Everything Sun @ Tennessee State University Jeff's Sun Blog

Although I'm about a week late in mentioning this, but I just passed my SCJP 5.0 certification. So now for the next 6mo-1yr I will be working on my SCJD. I want to have to have it before I graduate in May.

I don't think it's fair that I introduced ONLY TSU in the last entry, so I am posting each individual group by university. We really appreciated all of you coming here. So without further ado:

Morehouse:  

 

Attendee: Mark Slade

Florida A & M University:

 

Attendees (left to right): Sean Cohen, Kevin Lawrence 

North Carolina Central University:

Attendees (left to right): Jerome Pottinger, Jovanna Foreman

North Carolina A & T:

Attendees (left to right): Michael Jones, Maurice Ben-Oduro, Denetra Rook, Jesse Lowry(top), Willie Campbell, Michael    McLendon(top), Edmundson Effort

Southern University:

Attendees (left to right): Kadrica Tillotson, Deanna Roquemore, Kanetra Tillotson

Howard University:

Attendee: Joel O'Neil

Hampton University:

Attendees (left to right): Robert Willis, Courtney Hinton, Gheric Speiginer

and last, but certainly not least

Morgan University:

Attendees (left to right): Olusola Laniyi, Tunde Olubando, William Walker, Olu Sodipo

Tennessee State had the opportunity to host 25 students/faculty from 8 different HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) for this year's Java Boot Camp. It lasted from May 12-19. The event gives students with prior experience in Java programming the opportunity to get their SCJP certification. This year we focused on J2SE 5.0 (planning issues prevented us from do version 6, that's for next year). The event was sponsored by the Technology Transfer Project and IBM. In all we were able to get 7 out of the 25 certified! One student even got 91% percent on the exam! The other six ranged between 69-75%.

 

Here is the TSU group. Dr. Ali Sekmen, on the left, was the one giving the lecture. I am standing next to him. I was responsible for providing post lecture tutoring. Most nights I didn't get to bed until 3:00am And had to be back up at 6am! The students were diligent in their studies. Dr . Tamara Rogers is standing next to me, followed by Komla Richardson.

 

Here is Dr. Sekmen giving us the lecture. He teaches our Java Programming course here at TSU. I have to give it to him, he REALLY knows his stuff! We had to be at Holland Hall at 8am to start lecture and didn't get out until 1pm. It may seem like a long time but when you're Sekmen, you can make 5 hours seem like 2. The lecture notes had great examples for the students/faculty to study.

 

 

 

 

Even eight o'clock in the morning their alert and ready to learn.

 

 

After lecture we sat down to bit a bit of lunch and discussed what we learned and to give us some downtime. Notice the lazy looking one on the right in the bottom lunch pic? That's Gheric. He received the highest score out of the boot camp, 91%! 

 

And of course, this wouldn't have been possible without the help from these two fine people, Cassandra Teel, and Ramon Harris. I had to catch them when they looked like they were busy, lol! We really appreciated all the time and effort they put into this along with Dr. Sekmen to make this possible. And thanks for the Swett's! If you're ever in Nashville, TN, be sure to go there at least once. Great Southern food!

Although we would have loved to have everyone who attended to have gotten certified that week, that didn't happen. So we gave them the direction to continue studying and retake the exam within six weeks and report back to us. We provided all the study material they needed and even resources to find additional information. Within six weeks I would love to hear everyone who attended announce they are SCJPs!

Today is the second day of the TTP Java Boot Camp. Yesterday we covered over 100 slides!. Today we will cover another 150 slides. We will be finishing the fundamentals of OOP and then moving on to identifiers, operators, and possibly arrays. Any of the students who are in the TTP program and happen to read this be sure to check out our Google Group TTP Java Boot Camp at:

http://groups.google.com/group/ttpjbc

Everyone who is attending the Boot Camp should have received an email inviting you to the group. I sent one to the email that you provided to Cassandra Teel. I will constantly post new questions about the J2SE 5.0 Certification exam that I want you to answer and discuss.

Just made it back in Nashville. I got a chance to meet two of the students who will be participating in the TTP Java Boot Camp which kicks off tomorrow (in fact, there my roommates). I'll be up bright and early 7am to get started. Hope I can last a whole week of this!

I take my J2SE 5.0 upgrade cert tomorrow. Been studying all week for it. Since I wasn't able to attend the boot camp, guess that's all I could do. Wish me luck!

Today we opened an exciting and critical new chapter in Sun's open source story by announcing the first release of a new binary distribution of the OpenSolaris operating system, OpenSolaris (TM) 2008.05, now available for free download at www.opensolaris.com.

