Innovating@Sun

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Social capital is the currency of online communities. Those with the most friends, blog readers, or Twitter followers are the richest—enjoying the finest of online perks and delicacies like celebrity, notoriety, and above all influence—while those with only a passing level of participation lay bereft on the outskirts of the social media circle. The more valuable the content you produce is, the higher your personal stock rises; the greater the exchange of ideas, the richer the community becomes.

Peter Reiser is capitalizing on this concept with Community Equity 2.0, a Java-based social value system that measures and evaluates one's online social capital, or equity. Community Equity goes beyond a simple structuring of people and their online content. Community Equity performs complex calculations to rate one's participation and contribution levels, the ultimate goal being to drive the adoption of content and ideas, which provides an ideal platform for corporate communities.

Listen to this edition of Innovating@Sun in which host Hal Stern, VP Global Systems Engineering, interviews Reiser on Community Equity (CE) and:

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Cloud computing sits at the forefront of industry headlines these days. It's a trending computing model that is forcing many organizations to seriously consider it if they want to keep up with evolving IT business practices and maintain a competitive edge. But with this new shift towards virtualization technology come a number of concerns to address, particularly around issues of security. Glenn Brunette, Distinguished Engineer and Cheif Security Architect, is working on a project that attempts to solve some of the bigger problems around the security of virtualized environments using Immutable Service Containers (ISCs)--an architectural deployment pattern for highly secure service delivery.

Listen to this edition of Innovating@Sun in which Hal Stern, VP Global Systems Engineering, and Brunette discuss ISCs and how building them along principles of stronger security, greater integrity, and simplified security configuration and management is proving to be a very viable solution for organizations looking to safeguard their virtualized environments. Hal and Glenn go on to discuss:

Sometimes the best books you read are the ones your friends loan to you. The cover is a little ragged and the pages are dog-eared, evidencing an eager and avid reader who probably spent a few late hours on the couch devouring it. And he wanted you to share it with you so that you, too, could spend your nights tearing through the pages as voraciously as he did. We wanted to do something similar here, and although we don't have a book repository to loan them out to you (because if we did, we totally would because we know you're good for it), what we do have are a few recommendations from the community that you may find worthwhile. If you have a book you'd like to add to the list, join the discussion here.

Andy Paton recommended:
Easy Oracle Jumpstart (Oracle Database Management Concepts and Administration) - A very easy read and had a feeling I would be needing it!

Wayne Horkan wrote:
Here's a few of my favourites off the top of my head...
1) The Mythical Man Month (2nd edition has the essay "no silver bullet") - Fred Brooks
2) Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment - W. Richard Stevens
3) Computer Architecture (A Quantitative Approach) - John Hennessy and David Patterson
4) Building Scalable Web Sites - Cal Henderson
5) Object Thinking - David West

Wayne adds:
I quite like the 'pull out' section in Donald E. Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming Volume 3: Sorting and Searching" comparing search and sort algorithm efficiency too. And I think anyone familiar with Knuth's work would agree that it would be excellent to see him get to the fabled seventh volume in the next few years (only three volumes to go).

John Stanford suggests:
The Art of Systems Architecting by Mark W. Maier

Feel free to add your faves to the discussion board. This is your opportunity to share with others your sophisticated taste in technology literature and spread the word about your favorite published work. So go ahead, tell us what you think we should read today.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a single IDE that let you create applications in any language you wanted, allowed you to collaborate effectively with a team of developers scattered across the globe, let you import projects created in other environments, as well as let you export your projects to another IDE of your choice? With the NetBeans 6.7 IDE release, you can. With native Maven and Ant support, as well as full Kenai integration, plus enhanced support for languages like PHP, JavaFX, Javascript, Groovy, Grails, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails (just to name a few because, oh yes, there are a LOT more), this IDE is a one-stop-shop for web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile developers.

In this edition of Innovating@Sun, host Hal Stern, SVP Global Systems Engineering, and John Jullion-Ceccarelli, Sr. Engineering Manager for Netbeans, discuss this latest release of NetBeans and how it's connecting developers like no other IDE.

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Yggdrasil in Norse Mythology refers to The World Tree, an enormous arbor that connects many different worlds together, serving as the cohesive and central element of the universe. In the Sun Labs, Project Yggdrasil--with its roots in SunSPOT projects--is under way to develop a flexible data collection framework that connects a multitude of embedded devices to each other and to a relational database for greater collection, visualization, analysis, and sharing of the data and, notably, the metadata that the nodes produce. The Yggdrasil data collection framework has enormous potential in the area of scientific research and Arshan Poursohi, Sun Researcher, and the Yggdrasil team seek to revolutionize current research methods by making it easier for scientists to create applications that can harvest sensor data over extended periods of time and subsequently provide enhanced access to the data to be collated or interpreted in further empirical studies, something not easily achieved using current state-of-the-art technology.

Listen as host Hal Stern, SVP Global Systems Engineering, interviews Arshan to discuss how the project got started, its applications, and how Project Yggdrasil is being used today.