Friday May 20, 2005

Work From home tips

Scott Jolly has started providing work from home tips in his blog. Today was the first one. He makes some great points about being available. I've found that many of the people who work from home are easier to get a hold of than those who are in the office. (2005-05-20 11:07:25.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Sunday April 24, 2005

How we decide what to talk about

Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk also linked to this but it is an excellent essay about the impact of PR by Paul Graham.

It is worth reading the whole thing but I thought it was especially enlightening what he said about blogs. So much of what we read in the press and in magazines is as a result of PR. What is different about blogs is that content is what the blogger wants to write about. Although that is even influenced by PR. PR frequently creates the buzz. I guess one way to look at PR is that it instigates the conversation.

Sunday April 17, 2005

How to get iWork Support

In Phillip Wagstrom's recent blog entry he talked about helping a co-worker who had a problem with her work from home technology. One of the big challenges the iWork Soultions group faces is how to provide top quality support for people's work from home technical environments. I think the problem that Phillip fixed would have been a difficult one to fix over the phone. One solution is the Sun Ray at home. It pretty much eliminates the problem because people don't need to manage their own systems. But for people who need a fat client or in other words a laptop or PC that needs administration the solution often is to find a friend who will help. Cookies or beer definitely help.

Monday April 04, 2005

Moot or mute point?

I just received an email in which the sender said that if we agreed to support either version then her argument about why we had to use a particular version was a mute point. I always thought that the phrase was moot point. So I looked it up and found an interesting description of how the phrase has evolved here.

Friday April 01, 2005

A Great Sun Partner Blog

If you want to read a really great Sun partner blog I highly recommend Jaime Cardoso's weblog. Jaime works for the biggest Sun reseller in Portugal. I was going to comment on his great response to my posting on working from home. But Jaime is getting married soon and I just read the posting he did on weddings, women and colors. You have to read it!! and especially read the comments. I love what his brilliant fiancee Luz said comparing getting married to what it is like to move from Windows to SunRay and JDS.

When I read the comments to Jaime's post about iWork it moves Portugal to the top of my list of places I want to visit.

Monday March 28, 2005

Solaris 10 and JDS 3 on my SunRay

Last week another colleague and I presented to one of the groups of SAs who will be converting our infrastructure to Solaris 10 / Java Dektop 3.0 over the next quarter. They already have some machines up and running so I got the instructions on how to try running Solaris 10 / JDS 3 on my Sun Ray. I did a UTswitch and was up and running on Solaris 10. IT is still working on the final details of the deployment and the look and feel but it was exciting to actually be running the real JDS. Gnome 2.6 does look much more together than Gnome 2 which is what we were using for JDS Preview. I think the biggest complaint is going to be that people will have to redo any customization of the desktop that they did with JDS Preview. By having separate configuration files for the two different versions of JDS there won't be any chance of corruption if you go back and forth between the two.

The plans for this week include presentations to two more SA staff meetings, continuing to execute on our stakeholder engagement plan, a change acceptance review on Wednesday and lots more.

Tuesday March 15, 2005

Ajax is good for Sun

In Monday's Wall Street Journal Lee Gomes had an column about AJAX. AJAX is the name for an overall approach for developing fast and powerful web based programs. Tim Bray also referred to Ajax in his perspective on Sun written on his first anniversary at Sun. I have to say that Mr. Gomes did an amazing job of explaining something complicated and making it simple. I am always in awe of people who make writing look easy. It is just too bad it costs significant dollars to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal online to read the article.

I disagree with Mr. Gomes on his analysis of how Ajax impacts Sun. Towards the end of the article he says "Who loses? For one, Sun Microsystems, which has for years talked up its Java programming language for precisely these sorts of jobs. Instead of Java Ajax-style programming uses JavaScript – no relation – which is easier to work with and built free into every browser."

Sun builds and sells computers, especially servers. As Tim says in his essay Sun does it very well. The more that what people want from their computers moves off people's desktops and on to the internet, the better off Sun is. To serve up content and programs from the internet requires servers. It requires lots of fast, powerful servers. That is exactly what Sun builds and sells. The more this web centric model becomes reality and the more people come to the conclusion that they don't need to own or administer a computer to do everything they need to do, the better the Sun Ray stateless client will sell and the better Sun will do.

When I started reading Gomes' article I thought to myself how great AJAX is for Sun and I still think so.

Thursday March 10, 2005

Desktop access while travelling

Recently I got a question from a Sun user about whether we were going to make it faster to access your Sun Ray desktop when you are traveling. The following response from a colleague in Sun IT may have limited interest for non Sun readers. By the way I am sharing this with his permission.

Remote access to your desktop is one that we've put a lot of time and energy into. Yes, startup times and usability when traveling can be an issue, as we rely upon remote NFS mounting. Right now, today, you can access the Lightweight Roaming Desktop by choosing it before you log into a remote system. Select "Options-Sessions-Lightweight Roaming Desktop" This will bring up a desktop with email and browser capabilities which is very fast, but does not have direct access to your home directory and its preference files.

