I agree with Tim Bray here with his “Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career” and with Jim Grisanzio addition that it’s Fun as well (although I personally have more fun reading than writing).
But I’m not blogging to get promoted (and considering the number of
blogs that have greater numbers of hits, I’m not in the short list
anyway :-)).
I’ve started blogging as a way to better share my ideas and knowledge
with my collegues and customers (if any are reading), and at least to
get better organized, improve my communication and potentially reduce
the amount of emails that I was exchanging every day. In other words,
gain efficiency. With that matter, I’m starting to see the value.
I never thought that blogging would make me more important or more
elictible to a promotion, but if it comes, I’m not going to refuse 😉

I’m still learning how to become a decent (and interesting) blogger,
and it looks like that I still have a lot to learn, and especially to
write faster and more often.
I intended to write about the Sun Engineering Conference (SEC), sponsored by our Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos, that is happening this week on the Santa Clara campus, and about all the Sun bloggers that I met, but Dan Lacher beat me on that later subject (although he forgot to mention Norbert Lindenberg). I had a nice conversation with Tim Bray
on various subjects such as IETF and France (this summer ‘s IETF will
take place in Paris), eXtreme Programming and of course Blogs….

More on the content of the conference in a future entry.

Update on March 9th.
During the SEC, I’ve also met another Sun blogger, although I wasn’t aware of his blog: Lars Oppermann,
from the StarOffice / OpenOffice team. Lars and I seem to have common
interests as we often found each other in workshops, BOFs, and of
course around the chocolate fountain.

Sun Java Enterprise System 2005Q1 has been released and it available on Sun web site.
Java ES 2005Q1 also evolved into several Suites, including the Sun Java Identity Management Suite.

This release of Java ES contains a new version of the Sun Directory Server 5, internally versioned 5.2patch 3.

What’s new in Directory Server 5.2 patch 3 ?
This micro-release brings a few features enhancement such as the
ability to move an entry within a database (MODDN operation), lots of
defects fixes and some performance improvements. And this is the first
release to be fully supported on Solaris 10, Java2 Standard Edition
5.0, and Red Hat Linux Enterprise Server 3.0 update 3.
Please check the Release Notes for the full details.

Java ES 2005Q1 and consequently Directory Server 5.2patch 3 will be
also be available on HP-UX 11i and Windows 2000 in a couple of months.

Patches to upgrade to Directory Server 5.2 patch 3 level from previous releases will be available shortly from Sun Solve.
And you can count on me to advertize the patches on this blog.

I’ve upgraded my workstation today to Solaris 10 (from Solaris 9 update 6).
For building and testing Directory Server,
I don’t need the leading edge operating system (and in fact, it is
better to keep a referenced version). So I’ve never taken the time to
upgrade. Now that Directory Server 5.2 patch 3 is done and waiting for
Sun Java Enterprise System 2005Q1 to be released, I’ve decided it was
time to give my workstation and desktop environment a little lifting.
After rebooting the workstation over the network, and clicking a few
times the Next button, the upgrade procedure started and about 20
minutes later, it was done: Solaris 10 was booting and the new login
page showed up.
While I was in the mood for change, I’ve also changed my window manager
and desktop environment for the Java Desktop 3. It’s slick and FAST…
I’ll be exploring Solaris 10 features and changes over the next
days. But for sure, I’ll be recommending my coworkers and others to
move as soon as possible.

It seems that the snow has hit the northern hemisphere, in the US (see here , here or here).
Today the snow is hitting France. It started snowing in Grenoble today
around 9am and everything starts to turn white. It’s been heavily
snowing in the mountains last week, but the temperature is lowering and
so is the snow, hitting the valley.
Although located on the edge of the Alps and surrounded by 3 ranges of
mountains, Grenoble’s altitude is pretty low, 260 meters from sea
level, and snow usually hit the ground only a couple of times a
year. 

I really enjoy watching the snow falling, and I’m looking forward to the sun to come back and shine to go skiing.

I’ve resisted to this… until now.
I’ve just went through the Nerd Quiz and here’s the result:

Somehow, probably about what I expected. Probably that taking the test already qualify you for a score higher than 50 !

