If you haven’t seen already, see Jonathan’s blog entry here and find a link to the demo of Sun Fire X4500 server by Andy. Project named Thumper, this is a great box that can offer upto 24 TB of storage in 4U space. More details on this box here on the product page. You can directly go to the demo by clicking this link.

Quoting from today’s Economic Times:

Computer maker Sun Microsystems has launched an offshore centre in Chennai to manage and monitor is customers’ IT infrastructure and processes. The facility would start operating with 150 engineers and grow to 300 shortly, officials said. …

PG & E offers energy incentive rebate after teaming with Sun. The estimated savings are about $700-$1000 per server.

Visited HITS College Of Engineering today. I did a two hour session on technologies like Solaris, Open Office, SPARC, Sun Systems, etc. This event is attended by students from this college of all years of engineering and all streams of engineering.

There was some initial resistence to asking questions, but at the end of the preso, the students really opened up with lot of good questions. One interesting question that is not often heared:

Can I assemble a Sun Sparc system by buying individual parts?

Interesting thinking by the student who asked this question. Rest of the questions are like:

• Can I install Solaris on a regular PC?
• What is clustering technology?
• How much hard disk space does Solaris take?
• Under what situations should I replace my Windows installation with Solaris?
• What is the difference between Linux and Solaris?
• Can I install Open Office on my current Windows desktop?

There is considerable interest for Belenix LiveCD, but I had limited quantities. Left a few copies with the college office so that they can make additional copies.

Post-lunch, Rajesh gave a very good preso on Java technologies and how/why they are important. Thats a very good preso of Java history and importance.

A few things I couldn’t do today include visiting the labs and talking to faculty. May be during next visit, whenever there is one.

There is an interesting thread on slashdot titled Experiences with replacing desktops w/ VMs? I have been using a Sun Ray client at work, connected to a Solaris Server. It has been working fantastic, after few glitches in the intial days of its rollout about a few years ago. I do lot of office productivity work (presos, documentation, email etc.) using the Sun Ray client. My legacy desktop is now morphed into a lab server, used to test some sample configurations of the products I build.

Do I recommend replacing Desktops with something like a Sun Ray Client? Absolutely. I never had to call servicedesk people to fix my desktop again. Moreover, I walk into any empty office, on any floor, just with a Java card and tuck it in the Sun Ray. There comes my desktop! Gives me better mobility than my laptop, especially when I am in a nomadic spree of walking across the floors for meetings.

A few years ago, when I first wanted to create a favicon for http://www.spurthi.com/, I had to use the Gimp 1.x on my Linux box to create a .png file and then convert that to a .ico file using png2ico utility. Today, I just wanted to play with this for this blog site. Using the Gimp 2.x on my Solaris x86 laptop, I created a very poor quality (from a user interaction perspective) favicon with just a few strokes. May be I need to get a good theme for a real favicon for this blog.

Here is a very informative interview of Jonathan Schwartz, given to The Economic Times, leading financial newspaper in India.