Scott Dickson's Blog

Nice review at Gizmodo, here, of VirtualBox.  Title is Virtualize Any OS for Free.  Check it out.

Between Redmeat and Cyanide & Happiness, one might think my sense of humor a little warped.  Check out today's Cyanide & Happiness, though.  I love comics and some of the online ones are my favorites.

After a really long and difficult week, we've lost a good friend in our house today.  Our Ernie passed away at 16.  Ten days ago, everything was good.  But, when he went in to get his teeth cleaned, they found a cancerous tumor in his lower jaw.  Kathleen and I are losing a friend, a member of our family.  He's like our baby.

We will so much miss him.  I know he didn't want to go now, either.

I just need to take a minute to brag on my wife, Kathleen.  She has taken over as the local coordinator for our food pantry for America's Second Harvest, now called Feeding America.  She coordinates the couple of dozen volunteers who glean extra food from the local restaurants and groceries and bring it all back to our food pantry, North Fulton Community Charities. It's amazing how much these places would just discard as leftovers at the end of the day or as they restock the shelves with newer product.

Since she took this on, she has done some really cool stuff.  She has started to recruit volunteers from among the people who receive food from the pantry that want to give back to the community in gratitude.  She has gotten the pantry to start collecting and distributing pet food for the families who need groceries as well, so that they can continue to look after their pets.  Now, she has started working with some local folks who make decorative cut fruit arrangements  to provide fresh fruit to the pantry.  That's something that really makes a difference to the people who are receiving the food subsidies and groceries from the pantry.

I have to say that I am right proud of her for all of this.  And I would encourage folks to get involved with their local charities.  Go to the Feeding America page to find out what opportunities there are in your area.  It really can make a difference to so many people.

Today is my first day back at Sun.

I am excited to be back at Sun.  We have a new group of folks focused on Solaris and OpenSolaris.  Now, we need to get our heads together and put together a bit of a business plan for the team.

I am sure that the next few months will be hugely busy and exciting!

Thanks to Hal and everyone who made this possible.

I've not been terribly faithful about blogging here.  Once in a while, but this is worth saying.

I am part of the great exodus going on this week from Sun.  I was notified yesterday that my position has been eliminated. 

This has been a great 13 1/2 year ride.  Sun has had great peaks and great valleys in that time.  But through it all, it has been a top-notch place to be.

Of the things I have done at Sun, I am proudest of being associated with two groups: Dawit Bereket's Solaris team for the last three years and the OS Ambassador program for the last 13 years.  These are both groups of the top flight of Solaris folks in the field, and folks who all wear the SUNW (oops, JAVA) hat, rather than the hat of any parochial group or division.

So, for now, I'm signing off.  But hope to be back soon.

Being a long time Sun and Solaris guy, it's not often that I step up to say "Wow, Microsoft did something good."  But this time I want to.

Recently, a good friend's son returned home from a tour of duty with the Air Force in Iraq.  As the plane unloaded in Baltimore, there was a representative from Microsoft handing each of the servicemen and women a fully tricked out Zune, accessories, speakers - the whole nine yards. 

There were no cameras, no press releases, no publicity.  Just a nice gesture for these men and women who had been away from home and family doing something that, even though they trained and prepared for it, they would just as soon not have to do.

Thanks for this nice gesture, Microsoft.

So, CEC is actually almost over. It's been a whirlwind of sessions, meet-ups with folks, filling my head with new stuff. And, of course in the midst of all of the CEC excitement, there's still the need to keep up with what customers back home need.

So, what was exciting from days one and two? Lots!

 

• Jon Haslam and Simon Ritter gave a great talk and demo about using DTrace along with Java. I am absolutely not a developer; never even written "Hello World" in Java. But, this really helped me understand how DTrace and Java are two great tastes that go great together. And with the newer JVMs, it really is a case of "Hey, you got your DTrace in my Java!", "No, you got your Java in my DTrace!" This all comes at a great time -- I have to do a presentation on Wednesday in Florida on exactly this topic.
• Matt Ingenthron and Shanti gave a great talk about the various working parts and commonly used components and tools in a modern web infrastructure. Really helped me figure out how the pieces fit together.
• Tim Cook had a great talk comparing the various file system offerings from Sun and others for OLTP workloads on large systems. He gave us some handy, simple, best practices for each and worked to bust some commonly held myths and misconceptions.
• Tim Bray shared his perspective on what really is important about a Web 2.0 world, about how the things in that world can really matter to an enterprise. He talked about the fact that, end the end, time to market and managability are the overwhelming priorities for enterprises in selecting tools and techniques for application development and deployment. I am really inspired to go out and finally learn more about Ruby and Rails as a result.

