Tuesday July 31, 2007

New Year's Resolutions

Yesterday, we've announced good financial results for the last fiscal year 07. Very good financial results. I like working for a profitable company, it makes so many things so much easier.

Tomorrow, I'm going to have a meeting with my managers to discuss what to do next. Since we're early in the new financial year 08, I'm thinking about what to do next. So, here are some new year's priorities for my FY08 at Sun:

• Web 2.0: I've been talking to customers, partners and Sun people in Germany about Web 2.0 a number of times. Every time, the feedback has been very clear: We want More! So I'm going to do more Web 2.0 related stuff: More blogging, podcasting, perhaps a successor to the now famous ZFS movie, more participation in social networking sites, including del.icio.us, XING and Facebook, more evangelizing and of course more insight into where this journey is headed to.
• Technology: Sun is all about technology. We create, apply and leverage technology to enable the participation age. (Did you know that we've proclaimed the participation age before Tim O'Reilly published his famous Web 2.0 article?)
  We've seen Niagara changing the rules of processor technology and building the backbone of the web, again, and we've already disclosed some information on Niagara 2. We've seen the Constellation System debut during ISC 2007. You may have noticed that the Sun Ultra 40 Workstation is the best workstation on the planet, and BTW, we're changing the economics of true Video-On-Demand Streaming as well, just to name a few favourite technologies on my list.
  The biggest problem to solve now is: Spreading the word. Let me explain. Whenever I participate in a Sun day (A customer meeting in which Sun people present on new Sun technologies), two effects consistently happen: First, more people than originally planned show up (I once had people join in over a video conference line). Second, the meeting takes much longer than originally anticipated, because customers want to hear so much more about our technologies.
  Since we don't have much money to spend on advertising, sponsoring or other forms of traditional awareness generation, we need to do a lot more of these Sun days, and talk to customers one by one. Is this more difficult and time-consuming? Yes. Does this have a more lasting effect than traditional marketing? You bet. Only by talking to the experts at our customers are we able to verify that what we do is right and make sure our technology meets the people that want/need/develop for/join/use/participate in it. In FY08, I'm going to participate in more Sun days and talk to as many customers about Sun technology as I can.
• Solaris: This may be a sub-topic of "Technology", but it really is a topic of its own: I use Solaris at home, on my laptop, evangelize it to customers, and it feeds my need as a computer scientist to learn about interesting things every day. In FY08, I'm going to use more new Solaris features at home and at work, write more about it (German readers: Check out this ZFS whitepaper), participate more in the OpenSolaris communities and make sure OpenSolaris gets the attention with developers, customers and partners that it deserves.

"New Year's Resolutions" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-07-31 14:17:55.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
community niagara niagara2 open opensolaris opensource solaris sun system technology web2.0 work zfs
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Wednesday July 25, 2007

Now That's What I Call Rock-Solid!

Check out this story from systemhelden.com. A system admin enters their datacenter, only to find this scene of a crushed floor and a fallen rack full of Sun equipment. This must have happened some time ago, only the sysadmin didn't notice it because all of the servers were still running as if nothing happened! Later, Sun services checked every system in the rack and the only fault they found was a simple harddisk failure.

Sun systems have a reputation for being rock-solid, no doubt... 

P.S.: "Systemheld" translates to "system hero". Systemhelden.com is a community for the unsung system admin among us, in constant danger to be disbudgeted by moronic beancounters and haunted by incompetent lusers. Sometimes, their only defense is a LART-Whip.

"Now That's What I Call Rock-Solid!" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-07-25 12:31:07.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
fun reputation server solid sun system x64
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Tuesday July 17, 2007

A Better Alternative to "Bruellwuerfel"s

A "Brüllwürfel" translates to english as "yellcube". It's a german play of words for cheap, tinny PC speakers. It ryhmes with "Brühwürfel" which is the german word for stock cubes. You know, those cubes you toss into the soup to make it taste like soup.

When sitting at my desk, I don't have any decent speakers to hear music with, only what's built into my laptop. The standard solution for laptop/PC listening are low-cost active speakers, Brüllwürfels, and their audio quality generally tends to suck.

When noone's listening, I'm trying to create some music with Logic Express. Same problem here, but the solution space now expands into the wonderful world of studio monitor speakers. So I went shopping.

It turns out that studio monitors are optimized to sound as neutral as possible (which correlates with my personal definition of "good") withing a short range (home studio or desk, both are near-range) and they come with their own built in amplifiers (which are optimized to sound good with the particular speaker). And they are designed with the musician in mind, not some PC-gamer. Here's a good introduction into the subject.

The german Professional Audio magazine's review list features quite a few low-cost studio monitor speakers below EUR 200. In particular, Fame's 1060 AM speakers earned a "very good" in overall rating and an "outstanding" in price/performance for their class. They are on sale for EUR 99 at Music-Store, so in they go into my shopping cart.

Professional equipment uses balanced signaling instead of the consumer audio connections and they typically come with XLR or 6.35 mm TRS jack plugs - not your regular audio out connection from your laptop. But since laptop sound chips rarely deliver good quality anyway and because we just saved so much by not having to buy an extra amplifier, we can now invest in a decent D/A converter.

Most of the computer audio and electronic music companies sell good, USB-powered D/A converter boxes that sound better than any laptop audio-out jack. In my case, I fell in love with the beautiful Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1. It's portable, it has a microphone pre-amp and inputs (for podcasting), great audio quality at 192 kHz and 24 Bit with balanced outputs (better quality than standard audio wires), fully programmable controller knob and switches and it's full of good german engineering inside as well. It currently sells at approx. EUR 250 but of course you can find lower cost alternatives if you don't care about recording and just want to feed those monitors.

I can't wait to get the stuff delivered, I'll let you know how it sounds :).

Lesson learned: Don't settle with the consumer stuff, check out what the pros use when faced with a similar problem!

Update (Friday, July 6th): Today the monitor speakers and the audio interface arrived, and I only ordered them wednesday evening. Great mail order service! The speakers are a bit bigger than I expected, but that's actually good as they now sit at the top of a shelf, laying on their sides, creating an extra layer on top of them to place my printer on. The NI Audio Kontrol 1  audio interface is simply amazing: Great quality, nice design, lots of features. The speakers sound excellent: Great detail, good sound stage even though they're only at arm's length, not a single speckle of hum nor noise and lots of power. The whole setup is so good that I can easily hear which songs have been recorded/mixed at high production quality and which ones could need some tinkering here and there. Didn't know I could actually hear that.

I'm now in Brüllwürfel heaven...

Update (Friday, Tuesday, July 17th) Since the original version of the article had a few issues with german "Umlauts" and Feeburner and/or the comment function, I'm reposting this with an Umlaut-less title.

"A Better Alternative to "Bruellwuerfel"s" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-07-17 07:51:24.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
audio bruellwuerfel brüllwürfel monitor speakers
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