Sun Provides Universal Access to Safari Books Online

So Sun has negotiated access for all Employees to the Safari eBook Library.

I have used and been happy with the Safari Books before...unfortunately I find myself slightly disapointed by the following

Unable to generate a temporary class (result=1). error CS2001: Source file 'C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\pvpviplu.0.cs' could not be found error CS2008: No inputs specified

Not that it didn't resolve itself in a moment (presumably after the file was copied into place) but the use of windows in the backend.

Shame on you Safari Books Online, of couse if I worked for Microsoft I would probably be happy.

Maybe we are working out a trade, we get access to your books and we will help you move to our wonderful Solaris operating system.
In any case, Sun Managed Operations would be happy to help you implement the migration AND monitor the entire infrastructure BOTH running on windows and running on Solaris.

Go and Register Yourself for access: Sunlibrary
I must say, that was one of the easiest self provisioning processes I have experienced in a very long time.

CEC: Managing Systems at Grid Scale (Our Presentations)

Shawn Ferry (ME) and Brian Smith





In general our  attendance was a little bit lower than I had
been hoping for. I think we got in the neighborhood of 80 total...I
think I should be able to find out exactly somewhere.



Both instances went fairly well we had the required Managed Operations
content. In the future we need to go straight to an elevator pitch and
be done with it. I watched as people got bored hearing about how
managed operations does things. Certainly they were interested in the
more technical details CTA, encrypted transport and such. Unfortunately
in our general Managed Operations presentation the less technically
interesting details are more prevalent and this is a geek
conference.



Both presentations had a few Managed Operations staff in attendance for
solidarity. As well as a couple of new Managed Operations staff from
APAC and EMEA.



The first presentation had a slight timing problem, the 15 min max
planned managed operations specific content ran about 30min, in the end
I got
my content in with about a minute to spare and Brian got the last bits
in about 5 after the scheduled end.  



The second presentation went more to plan. I was able to go into
more depth on the technical aspects of the monitoring. For those who
attended the presentation. We send an alert.



The only real failure for the whole thing was the attempt for a demo in
the extra 5min before the scheduled end of the second presentation
during the question and answer period. I had maintained what looked
like good network connectivity until I tried to use it, at which point
it all went pear
shaped and I lost network access again.



In brief we covered monitoring methodology:

We have a top down and bottom up approach.



Top Down(A Holistic View):

We start measuring from a user experience, can you reach the web site.

Then a complex web site walking script/library(That I
wrote) performs a:

• login


• job submission


• waits for completion


• downloads and analyzes the results


• deletes the job


• logs out

At various points in the process if we don't get specific results
(Welcome to the Grid,Job X submitted, Job X Successful, Logout
Complete)
or the process is taking too long we send an alert.



Really in the Middle Here(Business Process Monitoring):

The from a Managed Operations Point of view what we want to know is
what went wrong.



A user can get an login failure for a number of reasons:

• External authentication service could not be functional(Sun
  Grid does not maintain direct authentication data, you must have a
  sunsolve/mysun/store.sun.com account...Go  href="http://www.sun.com/identity">Federated Identity
  ( href="http://www.sun.com/software/media/flash/demo_federation/index.html">Silly
  Flash IDM) , see also: href="http://blogs.sun.com/saragates" rel="co-worker">Sara
  Gates Sun's VP IDM)


• Your name may have been found on the href="http://www.sun.com/sales/its/export/DRPL/index.html">Denied
  Restricted Persons List


• You may have moved to Brazil (This is a presentation In
  joke, I was hoping for some Brazilians to jump up and down and cheer)
  or really you are coming from outside the US.

A job can fail for a number of reasons:

• Malformed Job


• Portal Submission Failure


• Grid Engine Failure

Some of these things we can see cause from the middle and some we need
a lower level view.

Bottom Up (A small sampling, we monitor a very wide range):

• System level KPIs(Memory, CPU)


• processes (sge_qmaster,sge_execd)


• services(SMF)


• logfiles(errors, failures)


• disk utilization


• network devices (firewalls, switches, routers)

Examples:

• If the qmaster is not running the job will never actually
  get scheduled.


