All posts by Deirdre Straughan

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The Last of OpenSolaris

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The summer of 2010 was largely a painful mess. I had moved to San Francisco in April, and by late May was very ill with a sinus infection that would eventually require months of antibiotics and two procedures to clear out. On the work side, Sun had been bought by Oracle, and we were in the throes of a merger that caused enormous pain to most former Sun employees.

I had an office in building 18 of Sun’s Menlo Park (MPK) campus, but I didn’t spend much time there. The building already seemed very empty: whole teams had been laid off, and those remaining preferred to work from home so as not to be constantly reminded of those who were gone.

By midsummer, we knew for sure that MPK would be sold and we’d all be moving to Sun’s Santa Clara offices. As a minor part of preparing for the move, I was asked to clear out 10 or so storage rooms that had belonged to various groups. I was ideal for this assignment: I’m very good at sorting and packing. I also hate waste, so I was anxious to find good homes for as much stuff as possible, though this was a lot more work than just “recycling” it all.

First, I took inventory:

  • Over 3000 t-shirts. Most had been made for OpenSolaris user groups (why were there so many for Poland?!?). We were no longer allowed to give these away outside the company, because the OpenSolaris brand had been “deprecated”.
  • Hundreds of baseball caps, also OpenSolaris-logoed. Ditto.
  • A gigantic shipping pallet full of copies of the OpenSolaris Bible. The information in them was (and is) still useful, but, again – wrong branding.
  • Hundreds of copies of Solaris Internals, Solaris Application Programming, and others, but only 28 of Solaris Performance and Tools – which proved to be the most in-demand of the books.
  • Huge amounts of office supplies, which we gave to a program that gives this stuff to teachers.

There were a few unique items, such as Solaris-logoed boxer shorts. Thousands of plastic license plate frames intended for a dismally-failed promo for the Sun cloud (nothing to do with these but put them in the recycle bin).

^ I found two of these robots in a closet that had belonged to the Java team. Online research showed that they had been part of one of Gosling‘s toy shows at JavaOne some years before. They came home with me; one has since gone on to pursue a career in Hollywood, the other is at the Joyent offices (matches the decor) went to live with Ben Rockwood’s family. I assume that Number 3 still lives with Gosling.

And OpenSolaris-labelled champagne:

I remembered this: it had been served at a party during CommunityOne in 2008. Lynn and I snagged a case of the remainders to take back to our colleagues in Broomfield. The case or so that I later found in a store room in MPK we served at a farewell-to-MPK party in August, 2010.

Making endless trips between buildings with trolleys full of heavy boxes, I consolidated all the books and apparel into one large storage room. Then I advertised within the company to find “buyers.” To my surprise, everyone wanted an OpenSolaris shirt. None had been given out within the company: only people who had attended conferences and user group events had them. Which left out most of the engineers who had actually created (Open)Solaris! So I packed up dozens of shirts to send to Sun offices around the world. I took piles of stuff to the engineering meetings that I attended as part of my regular job – which turned out to be a good way to warm up engineers who were previously too shy to even speak to me.

But there was still a lot of stuff left. Towards the end of summer, when I was on a deadline to get Building 18 cleared, I started having lunchtime “store hours” when people could come rifle through piles of shirts and pick up books.

An Oracle VP of software drove down from Redwood Shores to get copies of Solaris Internals for his team – said he didn’t have budget to buy them. ???

Dozens of people came to grab some remnants of Sun history. There were historic encounters, such as the above meeting in my storeroom/showroom between Solaris book authors Darryl Gove and Brendan Gregg.

Some of the schwag has had interesting later lives. Several dozen hats went to a church, to help keep people together during a hike in Yosemite. Another bunch ended up at a school event, and are still seen on that campus today. I gave a hat to a friend who had nothing to do with Solaris, but now gets chatted up by random geeks in San Francisco whenever she wears it.

^ One of the largest things we kept was this 40-foot banner, which we later used to decorate a Solaris Family Reunion.

