June 1st, 2008 Michael Clarke
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.
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March 10th, 2008 Michael Clarke
This morning I am about to go on the week long Solaris 10 Internals course at Sun. This is a course that I’ve been looking forward to for some time as it goes into detail about the implementation of the Solaris 10 Kernel - including things such as memory management, file systems, multi-tasking support etc. This started me thinking how great working for Sun really is…
- Everyone at Sun is really friendly and always willing to help and tell you about (and ask for feedback regarding) their own little (or sometimes rather larger) projects.
- The training provided is excellent - so far in a year I’ve been on four courses starting with a mid-range Serengeti course, then the Solaris Intermediate and Solaris Advanced course, and then the high-range Starcat course. I’ve got another two courses to go, the first one being the Solaris Internels and the other one I’ve got to decide on still!
- Sitting where I sit I get prime access to some of the highest level support engineers in Sun - and some of the conversations are immense - but the really great thing is the engineers are always willing to accept suggestions and comments - even from me and my peers - lowly interns.
- Working mostly in the Lab we get access to all of the latest Sun equipment usually before it has been released, and quite often beta versions during the development cycle before the products have even been announced.
- There are always opportunities available - if you want to have a little go at something else for a while you’re encouraged to do so - take for example my recent DTrace work thanks to Paul Humphreys (my manager) and Jon Haslam (one of the DTrace engineers) - it’s not my job, but they’re both being really supportive and offering help and advice - not many jobs you get that sort of support and encouragement…
- You get to travel. Recently I went to our Paris lab in France. Matt has been to Sweeden. Fraser is about to go to Germany and Robin and David are both scheduled to go abroad at some point during the rest of the year - not bad for an internship.
- You really are considered to be a part of the team - not just ‘the students’…. well, we are referred to as ‘the students’ some times, but it doesn’t hold any prejudice… We’re often asked our opinions and suggestions on subjects concerning the lab (and indeed the future of the lab when we’ll have left) and we’re left to (for the most part) manage our workload ourselves - we’re not micro-managed
Thinking about it, I should really have posted this some time ago whilst we were looking for new interns for next year. Unfortunately (or should that be fortunately?) we’ve now filled the three positions for next year - surprisingly all from Aber, so I’m a little bit late… However, I’m sure next years students are going to have a great time in the lab (just like we have).
If you’re interested in working for Sun (as an intern) there are still opportunities available in other departments. I’m not sure of a specific page but if you need/want more info leave a comment and I’ll get you the info… Otherwise, if you’re after a job more permanently then you should visit http://uk.sun.com/aboutsun/employment/
Posted in Solaris, Work | No Comments »
February 15th, 2008 Michael Clarke
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.
Posted in Random, Work | No Comments »
February 12th, 2008 Michael Clarke
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.
Posted in Family, General, MouthOS, Operating Systems, Solaris, Sun Microsystems, Work | No Comments »
February 7th, 2008 Michael Clarke
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….
Posted in General, Random, Sun Microsystems, Work | No Comments »
January 13th, 2008 Michael Clarke
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.
Posted in MouthOS, Operating Systems, Sun Microsystems, Technology, Work | No Comments »
January 4th, 2008 Michael Clarke
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!
Posted in Sun Microsystems, Work | 1 Comment »
