Monday, January 31, 2005

Solaris 10 FCS is here!

Earlier today, the FCS version of Solaris 10 finally became available! If you haven't already got it, you can doenload it from www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.html.

And yes, dear reader, it is FREE (as in $0 RTU), for commercial as well as personal use.

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

OpenSolaris' first baby steps!

Kudos to my friend and fellow Solaris advocate, Ben Rockwood, for getting the first build of OpenSolaris outside of Sun up and running! Here's the output of his uname -a:

benr@betty ~$ uname -a
SunOS betty 5.10.1 CUDDLISH sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2


He also built OpenSolaris on a 64-bit AMD box.

The nay-sayyers had better start heating up their humble pie, because OpenSolaris is coming to all and sundry, real soon. More details I'm not a liberty to divulge, but as they say, stay tuned...

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Word of the day

My editor, Greg Doench, introduced me to this one: omphaloskepsis. It means "contemplating one's navel", also known as navel-gazing.

Well I thought it was interesting... :-)

It was the best of days, and it was the worst of days...

Last Thursday (January 20th) I was flown down for a job interview with Sun's Technology Evangelism group. Unfortunately, due to my relatively weak presentation skills, I didn't get the job. :-(

However, the good news is that I managed to meet up with Alan Coopersmith, who escorted me on a tour of the campus, so I could visit old friends and colleagues, and put faces to names I've known for years through email and Usenet. I got to meet such people as Casper Dik, Andy Tucker, and Darren Moffat. Alas, I missed my old manager, Peter Brentnall, and a few others, like Alan Duboff and Jim Grisanzio. Maybe next time...

As if that wasn't enough for one day (which, incidentally, started at 04:00!), fellow Solaris advocate and OpenSolaris pilot member, Ben Rockwood, was kind enough to take me out for a steak dinner! We spent hours talking about all things under the, err, Sun, and generally putting the Solaris and open source worlds to rights. Ben's wife, Tamarah, and their daughter, Nova (who has gotta be the cutest Solairs advocate in Silicon Valley!) joined us. Great people, all of them (Sun is lucky to have Ben on their side: I pitty the poor bugger who rubs Ben up the wrong way!).

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Open Solaris

One of the things I'm most passionate about is Sun's operating system, Solaris. Sun is on the verge of releasing the Solaris source code under an OSI-approved license. To help them with their plans and the long and sometimes painful process of open sourcing something the size of Solaris, Sun engaged the help of some of the Solaris community to create a pilot program.

I'm proud to say that I've been a part of this program since day one. Due to the NDA I signed, I can't reveal the details of Open Solaris, but I can tell you (to quote one of Arthur C Clarke's books) that great things are afoot.

There are many vocal nay-sayers, who are sceptical or even suspicious of Sun's plans for Open Solaris. They're entitled to their opinion, of course, but I think those with an open mind will be pleasently surprised...

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Let it Snow!

We've had a bumper snowfall this year. A couple of weeks ago set a new record for the most amount of snowfall in Kelowna in one day: 28cm. Today we had another 10cm or so, which makes getting up our hill (I live on a small mountain here in Kelowna) "interesting", at least until the road gets ploughed.

You wouldn't believe it looking out my office window right now, but in the summer the temperature here regularly exceeeds 30 degrees. Fortunately, we are very far inland, so the heat is nice and dry (I can't abide humid heat!).

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Hello, World!

OK, so I've started a web blog. Time will tell if I keep this thing current or not...