Thiago Sá

   This was my last week as a Campus Ambassador at Sun. We hoped to stay longer in the company, but the need to cut costs has affected the ambassadors program in the entire Latin America, although we were all doing an excellent job.

   The experience of working at Sun for one year was spectacular. I made lots of new friends inside and outside the company, not to mention all the experience acquired. In short, there's nothing I can do but to thank everyone, specially Eduardo Lima, who supported us from the very beginning and was such a great leader.

I'll create a new blog as soon as I can and inform you my new address here. If you want to contact me, do so by email or twitter.

Cheers, and see you all soon!

Last Saturday we had another CCT (if you still have no idea of what CCT stands for, see the previous post on this blog). The October edition took place at Unice. We had great presentations and a good number of participants.

Our thanks to the students who were massively present, to the university, which gently offered the facility and collaborated with the organization during the entire time, to the members of Cejug who were present and, of course, to Daniel Valente and Silvio Netto, who added lots of value to the event with excellent presentations.

Here's a little gallery:

There's more coming in November!

After three events in a week, it was time to take a little break and enjoy a relaxing friday, right? Not at all! The fourth Software Freedom Day event in Fortaleza happened last friday at Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC). As usual, we had presentations about OpenSolaris and Ruby/JRuby (with Hermínio).

Here are some pictures:

Unfortunatly, there's no pictures of my presentation. Sorry! We raffled an OpenSolaris book and t-shirt, some Sun bags and an USB flash drive too.

UFC and CEJUG (Ceará Java Users Group) have the biggest OSUM groups of Ceará, you are welcome to join us too!

Next post I'll talk about the last event we had last week (yes, there's more!), which celebrated the 7th anniversary of CEJUG. It was a beautiful event with a massive participation of the Java community from Ceará. Stay tuned!

The third Software Freedom Day event in Fortaleza took place at Faculdade Christus few hours after the event at FIC. I have been at Christus before as well, presenting some academic initiatives of Sun Microsystems.

The event had three presentations: I talked about OpenSolaris, Hermínio gave a presentation about Ruby, JRuby and its integration with Netbeans, and Weliton talked a little bit about JBoss Seam.

The OSUM Leader from Christus, Hermínio Cesar, was responsible for organizing, advertizing and giving one of the presentations. As I said before, the OSUM Leaders in Fortaleza did a great job supporting SFD events!

See how it was:

Once more, my sincere thanks to Hermínio for all the work dedicated to this event. We all know how hard it is to organize, advertize and be one of the presenters all at the same time!

Besides the regular raffle we always do, a Sun memory stick and an OpenSolaris t-shirt will be raffled among the OSUM group members of Faculdade Christus. We also had a coffee break during the event.

Next post I'll talk about the SFD at UFC. See you soon!

Last Thursday (09.15), the Faculdade Integrada do Ceará (FIC) hosted the second Software Freedom Day Event in Fortaleza. I have given a presentation at FIC few months ago about Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland for the students of the Digital Games course.

This time, my presentation was directed at all students and I talked about OpenSolaris. The new FIC's OSUM Leader, Euclides Filizola, was responsible for organizing and advertising the event. It is really nice to see the commitment of all OSUM Leaders in Fortaleza. All the events we had here involved their participation directly in some way.

Here's a couple of pictures:

All the participants received OpenSolaris 2009.06 CDs and folders and I raffled some pens and wristbands too, just like the event we had at Unifor.

I would like to thank Euclides for the effort. He's the one who made it happen!

More information about other SFD events in Fortaleza are coming soon!

It was an extremely busy and tiresome week, but it was worth it. In five days, we had five events at five different universities/colleges. A real marathon that involved the collaboration of a great number of people and that will be described here in this post and in the next ones.

Before talking about the first event, here's a brief overview of what happened in Fortaleza between September 15 and 19: the Universidade de Fortaleza (Unifor), Falculdade Integrada do Ceará (FIC), Faculdade Christus and Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC) have hosted Software Freedom Day events with presentations about OpenSolaris and Ruby. The last (and bigger) event celebrated the 7th anniversary of CEJUG, the Java Users Group of Ceará, and had over 300 participants during all day.

SFD at Unifor (09.15)

The first Software Freedom Day event took place at Universidade de Fortaleza (Unifor). I gave a presentation about OpenSolaris and Hermínio (OSUM Leader of Faculdade Christus' group) talked about Ruby, JRuby and its integration with Netbeans.

The Unifor's OSUM Leader, Gregory Fontenele, had a crucial role in the organization process. He took care of issues like advertising the event (he talked about it with the Computer Science course principal, who helped sending some emails to the students), booking the auditorium and many other important details.

Take a look at some pictures of the event:

All the participants received OpenSolaris 2009.06 CDs. We also raffled some OSUM pens and wristbands and had a coffee break during the event.

