Monday December 22, 2008

[ Work ] Conversation with Lenz Grimmer

You can read my conversation with Lenz Grimmer or look at other interviews conducted by the MySQL community team. 

2008-12-22 17:06:07.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases interview mysql open-source software technology work

Friday December 12, 2008

[ Work ] Is Project Management Dead?

The PMBOK book comes to you courtesy of Project Management Institute. It is considered a standard for project management. Chapters 1 to 3 are "must" reads. The remaining chapters are further, very useful elaborations of the material in these earlier chapters. When you read chapters 1 to 3, think of what it would mean to apply the concepts in some project you're facing: Perhaps, you're organizing a large conference, a wedding, or the construction of the next space shuttle. See which concepts are applicable where. I used the book, along with cases form the real world, to teach a semester-long graduate course in project management at NPU last summer.

Far from it. Projects are about unique objectives attained within defined duration. They are inherently different from operational work. By the very nature of how we operate as human beings, any cooperative activity involving more than a two or three interactions per person contains within it the seeds of error, missteps and failures. (This may have to do with the common size of family units in some of our societies.) The whole practice of project management involves instituting processes that meet in anticipation of these errors and failures, handle and check them when they occur and make the necessary adjustments in order to digest the uncertainties that future brings. If future could be perfectly predicted, there would be no need for project management. If groups could cooperate with a guarantee that no failure or shortcomings would occur on the way to the objective, there would be no need for project management.

2008-12-12 15:47:12.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
management projects software technology work

Tuesday December 02, 2008

[ Economics ] Inescapable Facts of Mass and Distance

It is not clear whether Liam Denning was writing prose or an article on supply chain management and global logistics. Good writers lurk everywhere.

I will have to quote his whole article from The Wall Street Journal to make my point.

Ship Ahoy: New World's Supply Chain

By Liam Denning (The Wall Street Journal, December 3rd, 2008)

The world is bumpy.

In the age of globalization, conventional wisdom holds that supply chains prioritize labor-cost arbitrage over mere distance.

Geography, however, could make a comeback. Triple-digit oil provided the first intimation of this. Jeff Rubin, chief economist for CIBC World Markets, estimates $150 crude oil boosted the cost of shipping imports to the U.S. by 11%, costing roughly as much as trade tariffs in the 1970s.

Crude now trades under $50 a barrel, but the crash reflects faltering demand more than rising supply. When demand recovers, oil prices will, too.

Marc Levinson, author of container-shipping history "The Box," suggests the world also is hitting the limits of economies of scale in logistics, citing bottlenecks at ports and congested road and rail networks. These impose costs and delays and, as supply chains have become more complex, more potential points of failure. Initiatives forcing ships to reduce harmful emissions also will weigh on economics.

Innovation could change the equation again. But the ultimate facts of mass and distance are inescapable when it comes to rethinking logistics.

One answer will be shorter, regional supply chains -- a phenomenon observed in changing sources of U.S. imports during the 1970s oil shocks. That ought to have positive implications for exporting economies such as Mexico, while China could suffer.

U.S. workers cheered by the prospect of jobs returning home, however, shouldn't be too jubilant: Globalization and labor arbitrage aren't going away. And rising supply-chain costs mean U.S. workers will pay higher prices for the goods they buy.

2008-12-02 23:46:20.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
economics globalization international logistics strategy supply-chains technology world

Wednesday October 29, 2008

[ Business ] An HBR case on Wikipedia

Karim Lakhani has put together a business case study on Wikipedia. It is worth noting that Wikipedia uses MySQL as its database engine. 

2008-10-29 17:51:11.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
business content mysql open-source software technology wikipedia

Thursday October 09, 2008

[ Networks ] Reminiscing on Micro-Kernels and Group Communications

Yes, I have to admit that, in my opinion, JGroups is probably the best early example of the "micro-kernel" concept in Java, aesthetically speaking.

The Group Communications stack can simply be specified by literally stacking micro-protocols into a group communications stack—each micro-protocol can be considered a micro-kernel with its own "up" and "down" threading system.

Stacking can be specified like this: "A:B:C:D" or "A:C:B:D" or "A:C:D:B" or .....

Not all stacks are semantically valid or useful.

