Kate's Blog

Partners and cryptography at CEC

On Monday I gave the presentation that paid my way to the conference - "Delivering projects with Sun's Partners". And, not surprisingly, a few partners turned up! Since I live in Australia, most of the presentations I do are delivered over the phone - no audience feedback, or very little. Because people can't see you, they tend to listen patiently and not interrupt with questions. Presenting live meant I could watch the body language, adjusting my presentation as I went along - much more energy, I was almost sorry when I reached the end!

The initiative I've been working on should make it easier for Partners delivering solutions with Sun to collaborate with Sun staff they are working with on projects - of course, with security, protecting both the Partner's IC and Sun's IC. Many people had good feedback for me, and overall it was very useful.

One of the highlights of the day, though (for an ex-techie like me... my manager is laughing at this point...) was attending Radia Perlman's talk on the use of encryption to protect your backups (ensuring that they are securely deleted when you are finished). You can read more about it on http://research.sun.com/minds/2005-0208/ . Crypto is about as geeky as you can get, of course - it's probably the best argument for teaching pure mathematics there is. I felt privileged to hear from one of the pioneers in the field. Radia was nice enough to skip over the mathematics slides - so, I didn't have to try and remember my university mathematics.

Technorati tags: cec2006

Posted at 11:28AM 04 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun  |  Comments[0]