Two Years Later: Why Linux people still lust after DTrace

Bill Pearson from the Intel Software Network posted a declaration of a party on the occasion of the 2000th blog post on ISN.

One of the highlights he listed was the conversation which was engendered by a post I did about two years ago called "Why Linux people lust after DTrace." My intent was simply to write up the notes from a talk I had attended by Bryan Cantrill from Sun about DTrace, and some random musings based on my own shaggy dog history in the industry.

Frankly, I wasn&apost prepared for the resulting thunderstorm of comments on my blog, as well as the comments which popped up on other blogs which referenced my post. Suddenly I had a steady stream of comments and post views on a topic that, well to be honest, I wasn&apost prepared to address. Heck, it was just a random post, why was there so much response?

And better yet, how could I replicate this outpouring of passion?

Since I posted this, I have learned a lot more about DTrace. The community has extended DTrace probes into MySQL, JavaScript and Python, to name a few. Intel extended DTrace to support an OpenSolaris version of PowerTop. (And I believe there are other DTrace-based tools which are forthcoming). I also learned more about similar options in Linux, and the pros and cons vs. DTrace.

Here&aposs a shout-out to Bill for mentioning my humble little post in his 2000th post party!

And, a little full-circle irony here: In the original post, I commented on how Oracle engineers in particular wished they had a version of DTrace for Linux. I guess with the coming acquisition of Sun by Oracle, they may be able to finally satisfy their lust for DTrace!

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Oracle Gets Sun xVM, Solaris Zones and Virtualbox

When Oracle announced that it will be acquiring Sun that didn’t just impact the database market it’s not just the question of what will happen with MySQL, OpenOffice and Java the impact on the virtualization market is big.

Imvho Sun has a very confusing Virtualization offering, they have different flavours, different tools and depending on which Sun representative you talk too another technology is their next big thing. They indeed cover the 3 big areas , with Solaris Zones they have a nice OS Virtualization alternative, with xVM they have a powerfull Xen based Bare metal virtualization technology based on paravirtualization , and with VirtualBox they have a Type II hypervisor ready to taclke the deskopt market, a nice set of features indeed.

Oracle on the other hand was really focussing on Xen, and probably will continue to do so … so what will the future of Solaris Zones and VirtualBox be..
Some people already mentionned that VirtualBox could merge up with Hosted Xen .

Now what was Oracle’s Cloud offering again ? Sun already has a strategy here .. and after they took over Qlayer earlier this year they also have a solid product line…

Xen just got another really strong vendor backing it’s technology, both Citrix and Oracle are behind it now

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Virtualizationdotcom/~3/DCY3NyESdMM/

Moodle Community, Another Example of Moore’s Law

In the current unprecedented global economic downturn, a community associated with a  learning management system ( LMS) called Moodle for global educators  is growing at an  exponential  rate, and becoming extremely popular more so in this economy because it is open source with high performance/cost ratio. The growth of the number of moodle sites has been following the Moore’s law since 2003, and the total known moodle sites (most of them are created by academic or corporate educators) have reached 60000 in March 2009 (http://moodle.org/stats/). So far, after a few weeks of climbing up my learning curve on how to get it to work, I have enjoyed Moodle’s overall functionality and robustness performance.  I’ve installed it a few times on both Windows and Linux platforms, and integrated it with Apache, and MySQL database after a few days’ cram sessions on PHP Programming and worked with administration functions as well as adding modules to make it meet the need of our organization.  Its a very powerful and robustness platform that I haven’t seen for years with very few hassle along the way.

Moodle stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. In the technical terms, Moodle is Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) which enables learning professionals (educators) to create engaging online learning courses. Moodle is the brainchild of Martin Dougiamas, who designed the program while working on his Ph.D. at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. He developed it as a tool for his dissertation which was on a Socio-constructivist approach to learning. Thus Moodle originally excelled in features which supported this approach to education, in particular through its very user-friendly discussion forum layout that includes mug shots of the participants as an aid towards “community building’. Dougiamas programmed Moodle in PHP, a programming (or more strictly, “scripting’) language that can create web pages based on user input and data-based information. Moodle’s Philosophy of learning  is that focuses on collaboration, activities and critical reflection. This social-constructivive approach involves a strong community of learning orientation rather than simply computting courses and exercises online. In general, a healthy amount of connected behaviour within a learning community is a very powerful stimulant for learning, not only bringing people closer together but promoting deeper reflection and re-examination of their existing beliefs.

In today’s internet connected world, virtually every educational institution or corporation, one way or another, has by now adopted a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or CMS (Course Management System) for use either as an adjunct to its traditional courses (often called a “blended” or “hybrid” course system), or as a tool for its distance education program via some commercial platform, of which are expensive to license and which are rather rigid in the ways that they can be used. Moodle is different, rather than just publishing and assessing the information you think they need to know, it help you realize how each participant in a course can be an educator as well as a learner. Your job as an educator can change from being ‘the source of knowledge’ to being an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with learners in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and moderating discussions and activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class.

