Met Sherif at a local ATM today, after a long time. He is former CTO of Sun’s India Engineering Center and he is the role model for many of my IEC activities today. His company is doing a great job by enabling professionals acquire right skills for further growth. A much needed service for IT industry in India.
During my chat, knew that he is running a few production systems with OpenSolaris. Great!
My original plan for the weekend is to visit my parents. I also planned to visit Hinduja and her new born son. That was the plan until two days ago. Now, I get off the train in Bhimavaram by 5.30am on Saturday, about 20km from my parents’ place, and I reach them only by 8.00pm in the evening. The schedule for Saturday is very busy:
Busy!
Sun Constellation System, the open petascale computing environment, is here. Among other things, it features Sun’s N1 System Manager for monitoring and management. Datasheet for Sun Constellation System is here. Being built on open standards and components, this technology has potential availability to research and academic communities across the world.
On Saturday, we conducted the meeting of Hyderabad Open Solaris User Group (site, forum.) This group is still in infancy stages and I am assisting the group to come up to speed.
The venue is Kamma Sangham building at Ameerpet. We started the meeting by 3.00pm. It was raining a bit on the day, hence the attendance is relatively low. NIIT sponsored the event and provided the logistics support. The attendance is 100+ and mostly consisted of student community.
We talked about the Open Solaris in general, and the way to join the Hyderabad Open Solaris User Group. I gave an overview of OpenSolaris and demonstrated few tools on OpenSolaris. There is a special offer to attendees of this meeting. They can opt to receive a free Belenix CD or Solaris Express developer CD. For more details, refer to HOSUG page.
Sunita Williams is safely back from space, after her return trip delayed a few times due to technical and weather conditions. Probably this is the most viewed and covered news item in India in the last week or so. Sunita, the NASA astronaut of Indian roots, is sure going to inspire many children in India. The whole nation might have sighed with relief when the landing is safe. The country vividly remembers the failure of previous space attempt by a person of Indian origin, Kalpana Chawla.
I took my family to a late night movie on Friday and returned home at about 1am. Switched on the TV to see the status of the proposed landing in Florida, but found that the landing attempt is being made in California’s Edwards base. So glued to the TV for next hour or so, following the live telecast of the landing. Almost every TV news channel in India (about 20 of them) did a live telecast of the event.
Congratulations Sunita!
This news item says that there are more than a million downloads of Safari web browser for Windows. I am not surprised. I am one of those enthusiasts and downloaded this browser for my dual boot (Solaris/Vista) laptop. In fact, the only two downloads from the Vista boot are Firefox and Safari.
My personal preference? Mozilla because my desktop is Open Solaris and I prefer open sourced products. Just by comparision on a windows box, here are my personal rankings:
For example, my blog rendered best with default settings on Safari. Next best is Mozilla. It was great to watch iPhone pages on Safari.
Nature magazine recently published an very good article titled “Nature’s guide to mentoring.” This article outlines the key benefits of mentoring programs like Sun’s SEED program.
The article talks about the benefits of mentoring in research and scientific community. The same benefits can be extrapolated to thought leadership in industry research, product development and engineering processes. SEED essentially does the same thing. The engineering community at Sun contributes to research, development and engineering processes at/from Sun. As part of the SEED program, selected engineering community members are paired up with mentors to improve their growth potential. As a result, the quality of the engineering community keeps on improving at Sun. This has a long term positive impact on Sun’s innovations and product lines.
Curriki has a new and updated wiki look and content. Now they have a blog interface for the members. I just checked the interface and added my first blog entry on Curriki.
The site looks better now.
Katy announced SEED participant selections for the upcoming SEED terms. SEED Program, in a nutshell, is Sun’s worldwide employee mentoring program. Out of 69 selections announced worldwide, Sun’s India Engineering Center at Bangalore bagged selections.
Over a period of 6-12 months, these participants are paired up with best leadership minds in the company. A formal progress tracking mechanism is established by Katy. Our past experiences tell that the formal duration of the program is usually the start of the relationship and the mentors and mentees continue to work together beyond the formal tenure.
Congratulations to the new participants!