Category: Sun

When a new week, full of promises looks straight at your eyes, it may not be a good thought to sit in a retrospective mood to look back to the events that passed by. Do not worry; I am not going to write anything about my boyhood days or my crush at College. I am only going to take you a week back into the time and very quickly brief on what happened after I landed in Mumbai for an AM 3480 course, with a certain hope of going through some comfortable sessions on Access Manager. Things do not necessarily work in your favour at all points of time. If that was the case, then the life would seem meaningless! Due to several reasons, the lab set up for this course was a bit messy last week and it took a complete day for the things to fall in place. I had a family function to attend during the weekend, which only meant that I had no extra day to spare for this training. But with the help of some of my colleagues and a few others, things went on quite smoothly and the course concluded well in time for me to fly from Mumbai to my home town to register my presence for an all important function. I must also not forget to mention here the enthusiasm shown by my participants – all of ’em from Tech Mahindra – to sneak into the classrooms during the early hours on all morning (despite heavy downpour and annoying traffic) and also to stay back in the late evenings to complete all the lab exercises authored neatly by David & Co. Well, you wouldn’t see those generous folks in a batch photograph on this post as they are already up on my blog here. And probably for the first time, I saw all the participants sticking to the exact time during their teach back assignment. Let me put up their performance in the form of some photographs:

By the way, Happy Janmashtami to all of you and a grand week ahead.

I am convinced on the exciting prospects of Sun Softwares, especially the ones that falls in the Identity Management stack. So it is no surprise to me that I am spending most of my time in the Sun Learning Services Classrooms going through the training on the Identity Management components.

A couple of weeks back I could seize the opportunity to meet up with the Senior Product Manager of Access and Federation Manager and got to know from him the immense progress that the Engineering team is making in improving upon the features of the products. Frankly, it is a nice time to be a part of these positive developments in the software portfolio of Sun.

Last week I met up with some nice folks from various organizations, who had come down to Bangalore from different locations to learn IDM 345. Most of them have positive feedback about this course and some of them are in fact looking forward to take up the advanced training on IDM viz IDM 4484. As of this writing, the course IDM 4484 is based on 5.5 version of Sun Java System Identity Manager. I am told that the IDM 4484 course based on the 7.0 version of Identity Manager is in the pipeline and is likely to be released soon.

I am traveling to Mumbai this evening to start a training on Access Manager tomorrow. So let me get out from here and start preparing for my journey, but before that meet my new “IDM friends“

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

–From Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Sun today announced the decision to change the stock exchange ticker of Sun Microsystems from SUNW to JAVA. For those who are curious to know why such a decision was made, read what the big boss has written on his blog.

Didn’t you hear about the landmark agreement between Sun and IBM to distribute the Solaris operating system (OS) and Solaris Subscriptions for select x86-based IBM System x servers and Blade Center servers? I wish you take a few minutes to read through the official announcement on both Sun and IBM websites.

I just reached back Bangalore from Mumbai. The purpose of visit this time was to go through the Directory Server training for a few folks working for a leading IT Solutions company. Things went quite smooth, save the horrendous traffic jam that I had to tolerate on my commute from the venue to my hotel. It is high time that the Government take some corrective steps to improve upon the conditions of roads in Mumbai. Not that the other cities in India are free from this; still, being the financial capital of India, one would expect slightly better infrastructure in Mumbai. I am absolutely in no mood to write anything more, for the sleep is arresting me. Before I hit my bed, let me put on this blog the picture of my new friends.Good night.

Sun Startup Essentials program is now in India. Would you wish to know if you (read your organization) quailify for this program? See, if you have positive answers for the following questions:

Be in business for 4 years or less
Less than 150 employees
Verifiable company presence ( website , company profile etc)
Be based in India
Provide a valid street address

You may submit your questions, comments, questions and suggestions for the Sun Startup Essential program by clicking here.

Today Sun introduces the Ultra Sparc T2 processor. You may watch the webcast about it here.

After a week long stay in Pune to talk about the New Features on Solaris 10, I reached back my base location last night, only to fly again to Hyderabad tomorrow evening. This is probabaly the first time that I am having an onsite training back to back on a same Sun Course. Travelling is fun.

The story on the front page of my favourite newspaper wasn’t all that encouraging on my departure date from Bangalore to Pune. On landing in Pune, it was umbrellas all around me (I could have written a poem like this on Umbrellas). It appeared to me that the rain wouldn’t cease. And it poured down rather continously over the next couple of days, after which it was all ‘sunny days.’

I now have ten more friends in Pune, all employed in Symantec. It was sheer fun out there for five full days, starting July 2. Felt nice to interact with some experienced folks there and learn a lot about their work culture and also their products. They felt the new features of Solaris 10 were kewl, especially the ‘killer’ ZFS. I was more than excited to hear a friend from the group below say, “I really like the way Sun is launching in the market opensourcing all its products.” There are other people as well who think that Sun is getting the right pulse of the market.

While at Pune I managed to watch Die Hard 4.0. Thanks to a friend in the picture, I got my tickets through online reservation. So next time I go to Pune for some reason or the other, I know whom to contact for movie tickets

Today I concluded one more training on Sun Java System Access Manager 7.1 and that takes the tally of AM 3480 course to three this quarter in India. The growing demand for the Access Manager training speaks a lot on its prospects.

For a change I didn’t bother these folks with the usual ‘teach back’ assignment, for I wasn’t well and wasn’t really in a frame of mind to conduct the same. Instead, I myself took up the task of performing a marathon review of the entire course in the end. Thanks folks for your time and good luck with all your future endeavours.

Want to know who’s buying the first Project Blackbox. Check this out.

I’m back in Bangalore. The weather in Delhi had changed dramatically after my previous visit to this blog to post the weather update and since then, occasional rains in the capital city of India had kept all of us safe from probable sunburn. Perhaps, it was Nature’s generosity to keep things cool at the capital city from the chaos revolving around the Presidential Election, which is just around the corner; or may be it could well be a tribute to the eminent personality occupying the office of President at this point in time.

I couldn’t save myself though from a viral attack during my stay at Delhi and I still haven’t recovered from it completely. Thankfully, it showed up only the last day of the five day training program on New Features of Solaris 10 and hence did not have much of a negative impact in the overall context of this course. Gentlemen from HCL and Adobe, who came for this course believe that the changes and features in Solaris 10 are just too many to be discussed in five days time. I wouldn’t disagree with them. I’m putting them up in here, see if we have any common friends:

It’s a wet, windy evening here in Bangalore. Monsoon has arrived and along with it a number of problems affecting health. Well, we just can’t fight it, so let’s face it.

I know I am late. Why am I writing this only now? I usually do this when my class gets over on a Friday. I was trying to figure out a reason for it, but failed. I hate to say that I was lazy over the weekend, but facts cannot be hidden. I was indeed lazy after a week full of fun with the folks in the picture below:

They came to me for AM 3480. We’ve some positive remarks from them on the contents that were covered in this course about Access Manager. And I sincerely hope that the concepts discussed in this course comes in handy for them, when they get into their respective projects. I am sure, it will. Of course, I didn’t spare any of them from the usual ‘teach back’ assignment even this time and they all gave a decent show. It went into the late evening on the last day of the training program. So the least I should do to help myself from their curses for keeping them so late even on the final day of the training program is to put them up on my blog:

Inspired by the enthusiasm of a few of them who came for this training, I continued to do some research on the Identity Management Products of Sun. Consequently, I found myself in the Sun Learning Center even on Saturday trying to do a few things with the new version of Sun Java System Identity Manager. Don’t know, I was missing some basics and I messed up with most of my experiments done on that day. I was also trying to use the Access Manager 7.1 component from JES 5.0. And to add on to that, I was playing around with this whole stuff in Solaris 10 Zones. But I messed it up big time and all I achieved from Saturday’s adventure is a severe back pain, which is quite annoying.

I couldn’t sit with my laptop after that and I could think of nothing to write, even though I wanted to scribble down something. On such occasions I generally pick up a book and read. And this time, I went through a book which I bought through Sify Mall a couple of days back. It didn’t take me much time to read through this book. It was never boring and it kept taking me back to my college days. I wasn’t the best of students in my college, yet I had done enough mischiefs to carry back some good memories from my college campus which I cherish even to this moment. My friends at college, of late, have been blaming me for getting them into the habit of drinking so many cups of coffee a day (it’s just Madras filter Coffee and not Vodka for heavens sake). Hey hold on, I think I am getting into some nostalgic mood now and I don’t really want to drag my long suffering readers into that. So I am logging off, trying to think of some good things that i did in my college, that would have made my mother feel really proud (it’s difficult though).

“Sun announces the Industry’s most open and versatile enterprise blade platform.” Sun now has the ONLY open
enterprise blade based on three CPU architectures: + + .

Read about it more here.

Sun Java System Identity Manager 7.1 is released. To go to its download location, click here. It’s free (as if it surprise you).

