And to wrap up the day, we did a session at the Beijing OpenSolaris User Group. Great to meet everyone!
Friday Sep 26, 2008
I went to Beijing Jiaotong University with Shao-Ting and Chengzu Zhou today. We spoke to a group of about 60 college freshmen. I really love going to universities here. It changes my perspective. And it's hard not to feel welcome when people jump out of their skin to talk to you, and when students and professors and school administrators ask you to come back. I'm continually impressed by the level of English spoken here, and how eager students are to engage in English. People have even asked me to move here! Talking to administrators afterwards, I was not at all surprised to hear that integrating with the west is a top priority for the university. You don't have to hear that, though. It's obvious. Very nice day ...
Thursday Sep 25, 2008
I just got back from a couple of hours at Beijing University of Posts
and Telecommunications talking to a small group of 30 students about
OpenSolaris. Sun's Robert Sohigian also spoke about career
opportunities these guys can expect to encounter as they finish school
and enter the dynamic IT work place here in Beijing. It was a really
nice night, and the students had a lot of interesting questions during
and after the talks. Fiona set all this up and she has more here.
Wednesday Sep 24, 2008
Nice dinner tonight with some of the OpenSolaris engineers at Intel. I'm stuffed. :) Very cool time. Intel has guys here in Beijing and also in Shanghai as part of the Intel project on OpenSolaris.
Liang Kan, Wesley Huang, Jim Grisanzio, Tony Su, Jiang Liu
I had a nice meeting today with part of Sun's globalization team in Beijing. These guys are involved in a whole range of OpenSolaris engineering and community building operations around China -- user groups, education activities, release engineering, teaching, input methods, testing, and internationalization & localization. Great conversations. Thanks, guys.
Check out the two images above. That's a new handwriting recognition application written by Feng Zhu in g11n that will eventually make its way into OpenSolaris and offer a new way of inputing characters. The application is self-learning and makes character recognition easier. Users can define their own glyphs and mappings between glyphs and characters. Look for a source release in the Internationalization & Localization Community Group as part of the Input Method project in the coming months. Basically, you write on the screen and are presented with some characters as options. Chinese. Japanese. Korean. Sanskrit. There will be a web interface for the community to help input the thousands and thousands and thousands of characters into the database. Should be cool.
The characters in the screen shots below mean "move" in English. The second one is written more carelessly.
Tuesday Sep 23, 2008
I'm in Beijing for the week. Just got in. Really wild ride to the hotel
from the airport. The driver got lost. Three times. Ok, it happens. Not
a big deal. He was a charming fellow and trying very hard to please me.
But each time he stopped and got out to ask for directions, he left the
car running in the street. In the middle of the street. In
traffic. With me in it. Now, Beijing is known to be a rather busy
place. In fact, it's one of the most densely populated places on the
planet. And with the lines on the road being mere suggestions, why
would you park your car in traffic with a customer inside as you dart
through oncoming traffic to ask for directions from the guy all the way
over there on the sidewalk? I must admit, this has never happened to me
before. Fortunately, the guys in the gigantic trucks were able to see the car in time and dodge around me with horns blasting. Got my
attention, though, that's for sure.
Monday Sep 22, 2008
I'll be in Beijing next week to meet with the Linux and OpenSolaris
communities and also hook up with students at Beijing Jiaotong
University and Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
Can't wait. Should be a nice trip. Also looking forward to seeing my
Sun colleagues and our Intel partners as well. If you are around,
please feel free stop by the OSUG meeting.
This blog copyright 2009 by jimgris
