Thursday Sep 04, 2008
This is a special edition of our SunStars blog. We would like to recognize the winners of the Sun Microsystems
Asia Pacific Systems Engineer (SE) of the Year Award for FY08:
Gold Medal Winner
Takafumi Sasaki (Japan)
Silver Medal Winners
Shailesh Bhadoria (India)
Jongjun Son (Korea)
Bronze Medal Winners
William Lo (Greater China)
Andrew Foote (Australasia)
Tepparit Ritthongpitak (Asia South)
Congratulations to all the winners - GREAT JOB!
Monday Aug 04, 2008
Are you surprised to hear a Diva discuss chemical compounds??
If you
really want to be impressed, visit the
Innovating@Sun site to hear our favorite Sun geek, Hal Stern, interview Bob Brewin, VP, Sun Distinguished Engineer, as they discuss
Project Hydrazine : An end-to-end solution hosted by Sun Microsystems that enables developers to quickly create service mash-ups that are supported by back-end services such as security and federated identity.
Monday Aug 04, 2008
Last week I took my 5 year old daughter to see the
Walking with Dinosaurs show in NYC. We sat in the 3rd row-- check it out:
It was wonderful and a bit scary! I strongly recommend this show if you have small children that are learning about dinosaurs. Be careful if your seats are very close to
the stage, T-Rex is a carnivore and he looked
VERY hungry!!
Monday Jul 21, 2008
You know how much we like to brag, therefore it is our pleasure to inform you that four engineers from our very own Global Systems Engineering organization at Sun received the prestigious
Innovation Award for the
Sun Systemic Security Project last week at the Sun Leadership Conference award ceremony:
Glenn Brunette, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Security Architect
Joel Weise, GSS Principal Engineer, Chief Technologist, Sr. Security Architect
Rafat Alvi, GSS Principal Engineer, Sr. Security Architect
Bart Blanquart, Security Architect
Pictured at the awards ceremony from left to right: Greg Papadopoulos, Rafat Alvi, Bart Blanquart, Glenn Brunette, Joel Weise, Jonathan Schwartz
This team developed solutions that have enabled Sun to improve its products to better comply with our customer's security policies and requirements, develop new architectures and best practices that solve key customer security challenges and position Sun as an architectural and security thought leader across industry and government.
This is a fantastic achievement, so please join the divas in congratulating the Systemic Security team for winning Sun's Innovation Award!!
Thursday Jul 03, 2008
Find out
more on 7/9/08.
Monday Jun 30, 2008
I gave my first presentation in Second Life today - what a blast! I spoke about how Sun's Global Systems Engineering organization utilizes various Social Media tools /venues to build communities and share the wealth of information and technical experience with colleagues around the world.
Thanks to Christy for setting me up with some basic training and making my avatar
look like a goddess.
Best of luck to all the Sun Microsystems summer interns that participated in the meeting!
Thursday Jun 05, 2008
Isn't this the
SECOND year in a row that the Divas has to
blog (brag) about Sun being named by
Ethisphere Magazine as one of the
"World's Most Ethical Companies?"
Congrats to Sun!!
Tuesday May 20, 2008
What Hungarian city is administratively divided into 23 numbered districts, always written in Roman numerals??
If you don't know, you will have to pay a visit to this month's
SunStar, Erik Fischer, to find out!
How long have you been employed at Sun and where are you located?
I am with Sun since 1994, which means that I am in my 15th year at Sun. (Happy Anniversary from the Divas ! )
I am dwelling in the Budapest, Hungary Sun office.
What is your current job role?
At Sun, you don't have one job, you have many .
I am a Principal Engineer and also managing the Hungarian Systems
Engineering team. My background is computer and CPU architecture,
compliers, operating system architecture, application and system
performance measurement and tuning, and High Performance Computing.
