looks like my nerdiness has gone up quite alarmingly since i first took the test. maybe i guessed different answers correctly ^_^

but things are looking up: i'm definately a d12 (one of the most underrated dice...)

You are the rare, the overlooked, yet incredibly useful dodecahedron: the d12. You are a creative, romantic soul. You often act without thinking, but make up for your lack of plans with plenty of heart. You easily solve problems that stump others, but your answers tend to put you into even deeper trouble. You write long, detailed backgrounds for all your characters, and are most likely to dress up as one or get involved in cos-play. You can be silly at times and are easily distracted by your own day dreams, but are at the end of the day you're someone who can be depended on.

hmm - probably shouldn't put it on the resume, but it's fairly close (at least at this time in the morning....)

thankyou and goodnight.

kristien had this on her blog, and it looked like fun. i got more of asia covered than her, and i'm probably cheating with some of the european countries i visited before i was 10 ;). still, we're in the same boat as far as south america is concerned. shame i didn't get down to argentina last year...


create your own visited countries map

sun labs comes up with some amazing technology demonstrations, but they often take a while to get 'baked in' to a complete product, with all the support, distribution, training, localisation, etc etc etc that goes on for an enterprise offering.

i'm sure this article will have a few people banging on my door asking for a demo, but it's early days yet, so bear with us.

besides, there's already a great way to do word processing and spreadsheets on sun ray. just look here. there's even a free version.

it's frightening to think that it's about 15 years since i started playing online multiplayer games. MUD easily sucked up many hours while i was at university, but their appeal started to fade when the internet became more popular, and more people could run their own servers - thus dropping the critical mass of players in each game.

but technology changes and now the evil timewasters are called MMORPG...

on the positive side the main reason these games are so addictive is that you're dealing with real human beings on the other end, which gives variety and interest that scripted AI systems can't (yet) replicate. when they do there'll be a proportion of the population who will probably never leave the house.

of course, you have to make sure you work out with your friends when you're going to play.....

the photo in the top corner is mine, of a little orange kitten we had called mikan(). unfortunately although he looked beautiful he didn't have much going for him upstairs, and met an untimely end on the road outside.

i'm now using solaris™ 10 for my sun ray™ sessions, thanks to amazingly fast installation of solaris 10 to production machines for general-purpose users (well, and me). this fast deployment is almost certainly thanks to the software express program which helped stage early-access releases inside sun as well as to customers. (want a sneek peek at solaris 11? go download it!)

i must admit the upgrade process for me was quite involved. what i had to do was log in to the old solaris 9 server, type in a single command in a terminal window, and i was automagically transferred to the new solaris 10 server. the whole upgrade process must have taken me 15 seconds 8P. try that on windows.

now the clever thing about my sun ray set up is that i'm actually using it (and typing this) from home. with a magic vpn box and my java™ card id, my desktop at home is the same as the one in the office. literally. i mean the mouse pointer is in the same place when i move from one site to the next.

the really clever thing, though, is that the local gateway for the sun ray home users trial is in singapore. that means that the session i'm using at home:

• travels through my home ADSL to my ISP in sydney
• goes from sydney to singapore via the internet
• enters the singapore gateway
• returns to sydney via the sun internal leased line
• does stuff on the sun ray controller
• returns back to singapore via the leased line
• out the gateway
• back to my ISP in sydney via the internet
• back down my ADSL line to the sun ray appliance

oh - and this is all encrypted traffic by the way.

and it works just fine. it just works

now to be honest, i'm not going to be watching video telecasts or anything this way, but really - this technology is light years ahead of what anyone else has. i wish more people knew about it...

in the extremely unlikely event that you're looking at this blog you may notice weird things happening with the appearance. i'm just fiddling about with the CSS and layout, since none of the built-in themes do what i want.

sun™ cluster is a platform for making applications highly available. you can get pre-packaged software agents for popular applications (like NFS or Sybase database), but you can also write yourown agents for applications without a shrink-wrapped solution (such as Postgresql). although developing an agent isn't difficult, there are some concepts which you need to understand before you can start, and some techniques you can use to make development easier. we've tried to cover this in sun cluster 3 programming. feel free to drop questions here.

a couple of weeks ago simon phipps flew into sydney for a meeting with some folk looking to start an opensolaris^™ user group in sydney. the meeting has borne some fruit, and a sosug google group has been set up. so - if you're in the sydney area and want to be involved in such a group, go sign up. now. we'll still be here when you get back.

...the driving concern for this blog is to pick up a mediacast account so it can be used for opensolaris^[tm] user group purposes. note the [tm] there - it has something to do with the word solaris^[tm?] being in there. this is also a sample article so i can muck about with settings & see what comes out. blogs need to be attractive. right - stop reading this and go look at something more interesting