Random Thoughts !!!: Its a all random !

Day 0

It was a tiring day. I had to get up early to catch a morning flight to Hyderabad and it took about an hour from Shamshabad Airport to reach the place [although it it felt like its about the same distance as what Hyderbad is from Bangalore ] where I was put up (Novotel Hotels) along side Hyderabad International Convention Center  the place where the developer conference was held ... Had a rather heavy lunch and took a walk around the presentation halls and rooms and eventually landed up in the room to catch some sleep ... In about one hour we were  back again in business for dry runs (rehearsal) for our talks that were scheduled on the 18th and 19th of Feb .. One after the other we struggled getting our Solaris laptops understand that we are presenting our material on a projector :D Man its a very tough language

Day 1

Reached the main auditorium to catch the preparations for the grand opening of Sun Tech days 2009. Settled down in the first row allotted for the speakers. I was busy looking at the 4 podiums built for the grand opening for showcasing the different technologies and the various demos. James Gosling came by and I was just waiting to sneak in and talk to him and steal a photograph with him .. Thanks to Madhu we managed to take a snap with James. Spoke to him breifly on JavaFX and the new Media Toolkit and the new open source media library project…

On the other side was an array of percussion instruments arranged in a perfect circle for Sidhu [Siddarth Nagarajan] to play for the Opening Bell .. He is on charming drummer I must say .. All I was waiting for was the clock to hit 9:00...

The opening ceremony got delayed by a few minutes and then there was loud music and the two doors on either side of the auditorium opened and people started just swarming the auditorium … It was truly a mesmerizing sight to see a auditoruim capacity of over 3500 getting filled up as you are looking in just minutes :D

Just then the sight of people entering seeped in .. the Keynote presentation kicked off … Anil valluri’s keynote  followed by James Gosling.. He talked about various new developments around Java and talked a lot more about Java FX .. The one statement that made everyone clap was somewhat like this .. “If anyone of you in this hall still using Emacs ? … I say .. You Should STOP it … I developed it for Unix 20 years ago .. There is a much better and capable IDE called Netbeans that’s available .. Go use it ..”

Following that were a few demos on stage .. Java TV .. Java FX  and Opensolaris.. followed by a series of sessions on 5 different tracks.  I was mostly hanging around the Open Solaris track where we had a bunch of talks lined up around Open Solaris and the various applications and features that are available on it … Booth time today I spent in Open Solaris install fest area .. Sun Nas .. And some student project on Sun technologies … its was amazing to see final year students having exposure and capabilites to show case such enterprise class products ..

Loitered around the booths for a while .. Spoke to John Broch who was very emphatically explaining all that one could do with Project Kenai .. It was one amazing tool .. More on project kenai .. [http://kenai.com/]

End of the day was a grand entertainment session by a bunch of kids playing or rather jamming for about 20 mins followed by a Fashion show and Dance show intermixed :D .. It was one hell of an entertainment session .. People were just jumping and standing over the chairs and running towards the ramp .. [PS: The amount of excitement was indirectly proportional to the amount of clothes the models were wearing :D]

After about one and a half hour of entertainment I was dead tired … The only thing left to do was to just have dinner and go to sleep .. I needed that coz I had my talk the next day .. I did one final check on my presentation material to make sure everything I needed was in order …

Day 2

Breakfast time.. I was alone at the breakfast area and was hogging some idlies and corn flakes and then Vijay Takar joined me .. He mentioned he was going to demo the Sun Cloud Computing infrastructure ..  I was talking to him about it for a while and then left for the keynote along with Vijay ..

As usual took the speakers section seat in the first row .. Today the keynote session had a lot of activities .. Matt Thompson was the designated keynote speaker .. He started off with the Cloud computing infrastructure from Sun .. and how different and unique it is from the other providers like Amazon and Microsoft and IBM .. It was a great preso .. Followed by a couple of demos on how can one access that cloud and do real world application development on a Hardware that is impossible to be bought by a mediocre developer like me J .. this was a very interesting demo by Vijay Tatkar .. Srividhya gave another presentation on Social Computing the Sun’s way of getting the developers all in to on hood … Zembly .. It was very basic but good enough to show the feel of the service… Then there was a award distribution ceremony to a couple of Indian giants who have made some significant contributions using the Open Source technologies … Followed by James gosling’s demo on Java FX on mobile ..

One of the most interesting part of this day's intro was to get a bunch of people from the crowd and ask them to display whatever talent they can showcase :D  All of a sudden I see a known face right up on stage singing a nice Hindi song .. while the crowd going crazy !!  She did pretty well … and indeed she won the java jacket :D Followed this reality stunt was the ipod lucky winner :D … after which it was a break and followed by 5 different tracks stuffed with talks on various technologies ..