My working hobby is security and CGI. So, the background and the long
time experience makes me to have not a single job, but to help and
contribute wherever I can. It is indeed a very pleasing situation,
since the toughest, hardest and most challenging problems find me
and I am happy to solve them! I am also handling the official press
conferences on technical subjects and organizing and participating
in many customer, partner and community activities. Finally I develop
a bunch of tools for fun.
Because they are SuperHeros, Sun Stars use their Super Powers to get
the job done. What are your Super Powers?
Well, I hardly believe, that I am a SuperHero, but my abysmal and
everlasting love towards the architecture of microprocessors helped
Sun and our customers a lot all over the world. It is truly one of
the major passions of my life to let people know and understand more
about the wonderful world and the technical beauty of the
microprocessor microarchitecture. So I grab every possible opportunity
to talk about it and help. Well, it might qualify as a Super Power...
What do you like best about working for Sun?
The talent, the excellence and the fantastic engineers that surrounds
us all at Sun is the foundation of the company and what I like best.
Have you had the opportunity to assist customers in creating energy
efficient data centers? If so, please give us an example.
I am an advocate of the energy efficient computing using our UltraSPARC
T processor family, which I demonstrated and introduced at many
customers and conferences.
Do you have a favorite blog or website? What about a favorite movie?
I do not have a single favorite site. I am a strong believer, that the
Internet as a whole is one of the marvels of what technology can do to
serve people. The Internet is something very close to mobile telephones
and mobile communication which gives an unprecedented communication
freedom to all of us. The wonder of the Internet is the community, the
content and the possibilities both on gathering information, doing
business or simply just reaching the other side of the world. This is
fascinating, entertaining and also challenging at the same time and
I love it!
Regarding movies, I am die hard fan of the moving pictures, but can not
name just a single one. There are so many marvelous and beautiful
movies and also there is a large number of very entertaining movies.
I own a DVD collection of around 600-700 disks, each one is my
favorite - and I can not have so many older ones - so if would be
definitely a long list to name them all...
Do you participate in any social networking websites?
I regularly posting at various forums in my native language
on the field of Solaris and microprocessors. I am also member of
Facebook and LinkedIn.
Please list any Sun or external communities that you are a member of.
I am member of IEEE CS, I am a Sun Principal Engineer, member of
the Sun Technical Systems Ambassador group, member of the Sun HPC
Aces community and participating in several Hungarian Unix related
user groups.
If you could go back or forward in time,where would you go?
Well, it is not an easy question. There were many-many interesting and
wonderful moments in the history of our small planet, furthermore the
future looks also very-very interesting. However, if I have to pick just
one moment, I definitely would like to see the times (if they will come
at all) when the human race leaves this planet and starts to colonize
other habitable planets or finds intelligent life forms.
Outside of work and family, is there anything that you're passionate
about?
As I already mentioned, I am a die hard fan of good movies. I am also
the fan of contemporary classical music and own around 1200-1300 CDs
full with truly wonderful - and sometimes hard to listen - music. I also
very much enjoy contemporary literature, especially from South-America,
from the Mediterranean region of Europe and from Japan. I am a collector
and reader of science fiction and own around 2000 books. Also enjoy the
history of computing machinery, drawing huge and small dragons and
learning the Maori language. I try to ride my bike as much as possible
and if my sons give me some free time, I make nature photos.
If you have an external blog, please send us the url.
I have my own web site, which is under construction currently: www.nomac.org
Tuesday May 20, 2008
Does it make me a bad mom that this is what I gave my 4 1/2 year old for dinner last Friday night? Pizza rolls and
Jiffy Pop!
It was movie night
("Barbie Mermaidia") and my husband was out of town. Why cook??
