that’s whacked

infoworld article on Sun

Thursday, Sep 14. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Sun

i don’t normally post these sorts of articles – but i have to admit, the last sentence of this article really got me excited:

Sun’s growth is good news for the entire industry. It proves, as I keep pointing out, that trends are useless in predicting the future. Find players with vision, drive and patience, mixed with a desire to please customers as well as shareholders, and it’s easy to pick the winners. Sun’s a winner.

a tough day at work today…

Thursday, Aug 3. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Sun

for anyone not following the news and blogs, today was a big RIF day at SUNW. thankfully, nobody immediately under my director was affected (OpenSolaris and JDS are still around!). i’ll still be your ON delivery monkey for now.

sadly, many other groups and many good people did not escape unscathed.

just wanted to wish everyone who got caught up in the RIF everyone good luck, and ‘bon chance’. i can’t imagine what it’s like to be RIF’d, and i’m truly sorry to see so many good people go. i realise and understand the business decisions behind it, but it’s still painful.

like alcohol on a wound, it’s good in the long run – but boy does it hurt in the “right here, right now”.

anyway, i’m rambling. to the people i had the good fortune to know, and to the many many more i never had the pleasure of working with: thanks for everything you’ve done for Sun.

cheers, steve

sometimes i really truly hate ITOps

Monday, Apr 10. 2006  –  Category: Sun

so on friday i was running a script out of my homedir. when i came back a few hours later i noticed a bunch of files missing… upon further investigation, i noticed a ton of files missing…. including my directory with all my opensolaris delivery scripts/stuff i’d written in the past 9 months.

i got freaked out and killed my script and sat there in stunned silence for about 15 minutes (well, not complete silence since i was bitching about it on #opensolaris). i then filed a ticket with ITOps to try and recover from a nightly backup.

i got a call about 10 minutes later from someone with ITOps in India who kept insisting on emailing me ‘ls’ output of my directory. i don’t need her to do that. i’m perfectly capable of doing an ls myself. she also kept trying to find out how i was connected to the SWAN (Sun’s network). she didn’t know what punchin was (our next generation VPN) and asked me a few times if i was VPN’d in (to which i replied yes, via punchin). she then asked me a what version of Windows i was running and what program was i using to connect. sigh.

anyway…nothing major was lost… i lost a few changes to some small scripts i use to deliver the nightly and build-synchronised deliveries, but nothing i can’t recreate in an hour or two. but this whole weekend i kept berating myself for writing and then running a script which had managed to trash my home directory. i felt pretty damn stupid.

until i check my email this morning and see:

Dear Jurassic users,

There was a rogue script run by ITOPS which deleted some of the files and directories in user home directories. We have disabled the script and are trying to figure out how to recover from this.

)(#!@&&#%&@#(*%&#!!!!

what the f.

this whole time i thought my script had gone insane and psycho and started trashing my home directory. turns out i was wrong. Sun ITOps had gone insane and psycho and started trashing my home directory.

i know people joke from time to time about their IT departments being unhelpful… we certainly have our fair share of disagreements with ITOps. but this is the first time i’ve genuinely felt like they were out to get me.

correction: i’ve been told it wasn’t ITOps, but somebody’s rogue cron job. i suppose that’s mildly better.

random musings…

Friday, Mar 24. 2006  –  Category: Football, Sun

my random thoughts for the day while i consume the spicy chicken sandwich i bought for lunch:

hrm. this sandwich is not bad. surprisingly spicy. i have to say, this may have supplanted Jack’s spicy chicken in my expert Zagat-like ratings of spicy chicken sandwiches.

the US-Germany football match on Wednesday was sad. it’s sad when the only goal your team scores is a freak goal with an assist from the keeper. seriously, Germany destroyed the US – and it wasn’t even Germany’s strongest team. our defense had more holes in it than cheesecloth. and an midfield missing Donovan, Beasley, and Reyna was sadly lacking any creativity whatsoever. the US team, at its strongest, can be a FIFA top 10 team (i dispute FIFA awarding them 5th, but whatever…) – but the US team has no depth. look at England, Spain, or Italy: they have depth in numbers. Owen is out? fine, no problem…toss in Bent, Defoe, or Ashton (just… please… don’t put in Heskey again. i can’t take it.). England has a wealth of players in defense… Carragher, Terry, Ferdinand, Campbell, King, Brown… and that’s only the centrebacks! who does the US have? Oguchi Onyewu…and uh… uh…hrm. yeah. the US defense was lackluster and unconvincing.

today i had my first english breakfast tea latte since i left SoCal. mmmm…. i loved coffee bean and tea leaf when i lived down in San Diego. little did i know there was one a few blocks away from the Sun office in SF. heaven. thank you connie

some of you may be familiar with Sun’s Flexible Workspace setup. i’ve been working in SF most of March and enjoying the iWork and flexibility of being able to work up here. what i’m not enjoying is the f-ing idiot who i can hear anywhere within a 10 cubicle radius. i don’t mind people on the phone… heck, i make a conscious effort to reserve an open cube instead of an office. what i mind is this guy who gets so frustrated at everything that he’s always hitting his desk and swearing or letting out huge sighs that i can hear even when i have my headphones on. and i’m wearing Shure e2c’s… the ones with the foam ear-plug-like inserts that go into the canal… the ones that block out most ambient noise on BART. and yet, i can still hear this guy who swears and curses, and talks into the phone like he’s trying to compete with a 747 engine for sheer volume.

to the guy in the cube next to me: please. just STFU. i used to think you were so stressed out you were going to go postal on us here. now i’m so annoyed, i’m worried i may go postal on you. my fiancee is an oral surgeon… i’ve looked through her textbooks enough to know where the weak points of the skull and jaw are. please don’t make me break your jaw. please?

frustration

Wednesday, Mar 15. 2006  –  Category: Sun

normally i treat my laptop with all the love and care in the world.

but using Sun’s @)#($)@(#%)@#(W*%-ing travel planning website makes me want to take it, and hurl it out the window. if i could make an invention that would let me virtually reach out and strangle whoever wrote this piece of crap, i would. i wouldn’t be rich. but at least i wouldn’t be so freaking frustrated.

