Ludo's sketches: Ludovic Poitou's blog

I'm taking some time off the network with my family. I expect to be back online end by August 24.
Enjoy the silence...

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Today is my 14th anniversary at Sun. This is way more than I had anticipated but I can't say that I've been really counting the days or years. I've been very fortunate to meet and work with very bright people, to participate in the birth and development of a very successful product line. I've done and I'm still doing things that get me excited, passionate, with a really good balance of the technical and the business aspects. Looking back from where we've started with Sun Directory Services, I'm amazed and I'm proud by the amount of business we've driven for Sun. And still our customers are pushing us to innovate and we're taking LDAP directory server to levels that a few years ago we would not even consider as possible. So there is still some interesting work ahead and that keeps me going to the office every day with motivation and a steaming brain.

However, I know there will not be a 15th anniversary at Sun, just simply because Sun will no longer be Sun very soon. The page is turning... Let see what the next chapter will be about !

Technorati Tags: directory-server, ldap, opends, Sun

I've just received a "certificate of attendance as a Speaker" from the FISL organizers. This is a very nice gesture and adds to the amazing experience that is FISL. Big thanks to the organizers and more specifically Fernanda Weiden who had to cope with the egos of over 320 speakers.

Technorati Tags: conference, fisl, java, opends, opensource

I've just spent a wonderful week in Porto Alegre, Brazil where I've landed to talk about OpenDS at the FISL 10 conference.
This is my first visit in Brazil and I must say that I didn't get any good impression of the country in the first two days. As a matter of fact, I didn't get any impression at all. I arrived on Monday evening around 9pm, it was all dark. After more than 16 hours of traveling, I just wanted to hit a bed.
On the Tuesday morning, thanks to the jet lag, I got up quite early, checked email and went for breakfast by 7am, noticing a rainy day and still pretty dark. I was just done with the breakfast when Bruno Souza arrived and took me to the location of the Javali meeting, an ancillary event of FISL, sponsored by Sun and organized by SOU Java and RS JUG.
We spent the whole day in the conference room, watching from time to time through the windows the heavy rain and wind. The Javali talks ended with pizzas and guarana and by then the night was already dark.
While I didn't get to see how Porto Alegre looks like in the first days of my visit, I did enjoyed the friendliness of Brazilians. At Javali, trying to follow the presentations in Portuguese was though but I think I got probably 50% of the technical parts thanks to the mix of english words and to my understanding of Spanish. And when it was necessary, Bruno or Mauricio Leal would do some translation for us.
I didn't get to talk at Javali, the agenda was pretty full and I hadn't told Bruno I would be coming as I wasn't sure I could make it. But Pat Patterson presented Securing RESTful Web Services with OpenSSO (and OAuth) and mentioned a few times OpenDS.

Wednesday was the first day of FISL and all the Sun participants went quite early to help setting up the booth in the Exhibition Hall. Sun's booth was very well located and its main attraction was the thousands of small soccer balls that were given to attendees that registered to the OSUM program. I think that throughout the whole event, the Sun's booth was the most vibrant and busy one, with Roger Brinkley making demos with his toys, Angel Camacho, Brian Leonard, Kirthankar Das and others helping with installs of OpenSolaris on attendees' laptops.

Arun Gupta fired the event on Wednesday morning with his presentation demonstrating the combined power of GlassFish, MySQL and NetBeans to build web applications.

Friday was the busiest day for me as I was scheduled for 2 presentations. But before that, I was invited to participate in Simon Phipps talk show, describing in 5 minutes, what was OpenDS, what were the benefits for the Brazilian open source users and developers.

Immediately after, and in the same room, I did my presentation for OpenDS with the theme of "Scaling the Identity Store with OpenDS". The sessions talked about the 3 models we have in OpenDS for deployment :

• Embedded in Java applications,
• Standalone replicated servers,
• LDAP Front-end access to MySQL Cluster's network DB.

