Learn DTrace, visit Sydney

Sun is borrowing me to deliver a 3-day DTrace class in Sydney, starting on the 6th of March (assuming enough students sign up). I love DTrace, and teaching it on behalf of Sun is a great privilege.

Occasionally, Australian IT workers will be lucky enough to visit the US (or elsewhere) to attend unique training classes. Classes that aren't taught anywhere else in the World. While it's no holiday (it can be hard work), it does make for a fantastic break from sitting behind a desk day after day (or sitting in a cold server room).

Please let me return the favour and give you an excuse to visit Sydney, Australia! Where else in the World will you be taught DTrace from the author of the DTraceToolkit?

I have taught DTrace before: be prepared for some really intense training! We usually drink lots of coffee, finish later than usual, and cover a lot more than is in the notes. I encourage students to bring in their work problems and get me to solve them (live, in front of the class!).

Ok, I know many companies may choke at the thought of paying for flights to Australia + hotel + training. But if you do wangle it, then I'll see you on the 6th (and the weather is usually great that time of year. ;)

OpenSolaris Games

The OpenSolaris Games community has opened. It exists to list games, provide install instructions, develop new games, and to give us an excuse to play games.

There are tons of games out there that will work on OpenSolaris. These include RougeLike games, such as NetHack, Angband, ZAngband, ToME, etc, and ports of the Doom engine. I've linked to a modest collection on the website, which will gradually grow as others help out.

Please post game URLs to the mailing list, and help out where you can. There are many games and many genres, and to cover them properly on a website will need a lot of help from the OpenSolaris community.

So far, most of the games are hosted on Blastwave - thanks to Dennis and team for making them available.

...

I have actually written games in the past, although they wern't very good games. These include xpong written entirerly in dtksh, and a port of "Hunt the Wumpus" as an mdb loadable module. I'm also helping with other projects to write decent games, including a curses based shoot-em-up written by Boyd; more on that later.