OpenSolaris OS developers and users will learn about exciting new applications and tools that are now available and how to port their favorite open-source software to the OpenSolaris OS, using the powerful yet easy-to-use OpenSolaris SourceJuicer. Jim Walker presents at CommunityOne, San Francisco, June 2009.

Brian Leonard presents at CommunityOne, San Francisco, June 2009.

This session is intended for experienced developers who do not necessarily have experience with performance tools. The attendees will learn how to use the Sun Studio software performance tools. Marty Itzkowitz presents at CommunityOne, San Francisco, June 2009.

Sunay Tripathi and team present at CommunityOne, San Francisco, June 2009.

Ben Rockwood speaks at CommunityOne, June 2009, San Francisco.

Part 2

download part 1 in m4v format

download part 2 in m4v format

Max Bruning speaks at CommunityOne, June 2009, San Francisco.

Part 2

download part 1 in m4v format

download part 2 in m4v format

(No one told me!) All the Tuesday session videos are up on slx.sun.com. Check 'em out!

Ashwin Bhat and Angad Singh asked me for one minute of my time outside the keynote hall at CommunityOne a few weeks ago. Hey, what's a minute, right? Happy to. But this minute was to be digitally recorded. Uha. Video. I generally shy away from such things because I`m shy about being interviewed. But these are really good guys and they`ve done great work as Campus Ambassadors in India, so I felt safe in front of their camera (though I`d clearly much rather be behind the camera). It wasn't too bad, though. But the 1 minute ran for 2 minutes and 21 seconds! Anyway. Thanks, guys. Great fun. Hope to get back to India sometime soon.

Attending JavaOne 2009 Conference at San Francisco was a wonderful, learning experience. As a part of Sun Microsystems's Campus Ambassador Program, they nominated five CA's from all over the world who would get an opportunity to attend the JavaOne 2009 Conference, fully sponsored by them. Let me now share my JavaOne 2009 experiences with you all.

Let me start with the day when we reached San Francisco. Three of us – Ashwin Bhat from Mangalore, Angad from Delhi (Both of them are Tech Leads) and I – landed at San Francisco on Sunday, the May 31 afternoon, It was one of the "most awaited moments" of my life. When I reached the hotel lobby (Hotel Nikko, where we were put up), Gary was there to receive us. He had told us that we would meet-up for dinner at 6 p.m. Besides me, other three CAs, Tom, Hyejin, Felipe had also checked in at the hotel around the same time. After the dinner, he told Tom, Hyejin, Felipe and Me that all four of us would be on stage with David Douglas during his Keynote session the next day! Wow! This news was thrilling…. To be in front of 3000 audience (delegates) was unimaginable!

On June 1st (Day-1), we were ready with our "two sentences" that we were supposed to answer to David on the Stage. In the course of his Keynote Address, David invited all four of us (CAs) to the Stage. After welcoming me to JavaOne, David asked, "What OSUM looks like in India". That was simple. I answered, "As Campus Ambassadors, we have set up OSUM Clubs in various Universities in India, where we conduct Tech Demos, Contests for the Student Communities. It’s all about promoting Free and OpenSource Softwares to the Students. For more details, please visit osum.sun.com"

It was truly amazing to be on the Stage - not as speakers but to be rewarded :). I was extremely delighted when I looked back on the Stage…. Our University name was up on the big screen! Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham declared its presence, on the world-map!!

JavaOne was a huge convention. It was Java, Java and Java, all the way. Everywhere there was Java in some or the other form. The Pavilion opened up at around 3 p.m. When I went in, there were a number of stalls/lounge put up by different companies, individuals, or anyone who use Java in some or other form. I was given the responsibility of manning the "OSUM Lounge" - a stall/lounge for students to come in and learn or join the OSUM Community. The entry to JavaOne Conference was free for the students so we had many coming in! It was nice to meet a lot of students and exchange the thoughts. At the OSUM Lounge, we had a "Scavenger Hunt" where we gave out small cards to the students with a list of "must attend" technical session, lectures beneficial to students. To verify they attend the session, a person from the stall would stand in front of the hall for stamping. And at the end of the day, if a student has a minimum of 4 stamps, they are entitled for the Raffle where "IPod Touch" or "SunSpot" were given out! This helped students participate efficiently in the JavaOne event by providing the schedules ahead of time. Fun while you learn….!

Apart from OSUM Lounge, we had the OpenSolaris Install Lounge, Sun Cloud, Zembly, Intel, Sony, BlackBerry, JavaFX and many other stalls. There was also an interesting stall titled "Create Your Custom T-Shirt". When you give a caption like, for example, "Java + Community = Powerful", you will have this printed on your Java T-Shirt. It was fun!

The 2009 JavaOne Conference opened on Tuesday (June 2, 2009) morning with the Sun General Session. Hosted by the Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, the session ended with an appearance by Sun Chairman and Co-founder Scott McNealy, who introduced surprise guest Larry Ellison, Co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation. Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, announced in April, is expected to be finalized in the next few months.

