Un Posto al Sole: Finding My Place in the Sun

Yesterday Jim Grisanzio gave a lovely keynote at the Open Solaris Developers' Conference in Prague, well illustrated with his own fantastic photos.

Here's Part 2:

part 2, ~40 mins

Also available in iPod video format:

• Jim Grisanzio OSDC keynote part 1
• Jim Grisanzio OSDC keynote part 2
  

Yesterday Jim Grisanzio gave a lovely keynote at the Open Solaris Developers' Conference in Prague, well illustrated with his own fantastic photos.

Here's Part 1 - I'm still processing Part 2.

part 1, 30 mins

Check out Jim Grisanzio's great photos, I'm in there.

This is a very busy month for me, travelling to videoblog events and sites worldwide.

To give you an idea, here's a brief video from the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, where Sun announced a new member of our Sun Constellation System Family (along with new goodies in HPC software).

The show floor wasn't an ideal filming environment. We had a gaggle of press gathered around the booth, many of them tall, so I had to shoot holding the camera over my head. There are advantages to using a lightweight, consumer-grade camcorder instead of heavy professional equipment!

~5 mins

About a year ago, Dan Maslowski had a simple-but-brilliant idea to increase the reach of some of Sun's Open Solaris Storage blogs: translate them! Sun's globalization team was initially cautious: they already had their hands full translating interfaces and documentation, and weren't sure where this blogging thing fit into their scope of work. But they agreed to give it a shot. 

We started with Bob Porras' blog. Based on attendance at Sun Tech Days worldwide, he opted to have it translated into Chinese (first post July 9th), quickly followed by Spanish (first post August 17th) and Russian (August 20th). We've recently added Japanese (April 30th) and Brazilian Portugese (May 22nd).

The results were good, though not surprising: traffic increased.

What's more interesting than the simple increase in page views is the range of countries now represented in Bob's readership. Here's a breakdown of traffic by (roughly calculated) language areas:

New entrants Japanese and Brazilian Portugese are already making a noticeable contribution - clearly, there was demand for material in these languages. (Note that "all others" refers to all other countries that have sent traffic to Bob's blog - folks from these countries are obviously reading one of the six languages so far represented.)

Our geographic reach increased. For example, look at the number of Spanish-speaking countries from which people are reading Bob's blog each month:

Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May
3	6	8	8	9	13	8	10	10	12	11	11

The list varies a bit from month to month, altogether 15 Spanish-speaking countries are represented so far:

Andorra
Argentina
Bolivia
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Mexico
Peru
Puerto Rico
Saint Lucia
Spain
Venezuela

Some of these are tiny countries bringing us only one or two visitors a month - but that's one or two more people we're talking to that we weren't before.

Now let's look at Storage Stop, a very different kind of blog which we began translating into Chinese in November, but have neglected to since March. Umm, we'll just claim that was a web traffic experiment, not an oversight, right?

I wonder whether translating Storage Stop is useful, because it's primarily an aggregator, pointing at material on other blogs (so far mostly in English), and a venue for videos which are so far entirely in English. (We're looking into ways to translate videos.) For that or whatever reason, Storage Stop never got a lot of traction in Chinese, and I may abandon that experiment to spend translation resources more productively.

Since December we've also been translating Scott Tracy's blog and Lynn Rohrer's blogs into Chinese.

But it was clear from the overall trends of traffic to Sun storage blogs that our most-valued material is mostly highly technical. So over the last few months we've been translating selected posts into various languages. Examples include:

• SAMQFS
• Jeff Bonwick in multiple languages - use the language selector on the right
• Dan Maslowski
• Eric Kustarz
• Mark Carlson
• Tim Thomas in Chinese and Japanese
• Jeff Cheeney
  

These translations are mostly too recent to draw conclusions; I'll report back after we've got some numbers to analyze. 

We also translated one important post by Jim Grisanzio on Building OpenSolaris Communities, into multiple languages. Early returns show that this is having an effect on traffic and, more importantly, as Jim had hoped, it's opening up new conversations.

Sun's globalization team are now enthusiastically and ably taking over more of the blog translation process: all I have to do is identify the posts to translate, and they do the rest. With their help, more blogs are being translated all over Sun, in other technology areas such as Sun Cluster.

