'Til All Are One

I was hav­ing a dis­cus­sion at work, and it occurred to us that a simple way of improv­ing our data secur­ity is to turn machines off (or sus­pend, hibern­ate, etc.) when they aren’t required. Now this isn’t exactly rocket sci­ence, but what I found most inter­est­ing is how this ties into our energy con­ser­va­tion plans. Obvi­ously, it means we save money on elec­tri­city. How­ever, it also means that in redu­cing our net­work foot­print we also reduce our envir­on­mental footprint.

Con­vin­cing a com­pany to save energy can be dif­fi­cult, but know­ing that this also enhances secur­ity can be a win­ning argument.

The Open­JDK plug-​​in that comes with mod­ern dis­tros is usu­ally very good at hand­ling Java in Web pages, but some applets are just stub­born. Thank­fully, Sun have finally (after over six years!) released a plug-​​in for x86_​64 Web browsers.

I man­aged to get the JDK ver­sion work­ing on Fedora 11 and Cen­tOS 5.3. Here’s the process.

1. Firstly, down­load the JRE or JDK from Sun. You’ll need to get ver­sion 1.6 Update 12 or above. I got the RPM version.
2. Run the install script to extract the bundle. On the RPM ver­sion, this auto­mat­ic­ally installs it to your sys­tem if you run the script as root.
3. Execute this in a terminal:

   # ln -s /usr/java/default/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins

   This part took me a while to work out, as I was look­ing for a file called libjavaplugin_oji.so, the name of the x86_​32 version.

4. Restart Fire­fox and type about:plugins in the loc­a­tion bar to check if the new plug-​​in has been accepted.
5. Enable the plug-​​in: Edit ? Pref­er­ences ? Con­tent tab ? tick Enable Java
6. You can test your plug-​​in at java​.com and java​tester​.org

Apo­lo­gies for pimp­ing my employer, but I became the sub­ject of the inaug­ural ‘Meet the Team’ por­tion of the BizCubed news­let­ter.

It’s a good feel­ing know­ing that you work for a com­pany that actu­ally cares about open source and open stand­ards. For example, we sponsored the Gov­ern­ment 2.0 event in Can­berra last week.

For the sake of pos­ter­ity, I’ll repro­duce the inter­view here:

Meet The Team — Srid­har Dhanapalan

We are more than a con­sult­ing com­pany — we are a great team! In this sec­tion we will be intro­du­cing one mem­ber of our team in each newsletter.

What do you do at BizCubed?

I make sure that our Sup­port sub­scribers are receiv­ing legendary ser­vice. We like to be an open com­pany, and so know­ledge shar­ing is import­ant to us. I write a lot of doc­u­ment­a­tion on our wiki for the bene­fit of the Pen­taho community.

Intern­ally, I ensure that our team is prop­erly enabled with any inform­a­tion or infra­struc­ture that they need. I take care of our serv­ers and deploy­ments. I also do the occa­sional devel­op­ment of BI solu­tions. It’s a var­ied role — I never have a reason to be bored!

What attracts you to open source BI?

It seems incon­gru­ous that while we demand trans­par­ency from, for instance, our polit­ical sys­tems and fin­an­cial insti­tu­tions, they rely on soft­ware that is opaque.

Pro­cesses and organ­isa­tions can­not be thor­oughly audited if the soft­ware that drives them is closed. I also believe that in using open source and open stand­ards, you are show­ing respect for your users and cus­tom­ers. Your users can see what you see; touch what you touch. They can inspect and inter­rog­ate to their heart’s con­tent, and even make their own modi­fic­a­tions if they so wish. They may not opt to exer­cise those rights, but ulti­mately it’s their choice and not their vendor’s.

What were you doing before join­ing BizCubed?

I’ve been using com­puters since the early 1980s, and I dis­covered open source just over ten years ago. I’ve been for­tu­nate enough to make a career out of it. I have a back­ground in net­work engin­eer­ing, satel­lite com­mu­nic­a­tions, sys­tems admin­is­tra­tion and good ol’ fash­ioned tech support.

I com­pleted uni­ver­sity with a Sci­ence degree major­ing in the His­tory and Philo­sophy of Sci­ence and Tech­no­logy, which I feel gave me an appre­ci­ation for the inter­sec­tion of tech­no­logy and soci­ety. I think there should be more atten­tion paid to this in ICT, and it’s an area I often encounter in the field of BI.

Do you work with any pro­jects other than Pentaho?

I’ve been very act­ive in the open source com­munity over the past ten years. For the first half of this dec­ade, I was an admin­is­trator, editor and author at what was at the time the largest Man­drake (now Man­driva) Linux com­munity Web site.

I’m cur­rently the pres­id­ent of the Sydney Linux Users Group and also on the Linux Aus­tralia Coun­cil. Through those, I organ­ise and co-​​ordinate meet­ings and events for the Aus­tralian Linux com­munity. Other than that, I’m involved in the Ubuntu com­munity, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the Grameen Found­a­tion and a few other projects.

What do you do in your spare time?

My open source con­tri­bu­tions take up the bulk of my non-​​work hours. I read a lot of news and cur­rent affairs, and I’ve been known to go on Wiki­pe­dia binges. Other than that, I spend time with fam­ily and friends.