Referring to the title of this post, I came across Daniel’s post this morning and I forwarded this information to a few hundred associates of mine for which a good friend friend of mine wrote a reply. I here unto append the E-mail from her, unmodified:

————————————————————
From: [Removed to Avoid Spam]
Date: 4 June 2007 9:14:58 AM GMT+05:30
To:[Removed to Avoid Spam]
Subject: RE: Sun Java System Access Manager (war file)

Thanks Rajesh,
We have tried this… We have deployed the single war file in tomcat, JES and have also tried the Netbeans IDE 5.5 enterprise edition that contains Access Manager and App server. I guess you would know about it. In case you don’t, I guess you must give it a go. Its awesome. Just install it, start the browser and type http://localhost:8080/amserver. That’s all. Good for beginners who want to browse through the AccessManager. We are doing all customization in internationalization thorugh
this as it is damn easy. No need to restart, redeploy nothing… just change the required files and press F5 on the browser.
————————————————————

The fact that I am going through my second training on Access Manager 7.1 course in the last three weeks gives a clear indication on the prospects of this product.

Now pay close attention to what I speak: IDM 4484 course is very tough. Sounds familiar? I have said it before and I must repeat myself more than often. Certain things needs emphasis again and again for the good of all. So in case, if you are are likely to drop in at Sun Labs to pick up lessons on advanced lessons on IDM, make sure you have some prior experience on Identity Manager deployment, else you might find yourself wasting four precious days of your life hearing me talk all Greek. I am writing this on behalf of those who have already come for this course, for those who would enrol for this course in future.

Four long days of discussions on IDM, with so many problems popping up in the labs – all of them unique in nature- my participants would have felt bone-tired this evening. That’s quite natural. Good luck to all of them for their future endeavours. Thankfully, I had a few experienced IDM guys sitting through this training, assisting me in my discussions (No, I didn’t tell them that I would pay ’em a share), helping their colleagues to get over the scary thoughts on IDM projects .

In spite of the an atmosphere so intense, we managed to have great fun while learning. All credits to the people in picture below:

For me, this week was nothing short of a memorable experience. Thanks a lot folks for your time.

It rained rather heavily in Bangalore this evening. That has been the case over the last few days anyway. I didn’t hesitate though, to walk home a mile from Sun Labs, drenching myself thoroughly in the process. I might catch a cold ‘cuz of this, but I was too excited this evening to even think of such an outcome.

Indian Film Makers believe that the rain invokes romantic feelings. I don’t intend to question their thought in here. But for me, I had a different reason to be excited about: the first ever teach on Access Manager 7.1. It concluded this evening, and it has given me some wonderful memories to cherish. In retrospection, I had some smooth sessions spanned over five days, largely attributed to a brilliant course developed by David Goldsmith. I must also not fail to mention the support received from people high up in the hierarchy of Sun, in answering some of my basic questions. Thanks again to David for connecting me to them. On the whole, it was a good learning experience for me, if not for anyone else.

Picture below has the set of people, first exposed to the Access Manager 7.1 course offered by Sun Learning Services. A couple of my participants are missing from this snap.

Some of them found the lab materials very interesting, while a couple of ’em felt it be slightly lengthy. But most of them agree that the course covers a wide area on the Access Manager Product. Rightly so, this course touches upon Authentication, Authorization, SSO and Federation using Access Manager. Of course, a discussion on Federation itself can span several days at stretch and for this reason, only the relevant information to understand the concepts of Federation is what is included in this course. An interesting change in this new revision of the Access Manager course is an introduction of a couple of business case studies on Federation, which gives the audience an understanding on the basics of Federation Identity Management. This is a brief feedback that I fetched from the folks in the picture above. Only time can tell their actual take back from this training.

I didn’t have to spend much time convincing my new friends on the importance of a “teach back” session and the enthusiasm that they showed to talk about various topics that constitutes the AM 3480 Rev B course this evening was commendable. More than anything else, it was sheer fun. I enjoyed every bit of it and couldn’t resist the temptation to capture it. It would be unfair if I don’t display their efforts in the form of a few snaps at least.

I’m sure their interest on Identity Management Solutions would help them go places. And I would certainly put my efforts to keep track of their progress in this field. Wishing them good luck for a grand future.

The rain has stopped. I’m going to hit the sack soon, with a hope that I wouldn’t have to bear a running nose tomorrow.

You may read Scott Mcnealy’s report on his visit to India & Japan here. Enjoy reading the Sun Executive Perspectives.

The Hindu Business Line has one more article on Java, authored by Anand Parthasarathy. You may read it here.

The Sun Java System Access Manager course AM 3480 has a revised edition which is going into the classrooms starting today. I’m happy that I am one among two Instructors across the globe to deliver the first ILT on this new revision of Access Manager today. One of the significant changes in Revision B is that it uses Java ES 5. David Goldsmith has done a marvellous job in modifying the course contents in a manner that would throw more clarity on the topics as well the lab practises. I understand from David that the other location where this class is happening today is Tampa, Florida. A more detailed description about this course can be found at the official Sun Education Website. To enroll for this course or to know more on the pricing and other aspects, please visit here and fetch the contact details.

Lot of stories are flowing from the JavaOne 2007, a few of which you could find in the The Hindu Newspaper;the links for the same are mentioned below. All of these articles are authored by renowned journalist Anand Parthasarathy:

1. Finally, Sun sets Java ‘free’.
2. Now, a do-it-yourself robot.
3. Telephone of tomorrow sighted.

It is rather rare to get a bunch of people with similar frequency for a training. Even more difficult is to see through a lab intensive course like “Sun Java System Identity Manager: Advanced Deployment,” course coded IDM 4484. Last week, half a dozen folks, from three different organizations (Sun, Accenture & Wipro) walked into the Sun Labs for attending IDM 4484 and believe me, it was pure fun out there!! May be because of the small strength, the class never extended beyond a certain time in the evenings on all four days of the course. That’s again a rare occurence. There were only a couple of them in the batch who were trained in IDM 345, because of which a few others had a bit of trouble in understanding some of the labs in IDM 4484 that had some dependancy on specific labs in IDM 345. And they have asked me to broadcast an imporant information to the public: IDM 345 (Sun Java System Identity Manager: Deployment Fundamentals) is a pre-requisite for attending IDM 4484 (Sun Java System Identity Manager: Advanced Deployment), a fact which I believe is already known to the world, yet no one seems to care about.

See my new friends in the picture below.

I am away from work for three days into this week to attend a family function. Wishing you all a good week ahead .

I met Carlo for the first time in Bangalore, almost two years back, when he had come down to speak about 3510 storage. He is one of those Instructors in APAC, who has his breakfast from one part of the globe and end up having his dinner the same day on another part on Earth, quite some distance apart . He is back again in India, this time to deliver a series of training program on Storages, which is concluding tomorrow and he’s flying back to Germany via Tokyo.

If at all I could figure out something common in Carlo and me, it’s the recurring throat problem . On my first rendezvous with Carlos in November 2005 in Bangalore, he was literally whispering after his class. And now a days when I find myself in a similar situation, it reminds me of Carlo. His advice to me is to have a cup of water ready on the table at all points of time during the speech. It’s quite a handy tip, but very often neglected. But of late, I have started to make it a point of have plenty of water during the speech. It has given me some positive results of course.

I had a short conversation with David Goldsmith on the phone some time back. He is all set for a 545 mile ride on his bicycle from San Francisco to Los Angeles for a noble cause. Please join me in wishing him good luck in this endeavour. You may read more about this and convey your wishes directly to David by clicking this link.

I have been involving myself in the process of helping lot of youngsters associated with me in adapting to a Unix flavour and I had chosen Ubuntu for them because of the very simple reason that it “just works.” And today I am more than excited to hear the news about Java being a part of Ubuntu 7.04 [Fiesta Fawn] and the users of Ubuntu 7.04 can just download and install Java from the repository. It’s great that the GNU/Linux Community now gets the power of Java. Java is not the lone component that Sun is putting in Ubuntu. There are so many development tools becoming a part of Ubuntu and you may read about it here and here.

I was really worried, when I left my home after jotting down my previous web log entry. I was to disobey my doctor to speak to a small audience on Sun Java Enterprise System. I was literally stepping into the third day of a five day training program because this program was once cancelled after two days because of a personal tragedy. So any more hiccups to this training program was beyond an acceptable limit. Fortunately, my audience was kind enough to raise themselves to understand my situation and listened carefully to my very low and soft voice. Not only that, a couple of them readily accepted my request to review some of the topics that I discussed in the class, speaking about it louder to the entire class and throwing more clarity to eveyone out there. Below you would see the pictures of Saurabh and Sajin taking over the platform and reiterating through some of the topics in the JES Workshop. Thank you so much guys for your understanding. You must know that you all made me feel really better. Needless to say, I am in a much better frame of mind.

It appears to me that I would very soon become a popular figure among the ENT specialists in this part of the world. I am under medication again, this time it is a different doctor, but the reason remains the same: I have gone voiceless.

Thankfully, I survived my training this week that concluded last evening. I had received an E-mail from David Goldsmith the other day in response to my blog entry Deja Vu, kindly sharing with me his own bad experience during a training due to Laryngitis. He also mentioned to me the heroic story of an Instructor who suffered Laryngitis in the middle of a training and yet continued with his sessions, whispering the lectures to one of his students, who in turn communicated the same loudly in the class. The timely note from David full of wishes and encouraging words did a lot of good to the state of my mind. Thanks to him.