The final, beautiful touch in Bela Ban's design was to provision a fusing concept ("fusing" is my word for it), where all the micro-protocol/micro-kernel pieces can be fused so that they will be one "kernel," using a single thread system for "up" throughout the stack and a single thread system for "down" throughout the stack.

Or course, some of the design elements for all this was probably, mostly, and already present in the Ensemble Communications System, the group with which Bela did his post-doc work, near the turn of the millennium.

Also, see Mark Hayden's PhD dissertation on Ensemble, which was written in the 1990s, and supported by DARPA funds.

And a bit about my own role in all this—

I should mention that we used Ensemble (and its Java binding, whose deficiencies led to reimplementation of the protocol stack concept, in Java by Bela) in the DARPA projects I led before joining Sun.

This is how I got to learn about Mark and Ensemble, and later, about Bela and JGroups. It was an honor to meet both of them in the course of my work with group communications systems. By the way, I wouldn't be surprised if we find out, when historians of software look back at our work some years from now, that Bela has played a role in re-architecting of JBoss's microkernel system. I may be wrong but I believe he decided to join JBoss sometime in 2004, during the same year when I was trying to bring him to Sun. We almost got him to join SunLabs. It wasn't meant to be, like many other things that go awry. Perhaps, with my managerial skills now, I could have made a better difference in that realm. At least, I'm happy to say I was able to convince Bela to change the name from JavaGroups to JGroups, which protected him from some copyright violations.

2008-10-09 22:36:40.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
distributed group-communications networks software technology

Tuesday September 23, 2008

[ Web ] Software Freedom Day!

Sun celebrated Software Freedom Day in various locations on the globe, including in Riga, Latvia, where the database engineering team is having its annual developer meeting. MySQL community team and Michael Dexter, who works with the Linux Fund, helped put the Riga SFD meeting together. (Lenz Grimmer and Colin Charles have written about the meeting. It was held at the University of Latvia.)

2008-09-23 00:06:18.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
linux opensolaris riga software technology

Monday September 22, 2008

[ Technology ] Future of Business Technology

Check out MIT Technology Review's special reports on "The Future of Business Technology".

You may want to read the story of Postful and Figaro Interactive, and the accompanying contrast between Amazon Web Services and Google App Engines.

2008-09-22 00:38:53.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
business organizations technology

Thursday September 11, 2008

[ Technology ] Memcached and Java DB (Apache Derby)

Knut Anders Hatlen writes about memcached user-defined functions (UDF) for Java DB on OpenSolaris.

Knut has also mentioned the recent release of Apache Derby 10.4.2. A corresponding Java DB release should be available for download soon. (Usually this happens immediately but we're all at a developers' conference for the next couple of weeks.)

2008-09-11 12:58:29.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases java memcached mysql opensolaris software technology

Wednesday September 10, 2008

[ Papers ] A Position Paper Resurrected

This four-year-old position paper I wrote for the W3C Mobile Web Initiative still reads well. 

2008-09-10 18:37:44.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
identity mobility technology

Monday September 08, 2008

[ Technology ] ERP and CMS on PostgreSQL on OpenSolaris

Jignesh K. Shah and Robert Lor describe how to set up Openbravo (an open-source ERP system) and Drupal (an open-source CMS) on PostgreSQL on OpenSolaris.

2008-09-08 12:20:16.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases erp open-source opensolaris osdb postgresql software solaris technology

Wednesday August 27, 2008

[ Business ] Brand Value vs. Logos

Jim Buckmaster, Craig's list CEO:

We pay zero attention to brand. We never use that word internally. We do zero advertising. We don't have a logo. We've never done a focus group. We don't care about any of that. And now we're told we have the strongest brand ever for a company our size.

What a great example, and still, isn't there a little symbol, a little logo, a little peace sign in the browser URL box?

2008-08-27 11:49:07.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
brands business community internet logos software technology web

Tuesday August 26, 2008

[ Technology ] PostgreSQL BuildFarm on Solaris on Sparc

Check out a new PostgreSQL buildfarm set up by Zdenek Kotala. (By the PostgreSQL community convention, I'm referring to it as a "buildfarm" but it should probably be better known as a "testfarm".)

