Liane Praza's Weblog

It's hard to come to work unhappy after attending an external-to-Sun Solaris event. Despite an exhausting day which started ridiculously early to receive the Sun Chairman's Award for Innovation with the rest of a well-deserving team (see Stephen's post for pictures), I had a great time talking to and with folks interested in Solaris.

The (basic) presentation I used is posted here. I made a few minor changes for last night's audience, but the vast majority of the content is identical. Jan didn't have canned slides -- the demo spoke for itself. You'll be able to see the work he and his team did re-architecting x86/x64 Solaris boot for yourself in an upcoming Solaris Express release.

Ben Rockwood was there with camera and video equipment. He's going to try to post a video for those who couldn't attend. I'm cringing at the idea; watching yourself after a presentation can be terrifying. Personal mortification at a permanent record of my mistakes aside, I hope this is helpful for some people. :)

I look forward to meeting more of you at the next meeting. Congratulations to Alan for kicking off such a great group. Hopefully you'll also be able to see a variety of Solaris engineers at the User Groups starting soon around the world.

I've blogged about it already, but the first (SF Bay Area) OpenSolaris User Group is tonight at 7:30pm. Both Alan and Claire have given more details, including maps. It isn't just Alan, Jan, and me either -- there are a number of Sun/Solaris/OpenSolaris luminaries who should be in attendance.

Returned from Usenix today and I'm still exhilarated and exhausted -- wish I could have stayed longer. I'm a complete laggard compared to everyone else who has been so diligently posting after crawling back to their hotel rooms/homes after closing out the BoF and the bar at 1 or 2am. As I mentioned already, we did two BoF sessions: Solaris 10 and Beyond, and Developing for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Lots of folks (80+) and lots of great questions on Tuesday night -- many stayed until the bitter end to chat with us about Solaris and other interesting topics.

The developer BoF I ran on Wednesday was, as expected, a bit smaller. There was lots of competition from interesting sessions and the topic was less general: we had somewhere between 40 and 60 people (which was still a great crowd). Sun folks included Dan, Bart, Alan, Tim Marsland, David Bustos, John, and Matt. Spencer even stopped by despite an early NFSv4 session the next morning. Roy Fielding was kind enough to indulge my request to talk a bit about his view of OpenSolaris from the perspective of his new role on the community advisory board.

As the slideset I used for the developer BoF was completely new, I want to take another look over it before posting it here -- didn't even have the time to spellcheck before the BoF! I hope everyone went home with at least one new tidbit about developing on [Open]Solaris they didn't know before, even if I wasn't as funny as Dan the night before. Apologies that my presentation didn't have more panache. Here's a quick [pre|re]view. In addition to talking about the Solaris lifestyle and specific features that I think make it a great platform for software development, we also talked about what's coming with OpenSolaris. I'm hoping to have time to add notes about some of the detailed examples we went through during the BoF too, but that may take a while longer. It is more fun to do them live, unscripted -- mistakes and all. :) Bart has promised to post his example of inserting stable DTrace probes into an application on his blog soon too.

Thanks to all of you who were able to come. We had a bunch of fun and learned quite a bit from the comments, questions, and subsequent discussions. If you were there, do you have any comments on what we could do better next time aside from having more free beer?

I'm now re-posting this with some more solid information... A number of Solaris folks will be around at Usenix'05. Some of us will congregate at the two Solaris BOFs. Dan will be leading Solaris 10: Where We Are and Where We Are Headed 8-10pm Tuesday. I'll be leading the Developing for Solaris and OpenSolaris BOF 8:30pm-10:30pm Wednesday. While you can be sure I won't be able to resist mentioning smf(5) once or twice, I promise plenty of other good stuff too. If you're attending Usenix'05, stop by and say hello!

I'm conflicted. On one hand, George Hotelling's gopherblog¹ brings me a nostalgic chuckle. On the other, I lament this fine, structured protocol being usurped in the name of a weblog. I have hazy recollections of days when http sites carried only esoteric physics information and pictures of peoples' cats, but gopher sites were useful. Caring about any of this certainly relegates me to a niche that shouldn't be offering opinions.

¹If your browser is confused by the protocol, try firefox.