The first couple of hours attending CommunityOne have been very interesting.. here you have a couple of pictures about it:

Testing ZFS.. the rough way

Green and Hahn introducing IPS

I'll upload some more picture later on.. :-)

I have just uploaded some of the pictures that I took during the first day of the OpenSolaris Summit 2008:

After reading Ted Ts'o comments on OpenSolaris I cannot stop thinking about how partial someone can be. From Ted's point of view, OpenSolaris has failed to build a community (as published in Slashdot), and if you read his post, you would probably think he is right.

Well, I think he is.. but only from a Linux-centric point of view. Actually, if you assume that the Linux development model is the only way to develop F/OSS, he would probably be right. However, if you are more open-minded than that and you know about other F/OSS development models, you will probably know that OpenSolaris' and Linux's models are different, and of course both perfectly acceptable. In fact, each model has its own advantages.

Let's see how different both communities are. Firstly, Linux was born Free Software, while Solaris has been opened after a long time being a closed product. Have you thought about how difficult that process has been? That is a huge amount of tough work that the OpenSolaris community has done in order to liberate such a huge project.

Besides, the OpenSolaris development model is quite different because of a number of technical reasons. IMO, the first one is something as simple as that we want to ensure its quality by following a number of processes. Another very important technical point is that we want OpenSolaris to continue being binary compatible (ABI) with the previous Solaris revisions, which is something Linux could not even dream of. Again, nothing of that has anything to do with Ted's comments; the most important thing here is that, as long as the operating systems goals and objectives are different, their communities are different as well.

And please, do not get me wrong; I have nothing against Linux, nothing at all. In fact, I like it a lot. However, I do think that trying to compare Linux and OpenSolaris communities from a Linux-centric point of view is simply wrong and an unfair comparison. So next time someone feels the need to compare them, it would be so much better if he could base the comparison of each operating system technical merits. Obviously, both communities are different, we all know that.

A couple of days ago I went to UEM, the university where I obtained my CS degree. The LUG organized the "UEM: Free Knowledge conferences 2008" and they invited me to give a talk.

I'm glad they invited me, although I have to confess that it was kind of weird to be in the university again, remembering so many memories, checking what changed, and cheering people who I hadn't seen for about 5 years. It was like traveling back in time for a few hours.. and that made me realize how many things have changed - for good - after all these years :-)

If you are in Madrid, you are still on time to come along. It is worth attending.

There are sometimes when you play to be what you are not, and experience says that most of them end up in some sort of trouble. A few months ago, I played to be an OpenSolaris evangelist within a group of 4 more colleagues for a few weeks.

I must say that there were some tough days, there were even a few days when we had almost no sleep; but on the bright side, we met many people, we gave a bunch of talks on the technology that we develop, and of course we had a lot of fun.

Here is a video that the some Netbeans folks have compiled about one of the adventures we went trough. The story begins with: "In November of 2007,five Sun engineers had planed to fly from Buenos Aires to Cordoba, Argentina to present NetBeans and OpenSolaris at two universities.. ".

You wonder what happened. :-)

Here are a few pictures of the first day of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that is being held at the UT Supercomputing Center in Austin, Texas. It has been really interesting so far, and as you can see, it is also a quite big event:

A few months ago, I made the decision of stop traveling and attending conferences. I was spending almost all of my time traveling and giving talks, which left me very little time for doing real work.

However, I'm going to continue attending the most interesting conferences and meetings. It does not make much sense for me to spend months traveling as I did the past year, but it is definitely worth attending a few of them.

The Linux Collaboration Summit is one of these events, for instance. The second edition is taking place at the UT Supercomputing Center in Austin, Texas from April 8 to 10, 2008.

So, tomorrow I will be heading to Austin. It's a quite long trip from Spain, but if the meeting is as interesting as the first edition (held at Google, in SFO), it will be well spent time.

El Geek Errante #34 is available now. If you are a spanish speaker, I bet you already know El Geek Errante. It is one of the best Spanish spoken podcasts available on the Internet.

A couple of weeks ago, during an OpenSolaris community meeting, a met two of the "mothership crew" members (long story here, you would have to listen to their first podcasts to get it). They interviewed me for their last podcast. We spoke about Cherokee 0.6: what is new and what is coming on the upcoming releases , the OpenSolaris technology and community, a few F/OSS related gossips , and some questions with which they wanted me to comment on the Linux and OpenSolaris development model and community differences.

We had a pretty entertaining evening recoding this podcast. I hope you will like it! :-)

With a couple of the "El Geek Errante" authors

Here you can find the MP3 file [Spanish, 70:44m].

