Web based technology is cool.   The Asian Bird Flu is not.   On this MSNBC website, the two briefly meet.   Here, one can see a representation of how the avian influenza known as H5N1 has slowly crept across Asia and Europe between December 2003 and May 2006.

Okay, so aside from pointing you to a cool graphic, what's really on my mind?

Whiz bang cool marketing thingiemabobs, that's what !

Specifically, what I would really love to see is a graphic similar to the one MSNBC is showing, but one that shows the Adoption of Solaris 10 around the world.

I imagine the graphic would start a bit slow at first...   A customer here, a customer there.   Early adopters wanting to test drive the rich S10 feature set.   But then it would show S10 spreading like a wild fire across the globe.

Solaris has sexy technology, it's safe & secure to use on everything from laptops to mega-humungous systems, and it's open.   Way cool.

I leave it to our marketing people to talk about the millions of Solaris 10 downloads that have taken place since its release.   Suffice to say, Solaris is spreading fast!

This past month, I spent two back-to-back weeks working in California.   Aside from having to copy works-in-progress from my home server to a server based on Sun's wide area network, working from California usually is okay and non-eventful.

I've learned to rely on the SunRay technology when working in any Sun office. This allows me to use my Sun employee ID badge to have my work in progress follow me from Sun building to Sun building, SunRay to SunRay.

Wednesday night, I attended an evening get together at my Director's home.   However, it was the same evening that an update on a critical project had to be penned and sent out.   The team working on the project was still providing updates and time ran out.   I had to leave the office and get to the party.   I had promised to pick up the catered dishes!   So, the update would have to be done "remotely" from my bosses home.

There, in the quiet space of her office at home in Foster City, overlooking the tranquil neighborhood waterway, I sat at her desk.   There in front of me sat a monitor and a mouse.   Unlike my own setup at home, her "workstation" was simply a sleek, flat screened monitor.   At the bottom in the front was a slot for a smart card...   such as a Sun Employee ID badge.

I had assumed I would have to login and then rlogin into an office server.   But Diann had recently moved to the latest SunRay Client technology.   Not sure what would happen, I gave it a try.   I inserted my badge....

After entering my password, I was right back to the screen I was at when I rushed out of the office an hour earlier.   My email was in front of me, the project notes were still sitting there, StarOffice was waiting for the next update to the spreadsheet, and I was primed to update a TWiki site.

"Okay, let's try it!", I thought.   "It'll probably be slow, but I'll just get some food and chat a bit when it bogs down really badly."

For the next two hours, I worked without interruption, without hiccups to the connection, and with excellent performance.   And when I wanted to step away for a minute, I took my badge with me, safe guarding my working session as I walked around the party.   Plugged back in, I was right back to where I left off.

Thursday morning, I plugged my badge into a SunRay in Menlo Park and simply continued with my work.

I love my SunBlade 150 workstation.   I like the option of being able to fine tune my own kernel...   but no longer feel the need to do so.   I like having a local disk drive...   although even that loses it's appeal when I think about backups.   And of course, having a DVD player is nice...   but again, I don't think I've actually used it at all in the past year.   Still, I am quiet happy of my SunBlade.

So, for me to admit that my SunRay Client experience was actually downright terrific, well..., that's really going some!

SunRay technology is clean, simple, very smart, and now, it's even elegant!   If you haven't already, you should try this cool technology!

Recently, some of my peers have been having a bit of fun teasing me about my lack of sheer enthusiasm to live life on the bleeding edge of technology.   But here I sit, watching (okay, more like listening to) TV, and blogging for the first time.... wirelessly on the Ferrari.

It took me years to get to the point of being able to work from home.   I saw my home as a sanctuary AWAY from work, so working from home was a huge conflict.   Now, I can work from home without problems.   When I step into my office and log in on my Sun workstation, I shift into work mode.   Tied to a wire.   Tied to a desk.   Tied to an office.   It works for me.   The idea of using a computer outside of the office was...   well...   yuck.

So here we are tonight.   Forty something DINKs (Dual Income No Kids), sitting with wireless laptops on the coffee table, watching TV, loading the latest builds of Solaris, shopping online, reading the news, blogging.   Yikes.

Is this a picture of the future?   Geez, I hope not.   Hopefully, it's simply a picture of the present.   But if it is the future, it'll probably take me another year to adjust....   Meanwhile, my peers will no doubt continue to chuckle.

In the 1980's and 1990's, this question was often a delightful source of debate.   With concerns about disk space, tmp files getting too big, non-specific worries about security, idle logins, few ports, system resource allocation limitations, and other sysadmin issues, many UNIX system administrators liked to reboot on a regular basis.

Daily reboots with full diagnostics turned on.   That was my own preference for many years....

But have times moved on?   Has UNIX matured to a new level?   Has UNIX's more mission critical applications in the world changed things?   Have UNIX system administration practices changed from what I remember 15 years ago?

This is something I've been wondering about....   And everyone I talk to about it has a different answer.   So, I'm casting the question out to a wider audience....   How often do you boot your UNIX system?

If you want to answer this question, there is an online survey at my Panic! webpage.

Meanwhile...   How often do I reboot?   Every day, but only because I shutdown my desktop, which is running Solaris 10, every night.   Yup, some habits are hard to break.    

Thank goodness I live in a civilised country where technology is available for all to use.   And thank goodness I don't have to fight my way through a mob to get a computer.

When I see photos like this, I am thankful I live in a modern society where these scenes are not seen.   Or so I thought....

According to this BBC article, this scene recently took place in Virginia... yes, in the United States.

Wow.

Super computing power is an amazing tool for many companies.   But when I read this article in the New York Times, well.... you can't help but giggle!