Today's release launched at CommunityOne marks a fundamental and deliberate change in the way we are packaging and distributing our software for both developers and deployers. We are significantly lowering the barriers to adoption by modernizing our offerings with powerful tools and technologies designed to optimize the user experience, get developers up and running quickly, and encourage community collaboration with some of the greatest innovators on the planet. We are listening to our communities and taking the important next step in building a new level of volume in the enterprise and web economy markets.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 features LiveCD technology, which allows users to experience OpenSolaris immediately without installing the operating system. When users are ready, they can start the fast and easy installation with a single click and simply add software via the new Image Packaging System (IPS). This is a network-based package repository that enables users to easily customize their implementations directly over the network by installing just the packages they need to build, test, trouble-shoot and deploy their innovations. OpenSolaris 2008.05 also includes a compelling new set of features such as Solaris (TM) ZFS, the Solaris default file system that allows users to protect and store their data with a new instant roll-back and continual check-summing capability, Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), which offers real-time debugging and acceleration of application development and Solaris containers, that enable easier development of virtualization-aware applications without worry about 3rd party software compatibility.

Highly scalable, OpenSolaris can be deployed on nearly 1000 systems, ranging from single machines through multi-CPU and multi-core systems, from every major vendor. With this kind of innovation, community engagement, scalability, usability, familiarity and access to Sun's world-class support, OpenSolaris not only opens up a new level of global participation and innovation, it opens enormous long term opportunities for Sun.

I am extremely proud of the efforts made to make today's milestone release possible, but our work is not done. To make mass adoption of OpenSolaris possible, we will need to continue our focus on getting new contributions to our repository packages. Throughout FY09, we will encourage the participation of our internal and external developer communities to build, optimize, and repackage all of Sun's software along, with popular community open source projects, to make OpenSolaris the most innovative, compelling, and comprehensive software system in the market.

Regards,
Rich Green
EVP, Software

Tomorrow is the first day of our annual Java Boot Camp. The camp is scheduled to go from 8am-1pm. Be ready to deal with this everyday for the next 7 days. The work will be in-depth, we hope to have fun with this event. Unfortunately I won't be attending because the university denied on-campus students housing for the week for some unknown event and I haven't a place to stay. So I will going back home to Memphis to enjoy a week off and I'll be back for the TTP boot camp that will start on the 11th. I will also go ahead and take my upgrade exam for J2SE 5.0 while I'm in Memphis. Wish me luck on it and good luck to everyone who is able to attend the camp this week!

Netbeans 6.1 was released a few days ago to the public. It has a lot of new improvements and features such as:
-Less memory consummtpion

-Up to 40% faster startup
-New MySQL Support in Database Explorer
-JavaScript support
Click here for full details.

Finals start today. First day of finals is always the Math/Hard Sciences day. Physics, Chemistry, and Calculus I & II. I have two of these today, plus I have to make it to see Senior Project presentations in the Computer Science Dept today. Also there are only 7 days left before TSU's Java boot camp starts. I'll be keeping a countdown all the way to it. I'll also try to get some number on how many people have signed up for it. Wish me today!

TSU has the honor this year of hosting a second boot camp for 25 students from HBCUs from across the country. The Executive Leadership Coucil has an initiative called the Technology Transfer Project. Its mission to prepare students at historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) to use technology for advanced career success in information driven work environments. From May 13-19 they will go through rigorous training to prepare them to take their SCJP J2SE 5.0 certification. Dr. Sekmen has asked me to attend to help tutor the students during the camp.

The semester is quickly drawing to an end, but here at TSU we are prepping for our annual Java Boot Camp. It is a week long informative and fun course that prepares the students who wish to get their SCJP certification. Last year there were approximately 45 students that attended and approximately 18 that got certified. This year we are hoping to draw a larger crowd PLUS get more people certified. I'm placing my bets that we will have at LEAST 30 students who will get their certification. If you are interested in attending please email Dr. Ali Sekmen at asekmen @ tnstate.edu. (Have to avoid email harvesters, LOL). I'm not sure if it is too late or not, but email him or see him at his off in McCord Hall Rm5 if you have any questions. Also this will be one of my main communications about the boot camp, so be sure to check here periodically.

My friend David and I have arrived in Greensboro, North Carolina. We got a bit lost on the way to the inn, but managed to find our way (thanks to Google Maps). We'll be out and about on North Carolina A&T campus. Hopefully they'll answer David's questions about their Information Assurance Grad program. I'm REALLY interested in finding out what advances their Computer Science Dept have made with AI. I'll be sure to ask plenty of questions on the subject. Who knows, they may even persuade me to attend!

This week is Spring Break here at Tennessee State University. While the university is off of classes and partying in the sun, I'm traveling to North Carolina A&T to visit their computer science dept. One of my friends is graduating this semester and he's attending there for grad school. I heard they have an excellent CS program. I'm going to see if they have a CA there and hit him/her up while I'm there.

I gave my first demo on Feb 18 @ 5pm. It was on Netbeans 6.0. Alan Morris showed up to give me moral support. I really thank him because I needed it! I was demonstrating the new features in v6(The CS dept still had v4.0 installed on all of the systems). I had 26 people (students and faculty) show up. At first I thought only a few people (there were 6 at the time I started) would show, but about 10 minutes into the demo, I had a professor bring in her C++ class because they wanted to know about Java. After answering some questions about the differences between the languages and how easy it is to learn Java, I showed them how to use use Netbeans to help them learn. Everyone had fun and plenty of questions. It lasted about an hour, then I had everyone go to one of the classrooms for some pizza and drinks. Can't help but say I'm psyched for the next demo!