Of course, there were more. These are just some of the highlights that come to mind quickly. As always, CEC was a great trip and well worth the effort (but I still dislike Las Vegas - a lot). And like Juan Antonio Samaranch at the Olypics, this CEC is about to be declared over, realized to be the best yet, and we will agree to meet again next year. I, for one am looking forward to it. Time to start working on a topic for my presentation!

So, it's the first day of CEC, Sun's Customer Engineering Conference. This year, there are about 4000 of us hanging out at Paris & Bally's hotels in Las Vegas. Systems Engineers, folks from Sun's various practices, Service & Support engineers, architects, folks from headquarters engineering are all here. But, we also have a huge number of our partners - resellers, OEMs, developers, etc.

Last night was our Networking Reception. Great to see folks again that I had not seen in a while and to meet lots of new faces.

Today, we start with opening sessions from Hal Stern, Dan Berg, Jim Baty, and a host of others. Then, we get into, for me, the guts of CEC - the breakout sessions. There are over 240 sessions, selected from a pool of over 700 submissions. I'm talking (Tuesday, 6PM, Versailles ballroom 3 & 4) on Dynamic Resource Pools in Solaris 10. I'll post my slides after the talk. If you are at the conference, come on over. I understand my talk will also be available in Second Life. I'm still trying to figure out how all of that works, though.

Here are some of my initial + and - observations from CEC so far:

• Plus - Paris is great. Very lovely hotel. The look really captures all that you might remember and love from Paris.
• Plus - I scored a deluxe room - corner room, view of the Bellagio fountains, windows on two walls.
• Plus - Check-in logistics. Got through even the really long materials line in less than 10 minutes.
• Plus - Networking Reception - Food was good and plentiful. Double plus for the desserts. Great to see folks. Last year, I missed the reception since I got in late.
• Plus / Minus - In-room network. Fastest hotel network I have had in as long as I can recall. But it costs $13/day.
• Minus - Room for meals was really, really, really crowded for breakfast. I can only imagine as folks try to rush through for lunch. And no sodas. Last year, folks finally got it that geeks often take their caffeine in a carbonated form.
• Minus - Having the agenda only on-line via schedule builder has made it sort of inconvenient to select sessions, alter you plans, and pick new things on the fly. Same as last year. Sometimes paper really is useful.
• Minus - Smoke - Las Vegas is smoky. Seems that they are managing it better now than in years past, but in these days of smoke-free public spaces, it's really noticeable.
• Big Minus - For me, Las Vegas is absolutely not my top choice for a venue. For me, this is a very uncomfortable place. Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud or a prude or old in my thinking, but this town is just about too many things that really make me uncomfortable.

All in all, though I am excited about a great conference and expect to be really tired when I get home!

Jason Calacanis has posted his "official" definition of Web 3.0. He says "Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform."

The same day I saw this, I also saw, on Keith Bostic's fabulous /dev/null mailing list, a link to Cracked.com's The 8 Most Needlessly Detailed Wikipedia Entries. Even though all of these folks are clearly authorities in their field, are we really getting the "wisdom of the crowd"? Geek and Poke gets it pretty right.

In between Solaris workshops, I got to take a week off and go canoeing with my dad.  We had planned to go to the Okefenokee Swamp, but the fires in south Georgia and northern Florida pretty much made that impossible.  So, we just bummed around instead, going over to Coldwater Creek in northwest Florida, and then over to Wakulla River, south of Tallahassee.

I have to say that the Wakulla River, with its headwaters in Wakulla Springs State Park, is way cool!  This river is fed by a spring that pumps out 250 million gallons of water per day.  Crystal clear.  At the spring, you can see the bottom at 125 feet!  There are mastadon bones on the bottom from when either the cave that supplies the spring was dry, or when the furry brute fell in.

There is a fabulous site that talks about the spring, its geology, the land around it, etc. here.

At the state park, there is a lodge, built in the 1920's, formerly frequented by Johnny Weissmuller of Tarzan fame.  In fact, several of the original Tarzan films were shot here.  As well as the Creature from the Black Lagoon.  The lodge looks like a great place to stay - very Art Deco and ornate and old.

But we were there to canoe. 

