Column for a Purdue Ambassador

Sun SPOT Tech Talk

Ever since I was introduced to the Sun SPOT technology by Michael Hayden a month or so back, I have been bouncing the idea of bringing it to Purdue off of members at our local ACM. Everyone that hears about Sun SPOTs and the vast array of things that can be done with them is intrigued by the idea. Because of this, I held a tech talk of the technology this past December 6th. The tech talk had a turn out of about 20 students and faculty.

We watched a number of different sample videos online of what can be done with these little devices. The presentation sparked a number of different questions from the audience. They ranged from the whether squawk could run on other architectures to the nature of the AES in the wireless configuration. It seems to be the general consensus that we want to bring this technology to Purdue.

With this in mind, we will be asking not only our local OSUG SIGOS (http://sigos.cs.purdue.edu) but as well as our local ACM to come up with interesting ideas for what we would do with Sun SPOTs. If any of you have any ideas that you have yet to see and would like to let me know please comment or email me at jonatha.micklos@sun.com. In the event that this is successful enough, it is possible this may spawn off an embedded SIG at Purdue through the local ACM.

Posted at 08:35PM Dec 15, 2007 by jmicklos in Sun  |  Comments[0]

OpenSolaris Tech Talk and SIG OpenSolaris Call Out

On October 10th, I gave my first tech talk of this year. Once again, I am the Student Ambassador at Purdue University. This specific tech talk was very packed. During this session, I gave a tech talk over OpenSolaris and a call out for our OSUG at Purdue, the ACM SIG, SIGOS. After I was done speaking, Ian Murdock was there to give an overview of the Indiana Project. Including Students (graduate and undergraduate), staff and others, about 30 attended.

Outside of OpenSolaris in general, the two other main points of concentration for the evening were SIGOS and Project Indiana. Project Indiana is aimed at distributing a binary distribution of OpenSolaris with built in package management (akin to apt-get in Debian/Ubuntu). SIGOS (which I have already previously blogged about), is the special interest group at Purdue University of OpenSolaris development. We will be having our first meeting for the year soon :-). I will likewise keep all of you updated as to how it is going.

Those who were there were asking questions throughout the presentation. Ian Murdock's presentation was great as well. At the end of the session, 10 people signed up for SIGOS. Overall, the night was a success.



As People Were Still Coming In:


Ian:

Posted at 01:27PM Nov 12, 2007 by jmicklos in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Project Darkstar - Sun Game Server Talk and SIGOS

On March 29th I gave my second tech talk as Student Ambassador at Purdue University. Just as with the ZFS tech talk, this one was very well received. This time, I gave a talk over Project Darkstar and the Sun Game Server. Although this time, 18 people attended, it was still a great tech talk.

For those of you who are not aware. Project Darkstar is a project for the Sun Game Server. SGS is an open source game server which handles communication and threads/processes. To the programmer using SGS, all game development is synchronous, single-threaded, and event driven. This is a game server for which to place any type of game over. The SGS is also scalable. It has 4 tiers (think MVC with a server view and a client view).

At Purdue's local ACM Chapter we are currently starting a SIG called SIGOS (Open Solaris SIG). Although the primary intent of this SIG is driver development, we will be experimenting with other technologies such as SGS.

SIGOS at Purdue University: Here

Posted at 01:25AM Mar 30, 2007 by jmicklos in Sun  |  Comments[1]

ZFS Tech Talk / Demo

On February 21st I had the pleasure of giving a tech talk and demo session over the ZFS. This tech talk was meant to last only 50 minutes, yet, it lasted almost a whole half hour extra. About 25 individuals attended the session. It went so well that by the time I was ready for questions, we were already experimenting with the system. Questions and experiments lasted that extra 30 min.

My setup was a follows. I was not able to get Open Solaris running on my laptop. Even if it were, CRT out for the tech talk projector would not be an option. As a result, I stuck with Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Because linux's kernel is GPL and ZFS is CDDL, there is no native kernel support for ZFS. So I went ahead and installed the alpha version of the ZFS through the FUSE toolset. Although as alpha, many of the options do not work, the main components of ZFS work just fine. In order to test ZFS I went ahead and made 4 file disks with the command 'dd' as 'mkfile' does not exist for Ubuntu (at least to my knowledge).

On the whole, this was a very successful demo. Members of the Purdue Linux Users Group even said that they were going to switch their servers over to ZFS soon as they get a chance.

Posted at 09:47PM Feb 28, 2007 by jmicklos in Sun  |  Comments[3]