Weblog

Tuesday June 28, 2005

Introduction

I'm Mike "Ford" Ditto and this is my blog at Sun.

I've been a Sun employee since 1997, working mostly on networking and security software. I'm now in the Solaris Core Technologies Group which includes the core networking and kernel groups.

I'm an old-fashioned Unix geek, having worked with Unix for about 22 years now. I fancy myself a bit of a Unix historian, too -- I enjoy looking back through source code archives to find when a particular feature (or bug) first appeared in Unix.

I'll try to use this blog to point out some interesting things that I've worked on in Solaris or amusing bits of history that I find buried in the code, or maybe just things that bug me about the burden of historical behavior and backward compatibility.

Ford is an old nickname I picked up as a fan of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" back around 1981. Sadly, "ford" is not really my Unix login name here at Sun -- but what can you do, it's a big bureaucratic IT organization in a huge company, and that name was already taken. At least I got to pick a login name -- nowadays new employees are forced to use their employee number as their Unix login. Yuck! Anyway, I guess I get to reclaim my "Ford" moniker when blogging.