I "Googled" Jiffy Pop and learned that it was invented in the United States in 1958 by Fred Mennen. What a genius!! If you
grew up in the US and you are somewhere near my age range (or even what I claim to be)
you should remember this:
In case you're curious about the
nutritional value I was able to capture that as well:
Serving size
2 TABLESPOONS?!?!? That's about 6 pieces of popcorn, which means I ate at least 5 servings.
Anyway... it made me feel like a kid again and my daughter now thinks I'm the coolest mom in the world. Totally worth it- but I promise not
to do it again. (In case my husband or the grandparents are reading this)
Tuesday May 13, 2008
Sun is excited to
introduce a new line of innovative
x86/x64 systems and the continued build out of its x64 server line with the addition of
Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processors.
The Sun Fire X4140, Sun Fire X4240, and Sun Fire X4440 servers all feature AMD Opteron processors.
The High Density and ECO efficiency of the Sun Fire X4140 and X4240 are ideal for virtualized Web 2.0 environments, while the exceptional capacity for Internal Scalability and a Highly Available design make the Sun Fire X4440 the choice for complex, business critical Database applications.
In addition, Sun extends the value of its current x64 product line by offering Quad-Core AMD support for the Sun Blade X8440, Sun Fire X4200 M2, Sun Fire X4100 M2, and Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers.
Upgrade to Quad-Core today!
Friday May 09, 2008
A
chipmunk - caught red handed, posing for the photo!!
Now what do I do?
Thursday May 08, 2008
Can somebody please tell me what this is??
I found this hole, about 10 inches in diameter, on the edge of my driveway. It is forcing me to climb in to the driver's seat of my car through the passenger door.
Could it be some kind of reptile, or dare I say "rodent", dwelling at my NJ suburban princess castle??
I'll keep you posted... but if you don't hear from me, send out a search party!!
Friday May 02, 2008
Bet you thought we were going to say "tequila"!!
Before you begin the traditional
Cinco de Mayo festivities, please join
Sun Microsystems as we open our tent flap to the developer community for the
OpenSolaris Launch at the
CommunityOne conference. Learn from experts representing a wide range of open source projects; from chip design to operating systems to web servers and databases to scripting languages and tools, in one jam-packed day you'll find sessions on everything you need to create and deploy a next generation infrastructure and compelling web experiences.
CommunityOne is a
FREE and
OPEN developer conference sponsored by Sun Microsystems.
Date: May 5, 2008 (the Monday of the
JavaOne conference week)
Location: Moscone Center, San Francisco, California
Register
here.
Monday Apr 28, 2008
Did you know that during the 2007
Oktoberfest
there were 6.2 million visitors, 69.406 hectoliters of beer consumed and 58.446 units pork knuckles eaten??
I bet our latest
Sun STAR, Constantin Gonzalez, can tell us many more interesting facts about his home town of Munich, the capital of the German state of Bavaria!
How long have you been employed at Sun and where are you located?
I've been with Sun for more than 10 years now. I live in Munich, Germany with my wife Friederike and my 21 months old daughter Amanda.
What is your current job role?
At Sun, you don't have one job, you have many .
I work for Franz Haberhauer's Platform Technology Team in Sun Germany's Global Systems Engineering (GSE) organization and I'm part of the international Technical Systems Ambassador group.
We evangelize new hardware and OS technologies to customers and take back
their feedback to the product groups. Interesting technologies today are
Sun's new CMT processors, x64 systems and of course Solaris. Grid Computing
and Visualization are other favourite areas of mine, as is Web 2.0.
Most of the time, I stand in front of partners and customers and present about
interesting Sun technologies, do pre-sales consulting for customers or
help out in internal projects. For instance, I've been lately involved in
creating a Solaris training curriculum for GSE in europe.
We also have a group blog called Solarium
in which we blog in German about interesting Solaris features, tips and
tricks.
What do you like about working for Sun?
I'm a computer scientist (that's a formal term for "geek") by nature, and
at Sun you get to play with new and exciting technologies every day!
But the biggest part are people. No matter who you work with, there's
always a sense of helpfulness and, well, Sun spirit to it.
Please briefly describe any projects you are involved in that support
Sun's vision to see everyone and everything participating on the network.
