At Sun IEC , Bangalore

Sun’s India Engineering Center (IEC) occupies most of the Divya Shree Chambers building off Langford Road in Bangalore. I kept on telling everybody that is near M.G Road but in reality it is nothing like that

Lunch (always a major preoccupation with me) is provided at the 5th-floor canteen, which gets very crowded around 12:45,hence sometimes we need to book the conference room to have our lunch . There’s a buffet of both Vegetarian and its non counterpart for a reasonable sum of Rs 35 /- (Very very cheap as per Bangalore standards but just a bit expensive as per Kolkata standards.)

 

For a change we can order fresh fruits , as I saw for some ladies who prefered them for the dieting routine.

The Sun break rooms have a great selection of teas, including elaichi (cardamom), masala (what Americans call chai spice), and ginger. Plus a selection of other hot drinks – cocoa, instant coffee, and flavored mixes that I haven’t quite understood yet.

There’s a machine dispensing hot water and hot milk to mix these with. There is also brewed coffee, chocolate powder,tomato soup mix and powdered,badam milk and many more .

Now coming to the important part that is WORK . The very first day I got my Badge ready for which there was a photo session sort of arrangement at the ground floor near the data-center . For the first time in my life I felt very important .

For those of you who don’t know what a Badge is , I will like to tell that it is card like thing with my photo and other details and chip and a magnetic strip .It comes to use at the security gates where we need to show it a sensor and only then the door opens .Besides this is used when we need to use a Sun Ray machine ( Runs on Solaris 10 and has a SPARC architecture) , it is inserted into a slot inside the machine.

Its is a really nice environment around to work with caring and loving seniours and and lots of respect for every employee . The working time is flexible ,by flexible I mean there is no fixed working schedule and timing or anything like that . When you are done with your work you can can go home and sleep and if its like you prefer to work nights then you can work in the office during the nights. 

So I am kind of enjoying the experience as a Sun Intern and another news I have just heard that Sun IEC Bangalore will be celebrating its 10th birthday by throwing a huge party at a hotel called OTERRA at Electronic city and we are invited . So my next post will be on IEC 10 years of Engineering Excellence.

Roumen Strobls Leaving Sun Microsystems Inc.

He is the man behind all those brilliant screen casts and blog posts and loads of tutorials for both Netbeans and OpenSolaris. Finally he has decided to leave Sun but he will still stick on to Java and work for JavaOne

Here is what he writes in his blog http://blogs.sun.com/roumen/entry/leaving_sun)

“I have decided to quit Sun Microsystems. I spent amazing 5 years at Sun and I am very grateful for all I’ve learned with the company. Working on both NetBeans and OpenSolaris adoption was real fun so I leave with very mixed feelings.

I am going back to Java developer business and will be going to Java One with my new employer, so you will find me in the Java One pavilion area if you want to say hi. I wish my Sun colleagues good luck with their new adventures!

P.S. Thanks for all the beans.“

Wish you all the best Sir . Keep enlightening us with your screencasts.

From the “City of Joy” to the “Garden City”

After 36 hours of train journey (most of the time I was sleeping) , I am finally in Bangalore . Thanks to the office rush around 9 am , I enjoyed the pleasure of sleeping even in the prepaid auto which I took from the Yashwantpur station as  I witnessed my second worst traffic jam ever , the first one being in Mumbai , that was in the evening. I am here for an Internship at Sun Microsystems Bangalore office and I am looking forward to have a nice time working for Sun. I have managed a temporary accomodation at one of my relatives’ house and would be searching for some ‘sasta’  PG type for my 2 month stay here . I had my lunch at some restaurant where  I had to pay 50 bugs  for a thali which I haven’t still been able to figure out what the hell it was . I soon realised that I had some real bad days awaiting me in terms of my        ‘ khana pina’  though I was warned about it before hand from some of my seniours and friends staying at Bengluru.

Though its been not more than 10 hours here but one thing  I have noticed about people here that they are very honest and calm in nature . Talking about the honesty I would like to share the fact that there were no TT’s to look for our tickets at the station . I am again feeling sleepy I donno what has happened to me so I feel like ending it here . More from Bangalore coming soon .

The Sun won’t set at NIT Durgapur … I promise !

As we all might have heard, Oracle has entered into an agreement to acquire Sun. While it is natural to have questions following an announcement of this magnitude, its also important to acknowledge that this is an
industry transforming event. The following excerpt from the Oracle Press Release helps to highlight this point.

“This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of
the technology marketplace,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, “From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems.”

Coming back to the question of what will be the future of MySQL under Oracle. I think that as long as there is a demand for a product and such a vibrant community of users and developers behind it the product will never die.

Since it is all business as usual, we should not create a huge fuss about Oracle acquiring Sun and the future of Sun Campus Ambassadorship and the Sun Academic Initiative (SAI). I think we all should focus on our respective efforts to evangelize Free Softwares and continue conducting Talks , Workshops and related Technical sessions and continue building the Talk culture in our college which has just started some times back. We should try building the best open source community in NIT Durgapur with our Sun Club and the GNU/Linux Users’ Group.