Schwartz opened the 14th JavaOne conference with a trip down the memory lane. It was fabulous. My day went in interviewing people - for JavaOne Minutes, asking them about their experience at JavaOne and running around in the Pavilion grabbing my "GOODIES". I got loads of them. I also had an opportunity of talking at an Exclusive JavaOne Radio Coverage with Lin Lee, Vice President Global Communities, which was streamed online.

My next best moment at the Sun Party was when I got a rare opportunity of standing with James Gosling, the Founder of Java for a photograph. It was great; I am going to preserve this photograph life-long! A real memoir, of course!!

The next day, I went on attending the sessions, manning the OSUM Lounge, running around and so on. The best part of the day was when we CAs were called for a video shooting as part of The Global Communities Teams Success Stories, which works directly with Influencer Worldwide who shape how billions of people use and will be impacted by technology. After that, we had a dinner party with Lin Lee and some more Sun Employees who help with the Student Communities around the world. Here, Gary surprised us (Tom, Hyejin, Felipe and me) by presenting a very nice glass cube memento to each one of us. It was really awesome with our name and "Campus Ambassador Program - Outstanding Results Award" carved on that. Thank you Sun!

Thursday was usual - attending sessions. In the second half, Gary took us all - Angad, Ashwin, Kevin, Felipe, Tom, Hyejin, David Botterill and me - on a San Francisco tour. It was again a great one. Thanks a bunch Gary!

On the last day, James Gosling's annual whirlwind Toy Show at the JavaOne conference displayed not only technical excellence and innovation, but also excellence in generating technology that serves humanity. He gave out the "Duke's Choice Award" - The award for the most innovative concept / idea done using Java. The event was well attended, and the audience was enthusiastic as ever.

What a learning experience….! Learning never stops. In all, it was a great opportunity that I got from Sun. Sun Microsystems is an amazing Organization. I am so much influenced by the people and the technology @ Sun that it’s hard to leave them all. I just cant complete without thanking (in no particular order) - Lin Lee, Gary Serda, Ganesh, Vijaya Santosh, Ajay, Rajesh, Kumar Abhishek, David (who was with us all the time entertaining us), Pratibha (Travel Desk), and Veena Damodaran (sorry if I have missed someone). I am greatly indebted to my College for creating this opportunity for me and for the support. In particular, I want to thank my professor, mentor, guide and friend Vipin Pavithran Sir who was the source for me to reach up to this level. He inspired me; ignited my thoughts and took me to the right direction. Finally, thanks to my parents, for their encouragement and support in my endeavors. Thank you everyone.

Here are some Links:

Photos
1. http://avinashjoshi.co.in/my-image-gallery/javaone-2009/
2. http://avinashjoshi.co.in/my-image-gallery/photos-of-me/
3. http://avinashjoshi.co.in/my-image-gallery/at-san-francisco/

Video on my blog
http://avinashjoshi.co.in/2009/06/03/me-on-the-stage-during-the-j1-openning-session/

Welcome to CommunityOne, General Session, June 1, 2009
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid22207469001?bclid=24767779001&bctid=24939845001

Exclusive JavaOne Radio Coverage with Lin Lee (Vice President, Global Communities, Sun  Microsystems)
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/JavaOne/2009/06/02/Sun-at-Java-One-Live-Jun-2-2009-511PM

Video shooting as a part of The Global Communities teams success stories
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/globalcommunities/vid_gallery.xml
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/globalcommunities/

All Connected Students Media
http://slx.sun.com/media/6245

Watch Welcome to CommunityOne, General Session, June 1, 2009
http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/2009/west/video_replays.jsp
http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/2009/west/

CommunityOne and The First Day at the Moscone Center

Gary, Me, Ashwin, Avinash, Tom, Hyejin, Felipe and Kevin rushed down to the Moscone center on the first day of the conference, it was most certainly an enjoyable hustle. We entered Moscone, registered for JavaOne and CommunityOne 2009, got our conference attendee badges, conference agenda and other material.. and then we went off to get more material downstairs.

Arrival, Registration and material collection at the Moscone center

The CommunityOne General Session

CommunityOne started with a bang. We all took up front seats few minutes before the session started. Gary introduced us to Lin Lee, our super-super-boss, VP of Global Communities in Sun. Checkout Gary’s JavaOne minute taken just when the halls were filling up. The session's highlights were Sun's new cloud computing offerings. David Douglas, Senior Vice President at Sun for Cloud Computing took the stage to talk about citizen engineering, eco computing and various other stuff and then came then came to the exciting part: he called on stage, 4 of the campus ambassadors who were sponsored to attend JavaOne this year: Avinash Joshi from India, Felipe Cerda and Tom Petreca from Brazil, Hyejin Park from South Korea and Kevin Li from China. David asked them to talk about their experiences as campus ambassadors, in fostering open source clubs on their campus and leading their OSUM communities.

