Jim Grisanzio

Some people have asked me what that says in the top right corner of my blog –  ジム　グリサンズィオ  サン · マイクロシステムズ

Well, it says “Jim Grisanzio, Sun Microsystems” (with a slightly different pronunciation) and links to my contact information and my tiny little bio. It’s written in katakana, which is one three writing systems used in Japanese. Katakana, hiragana, and kanji all combine to make Japanese writing. Katakana is used for foreign words, which my name certainly is since it’s attached to me and I’m American (half Italian and half Irish/Scottish/Ukrainian).

I can now pretty easily read and write the 46 characters in katakana and the corresponding 46 characters in hiragana, but I haven’t started on the thousands of kanji characters yet. And just because you can read some characters doesn’t mean you know what the word means (a 100k word vocabulary would come in handy right about now) or how the sentence is structured or what the situation is. So, I have a bit of work to do. Like years of work. No matter. I’m in this for the long run, and over time more and more of my blog will blend into Japanese.

It is truly sickening, though, how effortlessly my 18-month old kid is learning Japanese and English. It’s like it’s nothing at all to her. No big deal. A game. Whereas I feel like I’m rupturing brain cells. I’m still way ahead, though, and I still think I can take her.

For the last few weeks some of us have been talking about building language/country portals on opensolaris.org. Some of the conversation has been happening internally, but it’s moving externally now as well — pending community interest and consensus, obviously. The longest thread at present is on the Internationalization & Localization Community discuss list. As a result of these conversations, I put an OpenSolaris project proposal on the main OpenSolaris discuss list under the conveniently titled Project Proposal: Country/Language Portals for opensolaris.org. If you are interested in commenting or participating, please feel free to chime in on either thread. The formal project proposal thread only needs a "second" to be approved, but after that the conversation and implementation will continue within the Internationalization & Localization Community in collaboration with the OpenSolaris website infrastructure team. It will be interesting to work on this project and to see what regions around the OpenSolaris world translate the site.

I shot these way back in September of 2001. A million years ago. I liked them in color, but I like them in B&W, too. I can never decide if an image should be B&W or color. This was a foggy, chilly, windy summer day along the Pacific Coast Highway …

We opened a new Japanese OpenSolaris User Group list — jposug (subscribe here). You can sign up to all the lists in the user group community here.

I went to the Nihon Sun User Group (NSUG) meeting last night in Tokyo to hear Hajime Akashi talk about Solaris. Very nice to see everyone. Here are some pics …

Teresa Giacomini posted some photos from OpenSolaris Day in Buenos Aires.

OpenSolaris continues to grow among the Chinese university community. Check out Joey Guo’s latest posts (here and here). Lots of photos, too.

OpenSolaris continues to grow among the Chinese university community. Check out Joey Guo’s latest posts (here and here). Lots of photos, too.

Is it just me or does Richard Dawkins sound just exactly like what he criticizes?

The importance of Solaris 10: ” … the importance of the OpenSolaris community …” — Paul Murphy.

Trusted Blogger, Solaris Trusted Extensions: Glenn Faden joins the BSC blogging community.

Rich Teer Building: A new Rich Teer piece — Building Software on the Solaris OS

Dutch OpenSolaris User Group: The first meeting of the Dutch OpenSolaris User Group: Thursday, October 26th at the Sun office in Amersfoort.

Blog of time: Sun University Days at the University of Indonesia.

Joyent & Sun: The Movie: “OpenSolaris evangelism is now a full time job.” — Ben Rockwood

OpenSolaris SCM: ON Mercurial: OS/Net Consolidation moving to Mercurial. “I’m happy to announce that the ON Mercurial (Hg) mirror is now up and mirroring in REAL-TIME. — Steve Lau

OpenSolaris SCM: JDS Subversion: “The JDS Subversion SCM system on OpenSolaris.org is now LIVE. Both Sun and non-Sun community members can now commit JDS changes directly to the same code repository.” — Dermot McCluskey

Who owns Solaris?: “OpenSolaris represents the direct continuation of a strategy that has proven itself since Ken Thompson first sent a Unix tape to a colleague at Berkeley … ” — Paul Murphy

Sun Labs Gives PowerPC Development Environment to OpenSolaris Project: Timothy Prickett Morgan on the recent OpenSolaris PowerPC release.

Nexenta combines OpenSolaris, GNU, and Ubuntu: “Shaping up to be a very interesting operating system.” — Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier

BOSUG Logo: Nice logo for the Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group. I think this is the first logo of any of the OpenSolaris user groups. More to come, I bet.

DTrace on PodTech: Podcast with Bryan Cantrill on DTrace.

Welcome to the Korea OpenSolaris User Group (KOSUG). And thank to Jay Lee for getting the group started. You can sign up to the KOSUG discussion list to participate in conversations or to practice your Korean. I can see now that I’m going to have to learn a few more language beside Japanese. No sweat. Anyway, I’ll be in Seoul for OpenSolaris Day at Sun’s Tech Day’s Conference in a few weeks, so I look forward to meeting the Sun Korean team and the OpenSolaris community there.

I see that Teresa recently posted some new OpenSolaris photos to flickr. There are almost a thousand images tagged “OpenSolaris” on flickr now. Excellent. Keep ‘em coming.

Congrats to everyone working on SCM for OpenSolaris. I see Mercurial is going beta (here, here, here). Another important milestone for the project. I know, well, just about next to nothing about source code management systems, and that’s a good thing, believe me. But I do know that this tool is critical to the success of OpenSolaris and to the engineering community evolving this code base. I also know how hard the tools community has worked on this project and how much they’ve focused on quality and openness. Very nice.

Interesting article on CNN/Money about corporate blogging that’s done right and done wrong. I’m not sure why some companies are getting themselves into trouble with this form of communication. It seems really simple to me, but hey, we all make mistakes so it’s hard to be hard on someone attempting to be more transparent. And I understand the recent PR example quite well because I know that business and those errors speak for themselves. For a nice review of that one, check out Dave Taylor’s piece from the other day. It’s a piece I tend to agree with a great deal .

Sun, on the other hand, seems to be just surfing right along with blogging. I think I have a theory as to why — Sun grew from the community so it understands how to behave within a community, and we have a large number of engineers participating in communities of all kinds — some Sun run, some run by other vendors, some run by standards bodies, and some by foundations. All these interactions take place on open mail lists or forums. So, when blogging came along it was really nothing new, and people seemed ready and eager to get going. It was just a new way of doing what they had been doing in the past — communicating openly and honestly. Not perfectly, but openly and honestly for sure. And that can take you a long way.

This trial of an “intelligent transportation system” — Japan to trial inter-vehicle messaging system — is taking place in Kanagawa Prefecture, which is where I live. Very cool. And well needed, I might add. The streets around here are very tight, so the more intelligence baked right into the roads and the cars the better. Of course, drivers could slow down a bit, too.