rv's techblog: some kind of blog

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..

During FISL, I attended a talk by Erwin Tenhumberg about the Open Document Format. He talked about how OASIS worked to get an ISO for ODF and how important that is in terms of data longevity and data freedom.

Now, think about that for a second. Data freedom. Sounds cool, doesn't it?
Like a march of 0's and 1's burning their underbraws in public - bits do have gender, they're females, I'm convinced.

But back to the point.

When you (or your lawyer) asks for some public document while filing a complaint because your tax returns are taking too long to process, in what format is that stored?

Better yet, what format or application does your government use to store information about _you_?

Do they use proprietary stuff that you need ($$) access to in order to view it?
Why should you have to buy someone's product to read public information produced by a public institution?

What if the company that makes such product goes under in two years?
How would the government understand those docs?

Reverse engineer it?
Keep using legacy versions of the software?

Because of those reasons, and many others, governments and institutions all over the world are adopting the Open Document Format and OpenOffice as their standard.

Because it's free, because it's an international standard and because it should be open.

More here:
Oasis ODF Adoption Committee
ODF Alliance