[Published on 10/October/2007 at 02:15 A.M. local time]

Thank You!

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[Published on 10/October/2007 at 02:00 A.M. localtime]

We are told that the number of Sun Certifications completed during the CEC 2007 event (two days, mind you) touched around 267 and is still growing! That’s amazing statistics! If you are one among of those who haven’t done it yet, don’t wait any longer, do it right away. There are folks who completed four certification exams (Glenn Brunette & Richard Wright) and one gentleman named Hugo Raposo scored the maximum (a perfect 100%). Congratulations folks!And all the best if you plan to do more of those

Some of them (see the picture below) managed to win themselves an Ultra Sparc T2 System each!!! Aren’t they the lucky ones.

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[Published on 10/October/2007 at 1:40 A.M. local time]
She gave you this ‘heads-up’ and if still you didn’t watch, then that’s your problem. We the lucky ones got to see it live at Paris Hotel in Las Vegas on the second day of CEC 2007. Sun’s New Ultra Sparc T2 Systems are launched. John Fowler, Andy Bechtolsheim and Rick Hetherington, after which John Fowler gave us details about so many benchmarks. Those are figures and it wouldn’t show up in my mind, when the clock on my desk display an insane hour. I am sure that would be avaible in the appropriate website for reference. As sleep is slowing getting better off me, coupled with the fact that I am feeling a bit lazy to write anything, let me rely on the old proverb which says, “Pictures speaks a thousand words.”

Out of the several messages that popped up for John Fowler & Co. after this product launch, Andy read a particular question which said, “When is Sun planning to come up with a T2 based laptop?” Though is invoked laughter in all us, there was a tinge of seriousness in the way Andy reacted to it and I am sure I would be forgiven to imagine that probably the great Andy would sit on this weekend and design a laptop based on T2!! We have all read and heard about Andy. Tell me, isn’t he capable of doing that?

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[Published on 10/Oct/2007 at 12:50 A.M. local time]

Came the hour, came the man; with an enigmatic smile, walking briskly across the stage, commenting on the T shirt that the CEC host had worn, he addressed all of us on the second day of the Customer Engineering Conference 2007. Many would have read his thought provoking blogs, but many wouldn’t get a chance to see him speak in stage. As expected, his speech had some elements on the vision of Sun, some elements on the its direction, some elements of motivation and more importantly some elements of humour. No wonder he bears the highest office in Sun.

Johnathan Schwartz’s speech revolved around three questions, three questions that he answered himself. The three questions that he put forward to us pops up from the fact that Sun spends a few billion dollars on Research and Development and the obvious questions that Johnathan displayed on his slide were:

* In What (are we investing)?
* For whom?
* How?

What was more attention grabbing was his answer to the second question, wherein he put a slide on the screen with a photograph of Richard Stallman on the left hand side and the logos of some corporate customers on the right hand side. He then asked us all if we paid for Intellectual properties while at College, and none of us had a positive answer there. He then went on to throw more clarity on the two distinct markets that Sun is serving viz community(who will not pay for the softwares) and corporate customers (who is more than willing to pay for the softwares, for the downtime of their business dwarfs the services fee charged) and the role that each of them would play in having a positive impact on Sun’s growth. Jonathan then showed us his favourite photo, more favourite than his family photo and told us he could spot a Solaris user in Antartica(!) without having a Sales force there. That’s precisely what a community involvment can do to a software. Johnathan was also interested in showing us the pink dots for the other softwares as well.

Johnathan answered a few questions that showed up on the web page as well as a couple of them asked by the audience. Needless to mention, it was a great session.

Earlier today, Dave Douglas, Vice President, Eco Responsibility made his entry into the stage and spoke at length on the measures that we are taking at Sun to ensure that we don’t spoil the planet that we are in. He, being the VP of Eco Responsibility could show us slides like this, ensuring that none of us sent a feedback about his presentation(a fear that he admitted)By the way, please click right here to read Sun’s 2007 CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) Report.

