Friday August 27, 2004 
James C. Liu's Weblog
Friday August 27, 2004
Super-Natural-Techno-Fishing-British Columbia
Road Trip Weekend to Vancouver, British Columbia
Yee....haw! Friday's almost over, and tomorrow, the Family and I drive up to Vancouver for a week to do some Super-Natural B.C. Fishing, Dimsum, More Dimsum and shopping. And maybe we'll hit up Victoria for our second time this year for the 100th Anniversary of Butchart Gardens to visit my favourite Republican rose - the "Barbara Bush" :-)
I always get this question from colleagues when I talk about driving up to Vancouver: How long does it take? The answer really depends. If I'm the sole driver and we only stop for gas and fast food, it's about 16 hours. If my wife's 27 year old cousin who learned to drive while attending Cal Poly - Pomona is rotating out, we've gotten there from SF in under 14 hours, ticket free. But these days, with a 2 year old, 4 year old, and maybe my Parents heading up with us, we stop in Oregon over night. And it's not so much that we need to stop, except, now that my wife has learned how to operate the Garmin GPS unit in the car. Over time, she's accumulated a whole bunch of waypoints. For example, did you know that 1 mile east of the I-5 exit 253 near Salem is a massive Dollar Store? Never mind that they have a massive Sportsman's Warehouse that carries a huge section of fishing tackle that I'd like to buy, but it's important for the wife, who is a Dollar Store Junky, to note all the dollar stores on the west coast, or at least the good ones. In fact, her number one discovery has been the Dollar Store in Lompoc, CA, a little town along the coast 40 minutes north of Santa Barbara. Killer deals for ANY Junky. That's on the GPS.
And just a couple of last facts - Medford, Oregon exit 27 Burnett Rd is excellent because they have a Chevron station next to a Washington Mutual ATM, next to Jack in the Box, KFC, and a HomeTown Buffet. It's cheaper gas than in California usually, they pump the gas for you, and they get those bugs off your windshield too. Plus there's lots of cheap eats around and it's literally a block off the freeway. Also, there is a Costco in Eugene, OR, off exit 195B to Coburg. It's about 1 mile west. They have cheap gasoline and more square footage, which means they tend to carry more stuff than the Costco out of exit 253 in Salem. I bought 2 toshiba laptops that run JDS/Sx86 fine btw, for just $700 each! Yeah, 256 MB units with 30 GB disks, and DVD roms. Couple that with mis-marked 256MB sodimms for $26 and what a deal! Why the focus on Oregon? Because, they don't charge sales tax. Great for buying laptops, or dig-cams for that matter.
Cumulative distance from Sunnyvale to the US-Canada Border in Blaine, WA is about 985 miles according to GPS. My mom loves one-arm-bandits, especially the nickel machines, and there are three convenient Indian Gaming Casinos on the way up. Northern California, just as you hit Tehama County there's the Rolling Hills Casino, then there's the Seven Feathers in Canyonville, OR somewhere after Sutherlin, and finally, north of Seattle the Tualip Tribes have opened a new Casino next to the Walmart at the Quilceda shopping center off I-5. That's gotta be my Mom's favourite. Wal*mart -next- to a Casino. But luckily for me, the Driver is the King - and I usually get to dictate how long we get to stay...or not stay. After all, why waste quality fishing time in a Casino, right Mom?
US Border Crossing and Homeland Security
Big brother is watching you. Just remember that. It ain't so much the Canucks as it is the Americans. The Canadians practically only need a valid Driver's License to let you into Canada. But if you wanna come back, you'll need a full passport, or US certificate of Citizenship (the real thing... not a copy), or a US Birth Certificate for a child (not a copy). You get passports for kids for $40 at your local major Post Office on certain hours of the week - usually the most inconvenient hours - and they take up to 40 days to run a background check on a two year old child, probably just to make sure it isn't a dog or illegal alien from some Stargate program in Colorado, but the Feds seem extremely willing to buck the thorough background check and expedite service back to you in a few days for a fist full of $120. (Note, prices may have changed in the last 2 years).
No firearms allowed across the border into Canada folks. Usually not a problem for Californians. But if y'all look like you're from Texas, and got your Beater White Pickup Truck with GW*2004 Sticker on the back window, well, best be ready to get mess'd with. Gettin' the picture, pardner? Blaine, WA/Whiterock, B.C. are NOT like Austin, TX.
Limits on alcohol and tobacco too. They don't get Trader Joes up in Vancouver, at least I haven't seen one, and they don't sell liquor/wine/beer at supermarkets - only in licensed B.C. Liquor stores. That means no Two-buck Chuck - Charles Shaw up there, and if you chose to bring some up, there's some limit on the quantity. I like the Okanagan wines anyway, and there's a lot of Australian imports too, and they are reasonable so there's usually no need to bring wine up there. No one in the family smokes anyway, and it'll kill you and your kids, so why smoke? I can find all the wine I need to cook and drink and it's quite good. A treat for Californian Wine lovers - if you like sweet desert wines like Ports, Sherries, Sauturnes, try some of the Okanagan Ice Wine.
No limits on how much gasoline is in your tank in Canada, but there's also seems no limit on the price north of the border. So fill'er-UP! before going across the border, because even with the exchange rate, welcome to Socialist Canada where gas costs like $3/US gallon. And I almost think it's a conspiracy in Canada to mess with American's by labeling all the gas prices in Canadian Dollars per LITER! If you're an engineer like me, at every fill-up, there you are, pumping and thinking... hmmmm...89.5 cents per liter $CDN is like...x USD and 3.78 liters per US Gallon, and what was the current exchange rate? .... Whatever. Only, you end up forking over about $70 CDN to fill up the Sienna minivan from Empty. But watch out. The prices change by 10% during the week. Usually, I try to fill up on Wed., or Thursday evening. Sometimes, they have like a discount evening and for 6 hours, they lower the price of gas by say 8 centers/liter. Then magically on Friday, they jack it all up again and then some. With my luck, I run out the day before they lower the prices that week.
