Category Archives: News & Reviews

One of our favorite restaurants is
Michi Sushi
(2220 Winchester Blvd, Campbell, CA). In addition to excellent food
and charming friendly staff, Michi’s has a big two-sided fish tank. Photographing
tank fish is harder than taking pictures of flowers. Flowers hold still and are
rarely surrounded by highly reflective surfaces. My only advice is – don’t use a
flash. It scares the fish and unless you are lucky, the light mostly bounces off
the tank. I take many pictures and hope for the best…

Yucca flower with bee

Passion flower

Cactus flower

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson

This is an open invitation to Arduino
Night (buy a kit, build a kit, bring a board):
7:30pm-10:00pm, Thursday, 23 October 2008 at the
Sun’s Santa Clara Campus historic Mansion (across the road from the Auditorium).
If you are in the area and open source or
Sun SPOTs (Sun Small Programmable Object Technology) are your passion, this
is a great chance to expand your network.

More event information is available in
Alan DuBoff’s mail:

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ug-svosug/2008-October/000093.html.

Tiger Xylophone “XyloTiger”

This event is part of the Silicon Valley

OSUG (OpenSolaris User Group)
meeting. There are 72 OpenSolaris User Groups all over the world. See:

OpenSolaris User Groups: Locations & Lists for more.

For one example of a fun Arduino project, see my

1 August 2008 blog entry called
“OSCON and ServoBells”. Come on Thursday night to see my husband
John’s improved Arduino xylophone (built from a Toys’R’Us tiger),
plus his JMRI controlled portable
N-scale model train layout. More on John’s projects is on his website under

Category:Arduino.

Image Copyright 2008 by John Plocher

Sun customers who are in the market for a Sun Modular Datacenter
(aka a Black
Box) are probably more concerned with adding cost-effective instant
data center capacity than with landscaping. Rightly so! However,
a Black Box has to go somewhere. As a dedicated gardener, for the last six
months I have been watching with interest the creation of a handsome
landscape setting for the new Black Box now inside of Sun’s Menlo
Park campus. “MPK” as we call the
Sun Menlo Park campus includes one of Sun’s two award-winning
Executive Briefing Centers (“EBC”).
The new Black Box is in the EBC courtyard in MPK.

I have a particular interest in the Black Box because the
Technology Advisory Board or TAB, which I manage went on a prototype tour
about six months before the product was announced in 2006. It has been exciting
to watch that prototype data center in a shipping container turn into a
real product.

From the 2006 announcement until April 2007, MPK sometimes got to see a
Black Box when its truck came by as part of the
Sun Tour.
In April 2007, an
April Fool prank featured an empty Black Box appearing in the center of
MPK’s grass amphitheatre. It was set up as an executive playspace
for
CEO Jonathan Schwartz and

CTO Greg Papadopoulos. One of the display boards created for the prank
showed a faked photo of what MPK would look like with Black Boxes (including
windows) taking over the whole amphitheatre.

In March 2008, the MPK campus was being spruced up with new paint
and landscaping. It was clear from the size and space that was left open outside
of the EBC that a Black Box was coming our way, so I took some pictures.
Then, this summer, MPK finally got its own real Black Box. Photos:

Sun MPK from the air

April Fools 2007, Fake Black Boxes

Mar 08: Space for Black Box

July 2008 – New MPK Black Box

MPK Black Box

Sep 08: SEEDs Visit Black Box

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson

My job includes managing Sun’s sponsorship of a few external-to-Sun
events, like the American Heart Association’s Silicon Valley

Heart Walk (see my
September 21, 2008 blog entry), and the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (see my

October 14, 2008 blog entry).

The team usually designs a tshirt as part of event preparation.
Tshirts are good advertising and a popular giveaway, plus they make us
easy to find in a crowd.

In a big company, some decisions are easy. We don’t need to go looking
for a tshirt manufacturer because Sun has a preferred vendor. This means that
vendor selection, terms, payment, and method of shipment are already sorted out. The
event team can focus on other questions like shirt quantity, quality, cost, and
design. My event budget tells me how much I can spend. The number of event
participants tells me the rough quantity of shirts to order. There are some
tradeoffs I can make, such as raising shirt quality in exchange for fewer
shirts overall. That leaves mostly decisions about design.

Below are pictures of two sets of Sun tshirts that were very popular. (I know we have
a winner when people offer to buy the shirt from our backs!) In both cases,
we reused most of the 2007 design for 2008. The 2007 Hopper shirt took months to
create because Tanya Jankot and I asked Sun Engineering staff around the world to
help us translate and find the fonts to write “Sun Women in Engineering”
in English, Hindi, Spanish, Mandarin, Czech, and Russian (the languages of
Sun’s biggest Engineering centers). I think Sun’s 2008 Heart Walk shirt was a hit
just because teal is a flattering color for most people.

