Paul Durrant's Weblog

Paul Durrant's Weblog
Stream of (un)consciousness...

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Wednesday March 30, 2005

Moving on...

I discovered that decent jobs around the area I live, Slough, are not that easy to find. However, thanks the to the University Computer Lab, Cambridge seems to have a good range of vacancies. On the day I was laid off I contacted a recruiting agent there about a job I noticed on their website and fortunately, a few weeks later, I accepted a position at Level 5 Networks. This does mean that I need to move to Cambridge but I discovered that housing around that area is cheaper than here and so I don't think it will be too much of a problem.

(2005-03-30 00:33:00.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Tuesday February 22, 2005

The Grim Downsizer

So, the grim downsizer came a calling and (in common Sun parlance) I've been RIFed. Not a nice way to go, but I wish all my ex-colleagues at Sun well. Solaris is still an awesome OS and let's hope, even with a severely depleted R&D staff, it can stay that way.

(2005-02-22 15:28:36.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday November 12, 2004

Bigger Turbocharger

Nice to see that FireEngine is the feature element of the current sun.com front page.

Project Nemo is building on this performance by extending the technology down into layer two of the stack (IP being layer three). It's too later for us to deliver this in the initial release of Solaris 10 but you can expect a bigger turbocharger for your network in an early update release.

(2004-11-12 02:35:00.0) Permalink

Wednesday October 06, 2004

It's dead Jim...

It looks like our dishwasher is dead. It's a Bosch SGS43A12GB, is only two years old and apparently has a dead heater. I'm told that on many dishwashers this wouldn't be too bad since the heating elements are exposed and can be replaced easily, much like the element in a kettle. However, Bosch in its wisdom concealed the water heater underneath and the engineer tells me that this basically means a complete rebuild on top of the cost of the new heater. Since a new heater is likely to cost over GPB100 and the rebuild labour is probably going to be around the same, it's just not worth it. It's a write-off.

So, be warned. Don't buy a Bosch dishwasher unless it has an exposed heating element because they apparently don't last very long and, when they break, they're not worth fixing.

(2004-10-06 05:35:00.0) Permalink

Friday September 24, 2004

HHGTTG

Hurrah! The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy is back on the radio. Unfortunately I have a meeting that clashes with the Tuesday slot (6:30pm) but I caught the repeat last night and it was as good as I'd hoped. Episodes can also be enjoyed via RealPlayer using the URL rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/comedy/thu2300.ra

(2004-09-24 08:40:00.0) Permalink

Tuesday September 21, 2004

A new view...

The folks from Solaris Sustaining just moved from their office in Bagshot to the main campus at Guillemont Park and I decided that I'd join them. I still keep in touch with my colleagues in Watford via our internal IRC channel(s). In fact, little has changed there since it was actually quite rare that we'd all be in the office on the same day. So, my first impressions of SPARC House, Guillemont Park (or GMP03 as it is affectionately known) are pretty good. It's nice and quiet... there's plenty of space... the air conditioning works. The commute from my house near Slough, to my surprise, actually seems quicker. Since less of it is on motorway, it's also more pleasant and perhaps the rear tyre of my motorbike won't square off quite so quickly either.

(2004-09-21 03:49:00.0) Permalink

Friday September 10, 2004

RTW

A Round The World trip seems a popular choice for some of my ex-colleagues from the Volume Systems Products group. They were part of the last Reduction In Force (RIF) and, since some of them had been around from well before the IMP acquisition, there were some substantial severance packages. Once of the more unusual RTWs is from Cynthia Milton who is doing the majority of the trip on her BMW R80G/S. You can follow her progress on her Yahoo! group. She's currently on her way from Latvia into Russia.

(2004-09-10 09:39:00.0) Permalink

iTunes Store

Sun were kind enough to buy me a PowerBook G4 as my laptop so, naturally enough, I generally listen to music using iTunes. So, the other day I decided to try out the iTunes Store since Apple opened their UK version to business a few months back. I have to say that I was impressed by the ease of use: browse songs using the standard iTunes interface, listen to samples and, when you're ready, just hit the button to download. And at GBP0.79 for a song or GBP7.99 for an album, it seems like reasonable value. What I wasn't impressed by was the inventory. Absolutely no Stone Roses stuff which, for an child of the 80's like myself, was most irritating. Even more irritating is the fact that the US iTunes Store seems to have most of their back catalogue... but I can't buy it!

(2004-09-10 06:00:00.0) Permalink

The best album I've heard for a while...

...is Hopes and Fears by Keane which I just purchased. This was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize but didn't win. It was beaten by the eponymous album from Franz Ferdinand which, oddly enough, was my previous purchase. Maybe I have taste after all?

(2004-09-10 05:49:00.0) Permalink

peer group pressure...

...leads me to participate in this apparent blogging revolution. It's not that I'm reluctant to participate, it's just that it's never been high on my to-do list.

So, as is customary, a short resume or, as we say in the UK, curriculum vitae...

I graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1994 and went to work for a small Token-Ring network adapter vendor called Madge Networks. Back then Madge was a fast growing business and Token-Ring was actually beating Ethernet in the performance stakes at 16Mbps to Ethernet's 10Mbps. Madge's business plan was pretty much 'Do it faster than IBM, for less money, in less space', the space aspect referring to the amount of memory the device driver's resident code would occupy under the good old 640k limit under DOS. This involved doing some pretty cool stuff, such as running a TCP/IP stack on the card and having the host based device driver code modify itself post-initialization to release all the memory occupied by the initialization code that was no longer required. Whilst at Madge I became involved in a small effort to write devices drivers for our Token-Ring hardware for the popular flavours of UNIX of the day: Solaris, Unixware and SCO Unix. This experience stood me in good stead when Madge's Token-Ring sales started to rapidly dry up (mainly in the face of the new, cheap 100Mbps switched Ethernet) and it became apparent that it was time to look for a new job.

I came to Sun in 1996, and joined the IMP business unit which was formed from the company Integrated Micro Products, which had recently been acquired by Sun. I worked in the Slough office on the ftSPARC and Netra-ft 1800 fault tolerant systems. These were pretty cool technology too. The basic principle was that they ran Solaris in lock-step on two independent sets of CPUs. An external bridge was used to compare the behaviour of the two sets and, if they differed, a fault was deemed to have occurred on one set. The boxes also were also at least dual-redundant in everything else, including network and disk. I gravitated back towards networking and ended up maintaining the Ethernet multiplexor driver. Since then I've been through quite a few other projects in Sun and now work for the Solaris Networking/Security Technology group where I maintain the Generic LAN Driver (GLD) module and am technical lead on Project Nemo which will take the straightforward interface that GLD provides and provide enhanced functionality and performance. We're seeing some very encouraging results from our prototype code but, since it's a work in progress, better not say too much more.

(2004-09-10 05:39:00.0) Permalink Comments [2]