March 30, 2007 · 1:38 pm

UC Berkeley California Centennial features 3 from Sun

UC Berkeley’s alumni magazine, California, recently issued its Centennial Edition, featuring hundreds of Berkeley luminaries. Sun and Berkeley share some particularly bright stars: turning to p.30 you will see a full page photo of John Gage (Sun’s Chief Researcher and Vice President of the Science Office) with Kim Polese (former Sun Java product manager then co-founder of Marimba). Turning to p.104, there is a photo of Eric Schmidt, who hired me when he was Sun’s Software Manager and left after becoming Sun’s CTO to go to Novell and then Google.

Strangely enough, Sun Founder and notable Berkeley alumnus Bill Joy is only mentioned briefly in this issue. Other Cal profiled graduates who did well in the Silicon Valley include Douglas Engelbart, Gordon Moore, and Andrew Grove.

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March 28, 2007 · 11:36 am

More College Responses – 4 to go

My High School Senior daughter Jessica has been hearing back
from the colleges, universities, and music conservatories to which she
applied last year for admission to the undergraduate class of 2011.
This has been going on since 8 March and will continue until 2 April. We
expect to hear back from Brown and Princeton tomorrow, and from Oberlin
and Rice on Monday.

Waiting is hard. Once we have all of the replies, we get to decide
which schools she should visit for a last look around before deciding.
Jessica’s acceptance decisions back to the schools are due 1 May.

College Response Music Conservatory Response
Brown

(Providence, RI)
 due 3/29 — —
Carnegie Mellon

(Pittsburgh, PA)
 accepted CMU-Music declined
Lawrence University

(Appleton, WI)
 accepted Lawrence-Music declined
MIT

(Cambridge, MA)
 declined — —
Oberlin College

(Oberlin, OH)
 due 4/2 Oberlin Conservatory declined
Princeton University

(Princeton, NJ)
 due 3/29 — —
Rice University

(Houston, TX)
 due 4/2 Rice-Shepherd School due 4/2
Smith College

(Northhampton, MA)
 accepted — —
University of Rochester

(Rochester, NY)
 accepted — —

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March 24, 2007 · 5:34 pm

Singing Competition – CMEA

Today was a big day for Jessica, my 18-year-old daughter. She checked the web site and was happy to find out that Smith College has accepted her application. We have now heard back from 3 of the 9 colleges to which Jessica applied. (University of Rochester also accepted her, MIT alas said no.) We will hear from the remainder by 2 April. It is a long and difficult wait.

Also, John and Jessica and I just got back from the CMEA (California Association for Music Education) Solo & Ensemble Festival at San Jose State Univ., that is: a musical performance competition. Jessica was the last singer today. She sang an aria in Russian from Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Czar’s Bride and was awarded the highest rating of “Superior” along with a Command Performance. The judge said Jessica’s was the only Command Performance he awarded today!

Susan Nace (Harker’s superb music teacher and the director for Cantilena, Harker’s Upper School Women’s Choir) accompanied Jessica on piano. We are very proud of Jessica and continue to be delighted with the excellent music education and support provided by Ms. Nace.

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March 23, 2007 · 10:50 pm

California Central Model Railroad (Next to Sun Santa Clara Campus)

Our home club, the
Silicon Valley Lines Model Railroad, was invited for a
visit and joint operations tonight by the California Central Model Railroad
club. The California Central Model Railroad has been in the historic
depot building on the other side of the tracks from Sun’s Santa Clara Campus
(formerly Agnews State Hospital) since the late 1960’s. It is located at:

    4185 Bassett St

    Santa Clara, CA 95054


    (408) 988-4449

John and Paul and I did not stay for the entire session but saw
much to admire at this friendly club. The building is small but they
own it and pay nominal rent
to the railroad that owns the land itself. They thus do not have the high
monthly rent problem that plagues many clubs. The building is fully built
out with a raised floor layout. The space under the layout is well
used for corridors, the dispatcher’s desk (with monitor screens and
switches), access to remote layout areas, a lavatory, even a small
coffee room. Communications with the dispatcher are by dial telephones
mounted to the panels under the layout. Paul was fascinated by the
dial telephones (he had never seen one used before)!

Cal Central Meetings are Fridays, 8:30-11:00 p.m. Their
National Model Railroad Association
(NMRA) listing says:

    Call for directions and upcoming show/events.

    The layout is HO scale with a dual guage branch line for those of the narrow-minded persuasion. The layout is a “folded dog bone” or point to point with a turning loop at each end and is located in the turn of the century South Pacific Coast Agnew Station. The main line is approximately 300′ and the scenery is 90% complete. This club layout has been on several convention tours and also on the cover of RMC and MR multiple times. There are several NMRA Master Modelers in the ranks and even some past NMRA officers and it shows in the layout.


We took away many good ideas from our short visit. This is a club
and layout worth seeing.

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March 23, 2007 · 2:22 pm

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007

I know of at least five women in Engineering here at Sun who
are preparing proposals to submit to the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007. The submission deadline was just extended to 9 June.
Hopper 2007 will be held October 17-20 in Orlando, Florida.