Coming back into the US is problematic. Long delays, fruit and vegetable inspections, homeland security alerts can all add 2 or 3 hours at the border. I recommend taking the Highway 15/Surrey route which is a slightly different border crossing inside the town of Blaine. In fact, I often take that route coming into Canada as well. It can save an hour in line getting into B.C., and about 3 hours coming back because fewer people know about the 2nd crossing. If people are here from Non-Treaty countries (PRC, Taiwan, HKG, MiddleEast) you will need to first apply at the U.S. Consulate for re-entry permits if you visit the U.S. and then go to Canada, only to come back to the U.S. before heading on. I deal with this once in a while because a relative from Hong Kong visits us in San Francisco, but then they decide to head up to Vancouver for a few days and come back to depart from SFO back to HKG. Do NOT bring any food. With every kind of quarantine, SARS, Mad Cow, yadi yadi, the US is paranoid about everything. I even had my Safeway big deli submarine sandwich purchased at Lansdowne Mall Richmond, B.C., confiscated by hungry looking U.S. Customs agents. They claimed that the cold cuts might have beef in them and there was a quarantine. So bring no food.
Drive Slow - it's a KMH versus MPH thing
Silicon Valley drivers beware. We get so used to pushing 85 miles per hour driving on Hwy 85 or Hwy 101 to make our meetings. And the CHP (Calif. Highway Patrol) really don't monitor speed along 101 from Redwood City south to Santa Clara. And they don't do speed checks either on Hwy 85 much north of Almaden Expressway. They pretty much only check for CarPool violators. So, I admit, I sometimes follow traffic at excessive speeds. And I've gotten used to the hustle. In fact, that new offramp from 101 south to 85 south next to SGI/Microsoft in Mtn. View is a big irritant. You get a few drivers who can't handle the narrow turn at more than say 55 mph. But everyone else in their Silicon Valley Audi's and Volvo sedans with over 180 Horses are chomping at the bit to hit 80 mph on the nice curve that unwinds onto a wide and flat Hwy 85.
So, Welcome to B.C. Now slow down! I believe the Metric KM/H speed limits are another conspiracy the Canucks pull on Americans. What's up with putting in these unexpected 50 KMH (30 mph) zone like right smack in the middle of some 6 lane Freeway? B.C. recently passed a referendum where they outlawed all the un-manned radar-camera setups, but the cops are still able to set up manned traps. The worst (or perhaps best revenue generators) seem to be the West Vancouver cops. They monitor Hwy 1 and 99 near Taylor Way (exit 13) and Horseshoe Bay. And having so many transplanted bad drivers from Hong Kong that are used to driving on the Queen's side of the road, they like to nail those folks, especially those ones with embarrassingly Green [N] for Newbie driver signs stuck on the back of their vehicles. I think the West Van Police like nailing transplant drivers so much, it's second only to their love of nailing Drivers with California or Washington license plates! But in general, I've become a sedate driver after crossing the border. I've been nailed twice up there - in a MiniVan for Godsakes! But I did grovel and profusely apologize both times. The first ticket, the guy discounted, and the second time, he let me off with a warning. So I recommend practicing your grovelling. Just don't make it too obsequious or it'll come off wrong.
California Java-Slinger teaching them Canucks a thing about fishing.
If and when I decide to actually stop gorging myself on world-class Chinese, Indian, or Japanese cuisine, I may think about fishing this time of year. Folks like me who fish in California should be used to the near water-rationing desert conditions with 35 Million other anglers, many of them immigrants from cultures that are used to completely decimating fish and wildlife in their countries of origin. But even under those conditions, California provides pretty good sport for the skilled. I might even say that Californians are better anglers than most, at least the ones that can consistently catch fish. And it's due to the natural selection and competition for fishing in California.
B.C. is like a fisherman's paradise. Our vacation house is a townhome nestled half way up Howe Sound toward Squamish. It's overlooking a deep saltwater fiord that is surrounded on both sides by mountains. A golf course lies just behind our complex, and it's almost possible to cast to the water from our balconey. Our complex actually rests on a wide ledge on the side of a mountain that extends 2500 ft toward the sky to more than 1300 ft below sea level. Only, we can't see the ledge because it's covered by water. But the proximity to deep waters means that many migratory species and deepwater species of fish or crustaceans are very close to shore. Casting out 50 meters in some places will put you over waters that are more than 50 meters deep. Our complex is located next to a creek that supports 4 species of salmon - Chinook, Coho, Pink, and Chum. Sockeye do come by I'm told but I haven't caught one yet, and probably won't since they're supposedly filter feeders on plankton/krill. We have 2 types of char - Dolly Varden and Bull Trout, and lastly we have Steelhead. And the waters just a bit off shore host migrations of hundreds of thousands salmon a year that spawn in the Squamish river basin system. We also have a number of other great seafoods like rockfish (genus Sebastes), Lingcod, and Greenlings, halibut, rock sole and English sole, surf perch, dungeness crab, mussels, sea cucumbers, sea urchin, and spot prawns. Orca may infrequently visit us in the fiord, but seals, otters, black bears and bald eagles are residents. That's why they call this place Super-Natural British Columbia.
Fig. 1. Bull Trout - A type of Char, belong to the family of Salmonids. Caught on chromed 4" buzz bomb.
The complex is new, with the first units completed September of 2000. The last of 79 units in this phase were just finished mid 2003. There are still some discussions on a marina, boat launch, and some landscaping. And the rec-center is almost finished. We bought our unit Christmas of 2000 and were to first to get DSL and wireless within 12 miles December 2003. Up until last year, only about half the residents did any fishing and most took boat trips, heading back south to Vancouver to take a charter back out to the Straits or at the mouth of Howe Sound. Few fished the shoreline because regulations made it impossible to keep salmon in that zone. But beginning April 2003, Dept of Fisheries and Oceans Canada predicted a massive oversupply of salmon in the lower mainland system. They were predicting over 3 million salmon returning into river systems (Fraser and Squamish) that could at most support 2.7 million salmon. So they opened up the take of salmon in our near shore waters. Well, DFO's estimates were wrong. Last year, more than 5 million salmon returned into the lower mainland. It didn't drop the price of canned salmon at Costco (those bastards!) but it sure made fishing a lot of fun. For a California resident, the annual $200+ tidal/non-tidal non-resident-alien license was hefty. But the ability to head out 3 evenings in a row, toss a little piece of pink painted metal and nail salmon after salmon after salmon made the price of the license a pretty decent investment. I released the vast majority of the catch and only kept one to eat - which was delicious. But because the salmon returned at different times, Pinks first, then Chinook, then Chum, and then Coho... it was continuous fishing for the neighbours living there from July through October.