We all listened to them proudly. Then John Fowler came to set the stage on fire with the launch of OpenSolaris 2009.06 and a discussion of all its great new features! While the presenters kept throwing all the cool stuff at us I tried to keep up with them and tweet updates along the way. Unfortunately the WiFi really sucked at the Moscone Center and I had to do that on my international roaming airtime, but I guess it was worth it. Gary did a JavaOne minute with Avinash to get to know about how he felt being up there on the stage at the CommunityOne keynote! While there were many exciting things announced and demoed during the keynote (you can watch the replay here!), my personal favorites are Crossbow's new drag-drop GUI, multicore optimized networking stack and JavaFX finally working on OpenSolaris (and so well too!). As expected there was a huge crowd at the keynote and lot of people were standing just outside the hall to discuss how things went in the keynote. Thats when we ran into Valeriya Alaverdova, Program Coordinator in the Sun Marketing Team who had travelled to JavaONE all the way from Russia. We did a JavaOne minute with her about how things are going for her and what she's there for. Then we caught hold of the OpenSolaris Community rockstar - Jim Grisanzio in the flesh! I have been following Jim's blog since a long time and keep reading his mails on opensolaris-announce, advocacy-discuss, etc. He is undoubtedly the best community manager the opensolaris community could ever have. We did another quick JavaOne minute with him on his thoughts about CommunityOne and the amazing keynote we just attended. We also ran into Sriram Narayanan! He's a very active member of the Bangalore OpenSolaris Usergroup. I was quite happy to meet him there.

You can see all the keynote replays as well as read their summaries here.

At the end of the exciting as well as tiring day, we had the Pavilion reception, with good food. The catering was good. There was a long line for the beer so I skipped that. At around 6.25 PM we were surprised by a group of dancers and musicians taking a backdoor entry and catching everyone’s attention by parading through the Pavilion..!

This is part of a series of blog posts on my JavaOne 2009 experience..

As I mentioned last week, my two co-authors of OpenSolaris Bible and I were at the CommunityOne conference in San Francisco earlier this month. What I didn't note in that post is that this was the first and only time we've all three been in the same place at the same time. Luckily Tirthankar Das was present to record this moment for posterity:

From left to right, Jerry Jelinek, Dave Miner, and me in front of the bookstore in the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

I gave a presentation called, "Developing On OpenSolaris" at the CommunityOne conference in San Francisco on June 1st. This talk was an overview of the benefits and features of OpenSolaris as a development platform. Topics included software management with the Image Packaging System (IPS), ZFS, Time Slider, DTrace, D-Light, SunStudio, GCC, Eclipse, and NetBeans. The goal of the presentation, in one sentence, was to answer the question, "why should I choose OpenSolaris as my development platform?"

In case you missed the talk, I’m happy to be able to offer the video here free of charge. This video doesn’t show the slides, so if you want to follow along at home, you can download the slides here.

Without further ado, here’s the video:

And here are some still shots, taken by Tirthankar Das:

The presentation I gave at the CommunityOne 2009 conference is now available online. I presented a talk enitled "(Open)Solaris Operating System Secure Deployment" in the system administration track on Monday, June 1, 2009. This slide deck was used for the presentation. I also presented the demonstration of RBAC and the demonstration of the Cryptographic Framework that I posted previously as recordings during the talk.

我已经在 CommunityOne 上载了有关 Sun GlassFish Portfolio (S307894) 的演讲。我以项目的翻新和使用评价作为开始，然后审查了 GlassFish Portfolio，最后迅速浏览了含有到会话和 pod 的链接的项目。有许多幻灯片，但其中一些尚不成熟，期待着有时间进行常见问题解答。 幻灯片参见 PDF@SLX 和 SlideShare；稍后我会创建 SlideCast。

提醒一下，明天，也就是 5 月 31 日星期天，是我们的 GlassFish and OpenSSO Unconference 会议，还有派对，地点是 The Thirsty Bear。 The Thirsty Bear 是 JavaOne 期间一家不错的去处；他们提供非常棒的食物和饮料，而且离会场非常近（参见 Google, Live）。感谢 RSVP 对用餐需求进行了评估。 另附最近我无法张贴新闻，因为准备 J1/C1 – 以及今年还有额外的事件 - 但今年我承诺是在这周早些时候，我将随后补上。

En esta serie de posts quiero contarles lo que fué el JavaOne 2009 y mi experiencia en este mega super evento en San Francisco, CA. Pero antes de hablar del JavaOne, les contaré en esta ocasión del CommunityOne West (también existe el CommunityOne East, que se realiza en otra fecha en la costa este de los Estados Unidos), un evento que se realizó 1 día antes de su hermano JavaOne, el 1 de Junio de 2009, en el mismo lugar: El centro de convenciones Moscone Center en San Francisco.

El CommunityOne es una conferencia auspiciada por Sun Microsystems que se enfoca en temas de open source, y todo lo que se puede innovar e implementar con el. Es un evento enorme, que reúne desarrolladores, entusiastas, estudiantes y profesionales de todas partes del mundo, para que puedan intercambiar ideas, conocerse y asistir a las muchas sesiones técnicas acerca de open source que se realizan en la jornada.

Nos subimos al escenario del Moscone Center

Apenas llegué a San Francisco el día domingo 31 de Mayo, me estaba esperando Gary Serda (jefe y coordinador del programa de Campus Ambassadors y la comunidad OSUM en el mundo) en el aeropuerto SFO, junto a Kevin Li y Hyejin Park, ambos destacados Campus Ambassadors de Sun en China y Korea respectivamente. Llegamos al hotel y lo único que hicimos fue dejar nuestro equipaje porque luego partimos caminando al Moscone Center al ensayo de lo que iba a ser la keynote principal del CommunityOne el día siguiente, 1 de Junio.

