Saturday June 25, 2005 
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Saturday June 25, 2005 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium The Europe 2005 Sun HPC Consortium was held June 20-21, 2005 in Heidelberg, Germany. These HPC Consortium meetings are a good way to learn more about what people are doing with HPC. The variety of topics covered by the HPC Consortium meetings is highlighted in the links to previous presentations that you access from the Sun HPC Consortium Registration page. I found my name on the list for the 2003 HPC Consortium on Saturday, June 21, 2003 in Heidelberg, Germany where I gave a presentation on HPTC Technical Publications. To participate in the Sun HPC Consortium, you can subscribe to the SunHPC email list. The email list is run by the Sun Center of Excellence at Aachen Technical University.Dieter an Mey supports and participates in many HPC and technical computing activities, such as the High Performance Computing on the Sun Fire SMP-Cluster Workshop, held last March 14 - 18, 2005 in Aachen, Germany, and the First International Workshop on OpenMP IWOMP 2005 (program), held last May, 2005 in Eugene, Oregon. ( Jun 25 2005, 09:47:06 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Friday June 24, 2005 A Hodgepodge of Minor Learning Exercises Today was a hodgepodge of interesting little learning exercises. This whole blogging experience is having a positive effect on my learning and interests. Looking at other blogs, thinking about all the information that is available, wondering how to best organize that information so you can find it, lots of things to think about. Today I spent some time reading about the Bash shell, some of the commands in the man pages section 1:User Commands manual on docs.sun.com, and trying out the Sun Studio demos for JavaOne. Mark G. Sobell's book Practical Guide to Solaris is still an interesting and helpful book. I've also been reading about CSS files. The O'Reilly books Cascading Style Sheets and CSS Cookbook have been helpful. ( Jun 24 2005, 11:55:14 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Thursday June 23, 2005 The days leading up to JavaOne are getting more interesting. People have been working hard to get everything ready for the show. Sun Studio will have a booth at the show, and we went through the Sun Studio demos today. We have some demos that show Java and C++ code, which could be interesting to people doing mixed-language development. Sun Studio hasn't had much of a presence at JavaOne before, so if you get a chance, stop by the Sun Studio booth and check it out. Patrick Keegan is in town from Prague, and he has started blogging about his JavaOne experiences and his work on the NetBeans IDE Field Guide.We found out today there will be a book signing at the reception that follows NetBeans Day on Sunday, June 26. It's also nice to see some of the other people that are in town from Prague and to put some faces with the voices I've heard during our phone meetings. We had an OpenSolaris docs meeting today where we talked about the different docs being referred to in the OpenSolaris communities. Sue Weber started her blog today, so she'll start to some good Solaris and OpenSolaris information for you in the coming days. Just a reminder that the 3rd OpenSolaris User Group Meeting is next Tuesday, June 28, in Santa Clara. For more information, please see Alan DuBoff's June 22 blog entry.I'll be at JavaOne next week, so I won't be able to attend the user group meeting, but I will plan on attending future user group meetings. Technorati tags: Solaris; OpenSolaris; NetBeans ( Jun 23 2005, 11:51:05 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Wednesday June 22, 2005 How do we keep track of all the docs that are of interest to OpenSolaris developers? I have been talking with Sue Weber, who leads the Sun OpenSolaris docs team, and Ginnie Wray, one of the Documentation community leaders. We've been looking at the various docs that have been referenced on the various community forums, and thinking about how to create an organized list of docs or a repository for community contributed docs. Docs that we've released with the Solaris and Sun Studio products are kept in a number of different places. I've been trying to point to various docs in some of my previous blog entries. Today, I'd like to share some information Sun Weber provided on the Solaris Express documentation.This information was take from a posting Sue made on the Opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org and docs-discuss@opensolaris.org forums. Solaris Express documentation is published with each release and can be found on the docs.sun.com website at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/prod/solaris.exp#hic The documentation set includes 3 collections right now:
For each Solaris Express release, we update the "Solaris Express Release Notes" and "What's New in Solaris Express" books. Other books are regularly updated and published by Sun writers. As Solaris Express is an early access release vehicle for the next Solaris release, documentation is not always in lock-step with the code. Over time, the collections will grow as our writers work with developers to cover features that integrate through OpenSolaris. man pages for Solaris Express are contained in the SUNWman package, which can be downloaded for installation. man pages are generally available with the same build as the code, but may at times be delayed by a build or 2. The full set of Solaris 10 documentation is available at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/prod/solaris.10 This documentation is not yet available as open source. For more information on the road map for OpenSolaris feature documentation, check out the Documentation community page at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/feature_docs/. ( Jun 22 2005, 06:29:13 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Tuesday June 21, 2005
Still time to sign up for NetBeans Day at 2005 JavaOne June 26, 2005
If you will be attending the 2005 JavaOne conference, there is still time to sign up for NetBeans Day on Sunday, June 26, 2005 (full schedule). Note the promotion where the first 300 attendees will receive a copy of the newly published NetBeans IDE Field Guide. I am particularly excited about this book because it was written by Patrick Keegan, Ludovic Champenois, Gregory Crawley, Charlie Hunt, and Christopher Webster. Patrick is a NetBeans technical writer in Prague, and he has done a great job of making this book a reality. Patrick Keegan, Ludovic Champenois, and Charlie Hunt will be availabe for a book signing at the Digital Guru, the official conference bookstore at JavaOne this year, from 4:00 to 4:30, Monday, June 27. Additional NetBeans IDE documents are on the Docs and Support page of netbeans.org. Some of the docs on that page include the Using NetBeans IDE 4.1 guide, which provides a detailed introduction to NetBeans 4.1, and the J2EE 1.4 Tutorial for NetBeans IDE, which is an adapted for NetBeans version of several chapters of the J2EE 1.4 Tutorial. The Docs and Support page also includes links to documentation for NetBeans IDE 4.0 and NetBeans IDE 3.6, User FAQs, Knowledge Base, and the Module Developer's Resources. The Knowledge Base is the place to go for documents contributed by the open source community, and that page includes user-translated versions of some of the NetBeans IDE docs and additional topics of interest to developers.
Technorati tags: NetBeans ( Jun 21 2005, 11:48:05 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Sunday June 19, 2005 HTML versions of Sun Studio 10 man pages on developers.sun.com HTML versions of the Sun Studio 10 man pages are on the Sun Studio 10 Documentation page of the Sun Studio Tools hub of developers.sun.com. The Documentation page also contains links to HTML versions of the Sun Studio 10 readmes and compilers and tools manuals. HTML versions of the man pages and readmes are available for the following previous releases of the Sun Studio compilers and tools: Version numbers for the compilers and tools, and the components of the various Sun Studio releases from Forte Developer 6 through Sun Studio 10 are listed in the Sun Studio Support Matrix, which is part of the Support page of the Sun Studio Tools hub. Online versions of the Solaris 10 man pages are in the Solaris 10 Reference Manual Collection on docs.sun.com. Technorati tags: Solaris; OpenSolaris; Sun Studio ( Jun 19 2005, 08:40:16 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Saturday June 18, 2005 Good-bye to that troublesome x2 Roller theme Blogging is great, but the Roller themes are pretty challenging. My original blog used the x2 theme, and I have been having a number of problems getting the blog to format properly. The tipping point for dumping the theme and admitting defeat with respect to solving those pesky template issues came when I realized my blog was causing Internet Explorer to crash, and the pages were bogus in Safari. The pages looked ok in Firefox and Mozilla, but application crashes or the sidebar being at the bottom of the page is not conducive to a good user experience. I did some benchmarking of other people's blogs on a lazy Saturday afternoon, and I came across Claire Giordano's blog. I found Claire's blog to be quite soothing to my template tattered psyche, so I decided to update my x2 theme to the Currency theme. The process is really more of a semi-sorta update to the new theme because the new theme only got applied to my Weblog page, and I couldn't find the magic trick to get the them applied to the About page. Lot's of cutting an pasting and twiddles and fiddles later, I now have my theme a bit more closely aligned with the Currency theme. I still need to add some styles to my Weblog page to compensate for some font issues, but at least