This Saturday I got the chance to give back to the community a little and participate in San Marcos' Electronic Recycling. It was a good way to help out the environment and pretty entertaining to see all the junk people have been keeping stored away for 30 + years. The event recycled monitors, desktops, laptops, tv's and pretty much every other electronic. We unloaded about 250 cars most of them carrying several monitors and desktops - in some cases a trailer full.
I've been a little late in blogging about this event but Texas State Tech Day was a huge success. Tech Day 09 was an event with the purpose of bridging the gap of technology and students of all disciplines. The Texas State OSUM was able to get a wide range of speakers from Apple, Mantech, Guidance Software, University of Texas Center for Space Research, Texas State's Oleg Komogortsev and Sun Microsystems very own Conrad Geiger. Conrad kept the crowd on their feet covering a massive amount of Sun's identity in just under an hour. He really went the extra mile - bringing out hardware - giving the students a hands-on introduction to Sun. On top of it all we had the event partitioned so that on the side opposite of the speakers; booths were set up which included representatives from all of the above, plus Hitachi, Texas State Computer Science, Criminal Justice, Career Services, and D-pad.
We had a turnout of about 200 student/faculty visitors that day, and had about 20 students coordinate, and work the event. They were all rewarded with catering from Carinos. After hours the event turned into a sponsored gaming tournament with 20 students competing to take home 70$ of GameStop gift cards and some really cool Sun shirts. Please check out the pictures below!
This week I checked out a live-online demo of SAGE . Conrad Geiger sent out an invitation to this and I'm glad I took him up on it. What I gathered from this was a close experience to expensive/closed source products like Mathematica, Matlab, etc - yet it is free and open source.
From the SAGE website it explains it a little better than I could:
"Sage can be used to study general and advanced, pure and applied mathematics. This includes a huge range of mathematics, including algebra, calculus, elementary to very advanced number theory, cryptography, numerical computation, commutative algebra, group theory, combinatorics, graph theory, exact linear algebra and much more. It combines various software packages and seamlessly integrates their functionality into a common experience. It is well suited for education, studying and research."
The program was written in python and runs on a web browser which I like, and seems to have a lot of potential. During the demo it was mentioned that SAGE is working on support for both Windows, and Solaris (it already has binaries created for Mac and Linux Distros).
The download size is pretty big about 400 MB, but I'm installing this on my desktop (Ubuntu) and giving it a run.
Wow, I feel like I'm about to pass out after this week's overload of activities. For those of you that didn't know; Super Computing 08 was held in Austin this year. In conjunction with SC08 Sun hosted it's HPC Consortium 08 in Austin. This was great news for the campus ambassadors in the area who got the opportunity to tap into Sun's experience in the field.
The weekend started off great when Conrad Geiger and Jeremy Deckert of Sun told us local CA's we would be able to attend Sun's HPC Consortium. The Consortium was truly first class. Held at the Austin Hilton, we had access to all the latest presentations and news in Super Computing, and most importantly as a college student - some high quality grub.
On the first day Marc Hamilton opened up the session, prepping us for what was in store, it was all new and exciting for me being a student and getting my first taste of HPC. We were brought up to speed on everything Sun is doing in Open Storage, Lustre, Solid State Disks, Sun's involvement in the Linux community, virtual machines and more. No matter who you talked to everyone sang praise for Sun's products. Prof. James Leylek of Clemson University discussed how Sun fit his HPC needs and passed all acceptance testing beyond anything he could have imagined.
After the first day ended everyone was treated to Salt Lick BBQ at the Fire-Lake Event Center. The food couldn't have been better. With live music playing and a packed party, I got a chance to meet employees and customers alike. Individuals from: San Diego, Quebec, Tokyo, Boston, Boulder, Milwaukee, and just about everywhere else. Everyone from out of the state got a good entry on Texas food and music. Below is a picture of the area getting ready for the event.
The next day I woke up early to get back to the Hilton to see Andy Bechtolsheim – a chief architect at Sun give a presentation, on Sun's HPC storage road-map. People were telling me, “You want to make sure your here in time for Andy.”; They were right, it was 8:45 A.M. And all I can say is... he knows his stuff. I can't debrief on everything he showed us due to NDA but I can say that there's a great line-up for Sun this upcoming year. Andy was followed up with another killer presentation from Karl Schulz on the work being done at TACC (whose Ranger is #4 on the top 500 list and running on Sun's Hardware).