Gary nos presentó a David Douglas, Senior Vice President of Cloud Computing y Chief Sustainability Officer de Sun Microsystems. Para nosotros, toda una celebridad que sólo conocíamos por internet. Muy buena onda además. Con él ensayamos nuestra aparición que ibamos a tener en la keynote, nos iba a llamar al escenario en la inauguración del CommunityOne.

Básicamente nos iba a presentar como estudiantes y Campus Ambassadors de Sun destacados y también nos iba a preguntar 1 pregunta a cada uno, acerca de las cosas que hemos hecho en nuestros respectivos países en temas de evangelización del software Open Source de Sun. Nada de nervios hasta el momento. Nos subimos al magno escenario y nos imáginabamos que mañana iba a haber mucha gente, y ensayamos, todo muy profesional, como se estila por esos lados.

Productor, cámarografos, cámaras HD, un escenario enorme, pantallas gigantes y miles de sillas para los espectadores (5000 para ser exactos) estaban ahí ese día. Yo quedé impresionado al momento de entrar y ver ese impresionante despliegue de infraestructura, medios y personas.

El día siguiente era el día D, nos unimos con Tom Mix, Campus Ambassador de Brasil que llegó ese día en la mañana y con Avinash Joshi de India. Estabamos ya algo nerviosos, llegamos 1 hora antes de que empezara el show, a las 7:30 AM y repasabamos en la mente lo que ibamos a decir. El productor luego nos dijo que nos teníamos que sentar en línea, en el mismo orden en el que nos íbamos a parar en el escenario. Cuando organizan este tipo de eventos tan profesionalmente, no bromean.

Subímos, dijimos nuestras palabras, nos vieron miles de personas a través de la transmisión por la web y miles más ahí mismo en vivo. Yo estaba emocionado, nunca había subido a un escenario tan grande y menos frente a tanta gente. Fue increíble. Hablé acerca de cómo lo hacía para crear tantos grupos OSUM (Open Source University Meetup) en Concepción, que no es una ciudad muy grande, pero sin embargo tiene muchos estudiantes que están en la comunidad y muchos grupos.

Después de eso vino el relajo y disfrutamos el show. Fuimos a que nos pasaran unas cámaras portátiles HD para poder grabar los JavaOne Minute, unos videos de 1 minuto en los que entrevistamos a alguien o damos nuestras impresiones acerca de algo que hayamos visto en el JavaOne. Pueden encontrar muchos JavaOne Minute en este enlace. El primer día tuve el agrado de conocer, entrevistar y conversar con Iban Nieto, que representaba al grupo de usuarios de OpenSolaris en España, además conocí a Kira Morrow, ex Campus Ambassador de Sun Microsystems hace 2 años, muy buena onda y a Jim Grisanzio, el encargado del portal de OpenSolaris.org, todo una celebridad (y muy buen fotógrafo). Jim trabaja en Tokio, Japón, por lo que solo nos habíamos comunicado por Twitter y algunos correos, así que fue un agrado conocerlo en persona.

El momento de relajo, comida, bebida y fiesta!

En la tarde una cena, a las 6:30 PM, bastante temprano para lo que estamos acostumbrados en Chile, con los Campus Ambassador, Gary y Tzel, nuestra coordinadora. Muy buena onda todos! fue un agrado conocerlos y compartir la semana entera con ellos :)

Después de la cena teníamos algo de sueño pero el día no se acababa, era el momento de partir para la fiesta del CommunityOne, en el mismo Moscone Center, con comida, bebida, cerveza, tragos, palomitas de maíz, etc ilimitado. Una banda en vivo muy buena y geek llamada Spazmatics y juegos como Dodgeball, entre muchos otros. Muy pero muy entretenido :)

Luego de la fiesta si que nos fuimos a dormir, cansados por el agitado día pero contentos por las cosas buenas que estaban pasando. En el próximo post les contaré más de los próximos días.

Las fotos las pueden ver mi galería en flickr.

According to this list, OpenSolaris Bible was the tenth best-selling book at the JavaOne bookstore, and the only book in the top ten not aimed at Java, Web, or Application developers. Although Dave, Jerry, and I didn’t get a whole lot of people for our book signing, I’d like to think that our presence, our various presentations, and the book giveaways at CommunityOne on Monday and Tuesday helped drive the book sales.

Did you miss the big announcements at CommunityOne?  No problem!  Just listen to the short segment below by Chhandomay and I to get up to speed.

The numbers were a bit down from previous years and perhaps there was a little less buzz, but I found this year's JavaOne Conference to be as interesting and fun as ever. As always, I was part of the Sun Developer Network team that covered the general and technical sessions for the conference web site. I was also host for a number of "Man/Woman on the Street" interviews with conference attendees.

I found the sessions to be uniformly excellent. It seemed that the quality of the presenters and their demonstrations at these sessions was exceptionally high. I hope those of you who went to the conference were equally impressed with the sessions. If you didn't get a chance to attend the conference, you can view video replays of the general sessions.

