FY ’08 Last Batch

In a couple of days time, we are entering a new Fiscal Year, which only means that the training that got over this evening was my last one in FY ’08. I’m glad that things went well, and more so because of the fact that the final training this FY happened to one of the best offered from Sun and one of my favourites. I’m heading home tonight for a couple of days, before which I would want to complete the job of posting the snap of my IDM 4485 batch – the last one, this FY.

To all my kind readers, wish you all a restful weekend.

Typing Tutorial in Ubuntu

At my home in Kerala, where my parents live, I use an Ubuntu desktop. My parents have been eager to pick up some computer lessons for long. Last week, while I was at home, they managed to learn quite a few things on using a Computer desktop that includes, but not limited to using an E-mail client, an Internet browser and to some extent an Office Suite as well. One of those things that my father found frustrating was to get used to the Computer keyboard layout. I remember facing the same problem, when I started my career in Computers. With the help of a typing tutorial software that I found then, my typing speed increased to an impressive rate. Thanks to my father’s favourite website, my search to get hold of one such typing tutorial in Ubuntu, fetched me a rather quick result. Tux Typing, which is also a part of Ubuntu repository offers some cool tutorials to help a novice get used to the Computer keyboard layout. Needless to say, my father seems quite motivated by his progress.

Let me also mention here that with the rather uncomplicated and clean User Interface in Ubuntu, the learning curve looks quite smooth. Ask my parents.

Three Days at TI

I’m feeling slightly tired. But as always, it feels good to have done a job assigned satisfactorily. Three days of sessions on Solaris 10 for the folks at TI had me gasping for breath at times, but would offer me a tight sleep tonight for sure. Let me take a moment to thank each of them in the picture above: one, for attending an ILT from Sun and two, for stepping out of TI campus to capture this moment.

I’m certain, Sun’s Eco Responsibility VP, Dave Douglas would be more than happy to see the snap above, for it sends across a signal, very clearly, on one of Sun’s many serious initiatives viz. Go Green.

IDM 345 is Not JAT

Exactly two days back, yet another IDM 345 training concluded here in Bangalore. Below this note, you would see my training participants. After sweating it out for five days, just about everyone in the group expressed to me that what they went through in five days were some real intriguing sessions on Sun Java System Identity Manager, quite unlike many other training programs that they previously attended. Of course, that’s largely attributed to the very nature of this course, containing some exhaustive lab materials, requiring every attendee to focus hard for five continuous days, which may turn out to be taxing . Afterall, it’s the first of two parts of a popular bootcamp program that existed on Sun’s provisioning tool two years back or so. Know that the sequel to this course “Sun Java System Identity Manager: Deployment Fundamentals II” coded IDM 4485 is even tougher. For all the prospective IDM 345 candidates, please note that IDM 345 or its ‘brother’ IDM 4485 is not Just Another Training, but a marathon that’s real energy sapping. But hey, it’s worth it!

Don’t want OOXML, says India, Brazil

Let me set the context here: On 2nd April 2008, ISO approves Microsoft Open Office XML (OOXML) as an ISO/IEC International Standard. India didn’t vote for it, says The ET. Dr. Deepak Phatak writes a lengthy, but stirring note on the OOXML happenings in India. Cut to present, India and Brazil file an appeal against the adoption of MS OOXML as an International Standard. The news is here.

And as all this happened, MS quietly announced its support for the ODF.

OpenSolaris Learning Resources

Now that probably you have had a chance to download OpenSolaris 2008.05, it’s time to access a set learning resources associated with it. Instead of wandering around in the world of Internet, trying to find out appropriate information on OpenSolaris and its features, access the OpenSolaris Knowledge Center directly that has everything you need to know to start using and developing on OpenSolaris, including a FREE web based OpenSolaris guide from Sun Learning Services that introduces the basic technical skills around OpenSolaris guiding you and your associates through various resources required to successfully install, use, administer, and distribute OpenSolaris.

The 500,000th Sun Certified Professional is in India

January 30 2001, on a rather hot day, I walked out of a prometric center in Kochi, India, trying to digest a triumph that I had dreamt of for a reasonable period of time. My heart had pumped fast, when the score-sheet slowly rolled its way through the printer, exposing to me, for the first time, the taste of success in a vendor certification exam. It required a rather good effort from my friend to calm me down from a state of ecstasy that I was in on that day; I was still in college then. In retrospection, I’m convinced that what happened on 30th Jan 2001 was one defining moment in my career that finally ushered me to my dream company. I’m lucky!

Now if you want to hear the story of a more lucky SCP , you might want to get in touch with Ms Swathi Reddy Potu, employee of Cognizant Technology Solutions, Chennai, who turned out to be the most wanted for being the 500, 000th Sun Certified Professional, receiving special recognitions for being so. It happened at a NIIT Test Center in Chennai. The ‘small gift’ that this candidate would receive from Sun includes:

[*] A Conference Pass to the 2008 JavaOne conference, which is held from May 6 to May 9, 2008.
[*] A pass to Java University, which is held on May 5, 2008.
[*] $1000 US prize money.
[*] Return Airfare.

So one more milestone is hit and none would get another chance to be the 500,000th SCP. But one thing I assure you, every time you succeed in a certification test, there is some element of fortune, big or small, awaiting you somewhere in this planet. So don’t hesitate; just go for it.

Let me leave you with an interesting video (~20 minutes) of an interview with the first java programmer, and hear him underscore the importance of Java certification. Look who makes a guest appearance in this video. Enjoy!

In-House Training on HA

This week I completed an in-house training on Solaris Cluster at my office here in Bangalore. For quite some time, I had kept myself away from Sun Cluster courses until recently, when I handled a cluster batch for one of our prime customers. Like I said before, the concepts of cluster are too interesting to be away from it for long. And as usual, I enjoyed five lively days of my life with the folks whom you would see in the picture below:

There was an interesting observation on day 02 of this training program. I am mentioning it here, firmly believing that it would be one useful piece of information to someone wandering around in the blogosphere. During the process of Cluster Installation, while the second node in a two node-cluster was being configured using the scinstall command, precisely at a point when the cluster name was specified, the configuration kept failing. Upon running the snoop command specifying the hostnames of both the nodes, the following error was spotted:

sunc6 -> sunc5 PORTMAP C GETPORT prog=100145 (?) VERS=1 proto=TC
sunc5 ->sunc6 RPC R (#140) x10=1209249015 can’t authenticate (unknown cause)

Thanks to the internal edition of sunsolve, we figured out that we could eliminate this error, magically, by changing the property config/local_only of the Solaris 10 Service rpcbind (FMRI: svc:/network/rpc/bind) to false.

