Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Automating builds of demos

John Clingan posted about getting an N1 environment going for us field folks to setup things we may use with customers (i.e. demos and such). Sure John, I'd like to help out.

It'd be excellent if we could get this going with zones. For instance, I'd love to be able to be able to have a stock of different demos that could be provisioned to a zone. I keep my global pretty pristine. I guess we'd have to work through the dependencies, but I think it should be doable....

( Jun 14 2006, 10:27:47 PM PDT ) Permalink

Congratulations (times two)

I sat through a "global townhall" this morning and listened to Scott and Jonathan talk about the changes announced yesterday. No, I'm not going to tell you what they said. Look at the official announcements. The message was effectively the same (though the parts the press seem to focus on seems to match some of the same, tired template stories).

Anyway, to both Scott and Jonathan congrats. There are many of us (myself included) that do get the Sun message, and have found their way to Sun by advocating it at the partner level, taking an opportunity to drive the same message as a Sun employee when it's come up.

Scott will, I'm sure, do well carrying "The Network is the Computer" to the world (speaking quite literally). It's hard for him to not spread that message. I absolutely agree, that's where Sun needs to take the message next.

Congrats to Jonathan as well. I've only had the opportunity to work with him a couple of times, but he's also very focused on upleveling Sun's product set and capabilities. I absolutely think that's where we need to be going. I don't have a vote in that, but the Board does-- and they've shown they have confidence in his leadership and abilities to carry out the vision.

Honestly, six months ago I was considering looking at other opportunities, but a couple of compelling events have lead me to believe this is the right place to be for the next few years. The doubling-down on the vision, and handling the transition with class and style makes me even more secure with that decision.

Again, congrats.

( Apr 25 2006, 11:46:22 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

How you know if a friend is blogging too much...

Just now, via Sun Instant Messenger, I asked John how his jury duty was. He replied with a URL to the blog entry where he discussed his jury duty.

Now, if that was the first time such a thing had happened, it could be overlooked. It isn't. John, you may be blogging too much if every question about you and your knowledge can be answered with a permalink URL!!!

( Mar 23 2006, 03:57:36 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Oscar Irony

I watched a few minutes of the Oscars and looked up the results. The good news is I saw the Best Motion Picture of the year. The odd thing is I didn't see any of the others!

I admit I'd not seen as many films in 2005 as I had in 2004, but I think I'm not the only one that's noticed the films in the Oscars are not necessarily the ones most folks put on their "must see" list....

On the other hand, I did mean to see Munich, Syriana and Capote. I guess now I need to take out the time to do that. :)

( Mar 05 2006, 08:58:35 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]

Real Coffee

Hey Marc, another blogger will (hopefully) make your event on Friday. Unlike the proprietor of the Clingan zone though, this one actually drinks proper coffee. :)

( Jan 03 2006, 10:20:52 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2006!

I'm back from a vacation that left me feeling like I need a vacation. I didn't get most of the stuff on my list done. That's how it always seems to go though. I still have some leftover painting in the master bedroom, and have had for about 2 years.

I did take enough time to go back to St. Louis, somewhere I've never lived despite most of my family being there. I'm lucky enough to have all of my grandparents still around, so I need to see them as often as I can. Some of 'em are in their 80s, some in their 90s. Only the ones on my mom's side are in St. Louis. My dad's side are in Kansas City.

Short term here at Sun in 2006 I'll be helping a customer migrate to our Access Management software. I hope to later be able to take some more time to spend on the Integration Suite. I was able to do the training.... 18 months ago or so, but I've not been able to do much since then. It's one of those things you need to have a problem to solve on first. :)

( Jan 02 2006, 09:49:16 PM PST ) Permalink

Forward Compatibility

Earlier this week, I ran into a colleage from the LA-JUG. Turns out he works in the next building. We had a brief conversation about the previous meeting, which I couldn't make. It was on Maven 2.

During the conversation, he brings up the fact that one of the Maven supporters in the JUG was drilling into the speaker about the fact that everything has changed. Compatibility is broken!

Then my colleague says something about how this tends to be the case with Open Source projects.

Now, I hate to pile on, but this is so very, very true. At the UUASC last month, the speaker talked about GNU Cash. To try to help him out, I tried to set up a system in the office with GNU Cash on it. I had a number of systems available to me: Solaris 8, Solaris 9, Solaris 10, SuSE Linux, etc. Sadly, I couldn't get it running on any of them...

