Jim Walker: Sun Software Engineer

With over 3200 people in attendance, Sun Tech Days 2008 in St. Petersburg, Russia was another successful developer event, and I had the pleasure of working with my colleagues from the local Sun office. It was nice to return to St. Petersburg. I visited Leningrad in December 1988, so I noticed a lot of change. The city is definitely the Paris of the north. I gave the OpenSolaris Testing and OpenStorage for OpenSolaris presentations during OpenSolaris Day on April 4th. I gave the presentations in the main hall where the keynotes where given and had a great audience of over 150 people. Alexander Belokrylov did a great job with the demos, and I enjoyed engaging with the audience and got cheers everytime I spoke a little Russian. I have never seen better questions, and we had more questions than time after both presentations.

In addition, I supported Jim Hughes, with the ZFS demo during the Solaris Track keynote on April 3rd. Here's a picture of Jim, Kirill Nikonchuk, who setup the hardware and me the night before. We had some USB issues with a PC clone, but once we switch to a Sun Ultra 40 everything worked. This picture was taken unattended by timer from the keynote podium. Also here's a pointer to the ZFS is Smashing Baby video on YouTube.



Later in the day after the keynote, my wife Suzanne and I climbed up to the colonnade on St. Isaac's Cathedral to enjoy the view. Here's a picture of me in a Z-DAY tshirt, which highlights Halloween 2005, when zfs was first integrated into Solaris.

My wife Suzanne took this picture while we were in Tokyo visiting the National Museum. I think it is nice, and the artist approved.

Information on this month's Front Range OpenSolaris User Group meeting has been posted at: http://frosug.org

This month's FROSUG (Front Range OpenSolaris User Group) meeting is on Thursday, May 31, 2007. Brad Lewis and Tim Jacobson will give a presentation on Sun Studio 12 Compilers and Tools. In addition, we will be giving an OpenSolaris Update, and will be having an InstallFest. So, if you want help installing an OpenSolaris distribution, backup your laptop and bring it to the meeting!

!! FREE OpenSolaris Starter Kits and Solaris Express Developer Edition DVDs. !!
About the presentation:
OpenSolaris includes the best package of compilers and tools for developers. This free package is called Sun Studio and version 12 will be released in June. This presentation will give an overview of the components of Sun Studio and new improvements for version 12. In addition, there will be several short demonstrations using performance and diagnostic tools.

The presentation will be posted on http://frosug.org prior to the meeting.

About our presenters:
Brad Lewis and Tim Jacobson work in the Performance Library Group (Perflib). Perflib is a collection of Mathematical Routines for Scientific Computing. These routines are custom written to obtain the highest performance on Sun hardware for both stand-alone and parallel systems.

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Meeting Details:

When: Thursday, May 31, 2007

Times:
6:00pm - 6:30pm Doors open and Pizza
6:30pm - 6:45pm OpenSolaris Update
6:45pm - 8:30pm Sun Studio 12 Compiler

Where:
Sun Broomfield Campus
Building 1 - Conference Center
500 Eldorado Blvd.
Broomfield, CO 80021

Dialin: 866-545-5220
Access Code: 9303067

The meeting is free and open to the public.

Pizza and soft drinks will be served at the beginning of the meeting. Please RSVP to frosug-rsvp(AT)opensolaris(DOT)org in order to help us plan for food and setup access to the Sun campus.

We hope to see you there!
Thanks,
FROSUG

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Future Meeting Plans:

June 28, 2007:
Bonnie Corwin presents "OpenSolaris: Where We Are and Where We're Going". In addition, we will celebrate OpenSolaris's two year Anniversary!!

If you have ideas for topics or have a topic you would like to present, send them to: ug-frosug(AT)opensolaris(DOT)org

This Wednesday (April 18, 2007) we had a large number of volunteers from the local Sun campuses to work on the houses being built by Habitat for Humanity. Combined with the other people working that day we set a new record for the number of volunteers for a Wednesday. Here's a picture of the Sun volunteers.


I was crew leader on one house where we did the finishing touches (plaster,painting,etc...). I had a great crew (Diana, Lisa, Susan, John, Maryann, Michele and Tom). Here's a picture of the house our crew worked on.