# svccfg
svc:> select network/rpc/bind
svc:/network/rpc/bin> setprop config/local_only=false
svc:/network/rpc/bind> quit
# svcadm refresh network/rpc/bind:default
# svcprop network/rpc/bind:default | grep local_only

Things worked and I was happy about that. But then, how did this property (config/local_only) changed to true, allowing only local connections, in turn resulting in the configuration error during cluster installation? On the same day, at night I reviewed the Security By Default Design in Solaris Operating System and very soon realized that all such properties – like the one mentioned above in this paragraph – are set to true if one chooses NOT to enable network services for remote connections, a question that is asked while the installation of Solaris 10 Operating System. All was very clear. Let me leave you with an additional information revolving on the topic above: When one chooses to disable network services for remote clients in Solaris OS, the profile named generic.xml would be a symbolic link to generic_limited_net.xml found under /var/svc/profile, whereas if it is enabled, then generic.xml would be a symbolic link to generic_open.xml profile in the same directory. To know more about it, click here.

I’m taking the same course next week. Unlike the 99.999 % uptime expected from a Solaris Cluster set up, my job permits me a ‘downtime’ during the weekend and I really hope to have a peaceful and productive weekend. Wishing you all the same.

Tea Time Quiz

Very recently, I got an iPod Touch. I don’t think it needs any mentioning here about how cool that device is. Now, if you wanna get hold of one of those amazingly cool stuff from Apple, then you might want to give a try at Netbeans fun tech quiz starting this week (open only for residents of India). If not iPod touch, may be you might find yourself lucky to walk away with some other cool electronic gadgets. Go, give it a try; good luck.

A Rare Occurrence

If my job was to report news, I would have lost it by now, for who would ever like to read those news that are old. Luckily, my primary job isn’t writing and I assume I would be forgiven to have taken some time to record events as below that are not fresh.

What you see in the above snap is an occasion so rare. Recently, Sun Learning Services team here in India had an offsite meeting and that’s when most of us got to see the members of our team together, probably second or third time in an year! Some of us are on the move most of the time that it has always been a difficult task to get together for an event. That’s the case with almost all teams in Sun. So when we meet, we make sure we’ve some fun; we did have some fun this time, not to forget the serious business that we discussed for a day long. By the way, this news isn’t very old; it happened on April 3rd and 4th this year.

Now a more recent news: I was at Chennai last week, going through a five day program on Sun Java System Access Manager with over a dozen folks participating in it. See them below:

We had five busy days with a ‘teach back’ session offering a satisfying finish to the whole program.

Lastly, an awfully old news: I remember mentioning in one of my earlier posts about my journey to Mumbai to deliver a class on Sun Java System Communications Suite. Following are the people whom I met while at Mumbai for the MSG 2379 course

Today being an an auspicious day, it really feels nice to have managed to complete some pending jobs. I hope, at least on this day I would succeed in making a resolution to be a good news reporter in the days to come

On a Friday Night at 8:00 P.M.

You wouldn’t be blamed for hitting this post, hoping to read about Friday night party in one of many pubs in the city of Bangalore. I’ve friends who say, 8:00 P.M is night so young, feet so stable, mind so playful, setting a stage so perfect for some real weekend fun. Pardon me, in my tale, there isn’t any tinge of such party element. This note is still about a Friday, but not quite the usual ones with party mood painted all over it.

How could anyone party, when a workflow doesn’t quite behave the way one expects it to. You see the folks in picture below, I gave them enough heads up about the gigantic seventh module in the newly released IDM 4485 course. Yet, all of us ended up cracking workflow issues on even a Friday night, while rest others partied around. The clock stuck 8:00, when we parted on Friday, March the 14th. That’s how my first ever batch on IDM 4485 ended. It was quite an engaging week, just the way I expected it to be. And I guess none in the picture below would regret to have missed a party this bygone Friday. At least they didn’t say so.

This, perhaps, was one rare occasion when I met an audience, who had the pre-requisite of learning an Advanced IDM course, and it was such a pleasure to discuss in depth about Sun’s provisioning tool. At times, I stretched the theory sessions a bit too much, if avoided could have given my friends some more time to complete the labs. That, I will fix in my next batch for sure.

And yeah, in case you wonder, looking at the picture above, if this class happened in open air, that’s not the case. I acted a little too late to get an approval for taking my camera in, and the only way out was to bring all my participants out. After all, they deserve some fresh air after such an exhaustive lab sessions .

So that’s the story from me this week. I have landed up at Mumbai to start a training program on Sun Java System Communication Suite, which is a three day program, ensuring no one’s Friday party is spoiled this week.

Great week ahead, all of you

In My Own Backyard

No, I haven’t started getting involved in Moby; neither did Joe Diffie’s song influenced me this weekend for a walk down memory lane. To express better about a week, spent at Sun premise, talking to Sun Employees on a Sun product, I don’t think I have any better one-liners in my dictionary: I really felt as if I was in my own backyard; everything about this training last week was so comfortable, especially the friendly nature of my friends in picture below.

With this short note let me sign off now, for tomorrow I’ve a training on IDM again and it’s not happening ‘in my own backyard.’ I wouldn’t know if I would take some time to get used to the environment at a client location, but what I know clearly is that if I don’t get to sleep properly tonight, I would make a mess of my class tomorrow. So good night!

The Final Day

There is a German proverb which says, “Aller guten Dinge sind drei,” meaning, “All good things are three.” [Translate it here]. It’s no coincidence then that a good event like Sun Tech Days last only for three days. Friday, February the 29th was the final day of Sun Tech Days 2008. A memorable one indeed and as my boss reminded, for another Feb 29th like this, it would take four long years .

Third and the final day of Sun Tech Days 2008 was meant for the community. It was rightly called as the Community Day. Who else could address us better on such an important day than this man below, whom you would all know as the founder of Debian project. Why did a Linux guy join Sun? Hear it from the man himself here.

Ian clarified that what people meant when they say they want Linux is not actually Linux, but a Linux Kernel and lot of softwares on top of it. He pointed out that the idea of having a variety of distro available wasn’t really a good one and further took his discussion to mention about Sun’s decision to combine the powerful features of Solaris with good and useful utilities from other side of the world (free and open source softwares like Mozilla, Thunderbird to name a few). After joining Sun as the Chief Operating System Strategist, Ian recalls the first step taken to close Solaris ‘usability gap.’ I don’t think it would be out of context to guide you to an interview with Ian that I read an year back or so. Please click here to read it.

Ian shared with us how excited he was to hear the news about Sun’s decision of open sourcing Solaris Operating System, upon which he browsed the official OpenSolaris website only to discover how complicated a process was it to get the OpenSolaris up and running. His blog would supplement what I just mentioned above. And hence Project Indiana. Know more about it and get OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 [code named: Project Indiana] here.

Ian quickly ran through the breakthrough features in Solaris like DTrace, ZFS etc. and detailed about the new and exciting Image Packaging System.

Ian then reiterated the business model of Sun making it clear to all of us how a bunch of “Garage Engineers,” who wouldn’t have much money initially would try to get only those products (read softwares) that are freely and easily available, support their business on their own and when their business would flourish, they may possess enough money but not sufficient time to scale up their infrastructure or even to support themselves, which is when they would start turning to the appropriate vendors to support their business. Gee, that’s when Sun chips in.

