A very busy week for Sun.  Both CommunityOne and JavaOne conferences being held in San Francisco back to back.  First OpenSolaris - OpenSolaris 2008.05 has been announced and released during CommunityOne which you can download now.

You should also review our announcement of world's first open storage platform from last week.

Matching Wine and Food

There is a lot written about best wine-and-food paring.  Some people are very prescriptive about it and some people say the best pairing is whatever you like.  No matter what! 

There is no rule behind it - rather than rules, it's based on instincts and experiences.  However, there are definite pairings which create synergy to enhance each others taste - it's like squeezing flesh lemon onto your oysters.

One example of this is blue cheeses, because of their strong flavor, overpower most wines except one type - dessert wines.  This is why most of you know Roquefort cheese with French Sauternes is a classic match.

Now, living in Korea, we must answer this question..."what goes best with Kimchi(or spicy food) ?"  For those of you who had wine with Kimchi can testify to the fact that spicy taste of Kimchi overwhelms wine, right ?  So, what pairs best with Kimchi and spicy food ?  Try out these three wines recommended by 신의물방울.  I have not tried them myself, so I will let you know as soon as I do  

The first two probably taste spicy which match the spiciness of Kimchi and the champagne's strong stimulating experience enhances Kimchi's strong flavor.

For second consecutive years, Sun Korea has been selected as "the  best place to work in Korea" in a nation-wide contest conducted by Hankyoreh Economy 21, a leading business publication.  Sun Korea was one of 11 companies selected this year representing respective industries.

This is a great recognition for every individual at Sun Korea in striving to make Sun Korea "the most admired company" in Korea - CONGRATULATIONS !!

KSUN(Korea Solaris User Networks) is sponsoring OpenSolaris Conference on March 29th(Sat) as described below:

This photo was taken during Hal's Q3 extended staff meeting in Seoul a couple weeks ago.  James(Americas VP) kept asking difficult questions   Who washes all these hundreds of side dishes ?  You guys eat so much, how do you stay so slim ?

It's done.  It's finally settled - the war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray formats.  Here are a couple of news from thedigitalbits and NYT.  Now I can finally invest into the High-Definition format.

Bluray is Java friendly with Bluray Disc Java(BD-J) which is an interactive platform for Bluray Disc's advanced content.  Thus, this historical milestone in HD format war is also a win for Sun.  If you want to deepdive into BD-J, please try this videocast.

On a personal note, this really gives me an excuse to buy a Playstation 3 although my kids and I are fan of Wii - especially the latest game Super Mario Galaxy...

Happy Lunar New Year !!

Korea is one of Asian countries which celebrate the lunar new year.  We had the luxury to stay away from work for past 3 days (wed thru fri).  During this break, I finally accomplished something I've been meaning to do for a long time - upgrading/replacing my home computer.  Before I get into the details, here is...

BEFORE


AFTER


Do I need to explain the first picture? - it was basically a messy uncontrolled environment.  That was just under my desk and the top of the desk wasn't much better.

Now, you may ask... why I gave up a desktop PC and bought a laptop/notebook PC?  Well... this wasn't any ordinary notebook PC, it was 20 inch desknote PC(this is what notenook with bigger than 17 inch LCD is called in Korea).  In every features aspect, the new desknote PC was better than my old PC.  The most impressive features were:

• it only needed one connection which was power cable. 
• it only weighs 7kg(15.4lbs) and actually mobile from a room to room in the house.
  
• it's actually a multimedia station with a remote control.

Information and communications technology accounts for roughly 2% of global CO₂ emmissions.  If you break this down by types of devices, the biggest culprit turns out to be PCs and monitors which accounts for 39% of the CO₂ emissions, followed by servers ar 23%.  My drive behind replacing my older PC was not necessarily in reducing the carbon footprint, but in:

• reducing noise pollution
• cleaning up under and over the deak - cleaner environment
  
• reduce heat being generated
• becoming mobile
• etc...
  

With this I am personally contributing in being eco responsible and Sun is doing its part in being eco responsible and also providing eco innovation solutions.

I will answer the last question before you even ask...why didn't I buy iMac?  I did consider, but two biggest contributing factors were:

• Korea is probably a country with most Microsoft ActiveX dependent web sites - e.g., can't do any bank transactions on non-Window/Explorer environment.
• my children do not use Macs at school - use only Windows

This is a part of reasons why Apple computers are not widely used in Korea. 

