Michael Clarke

Well I’ve not blogged that much recently. However, I’ve been pretty busy and I’ve got quite a lot to blog about. So, I suppose the best place to start would be the middle of last week…

On Wednesday or Thursday last week (I forget exactly) Kim Austin who runs the Campus Ambassador program for Sun informed me that she would (officially now) be taking me on as the Aberystwyth University Campus Ambassador when Chris Talbot leaves at the end of this academic year. I had for some time been a shoe in for the job, however it is now official which is excellent.

At the same time as this Kim also introduced the other interns and myself to the SAI (Sun Academic Initiative) website. This is a excellent website that offers pretty much all of Sun’s courses (except it seems Solaris Internals) for free to students. If you’re a student, specifically a Computer Science (or perhaps Physics/Maths) student, I really recommend you get yourself over to http://www.sun.com/solutions/landing/industry/education/sai/index.xml and register. If your university isn’t already registered they can do, for free! All you need to do is get a professor to register here.

So, what else has happened. Well on Friday we took down our x86 Sunray server, eagain (all our Sunray servers are named after Unix error codes), to replace it with a Huron. ‘Huron’ is the internal code name for the new T5120/T5220 systems Sun sell based on the Niagara 2 chip. These machines are truly amazing - in a 2U rack you get 32 Thread engines (64 total threads) and 64GBs of RAM… This makes the Gnome system monitor a sight to behold…

The funny thing is the way it sort of gives up choosing colours after 4 CPUs…

As most of you will know I’ve recently been given the opportunity to do some work on DTrace, initially just fixing a few bugs and doing some RFEs (Request for Enhancements). Well a number of things have happened since I had my first meeting.

First, Robin (my house mate who thinks that this whole blog is centered round him) has decided to port MouthOS to SPARC. This has proven to be most interesting for both him and myself. Whilst we’ve still not even managed to get characters on the screen we’ve both learned an awful lot about the way that OBP works and how SPARC boots and functions. I have to admit that I’ve been truly amazed at what OBP provides you out of the box compared to x86. OBP defines a number of amazingly useful functions (such as putchar() and printf() etc) so that your boot loader/OS can just call them directly. It also has great debugging utilities built in to the point where you can literally set break points in your OS and then print CPU registers and all sorts of things. All this and it will even give you a nice tree structure with all the hardware devices in the system.

Apart from getting slightly side tracked you may be wondering what this has got to do with DTrace. The simple answer is not much other than this has now meant that Robin will also be doing some Solaris Kernel work - specifically with ‘newboot’ which is designed to allow Solaris (SPARC) to boot ZFS file systems. I’ve no idea when it’s planed to be released or what state the project is at - but I would like to wish Robin good luck with his future Solaris development work, and I also think that another thank you to Paul and also Tim Graves is in order, not to mention Chris Beal who has agreed to be Robins’ mentor.

Anyway, moving on a bit… In regards to my work on DTrace. Apart from endless hours of reading the source code (which I have to admit is the most well commented code I’ve ever seen) yesterday I finally chose my first bug - http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6287021.

It doesn’t look to be a particularly complex or important bug - but it’s a great place to get started with the development as it will require quite a bit of investigation first in order to produce a test case. With a test case I can then start to identify where the error is happening in the code and I can then implement the fix.

I think that pretty much sums up what I’ve been up to recently. This weekend I’m off home again for Mothers Day and my sisters birthday. I’ve booked a couple of days off work (Monday to Wednesday) to have a look around for a new car also, so with any luck I shall hopefully be returning to Farnborough with a car! I’ve seen a couple of Mondeos and a Vectra at a place called Robert Car Sales (about an hour drive from home) - I can’t wait as it’s been so long since I had a car now.

Talking of cars, Matt (another intern at Sun, and friend) had quite a nasty crash the other day on the M1. Some truck driver basically pulled out of the slow lane into the middle lane - into him. His car rolled all the way onto the hard shoulder. Fortunately (bar a cut on his arm) he’s alright - though his car is a write off I have given him some advice from when I had my crash so at the very least he’ll know what to expect from the Police, insurance etc. The only problem is the truck driver just drove off and no one seems to have got his number plate!! From the sounds of it he’s going to get off scott free as the CCTV was also down due to road works!

I think that’s everything for now, so until my next exciting installment!

The other day Matt and I got wind of a decision by workplace resources to replace all of the vending machines at Sun. This was most traumatic news as it meant that today we would have no access to the said vending machines, and as such we would have limited access to coffee!!

In light of this we quickly put operation ‘bring coffee into office’ into effect. I’m sure that we’ve probably got a code name for this operation (no doubt using Java as some kind of pun) however, I can’t remember it - ah well…. Anyway, as such yesterday Matt brought in his coffeemaker and I brought in the coffee… fortunately we both also remembered mugs - phew!

As of yet workplace resources haven’t discovered the coffeemaker - however if they do we’ve got an excellent cover story - it’s a Sun Ultra SPARC Enterprise Java Coffee Maker that we’re having to get part replaced from logistics.

Last night we decided that it’d be a good idea to watch a movie. After an enormous amount of time deciding what to watch we started the process of working out exactly how we were going to watch it. This is always a most interesting experience and usually results in us getting every computer, TV, monitor and media capable device in the living room and then connect everything to everything else wondering why 2 hours have passed and we’ve still not seen the opening titles.

