One of the research engineers at Sun just made this interesting discovery.

Original posting originated here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/05/shouty_sun_engineer/

An excellent example of useful telemetry you can gain from the latest Sun storage software....

Tags: Humor

I’m working on a paper for work (actually, “executive editing” is probably a more accurate description). I’ve done a number of papers for the Sun BluePrints folks -- the technical editor for that program at Sun is an old work acquaintance of mine. It’s also given me a good chance to expound on technical wrongs and try to make them right.

I wrote a teaser for an upcoming paper I’ve been working on forever. See it here.

http://blogs.sun.com/blueprints/entry/new_dogs_new_tricks_thinking

Even if you are not totally into nerdy stuff, you still might find it an interesting read. Might.

Tags: Blog Tag

I need a job like this one:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,395181,00.html

I think I’d qualify very well, especially with my degree in Aerospace and experience doing documentation in the Aerospace industry.

Where do I sign up?

Today is a good day not to have been transferred to department 1107940052 at work.

This is the department code for the Sun MegaRIF 2008...

Happy to say that this is not my department number today.

When traveling anywhere, you often notice things that not only do you not see at home, but really draw your attention as being interesting, or worthy of mention at the least. Especially true when going overseas.

On my last trip the following items kind of stood out in my mind:





Package of Kleenex from Hungary with a Ratatouille theme. Just kind of cute. And the package is interestingly square instead of rectangular.




Our taxi which had an ominous telephone number...




This is most interesting - this is the switching control panel from the Hungarian Railroad station that we visited. One of the members of the group from our partner company had a big interest in trains, so our assembly plant staff arranged for a "Behind the Scenes" tour of the local train station. This was "State of the Art" when it was installed in the mid 1970's. And is still in use today. I wonder if it even has solid state technology...




Finally, a picture from the Duty Free shop at the Vienna Airport. We put these tiny little warning labels on our cigarettes. These are nice, big, simple, easy to read labels. Love them. Wish we could have them here. But interestingly, you see a lot more smoking in Vienna. I came out feeling a bit like an ashtray every time I went indoors to a restaurant or some other public place. Wonder why this is? Maybe they should have the warnings in German/Hungarian/local language? Or is it in English because the cigarettes are American?

Tags: Humor, Travel

The food in Zalaegerszeg has been surprisingly good. Ate well every night I was there. And every lunch I was there. Our hosts were apparently pulling out all the stops. And definitely doing a good job. I have a lot of pictures from the trip and will hopefully in another entry highlight some of the pictures I found the most fascinating.

In addition to the food, there were a few other redeeming points that I ended up finding. The town is major enough to have a Citibank. The people seemed friendly enough (to someone who didn't speak anything remotely sounding like the local language), and there definitely wasn't much traffic. the town was virtually a ghost town after 8pm in the evening.

Gas, like in the rest of Europe, is expensive. About 310 Forints per liter. Given an exchange rate of approximately 160:1 and 4.5 liters per gallon, this works out to about $8.71 per gallon? Wow.

I was warned that this town was a throwback to Cold War Era Eastern Europe. Not entirely far off.

It was a 3 hour van ride from Vienna through some extremely interesting, and extremely rural countryside. Went right to work on arrival at the production facility I was visiting, which seemed rather out of place. Very modern in just the middle of nowhere. Arriving at the Hotel Arany Barany, which is in the center of the town, the first thing you notice is, well, it's very dark. And I've not seen dark wood paneling in my hotel room since the 1970's. I do have free internet access though.

You notice how unmodern the hotel is when you realize there is no smoke detector in the hotel room. This hotel is very old. But given there's only two hotels in the town and this one is reportedly the more modern one, it makes me wonder what the other hotel is like.

You seriously wonder if someone is going to jump out of the hallway and scare you as you walk down the hallway. You hope the motion sensors for the lights work (you walk out the elevator and it's pitch dark until you step out and the motion sensors turn the lights on in the hall).

I have to admit I slept with the light on last night.

Hopefully more later!

Work this week is allowing me to do a little travel - I arrived in Vienna this morning and as things have it, have had a little time to sight see. Will post pictures when I get them downloaded (I've got a lot of pictures to post unfortunately from the last couple of months).

Vienna, from the limited time I've been able to sight see is neat. The airport (which I've seen the most of) is by US standards, a bit small. The hotel is literally right across the street - I typically park farther away from the terminal building in hourly parking than the hotel is to the airport! Flying in on Austrian Airlines was also interesting. The color scheme in the plane was, um, bright. But the service was friendly, I had two seats to myself, and you board to waltz music. That in and of itself was really nice!

Next stop, Zalaegerszeg, Hungary.

I decided to upgrade the system I use for primarily work at home to something newer. 3.5 years is an eternity in PC technology, so I saw what seemed like a nice cheap system with which to upgrade. This was a Dell Dimension C521 w/ a dual core AMD64 Athlon processor (the 4400 series so 2.3 GHz), 2GB of RAM, 320GB of hard drive, and an nVIDIA built-in graphics controller. For $560 (before tax) it seemed like a nice system which would be a nice boost in performance for not much money. Given that I would then use my old system to replace Andrew's 7 year-old $399 Dell Special, it seemed even better (Andrew's system is so old, it won't even run Windows XP).

Unfortunately, one of the conclusions I've arrived at is that I hate Windows Vista. First, there's that ever irritating Windows issue of needing to get a new driver. Everything needs a new driver. And not every thing has a Vista driver. Arrgggh.