Anyways, my home is now a bit more eco friendly.

"What is the most expensive wine in the world?" 

It's the bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite from Bordeaux sold in an auction in1985 for $160,000.  You can read more about it here.  This was said to been purchased by billionaire Malcolm Forbes.  Unfortunately, it wasn't kept in proper conditions - put on display under strong lights and at the wrong angle. These conditions eventually made the cork fall into the bottle, and the wine lost its value and was thrown away.

And, now you know why wine should be kept in a cellar under a proper temperature and never kept straight up for a long time - if the cork does not come in contact with the wine, it dries up and loses the ability to seal.

Earlier this week, I visited our Taiwan office in Taipei.  We have a very strong group of Systems Engineers which is part of GC(Greater China) GEM(Geographically Established Markets).  It has been over 10 years since I last visited Taiwan and first time in this job - I definitely need to visit more often to aid the growth - there is a great potential here.

After Taiwan's parliamentary elections last weekend and a presidential election to be held in March, there is a great hope for recovery of a sagging economy.  The result of parliamentary election was a landslide victory for opposition party which signaled desire for change and economy improvement.  I was amazed at the similarity betwwen Taiwan and Korea's political/election situation.  Korea's new president was elected last month from an opposition party by a landslide victory also and parliamentary elections to be held in April.  Korea's result also reflected people's desire for globalization and economy improvement.  I believe recovery of economy and unbounded growth await both countries.

Yesterday, Sun made a history by announcing agreement to acquire MySQL -  an open source icon and developer of the world's most popular and one of the fastest growing open source databases.  This without a doubt will become a significant milestone in Sun's history.

Whenever I give a "Why Sun - Sun's History & Vision" speech to new hires(coincidentially, I gave presentation to Sun Korea's new hires yesterday), I recognize key innovations which drove Sun during past 26 years - Solaris, SPARC, and Java.  I personally believe working with MySQL/open source will be another key innovation/event going forward which we can look back in the future to be at equal level.

The significance of the announcement is described by both Jonathan and Greg ...

I have been away from blogging for a bit too long

It's time to return from holiday mode and get back in shape.  I usually don't make new year resolutions because I end up not accomplishing them.  My philosophy is "just do it or get it done when you need to ..."

I am starting the year on a good note - a compliment from my boss Hal Stern.  Thank you very much.  I view it as a recognition to APAC Systems Engineering community and APAC's business success during past year.

It's time to travel again and start blogging again ...

Last week, we gave our older daughter(Kelly) her 8th birthday party at home and invited 15 of her girl friends.

During the party, they kept asking me to play "Ghost in the Hospital".  What is Ghost in the Hospital?  Have I been traveling too long?  I told them we didn't have a such DVD.  They responded by asking me to bring my laptop and hook it up to our PDP and download the movie.  At this point I was a bit amazed - maybe they know how things work ...

I hooked my laptop.  Turned on the TV.  All ready to download a movie and asked them what next ?  To my surprise, they instructed me to go to "youtube"  Then, I realized what they wanted to do.  So, we typed "Ghost in the Hospital" searched for short clips of real(?) ghosts appearing in the hospitals and watched it together.

Lessons learned from this experience:

• popularity of "youtube"
  
• kids ability to learn
  
• generation gap
  

This is me playing golf in freezing temperature today - I think it was minus or close to zero celsius.  It definitely is my last round until next Spring

p.s. Yes, the white stuff in the picture is snow. 

I am back home working in Seoul office after a four consecutive weeks of traveling - I attended  6 meetings in four different countries.  You wonder how I do this.   Well...I have a simple philosophy on this.  "If you can't fight it, enjoy it.  But, more importantly, condition yourself that this is a part of the job"

But, seriously, after all these meetings, I feel good about the progress "Systems Engineering" group in APAC is making in terms of FY08 goals and improvements in becoming trusted advisors for customers.  We may not be comparable to our competitions in terms of size, but we are definitely comparable and exceed our competitors in brain power.

It's time to spend time with my family during the holidays and rejuvenate myself before I hit the road again...