There's a podcast we produce in Germany for the system administrator
community at Systemhelden.com. That's german for "System Heroes.com". (There's
also an english version at systemheroes.co.uk). The podcast is called
HELDENFunk ("Hero Radio") and it's produced by a couple of people from
(product) marketing and myself. We feature interviews with interesting people:
Sysadmins, bloggers, principal engineers, Sun partners, etc. By encouraging
people to podcast (and to blog, participate in wikis, etc.), I try to turn
them into active participants in the network.
You may not expect that from someone who's supposed to sell tech stuff, but
the reason that user generated content in web 2.0 is successful is because
it is authentic. You can't create a portal for sysadmins without having
sysadmin/tech type people behind it. Also, it's a great way for me as
an SE to reach a bigger audience than would be possible with traditional
presentations.
Have you had the opportunity to assist customers in creating energy
efficient data centers?
I was involved in introducing customers to UltraSPARC T1 and CMT in
Germany. For example, I worked with a financial customer in showing the
efficiency and throughput benefits of the T2000 for their Java based
application server infrastructure. I've also helped a telco OEM beta test
the T2000 for video streaming to handhelds and it proved to be a great
streaming server!
Do you have a favorite blog or website?
It's amazing how many bright people blog on blogs.sun.com. You could
spend hours reading them! Also, there's some fascinating stuff happening
at the Foresight Institute which deals with
advancing beneficial Nanotechnology. Who knows, we might end up using
tiny rods and gears instead of silicon for very futuristic CPUs...
When commuting or traveling by car, I like to listen to a couple of
podcasts, such as the one from
Extremetech.com, the EGM live podcast, the German
Podcast for Alternative Computer Systems,
the Blick ueber den Tellerrand, which is
a German web-2.0-in-business podcast, or BrainCast, a German podcast about your brain.
Do you participate in any social networking websites?
Yes, sure. In Europe, Xing is very popular. I'm also on
Facebook, LinkedIn and even Twitter.
Please list any Sun or external communities that you are a member of.
I'm a member of the Sun Technical Systems Ambassadors, a worldwide
group of senior SEs that serve as a link between customers and the
product groups for CPU, System and HPC related technologies. I'm also
a member of the German Unix User's Group " GUUG" and
a senior associate at the Foresight Institute.
If you could meet anyone tomorrow, who would it be? Why?
I'd love to meet Rhys Fulber, an amazingly creative electronic musician. He does everything from
electronic to punk to metal to sweet pop and if I had more time, I'd spend it learning to create music on my own .
Other interesting people I'd like to meet would be Robert Scoble, the famous blogger and Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, futurist and author.
Tell us a little known fact about yourself.
My dad is from Chile, my mother from Germany. I was born in Germany, went to
kindergarten in Colombia, elementary school in Turkey and Germany, then I
finished high school in Italy. So I grew up multilingual with Spanish and
German, then added English and Italian to the mix .
Outside of work and family, is there anything that you're passionate about (sports, causes, etc.)?
I'm always passionate about the future. That's why I like to be at Sun and
why I think Web 2.0 plays such a significant role in the world's culture.
At home, I have a lot of gadgets that are "future" to family and friends.
Those are mostly part of our home theater. It's one of those hobbies that are
never finished and where you always find something to improve on: Better
sound, better picture, streaming audio/video from a ZFS file server in the
basement, you know. But it's also one of those hobbies that bridges technology
with people: There's nothing like watching a great movie with family and
friends, nice picture, clean sound, a good wine (or beer, depending on the
movie) and no hassles or endless commercials you'd otherwise get at one of
those crowded multiplexes .
Do you have a blog?
Yes, Constantin's Blooog!
Maybe Constantin will add the
GSE Divas to his blogroll
Monday Apr 21, 2008
As a Diva, the last thing in the world I want to do is participate in a bowling event. Why?
