Chris Armes's Weblog: The Bug Stops Here

Blogging is one of those things I keep talking about doing and despite having created something basic well over year ago, in fact I only got as far as the template creation, I never got any further.

Twitter and facebook I've got working, especially using facebook as free way to post photos :-) oh and having twitter update my facebook status, SMS and JavaFX apps are wonderful things.

I'm sitting here in St Petersburg at the Sun TechDays 2009 having finally (well I will if I post this) getting round to writing my first blog.

I've not actually decided what I'm going to write about in this one, other than some ramblings, a couple of links to web pages and maybe a few photos. Like the one below of the pavilion area here in St Petersburg (click on the photo to see the rest of the photos I've uploaded so far onto facebook).

Oh and also a little bit more about how I was persuaded to start this, well pushed or made to feel a little bit guilty about not writing a blog, not least of which by admin Joy Marshall who has been blogging for over a year as well of two of my colleagues Bob Porras and Lynn Rohrer. Bob actually said to me your happy to play around in the kernel but won't blog, what is that all about?

OK guys so your guilt trip worked and here I am attempting my first blog.

Once I figured out how to setup the editor to not require html, uploading photos and linking out to webpages was not too painful, even adding bookmarks on the RHS and changing some of the settings, still have not figured out how to upload a photo of me yet, but I'm sure someone will embaress me and tell me it is really simple (OK Bob Porras just did, which prompted the comment from Simon Ritter who is sitting next to me in the speaker room here in SPB of "How any executives does it take to write a blog?")

So what do I do @ Sun, well I run the team that provides the sustaining engineering for all the products in the Solaris portfolio including Cluster and OpenSolaris as well as Solaris 10 and earlier versions to name a few.

We also sustain the software and firmware stack underlying the Sun Storage 7000 series platform aka Amber Road.

I traveled some 250,000 miles last calender year and visited many Sun customers as well as spending time with my global team which is spread across the world; India, Czech Republic, France, Germany, UK and many locations the US. My plan is to spend the time I have on those long plane flights writing at least the txt for blogs, unless someone happens to know a tool where I can put together a StarOffice document and just upload that.

Based on the last 12 months experience I'll have lots of customer experiences to write up (minus the names of course) and I'll try and include some of other things my team is working on that I can share.

This assumes I'll do a better job than I did the first time I wrote a starting entry back in 2007 and actually post this one.