Moreover, I began a trend in the technology of fishing. It had three phases. The first was to get the proper equipment. Shore casting for fish is different than boat fishing. Instead of dropping a lure over the side and dragging it behind a slow moving boat (aka Trolling), anglers need to cast out and retrieve constantly. The fish can get spooked and move off shore when humans approach the edge. This isn't a big problem in California because we have big surf and waves that pound the coast. The fish are living in a loud disco-washing machine combo drive, and couldn't care less about humans. But inside Howe Sound, there is very little surf and tidal action. The water is usually calm, unless we have a big Tsunami. And it has to be a BIG Tsunami. The recent Seattle earthquake a few years ago did a little water-hammer action on the toilets, but that was all. We had mysterious blue-spots from dried toilet bowl cleaner on the undersides of our toilet seats when we arrived back up. But none of the neighbours saw any tidal action in the Fiord itself.
The tides raise and lower water by as much as 3 meters in a day, but with little surface disruptions and smooth and steady currents only. Under these conditions, we can expect schools of salmon to only be drawn inshore during high tides and seasonnally when there are fingerling Chum smolts or baby Coho salmon in the shallows to feed on.
What's needed is equipment to cast precisely upto 100 meters out and to retrieve quickly enough to match the blistering speed of a 25 lb chinook salmon, which can swim in bursts in excess of 12 knots or so. A distance surf casting rod for upto 3 oz of metal lures, and a fast gear ratio levelwind are what I specified. I actually built a number of rods for both boat and shore fishing for salmon fishing in Howe Sound, and they performed fairly well. I experimented with building rods that had more guides or less guides, longer, shorter, and with different tapers. I wrote a Java applet to compute the guide spacing on the rods.
I supplied Abu Garcia 5600c4 reels with 6.3:1 gear ratios as standard equipments. These reels are 19% faster on retrieve than the Abu Garcia c3 series of reels with only 5.3:1 gear ratio. This is a small difference on the surface, but knowing that the regulations require barbless hooks and single shaft hooks means that any sustained slack in the line may give the fish an opportunity to spit the lure out, the extra gear ratio means that I can crank faster and keep up with the fish. Especially if a chinook swims towards you. Results on the fish concurred with hypothesis.
Fig. 2. Custom-Built Spinning rod for B.C. Note the Blue-Gold colour scheme. Cal Berkeley - Go Bears. Eat your hearts out Stanfurd.
I also introduced 20 and 30 lb test line made from very high-tech Spectra fibre. Yes, the same stuff they use to make the new generation of bulletproof vests. This is roughly 4 times the strength to cross-sectional Area ratio of nylon monofilament and has zero stretch. The 30 lb test spectra line has the equivalent diameter of 8lb test mono. In addition, at 80 meters out, if a fish bites, nylon monofilament has too much stretch to provide any real way to exert much hook-set power on the fish. With spectra fibre braid, that changes the name of the game. Technology allows us to set the hook and exert power and with less fear of line breakage. The only problem with this line is the cost. Because it's imported into Canada, the costs are about twice that of the US, where most of the gel-spun fibre fabricators are located. NAFTA helps us here, because the tax-free stuff I can buy in Oregon that has a "made in USA" sticker on it can be imported into Canada for private use in any quantity with no duty. Don't get me wrong; the stuff is still expensive down in the U.S. Expect to pay $15 for 300 yds of the low quality stuff and about $23 for 150 yds of the good stuff. You can get spools of bulk premium mono for $8 per 1000 yds.
Tackle alone doesn't catch fish. Doing some research on local forage was useful. Using the internet and scouring websites on Salmon lifecycles, I learned that other species of Salmonids, like Dolly Varden, Bull Trout and Steelhead, often take up residence in saltwater estuaries for baby salmon. Trying out chromed and painted lures that matched the current size, shape and colour of salmon smolts immediately caught Dolly Varden and Bull Trout. Some as large as 36 inches! The above picture is a bull trout (a type of Char), released. It topped out at over 30 inches.
Lastly, I introduced the neighbours to my Tide Server. It's free software that uses Xtide, from David Flater. There is also a Palm OS version called "TideTool" that is based on the same software. There's a 600kB database that includes datum for the entire N.America West Coast. These tools have made local tide prediction much better than a crap shoot using newspaper almanacs that report for too wide an area. Because I live so close to the water and it's less than 3 minutes from walking out the door to wetting my line, having this tide technology lets me target the most productive 45 minutes in the tide cycle and catch fish. That's more fish in less time, leaving more time, of course, to head down to Richmond, B.C. for Dimsum!
So is all this high-tech fishing an unfair advantage for this ex-Canuck now turned California Boy? Yeah, but the edge has been short lived. I was competitive until my neighbours got their DSL hooked up, started hammering my servers, and put in orders to have me build a half dozen salmon casting rods. In addition, they're out there now in float tubes and kayaks nailing 24 lb lingcod! But being the landlubber that I usually am, I joke with them about getting swallowed by Shamu one of these days. It's remote, but it could happen! :-). In exchange, they have dropped off some vigourously pinching dungeness crabs and buckets full of flapping spot prawns. August 27, 2004 03:49 PM PDT Permalink
Thursday August 26, 2004
Techies just don't understand Business
Geeks just don't Get the Lingo
Throughout college, I recall walking down to the other side of campus and talking to my Liberal Arts professors during office hours, and we'd try to get deep into analyzing some passage in a novel or essay. But in more than one case, my instructors would insinuate that I just didn't get it. They knew I was an Engineering major that was just taking their class to satisfy my general Ed requirements, and they'd tell me that the life and literature just weren't as simple as Engineers made it. Emotions aren't black or white, they'd say. And that to appreciate the Letters, Scientists need to escape the "box." Without thinking out of the "box," we wouldn't quite understand the human condition.
And I almost believed those criticisms. I had doubts as to whether I belonged in the Human Race. In my college youth, my Alienation was reinforced constantly. For example, I always pondered why those Liberal Artsie Fartsie guys could score on the cute members of the opposite gender. It wasn't until I completed grad school and was working overseas and drinking with a bunch of seasoned business guys in a bar that they all laughed at me. The project lead leaned over and gave me the facts straight up. He explained that Geeks dig Relativity, but Girls dig Relativism. That's why Engineers don't score in College. What I should have done was to be like him, and take some Poli-Sci and Philosophy classes, and walk around being anti-establishment and tell people I dig Nietzsche and Marxism. Later, with Berkeley credentials, I'd land some Director job and make a big salary managing a bunch of geeks. Oh, and BTW, to "think out of the box," humans need assistance - usually in the form of smoking a mild narcotic.