With a user base situated around the world, it is common for moodle user to receive help within a matter of hours, regardless of the local time of day. There are times when a human response works better. People have not only given help, but have also created new computer code to help a user modify a current feature or create a new one. Some of Moodle’s virtues have been alluded to already. Now let us take a closer look at the top key items of Moodle for academic and software developer training community.

• Interface languages: When a user logs on, there is a drop down menu from which he can select an interface language. Once set, that language choice remains unless another language is selected. These language modules have all been created by volunteers.
• Multiple material type support: Moodle platform in well positioned to host different learning materials such as animation, case study, drill and practice, lecture/presentation, quiz/test, video, live chat, survey, simulation and virtual conference etc.
• WYSIWYG HTML editor: It is the embedded tool in Moodle for users to edit text entry areas like resources, forum postings and journal entries. Copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text, and lectronic assignment submissions.Instructors have various choices for course formats such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focused social format. 
• Activity Report: It is the full logging and tracking report for each student with graphs and module details (Access/Number of time read) as well as details of each student involvement like postings and journal entries.The course activity in Moodle includes Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, and Workshops as well as virtual areas for group work. Instructor can easily get full reports of the activities of individual students, or of all students for a specific activity.
•  The quiz-making function:  Self-assessment quizzes and online testing.  Quiz types such as: Multiple choice, True/False, Numerical, Matching, Description, and Cloze.A wide range of options allows you to randomize the questions and multiple-choice items, specify a time frame for availability, choose whether the students receive feedback or not, decide if they are allowed to view the correct answers, and determine how many times they may take the quiz and how it is to be scored (first attempt, highest attempt, average of all attempts or last attempt).
• Modular design: Each functional feature of Moodle can be regarded as a module. Moodle is built in a very modular fashion. New functions can be created and activated merely by dropping them into the site’s directory where all of the plug-in modules are stored. There are site management, user management and course management for different users with different access. In general, there is Assignment Module, Chat Module, Choice Module, Forum Module, Journal Module, Poll, Quiz Module, Resource Module, Survey Module and Workshop Module. Embedded Shockwave Flash (.swf) files

Entering “Moodle”, an open-source platform, which is not only free but also highly adaptable for computer science education, universities and corporation education organization are quickly discovering that they can save thousands of dollars or more by implementing Moodle, and then spending a small portion of the money saved to program it to work precisely the way they and their educators want it to. More and more universities  and professional training organization have finished their transition of traditional  education from  instructor lead class into moodle based dynamic online class or integrated type such as California Tech Computer Science Curriculum, Virginia Tech Computer Science Curriculum , Oregon Inst. of Tech. Curriculum for Computer Science and Tech and International ACM and IEEE sponsored conference such as Super Computing Education moodle . Where others universities have been systematically evaluating and piloting Moodle as the online learning management system. For example, at University of North Carolina at Charlotte (website: http://www.lmseval.uncc.edu/ ),  In 2008,  10 faculty participated the pilot and taught classes based on Moodle. Moodle pilot faculty also attended a focus group to discuss their Moodle experiences, and in earlier 2009, the pilot extended to 18 new faculty members selected based on a variety of criteria, including college representation, course types, experienced vs. new users, fully online vs. hybrid, and face to face courses  and concluded that moodle offers advantages include ease of use and mastery, minimal support, collaboration with the open source community, flexibility, and adaptability to the needs of faculty and students.

Moodle can run on virtually any machine, Windows, Macintosh OSX or Unix, as long as the following are installed: 1) an Apache web server, 2) the page generation freeware, PHP, and 3) a database application, usually, but not limited to MySQL. Applications exist for all platforms and are listed under “Installing Apache, MySQL and PHP” at http://moodle.org/doc/. Some basic data about moodle is listed in the following table:

 

Title:             

Moodle

Author:

Martin Dougiamas

Contact Information:

http://moodle.org

Product type:

Course management system

Platform:

Any platform with Apache, PHP and a database system such as MySQL installed

Price:

Free

Best Features

Can easily have every feature you want as long as there is someone around willing to program it

Registered community member (Moodle.org)

672,965 ( as of 4/24/09 and growing)

 

It is not yet to know how long Moodle can keep its exponential growth. For sure, it will help academic or corporate educators connect with learners, but in the larger scope, perhaps it will organize and network the fragmented and vast knowledge we can all explain in so many different and fascinating ways, especially in the United States, where people expect more from universities and employer, while at the same time the available tax dollars are dropping.

I am a Moodler since 2009 and building a Moodle platform for Intel academic community and actively working on every details of the project, if you have any suggestion or comments that you want to share with me, I would love to hear from you at tao.b.wang@intel.com

 

 

 

 

 

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