The Other Sun

Hi, All!

During my first week here at the University, I did myself a huge favour by signing up with the Computer Society. I thus got the opportunity to attend several interesting seminars on a variety of tech topics and interact with different people in different capacities. But I was most pleased about the prospect of a visit to the main UK campus of Sun Microsystems.

Jenya, my enterprising friend and Computer Society founder, thought of and planned the whole trip. She was ably supported by the new president of the society, Bogdan Suvar, a dear friend of mine and a real genuine guy.

Early morning on 25th March, a bunch of us from the Computer Society set off for the Sun Microsystems campus at Camberley, Surrey. It was nice of our fellow society member David Snow to drive us there and back.

Welcome to the Sun

The campus was quite impressive... sleek orange-brown-silver buildings contrasting nicely with the lush greenery. We spent the day at one such cool location, Solaris House. After getting our visitor badges, Senior Staff Engineer Tim Graves welcomed us and explained to us our agenda for the day. Kim Austin, the university co-ordinator, also spoke to us about Sun's interaction and involvement with universities across the UK. Sustaining Engineer, John, told us about the workings of this particular Sun campus... attempting to fix significant errors in their clients' systems by reproducing their configurations and mimicking the systems' workings in real time. He also explained to us this awesome piece of smart card-based technology, Sun Ray, which allows Sun employees to work from anywhere without having to actually carry their work around. Pretty cool, eh?


The Future is here

Next, Services Lab Engineer David Cole showed us around the lab. Now, this place totally blew me away! To be honest, computer hardware is not exactly my strong point. But the moment we entered the lab, that didn't matter any more. It was like entering a futuristic science fiction movie... like being on a spaceship... blinking lights, miles of cables, walls and racks lined with shiny speedy machines ... an out-of-this-world experience indeed!

Sun Lunch

After that blast from the future, we all went to the cafeteria for lunch, complimentary from Sun. We got to choose our meals from a colourful array of foods and desserts. It sure was good fun.

Sun's colourful cafeteria

Expert Voices

We then spent a better part of the rainy afternoon listening to talks from experts. First up, Chief Technologist, David Levy, spoke to us about the power of open source software. Then, MySQL's Mark Baker told us about just how big this little database product had become. Next, Jarod Nash let us in on some secrets of the Solaris operating system. Finally, Dave Walker gave us an in-depth talk on a variety of security issues and how Solaris combats them.

Expert Voices: (Clockwise, from top left)
Tim Graves, John, David Levy, Mark Baker, Jarod Nash, Dave Walker

CSoc, Sun, and Rainbow

In the span of a single day, we had seen and heard very many cool and interesting things... about Sun as a company, and also about its technologies in general. But above and beyond that, we bonded as a group and had a really nice time hanging out. All too soon, it was time for us to head home... and on the drive back, as if to top off the day, we saw a rainbow!



***

It's been a fair few years since I've been associated with the field of IT and computers. It's been just as many years that I've known of and been fascinated by Java and Sun. To then be able to visit the Sun campus, that too, one in the UK was a very big deal to me. This day will thus go down as one of the more significant days of my professional life. A big thank you to Jenya, to Bogdan, to David, and all the CSoc members for adding another memorable day to my growing collection.

Signing off,

Kay