Adium is the Future ·
The people I work most closely with are located in New Jersey, Southampton (U.K.), Santa Cruz, North Carolina, Prague, and Hamburg. Instant messaging is an essential business tool. I use Adium, which relies on the Gaim multi-protocol IM software. There are a lot of things about it that prefigure the future of software ...
Yellow House ·
It’s been bright and cold the last couple of days in Vancouver, and at 49°N., the sun never gets that high, which makes for strong shadows wherever you look. I walk by this yellow house on my way to work every day ...
Meta-Blogging ·
So, here’s the good news: I walked into the bar at ApacheCon to get a beer, there was another guy there waiting; when the bartender came around, he ordered a drink then, pointing at me, said “... and whatever he’s having”. He turned to me said “Love the blog” and we shook hands and talked for a while. I’m terribly embarrassed that I’ve lost his name; Interesting guy, he’s at Google and was there for the JCP Board meeting. That’s the first time my blog’s earned me a beer, what’s not to like? So here’s the bad news: Recently, a colleague asked me what I thought about a subject that I’d just written a big piece on two days earlier. I harrumphed, and she said “Who has time to read all your stuff? There’s too much!” OK, so I write really fast and I don’t sleep much, but she has a point. The problem is that the creative flow is really uneven. First half of the week, I was on the road and didn’t post much, now for some reason I have five big pieces squirming around in the back of my head wanting to be written; and the nasty bit is that if I don’t write them, they don’t save up, they evaporate. I suspect there isn’t a solution.
Gleanings ·
I’ve been kind of busy, in part due to my employer having made some sort of announcement approximately every fifteen minutes for the last three months. I’m still behind on more or less everything, but here are some things that have built up in my tabs bar that I just can’t bring myself to bypass. Item: Quoting Simon Phipps: “It seems to me inevitable that eventually, the nobility of the old world will turn up at the doors of the frontiersmen of the new world and demand payment of tribute in the form of patents royalties.” Item: Br’er Rob channels Georg channeling God. Item: Zawodny: Do Search Engines Censor Bloggers? Good question; the one time I’ve dropped into unmitigated-flame mode here about a company, the result is that if you type their name into Google, my flame’s right there beside their homepage. I feel guilty even though they entirely earned the flame; people’s jobs are at stake. Item: Good Richard Pryor eulogy. I still think the original Richard Pryor Live video is maybe the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, comedy striving for the divine and not missing by much. Item: IBM licensing its patent portfolio to startups via VCs. This deserves more attention than it’s received. My initial reaction is visceral horror, does it mean you can’t safely start a company without taking VC money? Item: Beau Hartshorne has abandoned databases in favor of Atom. Item: Amazingly cool optical illusion. Unifying theme: None.
Christmas Spirit ·
I know it’s a little early, but I’ve got the feeling at the moment, courtesy of a piece by Rob entitled Wonderful.
Discipline? ·
Having recently agreed with Nicholas Carr on search economics, I’d now like to disagree with him on the subject of my employer. Carr is obviously a smart guy, but his recent Sun and the data center meltdown seems bafflingly simplistic. He’s complaining, it would appear, that we’re doing too many things: we give Dell a hard time (yep), we holler that eco-responsibility is good business (yep), we ship what we claim is the fastest Web-server CPU on the planet (yep), we focus on volume (yep), we let anyone try our software for free (yep), we seem to be having fun (“pod duel”—yep). Hey, I’m with Carr on one item, I don’t want to go anywhere near “Web 2.0”, but as for the rest... because we ship fast chips, we shouldn’t worry about volume? Because we think Dell is losing focus, we shouldn’t push the free-software idea? And so on. This is a big company. We’re working on a lot of things. Is this perhaps nostalgia for a simpler era in which companies had one simple message at all times and spoke it with one voice? I don’t think the world in general or the IT world in particular are like that; there are a lot of problems and a lot of opportunities and we have the scale to address a bunch of them. Anyhow, Carr left out Microsoft interoperation and grid computing and new pricing models and and observability and lots of other good stuff we’re working on. Right now is not the time to be doing less.
The Future Search Market ·
Recently, I learned that search providers pay for traffic, which makes all sorts of sense in a world where they’re offering approximately equal levels of service. So, where to from here? I can see the opportunity to build a near-perfect market. (Please note for the record that in this piece, I agree with Nicholas Carr) ...
Statistics ·
Almost every Sunday I grab the week’s ongoing logfiles and update my numbers. I find it interesting and maybe others will too, so this entry is now the charts’ permanent home. I’ll update it most weeks, probably. [Updated: 2005/12/11.] ...