Overall, this last keynote of Sun Tech Days 2008 by Ian Murdock was fantastic and offered a perfect foundation for the Community Day.

After Ian’s keynote, prizes were distributed to the Code For Freedom winners. It’s a motivation to see a lot of University students participating in such programs. They have every opportunity for going places for sure. You can find the detailed list of Code For Freedom winners here.

Matt Thompson picked up a lucky winner (by shuffling), who got to carry back the last available Java Jacket.

After this event I rushed to join my colleague Ajay Ahuja to participate in a presentation on Solaris 10 Features Workshop. It was a full day program with around 50 participants sitting through the whole day, performing hands-on practice on various features of Solaris 10. Ajay led the show and I chipped in and spoke whenever required. Overall it was a very satisfying effort and I felt happy to be a part of such an event.

More than a hundred and fifty machines were installed with Solaris 10 OS for conducting our session as well as a Web 2.0 session taught by Stacy Thurston. Alongside Stacy and Ajay, you would those gentlemen who were responsible for setting up the lab for conducting our sessions. Great job folks!

These three good days went like three hours. But I am sure the organizers of this event would have spent several sleepless nights to make this event the largest ever in the history of Sun Tech Days. Kudos to all those worked behind the scenes to make this happen. It’s sad that the next edition of this World Wide Developer Conference is one year away from now. Thankfully, I have enough recollections from the Sun Tech Days 2008 concluded at Hyderabad, the sweetness of which I intent to carry forward at least until the next Tech Days.

SELECT keynotes FROM suntechdays08 WHERE day=02

Doesn’t the title sound really weird? The gentleman in picture would disagree. Neither would he tolerate someone pronouncing MySQL as “My-See-Kwel” . Didn’t Rich Green in his keynote make it clear that MySQL is actually “My-Ess-Kyew-Ell” and NOT “My-See-Kwel”? Most of us are used to say it the ‘wrong way’ and now It’s hard to change, I know. But for this man and his mate, who opened up immense opportunities in the field of database, can’t we extend at least this small favour of twisting our tongue slightly differently? Let’s try it.

David Axmark walked quite unhurriedly on to the dais. He spoke very calmly and with minimal body movements. It was indeed a charm to watch the co-founder of MySQL speak about its history, Innovation by different means, the decision to make it freely available and finally joining Sun on Tuesday, February 26 2008. The story that David told this morning was a pleasure trip for all of us on the evolution of a popular database, used by some big names in the market. Here is a humble attempt to produce the summary of his keynote today at Sun Tech Days 2008 :

I captured the first slide that David used, titled MySQL History and I think I can safely INSERT (God I’m already influenced this db) that in here, undistorted:


* 1982: First database code is written
* 1995: First pure MySQL code
* 1996: Public release & over 1000 downloads
* 2001: ‘Real’ company started. First investment CEO joins
* 2008: Sun acquires MySQL for 1 Billion USD

David then continued his story telling us how adamant they were to stick on to the ’15 minutes rule.’ Now in case if you wonder what this 15 minutes rule is all about, this is what David would say about it: “So we worked hard to make the installation and the first use as easy as possible. We came up with the 15 minutes rule: we wanted a user to be able to have MySQL up and running 15 minutes after he finished downloading it.” [Read about it in an interview with David Axmark here].

Another one slide that David displayed during his keynote talked about the fact that Innovation in OpenSource tends to be a lots of small but very useful ideas. As an example he mentioned about how the SELECT statement made its way into MySQL, an idea came from the founder of PHP, which now has spread to other databases.

David admitted that he didn’t know much of Java and when there was need to develop a JDBC driver for mysql, they looked at various drivers developed by the University students, picked up the best one and hired the guy who created it! He went on to say how open sourcing a product helps to easily identify the right talent (may be for hiring) as against the traditional method of going through the CV, a process that would take longer time for obvious reasons.

He recalled how difficult it was to convince the market on the advantages of giving away the product for free and that too in an era when open source wasn’t a very popular affair. I felt excitement in his voice when he mentioned, because it was open source and free, they could find a lot of people using their database in a very in a very short span of time. And when such a free and open stuff works, then why think of another.

One another advantage of open sourcing a product, he says, is to have the code scrutinized by a number of Security organizations rather than one company certifying a product as secured, get instant feedbacks about the security flaws and fix it immediately. He mentioned that a large amount of code in MySQL was written by the community.

When David listed a number of programming languages that could connect to MySQL, I wished I could think of one language that I knew or heard of, which wasn’t in the list. But I doubt, coz just about any programming language on this planet can connect to this database.

David concluded his keynote telling us all how excited he was to join Sun, but at the same time didn’t conceal his anxiety of moving from a smaller firm to organization with well over 30,000 people. David’s presentation was such an informative one.

Vijay Anand, Vice President in the Server Technologies Division at Oracle Corporation, India was the next keynote speaker this morning. Tell you what, I was quite impressed with his flawless presentation and his in depth knowledge on the topic that he was handling. He had two Senior Product Managers from Oracle showcasing a demonstration of their Middleware Fusion components.

I have seen Vijay Anand speaking at last year Sun Tech Days as well. Last year, it was as if he was stuck to the podium and maintained very minimal eye contact with the audience. But this year, he walked around the stage, made proper eye contacts with the audience, paused at the right spot to induce curiosity among the audience. He had broken his presentation into several logical sections, which made really good sense and more than that he injected the right amount of information, with appropriate examples everywhere and illustrations. Thanks to Vijay Anand, I got a much better clarity on SOA.

The first few slides in Vijay Anand’s keynote talked about the Web 2.0 experience. He then discussed Mashup and the need to employ something similar even in Enterprise, which he called Enterprise 2.0. I enjoyed the way he displayed a slide building one component after the another in such an architecture and that included an ESB, BPEL, and CEP.

A demonstration of the shopping cart experience summarized the whole discussion. One of the Managers who was assisting Vijay Anand in his keynote, demonstrated the Oracle WebCenter and how an Administrator could login to it, check his E-mails, detect credit card frauds, review policies and perform so many activities which are otherwise performed in isolation. A damn neat and convenient way of brining in data from various sources to a single browser space; just the way Web 2.0 magic works. I thoroughly enjoyed what Vijay Anand spoke for about 40 minutes or so.

‘Java Jacket Give Away’ is a fun event at Sun Tech Days. A handful of delegates are given an opportunity to perform their weird talents on the stage and the audience would choose the weirdest of talent among them and winner gets to take a leather Java Jacket. I don’t think this years ‘Java Jacket Give Away’ event was as good as the one last year. The Java Jacket was given to a girl who sang a classical song. Let me reveal the pattern here: last year also it happened the same way. So make sure that you fine tune your throat before the next Sun Tech Days so that you could give yourself a good chance to carry a leather Java Jacket. This event was followed by cutting a cake, marking tenth anniversary of Sun Tech Days in India.