You can find all of the articles covering the sessions here. I covered the following sessions:

• Intelligent Design -- The Pervasive Java Platform. What drives the evolutionary and revolutionary changes in Java and JavaFX technologies? Ultimately, it's the consumer, says Sun Distinguished Engineer and CTO Bob Brewin.
• Building Cool RIA Enterprise Applications With JavaFX. In this session, JavaFX experts Jim Weaver and Stephen Chin showed how easy it is to build a visually compelling application using JavaFX.
• RESTful Web Services Made Easy. JAX-RS makes it easy to develop RESTful web services using Java technology. This session showed why.

I also had the opportunity to cover the general session for CommunityOne West, a conference focused on communities and open source. CommunityOne West started the day before JavaOne. Cloud computing and a new release of OpenSolaris were the stars of that session. BTW, if you're into cloud computing, there are a lot of good cloud-related sessions that my SDN teammates covered during the JavaOne conference. These include:

• Continuous Integration in the Cloud With Hudson. Sun's Kohsuke Kawaguchi discussed Hudson, the open-source continuous integration system that enables developers to automate various aspects of the development process.
• A New Database for the Cloud. Learn more about the goals of the Drizzle open-source project in building an optimized database.
• Zembly: An Extensible Development Environment in the Cloud, for the Cloud. Sun's Todd Fast and Jiri Kopsa discussed zembly.com, a browser-based development environment that enables programming for web applications and social platforms, as well as web widgets.
• Cloud Computing: Show Me the Money. Panelists from six leading cloud companies talked with Rags Srinivas about the current state of cloud computing.

Also see the new Sun Cloud Developer Tools site.

You can find a great wrap-up of the conference here. As the wrap-up notes, this may be the final JavaOne Conference. I've had the pleasure to attend the last 10 of them. Covering these conferences always required a lot of preparation work and a goodly amount of toil and sweat. But I always found them educational, even exhilarating. They gave me a chance to learn, a chance to share ideas, and a chance to meet some of the most interesting folks on the planet -- the Java community.

Photos of my trip to San Francisco.

http://picasaweb.google.com.br/apenastom/JavaOne2009#

Thank you

The highlights from our JavaOne and CommunityOne 2009 conferences are now available. Chhandomay and Maijaliisa have put together the short segment on JavaOne 2009 here, while the CommunityOne West 2009 segment is here. Enjoy!

The keepers of the OpenSolaris Community took advantage of having a number of the User Group leaders at the CommunityOne conference this last week to set aside a day for a User Group Leaders' Bootcamp.

What a great opportunity to get together in the same room with folks working to create and sustain OpenSolaris user groups around the world! We had folks from every continent - from Atlanta and Argentina, from Dallas and Serbia, from China and London, and on and on. Something like twenty-five to thirty of the OpenSolaris User Groups were represented.

The whole day was a great experience. It was great to see that as different as each group was, there were a lot of common themes for both successes and for challenges. And a lot of great ideas were shared as to how to boost participation, to improve meetings, and to improve the success of the groups overall. It will be exciting to hear a report back next year on how these ideas have played out.

Be sure to check out Jim Grisanzio's photos to see some of these characters and what all went on at CommunityOne and in the OSUG Bootcamp.

Jeff Jackson, Sr. VP for Solaris Engineering, started the day off with a greeting and charge to get the most out of this opportunity to meet with each other and with the OpenSolaris and Solaris headquarters teams.

Since the thing that brought this group together was a common focus on OpenSolaris User Groups and not the fact that we knew each other, we began the day with a bit of team-building exercise, courtesy of The Go Game. This is a cross between a scavenger hunt and an improvisational acting class. Teams criss-crossed downtown San Francisco trying to find and photograph places hinted at by clues on web pages. At some venues, the teams had to act out and film various tasks. For example, on the Yerba Buena lawn, the team had to engage in an impromptu Tai Chi exercise in order to find their long-lost phys ed teacher, Ms. Karpanski, who then led the team in creating a new exercise video. Once we all returned, all of our submissions were voted on by the team and a winning team chosen. Supposedly, we can see all these photos and videos. Haven't yet found out how. Perhaps, that's for the best!

In order for us to get to know each other's groups, each User Group prepared a poster describing the group, where we were located, what we do, what sort of members make up the group, and what makes us special. Many of these posters were really well done! We had a bit of a scavenger hunt for answers to questions found by careful reading of all of the posters. It was really cool to see what sorts of projects some of the groups had undertaken and how they were working with various university or other organizations.

But the main part of the day was spent in a big brainstorming session. We all identified our successes, our failures, our challenges, and ideas for the future. We put all of these on several hundred post-it notes and placed them on large posters. We grouped them by topic and then went through all of these. Even though this only had an hour on the agenda, it ended up taking the bulk of the day. Since this was the most important thing for us, we decided to rearrange the day to accommodate it.

From these sticky-notes, we found out that some of our groups were mostly focused on administrators but others had a large developer population. We all have some sort of issues around meeting locations - whether it's a matter of access in the evening, finding a convenient location, or providing network access and power. For most groups, having some sort of refreshments was important, though some groups felt like good refreshments attracted too many folks who just show up for the food.