Some of the tshirt decisions we made in 2008:

• Sun’s 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing shirt:
• Kept the black fabric color.
• Provided different base shirts for women and men. Picked a softer fabric and
  more form-fitting shape for the women’s shirts. (We tested several samples
  until we found the best.) Used standard T-shape men’s shirts.
• Updated the OpenSolaris logo and colors (from grey and orange to blues and
  greens).
• Kept one text/image design and printing size for both women’s and men’s shirts –
  significant cost savings from this decision allowed us to make more shirts.
• Picked the brightest colors (lime green and baby blue) from the OpenSolaris
  “bubbles” logo for the text on the back. The photo below does not show how
  very bright the printing ink colors are.
• Put the chest logo higher up – more flattering for a woman.
• Sun’s 2008 Heart Walk shirt:
• Changed fabric color from baby blue to teal.
• Added a new event logo (designed by Sheri Kaneshiro) on the chest:
  the Sun logo next to a white heart contining the words “Heart Walk”.
• Changed ink color from green to white.
• Kept one design and printing size for all size shirts.

Some ordering tips:

• Ask the vendor to for unprinted sample shirts to feel and try on. This will
  tell you whether the sizes run small or large. Two of the
  common comments at the Hopper conference about Sun’s shirt were: “Cool design!”
  and (after we gave the person a shirt): “Oooo, soooft!”
• Always request a pre-production printed physical sample (in both smallest
  women’s size and largest men’s size) from the vendor. We have seen the wrong logo
  used, crooked printing, too-small printing, text too high or too low, and other
  problems. An electronic image is good for basic design decisions but do request
  a physical sample before approving production.
• Consider your event population before deciding how many shirts of each
  size to buy. At Hopper, we need 90% women’s sizes. The Heart Walk has more
  men participating but also little kids, so we order 35% men’s large and extra-large
  and the rest smaller.
• Using one text/image design and printing size for all shirt sizes can yield
  significant cost savings.
• Once the pre-production sample is right, ask to ship the shirts directly from
  production to the event.

2007 Grace Hopper

Tanya in 2007 Grace Hopper Tshirt

2008 Grace Hopper

Heart Walk 2007

Greg, Danny at Heart Walk 2008

Paul, Sheri, Pat at Heart Walk 2008

Images Copyright 2007 – 2008 by Katy Dickinson and Sheri Kaneshiro

I love airport art. Some airports are simply functional, like busy small town
bus stations (Bangalore and Frankfurt come to mind). Others are like big expensive
shopping malls (Barcelona and Heathrow/London). My favorite airports offer
restaurants and shops (especially bookstores!) but also good art.
Vancouver (YVR)
and San Francisco
(SFO) are good examples; last week I found another:
Denver (DEN), Colorado.
I have passed through Denver many times but rarely with enough time to notice much.
Last week, on my way to the Grace Hopper
Celebration of Women in Computing in Keystone, Colorado, I had more time.

I flew Frontier Airlines from San Francisco to Denver. Frontier has

delightful animals pictured on their tails with each flight hosted by
the pictured animal. I flew a pelican there and a baby lynx coming home.
The first thing I saw in Denver coming off the plane was
a huge swooping railway sculpture. (I was sorry I could not find any indication
of who created it.) This was followed by “paper” airplanes
floating above the escalators, then two bronze gargoyles sitting in suitcases.
My funniest DEN experience was subtle: steam railroad engine sounds played over
the loudspeakers when the intra-airport shuttle train pulled up to the glass doors.
Someone had a good time designing that!

On the way back home, we arrived at the Denver airport just at dawn. This
was an excellent time to view DEN’s newest major sculputure – the bright
blue rearing
“Mustang” with red lit eyes by Luiz Jimenez. The artist died while
working on this 32-foot cast-fiberglass sculpture but it was finished
and installed to honor him. We drove by too fast for me to take a
picture but “Mustang” is impressive.

I hope to visit DEN again soon so that I can see the rest of the collection.

SFO: Stutz Kore

Fontier Pelican Tail

DEN: Railroad Sculpture

DEN: Rail Sculpture

DEN: Airplanes

Terry Allen’s Notre Denver Gargoyle

Allen’s Denver Gargoyle

DEN: “Notre Denver” Gargoyle

DEN: “Notre Denver” Gargoyle

SFO: Deborah Butterfield’s “Pohina”

Images Copyright 2008 by Katy Dickinson

My daughter and I are about to watch the second and third episodes of
“Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog”,
a short new musical by the Whedon brothers.
Jessica is setting up the movie on her laptop (she has her own copy, bought
from iTunes). You can also read Jessica’s
23 September 2008 blog entry on “Dr. Horrible”.

When we travel together, Jessica and I usually watch a video at night. Over
the past few years, we have watched “Serenity” and “Firefly” and “House M.D.”
episodes as well as more conventional movies. Jessica is a big
Joss Whedon
fan. Last night, we watched the strange but fun first “Dr. Horrible” episode in
which Nathan Fillion (who was Captain Mal in “Serenity” and “Firefly”) plays
a “hero” similar to the character Gaston in Disney’s 1991

“Beauty and the Beast”.

Jessica and I both fly home tomorrow from
the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (aka GHC 2008)
in Keystone, Colorado. I am flying to San Francisco and she goes to
Pittsburgh, PA, where she is a CMU Sophomore. This is probably our
last in-person time until she comes home from college for Christmas.
Jessica and I have had a good time together this week and I will miss her.