I got into watching American TV series with Lost.  The first season was very refreshing - never seen anything like it on TV before.  The second season was interesting because it answered many questions but posed even more.  The third season dragged on and I lost interest quickly.  The fourth season episodes are peding due to 2007 Writers Guild of America Strike.  In my opinion, the mistake with Lost is not ending the show when the public interests were at the peak - it could have remained a classic.

So, my interest turned to Prison Break where there were so much hype about the show in Korea.  The first season turned out to be much more intense than the hype.  The process of breaking out was so thrilling, I was always waiting for the next episode.  The second season was as exciting viewing how fugitive survived or died.  However, the third season, currently being aired, is also on the track of boredom - I don't know why they are back in prison and trying to escape again   Prison Break is on the same path as Lost trying to stretch the series unnecessarily due to it's popularity.

However, my REAL interest is in Heroes.  This series is a cross between Lost and X-men.  It's on its second season continuing to build excitement.  I can't say enough about how exciting this series is - it's my best pick so far.  I hope this series ends on a climax and does not try to extend itself beyond its age.

To close this posting, I am recommending a Japanese manga  - "Death Note".  It comes in manga, anime, movie versions.  The manga and movie have complete different endings and both are very creative - I recommend you read and watch both.  I have no doubt you will love this series.

I mentioned during one of my previous posts about wine studying.  It's been less than a year since I started and  I am enjoying it tremendously.  As I gain knowledge and acquire tasting skills, I thought I share some interesting facts about wine.  This will be my first of many posts to come ...

There is a misconception that all wines improve with age.  However this is not true.  Over 90% of all wines produced in the world should be consumed within a year.  And, more interestingly, less than 1% should be aged more than 5 years.  But, no need to be alarmed.  1% equates to over 35 million bottles of wine produced in a year worldwide.

Finally returned home from the largest field engineering event at Sun - CEC 2007.  This is there were 1,000 more engineers attending the event compare to last year.

Interesting trials held this year were unconference and speed Geeking sessions.  Here are two posts to give some flavor of what went on (one, two).

APAC GSE management team got together on Monday night for a team dinner at Planet Hollywood where this picture was taken.

On a personal note...I resisted getting to the gambling table until the last day after the event was completed ... I somehow felt I was obligated to do it just becase I was in Vegas...well as always I tried and donated money to Vegas fund

I am currently attending our annual Customer Engineering Conference(CEC) in Las Vegas.  These are all the great things happening in CEC this year.  Make sure you check out GSE divas photo journal of the event.

We also announced this morning our latest products based on T2 processor during the second day of CEC.

More to come ...

As I have mentioned in my previous entry, Andy presented some interesting facts during his keynote speech and one of them was "silent data corruption".

We all know bugs and errors do happen from applications down to the network layer.  However, we tend to think what's written to the disk is error-free and permanent.  Well...CERN did an interesting experiment (taken from Andy's slides) which proved otherwise:

• Wrote a simple application to write/verify 1 GB files
• Ran on 3000 rack servers with HW RAID card
• Over 3 weeks, 152 silent data corruption instances
• Previously thought “everything was fine”

Where did the errors come from ?  Any defect in disk, switch, controller, cable, driver, or firmware can corrupt data silently.  With ever-increasing use of data and storage, the silent data corrupt is going to become a fact of life.  So, how do we cope with this ?  This is where Sun's "ZFS" file system comes to rescue.   ZFS provides pooled storage with end-to-end data integrity:

• Completely eliminates the concept of volumes
  
• Does for storage what VM did for memory
• Everything is copy-on-write
  
• Uses 256-bit checksums per disk block
• Self-healing data on every read
• Transactional
  
• Disk scrubbing in background
• etc...
  

It basically creates "reliable storage out of unreliable components".

"Silent Data Corruption" is also briefly discussed during one of the innovation@sun podcast.

HPC Asia 2007 was held in Seoul Korea last week and Andy Bechtolsheim gave a keynote speech - "Scaling to PetaFlops".

There were some interesting ideas, facts, and data from the presentation which I will blog in future posts.

During our Q1 meeting, we had an interesting team building exercise - we were divided into teams where each was tasked to build a "Mars Surface Rover" (yes, actual working version).  The exercise was to measure the effectiveness of different type of leadership.

Each team was assigned with one of the following leader types:

• traditional leader - they are authoritative and controlling and do not have a great deal of trust in their subordinates' abilities.
  