Thanks to all who were present, and some special thanks to Gregory Fontenele, who made a great deal of effort for this event to happen.

The next posts will bring more information about the other SFD events we had last week. See you all soon!

The Sun Academic Initiave (SAI) is an academic program maintained by Sun Microsystems that aims to deliver free online training to students all over the world. Moreover, being a SAI member allows students to obtain discounts of up to 80% on certifications exams, which means they only pay U$40 for any of these exams.

An excellent piece of news is that SAI is now also offering these great discounts on MySQL certifications exams, besides Java and Solaris exams, which have been on the program since its beginning. The new certifications covered by SAI are:

- Sun Certified MySQL 5.0 Developer Part 2

- Sun Certified MySQL Associate

Good study and don't miss that chance!

Sun has launched another contest involving blogging and one of its technologies. This time, the competition involves Sun Studio and, of course, your capacity and creativity for creating a good post. For those who have seen and/or participated in the previous JavaFx related contest, the rules for this one are quite similar. Follow the steps below in order to participate:

1. Download Sun Studio.

2. Blog about it or any other version of Sun Studio.

3. Inform your post link here.

Sure, but... What am I supposed to write?

You can talk about the Sun Studio features that you like the most, and why they make the difference to you. Make suggestions, tutorials, case studies, requests for enhancements, and more... The sky is the limit, buddy.

Keep in mind that your post must be written in English!

Now let's talk about the prizes: the top 10 posts will win U$500 awards. Also, the top 50 posts will receive 2GB Sun Studio memory sticks.

Check out the deadlines:

Contest starts: June 23, 2009
Contest deadline: August 14, 2009
Judging period: August 14-September 4, 2009
Winner announced: September 14, 2009

Good luck and hurry up! There's only a couple of weeks left.

I took me a long time to finally get these pictures, so finally I am going to talk about another event I did last month. It was the Technology Week at FATENE.

The event had presentations about a great variety of subjects with presenters from local companies to big multinational corporations. I talked about Sun certifications and how to get them using free training and discounts offered by the Sun Academic Initiative. Also, I talked about the Open Source University Meetup.

The instituition didn't have an OSUM group yet, so it was created before the event and I used the presentation as a means of getting people to know OSUM and join this new group.

Some pictures of the event:

Cheers everyone, and until next time!

Here is another event that I participated last month. It is an anual event that takes place at my university, Universidade Federal do Ceará. It's called "O CT quer você!", which means "The Technology Center wants you!". 

The event aims to present all the courses of which the Technology Center of the University is composed for high school students that are willing to become Engineering students.

I was invited by the coordinator of my course, Teleinformatics Engineering, to talk about the Sun Campus Ambassadors Program. It was a big event and more than 500 studentes were present, for sure.

Here are some pictures I took:

See you all next time!

Last week I did some presentations at three different events, so I am going to post some details of each one during this week on the blog.

One of them was the Technology week at Faculdade Christus. Professor Adail Nunes invited me to the event after an indication from Hermínio, who was at the Café com Tapioca event with me in Sobral and also studies at Faculdade Christus.

I talked about OSUM, the free courses offered through SAI and about each of the certifications that students and professors can take using the SAI discount vouchers.

The insituition already had an OSUM group, created by Hermínio, and now have some more members participating.

Here are some pictures of the event:

Soon I'll post some information about the other events. Stay tuned!

Here's another contest involving JavaFx. As you'll see on this post, participating in the JavaFx Blogging Contest is very simple. See how it works:

First, what you need to do is download the new JavaFx 1.2 (download here). Then you take a look at all the improvements in this new version and blog about your experience with it. The top ten posts will be awarded with a U$500 prize. Also, there will be more fifty U$20 gift certificates prizes from Amazon.

The judging criteria will be: novelty and originality of the blog entry, usefulness and character of the substantive feedback, the blog's interest and appeal to the other users of JavaFX 1.2, clarity in the expression about the user experience, how the blog demonstrates or showcases specific features and the ability to use the blog to improve any aspect of JavaFX 1.2.

After creating your post, go to this link and complete the submission form. You can submit it until July third.

That's it! The winners will be announced in the week of July 31.

Check out the contest official website for more information. It's very important to read all the contest guidelines and rules available there.

Good luck and until next time!

The new version of OpenSolaris was just released a few moments ago on Community One and is already available for download in the official website. This new version is called 2009.06 and comes with lots of enhancements. Some of them are the support for the SPARC platform, the inclusion of Project Crossbow, enhancements in the ZFS and a JavaFx SDK! By the way, JavaFx is now available in many operating systems. Watch the video of an interview with Stephen Hahn, engineer of the OpenSolaris development staff, talking about some news of this just released version: