Posts tagged "video"

If you’ve been following my blog or the Systemhelden.com podcast for some time, then you probably know that I’m a big fan of and small investor in the movie Iron Sky, a crowd-funded science-fiction comedy about the Nazis who went to the dark side of the moon in 1945 and come back to conquer Earth in 2018.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending a pre-screening of the movie’s beta version in Helsinki, Finland. What can I say? It exceeded my high expectations!

A deserted street in the docks. The rain is pouring.

A small, old, flower-power style painted Volkswagen van drives by at high speed, then stops below a lifting crane, tires screeching.

The door opens and a woman stumbles out of the vehicle, as if trying to escape. A tall man in uniform catches her violently. Intense exchange of words, probably four-lettered. She hesitates, then follows him back into the van.

“Cut!”

My brother and I are watching from the side of the road. It’s a scene from the upcoming movie Iron Sky (no link, ironsky.net no longer exists), a science-fiction comedy about the Nazis who escaped with UFOs to the dark side of the moon and who come back in 2018 to conquer the earth.

What?

It’s a long, fun story, but you better see it for yourself. Early 2012, that is, when the movie is done.

About 4 years ago, a few colleagues and myself got together and we created a short video about the coolness of two of the most innovative products from Sun of the last decade: ZFS and the X4500 Server.

Today, nearly 4 years later, the video has been downloaded more than 100,000 times (across the original German and the English dubbed version, plus the full resolution downloadable files) and shown to a lot more people during tradeshows, customer demos, etc.

Now YouTube and Google Video (remember?) don’t allow for highest video quality and the old Sun Mediacast server, where we hosted the original MP4 file, no longer exists. Instead, Vimeo has emerged as my video hoster of choice for a variety of projects (check out my video collection on Vimeo) and so it was time to give this video a new home.

For my last article, I wanted to include a couple of videos from YouTube.

First, I pondered using the standard YouTube embed code, but I wanted a more simple, elegant solution. The Drupal RepTags module supports powerful macros and it comes with some pre-built YouTube macros, so that wasn’t bad.

But I wanted more: HTML5. Read on and see how easily you can create your own Drupal RepTags, including the code I use to add HTML5 support for the Drupal YouTube RepTag.

The recently announced Oracle Solaris 10, 09/10 release (no link, page no longer exists) introduced a number of significant upgrades to the ZFS file system.

Ironically, Solaris 10 now comes with a higher ZFS pool version (19 (no link, opensolaris.org no longer exists), at least) than OpenSolaris 2009.06 (14 (no link, opensolaris.org no longer exists)).

So let’s look at some of the key ZFS improvements that came in this update and figure out why they’re so useful.

In this article, you’ll learn more about LUN Expansion, Snapshot Holds, Triple Parity RAID-Z, Log Device Improvements, Pool Recovery, Splitting Mirrors and we’ll discover a new scheduler class!

And as a bonus, we’ll get to watch some videos that explain these features in further detail.

During OSDevCon 2009 in Dresden (no link, osdevcon.org no longer exists), I had the honor to present on some lessons learned while putting together a ZFS Automatic-Scrubbing SMF service.

Today, Deirdre was so kind to publish the video recording of my presentation on The Oracle Solaris Video Blog (no link, sun.com no longer exists).

From the description:

This talk walks you through the implementation of a simple SMF service. What sounds "simple" at first, develops a life of its own when you consider installation/de-installation, security considerations, error handling and debugging, and of course unexpected little bugs and shortcomings. Finally, we add a GUI to our service by discovering the OpenSolaris Visual Panels project. This "lessons learned" talk is intended to be a practical roundup of things to consider for developers interested in integrating with SMF.