If I am elected to the OGB, I will bring communication and program management skills to the Board. 'Program' is bigger than a release, so I will drive projects that have impact beyond the scope of a singular release on behalf of OpenSolaris (the community).

I will advocate on behalf of the community to Solaris management and stand in their offices to enable conversations we must have, and indeed, to inspire new conversations we should have as a governing board. I will bring standing conversations I have inside Sun to the OSOL lists in a manner that enables the community to be successful.

I will advocate on behalf of Sun to facilitate constructive electronic conversations, meetings, and projects that serve Sun's business goals to the delight of the non-Sun OSOL community. These projects, like others I have completed (see below), will highlight and reward the hard work and innovations of our community and simultaneously meet business goals for Sun.

Summary of my work on OpenSolaris this year
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

• Attended first OSDevCon and first OpenSolaris Developer's Summit and blogged my notes of each. I've also represented OpenSolaris at LinuxWorld San Francisco, JavaOne, FOSDEM, SIGCSE, SIGDOC and regularly attend SVOSUG.

• Delivered source for 4,300 SunOS man pages under OSI-approved CDDL to the opensolaris man page consolidation with bi-weekly builds of changed files.

• Delivered source for 36 technical manuals under Public Documentation License v1.01 to the opensolaris docs consolidation with monthly updates of changed books.

• Delivered 7 versions of the OpenSolaris Starter Kit. The OpenSolaris Starter Kit includes Nexenta, Schillix, Belenix, Solaris Express Community Edition and documentation in nine languages for each distro. We have shipped nearly 100K copies of the kit to 106 countries in nine languages (de, cn, pl, it, ja, es, ptbr, ru).

• Delivered two complete updates to the OpenSolaris Student Guide, distributing 40K copies in pocket-book size in nine languages. Contributors to the book are named on page 12. This guide was used to create a High School course for OpenSolaris in Brazil and serves as a starting point for university operating system curriculum with OpenSolaris in all the examples.

• Initiated creation of the first and only source repository hosted on the Indiana Project to date, ssh://anon-AT-hg.opensolaris-DOT-org/hg/indiana/docs1
  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'd be honored to serve on the OGB in 2008!

I recently attended the ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication conference in El Paso, Texas. There were about 40 attendees from academia and corporate worlds both.

I attended only the first day of proceedings and the Bofs following. I led a Birds of a Feather (Bof) session about open source documentation for a small group that was very informal. It was great to talk with folks who are so keenly interested in pubs and who have so much experience and passion about information design and architecture. I discussed with one professor of Rhetoric and Writing studies at UTEP the online component of his courses and how it is used by students today and how they might interact in an open source project. He is most interested in giving students a way to customize their experience of the web site. If you watch the website-discuss alias on OSOL, you'll see the same sentiment. Folks want to change look-and-feel first.

I think the Academic and Research Community on OpenSolaris.org would be a great playground for writing students who need real software to document. I know that I was most interested in the real-world projects I was given to document as a technical communications student. However, open source in academia is still quite new and because I am from Sun, the professors generally thought of my comments about developers as being comments about customers and therefore not applicable to their situation. So, I learned a great deal by discussing opportunities with them that will hopefully result in a published article on the subject. Following are my notes on the talks.

Agency, Invention, and Sympatric Design Platforms, Brian J McNealy

WebCT is the online course tool used at UTEP and other Universities. Wikis are also in use for some components, but WebCT is the secure platform that enables electronic assessment. Brian talked about agentive potential being stifled by existing online tools and then tied this back to biology theory of speciation. He posited that online tools that foster invention and agency mimic speciation theory. He submitted WebCT as the alopatric component and compared writing for interfaces and databases with sympatric components in that they involve not just the individual and include multiple layers of writing. In general, he pointed out that meaning-making is visual and limiting the ability to alter or customize visual elements likewise limits innovation and agency.

Preference Based Queries for Course Sequencing, Penklis Georgiandis, Greece, University of Crete

The motivation for the system described in this talk was driven by personalized curriculum. The Skill and courses described included an atomic skill and the schedule of courses. The preferences gave priority with regard to descriptions and included a theme or thematic area of study. The sequencing was ordering according to pre-requisites, alternative course for atomic skills and extensions. This talk was very interesting because it described all of the math behind the preferences used in the course sequence queries with charts describing the priority choices as you walk through the scheduler.

The Decision Pattern: Capturing and Communicating Design Intent, David Wright, North Carolina State University

The problem solved by this paper and resulting course is one of determining how design decisions are made. The constraints are to minimize overhead of capturing the following elements of design decisions:

• context
  
• root cause of problem
  
• constraints on solution
  
• how problem is solved
  

Pattern: decision, intent, context, forces, resolution, predecessors

This talk was interesting because the speaker described the impact of the course and the feedback from his students. In general, computer science students either dropped the course because there were no coding assignments, or they really liked the class because it opened new doors to their own design patterns and helped them to gain much greater understanding of how and when in the development process design decisions are made and the factors at play. It also gave students a low-overhead mechanism for questioning and deconstructing their designs that many put into regular practice during the semester.

Chromatic Prototypes for Information Systems, M. McCool

This presentaiton began with a review of Newton's Optiks, 1704 and discovery of primary colors or 'colors unto themselves'. The presenter then referred to the work of Berlin & Kay and Mussell color chips, an array with cultural implications of color. the Mussel color chips resulted in a chromatic sequence that follows black/white: red, green/yellow, blue, then grey/orange/indigo/pink. Neuroscientific visual system for humans color spectrum matches closely the chromatic sequence. So, the paper asks if it is possible to use the chromatic sequence to code hierarchy of information to apply themes, improve retention, search, and navigation.

Information Salience and Interpreting Information, Mike Alberto, East Carolina University

Current problems include search, information overload, finding the chunk you need and making it linear. Information salience and problems that diminish described in the talk, as follows:

• Information occupies too much of the display
  
• Information is hard to integrate
  
• Remembering subtle cause and effect of information relationships
  
• Difficulty of unseen information
  

Designing for salience takes into account the following:

• Difference between designer and reader
  
• Not one-size-fits-all
  
• Timing of presentation (too early vs. too late)
  
• Signal to noise ratio of information
  

The effects of presentation:

• Cues get attention
  
• Privileged in order viewed
  
• Users think they use more information than they do
  
• Readers look for confirmation of assumptions
  
• Invisible or unseen is ignored
  

Redundant information can increase salience, but can also overemphasize problems or cautions.

Summary

Overall, a really interesting set of talks and I wish I'd stayed for the following day of presentations. Partly because the content was so excellent, but also because being on campus was really fun and I would have enjoyed a quick trip to Juarez while I was so close. But, I jumped on a plane next morning, extremely tired after four conferences in same number of weeks, very happy to be heading back home.

Santa Clara California, USA
October 15-16, 2007
~150 Attendees

I attended the SMI Open Source Summit in Santa Clara last month, following are my notes.

