Monday November 28, 2005
Monday November 28, 2005 Cross posting this to my old Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh and my new blog at http://clairegiordano.org/blog/
It's true, I'm leaving Sun. And in the last few weeks of farewells, I have discovered the obvious: goodbyes are not easy.
Another discovery: Cliches such as "It's difficult to leave my friends and colleagues at Sun" are trite but oh so very true. It's the people that I will remember, and the little everyday joys of working together to make something happen. But I'm not leaving the community (or the valley.)
Sun has been good to me over the last 16 years and I have much to thank this company for.
I worked on the operating system in all sorts of roles over the years and together with some extraordinary people accomplished a lot. But those things that endure are the most important. I'm proud of the Solaris Platinum Beta program that I created to put engineers in close contact with our customers' most important problems. And of course I'm proud of the OpenSolaris project, which I was privileged to kick off back in the fall of 2003. OpenSolaris is now well on its way and I feel comfortable leaving it at this point - there is a lot of community support and leadership to move the project forward.
[Update: And, yes, I'm proud of my engineering team's many contributions to Solaris 10!]
My decision has little to do with Sun, and everything to do with the exciting opportunity ahead of me at A9.
A9, a subsidiary of Amazon.com located in downtown Palo Alto, is doing all sorts of interesting things to improve the search experience. If you haven't yet checked out the A9.com website, please do. And the A9 toolbar. I'm particularly jazzed about the A9 OpenSearch technology which makes it easy for content providers to publish their search results. I'll be Director of Product Management at A9 starting in mid-December and can't wait!
So, it's ciao to Sun and hello to A9. I'll remain a part of the OpenSolaris community, of course. And I'll still be blogging - just not on the much-loved blogs.sun.com. You can find my new blog at http://clairegiordano.org/blog/. I hope you keep reading. I'll definitely keep writing.
Technorati Tag: A9
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: SunMicrosystems
(2005-11-28 08:53:31.0) Permalink Comments [4]
Saturday November 26, 2005 Cross posting this to my old Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh and my new blog at http://clairegiordano.org/blog/
Those of you who read my post about OpenSolaris and Flickr and went over to Flickr to check out the OpenSolarisEnthusiast group may have noticed that I had not yet posted a photo of myself. Bad bad bad. Well, I've fixed that problem. I was in the Palm Springs area for Thanksgiving, with OpenSolaris t-shirt in tow, and my photo is now part of the collection. Complete with fuchsia bougainvillea in the background.
Other recent additions to the OpenSolaris Flickr group are from Jim Grisanzio and lovely daughter in Japan, Eric Boutilier in Vienna and Wez Furlong in Paris. Don't try to look in Flickr at the instant I post this blog entry, though. When I just went to look, I encountered a classic Flickr message - classic in that it has spunk and shows that the creators of Flickr were having fun: "Flickr is having a massage."
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-11-26 23:42:44.0) Permalink Comments [1]
Cross posting this to my old Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh and my new blog at http://clairegiordano.org/blog/
Teresa Giacomini just forwarded me a link to the schedule for UCSD's CSE 120 class, more descriptively known as Principles of Computer Operating Systems at the University of California San Diego. What I find cool is the agenda item for Nov 29.
Yep, that's right, they'll be talking about OpenSolaris. Sweet.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-11-26 22:36:48.0) Permalink
Thursday November 24, 2005 Cross posting this to my old Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh and my new blog at http://clairegiordano.org/blog/
Friday afternoons are special. I forget about work and pick my children up from school. Not by the car line. I park about 2 blocks away and walk in, amid the hurry of all the parents. Ten minutes later, I walk back to the car accompanied by two children. They are bubbling with stories. Sometimes they hold my hand, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they smile and sometimes they bicker. And always they want something.
Things get more special after that. We pack the swim bag and a snack and drive to swim team. I park, the children scamper across the parking lot, we walk through the gate. The three of us then go our separate ways. My daughter into the pool. My son to wander and play - to swing on jungle gyms, play with a tire swing, stand next to the coach. As often as I can get away with being antisocial, I sit alone and watch both of them. The splashing of swimmers beats steady. The coach's voice booms and reverberates. "Up down up down up down up down. Kick both ways. Both ways!" A group of children who on their own would easily create chaos are seamlessly organized. They share the lanes, navigating by each other. My son plays, my daughter swims, my mind wanders. Watching the swimmers practice is like watching the waves rush in and out on a beach.
This moment is my favorite part of the week. It's not just the peacefulness of it all, or the time alone yet together. Sometimes you have to forget about everything for a while to figure out what's worth remembering. When I watch them on Fridays at swim team, I get to forget. So that I can remember.
