RTI Madness!!

We've got a major build closing tonight, and I'm up to my ears in RTIs (Request To Integrate). This is a good thing :-)

Ooops... Never actually *posted* that last night. Anyways, all went well and I did finally get to leave the office about 11.30PM.

My mom's cancer

My mom is a lung cancer survivor and she sent me a link to an online (for now) comic about one family coping with their mother having lung cancer, simply put as My Mom's Cancer. My mother was lucky and hers did not spread to her brain, and she's also a nonsmoker (never has smoked, but she's been around it her whole life), but there are so many parallels to this guys story.

My mom's cancer was also found by just dumb luck. She had a fall and broke her leg. Considering it was not a bad fall, her doctor was concerned that she may have been osteoperatic (she is) and may have broken other bones, so she went in for a series of x-rays. The leg was the only bone broken, so she went home to heal up.

Months later, she went back to work. Because she is a nurse and happens to work in the same hospital where her leg was set, she asked to look at her own x-rays just out of curiosity. Looking at her chest film, she noticed something strange in her left lung and found notes from the radiologist suggesting to her primary care physician that follow-up was needed about the discrepancy in her lung. It was cancer. Her doctor had never mentioned it.

Suddenly her shortness of breath and repeated respiratory infections made sense.

Because of the broken leg and my mother following up on her own x-rays, the cancer was found very early and it was operable. Sounds easy, doesn't it? Not really. Her oncologist removed half of her left lung to make sure nothing spread or was missed. That's a very invasive surgery, and even 4 years later my mother still has nerve pain. The road to recovery was not short or easy.

Anyways, reading that comic sort of brought all the memories back. I was living far away from my mom at the time, so I was only there for the surgery. My sisters were there for all of the other very difficult times, and I'm so glad for that. I'm doing a bike ride this summer to raise funds for the American Lung Association - hopefully money I raise now can help prevent more people from having to go through this.

Solaris Cryptographic Framework - Demo providers

The news just gets better & better!

We've just released the source code for some sample providers for the userland cryptographic framework. If you're interested in developing libraries to plug into uCF in Solaris 10, this is a great starting place. The demo provider has source code for a lot of the basic PKCS#11 stuff, like session management, and skeletons for the rest of the crypto stuff.

You can get the providers from the Sun download center.

Other sample code is available from the development guide (click on Solaris Security Examples).

many thanks to our intern, Susan, for all her hard work making these demo providers a reality. We hope they'll save Solaris developers lots of time getting started making providers for the Solaris Cryptographic Framework. Let me know what you think!

Solaris Cryptographic Framework Whitepaper published!

Ok, this took entirely too long, but I've finally gotten the whitepaper I wrote on the Solaris Cryptographic Framework published externally! Finally, in Solaris 10, access to optimized cryptographic algorithms are brought to the general user. Now you can read all about it on BigAdmin: Solaris Cryptographic Framework

Let me know what you think, or if you have any questions. There is also a Kernel API/SPI that is touched on briefly in the paper. We're working on stabilizing the kernel interfaces so we can publish those as well.

This paper also contains my first piece of externally published source code that I've written for Sun. It is a combination of Sun's strict c-style and RSA's PCKS#11 style. Certainly not the most challenging work I've done for Sun (that would be SunScreen's NAT or libpkcs11.so.1 itself). Go ahead and try it out on your s10 box now.

Solaris 10 Update 1 - Crunch Time!

So, we've moved into bug fixing mode over the last month, and now we are folding our feature gate and our bug fix gate into one. And the last minute features are crawling out of the woodwork! Lots of folks threatening to escalate up to Jonathan Schwartz (or telling me how important this feature is to Mr. Schwartz), or at the very least threatening to escalate to my VP, if I just can't understand why their feature is so important.

Here's the thing: Updates are *very* short releases. We just don't have that many builds, and as much as we all do testing, new features very often have bugs. Or defects, or issues - whatever you want to call them, I don't want more problems in my gate. It's important to Sun, and to me, to make each release a quality release, which is why at some point in time I just have to say "no" to new features. Fortunately, most folks are very understanding and will retarget their project to the next update. The releases really aren't that far apart.

Soon we'll be in "stopper" mode, which means I'll even have to say no to noncritical bug fixes.

All the same, I'm still really enjoying my work on the update. It's really cool getting insight into other groups, though it can also be frustrating getting insight into other groups ;-) The update core staff are all hardworking, intelligent people. I'm very lucky, indeed!

Now I just have to get back to my obnoxiously large RTI queue....

Squirels, cats and bats - oh my!

Ok, so for a long time now, I've been plagued by the squirels that live on my roof and love to run across the cable wires to the apartment across the alley. I'm not bothered by the squirels themselves, but rather by my cat who is fascinated with them - and with trying to attack them. This wouldn't be a problem if she could watch the squirels from another room, but she has to be in the same room as me at all times. Squirels get up much earlier in the morning than I like to, which means I have to listen to my cat meowing and pawing at the window and blinds first thing in the morning.

Katy (the cat) gets really wound up by these squirels and will often try to actually jump at them, as she does not understand the concept of gravity and windows. One early morning last summer, she took off running at full speed at a squirel on the wire and hit the screen. I had just recentlly gotten new windows and when she hit the screen, instead of stopping her like my old screens did, she FLEW out the second story window to a concrete alley below. I grabbed my glasses and ran full speed out the door and down the stairs in my pajamas, thankfully finding a perfectly terrified but healthy cat. She's an indoor only beast, and the big wide outside was just more than she could handle. I think these new screens are somehow fire safety, or something, because they pop out of the window *so* easily.

Now, you would think she would've learned a valuable lesson about gravity and the sysiphian nature of her attack on the squirels. Nope. She's just as much a squirel fanatic as before. Only now, I have to make sure I don't open the window wide enough for her to knock the screen out, and instead she rams herself against the window.

Then it gets worse.

Last night, I notice she's going apeshit over something she can see out of the window of my bedroom and everytime I drag her into another room, she goes running (full speed) back to the bedroom to the window. So, I go into my room and look out the window and see little dark flashes going by the window. Turning off the lights confirmed my suspicions: bats. Lots of them. Now my cat has something to "chase", in my bedroom, at all hours when I might possibly want to sleep. I hope bats are just seasonal. *ugh*

Seattle!

Just got back from an amazingly beautiful weekend in Seattle. After the rough week here at Sun last week, it was good to get away for a few days. We stayed with a couple of my college friends at their new house - very impressive! Lots of eating, drinking, walking and shopping occurred, along with the obligatory trips to Pike Place Market and the Space Needle. As always, meals out in Seattle were fantastic. We went out to the People's Pub on Friday night and tasted nearly every one of the outstanding beers they had on tap, Saturday was the Snappy Dragon and Sunday was half price wine night at Calypso. The jerk spiced ribs at Calypso were delicious! The only, um, odd note is: don't trust the new public toilets on the water front. The sensors for determining if they are occupied or not do not always work, and there is no button at all for *closing* the doors if they are opened at an inopportune time. *hmpf*