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.
Monday May 12, 2008
Thursday May 08, 2008
During the OpenSolaris Developers' Summit last weekend, Glynn Foster had everyone in the room (on Saturday morning) introduce themselves. Capturing that on video seemed like a good way to introduce them to the rest of the open solaris community as well, so here they are:
~40 mins.
Lo-Res version, for those with less bandwidth:
download iPod video version
Wednesday May 07, 2008
After the general party at Moscone Center (footage to come), there was a somewhat smaller party at a nearby bar/restaurant.
We had quite a bit to celebrate - and quite a bit to celebrate it with!
A number of cool non-Sun people were present, including ^ Jay Edwards (one of the handful of engineers who runs one of my favorite online services, Twitter). I had to have a photo taken with him, to impress all my Italian twithead friends.
^ Jesse Silver, who had done such a fantastic job organizing the Developers' Summit, and Silona Bonewald, whom I'll be seeing more of at next week's Grid & Cluster conference. Silona is wearing our trendy green and blue opensolaris wristbands.
^ Jim Huges unites opensolaris (temporary tattoo logo on his forehead) with MySQL's dolphin mascot. Hey, I didn't get one of those! (Nor did I get one of the very cool "Build your community" t-shirts from CommunityOne, wah! But I do have two different opensolaris t-shirts.)
Jeff Bonwick and Jim play an intense game of pool.
Tuesday May 06, 2008
After a busy weekend at the OpenSolaris Developers' Summit in Santa Cruz, Lynn, Jeff, and I drove up California's gorgeous Highway 1 to San Francisco to attend CommunityOne.
The keynote session was kicked off by Ian Murdock, who talked about open source, with help from Jonathan and illustrations from Hugh McLeod.
This was all by way of introducing opensolaris 2008.05.
Rich Green, Jim Hughes, and Jeff Bonwick went all Wile E. Coyote on some disk drives to prove the resilience of the ZFS file system (note the name on the anvil).
I spent most of the afternoon filming sessions (footage which will be publicly available as soon as I have time to edit it) and then... it was time to party!
Sunday May 04, 2008
I'm attending the OpenSolaris Developers' Summit, held in Santa Cruz, CA, May 3-4, 2008. I've been working with and participating in various online communities for a long time, but I'm new to this one, and have a lot to learn about the people, technologies, history, present realities, and possible futures. This weekend is an excellent opportunity to start filling in some of those gaps.
Tim Cramer and Jim Walker
Lunch line: Mark Carlson, Dave Stewart (Intel Dave), Ken Mays...
Back of someone's head, Shiv, Jim Grisanzio, Sriram Narayanan
David Korn speaks, with IRC backchatter.
My mascot and (some of) my equipment: The Mussoorie Monster and the videocamera.
Jim Plocher, Simon Phipps, soi-disant PITA Ben Rockwood, Glynn Foster, Vincent Cordrey
The entrance to Cocoanut Grove, Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, where we gathered for a Go Games teambuilding exercise, similar to one I took part in last September in San Francisco.
Team "Sleeping Threads" strategizes: Shawn Walker, Nick Solter, Glenn Fowler, Alta Elstad. I got to know them quite well in the course of running up and down the boardwalk and surrounding area. We all had an unfortunate tendency to start walking fast as soon as we completed a "mission", before we had figured out where we were supposed to go next. By the end of the evening we had done far more walking than was strictly necessary to complete our tasks. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere...
Someone in Santa Cruz town planning had a senses of humor: this street is across from the boardwalk.
The Mussoorie Monster and George hitch a ride on John Beck's cool feathered hat.
Friday May 02, 2008
You don't want to stand under the eaves of the BRM roofs after a snowfall...
NB: Filmed on the BRM campus on May 1, 2008.
Thursday Apr 17, 2008
Yesterday we had the perfect snow: it fell very prettily for hours, coating everything in white - except the roads. But I didn't know it wouldn't stick to the roads, so I went home early (I don't know very well how to drive in snow yet, and try to avoid it) and participated in a phone conference from there.