There were a lot of good ideas around using a registration site to get access to the facility and order food, creating and using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, using IRC, interacting with the Sun Campus Ambassadors, using MeetUp to find new members. Many folks found it useful to video and make available presentations given at their meetings. Some groups (for example in Japan) have special sub-groups for beginners. Other groups are doing large-scale development projects, such as the Belenix project in Bangalore.

For me and the Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group, I have a lot of new ideas that I want to put out to our membership and our leaders - move back to monthly meetings, use a registration site, set up a presence on various social networks.

Many people said that folks come to the user groups in order to network and expand their circle of business acquaintances. In light of the current economic situation, with so many smart people out of work, I am thinking of promoting our group with some of the job networking groups around Atlanta. For example, my church, Roswell United Methodist Church, has one of the largest job networking groups in the Atlanta area. Every two weeks, nearly 500 people meet to network and help each other in their job search. Perhaps the many IT folks in this group might find this a way to get current and stay current in a whole new area.

At any rate, I am inspired to get things cranking at ATLOSUG!

After spending the afternoon working through our hundreds of sticky notes, the OpenSolaris Governing Board had a bit of a roundtable with us to talk about what they do and how we can work better together. It was really helpful for me to hear from them and to get to put faces to some of the names for the folks I did not already know.

We finished out the evening with a great dinner at the Crab House at Pier 39. From what I have seen, many of the photos from dinner and the meeting are already on Facebook, Flickr, and likely blogs.sun.com. Jim Grisanzio, OpenSolaris Chief Photographer, was out in force with his camera!

Thanks so much to Teresa Giacomini, Lynn Rohrer, Dierdre Straughan, Jim Grisanzio, Tina Hartshorn, Wendy Ames, Kris Hake and everyone else who had a hand in organizing this event. Thanks to Jeff Jackson, Bill Franklin, Chris Armes, Dan Roberts and all the other HQ folks who took the time to come and listen and interact with the leaders of these groups. I know that I got a lot out of the meeting and am more eager than ever to promote and push forward with our user group.

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend CommunityOne West in San Francisco, along with a number of the other leaders of OpenSolaris User Groups. (I head up the Atlanta OpenSolaris User Group.) What a great meeting! Three days of OpenSolaris.

First off, I am sure that Teresa and the OpenSolaris team selected the Hotel Mosser because they knew it was a Solaris focused venue. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up! Even the toilet paper was Solaris-based. Bob Netherton and I were speculating that perhaps this was an example of Solaris Roll-Based Dump Management, new in OpenSolaris 2009.06.

CommunityOne Day One

Day One was a full day of OpenSolaris and related talks. The OpenSolaris teams maintained tracks around deploying OpenSolaris 2009.06 in the datacenter and around developing applications on OpenSolaris 2009.06. For the most part, I stuck with the operations-focused sessions, though I did step out into a few others. Some of the highlights included:

• Peter Dennis and Brian Leonard's fun survey of what's new and exciting in OpenSolaris 2009.06. ATLOSUG folks should look for a reprise of this at our meeting on Tuesday.
• Jerry Jelinek's discussion of the various virtualization techniques built into and onto OpenSolaris. This is a sort of talk that I give a lot. It was really helpful to hear how the folks in engineering approach this topic.
• Scott Tracy & Dan Maslowski's COMSTAR discussion and demo. COMSTAR has been significantly expanded in recent builds, with more coolness still to come. I had not paid a lot of attention to this lately and this was a really helpful talk, especially since Teresa Giacomini had asked me to present this demo for the user group leaders on Wednesday. In any case, I have reproduced the iSCSI demo that Scott did using just VirtualBox, rather than requiring a server. Of course, the VB version is not something I would run my main storage server on. But it certainly is a great tool to understand the technology. I hope to have Ryan Matteson (Ryan, you volunteered!) give a talk at the ATLOSUG sometime soon.
• I branched out of main OpenSolaris path to see a few other things on Day One, as well. Ken Pepple, Scott Mattoon, and John Stanford gave a good talk on Practical Cloud Patterns. They talked about some of the typical ways that people do provisioning, application deployment, and monitoring within the cloud.
• Karsten Wade, "Community Gardener" at Red Hat, gave a talk called Participate or Die. This was about the importance of participating in the Open Source projects that are important to your business. He talked about understanding the difference in participating (perhaps, using open source code) and influencing (helping to guide the project). By paying more attention to those who actively participate, active members of the community enhance their status and become influencers of the direction for a project. And it is important that this happen - in successful projects, the roadmap is driven by the participants rather than handed down on high with the hope that people will line up behind it. Really, I think, his key message was that it is important not to just passively stand by when you care about or depend upon something, leaving its future in the hands of others.
• Kevin Nilson and Michael Van Riper gave a great talk about building and maintaining a successful user group. This was built on their experiences with the Silicon Valley Java User Group and with the Google Technology User Group. They took a great approach by collecting videos from the leaders, hosts, and participants in these and other groups around the country. It was really helpful to hear people's perspectives on why they attend a group, why companies host group meetings, and why and how people continue to lead user groups. While a lot of what they had to say, and the successes that they have had, are a product of being in a very "target-rich environment" in Silicon Valley, it was interesting to see that some things are universal: a good location makes a lot of difference; having food matters. I got a lot of ideas from this and from the OpenSolaris User Group Bootcamp that I hope to get going in ATLOSUG.
• OpenSolaris 2009.06 Launch Party finished out the evening. Dodgeball and the Extra Action Marching Band. I thought these folks were the hit of the evening. You get the best of marching bands, big drums, loud brass, but add to that folks flaying around, throwing themselves at the dodgeball court nets. Much more exciting than your regular marching band, even some of the cool ones around Atlanta in the Battle of the Bands!

