Sun employee & fanatical motorcyclist Mike Belch's Weblog Biker Mike's Weblog

This is my last blog entry on this site. As of August 31st 2009, I will no longer be a Sun employee. I would like to thank Sun for the past fourteen years, much of which I have greatly enjoyed. I would also like to thank them for providing me, through blogs.sun.com, with a platform to publicise the work of Freewheelers EVS, a charity for which I have a great deal of time and affection. 

Anyone wishing to contact me will find me on Freewheelers website, http://web.me.com/mikebelch, on Facebook and on the mobile phone number that I had at Sun, which I have kept on leaving the company.

Version 2.2.2 of VirtualBox, running on Mac, is the best release I have seen to date. It is much more stable than any of the last three releases, of which I had begun to despair following a persistent problem with suspend or restore of virtual machine state. The new version is not only stable but also lightning-fast.

If anyone is remotely interested, I have been using it for both professional and personal reasons. At work I have used it to give me a clean client-machine/browser environment for testing Sun's IBIS implementation of Oracle 11i. Personally I have been using VirtualBox to host a MySQL and Apache environment to do some prototyping of a new Joomla-based website for the charity that I support in my spare time. The website I developed for Freewheelers EVS has now gone live and is receiving good reviews from my colleagues in the charity. I'm also relieved to see that so far the redevelopment hasn't messed anything up in our Google rankings - an important part of maintaining our profile with new volunteers and sponsors. 

The news that Oracle is buying Sun raised an incident from the dark recesses of my memory. In March 2000, I did some private flying from San Carlos airfield in California. It is located within direct sight of Oracle's headquarters and has the very apt ICAO designation KSQL. Anyway, for one of the flights I was returning to the airfield after a couple of hours touring the bay in my Piper PA28-181 Archer and was told that I was number one in the circuit to land - directly in front of Larry Ellison who was waiting also joining the circuit to land behind me. Anyway, being a Brit who was unfamiliar with US flight procedures I messed up my approach and caused some delay to the others in the circuit. It makes me wonder if Larry if the forgiving sort and will overlook a minor incident that took place nine years ago! 

I decided that my blog was looking a bit tired, so I just updated it to use Sun's Pacifica theme. I am still struggling to find my way around - for example I have lost all my fancy buttons and twiddly bits (that's a British technical term) on the right side for last.fm, technorati and sitemeter. Hopefully I can have it looking just how I want it within a short time. It might even give me a jolt into doing some more blogging!

British TV is saturated right now with Microsoft's "I'm a PC" advert and it is driving me mad. And don't get me wrong, I'm no great detractor of Microsoft despite working for Sun. I have made a good living over the years in the area of Microsoft and Unix interoperability.

The advert does sometimes bring a wry smile to my face when I see the "Life Without Walls" tagline and think of Scott McNealy's infamous words from the mid-nineties: "In a world without walls who needs windows? In a world without fences who needs gates?"

I just heard, via a former colleague's Facebook status update, that an old Sun friend Gene Saunders died suddenly last week. I always thought of Gene as Mr OneStop due to his early work on the Sun internal information portal of the same name. Although Gene left Sun a while ago he and I stayed in frequent contact. His cheerful comments will be greatly missed.

EDIT: Geoff Arnold just published a fitting tribute to Gene.

During my time in hospital I missed the launch of the best films that I have seen this year. Big Buck Bunny, already mentioned by a number of my fellow Sun bloggers, is a short computer animated film rendered using Sun's network.com and released in its entirety as open content under the Creative Commons Attribution License. As a technical exercise to test out the Blender software it is interesting. As a movie it is funny, moving and thoroughly watchable. I encourage you to download it or watch it online.

For a couple of years now I have been a bit of a wiki evangelist within Sun. Together with a few colleagues, we have championed the use of wikis for the community development and publication of documentation. We have always come across one major stumbling block - the lack of a printing solution. Try printing wiki pages and you will see what I mean. Try to publish a manual from a whole group of wiki pages and the problem becomes even worse.

Today I was excited to read in an article entitled "Wikis Go Printable" that from mid 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation will support direct export of Wiki content into printable and word processor form. This includes OpenDocument format, meaning it will be possible to take wiki content and provide customised high-quality printable copies.

What a great piece of news to end 2007!

I read today that Robert Youngjohns, former VP of Sun UK and ultimately senior VP of global sales for Sun, has just joined Microsoft as president of sales for their US and Canada operation.

Robert joined Sun shortly after I did in 1995. He had a knack of being able to impress any audience by finding a way to talk on their level about subjects that mattered to them. Shortly after joining the company Robert presented at the UK Systems Engineering meeting to Sun's pre-sales technical community. At the time all of our systems, network and PC management software products had been brought together under the "Solstice" umbrella. Robert started to talk to us about the Solstice products saying "These Solstice products are a great example of software integration....", he paused then continued "at the brochure level". Robert Youngjohns won 120 new friends that day.

I wonder if he will find the same thing at Microsoft?

I just read in my favourite IT scandal rag, The Register, that Microsoft has withdrawn Office from its Microsoft Authorised Refurbishment (MAR) program. MAR allows IT professionals to install a suite of Microsoft software onto an end-of-business-life PC for donation to a worthy cause such as a school, hospital or charity.

I find it reassuring that all but 4 of the 34 comments posted at the time of writing this blog suggest OpenOffice as an alternative.