In last nights case, 2 laptops, 2 TVs, 1 set of speakers and 1 XBox later we finally managed to get some kind of output…

In our naivety we’re about to try and watch another movie tonight - who knows what mayhem will ensue…

After my French explorations I booked Friday off and went home for the weekend. I had a nice time back in sunny Wales except for the fact that my family had literally managed to break every single computer in the house - and when I say break, I don’t just mean a few viruses or malfunctions, I literally mean motherboards broken, screens damaged, graphics cards frizzled and who knows whatever else. By the end of the weekend I’d managed to pull the few working parts remaining into two systems - the server (which for the most part was working to begin with except that it wouldn’t boot because it couldn’t find the floppy disk drive) and a computer upstairs for everything else. To be fair I think they’ve had some kind of power surge as one computers PSU fuse had blown along with the fuse in the plug… I think they now plan on buying a few surge protectors :p

When I returned today Paul (my boss) asked for a quick chat in the office. He had some not so great news and some excellent news for me. The first bit of news was that the presentation he and I were going to do at Sheffield university had been taken over by some other guys in the office. This turned out not to be so bad after all as I realised that it was the 29th February anyway - at which point I’m back off home anyway for my sisters 5th birthday. However, the good news (which is very good indeed) is that he has managed to get one of the guys in the Solaris Kernel Engineering department (who works with DTrace) to mentor me (after showing him some of the stuff I’d been doing with MouthOS) for my last two years at university. During this time I will be doing things like fixing DTrace bugs via the Open Solaris community - opening some real possibilities for when I finish to come back and work for Sun in their Solaris engineering department! I’ve got a meeting at 11am tomorrow morning with Jonathan, my mentor to be, which I’m really looking forward to as I’m raring to go and I really can’t wait now until the 10th March when I will be going on the Solaris Internals course - thanks Paul

So, what else has happened over the last few days? On Thursday I got another phone call from ‘Private’ offering me a new phone. I keep telling these people that “I’m not interested and that I’ll deal with Orange directly thank you very much.” However, this prompted me to actually ring Orange and see if I really was entitled to a new phone. The answer was no, not really, but we’ll give you one anyway. Apparently these companies will ring you up, offer you a contract and then (only then) contact Orange to see if it’s going to be alright! The cheek!

Whilst I was on the phone I did say I wanted the Nokia N95. However, they wanted £89 for it. Instead I said I’d have the LG Shine (http://www.lgbloggers.com/)… this was fine except it was out of stock. In the end I decided on the Nokia 6500 Slide (in black which is apparently a Orange exclusive). So far I have been most impressed with the phone. However, as with all new gadgets it’s a requirement to test out every feature it has to offer, one of these features being the camera. I decided that it would be a good idea to take a couple of pictures of the MouthOS development centre (i.e. my desk)…

I have to admit that whilst I would love to be able to say that all of those books are mine, only the top C book and the bottom three Intel books are truly mine - the others are on loan from my house mate and friend Robin. However, I highly suspect that I will be buying my own copies before I have to give them back to him as they have been really useful for ideas and all that malarkey during the development of MouthOS so far - I think another thank you is in order - thanks Robin.

I’ve just got back today after a week in France working in the Paris office of Sun. I decided that it would be a very good idea to get up nice and early last Wednesday (5am to be precise) so that there would be no chance of missing my incredibly cheap, no refund, no modifications, return Eurostar journey at 10.30am. This proved to be more than sufficient as I arrived at St. Pancres at 8.30 with 2 hours to spare!

When I arrived in France (about 1.45pm) it then took me a further 2 hours to find my hotel. This was most unfortunate given that my hotel was quite literally 15 minutes walk away from the Eiffel Tower! Ah well. Once I’d finally found my hotel I went for a brief walk around the Eiffel Tower and towards the office - which I found with much more ease.

At the weekend a couple of Friends from University came over to visit. One of them (Ash) had a newspaper cutting which described “how to do the top 5 sights in Paris in one day”. I suspect that we were meant to do this via the Metro, however he insisted that it was a walking exercises. This meant about a 10 - 15 mile walk starting (and then finishing at) Gare du Nord. First we walked to the Pompidou Centre (which is one of the most bizzar places I have ever seen). Then from there we walked to Cathedral Notre dame. From there we walked to the Louvre, then onto the Arc de Triomphe and finally the Eiffel Tower. From there we walked back to Gare du Nord via the major shopping street in Paris. My friends thought this was all very exciting, unfortunately my feet were not too excited by this point having developed numerous blisters!

On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday I was in the office again working on getting the lab back up and running after the power work was completed. There were a few minor problems with the work completed such as the fact that the electrical engineers had used armored cable and not steel wire armored cable (tut tut tut) and the fact that they decided to use some of the 16AMP commandos off some 32AMP to 16AMP splitters we had in the lab because they ran out (go figure, they’ve had the numbers they’ve needed for over 3 months now!). However, on the whole the work went reasonably well and the three power phases are now much more balanced in terms of load.

The last couple of nights in France I went out with Paul (my boss) and JD (one of the old students who is looking after the French lab this year). This was nice, except that on the way back to his Hotel, Paul managed to walk into a glass door and now has quite a bad cut on his nose He said that the manager of the hotel was more interested in cleaning up the blood off the floor than helping him with a plaster.

So, here I am back in the UK and what awaits me in the office? The usual? Well, in reality I suppose the answer is yes, in so far as there is nothing ‘usual’ about our office… and so the usual is the ‘unusual’ most of the time….. Tim Uglow decided to bring his two Samoyeds’ into the office… Thanks to Matt for letting me use his photo….