(2005-11-24 01:06:25.0) Permalink
Tuesday November 22, 2005 Cross posting this to my Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh and my new blog at http://clairegiordano.org/blog/
Chandan is an artist. Of colors and pixels as much as of code and usability. He has a well-developed sense of design. As someone who's made the mistake of debating Chandan on aesthetics, I have to say that he knows his stuff and he stands his ground. In a good way. Whether you're more interested in graphic art or in code-as-art, I recommend you checkout the wicked fast OpenSolaris source browser. And also the tool that powers our source browser, open sourced last week and dubbed OpenGrok.
Back in the day, as they say, I used to be an avid cscope fan, and with cscope as my comparison I was hugely impressed when I first tried the OpenSolaris source browser. Yes, it's fast. But more than that, it clearly showed the connections between different parts of the rather complex code base we deal with in OpenSolaris. And by making those connections rapidly and visually, well, it made it easier for me to grok the code. Did I mention that it's written in Java? Or that it's released under the open source CDDL license?
Kudos to Chandan and Andy and all involved. From developers everywhere, thanks. Wicked thanks.
To find out more:
Andy Tucker talks about the conception of OpenGrok and how he's already using it to browse VMware code.
Chandan's blog entry about OpenGrok
Announcement on OpenSolaris.org
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: OpenGrok
(2005-11-22 00:40:24.0) Permalink
Sunday November 20, 2005 Open Source and Mechanical Advantage
Cross posting this to my old Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh and my new blog at http://clairegiordano.org/blog/
I opened a bottle of wine on Friday night [1] and in my mind thanked the person who had given us the Screwpull opener as a gift. A flick of the wrist, hardly any effort on my part, and the bottle is uncorked. Mechanical advantage is really quite wonderful, isn't it?
And that's when the question hit me - perhaps open source is like mechanical advantage?
I'm
constantly looking for real-world analogies that will help to explain
what I do - and in particular open source - to friends of mine who are
not in the industry. So please bear with me while I explore the
analogy.Just a moment before, I had been thinking about an email I'd received from one of my OpenSolaris colleagues about the planned "University Sun Days" being organized by another team at Sun. Excerpt of his email:
"It seems to me that we [OpenSolaris marketing and engineering teams] should have a much more significant role in this. In other words, shouldn't OpenSolaris presentations that are being made to universities be done by people from the OpenSolaris development/marketing team?"
He asks a good question. I certainly would love the opportunity to talk face to face with developers at these University Days. And there is real value is in the Q&A conversation that ensues - which if done right is a win/win, both strengthening their understanding of how OpenSolaris might help them and my understanding of what students and developers want.
That said, the engineering and marketing teams at Sun simply cannot scale to do this. There aren't enough of us to go around. And - perhaps what we have to say might be too insular? There are certainly benefits to having a diverse set of evangelists who can reach different audiences and make different connections. (If you haven't yet read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, please do, and you'll see what I mean.)
I've recently engaged in a discussion about what open source is about. Is it about the code? Or is it about the community? My belief is that open source is about the community. Which is not to say that all open source projects have community-building as top priority. And I do not mean to say that there are no benefits from a sharable code commons - of course there are, since with a sharable code commons, people don't need to start from scratch for each project they undertake. And I don't mean to equate open source with open development; I recognize that some open source projects don't do development in the open, which means that while they are technically open source projects, they are not nurturing a community of participants.
So what do I mean? I think the real value of making a project an open source/open development project is the power unleashed by enpowering a community. Empowering many people to each make their own mark, in support of shared goals and objectives, is a very powerful way to make a technology grow and spread and solve even more problems. Sure, you have to give up control (which is not to say that you give up leadership - you still have the opportunity to lead and influence), but the potential benefits far outweigh the cost of giving up control, IMHO.
Going back to the discussion of the "University Sun Days" - one of the benefits of an open development project is that the initial team doesn't have to give presentations at all 50 universities. There are other evangelists. More cropping up all the time, in fact. They each bring their own talent and creativity and passion to the table. They'll come up with new approaches and new ideas. And as a result, we'll be able to reach many more universities, and developers, and communities. So, with a little bit of evangelization on our part - on the opensolaris.org site, via blogging and via outreach to the other sales and marketing teams at Sun - there is now a growing set of diverse evangelists that can accomplish far far far more. Kind of like mechanical advantage.