my blog displays on Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, and Mozilla. So the next time you come across a blog you like, or an entry that gives you some satisfying information, give a word of thanks to that individual for taking their time and effort to make this information possible. People are working pretty hard to make blogs.sun.com useful for you. It is pretty neat that so many people are posting on blogs.sun.com. ( Jun 18 2005, 06:08:59 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Friday June 17, 2005 Acrobat and the Solaris White Album Had a nice day looking at the Solaris White Album: Essential Papers listed in Ozan Yigit's blog entry dated March 4, 2005. In fact Ozan and I had talked today about the files, and he was kind enough to send me the PDF files to look at. Some PostScript files hadn't been converted to PDF yet, and some of those PostScript files had the page order reversed. I used Acrobat Distiller, included with Adobe Acrobat, to convert the PostScript files to PDF and then printed the PDF files back to another PDF file using the Reverse Pages option with the printer driver to get the page ordering right. One PostScript file failed to convert to PDF, so I looked at the PostScript file in BBEdit and found there was an email attachment embedded in the PostScript file after %%trailer. (I realize BBEdit is expensive, but there is also TextWrangler, which is free from Bare Bones Software.) I deleted the email attachment in the PostScript file, and the file converted to PDF without issue. Interesting. Spent a bit more time taking one of the Solaris White Album text files and converting it to PDF so I could make a combined PDF file of the individual White Album PDF files. I used the Header option in Acrobat to add page numbers to the combined PDF and sent it back to Ozan. Next week, I'll talk to the people that manage the Solaris hub of the developers.sun.com site to see if we can't get the Solaris White Album files posted there. All in all, it's been a pretty good week. I've had my blog up for a week now, and the OpenSolaris site went live. I've had a chance to talk to several people about their blogs and their documentation. It really is about growing the community and adding value. Lot's of possibilities ahead. ( Jun 17 2005, 10:55:47 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Thursday June 16, 2005 Become a part of the OpenSolaris community Become a part of the OpenSolaris community. OpenSolaris is more than code or developer tools. OpenSolaris is a community of developers, and you can join or form the communities for the parts of OpenSolaris that interest you. I talked a bit yesterday about the Documentation community. Today I'll talk more about some of the feedback people are providing through the OpenSolaris forums. Documentation is an interesting thing. I manage a group of writers that write docs for Solaris Developer and the Sun Studio compilers and tools.These books, along with man pages, readmes, and docs on developers.sun.com (Sun Studio Tools and Solaris hubs) and BigAdmin form part of the information resources available to you. A lot of Solaris documentation is written by people in other groups at Sun. By being a part of the OpenSolaris community, I can tell you the docs we provide, and you can tell me the docs you provide. We learn from each other, and that is really exciting. I just signed up for the OpenSolaris: discuss forum for general OpenSolaris comments and questions. There are a number of questions there about documentation, and a number of people are responding. There is also a documentation: discuss forum for documentation questions that hasn't been getting much activity. I am sure documentation questions will come up in other forums, so if you have a comment on docs that you would like us to look at, please subscribe to the documentation: discuss forum. We would like to talk with you. Part of what I'd like to do is highlight some of the helpful questions and responses from some of the forums and identify the additional sources of information available to you. Some of the helpful docs mentioned from the last several days include:
Well this is just a start. I'll continue to let you know what I learn. Tags: OpenSolaris ( Jun 16 2005, 08:19:52 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Wednesday June 15, 2005 OpenSolaris, code, documentation, community: they all work together. I've been reading some of the blog entries, and there is a lot of good information out there. A number of groups are working together to get you the information you need to start using OpenSolaris. The OpenSolaris Community: Documentation page is a good starting point for getting OpenSolaris documentation. From the OpenSolaris main page, click the All Communities link in the Communities section of the left side head. The All Communities Page lists the current OpenSolaris communities, which range from Academic and