CommunityOne Day Two

Day Two was filled with OpenSolaris Deep Dives. These were very helpful, not just in content, but in helping me to hone my own OpenSolaris presentations. For this day, I stuck close to the Deploying OpenSolaris track, having learned in graduate school that I am not a developer. This track included:

• Chris Armes kicked off the day with a talk on deploying OpenSolaris in your Data Centre (as he spells it).
• Becoming a ZFS Ninja, presented by Ben Rockwood. Ben is an early adopter and a production user of ZFS. This was a two-hour, fairly in-depth talk about ZFS and its capabilities.
• Nick Solter, co-author of the OpenSolaris Bible, talked about OpenHA Cluster, newly released and available for OpenSolaris. With OpenHA, enterprise-level availability is not just available, but also supported. He talked about how the cluster works and about extensions to the OpenHA cluster beyond the capabilities of Solaris Cluster, based on OpenSolaris technologies. Some of these include the use of Crossbow VNICs for private interconnects. I am still thinking about the availability implications of this and am not sure it's an answer for all configurations. But it's cool that it's there!
• Jerry Jelinek rounded out the day talking about Resource Management with Containers, a topic near and dear to my heart and one I end up presenting a lot.

We finished out Day Two with a reunion dinner of some of the old team at Bucca di Beppo. Around the table, we had Vasu Karunanithi, Dawit Bereket, Matt Ingenthron, Scott Dickson (me), Bob Netherton, Isaac Rosenfeld, and Kimberly Chang. It was great to get at least part of the old gang together and catch up.

Day Three was the OpenSolaris User Group Leaders Bootcamp. But that's for another post....

JavaOne (and CommunityOne) 2009 were last week and I spent the bulk of my week there at the event.  All in all, especially given the state of the economy, I thought it was well attended and there was a host of great sessions and content.

It started off with CommunityOne on Monday with a keynote and announcements around the Sun Cloud and OpenSolaris.  And while the keynote gave the day a cloud/OS feel, the rest of the day had many sessions on lots of topics including those near and dear to my heart, server side Java.

JavaOne itself kicked off Tuesday morning with the main Sun keynote with Jonathan showing some neat JavaFX stuff, announcing the Java Store, and bringing up executives from eBay, RIM, Sony, and more.  There was also a cute video that had James' Gospel of Java.  It finished with Scott reminiscing a bit and bringing Larry Ellison on stage for some Q&A.  Bob Brewin's technical keynote also went well with demos on Fuji, Java EE 6, Java SE 7, Java FX, and the architecture of the Java Store.

It was then off to technical sessions and I was able to attend several on OpenSSO, Java EE 6, Fuji, CEP, Camel, and more.  Look for presentations to be published soon.  I also spent some time in the Pavilion and traffic there kept things nice and busy.

If you weren't there, sorry you missed it, but take a look at what is available on-line that I linked to above.

I was in San Francisco last week for the launch of OpenSolaris 2009.06 at CommunityOne and for a pile of team meetings about the website transition. And some other stuff. Pretty good trip. It was great to meet so many people who I have developed digital relationships with over the past few years. I took hundreds of images as I walked around, but only these 66 survived. Also, I made no attempt to be comprehensive, so this set below is only a tiny portion of the actual conference. Anyway, it was fun -- especially hanging out with the OpenSolaris User Groups. Special thanks to Teresa Giacomini for running a wonderful OSUG event.
OpenSolaris at CommunityOne SF 2009

As we come to the close of yet another week, I am reminded that this week was different. Unlike most weeks, I was actually off from work, recovering from surgery, and yet at the same time, several of my projects were living lives of their own at CommunityOne West and Java One. Since I could not be there in person to talk about this work, I figured the next best thing was to take a few moments to highlight them here and offer an open invitation to publicly discuss them on their project pages.

There were three Cloud Computing security projects that were discussed and demonstrated this week:

• Security Hardened Virtual Machine Images.

  Summary: Sun and the Center for Internet Security have been working together for over six years to promote enterprise-class security best practices for the Solaris OS. Building upon their latest success, the Solaris 10 Security Benchmark, they have adapted its security guidance to the OpenSolaris platform and today are announcing the availability of a virtual machine image pre-configured with these settings.

  Key Points: Sun is the first commercial vendor to publish and make freely available a hardened virtual machine image - secured using industry accepted best practices. Images will be made available for both Amazon EC2 and Sun Cloud.

  More Information: Announcement.

• Cloud Safety Box.