But if that was the path to success, then shouldn't I just blow this whole interest in Technology and go the way of my leaders? And to my surprise, my sage Project Lead vehemently told me, "Heck NO! We need you in case the customer has some real technical problems." :-)
Well, now, I understood. It was a vocabulary problem. It all made sense. Gee, how stupid I've been. I should have had shed the shorts, sneakers, let my hair grown long to put it into a pony tail, gotten a piercing and gone around bashing the Republican party and experimenting with various combusted herbs, while NOT inhaling. But that project manager did get one thing wrong. Berkeley credentials don't go very far in Business circles. It's the Stanford, Wharton, and MIT Sloan Biz school grads that get into Director/Veep positions. That's because Berkeley is a public school and they don't mandate curriculum that teaches students this management lingo. They also don't mandate taking courses in how to leverage others to do your work, sandbag, and communicate effectively to take credit for work we didn't do. And lastly, an esteemed colleague of mine, once a very well respected engineer, and now promoted to Director (someone who made the transition to management), explained to me that I need to learn how to talk to Execs. It's not as intuitive as you might think. The trick is to never start a talk at the ground level, but begin at the 30,000 ft level. And instead of dropping down over time to say 10,000 ft - NOPE - don't do that - Pull UP! Yes, start from 30,000 then PULL UP to 100,000 ft. Execs will really be impressed. They'll think, son you have vision!
As a Geek, I must admit I still harbour feelings that the management-style of content delivery seems superfluous, inefficient, and often times, data is lost in translation. But over the years, I've discovered, non-techies like high-level and non-specific/non-committal content with lots of colour and simple arrows that point here and there. They love jet-setting around on big travel budgets lugging super-thin laptops, with their PowerPoint or StarOffice Presentations displayed on a wall with the latest 3 lb Digital Projector. This is called being a "Player." Yepp. And we can't forget fine Corinthian Leather laptop case. But I digress. :-)
It shouldn't really matter what the mode of communications is in a tech company, right? If there's a business process problem and we talk about it face-to-face, or explain it in a clear email, or have just a plain old overhead slide with text, non-techies should be able to grock the primary gist, right? I prefer source code myself. With exception of lazy-techies who don't align curly braces, or zealots who use full 8-charater tabs to indent, it's hard to confuse what someone is saying with those irrefutable characters, semi-colons, and curly-braces in nice colours in a VIM, Xemacs, or other IDE Window.
And based on the substance of the discussion alone and not the delivery channel, our non-tech-leaders should be able to process the idea at both a wide enough and high enough level, but also understand the low-level consequences of their decisions. But my suppositions have proven incorrect. I've discovered that using Photoshop, Illustrator, StarOffice Draw or GIMP to add colours, 3D shadows to arrows, and nice fonts that follow Bezier curves -really- helps communicate ideas to some such folks. Granted, I've been somewhat slow-witted (i.e. stupid) at "management lingo." I've actually been taking it seriously when they squint at my proposals, and then shake their heads in disapproval and tell me they don't agree, and to go back and find more data to back it up. Actually, I've learned this really means "NO," by management, and it's a polite form requesting that I, "...please go away and don't come back." My apologies for being so dense!
I guess I'm just the stereotypical Engineer. I just don't get it. What I think is common sense and obvious, management sees completely differently. In the past, I use to start at base principles, like Micro-Economics inside the Envelope, and derive the entire supply/demand-time continuum equations, then use them to prove that my ideas would be correct. But getting non-techies to actually buy into such logic has been impossible because I have yet to have any of them be able to sit through and understand any of my Eigenvalue solutions or Lagrangian Matrix derivations. So I've recently switched tactics and tried some rhetoric. Rather than telling the decision makers, "C'mon, you idiots, it's common sense," I've changed my delivery and tried to quote Shakespeare - "This to thine own self be true..." But that hasn't worked very effectively, either. I guess I just don't communicate effectively and there is no Management Lingo that expresses the Economic Eigenvalue solution to a boundary value Lagrangian problem that involves necessity and sufficiency. (yes, I took Mathematical micro and macro-Economics, taught by a Nobel Prize winning professor - and thank God it still counted as a "Liberal Arts" courses).
Thermodynamics of the Wealth of Tech Corporations
I have aptly coined this overhead introduced by Management Lingo - "Corporate Entropy." And some engineering and science neophytes might remember that Entropy has some association to "Chaos." But let me state that such a view is simplistic and inaccurate. Entropy can be quite orderly. In Heat Transfer, it is equivalent to the integral sum of the quotient of heat dissipated to the ambient environment divided by the current Temperature. They teach non-techies and high-schoolers that Entropy is Chaos, because the heat that's dissipated is often transferred to increasing molecular energy and momentum of the ambient air. This transfer happens in a purely dissipative mode and does no useful work except to make the molecules bounce around more chaotically. But as Einstein said, God does not play with dice, and what small minds think is Chaos is simply energy transfer to the ambient environment which makes the molecules more vigorous. Ironically, recapturing the lost heat, requires one to put much work into a system, and doing so, according to the second and third laws of Thermodynamics means you generate more Entropy.
Pop-tech-culture has coined a management lingo-ized version of the Three Law of Thermodynamics. 1. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. 2. There ain't no such thing as a Cheap Lunch, and 3. Don't waste time looking for a cheap lunch because the cost is always going up! But I get the feeling that non-techies think they need not be concerned by such silly Laws, because they "think out of the box."
But make no mistake, the Laws apply to everyone. Entropy often happens in Corporations, especially when non-techies think they can violate the Laws of Corporate Thermodynamics. We generate a lot of waste of resources running around making slideware and attending meetings and throwing around proposals. And in the end, Engineering must do a lot of work to get us back to where we were before the initial proposal. And Engineers tend to be less efficient at such communications.
I've often wondered why Business Thermodynamics would allow for such large Marketing organizations inside companies. There are some excellent Marketeers to be found and don't get me wrong, I believe in Marketing and support organizations as long as they prove effective over time and have valid data to back up their assertions. But it seems like an industry epidemic in techbiz. Why are there such large numbers of seemingly ineffectively deployed Marketing resources that generate a lot of Corporate Entropy? Well, according to the Laws of BizThermo, without lots of work by senior management to keep Marketing in line, there is a natural tendency in any corporations to degenerate over time into high-Entropy. This degeneration accelerates over time because of interactions with partner corporations. You see, let's assume that all corporations started out with only great Marketing folks who were very effective with no Entropy. But the moment any corporation grew to the point they hired more Marketing folks within whom there was one bad apple, then the degeneration of that corporation's Marketing would accelerate and it would also accelerate that of the partners. Why? Because that one marketing person would start to make lots of superfluous FUD and try to spread it to the engineers. Not wanting to hear this drivvel, they'd redirect this person to market somewhere else. Before long, the marketing reaches out to the partners and in order to handle the new volume of FUD, they hire more FUD marketeers, and so on and so on. Soon, all partners have large marketing divisions where the majority of employees in those groups are there to handle FUD only.