I was a speaker at the event, so I got to sit up front at the speaker tables, but it was like a Lutheran congregation, with everyone filling up the back pews, and only a few folks daring enough to sit front and center. I saw Flip up there though, so I joined him. Flip and Emily and the rest of Simon's Open Source Group did a great job scheduling the event, keeping presentations timely, and explaining the activities. Kudos to the team for pulling it all off in such short time. Everyone's a critic, of course, so here are my wish list items for next time: more advance notice, fewer executive presentations, and more women on the panels.

Keynote

Simon Phipps kicked off the event by introducing Johnathan Schwartz. Johnathan got some familiar and tough internal questions right off the top, that he answered in a familiar and tough manner. I wrote down that, as CEO, Johnathan's main responsibilities are threefold:

• pick good people
  
• allocate budgets to them
  
• tell people his vision
  

Plus that blogging thing he does in his spare time. Note to self, this gets one out of answering a lot of specific questions swiftly. I think that, for this audience, more answers would have been better. Johnathan does know leadership and to him, leadership = courage. The courage to innovate, question, collaborate, develop leaders, and act first.

10 Ways to Kill Your Community: Josh Berkus

Josh's talk was the best presentation of the event, in my opinion. His presentation style is expert and the content was referred throughout the following two days of talks because it was so damn good. Here are the nine ways that I wrote down:

• Be Silent
  
• Document Nothing
  
• Stop outside commits
  
• Obfuscate Governance
  
• Hold closed meetings
  
• Legalese
  
• Encourage Poisonous People
  
• Make Tools Difficult
  
• Change Licenses
  

I guess I was laughing too hard to note down that tenth way to kill your community. In many ways we've all done all of these things and it was nice to have a good laugh about it and be reminded how deadly these are for communities trying to build software together.

Josh was followed by two expert panels on joining, forming, and working in communities. For good reason, we work in teams and organizations inside Sun and there is strict hierarchy everywhere, so community work is very different and very new and the experts did a good job of describing how to walk the lines of the corporate life of assignments and community life of contributions. We must always do both corporate and community and finding a balance while getting both into agreement is the core competency of the group who attended this summit. I was proud to be one of them.

Lightening Talks

I proposed a lightening talk on OpenSolaris documentation that was accepted, so I presented one slide entitled Credibility and Communication. I introduced my talk with the most important function of documentation: providing new information types.

If you do nothing else, develop new information types to address the biggest software problems you face. In OpenSolaris, the first big problem is learning, so we created a mini-curriculum. It is a small 5X7 hard-copy guide to OpenSolaris communities, user groups, core features, userland, processes, scheduling and debugging, with ~20 labs on ZFS, Zones, Networking, and DTrace in seven languages. It also has a companion instructor guide for professors. The second big problem was installation. So, we created a starter kit to provide LiveCDs, training, documentation, videos, step-by-step instructions, and resources for installing OpenSolaris and we translated it into seven languages. These two new information types (mini-book & starter kit) touched 100,000 Solaris newbies this year in a fresh, informal manner that we hope will bring them back to our technology and build out our community.

The rest of my five-minute lightening talk was bread & butter:

• Change acceptance process (CAP) - Internal writers need processes, exercises, meetings, and web pages to help them learn how to work in the open, how to transition to using new tools and foremost, how to understand licensing of their content and how their job changes.
  
• Outreach - You must reach out to other groups and projects to offer them documentation services, advise, support, and to answer questions and comments on mailing lists. This includes attending user groups and conferences and introducing yourself to developers, sysadmins, and enthusiasts in order to understand their use cases, problems, and needs.
  
• Contribution - You must contribute your documentation source files to the commons so that developers can use your stuff and make cool new stuff with it, translate it, re-spin it, and redistribute it to anyone anywhere who wants to know about your technology.
  
• Recognition - You must recognize and praise and cheerlead contributors and their contributions and welcome them and their valuable skills to your projects.

  Press Panel

  
  Simon followed with a panel of the press, Tony Wasserman of Carnegie Mellon, Ashley Vance of The Register, Fabian of OpenJDK governing board and Brazilian Java Enthusiast, and Dalibor Topich of OpenJDK governing board.

  What is going well: Relationships, developer conferences, open processes and descriptions of processes.

  What do we need to fix: Make processes more transparent and figure out decision-making.

  What do we need to overcome: Sun and other HW company histories

  How are we doing with users: Don't oversell and improve services

  In general, the press panel was very positive on our open source efforts, finding very little fault with the efforts behind OpenSolaris and OpenJDK and declaring that we've completely turned around perceptions of Sun software in two years time.

  Ian Murdock

  
  Ian followed with a short talk about OpenSolaris, and he specifically talked about the support model for OpenSolaris. Some in the room questioned how this support model will be in place by March, and he assured that it would be ready. Ian also talked about articulating the relationship between OpenSolaris and Solaris. DAY 1 closed with a fish bowl exercise, which is a free form discussion between anyone in the designated chairs (fish bowl).

Santa Cruz, CA USA
October 13-14th, 2007
~90 Attendees

I attended the OpenSolaris Developer's Summit in Santa Cruz last month. It was a great chance to catch up with folks I met last Feb. in Berlin, meet new members of the project, and take time to be with local friends and co-workers. Ian Murdock gave the keynote, followed by presentations from Stephen Hahn, Ph.D., Dave Miner, and David Comay on the first day. Here are my notes and impressions.

Keynote

Ian opened with his intention to host an informal face-to-face meeting in preparation for Milestone1 of project Indiana. He introduced himself in the context of his work on the Linux Standards Base. He then discussed the problems we face, what we should emphasize and how to attract mind-share.

Problems:
-Packaging and presentation; how to lower barriers to immediate productivity

-Distribution model; regular schedule

Emphasis:
Unique OSOL features: ZFS, Zones, DTrace, etc.

Mindshare:
Attract users with OSOL uniqueness

He then opened the room for introductions and we all stated our purpose for being there. It was really great to hear from everyone right at the start, kudos to Ian for keeping it short and allowing all of us to know a bit about the group. Take a look at here for the complete list of participants and their affiliations. Pretty impressive list, I was thrilled to see that five individuals who attended the conference affiliate with the Documentation community.

Image Packaging System

Stephen Hahn followed Ian with a presentation of pkg(5) slides that describe the new packaging technology he's been working on. Check his blog above for slides. I was really impressed by the talk, I haven't seen Stephen speak publicly, and it was a pleasure to hear his oral presentation of the technology, the problems it solves, those it does not, and all the thought and consideration that go into this type of new system and implications for the existing system. Refer to pkg.opensolaris.org and the documentation.
A snapshot of useful commands:

pkg freeze
pkg refresh
pkg status
pkg install


Installation and Upgrade

Dave Miner then described Slim install, Snap upgrade, Distribution Constructor and Caimen projects. He demonstrated the LiveCD and it booted in under a minute. Just like that. Dave is really a friendly person face-to-face, with a great sense of humor and a gentle manner that you might not expect from his online presence as a technical expert.