To all the Sun Tech Days 2008 absentees, if only you wouldn’t feel depressed, let me share with you this: the Sun Tech Days celebration this evening had some gorgeous models taking the ramp and walking in tune to the music of a DJ. It was exotic, to say the least. I know your next question, “Where are the photos?” Not answering .

Participate, Learn and Thrive

I hate people repeating themselves. This was the case even from my school going days. My teachers at the convent School always advised us; very often they uttered the same piece of advice again and again. We would pretend to listen to them and when they disappear, we would laugh over it. It took me years to realize how foolish of me to have neglected those words of wisdom from my experienced teachers. Had I listened to them, I would have done better in life. That’s okay, I can’t go back and fix my past. Mind you, I am not going to repeat those mistakes either. I still hate people repeating themselves. But I make an attempt to listen to all, listen carefully; especially to the great visionaries. Sun’s World Wide Developer Conference a.k.a Sun Tech Days is one among a handful of opportunities to hear the Executives of Sun speak.

Rich Green had lot of slides to cover in his keynote. He blamed it on the developers to have put him through a bit of trouble to talk a lot. He covered so many things in just over sixty minutes and it was done pretty fast. He had a wide range of technologies to cover in his talk that included but not limited to Java, OpenSolaris, GlassFish, Virtualization solutions and how-can-I-not-mention MySQL, which is fully and completely a part of Sun, an announcement that was made only yesterday. But for all sections of the technologies that Rich Green talked about in his presentation, he had carefully inserted a common slide (almost), which carried the a title as follows: ‘Participate, Learn and Thrive.’

I believe that slide, by and large, summarized Sun’s strategy of open sourcing all its softwares and inviting the developer community from all around the world to participate and learn. The result: when a large number of people participate, Sun gets to know what’s good in its offerings, what’s not and what’s missing. Certainly, It’s good for business; it’s good for all. Imagine if someone from a corner of this worlds can join you in solving your puzzle, wouldn’t you be able to focus more on your actual job, not re-invent the wheel, but innovate and thrive?

Rich appeared quite excited about the Virtual Box software and had one of the folks from the Engineering team take the platform to perform a demo of making use of the power of Virtualization by running Ubuntu and Solaris SXDE on a laptop ‘hosting’ Windows Vista. It would be damn convenient for a developer to test his application across various platforms using a single machine. That’s exactly what was demonstrated this morning.

One another slide that I saw this morning and can memorize is the one that lists the features of Java SE Update 10. I am going to try and list down all that I can remember from the slide that Rich used. A word of caution though: this list isn’t complete and the words used here may not be exactly the same as in the slide.

*Multimedia Support
*Easier Installation
*Faster Startup
* (Even) Faster Graphics
* Faster version detection

When Rich talked about the HD DVD format war between Sony and Toshibha which ended in favour of Sony, I wondered why he ever talked about it in a Sun event. And if you nurture similar thoughts, I recommend you read this.

There was no stopping Rich from talking passionately about Netbeans and its support for other languages like Ruby, which isn’t a language developed by Sun. Again, the point that he was trying to make clear was Sun’s willingness to offer the developers what they want. So if you haven’t tried your hand at Netbeans yet, download it now.

After the keynote, two teams of three members each, demonstrated a few cool things. As far as my thinking goes, the entire show, which lasted for about half an hour so sent at least the following messages, very clear and loud, to the audience:

* You can create some really cool games in the mobile device using the Java ME.
* JavaFX Scripting is fun and can be used to create some funky stuff. More details about JavaFX in here
* Solaris Express Edition Desktop (on supported hardware) is supercool. Believe it or not, it looks similar to the Mac OS X.
* Java Swing is NOT all that bad to create some amazing user interface.

An SMS poll was conducted to figure out which team performed the most cool demonstration. In my opinion, it all looked great.


Sun has a culture of balancing some real serious stuff with lots of fun. I’m certain it shall remain so into the future as well. While there is also lot of learning at Sun Tech Days 2008 here at Hyderabad, the organizers were very particular about the delegates having some fun. And know what, the popular band Euphoria came and rocked the Sun Tech Days venue tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised if I see some of the delegates limping their way to attend the keynote tomorrow.

People who danced to the tune of Euphoria may limp, but would still be able to make it for the keynote tomorrow. But if I keep myself awake any further to this, I would miss the second day of Sun Tech Days 2008 for sure. So, I’m leaving now. Good night!

Sun Tech Days 2008

The flying time from Bangalore to Hyderabad is around one hour. Mine is scheduled to take off from Bangalore airport at 9:30 A.M. IST today. Roughly forty eight hours forward to that, I would find myself among thousands of developers from different parts of the country, listening to the visionaries, and learning things from Sun Evangelists on emerging technologies. This is second year in a row that Sun Tech Days is happening at Hyderabad. Detailed agenda here.

Before I walk out of my home to reach the Bangalore airport in time, I’ve a job to do, which is to show you all the folks whom I met last week for an onsite training on IDM 345. I had to put my friends through a bit of trouble in getting proper approval to carry my camera in. And the outcome of their efforts to render this favour to me is what you would see below:

Wishing all my readers a good week ahead and please stay tuned for the reports from Hyderabad on the rocking events at Sun Tech Days 2008.

A Quick Note

It’s a new week and I’m about to get ready to go for an onsite training on Identity Manager in Bangalore. But before that, let me stop by you to introduce you to the folks who came for the Sun Cluster 3.2 training last week at B’lore. I was taking up a course on Solaris Cluster after a gap of 11 months or so. For that reason, last week’s training offered me a chance to brush up my basics in Cluster.

Good week ahead.

What an Engaging Week!

For a change, the flight took of at the exact time. While it landed, there were no announcements about traffic congestion in Bangalore; another rare occurrence. Mine was the very first luggage to show up at the baggage claim area; it never happened that way ever before. I felt very tranquil while I walked out of the Bangalore airport. This time, unlike many other occasions, it wasn’t a hassle to spot my chauffer holding up a placard that had my name clearly written on it. Time then, just past 10:00 P.M. on 08th February 2008. It was a perfect ending to one of the engaging weeks in my life.

It takes time to ‘tame’ fourteen people in a batch. The job becomes even more difficult if the course is lab intensive. some hold an opinion that IDM 345 could include more topics. A mention about the same is here. But I don’t think anyone in the picture below would agree to that point of view, for they spent their lovely evenings working on Identity Manager, Sun’s provisioning tool.

Everyday the sessions went on well beyond 7:00 in the evening; everyday there were heated discussions on various topics revolved around Identity Manager; and everyday all I could do in the late evening was to get back to my room and crash. Boy, it was exhausting. On top of all this, an online test was conducted on the last day of the training followed by a ‘teach back’ session, an exercise that I had forgotten to carry out last week coz of a free lunch. This time I somehow managed to resist temptation to join them for a lunch on the final day and insisted them to take the platform to teach me back one module each from the IDM 345 course.