[1] Rodney Strong 2003 Sonoma County Chardonnay, for you wine afficianados out there.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-11-20 18:21:50.0) Permalink
Friday November 18, 2005 Cross posting this to my old Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh and my new blog at http://clairegiordano.org/blog/
Andy Tucker, formerly a DE on the Solaris and OpenSolaris teams at Sun, now a Principal Engineer at VMware, is blogging again. Yippee. Welcome, Andy. At Sun, we used to say that Andy had a "45 minute rule." The story goes that Andy wouldn't weigh in with a comment for the first 45 minutes of any meeting. Of course, it wasn't true. Not even close. More like urban myth - people thought it true because they'd heard it said. It certainly wasn't the case for 1/2 hour meetings. :-) But there was a kernel of truth - Andy was a good listener, and didn't storm into a room like a 200 lb gorilla intent on taking over. He gave other people room to be.
Of course I'm pleased to see that of Andy's first three blogs, the second is titled "VMware and OpenSolaris" and the third is "A new source browser is born" - about our open source operating system and the wicked fast OpenSolaris source browser called OpenGrok, respectively. He may have left Sun but the OpenSolaris project still has some of his mindshare. Good good good.
When Andy left Sun earlier this year to make his mark at VMware, I tried to write a blog to say thank you and wish him well. And failed. I found it difficult to figure out what to say. I know that's a lame excuse, but we had worked closely together closely for such a long time. First on Solaris 2.5 Platinum Beta, later in Clustering, later in Resource Management, then Zones, then OpenSolaris. Not only is Andy brilliant, not only does he possess incredibly sound judgement, but he's also flexible and willing to be questioned and challenged. And I'm sure he'll confirm that I asked him a lot of questions. :-)
Andy: I hope that Steve Herrod and team at VMware know how blessed they are to have you on board. And I look forward to reading more of Andy Tucker's Blog. Thanks.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-11-18 23:59:33.0) Permalink
Thursday November 17, 2005 Cross posting this to my Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh and my new blog at http://clairegiordano.org/blog/
I meant what I said in the "About Me" section of my blog: I'm hooked on blogging. I have Danese to thank for getting me started. And the fabulous team behind blogs.sun.com for creating the platform for Sun employees to blog on.
More importantly, I'm hooked on what I learn by reading other people's blogs. I know that a lot of people can't figure out how we bloggers find time to write blogs, or to read blogs, or to know what del.icio.us is -- all I can say is that once they figure out the answer to that question they may well become hooked too. Not only is blogging addictive, it's also a very effective way to share ideas.
All the above is drumroll and preface to a blogging decision I've made:
To take the plunge and create my own blog, separate from the ever cool blogs.sun.com platform. With a bow and thanks to the Roller blogging software that powers blogs.sun.com, I am switching to WordPress and have created my own blog.
And I have to say that WordPress rocks. So e-z to install. A promised 5 minute install that takes less than 5 minutes. A multitude of themes to choose from. (Thanks, Alex King, for the theme browser and the contest.) A thriving community that create plugins and themes and extensions. A collection of documents called the WordPress Codex. I'm quite pleased so far. (And yes oh yes, I have a lot more fiddling to do still.)
Hello world to http://clairegiordano.org/blog/ - And remember: WordPress rocks!
Technorati Tag: WordPress
(2005-11-17 23:37:34.0) Permalink
Wednesday November 16, 2005 ZFS Announcement on OpenSolaris - and Question of Voice
The "Welcome to the ZFS Community" announcement on the frontpage of OpenSolaris.org has a very succinct and to-the-point opening paragraph:
"ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use."
and the closing sentence of the announcement is worth repeating as well:
"Give it a spin, and let us know what you think!"
I've been asking that the announcements on the front page of OpenSolaris.org be personally signed and be written in conversational voice (not the written voice that so many of us learned during our education which is formal and stuffy and fails to capture the reader's imagination!) I agree with much of what Kathy Sierra says in her "Your user's brain wants a conversation" and "Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass" posts. I also appreciated Stephen O'Grady's discussion of the importance of voice as well in his "The Problem of Voice: On Paul Graham, Press Releases, and More" post. If you haven't thought about the role of voice, or think conversational voice is only for "dummies", I encourage you to read the above posts and start caring about the readers you lose as a result of using "formal voice", "press release voice", "man page voice" and "legal voice".
This announcement is signed by "The ZFS Team" (who on the ZFS team wrote it, I want to know!) so at least it is signed. And it does appear to be written in authentic voice. So, thanks to the ZFS team for a an announcement that is not robotic. And a question for all my readers - what do you think of the language in the ZFS announcement? Is it conversational enough? Does it keep your attention? Does it seem authentic?
If you want to know more about the Zettabyte File System, read the rest of the OpenSolaris announcement about ZFS. Or check out the ZFS community here. And be sure to check out the inaugural ZFS Screencast that I blogged about earlier this morning. Enjoy!
