rv's techblog: some kind of blog

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.

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

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.