rv's techblog: some kind of blog

Last Thursday I gave a talk about the kernel at my university, about 20 people showed up.
I talked about the scheduler, dispatcher and virtual memory. I'm still working on the slide deck, it's an overview of those systems with some of the structures that represent things like processes, threads, cpus.

I'm trying to show it's not such a 'black box' - like some people might think - by pointing out how some things are implemented. My idea is to get more people interested in contributing to the project. Check out the slides and send me some feedback. I'm all in favor of improving it so any comment is appreciated.
You can get the BR-Portuguese version at our OSUGs website.

Here are some photos..

Then yesterday (Saturday) I gave pretty much the same talk at a kick ass event organized by the TcheLinux user group. I'm really glad those guys invited us there. It's just amazing to see a positive and open attitude towards technology, specifically open source technology. More pictures..

I'll tell you this, with the great work they are doing, I won't be surprised to see their events grow to national or even international size. We had a blast. I hope everyone who attended our talks left feeling they didn't wake up early on Sat for nothing.

We handed out around 30 'Intro to OSs with OpenSolaris' books and SXDE DVDs between the two events. Good to see our OSUG growing.

A couple of weeks ago myself and four other campus ambassadors were invited to visit the Menlo Park campus and present a panel to the ELT about our perspectives on Sun's technologies and the CA program.

We had the pleasure of meeting a lot of people from different areas inside Sun, from executives to engineers. Not to mention meeting and hanging around with four CA's from different parts of the world. It was a really amazing experience.

From left to right, that's Kira, Rita, Hal Stern, Anil, Filipp and myself.

I was very impressed at how the MPK campus doesn't look like a corporate HQ. Looks more like a college campus. Here's a picture of the Blackbox that is parked inside - last April Fool's joke :)

One of nicest things about this trip was meeting the other four CA's and our manager, Gary Serda. I mean, when do you get the chance to talk to people from four different parts of the world at the same time? Not to mention they are all from the same field of work that you do, so you're learning new stuff pretty much all the time. Gary was just amazing, taking care of everything and making sure we had a good time. We definetly owe him a few gallons of gas.

On Wednesday we met Jonathan Schwartz, our CEO. An incredibly nice and forward thinking guy that just makes you wanna come work for Sun. We were really honored that he took the time to come chat with us.

Sometime during the week we spent about an hour talking to Bart Smaalders, a regular name on my 'Solaris Internals' book. Very inteligent guy, I was really impressed. He gave us some great news about the upcoming Nevada (and eventually Solaris 11) releases, stay in tune for that.

I managed to go say hi to some of the engineers on the Solaris Performance Group. They were really nice to take the time to talk some NUMA and memory management stuff with me - I've been studying that for the past months at college. Talking with people that work everyday with something I'm passionate about is a great learning experience, I had a blast.

You can't go to San Francisco and not see the Golden Gate Bridge. It's just beautiful.
The city seems really interesting. Some parts reminded me a little about some neighborhoods we got over here. Just great architecture. Living around the bay must be very cool.

There's just no way to talk about all the cool stuff we saw on a single post, so come by to check out the next ones. I'll get into some really interesting things..

Earlier today I did a TechTalk about SunStudio at college, the main topics were auto-parallelization, garbage collection (libgc), race condition detection, OpenMP and the Temple of the Sun game.

I wanted to cover the main benefits of Sun's compilers and also take a little tour around the IDE, so I showed how to create projects, compile with different arguments, debug and other basic stuff. I also mentioned the Collaboration Module, I have it installed so it was a cool example of how the Netbeans IDE is used on SunStudio, since it's originally a Netbeans/Java thing.

I always like to show things working and try to prove that it is worth doing it this or that way. I did this by running performance comparisons between optimized code and plain serial code with the "time" command. For instance, on both auto-parallelization and OpenMP demos, I would show some code, explain it, compile without optimizations and run it with "time". Then I would explain how the optimization works, implement or uncomment it and then do the same. The difference was obvious, both auto-p and OpenMP ran at least twice as fast as the serial ones.

The race condition detection part was also cool, I had ran "collect" before hand and saved the experiment file so we didn't have to wait for it. I'd written a little multi-threaded program with three threads writing to the same global variable, so the race condition was evident.

Everything went smoothly, at least 40 people attended, a few grad students and a professor.
I think I gave away like, 35 Temple of the Sun DVD's - the one with SXDE. I also mentioned SAI and promoted our OSUG.

Great turn out considering today's probably the coldest day in the year - so far.

Today I held my first TechTalk at campus, about NetBeans 5.5.
Had a great turn out, a little over 50 people showed up. Mostly undergrad, with a few grad students.

Check out some pictures..

I talked about Matisse, Collaboration Module, Profiler and Sun Academic Initiative. Managed to get a good timing, it started at 12:45 (usual time for talks and presentations at the Institute) and ended at 13:20. Varied crowd in terms of Java and NetBeans knowledge. A couple of guys were new to Java and about half of the audience already uses NB.

Thanks to Glaucio Souza, who's also a Campus Ambassador at UFRGS, and Bruno Bastos who helped me out with the Collaboration demo part of the Tech.