Dominique Merle's Weblog LYON

I hesitated to name this post : "The cobbler's children go barefoot" = "Le coordonnier le plus mal chaussé"

Last friday, just before Christmas, we had the first Solaris InstallFest @Sun France in Velizy. Kudos to William and Quentin who organized the Nevada installation. Ten of our colleagues were present and satisfied with the installation.

The idea of the InstallFest is that anybody willing to boot Solaris on his PC comes to the installFest. Together, we are stronger than being alone. The installFest spirit : everyone help each other and tips and tricks circulates between the attendees. You do not come with your PC and get back later to see if someone has installed it for you. This would be the wrong attitude.

We installed Solaris Express build 78 and 79. A Cepedia (Sun internal wiki) page has been written by Quentin and William. You will get here the InstallFest guide.

You will be able to runCompiz (3D Desktop), vpn, mount your home directory, wifi, etc...and make presentations with OpenOffice not on Windows but on Solaris!

After such a success, William and Quentin will certainly reiterate this install fest next quarter.

See Wiiliam and Quentin answering questions to attendees (standing up on the photo 's right). What's funny with this situation, it 's that Quentin and William are the younger in the assistance and actually are trainee.

We are planning a technical software event for partners in Grenoble France.

The event is described here.

The subjects which are covered : Sun Secure Global Desktop, OpenSolaris, GlasssFish, NetBeans, OpenDS, OpenESB, xVM, OpenJDK, OpenDMK, Identity Management, Federation Management, Java CAPS ...

You can attend one, two, three or four days.

For registration, just send an email to gec-event@sun.com and specify which day(s) and which tracks you plan to attend. 

Save the date : 15*, 16*, 17 and 18 january 2008 in Grenoble France:  a four days (free) software technical event for partners, developers, System Integrators and customers. (* partners only)

The software topics which are covered:  Sun Secure Global Desktop,  OpenSolaris, Glassfish, NetBeans, OpenDS, OpenESB , xVM, OpenJDK, OpenDMK, Identity Management, Federation Management, Java CAPS ...

There will be plenary sessions in the morning and track sessions in the afternoon. The agenda is available here.

For registration, please send an email to gec-event@sun.com indicating which day(s) and which tracks (green, blue, pink, yellow) you plan to attend.

After these four days, you can extend your travel and take advantage of the nearby Alps.

See you there : 

Sun Microsystems
Grenoble Engineering Center
Inovallée - 180 Av. de l'Europe
38334 Montbonnot Cedex
France

Located in Montbonnot, close to Grenoble in the south east of France, ( N 45° 12' 50" / E 5° 48' 23" / Alt 240m ) the GEC attracts a workforce of multicultural, multilingual experts in software design, productization, and sales, and provides a European point of view within Sun's international research and development community. Grenoble was chosen as the location for the site, based on the city's proven reputation for technological innovation and scientific research. It hosts several French and pan-European research centers, an international university, and offers a stimulating economic environment that has attracted many other multinational corporations. And, of course, there are the French alps too.

I will run the Beaujolais marathon on november the 19^th : that will be my 3^rd marathon and i will have the number 33. My first marathon is commented here, and the second one here.

This marathon is a  42 km race in the Beaujolais, a vineyard north of Lyon in France. For this event, i am training since 4 weeks for a training program that is lasting 8 weeks. Four sessions of training per week. The training program is a mix of long session of running alternatively with maximal aerobic speed (MAS) session.

For this event, i just bought new shoes, which in fact are really slippers : Mizuno Wave Rider 10:

These Mizuno are an evolution of the famous Wave Rider 9 i was using last year. I just add some viscoheel inside to increase the cushioning:

Next week-end, that will be the Lyon semi-marathon, a race which comes in the middle of the training for Beaujolais's marathon. Just a race to see where do i stand, how i feel compared to previous editions. Hope to see sister and nephew :=)

Ten years later, EUNIS was again in Grenoble, in the French Alps. EUNIS stands for European UNiversity Information System. Hal Stern came at this conference, and gave some interesting ideas to the participants. Redshift of course. Have a look at the figure below :

The green area below indicates the way IT traditionally works: there is demand for an ERP, and IT fulfills the cpu demand without any problem as Moore law is well above.

When it comes the red area above, the story is completely different. Here IT is driven by consumer demand, and usually IT has difficulty fulfilling the cpu demand. It's what we called the Redshift.

Hal also speaks about Twitter, The Long Tail, LinkedIn: the network effect!

I also gave a presentation about the Grenoble universities portal : 4 universities sharing a common infrastructure based on Sun Java System components : portal, directory, access manager and web server. The portal is serving more than 50 000 users. Later on, we had a BOF (Bird Of a Feather) session where people from the universities demonstrate the portal.

When you want to collect your ideas, or the ideas of others,  and then order them in a schematic way, Freemind may be of interest!

What is it? 

Freemind lets order your ideas : it's a mind mapping software.

When using it? 

I used it personally to take notes. A friend of mine who is doing consulting activities use it during brainstorming meetings. An other friend is using it to write minutes of meeting.

Below is a map example.

You can click and expand the nodes, generates html report, or image files like above. In short, a smart tool! 

Where to download it?

Here is the web site

An it runs on Solaris! 

When you are in a company that offers products like directory, operating system, language, machines, software, you can imagine that there are a full range of possibilities of specialization and interest for an employee.

As an employee of Sun Microsystems, i like this wealth of interest. I imagine also that being a partner or a customer is not always easy when contacting SUN. Who do i contact? I need together a specialist and a generalist that can bring me a global solution. This role at SUN is named a "system engineer". I am one of these system engineer, and in such a role, i always try to communicate what i know.

Blog is a way for me to communicate what i know. One colleague told me one day "what you give own you, what you keep for yourself is lost forever"

So the story today is about mixing OpenDS (a full directory written in java) together with Nevada (The Solaris Express release).

Installing OpenDS is a piece of cake when using quicksetup, together with the documentation. The installation is done via Java WebStart.

After installation, you can scrutinize the OpenDS behavior with the java console (/usr/jdk/instances/jdk1.6.0/bin/jconsole), as Open DS is instrumented with JMX (Java Management Extensions). Below is a snapshot of OpenDS attributes seen via the console.

You also have the OpenDS console status:

This is easily feasible when all of these tools are opensource : documentation, downloads, all is on line and life for a developer or someone who wants to test is easier.

Just try it all and say thanks for the great work of OpenDS guys!