Among several things that Dave discussed, he emphasized a lot on “eco friendly” features of Sun’s Open Work Practice such as keeping a lot of people out of the road by encouraging them to work from their homes (Ask me, I love the idea of working from home). Sun’s products, as you would know, are also increasingly becoming environmental friendly.

Well, do you know that there is an open source tool help participants assess, track, and compare business energy performance, share proven best practices to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and encourage sustainable innovation. Well, I didn’t know until Dave shared it with us this morning. If you want to know about it, go for it and save our Earth.

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The central theme of the second day at CEC 2007 is Our Earth. The beautiful home of ours would turn out something like this if we do nothing about it. Sun is doing all that is possible to maintain an eco friendly environment and that attempt shall continue in all directions, in full swing. Let’s Go Green, for us and for the sake of generations to follow.

If you are a CEC attentee and you are keen to attempt any of the Sun Certification Exams absolutely free of cost, please consider stepping into the Bronze 4 of Ballys Hotel. If you don’t have a prometric id, create one there, the process is absolutely hassle free. Good luck and good day

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A split personality disorder would have probably helped me sneak into different rooms to attend as many technical sessions as possible, perhaps simultaneously! I know that’s asking for too much. But then technical sessions that induced interest in me clashed and I had to drop one or two of them for the other. A few hundred hours of sessions on various technical topics are happening in Paris and Ballys, spread over two days. I chose a set of them from the schedule builder tool that was there on the offical CEC 2007 website and here is a summary about some of the sessions that I attended today.

Session 1: DTrace & Java: Spanning the Observability Gap
Speakers: John Haslam & Simon Ritter
The one-liner summary of this session would say, “Using DTrace to look at Java Applications.” It appears that the speakers were misinformed about the venue and they had to run around figure out their actual venue for the talk. There was a slight delay in starting up the program. I wanted to know more on DTrace and that is why I chose to sit through this session. Well, this session wasn’t fully about the DTrace tool, but about leveraging the power of DTrace to observe/debug a Java Application. Do I didn’t fully get what I actually wanted. But to say the least, I got some of my DTrace fundamentals straight after attending this session. The presenters repeatedly pointed out that the tools like Netbeans do have a powerful profiling mechanisms to count the number of methods and objects in an application, but was limited to that and could not cut across the entire software stack and reach the Kernel to figure out what Kernel is doing when an application is running. They demonstrated this feature by running a game and occasionally showing us the piece of code written in D script to scrutinize this application.

Another interesting aspect of this session was the introduction to DTrace grapher. I had not seen something of that sort before. The presenters pulled up a program to create rectangular boxes, and each attempt to create a rectangular box, resulted in a massive amount of calls in the Kernel. The same was displayed in something like a state transition diagram, which looked quite scary. Simon showed us a printed copy of one such diagram, which spanned a chart, bigger than a architectural plan for a star rated hotel (a little bit of exaggeration, I hope is forgiven)!!

Session 2: How to take advantage of the Dynamic Reconfiguration of the Sun SPARC Enterprise Mx000 (OPL) Servers
Speakers: Stephane DUTILLEUL & Ramon Garcia
This was of course a session that wasn’t in my agenda. I got inside the venue for this session, only because I had some time at hand before I attended my next session. I didn’t have much background on the High End Servers and for that reason, it was difficult for me to pay undivided attention to what the speakers had to say. From whatever I understood, the following is what I inferred: Dynamic Reconfiguration is not so pretty in Mx000 in this point of time, but it is likely to get better in the next few weeks. I know this information isn’t going to help any, but I am afraid that’s all I can provide from my side.