In the near future (Q1fy06) you will be able to hotdesk to your existing Sun Ray session when traveling to most parts of the world. Your single, authoritative Sun Ray session stays at your home location, but you can access if from any Sun Ray at Sun. The performance needs to still be fully tested out, but it seems to work even all the way around the world over reasonably small links. There is no startup/load time, since your desktop is already there. This feature is variously called Regional Hotdesking, Global Session Mobility, or Automatic Multigroup Hotdesking.

Soon, we will be moving your preference files onto the network by leveraging new features in JDS called APOC. This allows you to startup "your desktop" without even your home directory, and will even enable synchronization between your laptop and Sun Ray. It will also help, tremendously, with remote desktop startup, if that is still a need once hotdesking everywhere gets implemented.

Friday February 25, 2005

Moving Sun to Solaris 10

We have started a very aggressive plan to roll out Solaris 10 across the approximately 1600 servers we have world wide. Obviously it is to Sun's advantage to demonstrate how quickly and painlessly we can do this. A key part of our strategy is to put in place a very strong change acceptance program (CAP).

In our CAP team meeting this afternoon we talked about our vision for the transition. It includes some of the following components.
Our roll out strategy is intentionally aggressive.
Executive communications to the Sun user base will emphasize the need to be aggressive in our roll out plans. Focused leadership will dramatically help our CAP efforts.
All applications will not have been tested before the Solaris 10 /JDS roll out. We will have excellent options and support in place to make sure all users can run the applications they need to.
We will have a clear and well understood mechanism in place for people to report problems and get answers.
Support will be outstanding. Our support organization will have extensive training.
The SA community will be well informed and active supporters of the success of Solaris 10.
We will use aggressive methods to get answers to people.
User will recognize the move to Solaris 10 is part of a continuum which started with the move to JDS preview.
We will be supporting Sun's success by demonstrating what a great O/S Solaris is.

We have a lot to do to make our vision a reality but having a clear shared future state (vision) is the first step.

Thursday February 24, 2005

SunRay Power savings

Michael Jordan did an interesting posting today. He pointed out that utility cost make up for about 10% of a corporate real estate budget, about as much as property tax. It reminded me of something that some people may not raealize. SunRays save an enormous amount in utility costs. Instead of running a computer in my office all I have is basically a monitor. It makes no noise, it doesn't heat up the office and it uses a very small amount of electricity. Sun has more than 27,000 SunRays deployed which results in over $24 million saved annually. Of that $2.8M is electric power costs.

Do you have to be a techie to blog?

I just ran into a co-worker who is planning to start a blog. We were talking about how daunting it can be. There are all sorts of things that aren't intuitively obvious. I know when I started I basically just played around until I figured stuff out. That is what he has been doing too.

I'm sure that when non bloggers read a blog like mine they wonder what the heck a permalink is.The answer is: If you copy the permalink you will get the permanent URL for this posting. You can use it to insert a link to my posting in your blog. If you just used my blog URL you would always get the most recent posting not the specific one you want to point to.

And how do you format your entries? You need to know a tiny bit of HTML which is really easy but how do you figure it out? I found this posting from Geoff Arnold that was really helpful. I also have an email I'll send to anyone who wants it. It lists the tags you need for paragraphs, bold, italics and linking. I'd put them here but then I'd have to figure out how to make the blogging software show them and not interpret them. I know it can be done I just don't have time today to figure it out.

If I tell someone a web address or my email address today most people know what I'm telling them. But not too long ago if I gave someone a web address or my email address they didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I wonder if blogging will eventually get to the point where talking about your RSS feed or your aggregator (like Bloglines) will mean something to more than 1% of the population.

Monday February 14, 2005

SunRay under Hyped

I love what Rob Wright says in this blog posting about SunRay. I never thought about comparing what it costs to lease a PC to what it might cost for a service offering SunRays with broadband. But Rob is right it would be a great deal. He also talks about how much tech support a PC requires. I flew down to San Diego last month to reload Windows on my parents PC because the viruses had made it unusable. SunRays make this a non issue. Read what Rob says! I do believe that someone will offer this service.

Here's something else to think about when it comes to SunRay. I was in a meeting this morning and people were talking about a government customer they had been talking to. The social workers in this agency deal with a lot of very confidential information. They were very excited about the idea of having all that data secure on the agency's computer but available to employees wherever they are. The social workers could just use their Java cards in a drop in location or even carry a wireless SunRay. No more hard disks full of confidential information floating around. It makes a lot of sense to me. This Bill Vass presentation about Mobility with Security says it all much better than I do.

Friday January 14, 2005

SunRay and JDS

My parents computer has some kind of a virus or spyware that won't allow them to access the internet. I'm planning to go down to visit them in San Diego this weekend to fix the problem and of course to visit with them. While I am there I think I'll move them to Firefox and Thunderbird for browsing and email.

I really wish some company would offer a service that would allow people to use SunRay with JDS so that that they didn't have to worry about these kinds of problems.