This is such a relief. Now, after years of on-and-off studying, I have yet another degree: a Bachelor of Arts, also known as a BA, also known as "Bugger All", a snide comment we Engineering and Computer Science students had for Arts students who vacationed on campuses as if they were expensive dating agencies, implying that arts degrees are practically worth zilch when it comes to employment potential.

Having studied Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, I can fairly objectively say that engineering/science requires far more work than arts. However, I need to qualify that by adding that not all major subjects are equal, just as not all universities are equal. And a lot depends on aptitude. I don't think I have much of an aptitude for languages: English is my second language and I decided that I wanted to study a third language from scratch when I was 27 years old. It has been a difficult and frustrating undertaking, especially since I studied by correspondence from South Africa - where there are hardly any Spanish speakers. But not nearly as difficult as it would have been to study, say Russian or Mandarin - at least all the languages I know share a common (Latin) alphabet.

Also, I have always disliked pure theory and always wanted to practice what I learn, which is why I always scored above 80% for my programming assignments, while not doing as well as I should have in my theory exams. My entire Spanish education has been by correspondence with the aid of books and audio tapes. Now I really need to go and live in a Spanish-speaking country for a while to apply my knowledge. I've visited Spain twice so far, but I need to actually live and immerse myself in Spanish culture to really benefit.

Anyway, I'm glad and very relieved it's all over for now. I was going to read Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes this year to celebrate 400 years since the publication of, what some regard as, the world's first novel (La primera novela del mundo). I bought a copy of the original text a few years ago, glanced at it and gave up. Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare (they died on the same day), and the Spanish of the original text is just too archaic for my level of Spanish. So, I bought a few simplified texts when I visited Madrid in April. Now that I've passed my last exam, I am really motivated to read it, 'cos this time it will be for fun, not to study for a friggin' exam!

Also, now that I have all that behind me, I shall delight in gathering together all my Spanish notes, crumpling them up page-by-page, and throwing them (roughly) into a heartwarming Irish peat fire.

I just returned from a trip to the US, which required a nonimmigrant visa.
For those of you who have never needed to apply for a US visa, here are some of the questions they ask you on the DS-156 nonimmigrant visa application form:

• Have you ever unlawfully distributed or sold a controlled substance (drug), or been a prostitute or procurer for prostitutes?
• Do you seek to enter the United States to engage in export control violations, subversive or terrorist activities, or any other unlawful purpose?
• Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization as currently designated by the U.S. Secretary of State?
• Have you ever participated in persecutions directed by the Nazi government of Germany; or have you ever participated in genocide?

Often the sanest refuge from bureaucratic idiocy is humour, and highly appropriate in this context is Welcome to the United States from Franks Zappa's Yellow Shark album.

The lyrics are based on the actual text of a US visa application form. Zappa was best known as a rock musician with fondness of satire and off-beat humor. But he was also a composer and the Yellow Shark album contains recordings of some of his more "serious" compositions performed by a German chamber orchestra with Zappa conducting. The album was released shortly after his death in 1993.

Anyway, back to the trip... I met up with Sun Ray engineers to discuss work we are doing on a new Sun Ray administration user interface. So, if you are a Sun customer and a Ray Server administrator, please let me know if there is anything you would like to see added to the admininstration UI, or any other comments on Sun Ray administration tools in general.

My visit coincided with the Desktop Performance Summit led by John Rice. I popped in on Wednesday when there was a talk on the performance analysis tools in Sun Studio. I also talked with Sean Meighan, who leads the development of Canary - a tool that gives an overall birds-eye view of the health of a group of machines on a network. I did some work on Canary a few months ago, and from what I have seen it is bound to be of great value to systems administrators in general, and Sun Ray server administrators in particular.

I felt a bit out of my depth with all the performance experts around, but it has motivated me to start playing around with DTrace and other tools available on Solaris. Up till now I have done most of my development on Linux, but with all these tools available on Solaris I'm going to make it my primary development platform from now on. My past experience in multiplatform development has proven that it is always beneficial to compile, test and run on as many OS's as possible, using as many different compilers as you can get your hands on. Subtle differences can expose bugs that may remain hidden if you stick to only one platform. So, with the Solaris tools now available, the desktop team should be able to identify and fix more performance bottlenecks in GNOME - work that will benefit both Sun and the GNOME community in the long run.

I would encourage free and open source software developers to consider using Solaris in addition to their favourite OS. With Open Solaris there are already a variety of different Solaris distributions available. One that I'm particularly interested in is Nexenta, which combines the Solaris kernel with Debian tools, which will result in an environment similar to my favourite Linux distro: Ubuntu.

A good working relationship between Open Solaris and Debian would be great. Some people have been keen on this for quite a while already, though there are some reservations about the CDDL. Hopefully these can be ironed out - my colleague Alo is certainly keen on getting a discussion going on this topic, and has proposed a talk at next year's Debian conference titled: OpenSolaris and Debian: Can we be friends?

Now, time to download the Nexenta LiveCD...