If hearing about the work wasn't cool enough we were all given tours of it afterwards :).
Number of Nodes: 3,936
Number of Processing Cores: 62,976
Total Memory: 123TB
Peak Performance: 579.4TFlops
Total Disk: 1.73PB (shared) 31.4TB (local)
I was pretty tired after the tours and the presentations but the events kept coming. Sun hosted a Student Party at the Karma Lounge in Austin for student volunteers at SC08. I got to meet some students from all over and saw some old friends from Texas State University. You can read more about this party and see pictures at Deirdré Straughan's blog. This has been a pretty long post but I have an upcoming post on SC08 itself, so check back soon. Additionally I have a lot of video that will be coming up in the near future.
We had a day out for the Texas State C.S. students to display their physical prowess. A game of Ultimate Frisbee in the hot Texas Sun get's you tired. Well, at least I was exhausted, but it was a great time and a nice break from studies.
Back to the natural state of things.
-Taylor Groves
Everyone really enjoyed themselves.
Software Freedom Day 2008 is fast approaching. And Texas State is celebrating a day before everyone else on Friday, September 19th, 2008!
Don't know what Software Freedom Day is? It is a worldwide event celebrating everything that is free and open source in life.
The mindset of open source is taking over. You can see it everywhere: OS's, Browsers, Games, Text Books, even large organisms like Wikipedia thrive on the the wave of information that the internet has made available. I see Software Freedom day as a recognition of the changes that are sweeping over the world. Borders are being torn down while society is sharing, learning, and profiting from these collaborations of data. Come and participate in the phenomenon that we so often take for granted.
When: September 19, 2008: 5PM to 7PM
Where: Texas State University, San Marcos Texas, LBJ Student Center 3.5-1
Free Food, Free Drinks, SWAG
Demos, Guest Speakers, and getting to know the individuals you see everyday in class, but didn't think they were as interested in Open Source as you are. Both AITP and EXE Texas State Chapters will be present at the event.
Sun Microsystems plays a major role in Open Source development, and is the largest contributer to to the Open-Source Community in the world. Additionally SUN provides the food and drinks. Thanks SUN!
The festivities continue with a LAN party down at my place. All are welcome until the circuit blows.
Enjoy,
Taylor Groves
The campus ambassador program is back! Summer is over and I'm ready to jump back into SUN's program. The new campus ambassador community is really nice. It's got a feel similar to facebook, or any other social networking site with the addition of a wiki and forum.
Gary Serda gave a presentation over Elluminate Live that was really motivating in preparing for the new semester.
For those of you Computer Science Students at Texas State I will be sending out SUN's SAI program information shortly. So you will all be able to start your training and get some knowledge of some really cool stuff.
Take Care,
Taylor Groves
So, I'm back from a little under a month
in Cambodia and it was fantastic. The only problem is that I've been
immediately rushed back into school. Pictures are already up TaylorLGroves.com , but I
will post my journal entries slowly but surely as I get my bearings.
Thom excited to go to the water park :) Sorry if I misspelled somthing!
This entire school had only 1 computer, but what an amazing group of students and teachers.
I'm getting familiar with how much work it takes for a bowl of rice.
I believe this is me climbing up the Terrace of the Leper King.
Sunset at Kampot.
Killing Fields Memorial (outside of Phnom Penh)
Silk weaving on a loom, this is really a amazing art, the process can take a week.
Building a shelter near Kampot.
Well it's better than swimming (homestay at one of the floating villages on the Tonle Sap)
Additionally some more events are coming up for Sun Microsystems. That sound pretty interesting, including Project Blackbox. http://www.sun.com/emrkt/blackbox/index.jsp
Best of Luck - Updates to Come,
Taylor Groves
So finals are finally over for myself. I can finally catch up on all the games I've been missing out on for the X360. I've started playing Bioshock (old news) and have to say that the gameplay is amazing. It seems like a hundred different ways exist to complete a given task in the game. The plasmid abilities and weapons are awesome. You can't possibly overlook the art direction of this game. An entire Art Deco 50's world underwater, the voice acting is superb, and the suspense is chilling. It feels more like a movie with the realism of the shadows and the camera placement. Taking on your first Big Daddy is a one of a kind adrenaline rush.
