Going green

Every year, Employees of Sun Microsystems dedicate a week for Global volunteering program. India Engineering Center (IEC) is also very active during this week. One of the events as a part of the Volunteer program, was to clean up the plastic waste at 'Sangama', a popular picnic spot at the intersection of rivers kaveri and Arkavati. Close by is a 'MekedaaTu', another famous getaway from Bangalore. Lot of tourists visit these places every year and leave a lot of plastic waste. Employees of Sun along with volunteers from 'Clean and Green' go on a cleaning program along the banks of river kaveri. Last year (2007), we all had been to Muttatthi and this year they had chosen 'Sangama'. Along with my family (mom, wife, sister and nephew) I joined the team of volunteers at Sangama. The place was a big mess with plastic covers, bottles, gutka packets etc. A group of 60 volunteers worked for 3 hours in the scorching heat to collect 220 KG of plastic waste. The plastic waste was handed to a plastic company in Kanakpura who use it for laying tar for road.
Last year we had collected 303 kgs of plastic at muttatti. You can read about it on April 14 2007 - Mega Acitivity @ Muttathi

The same day evening, I had to attend a wedding reception. I met a few friends at the wedding and told them about the clean and green activity and they appreciated our effort. In most of the South Indian weddings, the guests are given 'Tamboola' (coconut and beetle leaves) as a tradition. It is believed that the guests who attend the wedding should not be sent empty handed and hence there is a tradition of giving tamboola. The practice is to give the tamboola in a plastic cover. My friend told me that in the wedding, they had decided not to use plastic and hence they gave the tamboola in a paper bag, with a very nice note on it. The note requested people to reduce the usage of plastic. click on the image to read the note.
Read A letter to Reliance Industries

New announcements from SUN

Today Sun Microsystems made a couple of annoucements. These two announcements will help SUN expand its business with customers where it doesn't have an account.

1. Sun and Microsoft have announced an expanded relationship including Sun becoming a Windows Server OEM Read more on this at
http://www.sun.com/software/windows/
Sun Streams Through Windows

2. Sun Acquire Assets of Cluster File Systems, Including the Lustre File System

About Cluster File Systems, Inc.

Cluster File Systems, Inc. (CFS) is a leader in high-performance, scalable cluster file system technology. Extensive experience, innovative insights, and proven engineering have enabled CFS to dramatically surpass the scalability limits of modern computing. The Company's premier Lustre File System currently powers clusters with ten of thousands of nodes and petabytes of data, delivering groundbreaking parallel I/O and metadata throughput on many of the world's largest Linux-based supercomputers. CFS provides technical support, training, and engineering services, and is actively working with storage and cluster vendors to develop the next generation of intelligent storage devices. The Lustre File System for Linux is open source software developed and maintained by CFS. For more information, visit www.clusterfs.com.

Read more on this on
Sun Microsystems Expands High Performance Computing Portfolio




Additionally, there were more announcements earlier
The technology landscape shifted again earlier, with another announcement between Sun and IBM - IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org community.

Sun Seeks 1-For-4 Reverse Stock Split

If the reverse stock split is approved by our stockholders, Sun will exchange one new share for every four outstanding shares. As a result, Sun would have one-fourth as many outstanding shares, but each share would be worth approximately four times as much. In general, a reverse stock split will not impact the market value of Sun as a whole

Read more on
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070905/sun_microsystems_stock.html?.v=3

How JAVA got its name

James Gosling the father of Java says, how it was named

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Begin forwarded message:

From: James Gosling
Date: August 24, 2007 8:16:58 PM PDT
To: Jonathan Schwartz
Subject: How was Java named?

The story goes like this:

We needed a name. We had been using "oak" (which was selected essentially randomly by me), and while the team had grown attached to it, the trademark lawyers ruled it out. We had lots of email debates about names, but nothing got resolved. We ended up in the awkward position where the #1 thing stopping us from shipping was the name.

Our marketing lead knew someone who was a "naming consultant" (I don't remember his name, but he was great). We could neither afford the price nor the time of a conventional product naming process. He agreed to do something rather odd, but effective and quick: he acted as a facilitator at a meeting where about a dozen of us locked ourselves in a room for an afternoon. He started asking us questions like "How does this thing make you feel?" (Excited!) "What else makes you feel that way?" (Java!) We ended up with a board covered with essentially random words. Then he put us through a sorting process where we ended up with a ranking of the names. We ended up with a dozen name candidates and sent them off to the lawyers: they worked down the list until they hit one that cleared their search. "Java" was the fourth name on the list. The first name on the list was "Silk", which I hated but everyone else liked. My favorite was "Lyric", the third one on the list, but it didn't pass the lawyers test. I don't remember what the other candidate names where.

So, who named Java? Marketing organized the meeting, the consultant ran it, and a whole pile of us did a lot of yelling out of random words. I'm honestly not real sure who said "Java" first, but I'm pretty sure it was Mark Opperman.

There certainly wasn't any brilliant marketing mind who went through a coherent thought process.

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Sun Ranks amongs Top IT Employers in India

Sun Microsystems with an employee base of about 1,000 made its entry into the Dataquest-IDC Best Employers listing at No, 10 largely driven by a high employee satisfaction score. It scores high on compensation and topped the rank on the new age priority, work-life balance.
Read more India's top IT employers http://www.indiainfoline.com/news/innernews.asp?storyId=43817&lmn=1

Sun Rising

Recently Sun Microsystems announced that it is changing its ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA.
Today more people know Java than Sun Microsystems. Company is using the popularity of Java for it branding. This has not been received well by SUN fans and other techies. Read the comments on Jonathan's blog http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/java_is_everywhere#comments
Sun, once the darling of Wall street is trying very hard to stay profitable, after years of bleeding. Recently it announced a partnership with Google, in which they'll be distributing StarOffice for free as a part of their Google Pack.
Sun has always come out with very cool technologies, but somehow not been able to convert them to revenue. Hope these new marketing gimmicks will help SUN to be back on top as the most preferred Hardware/Software vendor.

Code for Freedom Contest from Sun Microsystems

Code For Freedom is a 6-month campaign in India's academic community. With a theme that ties Open Source to Freedom. Sun Microsystesms is launching this campaign during the 60th year of Indian Indpendence. The associated contest is open to any college student in India and provides laptops, iPods, equipment, and T-shirts as prizes. The goal of the contest is to catalyze academic community participation in Sun open source projects.

SUN is showcasing OpenSolaris, NetBeans, GlassFish, OpenPortal, and Apache Derby. http://in.sun.com/codeforfreedom

Open High Availability Cluster

The product I worked on for 2 years in SUN, is now available for the open source community.

Solaris Cluster made first contribution of source-code to the OpenSolaris community.

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ha-clusters/


check out these cool videos on Solaris cluster

volunteering at SUN

Working at SUN is not just about coming out with cool technologies, but also contributing back to the community.
We mobilize employees to visit a blind school, senior citizen home, and school for poor children. They do this at least every quarter. They support the old age home, "Shambavi Home", by sponsoring all the medicines required by the residents throughout the year. Last year, school children from an orphanage were invited to the Sun campus giving them a sense of what work is like in a corporate environment. The volunteer team also treated the children to fun--complete with a movie, magic show and sweet feast.

The volunteer team in India is committed to social responsibility. Their commitment, high spirit and team work is something to emulate. They make a difference!!!

Read more about Sun India volunteering team. I am proud to be a part of this team.