And below you would see my friends, who were at the receiving end when my throat was hesitant to let out words freely during the training. Thank you all for your cooperation and active participantion during the training program and really sorry about my voice:(

I am advised absolute voice rest and hence may not be in a position to pick up the calls over the next couple of days. Please bear with me for the same. Good weekend all of you:)

My voice is cut off almost completely. Was shocked this morning to discover that my voice hardly came out. And I have a couple of more days of training to deliver. I had faced a similar situation a few months back about which I have written a note here. But on that occasion I had to survive only for a day. This time around I have another 16 hours of speech to make, with my voice hardly making its way out of my throat. I have no clue on how I am going manage the same. I should be able to give you an update about this towards the end of today. Hoping to survive this.

Update @ 9:00 P.M. IST: Survived today. Felt giddy at times. Used board a lot. My participants were very co-operative and highly receptive. Thanks to them. Feeling slightly feverish.

The nature of my job offers me direct acess to a good number of smart people in the Industry, from whom I have managed to pick up a few good lessons in life. And I have had the opportunity also, to talk to so many of them about the stability and features of Solaris OS and the immediate need to adapt to a Unix flavour to explore the actual computing power of a computer. Most of them, however, were reluctant to absorb this idea, indicating how dependant they were on the more familiar Windows Operating System, but a handful of others expressed their willingness to change their Operating Environment and try out something that would give them a better control and stability. Well, it is purely a personal decision to choose one’s working environment (read OS) as per the requirements, but at the same time it wouldn’t also be a bad idea to try out the various options that are available and then choose things wisely.

I have found young people to be more open minded, may be because they are less egoistic. You pour ideas into them and they would start absorbing it and then would accept it if found interesting or would reject it mercilessly, but would certainly not close their ears to suggestions. So it is always good to begin a revolutionary process with them, the young ones. Afterall, they are the future torchbearers.

Richie is my nephew and he is barely 15 years old. Like many others, he has been using a Windows version to play video files, to listen to music, to surf the Internet, to prepare his project reports and perform various other routine tasks on a computer. Recently I suggested him to try out something different. I did so mainly for the following reason: I didn’t want him to get into the loop of software piracy affairs and wanted him to know that there are several open source solutions available for students like him, which would not require shelling out too much of money for the OS and the other related softwares. My suggestion to him was to use Ubuntu. Why Ubuntu? Coz, it’s cool. Why not Solaris? Because he doesn’t require such a sophisticated Operating System. And thus I installed the Ubuntu 7.04 Beta on my machine to familiarise him with the GNOME interface. It looked awesome!

For me, the Ubuntu desktop environment just appeared very similar to that of Mac OS X. Even Richie found the well organized GNOME desktop very interesting. Without much assistance he could navigate through the menu on the desktop and found out all that he wanted on his own. Below you would see Richie enjoying his Ubuntu experience.

Richie is browsing the Sun website and has started to show interest in knowing more about the open source community. He has already had an argument at School about this newly installed OS (I wouldn’t encourage that of course) and is very keen to spread the information about a ‘non-windows’ OS to as many people as possible. Overall, he could get used to the Ubuntu environment just under an hours time!!!

If a Fifteen year old could do this, why would an Eighteen old guy keep himself away from this change. My cousin Vivek stepped forward to start using this ‘new OS.’ And he was happy too with the great look and feel of Ubuntu.

For Vinu, as we all call him, this OS offered him an interesting feature: minimal (no) use of CTRL + ALT + DEL key. He also hates to spend money for Anti Virus packages and I have guaranteed him that he wouldn’t require any of those softwares anymore. Know what, he is now trying to find out a mobile ringtone that matches the startup music of Ubuntu OS.

Apart from keeping themselves away from the dirty software piracy affairs, these young chaps would also be able to add values to their life by being a part of a community program, where qualities like unselfishness, sharing and the likes are given very high priority.

It is true that I don’t control their destiny. Afterall they are the makers of their destiny and they might even take a route that would not involve extensive usage of a computer. But for the time being I know for sure that these lads hold an upper hand, because they at least know, unlike several other who hesitate to open to suggestions, that Windows is not the only choice that they have.

They have taken up the task of talking about this to their friends and acquaitances and I am sure several people of their age would come forward to try out this change. It would then be a pleasure to watch all of them play around with different flavours of Unix. Let me also add here that I have also provided them with a copy of Solaris 10 Developer Edition. Who knows, they might use it pretty soon!

I know there are a few out there, who wouldn’t readily accept what is written on this note. I would rather encourage them to express their comments on all that I have written about. But before doing so, please ensure that your answers to the following questions are ‘yes.’ Only then would you be eligible to write a comment for this entry.

(1) The Operating System that you use at your home is either a freely distributed version of an OS or a commercial OS for which you have paid, and not a pirated copy.
(2) The softwares that you use at home including the office suite are either free softwares or commercial packages for which you have paid, and not a pirated copy.

If you are associated with a few young guys in one way or the other, please do guide them to the wide range of options that they have in choosing their work environment (read OS) and believe me, they would thank you for the same. Catch ’em young.

A good friend of mine reminded me through an E-mail that it has been quite a while since I wrote something on this blog. So I thought, may be it’s time again to show up.

The week subsequent to my return from my home town, I was engaged in revising through the yet-to-be-released revision of an Access Manager course developed by David Goldsmith. This revision (Revision B) of the “old” AM3480 course has some noticeable changes that throws more clarity on the concepts of Sun Java System Access Manager. More importantly the course uses JES 5, which has Directory Server EE 6.0 and Web Server 7.0 as its components. I have already got good opinions about the Revision A of AM 3480 course from various participants of mine; revision B is even better. So watch out for this new course in the coming quarter. Thanks to David Goldsmith for making drastic improvements in the new revision of the Access Manager course and more so for giving me opportunity to perform a QA on it.

I had been to Mumbai after that and I returned to Bangalore only last night. I travelled to Mumbai to deliver a two day training program on Solaris Containers for a batch of around 20 participants. I was supposed to travel back to Bangalore on Tuesday night, but had to extend my stay there for a couple of more days to deliver the same program for a second batch as well. Published below are the photographs of my new friends.

For a change, I am not traveling home this weekend:) Wishing you all a restful weekend.

For my close associates, this blog title is no surprise. And it is not the first time that I am traveling 600 odd Kilometers on road to spend just a night and two days at my home in Kerala. True it is tiring, especially after an energy sapping lecture sessions during the weekdays. But as they say,”There is no place like home.”

I am glad to have got introduced myself to another dozen folks, this time while delivering the Sun Cluster 3.1 course.

It was a very productive week for me and I am very satisfied with the way things went for me this whole week. At the same time, there is no denial of the fact that I am exhausted. The exhaustion is so high that I am unable to focus much on sending replies promptly to the E-mails that are reaching me. I plan to spend some time sorting that out during this weekend.Those of you who have not heard from me, please bear with me. An E-mail from me is on the way:)

Dr Karie Willyerd requires no introduction in Sun Microsystems. And when a top level executive like Dr Karie steps into the Sun Learning Center for a ‘ribbon cutting’ ceremony, it can be marked no less than a special event in the history of Sun Learning Services. And when I found myself a part of such a significant event, naturally there was a sense of excitement and, frankly, a bit of fear. With such sort of feelings lingering around the mind all through the day, on this very special day, there was hardly any idea about the contents of my blog this evening. My state of mind is no different even now and I doubt if I have enough vocabulary in my dictionary to detail to you the sequence of events that happened in the 4th floor of H J S Chambers in Richmond Road, Bangalore – Sun Microsystem’s new learning center in the Silicon Valley of India.

I have already briefed my long suffering readers about the new Sun Learning Center here in Bangalore and that story, I believe, needs no retelling. Today it looked more attractive than ever with plenty of decorations all around the place.

A Red Carpet Welcome to Dr. Karie Willyerd and other Sun Executives was followed by the much awaited ‘ribbon cutting’ ceremony at around 1800 hours IST, signifying the official opening of Sun’s Learning Center operations in this part of the world. I wasn’t present there, for I had an audience to speak to about Sun Cluster, which I shall continue to do over the next four days as well, and I am as ignorant as you are on the frame by frame details of the most important moment of the day at the center this evening. But then, sticking to the old adage, ‘A picture speaks a thousand words,’ let me put my lips to silence and display to you the most signficant moment in the Learning Center this evening.

Traditionally, in India a lamp is lit during all the major functions and behind such an act there exists a very serious and profound thought that by lighting the lamp we remove darkness. Light is knowledge and darkness is ignorance. If at all this thought and action fits anywhere, it fits the best in the field of Education. And today during the inaugural function of the new Learning Center of Sun Microsystems, five prominent men from Sun lit the lamps at the center. Again, I am going back to the background, bringing to you in the foreground those moments in the form of some photographs.

I was fortunate to have Dr. Karie and others coming into my classroom and addressing my participants for a couple of minutes. I do not know how frequently does one get an opportunity to interact with a top executive of an organization and that too when the crowd is minimal. Well, assuming that such occasions are really rare, the training participants who came for the Sun Training were lucky enough to get an open session with the Executive Vice President and the Cheif Learning Officer of Sun Learning Services, Sun Microsystems Inc. Subsequent to the visit to my classroom, Dr. Karie and others went into the other two Sun classrooms and interacted with the students for a few minutes.

