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May
21
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Eve Maler has the skinny on Sun's recent announcement to not assert any of its patents against anyone wanting to implement OpenID (1.1) technology. Technology that relies on the network effect require a zero-friction path to adoption - if other vendors follow suite - OpenID will be off to a good start.
I'm also amazed at the brevity of the full legal text - at first I thought I was missing a few pages - maybe this is a new benchmark.
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May
7
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Today, Sun announced one of the side-projects I've been involved in over the last couple of months. It's all good. And the service, when it gets rolled out, will be really interesting. The start of something big I think.
Honestly though - to me that isn't the most important thing. What I appreciate is that Sun is still the kind of place where you can get things done (important things that have an impact) and you can get them done without having to first ask for permission. Here's how it works - you find some people with similar interests (it often helps if they are a diverse group) do some planning, find some money (if needed) and go do it. Above all - don't ask for permission - that's not how Sun works.
Oh, it also helps if you're working with super smart people - the OpenID team at Sun has those in abundance.
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Apr
21
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Weekend blogging is becoming a bit of a habit lately - I'm working on a couple of hush-hush projects that converge around JavaOne so things are getting a little hectic. That by the way was an understatement - the English do that all the time. For example Scott (the Antarctic explorer) would probably have described the deadly conditions at the South Pole (had he found it) as a "tad inclement".
Anyway, a busy week interrupted by a quick trip to LA didn't leave much time for reading blogs; let alone actually writing any - so here I am again at the breakfast table scribbling down a few thoughts. O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo. was last week - I did intend to go along for half a day but never got there - I'm sure there's a whole bunch of news to catch up on.
One bit of news I did see was that Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) is out - I'll either resuscitate an old machine or install Parallels and try it out - It'll be interesting to see to what degree they are closing the gap on Mac OS/X. The real news, however, is that Ubuntu now includes the full Java software stack - including GlassFish, JavaDB, NetBeans and Java SE. A good arrangement all round. That's an understatement by the way.
Read more about that news on the Tom Marble's blog, the Aquarium and on John Clingan's blog. By the way - John has chosen a great time to become the Product Manager (or should that be Community Manager) of GlassFish - things seem to be panning out pretty well. That's another understatement.
Until next weekend !
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Feb
15
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I feel a bit guilty - I managed to escape Washington DC yesterday and spent last night in my own bed. Winter storms that have battered the mid-west and North East cut short my Washington / Chicago trip and I managed to get home a day early. I feel guilty because many of the folks I bonded with in the various queues at Dulles were on their second or third attempt to get home - I'm guessing many more spent another night at airports throughout the US. Not fun.
During my wait at Dulles I watched as a United flight got within 6 inches of the terminal only to be held up for (another) 30 minutes as the ground crew attempted to move the frozen gantry into place. Ironic - a puddle of ice no bigger than a doormat separating a hundred million dollar, state of the art jet liner and a multi-billion dollar air terminal - in the end one of the ground crew resorted to some percussive maintenance with a monkey wrench. I'm surprised the frustration on the plane didn't turn into mutiny (I think the plane had been on the ground for 90 minutes already and most likely had a severely delayed landing too).
It's nice to be home.
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Feb
9
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I'll be traveling again next week as part of Sun's EBC on the road; Washington DC and Chicago to be precise. The days are pretty packed so the chances of writing are pretty low. No sooner do I get back in California - we're taking the kids to see the snow in Lake Tahoe - hopefully we'll get some nice pics. like last year but I have a feeling I'm going to see more snow in Chicago !.
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Jan
26
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The Department of Homeland Security and Liquid Abatement recently changed the rules for entering the US from Canada - as of last Tuesday you need a passport rather than your driver's licence or other easily forgeable photo Id. Fortunately I knew that and grabbed my (British) passport as I left the house for a series of all day meetings followed by a late flight to Vancouver from SFO.
On the way back, checking in at the e-ticket machine in Vancouver it dawned on me that I'd forgotten my Green Card - that's the thing that proves I'm allowed to be in the US (vs. a temporary visa). Ah well I thought - I have the number in my organizer and I'm sure they can quickly determine that I have a Green Card (after all it's the same people that issued the card) - right ?
So I queued up at immigration (you pass through US immigration in Vancouver) and explained my situation to the immigration officer expecting to be quickly on my way. Nope. He explained I'd need to go to the immigration office. As I walked through the nondescript door I saw a room full of people who looked like they'd given up all hope of every seeing their loved ones again. I asked a couple of people how long they'd been waiting - I got various replies from 45 mins to 4 hours. Oh, feck, 45 mins 'til boarding. I asked one of the uniforms what the process was and was told to take a seat. I called the travel agency to see if I could get on a later flight but the same uniform told me I wasn't allowed to use my phone. I was about to rant about the lack of any signs saying anything about not using cell phones but decided it wasn't important enough to risk getting rubber-gloved.
Another uniform walked by so I explained very politely my situation and asked him what the process was; skipping the details he told me there were a couple of options but my best bet would be to stay in Vancouver a few more days and get my Green Card Fed-Exed. Vancouver is a really nice place and if it were Summer I'd probably have gone for that option. The uniform also explained I couldn't actually leave until I'd been 'processed' which could be a while, Feck^2.
