Friday March 27, 2009

It's about time

Holy cow, has it really been three years since I last posted? Well, I guess I can say I told you so now. I am shy, I'm not a natural blogger. But some things just force me to do it. Last time, it was a challenge from a colleague about the male dominance among bloggers on our team. This time, it's Ada Lovelace, and a challenge from another colleague (well done, Valerie!).

I'm of course late to the game; last Tuesday, March 24 was Ada Lovelace Day. But it's never too late to talk about the people or things that inspire us, right? I sure hope not.

I was in 7th grade when we read Isaac Asimov's I, Robot as a school assignment. I don't remember it being especially popular with my classmates; but I was hooked. The notion that there could be so many subtleties--and breakdowns-- associated with three seemingly simple rules was fascinating; the logical analysis of what went wrong completely enthralled me. And all the stories were told by Dr. Susan Calvin. She teased out the logic behind the seemingly aberrant behavior; she was the one who really understood the inner workings of the robots.

The path was not entirely direct (just a small detour through a degree in Electrical Engineering), but I think the memories of that book were what made software development feel just right when I landed here.

Surprisingly, I haven't gone back to re-read it. I tend not to re-read books much; there are always too many that I haven't read yet! It might be better to let the lovely, hazy memory remain so. Or maybe it will remind me of what I love about what I do.

Thursday July 27, 2006

All my friends have blogs, so I suppose I need one too... Several colleagues have been trying to persuade me to do this for a while. I'd send an innocent mail to one, and the response would be "you know, that would be a good thing to blog about." One even blogged on my behalf: I became an anonymous "non-blogging colleague." My project lead tried a little psychological persuasion: he pointed out that of the eight team members listed at the top of our architecture document, the five male team members had blogs, while the three female members did not. That almost did it.

But, I thought, what do I have to blog about? Sure, I'm working on a cool project; but if you want to read about that, you can just look at our opensolaris page. I suppose I could go on about my beloved but eternally frustrating San Francisco Giants, but there are already some really good blogs out there on that topic (I'm a big fan of McCovey Chronicles). I have an absolutely adorable nephew I could rave about, but that might become monotonous.

But then last week, I gave a presentation that a colleague and I put together about transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 (prior to joining the NWAM team, I worked on some of the IPv6 projects that went into Solaris 10). When it was all over, I thought wow, that was so much fun, I must be an extrovert after all. Well, that's not exactly what I thought, but I've been persuaded that posting that presentation would be a great reason to start a blog. So here we are.

I won't claim it's fascinating reading (definitely not as much fun as the aforementioned McCovey Chronicles), but if you're thinking about trying out IPv6, the presentation has some good references to check out. And Solaris is a great platform to use for your experimentation (or your deployment!): with two exceptions, Solaris 10 supports all the technologies discussed in the presentation. The two exceptions are DHCPv6 (work on this is staffed and underway), and Teredo (future work on this will depend on market acceptance).

Note: despite appearances, this is not really a 26-page presentation; it is actually 13 slides, followed by the same 13 slides with notes, which will hopefully give you a bit of the context that was presented verbally. Enjoy!

Posted by okie ( Jul 27 2006, 05:15:25 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]