These activities were followed by awarding momentos to the guests by the Sunil, Director of RPS Consulting Services who also holds the portfolio as the Director of Sun Learning Center, Bangalore. The photograph below was taken during that occasion.

The work done by Sunil and Prasad, Directors of the newly inaugurated Learning Center is indeed commendable and what I liked the most about them in my short association with them is an attitude where the word ‘impossible’ hardly finds a place. And if this good work is continued, which I am certiain about, then what we witnessed today could well be one of several milestones that they would touch in taking the Sun Learning Center to an elevated plane. Let time tell that tale of success.

Several photographs were taken during the function, which for practical reasons cannot be published on this page. I have managed to upload all of them in a dedicated location, which you may access right here. And out of those photographs that I have put in there, one is chosen to be added here, because I thought – just a thought – it could well be a future Bond movie flyer 😉

By nature, I am an early riser. But today it required a knock on the door to force me out of my bed very late in the morning. Perhaps, it was a result of exhaustion or may be a direct consequence of the deep sense of satisfaction after a productive week. Whatever it is, I am feeling very tranquil this morning, which is something that I haven’t experienced since the beginning of this New Year.

I was handling Sun Java System Access Manager course last week and it concluded late evening yesterday. I had made a few decisions of not talking too much about anything outside the curriculum while delivering a Sun Course, but that didn’t work out last week and I ended up discussing too many things about various Sun technologies including Solaris Containers, that too on a late Friday evening! It was purely because of the interest shown by the bunch of guys attending the training program, that I was prompted to speak a lot. And with Yashwant’s encouraging note on my blog, I am taken to believe that the technique that I have been employing in my training programs are accepted by a majority of audience and I better stick to that and improve upon it.

The course on Access Manager was accepted wholeheartedly by all those who sat through this training program and most of them expressed their complete satisfaction on the preciseness and the error-free nature of the course materials developed by David Goldsmith. Thanks to David for coming up with such a neat courseware. As usual, David extended his support to me in getting a few concepts clarified during the course of the training, in spite of the fact that he himself was busy with some other training sessions. His enthusiasm and generosity is commendable and has been a source of inspiration for me as well.

For me, it was a week when I experienced a very good rhythm starting from the beginning of this program till the very end of it. And I would sincerly thank the attendees for the maturity shown and for extending their full co-operation in making this a memorable week for me.

What was more fascinating was the effort that each one of them put during their teach back session and the value add they provided to each other by discussing their own experience with the related products of Sun or other vendors. And when the ‘teach back’ sessions were on, I was happily sitting in the classroom capturing those moments, which I am throwing on to this page (such a nasty way of publishing some photos).

Good weekend to all of you; it is certainly a different one for me.

The coming week Dr. Karie Willyerd, Executive Vice President, Sun Learning Services is in India for a short visit and on one of the days during her stay in India, she would be performing the inauguration of Sun Learning Center, Bangalore

Sun Learning Center, Bangalore has three classrooms, equipped with new Sun boxes and would host all Sun Training that would happen in Bangalore. Though the activities at Sun Learning Center began since the beginning of Year 2007, an official “ribbon cutting” inauguration is scheduled to be on 12th of March 2007 at 1800 hrs.

For the invitees of this event, I have managed to “steal” a route map from Vaishnavi (which she prepared of course) that could turn out to be really handy.

In case if you are not making it to the Sun Learning Center for some reason or the other, and still would wish to see how the center looks like, I have some photographs for you.

What you see on the left side of this boring commentary of mine is (of course self-explanatory) the reception. The thing that grabs one’s attention the most in this part of the center is the huge flyer about Java. A security personnel remains round-the-clock here, which gives the training participants the flexibility to work till late night and even to sneak in during the early hours of morning (that’s unlikely though:)).

Right to the right of this text is the corridor that would take you to the pantry of Sun Learning Center. That’s where the home made tea and snacks are served twice a day: one in the morning and one towards the end of the day. And on the way to the pantry, you would hit Vaishnavi, who would be holding a phone most of the time, talking to the client discussing about the prospects of various Sun Courses that are available in the Education Catalog.

The classrooms (of different capacity) at Sun Learning Center are generally occupied on all weeks of a month, except on very rare occasions. Equipments that are required in a modern training room are already in place in all the classrooms, but at the same time proper efforts are being made to improve upon it, ensuring a smooth, comfortable and hassle free training sessions for the training participants. Certain things take time to touch nearness to perfection.

Last but not the least, there is a refrigerator in the pantry, loaded with variety of soft drinks ready to be emptied and that’s a luxury you would hardly see in most of the training locations. Whether the consumption of soft drinks is good for health is something that is debatable and that of course is a different story, beyond the scope of discussion in here.

Many a number of people are actively involved in improving upon all aspects of Sun Learning Center here in Bangalore. I would wish to congratulate them for the good job done so far. On the other hand, I also don’t deny the fact that improvements can be made in all departments to make the learning experience in Sun Learning Center better and the best. Trust me, it is being done. And before I leave, I would wish to express my heart felt thanks to all those who extended their cooperation during the training programs in understanding the limitations of a training room in its transition phase and also to provide with valuable suggestions that are being considered on a very serious note. It’s only going to get better; day after day.

Welcome, Dr Karie to the Sun Learning Center, Bangalore, India

At home in Kerala this weekend. Things are settling down here; well, it has to. My IDM4484 course concluded on Thursday(01/March/2007). Personally, I am not satisfied with the way things went during the four days of IDM 4484 course. I have a feeling that I indulged in lot many conversations outside the scope of subject and talked about various other products of Sun, which I now feel wasn’t really necessary. I should have insisted my participants to spend more time on the labs in IDM 4484 rather than deviating their attention to a variety of the products falling in the scope of Identity Management space. I also don’t think it is a good idea to take the class into the late evenings for several reasons. I might have to make some serious amendments in the way I deliver a course. And I am going to start doing so, starting tomorrow, when I would take the platform for the Sun Java System Access Manager course. I know it is a process that would take some time, but neverthless it requires a proper start.

Currently, I am delivering a training on Sun Java System Identity Manager to a few folks belonging to different organizations. My experience in teaching this course has been truly marvellous and everytime I have taken up a course on IDM, I have managed to get some or the other fundamental concepts right. Well, this week it’s no different.

I knew much before I stepped into my classroom on the first day this week that I would have late evenings on all four days of this course. But then, this week my participants are running 12-13 hour session on all days! They are putting all attempts to perform the lab exercises very diligently. May be, I am talking too much in the class and they are left with no other option, but to stay back in the Sun labs and perform the lab exercises in the late evenings. Is it that I need to make my conversation curt and concise so that the people who would come for the training would get more time to perform the labs? Well, I do not know.

My audience was generous enough deviate their attention from the Sun books and raise their heads to pose for a photograph:)

Sun Java System Identity Manager:Advanced Deployment course is tough, isn’t it?

I have reached my home in Bangalore. Before I brief you on all that happened on the last day of the Sun Tech Days 2007, let me wish Sun Microsystems a Happy Twenty Fifth Birth Anniversary. I was told that Sun was officially born on February 24, 1982. In this context, I invite you all to read through this brief history of Sun Microsystems as time permits.

I reached the Sun Tech Days venue at around 7:30 A.M. Had to do some fixes on several machines to be used for Stacy’s Ajax Session. Things went on smoother than I expected and the machines with Solaris 10 Developer Edition were up and running just in time for Stacy to introduce his participants to the whole new and exciting world of Solaris OE and then on this actual curriculum. The number of participants who came for the hands on session on Ajax was close to hundred and each one of them got accustomed to the Solaris OE in no time. Published below is a photograph that was taken a few minutes before Stacy Thurston took the platform to talk about Ajax.

Most of the tasks in his session were conducted using the Netbeans and Sun Java System Application Server 9.0. Some of them attending this program were familiar with Netbeans, but not all of them, which of course was a little bit surprising. But otherwise none of them had any problem using the ‘unfamiliar’ Solaris 10 Operating Environment. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them go back and try to install Solaris OS and use it as their development platform. Well, I would strongly say it is worth trying it.

Towards the end of the day, I felt very tired and was feeling so sleepy. It was really really tough to keep my eyes open. But somehow I managed to hang around till Stacy concluded his training. The labs for this course was done very religiously by most of the people, but if you are one among those who could not pay complete attention to the labs on Ajax or who could not make it to the venue for some reason or the other, Stacy has plans to publish his course slides and the lab files on his blogs. Please stay tuned.

By evening, most of the attendees had left the venue and the venue looked very empty. I don’t know whether I would meet Stacy again in the immediate future. I can only say that I enjoyed the moments that I spent with him. Thanks Stacy and have a pleasant stay in Singapore.

Stacy,myself and the whole of SLS, Bangalore are thankful to the gang below who played a crucial role in bringing up the labs just in time.Thank you folks and wish you all a bright future.

Sun Tech Days 2007 is considered to be the largest Developer Conference that happened in India. India’s leading Newspaper The Hindu has a report on this. It was well and truly a wonderful experience for me.

