Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

It was a beautiful morning for running in Los Angeles, sunny, with just the right amount of ocean breeze. I do a lot of my best thinking and decision making on runs. I'm heading off to JavaOne on Monday, along with Ian and the rest of the Solaris gang. But before I talk about Indiana, which Jonathan mentioned in his blog on Friday, a bit about hacking and India.

My daughter's high school is hosting a number of foreign exchange students and we are lucky enough to have a 16 year old boy from Daly College in Indore India staying with us for six weeks. He is a very good Indian food cook, I dare say perhaps even on par with Jonathan. Anyhow, over dinner Friday he was asking what decisions I had made during the first few weeks of my new job running the Solaris organization which led to talk of Project Indiana. I hear OpenSolaris is good for hacking because you can get the source code, he told me, followed by, "Uncle Marc, can you teach me to hack?" As my daughter walked off with that, oh no, here comes another one of dad's four hour computer talks, I just smiled. The rest of the evening, while not necessarily a discussion of hacking in the traditional sense, was all about why open source actually leads to more secure code as well as an introduction to networking, TCP/IP, port scanning, ssh, and firewalls. At about 1 am, a tangle of power cords on the dining room table where 3 laptops, Windows, Mac, OpenSolaris, each with 10-20 terminal windows open, sat with fans humming.

I wasn't quite sure how successful the lesson had been, so Saturday at breakfast when my wife asked our Indian guest how the hacking lesson had gone, I braced for an answer that would cause my wife to turn and give me one of those I told you so looks. "Auntie, the hacking lesson went great, I learned so much, I need to learn more about programming when I return to India but I really understand how operating systems and networks work now, none of my hacker friends in India know that stuff." Mission accomplished. For the record, no systems were broken into.

That brings me back to Project Indiana. Despite the rumors , don't look for any big Solaris related announcements at JavaOne. This week is to celebrate Java technology and one of the world's largest developer communities. Yes, Solaris is one of the best platforms for developing and running Java code, but Sun has, since the start, worked to ensure the Java community was not a Sun or Solaris only community. Soon enough, we will present our ideas for Project Indiana to the OpenSolaris community. Gaining the worldwide reach and adoption of Java technology doesn't happen just because one company supports the technology. So if you want to learn more about Project Indiana, join the OpenSolaris community, and stay tuned. We will come asking for your advice and asking for your support soon, not simply announce some grand new plan for Solaris. That is the one big decision I made on my ten mile run this morning.

In the meantime, hope to see many of you at JavaOne this week!