Tell you what, It was a very satisfying sight to see everyone flawlessly expressing their understanding on this product. I had not done this exercise of ‘teach back’ for some time now and how foolish of me to have neglected it.

For several reasons my stay at Hyderabad to deliver a back to back training on Sun’s Identity Management Solution would stand as one of the exciting and memorable experiences.

Before I leave this space to get some sleep and gather some energy for ES 345 starting tomorrow, I must mention here my gratitude to the folks at Sun Learning Center, Hyderabad for offering me great hospitality and for taking me for lunch everyday at Malgudi.

Interested in a Solaris 10 New Features Workshop?

Should you find yourself interested in attending a hands on session on Solaris 10 New Features, visit us @ Sun Tech Days ’08. To know more on this workshop, click here.

On the other hand, if you are a Web 2.0 enthusiast, you might want to attend a session by Stacy Thurston, Community Advocate with Sun Learning Services. To know more on what is covered by Stacy and what you can take back, visit here.

To find more details about Sun Tech Days 2008 at Hyderabad, India, browse this page.

You all have a great day

Hyderabad Trainings

In a few minutes, the clock would strike 12, marking a new day. It’s Monday again and it’s all set for me to take the platform for another training here at Hyderabad. The venue remains unchanged. Some participants from the last week’s training would turn up for this as well. The training is on Sun’s provisioning tool.

But before all that, check out the batch photograph of AM 3480 class concluded on 01/Feb/2008, here at Hyderabad.

Thanks folks for the lunch on the final day; more so for choosing Sun. Wish you all good luck!

Oh, For a Hassle Free First Day!

You wouldn’t have seen me smiling like this in the batch photograph of PTL 4310 class that happened last week in Mumbai, had the events on day 01 and day 02 sustained itself in the subsequent days of the training. I am kind of used to the first day problems in a classroom: be it a hardware issue or an incomplete OS install. Last Monday it was a combination of both. And the result: none could install the Portal Server on Day 01. I had all my participants looking at me with an expression of helplessness and a huge question mark which read ‘what next?’

Cut to day 02: I spoke to them at length during the first half and sent them out for a walk after lunch, requesting them not to turn up for an hour or so. The technical support folks at Pragathi Software were kind enough to download and make a few set of Solaris 10 CDs, and I walked around the classroom performing a media installation of Solaris 10 OS on all machines. Why not Jumpstart? I felt very lazy to set up one. Moreover, it was only a matter of installing six boxes. And the ending of the whole story: well, it’s a happy one.

Vikram, my PTL 4310 participant used his mobile to picture all of us while I demonstrated the first successful Portal Server Installation in the class. After all the hassles that we went through on the day 01 and part of day 02, this moment was certainly worth capturing.

Tomorrow it’s another ‘First Day’ for me here at Hyderabad. Though I don’t expect a replay of Mumbai events here at Hyderabad, I guess I’m prepared for those surprise elements on the first day of training.

You all have a good week ahead.

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IDM 4484 Last Batch?

Let me post the first entry for CY’08 sharing a news about the release of an exciting Sun course: IDM 4485 (Sun Java System Identity Manager: Deployment Fundamentals II) replaces Identity Manager Advanced Deployment Course, coded IDM 4484. The websites are not updated yet with the information about this course, but know that this course is ready to be delivered. E-mail Sun Learning Services for more details.

The key highlights of IDM 4485 includes:

*It is a five day course unlike its predecessor (IDM 4484)
*Based on Identity Manager 7.1
*Labs use the up-to-date version of the MySQL and Tomcat as a base
*ActiveSync labs reworked to use Identity Attributes (Metaview)
*New lab that demonstrates ActiveSync using the process mode
*Self-Service labs updated to utilize End User Authorization
*Lots of refinements and additional explanations

The bullet points above are taken out, undistorted, from a slide that David Goldsmith and David Awad prepared during a call with the World Wide IDM Instructors. The above information is of course useful only if you have had a chance to go through the IDM 4484 contents.

While the information about IDM 4485 gets to the Sun Education websites, let me mention here the pre-requisite for attending this course:

To succeed fully in this course, students should have successfully completed IDM-345 Sun Java(TM) System Identity Manager: Deployment Fundamentals. In addition, a minimum of six weeks of Identity Manager deployment experience is highly recommended.

I felt the need to emphasize here the pre-requisite of IDM 4485 and more importantly mark it in a colour bearing the longest wavelength so that its importance sink in to the prospective IDM 4485 customers. I don’t know about other parts of the globe, but in India there is a tendency among the customers to bypass the fundamental training on Identity Manager (IDM 345) and jump straight into a tough course, putting all the participants in a very difficult situation. I have told this before, I am telling this again and I shall continue to utter this, for I consider it my duty to do so. We certainly don’t intend to question the capacity of those who choose to take up IDM 4485 directly, but would want everyone attending IDM 4485 go back from the Sun Classrooms with an unwavering confidence to work on this product. Very clearly, that can only happen if they meet the pre-requisite for attending this course.

Release of IDM 4485 leads me to believe that the training that I took up last week for a huge batch in Chennai was perhaps the last ILT on IDM 4484. Have a look at the batch photograph below:

I am not in a good state of health. Looks like an irritating throat infection is going to stay with me for a few more days. Hoping for a faster recovery.

Have a good week ahead .

The Last Batch – Y ’07

With only a handful of hours left in Year 2007, it’s perhaps a little too late to introduce you to set a people whom I met at Mumbai for Sun’s Portal Server Training last week. But of course, I don’t want to carry forward that task to the forthcoming year.

The initial hiccups related to the infrastructure aside, I managed to produce some flawless sessions last week, ending the last batch of Year 2007 on a satisfactory note. The highly cooperative and generous audience for this training certainly contributed to its success. So here is my last batch of Y ’07

Once again, wishing you all a Happy New Year 2008!.

Happy New Year 2008 [In Advance]


From: R Rajesh
Date: 28 December 2007 4:55:58 PM GMT+05:30
To:All My Training Participants, Relatives, Friends, Colleagues and Kind Blog Readers
Subject: Happy New Year 2008 [In Advance]

Dear All,

This time of the year, every year for the last few years, a sense of restlessness dominates in me to reach out to my friends, acquaintances and relatives alike to pass on the seasons best greetings. I do remember writing a similar note in the past, around this time last year and I know a few out there who received it, read it and replied to it. Clearly, I am running myself into the risk of repetition.

But then if pattern of events in life – both joyous and grievous – can repeat itself year after year, in spite of all our celebrations at the moment when the New Year would meet the old one, why would I ever hesitate to show up and speak out the same old thoughts.

While we pull ourselves together to flip through a brand new calendar, hoping happiness, peace and prosperity all the way along, this may well be an appropriate occasion to sit back, contemplate on the path trodden during the past dozen months or so, and may be take suitable measures to do the productive things better, put a full stop to all activities that are useful to none, and finally pray and hope for the possession of a stable mind, capable of absorbing all those episodes in life that are generally beyond the control of human beings like you and me.