I am writing this note as I travel in my car to my hotel from the Sun Tech Days venue here at Hyderabad. And the time now is 3:00 A.M. I had a very tiring, but exciting day at the Sun Tech Days 2007 event. Tiring because I was up till now and I even had to involve myself in brining up hundred Solaris boxes at the venue, where Stacy would deliver a class, and that wasn’t an easy job. Exciting because of the sense of satisfaction that I felt to have been a part and parcel of such an event and also to have met so many people in the process.

I moved around the venue this morning taking lot of snaps. I don’t think I have sufficient energy to sit and sort out the photographs and publish the same on my blog today. But I shall do that on reaching Bangalore on Friday night.

I also attended so many tracks that happened today, but wasn’t really in a position to pick up much. In between I made an attempt to speak to the audience who came down to the Java University stall. That wasn’t really a bad attempt I guess.

By around 8:30 P.M. we started to shift the Solaris boxes to the classroom and it got over only around 2:50 A.M. We had some trouble in getting the resolution of certain monitors right, but with access to people like Moinak and Madhu, it wasn’t a difficult job to debug and fix the issue very fast. Thanks to them for coming down to our venue to help us out.

On this note, I am stopping it here for the time being, purely because I am very tired and sleep is arresting me. I hope to have a couple of hours of sleep at my hotel and need to get back at the venue by around 7:30 A.M. tomorrow.

Sun Tech Days 2007 kicked of in Hyderabad on a grand note. I reached there only by the middle of the day as I had to sneak into one of our partner’s site to see how much of Solaris installations were over for Stacy’s Ajax session on Friday. Amazingly, the guys out there had completed installation of Solaris 10 DE on over 80 machines over night. Considering the fact that most of the guys who were performing the installation of Solaris 10 Developer Edition were new to Solaris OE, this is a major achievement. I must thank the following people, who turned their night into day to work hard and complete the installation of Solaris 10 DE on hundred x86 boxes in just under two days: Shijith (RPS Consulting), Rajesh (NIIT ), Ravikanth(NIIT), Sreedhara Moorthy (Digital Media Technologies Ltd.), S Venugopal (Digital Media Technologies Ltd.), A Purushotham (Digital Media Technologies Ltd.), E Giribabu (Digital Media Technologies Ltd.), J Satish Kumar Reddy (Digital Media Technologies Ltd.). I wonder whether such a massive scale of installation of the newly released Solaris 10 Developer Edition has happened elsewhere. Let me also make it clear here that the guys involved in this whole process, were using the Solaris 10 DE DVD to install on each machine individually. Amazing job folks.

I went to the Sun Tech Days 2007 venue in the afternoon, but wasn’t in a position to sit through any of the tracks going on in there. That didn’t really stop me from moving around with my camera capturing pictures. One of them, you would see below:

At around 7:00 P.M. the renowned singer in this part of the world K.K rocked the stage with some of the Sun Tech Days delegates dancing all around him. I managed to use my mobile to take some pictures then. Sorry about the clarity of the same.

A few other photographs that I took today using my camera are displayed below. The resolution of the pictures are auto adjusted once you click on it.

Meanwhile, let me spend some time trying to figure out what little role did I play in the large scale Solaris 10 DE installation that happened in a day or so. Well, my role in this success could be negligible, for the folks about whom I talked about in the beginning of this entry did one hell of a job to get things moving. Thanks guys.

In Hyderabad for the Sun Tech Days 2007. This largest Developer Conference in India would kick off in just under twelve hours from now.

I, of course had a bad experience on landing in Hyderabad airport. The cab that was arranged for me did not turn up on time and I ended up waiting at the Begumpet airport, Hyderabad for well over one hour thirty minutes. The lesser I talk about it, the better it is. Most part of today was spent with Stacy Thurston, who would talk about Ajax on 23rd of this month, which incidentally is the last day of the Sun Tech Days 2007. We both went to the NIIT center here in Hyderabad to prepare the volunteers for assisting Stacy during this session in Sun Tech Days 2007. Below you would see stacy actively involved in preparing volunteers for his session(All photographs in this blog entry is taken using my mobile phone and not a dedicated camera):

After conducting a session at NIIT, Stacy and myself went straight ahead to Sqlstar, where Shijith and company are doing the installation of Solaris 10 Developer Edition on hundred machines to be used for Stacy’s program. We tested the softwares on top of Solaris DE and believe me, things look good. Well, there is anyone among my dear readers, who would be sitting through Stacy’s session, then below photograph will tell you what would you see on Stacy’s hands on session.

Well, I guess I am too tired to scribble anything more. So let me hit the sack now. See you all @ Sun Tech Days 2007, Hyderabad.

Probably for the first time in my career, I completed a training on a Monday! The DIR 2337 course, which is a three day training program started on February 16th and concluded this evening. Sunday there was a break and I flew home for that one day. You would find below a set of people from HP and VSNL, who spent their three days with me discussing Sun Java System Directory Server concepts.

Tomorrow early morning I am flying to Hyderabad to participate in the Sun Tech Days 2007.

Reached Bangalore this morning. I spent most of my time with Stacy Thurston. He kept himself busy with the preparation for his session on Ajax during Sun Tech Days 2007 at Hyderabad. Got to know that his hands on sessions would be conducted on Solaris Express Developer Edition. Solaris Express DE got released only a couple of days back. Perhaps David Lindt’s blog is a good place to go and fetch more details and resources on Solaris Express DE.

I’m very tired (as is evident from my photograph with Stacy) and I need some good sleep tonight. So let me move away from here for the time being. And if you want to hear from Stacy what he was doing the whole day- apparently his first visit to India- then please read his blogs.

Writing has always been my choice of medium both to express pleasure and to relieve myself of immense grief. This writing, I’m afraid, would have a melacholy mood painted all over it. So read on, only if you would not mind it, else leave this entry untouched.

I have come home and I did so after I heard about my cousin’s death. He was one of those members in my family, who has played a major role in shaping my makeup. Ask anyone around and you would hear from them how safely he used to drive and ride. Yet destiny had something very different in store for him and his quota of life on earth ended in a head-on collision with a local bus on February the 6th 2007. We would take quite a while to recover from this shock for sure.

It is under these circumstances that I was tagged by Binu Kurup of Sun Learning Services(SLS) and it now becomes my duty to let the public know three things (its three in SLS and not five) about me. I must add here that the untimely demise of my cousin has certainly influenced my choice of three things about me that I am mentioning below:

(1) For a very long time I have been in the process of jotting down all that I remember from my past, mainly as an expression of gratitude towards all those who have played major roles in various phase of my life. A good friend of mine suggested me a title for my story: Soliloquy. With a sincere hope that I would be able to publish this work of mine very soon, I hereby display the coverpage of my book about which only my close friends were aware till now.

(2) Nothing in my life has affected me as deeply and as profoundly as the story of Anu, my cousin.

(3) On 11th May 1991, seven of us miraculously escaped a major train accident. The omni in which we were travelling was hit by a slow moving train, causing severe damage to our vehicle, but leaving most of us with only some minor injuries. Should you wish to know more on this, you may kindly read about the complete incident here .

Came across an article on Java Economy. You may kindly read it here.

This evening I completed a training on Sun Java System Access Manager in Bangalore. This note is specially for David Goldsmith, who is also the lead course developer for this course. I have no words to express my gratitude to him for all the help that he rendered during this week in answering all my questions on Access Manager, very patiently in a detailed manner. This week has been a productive week for me, if not for anyone else. David, the group in this picture is really thankful to you for all your support.

And guys, thanks for the wonderful ‘teach back’ sessions this evening. Good luck:)

I am conducting a training on Sun Java System Access Manager this week. A participant sitting through my training program was mentioning to me about the problems that his team faced in a Portal Server Deployment. May be in future they can refer to Navaneeth Krishnan’s blog, which appears to be a ‘One Stop’ for Portal Resources.

Sun Learning Services has published a few videos on some of the “hot topics.” I recommend you to spare some time to watch these interesting videos. You may view/download these videos from here.

I am a couple of days late in writing this note. But it is better to be late than never. The second phase of the Sun Guru program got over this evening. I had a role to play in this program during the last weekend and it was mainly to talk about the features of Solaris 10 to the teachers of some reputed Engineering Colleges in this part of the world. Last time when I took up a similar program, I had lost my voice completely about which I had written a blog entry as well. But this time ,thank heavens, no hiccups.

I don’t need to tell you how it feels to stand before an elderly audience and do a job, which they are so much accustomed to. This coupled with the fact that they all came from Institutes (PSG Coimbatore, NIT Suratkal, NIT Trichy, NIT Warangal), that produce some really good Engineers sent shivers down my spine. But such initial thoughts and feelings gave way for some serious discussions on the features of Solaris 10 that included SMF and Solaris Containers. I can safely mention here that my two days spent with them was indeed very productive. Unfortunately, I could not be a part of the last two days of this program, but I read about it here.

I must add here that the efforts that Vardhini is putting in organizing events like this is commendable. Many University students across this nation would derive enormous benefit out of programs of this sort. Unlike my college days, a majority of Engineering students would now know that there is a big computing world out here ready to be explored. I sincerely hope that several colleges in India take initiative to participate in this program and thereby make their students aware of the enormous opportunity that is available for them.

