that’s whacked

good fortune!

Friday, Jun 11. 2004  –  Category: Sun

we went to Lucky Buddha, a pretty good Cantonese restaurant in San Carlos of all places for lunch today. anyway, my fortune cookie had the following:

Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.

by sheer coincidence, our annual performance review/focals are due today.

where does a fish plug into a sun box?

Thursday, Jun 10. 2004  –  Category: Sun

ahhhh product code names. gotta love ‘em…. (11:03:12) aditya: dude, what’s a minnow? (11:03:16) stevel: a fish (11:03:28) stevel: why? (11:03:31) aditya: no no .. i meant hardware that you connect to sun boxes (11:03:35) stevel: haha (11:03:46) stevel: hrm. probably not a fish. (11:03:54) stevel: not sure. haven’t heard of that before (11:03:57) aditya: someone just sent me email to reboot a computer and i’ll see a newly connected minnor (11:04:07) aditya: i dunno what to expect .. (11:04:13) stevel: http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/3310/3310.html

i’m sure somehow, someway, someone can figure out a way to plug an actual minnow (the aquatic variety) into a [sun] box somehow. wonder whether it would fit into the USB slot? or maybe i could slide it into the smartcard reader…

new computer!

Thursday, May 27. 2004  –  Category: Sun

i got a new workstation to replace my pos Sun Blade 150. i got a nice shiny Sun Blade 2000. yay! it’s suuuuuper fast….. two UltraSPARC-III+ CPUs @ 1ghz, with 8 megs of ecache each!!! man. i’m flippin’ out i’m so friggin happy.

but the best part of the new machine?

it’s not the two UltraSPARC-III+ CPUs. it’s not the 72GB scsi drive it’s not the 2GB of memory

it’s the fact that….. almost a year after i started here, my mouse scrollwheel finally works. for the past year i’ve been mindlessly scratching and rolling my middle scrollwheel button, and it never worked. i probably did this absentmindedly at least 5-10 times a day. after i brought my new machine online yesterday, i started up Firefox and was looking at the grommit homepage when i absentmindedly scrolled the wheel again. only this time…the page scrolled!

oh man. i was so happy i started laughing out loud right in my office. my day was made by a fucking scrollwheel. how pathetic is that?

yay. i survived.

Tuesday, May 4. 2004  –  Category: Sun

lay-offs for my organisation are done. i survived.

to the guys who were RIF’d: that sucks…i’m sorry.

[yes, this entry has been edited]

i’m pretty new (10 months now) to [sun], so i can hardly claim to know many people outside of my immediate team beyond the developers i’ve worked with for the past few months. in fact, afaik, the closest i was, was two degrees of separation away from someone who was laid off. the only past experience i had with corporate lay-offs was from my time at Ricoh when they laid off most of the company…. and in a company of around 150 people, it was inevitable that many good friends and co-workers were gone.

this lay-off is different for me, since i hardly know anyone personally who was affected. does it make it any less sad? does it affect me any less? no… because those were still people who contributed to [sun], who put in an effort day in/day out to do the best they could for our company. some people put in 14+ years. i can’t even imagine what that must be like.

how do you even comprehend 3300 people being laid off. three thousand three hundred people. given my high school class of around 300-350 people….that’s every single person who graduated with me in high school, all losing their jobs 10 times over. how do you even begin to measure the impact of that on a company, let alone their personal lives.

anyway. it’s a bittersweet day i suppose. i’m happy that i still have my job, and i’m happy that my closest friends/colleagues at [sun] all still have their jobs. i am saddened by the loss of all the good people set aside in the RIF. the hallways, offices, and coffee stations will be emptier without you.

… in any case, it’s a relief to have this over with now. we can get back to work and move on with getting Solaris 10 out the door now…

link: i like Geoff’s post. poignant, well thought out, and well written. this may be why he is a distinguished engineer, and why i’m an mts2 (though to be fair, he has like a 30-40 year head start on me)

RIF

Tuesday, May 4. 2004  –  Category: Sun

reduction in force.

this is sun’s happy term for lay-off.
“you’ve been RIF’d” “i hear there is gonna be a RIF soon”

i swear, if one more person comes into my office and asks who i think is gonna be RIF’d, i’m gonna RIF them a new asshole.

in all seriousness, rumours have been flying, and the atmosphere at work hasn’t been that great. people are pessimistic, and there’s no real motivation. the hallways were definitely quiet today. the only sound was the gentle “donk, donk, bonk, NICE SHOT!” of the ping pong table. the rumours, as i hear them, say that our organisation (Solaris) will be having its lay-offs tommorrow and/or wednesday.

i’m optimistic…but i always am (no really, ask any of my friends, i’m optimistic to the point of being foolhardy and stupid sometimes). but hey, what can i do….there’s no sense in worrying about it, right? if it happens, it happens. there could be worse things in life than to get laid-off. it would be absolutely shitty timing with regards to my having just taken on a mortgage, but oh well…. like i said, i’m optimistic that the cuts won’t be felt too heavily in my group - and if they are, well….i just hope it’s not me, poorna, aditya, or anyone else i know well.