So I sat back in the chair along with all the other dejected souls and start thinking of the Tom Hanks film - The Terminal - a fellow immigrant called Victor Navorski who get's stuck in JFK for a couple of years because he didn't have the right travel documents. I also start imagining the the smell of freshly powdered rubber gloves. Shudder.
Then, five minutes 'til boarding, out of nowehere a voice summons me into another office and another uniform asks me a bunch of security questions then explains the process (which I've already heard) and insists that they'll need to sort my case out tomorrow. After a bit of persistence - the uniform consults with one of his buddies and decides they can do something but it'll take time and cost $260 - and I'll probably still miss my flight. After several more minutes of furious form filling I'm running through the terminal and make my flight with a whole couple of minutes to spare. Yeeeha.
BTW if you're ever in Vancouver and like Indian food - I'd recommend Vij's, It's more like West Coast Indian Fusion but don't let that put you off - it's a very lively place, the food is top notch and they sell beer.
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Jun
28
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Sorry if you arrived here looking for pictures of scantily clad beach volleyball players - but read on - there might be something here for you.
I've recently officially ditched my office in Santa Clara and now my assigned office is at home. In the last 7 years at Sun - I've only rarely used an office - I've always preferred the work / life balance that working from home gives me. Also, as Sun are closing some Bay Area campuses - it seemed unfair for me to be hogging barely use office space.
As part of that move, I recently installed a new SunRay 170 in my home office. If you don't know what a SunRay is (which many don't) - it's an ultra-thin stateless client that allows me to work as if I were inside Sun's firewall (and not have to bother with overloaded VPN connections). It's also very secure (multi-level authentication) and it's stateless nature gives me a feature not found anywhere else - Session Mobility. Basically - I can pull my smart card out of the SunRay - drive to another Sun Office - put my card in and my session continues just where I left off. This is a great feature for me - I typically have 20-30 windows open over multiple vitrual desktops - and having to re-create that environment is a real pain. As an aside I tested this feature live in front of a customer this week at Sun's Executive Briefing Center.
Another awesome feature is that it generates no noise (it has no fan or other moving parts) and virtually no heat so it keeps my office much cooler than a desktop / laptop and apparently uses the same amount of electricity as a light bulb (so saves me money too).
There are still a number of things I need to figure out - occasional latency issues, mounting a USB drive, using a scroll wheel mouse, installing performancing, access to Thunderbird / Firefox - but so far, so good.
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May
10
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This really is for Sun Employees only.
I'm having an office clear-out and have 20 or so geeky computer text books (covering OO analysis, design, patterns, Java and Unix) some old, some new, some never used.
There's a (poor quality) picture here.
If you want any of these books, they'll be in the 2nd Floor SCA14 Break Room (by Big Thunder Mountain CF 2360) in the next 3 minutes. They are free. No reservations, first come first served; any left on Friday will be recycled.
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May
5
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treo-mail
Originally uploaded by sharps.
For better or worse I can now get work mail on my "thing that used to be a phone" (aka Teo650).
My mail account was recently migrated to sun's Edgemail - meaning I don't have to be inside the firewall to get my mail. I can't say the migration wasn't without it's problems (mainly due to detritus left over from previous migrations) but all seems to be working now.
Anyway, one of the benefits is that I can get my sun.com mail on my Treo - it was trivial to set up (but be sure to check the "receive headers only").
I doubt I'll use it much but it will be invaluable when I'm on the road (eg. JavaOne) - no more lugging my laptop :)
Now I just need EdgeCal.
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Apr
20
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Mary has incited a blog-riot over on her blog about the inadequacies of Voice Mail. That got me all fired up about an experience that I'd all but forgotten about so thought I would do a quick blog-vent to clear my head.
I recently got trapped in one of Sun's business processes - it required me to send a fax that contained little else but my scrawly signature - to meet the deadline I had to send it that day.
Now I've never really been into faxes (may be I'm too young) but I recognize one when I see one and I'm fairly sure that we have them dotted around the office, unfortunately I don't go to the office everyday and I wasn't about to make a special trip (to the office or to Kinko's) just to use a Fax.
I tried to convice the HR folks that I could think of multiple ways of getting them a signed form in the next 2 minutes but the answer was no - it's got to come via the fax - that's the process. Sigh. I gave in, I then spent about an hour looking for simple / cheap ways to send a fax over the web and eventually found FaxItNice which seemed about the only service that didn't require a monthly subscription.
So, if Mary's blog manages to provoke some kind of petition to outlaw voicemail I'd also like to kill faxes at the same time.
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Jan
23
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The Aquarium group blog has been running for about 2 months now and I believe it was one of the first group blogs using Roller. Tim Bray's post on group blogging prompted me to write about some of my experiences with Roller and of group blogs in general; in the hope that others might find it useful. I certainly know from within Sun there seems to be a fair amount of interest in group blogs.