This river has its fair share of wild life.  There are turtles, wading birds, osprey and birds of prey, mullet leaping, and even manatees.  And there are alligators.  Lots of them.  Weird thing is that there's swimming right next to the prime alligator areas.  They seem to hang out in the marshy edges right around the spring itself.  Maybe they are waiting for an unsuspecting teenager to wander too close.

 And we found our share of alligators, small and large, as we paddled the river.  Dad was in the front taking pictures and my job was to paddle and put him where he could get good pictures.  So, we got really close to this one.  It was about 8 or 9 feet long, and we got as close as maybe 8 feet to it.  I would have gone closer, but there was a log I couldn't get the boat over.  I figured that I was okay.  It's like the old story of the guy running from the bear.  I didn't have to be so far from the alligator that it couldn't get me, just father away than Dad!   I'm working hard to get back to Wakulla River, this time so I can be on the river before light and after dark to really see what goes on on the river.  If you're looking for a great place to escape from most everything on the Florida Gulf Coast, Wakulla River, Wakulla Springs State Park should be on your list.

 

 

I feel like that Johnny Cash song (which I think maybe Jimmy Rodgers did first - can't recall for sure).  Seems like for the last several months, I've been on the road doing Solaris bootcamps, best practices workshops, and all sorts of other things Solaris.  I've seen a lot of interesting places and met lots of interesting folks.  Just the last few weeks, I've been to:

• Bismarck, ND, Sioux Falls, SD, Fargo, ND for University Solaris Bootcamps.  Got to see lots of that area driving from one to another across the secondary highways.  Thanks to Greg Stromme from Applied Engineering, Sun's reseller partner in that geography, for driving me and showing places I'd never been before.  We saw the homeplaces of Lawrence Welk and Laura Ingalls Wilder, plus lots of wide-open territory
• Conway, Arkansas for Solaris resource management workshop.  Got to see a cousin in Russellville this trip.
  
• Austin, Texas for Solaris virtualization workshop.
  
• Baton Rouge, LA for University Solaris bootcamp - Got to see a cousin here, too
• Huntsville, AL for various Solaris briefings

And that's just the last six weeks!  I'm kind of thankful for the end of the quarter and the year coming up.  I have no tickets booked until the end of July right now!

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Spring has arrived!  My first iris are blooming right on schedule, actually a couple of days early.  The White Flags of Spring, as my grandmother called them, bloomed on the first day of spring, Tuesday of this week.  These are a small, only about 14" high, white iris.  The always bloom before the first day of April and this year was no exception.

I am looking forward to a pretty good crop of iris this year, I think.  I just cleaned out the winter cruft.  It looks like this is the year to dig up several of the beds, split them, give them away, and replant.  I think I will get a couple of yards of new good dirt to work in with them, too.  It looks like everything is just sand anymore in the beds.

 

I hope that the purple and bronze iris that my grandmother hybridized come back.  I didn't see any last year, so I am afraid I have lost those.  But I still have so many of hers that every time I go out I remember being at my grandmother's house in the springtime, having Easter egg hunts among the iris, and the sweet smell of the flowers everywhere. 

For some reason, I have the Indigo Girls song Southland in the Springtime running through my head about now.  Just call me a sentimental old softie.....

 

 

 

 

I am amazed and awed by all of the folks on BSC who are able to contribute great content *and* get their jobs done!  I find that even when I want to share something, there just don't seem to be enought hours in the day to get the job done, talk to & support the customers, and then to put something together that makes enough sense to share.

 How do you guys do it?  Or do you never sleep?
 

Got into SFO Sunday evening and went straightaway to the reception at the Hilton. It's always great to see the folks that you have worked with over the years and don't get to see very often. Networking is as important as anything else at these events. If social networking is important in a Web 2.0 world, it only got that way because social networking in our day to day life is how we get stuff accomplished.

Laura Ramsey and I hosted an OpenSolaris BOF at lunchtime. We had a pretty good crowd and had short, "lightning talks" from a number of folks

• Ienup Sung talked about Internationalization and Localization in OpenSolaris
• Ken Drachnik talked about Glassfish
• Jeff Savit talked about some cool stuff going on with ports of OpenSolaris to "alternative platforms." More on this as it is ready for prime time.
• Iwan Rahabok talked about Singanix and the OpenSolaris user group in Singapore
• Bruno Gillet talked about how he uses OpenSolaris as a tool to demonstrate new features that will appear in Solaris and how important OpenSolaris can be to Sun's engineers as a day-to-day too.

After lunch, the breakout sessions began, the real reason we come to CEC.

