A humble Sun Campus Ambassador Jason Antman's Blog

Before diving into some more technical content, I thought that I'd begin with a brief introduction. Sun appears to be a very blogging-oriented environment, and as an Intern, I've been encouraged to setup my own blog. While most of my personal content will still live at blogs.jasonantman.com (which is in dire need of a working template), I'd like to keep this blog as active as possible, especially given what I'll be working on for the next few months...

I'm a 20-year-old undergraduate student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, USA. I've been involved in computers since I was quite young, and remember the fascination I experienced when my father pulled a 14.4k modem out of a cardboard box, hooked it up to the 386 in my grandmother's basement-turned-ad agency office, and proceeded to show me text from computers around the world. Admittedly, I couldn't read at the time, but there was a really great game where I could put the "hand" on a bottle moving across the screen and "shoot" it. Since then I've remained involved in some aspect of computing, whether it was being the first kid to have a network in his house, or ripping open old machines to figure out what made them tick. I think that I'm entering the IT world at a relatively interesting time, one where I experienced the use of a computer before I knew how to read, yet work alongside people who didn't get their hands on one until college, and also have peers who still aren't fully computer literate. When I was 15 or so, I purchased my first CD-and-manuals (and floppies) copy of a Linux distribution. I immediately setup a web server, and am now on my third machine, with the same host, in one incarnation or another, running more or less continuously for five years.

Over this past summer, I was recruited by Sun Microsystems to be the Campus Ambassador for Rutgers University. I look at it as a unique opportunity. At the moment, Sun seems to have great interest in advancing the use of some of its' open-source technologies on college campuses, including the NetBeans IDE, the various flavors of the Java programming language, and the Solaris operating system. For the past few years, I've been deeply committed to open-source software. Not the level of fundamentalism that some have, but for my own purposes, I've found that many open-source technologies perform as well or better than purely proprietary ones. And I've been amazed at how few of my peers realize that such technologies exist, yet alone how usable they are. Moreover, I'm really looking forward to some of the training that I'll be able to receive from Sun - I have little experience with the Java2EE and ME programming languages, and I'm truly looking forward to expanding my horizons, and my experience.

Two years ago, I never thought that I'd ever voluntarily give up my now-beloved Linux operating systems. I'd heard a few things about the Solaris operating system, and definitely connected the name with high-end systems that were expensive, robust, and would surely make any SysAdmin drool. In the past year or so, I began to read more about it - primarily because my "farm" of servers and desktops has grown to a dozen-plus machines, and they're getting quite difficult to manage. When I started reading about the openSolaris project, and realized that I could have the reliability I dreamed of at no cost, and in a open-source-friendly project, I was immediately intrigued. A few weeks ago, after being hired by Sun, I decided to bite the bullet and give the Solaris operating system a fair try - not a quick demo, but actually sit down and decide to learn. Well, it took about half an hour for me to make a decision. I opened the Solaris Management Console program, and it struck me like a ton of bricks - here was a program that was designed to allow me to manage multiple servers. It had a clear field for me to type in a host address. This wasn't some hack in an archaic Ncurses interface, but something that was designed to be used in a network environment.

At the moment, I'm in the process of replacing some of my archaic hardware (literally machines 10+ years old) and starting from the ground up with a network environment based on the Solaris operating system. Why such a big project? Well, I'm a college student. I can't devote weeks to planning, and I've tried to do one little upgrade here and another there, and won't make that mistake again.

In the coming months, I hope to share some insight into the life and work of a student intern at Sun - both in terms of helping the University community to explore the myriad technologies offered by Sun, and exploring some of them myself. I can get off on some pretty long technical rants (as exemplified by the one above), and truly enjoy it - especially when it's something that I'm truly excited about - but want to keep some light material in here, as well.

So, for some light reading... I've lived in the same small town in northern New Jersey for all of my pre-college life, and still spend the summer, school breaks, and some weekends there with my family. While computing has always played an important part in my life, most of my senior year in high school was spent planning to go to school to study Fine Art Photography. I attended Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) for ten weeks (a trimester) as a freshman. They were both some of the best and worst weeks of my life - I enjoyed immersing myself in art, and studying under Willie Ostermann (a photographer and mentor to whom I am deeply grateful for) - yet transferred out (to Rutgers) after my first trimester due to personal reasons. Life since then has been a blur, and I haven't done any serious photography since I left, yet one day I will. I've also been a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician since I was 18, and it's an irreplaceable part of my life - I've also written the PHP EMS Tools package, an open-source solution for scheduling of crews at small EMS organizations, and am planning an Electronic Patient Care Report package targeted to the volunteer EMS community (usually without funding for a commercial solution) which will be written in the Java programming language.

As much as I'd like to add some more, I would like to keep my blog posts short enough that if they are eventually read, they won't put the user to sleep. And, speaking of sleep, I have a US History exam tomorrow (err.. today, after sleep) that could use a good night's sleep and some studying. Stay tuned...