Friday January 13, 2006

I, Luddite

At the old SeeBeyond, I was the patent coordinator. Over four years, I increased our portfolio of filed patent applications from three to 24. I was rather proud of this, but today I am turning the keys over to ... a robot. Yep, automation strikes again. Sun uses an online system in which any employee can submit a patent idea, which will then be evaluated by a Patent Review Committee for possible filing as a completed patent application. The system seems to work well, since Sun has thousands of issued patents, but it is a little disconcerting to see one of my major activities turned over to a web site.

Solaris 10 on DistroWatch

I just noticed today that Solaris 10 is on DistroWatch.com. This is way cool. And it's ranked 29th, based on daily page hits! This is actually very good, when you consider that there are hundreds of Linux distros out there, and that we're only four places behind Red Hat. The page they devote to Solaris is great, filled with useful links and info. I'm sure you hard-core Solaris guys knew all about this, but to a newbie like me it was quite inspiring.

Need to handle Asian encodings?

A few weeks ago I was made product manager for internationalization activities at Sun SeeBeyond, in addition to my regular eView Studio duties. I guess they think I don't have enough to do....;-)  Anyway, this is a fascinating area. For our products, it goes way beyond the normal Sun requirements of translating GUIs and online help screens into various languages. Since we are in the middleware game, what it means to us is the ability to handle messaging in weird double byte encodings like shift-JIS and Big5, as well as UTF-8, UTF-16 and other crazy stuff. Japanese EBCDIC, anyone? Pretty cool stuff, and actually only weird or crazy from my own narrow, ethnocentric view.

Sun is such a big company that sometimes we don't know all the great capabilities we have in-house. So if your customers have the need to communicate between applications using Asian encodings, we may be able to help.