• I heard Jim Mauro talk (and make himself tired in a mad dash through more slides than minutes) on Solaris POD - Performance, Observability, and Debugging - tools.
• I saw a talk about new features in Sun Cluster 3.2 that make upgrades of not only the cluster, but also the OS and application easier and with less interruption in service.
• I saw two good talks on ZFS. One by Detlef Drewanz and Constantin Gonzalez on how they use ZFS and some of the reliability metrics around various configurations of disks. And one by Roch Bourbonais about some of the ZFS implementation details. That one just whet my appetite for a week long deep dive into ZFS internals I hope to attend in December.

Now, it's time to start again. Andy B. is on tap today for the general session. I plan to hear Richard Elling talk about RAS for sure, but I don't know what else. Busy, Busy, Busy!!

Technorati: cec2006

I had these grand intentions of writing some sort of brilliant synopsis of all the amazing things I had seen during the first day of CEC, but this CEC stuff will wear you right out! Long, long days full of firehoses to the brain make you just want to sleep. Couple that with the fact that the folks back home on east-coast time still want you do do your day job and be on con calls convenient to them. 5am and 6am calls start the day, followed by sessions until 7pm. The the after-session stuff goes on until late. Then you collapse in your room. But, wait... Didn't you commit to putting together a slide deck and sending it out before tomorrow morning. Gotta get that done. Finally to bed after 12, only to start again at 5am.....

It's a great opportunity to be here at CEC. Tons to see and hear and learn about that I can take home and use directly, but this CEC thing will wear you out!

Technorati: cec2006

I'm on my way, like so many others at Sun, to CEC 2006 on Sunday. Sounds like there will be nearly 3000 Sun engineers and architects from around the world convening at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This year is the first time that I have attended without presenting a paper. Maybe I'll get to see more presentations this way!

One of the highlights of CEC is the many BOFs - Birds of a Feather sessions. Laura Ramsey and I are hosting a BOF for OpenSolaris on Monday over lunch. Plan is to have several Lightning Talks - 5-8 minute, very brief presentations on a variety of topics. We've got Lightning Talks lined up on Security, Trusted Extensions, I18N & L10N, Glassfish, and a bunch of other stuff. Shame we have only about an hour for the meeting. If you are CEC and are looking for a BOF to attend on Monday, try the OpenSolaris one!

Also like others, I am combining CEC with an Ambassador meeting, but for me it's OS Ambassadors rather than DC Ambassadors. 50 or so of us from around the world who focus on Solaris will get together with Solaris engineering and marketing. It's always a great meeting and a good time to see folks that you don't see very frequently.

So, look for a few more blog entries here on things that I see that might be interesting to pass along.

Technorati Tags: cec2006

My granddad is 86. He decided a few weeks ago that he wants to be able to send email to his grandkids and great-grandkids. So, at 86, he bought a PC! Now, he's got it all set up, with DSL service into the assisted-living facility where he lives. And he's raring to go! I think this is really cool.

Granddad worked for and around the railroads for years and always has loved the switching yard. Years ago, he tried to get going with a Timex Sinclair to manage his model railroad switching yard, but that didn't work out too well It was the eternal problem of lack of application availability to do what you want to do.

I think this time things will go much more smoothly, especially with Granddad's new pacemaker (which he got yesterday). I hope to be sending him email by the end of the week!

Way to go, Granddad!

It's mid-July and for me, that's still time for the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts in State College, Pennsylvania. CPFA is a great break in the middle of the summer. Like so many things in Central PA, part of its great appeal is the fact that so much stays the same year after year after year. Friday night means gathering on the lawn of Penn State's Old Main and listen to Cartoon followed by a sing-along with Ernie and the Phyrst Family. Cartoon broke up over twenty years ago. And the Phyrst Family has been leading their sing-alongs to drunken crowds of students and alums for forty years at least!

I guess there's a lot of comfort in finding something that feels like home and sticking with it. Penn State and central Pennsylvania is like that. Happy Valley is a beautiful place and is very comfortable. So many people have come there for what they thought would be a short time and stay forever. Ken Hall, a good friend of mine arrived there in 1935, intending to stay for a few months to make some money to go to undertaker school. He ended up making sandwiches at the Hotel State College for almost sixty years.