We're opening up to the global conversation, and the world is talking back. Sometimes the simplest ideas have the profoundest effects.

Travel, travel, travel...

During my year as a contractor to Sun, I wasn't allowed to have an external-facing Sun blog. Being an obsessive documenter, I started an internal blog (accessible to Sun folks only) so that I could capture what I was learning, just in case it was useful to someone, someday.

When the Sun wikis became available, I put a bunch of those blog posts into a new blog tips section. But they're still kinda buried. So here are the links:

 

How-To's

• Posting Flash Video to a Sun Blog
• Add a Blogroll to Your Blog
• Adding Language Selector Links to a Roller Theme
• Preparing a Blog Post for Translation
• Use the Icon and About this blog features

Tips

• Tell Your Readers Who You Are
• Some Links Good, More Links Better
• Let Roller Do the Formatting
• Refreshing Old Blog Posts
• Use Your Signature to Increase Links and Traffic
• Spell It Right
• Build Blog Traffic by Serving Your Two Core Audiences

One of my reasons for coming to Bangalore was to work with the Sun Cluster team here on some short films. They had great ideas (no, I'm not going to tell you what they were - don't want to spoil the fun before the films are edited and released), loads of enthusiasm, and the talent to back it all up.

This was my first attempt to direct anything: usually I just film what's in front of me as best I can. I'm not sure they really needed me to do it, either, except perhaps as a catalyst. Now that the ball is rolling, I suspect the team will find inspiration to make plenty more films on their own. But, FWIW, there I am, looking directorial.

Just call me Farah Khan, without the choreographic talents.

It was a privilege and a blast to work with these folks. Once we release these films, we'll issue a company-wide challenge: I'd like to see whether any other team at Sun can do as well!

Thanks to Thirthankar and Shiv for the photos!

In my visits to various Sun campuses, I enjoy comparing and contrasting Sun lifestyles worldwide.

Sun's India Engineering Center (IEC) occupies most of the Divya Shree Chambers building off Langford Road in Bangalore. Lunch (always a major preoccupation with me) is provided at the 5th-floor canteen, which gets very crowded around 12:45. There's a buffet of Indian food for Rs. 25 (about 60 cents US)...

or you can order a wide selection of vegetarian sandwiches and fresh fruit, including a fruit chaat plate - diced seasonal fruit lightly seasoned with spices (so lightly, in fact, that I couldn't really detect the spices over the amazing flavors of the fruit itself).

This is mango season, so I've been eating mangoes every chance I get. The poor, pale things we get in the US and Europe are only very distant reminders of what a really good mango can be. Makes coming to India in the hot season worthwhile!

To give you an idea, this is a selection of three different types of mangoes that I bought in Delhi, including the famous Alfonsos (yellow, in front). The large yellow thing on the right is a papaya, the stripey things are melons. 

The Sun break rooms have a great selection of teas, including elaichi (cardamom), masala (what Americans call chai spice), and ginger. Plus a selection of other hot drinks - cocoa, instant coffee, and flavored mixes that I haven't quite understood yet.

There's a machine dispensing hot water and hot milk to mix these with. There is also brewed coffee, brewed south Indian style. Umm... Sorry, I'm not a coffee snob, but i just can't get used to this stuff. I'll make do with instant.

As with most establishments of any sort in India, Sun's offices have a lot of support staff - labor is cheap here, and people need jobs. There are men in the break rooms to brew the coffee, ensure constant supplies of everything, and wash the cups (a much more eco-friendly practice than the disposable ones used at US offices). They also come around periodically to collect cups that people have carried back to their desks. All the work areas get thoroughly dusted every morning before people arrive (I know because I arrived early yesterday). This is in sharp contrast to Broomfield, where I have to dust my desk every time I go back there.

After seeing my daughter graduate from Woodstock School last week, this week I'm visiting Sun's engineering center in Bangalore, to meet colleagues - and film them!

I haven't been to Bangalore since 1980, when it was a sleepy little town. No more! The ride in from the new airport (just opened last week) took an hour and a half, the first part of it very fast on a brand-new six-lane highway. Then we hit city traffic...