While the last of the OpenSolaris branding was thus being purged from Sun/Oracle, two significant things happened for the future of the technology itself:

(More history and what happened next is here.)

 

Part 1: Resistance is Futile: The Oracle Acquisition

Part 2: What to Expect When You’re Expecting – to Be Acquired

Part 3: Fishworks and Me

Part 4: Into the Belly of the Beast

Part 5: The Last of OpenSolaris

Coda: Letting Go of a Beloved Technology

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Centro Ippico Lombardo: Gara Sociale 1999

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My daughter began riding at age eight at the Centro Ippico Lombardo, a stable and riding school near Milan’s San Siro stadium. This was around the same time I was starting to learn to shoot and edit my own video, so I was able to document some of her earliest events. Some of this old video – in this case an informal “social” competition in 1999 – recently came to light, on some old CD-R discs – which are holding up just fine!

For those who wish to practice conversational Italian, the last clip in this playlist is the dinner we all took part in after the event.

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Loss and Found

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Every now and then a friend asks how I’m coping with my dad’s death, and I wonder if I’m heartless because I don’t seem to think about it much at all. But there’s a reason I don’t.

Loss is old and familiar to me. For one thing, it’s part of the TCK lifestyle: at a young age you follow your parents to a new land. You leave behind almost everything you knew (except your immediate family): home, friends, pets, possessions – whether you want to or not.

Your parents generally do have a choice in the matter, and no parent wants to think they make choices that hurt their children. So they dwell on the advantages of expatriate life, and often do not allow their kids to decently mourn what was left behind. The kids deal with their feelings as best they can, get settled, make new friends, grow accustomed to new routines, adopt new pets – and then it’s time to leave again.

In my life, the usual TCK experiences of loss have been compounded by many other losses: my parents’ multiple divorces. My mother’s absence from my life, both emotional and physical. (Some of this was not her choice – but some was.) A similar choice by a beloved stepmother to walk out of my life. The deaths of my father-in-law and my aunt Rosie. The dissolution of my own marriage: always a loss to be grieved, even though I was the “bad guy” who finally admitted it was over. The loss of the close and easy relationship with my daughter, though I’m hopeful we will find a new way to be close.

As for physical places and possessions – hah! Left, lost, given away, destroyed. Even the memory aids that we rely on in modern life: most of my baby pictures were lost at sea in one of my mother’s moves. I now try to store my photos “permanently” in the cloud, and my public memories here on my site, but that’s more for my own future use and reference than as a hedge against loss. Sometimes I’m startled and delighted at the depth of now-forgotten detail in pieces I wrote years ago.

What got me started thinking about all this was a recent column by Roger Ebert in which he mourned the loss of old friends and the memories they held: “We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear.” He’s two decades (and a nasty run-in with cancer) closer to death than I am, so perhaps it’s too soon for me to understand his feelings. But, for the moment, I can contemplate my own eventual death with tranquility. At least that is one loss that I won’t have to cope with. As Ebert himself said in a more sanguine moment: “there is nothing on the other side of death to fear”.

As for all my other losses, past, present and future, I suppose I do cope well with them, through long practice. There have been times when the choice was stark: “Get through this as best you can, or kill yourself. If you’re not going to kill yourself, you might as well try to be happy, because living depressed is a waste of your time and everyone else’s.”

How do I do it? I don’t aspire to be a self-help guru and don’t claim to have answers that will work for everyone, but my recipe is: delight in change. You might as well, because things are going to change whether you like it or not! Economies change, technologies change, natural wonders come and go (more often go, sadly). Cultures, languages and “rules” for living change. Verities we thought eternal (“Invest in real estate”) prove untrue.

Learn to enjoy what’s new in your life, while keeping a (light) grip on what’s important from the past. Be loyal to those who are loyal to you, let go gracefully of those who are not – including those who commit the ultimate disloyalty (<wry smile>) of dying on you.