And I quote:

"....Once the exclusive territory of nuclear weapons designers and code breakers, ultrafast computers are increasingly being used in everyday product design.   Procter & Gamble used a supercomputer to study the airflow over its Pringles potato chips to help stop them from fluttering off the company's assembly lines...."

Today marks my one year anniversary of blogging.   A year ago today, I dipped my toes into the blogging pool and although a bit scary at first, I found the temperature to be just fine.

There are a lot of people who "poo-poo" blogging as a way to stroke the ego or seek attention.   They don't blog.

Then there are those who find blogging a cool way to communicate with the world, talk about their work, share their lives, and clarify their thoughts.   They blog.

(I imagine there are about a zillion other points of view on this as well.)

For me, blogging has turned out to be, first and foremost, a fun way to communicate with my friends & colleagues back "home" in England, my family which is spread from coast to coast in the USA, and my husband's family in Germany.

But over the past year, I've learned that some of what I write about touches other people, people who I don't even know.   I've received emails from around the globe, from people wanting to share their experiences, views, and thoughts with me.   And that, for me, is coolness.   After all, blogging is about connecting with other people.

Yes, at some level, sure, the Ego kicks in.   But the way I see it, that's just the part of me that happens to notice....   "I am".

Life without email!?   What!?   You've got to be kidding!

What would happen to our companies and our lives if email just "went away"?   It doesn't bear thinking about!   And yet, that is just what the new Police Chief Constable in Essex, England is recommending.   (Click here to see more detail).   He wants to see Wednesdays be email free...   encouraging everyone to use the telephone or meet face to face.   Wow.

I've been with Sun over 16 years.   I can't imagine Sun without email.   How would we function?   Would we do more work....   or less?   What skills would we have to learn or relearn?   It's almost a scary proposition.

Life without email.   What a wild idea!

One of the big changes in the international move from the UK to the USA involves the systems I've been using at work.

Up until our move at the end of March, I have been using the latest and greatest desktop systems.   Our team at Sun Engineering in the UK had rejected moving to SunRays due to all of the development work and alpha testing of the next OS that we do on our own desktops.   But, having moved to a Flex Office, SunRays are the (thin client) system of choice.

Doing a ps -ef command on a SunRay, one quickly remembers that a hundred other people are sharing "your system".   And it takes time getting used to not being able to become root to do some diddly fiddling with the system.

The joy of the SunRay is in the use of my Sun ID badge to have my "data" follow me around as I get assigned to different flex offices.   And to show someone a file, hey, just let me put MY badge into YOUR SunRay for a second...   Voila!   Yes, this technology is cool...   Even for a hacker like myself.

Of course, remembering to take my badge OUT of the SunRay when I leave the system is turning out to be a bit tricky.   Old dog syndrome...

However, one apparent downside of the move to the USA was that the Sun systems had been upgraded.   My own desktop was still on Solaris 8, which I loved dearly.     What I really loved, was not having to learn CDE.   By staying on the older OS's, I completely avoided ever becoming a CDE user.

I've admitted it before...   I am what marketing folks refer to as a Late Adopter or in some cases, a Never Adopter.   It was bad enough going from SunView to Open Windows.   I was not emotionally equipped to make another switch to YAWS, Yet Another Windowing System, after getting mine so finely tuned and customised...   CDE would never happen for me.

But in the flex office, on the SunRay, there were only two choices available to me.   CDE (just say no) or something called GNOME.   Hmmm...   I had heard about this GNOME thingie before.

The choice was clear.   I was about to become an Early Adopter... or so I thought.   in actuality, I'm probably one of the last to move to GNOME.

Now, to learn to use it...   Don't tell me it's intuitive!   It's not.   But then, let's look at my experience with windowing systems.   SunView was my first in 1989, followed by OpenWin.   Before that, I lived in the world of the Bourne shell via terminals, ed (not vi), teletypes, punched cards, collators, and IBM 1130's with core memory.   GNOME was rocket science in comparison.   And no, I have NEVER used those PC thingies.   Even my NatureTech laptop is a SPARC system running Solaris 8 and Open Windows!

Fortunately, I found some time to really sit down and experiment with GNOME.   Before long, I had well and truly managed to mangle my setup, but found I could easily wipe it clean and start from scratch.   GNOME is clean, it's light, and it really lets you play with customisation.   I like that!   And, of course, it works great (and fast) in a SunRay enviroment.   Really cool!

Maybe new things aren't always so horrible after all.   Having said that, I refuse to get a USA mobile with a built in camera.   Sheer overkill if you ask me.   (Maybe next year...)

As they say in the states, "Have a great day!"  

Today, I received a new laptop:   An Acer Ferrari 3400.   From what little I've seen of it so far, I can say it's quite sexy in a Ferrari red kind of way.   Beyond that, the only observations I can make are these:

o   It installs easily and quickly

o   It is apparently very fast

o   The screen is quite impressive

o   It comes with a wicked cool mouse!

o   It'll be difficult to pry away from Georg!

Georg unpackaged it, plugged it in, configured the wireless, set up users, and upgraded memory, all while sitting in our lounge.   This was accomplished while I sat on the other sofa watching one episode of The Simpsons!   Aside from a bit of soft music and the occasional Ferrari vrrroooommmmmmmm sounds, the Ferrari was quickly and quietly online.

Very impressive!   The only improvement we can make to it now is to install Solaris 10.   No doubt, Georg will be doing that this weekend!  

Maybe in the USA this did not make the news...   I don't know.   But here in the UK, this weekend, the opening of the first Apple Computer store opening in Europe was big news.

And, not just somewhere in the back streets of London.   Apple moved into 235 Regent Street!   Nice address.   Gorgeous looking store.   Good luck, Apple!