First, let me describe what The Aquarium is about. It's a blog about server-side Java, relaying news about Java EE 5, Web Services, XML, and GlassFish (the Open Source java.net project which includes Java EE 5 and Sun's Java Web Services Stack). We use the blog to highlight some of the cool things that people are doing in the GlassFish community; as well as injecting a bit of our own opinion from time to time. The Aquarium is a "professional blog" - by that I mean it has an important role to play in the community and awareness building for GlassFish - and a fair amount of time and effort has been invested to get it started.
I must admit I shared some of Tim's perception of what blogs are, ie. "... being about an individual voice..." and needed a little bit of pushing from my blog co-editors. I think some of my reluctance was that I knew I'd probably need to give up my personal blog on b.s.c (which I'd been nurturing for about 18 months) due to the pressures of balancing the job Sun actually pays me to do, my family and all the other interests competing for my time. Also, I actually like reading blogs that expose a bit of the bloggers personality from time to time and would argue that it adds some depth and colour. I also like being able to use my personal blog to rant about things that bother me; though I also appreciate that others read technology blogs for the technology alone and find the personal aspect a distraction. I guess we'll find the right balance over time.
One of the obvious benefits of a group blog is that we have the ability to share the load. As I mentioned previously - The Aquarium has a real job to do and that would be a very heavy load for a single person. For the domain we cover on the Aquarium there is never a shortage of news - so volume is pretty high (often four or five postings a day) though I think Carla and myself are running up a bit of a deficit !
Roller's support for GroupsRoller WebLogger is an Open Source, Java blog server used by Sun, IBM and JavaLobby; among others. Roller 2.0 introduced some features specifically for supporting group blogs, these include :
- The ability to invite users to join a blog
- Three levels of permission - Limited (draft but not publish entries), Author (Limited + post and edit entries), Admin (Author + change settings)
- The ability to leave a group blog
There are other features that could be useful - using drafts and timed postings it is possible to create a 'pipeline' - ie. blog entries moving through the workflow - allocated to an editor, various drafts, reviewed, published. Unfortunately for us that isn't completely possible because we all use external blog editors and as far as I can tell most editors don't allow you to edit 'published / draft' posts. That said - the timed posting is pretty useful for spreading the posts through the day or timing to catch specific time-zones.
Also for the 'workflow feature' to be really useful it would also need edit locks to avoid overlapping writes on entries - this isn't something we've really had a problem with (there are only three of us) but would probably be a requirement for a larger group bog intent on using the pipeline more.
The only enhancement requests I have for Roller aren't really specific to group blogs as much as they are a requirement for high volume, busy blogs like The Aquarium. First would be the inclusion of tags - I see a 'category' as limited form of tagging - what you really need is the ability to apply zero or more arbitrary (ie. not previously defined) tags to a posting and be able to quickly search on the available tags.
Managing a Group BlogWe use a couple of wikis - one on java.net; and one internal (for all the secret stuff) to maintain a pipeline of future entries so we can keep track of who's doing what and when. We have a fairly loose process :
- identify something bloggable
- blog it or put it in the pipeline for someone else
- get it reviewed (if needed)
- post it or queue it
Additional note - mail, IM, blogs, wikis, workflow - I think these are essential tools for Enterprise Collaboration - these are the things that will probably combine to become the next generation 'Enterprise Intranet Portal'.
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Jan
17
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It's been eleven days since my last entry and only four entries in the last month - so what's up ? I'm still alive and well (as the photo taken the past weekend at North Lake Tahoe shows).
I have a couple of excuses for not posting more frequently; first I have been helping get another blog off the ground (TheAquarium[1]) who's popularity, so far, has surpassed our wildest expectations - so that's where my work related blog-time allocation goes (at some point I'll write about my experiences of group blogging - especially as it relates to Roller). As for the personal side of my blog - well things have been pretty hectic work-wise (I think people really did use the Christmas break to re-energise) - basically I just haven't had much time to blog at all.
Longer term - now that much of my work related blog-time allocation goes into The Aquarium I may even have to stop blogging here - my personal feeling is that a purely personal blog doesn't live on b.s.c so I may well move a more family and friends focused MirrorWorld somewhere else - stay posted.
[1] The Aquarium is a blog about Java EE 5, Web Services, XML, GlassFish and Sun's growing OpenSource presence - check it out.
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Aug
3
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Returned to the office today after being away for a month or so - Java One then July shutdown then the birth of my son Jack. While I was away my office was moved from SCA18 to SCA14; it's more convenient for some things (namely meetings) but I have lost my view of the hills and am further away from the coffee shop - caffeine will be important over the next couple of months as my son's sleep deprivation experiments continue.
Settling in to my new office really just ammounted to :
- hanging my St. George's Cross on my door (for privacy - I've also become a bit more patriotic since moving the the US)
- plugging my JDS powered Toshiba laptop into SWAN (and locking it to my desk!!)
- Getting my SB2000 workstation up and running (after being hacked for Java One demos)
- Installing the latest promoted build of Sun Java System App Server 2004Q4 (or 8.1 as we call it) - I'm going to be playing with this over the next couple of months and will hopefully be posting my findings right here.
OK time to fight the ravages of sleep deprivation with some real work.
