Category Archives: what I do

bio, what I do

The Glamorous Life

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I’ve been told that some of my colleagues envy my job. I admit that it’s a lot of fun – and, when asked what I do, I focus on the positives – but right now I’m mostly tired. This month is  the most intense I’ve yet had with Sun. Here’s what it’s looked like so far:

Oct 23: Flew to Minneapolis.

Oct 24, 27, 28: Filmed interviews with the SAM-QFS team at Sun’s Eagan, MN office.

Oct 29: Flew back to Denver, straight into meetings and more office time.

Nov 1-6: Filmed parts of Sun’s Data Management Ambassadors’ conference, fortunately being held near my “home base” office in Broomfield. Especially fortunate because I still had a lot to do organizing the SC08 Student party. Worked long office hours when I wasn’t behind a camera in a hotel conference room. (At least this particular conference room had huge windows, so I didn’t feel like I was in a cave all day.) When I was behind the camera, I was also usually doing something on my laptop, such as running the October stats on blogs and community websites.

Nov 8: Flew to San Diego.

Nov 9: Much-needed day off (it was a Sunday!), went to the zoo. Spent much of the evening on email, trying to finalize details for a blogging contest to be held around an important product launch the next day. Having received no word on a decision by 10:30 pm, I went to sleep.

Nov 10: Woke up and checked email again at 12:30 am, nothing. 5:30 am, still nothing, so I went ahead and mailed it, because the contest began at 6 am Pacific Time. Woke up at 7 to film an all-day ZFS Workshop at LISA.

Nov 11: Flew to Las Vegas for Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference. Lunch with Barton, toured the CEC show floor, hung out and had dinner with my OpenSolaris buds, declined to go to a late show with them, went back to my hotel room, watched House.

Nov 12: Filmed an HPC track that took most of the day, plus one other presentation. In the evening, participated in a Birds-of-a-Feather session on blogging. Disagreement was, er, lively.

Nov 13: After a very bad night’s sleep (my room at Caesar’s was right on top of a disco), got up at 4 am to catch a 6:22 am flight to San Francisco. Lynn picked me up, already dialed in to a staff meeting. In the afternoon, moderated the chat as Lynn’s presentation to Forum 2.0 was streamed online. Had a few ideas about how to do the moderator’s job better, will be writing about those later. In the evening Lynn and I had a meeting with Meena, then went back to our hotel for dinner. Had an extremely hot bath – the cold water didn’t work. At least the bed was very comfortable.

Nov 14: Up early again, interesting news on my iPhone. Hurried to get to Sun’s Menlo Park campus for Lynn’s second Forum presentation, then a dash to the airport for our flight to Austin. Arrived a little before 5, Diana about the same time from Denver, then ran into Matthew at baggage claim. Everyone’s coming to town for SC08. Got our cars, I went to Spankyville, where Ross was preparing dinner for a gang of us.

Nov 15: Up at 8 to catch up on emails and run some party-related errands, then on to film at Sun’s HPC Consortium all afternoon. Ended the day filming an interview with Dr. Jim Leylek. Had a quiet dinner with Dominic, went home and to sleep.

Nov 16: Up early again for the Consortium – first speaker of the day was Andy Bechtolsheim, so sleeping in was not an option! Left early (Peter took over the camera) so I could go help set up the venue for the party. More running around to pick up a tank of helium for the balloons and move our student helpers to the venue. Busy with preparations and then the party (which I think we can count as a success) until about midnight, went home and collapsed.

Nov 17: Woke up at 6:30, my brain immediately whirring madly through all the things I needed to do, though my body emphatically did not want to get out of bed. Made it back to the Consortium by 10 am to continue filming. Left again at 1:30 to go see Ross’ new home, have lunch, return the helium tank, and dash out again to film the opening of the SC08 show floor.

I hope to survive until Saturday, when I leave for warmer climes and something resembling a vacation. I should note that this month has been equally intense for practically everybody at Sun. We’re all looking and feeling a little ragged around the edges by now.

above: I did get to sit down long enough to have a caricature drawn at the OpenStorage Summit

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what I do

Professional Videography vs. Videoblogging

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^ filming at the Open Storage Summit after-party

I don’t claim to be a professional videographer (for one thing, I’m entirely self-taught). I do videoblogging, which is fundamentally different.

From my (very limited) experience, it seems that professional corporate video is, usually:

  • thoroughly planned (and likely scripted) in advance;
  • involves quite a lot of large, heavy equipment, with multiple people to set it up and run it.
  • the people who do this know how to do media, but don’t necessarily know much about what or who they’re filming (nor do they need to).
  • filming often takes place in a studio, which may need to be reserved well in advance, or in some other carefully-planned, controlled location;
  • professional post-production (editing, compressing, and posting video) can take a long time
  • all of this is expensive

Videoblogging, on the other hand:

  • eh… not so planned. When I go to an event, I have an idea which talks I want to film, but things usually get added or subtracted at the last minute. Alongside the formal talks, I also try to grab interviews and other material.
  • equipment is minimal and light, reasonable for one person to move around and manage.
  • a videoblogger is part of the community, and therefore can see and take advantage of filming opportunities as they arise – or create them.
  • shooting can take place anywhere – no reservation required.
  • post-production is quick and dirty – the important thing is to get the material out FAST
  • all of this is cheap

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My New Baby

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Isn’t it gorgeous? It’s my very own Thumper, aka Sun Fire X4500 Server.

