Using Sun tech at Strathclyde Sun@Strathclyde

Another week, another Sun tech demo at Strathclyde. This week, I was talking about ZFS, the revolutionary filesystem that comes as standard with the OpenSolaris distribution. It's pretty cool technology, so I've been looking forward to doing this talk.

As I've done before, I recorded some video clips at the demo. Below you can watch the first twenty minutes or so of the talk. It has to be said that this only scratches the surface of what ZFS can do - I discussed a lot more in the talk (ZFS properties like quotas and reservations, transparent compression, snapshotting, and so on), and even then there is a whole load of other funky stuff that ZFS does which I didn't have time to cover...

We're now four weeks into my programme of weekly events at Strathclyde, and I'm not letting up. Next week I'll be talking about Zones, another OpenSolaris technology, and I should hopefully be welcoming Michael Clarke to Strathclyde the following week for an entertaining introduction to device driver development using NetBeans (I'm waiting for absolute confirmation on that, so watch this space!).

After accidentally leaving it in university over the weekend, I've now retrieved my camera and pulled off some clips from last Friday's Sun@Strathclyde tech demo, which was all about OpenSolaris. I've had to split the clips up a bit since YouTube doesn't like videos longer than ten minutes in length, but thankfully there's a custom player option which allows me to combine them into one:

The next two demos I'll be running are also going to have an OpenSolaris theme, so if you're interested in hearing more about ZFS and Zones, make sure you remember to come along!

Today saw the second Sun@Strathclyde OSUM tech demo of 2009, this time about Sun SPOTs. We had a lower turnout than last time around, which is a shame, because those who did come along seemed to enjoy the demo. It was certainly fun getting some audience members up to throw a SunSPOT around between each other while I graphed the accelerometer data on my laptop (and I think they enjoyed the free t-shirts too!).

Sadly, the videos I took today haven't turned out well; I had hoped to be able to share them online, but my camera decided it didn't want to play ball. The fact that Jason wasn't around to play cameraman didn't help (he was away seeing a lawyer about sorting his US taxes out or something - can't see how that's more important than helping out at my demos, but there you go :-D ).

There seemed to be a fair bit of interest in the tech from the CES students who arrived in the room for a tutorial afterwards, so if there are more people who'd like to see this talk given again, I'd be happy to oblige. Just get in touch - preferably through the OSUM website ;-) - and I'll see what can be done!

My next demo is an introduction to OpenSolaris - Sun's free-to-download open-source operating system. As always, it's next Friday at 1pm in room M4.09 (the James Weir Building). See you there!

Here's another short clip from the Sun@Strathclyde OSUM Kickoff event last Friday - this one's an introduction to SAI, Sun's program offering students and academics free access to online training resources (plus deeply-discounted certifications!).

Unlike the previous video, there's no walkthrough showing how to sign up. This is because you need a special code and program ID to sign up to SAI (this is so we can make sure that only students and academics are actually signing up). If you're interested in getting access to SAI (and why wouldn't you be?!), give me a shout and I can provide you with a card which has detailed instructions on how to sign up.

I've now ploughed through all the feedback forms from last Friday and worked out what I'm going to be talking about in my weekly tech demos over the course of this semester. It was a surprisingly close-run thing in places, but the areas of interest were mostly as I expected. I'll have to see about getting in a guest presenter for one or two of the events, but that hopefully won't be a problem :-)

Here's the list of topics and dates. Unless otherwise specified on the OSUM website, all my tech demos will be held on Fridays at 1pm in room M4.09 (that's the James Weir Building). You can click the links below for more details and to register for events, just so long as you've got an osum.sun.com account (and if you don't, see my previous post for a run-through of how to sign up!).

• Fri 06/2/09 - Sun@Strathclyde OSUM Kickoff 2009
• Fri 13/2/09 - Sun SPOT: Small, Programmable Object Technology
• Fri 20/2/09 - Introduction to OpenSolaris
• Fri 27/2/09 - ZFS: The Most Advanced Filesystem on the Planet
• Fri 06/3/09 - Zones: Virtual Operating Systems
• Fri 13/3/09 - Introduction to NetBeans
• Fri 20/3/09 - Web Development with NetBeans
• Fri 27/3/09 - MySQL: The Open-Source Web DB
• Fri 03/4/09 - No event (final-year project submission day!)
• Fri 24/4/09 - Sun Studio (to be confirmed)
• Fri 01/5/09 - Project Darkstar (to be confirmed)

In addition to the above events, I've got some other stuff in the pipeline to sort out, including an organised tour of Sun's Linlithgow campus. I'll probably do that one during the Easter break, so we don't interfere with anyone's class schedules, so I'll talk about that more once I've made some arrangements - as always, watch this space!

It's been a pretty hectic weekend for me - immediately after finishing my first tech demo of the year on Friday, I hopped straight onto a train to go visit a friend for the weekend. Then, with it being my mum's birthday today, I had to high-tail it back home to join my parents for dinner at The Bay Tree (a very nice wee restaurant on Great Western Road, highly recommended). I was going to finalise my demo programme tonight but my brain's not working so I guess it'll have to wait till tomorrow :-p

The kickoff event on Friday went fairly well - we got 46 students along, which is not too bad for the first event of the year. Hopefully word-of-mouth and the continued allure of free stuff will keep people coming along. Below you can see a short clip from the talk in which I describe Sun's open-source strategy and how the OSUM programme fits into it. There's also a run-through of how to sign up to the website and join my group (hint, hint) :-D

So that's one down and ten to go - we've got ten weeks left before the end of the semester and I'm hoping to fit ten demos in, one per week. Watch this space for news of what I'll be covering!