While FISL is mostly attended by students, my session had a majority of System Administrators, interested by simplifying and reducing the cost of their data-centers.

Later in the afternoon, I was presenting again, repeating JavaOne's presentation from Tony Printezis and Charlie Hunt GC Tuning In the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine. Charlie was meant to attend the event, but the week before found out he could not make it. As they recalled I was in the room at JavaOne and I'm quite familiar with the subject as we're spending a lot of time trying the different options to tune the JVM to get the best performances out of OpenDS, they asked me to cover the talk. I think I've done a reasonable job, despite the density of information in the slides, and the simultaneous translation in Portuguese for the largest part of the crowd not so familiar with English.

Still on Friday, part of the exhibition floor was closed to the public as the Brazilian President, Lula Da Silva, was schedule to visit the event. Sun booth was very well positioned, on the border on the closed area and the crowd started to gather by the booth as President Lula arrived. The excitement was amazing. When the President reached by the OpenSolaris Brazil user group, he received an OpenSolaris cap and T-shirt from Vitorio Sassi, Sun employee and one of the leaders of the Brazilian OpenSolaris community.

Photo taken by Ludovic Poitou, June 26 2009.

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On Saturday and last day of the FISL conference, I got to share a little bit more of the stage by answering a performance related question from the attendance on Bruno Souza's session about the future of Java,with the exceptional presence of Javali, the mascote for the Javali user group.

Overall FISL has been an amazing experience. It is definitely the biggest open source I've participated to. Over 8200 registered visitors, from 27 different countries, more than 320 speakers for 354 presentations and a presidential visit. More than that, Brazilians are extremely nice, generous and happy to live. They made our stay in Porto Alegre something that I'll remember for a long time. A special thanks to the main organizers: Bruno Souza and Eduardo Lima (here below with Simon Phipps)

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I'll definitely participate to the Call For Presentation next year, if evangelism of the OpenDS project is still one of my tasks for next year.

You can find all photos for the event in the FISL 10 picasa album.

Technorati Tags: conference, fisl, java, ldap, opends, opensolaris, opensource, opensso, Sun

Many of you have requested the slides.
Here they are :

• Scaling the Identity Store with OpenDS
• GC Tuning In the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine

Thanks for your presence...
A more detailed article is in the works.

Technorati Tags: conference, fisl, java, opends, opensource, performance

Well, I'll be leaving home tomorrow morning, but early enough that people in California will still be up on the Friday night.
I'll be arriving in San Francisco on Saturday mid-day, getting prepared for a long and intense week.

On Sunday, from 1pm to 7pm, we have our OpenSSO / OpenDS community day at the Moscone.
And for the rest of the week, we'll be at CommunityOne West and JavaOne, mostly working on the Identity booth in the Pavilion.
See you there !

Technorati Tags: conference, javaone, ldap, opends, opensource, communityone

Some time ago, I enabled the ClustrMaps on my blog to get some idea of who was reading this space and where from.
And I must say I'm completely amazed by the global reach out of what I post here.
Below is a picture indicating the location of the readers from March 19 to May 20, 2009.

While I'm not surprise that most readers are from US and Europe, I find it interesting that the blog has been read from 94 different countries, some of which I cannot even place on the map.
The power of the Internet keeps amazing me everyday. Now it would be really cool if you, reader from one of those little isolated red dot, could leave a comment and tell me what you're interested in, and how you use OpenDS if you do.

Note that I do understand French, English and Spanish, so this leaves you some choice for leaving your comment. So don't be shy !

Technorati Tags: blog, java, ldap, opends, opensource

I meant to post this earlier... but thanks to our new friends, I have a new OpenDS cap.
For the time being, this one requires no extra work nor shift of duty ;-)
I could have worn Felix's cap as well, but I think it suits him better. And anyway, LDAP and OpenDS are good friends...