Session 3: Directory Server 6- Tips, Tricks and Secrets
Speakers: Ludovic Poitou & Terry Sigle
This was a session that I was looking forward to attend and I must say that I was very satisfied with the contents of this session. The presenters dealt the session with extreme professionalism and was very careful in discussing the basics about the Directory Server before getting into its internal. And if you want to verify my attendance for this session, you could check out the blogs of one of the presenters here and you would see me in the photograph

A few key points that I would wish to share here is that the DB technology underneath the Directory Server is sleepy cat (precisely the version 4.4), which is open source (Berkeley DB) database, now acquired by Oracle(an attempt to access the site sleepycat.com would redirect one to the Oracle website). It, however, continues to be OpenSource.The speakers referred about a tool db_stat which is a sleepy cat utility, but unbundled with the Directory Server EE 6.0. If required, this could be downloaded and used. A word of caution: the version of this has to be same as that of the DS. I recall the command syntax as:
db_stat -N -d filename

Some other recommendation that the presenters mentioned in their presentation include:
* When you design the schema, make the attribute name short
* Spaces in the DN (after each comma) are not recommended though it an accepted syntax
*Avoid duplications with different representation
*XML and non-ASCII values are base 64 encoded (+33% in size)

I felt the executive summary of the session on Directory Server 6.0 this afternoon was: For a successful deployment of Directory Server, understanding its internals is a must. And this session certainly provided some valuable pointers to achieve that objective. Should you feel interested in attening an SLS course on Directory Server, please go through the course description and contents here

Session 4: Project Indiana
Presenter: Glynn Foster
This was a very cool session. Firstly, Glynn accepted the fact that there are a lot of people out there who are struggling with the installation of Solaris 10. Then he went on and talked about the history of OpenSolaris a bit after which he discussed about tomorrows opportunity. Three key points from tomorrows opportunity includes the following:
* Ease of Access
* Developer Familiarity
*User Community – Approachability for new users

Glynn summarized the goals of Project Indiana (re-distributable version on Open Solaris expected in the future):
* An OpenSolaris binary distribution
*Focuses on Solaris unique features
*Easy to acquire
*More familiar and discoverable
*Built by community
*Single CD install image
* Core OS
>Kernel, System Libraries, System utilities
* Network based package management system
*Desktop Environment
* ZFS as default filesystem
Glynn kindly demonstrated to us a quick installation of Solaris Express DE using the new installer (boy, that was super fast and invoked ovation) and also the package management system.

All the while Glynn addressed the audience for OpenSolaris as Developers, which prompted on of the attendees to ask this question: “You have been repeatedly mentioning the audience of OpenSolaris as Developers. What about the 14 year old – 15 year old folks, who are the future developers? When would they be able to use OpenSolaris?” Glynn just smiled and said, “Well, I don’t know.” Neither do I. So let’s leave that topic there and move on.

Session 5: Solaris 10 Security Features/Futures
Speakers: Valerie Fenwick & Christoph Schuba
I must confess that I didn’t have the sufficient background to sit through this session and hence the take back from this session for me was minimal. But both of the speakers kept the event lively and talk eloquently about the improvements in the Cryptography Framework and also the plans for Virtualization in Solaris (Christoph took up the second part). One of the important points that I could pick up from Valerie’s presentation was the major developments in the field of Kerberos including the ease of set up. I wish I could read a bit more about the Cryptography framework, then I wouldn’t been able to follow lot many things in this session. So here is an advise to myself: Have sufficient background information before listening to the authorities of specific subjects. Oh by the way, SLS offers you an exam on Solaris 10 Security Administrator, the objectives of which you may find here. Should you feel interested in taking up an SLS course on Solaris Security Administrator, have a look at the course description on this website

I am looking forward to the other exciting sessions tomorrow.

suncec2007

I had a grin on my face, when I stepped into the CEC registration section, the reason for which is already written about. The queue there was long. The counters were many. It wasn’t a long wait for me. Went over there, keyed in my E-mail address and got my badge printed. And that’s my access to everything that CEC 2007 would offer in the next three days.