One of the lightening talks was given by the Sun Campus ambassador Lalith. His presentation was on developing a Data service agent for the Solaris Cron.. He called it HA-Cron Agent...  He did pretty well and there was a very good response from the audience. People started firing a lot of questions.. I tried helping him with few of the questions that were there on Clustering in general .. Also pointed to them to attend my talk later in the day to get a more in depth information on Open HA Cluster...

I finished lunch quick asnd went to the hall to setup my laptop for the presentaion .. There was a sponsored talk on intel  chip optimization for Solaris and Java .. It was a very informative talk .. Although I was just waiting for the talk to get over and start mine frankly !

The clock hit 3:00 P.M and it was show time .. I reached for the laptop while Mayuresh did the speaker introduction ..  There were around 75 people in the hall... Just to create some exitement just for the heck of it .. I started the preso with a demo playing a nice new Delhi - 6 song and an ex-collegue dancing for it in the video .. It was fun to see everyone clapping for the tune … Now I know people are awake .. Decided this is the time to start the presentation and say what ever I wanted to and get it over with before they go back to sleep :D So I just went thorugh the slide deck .. Starting from Single host availability using SMF and FMA ..and then Multihost availability using Open HA Cluster with hardware redundancy …followed by the Open HA Cluster - Geographic edition for disaster recovery …

It went pretty well (So I think … you should really ask thhe people who attended !) .. I started with the demo again . Showed them how the video-audio streaming application just continues to play with a minor pause for a while and then gets back in business where it left off even when I inject any fault like killing the web server serving the application or just halting the zone serviing the application  .. People were just amazed … then as usual Q & A … distributed a few coupons and Duke toy ... That ended my talk on Open HA Cluster ... and infact end of Sun tech days 2009  for me :D

Day 3

Got up and first thing was to transfer a few snaps to my laptop .. Also I tried transferring the video from my handycam .. but failed .. So left it there … No booths today .. And not many people today as its was just a university day. I had to check out at 11. Waited for a while for Madhu to reach the lobby .. We then called the cab and left for the airport ..  Bye Hyderabad

That’s it .. Thats a short story on Sun Tech days 2009 - Hyderabad in a long format !!!

Overall it was a good learning experience and a great place for me to know & connect with a lot of outstanding professionals would love to be presenting again if given a chance next year

Ganesh Ram

Solaris Cluster Engineering

Music The Agam Way! by Agam is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
Based on a work at agamtheband.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at agamtheband.blogspot.com.

Credits
Music: Agam
Vocals: Harish Sivaramakrishnan, Padmaja Swetha, Shyam, Krishna, Ganesh
Violin: Harish Sivaramakrishnan
Flute: Annada Prasanna Pattanaik aka Flute Butto
Bass, Lead Guitar: Vignesh
Keys: Ganesh, TPK
Lyrics: Swamy
Arrangement: Harish, Ganesh
Additional Programming: Ganesh, Vignesh
Sound Engineer: Gokul Abhishek
Recorded @: MusicMint, Bangalore

Band Profile

Ganesh Ram Nagarajan – GNR
GNR is a self taught Percussionist and Keyboardist. With his unmatched ability in playing and programming rhythms with his blessed nimble fingers that etch magic on the keyboards, GNR is the back bone of the instrumental arrangements of Agam’s compositions. GNR also brings to the band his expertise as a live musician from the innumerable stage shows that he has performed across India for many years. While not playing music, GNR writes junk code to make buggy applications at Sun Microsystems

Harish Sivaramakrishnan
A trained carnatic musician and a violinist, Harish is the lead vocalist for agam. With his interest spanning across the myriad forms of music ranging from carnatic to Hindustani to ghazals to sufiyana to asian underground Harish comes in the capability of a composer & arranger for Agam.
With his soulful rendering, Harish has an innate talent to add creative dimensions to a song without altering the intended theme and the expressions at ease. His soulful rendering brings out the anticipated emotions of the every note and word to perfection. He is a for sure the blue eyed boy for any composer.
Career Milestones :
Winner Oohlalala
Finalist Airtel Super Singer 06 - Vijay TV
Winner Asianet Voice of the year - 1997
B-High grade carnatic vocal artiste - AIR Trivandrum
Finalist Fanta Voice Hunt - SS Music
A die hard Hariharan fan, Harish also does a 9-6 job at Adobe Systems Bangalore.

Shiva:

Who is Agam?

The presentation started off with a welcome talk by Prof. Srivathsan, Director IIITMK. He gave a very inspiring talk on various dimensions of how Open Source could help improving the current academic conditions in India. There were about 120 students. Everyone was mostly new to Solaris rather the Unix world itself. Most of them were familiar with C & C++ and a few of them who were familiar with Java.