Technorati Tags: eic, ldap, opends

Technorati Tags: conference, java, javaone, javaone2009, Sun

On Tuesday March 17th, members of the OpenDS project will be participating to the OpenSSO Community Day, an unconference event for the developers, deployers and users of the OpenSSO project. As mentioned on the event wiki, we plan on leading a discussion on using LDAP and OpenDS as the Identity repository. Look at the list of suggested topics and add your own if you have some in mind.

The OpenSSO Community Day is free and only requires you to sign-up. There are only a few seats left, so you'd better hurry. Sign-up here.

Click here to check out
The OpenSSO Community Group!

Then on Wednesday March 18th, I will be at CommunityOne East, a free and open developer conference. If you plan to be there and want to talk about OpenDS or LDAP, drop me a note and we'll figure out a way to meet there. I will definitely be in the "OpenSSO: Enterprise Security" session, from 11:10am to 12:00pm.

And again if you have not registered for CommunityOne East yet, do it now. The main conference is free, space is limited. Register today. http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/2009/east/

Technorati Tags: communityone2008, conference, ldap, opends, opensso

On behalf of the OpenDS project development team, I wish you a Merry Christmas, and a wonderful, relaxing time with your family and friends.

Today, Sun announced the immediate availability of GlassFishTM Application Server v3 Prelude and its commercially supported counterpart, Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Prelude.

The list of benefits and features of GlassFish v3 Prelude is long and impressive.
One thing I did not see on the list but is present and working very well is LDAP support.

In the OpenDS project we document "How to secure web applications deployed in GlassFish with OpenDS". The example is written for GlassFish v2 but continues to work with GlassFish v3 Prelude.

You can also run OpenDS LDAP directory server, embedded in a Web Application deployed in GlassFish
Or deploy OpenDS DSML Gateway in GlassFish 

Learn more about GlassFish v3 Prelude in these three videos: Introducing GlassFish v3 Prelude, What's New in GlassFish v3 Prelude?, and Java EE 6 and GlassFish. Or on The Aquarium UStream.TV channel.

Edit on Nov 7th.

I forgot to mention that there will be a chapter dedicated to OpenDS on the coming book : GlassFish in Action (and it looks like the chapter is already available in the Manning Early Access Program). 

Technorati Tags: glassfish, java, ldap, opends, opensource, v3

Sun announced Code For Freedom 2008, an open source code contest opened to any student of an accredited Indian Educational institution.

With this contest Sun intend to involve the large student community to join the open source movement by contributing to the various open source initiatives that Sun espouses.

The various Sun Technologies one can work on are: GlassFish, GridEngine, JavaDB, java.net, Mobile & Embedded, MySQL, NetBeans, OpenDS, Open ESB, OpenJDK, OpenCDS, Open HA, Cluster, OpenOffice.org, OpenSPARC, OpenSSO, OpenSolaris, PostgreSQL, VirtualBox.

The complete details are here.

Have fun !

Technorati Tags: developer, glassfish, java, opends, opensource, opensso, codeforfreedom

I've just installed the newly released Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0 on my MacBook Pro.

Here some of the new features :

• 64 bits guest support (64 bits host only)
• New native Leopard user interface on MacOS X hosts
• The GUI was converted from Qt3 to Qt4 with many visual improvements
• New-version notifier
• Guest property information interface
• Host Interface Networking on Mac OS X hosts
• Host Interface Networking on Solaris 10 hosts
• Support for Nested Paging on modern AMD-V CPUs (major performance gain)
• Framework for collecting performance and resource usage data (metrics)
• Clipboard integration for OS/2 Guests
• Support for VHD images
• Created separate SDK component featuring a new Python programming interface on Linux and Solaris hosts

You can download VirtualBox 2.0 for free now !

Here's a screen shot of my desktop running OpenSolaris 2008.05 as the guest OS in Seamless mode.

Technorati Tags: MacOSX, opensolaris, opensource, Sun, virtualbox, virtualization

Thanks to my friends Alexis and Henry, here's another view of this blog as visualized by Wordle (powered by Java).

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