I thought I wouldn’t have to stand in anymore queue. But then there was another queue, rather long one, for some goodies to be picked up as souvenirs. You think I would mind that! Know what we all got: a decent bag, a nice T Shirt with a truth written on it, a useful USB thumb drive with Sun Logo (wanted to get hold of something like this for quite some time) and a CD containing StorageTek Enterprise Software Backup Software (I’m going to have to figure out where would I use this).
Enter SLS, offering us all a kewl water bottle to carry back.It holds 230oz and has an attention-grabbing colour (that’s personal, some may not like such colours).

A welcome dinner awaited us in the Ballys‘ pavilion (truth is, we waited for it, an occasion that helped us chance upon some good old friends. With loads of champagne bottles around, I am sure most of them would have enjoyed their evening, the first day at CEC 2007. Honestly, being a strict vegeterian there was nothing in the buffet that fascinated. So I went around capturing pictures.

A number of Sunray machines were set up in the Pavilion for accessing the Internet. I am sure it would have required a good amount of work to set up those machines and I have read a bit about it in here.
The pavilion was also a stage to showcase some new technologies. Stalls of Sun and many of its partners (including Intel, IBM, Safari Books Online, Wipro, Brocade, HCL ,HP to name a few). I went around viewing those demonstrations and listening carefully to what they had to say. I managed to capture some of those moments. To publish all of those photographs in this post would look ugly. So I am conveniently uploading them on to a web location and you may kindly view it here.

So that’s it from me for the time being, but you will hear from me soon. It is 12:06 local time and I better get some sleep.

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By this time, it is known to my readers that the CEC is at Las Vegas, a place well-known for its casinos. There’s gambling even at the Vegas airport! May be, there are some who turn rich in the process. Easy money! But elders say, refrain from gambling. And I wouldn’t want to close my ears to their advice. So, no gambling.

Some say Sun Certification Exams aren’t all that cheap. Should I disagree? May be, may be not. Each Sun exam could cost you USD 150. By Indian standards, that’s some amount to be spent. At the same time, that’s certainly not awfully high. And if you wish to pass two such exams, then it of course calls for some planning and more importantly savings.

At CEC, Sun Learning Services (SLS) offers free certification exams to its attendees. All the attendees can appear for most of the Sun Certification Exams, absolutely free of cost. I would call this a jackpot. So my dear friends, get out of the Casinos, step into the Testing center at the venues and try out your luck. But yeah, be prepared.

Well, in a matter of 120 minutes, I managed to get through two certification exams, the significant one being Sun Cluster 3.2 Administration exam. But $250 odd is still in my wallet . Thank you SLS. Thanks CEC.

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No I wasn’t reading Stephen Hawkin’s book last evening to have inspired myself to post a blog on topics in astrophysics. The Big Bang talks about the ever expanding Universe, our Universe. Our Universe– That’s the central theme of the first day of CEC 2007.

When I first read about Project Blackbox, the whole idea seemed very exciting and promising. Today I got to see a Project Blackbox in the Pavilion where breakfast was served. Trust me, it looks awesome. If you are a customer, who wants to cut down the cost of data center operations, you might want to consider buying one of those Project Blackbox. It looks compact (by the way, it is a data center and not a high end server; hence the word compact) and it looks cool.

Breakfast was followed by the General Session. As we got into the venue for the general session, we could hear music in the background. The lighting wasn’t bright (intentional). The hall had the capacity to hold all of us(as many as 4000 attendees), which was great.

Before the host of CEC 2007 took the stage, some artists performed a mime on Sun’s role in the ever expanding market.

The Master of Ceremony had no problems whatsoever in capturing the attention of the audience. He did so by showing us all a funny video. He shared with a stunning statitics of a hundred attentees getting Sun Certified on a Sunday (there is a prometric center set up at CEC 2007 as I mentioned here) and is counting. As his speech progressed, he began to talk about some serious and interesting stuff and his main focus of talk revolved around the new product cetwo (Customer Engineer 2.0). What shall I say? Once in place, cetwo is THE most convenient system to get to the informaton (or rather the information gets to us). It could be treated as a one stop place where the information is aggregated from various locations (internal to Sun as well as external web sites) and is displayed on a single page. This technology is not site centric, but user centric. Aggregated information (useful ones) arrives at the users desktop. Isn’t that cool?

