Monday March 03, 2008

Remember, remember the 27th November..

While on a walk in the Staffordshire countryside we came across the site of the biggest conventional explosion in WW2. At 11am on this fateful day seventy people died. Old mine shafts in the area were being used to store explosives and something went horribly wrong. The resulting crater is 1/4 mile across and one hundred yards deep. A farm was blown to bits and its buildings and livestock were lost. The area is still fenced off and nature is restoring the ravaged area quite nicely. There is also a large colony or rabbits who are protected by the fence enclosing the crater.

Nearby is the National Memorial Arboretum which is a one hundred and fifty acre parkland planted with trees. There are also a multitude of memorials including one to the event above and in years to come as the trees mature it will become a very impressive place. It is just off the A38 near Burton on Trent

The First Tech Demo..

At last the realisation of our dream - the day of the first Tech Demo at Sheffield. An early start for me to catch the train to London and be part of the daily commuter scramble to the capital. The circle line almost behaved itself and I was soon in the refurbished St Pancreas station looking at the statue of the couple embracing below the impressive clock which are both at one end of the building.

At midday as my train pulled into Sheffield my co-presenter Jarod was waiting in a car to whisk us off the the University. He was already 'up north' having done the same presentation two days before at York. My teaser presentation to introduce the students to the company had also been presented to students by Rhodri their Campus Mentor.

At this point the weather took a turn for the worst and heavy winds were now accompanied by rain. We spent half an hour driving around the area looking for a place to park near the building where the presentation was to be held. The Sheffield campus is split over many buildings in the city it is not as the modern Universities are and on one site. We found a place to park and after three attempts we finally found our building and theatre. A quick bite of lunch and we then met Andrew and set things up. By 2pm we had about thirty people in the theatre and by the end of my pitch that was up to forty. In the audience we had one of last years students who is at the other University in Sheffield completing his final year.

My pitch went quite well but I have never used other someone elses presentations which I think is hard unless you are a seasoned presenter which I am not. If you write a presentation I think it is easier for you to present it as you know it so well. But I think I got my point over - where Sun came from and that our products are much more than just Java and Solaris and we are bigger than most people think!

Jarod then did his ZFS presentation. I'll be honest and say I've not done much with it and I really enjoyed being educated! Jarod then did the live demo but sadly his laptop packed in halfway through it and a backup one would also not play ball. But he got loads of questions at the end which were really good so it was clear people understood and were interested in the technology.

At the end people took away some cd's with OpenSolaris on them and also the Open Solaris Developer preview 2 which has the new installer and packaging system. So popular were they we ran out of them! I also had the T5120 machine with its lid off for students to look. I think they were amazed by the small heatsink on the CPU, the small amount of extra components on the main board and the engineering excellence. I should at this point now thank our host Andrew, Jarod and Rhodri and the students who came to see us on Friday. A special thanks to James who came along to support us and helped us answer some questios at the end on compatibility of platforms and Opensolaris.

We drove home and got back around 8pm. It was a long but very satisfying day.