A question on an internal email alias last week reminded me of a story I used to tell new university graduates joining Sun at the start of their career and undergraduate placement students (interns) who used to come to Sun for a year's work experience. The story, which explained how the names for the le0, be0 and hme0 Ethernet interface names were arrived at, was intended to illustrate to the students that Sun is a fun place and not full of stuffed shirts with no sense of humour.

Our early workstations used the AM7990 Local Area Network Controller for Ethernet (LANCE) chip. For this reason we named this 10Mbit/s LANCE Ethernet interface le0.

When we developed 100Mbit/s Ethernet chip our engineers came up with the codename Big MAC Ethernet, hence be0, because it was a bigger interface than LANCE Ethernet and MAC (Media Access Control) is the name given to the physical address of an interface.

Our next step in interface development was combined 100Mbit/s Ethernet and fast/wide SCSI on a single chip. If you pronounce fast/wide SCSI as "Fwies" and combine it with a Big MAC you get a Happy Meal - hence hme0.

Today is National Work from Home Day in the UK. Thanks to Sun's foresight, I have been experiencing this new way of working for the past seven years.

For a number of years I took advantage of Sun's remote connectivity, using 56K dialup and then later ISDN, to allow me to read email from home and avoid a 50 mile commute to Cambridge until traffic had died down. When my family and I moved to Cheddar in 2001 I continued to take advantage of this flexible working, despite the shorter 18 mile commute into Bristol. In June 2004, not long after broadband ADSL reached my village, Sun closed its offices in Cambridge and Bristol and I became 100% home assigned.

Aside from the obvious benefits of reducing commuting time, home working also allows me to see my more of my family and my dogs. But there are down sides. Work life balance can suffer as there is sometimes a temptation to pop into the office at 7:00pm and check if that important email has come in. Two hours later you can still be sat at your desk. On the flip side though, working late in the evening on conference calls with colleagues in the USA can easily be offset by taking off time during the day to walk my dogs, or ride my bike. Also, however much I like my work colleagues, my wife is a much prettier lunchtime companion!

Microsoft in the UK have just completed the first year of a three year flexible and home working trial. For Sun it isn't a trial it is now the default way of working for the majority of staff. What a contrast to a previous employer from many years ago whose response when asked about flexi-time was "Of course, you can start any time before 9:00am and finish any time after 5:30pm".

My one trusted source on the Internet for IT related news is The Register. It provides timely and (mostly) accurate articles on what is happening across the industry. Most important to me is that The Register doesn't toady up to any vendor, Sun included, which means you can generally rely on it to cut right through the marketing hype.

Imagine my disappointment when I read today's article "Ten Reasons why you should upgrade to Windows Vista". Talk about drinking the Kool-Aid! Of the reasons given, just three will be of any interest to corporate clients: improvements in account security, firewall and file search performance. All the reasons given are more likely to appeal to to game players. The last reason however takes the biscuit for me - you should upgrade to Vista because "It's inevitable". Experts agree that at some point in the future life on earth will be extinguished by some cataclysmic event such as a meteor strike, so excuse me while I go jump off the nearest cliff. It's inevitable you see, so I might as well do it now!

Of course, there is another way. Examine your desktop strategy. Investigate the alternatives. Don't be kidded into believing that you need expensive 3D hardware plus huge amounts of CPU power and memory to do email, calendar and other office tasks.

b.t.w. The Register redeemed itself slightly with a wonderful article on April 1st about the new phone to be produced by Google and Apple.

Sun UK employee John Russell is running in the forthcoming London Marathon on April 22nd. John is hoping to raise money for the Anthony Nolan Trust, a charity which maintains a bone marrow donor register to help leukaemia sufferers. Since it was founded in 1974 the Anthony Nolan Trust has helped to match over 4000 donors with sick children and adults.

My dad died from Acute Myeloid Leukaemia in October. If he had been younger a transplant would almost certainly have saved his life. I have sponsored John and I hope you will too. Donate online at http://www.justgiving.com/johnandrewrussell.

Technorati tags: Volunteer

I will shortly celebrate my 12th anniversary at Sun. Much of that time has been in customer facing roles, some of it was spent running the gauntlet of customer dissatisfaction over hardware, software or performance problems. However, right now I can't think of a better time to be in Sun. Our stock just hit a 52 week high almost 6 months after it hit a record low, but the most exciting thing right now is our hardware.

There is a saying for disk storage "pick any two from: cheap/reliable/fast". A RAID 0 stripe is cheap and fast, but not reliable. A RAID 1 mirror is fast and reliable, but not cheap. RAID5 is cheap and reliable, but not fast. Right now some of our competitors will be saying to their customers "pick any two from: cheap/fast/energy-efficient". Sun are saying pick three!

What is great about Sun right now is that our systems are low priced, often below the level of our competitor's standard offerings; are ultra fast (pun intended!), and consume far less power than our competitor's systems. Less power means lower electricity and cooling bills for the datacentre. According to IDC some customers are doing the maths and realising that they can rip out the old servers in their datacentre and replace them with the all-new Sun servers for around the same cost as a year's power and cooling bill. And with the US Government now pushing towards Energy Star ratings for servers, the demand for our products will keep growing. Oh, and don't expect to see anything from our competitors any time soon.

At heart I am a cynical Brit, but as I said, I can't think of a better time to be in Sun.

Technorati tags: Sun, Server, Energy Star