keep your fingers crossed… and everyone who is reading this and who works at [sun]…. hope things are well on your end. the worst will soon be over….of that, i am confident.

open source solaris

Sunday, May 2. 2004  –  Category: Sun

Infoworld, in this article claims that Solaris will be open sourced and GPL’d - and they quote none other than our recently-promoted Jonathan Schwartz.

i’m not sure how i feel about it. but that aside, i’m fairly certain this can’t happen. afaik, not all the code in Solaris is even ours. there are bits from AT&T scattered all over the place (from the SVR4 days). not to mention all the technologies licensed to go into Solaris (Postscript for one).

plus, i just can’t see [sun] GPL’ing all our recent hard work and innovative technologies like Zones, DTrace, etc. what do we have to gain by it?

i guess we could always release a neuteured Solaris w/o the licensed techs. and/or recent technologies…. i.e.: release source to an older Solaris (but it couldn’t be GPL’d). but really, what’s the point? that’s like offering your half-eaten moldy sandwich to someone.

sure it’s food, but who the fuck cares? nobody will want to eat it.

anyway, from my near-peon position down as an MTS2 in [sun], i just can’t see the technological or business advantages of open sourcing/GPL’ing Solaris. i think giving Solaris away for FREE is a good idea (which we do, incidently), and giving companies to right to have or examine the Solaris source code (i.e.: to soothe worries about backdoors/etc. similar to Microsoft’s Shared Source program) is fine too…. just don’t GPL it.

like i said in an earlier post….i’ve been brainwashed.

the coffee bitch

Thursday, Apr 29. 2004  –  Category: Sun

poorna is the coffee bitch. every morning we get to work, and he goes to the closest coffee station, and you can hear the familiar “sprltph” sound the dispenser makes as it spits out its last dribble of coffee. you can then hear poorna quietly say “fuck.”, as he goes to start the grinder, fill up the filter, and then place it in the coffee machine to fill up the coffee dispenser/insulator thing. he’s a good man…he doesn’t mind refilling the thing so everyone can have some fresh morning coffee.

i then walk with him to the next coffee station (sipping my tea, because i can’t have coffee first thing in the morning), where he figures he can just fill up there while the first coffee station is making a new dispenser-ful of coffee. the familiar “sprltph” sound happens, he gets another dribble of coffee in his cup, and he says “fuck!” again - only this time, it’s a little bit louder. but again, poorna is a good guy, he doesn’t mind filling up the second dispenser so everyone else can have some fresh morning coffee.

by this point, the first coffee station is usually done, so we trek back to that one where poorna can finally get his fresh morning coffee.

this is a ritual i’ve seen him do a number of times now.

say what you will…. poorna is a patient man. (coffee bitch!)

one of life’s great pleasures

Wednesday, Apr 21. 2004  –  Category: Sun

one of life’s truly great pleasures is walking up to the vending machine which has been sitting empty for over a week, seeing that it has been completely restocked, and realising you have exactly 65 cents in your pocket.

ahhh… F1. two simply button presses will quickly deliver a wonderful cuisine of sweet sweet chocolate chip cookies. sweet sweet option “F1″

Famous Amos…. wherever you are, i salute you. you have truly indeed made a cookie worth my hard-earned 65 cents.

who are we now?

Monday, Apr 12. 2004  –  Category: Sun

there’s a good article at The Reg titled “Why Sun Threw in the Towel in Mankind vs. Microsoft”

i just want to say, to all you Slashdotters out there who are bitching [sun] out about how we capitulated and gave in to the Microsoft juggernaut: fuck you. Where were you when we were the only company fighting Microsoft? for the past decade, Sun has defined itself as being the anti-Microsoft. we’ve been the only company who could FIGHT Microsoft openly, and back it up. IBM never really fought… on the one hand they said “Linux is great. Use Linux. Windows sucks.” and on the other hand they sold their eServers with Windows touting the tight integration with Microsoft software.

for years and years Sun has fought the good fight on behalf of the company, OSS, and its customers. what did it get us? nothing….except the jeers of self-professed Linux geeks who condemned Solaris as proprietary, and denounced Sun as nothing more than a dead Unix vendor. what else does Sun have to do except listen to the stockholders and its customers….? customers who want better integration with Microsoft products, and stockholders who want some f-ing profits.

you can’t fault McNealy/Schwartz for bringing this chapter to a close. we’re $2 billion richer for it. you can’t condemn a company for trying to stay alive.

am i brainwashed from being at [Sun] for only 9 months? maybe…. as brainwashed as it may sound, i believe in our execs. i think Solaris 10 is the next best thing to sliced bread, and i think Sun’s new partnerships with AMD & Fujitsu are gonna pay off.

don’t write us down as dead just yet…

home away from home

Tuesday, Oct 28. 2003  –  Category: Musings, Sun

i’m at [sun] in Los Angeles still. i should be able to make it back home tommorrow morning…

i have to say though, there’s something strangely comforting about walking into a kitchen with the exact same selection of hot teas, coffee, and hot chocolate as our coffee stations in Menlo Park.