This year, there's a special treat. If you are around Central PA today (July 14), head out to Tussey Mountain to check out the reunion show for Koehler Bay. Sylvia and Marilyn are well worth the trip. I used to go see them play anytime they played. Many Fridays, after playing happy hours, Sylvia and a bunch of us would go somewhere to make nachos and play Pictionary (I can't believe I admitted that in public!). Marilyn is the sultry-voiced, comedic front for the band, while Sylvia is the more retiring, extremely talented guitar player and songwriter. "Point of Contention" still rocks!

Yeah, I guess I am feeling sort of nostalgic for State College. Before long, it will be time for the Grange Fair and Hewlett's hot sausage sandwiches, apple dumplings, and people living in the same tent that they have used for 100 years. But, at the end of the day, while it's great to visit, it's so much better to be here, in Roswell, with Kathleen, at Sun. No regrets.

Gotta take this as an opportunity to brag on my little brother!

Dr. Marcus Wren Dickson, Ph.D., associate professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Wayne State University, received the Distinguished Teaching Contributions Award from the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology.

This award is given to recognize excellence in teaching, excellence in student accomplishments, and excellence in teaching-related activities. And all of this has to be done while maintaining research excellence as well. After all, in a university setting, research is still one of the very top priorities. So, that says a lot. It says that the recipient of this award is able to balance teaching and research, and to excell in both. It says that he not only is able to do the research, but to pass it on to the next generation of students in an effective and compelling way. It says that he is able to inspire students to go on to produce quality work of their own. And it says that he is a part of the community, building up the total through his efforts.

Seems like this whole idea of a Creative Commons that we talk about in the Open Source world really applies in a lot of other areas. Research is built on the shoulders of those who went before and is typically a collaborative effort. Teaching involves bringing together ideas and concepts and presenting them in a way so as to be compelling to others, so that they can in turn build on those ideas.

Anyway, Marcus keeps his own blog, about all of his travels while on sabbatical. He says he does it out of self-defense so as not to have to write the same letter or email over and over. He's been traveling all over the world this year. He goes to Amsterdam, I go to Jackson, Mississippi. He goes to Taipei, I go to Conway, Arkansas, half-way between Toad Suck and Pickles Gap. As you can see from his picture, he's quite the baseball fan, too. Marcus plays in a vintage baseball league at Greenfield Village near Detroit. They play baseball as it was played in 1867 - authentic rules, gear, cheers (Huzzah! Huzzah!), even an authentic band.

But, I digress. I could go on about the abstract for Marcus presentation for the teaching award, or that he is co-principal investigator in the GLOBE Project, a 62-nation study of leadership and culture, or give you lists of his publications and areas of interest. But, what I really want to say today is how proud I am of my little brother, little goofball that he is. He's turned out pretty much ok. He's a proud father of a great son, a respected professional, and a good guy. It's hard to believe that he not only has a PhD, but is a tenured professor, and has been one long enough to be on sabbatical this year! I guess that makes me old, too.

It's been a long time since my last blog. I feel like I have been on the road now for months, travelling about the South, talking about Solaris. Every where I go, folks are excited about Solaris 10, Open Solaris, Solaris running on x86 / x64. After being an OS Ambassador at Sun for 10 years, it's finally fashionable to focus on the OS. And that's a lot of fun.

Many of us OS Ambassadors have been presenting roughly six hours of Solaris 10 technical overview at a series of Solaris 10 Boot Camps held across the country. If one is in your area, try to take it in. Even if you are already a Solaris junkie, this is a great way to meet other folks in your area also interested in S10. For the most part, these events are hosted by colleges and universities and held on-campus, but are open to the community at large. I've been doing these in Florida, so far, and plan to travel to Mississippi for one next week. Who would have thought that there would be excitement for Solaris 10 in Mississippi?! But, we have between 50 and 100 people signed up in Jackson, MS for our event. There are a couple of these events planned for the West Coast (San Diego and Santa Clara, I think), as well as Atlanta, in the next month or so.

On top of the Boot Camps, I have visited dozens of customers, both very, very large, and very, very small, and everything in-between. Even if the customer is not currently running Solaris, Solaris 10, especially running on x86 hardware, is something that *they call us to hear about*! I've visited customers in Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Virginia in the last couple of months and the reception has always been the same - "This is way cool!"

It looks like my task for the next year will be focused around helping customers get Solaris 10 integrated into their environments. That's a pleasant task, to my way of thinking.

It's times like this that continue to make me happy to be at Sun and happy to be associated with Solaris and the people who make Solaris possible.