Research to Zones. Some of the other communities include DTrace, Tools for the Sun Studio and GCC compilers, and Documentation. The OpenSolaris Community: Documentation page contains links to the OpenSolaris Feature Documentation and Getting Started on OpenSolaris pages and the OpenSolaris Guide. The Getting Started on OpenSolaris page contains a table of documentation links for documents like the Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide, Sun Studio 10: C User's Guide, and the Device Driver Tutorial. The OpenSolaris Feature Documentation page tells you about the docs-discuss forum. You can go to the Discussions page to subscribe to the documentation: discuss forum, or one of the other OpenSolaris forums. This is your chance to get involved with OpenSolaris documentation, and we really want your comments. Building a community of people working together and sharing ideas on documentation is an exciting opportunity for all of us. This is just a start on OpenSolaris documentation. We have many documents on docs.sun.com, developers.sun.com, and BigAdmin available for your use. I'll talk more of documentation resources in future posts. Tags: OpenSolaris ( Jun 15 2005, 06:03:31 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Tuesday June 14, 2005 OpenSolaris is live today. Some useful Sun Studio and OpenSolaris links are:
The OpenSolaris Community: Tools page has information on the Sun Studio 10 Developer Tools, and links to the following: Information on building OpenSolaris is in the OpenSolaris Developer's Reference Guide. The Sun Studio 10 compilers and tools are mentioned in the following sections of the OpenSolaris Developer's Reference Guide:
Monday June 13, 2005 My reason for thinking about points of inflection, where the concavity of a function changes from concave up to concave down or from concave down to concave up, is to get an idea of when trends change and to look at how we can facilitate positive or negative changes. Facilitating negative changes comes from reacting to the downward trends, losing sight of the excitement of creating something new, or continuing to do what worked five years ago when we had twice the staff and a different business model. Facilitating positive changes comes from encouraging people to try new and creative ways of creating products and documentation, having some fun working with an interesting product and with interesting people, and prioritizing the work so you can do the best job you can with the time and energy you have available. For tech pubs, five years ago, we focused on manuals and man pages for the compilers and Solaris docs and online help for NetBeans. We still continue to support those docs, but we have also branched out in some new areas. Richard Friedman has been putting a lot of effort over the last few years on the Sun Studio hub of developers.sun.com. John Stearns has written a technical article "Roadmap to Sun Developer Documentation," posted on the Solaris hub of developers.sun.com. Geertjan Wielenga continues to deliver a number of interesting and helpful blog entries. John Jullion-Ceccarelli is also posting blog entries on NetBeans. Alta Elstad has her blog on device drivers going, and she has been working with us on providing docs support for OpenSolaris. There are a lot of possibilities, and there is a lot of work to be done. Jonathan talks about growing the business and making money. It's easier to do that when we have the passion for innovation and the satisfaction that comes from knowing we are giving our developers the products and information they need. ( Jun 13 2005, 10:38:54 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Friday June 10, 2005 Here we go with the initial entry in my blog. I am a technical publications manager for the group that writes the Solaris Developer, Sun Studio, NetBeans IDE, and Mobility Pack documents. I'd like to use this blog to tell you about the various documents we write and the various web-based docs available to developers. A lot of information is available in a wide-variety of places, and the location of that information isn't always obvious. With the numerous blogs being started, there are that many more places to find useful information. I would also like to talk about Technical Publications as a profession and of how we contribute value to you and to Sun. We are always looking for new and better ways of providing you with information. Sharing those ideas with you and getting your comments on what you like, need, and expect with documentation will help us to better meet your needs. The quality of the documentation and information provided with a product can make a big difference in your adoption of the product and your success with using the product. I look forward to sharing ideas on how to maximize that success. ( Jun 10 2005, 06:02:00 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0] |
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