I just completed the migration of my parents computer to a new 3Ghz
clone PC. It is pretty amazing … and it is fast! This is
the fastest PC that I have ever worked on. I picked it up from DreamTech today, and set-up the Windows XP Pro that they are now going to use.

One thing that was cool was how the Intel Hyper-Threading
support in Windows XP recognized the Pentium 4 processor as *two*
processors. When you open Task Manager it appears to be running
on a two-processor box. And does it scream … it’s amazing to
think that we’ll probably be seeing another 1Ghz added by Christmas and
break the 4Ghz mark …

I also picked up a copy of IBM’s Via Voice today. I want to see
where voice recognition is at these days. I’ll write about my
experience … or maybe I’ll “talk” about my experience in my blog!

We have been having some really fun weather in Utah the last several
weeks. It seems that we are caught in the cusp of Winter and
Spring … and even saw a glimpse of Summer. This morning I
headed out on a trip to the Bay Area of California, and when I drove
through Park City at ~6:30am it was snowing … again. What makes
this wild is that over the weekend it was in the 80’s!

I’m not complaining at all … I really like the variety and I know
that it’s great for the water levels. It is quite a wild weather
pattern though …

It was fun today … I got to go home for lunch. Our furnace is
having final death throws (made in 1976!) and it faltered. I had
to go meet the repair man and make the call on buying a new one.
He was able to breath life into it … and left the estimate of $1850
for a new furnace. We’ll get that this fall …

Sam woke up while I was there, and so we got to sit and eat chicken
strips and pickles. He liked the chicken … but he really liked
the pickles much more!

I have been too busy with too many projects lately. Not enough
time in the day to catch up on all the ready, and to blog. Well
… I just haven’t been setting aside the time …

We are moving forward on our next operating system product releases,
and the initial release of our SCOx Web Services Substrate
product. I’ve been working with UnixWare 7.1.4 builds, and also
implementing some new experiments on OpenServer 5.0.7. I set
aside the Darwin work for a few weeks while we get these product into
production. The Web Services Substrate is coming together.
We’ll have two of the core ‘encapsulators’ complete for
console-applications and SQL databases, along with the latest release
of WebFace and WebFace Studio. We already have some interested
customers, and are working to complete some demonstrations for Forum
2004 … it’ll be coming up quickly. It’s been fun to create a
set of web services that interface with UNIX and UNIX utilities …
we’re working on a WebFace UI for one of the demo services today.

I’ve been working with Virtual PC 2004 a lot lately … I bought a 60GB
external 2.5″ USB 2.0/Firewire hard disk … it is amazing. I’ve
stored all of my music, along with the Virtual PC .vhd disk files, and
countless .iso images … 60GB is a lot for a “second” drive.

I’m also working with MRTG again … I’ve written a set of scripts that
scrape statistics from various devices “web management” pages. I
also wrote a couple of custom scripts to graph data counts and stats
from a couple of MySQL databases. I now have a very complete view
of my wireless network, and the remote Internet cafe’s.

I have to get caught up on reading … there have been too many SCO
announcements lately … I’m sure there is a lot of conspiracy theory
to catch up on! Let’s see, last I heard Baystar was a puppet for
Microsoft … then they were wonderful for asking for their $20 million
investment back (still Microsoft puppet?) … now they are weakening
their position, and not commenting on the details of their request, and
saying that we just need “new management” to focus on the lawsuits and
not products … what will the Groklaw community think?

I am always accused of being too far ahead of the main stream in many
areas where I make predictions.  I think this comes from my habit
of watching the fringe areas of development, and simply noticing some
trends early on in their development.  I then tend to extrapolate
what – IMHO – seem to be the little trends with huge growth
potential.  As much as I love Virtual PC today – for what it
provides me in doing my job and R&D – there are numerous projects
that I am coming across that further indicate that Virtualization is
becoming a growing trend … both hardware virtualization and Operating
System virtualization.

First on the OS front – ReactOS –
this is becoming more and more of a solution.  With this release I
was able to complete the installation, and boot it to a graphical
interface.  There is some basic functionality, and it’s very crude
today … but this is an impressive effort from a team that is intent
on creating another kernel and application platform.  As they
continue to work on their road-map, I’ll be following their work
closely … it is going to be an indicator to me of several core
trends.  The ability to develop a kernel and user space that is
able to support end-user applications will be the real proof of how
easy it is becoming to create and commoditize these environments.

Now on the Virtualization front – Qemu
– this is another project to create a Virtual PC / VMware type
environment … and it appears to be gaining momentum.  With
processor power still doubling at nearly an annual rate, we are already
seeing the 4.3Ghz motherboards arriving.  With all of this power,
the ability to emulate a complete PC in software – running at an
acceptable speed – is becoming the norm.  Qemu appears to be a
project that is going to bring this capability to a broader market
quickly.  I’m going to be installing this solution – and tracking
it’s progress – also.

What all of this is doing is pushing the value in computer software and
technology into new places, and new markets.  As we began work
last year on our own Application Substrate we knew this was coming …
just not this quickly.  The acceleration continues …

It seems like people here in Utah are always complaining about Qwest
and the phone and Internet services that we get.  I don’t have as
many problems as others … and yesterday it got even better.

I called Qwest about increasing the bandwidth on my primary connection
at my office in Heber City.  Right now it’s a 640k/640k line …
and they indicated there was a special to upgrade the line.  Great
… what’s the “special”?  Well … when the rep checked my
service, he indicated that I could jump to the 1.5Mbps/896kbps line
right now … and for $27 LESS!

So I doubled my bandwidth … and saved $27.00/month.  Not bad in my opinion …

I have to admit that I really like Virtual PC
on Windows XP. I still use XP as my primary laptop/desktop
operating system. Virtual PC extends what I can do tremendously
… I now carry a SCO UnixWare machine with also … virtually.
And I am experimenting with a variety of other kernels and operating
systems virtually. The other day I saw a reference to a new release of Darwin v7.0.1
… and I thought about checking it out. I’ve downloaded the ISO
… booted and installed it … I was able to get X configured
and working with the basic ‘twm’ window manager. I have now been
working on getting the LAN driver working … the DEC Tulip driver on
the CD was for Power PC … I’m now close with the OpenDarwin Tulip driver … got it to make with some assistance … it’s not quite installed.

What’s fun is that I am now downloading and carrying around numerous
ISO images of various operating systems … and booting them at
different times to experiment and learn. It’s like carrying
around a bunch of PCs … all within my laptop. Also, with the
“Undo Disks” I am able to boot, experiment and see how far I can get
… if I can’t get things working, I just close the Virtual PC and
discard the disk changes … rolling me back to my last “known-good”
point.

I just saw a new build of ReactOS
… I was going to take another look at it tomorrow … the last
version would start to install, but failed to partition the hard
disk. I’m also going to continue to work on Darwin also … both
of these are interesting efforts!  Both of these also appear to be
free of the current issues surrounding the Linux kernel …

Virtual PC rules!