Monday morning was the final half-day of the Sun Customer Engineering Conference. We rounded out this morning with two breakout sessions and some time chatting with Scott McNealy. The breakouts I made this morning were particularly good. I started with Liane Praza giving a talk about SMF for Administrators. SMF is one of the particularly powerful new sets of features in Solaris 10 and Liane gave a great presentation on how all the pieces fit together. I can see a lot of promise for ISVs integrating their application software with SMF for higher levels of availability. One question that came to mind is "what sort of applications would be well served by having their own custom delegated restarter?" One possible area I thought of would be telco network applications. These sorts of apps often require special processing and go to great lengths to provide very high levels of reliability. Maybe having a delegated restarter based on the particular types of transactions, these core network apps could provide even higher levels of reliability. My second breakout was another view of server consolidation, this one being a session on lessons learned through an internal project to move internal applications to consoldiated environments using zones. One thing that comes out over and over is that no matter the server consolidation approach being used, planning and operational maturity are the key components to a successful deployment. One interesting comment from this session is that the group doing the deployment felt like they could make better progress and show positive ROI more quickly by approaching things in small, achievable chunks - 20-30 apps at a time, rather than a huge enterprise-wide analysis and deployment. We finished out the morning with a presentation by Scott McNealy, with a pretty good question and answer session. Like Jonathan's, Scott's talk is always a highlight of this event. I believe that the senior executives at Sun really value the contribution, and understand the significance of the contribution, of the technology organizations in the field. All in all, this was a great event. I'm definately heading home with a big list of things to try to work on in my _copious spare time._ There are so many gems hidden down in Solaris that deserve attention so that I can share them with my customers. It's sort of like the guy who works at the hardware store. He has to know from his own experience the basics of what he sells, but he also has to know from study and listening to other customers what all of the other mysterious and arcane items he might have in stock do and how to use them. Now, time to move to meeting two - OS Ambassadors for most of the rest of the week. That's always an exciting meeting. But for both of these, you end up tired! As invigorated as I always am after the meetings, I am also glad to get home!

Day Two of the CEC is Sunday, 2/27. Like other days, we begin with general sessions, but I missed the early ones. I "cut class" and went to church at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. Great service and I am glad that I went. More about that later. Finally got to the CEC in time to hear Andy Bechtolsheim and John Fowler's general session about where Sun is going with Opteron servers. David Yen, EVP of Sun's Scalable Systems Group, explained how CMT works and where Sun is going with our upcoming CMT systems. Right after lunch, I had the second round of my BART presentation. Pretty good turnout, I think. Probably about 35 people. BART is one of those little gems in Solaris that people overlook. After my talk, I caught several good talks this afternoon. First one was on the new way that Sun will distribute updates for Solaris 10. This looks to be a real improvement over the current tools and practices. The second talk was on metering and accounting resource usage for utility computing, aka in this case chargeback. The key here is extended accounting and its ability to report usage by task, project, or zone. Exacct is something that I have been intending to look more closely at for a while. Now, I think it's time to do that. Third talk was about the Fault Manager in Solaris 10 given by Mike Shapiro. The more I look at FMA and hear the plans for this, the more impressive this technology is. One more half day tomorrow morning, finishing up with a visit with Scott McNealy. Last year at CEC, Scott (like Jonathan this year) was very open with us. I'm looking forward to that. But, CEC is only the first part of the week for me. Tuesday to Thursday, the OS Ambassadors, a group of roughly 50 Solaris specialists worldwide , will meet or a short mini-conference. We are taking advantage of the fact that most of us are in town for CEC to catch up for a few days. So, looks like a busy week, too.