Note: A message came across the opensolaris-help discussion list today from a Windows user with the subject line: I have installed Solaris: Now what? Kudos to Dave and his team for making this situation possible. The same operating system that is used on supercomputers and Project BlackBox is now installable by mere mortals who've never even used Linux. Two years ago this reality was a pipe dream, that a windows user would be stuck trying to figure out what to do with our commercial-grade OS at the ready from their laptop! What will the next two years bring?

Decision-Making

We broke out for sack lunches in the courtyard. Santa Cruz campus is really beautiful, moist from the ocean, sitting atop a hill that overlooks the Pacific and nestled in among Redwoods. Deer and wildlife were mingling all around us each morning as we arrived and bedding down as we returned to our hotels.

Ian sat next to me, confirming recent reports that I am 'approachable'. He began a discussion of decision-making practices in OpenSolaris, and specifically wanted to know how decisions are made for commercial Solaris inside Sun. The answer is a combination of black magic, funding models, business owners, committee approvals, and technical feasibility. Do we model this process in OpenSolaris? Answer: not yet. The crux of this discussion was the need for partners to have a voice in decision-making for OpenSolaris if they are to participate in the community and code-base development.

From a bottom-up perspective, I perform decision-making on behalf on the Documentation community, largely by polling members for opinions, taking those data points back to technical experts, rounding it with management strategies, then proposing solutions back to the community. When I hit a roadblock, I adjust and communicate it all again until it hits the roadmap. Then, I schedule the work and bang through issues until we make the delivery of best possible solution. Solution becomes obsolete, wash, rinse, repeat. This is how to survive and thrive in software, you just stick in there, knowing that the new solution is better than the last, and understanding that tomorrow, you'll need to begin work on something better.

Modernization

David Comay presented his work on modernization, describing what is supported vs. unsupported, interface stability, and matching processes to user expectations. Discussion was very lively and my notes are limited. We talked about moving commands, SFW and usr/bin. David described evaluating replacement of commands and how to engage with the community in all cases. He presented the case for compatibility and took us through the strictness required to preserve it and where we need to make informed choices and do refactoring. See Familiarization for a more complete perspective on all the topics and issues that are at play in this area.

Evening Events

We broke for steak dinner and drinks after this final session. The atmosphere was lovely, candles lit, fancy appetizers, free beers and wine, the works. I have to hand it to the Indiana team here. In my six years at Sun, this was far and away the most expensive event I've ever had the privilege of attending. I felt truly appreciated and it was a bit of heaven. We all mingled and took photos, laughed and talked about what we could contribute to Indiana. We discussed naming in advance of the talk we knew would happen the following day. We broke bread together under the stars and it was just a real delight. We headed for the hotel for brief stop, then about ten of us went out in downtown Santa Cruz for drinks and more mingling until it got late, and we all found our way back to the Coast to rest our brains.

DAY 2

Sunday morning began with a discussion of naming and branding. Boy howdy, I hate naming and branding, inside Sun, outside Sun, my own songs never even have titles. I once had a band and our entire set list was a numeric list, songs were named in the order in which we wrote them, because I so hate naming. So, I slept in on Sunday. So did Martin Bochnig, and I picked him up on his way up the arduous hill climb to the University. Not because I thought he would leave the community this week, of course. Martin, if you read this, you can always come back. We understand you. I do, at least. I've been broke and dreaming of a job at Sun too, I get it. Let's meet up in Poland next year, OK? Goddamn, my approachability...

Naming & Branding

Anyways, I came in late to the naming/branding presentation and the tension was palpable. So thick it could be cut with a knife, and me with barely a cup of coffee in my belly. Difficult to stomach it was in person as it was on list Oct 31st. We continue to stink at naming and terminology. Let's just admit it. OpenSolaris was poor choice from the start, because it infringes on existing Sun trademark. But, it stuck, of course. Now, we have multitude of meanings for OpenSolaris, none of them technically = binary except in the minds of every new person who wants OpenSolaris. I don't envy the position of Ian and Sarah in this mess. But, of course, I see a way out of it--so easy when it's not my job nor my core competency, more like my core deficiency! Here is my opinion anyways.

First, we let go the dream of 'one' binary. We have five to eight Solaris binaries today, so a goal of ONE is lofty at best. Let's go for two or three, then iterate until we get to one. This will require discussions, roadmaps, meetings, and voting, BTW. This needs an owner who will not give up for the next two years in their quest. And who will at every turn, be there to bring up the cause of proper naming and branding in all public and private discussions. I mean a nag that never ends until we reach agreement that serves the user. Notice the font. Ian and Sarah are dead right that we need one thing, to get rid of confusion for users.

We just need to phase it in. Right now, Solaris Express is the reference distribution. Deal with that first. Handle Community Edition next. Then, grapple with Developer Edition. SXDE was the original Indiana, came down from on-high and incorporated the first contributions into a Sun binary at behest of executives. What is that quote about history repeating? Now, what about Nevada? There's a train we need to understand most and has again different cadence from all the rest.

• nevada=bi-weekly code
  
• SXCE=monthly binary
  
• SXDE=quarterly binary
  
• S10Updates=quarterly binary
  
• Indiana=bi-quarterly binary
  

Above is the scary truth, folks. The same engineers, writers, testers are delivering into all of these releases simultaneously all year long. What this feels like is getting run over by a different train every two weeks. After five years of this, you really don't care what the train is called, you just know it is coming and avoid the tracks. Seriously. No one gets that all these releases are different, but same individuals are making them happen all the time. I can't say this enough. Deal with this problem and the naming/branding issue solves itself. Naming is a red herring to the problem of too many release trains.

Documentation

After the naming discussion, I broke out for my unconference talk on Documentation. We had eight folks in the room to discuss the topic, so I was pleased with 10% interest. Here is the list of potential Documentation community contributions to Indiana that I presented for the group:

• Consolidations: Docs Man Pages
  
• PDFs
  
• Indiana docs
  
• HowTos
  
• FAQ
  
• Glossary
  
• Specs
  
• Articles
  
• Printable manuals
  
• SMF doc
  
• Starter Kit
  
• Curriculum

  I presented each of the areas above and we discussed them as a group. We talked a lot about man pages, these are truly critical to the success of OpenSolaris and we need to engage with the Emancipation project on some of the issues raised. We talked about the Desktop experience and desktop documentation that users need beyond that which is provided by GNOME today. We discussed repositories and usage for documentation. We discussed BigAdmin resources and MediaWiki to DocBook XML. I passed around the curriculum mini-guide and the latest Starter Kit. It was exciting to talk with folks in person, hear from them and feed off of their excitement. Irene, from Beijing, responded to me right away with question about the desktop doc requirements, so I'm working on a plan to help her help us create a great user experience.