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: ZFS
(2005-11-16 12:10:39.0) Permalink
A ZFS Screencast for the ZFS Blog Carnival
Dan Price's gift of love to the ZFS BLOG CARNIVAL this morning is near and dear to my heart: a ZFS SCREENCAST. w00t!
Check it out! You do have to be a bit of a geek (it's good to know what a filesystem is) to appreciate it, but the simplicity of the administrative model should come through regardless...
I fell in love with the concept of an authentic voice, natural demo with both visuals and an audio track when I first saw Jon Udell's killer del.icio.us screencast. Jon later wrote an article titled, "The New Freshman Comp" (which is worthwhile reading, particularly for developers) which he concludes with:
"Writing and editing will remain the foundation skills they always were, but we'll increasingly combine them with speech and video. The tools and techniques are new to many of us. But the underlying principles--consistency of tone, clarity of structure, economy of expression, iterative refinement--will be familiar to programmers and writers alike."
I think Jon's right (as I've said before) and it's not a surprise to me that Dan is the one of the first in the Solaris (now OpenSolaris) engineering team to pave this screencasting path. Dan's always peeking around corners, looking for what's coming, critiquing how we approach problems and coming up with ideas for how to communicate and how to spread the word. In addition to doing his day job of engineering great technology.
In summary, I have 4 things to say:
1. Here is my Huge Welcome to the ZFS bits into OpenSolaris. This next-generation Zettabyte File System is sure to have a positive impact on the lives of system administrators - and the bottom lines of businesses. Congratulations to the fabulous team behind this great accomplishment.
2. Big thank you to Dan Price (and the other folks who helped him) for creating the First ZFS Screencast!
3. Please note that the ZFS bits are available in the OpenSolaris source code first - before showing up in a product anywhere. We really are serious about this open source and open development thing.
4. Thank you to Dave Johnson for giving a name (via Siflay Hraka) to what we're doing today (and what we did on the OpenSolaris Opening Day) - a Blog Carnival. I like it.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: ZFS
(2005-11-16 09:30:41.0) Permalink
Tuesday November 15, 2005 
The provocative title of "Was OpenSolaris a Mistake?" kept me away from Paul Murphy's blog entry for a few days, I admit. I'm usually lightning-quick to open a letter to discover its insides, regardless of whatever qualms I might have about the unknown (I'll never forget those much-anticipated college admission letters of decades past.. boy did those get opened quickly!) For some reason, I hesitated to read Paul's blog entry.
When I finally did read it, a big huge gigantic beaming smile slowly spread across my face. I love Paul's closing statement. Let me tell you why.
When I first started building the team to open source the Solaris Operating System (I was the senior manager in the Solaris engineering team given the "make it so" directive by Johnny Loiacono) I told the same story to all the candidates I interviewed:
"This project is full of challenges and obstacles and also tremendous opportunity. And no matter what the result, this project will be written up as business school case study. I don't know whether it will be a positive case study, or a negative one... But it WILL be a case study!"
So what was Paul Murphy's conclusion in the article? Here it is:
"So, bottom line: is openSolaris a mistake? Nope, it's business school 101 strategy in practice."
Emphasis and underlines all mine.
Paul gets the double-indirect strategy. Of course, the jury is still out on whether we will succeed in building this community - and community building takes a lot of hard work, sincerity and an ability to weather the storms along with the sunshine.
So, will OpenSolaris change the dynamics of the operating system space? Will more and more university computer science departments use OpenSolaris in their curriculum? Will developers get hooked on the benefits of DTrace? Time will tell. The early OpenSolaris numbers are quite encouraging, as are the early distributions based on the OpenSolaris code (SchilliX, BeleniX, Nexenta) and the fact that grassroots OpenSolaris User Groups have cropped up across 6 continents in the space of just 5 months. I for one believe that the OpenSolaris combination of technology and community will spawn all sorts of previously unimagined and creative endeavors. I await them with bated breath. Bring it on, folks!
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-11-15 16:14:42.0) Permalink Comments [3]
Saturday November 12, 2005 
AND 
Back in September I married my interests in Flickr and OpenSolaris by creating a Flickr group called OpenSolarisEnthusiast. The idea - to give people a place to post cool photos of themselves wearing their OpenSolaris gear - and to show the rest of the world how very real the growing OpenSolaris community is. After all, it's one thing to know that almost 10,000 people have registered in the OpenSolaris community in the first 150 days but it's another to see a picture of Patrick sporting his OpenSolaris shirt on his honeymoon no less.
