Egész héten a vékonykliens projekten dolgozom, de ma végre van egy kis pihenőm, mert délután elpusztult a gépterem hűtése és emiatt le kellett állítani a rendszereket. Végülis nem bántam túlzottan, mert így már 7-re hazaértem, míg kedden éjjel 11-ig ott marasztalt a konzol:). Tervezem, hogy írok egy cikket a Mozilla autoconfig lehetőségeiről, LDAP integrációjáról - a hup-ról megtudjátok, ha sikerült rávennem magamat.

Az utóbbi időben _Joel néven többé-kevésbé konstruktív módon szólogatok hozzá a HUP híreinek kommentárjaihoz. Volt néhány nagyon csúnya thread ami miattam robbant ki (lásd: itt, ami miatt még egy Tomcat féle B@LF@SZ pólóval is meg akartak páran ajándékozni). Az a baj, hogy ma Magyarországon rengetegen képzelik azt, hogy néhány Linux feltelepítése után övék az egész világ és az IT-ból nem lehet nekik újat mutatni. 6 éves korom óta ütögetem a billentyúket, 14 évesen C64 assembly-ben irogattam dolgokat, 17 évesen full x86 assembly-ben lemezújságot írtam. Elvégeztem egy egyetemet egész szép eredménnyel, de mégis nap mint nap, óráról órára új és új dolgokat tanulok meg. Most például éppen azt próbálom felfogni, hogy hogyan is működik a DTrace a Solaris 10-ben:). De ez kell is, mert az IT ma is dinamikusan fejlődik, és biztos vagyok benne, hogy bármilyen mai konkrét gyakorlati tudás 10 év múlva szinte semmit sem fog érni.

És egy sikersztori:) Az előző bejegyzés nem várt reakciót szült, ugyanis a Directory Server egyik fejlesztője írt, hogy szívesen megnézi az említett Sun Forum-os install scriptet. Ma délelőtt át is küldte a módosított LDAP sémát, amit délután sikerült bekonfigurálnom és a Sun Forum kliensek ezentúl képesek a Sun LDAP-ot használni. Ez azért fontos, mert ezt az alkalmazást fogják Helpdesk-ként használni az üzemeltetők: ha valakinek valami problémája van, akkor a Sun Forum-mal "felhívja" a Helpdesk-et, megosztja az alkalmazást (T.120), és átadja a vezérlést a Helpdesk-esnek. Közben tudnak egymással beszélgetni (aki használt már Netmeeting-et az tudja, hogy ez hogyan működik). A felhasználű nemcsak a problémáját mondhatja el, de azt is végignézheti, hogy azt hogyan kell megoldani.

Creating a Solaris 9 and Gnome 2.0 based locked down desktop environment which 300 Sun Ray users will use is a frustrating task. You come across problems you wouldn't think of in advance... like:
- How to get rid of "CDE Menu" in the Gnome Applications menu (it's a bitfield in gconf)?
- How to localize items in the "Add to panel" menu (you have to edit .server files in /usr/lib/bonobo/servers)?
- How to setup Mozilla autoconfiguration (if only it was documented somewhere)?
- How to setup an LDAP directory for Sun Forum 3.2 (a Netmeeting-like application for Solaris) when the included ldap setup script was written 3 years ago and the LDAP schema in Sun Java Directory Server 5.2 is not compatible with the old one (still struggling with this one)?

BTW, does anyone know how to convert Sun shipped .mo files into .po files? GNU's unmsgfmt says "Not in GNU format", which is sadly true... We were able to localize much of the Gnome desktop by unmsgfmt-ing the German .mo files, but Sun Forum is not compatible with this method.

The best place to watch a Formula One Grand Prix is most probably the Paddock Club. Unfortunately you cannot buy a ticket to this place. You can get it for free though.

It's common knowledge that Sun is the technical sponsor of McLaren. It's not as widely known that because of this sponsorship Sun is eligible to invite a few guests to watch the Grand Prix from the Paddock Club. The number of guests is limited and the most important persons are invited on Sunday. Last August I had the chance to be there all weekend:)

You may ask how could a simple presales engineer watch the show from the first row... Well the trick is: I wasn't there to enjoy the show. I was working. :)

Sun gave McLaren a Sun Blade 2000 workstation and two Sun Ray 150s to provide the guests with Internet access. The equipment was traveling with the circus around the world and in each country a lucky Sun engineer was asked to provide onsite support of the equipment. In Hungary I was the only one available with Sun Ray skills.

Although I only had a service pass (which didn't allow me to eat or drink in the area) I was able to get my hands on a full Paddock Club ticket both Friday and Saturday (some guests didn't show up and Alex - the brown-haired woman in a white top, smiling to some guests in the background on the picture above - gave me their pass so I didn't have to starve all day:). It was an interesting experience.

The Paddock club was located on top of the paddock area. Every guest was given an earplug which proved to be a real lifesaver. Without the earplug the noise of the engines causes real physical pain. I know, I didn't wear them on the first day:)

On Saturday and Sunday Balint Fleischer visited us. He's Chief Technology Officer in the Network Storage Group and was born in Hungary. He left the country in the early eighties and immigrated to the US.