  Website Redesign

  
  Finally, I attended the Website Redesign discussion led by Derek Cicero. This was pretty interesting, considering where we are today with the website. This is where the seeds of the change that happened on the front page on Oct. 31st began. This is where it was publicly discussed, in a single meeting at the Developer's conference on October 14th, attended by about ten members of the community. Within 10 working days a change was mandated, so Derek designed it and put it up there, and pulled it down again when the community reacted unfavorably. Pulling the new front page was a good-faith effort by Sun and the OGB and others are still discussing/determining next steps for defining the reference distribution. What I do know is that new graphics and designs are likely to be underway or contracted in coming weeks. We need to get on this as a community right away, like yesterday, if we are to have our say. Let's not wait until March to have this happen all over again. Let's talk about it on website-discuss, propose our ideas and iterate before it is too late and Sun feels the need to act independently again. We must be faster than ourselves! my ideas:

  Co-opt the branding of solarisinternals.com, using the car as our motif/icon. We can have Jack, but listen-up, we must also have Jill, Jack's quick-witted countepart, testing his faulty code/configurations and writing everything down. Just my opinion. In the 'auto' motif, we have the two cars: Nevada and Indiana respectively and if you want the truck (BlackBox) you go to Sun for that. One car is blue one is orange. If you need support, go to the various pits: sunsolve, docs.sun.com, sun.com/training. Just my ideas. I plant seeds.

  Summary

  
  Overall a great conference! I learned a lot, met new folks I will know for a long time, and just got inspired and energized around Indiana and the opensolaris community all over again. I look forward to the next conference, to incorporating more of our doc offerings into pkg(5) packages for download and updating the Starter Kit for the new world.

The founder of Lotus speaks at Berkeley in a three part series, following are my notes from the first part.

Mitch identifies most strongly with Long Island in the 1960's and the Pastrami sandwich. He enjoyed a white, middle-class education with special access to computers in his youth due to Sputnik1. Today, Mitch supports important programs like SMASH and Ideal Scholars, both summer programs at UCB for underrepresented youth.

After college, Mitch spent time in Boston, where DEC built mini-computers in the 1970's. Now DEC is totally gone, mini-computers having been completely replaced by PCs. How does this 'disruption' happen?

Disruption occurrs in print media, taking Computer LIB / Dream Machines as an example of how a document can be totally inspiring and dead wrong all at once, yet still herald a new era.

Disruption occurrs in hardware, the Altair 8800, first PC in 1975, Basic, and papertape. Then the AppleII in 1977. Mitch told classic story of how he crossed state lines to buy an AppleII because he only had enough money for it without the sales tax. (He was just working as a DJ and giving talks on transcendental meditation at this time during his 20s.)

Disruption occurrs in new communities, with the AppleII and the first Basic software product, a community begins to form out of programmers who hang out at the computer store (presumably between meditation sessions). AppleII user group is formed.

Then, disruption in software, Visicalc, the first spreadsheet, legitimizes the industry. Mitch worked on a product called TinyTroll that he sold to Visicalc and that money seeded the beginning of what we now know as Lotus.

Then, more hardware disruption, IBM's 16-bit machine. Mitch ported Lotus to this 16 bit machine and took it to COMDEX. Wrote $1 million in orders on the show floor. Did $50 million first year and 100 million the next. He was part of a bigger phenomenon, a new platform.

What else worked, besides hanging at the computer store, joining a user group, and porting good software to new platforms?

• Ads in the Wall Street Journal
  
• Help screen
  
• Usability
  
• Hired hands to demonstrate and sell product for dealers
  
• Building humanitarian company values around constant change
  

Q&A session:

What are the differentiating factors that lead to longevity of Lotus?
A: leadership, willingness to change, strong culture

Why didn't Rickland patent the spreadsheet?
A: IANAL, but patent was not a legal option in 1979 (further discussion with very techie guy who still has his Altair 8800 about the first true spreadsheet...)

What did you take for granted in your life that has helped you to be successful?
A: family stability, location stability enabling freedom of long-term planning

What makes a humanitarian company?
A: Respect, humor, and Managment bonuses that are tied to value-based behavior as seen in the eyes of their employees. Set up an anonymous communication channel with actions required. Disallow superiors from pushing others around. Mitch feels that the culture of Lotus had more lasting impact than the product.

What is the future of disruptive technologies?
Robots, virtual worlds, what is a game? and Skepticism. More in part II.
Note: I missed partII last evening, but will attend final partIII.

What can you say about proprietary versus open source?
Open source has unique value, but is a mistake to rely on that entirely, because you need the right incentives to get the right things done. The challenge is how they live together (os and prop.).

Sept. 29th, 2007 (where does the time go?)
------------------------------------------

The 2007 Fall event proceedings of the Sun Enigineering and Enrichment mentoring program were both well-attended and inspirational. I completed my six-month term in June and blogged about the SEED program here. The Fall event is the largest of the year and presents a great opportunity for any SEED alumni to attend, hear from new and old leaders, learn about global programs outside their own specialty, and get a sense of the questions on the minds of Sun's up-and-coming, uh, seeds.

This event began with a talk by Whitfield Diffie. Unfortunately, I missed his talk, and only caught the end of Q&A related to concerns about electronic voting and security in a contract/outsource model. Needless to say Whit has strong concerns about both areas and I can only hope to hear more on his thoughts at an upcoming wine tasting, where he is often found.

Jud Cooley presented following Whit, on the topic of Project Blackbox. The Blackbox tour has now been extended to South America and plans for Asia tour next year are underway. The box has an 8-12 week build cycle and regular production will begin with 2-3 boxes per month.

Jud talked about two major trends in the data center:

• Getting people out of the DC
  
• Over-provisioning so any failures are simply replaced globally at a set time later

Worldwide data centers produce 200M tons of CO2, Sun's contribution is 10K tons. Two blackboxes have been put into production so far. The first in Russia (Glycol installation) at MTS, the second in California at Stanford Linear Accelerator. Two more were expected in October time frame. Eleven have been built so far and 3 more are under construction.

The Q&A session about BlackBox included the following topics:

Q: What about Rackable and their recently announced competing Concentro product?
A: It is not released yet, currently is more of a one-off implementation which only supports Rackable hardware.

Q: Is there a try & buy option for Black Box?
A: (laughter)

Q: What about reliability?
A: There is no real data on reliability yet, but conceptually, reliability should be better because of increased control of the environment provided with BlackBox.

The SEED showcase followed with a presentation of Open Provisioning Toolkit (OpenPTK) by Fehrman and Sigle of SSO/Identity space. OpenPTK is for provisioning users, not software. This toolkit enables you to control and provision user interfaces with backend access, directory services, and identity credentials.

Seema then followed with a higer-level discussion of open source work. She defined the various aspects of a project that you need to be successful:

• Roadmap - voting and forums
  
• Project mgmt - timing of fixes and features
  
• Development - branches and main gate
  
• Evangelism - within and outside communities
  
• User community - trials and feedback
  
• Documentation - developer role
  
• Localization - developer role
  
• Marketing - formal events and branding
  

I was so impressed with Seema's ability to synthesize into one manageable list the most important aspects of an open source project.