This isn't to say that Geeks don't cause lots of Corporate Entropy. Only, as mostly inwardly facing resources, they tend not to cause Corporate Entropy in their partners. But quite commonly, very, very, very, senior Engineers, some quite Distinguished in fact, can make very technically bad decisions that can really mess up a company. Luckily for most smoothly executing corporations, engineering organizations tend to submit themselves willingly to peer review by a wide geek audience, not consisting only of insiders or old-timers whom themselves may be subjective. The peer review is a small inefficiency that can introduce slight delays in ideas turning into shipping product, but usually, the technology and implementation are sound. And while Marketing gets a bad rap with engineers all the time, in truth, some engineering groups in companies produce some fairly buggy technology products that suffer major defects such as in stability, robustness, security, etc. But the Marketing groups are so good at executing that Marketing actually comes up with the brilliant strategies that might include market share monopolization, or leveraging ignorance of average consumers to fool millions of them into purchasing their products. One Pacific Northwest manufacturer has even taken the decision out of consumers hands by forcing pretty much all major PC vendors to ship with that manufacturer's software pre-bundled. Brilliant Marketing.
But, in general, many high level non-techies argue that Engineers don't see the whole business eco-system because we're too focused on the low level technology. Actually, I would tend to agree with such statements, but there are exceptions. Specifically, technology Business is a different beast and when a business hinges on selling complex high-end technology products to enterprises that make millions or billions of dollars per year relying on it, it's important for senior management to roll up their sleeves and learn about the guts of their business by asking tough technical questions and doing due diligence. Management-Lingo familiarity-only probably won't cut it when trying to optimize decisions. Afterall, the users and buyers of such enterprise high-tech products tend to have IQs significantly higher than the average population, and they tend to be very savvy with technology in order to succeed over their competitors. If a company can't deliver successfully and competitively on complex technology, then it might as well go after some low-margin consumer space and become a lowly reseller or distributor, or hope it can settle into some gov't sponsored monopoly and bilk the public out of monthly subscription fees.
More and more, the laws of Corporate Thermodynamics are looking like Business Darwinism - two approaches with differing theories converging on the same conclusion? This usually means that the projected consequences for corporations with too much Entropy are gloomy and techies and non-techies need to really take heed.
And for those former-techgeeks that have gone over to the dark-side, I like to use this analogy from intro Electrical Engineering. We can think of all the massive revenue from product sales like the current that can flow through a semi-conductor diode. From a high-level, business execution is like the switch that turns on a voltage spike. If the company executes correctly, it's like flipping the switch and the revenues or current will flow. But if the company doesn't execute, no current flows.
But the test of Management isn't in giving the order to throw the switch or not; it's in solving problems such as throwing the switch and nothing happening. And that's where the semi-conductor diode can seem impenetrable to any amount of electric current. And the problem may be as simple as a tiny voltage differential that causes the bias to remain below a certain band-gap voltage. What the moral of the analogy says is that Non-technical Management, in addition to the Big Picture, needs to really see the fine details of their strategy to understand the impedance to making money because they've forgotten some infinitesimal engineering detail or process. Otherwise, they may try to implement what they think is a fix, but all they will do is generate a lot of Corporate Entropy trying to get their way.
There is a science and set of mathematical tools that enable decision makers to make sound economic decisions which optimize execution and profits. It is imperative that non-technical decision makers acquire the rigorous skills necessary to perform such analysis and do it thoroughly and correctly. It is insufficient to pass the buck by mandating such processes to middle and lower non-technical management where as a group they revolt and water down what might be a rigorous, mathematical analysis method, further passing the buck to pseudo-techies who are then allocated Martial Arts degrees like "black-belt" or "green-belt" who's sole purpose is to go around presenting slideware with yet more Management-Lingo and acronyms to boot, and acting as meeting facilitators with a stack of coloured sticky-notes. As a group, employees cannot make the decisions. Executives hold those positions, and in order to make sound business decisions, they need to obtain data objectively and analyze it themselves, without the taint of any bias by those that report to them. Otherwise, This Entropy to thine own corporation be true. August 26, 2004 01:56 AM PDT Permalink
Sunday August 22, 2004
Getting more Nines on Wi-Fi Availability
Reliable, Available and Scalable - RAS - is almost like a mantra we mumble to ourselves in Enterprise computing. You've all heard the story of the renovated University building at Stanford or Berkeley where some Sun box running as a department mail server was walled up behind sheet rock accidentally, and it remained that way for 5 years and kept running until some decided to upgrade the system and couldn't find it anywhere, but they could still ping it.
But I had a little related "thank you" email come across from a neighbour up in British Columbia where my vacation home is. It's half way up Hwy 99 toward Squamish/Whistler next to a fancy golf course and next to the water. Well, about 1/3rd of the neighbours are residents from the States. Last Christmas, Telus (a.k.a. BCTel) finally dropped some fibre down from Hwy 99 (which they laid 18 months ago!) into our complex. We all got broadband at a clean 1.5Mbps down/640kbps up. I planned a Christmas/New Year's trip up at the time just to get the network up and install some wireless. That way, I could kick back out on the water fishing and still be logged into work. It always seems like the fish bite better when I'm not paying attention to the rod, so surfing the net just invites more hits.
I keep the Wi-Fi network open to the neighbours and put up two access points on opposite sides of my house. The units also sport high gain attennaes that push the signal clearly out to Hwy 99 which is 1/2 km away. So folks on the Golf Course should be able to get clear signal as well. Also, I set one AP to channel 4 and the other to channel 10 to support more users with fewer collisions.
My US neighbours just love the WiFi. Most head up there to ski and golf several times a year. And they've gotten used to the very reliable and available wireless and it saves them the monthly fees and hassles paying for their own connection, and insuring that it's up and running and secure when they arrive up in B.C. every couple of months. I simply donate the bandwidth. It's a small cost compared to what I pay for down here in the Bay Area for my DSL and the signal is so much cleaner up there too - as if I was just next door to the C.O. Plus with the exchange rate for $CDN, the price is even better.
