Open Source: Sun Microsystems

The seminar held by representatives from Sun Microsystem a week ago or so, was both really entertaing and educational. They were really good. Good at holding a lecture in front of many students and had a lot of knowledge of what they were talking about and working with. The one to set off the seminar was Matt Thompson, a Senior Director for the Developer Outreach & Open Source Programs Office. He was accompanied by two others, a woman and a guy. I remember only the guy`s name, Simon Rittinger and that is because I noticed that under the name he had written "Technology Evangelist". I found that very amusing but he was in many ways that. He preached about things to come and how good his own company`s programming tools are. Anyway, their job was mainly to build and toy with new things, program them and see if they could build the thigns that they fantasised about. What a job. Their boss, Matt Thompson, meant they had the dream job!

Simon Rittinger and his partner presented to us a glove which could be used as a mouse in a particuar interface they had developed. She put on the glove and with arm movements in an interface pretty similar to that in the movie Minority Report, she opened windows and manipulated them around. She used an interface developed by themselfes, which was a desktop in 3D called Project Looking Glass. You moved to the left and right and up and down. It was really impressive.

Besides that, they presented their own Operative System, called Solaris. That looked like a good OS although I am at the moment, I`m sorry to say, too dependent on Microsoft with regards to especially games. And also they presented to us programming tools like Netbeans in particular and adviced us to start using those. Do any of you have any experience in programming with that? Let me know!

They gave us a good presentation and the pizza along with a bottle of coke afterwords was great. They handed also out "Sun"-sweaters and cd`s with Solaris and Netbeans. The sweater was a killer. See you! Next week Microsoft is throwing a seminar in Trondheim. I think I will show up there as well.