Felt dull this morning; reason unknown. This day appeared no special to me. With little interest, I powered on my laptop. A few E-mails sneaked into my inbox. The one I chose to read first was Jonathan’s E-mail to the whole Sun family. Its starting line said, “Today is a remarkable day for Sun.”

As I ran through this letter from the CEO, a sense of excitement started to build in me. A day that seemed to start on a dreary note was turning out to be a special one for Sun and all at Sun. It is a special news and it should be heard from the people who matter. So let’s part now and join here to know more on the giant leap that Sun has taken in the Industry this day. And if there are some out there, who still think I am biased towards Sun, then hear it from them.

There is one specific entry in Jonathan Schwartz’s blog that I read more than often: When I First Met Scott…. And every time I have travelled across this Nation to deliver a seminar on Java, I have made it a point to mention about this hair-raising article to the audience out there. What fascinated me the most was the vision of Scott (read every Sun Employee): The Network is the Computer. In the same blog entry, you would also find a mentioning about the so called Chicago Project. May be it is pure coincidence that a week forward to reading this article (that was a few months after Jonathan published this entry), I came across a column by Anand Parthasarathy in The Hindu Newspaper headlined Microsoft ready to give up the PC ‘mindset’. Upon reading the article, it required no time for me to realize that Microsoft was just repeating a statement that percolated from SUN several years back!

And this evening, I was guided to another piece of writing on the web, which talks about the Uninspiring Vista. The interesting fact is that this report is authored by a die-hard Windows fan. Let me make your life easy: It just discusses how simple and easy a Mac OS is as compared to the about-to-release Vista. I don’t intend to spend any more of my time comparing Mac OS with Windows, for I’m certain that there are many out there who wouldn’t digest these facts. To them, I will tell a tale:Please read it here. But what caught my attention the most was the author’s last few statements. Well, go ahead and read it and then you’ll know that slowly, but steadily Sun’s Vision is being realized and it indeed is the future. I sincerely wish to play my part in fulfulling this vision.

It always feels nice to have an open-hearted conversation about the professional experience, especially with a veteran overseas counterpart. Agreed that there exists several modes of communication in this day and age, which has narrowed down the geographical barriers; yet a table talk, to me, has a special value for sure. I missed Ser Chay Heng on my journey to Singapore. And he flew down from Singapore to Bangalore this week, not to meet me of course, but for a very serious reason: to talk about Sun Java System Portal Server.

It was nice to have him around in the evenings to have a cup of coffee from one of my favourite coffee outlets here in Bangalore, where otherwise I spend some solitary sessions occasionally on my stroll back home from office. His experience reflected in most of the things that he spoke; and the four days that I spent with him, both inside the class as a student – not very obedient though- and outside the class as a colleague shall remain memorable. Thanks Ser Chay.

Ser Chay’s training was attended by a batch of ‘developer community’ from Infosys. It was fun to have them around as well. The abrupt change of plan to cut short the training by a day gave me no time to replace the drained batteries of my camera. I am grateful to the lady dressed in yellow for the photo posted below:

Have a great career folks.

For a change, I have decided to talk less and instead guide you to a website which will introduce you to Sun Update Connection: here we go. Also, you may read its press release in here.

I completed one more batch for the Sun Cluster training this week. That takes my tally to a total of just over a dozen programs on this product, spanning a score months or so. And I’m sure there is more such programs in store for me in future as well. During one of those days, I was searching for some information on cluster for the gentlemen in picture below and I came across this useful link on the New Command Set for Solaris Cluster 3.2. Looks promising.

I’ll be back.

I feel immensly satisfied to have spent the first weekend of this New Year talking on Solaris 10 New Features to some really enthusiastic bunch of guys from ANZ. Half a dozen months had elapsed since I last took up this course. Taking up this course has always been a challenge as it covers a wide range of topics in Solaris 10, without discussing anything in depth. And this time around, I was expected to complete this course in four days (04/Jan – 07/Jan) as against the normal five day time frame. Luckily, my good friends who spent their weekend with me to have a look at the New Features of this blockbuster OS were matured enough to understand what is relevant for them and extended their co-operation to the fullest extent in helping me complete my first assignment this New Year on a good note.

I have heard many mixed opinions about the contents of this course from various people. I don’t intend to express my personal opinion about this course here, but the men in the picture below should be able to give us their review about this course. Meanwhile, let me invite you all to have a look at the following courses on Solaris 10, which I think can rightly be called as an “upgrade course” on Solaris: Make the Transition to the Solaris 10 Operating System and Solaris 10 Containers.

Have a good week ahead:)

The much talked about Windows Vista is ready to be released soon. Well, if you have already made up your mind to invest on machines with great muscle power to run this new OS, then I strongly suggest you to read this article and then take that all important decision of running your critical applications on this new platform. Good luck.

Tomorrow is Christmas. And shamefully, tomorrow I complete my thirty days of silence in the Sun blogs too. Though I am in possession of a few reasons that I could list for this rather long sleep, it has more to do with my laziness than anything else, which kept me away from the web logs. I can only hope that the Rip Van Winkle in me doesn’t show up so regularly and keep me away from jotting down a few lines in my web logs for as long as a calendar month.

Let me take you back in time to tell you, on a quick note, what was going around me during the last thirty days or so. The week subsequent to my Singapore journey was spent in Bangalore, teaching a course on High Availability. Last time I took this course was around January this year and hence I wasn’t so sure about my fluency on this subject. But Sun Cluster concepts turned out to be too interesting to be forgotten. Consequently, things went quite smooth (though of course my voice started breaking towards the middle of the course), the credit for which, undoubtedly, belongs to the gentlemen in picture below.

The Sun Cluster Administration training ended on December 01 2006, Friday. I spent that weekend for a two day program on Solaris Operating System at the Indian Engineering Center for Professors and lecturers from various colleges in and around Bangalore. It was indeed a nervous affair to stand in front of the people, who make Engineers and talk about a subject as vast as Solaris Operating System. But they were extremely receptive to what I was speaking and I enjoyed my two days spent with them. The only thing that went wrong was my voice. On Saturday evening, my voice cracked. And on Sunday morning, I went absolutely voiceless. That was quite depressing to me as I had to push it for at least eight hours on that Sunday. I kept motivating myself thinking about some great incidents in cricket: one of which was about Sunil Gavaskar’s only century in Limited Overs Internationals, which was made when he was running on high fever. And when I started speaking on that day, Sunday the 03rd December, I was shocked that my voice never came out. For the first half an hour or so, I could only whisper to them in the class. Occasionally, with great effort, I could produce some voice, but as a result of the same, I felt extremely weak and giddy. Somehow I managed to cleanup everything satisfactorily and there was immense sense of satisfaction in me on my walk back home from my office. But I didn’t know then that a few days of medication was in store for me from the next day onwards. The photo below was taken during the two day program on Solaris at IEC. You could see me putting all my efforts to produce some sound in guiding the ‘photographer’ to capture this group photo.

The medication was mainly for high fever and severe throat infection. The strength of antibiotics put me to sleep most of the time during those days and I found it really hard to attend to my duties, even to respond to my E-mails. I hereby openly apologize to all those who sent me mails during that period and never heard from me back. My voice is back to normal. Looking back, I feel extremely satisfied to have been able to talk continuously for hours on that unfortunate day, in spite of no voice, well almost.

Cut to the present, I am stationed at my home in Kerala waiting for the celebrations to begin.

So after a of week of Advanced Deployment lessons on Sun Java System Identity Manager, this week I took the platform to talk about its fundamentals. And in the photograph below, you would see my friends who were my audience this week. Most of ’em knew this product and some of them are already working on it. They sneaked in just to know the missing links.

Not of all of them, who came to hear my lecture are in the picture above. And there is something in the snap above that makes me feel giddy on my continuous stare. This photo is slightly tilted, giving a feel that all of us stood on the deck of a sinking ship. That certainly is not the case as everyone seems to bear a happy face. But if you feel I look slighly tired in there, then probably you got something right. I am a bit tired and getting drenched in the rain last night has only made things worse. With your permission then, let me leave you with this short note, promising to see you soon; very soon.

Some moments are really special; and some dates, requires special mentioning. A few years from now, 13th November 2006, would be looked upon as a day, which marked the beginning of a new era in the evolution of a programming language, whose inception dates back to the early ’90s by a few engineers @ Sun. What could that programming language do to the world of Internet is a fact well-known to the public. And I would only be boring my dearest audience if I repeat the success stories of the wonderful programming language called Java. I would also be failing in my duty if I don’t tell you now what I am expected to say.

Today, on 13th November 2006, Sun Opens its very own Java Programming Language. Well, what more can I say other than to request you, very humbly, to watch the live event coverage of the same on Sun Website at 9:30 PST. I realize that I am not the person to authoritatively talk about this decision, but this gentleman certainly is. I can also guarantee that there would be a lot many people in here, who would express themselves on this decision of making Java open.

And if Java is made open, where does Joe Parlang’s creation stand? Well, even that goes open source!!

And finally before we part, let us also hear one more time to what the creator of Java has to say to the Java Community. Let’s read his open letter to the Java Community and then wait in anticipation to see what effect this decision would have in the years to follow.

