Darryl Gove's blog
Second life slides and script
Just completed the Second Life presentation. It appeared well attended, and I got a bundle of great questions at the end. If you were there, thank you! I've uploaded a screen shot that I managed to get before the presentation started. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the stage setup with the life-size books, a very nice touch.
Posted at 10:59AM Apr 24, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Sun | Comments[0]
Presentation and Q&A in second life tomorrow
I'll be in Second Life tomorrow talking about the book. The session is at 9am PST in the Andromeda Theatre. I've got a small set of slides describing the contents of the book (Here's the full ToC for the book). After the slides I'll be sticking around to answer questions.
Posted at 01:33PM Apr 23, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Sun | Comments[0]
Congratulations Will, and thank you!
Will Zhang just received an SDN award for leading the effort to translate Solaris Application Programming into Chinese. Thanks, Will!
Posted at 12:04PM Apr 07, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Sun |
Second life appearance (24th April @9am PST)
I've been invited to appear in Sun's "Meet the authors" programme in Second Life. I'll be talking about my book on 24th April, 9am PST. Hopefully there will be copies of my free book available to some fortunate attendants.
I missed the kick-off event, which was Jonathan Knudsen's talk on his book "Kicking Butt with MIDP and MSA", the transcript is available. He's also the author of the "Unofficial Guide to LEGO Mindstorms Robots", which probably makes him a tough act to follow!
Posted at 03:02PM Mar 18, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Sun |
Interview posted in Japanese
I recently did an e-mail interview with SDC Japan - the interview has been translated into Japanese.
Posted at 10:30AM Mar 17, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Sun |
Kindling
Solaris Application Programming is now available as a kindle book. I've not had the chance to try one of these things, but it seems like a perfect fit for reference books; a lot probably depends on the speed of the search - I rarely use technical books in a linear way.
Posted at 04:06PM Feb 26, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Sun |
CMT related books
OpenSPARC.net has a side bar featuring books that are relevant to CMT. Mine is featured as one of the links. The other two books are Computer Architecture - a quantitative approach which features the UltraSPARC T1, and Chip-Multiprocessor Architecture which is by members of the team responsible for the UltraSPARC T1 processor.
Posted at 11:14AM Feb 12, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Sun |
Sample chapter from Solaris Application Programming available
There's a sample chapter from my book up on sun.com/books.
It's chapter 4 which is the chapter which discusses the tools that come with Solaris and Sun Studio. The chapter exists because I find that there are some tools that I use every day, and some tools that I might touch once a month, and some that I use even more rarely. The problems I hit are:
- What was the name of the tool which ....?
- What are the command line options to ...?
- Is there a tool to ....?
Obviously I hit the third problem very infrequently, but I'm sometimes surprised when I discover a tool which I'd previously never heard of which just happens to do exactly what I need. Anyway I hope you find the chapter useful. It's one of my two solutions to this problem.
The other solution is spot which attempts to collect all the data that you routinely need for performance analysis of an application. So it calls the other tools - so you don't need to know the commandlines, or the names of the tools. One of the things that should be noticeable with spot is that it has few commandline options. I was hoping that we'd end up with none, but some are inevitable; but those are really house-keeping options (where to put the report, what to call it). There's only -X which generates an extended report, given the time it can take to get the data, it seemed appropriate to do the high value stuff quickly with an option for the tool to take a longer time when the user specified that it was ok.
Posted at 10:07AM Jan 28, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Sun |
That cover picture
Quite a few people have asked me about the picture on the cover of the book. I didn't get to choose it; in fact the first I knew of it was when I saw it on amazon. I had provided some input, I'd picked some pictures out from a selection of Sun brand photo stock. I think I'd found Stone Henge, Tower Bridge, and also an enigma machine (before we moved to California we were living in Milton Keynes, just up the road from Bletchley Park where all the code cracking happened). My general request was 'something English'. So when I saw the cover I thought 'Hmmm, fields, that's kind of English, but those don't look like English fields'.
When the books arrived I noticed that the photographer, Kevin Horan, was listed on the back, and a quick google later, I have identified that the pictures came from a collection called ... wait for it... American Farms!
Posted at 12:38PM Jan 18, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Sun |
The book is here
Yesterday afternoon I got two copies of the Solaris Application Programming book. I'd been on edge for quite a few days, since they were supposed to be printed on the 21st. I've skimmed through it and it looks fine (I recently read this, old, post on Jim Mauro's blog about the first edition of Solaris Internals, so I was expecting the worst!).
Posted at 08:08AM Dec 29, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Sun | Comments[3]
Wiki for Solaris Application Programming book
Set up a wiki page for the Solaris Application Programming book. Nothing much up there at present, except a few links. The release date on Amazon has slipped to 7th January in the US. Apparently the copies should be rolling off the press today!
Posted at 02:52PM Dec 21, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Sun |
Solaris Application Programming - available as rough cut
My book, "Solaris Application Programming", is now available as a Safari Rough-Cut.
For those who are unfamiliar with the rough-cut programme, the idea is to get early access to drafts of new books. The draft of my book that is available is the one that I actually handed over about two months back. This is before the copyeditor went through smoothing out the grammar, and also before I did another review of the text. The layout of the book is also different.
From the link you can either get access to the full text (for example, if you have a subscription to safari), or you can view snippets from various sections of the book to get a feel for the content.
Part of the idea of rough-cuts is that they provide an opportunity to influence/improve the final product. So please use the mechanism they provide to comment.
Posted at 04:11PM Oct 29, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Sun |
Solaris Application Programming Table of Contents
A couple of folks requested that I post the table of contents for my book. This is the draft TOC, not the finished product. I assume that there will be a good correspondence, but the final version should definitely look neater.
Posted at 09:04AM Sep 28, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Sun | Comments[2]
Solaris Application Programming book
I'm thrilled to see that my book is being listed for pre-order on Amazon in the US. It seems to take about a month for it to travel the Atlantic to Amazon UK.
Posted at 02:03PM Sep 25, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Sun | Comments[2]