Call of Duty 4 is another game I am looking forward to, having only played the multiplayer briefly I can't give a full opinion yet, but from what I've seen, it is another quality experience.
Additionally I just received my Sun SPOT (these things are so awesome). I have a thousand different project ideas for these guys, we'll have to see what Christmas break can fit in.
Solaris Dynamic Tracing - Next Generation Observability
speaker Angelo Rajadurai, Sun Microsystems
Presentation Abstract
Have you ever wondered why your Java application is running slowly? Solaris 10 introduced an innovative new technology called Dynamic Tracing (DTrace). This allow developers and system administrators to have unprecedented observability into a live running system. This talk will cover the basics of using the DTrace tool. An introduction to observing Java applications with DTrace will be presented. The presentation includes many demonstrations of the tool itself; plenty of time for Q&A will be provided.
Speaker
Angelo Rajadurai, Sun Microsystems
Angelo Rajadurai works in ISV engineering at Sun. He is on Sun's team that helps developers and ISVs adopt Sun technologies like DTrace. He has presented DTrace to developers in over 20 countries around the world and at many large events like JavaONE. He has been at Sun for over 14 years.
What Is New in NetBeans 6.0?
Presentation Abstract
The 6.0 release of the NetBeans IDE includes important new features along with significant improvements and bug fixes. This technotizer provides a quick review of the highlights (with demos!) and pointers to more information.
Speaker
Gregg Sporar - NetBeans Technology Evangelist, Sun Microsystems
Gregg Sporar has been a software developer for over twenty years, working on projects ranging from control software for a burglar alarm to 3D graphical user interfaces. He has been using Java since 1998 and his interests include user interfaces, development tools, and performance profiling. He works for Sun Microsystems as a Technical Evangelist on the NetBeans project.
Location & Time:
Meeting in the Cafeteria in Building 8 at the Sun campus, 5300 Riata Park Court (off 3600 W Parmer Lane), from 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm You can enter Building 8 through the door that is by the large flag pole.
Sponsorship
The Austin Java User's Group is always looking for sponsors to help keep this organization active by providing meeting locations, guest speakers and financial support. Please see our sponsors link for more info.
I know everyones schedule is busy, but this Thursday November 29, 2007 I will be doing a Netbeans 6.0 Demo at Texas State University. This demo will be aimed at beginners and hopefully a good number of people will gain some insight into Java and Sun Microsystem's IDE Netbeans. The presentation should last around 45 minutes with time for questions at the end. If you can find time around the finals:
Derr. 240 Texas State University
5:30 PM Thursday November 29, 2007
Hope to see you there !!
-Taylor Groves
This event was well worth the time. I organized a carpool with several members of the Texas State computer science fraternity EXE http://cs.txstate.edu/exe . I had students comment afterwards, that they were amazed at how accommodating the event was. The NIS to LDAP migration was something we all knew very little about, but by the end of the presentation everyone had absorbed a good deal of new information. The food that was provided was great. A lot of free giveaways Heres a summary of what you missed if you didn't go:
AlamoSUG welcomes special guest Doug Strickland who will speak on NIS to LDAP Migration/Identity Management. All with interest in the topic and OpenSolaris are welcome to attend, enjoy food & beverage courtesy of ALAMOSUG sponsor SecureTek Group.
MEMBERSHIP DRIVE: We want to grow the opensolaris ALAMOSUG community! http://opensolaris.org/os/project/alamo-osug/events/ -- Everyone who brings a first time attendee will receive a gift. Member who brings the most first time attendees (minimum 3) will receive a Bose iPod Docking Station (Limit 1, if tie drawing). We encourage you to extend this invitation to others genuinely interested (or should be) in OpenSolaris. Everyone who attends will receive a cool prize. Bring 1 person and your prize will be cooler!
Agenda:
5:30 PM To 6:30 PM Meet & Greet Social
6:30 PM To 7:30 PM NIS to LDAP Migration/Identity Management
7:30 PM To 8:00 PM Q& A and Open Discussion
8:00 PM To 10:00 PM Let the Games Begin
*Where:* Dave & Busters (I10 and 410) 440 Crossroads Boulevard San Antonio, TX 78232
This blog copyright 2009 by Taylor Groves