Two
big reasons:
1) I don't want to wear bowling shoes. I only wear heels.
2) I don't drink beer or eat fried food.
But...
I love my sister and her birthday party was at Bowlmor Lanes in New York City, so I took a deep breath, put on
some heavy duty sweat socks, and slipped my feet into a pair of rented bowling shoes.
Now I'm all set!!
The perfect bowling score is 300. I bowled a 44
I told my husband that to avoid further embarrassment, I was going home if I threw one more "gutter" ball. So he told me to move over to the right since all my balls were curving to the left. Lo and behold, look what happened!!!
I bowled a TURKEY!! And my next game score was bumped up to 115!
In case you haven't heard of the term "Turkey" as it relates to bowling, I
Googled it:
A TURKEY is bowling lingo for
three strikes in a row. Probably, the most famous score for amateur and professional bowlers alike. The term dates back to before the turn of the 20th century. In those years, scoring was much more difficult and to get three strikes in a row was quite an achievement. During Thanksgiving or Christmas week, the proprietor would present a live turkey to the first person on each team who scored three consecutive strikes. The term has carried over ever since.
I was the only one to accomplish this feat the entire night.
What else would you expect from a
DIVA???
Thursday Apr 10, 2008
Sometimes it's gets lonely working from home. Today I had a visitor:
I know all my New York City friends are either laughing at me or worried right now...
Monday Apr 07, 2008
Last week the
Project BlackBox
truck made it's way to the Sun Microsystems New Jersey office.
Although it was parked in this Diva's favorite parking space, it was a fun event.
As you can see, the truck is now making it's way to New York City for it's April 8 & 9 visit to Broadway.
(45th street between Broadway and 6th to be exact)
No...not to see a show, but to invite you for a
private tour of the World's first Virtualized Datacenter!
In addition to this event, Sun will announce a new family of virtualized servers that
"Scale More with Less" on Wednesday, April 9, at the
Millennium Broadway Hotel (145 West 44th Street - NYC)
Please
join us, our favorite VP,
Hal Stern, will be presenting!
Tuesday Mar 25, 2008
The
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the central research and development organization for the US Department of Defense (DoD).
DARPA’s mission is to prevent technological surprise for the US and to create technological surprise for our adversaries. So, how cool is it that Sun was just awarded $44 million for a five-and-a-half-year research project focused on bringing revolutionary improvements to optical computing?!?!?!
Please listen to our very own VP,
Hal Stern, interview Distinguished Engineers from Sun's Microelectronics Group, Ashok Krishnamoorthy and Jack Cunningham on the latest edition of the
Innovating@Sun Podcast Network. In this insightful interview they discuss the partnership with DARPA on the UNIC program, and how Sun is working to develop innovative technologies that will significantly lower the barrier to entry for optics.
Monday Mar 24, 2008
Just for fun, I took a
personality /career quiz that was posted by Monster.com on my Comcast email home page. Here are my results:
What's with all the
EXERCISE career suggestions? I guess they don't read the
Diva's Blog!
Thursday Mar 20, 2008
Not only is this Sun Star a great engineer, he can cook too!!
Introducing Franz Haberhauer, Technical Director and Chief Technologist!
Franz, we heard that you recently celebrated a milestone anniversary at Sun?
I just had my 15th anniversary - I joined Sun in January 1993 and I'm
based in Stuttgart, Germany.
What is your current job role?
As a Technical Director and Chief Technologist I evangelize Sun's new technologies and
work towards their adoption among our customers. I'm leading a small, highly skilled team of OS and Technical Systems Ambassadors focusing on platform technologies especially Solaris, HPC, but also Web 2.0. On the other hand we provide technical support for Sun's education and research business in Germany.
What do you like about working for Sun?
I enjoy working on the (b)leading edge of technology. Sun is an incredibly creative and innovative company with passionate
employees. The ambassador program and other international initiatives and task forces gave me a great opportunity to learn about
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