Starting this year, Hopper is an annual event and will be held together with the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. As the web site
says: “Past Grace Hopper Celebrations have resulted in collaborative proposals, networking, mentoring, and increased visibility for the contributions of women in computing. This year’s theme is I Invent the Future“.

The Anita Borg Institute for
Women and Technology (ABI) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) present the Hopper conference. 2007 is the 7th Hopper, will be the
4th I have attended, and the 3rd to which I have submitted a
proposal. I had panels on mentoring at the last two Hopper conferences.

I am on the Advisory Board for the ABI. Sun hosted the ABI Ambassadors meeting here in Menlo Park yesterday. We discussed best practices in networking groups of women in Engineering at
Sun, Cisco, and HP. Sun’s group is called SASWE (“Succeeding @ Sun As a Woman Engineer”) and has been working since 1995. The ABI Ambassadors
also heard an update on Hopper 2007. The plans sound exciting!

More than 30 Sun women attended and worked at the Hopper conference in San Diego in 2006. (See my
blog entries for 2006 photos and commentary.) The flash of energy and
delight that resulted from their participation was exhilarating.

Greg Papadopoulos (Sun CTO and Executive VP) took the opportunity of Hopper 2006 to write a piece in CNET called “Perspective: Engineering field must have diversity”. I am
very much looking forward to Hopper 2007.

Error Correction!:

I got the date wrong on my 23 March posting, the Hopper submissions
deadlines are now:

  • Ph.D. Forum – April 29
  • Panels, Workshops, and Presentations – April 15
  • Technical Posters – April 29
  • ACM SRC – April 29
  • BOFs – April 29
  • New Investigator Technical Papers – April 29

Hopper Registration opens June 1

More information:
http://gracehopper.org/2007/

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March 22, 2007 · 1:59 pm

52 New SEEDs Selected Today

Congratulations to the 52 SEED Engineering mentoring program
participants just selected for the June-December 2007 term! This is a
special term for Sun Engineering staff working in Bangalore, Beijing,
Prague, and St. Petersburg. There were 81 applicants this term.

About the new Participants:

  • Location of Participants
    • 24 Bangalore, India (46%)
    • 14 Beijing, China (27%)
    • 7 Prague, Czech Republic (13%)
    • 7 St. Petersburg, Russia (13%)
  • Division of Participants
    • Software Group: 48 (92%)
    • Storage: 2 (4%)
    • Systems: 2 (4%)
  • Gender of Participants
    • female: 12 (23%)
    • male: 40 (77%)
  • Jobs of Participants
    • 30 Principal level (58%)

      including Members of the Technical Staff 4, Staff Engineers,
      Senior Staff Engineers, Engineering Manager, and equivalent titles

    • 22 Junior to Principal Level (42%)

      including Members of the Technical Staff 1, MTS-2, MTS-3,
      and equivalent titles
  • 7 People Managers (13%)
  • 18 Prior Applicants to SEED (35%)

The next regular World-wide SEED Terms will be announced in email to all
of Sun Engineering in late May 2007 (applications due in June, terms start
in September 2007).

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March 21, 2007 · 11:32 am

Sorting the SEED Applications (4-Site Term)

The SEED Engineering mentoring program is getting ready to hold a
meeting of its executive Selection Committee for the 4-Site term
tomorrow. The Selection Committee includes Vice President, Director, and
Distinguished Engineer representatives for each of the four target locations
(St. Petersburg, Prague, Beijing, and Bangalore). They have had passworded
access to the applications since Monday, 19 March. We have received the HR
Records review of the applications and have sorted applicants into 3 groups to
help structure Selection Committee discussions. The 3 groups are:

  1. Qualified and also in an explicit preference category

    Meets SEED and 4-Site term selection criteria, completed application,
    and also Principal job seniority level, and/or More than one “1”
    (“Superior”) annual performance rating, etc.

  2. Qualified but not in a preference category

    Meets SEED and 4-Site term selection criteria, completed application

  3. Disqualified

    Usually this means that the person did not complete their
    application, or had no “1” (“Superior”) annual performance ratings

There were 81 applications and 16 were disqualified, so 65 SEED 4-Site
applications are being considered.
The proportion of acceptances for each of the four sites will be roughly
restricted by the proportion of qualified applications from each site.
Since the target for this term is to accept 50 participants, we are
working toward a selection rate of about 77% (50 of 65 total
qualified applicants).

Here is where each site ended up in terms of the three groups:

  • St. Petersburg, Russia

    4 qualified and in an explicit preference category

    4 qualified (but not in a preference category)

    1 disqualified

  • Beijing, China

    9 qualified and in an explicit preference category

    9 qualified (but not in a preference category)

    0 disqualified

  • Prague, Czech Republic

    7 qualified and in an explicit preference category

    1 qualified (but not in a preference category)

    3 disqualified

  • Bangalore, India

    17 qualified and in an explicit preference category

    14 qualified (but not in a preference category)

    12 disqualified

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