WFH (working from home) will be much easier after I get an Internet connection installed next week. I can't use my housemate's; she uses it for her own Sun OpenWork. OpenWork was mentioned in the Economist this week, as part of a special section on The Mobile Workforce, with several quotes from Jonathan. Recommended reading.
Tuesday Apr 15, 2008
We now know that there are four owlets this year. I'm told this is well beyond the two-baby norm for Great Horned Owls, but the Broomfield owl pair are experienced parents who also have a good food source nearby: a colony of prairie dogs out at the Rocky Mountain Metropolitain Airport.
The two above are checking out an empty engineering office in BRM05. Sorry, kids - it's already been promised to somebody as part of the Broomfield re-stack.
Friday Apr 11, 2008
Today the owls are sitting on a window ledge outside an office in BRM05. Apparently they aspire to careers in engineering. Or else, as a colleague said, they're keeping an eye on the mouse...
Friday Apr 04, 2008
I'm Deirdré Straughan (pronounced DEAR-druh STRAWN). This is me:
I've been communicating
online since 1982, when I was a pioneer member of CompuServe, using a
Commodore Vic 20 computer with a cartridge-style modem.
Having moved to Milan, Italy, in 1991 with my husband Enrico, a mathematician, and our daughter Rossella,
I landed up working with Fabrizio Caffarelli at Incat Systems, writing
a book ("Publish Yourself on CD-ROM") and then documentation for Easy CD
and other CD recording software. I developed a passion for making
things as good as they could be for the user, which led to working
closely with the engineers on UI and usability.
When Incat was sold in 1995, I transitioned to Adaptec with the rest of the team, and began working in/inventing the new field of online customer service and support, doing everything from maintaining a company presence on the Usenet, to developing support content and web applications, and writing and editing email newsletters.
My Adaptec colleagues included Dan Maslowski, Scott Tracy, and several other people who now work for Sun.
When Adaptec decided in 2000 that they didn't want to be in the CD-R software business after all, I was part of the Roxio spin-off, where I oversaw the design and
implementation of an ambitious new website, while not losing sight of
existing services customers that loved, such as our email-based
discussion list.
More recent experience includes interaction design, documentation, support system design and many other tasks for TVBLOB, a video streaming startup in Milan.
I also maintain a personal website/blog, which (among other things) is a laboratory for me to keep up to date on web techniques and technologies.
In 2004 I started videoblogging, partly because I wanted to see just how difficult it would be for an average computer user to post video in a viewable form online. At the time, it was very difficult indeed: we early members of the Yahoo videoblogging group had to help each other through some difficult technical challenges. Not all of us went on to found YouTube. <wry smile>
In March of 2007, my old friend Dan Maslowski hired me as a contractor at Sun, and since then I've been working behind the scenes to make a lot of things happen, including the Storage Stop blog and the video that you can see there (one of the first things Dan did when I came aboard was to buy me a much better video camera).
As of March 24, 2008, I am a regular Sun employee - and delighted to be. My new boss is Lynn Rohrer, and my responsibilities have expanded to include Sun Cluster, Grid Engine and HPC software, as well as the storage software I'm already dealing with. I'm also helping to support the OpenSolaris communities around those areas. If you go to conferences or open source events related to any of these technologies (or OpenSolaris in general), you'll likely see me running around with a videocamera. Please say hello!
PS. "Un posto al sole" is Italian for "A place in the sun." (Which also happens to be the title of Italy's longest-running soap opera, but that's neither here nor there...)
PPS. The cartoon portrait of me, which also appears on my personal site, is by artist Mike Segawa.
Owls have been nesting on the Broomfield campus for some time, and every year (so I'm told) they have babies.
A few days ago, as I was heading for the cafeteria, someone pointed out this guy sitting on a windowsill in the courtyard:
Today he/she, or a sibling, was down near the cafeteria:
I guess it was past bedtime for baby owls.
The BRM courtyard is a protected area that attracts wildlife; I've seen rabbits in here as well:
This blog copyright 2008 by Deirdre' Straughan