  Summary: Security is a key concern for customers everywhere, and the Cloud is no exception. Customers who are concerned about the confidentiality of their information should encrypt their data before sending it to the Cloud. This utility simplifies the process of encrypting files and storing them in the Cloud (as well as decrypting them after they have been retrieved).

  Key Points: The tools leverage strong, industry standard encryption (AES 256-bit) but are configurable to accommodate other algorithms and key sizes. The tools can leverage the cryptographic acceleration capabilities of systems configured with Sun's UltraSPARC T2 (Niagara 2) processor enabling ~7x speed improvement over software encryption. The tools support multiple client platforms and multiple cloud providers today including Sun Cloud and Amazon S3.

  More Information: Project Page

• Encrypted ZFS Backups.

  Summary: Customers often encrypt their backups before sending them off-site for storage, so why should the Cloud be any different. This utility integrates with the OpenSolaris ZFS automatic snapshot service to automatically encrypt the content before storing it into the Cloud. This way, backup data is always stored in an encrypted form in the Cloud and the decryption keys never leave your organization. Recovery is as easy as downloading and decrypting the snapshots (using the Cloud Safety Box tool, for example) and reverting to those snapshots using standard ZFS methods.

  Key Points: The tool leverages strong, industry standard encryption (AES 256-bit) but is configurable to accommodate other algorithms and key sizes. The tool can leverage the cryptographic acceleration capabilities of systems configured with Sun's UltraSPARC T2 (Niagara 2) processor enabling ~7x speed improvement over software encryption. The tool supports multiple cloud providers today including Sun Cloud and Amazon S3.

  More Information: Project Page

Each of these projects were also highlighted during the Cloud Computing keynote delivered by Lew Tucker (VP/CTO, Cloud Computing) as shown in the replay, starting about 2:18 seconds into this video:

In addition, the Cloud Safety Box and ZFS Encrypted Backups projects were demonstrated at the Sun Cloud demonstrations pods and were featured prominently on both the Sun Cloud Computing landing page as well as on Project Kenai. Click the snapshots below for larger versions:

If you have not already, please give these projects a look and send me feedback! Cloud Computing security is in its infancy in many ways, and these projects are just a start down a long and winding road. I remain convinced as ever that Cloud Computing will have a role to play in raising the information security bar for everyone, but we still have work to do! As a teaser, I would say that this is just the beginning and we have quite a number of other tricks still up our sleeves! So stay tuned and send along your ideas and feedback!

Technorati Tag: security hardening encryption cloudcomputing OpenSolaris Sun SunCloud Amazon ec2 s3 aws

Probably many of you heard about or visited these events and if not think about to go. This is a great event where thousands of people from all around the world meet to chat in person and to visit sessions where all new things around Java and now also around OpenSolaris and other community projects are presented. Conference is held in Moscone Center North. It's huge and great place for a big conference, located just in heart of San Francisco which allows you to go for lunch to such place like Yerba Buena Gardens.

So let's go in ;) This picture is just what you meet after registration.

First day John Fowler was talking about OpenSolaris 2009.06 and its new technologies.

On JavaOne keynote Sun CEO Jonathan Shwartz is speaking with father of Java - James Gosling.

After that Johathan invited Scott McNealy, Sun chairman and co-founder, to podium and Scott continued the speech.

Scott got a big applause from public and expressed that we should not be worry about the Java's future. He made couple of jokes on Larry Ellison's address and invited him on the podium right after that. Larry spoke about coming invesments to Java and said he would like to see there will be devices like phones which will run on Java coming not only from others but also from Sun. As Larry is famous for his passion to sailing, Scott gave him a gift for his Rising Sun yacht. You can guess what the flags means in sailing world ;)

 Please enjoy video how it was with Java in fact.
 

 
And what's next. Let's march to the OpenSolaris and Cloud Computing party ;)
 

Tonight’s “After Dark” Bash is a great opportunity to sample some complimentary food and drink (two tickets per person, which can be picked up at registration) as well as have a bit of fun.  The bash has been moved to the Marriott on 4th and Mission.  The party goes from 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM (doors open at 6:30). CommunityOne attendees are also invited to the "After Dark" Bash.

And we’ll even include a few pictures from the past two days at JavaOne. Poker? Rock Band?  It looks like Java Utopia is all that it’s cracked up to be and more!  It’s also good to see that those P.I.E. guys, Baron and Hector, haven’t been kidnapped with all the madness they've been up to.

Dinner of reception

Registration

Dave Douglas - Senior Vice President, Sun Microsystems

Reggi

The Moscone Center empty

Top 4 Ambassadors

I was talking to 5 thousand

Thank you !!!

OpenSolaris Party and Sun Cloud Party

James Gosling - Founder of Java

James Gosling - Founder of Java

T-Shirt Slingshot

The Oracle was there !

Me and James Gosling

Me and Scott Scott McNealy - Chairman and Co-Founder, Sun Microsystems

Lin Lee Vice President, Global Communities, Sun Microsystems

Lighting Talk with James Gosling

Party again !!!

Snooker

Look who I was talking to...

Party Again, only for Sun employee

Reggie, Director of Sun Evangelists Team

Myself with my new HAT

tour around San Francisco

Garden of the Stanford University

Stanford University

Cool Place !!!!!!!