Jeff Cheeney and I (and whoever we can rope in to help) are going to make it into a video compression/archive/streaming server. (Before you start worrying about budget, don’t: this one is rebuilt and didn’t cost us anywhere near sticker price.)

Why do I need such a thing? Take a look:

I’ve shot over 100 hours of video since I began videoblogging for Sun about a year ago, and much more is on the way. I haven’t edited even half of it, partly because I’m doing all the editing and compression a Windows laptop which I also have to use for all my other work. So it would be useful to be able to offload some of the processing onto a different machine, one that can also archive and share the results.

This is also a learning exercise, to see what we can do with all this cool technology we have around, similar to the project that Jeff and Chase distilled into a ten-minute recipe for building a NAS box. Similar also to Dominic’s new recipe series, which began recently with Configuring Sun Storage J4000 Arrays and the ZFS File System in Ten Minutes.

It will probably take some months of poking around and figuring things out, and we’re not entirely sure we’ll be able to boil this one down to “Build a Video Archive/Server in 10 Minutes” – but that’s what we’re trying for. We’ll keep you posted!

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bio, what I do

Translating Blogs and Finding New Friends – Worldwide!

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Note: The images in this post were originally on a Sun site, and were lost in the Oracle transition.

About a year ago, Dan Maslowski had a simple-but-brilliant idea to increase the reach of some of Sun’s Open Solaris Storage blogs: translate them! Sun’s globalization team was initially cautious: they already had their hands full translating interfaces and documentation, and weren’t sure where this blogging thing fit into their scope of work. But they agreed to give it a shot.

We started with Bob Porras’ blog. Based on attendance at Sun Tech Days worldwide, he opted to have it translated into Chinese (first post July 9th), quickly followed by Spanish (first post August 17th) and Russian (August 20th). We’ve recently added Japanese (April 30th) and Brazilian Portugese (May 22nd).

The results were good, though not surprising: traffic increased.

What’s more interesting than the simple increase in page views is the range of countries now represented in Bob’s readership. Here’s a breakdown of traffic by (roughly calculated) language areas:

New entrants Japanese and Brazilian Portugese are already making a noticeable contribution – clearly, there was demand for material in these languages. (Note that “all others” refers to all other countries that have sent traffic to Bob’s blog – folks from these countries are obviously reading one of the six languages so far represented.)

Our geographic reach increased. For example, look at the number of Spanish-speaking countries from which people are reading Bob’s blog each month:

Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May
3 6 8 8 9 13 8 10 10 12 11 11

The list varies a bit from month to month, altogether 15 Spanish-speaking countries are represented so far:

Andorra
Argentina
Bolivia
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Guatemala
Honduras
Mexico
Peru
Puerto Rico
Saint Lucia
Spain
Venezuela

Some of these are tiny countries bringing us only one or two visitors a month – but that’s one or two more people we’re talking to that we weren’t before.

Now let’s look at Storage Stop, a very different kind of blog which we began translating into Chinese in November, but have neglected to since March. Umm, we’ll just claim that was a web traffic experiment, not an oversight, right?

I wonder whether translating Storage Stop is useful, because it’s primarily an aggregator, pointing at material on other blogs (so far mostly in English), and a venue for videos which are so far entirely in English. (We’re looking into ways to translate videos.) For that or whatever reason, Storage Stop never got a lot of traction in Chinese, and I may abandon that experiment to spend translation resources more productively.

Since December we’ve also been translating Scott Tracy’s blog and Lynn Rohrer’s blogs into Chinese.

But it was clear from the overall trends of traffic to Sun storage blogs that our most-valued material is mostly highly technical. So over the last few months we’ve been translating selected posts into various languages. Examples include:

These translations are mostly too recent to draw conclusions; I’ll report back after we’ve got some numbers to analyze.

We also translated one important post by Jim Grisanzio on Building OpenSolaris Communities, into multiple languages. Early returns show that this is having an effect on traffic and, more importantly, as Jim had hoped, it’s opening up new conversations.

Sun’s globalization team are now enthusiastically and ably taking over more of the blog translation process: all I have to do is identify the posts to translate, and they do the rest. With their help, more blogs are being translated all over Sun, in other technology areas such as Sun Cluster.

We’re opening up to the global conversation, and the world is talking back. Sometimes the simplest ideas have the profoundest effects.

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