Personally, I wish to take advantage of this moment of celebrations to stop by each one of you, to let you know how much thankful I am for all your valuable contributions to my triumphs and in all the milestones that I touched. Thank you!

As you read this note, probably there is an extravagant New Year party waiting for you. I wish the enthusiasm, the energy with which we step into one more New Year in our life and this celebration mood that we’re in this moment last throughout the year and make us capable to treat every single day as a New Year, full of positive resolutions.

Happy New Year 2008!

affectionately yours,

–R Rajesh

Late Arrival in Mumbai

Stationed in the fourth floor at Grand Hyatt, Mumbai and it is high time that I occupy some space on the bed to get some sleep. Tomorrow I’m kick starting a rather big batch for the Sun’s Portal Server Course, coded PTL 4310. All of a sudden we have started to get continuous requests for training on this product. I think the customers are getting wiser .

The hotel premises are decorated beautifully, marking the celebration of holiday season. I casually asked Altaf, who was at the reception how the Christmas season was looking and he said, “Oh yeah, looks like we are on a roll.” It shows.

Season of Joy

A couple of days from now, it’s Christmas, which many of us consider to be a festival that would invoke in all a feeling of great pleasure and happiness. No wonder, why even a theory oriented class like DIR 2217 turned out to be a fun-filled and pleasurable experience for me; much in contrast to my initial impression about its delivery. Let me get this straight across to you: this class is all about Analysis and Planning before deploying Sun’s Directory Server, and the last thing an Instructor would expect in such a theory intensive session is a class full of emotionless faces.

But it’s Christmas season and it brings joy and energy; or at least it brings you in the company of some bubbly folks, just the way it happened to me in the bygone week. And the four days of training, it just flew. Wouldn’t you echo my thoughts about such a joyful class once you take a look at the photo below, which has a sense of joy painted all over it?

Well, in the process, if you ask me, if they learned something, I’ll leave it to them to have the final say. But for me, barring a few fumbles here and there, this class clearly announced the arrival of yet another season of joy.

Happy Holidays

AM 3480 Course – WW Schedule

My good friend David has taken the pain to put the World Wide Schedule for the AM 3480 (Sun Java System Access Manager course) up on his blogs. If interested in knowing the information about the Access Training Program in different locations across the globe, click here. Kudos to David for all his efforts to get the training information through to a larger audience out there.

A Fortnightly Bulletin??

Is my blog mutating to something like a fortnightly bulletin? It appears to me that I am getting into a habit of showing up on this blog on a fortnightly basis, which is bad . I wasn’t all that busy, but then I don’t think I had any significant content to publish on this blog. But today I am going to break my silence, mainly for two reasons:
One, I would like to invite you to watch the Sun Net Talk published about the Sun’s expanded alliance with Deloitte on Identity and Access Management Solution:

Sun and Delottie: Unlocking the Value of Identity and Access Management with Enterprise Roles

Second important task I would wish to perform through this post is to introduce you to my new friends. Well, that’s quite a few of them this week. And I met them for a training on Sun Java System Portal Server . It was an open batch, comprising of people from five different organizations, who traveled from various parts of this country to Bangalore.

When fifteen people turn up for a “level four” training like Sun Java System Portal Server Customization (PTL 4310) it certainly calls for some energy sapping sessions, touching fourty hours. But then, in restrospection, it feels great to have spoken at length to a full class. Without any more talking, let me put their picture up here (unfortunately, one participant was left out of this photograph coz of a medical emergency):

A general feedback has been about the version of the Portal Server used for this training program. It’s not the newer version that we’re using for this specific program. And unfortunately I don’t have any news about the likelihood of having a course on the newer version of Portal Server in the very immediate future. But I shall be posting about it as and when there is an official announcement about the same. But for now, here are a few tips to those plan to take up a Sun Course on the Sun Java System Portal Server:

* It wouldn’t be a bad idea to check out the objectives, goals and pre-requisite of this training program from the official website of Sun before attending this training.
* At least for the time being, be prepared to learn about an old version of the Sun Java System Portal Server and not the newest version.
* It would be an added advantage, if some working knowledge on Solaris (Unix) is gained before sitting through this training as most of the labs are performed on Solaris OE.
* An overall idea about the positioning of the components in the Identity Management Suite like the Access Manager and Directory Server would throw more clarity on the concepts of Portal Server.

I am sure my friends would agree to at least a couple of points mentioned above. All the same, I wish to mention here that it was nothing short of a memorable and exciting week for me with this rather huge batch.

One of these days, my boss introduced me to Matson Sparling. He came down to India for a very serious reason (not revealing). My boss brought him to the Sun Learning Center in Bangalore and Matson had a short conversation with my portal server participants, which was a very kind gesture. I am sure the inputs that he got from the “Sun Learners” would help him and his team to improve upon various aspects on the offerings from Sun Learning Services. So be it.

I managed to persuade them to pose for a photograph. Matson, thanks for spending some valuable time with me, indulging in a serious conversation.

Last Fifteen Days

It has been fifteen days since I ‘absconded’ from this location on web. I was at Hyderabad. At a client’s location. It was fun to have spent my time at Hyderabad discussing on Sun’s Identity Manager and Access Manager back to back with the folks whom you would see in the picture below:

Some believe that the IDM 345 course could cover a little bit more topics than what it has in the current curriculum. Probably, that opinion holds good if the batch size is as small as this. But in a batch of ten, wouldn’t it cause a bit of trouble to cover a wide range of topics on IDM? My dear kind reader, if you have come for an IDM 345 training from Sun in the past, spare me your thoughts on this so that the content developers get a good picture.

What I liked the most at the site was their clean text book installations of Solaris 10 on x86 desktops. Such a neat lab set up gave me no room for any concern whatsoever. I must mention that I felt happy to have worked with some professional people out there during the pre-training activities right through to the end of the training program. And the team dinner that they arranged on the penultimate day of this program offered a perfect finish to the whole activity.

Before I leave, one happy news: I am informed that I am a recipient of the honourable mention award for best blogging during the CEC 2007 that concluded in Las Vegas on October/10/2007. Boy, doesn’t that make me a happy blogger!

All, have a great week ahead

A Flying Visit

Alright; it’s high time that I show up to tell you what I’ve been upto. I have enough work (I swear); and I am lazy. Together, these two factors kept me away from blogging. That’s no excuse, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to mention it here.

I was at Delhi last week, going through a training on Sun Java System Directory Server. It was a rather small batch. As a matter of fact, some of the folks who were nominated for this training pulled out at the last moment because of some urgent project requirements. So I ended up handling one of those small batches. You could see my DIR2337D friends below:

I must publicly apologize to one of the folks in the picture above for not being able to raise the standards of my training delivery to his expectations, as indicated by the Education Post Event Survey form. I would find out from him what went wrong this time and would certainly take corrective measures to improve upon my delivery skills. But otherwise, things went rather smoothly.