• passive leader - they take the opposite view of traditional leaders.  They take employee empowerment to the furthest extreme.
  
• facilitative leader - they combine the best attributes of the passive and traditional leaders.  They give their team members plenty of room to do their job, but they know when to step in and supply input and guidance.
  

Of course the facilitative leader/team won out, but some people cried foul   Anyways... we really did have fun with this little exercise and it truely brought out teamwork and team building.  The following sequence of photos will tell you the story ...

p.s. Thank you Jade(our HR Business Partner) for suggesting this team building exercise !!

After reading Hal Stern's latest blog entry on importance of lens filter, I thought I would say a few words about photography   I am not, by any means, an expert in photography.  Although I want to be, I don't have the time for the dedication required to practice photography.

As you all know photography is more of an art than science, but in order for it to become an art, one must learn technology and science behind it first.  I am one of those occasional photo shooter who rely on equipments/technology as much as possible.

I remember somone asking why it is so hard to take good quality photos.  Some experts would say it all depends on type of available light.  Yes, that is true, but I would lean toward the following few resolutions from my limited knowledge:

• drop your bundled lens and buy an expense lens - there is reason why it's expensive.  I purchased Canon 24-105mm f4.0 L IS USM lens for my Canon 400D a couple weeks ago.  It's amazing how the quality of photos improved - trust me
• when you actually press the "shutter release button" to take a photo, you are unknowingly shaking the camera.  IS(Image stabilizer" lens does help here, but the best way to take a photo is to use tripod and release the shutter remotely.
• flash photography is difficult and you can never seem to get it right.  I found something which will dramatically improve your flash mode - Gary Fong's diffuser.  You will be amazed at the result.
  

As suggested by Hal, definitely use lens filter for protection, it's a must.  However, spend a bit more and don't buy the cheap UV filter.  Someone told me taking photos with a cheap UV filter is like shooting thru a dirty window

Photo from APAC GSE FY08 Q1 Meeting - with 24-105mm f4.0L IS USM lens and Gary Fong diffuser

It's been a year since the reformation of APAC GSE(Systems Engineering) group.  The size of extended staff has grown since then.  Like last year, we had our first quarterly meeting of the fiscal year in Seoul last Wed & Thurs.  We've discussed our priorities and goals for FY08.

It was very productve meeting as usual with a special invited guest John Bost - Storage Practice's CTO.  Thank you John for joining us to give storage update!!  We also had a unique team building exercise which was suggested by our HR Business Partner - Jade Chung(special dedicated blog on this on my next blog entry).

The meeting always need good team dinner.  Not to disappoint the guests, we had Korean BBQ as usual and a special tradition dinner with live Korean music & dance at Pulhyanggi(풀향기).


A group photo at Pulhyanggi taken with Shitamichi-san's(our Japanese Chief Technologist) Ricoh Caplio GX100

Which office is the most cleanest field office at Sun?  Well...among all the offices which I've had a chance to visit, Bangkok office is the winner so far.  It definitely deserves 5 stars - although the office is 5 years old, it's so well maintained.  I was really careful not to leave any dust behind.

I visited Bangkok office last week to meet with the pre-sales technical team and with customers.  I always enjoy talking to field engineers to understand how they work and what their concerns/issues are.  Due to the size of pre-sales technical community in Thailand, I took a bit of different approach in holding a townhall (or un-townhall) meeting.  We sat in a conference room with no specific agenda discussing various topics for a few hours - We had lunch brought in to the office and talked thru lunch.

I really enjoyed the visit and thank you Bangkok office for the hospitality.

Picture with a few Thailand SEs

Last month I gave "Sun's Vision & Why Sun ?" speech to a group of 16 college new hires thru Sun Korea's "Millennial Talent(MT)" program. 

All sixteen MTs went thru four stages of arduous testing, evaluation, and interview processes.  The competition was 170:1(applicants to position ratio) on average with most competitive position at 500:1.  New hires are among the brightest people I've met in recent years.  I am really glad they chose Sun and not our competitors.

Again, welcome MTs and thank you for making the right choice to join Sun!

p.s. I was about their age when I started at Sun 18 years ago - how time flies...