So how's the Flickr group going in its first 50 days, you ask? So far, 25 enthusiasts have joined the Flickr group. And 22 photos have been posted from the Dead Sea, Paris and the Coliseum in Rome, from the Great Wall of China and an OpenSolaris User Group meeting in Texas, from a winery in Israel and from the OpenOffice.org conference in Slovenia! There's a great shot of Alan and his daughter in Australia and a photo of Bart on the Monster Garage boat wearing his OpenSolaris cap. One of the OpenSolaris Pilot members (a group of almost 150 people outside Sun who helped us prepare for launching this community) even posted a snapshot of his IKEA-framed, numbered OpenSolaris Pilot poster. (#037/150)
For those of you who haven't tried using the Flickr photo sharing service yet, I entreat you to try it. It's an easy-to-use and addictive way to share your photos. Flickr was originally a startup and was bought by Yahoo earlier this year. One of the things I like best about the service is how they use metrics to communicate what kind of attention things are getting. Such as how many times a photo has been viewed, how many photos have been tagged with a particular tag (tags such as OpenSolaris), how many photos in a group, how many members in a group. Some call this the Interestingness of Flickr.
If you're passionate about OpenSolaris, and if you like the cool t-shirts (I prefer the black to the white), here's a good way to share that passion. Join the OpenSolarisEnthusiast group on Flickr.
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-11-12 00:48:46.0) Permalink
Thursday November 10, 2005 BeleniX - a Live CD distribution built from OpenSolaris source code - is the "Featured distribution of the week" on DistroWatch. Thanks, Ben, for pointing it out. Congrats to Moinak Ghosh for the recognition. Gotta love the quote at the end of the article:
"Products like BeleniX are a clear indication that momentum is building behind Solaris and that many people find the product interesting enough to join the rapidly growing Solaris developer community."
Also to love - the beautiful artwork, by Chandan:
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: BeleniX
(2005-11-10 19:23:08.0) Permalink
Check it out - a video story about the making of OpenSolaris. Called Open Minds. Mary Mary aptly titled her pointer to this mini "making of" video clip "6 minutes, 24 seconds".
Since I lived, ate and breathed the OpenSolaris project for about 18 months before we launched on Opening Day, I think we could have populated a 60 minute documentary, but then again I have a thing for documentaries. The idea for Open Minds crystallized when Laura Ramsey and I ran into each other in Menlo Park back in May and sat down for a few minutes to chat in the California sun. We thought it might be interesting to get a bunch of the OpenSolaris team members to talk about why we open sourced the operating system and why we care so passionately about the project. Here it is... Enjoy! Thanks to Sara for making it happen. And if you like the story, please pass it around...
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
(2005-11-10 16:32:23.0) Permalink Comments [2]
Wednesday November 09, 2005 Communicating with del.icio.us
You know you're not blogging enough when other people blog your stories. Of course, that's a rather negative view, isn't it? I suppose the more positive perspective is that you know your stories are interesting when other people blog your stories. :-)
Here's my story. I presented on OpenSolaris to an IT exec from an Australian University last month. During the conversation, I decided to pull up del.icio.us (yes, my favorite social bookmarking service) to show the exec the growing library of bookmarked information that has been tagged with 'OpenSolaris' at del.icio.us/tag/opensolaris. Why? Whenever I talk about OpenSolaris, I try to do two things:
1. Draw a crystal clear picture of how the OpenSolaris Project will benefit whoever I'm talking to.
2. Outline ways in which they can participate in the community.
One way to participate in OpenSolaris is to share information about OpenSolaris happenings. Which you can do quite easily with del.icio.us. Your bookmarks are public. You can annotate a bookmark with a compelling one-liner that explains why a bookmark might deserve a click. (Thlinking, James calls this.) And you can tag your bookmarks for e-z sorting and viewing along with other similarly tagged bookmarks from other users. I've discovered all sorts of valuable stories and ideas tagged with OpenSolaris by looking here on a regular basis.
So, during the preso, I clicked over to look at the OpenSolaris bookmarks on del.icio.us, and lo and behold, one of the most recent bookmarks included a note from Stephen O'Grady to me and a few others. He knows I keep an eye on his del.icio.us bookmarks, so it was an easy and effective way for him to pass along a suggestion. (It turns out that Glynn Foster had already responded to the item in question, so I didn't need to weigh in as Stephen had suggested.) The point? O'Grady put it well: "it's a quick, easy way to collaborate in a more permanent fashion than email."
Here's what my Australian customer saw:
Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: del.icio.us
(2005-11-09 22:59:43.0) Permalink Comments [1]
