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
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.
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 and appreciate the cultural
diversity in an international company.
What paradigm shifts do you currently observe?
Sometimes it takes time until new technologies get adopted.
Sun Ray
isn't the latest technology, it had been on
the forefront of thin clients since years with session mobility as a
highlight. But now we are facing a perfect storm:
Desktop virtualization based on Sun Secure Global Desktop and Sun Ray on one hand are an approach
for a more efficient desktop provisioning and management and on the
other hand ultra thin clients are now
recognized as a means towards a more power efficient desktop landscape.
One of our projects in Germany
at University Hospital rechts der Isar, Munich has just been featured at
the Sun Analyst Summit 2008 session
on The New
Eco-Nomics. Sun Rays consume 95% less power than a PC based solution.
Another positive trend is the large interest in Solaris and OpenSolaris.
Sun's open source strategy is recognized
in the market - we get invited to events like
Linux Day or
LinuxTag which once picked Linux as a
synonym for Open Source but are still looking at the larger picture. Another driver are the technologies in Solaris, especially ZFS and Solaris Containers. At our recent partner university for which I acted as agenda lead the sessions on
ZFS and Container Best Practices have been the two most popular ones
among 30 breakout sessions coverings Sun's whole product and technology portfolio. Speaking about filesystems: SAM-FS is on the rise as well - a great fit for the digital archiving and library projects which are popping up everywhere.
Do you have a favorite blog or website?
blogs.sun.com has evolved into a great technical resource. Yet for much
information actually a Wiki would be better suited - like the
ZFS Best Practices Guide
on solarisinternals.com. But now there is Sun Wikis.
Beyond Sun - being a passionate photographer - dpreview is one of my favorite ones.
What about a favorite "junk" food?
One of my other passions is cooking - therefore "junk" food is not
really my favorite topic. DIVA comment: Oh... that explains the photo!!
Do you participate in any social networking websites?
Like most colleagues in Sun's German sales force I'm in
Xing - and internationally in
LinkedIn.
Beyond my professional life I'm participating in some German and
international photographer's forums
and communities like Flickr,
fotocommunity, and
Panoramio - I enjoy my pictures
showing up in Google Earth's geo layer.
Please list any Sun or external communities that you are a member of.
One of the most vivid communities within Sun are the worldwide OS Ambassadors.
They meet once or twice a year. Having met someone personally also
strengthens the relationships in a virtual community. I've made the experience that
people in virtual groups at some point in time want to meet others face to face in other
communities as well, e.g. within the fotocommunity
there are several local groups in Stuttgart which meet monthly.
Jointly with our local Sun Education Center I've set up a series of evening events
around Solaris and OpenSolaris:
Solaris@STEP
(named after the location STuttgart Engineering Park).
If you could meet anyone tomorrow, who would it be? Why?
Geoffrey Moore, author of "Crossing the Chasm". Having a focus on technology adoption, this book is a must read.
Tell us a little known fact about yourself.
Despite living in the home town of two leading car manufacturers - Mercedes and Porsche - I'm driving a BMW 525d touring.
Outside of work and family, is there anything that you're passionate about?
I mentioned my passions already: photography - taking pictures with my
Canon DSLR bodies (a 20D and a 40D)
as well as optimizing them through digital image processing , cooking
and eating out, and fine wines - especially from Tuscany and Bordeaux.
Do you have an external blog?
I maintain a blog in German on
blogs.sun.com/FranzHaberhauer.
While most
Germans in the IT business do speak
English pretty well many nevertheless prefer reading publications in
German. While I'm not very active in my own blog
I regularly contribute to my team's group blog
blogs.sun.com/Solarium which focuses on
Solaris and is maintained in German as well.
The Divas are always looking for Sun Star Nominati...