• If there are no execds running (slots available) the job
  will never get executed(or really scheduled because the qmaster won't
  schedule it unless it should be able to run.


• If queues are in an Error state they cannot run jobs.


• If the file system is full it is impossible for a job to
  write it's output

Presentation Things I learned:

• People want to know why they can't use the grid from
  outside the US and
  don't quite understand how it is that Sun can have a gird and Sun
  employees can't play with it.




• We knew this was an issue, we could have just addressed
  it straight from the slides




• Few Sun employees (who attended our presentation have ever
  used the
  SunGrid, of course I know that a good number of Sun Employees have used
  the Grid it would seem that we just didn't get a lot of them.




• A demo would have been well received, but if we were
  working with a demo we could have talked for hours




• I still need to remember to breathe fully. I find that I
  will talk but
  forget to inhale full breaths if I am not paying attention.




• I just need to pay attention to my breathing. A pause to
  take a breath is ok...also it lets people absorb your output

Real learning in a virtual world

The Christian Science Monitor has
an article discussing virtual classrooms in SecondLife.

Some
60 schools and universities have set up shop
inside Second Life - most in the past year. They join a population that
includes real-world business people, politicians, entertainers, and
more than 800,000 other "residents" of the virtual world.

It is an interesting idea, and I am wondering if I am seeing all of
these uses for SecondLife because I have been looking at/thinking about
the Sun Press Conference or if there has suddenly been an explosion of
articles and posts about SecondLife.



Real
learning in a virtual world | csmonitor.com



For the past two years, I had been taking classes to complete my a
Bachelors of Science in Information Technology. I have finished all of
my upper division classes but have about a traditional semester worth
of lower division classes that I never completed the first time through
in traditional schooling.



At the moment I am not taking any classes and the dividing point
between the attendance and not was the continuing classes being located
at a different campus, that and the cost at href="http://www.phoenix.edu/">UOP was
significantly higher than say NOVA,
Classes started at 6 and ran until 10, that wasn't a problem.



The problem was the href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=20098+Ashbrook+Pl,+Ashburn,+VA+20147&daddr=11710+Plaza+America+Dr,+Reston+va&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1">commute,
the campus at Plaza America (Reston, near Oracle), was a 30-60 minute
drive. The href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=20098+Ashbrook+Pl,+Ashburn,+VA+20147&daddr=9667+Lee+Hwy,+Fairfax,+VA+22031+%28Inova+Fair+Oaks+Hospital:+Thrift+Shop%29+%4038.864221,-77.278170&ie=UTF8&sll=38.983975,-77.42262&sspn=0.487838,1.251068&z=11&om=1">commute
from the office to the Gallows Rd campus (495 and 50 near Fairfax
Hospital)  is probably a 90 to 120 minute drive (This is all
in traffic to get there the return commute is probably 20-30 and 45-50
minutes). It goes almost without saying that the NVCC href="http://maps.google.com/maps?daddr=1000+Harry+Flood+Byrd+Hwy,+Sterling,+VA+20164+%28Northern+Virginia+Community+College:+Information+for+Loudoun+Campus%29+%4039.014590,-77.371315&saddr=20098+Ashbrook+Pl,+Ashburn,+VA+20147&f=li&hl=en&dq=nvcc&cid=39085828,-77478526,17427075337703451187&ie=UTF8&z=13&om=1">commute
is better, either to the Loudoun campus or to Reston (nearly identical
to my previous UOP commute).



Having said all of that it would have been interesting to see if a
virtual learning solution based on SecondLife or a similar venue would
have been useful. The commute is certainly shorter, but I have to
wonder if the level of attention that would have been focused on the
learning would have been the same given that it would be easier for
coworkers and such to interrupt by casually walking into the room.



It seems that only time will tell, but a good first taste of an
organized information centric event will be on href="http://blogs.sun.com/yakshaving/entry/secondlife_web2_0_and_collaboration">Tuesday
at the Sun SecondLife Press Conference.



Now I should go and sign up for classes as the next round starts on Oct
18. Should I be ashamed that I am looking at on the ground classes
working for a technical company?