Each day at the CEC start with general session, presentations from the leaders and executives at Sun. This gives all of us the opportunity to hear what is the execs are saying to customers and what they are up to. This morning, we started out with our hosts, Dr. Jim Baty, CTO of the Client Solutions organization, and Hal Stern, CTO of Client Network Services. Next up, Bob MacRitchie, Executive VP of Global Sales, and Marissa Peterson, EVP for Client Network Services, gave us an update on the state of the union from their vantage point. The highlight of the morning was a very open and candid question and answer session with Jonathan Schwartz. Someone wrote in a blog not to long ago, and I aplogize for forgetting the author, that one of the really great things about being at Sun is the freedom to speak your mind and ask the tough questions up and down the line. The group of folks here at the CEC are the engineers who are with customers every day, who see the ultimate effects of decisions made at the top levels of the company. And this group is anything but shy. Jonathan gave us a very brief talk about where he sees Sun, what the company's priorities are, and where we are going. Then, in a move not many company presidents would do, he opened the floor to an hour of honest question and answer in a room filled with 3000 opinionated engineers. Jonathan met every question head on. He didn't dodge or discount anyone's opinion. In fact, he often amplified the feelings expresses, saying that he had hear that same issue from other people, from other customers. And he validated people's feelings, letting us know that he has had many of the same frustrations as we in the field face. He talked honestly about what has gone into many difficult decisions over the last few years. He talked honestly about where we and our produces have been and where we are going. I've been at Sun for a long time, and it's things like this that keep me here and keep me excited and optimistic about being at Sun. I'm as opinionated as the next guy, and I have my own ideas about what's good and bad at Sun, but when our top executives talk to us honestly, it really makes me glad to be here. Break Out Sessions The big problem at the CEC is the fact that there are so many sessions that look like they will be really good and so little time. You have to pick and choose carefully. You have to move quickly and be aggressive to get into the most exciting talks. I tried to get into the talk on Sun's new Update Manager, the new mechanism for delivering patches and system updates. But every seat, every spot along the wall was filled and another dozen people were crowded around the door trying to hear the talk. I guess I have to get the slides for that on. I got to hear Claire Giordano talk about Open Solaris and all that we are doing there. This is a talk I have heard before, but I find it valuable to hear the conversation around Open Solaris. After all in the open source world, it often is as much about the conversation as it is about the source. As soon as Claire's talk was over, the doors burst open and hundreds of folks rushed in to try to get seats. Turns out the next presentation in that room was Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun badge number 1. Everyone wants to hear what he is up to. Next up was Grand Holland and Ed Turner, a couple of local Atlanta guys, talking about a project they have been working on called Service Configuration and Deployment Engine. This is a pretty cool effort to glue together packages and processes in the deployment and management of services and servers. I mostly wanted to see this since I've loaned a rack of gear in the Atlanta lab to Grant's team and I've wondered what they are doing. It's always fun to hear these guys. Grant is so wicked smart, and someone always asks a question that sets him to thinking of a whole new set of opportunities, that it's always a good show. The last talk I saw on Saturday was about the Solaris on x86 boot process. Like many sessions, this was packed. Everyone knows all about how SPARC systems boot, but many of us are just becoming familiar with the ins and outs of BIOS and x86 boot process. For the last session of the day, it was time for me to give my talk on BART. I had a pretty good crowd, but certainly not SRO. BART is the basic audit & reporting tool in Solaris 10. It's a simple tool that allows you to detect any changed files on a system. Pretty full day for sure.

Arrived in San Francisco early in the day on Friday for CEC2005. This first day (well, zeroth day) of the CEC is really just to get folks here, get reacquainted with folks you've not seen in a while. We had a short session on "The State of the Union" where each of the organizations involved in the CEC had a chance to meet with its leadership and get an update on what's going on. For my group, Client Solutions, this was particularly interesting, being a new organization this year. At the last Network Computing launch event and Analyst Conference, Chris Ostertag, Sr. VP for Client Solutions, introduced this organization to the analyst community. CSO is the result of bringing together the field-based presales engineering team with the professional services delivery team. This is a pretty major and far-raching undertaking. So, for the CSO State of the Union, each of the heads of the various disciplines gave a brief update on and make sure it matches the voice coming from the trenches. Spent the rest of the evening at the Welcome reception, reconnecting with folks. The best part of a big, worldwide event like this is getting to network with people that you don't often see, otherwise. Seems like everyone I talked to is finding huge interest from their customers in Solaris 10. Lots of us who work in that space are moving from spending our time introducing Solaris 10 to doing more in-depth engagements to talk about how exactly a customer might move forward with a consolidation effort using zones, or might use DTrace to optimize an application, or might take advantage of the Service Management Facility for better application management on their systems. Rounded out the day with a bit of planning for the rest of the weekend. Sessions kick of for real at 8:00 AM on Saturday morning. There are hundreds of breakout sessions given by my peers. One of the good things about the new Client Solutions organization is that new job roles help focus which sessions will be most useful. I'm now focused on Solaris and smaller servers. While I still think big servers are cool, I can skip those and narrow my focus a little. Even so, there are still far more sessions than I can attend. Luckily, I think we are recording sessions so I can catch them later on. At the very least, I can get the slides. My tentative list of topics that I want to see today has been narrowed down to: * Volume Server Performance Analysis * OpenSolaris * Sun's New Update Manager * Compliance - Technical view of Lifecycle Management * Reducing Service time with the Diagnistic Boot CD * A Basic Introduction to Reliable Computing * New & Upcoming Server Hardware * DTrace - This is Clive King and Jon Haslam. Definately don't want to miss it! * The Solaris x86 boot process * Transitioning NIS to LDAP and Issues * Performance monitory for Solaris on SPARC, Solaris on X86, and Linux * Solaris 10 Service Management Facility * Trusted Solaris - Simple, Powerful Security * BART - Basic Audit Reporting Tool * Report on Sun's internal POC with Zones and Solaris 10 From that big list, I think I get to pick 5 if I want to stay the whole session. More on what I see later.

