IT jobs, and probably all jobs, were incredibly scarce in 2009. I’m beginning to see signs that the situation is improving. I’ve been getting more interviews in the past couple of months, but that doesn’t mean a lot until I can actually land a position somewhere.

While it is somewhat depressing, the experience hasn’t been all bad. I had the opportunity to get some up-to-date studio training and set up my Voice Over business, and have been doing some long-overdue work around the house.

Also, thanks to the very generous severance package from Sun, I’m still paying the bills, and I’m not desperate (yet).

Anybody need a slightly used Technology Evangelist?

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I’m happy that the end of uncertainties stemming from over a year of this acquisition process (first with IBM, then with Oracle) will allow things to finally move ahead, and for customers to begin making forward-looking decisions for their computing hardware purchases.

On the other, the culture at Sun is about to be irreversibly changed, as Sun sinks below the horizon and becomes part of the largely-soulless software giant.

I will also miss the huge number of friends I made in my years at Sun (at the time of my RIF notice, I had been there almost precisely 1/3 of my life), and being part of a company where, as Scott McNealy said, we “Kicked Butt, Had Fun, Didn’t Cheat, Loved Our Customers, and Changed Computing Forever”.

Today, Oracle actually mentioned SPARC in an ad in the Wall Street Journal.

This might not seem like much, but it’s a huge change. There hasn’t been any marketing mention from Sun about SPARC systems in nearly a year (the newest SPARC server, the SPARC Enterprise T5440, was introduced in October of 2008).

While my little team travelled the Americas telling anyone who would listen why SPARC was still important, the Sun executives simply stopped mentioning SPARC, instead talking up the x64 products which are, let’s face it, almost identical to everybody else’s x64 products.

Even Jonathan Schwartz hasn’t blogged about SPARC in over two years!

Then, my whole SPARC team got torn apart, and most of us were laid off in May in preparation to sell Sun to IBM.

But IBM isn’t buying Sun. Oracle is (probably). And while Sun hasn’t mentioned SPARC in advertising in a year, suddenly Oracle has.

Makes me feel good.

Sun Ad from 15 Oct 2009 WSJ

I’ve been waiting for the iPhone version of Google Latitude for months. It’s a nifty way to find out where your friends are, or which ones are close by. It might seem like a loss of privacy, but if you’re already blogging, tweeting, and/or Facebooking your life away, this shouldn’t bother you too much. Also, it has some pretty nice privacy features to allow you to hide when you want, as well as to control the quality of position you show on a person-by-person basis.

The Latitude page has been saying that it’s coming soon for iPhone and iPod touch for quite some time. I’ve been using it on my laptop for several weeks, but if I want to keep my location updated, my phone is the obvious choice of device from which to do it.

If you have an iPhone, chances are you can get Latitude working, though it might take a few tries. On Mobile Safari, browse to m.google.com/latitude, and you will either get right in to Latitude, or you will get a “Coming Soon” page (which is what I got, at first).

Just keep reloading the page every once in a while (I had to do it 6 or 7 times), and you may eventually find yourself using latitude. Press the “+” on the bottom toolbar, and add a shortcut icon to your Home Screen, so you can get back to it.

I was a vocal opponent of hardware dongles and key disks way back in the 80′s, and I thought we were beyond that, until I started looking into Digital Audio Workstation software for my home Voice Over recording studio.

After reviewing what was available, I settled on Pro Tools, since I needed an interface for my studio microphone anyway (XLR connection and 48 volt power), and Pro Tools came bundled with a pretty good one. I only bristled at the hardware dongle aspect for a moment (the software won’t run without one of the approved audio interfaces attached). I acquiesced since, for my purposes, I’d need to have one attached to do anything useful (you can’t do much voice recording without a microphone).

Upon installing Pro Tools, I quickly verified that it wouldn’t start without the interface, then I connected the interface (Digidesign Mbox 2), and it started right up … almost.

Now, even though it would seem that the presence or absence of the Mbox2 effectively implements any needed copy protection, on the first execution of Pro Tools I still had to enter:

• A 14-random-character ID
• A 4-character “Release Code”
• An 11-character serial number

…for the connected interface. WTF?

Pro Tools comes with a wealth of plug-ins, many of which look really useful. In addition, the package I purchased included a bundle of added plug-ins. On going through the packaging, I discovered that these additions required key codes to use, and these codes reside on a USB dongle (a PACE iLok). But, in addition to requiring the presence of the iLok, the first time I tried to use them, up popped a dialog requiring entry of:

• A 14-random-character ID
• An 11-character serial number

Again, WTF?

Cryptic software keys are bad enough, hardware dongles are almost always bad, but both?!?!?

Maybe it’s just me, but this really bothers me.

Addendum

A reader has pointed out that DAW applications (and all audio apps) are heavily pirated. I still contend, however, that no copy protection scheme has ever managed anything more than to temporarily slow down the pirates and crackers, and at the cost of unduly punishing legitimate users.

The more egregious the copy protection, the more you alienate your Paying Customers! And for the others, it only needs to be cracked once. Copy protection has never made good economic sense, and it still doesn’t.

Thankfully, the practice of using an email address as a userid isn’t as common as it once was, but I’ve been active on the web since 1993, and have a lot of registrations scattered about.

As I feared, a number of these sites allow changing your email address, but only after sending a confirmation message to the original address, with no clear way of making changes should that address become unavailable. I’m sure I didn’t catch them all, but at least the ones I still use regularly seem to be done. Now, I’ll have to make a habit of checking the settings every time I log in to a site to be sure that they’re not sending stuff to the old address.

It feels a bit strange, but after almost 17 years of having the same primary email address, I suppose there is bound to be confusion and cruft left behind for quite some time.

Of course, I have seldom used my work address for non-work stuff in recent years, but not too long ago, it was uncommon to have more than one email address. Today, I have seven email accounts going to my iPhone, and there are several more on top of that which I only check on occasionally.

While I was trying to do all of that clean-up, I installed WordPress and got my first blog entry published, and packed up gear I had at home. After taking the gear back to the office, I met with a couple of ex-Sun friends for dinner and a few beers.

My RIF package just arrived via FedEx, so I’m going to spend some time figuring out what my benefits are. Looks like Sun is being very generous, so I should have some time to reflect on what I would like to do going forward.

I don’t need to rush around for anything today, so I think I’ll take in a movie (probably Watchmen) this afternoon.

My first ever, in fact, so bear with me while I flesh this out.

It seems like the right time to do this, since I was laid off today from Sun Microsystems, where I have been working for nearly 17 years. I’m still coming to terms with it, but I think this is not as bad as it might seem. I’m going to treat this as an an opportunity to try something new, hence the initial name of this blog.

And I have experience to help me. I was (very nearly) laid off in 2004, but was called back at the last moment. If you’re interested, you can find an email I sent out about that experience here.

The link in that message is very old and won’t work, but it referred to the announcement that Sun was going to develop the world’s first publicly-available Grid Computing Utility. I worked as Lead Engineer on the project, and we did it. It was kind of cool. Anybody could use our Compute Grid for $1 per CPU/hour.

So, it begins again. Thanks for taking this ride with me.

Curt Harpold

Posted from Rockville, Maryland, United States.