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The next couple of speakers spoke about the innovations that Sun has done and the pace at which Sun is growing. Growth was the primary theme of one of the speeches and the gist of the other talk was Sun’s wide array of products to the market and speed at which it is being launched.

It was Marc’s turn next and he spoke eloquently about the roadmap of Processors that’s Sun is planning. Boy, isn’t he coming up with an amazing set of products that will raise the bar so high that Sun’s competitors would take years to catch up with its Processor product line. His words, “I have been working with Sun for the last 16 years and I have never been so optimistic about the prospects of Sun ever as I am now,” summed up his vision on the product line that he is in charge of.

I am putting up here, what Marc showed us during his concluding words:

* We picked the right direction
* We are ahead
* We will be ahead for a few years
* We are working on the next big things
* We will succeed as a system company

Have a look at the picture below and guess what’s it all about:

Those are the questions raised by the viewers to the speakers. It popped up in a webpage and Marc patiently answered some of them. You could use pages, instant messengers and even E-mails to shoot questions to the presenter. Some Thanks Giving messages also came up for Marc.

In came a legend, quite calm and serene, drooping his head down, bearing a charming smile, talking soft about Sun’s plan on Intel and AMD boxes. This is the same man, who gave away Hundred Thousand dollars to ,Larry and Sergey to start up a company which we now know as Google Inc. He bears the Employee No. 1 at Sun and he’s the man behind Sun Constellation System, Sun’s answer to Super Computing. Andreas Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun, needs no introduction. He spoke about about Sun Blades, HPC and towards the end a little about corrupt data (basically about the advantage of using ZFS). Andy answered quite a few questions and there was a touch of humour in the way he answered some of them. Felt great to watch some great people on the stage, live.

Good start to the Customer Engineering Conference 2007.

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As I write this note, I am stationed at the 31st floor of the famous Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. CEC 2007 kicks off here this afternoon.

I was hoping to write about my journey from Bangalore to Las Vegas during my flight stoppages at London and Chicago, but the slight delays in the aircrafts gave me no room for a relaxed session at the airport. Never mind, here are my recollections: Boarded the British Airways flight from Bangalore at around 6:30 A.M IST, which landed in London at around 13:30 local time. It took quite a while before we could disembark from the flight at London and thereafter there was a marathon towards the security area to board the connecting flight to Chicago. Back home, I knew my people would be wanting to hear from me. My boss had kindly advised to pick an Airtel world calling card, which I did and it worked magically (of course it was expected to work). The process to call home was simple: Dial a toll free number (specific for the country as mentioned in a supplementary catalog that comes with the card), dial the World Calling Card No.(need to scratch the card to get this) and finally dial the number in India. The connectivity was fast and it was clear! Trust me, it isn’t a bad idea to pick up those on a travel like this.

The flight to Chicago from London took around 7 hours and 45 minutes and landed in Chicago at 18:45 local time. The immigration process took very little time and I found myself seated in the Chicago domestic airport to board a flight to Las Vegas at 21:15 local time. The flight to Vegasf took just o’er 3 hours, which meant when we landed at Vegas the clocks displayed 00:15 local time. The weather then was 68° F (I felt cold).

All said and done, when you travel miles away from your home town, there is always a bit of worry in the back of your mind until you reach the destination safely. At Las Vegas airport, we were informed earlier that we could spot Sun Volunteers with the placard “CEC 2007.” But looking at the clock while at the Vegas airport, I thought I would end up hiring a taxi to my hotel. At the baggage claim area, a gentleman wearing a red T Shirt, bearing a placard that displayed “CEC 2007” brought immense calmness to the otherwise wandering mind of mine. And then I spot a few other volunteers wearing this uniform. I knew then, that I had no problems to sort out.