Sun's annual CEC conference is coming up next weekend. A couple thousand Sun engineers from around the world will get together in San Francisco for this event. This is the main event for Sun engineers from the field to share what we are doing, what we have learned, what works well, neat tricks of the trade, etc. Engineers who work in service, in sales, and in delivery all present at the CEC. A number of us will be blogging from the CEC about the papers we see, what we learn, etc. I'll try to give an account of all I see. I hope that Clive King and Jon Haslam are presenting on DTrace again. They were hands down the best talk I saw last year. These guys get nearly as excited about DTrace as Bryan does! I'll be presenting on *BART, the Basic Audit Reporting Tool*. BART allows you to detect changes in groups of files and filesystems over time. One obvious (and intended) use is to alert the administrator to any unintended changes to key files, whether malicious or not. So, watch this space for new reports coming from the conference.

I spent this past weekend visiting my brother, Marcus, and nephew, Michael. He's a very bright and energetic seven-year-old. Gets excited about all kinds of techy things like Bionicles, Transformers, etc. Looking at my pictures from the trip, I found this great one of Michael and the Ferrari. See the Solaris boot messages? In the battle for hearts and minds, you have to start early! Looks like it's up to Uncle Scott to make sure Michael finds out about the *right kind* of computing. If we can find a way to run SSX Tricky on Solaris, then we are good to go. Hmmm... Who was it that ported Quake?

I'm part of the Solaris x86 and Volume Server practice within US Client Solutions. You might have seem some of the other folks talking about CSO in their posts. This is a new organization this year designed to bring together the technical folks in the field responsible for both pre-sales and delivery of solutions. This team is made up of about 25 folks spread across the US. I've been part of distributed groups before, but never a national group like this. I've probably met less than half of my co-workers so far. This coming week, we will all get together at the Sun campus in Newark, CA for the first time. I'm looking forward to finally putting a face to the voices from our team calls. It's funny. For every change like this new team and organization, there are always pluses and minuses. It's good to be part of a team focused around such cool technology as Solaris. But moving to a nationwide team rather than a local team does seem to force some extra effort to build a team out of a bunch of dispersed folks. This is one of those cases, I think, that this will work, though. We've got the coolest product going as our focus. I think the only downside here is that it's going to take more than the 25 of us to handle all of the projects that our customers will come up with.

I got a short update on my step-dad and the Texas Baptist Men in Sri Lanka. There was an article in the Dallas Morning News (registration required) this morning and Mom talked to folks who got word from the teams. Seems that they have been having a hard time getting the supplies together for their feeding efforts. Instead, this team of middle-aged and older men are mucking out and pumping out wells to provide safe drinking water around Batticaloa. They've taken a motto among themselves of "Be flexible. That way you don't get bent out of shape". Seems like that could be a good motto for most of us most of the time. This team comes home this coming weekend and will be relieved by new teams arriving then.

My stepdad is in Sri Lanka right now. He left Saturday morning with a group from the Texas Baptist Men to spend two or three weeks doing relief work from the recent tsunami. Mom said that he called Tuesday for her birthday. They still were in Colombo, since their luggage and some of their gear got separated from them on the flight from Texas. They were working to coordinate what they would be doing and where exactly they were being sent. He said that they were going to travel about 8 hours by bus yesterday to the camps they where they are going to work. From googling around, I think they are in the Batticaloa or Ampara region. The Texas Baptist Men sent several crews over with water purification equipment. My stepdad went as part of one of their teams focusing on feeding folks. All total, there are to be around seven teams of 10 men going to help from Texas. The Texas Baptists are always quick to jump into relief efforts in the US or in other countries. They have a semi-trailer outfitted with a kitchen that can serve, I think, something like 15000 meals per day. When the hurricanes hit Florida this year, they were there within hours. So, for now, he's somewhere in Sri Lanka, doing the thing that he and all of these men felt deep in their heart that they had no choice but to go and do. I have to say that I'm mighty proud of him.