From Nob Hill ·
I stayed a night last week at a hotel on on Nob Hill in San Francisco which was only OK so it gets no link, but my room was on the nineteenth floor looking south, and the Fogtown morning air and the vista’s breadth were way too much for my little pocket camera, but a couple are worth publishing anyhow just because they’re fun to look at ...
Writing and Speaking ·
Right now I’m working on my ApacheCon keynote. I decided not to use slides; actually, that’s not quite true, I have exactly four slides, which contain, in aggregate, five words. (I will, however, have props). This means that I pretty well have to write out the whole speech. I’m doing it here in ongoing as a blog entry, simply because I’ve got a highly-tuned writing environment where I can go fast. I’m not going to hit the “publish” button because unlike some people, I don’t have the courage to show the world half-baked works-in-progress, and anyhow, it contains a real actual Product Announcement. What’s interesting is that as I go back and forth editing the text, I’m conscious that these are words to be spoken, rather than read off the screen, and it makes a big difference. Among other things, it means that when I’m finished, if I decide to publish it here, I’m going to have to go back and do a major re-write, because while I hope it sounds natural coming off the stage, it sure doesn’t read like anything I’d write.
Dominator ·
I haven’t been watching that much hockey this year (basketball’s my winter game) and I hadn’t seen Ottawa play, and I hadn’t seen one of the new-rules shootouts. Until this evening; on TV mind you, but if they were all going to be like this I’d see about getting some tickets. The Canucks got away with the win, barely, four deep in the shootout. They actually didn’t play as well I’ve seen them in a couple of other games this year, but still it was good hockey on both sides. If Vancouver had been playing a team that had an actual human being in goal, as opposed to Dominik Hašek, the Senators would have been toast. I’ve always thought that the shootouts in soccer were lame and pathetic and stupid, but let me tell you, a hockey shootout is first-rate fun. We’re starting to get the occasional high-def game, too; I may become a fan.
FSS: Henna Hand ·
Friday Slide Scan #16 is from July 1983 and is labeled “Loni MM, hand painted: henna” ...
No Niagara! ·
Kraigus Shmeggus (hey, he made it up, not me), explains why sysadmins should stay away from Niagaras, and offers additional wisdom on the perfidiousness of professors.
Filesystem Lessons ·
I had the idea that I’d chop up the disk on my Ultra 20 into a bunch of partitions and do some filesystem performance testing with UFS and ZFS and Ext3 and Reiser. This turned out to be a really bad idea, but I still got some interesting numbers ...
2.0 is Read-Write? ·
Hal Stern says that if, wherever someone uses the phrase “Web 2.0”, you substitute “Read-Write Web”, you get a much more useful description of the same thing. Sounds plausible to me.
Niagara Day ·
You can’t possibly imagine the amount of work it’s taken to get here. Richard McDougall has put together a Niagara Blogging Carnival which is the right place to start if you’re the kind of person that the MSM (Main Stream Marketing, that stands for) isn’t aimed at; i.e., not a CEO, CIO, or journalist. My own personal favorite Niagara newsbites: Item: Nobody gets 100% yield on their chips. I gather that for the Niagaras that don’t turn out perfect, we’ll sell ’em cheaper as 7-core, 6-core, 4-core, or whatever. Some of these configs might turn out to be the deal of the century depending how we price them. Item: They’re open-sourcing the hardware, too. I’m not sure exactly what that means in the big picture, and the licensing is going to matter, but it’s cool. Item: Those eight cores, when one’s not busy, they stop it. No, they don’t idle-loop it, they stop it. Obvious when you think of it. Item: When not to use the new stuff. Item: How the I/O works. Item: What makes chips wear out and fail? Lots of things, but especially heat; so low-wattage chips are RAS winners. Item: Maximum geek-out! Last item: When you have Java threads that map real closely onto Solaris threads that map real closely on to hardware threads, and you also have a lot of well-implemented hardware threads, this is what happens.
RFC 4287 ·
I hadn’t seen the announcement, but this looks like a stable official IETF link to RFC 4287, The Atom Syndication Format. A little more work and we’ll have the publishing protocol done and I can return to my plow (or equivalent). The work of the WG and editors was just outstanding, and the IETF did, as advertised, provide a useful quality-control process without unduly getting in the way. Thanks everyone. The world now has a general-purpose syndication format that is small, stable, based on the last decade’s lessons, clean, and widely implemented. I feel happy.
I work at Sun Microsystems.
The opinions expressed here are my own,
and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily
agrees with them.
