rv's techblog: some kind of blog

The Porto Alegre OSUG along with the SouJava JUG are promoting an OpenSolaris Day in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on April 16th, as a pre-FISL event.

The groups have organized a whole day of Java and OpenSolaris talks in downtown Porto Alegre. Amongst the OpenSolaris subjects are:

- The OpenSolaris Project
- HPC and OpenSolaris
- Project Crossbow: Network Virtualization
- OpenSolaris Kernel: Introduction to the VM and Scheduling systems

More information and online registration at our website

Earlier today, we announced the creation of the Porto Alegre OSUG [PoA-OSUG].

We are evolving the existing community we created a little over a year ago at UFRGS to a city wide user group. The group has grown steadily over the past year and we decided that it was time to take it a step further.

I think we're in the middle of a momentum build here and in our country, with people from all over the place turning their heads to OpenSolaris. With the creation of this group, we intend to consolidate our efforts. We also have a better infra-structure to keep driving awareness about OpenSolaris and other open source projects.

Here's the email with the proposal to the OpenSolaris Advocacy Group. We received the two necessary votes within a few hours and had our page set up with some initial content.

Last week, our OSUG had its last 2007 meeting.

I'm really glad the group grew so much in its first year, we're currently the largest OSUG in Brazil - AFAIK.

We got some decals with our new logo on the way, started planning our participation on the upcoming FISL in April, talked about the future of the group and a couple of projects we are trying to get started.

Very likely to be my last meeting here, as I'm moving out of the country next year. I'm very proud of the work we managed to get done in these last 12 months. OpenSolaris is a technology that's growing quickly and I'm glad to see we're getting the word out to folks at UFRGS and in Porto Alegre.

Left to right, that's Vitorio, Cristiano, myself and Glaucio

And let 2008 come, we got lots in store for you folks.

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.

Earlier today our OSUG had it's third meeting. Same place, same time - but that was it, we're moving our meetings somewhere else.

The proposed agenda was:

1. our website and content
2. project Indiana
3. kernel-talk if anyone else's interested
4. this article
5. decals
6. beer

We covered the first two, then started talking about device drivers which became a GPLv2 and CDDL discussion. We talked quickly about decals (we're ordering some with our logo) and Leal's article will be on the agenda for next month's meeting. We did talk about project Indiana but that was brief. And beer, well.. that's a given.

Not everyone showed up, but - as usual - new members attended. So it was pretty cool talking to those guys. Good to see people interested in trying Solaris and OpenSolaris regardless of what OS they're used to.

Glaucio, Marcelo, Leonardo, Douglas, myself and Cristiano

If you got this far, I'm guessing you know that FISL just took place here in Porto Alegre. Last Thurs-Fri, April 12-14th.

It was pretty amazing, got to meet a lot of interesting people, learn _a lot_ of stuff and watch some pretty cool talks. I was participating with our OpenSolaris User Group, so we had a stand on the floor, just near to Sun's booth.

We didn't really keep an exact count, but we handed out nearly 200 OpenSolaris Starter Kits and demo'ed Zones and Dtrace to 40-50 people. The folks at Sun's booth also handed out a lot of kits, plus a really cool pocket book on OS.

On that same morning we met Alvaro Ortega, who's working on JDS, and Sara Dornsife, from OpenSolaris marketing. Really cool people, hope to hang out with them sometime in the not-so-distant future.

On Thursday afternoon I took Manyi Lu, Josh Berkus and Louis Suárez-Potts to the university, I had invited them to do a couple of talks there. Had never met them personally, but they were so into it that it felt like nothing to drive across town with a almost complete stranger. Thank you for coming over, it meant a lot to me :)

Friday morning I watched Josh's talk on FISL about PostgreSQL performance. You gotta love that stuff. Later on, me, Manyi and Erwin Tenhumberg went to Louis' talk on OpenOffice. It's always a great experience to watch someone talking about what they're passionate about.

Later that night, we had dinner with most of the people from Sun who attended the Forum. I was in awe for sometime. Felt like a really really lucky person to be sitting with so many interesting people. You look down the table and there's Simon Phipps :D

Also met Brian Leonard, one of the most down to earth guys I've ever had the pleasure of talking to.

Saturday morning I went to Erwin's talk on ODF. This will be the topic of my next post, so I won't ellaborate now.

Since I was responsible for our UG, I was asked to host a couple of talks. I picked Jean-François Arcand and Charlie Hunt's talk on Project Grizzly, and François Orsini talk on Offline Java DB apps. Both on Saturday. JF's talk was very intensive, advanced connection handling stuff - hey, I haven't read Grizzly's code so 'stuff' is as far as I'll get here without embarrassing myself (?).
François' talk was very good, he's a very cool guy and definetly knows his db. I got a little carried away and let him talk for more than I should've so we didn't have enough time for all questions - the girl in charge of the room wanted to kill me - sorry for that.

I got to meet (briefly) Bruno Souza, who's a really cool guy, really passionate about his work.
Also met Tom Marble and Rich Sands from OpenJDK, Phil (who speaks great portuguese) and Sue from Java ME.

On that night we had dinner with everyone and went out later, my girlfriend joined us on that part. Glad to see everyone was so friendly, Rich helped me explain to her how a company can profit from open source software.

Overall, it was a great experience. I had never been to FISL before.
The most interesting thing about it is that everyone seems to be on the same vibe, to learn new things, to meet new people and to promote and help others understand what free software is all about. I met quite a few interesting people just standing in line to get a cup of coffee.

Hope to be here for next year's.