I tried very hard to hold off in buying a 3G phone, but I finally gave up. Yesterday I purchased Samsung SCH-M620(Ultra Messaging Smartphone, a.k.a. BlackJack) with SKT's 3G+ service.

Some of you may ask why I stayed with 2G for such a long time...well, in Korea, for 3G services, it requires a new number - a new prefix "010".  I just got lazy and didn't wanted to change my number which I had it for over 10 years.

Well...I just bit the bullet - there were more benefits than need for keeping my old number:

• For those of us not using 3G services have probably experienced where our phone do not roam everywhere.  With all the travelling I am doing, I really needed to have my mobile phone roam everywhere - my old 2G phone could not roam in Japan, Singapore, India, etc...
• Wireless e-mail service is not popular at all in Korea.  I didn't wanted to commit to Blackberry device and service which probably only has less than a thousand user base in Korea. With SKT's 3G+ service, IMAP e-mail feature is just an added value.
  
• It provides high speed Internet access thru HSDPA and direct access thru Wi-Fi if needed.
  
• I am not sure how useful this feature will be for me, but it also provides videophone service.
  

It's not perfect.  I had to give up DMB services (Digital TV) with this phone

Our fiscal year starts on July 1.  All countries or regions have GSS(Global Sales & Services) fiscal year kick-off event during July to communicate our plans for the year - Korea was the first to kick it off yesterday.

Here is a series of pictures from the event - pictures speak thousand words.

Big boss - Denis Heraud (APAC GSS Senior VP)


Sun Korea GEM President - Wonsik Yoo


Sun Korea Sales Team Performance


Sun Korea College Intern Performance


Sun Korea Internal Rock Band - SPARK


Sun Korea Internal Rock Band - SPARK

People ask you where you are going next.  When you tell them I am going to Phuket on a business trip, people give you a perplexed look.  I do have to agree "Phuket & business trip" are oxymoron.  Well...what can I say, it was all business.

Early this week, I was invited to a graduation of Asia South & India GEMs LDP(Leadership Development Program) to be a member of judging panel for participants' final projects.

LDP is a year long leadership development program which started in the beginning of FY07 to grow the SMI leadership talent for the current and future business opportinuties in Asia South & India.

The participants have gone through four strenous modules:

• Personal Motivation - individual profiling
• Competency Assessment - self-awareness MBTI, others perception 360 assessment, actual behavior development center
  
• Knowledge Acquisition - mini-MBA & project assignment
  
• Skills Workshop & Graduation

I and all the judges were very impressed with the dedicated and quality of work delivered by the participants/students of this program - good work everyone and thanks for your dedication in truely being interested in becoming leaders !!

Last week, I gave a customer presentation on "Throughput Computing & Virtualization".  The talk went along this line:

• Demand for Web 2.0 environment - threads
• How Sun's CMT(Chip Multithreading) technology addresses this demand - throughput computing
• It's not about CPU speed anymore, but throughput
• CMT creates another problem to solve - network I/O bottleneck
• How Sun's first & new multi-threaded 10GbE networking card addresses this challenge
• How hardware CMT(both CPU and NIC) are enabled by virtualization at different levels

Interestingly, at the same time our India GEM's CT(Chief Technlogist) Santhosh D'Souza posted an entry which compares IBM's POWER6 and Sun's CMT which you should read.

Interesting to note how IBM has gone from 2.2GHz to 4.7GHz, but performance went up only 1.4-1.45x and how they don't talk about power consumption of new POWER6.

Now you can carry files on a USB memory stick and edit them using Staroffice 8(a full-featured office productivity suite that's compatible with Microsoft Office) provided by inflight entertainment system on
Singapore Airlines.

The following pictures were taken by one of Sun Korea's OEM Software Sr. SEs - Kyunghan Kim.  He used Staroffice to edit his presentation file.

Last week was very busy for me in Tokyo:

• I held my extended Q4 staff meeting on Mon & Tues
• Wed thru Fri morning were Denis Heraud's(my boss) APAC GSS Q4 leadership meeting
• Fri afternoon was spent doing operation review of Japan's GSE team
  

I flew back Friday night to spend the weekend with my REAL bosses - my family.

It wasn't all business... Chris Barnes(our Australasia SE leader) kept us from going astray.  He kept us entertained thru out, especially on the first night by becoming our official "Samurai Dundee" - Thanks Chris !!