I'm staying at the Chancery Pavilion Hotel, which is within easy walking distance from Sun's office, if you know how to get there. I didn't, so colleague Sanjeev Bagewadi came to get me - the route is impossible to explain. I've mapped it for the benefit of other Sun travellers:

View Larger Map

When you reach the building, what you notice first is this magnificent tree:

We don't have vegetation like this in Broomfield. In spite of the building boom, Bangalore is still delightfully green.

The security guards at the US offices cannot boast such snappy uniforms!

Sign in Kannada, the official language of Karnataka state, though many other languages are spoken in Bangalore, including, of course, English.

The building has a beautiful atrium lit by a huge skylight.

Here's the view into the atrium from the 6th floor:

Got back to my Broomfield office today, after two weeks in California, and was touched and amused to find that someone had appended a note to the hand-scrawled nameplate on my office (Diana's been out for a while and hasn't got around to printing me an official one):

 

It's nice to feel appreciated! (No, I don't know who wrote it.) 

This week I'm in Oakland, CA, videoblogging at the Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference. Here's the first video I've had time to edit from this event.

~20 mins.

download the iPod video version 

One of the things I do for Sun is videoblogging. I use that term in preference to videography, filming, etc., because I don't claim to be a video professional.

Nor do I have professional equipment. I need to be light on my feet (and in my suitcase), and I often have to shoot under less than ideal situations. When professional video services are justified, Sun has (expensive) teams to provide them.

But I've been upgrading, with advice from my videoblogging friend Jan McLaughlin, who's a movie sound professional.

So here's what I've got:

Camera: Panasonic PV-GS500. It's a decent camera, 3CCDs, but really nothing special; we got it cheap because it was a floor model at Best Buy. I prefer cameras that use mini-DV tape. Tape is a cheap form of permanent backup, and it stores the video in a high-quality, raw AVI format that I can edit with the software I have, and can output at DVD quality (or better) if I need to (though I more often compress to Flash and iPod video formats for online distribution). Hard disk cameras, on the other hand, often compress while you're shooting into a lossy video format - that's why they can fit so many hours of video onto a small internal hard disk.

Extra battery: Some of the events I've videoed weren't set up for it, at venues that wanted to charge hundreds of dollars simply to supply a convenient power outlet. It made more sense to get an extra battery that will last several hours, and having two means I can charge one at a less-convenient outlet while using the other on the camera.

Sound

At the first big event I taped, I learned that it's tricky to attach a professional sound board to a consumer videocamera. Running a big, heavy XLR audio cable into the camera's 1/8" audio jack required an adapter and was a shaky arrangement - we lost half the audio on one presentation because something came loose.

On Jan's recommendation, I bought:

• Rode VideoMic: Gets much better sound than the camera's internal mic, especially when aiming across a roomful of people. This is particularly useful in less-formal talks when there's a lot of Q&A between the audience and the speaker, and it's hard to get people to use secondary mics even if available (it's also hard to get speakers to repeat the questions). This mic is also great for hand-held shooting - it doesn't weigh down my camera hand too much.
  
• BeachTek DXA-4P Dual XLR Adapter: This is a mini-mixer that fits between the camera and the tripod, with a mini-jack that goes into the camera's mic jack. It provides a much more stable connection for XLR cables, and can also take input from another source such as the Rode mic, as shown above. Audio levels can be set independently for the two channels using the knobs - while you're filming, whereas the camera's internal audio level can only be set when you're not.

I won't claim I'm getting the best possible results from this setup; I'm still learning to use it. But the sound quality of my videos has improved markedly since my early efforts.

^ Here's my equipment bag for carting stuff to and from the show floor. It's a reusable grocery bag bought at a Santa Cruz supermarket the other day for 99 cents.

As for editing, I use the Roxio VideoWave software that comes with Roxio Media Creator. It's easy to use (with a few irritating quirks) and so far has most of what I need, including text and graphic overlays. Again, it's good enough, while a software upgrade would also require a skills upgrade that I don't currently have time for. When we need professional video editing, there are folks available at Sun to provide that service.

And here's how I post Flash video to Sun blogs and other sites.

Remember that team-building exercise at the Open Solaris Developers' Summit that I mentioned earlier? Part of the Go Games package is that you get access to all the photos and video shot during the game. So I had a little fun with it...
 

~10 mins.

download the iPod video version