Vijay Tatkar's Blog

See you at Sun Tech Days Hyderabad 2009 in mid-Feb
I will be at Sun TechDays in Hyderabad, India around Feb 18-20th. This is now the third year in a row for me. Its a wonderful place to present and have some hearty discussions. The crowd is typically very hungry for knowledge, the organizers are super-efficient and the planning is just immaculate. I go to several TechDays, typically, but this one has impressed me with the size, quality of organization and the impact we can make in recruiting interest in Sun.
Hope to see a lot more of this again this year. Frankly, it charges me up as well after spending 3 days there! Its refreshing to see what direction the future of Software industry (at least in India) is headed.
This is also a good time for me to catch up with whats changing in my country of birth, especially with the global recession underway.
Posted by tatkar ( Feb 05 2009, 10:26:39 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Sun previews a Cloud Computing announcement
The cat is out of the bag now at SugarCRM's SugarCon 2009 conference in San Francisco with Sun preannouncing that it is taking to the Cloud.
There is a lot of Cloud action underway, especially after announcing the formation of a division dedicated entirely to Cloud Computing. Expect to see Sun play in IAAS, PAAS and SAAS layers; Sun has plenty of offerings up and down this stack and bringing them into the Cloud world could do interesting things in the market.
Expect to see a lot more details at CommunityOne event in March 2009.
Posted by tatkar ( Feb 05 2009, 12:22:42 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

xrandr is your(my) friend!
I have had considerable difficulty connecting laptops (particularly ATI-based) to projectors at various conferences (the most annoying ones are where the projector is connected through an intermediate switch that multiplexes inputs) in order to get twinviews on dual-displays. Cant tell you about how many hours I and some of my colleagues have spent configuring, tuning, hand-coding xorg.conf files(an extremely tedious task). This is all on Solaris/OpenSolaris, though in some cases, Linux and even Windows didnt do any better!
Over the past few months, we now have xrandr in OpenSolaris which detects and sets displays to specifications. The typically 1024x768 is still the best resolution I can get in most places, but thats not the utility's shortcoming; its just the nature of the equipment.
You can typically just type the command:

xrandr

to get a listing of connected devices and their possible resolutions. Then you can set the connection to the projector typically with a command like this:

xrandr --output VGA-0 --mode 1024x768

to get dual-display.
Yay, finally a solution that seems to work most of the time (there are still the odd times when I've found it doesnt get it right). The next trip to Sun TechDays in Hyderabad, India, would be a good test of this capability. I will be talking about Sun Studio compilers and tools again, this year. We have some new and cool features to talk about, so if you're in the area, drop in!
Posted by tatkar ( Feb 02 2009, 11:43:34 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]