Sun Associate Partner Status

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 | General | No Comments

It turns out that Sun is pretty good with supporting third-parties who wish to use their systems and software. Support comes in the form of discounted hardware, use of logos, access to testing and development labs and all sorts of things. I applied last week for Associate Partnership and today I received it which includes permission to use their logo. You’ll notice it on the front page. I need to place it somewhere better and get a few more awesome logos. It certainly adds some weight to the front page, I think.

Of course, I’m sure Microsoft and others are equally as supportive. After all, they’re all fighting for the same space. I’ll investigate what it takes to achieve a Microsoft partnership.

New offices

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | General | No Comments

I’m renting some office space right next to the Fourways Mall about 5 minutes drive from my house. Today’s the day I moved in. It went okay and I rocked up with my laptop, got my Internet working and settled in. It’s nice having a place of work again. There are too many distractions at home and at least there are zero distractions at the office.

It’s quite pleasant to be able to walk across the road and visit the mall. I can do my daily shopping during my lunch break. It has a branch of the Virgin Active gym to which I have a membership. So my plan for the next couple months is to work and work out. After about 5 years of sitting in a chair doing software development for my previous company, I have a lot of health and fitness to recover.

Company Rule and Policies

Friday, August 21st, 2009 | General | No Comments

The company rules and policies are largely complete. They’re good. I spent a lot of time on them. I would like to work at this company!

Winding up

Thursday, August 20th, 2009 | General | No Comments

There’s been a lot of work put into this entire thing. Over the last few months I’ve basically reshaped my entire life, give or take, and I think it’s all coming to a head over the next few weeks. I’ve managed to secure some offices in a nice area right up the road from me. My bank accounts are opened, everything’s registered and I’ve successfully removed myself from my previous employ.

The previous company is possibly handing over some IP to my new company for me to take forward and this will provide some cash flow over the next year. If this comes through then my business is essentially a spin-out company. This is an excellent position to be in for a startup.

The unofficial launch date is the second week of September 2009. I’ll then have 1 year to make it a profitable venture. My goals for that year will be: steady work, 2 employees and a small salary for me to cover rent and food.

Remote Procedure Calls

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 | General | No Comments

As we all know, RPC stands for Remote Procedure Call and is a way of one program calling a procedure in another program to get information or effect some action. The procedure doesn’t need to be on the same machine. So it’s a common technique used when implementing distributed systems and systems which scale horizontally. Horizontal scalability is when you can add more machines into your network to increase performance of your system. Vertical scalability is when you can increase the power of your individual machines by adding more resources like CPU or RAM to achieve increased performance.

Horizontal scalability is great because you can join several cheap computers together to achieve the power of a large, expensive system. You can also just add computers as you need them. But you need some form of communication mechanism to coordinate all the machines or dispatch work and return results. The answer to this is RPC.

I’ve been experimenting with ONC RPC the last few days. ONC RPC is the new name for the original Sun RPC which was the defacto way to implement RPC across a network. More recently it’s being replaced with CORBA, DCE, SOAP and other protocols. However it’s still the cheapest and fastest RPC around and it’s supported on all platforms. The telecommunications networks I have experience with make use of it from high-volume traffic.

So I’ve decided to go with it ‘cos I’ve seen it work and work well. The common practice in those environments is to implement one or two simple RPC calls to merely transfer a higher-level protocol across to a different machine. For a bad example, you could transfer XML-RPC over ONC RPC instead of the standard HTTP. It also keeps the system less coupled to the transportation when you keep it simple like this. So if ONC RPC turns out to be a bad idea, you can just replace it overnight with something else. No major code needs to change.

Me, SCSA and YAY

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 | General | 2 Comments

Yesterday I wrote and passed my Sun Certified System Administrator (SCSA) exam. Hooray!

It’s a big relief because I had been stressing about this exam for a couple months. It’s a rather tricky exam and you should really be using Solaris for the particular tasks on a fairly regular basis if you want to get high marks. I set up Solaris machines occasionally, work with zones, basic admin and sometimes delve into the more advanced things but not on a frequent enough basis for me to know everything and pass the exam without studying or google nearby. So yeah…

It’s awesome!

Domain migrated and Accounting Officer

Friday, June 19th, 2009 | General | No Comments

To all of my one or two readers, if I’ve done my job right then you should be reading this feed from the domain smksoftware.co.za instead of smk.co.za. The old domain should redirect permanently (HTTP 301) to the new one. Could you do me a favour, dear reader, and update your feed to the new domain? I want traffic on the old domain to dwindle … down … to … nothing …

And then we can get back to the business of doing normal things.

Officially “SMK Software”

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 | General | 2 Comments

I’ve successfully reserved the name “SMK Software”. So it’s gonna be mine. I don’t have a clue what the useless company I used was doing or not doing. I managed to achieve this within 3 business days. They took over 2 months. I’m gonna rename this domain to smksoftware.co.za to be more accurate. smk.co.za will redirect to that domain. Good day. Yup. Good day.

The company registration came through

Thursday, June 11th, 2009 | General | No Comments

Finally! I have a registered company. And I’ve discovered how to do the whole registration thing and name changing stuff myself. So I did a quick search and founds tonnes of other registered companies called “SMK this” and “SMK that” but, even though they covered all industries, none were “SMK Software”. Bah! I must have had a grumpy government employee on the day my first registration went through and that’s why the name was rejected. So I put in an application to reserve the name I want – and only that one – and I’ll probably hear back from them next week. Cross your fingers and hold your thumbs.

Dual-licensing of source code

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 | General | No Comments

I have two social goals with this adventure. One of them is skills development. The other one is the support of opensource software. However, a company who wishes to also sell some software products can’t give away all their source code. Some of it has to remain closed or … you can dual-license the software.

I’ve been a big advocate of the BSD license believing that, because it’s closer to public domain, it grants the user of the code greater rights than the GPL which imposes the condition that source code has to be distributed. But when it comes to dual-licensing this restriction has its advantages because a commercial venture would be willing to pay to keep their source code closed.

This means that most of my smaller libraries will be distributed under the BSD license. For some of the software which could be used in an opensource environment or for commercial gain by another party, I will distribute that under a dual-license: commercial or opensource ala GPL or equivalents. So opensource projects will be welcome to use my software as long as the opensource nature of the project remains. Should commercial parties which make use of my software wish to close their source code, then they will have to purchase a commercial license from me in order to do so.

That seems to satisfy both the social goals and also the profit motive of a company.