So one neighbour wrote me a pleasant thank you email that expressed some amazement. On a recent trip, they had a power outage in the complex for about 30 minutes (a frequent event that happens once a month or so). But amazingly, they had laptops up and running, and the network never waivered. He said that he almost came over and knocked on my door because he swore I must be up there in the house working and maintaining that Wi-Fi connection because it's ALWAYS up. Even during the power outage. Whatever I was doing, Kudos.
I smiled when I read that. I guess what he didn't see when I came up during Christmas were the dual 50lb UPS backup power units I had. Each was connected to the AP plus the DSL router and switch. I chose the components carefully. Not so much for performance as I did for reliability and power consumption. I also have learned that less moving parts means more reliability. So I didn't put a running server up as the firewall/router, but used a solid-state off-the-shelf one that only has a limited number of ports. This way, I have battery backed power always available for the network and it's enough to power the entire network for 7 or 8 hours. Which exceeds 95% of outages.
So why back up the network? Because the Network IS the Computer. That's another mantra our company has preached for like that last two decades. But more importantly, I've learned from my mistakes. It was pretty embarrassing a few years ago when I was helping a friend setup his server for a Linux startup. The whole rig was in his garage. We bought a boat load of big UPS's to back up the servers. But we completely forgot about the network and on our first power outage, the servers were fine, but the network was down. That was pretty stupid and I've gone on to refine how I get more reliability into my networks. Some tips I remind myself with:
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Friday August 20, 2004
CPUs beyond the edge - Fiction
We watch movies like the Terminator with a lot of fascination, but few of us take the premise of the movie to be anything but outrageous fiction. After all, we all know time travel to the past is physically impossible in our continuum. We need to travel faster than the speed of light, and the thermodynamics of that would make the energy requirements unreal (both physically and mathematically). This isn't to say that we couldn't try to construct a type of singularity that violates the Magnetic Monopole prohibition in Maxwell's Laws, but in general, Quantum Thermodynamics, which remains valid despite relativity, says that Time is an arrow. We could travel into the future. We can't travel back.
But on more mundane levels, this means that a computer can't send back a Terminator to kill the mother of a future leader that would defeat it. But a computer could possibly take over and become sentient and operate in new ways such that it -knows- the future and the solution that fits the future. The computer could become so predictive, that we (humans) might get the fancy idea that we could use it like the Oracle at Delphi - as an engine to predict the future, and in doing so, become master of it. But what we didn't know was that the sum of all the probability distributions that would culminate in a solution to any Wave Equation set would somehow evolve into sentience. And it wasn't anything fuzzy in this logic - but brutal predictability that would allow the machine to predict and manipulate all aspects of our present to achieve its future.
Could it happen?
The conspiracy lunatics out there at the fringe already think so. A couple of key technologies have sprung up which feed such theories of Armageddon. And I must say that, while I smile and laugh at such paranoia, there is an iota of quiet, unease with which I mull over the consequences.
Many folks cheered in the late 90's when Bill Clinton signed new laws that freed up Cryptographic standards for export at 128bit to most of the world. This was seen by the "Randian" multi-national corporations as the liberation of industry to innovate and perfect secure eCommerce. To the lesser informed intelligence communities, this was the nightmare enforcement scenario. But to a very small and quiet research community that included a number of professors at some lofty institutions like Berkeley and Stanford, this was no big deal. Some of these folks have been working on new Operating Systems completely foreign to the traditional Binary Math systems that our current Silicon doping technologies have manifested. Amongst the inner circle are illuminaries from the world of Quantum Physics, from National Labs with particle accelerators, from materials sciences, and Mechano-Materials Scientists researching quantum power transfer techniques. No people from Sun, Intel, AMD, or even VIA (the makers of the low power Eden and C3 mini-ITX computers) have a clue as to what this new technology does.
In short, the new technology that will evolve/has evolved, are Quantum Computers. A whole new branch of mathematical science has been forged by this small cabal. They have taken secret billions of seemingly wasted Federal budget to create a device that is literally a 5 cm x 5cm x 5cm cubic block of 20 million quantum particle wells. Each with its own nano-super-conducting particle accelerator and phase control boundary condition generator, and each with a final state particle well EM field lattice. Heat transfer is via alpha particle injection and extraction through the lattice structure - aka - a Freeze Wave Collector. What's so expensive about this core? It's made mostly of Palladium and Platinum and the purity rivals that of any Silicon fab.
What can this core do? With just a small amount of power, less than several watts, it can break 128 bit RSA crypto in just 3 nanoseconds. The core is severely I/O limited and that's where the technology hasn't caught up. The damned memory latency and bus latency problems aren't unfamiliar to silicon-based binary computing. But the situation is aggravated even more in such a quantum computer because of Heisenberg's principles. One cannot extract the data without changing it. The temporary solution was developed by a brilliant Russian mathematician who defected quietly in 1988 to the US. No one made a big deal about it. He was a good Mathematiciam - world class. But the secret many didn't know about was his son, born in 1990. He was a child prodigy at age 3 and solved Fermat's problem independently at age 6. But basically, they solved it with an elegant wave equation equivalent to a "Checksum."
Computing Industry Leaders around the world have said many times over that "Privacy is Dead. Get over it..." But ironically, little did they know just how true it actually has been since 2002, when the US Gov't put 2 of these cores into operation to monitor all communications traffic world wide in all languages.
But it's been a couple of years now, and there are now 20 such cores running and on-line. Rumours amongst the system administrators say that these cores are buggy, and almost developing personalities. The scientists that built the cores say it's just a manufacturing flaw, or OS bug. But the operators suspect that some of these cores are sentient and the tremendous amount of bidirectional network traffic going on worldwide, would indicate that these cores are doing much more than listening, but actively infiltrating machines and programming them on their own. Is Skynet already alive?
[ Disclaimer: This is my Sci-Fi category. Please read with a grain of salt, pepper, cumin, garlic powder or whatever.] August 20, 2004 02:33 PM PDT Permalink
Thursday August 19, 2004
Marital Bliss in a 17" form factor
I love my Wife
My wife and I just celebrated our 7th anniversary last monty. And the only itch I'm having is from all the scraped knuckles that are finally healing from my do-it-urself car tuneup job a week ago. Later on that in a moment. But I just want to say, I Truly, Madly, and Deeply Love my Wife.
