alanc @ sun.com

Now that's a zoom lens...

Google's updated satellite images let you really get in the action - you can even see a football game in progress in the Cal stadium or the Chicago skyscrapers leaning on each other where they pasted together photos taken from different angles.

[Technorati Tags: Cal, Berkeley, Google.]

Posted at 11:08PM Jan 25, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

People coming and going at Sun

Going: Richard Giles

Sad to see Richard Giles leaving Sun. I got to meet Richard in person in 2000 when he came to the US Sun offices. At the time, he was one of the first people in the field to spend much time with the then-new Xinerama feature in Xsun, and he stopped by to talk to the engineering team. He also created an internal Xinerama FAQ that helped save us from having to re-answer commonly asked questions from early users and helped everyone keep track of the various patches needed to Xsun and to other Sun applications to get everything working well together with Xinerama on. His enthusiasm will be missed at Sun, but I'm sure it will serve him well on his new projects and wish him luck there.

I almost wrote that Richard was Sun's first podcaster, for his I/O Podcast, but I suppose first external podcaster would be a better description, because Scott McNealy has been doing the internal equivalent of a podcast since before anyone hooked them to RSS and called them podcasts. About once a month for years now, Scott has recorded The McNealy Report to update people inside Sun on what's going on inside the company. Styled as a radio show, it often includes interviews with partners, customers, Sun executives, or internal project leaders. It's been going so long that it was once available for subscription as cassette tapes for listening in the car - now it's mainly distributed inside Sun as online audio. (Personally, I prefer to read the transcripts, since I can read faster and my brain just seems to absorb printed text better than listening - which drives my wife crazy sometimes.)

Coming: Thomas Haynes

I was amused to see a new Sun employee posting how much he liked the strict processes employed in his group at Sun compared to his previous employer. Especially when compared to another Sun blogger posting "Why I don't believe in code review", it makes for interesting food for thought. Of course both of these make the same mistake, talking about the "Sun" process, when it's really just the process used in their groups, and different parts of Sun have different standards for code review. Not even all of Solaris operates under the same rules, and our group is even learning to deal with the very different processes of the open source X.Org source tree vs. our Solaris X source trees. Somehow I don't see us all coming to agreement on how much code review is needed anytime soon.

(The other thing that drew me to the post was the title "Ex-NetApp and Damn Proud of It." It struck me that while I used to know lots of NetApp employees, I actually know a lot more Ex-NetApp'ers now than the few people I know still at NetApp. It's not that NetApp is a bad place to work - Fortune clearly thinks it's a good place - it's just that most of the people I used to know at NetApp were in the customer support groups, and when NetApp decided to move it's main support center from California to North Carolina - they chose staying with their families, homes, and Bay Area lifestyle over following their job across the country. A bunch of them ended up at TCP acceleration startup RiverBed.)

Coming Soon: More X hackers?

The posting for the job opening in our group was supposed to be posted last week to the Sun jobs site, so I went looking to see if I could find it to post here. I found a couple that could be our groups, but wasn't sure, so asked before posting. (You can still contact me directly if you're interested and I can pass on your resume.) I was surprised to see how many of the other groups we work with also have job openings for engineers to work on X & related technologies. For instance, the Project Looking Glass team is looking for someone to, among other things "Add 3D extensions to X server." The Sun Ray group is looking for someone with Audio & Video knowledge, including if possible experience with the XVideo extension. Someone to work on graphics drivers is being looked for by the SPARC graphics group. And for those who prefer working higher up the stack, Glynn recently posted an opening in the GNOME group.

[Technorati Tags: Sun.]

Posted at 07:59PM Jan 22, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in Sun  | 

Where did December go?

Almost a month since my last blog post, though I didn't mean to go that long. I planned to write more about the Solaris Desktop Summit, but didn't. There were more good talks from people like Rod and Bart, who I'm fortunate to be able to grab in the hall for a chat most any time, but most of the JDS team members were getting their first in-depth time with them. Fortunately, while I failed to write more, other people there like Glynn, John, and Brian covered it well in their blogs.

I did miss much of one of the days of the summit for meetings back in the Menlo Park office, including interviewing a candidate to fill the opening in our group. Since the person we were interviewing had an interest in working for an "open source company" I brought him with me back to the summit, which was an interesting experience. In some ways, it was like a massive group interview, getting a lot of people he'd be working with to talk to him and for him to get a better sense of our place in the company and who we work with. Unfortunately we haven't been able to fill the position yet, and are back to sorting through resumés this week. (If you're an X hacker looking for a job at a old school Unix vendor evolving into a new school open source company, it's not too late to drop me a line.)

After the summit was done, it was time to work with the rest of the X.Org crew to finish up the X11R6.9 & 7.0 releases, which I was also going to blog about, but didn't find time to do. We got them polished off and officially released on December 21. It was three months later than originally scheduled, but the foundation laid in the 7.0 modular release should make it easier to keep future releases on schedule and easier to package and maintain in the future. Thanks to everyone who helped or sent in words of thanks and congratulations afterwards. Sun's “Chief Open Source Officer” even held up my role as X.Org release manager as one of the examples of ways Sun is actively supporting Linux by contributing to projects like X.Org, GNOME, and of course OpenOffice.Org.

After all that, I was ready to go offline for the week-long year-end holiday Sun US employees get off from Christmas to New Year's, and so didn't catch up on any missing blogs then either. The closest I came to anything productive that week was working with my wife on both preparing to move our spare-time project website to a faster server/new ISP, since the old 300Mhz server it's been on the last five years is really showing it's age, and on building the 1500+ piece 3-D puzzle of San Francisco she bought for Christmas. (Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of ours assembled, so the one here is from the puzzle maker's web site.) Of course, the puzzle assembly was done by putting together a lot of little modules and then rolling it up all the pieces into a big interlocking finished product, so even there I couldn't completely escape the echoes of the X.org modularization process.

So now it's January, and I'm back at work, rested and refreshed and with enough projects on my "Todo Now" list to keep me busy all month long, including (in no particular order):

• Checking in the X11R6.9 final release to Solaris Nevada (done today!) and then backporting to Solaris 10 Update 2. (See this note I wrote to the xwin-discuss at opensolaris.org mailing list for details on the X11R6.9 & 7.0 plans for Solaris.)
• Helping the Solaris x86 Platform Drivers team get the nVidia Accelerated Graphics Driver for Solaris integrated into the Solaris install.
• Working with the Solaris Trusted Extensions (formerly Trusted Solaris) X team to take the XTSol multi-level security X extension port they did to Xorg 6.8.2 and make it ready to integrate with our Xorg 6.9 builds and port it to the Xorg 7.0 modular builds in preparation for releasing it as open source.
• Finishing up the work to release the Solaris Xorg modifications, build scripts, and packaging to the OpenSolaris X Window System Community.
• Doing the dtlogin and xscreensaver pieces of the "CoolStart" project for Solaris you'll see more about in a bit.
• Watching Stuart go crazy getting everything ready for next month's X.Org Developer's Conference in Santa Clara.

Hopefully I'll be able to squeeze in a little more time for blogging between all that.

---

I almost called this post Wake Me Up When December Ends, but then while radio-channel-surfing in the car on the way home caught the end of the song whose title I'd be twisting, followed by a sound I think might be one of the signs of the apocalypse: "You've been listening to Green Day on the John Tesh Radio Show" and I couldn't bring myself to do it any more.

[Technorati Tags: Xorg, X11, Solaris, Solaris Trusted Extensions, OpenSolaris.]

Posted at 11:43PM Jan 05, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  |