We spent the week-end in Aime at my in-laws. They live in the valley of Tarentaise just below La Plagne,
one of the biggest french ski resort. As the week-end was absolutely
gorgeous (so sunny and warm despite the -10 Celsius in the morning), we
spent both days on the slopes with our daughters.
The snow conditions are not really good right now, the layer is very
thin and packed, and it hasn’t snowed since the week between Christmas
and New Year’s eve., but the rumor is that the snow is planned for
Tuesday and Wednesday (even down in the valley in Grenoble).
However we managed to have some good time, by staying on the Montalbert sector, pretty well equiped with snow canons.
Noemie’s style is improving and she’s trying to go faster and faster.
 
Lea (5) is doing her best to follow the tracks of her big sister and she’s not the first one to ask for a break !

Let’s just hope that the next week-ends will be as good as this one,
for it helps to start a week of work with energy and enthusiasm.

A happy new year to everybody.

I hope that you had a nice and relaxing holiday. Mine was ! I spent
time with my familly and friends, also visiting my parents on the
French Riviera.
Now the ski season is starting and we will be spending most of our week-ends in La Plagne which is a little bit more than 1 hour driving from our home.
Back to work today, I did my annual mailbox cleanup, ie archiving all the emails and folders and starting with an empty mailbox.
And now will be focusing on our next major release of the Directory
Server and Directory Proxy Server… Our themes for this release:
manageability and scalability.  More about these in the next
weeks…

I’ve changed my theme (to Basic) and customized it to celebrate the move to Roller 1.0 for Blogs.sun.com.

There are still a few issues with the new version of Roller,
especially displaying in Firefox 1.0, but overall it’s a major
improvement. Many deserved thanks to Dave.

Now I need to improve my regularity of blogging. This is one of my resolutions for 2005.

I’m currently in Washington DC, attending the 61st IETF meeting.
For those who’s never been to an IETF meeting, think of it as a gathering of hundreds of internet geeks wandering in the conference hotel with laptops opened in front of them. IETF meetings occur 3 times a year, there are about 4 sessions per day, of 7 meetings in parallel running for 5 days from 9am until 10:30 pm for the latest. And many many corridor, bar, lunch discussions. (for the real curious I recommend reading the Tao of IETF)

My main focus is LDAP and the ldapbis working group, but I’m also following out of curiosity other working groups in the Application and the Security areas.

The ldapbis (ldapv3 revision) working group is about to conclude with the internet-drafts revising the LDAPv3 specifications going under final review before publication. The new drafts remove lots of the ambiguities of the existing RFC (RFC 2251-2256, 2829, 2830 and 3377), by citing explicitely the relevant parts of X.500. But one can say that LDAP is no longer lightweight. Anyway, the clarifications were necessary and we will be enforcing a stricter compliance to the specifications in coming releases of Sun Java System Directory Server.

The password policy for LDAP draft that I’m co-authoring was published late october and Jim and I spent some time together to work on the known issues and we should be pushing a revision pretty soon.

The last remaining female bear native from the Pyrenees (a range of mountains between France and Spain) was killed this week-end by hunters who deliberately came close to the area known for the bears.

Cannelle was a 15 years old female bear and mother of a 10 months old bear cub. Chances of survival for the cub are small but reasonable if not disturbed. For this reason, the area is now fully protected and hunting banned.

There is about 15 bears left in the Pyrenees and only 2 males are indigenous. The other ones were imported from Slovenia.

Also in the last 2 weeks, two wolves (another native but protected species of the Alps), a male and an 18 months old female were shot in the Alps.

When will the man learn to respect wild life ? I hope it will be before all species are extinguished.

I’m Ludovic Poitou, Software engineer and currently Architect in the Directory Server Team.
I’ve been at Sun since July 1995 (on my arrival the almost first question I asked was: where is Java ?).
I’ve been working on X.400 Messaging than moved to LDAP and Directory Services, working on all versions of the Directory Server at Sun. I’m also participating in the standardization of LDAP and its extensions within IETF.
I’m based near Grenoble in France (in the Alps). My wife is a journalist (for a nature magazine named “Forets” -Forests-) and we have 2 cute daughters (7 and 4 years old). We do a lot of skiing, hiking and we enjoy our small but productive kitchen garden.