Diann Olden (my new VP) began the afternoon talks with an overview of management basics that have served her well in her career path to VP of Global Product Development and Operations, currently under Rich Green. Two core values are:

-Aim High: this is your vision and mission
-Collaborate: this is teamwork and processes

To achieve 24X7 support for customers, for example, the most important processes are the hand-off processes. Efficiency and effectiveness of hand-off processes in 24X7 service world will save your bacon.

Cascading down from there, you might have committees, as follows:
-Weekly TCE: technical steering committee that ensures the strategic vision meets tactical actions
-Partners: technical managers and ppl managers, tech. mgrs. assess risk, timing & roadmap;
ppl managers are in charge of morale

Golden rule: hold yourself accountable for what you said you would do.

Always expect the following:
-The unexpected! When you get the unexpected, adjust and communicate again.
-To measure the business goals, in order: people, process, customer, quality.

Greg Papadopoulos, Ph.D., CTO, Executive Vice President of Research and Development wrapped up the day of talks. He started with open source and processes. Greg referred to Innovation Happens Elsewhere, and talked about how free software (like freedom) encourages others to work on your software, but most importantly, free software is cool and helps others to build cool stuff. Cool is the sticky part, not free.

Greg then talked about copyright and patent briefly, reminding that copyright is the right to copy, patent is the right to stop build. License is the community agreement. Greg was going to get into his 8 core values of innovation management, but took questions instead. All but a few questions were related to OpenSolaris. I'm on OSOL all day every day for two years, so I found this an interesting, but not earth-shattering discussion. At Sun, lots of questions is just lots of questions sometimes. There is a tension between S10 and Indiana, that much we know. Go to to get involved in the 200+ projects and forums underway.

DAY2-------------------------------------

Mike Splain, CTO office, started off our second day of SEED talks. He discussed the culture at Sun and defined it in simple terms: bottom-up creation; top-down synthesis. From a business strategy perspective, Mike views internet ubiquity as main driver of demand for Sun innovations. He cites the current portfolio, margins, awards, and Recommend Sun Index (RSI) as positive indicators. Negative is developer growth.

Technical alignment across enterprise and consumer functions is what we need to help adoption and to address deployer problems of today (not enough of everything: space, cooling, power). We are supposed to use CTO, PACs, and technical review committees to inspect the portfolio and then create a strategic plan. Most recently, that order has become reversed, such that we set a plan before we define the strategy and CTO office needs to fix it. What can the rest of us do to help?

• Align across Sun, reach out and make good choices about what you work on each day!
  
• Understand urgency
  
• Stay energized and aggressive
  
• Learn and tell the Sun story often
  
• Recruit
  
• Understand customers
  
• Speak up!
  

Above all else:

• Integrity and honesty
  
• Look in the mirror first
  
• Manage your own career
  
• Choose your boss and peers as carefully as you choose projects
  
• We are here to do reasonable things
  
• Get a life outside of Sun.
  

I attended the rest of the morning sessions, then had to return to regular duties that afternoon. The engineers from Beijing were wonderful to hear from, they talked about globalization, the user groups they've started in China, and University involvement there, very exciting and interesting presentation. The SEED program is just a great way to recharge worn batteries every six months by hearing from thought leaders and technical superstars at Sun, I will always make time in my schedule to participate in this awesome event.

I attended the 2007 CEC as a pavilion staffer in support of OpenSolaris documentation and my department, Information Products Group (IPG). CEC was attended by about 4,000 other folks between October 7-10.

It was my first time at this conference and I spent all of it talking with sales, professional services, engineers, and partners about documentation and Solaris. The Las Vegas location meant that it was very sunny and warm, but none of us actually went out into it. That is, most folks I met didn't leave the hotel for the first 48 hours. Vegas is just like that, so sunny on the inside, there is no reason to go out.

My first day was full of registration details, orientation, and preparing for the pavilion floor evening event. They provided buffet dinner in the pavilion Sunday night, so that night was the best attendance in the pavilion by far. The pavilion was setup for demonstration pods and was a gathering place between conference sessions to check out new technologies and offerings.

The IPG pod was staffed by myself, Dwayne Wolff, and Ken Harper. We had a multi-media kiosk with new videos, screencasts, and documentation hubs to showcase. This kiosk was also compressed to fit on USB, so we had lots of folks download it for later use. I had the OpenSolaris Starter Kit running on my laptop and a copy of the English OpenSolaris student guide.

The highlight of visitors to our pod was Radia Perlman, best known for the creation of the Spanning-Tree algorithm that is used in all network bridges and switches. She is just so inspirational and having never met her before I was very excited. She is very personable, kind, and easy-going. She talked with us for a long while, indulged my request for pictures, and told us funny stories about how she became a Sun Fellow. It was a delight!

Customers and partners I met who are using Solaris 10 08/07 were very excited to see someone from documentation. In my very short two years in this job and just a handful of conferences, I've never had folks so excited to meet me. Reason: DOCS DVD. For Solaris 10 08/07 there is available a DVD ISO for download that includes 400+ PDF documents covering stem-to-stern S10U4 and every other Sun software product you can run with S10U4. Customers are so thrilled with this Doc DVD, they lit up when I introduced myself as a pubs person and then went on to tell me how tickled and surprised they were to have that ISO available and how much we deserve more kudos in tech. pubs for all the awesome documentation we provide for Sun products. They were gushing unsolicited.

I talked with data center system administrators about the Solaris installer. Overall, the feedback was good, fdisk is still a sore spot, and some default ports are not recognized by one particular NIC on a newer box. The video of the new installer was a great way to facilitate this conversation, we had it running on the big monitor while we talked and at each new frame, the sysadmin would describe the particulars of his most recent DC experience.

I work on OSOL all day every day, so being surrounded by customer engineers who serve a huge percentage of Sun customers running Solaris 9 and earlier releases was a new perspective for me. It might have hurt my overall 'sense of urgency' somewhat because I realize the gigantic number of customers who still haven't touched even Solaris 10 yet. Heck, I ran S9 U5 untouched for better part of 5 years on my SPARC box and was clam-happy, so I understand why folks don't move to new environments rapidly. But, this is where hardware really comes into play and why Sun is unique company to have strong portfolios on both sides. New hardware platforms disrupt, and software that aims to disrupt must keep up with those new platforms. More on that topic in a coming entry...

In general, at these conferences, I ask one opening question that leads down many roads: Do you run Solaris? Sometimes this leads to the starter kit, sometimes to a discussion of SPARC/x86, sometimes a long-winded explanation of an installation attempt that failed or an application that only runs on another browser. We talk about porting, Caimen, LiveCDs and eventually office product suites. At CEC, I heard more complaints about calendaring and diagrams than ever before. These are the pain points for engineers who support our blue-shift customers: calendar tools must be equivalent to outlook and graphics tools must import to-from Visio and be readable in Visio. I asked about the Thunderbird calendar plug-in and was told it is too hard to setup. I asked about StarOffice and was told they need to provide Visio format. These are the same guys who don't particularly like OpenSolaris because they can't find a way to sell into it, but I still think the pain points are probably valid barriers to their use of Solaris on x86.