I had also taken up a T3 (Train The Trainer) program for our partner Instructors on Solaris Courses(SA 210 S10 & SA 230 S10) during the period 29/Oct/2007 – 02/Oct/2007. Wouldn’t it be unfair if I don’t post their snap here. So here it is:

Right then, this was a whistle-stop for me. I hope to be back soon, in a much better state of mind, and post something useful..

FAM @ CEC 2007

In India, there are many who refer to this product as SIM and this product as SAM. So if you are one among them, you would be led to think of FAM as another in the lot. May be you’re right, but that’s a story for another day. For now, let me speak of about Five Adorable Moments @ CEC 2007 in Las Vegas.

* Marc in his speech passionately told, ” I’ve been at Sun 16 years now, and we’ve never had a lineup like this. I could not be more optimistic about this year, next year, and the next several years.”
* Emphasizing on the importance of listening to the customer requirements, Andy Bechtolsheim said in his presentation, ” For a change, we listened to these requirements.” This invoked a round of applause from the audience.
* Dave Douglas said, “You(audience) have a really bad reputation.” He said that he was given an idea by his colleagues about the audience sending feedbacks, questions and comments instantly, about the presentations. He then added, “Wait a minute, I am the VP of Eco Responsibility, I can fix this.” I heard a loud laughter and then I noticed this slide.
* Jonathan Schwartz in his keynote showed his favourite photograph and told us, “I see a Solaris download even in Antartica. And we don’t have a sales force there.
* In his inspiring keynote, Schwartz pointed at the Servers kept to his right and said, ” The most valuable asset is not this, but this (pointing to the audience).” Boy, doesn’t such words invoke goose-flush in all. I am sure it did, else there wouldn’t have been a heavy applause right after such a thunderous statement.

October 10 2007, Wednesday

The date on the title of this post is history. But the memories of this day, the concluding day of CEC 2007, are still vivid.

The cab driver started a friendly conversation with me. Foolish me; I don’t recollect his name any more. That’s the problem if you postpone scribbling diary entries. The destination was the Best Buy. I wanted to pick up a few electronic gadgets for my people back home. Amongst several things that the cab driver asked me, here’s one that invoked curiosity in me:

Cab Driver: So you must be a business man, to come to a place like Las Vegas?
Myself: No, I work with Sun Microsystems and I am here for a conference. Have you heard of Sun?
Cab Driver: Oh yeah, they are the rival of Microsoft. Aren’t they?

I don’t quite remember how that topic ended and how our conversation drifted to various other topics before I found myself at my destination. But I do remember having so many flashy thoughts right after my cab driver made the aforesaid comment.

Is Sun really a rival of Microsoft? Not really. A healthy competitor? May be. The whole conversation about the relationship between Sun and Microsoft appeared relevant to me that afternoon, because in the first half of the day – the concluding day of CEC 2007 – I saw this personality seated among a few other distinguished gentlemen on the CEC stage, discussing about the Next Generation Data Center. Jim was the moderator for the event and the following were the other gentlemen who were participating in the event:

*Eric Billingsley
*Charles Bess
*Jeff Routledge

The discussion on the Next Generation Data Center was followed by Don Grantham addressing the crowd gathered for the CEC 2007. His energy, enthusiasm and charm is commendable.

Earlier that day,I attended the All Hands Meeting for Sun Learning Services, hosted by Dr. Karie Willyerd. She decided against using presentations and gave us all a chance to discuss about various aspects: both in context of CEC 2007 and some outside it. The discussion on the CEC 2007 mainly revolved around thanking all the crews, who worked to make the event successful and also discuss pros and cons of all the breakout sessions that happened at CEC 2007 and the steps that needs to be taken to improve the quality of the programs in the coming year. Dr. Karie Willyerd and the SLS leadership team took some time to thank Kate & Co. for all the hard work that they did for the CEC 2007. That was a nice gesture and it was great to see the SLS crews for CEC 2007 lined up together in a platform. Sun Learning Services, had a major presence in this years Customer Engineering Conference, clearly indicated by the stunning statistics of well over 450 CEC attendees appearing for various Sun Certification Exams in a span of 96 hours or so.

All in all, it was a remarkable event. CEC 2007, its last day and other related events may be a history now, but it shall remain in the basket of my memories, bearing a label, “High priority.”

The Leopard is Arriving

In just under a few hours, the new version of the Mac OS (10.5), popularly known as the Leopard would be launched in the market. I happened to see some of the previews on this new version of the Mac OS X and as expected, this one offers some really really cool features. Some features, however, requires additional accessories like an external hard disk, Apple Remote Control etc.

General requirements and additional requirements for installing Leopard can be found @ the following location:

Click here to view the System Requirements.

The new features of the Mac OS X Leopard can be viewed @ this location.

Canon PowerShot SD1000 Support in Ubuntu 6.06

When my cousin plugged his brand new Canon PowerShot SD1000 on his PC running Dapper Drake, the autoimport failed with the following error:

An error occurred in the io-library (‘Could not claim the USB device’): Could not claim interface 0 (Operation not permitted). Make sure no other program or kernel module (such as sdc2xx, stv680, spca50x) is using the device and you have read/write access to the device.

After googling for a while, the following is what I had to perform on his PC to get the autoimport feature working for him in Ubuntu 6.06.

———————————————————————–
jithu@jithu-desktop:~$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 6.10 n l
jithu@jithu-desktop:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 016: ID 04a9:314f Canon, Inc.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
jithu@jithu-desktop:~$ sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libgphoto2.rules
###Add the following line at the appropriate location in the above-mentioned file. The numbers 04a9 and 314f are obtained from the lsusb output.
SYSFS{idVendor}==”04a9″, SYSFS{idProduct}==”314f”, MODE=”0660″, GROUP=”plugdev”
jithu@jithu-desktop:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart
———————————————————————–

My hope is that someone out there could save their precious time with this small piece of information.

Cool Gilles

Congratulations Gilles Gravier! Please know that I am saying this standing a bit backward in time on the concluding day of Customer Engineering Conference 2007. I felt Gilles’ presentation at the CEC 2007 deserved appreciation and he was rightly judged as one of the two best speakers of CEC 2007 on Day 02.

We could all pick up from the atmosphere, after his presentation, that everyone out there who listened to him, without exception, enjoyed his talk thorougly. At least that’s what the long lasting ovations after his speech suggested me. Let me share with you what I liked the most about Gilles’ session:

* Firstly, Gilles had a casual conversation with us before his actual presentation, which made all of us feel very comfortable and this particular act of his, I am sure, would have helped him get the pulse of the audience.
* It wasn’t a mere slideshow. He showed us only a couple of slides and then went on to perform ten cool demonstration, some of which produced “wow” from at least a few of us.
* Gilles’ session was more of a dialouge than monologue and his eye contact with the audience was very critical.
* The contents of his presentation, unlike many other sessions, wasn’t rocket science, fit perfectly in the allotted time and was appropriate for a large variety of audience with different bandwidth.
* More importantly, we came out of the venue with an unfamiliar feeling of confidence that would help us approach the customers, community and comrades to speak about the cool features of Solaris 10 OS and it adoption.