GNU Cash looked pretty cool, but it was coded back in the Gnome 1.4 days. Since then, GTK has gone through a number of incompatible changes. I spent a few minutes trying to see what it'd take to piece it back together, but quickly found it was futile. Others have tried and given up it would seem from a few web searches. It's only a few corner case Linux distros that have builds.

It's not Open Source that's causing this (though, it does seem to be the normal mode of operation in many projects), but instead not thinking through the details. Any API designer needs to consider how the implementation will affect not only the current implementation, but the future as well.

Some projects get this right. Others don't and make no bones about it. They seem to defend the need to recompile EVERYTHING from source. Seems silly to me. They apparently don't recognize that it's not always simple to do so. Witness my experience with GNU Cash. In the end, this always hurts the adoption of something...

Hopefully this will change... I hope that some of the popular projects out there start taking forward compatibility into their planning.

(p.s.: I know Sun has sometimes gotten things wrong in this area too, but generally Sun gets this stuff right)

( Dec 19 2005, 07:00:00 AM PST ) Permalink

Why it's cool to work at Sun

I'm currently sitting at our Software Summit. Deepak Alur is giving a talk to Sun folks and partners on SOA. Cool stuff...

( Nov 10 2005, 03:47:05 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Awesome! Sun Ray across California!

I'm currently sitting in a Sun office I've never been in off of Hopyard road in Pleasanton. I'm up here for an architecture meeting for a customer who has facilities up here and in LA.

Yesterday I was in the Sun office in Irvine. The day before I was in the Sun office in El Segundo. I'm using Sun Ray thin clients in all three. [didn't have one on the airplane... yet :) ].

Anyway, we recently had some upgrades to the Sun Ray server in El Segundo. The only immediate impact I noticed was that when I put my JavaBadge in, the system knew what my username was and asked me only for my password. Nice benefit, but not that big a deal.

So here in Pleasanton, I found the conference room where we're having our 11am meeting. I walked up to the Sun Ray 150 at one end of this room I've never been in before (also connected to the projector in the ceiling, nice...), pop in my card and... what's this? Xscreensaver password prompt?!?

A second after putting in my password, up pops my session from El Segundo, 8 hours away (for humans, not digital signals). Awesome!!! That means my "laptop" as it were, is the size of one of the 4-5 credit cards the average American carries around. I literally could have written my slides yesterday, walked away with my card, got on a plane, plugged it in here, start the preso and go.

The only downside I've thought of thus far is that I'd probably get a body cavity search from the TSA for the unusual act of taking a flight without carrying my office in a bag. "He has nothing with him, he must be up to no good-- make him take off his shoes and X-ray everything"...

The Sun Ray 150 was probably installed in this room 2 years ago by ITOps and hasn't been touched since. Yet it's gained new features and functionality all along (for instance, my session to El Segundo is encrypted-- I can tell by pressing the three keys to the left of the moon all at once).

Great job Sun IT!

Performance is great! I'm sure it's not up to streaming video, but Mozilla, StarOffice, mail, Sun IM (just IM'd John) are all just like I were in El Segundo!!!

Repeat after me: "The Network is the Computer".

( Oct 13 2005, 10:44:45 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]

Back in the US

I've been back at work for over 24 hours now, but haven't blog posted until now. I did a decent job of filtering email/voicemail whilst away (thanks to Sun's remote access and access line, I was able to do quite a bit to not let things get away from 'net cafes in Europe).

The last 24 hours, however, have been filled with filling my calendar for the next couple weeks. They will be full days!

I was struck with a tough question when I had to fill out the customs form. It asked which countries I'd visited while away. I had quite the list, but I'd also been in some countries without visiting them. Some of which (Slovenia) stamped my passport. I just filled in the countries I'd visited, and customs seemed okay with that. I expected to be quizzed a bit since I'd left the EU, but Hungary is apparently not a big deal afterall. :)

( Oct 05 2005, 10:58:13 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Thanks to the SGV Linux Users Group

I held my first lecture at Caltech. Well, not really, but I did get to present OpenSolaris to the SGVLUG.

They were a welcoming audience, and even though there were not that many questions, what feedback I did get seemed positive.