What I also learned was that our customer engineers need training and getting started information about Solaris 10. They could use a cookbook for learning Solaris 10. Maybe a top 10 topics would include: default shell, SMF tips, zones basics, ZFS basics, soffice suite, thunderbird & calendar, firefox, networking & FireEngine, FMA, and DTrace?

I'm about to bang out several interesting blogs about my recent attendance at local and regional conferences in support of OpenSolaris documentation, but before I do and because Patrick requested it, I give you two songs of my own:
Home Again
Katie's Song

Latest, greatest versions (v2.2) of the English student guides and instructor guides for OpenSolaris are posted here:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/edu/curriculum_development/

Updated translations of existing 5 languages are underway along with new
versions in Italian, German, and Polish coming next couple of months.

This version includes a lot of great new content about networking, advocacy, consolidations, user groups, source repos, and of course lab modules for ZFS, DTrace, Zones, IP Filter, MDB and much more!

I attended JavaOne this year for the first time. I went to CommunityOne sessions on Monday, prior to the main conference. Then, I worked the OpenSolaris pavilion booth the rest of the week. Following are my notes from the event.

Rich Green keynote (CommunityOne)

Why get together? Rich talked about the importance of face-to-face meetings now and then in our virtual world of work. JavaOne is a great time to gather and have verbal conversations.

Aside: Some folks are currently discussing this same idea WRT user groups on the OpenSolaris main list today. I agree with Rich and the reason I go to user group each month is to learn by having new conversations with folks interested in OpenSolaris. I have a much greater understanding of the documentation needs of the OpenSolaris community by going every month to meet and talk with folks about documentation. You cannot know unless you ask.

In addition to Rich Green's insights on live conversations, he said "simplicity and access is far more important than technical perfection". WOW. read that again everyone. This is big, McNealy was saying this years ago and I still don't think we get it a Sun. I still see a lot of complexity and secrecy, not as much, but we're hearing this from Rich because we've still got WAY too much. He went on to say that the power to share technological information overrides technological limitations. That is, the desire to communicate is the dominant force today. I think this is all very cool because communications is my trade.

Then Tim O'Reilly took the stage to moderate a panel discussion with Rich Green, Tim Bray and Ian Murdock. He started the discussion with a statement about 'How do we help developers to 1) harness collective intelligence, 2) create live software, and 3) think about open source and open standards in lock-in for the future (fuzzy notes on that last one).

Tim Bray complained about Tim O's use of terminology right off the bat. Which is right on target for a Sun conversation because we always nitpick terms first, get on same page, then have a discussion. O'Reilly did a nice job of heading off a full-blown terminology death spiral and focused on the real questions he'd posed: how do we get developers software toolkits to extract the data they need. How do we make it easy for developers to extract, implement and deal with all the data? Ian chimes in with commodity and expertise. Tim Bray mentions advent of Spring/Rails makes it easier to contribute. He talks about the convergence of human and compute communication.

Then, O'Reilly mentions web 3.0, there will be no typing, we'll use gestural interfaces, voice, movements instead. Tim Bray reacted with surprise to this idea. [I was relieved because my typing stinks, always has. Go W3.0!] Ian jumps back in with the importance of the operating system. ? Then, there was a discussion of the processes needed to grab all of what is written out there, or creation of the process to pull-through the right information, how to create more value than you capture. People contribute for their own self-interest, not to contribute to XYZ project.

O'Reilly and Bray are impressive in this conversation. I wish they'd discussed this topic a lot longer, as they only just scratched the surface and had to finish up just when it got interesting. I highly recommend taking any opportunity you have to hear those two talk, very exciting!

At the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group April '07 meeting, Brendan Gregg talked about the DTrace Topics project. This is a collaborative documentation project for DTrace. So, of course, as a writer, doc community leader, and infogeek, I loved this talk.

Brendan went on for 3+ hours and I would have stayed longer yet. He is so keen on documentation, that I just want to soak up his experiences and knowledge and sensibilities until they are my own. He also has a great sense of humor and appreciates Star Wars, so that doesn't hurt.

I let him know about the latest update to the Solaris DTrace Guide and offered help to update his DTrace toolkit with link targets when he finds an appropriate SPARC box to hook up the HD where it is all patiently waiting for his attention post-overseas-move. Hopefully the docs.sun.com hardware update is complete by then because the slowness is insanity right now. But, we did see the first interface update of the site in 5+ years last week, so my hope are high, thank you dot sun!! Brendan then had some threads on docs-discuss on opensolaris, where we're getting started on some cheatsheet documentation, and we had a chance to talk again in person at JavaOne.

I mentioned that we should get the DTrace toolkit included on the Starter Kit in future. That would totally rock. As an aside, I'm all stoked because I initialized a Mercurial workspace for the Starter Kit project late on Friday, so I should have it populated as soon as I get a README together. Mercurial just works and that is very cool, being a program manager all year (read:slideware hell), it felt really good to have a live workspace even if the only output is 0changes 0files 0diffs.

Currently, Brendan, me and few others are having a separate thread about wikis and how to get all the good doc collaboration from solaris internals and genunix.org consolidated on opensolaris.org wiki. We'll have to start small with regard to features for this new wiki, but we'll have all the basics covered and we can build out the fancier conversion and processing functions as we grow it.

I was accepted into the SEED mentoring program at Sun for the Jan '06-June '07 term. I was matched with a truly awesome mentor, Lynn Rohrer, since then we've been working together regularly on business strategy, leadership, and open source.

In April, SEED had its mid-term meeting and following are my notes.

The most interesting talk was given by Jim Baty, the first Distinguished Engineer in Sun Service, on "Everything 2.0". Jim talked about historical Sun a bit:

1st ten years: workstation development
2nd ten years: servers, enterprise Sun-on-Sun
3rd ten years: services

He then asked us each this question: What Sun do you work for?

The important part of the question is 'what measure do you use to describe your Sun'. Is it your geographic location? Is it software? Is it hardware? Is it mobile? Is it your organizational location within Sun? I usually think 'software' first, then 'education', then 'open source'. The education piece is bi-directional, I see Sun as a learning place, it is where I learned UNIX and tons of other great stuff, it is also part of my role to educate developers and users about Sun products.

Jim went on to talk about 1.0 versus 2.0. In 1.0 we pushed information to customers, visited customers in person, and made users wait for information. In 2.0, the lines between employees and customers get blurred as we increase collaboration on products and recognize the programmer as the end-user with a broadening of their customer role as innovative contributors. We move away from the push model and begin viral marketing for the participation economy. Where read/write is mostly write and cultural changes re-invent 'your Sun'.

This really resonated with me because OpenSolaris is all about information earlier, participation of everyone on the things that matter most to the community of developers who innovate the most.

Next up was Roger Meike from Sun Labs with some interesting demos of SunSpots.

We all had lunch together that day, then visited the executive briefing center, followed by afternoon talks and a lovely tea party with great food and wine. It was really a wonderful break from the usual Friday and a great opportunity to rub-elbows with lots of technology gurus.