Well, all I can say is, “Cool job, Gilles.”

Good Morning Bangalore

After a week full of fun, excitement and learning at CEC 2007 held at Las Vegas, I have hit Bangalore this morning. Naturally, one would expect me to be feeling happy to have reached home. But that’s not really the case. After I landed in Bangalore, it was informed to me and a few others that our baggages were missing . They have promised us to deliver it in a days time. And I really hope they do it. Before I travelled to US, there were many who talked to me about the baggage losses in British Airways. Not that I discarded their advice completely, but then I thought it would never happen to me (Why am I thinking nonsense?). And it happened.

I have several things to write about CEC 2007 that concluded on 10th October 2007. I shall be doing that in a couple of days or so. This evening I am traveling back to my home town to join the preparation for an important family function the coming week. Officially, I am on leave. But I might come online occasionally. So please send in those E-mails, but then you may not get a reply promptly. Please bear with me for that.

Well, my weekend did not start on a very promising note. But I wish all of you have a restful weekend

Breakout Sessions at CEC 2007 [Day 02] – Some Notes

[Published on 10/October/2007 at 3:20 A.M. localtime]

Session 1: Some Cool Things Available on Solaris, Thanks to Sun’s Open Source Activities
Speaker: Gilles Gravier
When I stepped into the venue to attend this session, I thought I got it wrong. There was music in the background and I felt I landed up in a wrong location. But then soon realized that Gilles was playing that cool music in Rhythm Box on Solaris Nevada Build 74 (Does it work??? Yes it does and I saw it working. Gilles’s approach of taking up the session in the form of demonstration, rather than a more slide show was commendable and the audience responded to it positively; quite evident from the fact that the applaud after the end of session lasted for a few seconds! Honestly, I was stunned to see many of the cool things working on Solaris. May be, I might consider going back home and install Solaris Nevada (build 74) on top of the existing Ubuntu installation. Believe, Solaris is catching up for sure. Now, the following are what Gilles demonstrated to us (and it worked).

(1) Native support (joint work with Logitech and the author of Video4Linux2) of USB-VC webcams (QuickCamTeam & USB WebCams at OpenSolaris). Gilled showed us the webcam working in Ekiga.
(2) Compiz (3D Effects on the Desktop). Download the script from this location, install it and it works. Looks cool.
(3) Video Conferencing on Ekiga, and making phone calls using VOIP with Skype(not open source) in a BrandZ (opensource) zone.
(4) Building open source applications (PIGDIN, OTR, CUPS, VIM, SUDO and more) easily using “./configure;make;make install.” Gilles thanked Sun Studio for this, for he says this was a suffering some three months back or so.
(5) USB attached cell phones as modems. There are a couple of files that you might want to keep in mind here (/etc/ppp/evdo-chat and /etc/ppp/peers/evdo).
(6) Google Earth runs on Linux, but not on Solaris (Gilles demonstrated this in the BrandZ though)
(7)Gobi7 SunRay laptop with VPN (not open source, but still way cool). More information about it here

An interesting piece of information from Gilles:” If you boot a Linux distro, by the time you boot to the login manager, you see more codes written by Sun than anyone else. Sun is one who wrote the maximum amount of code for GNOME.“

It is interesting to know that immense amount of development is happening in the field of OpenSolaris to make it more userfriendly. Way to go!

Session 2: Solaris Adoption in a GEM
Speakers: Franz Haberhauer & Uwe Strahlendorf
I don’t know if the very nature of this topic gives me enough freedom to publish the contents of this particular website to the public. Well, I don’t really want to violate this.

During the presentation, Franz suggested us a book titled Crossing the Chasm authored by Geoffrey A Moore. You might want to pick this up and read it know more on Technology adoption. And by the way, this book is available as an E-book at Netlibrary.

Session 3: A Biometric Authentication Integrated with JES in a systemic Security Architecture
Speakers: Domenico Minchella & Giuseppe Russo
Honestly, I couldn’t quite digest the first half of this session, as the topic covered was something that I wasn’t really familiar with. The speaker continuously emphasized on the security features of Solaris 10 Operating System, which they recommended to their clients at Italy. Towards the end of this session, they demonstrated a finger print authentication using Access Manager Interface and a custom authentication module. The token card that they used had a finger print reader in-built into it. The demonstration was really cool I must say.

I have been getting many queries on the biometric authentication using Access Manager, probably now I have some answers to those queries. I’m quite clear about the flow of the process.

Session 4: Logical Domains: How to install, configure, user and position them
Speaker: Jeff Savit
Jeff appeared quite dynamic. The way he dealt with the questions that popped up from the audience and the way he made the difference between different virtualization solutions (like zones, VMWare, LDoms), clearly demonstrated his authority on this subject. The following is what Jeff said on one of his slides:

How to create Logical Domains?
(a) Firstly, get T1000 or T2000 servers.
(b) Install Solaris 10 u3, build 8 or later
(c) Update firmware to support LDoms
(d) Reboot the system
(d) Install the appropriate packages and patches.
(e) Ensure that the necessary services are running.
(f) Create LDom
You are done!

I know it was a very high level, shall I say, checklist in creating an LDom. Of course there is more to it and some information you may find it here as well. Look out for me, it appears to be a good virtualization solution.

Session 5: Dynamic Resource Pools in Solaris 10
Speaker: Scott Dickson
Scott helped me clear some of my basic doubts about the man behind the curtains for the Dynamic Pools in Solaris – poold. It is a big Java program responsible for making decision about allocation of CPUs in pools. That’s to say the least. A few poins about poold that I can remember from Scott’s discussion are jotted down below:

*Each move (processor) is tested to see if it might help, or whether the move helped in the past.
* If poold decides that objectives aren’t met, it models possible configuration changes that might meet objectives or show improvement.
* A single, best move is selected and carried out.
* Only one processor is moved at a time.

What was most amazing to me was the information on the improvement in pool allocation for a zone in Solaris 10, from Update 4 (8/07 Release) onwards. Scott quickly ran through the following snippet:

# zonecfg -z z1
zonecfg:z1>add dedicated-cpu
zonecfg:z1:dedicated-cpu>set nepus=2-6
zonecfg:z1:dedicated-cpu>end
zonecfg:z1>commit
zonecfg:z1>exit
#

The simple commands above would create a processor set and associate the pool with the processor set!! Isn’t this amazingly simple. I am sure people who have done the same thing, in the earlier releases of Solaris 10, using the poolcfg command would agree with me completely. From now on, no processor set configuration, no pool association; a completely hassle free configuration. I am sure it is going to get better.

Thanks Scott for such an enlightening session at CEC 2007.