SEED panel, RSA booth duty and Take Your Kids to Work Day

On Tuesday I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel of folks talking about open projects started from within Sun, at a conference for SEED Mentoring participants.  I enjoyed talking with people from all over the company and really enjoyed learning more about the other open projects. Of particular interest to me was the speaker, Durgam Vahia, from the OpenSPARC project. He mentioned a recently released FPGA that was made possible because of OpenSPARC and was released by Xilinx.  The board, based on the T1 microprocessor can be up and running with Solaris in about 30-45 minutes and is a great way for students or any interested parties to learn about the SPARC architecture.

That afternoon, I worked in the Sun booth at the RSA conference.  Even though our booth was a bit off the beaten path, I still saw a lot of traffic coming our way. People were really interested in the OpenSolaris LiveCDs and hearing about the latest things we have been up to in Solaris Security.  We also had an SCA 6000 card and a UltraSPARC T2 motherboard. The mother board was an odd "demo" - considering it had no power supply/memory/etc, and I really wished I had the OpenSPARC FPGA I had seen earlier that day :-)

Of course, I got several of the inevitable  questions that I couldn't answer (really because I don't know anything, but even if I did, I still couldn't say).

Yesterday was a fun and crazy day, starting off bright and early with an OGB meeting, followed by a few Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day activities. I got to see the Project Wonderland demo, which was very cool - and the kids enjoyed playing the games, then I was lucky enough to have lunch with the girls from TechBridge.  Their passion for science and math was truly inspiring!