I was curious to see if it was really working, so I created a new file in "/usbdisk" with 1200Mb (bigger than the bigger memory stick capacity), and there it was:

Rebooted the system to check it was really true, and the file still was there. That's Great! Fantastic for projects like to create "A Home Fileserver using ZFS".

But after closing the virtual machine and openning it again the file wasn't there anymore. This got me upset, but just for a few seconds before I saw that still there was something in the pool, using "zpool list".

Then executing "zpool export usbdisk" and "zpool import usbdisk" all got back again. Must be something related with the usb devices, but now I know there is no problem removing the devices or even mixing them.

There are alot of features available in ZFS, like creating file system with RAID redundace, use the available GUI and many more. Here are some additional information:

* Solaris Operating System - ZFS Learning Center
* BigAdmin Feature Article: ZFS Overview and Guide

June 2008

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I'm back from JavaOne 2008 and it was great!

New project Marge version! I'm not kidding...

ZFS, Indiana, VirtualBox and a bunch of memory sticks

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