I must congratulate the organizers of the CEC 2007 for the Herculean task they have done in ensuring a smooth process to be in place, even in the minute aspects like picking up the attendees from the airports in a thoroughly disciplined fashion. A shuttle (this is how my mobile camera saw this shuttle) took us from the Vegas airport at around 01:20 local time to the Bally’s and the Paris hotel.

There was a slight bit of confusion at the reservation deck for assigning me a room and finally I landed in a Presidential suite because of the unavailability of standard rooms in the hotel. Well, who’s going to complain about thissuncec2007

In the next few hours, get into an aircraft (well, how would you do that??) flying towards Latitude 36° 11′ 39″ N & Longitude 115° 13′ 19″ W, and you’ll find at least one Sun employee sitting in it. (I wish my Geography teacher reads this post, for she would then be really proud of a student, who wasn’t her favourite). A statistics of interest: well over 3,500 Sun Employees would meet up at the above geographical location mainly for a serious reason and partly for fun.

Customer Engineering Conference a.k.a CEC is an annual Sun event at different locations intended to gear up the skill sets of employees and its partners. Speakers from different streams of technology would share their knowledge during this event. We get to see, live, many exciting projects of Sun of which we have only heard about or read about. It is also an opportunity to learn about Sun Executive Perspectives.

There are many people in Sun, working in different locations with whom I have worked with on various projects, but have never met. Wouldn’t it be great to finally meet up with them at a neutral venue so as to be able to associate a face with their voice? When such a massive number of people meet up at a single location, it calls for a party and no one said there isn’t any party at CEC. I feel there is no harm in saying, “It’s party time!”

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Last week, around this time, I was in a flight from Delhi to Bangalore after concludig a training program on Sun Java System Access manager. Before I flew from Delhi, I had promised my good friends that I would publish the batch photograph on my blogs. I prefer to do it late, than not doing it at all.

In just o’er a couple of days time, a good number of Sun Employees, including yours truly, would hit an exciting location on this globe for an annual event of Sun Microsystems. It is not always that you get to hear, straight from the Horse’s mouth on the mission and vision of an org; the fortcoming event is one such occasion. Let no one tell you that it’s only a few thousand people who would get to hear and see where Sun is headed. All others, who wouldn’t board a flight for this event would watch things, live, in the luxury of their parlour through Second Life. It is going to be informative, it is going to be exciting . On this note, let me vanish from here for now and I shall be back, very soon, with a commentary on the sequence of events at a bizarre location on the third planet from Sun.

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Request all of you to watch the public announcement of Sun Fire x4450 and Sun Fire x4150.

The title of this post and the cloudy background of the picture above might mislead one into thinking that the above photograph was captured at a location in Delhi. Trust me, the fog hasn’t hit the Capital City yet; and the snap you see above was taken on Saturday (that’s yesterday), after concluding a Train The Trainer (a.k.a T3) program on Solaris OS at Bangalore. On a Saturday, when laziness dominated in me, I found it rather difficult to carry even my lightweight digital camera along with me to the classroom! I know it is a big mistake that I did. The lovely moments of life that pass by may never repeat itself. Memories of those moments would turn out to be a precious asset at a future date. So I was disappointed not to have carried my camera along with me. But the young enthusiastic guy, wearing the bright red shirt arranged for a group photograph with the mobile phone that he possess. Of course, you can’t expect a perfect still with a camera attached to the hand phone.

Cut to present, I have landed in Delhi for an AM 3480 course, starting tomorrow at a venue in Gurgaon. I am hoping to have an exciting week with a new set of people. I wish all my readers a grand week ahead.

Sun’s provisioning tool Sun Java System Identity Manager is once again a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for User Provisioning. You may read the report here. But let me ask you this: does this surprise any of you? Good week ahead.

The title of this post is stolen right from the press release about this event on the Sun Website. Click here to read more about it.

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.