It's not my Birthday yet, but she gave me an early present in the form of an LCD flat panel monitor. Nothing fancy. But she did buy it a week ago when Costco was blowing them out with a $50 off coupon PLUS $30 rebate for a total of $80 off. Sweet. It's great knowing after all these years that she cares enough to buy me good stuff that I want. And I didn't have to leave that many hints around the house. Well, I mean that the couple of dead monitors out on the patio weren't a hint, and hardly intentional. I really didn't have garage space to hold them until I was ready to drop them off at the dump. And I wasn't pretending to squint at the remaining spare dinky 15" CRT screens that I have on my home systems. I was indeed squinting because those screens are so small.
So she must be psychic, 'cause now I'm stylin' with a new 17" LCD monitor and it just looks fabulous. It's absolutely the best monitor I've ever personally owned. I've been too much of a cheapskate to buy one. Most of the monitors I have in my house are hand-me-downs from my bro-in-law or friends, or el cheapo CRTs that came with an eMachines bundle. People would probably take me for some honkin' Iron kind of guy that has like a Dual Opteron home system wtih 4 GB of RAM, 0.5TB of disk and 21" massive monitor and all the nifty gadgets. But day in and day out, I work on tweaking performance out of Honkin' Iron boxes and shaving another few hundred microseconds off average response time for some ISV's code. The last thing I want to happen when I come home is to run some super-duper computer yet again.
I actually want a slow box that lets me enjoy my Sci-Fi Channel or Food TV Network between emails. So I'm not in a rush to do much of anything at home, except eat my Wife's awesome cooking. Did I mention she's a great cook? Not really a Potsticker Guru, but she makes some darn good Cantonese Style Food. Anyway, rolling potsticker skins is usually a man's job as it takes more upper body power to roll skins fast enough.
Linux and Solaris x86 on two old BookPCs
Speaking of slower boxes, I have two identical book PCs at home. These are small computers not much bigger than a phone book, with AMD K6-2 475 MHz cpus, 512 MB ECC RAM, 40GB disk, CDR/RW drives, floppy and integrated 10/100BT, Graphics and Audio. I have FC2 Linux running on one, and Solaris 9 x86 on the other. Amazingly, the Solaris box boots up to dtLogin in about 70 seconds, and then only consumes about 64MB of the total memory size. But Fedora Core 2 Linux takes about 2 min. 15 secs to come up and eats about 200+ MB of memory. Kinda of shocking considering that Redhat 6.1 still is pretty small and fast in my 64 MB NEC Ready 120LT notebook, which is the one we travel with on road trips. It's hard to think of Linux as a bloated OS, but I guess it's changed over the years and gotten pretty big, even if I shutdown all the services at startup time. A full FC2 install of everything is 6GB! A flash archive install of Solaris 9 x86 with Java Enterprise System, Studio, Star Office and other packages is under 4GB.
Has anyone else noticed the bloat? For Linux, the software size has gone from 1 CD to 4 CDs to install in less than 4 years. That's faster than Moore's Law. The only saving grace is that storage capacity is getting cheaper and bigger even faster.
Tune up the minivan
My wife may have had another reason to reward me with the flat panel display. I performance tuned her Toyota Sienna minivan recently and got some extra performance out just by changing the spark plugs. For most of us engineers who've ever worked with our own cars, changing plugs is usually pretty quick and cheap. Plugs don't usually cost very much and have a new, properly installed set helps with ignition and combustion. It's probably a good idea to always change them prior to a smog check.
But our Toyota Minivan is only 2 years old. But because we drive it up to Vancouver, Canada a lot, it's already got 62K miles on it. So we brought it into the dealer for a 60K service, and even with coupons and specials, it still cost over $1000. Yes. You read right. One thousand dollars for a major service. And what did the dealer do? I don't know for sure. They accidentally put a new ding in the car, that's for sure, and we had to argue about it with the service manager to get them to accept their fault. They did seem to flush some flush the radiator and change the brake pads. But other than that, not much else was done. They did itemize all the things they checked, but for a 1000 bucks, you'd maybe think they'd change the timing belt or the spark plugs. But Nope. They said the timing belt is rated for 90K service. And the new high tech Iridium spark plugs are rated for 90K as well.
Well I checked the service manual, and it does confirm the timing belt assertion, but it says that the emissions warranty is voided if the plugs aren't changed at 60K. So I haggled over the phone with the service manager and really was dissatisfied with the work. I wanted him specifically to change the plugs at 60K miles and it was the one thing I couldn't really do at home.
Well, didn't I say above that changing plugs was easy and cheap? Well, not with these new fangled Iridium plugs. You see, Iridium is very temperature resistant. Ceramic resistor spark plugs can take temperatures about 1700 C. The adiabatic flame temperature in most internal combustion engines is around 1500C. Platinum handles temperatures over 2100C and Iridium can operate at over 2500C. So Iridium allows the plugs to run hotter and longer without wear.
But after 60K miles, fouling and wear should warrant a change. And it would be easy and cheap, except Toyota transverse mounts it's V6 engines in the Sienna, Solara, Camry and Avalon. That means rather than having 3 spark plugs on the left and 3 on the right, there are 3 in front, and 3 in the rear. And the ones in the rear are covered by the intake/exhaust manifold. So you can't see them, let alone reach for them. It's a nightmare to change the back 3 plugs on these vehicles, and that's why Toyota specs iridium plugs. They last a long time so changes aren't required because it's still so difficult.
My dealer claimed that they would have charged me $350 more to change the plugs. Why? Because it costs 2 hrs in labour and $25/plug. Yepp. Iridium plugs cost a LOT more. So neither cheap nor easy.
So I basically gave up on that dealer and ate the loss. I fixed my own dent since I didn't want them to ever touch our car again, and I set out to order and change the plugs myself. And that's were Internet and eBay saved the day. I found the top of the line iridium plugs for sale at just over $9 each shipping/tax included. And then I found a number of discussion boards about changing the rear plugs. One guy claimed he did it himself on an Avalon, and another guy who worked for a shop wouldn't publish his method, but did offer to tell folks how to "cheat" if they emailed him personally.
So that gave me some ideas. To make a long story short, I accomplished the change out of all 6 plugs in 1 hour and 15 minutes. It was back-breaking and painful work for the back three that left bruises on both fore arms, and stripped the skin off my knuckles, but nonetheless, it was done. And the results are astonishing. There was immediate pickup in acceleration. Almost as if the car increased horsepower and torque by 5 - 10%. And it didn't take special tools, just finger strength, manual dexterity, and an ability to feel parts clearly and do work without having to visually eye-ball the part. My wife was very pleased with the results. The white puff of uncombusted and smelly exhaust that was making the vehicle start rough each morning disappeared as well. So I saved around $300. Not bad. That pays for the new 17" flat panel LCD.