The morning session started off with my presentation on OpenSolaris - History, Overview, Installation and Features (DTrace, SMF, ZFS) followed by a brief introduction to Virtualization Solutions (Zones, xVM, LDOM, Virtual Box) and leading up to High Availability/Scalability with OHAC. There was a lot of interest from the students on DTrace, Virtualization (Virtual Box in particular), ZFS & HA among all other topics that were introduced to them, The session lasted for about 3 hours, with that we took a break for 1 hour for lunch.

The afternoon session was shortened to just 1:30 mins due a parallel session (PPT from some company visting the campus for placements). I started of with basic introduction to Java and then building on that to provide an introduction to Netbeans and Sun Studio. After having familiarized the students to the various features of Netbeans, I presented a small demo of creating a simple "Hello World !" java project using Netbeans & also a Flash presentation (downloaded from netbeans.org) on creating Mobile Application using Netbeans. Then CA from IIITMK, Ajay Kumar took over the stage for presenting a cool demo of Sun SPOT. I must admit it was very cool to see those tiny devices doing wonders :)   There were a lot of buzz around the students seeing the colourful LEDs of the Sun SPOT devices glittering and with that presentation we wrapped up the day long workshop on Sun Technologies !!

Just to give an idea of how well the presentation went .. I actually had one of the students coming with his laptop to install OpenSolaris :) He had faced a lot of problems with the installation after repeated futile attempts earlier !!! He was very happy at the end that he had a fully functional working Solaris running on his laptop :) !!!

After the presentation I had an opportunity to have a discussion with Prof. Srivathsan, where he spoke about the various Academic initiatives that he is trying to push to the HRD Ministry and how Sun & its technology could help that cause.

Overall a very memorable experience at the God`s Own Country !!!

Reached the venue right on time for the presentation with KNR [Director RPE & Site Lead Sun India Engineering Center], Ganesh Hiregoudar & Anil Gulecha. It was a huge auditorium with a capacity of around 1000 and filled about 1/4th with students from Computer Science, Information Technology and Computer Engineering departments.

The Open Source Day started off with a Welcome talk by the HOD Computer Science department, SRM followed by the Key Note Talk by KNR. Abhishek (CA from Sasthra College) & Anil gave their respective talks after the keynote. Anil also showcased a demo on the robot he made using Sun SPOT. I was amazed by the kind of cool stuff these CAs come up with !!! The day forked in to two tracks one Workshop on Open Solaris and the other one on Java/Netbeans.

I was part of the Open Solaris track and Anil started the session [after a delay of about 30 mins .. we were actually waiting for the projector to be setup till then Also we were promised a few laptops for the hands-on session for the students to try out a few demos that we were planning to put up which Never H appened !! ] with an Introduction to Open  Solaris, its Salient Features, where is it being put to use and leading up to what would the student community gain by keeping track of it calling it the "Planet`s most stable Operating System" [I love saying this statement ]

After a brief 10 min break, I took over the presentation starting off with an Introduction to DTrace. I spoke in length about What DTrace is & How and when was Dtrace conceptualized and how much real world production environment can capitalize by using DTrace technology. I started the demo for DTrace with a simple program .. "Factorial of a given number N" Showed them how DTrace could help them figure out the call flow at a user program level and then went on to show the typical demo DTrace scripts that trace all the system calls that are made on the system. My talk was followed by an another Campus Ambassador from SRM, Univ Bipallav on ZFS followed by a Demo on ZFS. I took the stage again for the demo session. I spoke in detail about the features that are offered by ZFS like ZPools, Filesystem creation in constant time, Quotas & Reservations, Volume Management and Snapshotting !!!

And finally after about 3 hrs of information dump I ended the day with a Rapid fire Introduction to Solaris Zones technology and also portrayed the famous  ZFS Snapshot + Zones Clone use case where one can create a virtual instance of Solaris OS within a minute .. (We should probably have an advertisement on this )

Another interesting topic I covered during the presentation was High Availability and Clustering.  I was dragged on to this topic when I was pointing to one of the statements that Anil quoted during his preso. "Solaris is rock solid and these servers can say with out a reboot for years" .. I said .. "Yes, This statement is true in an ideal world !! But in a world where there are unexpected interruptions due to natural calamities and hackers how do we deal with these situations in real world" .. Bingo brought up the slides on Clustering and showed them how Open High Availability Clusters can keep applications alive even after a crash !!! (In the process I also gave the a little gyan on what a Failover was and How a Scalable Application balance the load across mutiple servers) ... There was a sudden gush of questions from the students .. I was more than happy to answer all of them !!!

Overall it was a very interesting and eventful workshop !!! I was amazed by the amount of Solaris knowledge that these college students have and how closely they follow the latest happenings on OpenSolaris.org !!!

Way to go Sun !!! Project Red October is really paving way to evangelize and educate about all of the planet`s coolest technology to the emerging talent in India !!!

Thanks,
Ganesh Ram N
Solaris Cluster Engineering