Not so long ago, there existed a boot camp on Sun’s leading User Provisioning Tool which is now replaced by a combination of two courses offered by Sun Learning Services viz. IDM 345 & IDM 4484. I have written elsewhere in this blog about the IDM 345 training program and my experience with different participants from different organizations in this corner of the globe. Hence that story needs no retelling. But to give you a brief one liner: these two courses covers the deployment of Sun Java System Identity Manager 5.5 version in a phased manner, the four phases (Regulatory Compliance & Self Service, Delegated Administration, Data Synchronization and Self Service) being distributed equally across the two courses, well almost. That means to say that the IDM 4484 training program titled “Sun Java System Identity Manager:Advanced Deployment” picks up from where IDM 345 stops. This implies, if not plainly expresses, that the audience of the second part of the IDM “boot camp” be thorough with the labs of IDM 345 training program.

And this of course was a cause of concern for me on my stroll towards the Sun Education Center here in Bangalore during the early hours of a fine morning on 06th the November 2006, that not all of my participants for the IDM 4484 training program had a chance to sit through the IDM 345 class conducted earlier. Yeah you rightly guessed that it was also the first ever delivery of Sun Java System Identity Manager: Advanced Deployment course, coded IDM 4484.

A quick recap of IDM 345 was a need of the hour even for those who have had a feel of the same and hence half a day of day one of IDM 4484 went in that fashion. And in the afternoon on day one, we stepped into the discussion on Flat File Active Sync aka FFAS and in turn into the labs. In a few minutes time it was clear to them, my participants, that they would have to write their own Rules from the psuedo code mentioned in the lab exercises book, unlike the step by step lab instructions in the IDM 345 course and that wasn’t all that easy job. And when they started getting the feel of the intriguing lab exercises in IDM 4484, they wondered if it was feasible to extend the training program by one day from four days to five days. But their request was turned down immediately, much to their disappointment of course. On day one, a few of them stayed till 8:30 P.M. to complete the labs. Well, that was to become a routine on the subsequent days of this training.

The intensity of the atmosphere within the classroom on all the days can hardly be reproduced in writing. It was agreed by one and all that the course and the labs were extremely good, but tough. And when it came to the modules on workflows, they literally were sitting on the edge of their seats trying to figure out what could have caused those funny errors, all kinds of them, preventing them from moving ahead with the course. Amazingly, most of them raised themselves to a different level, worked together wholeheartedly and solved majority of the problems that popped up during the exhaustive lab sessions. I must congratulate them to have displayed extreme professionalism in employing their minds to perform all the labs very diligently. I need not mention here that the maturity of audience is a major factor in the successful completion of any training program and these bunch of guys whom you see in the snap below with apparently happy faces are the ones, who made my first IDM 4484 course delivery not only a grand success, but memorable. Thank you so much folks and good luck with your Sun Java System Identity Manager projects.

I was looking forward for my first delivery on this course and I am extremely happy and satisfied that it went through fine. Well, if anyone of you wishes to know the real meaning of the word “boot camp,” I invite them to register for the energy sapping sessions on IDM 4484 and I bet my life, they would realise the meaning of it in just a few moments time. But before you do so, make sure you pick up a few lessons on Sun’s Identity Manager through IDM 345, for otherwise, you might find yourself at sea trying to catch up with the lessons in the Identity Manager Advanced Deployment Course.

This morning I received a series of E-mails on Project Blackbox. And after having a look at the photographs of Project Blackbox, I was in a retrospective mood to look back to my days in an organization, where I had to spent a few hours in the cold temperature of a datacenter ,even on some weekends, trying to figure out what caused a machine to go down all of a sudden, giving several employees a paid vacation at office, or to bring up a certain server as per the standard stack in the organization. Honestly, it was tough and I only have bad memories about the same. And I was all the more shocked, when I learned that the organization used to pay a heavy price as rental to keep those servers (it was a hetrogenous environment consisting of hundreds of servers) in that data center. To tax such a lot of money just for the space to keep those machines in shape…well, don’t we have a better solution?

Sun’s innovative ideas have always amazed me even during my college days and this time around it is no different. My dear long suffering readers, I think I have bored your enough talking to you a lot. Now, let me take my insignificant personality away and invite you all to have a look at Sun’s “extraordinarily simple idea” and then sneak into this picture gallary. And when you come back to me, if at all you will, and if you do not find me on my desk, well don’t get surprised, I might just be busy setting up my own data center either in the backyard or the attic of my house:)

Reached Bangalore yesterday morning. Didn’t feel like doing anything yesterday as my throat was in a really bad shape and I wasn’t feeling all that great. Today I feel much better. I do have a sense of satisfaction to have completed my training on a good note. And considering the fact that I had my heart in my mouth on last Sunday while doing the lab set up for IDM 345, I greatly feared that I would come across lot of trouble during the entire training program. But the folks whom you would see in the photograph below raised themselves to the occasion and helped me in brining up the machines to the ‘start state’ of the training program and got themselves very quickly equipped with the necessary working knowledge on Solaris Operating System to get on with their job of performing the lab exercises. As I mentioned elsewhere this course is very lab intensive and it requires enormous amount of patience from the participants to walk through the entire lab materials and they all did exactly that with no major hiccups.

Not only did they perform the labs very diligently, but also took the ‘teach back’ assignment very seriously to display some good presentations on the final day of the training program.

Guys, wish you good luck with your projects and my apologies to have made you run through the tedius installation procedures to bring up the machines to the ‘start state’ of this course.

In Mumbai. In fact, in the venue where I would be talking about Sun Java System Identity Manager tomorrow. This place is going to be my platform for the next five days time.

Landed in Mumbai airport at around 11:00 A.M. this morning. The flight journey was made interesting by a sailor sitting next to me (sorry that I am unable to recollect his name). In just under half an hour time he briefed me on his experiences travelling all around the world and how miserable life could be in a ship with only 21 sailors managing the whole ship. It seems, at times, they don’t see a glimpse of land for 3 months at stretch. Quite a scary thought I believe.

I checked in at the hotel at around 11:45 A.M or so and reached here (training venue) at 12:30 sharp. I came here to set up the lab for tomorrows class. I have done this several times before. And I was (over)confident to complete my job in a couple of hours time. I expected a text book installation, but didn’t have a clue that a surprise was in store for me and I were to have a very tiring and tension filled afternoon. Let me explain:

Generally I carry a Flash Archive in my laptop to the training venues so that I could install all the lab bundles for the course on the student machines. And the flash archive for IDM 345 course contained Solaris 9 Operating Environment, mysql installed and the lab bundles for the course. And a clean installation (read extraction) of this archive ensures a smooth take off for this course , since all the student machines would be in a ‘ready to go’ mode. And I was confident that my Flash Installation would not take more than two hours time. I had ten Sun Blade 1500 machines at my disposal for performing this installation and I chose one of them to be my jumpstart server. Let me also mention here that the archive that I had in my laptop was created on an Ultra 10 machine. I have had arguments with my training participants on several occasions on archive installation on machines with varying architecture. And until this afternoon I was under the strong impression that an archive created on one architecture could be installed on any architecture without any problem. It didn’t take much time for me to create a jumpstart server and I was using a Solaris 10 CD as the boot CD on the jumpstart server so that the clients could boot from the CD on the jumpstart server. The installation procedure appeared faster than ever and I was busy thinking on my agenda for the evening once I reach my hotel after what appeared to me as a clean installation process. It was a joy to watch nine machines extracting my the flash archive from my jumpstart server. Once the installation got over, one machine rebooted and then it crashed with an error indicating that the root filesystem is corrupted and needs fsck. I felt slightly shocked, but had the confidence that I would be able to repair the problem. But then I saw even the rest of the machines crashing one by one. It was a depressing sight to see each of those machine going into the maintenance mode one after the other. Perhaps it was an early Diwali dhamaka. I immediately called up Samson Selwyn, a very senior colleague of mine on his hand phone. Well, this is certainly not the first time that I spoiled his weekends. I have done that before and done it on several occasions. So I think he’s used to it now. He gave me a few tips to somehow get out of the bad situation that I was in. I was feeling very tired and hungry and hence went out to gobble something. Back in my mind, this was really bothering me, for IDM 345 is a lab intensive course and any minor upset in the lab setup would spoil my next five days.

I came back and tried booting the clients using CD and very soon discovered that the system was behaving very abnormal. The format command gave me “No disks found” error. I found myself at sea and the only solution that I could think of was to create an archive of Solaris 10 OS of my Jumpstart Server (Sun Blade 1500) and use the same to install the OS ‘at least’ on all the client machines. By this time, I had already reached a conclusion (whether right or wrong, I don’t know) that an archive created on one architecture may not work on other architecture. Well, at least this time the installation of the OS went through fine. So now all the machines in here are installed with Solaris 10 OS. Now I will have to request my participants to carefully install the other softwares tomorrow while doing the lab. That will tax a lot of our time, but then I don’t seem to have a choice. And I really hope that things work fine tomorrow. It has been a very tiring and exhaustive day and all I feel now is to somehow get back to my hotel and take some rest.