Next, realize that I work for Sun. One of my goals is to run Solaris on this thing. Multi-OS booting on a PC used to be pretty straightforward under Windows XP. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Windows Vista, which seems to insist on being in charge of things. It's not straightforward at all.

To get Vista to dual-boot with Solaris, fortunately, someone wrote some very nice (if somewhat complicated) instructions on how to accomplish this. With these instructions as a guide, I'm making progress. Now just need to get audio working, and the network working....

Keep your eyes on the Blog for more updates.

Tags: Technology

Ever since purchasing my Mini Cooper S Convertible about 18 months ago, I've often felt a little guilty over spending so much money on a fun car that I never drive much of anywhere. In 18 months, prior to this week, I hadn't even broken 8000 miles on the car.

This week, I got to do some work related business up in New Jersey. The weather forecast looked nice, so I took the Mini up on the trip. Getting home that night after spending about 7 hours on the road total, I was happily reassured that the car really does do long trips well. I arrived home with no back aches (a testament to the well designed seats) and a grin on my face (mostly because I drove with the top down most of the way). Music blaring from the stereo fed by the iPod, and a nice breeze blowing through the car - a great drive indeed. It helped to take the edge off all the other events of this week.

31.7 mpg for the entire trip didn't hurt either. And to use a quote from another co-worker of mine who has a BMW, "I didn't drive it to maximize fuel economy either."

So we've all known about computer viruses for years now. Did you know that computers get aphasia as well?

Apparently it's true. Got this note today about a problem with the telephone tree system at work. "The phone issue of overlapping recordings has been fixed. IT restarted a vocabulary process on the IVR that was not functioning correctly."

What's next? Stroke? High Cholesterol? ED?

You have to love computers....

No, I don't have amnesia. No, I didn't lose my badge today at work.

However, I've come to realize that in the last few weeks, I have lost an identity that I associated myself with. I've lost the unique identity of my group at work.

Almost 6 years ago, I joined a group at Sun called HES-CTE. "High End Services - Corporate Technical Escalations". I considered this organization to be like an elite strike team. We knew the complicated servers we supported as well or better than the engineering teams that designed them. We flew around the world on a moment's notice to fix the unfixable, to put our flaming customer issues at customer sites, to do whatever it took to get a customer running and save the business.

Since then we've been reorganized countless times, and with each successive organization change we lost a little bit of that "elite" status. But with this reorganization, the organization we had become, PTS (Product Technical Support), was finally buried along with whatever uniqueness we had left, and all ties with the past.

Our new Senior Director sent a memo out. To paraphrase, "We no longer escalate to PTS. There is no more PTS. There is no more call center. There is just TSC (Technical Service Center)." TSC is our new organization name.

While I think it's great we've broken down a lot of artificial barriers that used to exist between different groups, the fact that there is no real distinction between me who is a product specialist and the folks who answer the phones is a little sad from a personal point of view. It's like a step backwards. It's like losing something special, and the HES-CTE group I joined *was* special. Way back when. I think we took a lot of pride in what we did, because we knew we were the best and that our company depended on us as "The Last Line of Defense" (remember the movie "True Lies" and Arnie's character's organization?).

Tonight, I lift my glass to the memory of Sun's HES-CTE. To those who answered the call. To those of us who continue to try to carry its principles forward. Cheers.

When my wife and I moved to Maryland, I took advantage of my company's (Sun Microsystems) Work From Home program. I use the office in my house as my primary work place. It's great for me. Traffic in the morning is passing my 7 year old son on the stairs, and lunch and meeting breaks give me time to play with my 9 month old son. It's a great break during a stressful day.

With all these benefits, I usually loathe having to go into the actual office. It's a nice office, really, located in a town about 20 minutes from my house - a direct shot via highway. I love the folks in the office, but there's really no motivation to go in to sit in a check out office and do the same thing (sit on conference calls, work on projects) as I could do at home. Yesterday, however, I had to 1) Pick up two packages from the office, 2) Get more expense reimbursement envelopes, and 3) Copy about 2 dozen pages worth of stuff. Enough things that pretty much added up to, "James, you need to go to the office."

What a day to drive into the office. I started off at 7:45a. It was a wonderful 72 degrees, fairly low humidity (for Maryland at this time of the year anyways), light breeze. Put the top down on the Mini Cooper S. Cranked up the iPod. Ahhhhh.....

I started off first driving 20 miles in the opposite direction. Had to deliver my wife's bag to her office (she accidentally left it at home). Almost no traffic. Very few trucks (trucks are intimidating in a convertible to begin with - compound that with the small stature of the Mini and it's really an experience....). Perfect temperature. No one cut me off on the road. It took me about 25 minutes to cover the 20 miles.

I quickly dropped the bag off, hopped back in the car, and headed up to my office, now approximately 35 miles away. Again, everything was great - no traffic, perfect temperature, pulled into a nice space in the parking garage in 35 minutes. Turned off the engine and sat for a moment and thought, "What a great way to start off the day - a one hour cruise in the Mini with the top down at true motoring speed." I grabbed my laptop bag and headed into the office with a smile on my face.

Could only have been made better if I had commuted in via scenic Highway 1 on the California coast instead of Maryland State Highway...but I won't complain.

I think this says it all...

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060531/sun_microsystems_jobs.html?.v=9