I covered Sun and Open Source, what OpenSolaris is, a bit about the license (CDDL), and then did a zones demo,an SMF demo and a DTrace demo.

Oddly enough, at the end, I was accused of looking like Scott McNealy! He said it was because of the haircut and complexion (rather than Scott's most prominent feature). I replied that oddly enough, John (who authored the zones demo I used) is often accused of looking like Linus Torvalds. :)

Now I'm off for a bit of a vacation, I'll probably fall off the blog list a bit. See you all in a bit...

( Sep 09 2005, 05:53:28 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

IP based Storage @UUASC September '05

Look what you all missed by not attending the UUASC meeting!

First the meeting: The topic was IP Storage. Good intro! Michael covered all the options, the reasons for different technologies, what the standards are, who implements them, etc. He also demo'd a couple of Linux boxes as an iSCSI target and initiator running in VMware. Slides should be on the UUASC site soon.

I have an iSCSI intiator on my laptop running Solaris Nevada, but sadly no targets to point it at.

The books pictured above were given away by one of the UUASC members. There are some interesting ones in there. If you want an introduction to SNOBOL, you can get it. How about a 10 year old book on Postscript? Unlike the SNOBOL language, I think Postscript has probably changed a bit in the last 10 years. Then there's the "TRS-80 Basic" book. Yes, as in the programming language on the Radio Shack 'trash 80'. ((((Then) there) is) (the (book)) on (LISP))). I've not touched LISP since college.

There were some good ones in there. A number of Solaris books (all snatched up before I took the pic) and some O'Reilly nutshell books (TCP/IP administration book is in the pic). ( Sep 01 2005, 08:57:39 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Security for the casual user

John has a post about an overheard conversation at Starbucks...

I bet they will just disable the warnings. I did some 'family tech support' again recently, my brother's laptop needed some help. One of the things I did (after installing Windows 2000 SP4, he had no service packs on it and had just gotten it back "repaired" by CompUSA) was put on an anti-spyware thing and ran it. 592 known spyware objects! Granted, many of them were probably cookies/images/registry things, but still....

It turns out he was clicking on the various popup windows that said "do you want an internet accellerator" or some such crap! Ugh. How could a casual user be expected to handle this stuff...

I installed firefox and then created a cheezey little web page as the startup screen so every time he starts firefox, he gets a reminder to update his virus definitions monthly and run the antispyware thing.

With my laptop, in the last year, I've patched a few times but have never seen an exploit. But it's dualbooting Solaris and Linux.

( Sep 01 2005, 09:58:40 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Off to Europe So, in about 5 weeks, I'll be heading to London to start a three week European trip (not for work, this will be just for fun). I've never taken a three week vacation, and I've never been out of the US, so it should be quite the experience.

Here's what I'm currently thinking of as an itenerary:

1. Start in London, England I have a friend living there so I'll have a free place to stay for 5 days.
2. Head to Paris, France for 3-5 days, stay in the Latin Quarter, check things out there. I've not decided whether or not I should take the Chunnel or fly. I'm open to suggestions. Post a comment and let me know!
3. Board a train for Berlin, Germany. Check things out there for a few days.
4. Head to Vienna, Austria. Check out all of the historical music sites.
5. Overnight train to Rome, Italy. Meet up with my friend there. Check out Rome, then go up to Florence. Maybe go by Maranello and Bologna. :)
6. Bern? Dublin? Or just back to London and then back to LA?

I'm open to any and all suggestions. I worry that I'm packing in too much for three weeks. I also worry that I won't be able to handle the language issues, but hopefully I'll be able to muddle through. There's always "international pointing": point at food, point at mouth, point at wallet. I bet most vendors will understand that one.

I have no idea what to expect.

( Aug 05 2005, 09:59:07 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [7]

Does BGM really work?

So, I'm currently standing at the terminal at LAX, and there is an exceptionally long line loaded with haggard looking, unhappy people. Many are discussing the line that stretches nearly to the next terminal. As I inhale my airport morning's amount of spent diesel fumes and second hand smoke, I notice there is some cheesey, jazzy, flute based background music (a.k.a. BGM) coming out of a poorly overpainted, slightly rusting speaker grille.

So, I have to wonder, does BGM really make people more calm...?

( Aug 03 2005, 07:32:17 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]