Michael Clarke

When I was about 7 or 8 I remember wanting desperately to have guitar lessons. My parents, being the very kind folk that they are, bought me a guitar and I started having lessons. I remember my guitar teacher having an arrangement with the school, and so once a week I’d get to skip ‘real lessons’ to have my guitar lesson - along with two other people who were also learning the guitar. However, at this age I found it incredibly boring playing Jingle Bells over and over and over again to the point where I can now pick up a guitar and play, from memory after all these years, that damn song. All I wanted to do was play real songs, I wanted to learn strumming - non of that picking nonsense. After a not so long while, for better or worse - but definitely due to boredom, I gave up my guitar lessons.

Around January this year I decided that I wanted to play again, but this time I wanted to learn ‘properly’. This time I was uninterested in songs, or strumming… I wanted to know the techniques, the picking patterns, the reason why an A chord is the shape that it is - I wanted to know everything there is to know about guitars. I stole (or rather borrowed) my brothers guitar - he never uses it anyway and began with a few online tutorials piecing things together with the help of one of my house mates (Mike) who was always willing to give me some advice on my playing, or teach me a new scale or some other trick. However, I quickly realised that although I was getting to the stage where I could play simple songs - I wasn’t  really learning everything I wanted to. So, knowing that one of my mum’s friends used to teach guitar, I arranged for lessons.

I’ve now been at it for just over 6 months and, as I approach my 22nd birthday (16th July), I decided it was time to stop borrowing my brothers guitar and get one of my own, and so, although a little early for my birthday, my Adam Black O-7CE guitar arrived this weekend. It sounds (and looks) beautiful and I have to admit that I’ve hardly put it down today.

 
(Click on the ol’ images to get full sized ones what not!)

So, apart from playing my new guitar, what else have I been up to? Well first of all, although I had amazing and cunning plans to have finished my dissertation for next year by now (okay, a slight exaggeration) I have yet to do any work on that yet.  However, I have not been lazy (much). I’ve been busy working for Sun sorting out the campus ambassador program for next year - it’s good to have finally sorted that out as it has taken quite a large chunk of time this last couple of weeks.

I’ve also been pretty busy doing bits and pieces for the move in August - and that is something I ought to mention too. We were moving in July, the 11th to be exact. We then put the date back to the 20th July due to numerous reasons, work being done on the house, removal firms, packing etc. However, we’ve now pushed the moving date back further and it is now the 21st August. But it’s all good as we’re getting a complete new kitchen and right now (or well, not right now, but this week) we’ve got electricians in re-wiring the whole place and all that good stuff. Then I’ll be able to move in all the networking and TV gear and wire the house up. I managed to get really cheap back plates for network sockets from Wilkinson’s of all places - I’ve found them to be one of the best places to go for odd things you might need - for example I always get my windscreen wipers for the car from there - £1.49 per wiper and it literally takes me ten seconds to fit them, in a car-park with no tools, at that price you simply can’t go wrong!

Anyway, I’ve now pontificated for long enough. So, until my next exciting and invigorating update (even if I do say so myself).

Last night I started my new Sun blog at blogs.sun.com - http://blogs.sun.com/michaelfclarke. So, what does this mean for this blog? Well, nothing really. I’ll continue to update this blog as I have been doing, putting personal projects and the like up. What this does mean however is that you’ll now be able to track my progress as a Campus Ambassador Co-ordinator for the UK.

As some of you will know, I was going to be the Campus Ambassador for Aberystwyth University. However, recently Kim Austin (who is in charge of the Campus Ambassador program in the UK) asked if I’d like to be the Campus Ambassador Co-ordinator instead.  This job basically involves supporting the student ambassadors out in the field with their technical demos and day to day job requirements. Having worked for Sun for a year in the UK head offices I understand what Sun wants from the campus ambassadors, and being a student myself I also understand what students want from the campus ambassador program. It is my job to make sure that both parties get what they want.

So, why the new blog? I thought it would be nice to have an official blog for the Campus Ambassador work so that those who aren’t interested in MouthOS, or  that my bike tire still hasn’t been fixed (I’m waiting for the inner tube, honest… I’m not that lazy!) can keep a track of all the stuff that is going on in the world of campus ambassadors.

At the moment I’ve not got much on my new blog at the moment, but you should check it out for all the latest Campus Ambassador news in the UK.

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….

Sun have today announced that they are buying MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL for $1 billion. This is both good news for Sun and for MySQL - not to mention all those MySQL users (including myself). MySQL will become a much more commercially viable product with Sun’s backing - reaching companies that previously wouldn’t have gone near it whilst at the same time it reaffirms Sun’s position as a leading provider of web technologies.

You can read more about the acquisition of MySQL on Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog and also on MySQLs and Sun’s websites!

I’ve not had much chance recently to work on MouthOS or to write anything on my blog as I’ve been busy getting prepared for my trip to France at the end of the month. However, I’ve now finally booked my Euro Star tickets (at a very reasonable price of ₤49.00 return) and my hotel - “Hotel De L’exposition - Tour Eiffel”.

With this done I’ve spent some time this weekend working on MouthOS and I’ve made some excellent progress. I’ve written a new printf function which complies with the ANSI C standard (which also included implementing variable length argument function macros). I’ve also managed to get MouthOS to identify how much RAM a system has - putting me well on the way to finishing my memory manager.

However, the highlight has got to be the new “RSOD” or Red Screen of Death! Since I’ve now got a good printf I was able to start printing out the status of the CPU registers etc, and this has lead to the ability to add a lot of debug information to my panic() function…

Don’t worry folks - you shouldn’t see this too often. Also it should be noted that the exception was caused by a deliberate division by zero at the end of main() to test the panic function… I’m not that bad a coder - honestly!

	printf("\n   --> Low Memory:   %iK", _LOW_MEM);
	printf("\n   --> High Memory:  %iK\n", _HIGH_MEM);

	int i = 6 / 0;

Anyway, I think it’s time for an episode of ‘Allo ‘Allo before bed.

Today we had the first face-to-face interview with the new students. The interview is split into three sections. The first is conducted by Paul Humphreys and David Cole. It lasts for about 45 - 60 minutes and focuses on questions relating more to the students past technical experience.

After this one of the current students (this time me) takes the interviewee for a tour of the labs. This lasted about 30 - 40 minutes and is a great opportunity for the student being interviewed to ask questions and get a (if brief) overview of what the job really involves. The student is shown the production cage, the overflow lab and then the main lab.

When the tour is completed the interviewee returns to the office for another chat with Paul and David - this time regarding the Sun Ray technology (as is requested that they research when they are invited for a face-to-face interview) and also a few networking questions etc.

I have to admit that I spent a lot of the time during the tour trying to remember what my interview and tour was like. I was hoping to remember some of the cool things that I really liked so that I could show this guy (who also happened to be called Daivd) the stuff that really made me go ‘wow’. In the end I got the feeling that he really liked the high-end servers - specifically the 25K and the M9000+.

All in all it was quite a different experience being the interviewer as opposed to the interviewee!