A Crazy Idea About Solaris and Mac OS
I got my brand new Macbook pro recently and I love the cool feeling to hang around with slick GUI of Mac OS. Just read the article on The Register that Apple will integrate ZFS into Mac OS. Well, as a trade, why don't we port Mac OS user interface onto Solaris? Is it a crazy idea?
Posted at 10:58AM Jun 07, 2007 by kzhou in Sun | Comments[3]
The Things I Like in Sun St. Petersburg Engineering Center
Another week of wonderful working experience outside Beijing, China. And it's in St. Petersburg Sun engineering center this time.
Firstly, St. Petersburg Sun Tech Day was a great success. It was organized well, attracted, maybe, around 2,500 participants, not only from Russia but aslo from some other countries. I talked to a guy from Ukraine and another folk from Russia, pretty impressive. They both have long time Solaris experiences. Other interesting things? Of couse, cool demos, slides and exciting presentations. Among all the activities, I like the live band and their show most in the evening because all the players, including singer, were from Sun Russia marketing team. What enthusiasm! You can see the picture. Along with the free beer and food provided there, it was kind of hgih. :-)
Secondly, I like nice office environment and professional atmosphere in Sun St. Petersburg engineering center. I like the wood flooring especially. It gives you nice, warm feeling, not like a bunch of cubicals sitting there, one by one inside a huge space. No offensive. Just a personal opinion. And the receptionist guided me to admin, Anna's office in the first day. Smiling, fast pace woman lab engineer Sevindth showed me the working space which she had set up for me before my arrival! I noticed Natalia worked very efficiently to deal with a lot of logistic work for Sun Tech Day because she sat in the office outside of my office by coincidence.
The third, Igor and his team manage and support a great shared lab space for several teams in the site.
The fourth, I met an American English teacher, Holly. She teaches English there four hours a day for 5 days a week. She has a six months or a year contract (sorry, I'm getting old) and Sun hires her all way from New York. She is smart that she pulled me to her classroom for about a hour to do an on site English conversation practice with her students, the engineers there. No problem. I was glad to help.
The fifth, I like my experience that I beat the challenge to take metro (US people call it subway) from hotel to Sun engineering office. There was one time when I took the metro to go the opposite direction and I figured out what's wrong finally. It was a little scare, not because of anything else, no offensive again, but the fact that I don't understand Russian, and of course, the occasion that I was asking the direction was kind of funny. However, I made it and people there were nice.
Exciting things outside of Sun office there? A lot of beautiful things to see. Hermitage, definitely, runs the top of the list. Unfortunately, I had only one hour to go there before my leaving for the airport. It's horriblly sorry not to see Hermitage for 4 hours or a whole day because that museum shows you what civilization means in human sociaty.
Posted at 02:17PM Apr 17, 2007 by kzhou in Sun | Comments[0]
The Unexpected Things I Met in Sun Prague Office
I'm lucky that I had chance to work in Sun Prague office the week before last week. There were several things that I was surprised or didn't expect to see.
People in Prague speak some Chinese. On the first day of my arrival, I met four people. The driver who picked me up from airport. One engineering manager, one senior engineer in Sun Prague office and one guy on the street whom I asked about the direction to go to Solaris RPE team's apartment where I lived during that week. Among above four guys, the latter three of them could speak some Chinese and I can tell that it's, at least, 2 - 3 years more learning efforts. Considering how difficult it is to study a foreign language, especially like Chinese, in another country, I give them more credit for that. There are some people in Prague who are looking for more challenge.
I didn't expect a lot of people would come and join my presentation regarding Beijing engineering center and Solaris QE team because there had been visitings and rotation engineers between our two sites for a while. However, there were actually 30 - 40 people showed up in meeting room and they had some very good comments about the topic.
I met and spent a quite bit time with a rotation engineer, from ERI, Beijing, who had been working there for 6 weeks and we never actually had chance to really talk to each other when we were in Beijing.
I realized that my level of alcohol tolerance is so low that after some beers in the pub with some Prague engineers who obivously felt almost nothing for those beers.
Things I expected but still impressed me so much include the beautiful architectures, comfortable and convenient transportation system, etc. and people's tireless efforts to pursuit state of art level of work to build up such great city throughout the history.
Posted at 05:01PM Apr 16, 2007 by kzhou in Sun | Comments[1]
What it takes to be successful at Sun and for Sun?
