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Hal Stern

http://twitter.com/freeholdhal

Performance, security, networking and blogging kind of guy

Biography

Hal Stern is the Senior Vice President of Systems Engineering at Sun Microsystems. His responsibilities include technical leadership, training, and management of Sun's customer engineering teams in Global Sales and Services. Hal was involved in both the Sun ONE and Liberty Alliance Project architectures from their formative stages, and has been working with teams open sourcing Sun software projects. Hal's current technical interests include content delivery networks, privacy and security of large-scale systems, digital rights management for on-line and off-line use, network identity, structured data management, reliability and software quality measurement, applying telecommunications network principles to large-scale data centers, the future of horizontally scaled database systems and virtualization technologies from the chip to the filesystem levels. Hal has been at Sun more than 18 years, having previously held the titles of CTO for Software, CTO of Sun Services, Chief Architect for Sun Professional Services, CTO of the Sun ONE (iPlanet) infrastructure products division as Chief Technologist of the Northeast US sales area. Hal became the first field employee promoted to the position of Distinguished Engineer in February 1995. Hal was one of the creators of the first Java Day, held in New York City in September 1995. He received a Sun President's Award in 1993 for contribution to Sun's product strategies in clustered systems. He is listed as inventor or co-inventor on several patents in the networking and security areas. Before joining Sun, Hal developed molecular modeling software for a Boston area start up company and was on the research staff at Princeton University. Hal earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Princeton University in 1984. Hal currently blogs about everything from software economics to his latest nerd toys at blogs.sun.com. He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi societies, and when he is not traveling he may be found playing ice hockey, aggressive skating, or playing golf very badly. Hal lives in Livingston, NJ with his wife Toby and two teenage children.

Books

Managing NFS and NIS Managing NFS and NIS
by Hal Stern , Mike Eisler , Ricardo Labiaga
Second Edition July 2001
Print: $54.99
Ebook: $39.99

starstarstarstarstar (3)
(Read Reviews)

Managing NFS and NIS Managing NFS and NIS
by Hal Stern
January 2001
OUT OF PRINT
starstarstarstarstar (3)
(Read Reviews)

Blog

Hal's blog posts are hosted at:
http://blogs.sun.com/stern/
http://agrosnowman.com/snowmanonfire/

NHL Center Ice Package: I’m Sold

November 06 2009

I broke down and ordered the NHL Center Ice package tonight. It was actually a Facebook conversation with a co-worker that convinced me it was worth the $172 for the next six months, or as he put it, less than the cost of going to two games. My interest started… read more

First of the Year for the Stache

November 06 2009

Snowman favorite George Parros picked up his first of the year, ending a 21-game stretch without a goal that extended into last spring. It was a weird night, including a goal that Joffrey Lupul put in off of the glass stanchion near the blue line. read more

Counting the Growth Rings

November 05 2009

Sports fans most definitely mark time by sports seasons, and clearly associate events staggeringly good or bad with particular slices of our life. The 1969 Mets are what I remember from 1st grade; the 1972 Pirates-Reds National League Championship Series marked the beginning of understanding sadness in sports; the Devils… read more

Geography of Abuse

October 28 2009

It’s time for the Fall Classic, and this year it tramples the Garden State in multiple ways. Growing up in Freehold, NJ, I had the benefit of being located as close to the centroid of the state as you could be. We lived only a few miles from the boundary… read more

The Blind Side

October 27 2009

Trailers for The Blind Side are running along with a steady stream of TV spots. I think it’s the required viewing holiday movie for this year, because Michael Lewis captured so much of what can be good in sports. To top it off, he discovered the story accidentally, while looking… read more

New Graphics

October 26 2009

I’m finally getting around to adding some header graphics to the blog featuring images that are more advanced than a 2nd grader’s failed art project. I never much made it past stick figures (and my attempt at business graphics clearly demonstrates this), however, I have friends who are starving artists… read more

Teaching Kids To Play

October 26 2009

There’s a disturbing trend of parents pushing their kids into sports thinking far too long term. Elementary schoolers toting half-sized golf bags around the driving range are the next Tiger Woods. Pop Warner football players are Heisman material as soon as the other 8-year olds have trouble catching them on… read more

WordCamp NYC 2009

October 15 2009

WordPress is one of the most widely adopted, easily modified and customized blogging and content management platforms available. It’s what powers the Snowman as well as some larger sites (oh, like CNN’s blogs); WordPress blogs are read by some tens of millions of users a day. Cool? Not as cool… read more

Back to Basics

October 15 2009

After a few years of complete and utter futility on the golf course, I decided it was time to take a few lessons and figure out what was wrong. The symptoms are strange and possibly inconsistent – I’m hitting my driver 150 yards long but 75 yards right, I can’t… read more

Stan Mikita Hates My Golf Game

October 15 2009

I had the pleasure of playing in the NHL Charity Golf Event in July 2003, in a foursome with (at that time) Stanley Cup Champion and New Jersey Devil Scott Gomez. That shot is from the Medina Country Club, after we had once again dug divots in the fairway deep… read more

Freshman Week With the Devils

October 15 2009

Bubba and I attended the Devils’ opening night game at the Rock, and we’re willing to take the blame for the humiliation personally. We left our Elias jerseys at home (in honor of Patrik’s rehab) and rocked it old school red. Our bad. We’ll skip the Carvel during a future… read more

Ou Sonts Les Habitants?

September 24 2009

OK, my French is horrendous, my high school French teacher wants to rescind the award that she gave me upon graduation for “excellence in studies” and L’Academie Francaise is going to put a contract out on my tongue. Quelle frommage. I don’t get the hockey writer’s negative sentiment about the… read more

The Kids Are Alright (I Think…I Hope)

September 24 2009

It’s been progressively harder to get ready for Devils hockey each year. Training camp became a mystery to be revealed by proper beat writers, rather than open to the public as it was at South Mountain Arena. While other teams play exhibition games daily, the Devils haven’t played in a… read more

Equity in Communities

September 23 2009

Much is written about equity, capital and networking, particularly when prefaced with "social" to ascribe some value to sites such as Facebook, Yahoo or Twitter. Conflating these terms reduces their utility in describing the problem space. Equity is a measure of value. Tells you how much something is worth, net net of… read more

Carrie Fisher Tells It Like It Is

September 19 2009

I stumbled on Carrie Fisher’s blog following a pointer from the ever-popular Squeech. She is hilarious. She is the show-business equivalent of Howard Cosell for her ability to tell it like it is. And her blog is WordPress-powered, so nerds have yet another reason to like her. read more