It is a real privilege to be a part of this mentoring program, I have many many other informal mentors and I recommend having multiple mentors throughout any career. I have never been a mentor myself, but I surely will become one. The impact of my mentors on my life and well-being has been huge and I would not be here without their help, advice, consistency, and challenges. I applaud the SEED program for making this a part of our official work, for so many who might not otherwise be able to make time for mentoring.

What a year of music in San Francisco! Spring is really when things start to heat up, tours begin, new albums release, it is a joy to be alive.

So, it is at this time I feel that I must post a wrap-up of the concerts from 2006, before too many shows have piled up that I become blocked by my own procrastination. It is such a privilege to live here and have access to so many musical artists, here are the big shows I've had time to write up:

February generally starts the fire with Noise Pop festival in SF, but this year (2007) was a lineup that left me flat completely. I traveled abroad during this time, but for-the-record, only Erase Errata would have got my money had I been in town. Last year was not so, we saw 10 shows in 7 days, it was a blur, so I'll just begin with March:

March 14 2006, _Frank Black_, Cafe Du Nord. This night was exceptional because Du Nord is so small and intimate and he is so brilliant. Frank played three sets, one with electric, much acoustic, and one with accompaniment. He played everything that matters.

March 24 2006, _The Strokes_, Concourse. Probably the best show of the year, just following the release of their latest album, and everyone at the Concourse knew every lyric. After the first song, they were stunned by our adoration and said simply 'San Francisco, who knew?' We jumped and danced and sang the whole night with them and their indescribable guitars, I love them. I saw them once before and this was nothing like it, this was magical, drunken, loudness at it finest. And we were all soaking wet from the rain and did not care, I lost my polk-a-dot umbrella from childhood and it was worth it.

March 29 2006, _Heavenly States_, Rickshaw Stop. The Heavenly States are one of a few favorite local bands, their lead signer is divine and the band combines fiddle with rock with keyboards in a manner most cannot comprehend nor pull off without theatrics. I think it is because of the Telecaster ripping between all the sounds and brining them gracefully together and apart, but I'm probably biased. You might find a stop-action video of them on Havoc if you dig around.

March 31 2006, _The Cloud Room_, Slim's. I was not floored by this band really, we went to Von Iva show after this show and that is what I remember.

April 28 2006, _Yeah Yeah Yeahs_, Warfield. This is a close second to The Strokes show because she is just so amazing to watch and listen to. Vocally she really is the tops now and she is pulling through a giant mass of female vocalists that will change our music for a long time to come. She is gigantic. She bopped around a ton and said only on thing to the crowd, once she fell right on her ass, at start of like the second song in their set, and she just said 'Holy Shit!' and kept right on going. We had dueling tickets on this night for the Mates of State, but went for YYY, of course. I've seen Mates and love them, but they're no YYY, no?

May 2 2006, _Sleater Kinney_, Great American Music Hall. My one main brush with greatness, only major claim-to-fame, is that I opened for Sleater Kinney back in 1996 at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, CO. God those were the days, we even got to hang with them backstage. Anyhow, Sleater Kinney rocked like never before this 2006, I mean Carrie traded her trusty Rickenbacker for this huge guitar, a Thunderbird, I think, and played like she was channeling Jimi or something. Trees is the most enormous album of 2006, I really think, just like a Redwood. Just get it and One Beat too. I did not know it at that show, though we all felt it, that this would be their last, they have disbanded, and it is the end of an era for me, a decade of riot grrrl has finished and their mark on punk and rock and pop will always be felt strong by me.

May 26 2006, _The Ministry_, Fillmore Auditorium. This show was incredible, truly demonstrating that music defies age completely, these guys still bring it from every pore. San Francisco did give them a good reception, somewhat subdued as usual, and certainly not the moshing, spinning, scary-wonderful affair I experienced back in '94 when I saw their tour with Helmut, but still an awesome spectacle to enjoy.

June 5 2006, _Charletan's UK_, Fillmore Auditorium. My sweetie introduced me to this band, in great wisdom, this show was mind-blowing. This guy can sing like no other man can. He wales and croons and just slathers you with his voice and its beauty until you almost cannot take it. In so many differing styles, he sings effortlessly. This is to say nothing of the band, he can sing all day and only plays the occasional mouth-keyboard, but the band of Charletan's is truly exceptional rock band. Strong and tight in all of its parts, unfortunately a rare thing these days to hear a band this well-versed, trained together making such fantastic pop music with hard driving drums bass and guitars. Of all the bands this year, this one surprised me most because I did not know their superiority, or even a shred of it, but once I heard it I will always remember.

June 1 2006, _Les Claypool_, This Les show was my first on the main floor of the Warfield, and I'll never again sit in a seat upstairs. Why did I ever sit upstairs? My favorite of all women, Melora Craiger, divine beauty and queen of the Cello, creator of Rasputina, opened for Les. It was a crashing, attention-demanding opening act if there ever was one. Frustration Plantation was the setting with a bit of frontiering for good measure. Fewer vignettes than usual, but for the anticipation for the Les crowd, it was fitting. No corsets were worn and freedom from them was heard in each string plucked. Les had Gabby LaLa with him and to see her in this sold-out venue, after being schooled by Les for over a year, was to see her at her best, I am sure. She has grown before our eyes as a musician and on this night she played Sitar on-par with Les, trading licks and rifs with his genius, then jumping to accordion, then theramin, the yukelele, and back again. I will leave my ramblings about Les for the summary of a show at a different venue, he is in Bay Area, so we see him often...

July 8 2006, _Nine Inch Nails_, Shoreline Ampitheater. My first time having an actual seat at Shoreline, to be this close to Trent again was incredible. I stood on the grass for Radiohead two years back and the loudness beat on me until I was cured of all ills...that is another blog I suppose...if you ever might see or hear Radiohead, stand upon any surface to do so, and you will not be disappointed. Peaches and Bau Haus opened this show. Not much to write of these two acts really, Peaches is just too nasty for me to be interested and Bau Haus is just Bau Haus, but it was my first time to see them, so I'm glad for that, just to have seen a legendary band such as they are. Trent and NIN, well, if you read my blog, you know that we saw the first two nights of this tour at Warfield fall 2005. This Shoreline show was the final date to wrap it up. So, it was insanely tight, improved from repetition and rehearsal on-the-road all year long and summed up in this one night With Teeth. Lighting design was really stellar and highlighted nicely Trent's muscular frame, oy, I'll stop there. He was sad for this tour to be over, he said as much to us, he said he had to go back into the studio and sounded just so emotional about it, said that he would miss us while he was gone. He even tossed a guitar into the crowd at the end of crushing and banging the daylights from one another in a ritual that is uniquely NIN. They surely were on the brink of Survivalism and Year Zero at that time, and knew it. Recording and mixing is a test and grueling trial and Trent is no exception. He has now provided his Garageband files of Survivalism to the world for our use and edification, and I feel kindred to him in our delivery of sources to OpenSolaris. All of Year Zero will be made available from what I understand and the files for Survivalism are a joy to watch and listen to, we've been enjoying them all week. You can hear (pre-release) of the new album here.