John Fowler becomes a big topic in today's (PDT) San Jose Mercury News. Although I don't know much about him personally, I like the story and five things to know about him, I especially like the words "risk-taking", "crazy" and "Sun's turnaround".
As a consequence, I'm asking myself if those words are the words we should be looking for to be successful at Sun and, therefore, Sun will be more successful if we have more talents with those type of characteristics.
Probably, yes!
I noticed particularly that John was raised in Taiwan and
Indonesia for several years.
Does this contribute anything to his personality and vision? That I don't know.
Posted at 02:02PM Mar 26, 2007 by kzhou in Sun | Comments[0]
Fairness in management
A classical, difficult question. I had a chance to talk to Sin-Yaw, VP of Sun at ERI, about this topic. Actually, this talk happened before, at least couple of times, too. He has a version of definition of what is fairness in management and I would say that I agree with that. That is fairness in management is to let people know the rules of the game.
That said, to be clear and transparent about goals, expectations, competencies, metrics, etc. is a basic requirement for a manager. That requires certain level of skill sets. However, the more difficult part is that you can only do this as much as possible because people are different. In other words, different people have to play together under the same rules and you'd like to motivate them to do their best.
Moreover, you are part of your manager's team so you yourself are in the game, too.
Welcome. Your IQ and EQ will be tested constantly on this topic in your professional career life. Hope it's fun.
Posted at 02:40PM Mar 16, 2007 by kzhou in Sun | Comments[0]
View point from a Solaris engineer at ERI
My dear friend, one of my team members, Forrest Wu, a ZFS test development engineer at ERI, posted his new blog yesterday after our team meeting. He answered, at least, couple of questions we discussed in our meeting, as a matter of fact.
Disagreeing with the reason causing Solaris adoption slow and unenergetic in China that Jonathan heard and said in his blog, Forrest reckoned that there were three reasons made that happened in China so far. China has had very short history of computer education and Windows dominates most of it for a while, compared to Europe and US. The breath and depth of computer applications are in a small scale. And the last, the perspective, such as, Solaris vs RedHat.
But it looks like Forrest and other engineers are pretty optimistic for the future of the Solaris in China for some strong reasons, like yang students here are very curious about technology and many small enterprises would take advantage of OpenSolaris.
Great vision, I would say.
Posted at 03:52PM Dec 27, 2006 by kzhou in Sun | Comments[3]
One more example from Italian
I read the article by Maria_Bartiromo from Businessweek.com this morning. I was surprised because I only had known her as a business news ancho for CNBC television, hosting stock market news program. Anybody who experienced late 1990s .com booming time should be familiar with her hosting style, I guess.
However, looking through her wikipedia page, she is really an epitome of an American story of professional success, in a lot aspectives, intelligent, passional, working hard and visional, and others ... yeah. She wrote couple of books and is also a business/financial news reporter for some newspapers and magazines while she hosts television shows.
The thing interests me is that the fact she grew up in Broolyn, NY, "As a teenager, Maria checked coats at her parents' Italian restaurant, at which her father was the chef." (qouted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Bartiromo). That makes American Italian and Chinese as a pair, I'm sure most of people know why I'm saying that ...
So, a dream- comes-true story again, from an immigrant family from Italy, not China, this time. :-)
Posted at 04:22PM Dec 11, 2006 by kzhou in Sun | Comments[0]
Five years ride at ERI
I can't believe it! December 6 will be the day that I came back to Sun and work at ERI in Beijing, China for five years. Wow, five G... d ... years! I guess it's always good to look back to see what I learned, what I've done and ask myself how I feel about them. Yes, I learned a lot, for sure. Five years ago, ERI started to work on desktop applications, Solaris localization, then we expanded the product areas to work on Solaris, Java, client/server applications, etc. Organization changed, people come and go, sometime, it could be crazy, the same as other places. One thing I learned is to appreciate this much more diversified environment. People have all kinds of different backgrounds, experiences, viewpoints, desires, behavor patterns, it's more different than we could imagin and it becomes part of our life because of this global engineering thing. With that in mind, if we can still focus on one or two things we'd like to accomplish and be able to move things forward, step by step at a very compelling level, that's something we should be proud of! One of my way to define the meaning of doing things at compelling level is to do them with a group of very smart people in this industry. By that definition, I'm happy what I'm doing right now. Yes, congratulations to myself for my mostly-happy five years ride at ERI. :-)
Posted at 04:03PM Nov 22, 2006 by kzhou in Sun | Comments[3]
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