These are the earplugs and the McLaren hat.

There was absolutely no problem with the Sun Rays, though one of the guests (but not a guest of Sun:) tried to steal the McLaren mouse pads:). He felt a bit embarrassed when I asked him to take it out of his shirt and put it back on the table, but did so. He was a bit drunk actually... The other incident happened when another guy poured a glass of wine all over the keyboard but we had a spare one just for the case.

Circus...

Wow, our office is going flexible! We've tried to put it off as long as possible, but now it's official: from September on the Hungarian office will implement iWork and the flexible office stuff. I can't say I'm too happy about it. I have nothing against Sun Rays (I really like the mobility it gives) but the per head floor space one can occupy will be reduced as well (3 former cubicles will be used to create about 5-6 flexible office workplaces).

Tomorrow I'll be at a customer site all day. We're doing a 300 seat Sun Ray installation at a utility company in Budapest, and the project is nearing it's final phase. This is real solution business: the first presentation about thin clients were held in early 2002, the pilot was finished in late 2002 and for various reasons the RFP phase took almost one and a half years. We've won the procurement process in March and started the project in early April. It's really complex, two of the biggest problems are the localization of Sun software and the migration of the customers existing PC (DOS and Windows based) infrastructure. Localization means Sun Gnome and various JES web frontends, as Sun doesn't support us officially in this (we had to find a local company to help us in this respect but luckily I still have some connections at the university and students can be very effective in creating good quality translations of technical texts).

I've found the blog of Tim Foster, who seems to be working on technologies to make localizations easier to do. It's strange, I've always thought that Sun globally contracts other companies to do the translations... at least that was my perception last time I tried to convince a product manager (he kept on saying things like "I need a solution that scales"... Of course he meant a business solution, not a technical one:)

Ejtsük meg a blog első magyar nyelvű bejegyzését is, üdvözlet mindenkinek:)

Ezen az oldalon és ebben a rovatban elsősorban olyan dolgokról lesz szó, amikkel Sun alkalmazottként a magyar nyelvű internet (főleg szakmai) oldalait böngészve szembesülök.

Magamról talán annyit, hogy 2002-ben végeztem a Műegyetemen informatikus mérnökként, 2000 óta állok valamilyen formában a Sun alkalmazásában és az utóbbi időben elsősorban Sun szoftverekkel (Solaris, Java Desktop System, Java Enterprise System) és a Sun Ray vékonykliens technológiával foglalkozom. 1997 és 2002 között a BME Schönherz Kollégium aktív lakójaként ügyködtem, többek között egy belső portál fejlesztésével foglalkoztam (kir.sch.bme.hu), melynek végeredményeként a diplomamunkámat "XML nyelvek használhatóságának vizsgálata web alapú rendszerek tervezéséhez és fejlesztéséhez" témában írtam.

This piece of technology is really promising although it wasn't easy to get everything right. I've started playing with it yesterday afternoon. I've installed the software multiple times on my notebook, but all I got was a couple of NullPointerExceptions in Mozilla. I downloaded a packaged "canned" demo cd in the evening, took it home but the NullPointerExceptions just kept coming. I gave up at 11pm and decided to get up early in the morning and reinstall JDS before the aforementioned partner event (I've left the install CDs in the office). That was when I've found out about blogs.sun.com and spent half the night creating this simple template and the photo montage in the title bar. So, I went to sleep at 3am, got up at 6, arrived in the office at 7, reinstalled JDS by 8, installed APOC by 8:30 and arrived before the start of event at 9. Luckily it was held in the castle district: Hotel Hilton which is not far from the Sun office (although it's on top of a hill: probably most of you who had the pleasure to visit Budapest and Hungary should remember the place and the stairs quite well).

Of course the NullPointerExceptions were coming because previously I had JDS Quicksilver build 05 installed and later upgraded my installation to the last FCS build. The upgrade must have kept the Configuration Management facility broken. That's the price I pay for running Sun on Sun beta:)

I feel I'm going to fall asleep soon...

I'm back in the office from a partner event held by DNS, our Channel Distributor Partner in Hungary. We have a new software sales rep who used to work for IBM and has a very good understanding of how the software business and market works in this region. This was the first time I saw him give a presentation and he was really impressive. He had 14 slides but talked over an hour describing Sun's strategy, giving many hints on why these things are happening.

I gave a presentation on Java Desktop System with a little demo of JDS Configuration Manager (also known as APOC). Conf. Manager is pretty impressive stuff. Too bad most of the feedback was about the lack of Hungarian localization of JDS and StarOffice. I cannot blame them - I'm trying to do my best to convince people in product marketing to do Hungarian localizations, but it looks like a lone presales engineer/ps consultant located in a post-communist central european EU member country doesn't have the weight to achieve much success (on the other hand this is not entirely true but I don't think I'm allowed to talk about this just yet:).

First post... some facts and background

I'm working as a Sun Professional Services software consultant in Hungary, Europe. I'm 25 years old, living with my girlfriend in Budapest.

This blog will include a category called "Magyarul" which I will use to add entries in my native language: Hungarian.