Campus Ambassador Coordinator Around the Sun

I'm a day or two late but Sun announced on Monday the Amber Road line of products. Amber Road has been under development within Sun for some time. I remember seeing some of the early beta demos last year and thinking "This is going to be amazing!" Well here it is, finally - the Unified Storage System.

You can check out all the cool features, and even have a go with the software in a virtual machine by visiting: http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/index.jsp

But to whet your appetites here is a picture, they say a picture speaks a thousand words...

At Sun we get a 'Start the Week' email every Monday. I usually spend some time reading the articles in this e-mail as they can be interesting relating to new product releases, events during the week, talks to go to etc.

One thing that caught my eye this morning that I feel I ought to share is that a group of Sun employees are going to be sleeping rough in London this Wednesday (13th November) to help raise money for the national charity helping homeless young people, Centrepoint.

I'm going to donate some money and I urge you all to do so too... http://www.justgiving.com/sun-sleepout-team

This week has been quite busy, fun and interesting. On Tuesday a fellow student, Fraser, finished his internship at Sun and headed off back to Scotland for a couple of weeks before starting his Summer internship at City Bank. His departure managed to coincide with the Lab teams planned social event - carting. We had good fun carting. I did pretty good during the qualifier getting 4th place, but then, despite a 1 second improvement on my best time, didn't do so well on the final race, coming 6th or it might have been 5th place. Never the less, we all had good fun and it was a good way to say goodbye to Fraser. 

On Thursday Robin and myself left work at 4pm and headed straight into London for a talk by Scott McNealy at the London Business School. Apart from getting out of the tube station and turning left rather than right, we managed to get to the talk with 10 minutes to spare - just enough time to meet some of the new Campus Ambassadors for next year. Despite the gloom and doom predictions from a colleague that Scott wouldn't turn up (because when he went to a talk, he never turned up) - Scott turned up and delivered a pretty interesting and funny talk.

The talk was titled 'Free is the new Black' (thus the title for this blog post). It was directed quite heavily at Business students, which was to be expected given that the talk was done at the London Business School. However, he did propose some interesting ideas - most revolving around Open Source with an interesting side talk about a meeting with Pfizer regarding the possibilities of 'Open Source Drug Development'. This, I have to admit, conjured up ideas of people producing and selling drugs in a garage behind their houses... hmmm? Is it me? He did also have some other ideas (or perhaps more views), again revolving around Free such as 'Free Media' citing websites such as YouTube, Last FM, BBC iPlayer etc. Ultimately I found Scott to be very humorous in his delivery of his talk and I think I could have listened to his ideas for hours. I was surprised how quickly the questions came around.

Scott also mentioned one of his most recent projects, Curriki which is basically a Wiki designed for providing educational material and learning tools to every child - worldwide. I thought it was an interesting idea, and it's well worth a visit. If nothing else you could donate a couple of pounds (or dollars or whatever) to the project using PayPal - who have kindly agreed not to charge PayPal fees!

So, that brings me nearly to the end of this update, expect to say that the fun and games didn't end there. This morning I was in work for a planned production server outage. In addition to running a lab for support engineers we also provide ITOps alternatives for Sun employees with regards to home directories, Sunray Servers (we have 4 in the UK, 3 of which cycle through the latest builds of Nevada), E-Mail servers, Solaris Build environments etc. Most of these servers were in need of some kind of maintenance or other, and we felt it was time to give the 'production cage' a bit of a clean up. The work went very well and we finished by about 1pm - just in time for a nice lunch at one of the local Pubs.

That's all from me for now - but don't forget, Free is the new Black!