Category: Sun

Of course you sound that English, D4 Boy! But judging by our weekly team meeting, it’s now spiced with a sprinkling of Antipodean rising inflection for good measure

This just in from Fintan:

Thanks to Jamie O'Leary of DIT Netsoc we have a venue
available for the first Irish OpenSolaris meeting.

So, the time and venue
	
	DIT, Kevin St @ 6:30, Tuesday 27th Sept

Primary Speaker 

	Darren Moffat, Solaris Security Architect

and then a general discussion on what people would
like to get out of the UG.

Further details and directions for the exact location in
DIT will be sent out before the UG meeting.

Julie bought me one of these… look out for it around the Dublin office soon. It’s very hard to miss…

I’ve been at Sun in Dublin for five years now (well, as of last week or so)… which is actually the longest I’ve worked for any one company. (My previous record was four years with Logica, now LogicaCMG, in Cambridge, but much of that time was spent full time on-site at Reuters in London, and then at the NATS air traffic management R&D centre near Bournemouth, so that felt more like two or three separate jobs anyway.)

When I joined, Sun shares were trading at over $50. Now it’s an event in itself when they pop their head above $4. So what’s kept me here? Well, it’s certainly not the share options

Primarily it’s the work. Open source software usability still brings a new challenge practically every day, and I’ve been doing it for five years now. I’d also like to think that, along with the rest of the GNOME usability folks, we’ve blazed a bit of a trail… albeit one that’s wandered about a bit, and still isn’t quite sure where it’s headed.

Of course, you need smart and motivated people around and above you to achieve things anywhere, and Sun has more than its fair share of those. That’s not to say there isn’t as much politics, bureaucracy and (just occasionally) downright frustrating dithering as you’ll find at any other company, large or small, but for such a globally-distributed company (the JDS team alone has engineers in Ireland, the USA, Canada, Germany, China, India and New Zealand), we cut through it pretty well. And right now the whole software organisation is pulling in the same direction more strongly than at any other time I can remember.

Dublin is still a decent enough place to live too, even though the locals will tell you that the Celtic Tiger has turned it into a soulless shell of its oul’ self. And only in Ireland would they spend hundreds of millions of euro on a new tram system that has two lines that don’t join up, and a sub-city tunnel to take trucks out of the city centre that isn’t high enough to accommodate a lot of them. But that’s all part of its charm, I guess.

Oh, and we get to choose our own five year service award from a decent enough list– I’ve gone for one of these…

Sun Ireland is having a donut day today, to mark yesterday’s decent earnings results. There’s a bit of a flaw, though… I work at home on Wednesdays, and we weren’t given any warning that it would be today (although we knew one was coming). In fact, Sun positively encourages people to work at home as often as possible, so somehow, a donut day doesn’t seem like a very inclusive reward scheme any more. If anyone has any better ideas, let me know and I’ll pass them on to Scott

Wow… apparently we reached two million Solaris 10 downloads this week! I think it’s safe to say that’s exceeded even the most optimistic expectations of anyone at Sun, so much so that we’re having a doughnut day next week to celebrate What with that and the company almost literally buzzing with excitement about OpenSolaris, you can’t help but feel we could be on to something big. Here’s hoping.

We also had our 2006 financial year kick-off barbeque here today… despite the odd threatening cloud, the food was good, the beer was flowing, but as usual I didn’t get a sniff of winning anything in the raffle. Almost unbelievable that nobody wanted to go into town afterwards and make a night of it, though… is this really the same company I joined five years ago (almost) to the day?!

http://www.europe.redhat.com/news/article/431.html

I wonder if this means Daniel will let us Sun employees access rpmfind.net again

(Of course, I know a lot more people than just Red Hat and Sun have campaigned against this… well done to everybody on their tireless lobbying.)