2008-08-26 23:25:37.0 -- Comments [2] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases open-solaris postgresql solaris sparc technology

Sunday August 17, 2008

[ Business ] Organizing Production

In his Contemporary Strategy Analysis, Robert M. Grant describes a more recent phase in the long evolution of economic organizations:

As late as 1840s, the largest enterprises in the US in terms of numbers of workers were agricultural plantations. Most manufacturing was organized through networks of self-employed, home-based workers. The English woolen industry consisted of home-based spinners who purchased raw wool (on credit) from a merchant to whom they sold the yarn; the merchant resold the yarn to home-based weavers from whom he purchased cloth. This "putting-out" system survived until the onset of the Industrial Revolution. With the advent of water-powered looms, weavers moved to factories where, initially, they rented looms from factory owner by the hour. Factory-based manufacture made this system of independent contractors inefficient—it was difficult to schedule machine time, and there was little incentive for the independent workers to look after their rented machines. The emergence of firms where market relationships among workers, machine owners, and merchants were replaced by employment relationships between the owner of capital and the workers was a more efficient means of organizing production.

The issue of relative roles of firms and markets is a central aspect of economic organization. In the capitalist economy, production is organized in two ways: in markets (by the price mechanism) and in firms (by managerial direction). The relative roles of firms and markets is determined by efficiency… 

2008-08-17 00:44:20.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
economics organization production strategy technology transactions workers

Friday August 15, 2008

[ Technology ] Innovation Logic

Marten Mickos discusses the logic of open-source innovation and business in an interview conducted by Josh Hyatt, contributing editor of MIT Sloan Management Review. The interview, originally conducted for the Business Insight Journal Report, has been published by The Wall Street Journal: "Software Firm is Open for Innovation". I like the salient point with which Marten ends the interview: Even if I showed you my DNA, you wouldn't know how to become me.

2008-08-15 00:26:37.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases innovation software technology

Friday August 08, 2008

[ Economics ] A Little Big Grain of Truth

There's a little big grain of truth in what Daniel Altman says ("Fluid Dynamics and Alternative Fuels"), based on macro-energy balances which one can imagine grounded in some solid macro-economic and micro-economic analysis.

2008-08-08 00:12:31.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
balance energy markets technology

Tuesday August 05, 2008

[ Technology ] LinuxWorld Expo?

I dropped by "LinuxWorld Expo" in San Francisco on Tuesday, and I think the only thing worth noting is the PgDay.

Five years ago, when I attended the same Expo, it had a completely different spirit, with a lot more participation by the main Linux vendors and a large variety of software companies.

(Other references: PostgreSQL on Solaris and on OpenSolaris.) 

2008-08-05 23:14:32.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases hardware open-source opensolaris operating-systems postgresql software solaris sun technology

Thursday July 24, 2008

[ Media ] OSCon Presentations

Until O'Reilly gets the slides for OSCon 2008 posted, you can find some of the slide-sets and more at SlideShare.

Sun Microsystems was a platinum sponsor of the conference and had some free, slickly-published guerrilla booklets on operating systems and OpenSolaris, and several un-conference presentations at their booth, including some amazing presentations on DTrace and ZFS. I was also happy to hear the Erleng packages will be available directly as an OpenSolaris IPS.

All this, until O'Reilly posts the presentation for public viewing.

2008-07-24 15:08:21.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
community open-source opensolaris software source sun technology zfs

Saturday July 19, 2008

[ Code ] ACM Queue Magazine

Craig Russell (of Sun Microsystems Inc.) has written the lead article of ACM Queue special issue on object relational mapping (ORM): "Bridging the Object-Relational Divide". The opening sentence provides the motivation most succinctly: "Modern applications are built using two very different technologies: object-oriented programming for business logic; and relational databases for data storage."

2008-07-19 21:19:27.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases object-oriented object-relational orm persistence programming software technology

Friday July 11, 2008

[ Technology ] DTrace Envy

A colleague in our PostgreSQL team just pointed me to a "little" note on DTrace, which seems to be ignited by the work that Robert Lor and Jignesh Shah have been doing. (The PG presentation involving the Mac OS and DTrace is Robert's)

2008-07-11 00:03:02.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases dtrace linux open-source programming solaris technology

Tuesday July 08, 2008

[ Sun Microsystems Inc. ] Get Sun Research

To get Sun Microsystems research papers, turn here.

2008-07-08 17:27:21.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
research sun-microsystems technology