In the end, what can we rely on? Love and friendship (if we are open to them), here and now. Yes, Roger, you’ll lose friends, and those losses will hurt. Make new friends, and make sure that you value them no less than the old ones. At some point, friends of my own generation will begin dying off in droves (hell, I might be one of the first to go). One way to alleviate that is to have a mix of ages among one’s friends. My age group have no monopoly on interestingness.

Love, be lovable, and do your best to be loved. Remember that it can all change without warning, but don’t dwell on that possibility. I’ve had good years and bad ones, but, even in the worst of my bad years, I never wanted to turn the clock back. Change is coming – and it might always be change for the better.

 With So Little to Be Sure Of

With so little to be sure of,
If there’s anything at all.
I’m sure of here and now and us together.
…
Thanks for everything we did,
Everything that’s past,
Everything’s that’s over too fast.
None of it was wasted,
All of it will last:
Everything that’s here and now and us together!
It was marvellous to know you
And it isn’t really through.
Crazy business this, this life we live in
Can’t complain about the time we’re given
With so little to be sure of in this world,
We had a moment!
A marvelous moment!

– Stephen Sondheim

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Shopping in Delhi: Central Cottage Industries Emporium

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I’m not much of a shopper on my home territory, but love shopping in India, especially Delhi, which is well supplied with everything from roadside stalls to glitzy shopping malls, plus a good selection of handicrafts from all over India. The oldest and largest place to buy handicrafts (probably in all of India) is the Central Cottage Industries Emporium on Jan Path. It was there when I was in high school in the 1970s and 80s – already seeming to have been in existence for decades – and hasn’t changed much since.

Central Cottage Industries Emporium, New Delhi

It’s an unusual building (wish I could find out who designed it), a labyrinthine series of mezzanines build around an open interior. Though better lit now that it used to be, it still feels cavernous, musty, and strangely underpopulated. (This last is reason enough to spend some time there on a hot day in Delhi – away from the crowds of people on the streets, many of whom, in this part of town, are trying to sell you something.)

CCIE

Many of the goods here are items that have been sold to tourists in India for decades, if not centuries. There are innovative twists on handicraft tradition available in India nowadays, but you won’t find them here. However, for the usual stuff, you’ll get a large selection, decent quality, fair prices, and no shopkeeper at your elbow, constantly urging you to buy.

gold-plated goods at CCIE, Delhi

^ Gold-plated dishes as tourist tat was actually new to me, I can only guess that it’s aimed at the Middle Eastern market.

textiles, CCIE

CCIE has a nice, though relatively limited, supply of textiles – silk, cotton, wool; printed, dyed, batik, embroidered; for clothing, curtains, and upholstery. If you love fabric (I do!), this is a good introduction to the breadth of traditional cloth available in India. Note the remnants bin – great for finding decorative pieces suitable for framing.

More in the photos below, and there was much more that we didn’t photograph – books, clothing, toys, tea, perfume, jewelry, bedding, cushion covers, furniture, even architectural pieces like carved doorways and columns. (I assume they will ship that sort of thing, no idea what it would cost.) There’s also a cool, quiet coffee shop on the top floor.

Actually buying anything is a bit of a process. In each section of the store, hand over your selections to the waiting personnel – that they merely wait, and don’t hassle you, is a huge improvement on every other tourist shop in Delhi! The staff write you a receipt, your goods are whisked away, and you continue shopping. This is dangerous – you end up carrying a handful of paper, with no clear idea of how much you’re acquiring.

When you’re finally finished, you take your receipts downstairs to the “cash desk”, and pay for everything at once via cash or credit card. Each of your receipts is firmly thwacked with a “paid” stamp, and the whole pile given back to you. You trot over to the nearby pickup counter, and are handed a dozen or more recycled-paper bags in various sizes, one for each section of the store you bought from. It is permissible to consolidate these into fewer bags for easier carrying. Then you’re done, and step back into the heat and roar of Jan Path.

All of Brendan‘s photos of CCIE from our October India trip are here:

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