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Category: Solaris

For those who didn’t see it, Team DTrace was on the Scoble Show. As I mention at the end of the interview, this was the day after my younger son was born (if you look closely at my right wrist, you will note that I am still wearing my hospital bracelet in the interview). You can see the cigars that I offered at the end of the interview (and they were damn fine cigars, by the way) in a photo of Team DTrace that Scoble took afterwards. After the photo, we returned to our office and smoked the cigars — and then had an unplanned conversation with the building management about never again smoking cigars in the office. (I responded that I was done having kids, so they had nothing to worry about.)

Finally, as for DTrace on the iPhone (to which we made brief reference in the interview): it is now our understanding that alas, DTrace is not on the iPhone — Apple has apparently not yet ported DTrace to the ARM — but that a DTrace port “may be” in the works. So the dream is alive!

Our family is very happy to welcome its newest addition: Alexander Morgan Gaffikin Cantrill, born on June 17th at 3:22pm, and weighing in at a whopping 9 pounds, 7 ounces. (And that was five days early!) It’s amazing how much one forgets over
nearly three years; I’ve found myself cramming on forgotten (if simple) ideas like burping and “tummy time”. (But I can still swaddle like an all-pro!)

Joyent — the originators of the Ruby 1.8.5 DTrace provider and Ruby 1.8.6 DTrace provider — have set up a dedicated DTrace site, which Jason and company discuss in their latest podcast. If you are a Rails shop that cares about performance (and, yes, they very much exist), the resources at the Joyent page should become invaluable to you. And as long as we’re on the topic, if you’re in San Francisco this Tuesday (May 22nd), and you have fifteen clams burning a hole in your pocket, you might be interested in attending a panel that Jason and I will both be on: Ruby on Rails: To Scale or Not to Scale? (Once we have a few drinks in us, Jason and I also anticipate hosting a follow-up panel: “Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill: Will the Real Doogie Howser Please Stand Up?”)

As is known but perhaps not widely reported, all three of us on Team DTrace are products of Brown University Computer Science. More specifically, we were all students in (and later TAs for) Brown’s operating systems course, CS169. This course has been taught by the same professor, Tom Doeppner, over its thirty year lifetime, and has become something of a legend in Silicon Valley, having produced some of the top engineers at major companies like NetApp, SGI, Adobe, and VMware — not to mention tons of smaller companies. And at Sun, CS169 has cast a particularly long shadow, with seven CS169 alums (Adam, Dan, Dave, Eric, Matt, Mike and me) having together played major roles in developing many of the revolutionary technologies in Solaris 10 (specifically, DTrace, ZFS, SMF, FMA and Zones).

I mention the Brown connection because this past Thursday, Brown hosted a symposium to honor both the DTrace team in particular and the contributions of former CS169 undergraduate TAs more generally. We were each invited to give a presentation on a topic of our choosing, and seizing the opportunity for intellectual indulgence, I chose to reflect on a broad topic: the inculcation of systems thinking. My thoughts on this topic deserve their own lengthy blog entry, but this presentation will have to suffice for now — albeit stripped of the references to the Tupolev Tu-144, LBJ, Ray Kurzweil, the 737 rudder reversal and Ruby stack backtraces that peppered (or perhaps polluted?) the actual talk…

I know that I’ve been quiet for a while, and I promise that I (or rather, we) are close to talking about what we’ve been up to for the past year, but I wanted to first pop my head up to to highlight out some exciting news: Ian Murdock has joined Sun.

I have always been impressed with Ian’s decidedly pragmatic views of technology; he has been a supporter of OpenSolaris, and in particular he took a decisive and courageous stand against some absurd Debian-borne anti-Nexenta licensing FUD. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that our was not even two years ago, and that it was just eighteen months ago that we first saw a prototype of what that Utopia might look like. Ian’s arrival at Sun is a huge lurch forward towards the wide-spread productization of this ideal: it’s great news for OpenSolaris and it’s great news for long-time fans of Debian — it looks like we’re going to be able to apt-get our cake, and DTrace it too!

A little while ago, I blogged about DTrace on Rails. In particular, I promised that I would get diffs based on is-enabled probes out “shortly.” In giving a guest lecture for a class at Berkeley yesterday, I was reminded that I still hadn’t made this available. With my apologies for the many-months delay, the diff (against Ruby 1.8.2) is here.

And as long as I have your eyeballs, let me join Adam in directing you to Brendan Gregg‘s amazing Helper Monkey. Brendan’s work is an indisputable quantum leap for what has become one of the most important, one of the most misunderstood, and certainly one of the most undebuggable platforms on the planet: JavaScript. If you do anything AJAX-ian that’s evenly vaguely performance or footprint sensitive, you’re wasting your time if you’re not using Helper Monkey. (When Brendan first demo’d Helper Monkey to Adam and me, Adam’s line was that Brendan had just propelled JavaScript debugging forward by “100,000 years” — which is not to say that Helper Monkey is like debugging in the 1021st century, but rather that debugging JavaScript without Helper Monkey is like debugging in the late Pleistocene.)

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