Here are a few pictures of the second OpenSolaris Viernes Tecnico in Madrid:

Giving a short talk at the OpenSolaris Viernes tecnico

Some of the attendees

Today I will be attending a new Viernes Tecnico. In case you haven't heard of the Viernes Tecnicos, they are a set of technical talks organized by the OpenSolaris Hispano community.

Besides the talk, I will be doing an interview for El geek errante, one of the very best podcast I have ever listened. We will talk about OpenSolaris, Cherokee and another bunch of F/OSS related topics. It is going to be fun, and I am almost sure that there will be tough and politically incorrect questions, which will make it even more fun. ;-)

I will most probably try to take advantage of the environment to quickly demo the Cherokee 0.6.0 release candidate. I hope people will like what we have developed for this upcoming version of the server (and of course, their feedback will be very welcome)!

Guess who did "the biggest Open Source deal ever" a few days ago? It is interesting to see the buyers and the prices (the seventh position is less than 1/6 of the first one).

Here are a few pictures I took at the first OpenSolaris "Viernes Tecnico" that took place in Madrid a couple of days ago:

The sessions are organized by OpenSolaris Hispano, the Spanish speaking OpenSolaris community. There are five more "Viernes" programmed in Madrid for the next months. However, I would like to point that even if this first set has been planned for Madrid, the talks are meant to be organized in many other locations as well. We chose Madrid simply because there were a whole lot of people in the area who wanted to attend.

I'm glad to see it has been such a success. I will try to be in the next one as well, it is definitely worth attending. :-)

Yesterday, the OpenSolaris Hispano user group launched a community effort named Viernes Técnicos (Technical Fridays). It is basically a group of technical talks focused on the OpenSolaris technologies that the user group will be giving from now on.

The first three talks have been scheduled February, March and April in Madrid. We announced it yesterday hoping that people would fancy the effort. I am delighted to say that it has been a huge success, in fact, we have had to close the inscription less than 24 hours after the announcement because it was already overbooked!

It is going to be great to see a crowed room full of people interested on the technologies we are working on/with (depends on the case). Besides, you know what? It is a 100% community event, Sun has almost nothing to do with it.

Kudo's for David for his great work here. :-)

Valgrind 3.3.0 hit the streets a couple of days ago and I did not notice! In the unlikely case you haven't heard of this amazing application before, it is a suite of tools for debugging and profiling programs. It is one of the most useful programs I have ever used, actually.

IMO, the best thing about this release is that Helgrind is back. The long-awaited synchronisation errors detector is working again after a few years out of the package. That's so sweet! :-)

I'm going to get it compiled on my Linux box right away (it is extremely platform dependent and it only works on Linux).

It is done! I am back home, and I am going to stop feeling like Phileas Fogg for a while. :-)

These last few months have been kind of crazy, actually. I have done lot of traveling around America, mainly giving talks at conferences and congresses.

The truth is that I quite liked it, I met a huge number of interesting people, built many contacts, had lot of fun and learned a million things. Although, besides all those great things, being abroad for months isn't that easy: you get to miss many things, for instance, to rest and to do some of those boring things that you have done for so many years and that you suddenly miss when you are traveling.

This last "tour" - as some of my friends call them - has included a few stops through North, Central and South America:

• Santa Clara, US: OpenSolaris Developer Summit
• Santa Cruz, US: OpenSource Summit
• Puebla, Mexico: ENLi 2007
• Guaymas, Mexico: SmartDay 2007
• San Carlos, Mexico: VII Simposium Internacional de Computacion
• Montevideo, Uruguay: Latin America Tour
• Buenos Aires, Argentina: Latin America Tour
• Cordoba, Argentina: Latin America Tour
• Santiago, Chile: Latin America Tour
• Puerto Vallarta, Mexico: FSL 2007
• Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela: World Forum on Free Knowledge
• Bogota, Colombia: Universidad Distrital
• Caceres, España: X Congreso HispaLinux

There is something funny about this though. You could not even imagine how many time I have thought about how much I would like to speak English as my mother tongue: "it would be so damn handy! (sighhhhh..)". But, you know what? During these last trips I have realized that to speak Spanish as mother tongue and English as second language is not that bad after all. You can reach an amazing number of people that I couldn't otherwise. In fact, I am quite happy because it is the first time I see the language barrier from this perspective.

Anyway! I am back home for Christmas, and it is time to stop "evangelizing" -what an awful word!- and to start doing again some technical work: I have a few GIO related hacks to do for this week. It is going to fun! :-)