September 17 2006, _Israel Vibration_, Independent. Another brilliant show from Israel, roots reggae at its finest that gives you joy and light in every verse.

November 5 2006, _Lee Scratch Perry_, Independent. My first introduction to Lee Scratch, also awesome reggae, this guy basically discovered Bob Marley FWIU. It was strange, the band that opened we felt was not very good at all, then as it turned out, they were backing Lee Scratch, but *with him* they sounded incredible, without him mediocre. It speaks volumes about his presence and voice and energy. He appears to be about 70 years of age, but this man sang and preached and danced until we were all tired, then danced with the women some more. He was inspirational in his energy, not to mention his mirrored cap.

Date? _Peeping Tom_, Great American Music Hall. Peeping Tom, uhg, now this is tied with The Strokes for best show of the year, actually. This was more fun than any other show at GAMH ever, Mike Patton is a living legend in the Bay Area and the crowd makes it known. It was a romp and rough evening of beats and just downright hard to match music.

Date? _Kool Keith /return of Dr. Octagon_, Mezzanine. Small very fun show, so fun I was hit right in the bridge of my nose with a flying LP record during the first act. But, I sucked it up folks, that's right, I needed to see the doctor! Dr. Octagon.

November 26 2006, _Alice in Chains_, Warfield. This is a legendary band, so we went even though, of course, there is a new singer who is so-so, and this tour is a reunion of sorts and well, we just never did see Alice in Chains back in the day and now we have, sort of.
The lead guitar player really led the show and made sure the new signer stayed in place. He had the vocals yes, but not the gruff of Alice and Chains that comes from that angst of the early 90s. They paid nice homage to the man who was the face of Alice in Chains, took time after the first set to remember him and reflect, then played an acoustic set, followed by another set. Overall a good solid show I would recommend if you never saw them ever.

December 2 2006, _Primus_, Berkeley Community Theater. For this show, we had seats in the second row! What a way to wrap the calendar year. The seats were so close we were stunned throughout the opening act, I could smell their body odor, that's how close we were, I could see the pores in their skin and the sound trembled across my arm-hairs it was so loud and rich. Also my first time at Berkeley Community Theater, which I highly recommend if you have insanely great seats. We went for sushi beforehand over on Telegraph, I think, and it was so fun and yummy. Little boats of fish and rolls swimming past you while the anticipation of sitting directly before, no two rows from, a virtuoso bass player of our times. We will go again to enjoy his unique mad-hatting, frogish friendly fun at end of June, hooray.

Now, we've had a rush of nice, small shows this month of March 2007, that I'll cover real quickly, as follows:

-_Octopus Project_: great Austin-based band at BOTH that was a thrilling wall of sound
-_Miho Hatori_: New York based Miho, formerly of Cibbo Matto, brilliantly with her new album Ecdysis
-_TV on the Radio_: good solid band, not my favorite style, if I want this I want Bloc Party.
-_Teddy Bears_: amazing tiny show, we touched them, great great Sweden pop right now!!
-_Whitey_: New York band, very great guitar rock all Dan Electro through Marshall half-stack, check it.

And this brings us up-to-date completely. I will not fall behind this year, I will not! Now, if I do, just read this stuff or order one of these or find me over here where I spend almost all of my writing juice.

Background
----------
I have worked in software since 1996, started out shrink-wrapping and printing disk labels for a language translation software shop. There were two of us, smoking Marlboros and drinking Folgers working on Windows 3.x machines to parse bi-directional language dictionaries for word and phrase translation. I'm a horrible pack-rat, so I actually still have my 'I Hate DOS' book in the trunk of my car, just for a laugh when I load the groceries. You don't even want to see my home directory.

I worked up to print ad copy writing, WinHelp grammar file editing, and answering support calls. That is where I found great satisfaction, helping folks set up their keyboard for Icelandic or whatever and successfully getting them through a real software problem, from angry enough to call us, to happily translating phrases from an old letter their ancestor wrote.
I went back to school for technical communications, and worked at two other software companies before Sun in PR and tech pubs.

Sun Work
--------
I worked as a tech writer at Sun 4.5 years, quit smoking, found sumatra, and just became a Program Manager(mangler) last fall. I never wrote books or help for Solaris proper, only component products like Sun Cluster and N1. So, it is a great privilege for me to work on such a fantastic product. A product I've used everyday these last five years and I truly have never been so productive as I am on Solaris. That is part of what I like to share with folks most, great productivity when you learn even a tiny bit of UNIX and run on a solid platform. I've had to write content and build systems the other way and it sucks. I won't go back to using those sad sad tools.

I am extremely proud to be a part of the OpenSolaris community and consider it a real gift to contribute to its success. As soon as I heard about the Doc PM job, I could not stop thinking about open source for one second. I think it is just outer-limits to be making redistributable all these awesome documents, and I feel the power of having done this has not yet been realized by the larger market.

Position
--------
I just want to help create a place where folks want to come to innovate on this OS. I don't give nearly as much thought to how we rule ourselves as I do how to get things done. I care about how to conduct fruitful discussions, how to make needed connections, how to remove barriers, how to empower contributors, how to work on files and mail to make incremental progress everyday, every week, so we all can feel successful because we built something new and better and someone found use for it.

Nexenta: Martin Man
-------------------

Martin's presentation was expert, had many demonstrations and highlighted Unix for humans concept. He talked about the Debian social contract: you can use it free and it will stay free. He mentioned the Debian Free Software Guidelines. He described the Ubuntu Code of Conduct: we value anything you contribute and we respect that you have no time to work on it.

Nexenta, OpenSolaris for humans, packaging and compile changes.

Issues: partitioning and installation
Sun compiler and GNU gcc compiler
linker bugs not being worked

http://gnusolaris.org

Debian->Ubuntu->Nexenta

Belenix: Moinak Ghosh
---------------------

Live media changes default to boot RAMdisk (this is main difference in addition to what Joerg discussed). Also, pre-built repository.db to save time at boot. You want this because Live media boot is like a 'first boot' every time. Pre-populate driver_aliases and order block files on CD. Moinak used DTrace to figure this out, to determine the order. Compress 1.8 GB to 700 Mb, then you read one block and get two blocks worth of data, uses HFSF for decompression. Uses I/O scheduler to make blocks consecutive (re-order and coalesce). Then make them adjacent to like blocks, and call them all as one request so that the disk head always seeks in the same direction.

Get
livemedia project details.

USB boot goes like this:
1. Insert thumb drive
2. Go to BIOS
3. Expand +
4. Switch boot order of HD and thumb drive

This is great because you can have and save state with USB drive. For example, you could add a user account and when you boot on another machine, that new user will exist. You can also have encryption if you lose the drive. It requires only a computer and BIOS support for USB boot.

LiveDVD will be in Caimen.

Comments: We need an online software repository for cooperation between distributions.