Minnesota Government Information Technology Symposium 2005

Monday, Nov 7. 2005  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Sun

I’ll be going out and presenting OpenSolaris at the 24th Annual Minnesota Government IT Symposium in St. Paul, Minnesota on December 14th…. so if you happen to be in the area, let me know

I’m nervous since it’ll be my first official Sun presentation (booth babe duty at LinuxWorld doesn’t count), but I’m also excited to present on something so cool. Looks like it should be an interesting convention… there are a few talks I’m looking forward to seeing.

It’ll also be interesting/fun to be in a place that was 15 degrees (F) at the same time last year. Anyone know if there’s anything fun to do in St. Paul besides huddle by the hotel heater drinking wine in the bar to keep warm? I’m half-tempted to bring my snowboard and try out one of the local ski hills (there’s one about half an hour away which looks alright) if they have any night skiing.

SEED

Wednesday, Sep 21. 2005  –  Category: Sun

this is about a week late, but oh well…

last week we had our SEED showcase, the end of year meeting for our SEED program (one of Sun’s mentoring programs, and how i met geoff, my mentor).

some highlights? roughly in order…

• hearing Tom Chalfant’s talk on PTS (Product Technical Support). i always wondered what this guy did.
• hearing Keith Whisnant talk about system telemetry (used in our big machines like the Starcat). i actually heard his talk at the UCSD recruiting event last year, but Keith is one of the more engaging speakers i’ve heard come out of our engineering departments. you can tell he’s really enthusiastic about his work.
• the panel of DEs (2), VPs (2), and director (1) talk about ‘how to become a Sun executive’. this one was really interesting. one of the questions i first asked geoff when we started our mentoring relationship was whether breadth or depth was more important in his career. he answered (if i recall correctly, i don’t have my notebook in front of me ATM) that both were necessary. this may not be surprising given he’s the DE of HR (his words, not mine). interestingly, the two DE’s (Shueling Chang-Shantz, Poorna’s mentor, and Mike Wookey) both answered resoundingly depth was more important. whereas the 2 VPs & director answered breadth, with certainly some depth in your area of expertise. so now the question for the SEEDlings is, do we follow the technical track (aspiring to become DEs) or follow the managerial track? tough choice… and one i’m sure i’ll blog about in the future.
• the tour of the Sunnyvale compute ranch. holy crap this place is cool. this is the datacentre of your dreams. clean rows of machines, neatly run cabling, one system admin, etc. etc. part of it is helped by a uniform architecture (all fairly homogeneous SPARC machines), and doing a focused task: job queues of EDA tasks. so not quite your general purpose compute ranch – but still pretty darn cool.
• Ron Goldman’s talk on open source at Sun.
• Radia Perlman’s talk on her encrypted file system.

i should blog more details i know, but maybe in the future… for now i’ve got to go get build 23 delivered..

guilty

Wednesday, Jun 29. 2005  –  Category: Sun

Normally I have pretty high standards for the work I produce. I’m feeling guilty today because … well, my work sucks.

I’m supposed to finish up my tasks for my old group by Friday, before we go on our company shutdown for the July 4th week. I’ll then officially be starting in my new OpenSolaris role when we return from the break.

This means that I have to hand off my work to someone else in my group… work that I had originally planned on cleaning up, and automating myself during July/August. So now I’m caught in the middle.. I’ve been writing up a doc over the past couple of days preparing to transition my stuff to another guy in our group, Rob…. and looking at what I have so far… well… it’s ugly. It’s a hack. I’m ashamed.

Rob: if you’re reading this… sorry to have to give you my half-assed code. All I can really say is…. I really did mean it to be better.

planetidentity!

Friday, Jun 3. 2005  –  Category: Sun

i’m happy to announce grommit is now hosting PlanetIdentity, Pat Patterson’s aggregation of identity-related blogs.

gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when i can actually use grommit’s bandwidth and storage for a community purpose.

funinthesunatsun

Friday, May 20. 2005  –  Category: Sun

yesterday was a fun day. our veep got our division (the operating platforms group) tickets to go see Star Wars yesterday. i have to say, it was pretty good. aside from the cheesy love lines:

anakin: padme, i love you! padme: but i love you! anakin: you’re beautiful! padme: only because i love you!

ugh. but some other parts were great. (spoiler alert, maybe) the light saber battles were amazing. and the death of the jedi was actually really pretty moving.

today was my work from home day… and what a day it was. wow, the sun came out and was just beating down all day. i sat out on the deck and had a really nice relaxing day of work. i met up with jesse for lunch at The Cheeseboard in Berkeley for some great pizza. we had some trouble finding seating and ended sitting in the traffic median, right next to the sign which said “KEEP OFF MEDIAN” (which i actually used as a backrest). after our illegal sitting we swung by the UC parking office where I parked illegally in front while waiting for Jesse to snag me a discount BART ticket.

not a bad day at all…