It has certainly been a long time since my last post. Unfortunately, most of the activities I'm associated with at Sun are covered by NDA/CDA, so I'm unable to post anything about them. To exacerbate the situation, I've also been devilishly busy. Both excuses have conspired against my blogging habits. However, I'm now in a slightly better place in terms of the amount of brain power I can devote to blogging. With any luck, I'll be able to keep the ol' blog space updated regularly for at least the next six months! :).

I keep a pretty close eye on what is happening in the Subversion community. I have recently toyed with the idea of writing a regular series with a name like "This week on svn-dev", in a similar vein to This Week on perl5-porters. If you are interested in Perl development, this is the place to look. It summarizes the goings on of the perl5 development effort, including discussions on design of features and bug fixes. There are always interesting discussions on the Subversion development alias, most of which aren't well known by anyone except those that are able to filter through ~200 emails per week to find the good stuff.

I am also looking into the possibility of writing some articles on PSH (specifically fmd) internals. I've done a good deal of work with FMA in my day job recently. In fact, I wrote an object-oriented Perl API around the fault management configuration and reporting tools provided with Solaris 10 (fmadm, fmstat, fmdump). I then implemented a number of utilities on top of that API which are used in the manufacture of most of Sun's products (Currently Sun Fire 2900/4900/6900/20K/25K and US-T1 platforms [Niagara]). The tool set is primarily used to check, count, and classify hardware faults. For instance, I wrote a tool which dumps the contents of the fmd error and fault logs (which are extended accounting files (see libexacct(3LIB)) as XML data which is stored for historical analysis of FMA performance in our manufacturing processes.

Perhaps I will be able to publish some initial articles this week -- only time will tell. Unfortunately, blogging is icing for me, not cake.