As I write this note I have a small, yet serious problem with my Apple PowerBook G4. I have been using this for more than a year now and it has been serving me really well. But of late its keypad has started to behave very strange and very often I end up striking the keys really hard to echo on to the screen. This problem is not permanent though! It requires some really hard work on my part to key in certain characters esp. “u.” So everytime you see a word in this article which has a “u” in it, understand that I managed to put it in using the classic “CTRL + C” & “CTRL + V” method. It is indeed quite annoying to have a problem like this. For those of you who had sent me several E-mails over the last few days and still didn’t hear from me, kindly know that I am finding it slightly difficult to draft a mail to you because of this keypad problem. This morning I went to the Apple Service center in Bangalore, only to find them not working on a Saturday (Foolish me to think that Saturdays are off days only for me). I wouldn’t be able to fix up an appointment with the service center until next Tuesday, for Monday is a National holiday. I sincerly hope I can resolve this issue as early as possible.

I feel very serene today. This is a long weekend and I intend to take some good rest. I have not been keeping up well over the last one week and more importantly I was engaged in an all important assignment: the first roll out of Sun Java System Access Manager in India. I have been preparing for this for a couple of weeks and I am personally satisfied with the job I did last week. At the same time, I must also confess that this wasn’t really the best of training programs that I delivered. During the five days training program, I witnessed a couple of CPUs and monitors “blowing up’ right in front of me. The labs of this course were quite sensitive (in the sense that it worked fine only a specific version of the Solaris 10 Operating system and that we had lot of issues using certain browsers while testing the Policy Agents in the SJS Access Manager) and I found it a little difficult to manage 17 participants who sat through this course. There were moments in this training program, wherein I felt I lost control of the situation and I really hate to find myself in such situations. Nonethless, I managed to convey all that I wanted to convey to a bunch of people who travelled from various parts of this country to participate in this training program. In the next couple of days time, I would analyse the situation and probably find out different methods of improving upon the quality of the delivery. Well, life is all about accepting the mistake and eliminating them. Probably, such lab intensive course should slightly have lesser strength. Now that I have realized the situation I should able to give some valuable inputs to my Management. That would be helpful to decide upon several factors while scheduling the JES training programs. Having said all this, as usual I enjoyed every bit of my time that I spent with this people. What makes me moving is this exposure to various human beings with varying nature. For me, such an exposure is something that I rate much above the exposure to any technology.. It has been a pleasant experience to know several people and learn some good lessons from them and I am certain it shall continue to be so. Everyone would have a few things to share. And probably whatever they share would have great significance in the long run. All that is required an openmindedness to listen keenly to what others have to say.In this context my Master used to say,”Even a dead clock is correct twice a day.” So it was fun to be with another bunch of people, a proof of which you would find below:

I must express my gratitude to Edward and Gary (Sun Education Team, Australia) to provide some timely help in order to ensure that all the lab files for this course were in place and also to Manikandan to have spent some time, very patiently, on the phone throwing some light on various issues that generally pop up when we install policy agents on Web Server.

Last two weeks have been really really tough, esp after having some serious problems with my throat and chest. One of those nights I was finding it difficult t o speak and ended up spending a few minutes gargling some hot water with salt (traditional method of getting over throat problem). Another incident that is worthy of attention is a narrow escape from an accident yesterday morning. I was walking, very peacefully, towards the venue of the training and I was doing so on the footpath (obviously). And suddenly I saw a tempo traveller jumping on to the footpath from the road and the driver losing complete control over the same. I have a gut feeling that the driver dozed off in between. If it was a few meters behind, then I am sure it would have run over me. This prompted me to brood over various mysteries of life for which this is not the best time to discuss.

I don’t seem to have anything more to write for the time being. I look forward to my LVC on ZFS next week. But before that, I need some good rest. So if you have reached this far reading through the entire note, please remember that every “u” you came across in this article was produced as a result of two key strokes and not one.

Next time you see anyone of these gentlemen in the following snap, know them to be equipped with one of the Sun’s hottest technology: Sun Java System Identity Manager.

Five days of learning and good fun I had with these guys. Unlike the last batch, where we all the participants were working really hard on the lab sessions because of the very nature of the course (it was IDM 345 last week), we had some lighter sessions this week (IDM 2525). I think the difference was primarily due to the platform on which we installed the Sun Java System Identity Manager product. Last week, the participants had to work on Solaris boxes, which wasn’t really a pleasing experience for them, but this week the training was conducted on a more familiar Windows environment and hence had no major surprises during the five weeks. However, I have emphasized to them the importance of Unix and its flavours in the computing world and I am sure they would – at least one of them – would go back home and install their Intel machine with the best OS on earth. Time is not far when we would see people trying to save their notepad files using the ESC + wq! commands. I was pleased that each of my participant signed up for the SDN so that they could access the Forum on Identity Manager. Well, in case while reading through this note of mine, if my dear readers also feel the urgency to be a part and parcel of the Sun Developer Network, I hereby provide you the link for the same.

SDN Profile Management

Also, in case any of you are interested in Sun Java System Identity Manager related Forum, THIS is the place to go.

Well, I am satisfied with the way things went on all the five days; it went according to my plan and more importantly quite smoothly. And as usual there was this online test for my participants followed by a teach back session. Thank you guys for your co-operation and five valuable days with Sun Education. Good luck for your assignments. Now I am looking forward to have a very peaceful weekend and start fresh this coming week.

It was an exhausting five days of training sessions. One more Sun Java System Identity Manager Deployment training got over this evening (course coded IDM 345). I have taken quite a few batches of this course before, and all of them have been a wonderful learning experience for me as well. I love this particular course for several reasons: one of course it is conducted on my favourite Solaris Operating Environment (unlike the previous course on Sun Java System Identity Manager); and secondly it has around 32 hours of lab, which makes the trainer and the participantes occuppied all through the day on all five days of the training program. I have heard my participants murmering to me, towards the end of the training, “You are putting us under a lot of pressure.” This course covers this provisioning product of Sun in detail and is in fact designed based on Sun’s actual experience of deploying this product in an organization.

My participants were very co-operative. You would see all of ’em below in the picture (and the blurred handwriting that you would see on the while board in this picture is my handwriting and what’s written there is an XPRESS code to generate an E-mail address from the account id of a user in Sun Java System Identity Manager)

As usual, after four and a half day of exhaustive theory and lab sessions I continued to “torture” my participants by conducting an online test and asking ’em to “teach me back” the modules in the course. I must mention here that the gentlemen, whom you see in the snap took my request on “teach back” very seriously and I happened to witness some very good presentations on the course. Good job folks.

I have the same product training next week as well and the participants are from the same organization; but the course is slightly different and is very “light” as compared to the IDM 345. Before I leave, let me clarify here that Sun Java System Identity Manager is not referred to as “SIM,” as I happend to hear from several participants of mine.

Woke up quite early; at around 3:30 A.M. and had to catch a flight from Bangalore at around 6:30 A.M. The destination was Hyderabad. After one hour’s flight journey, I had my breakfast from Greenpark restaurant (a decent one I must add) along with another Sun fellow Raju Alluri and the Chairman of the Holy Mary’s Institute of Technology and Science(http://www.hitscoe.ac.in). In fact the main and the only purpose of my journey to Hyderabad was to conduct a seminar on Java at the aforesaid college. After having the breakfast we travelled towards the college. It was a good one hour drive from the Green Park restaurant. It appears to be me that the college was located in an isolated area and kept wondering how the students commuted. But then, later realized that the college had a dozen buses from the city to carry their students. We were welcomed by the Principal of the college. It was nice to be back in a college; a cherished, nourished and protected environment. Raju gave a wonderful presentation on various Sun technologies that mainly revolved around Solaris 10 and Sun servers. I felt that the initial few minutes were tough for me as the students, who attended the seminar took some time to get into the groove. Raju ran through several slides that talked about some important features of Solaris 10 (that included ZFS, DTrace, FMA and SMF). He gave some good examples of the various ranges of Server that is marketed by Sun. I heard a sigh of wonder from the audience, when Raju discussed about the 25K server. I liked the way he handled the questions from the audience (to my surprise there were lot of questions from the student community). The way he answered the questions clearly reflected the decades of experience he has in the field of Information Technology. A few questions that I am able to recollect are mentioned below:

a) Why should someone prefer Solaris/Linux to Windows?
b) On a scale of five how would rate Solaris, Linux and Windows (in terms of Virus attack?
c) How feasible is to assemble a Sun Server by buying its parts?
d) Is Open Office available for Windows operating system?
e) How would a Sun Technology help an Electrical & Electronics Engineering Student?

My session started at around 2:30 P.M. I was in no mood to have lunch. So I had only a short lunch and rushed to the venue. Students assembled by around 2:30 P.M. As usual I had no plans. But the flow I feel was good and I was personally satisfied towards the end of the presentation. My seminar emphasized on the application of Java Programming Language, its scope and more importantly on the importance of getting Sun certified. I could speak the latter aspect from my heart because I myself got certified on Java Programming Language, when I was in my 7th semester in Engineering College. And I know the level of confidence that I achieved after that. Perhaps, it is that calculated risk of bunking several sessions during my seventh semester and focussing myself on Java Technology and getting myself certified in the same laid the foundation of getting into Sun Microsystems. I know I spoke truthfully and spoke from the heart and I only hope that at least a handful of my younger friends get benefitted by the same and focus themselves for a productive career. I felt really exhausted towards the end of the presentation. Raju and myself rushed back to the City. I was early in the airport. Thank God my flight was on time.