P.S. - [2006 Mar 28] so many folks have contacted me about instructions on how to do this. I published them maybe a year and a half ago on the FAQFarm.com. The link should be [ here ]. Amazingly, it's gone from way down on the list to be ranked 75th in overall popularity in the last year and a half. I guess lots of folks have V6 Toyotas. August 19, 2004 06:27 PM PDT Permalink
Wednesday August 18, 2004
Eviction, quiet servers, and IPO
Evicted
I got a notice last week from Workplace Re-location folks that my current office in Menlo Park is now slated for flex office space. In short, I've been evicted. But I didn't lose my office. I just moved around the corner to a bigger and brighter one.
Don't get me wrong. I think flex is a great idea that works for many folks. Coupled with Sun's iWork initiative where employees work remotely over VPN from home, it's really given us freedom to work where we need to be. In fact, I'm actually working in a flex office right now in San Jose because I needed to attend meetings here, today.
Sometimes I wish there was an option for me to go flex, too. But the WR folks haven't got an option for us engineers that have development systems that we need hands on with. But I have an idea how they could do it if any of them are reading this. Basically, in addition to flex-offices, WR folks need to provide a flex-racking space to permanently host our development systems and have terminal server console access and Lights-Out-Management on those boxes. And instead of an office to put these systems in, we are given locked drawers or lockers, and a shared office with a couple of desks and KVM-switched keyboard, video monitor, and mouse where we can attach to any of the systems in the rack. The only requirement would be of course that we still have physical access to our boxes on this flex rack, and that the flex-desk space is separate from the flex-rack so we can work in peace and quiet, and that we have adequate cooling, backup UPS power, and unfettered network access and shared workbench areas.
Some might call that a lab space. But labs tend to operate on a shorter-term project-by-project basis. They are large rooms filled with benches and noisy racks. And many have special network configurations, or physical access controls. And labs tend to be away from the mainstream office space and this reduces the local watering-hole/breakroom socialization aspect of office space in buildings.
Peace and Quiet
For now, I'm content with the new office. It gave me a new opportunity to clean out my existing junk and consolidate hardware plus reduce the noise level in my workspace. With 4 servers running in my office, the deciBel level can be deafening. I pretty much need to mute my phone all the time in conf calls. Power supplies are one contributor, but increasingly, I've noticed that disk drives have been getting really noisy. And this isn't from the newer, faster RPM drives, but from the old small drives; a sure indicator that bearings are shot on some of my older disk drives.
One box in particular was a dual-300MHz cpu Ultra-2. It had dual 4 GB SCA SCSI drives occupying the two bays, and these things were whining badly. No surprise since the box and disks were over 5 years old and average uptime between boots has been 200+ days! It had been serving as the group web server/java app server for quite a few years now and was low on disk and noisy. It's response was still snappy however, and it'd be a real waste to scrap the machine and pay for newer capital when really, it just needed a disk upgrade. Since I had hot backup on another machine already, I didn't need to replace the drives with mission critical hardware, so I sourced eBay and other local surplus stores in the Valley for SCA SCSI drives. To my surprise, I found a store in San Jose that carried 9.1 GB SCA drives, refurbed, from $2.99 and up. I picked up some 10K RPM Quantum Atlas II 9.1 GB Low-profile drives which formatted perfectly and worked great. And they were just $19 each with warranty. In fact, these drives worked as well as any newer SCA/LVD/SE SCSI drive. I just powered down the system, took out the old drive, removed the Sun spud bracket off the old disk, and put it on the new disk; then I slid the disk into the bay, booted the system, and immediately after the POST, I Stop-A the system and type 'reset' at the boot> prompt. I can confirm that the disk is found by Stop-A again after the reset operation, and running 'probe-scsi' at the boot> prompt.
Replacing the boot disk was pretty simple. I had upgraded the box about a year ago to Solaris 9 from whatever it was before that. I wanted to keep the boot configuration exactly as it was. So with the boot disk still installed, I powered off the system, installed the replacement drive in the second bay, reset and reboot the system, then formatted the new drive, partitioned and labeled it. Then I created a UFS filesystem on the disk for /root and any other partitions, and then mounted that under the current FS as /mnt or other mount point. Then I ran:
# ufsdump 0cf - /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 | (cd /mnt; ufsrestore xf -)
Afterwards, I ran the installboot(1M)
# installboot /usr/platform/`uname -i`/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c0t1d0s0
And then I powered down, and physically replaced the first disk with the second, and rebooted with reset. With a new second drive as well and the /export/home directories restored on that second drive, I now had doubled the disk capacity cheaply and quickly, I've now reduced the noise from the failing bearing to a dull buzz of the power-supply fan. Not bad for more peace and quiet. I'm now on the lookout for some quiet 36GB SCA Low-profile SCSI drives at a bargain. If they have them discounted in the 10 pack, I'm interested.
dotCOM IPOs All Over Again?
So what's up with Google's IPO? I heard on the news that it was repriced somehow and SEC had not replied back with a confirmed IPO date. I was amazed to hear that it was originally priced at $130 or so, and they downgraded the IPO price to $85? That's a huge hit. For a second there, I thought is was the dotCOM boom all over again.
I'm not sure if I'm going to buy any. I'm a conservative investor-type. I follow the Peter Lynch model of buying what I know and buying stocks of companies that I'd buy from. For example, it's not hard to invest in a sound enterprise computer hardware/software business. If the hardware and software solutions are compelling for a large enough enterprise market and the margins are acceptable, then the business model is purely based on execution and track record. That's a no-brainer for any investor. Then there are investments in consumer products companies. For example, I shop a lot on-line for outdoor gear. My favourite store is Cabela's. I've been a loyal customer for about 20 years now. BTW, they run ATG software on Sun, too. They have incredible customer service and great prices. They went public (stock symbol CAB) back in early July I think, and they've gone down a bit but come back a bit too. I buy what I know. And I know Cabela's gets at least $1000/yr in business from me.
With Google, I'm not sure. I've never paid for any of Google's services, so I'm pretty sure they make their money on advertising and through affiliations and selling subscriptions to their search engine software. But I'm not sure what kind of business it can be or what the volume is. If they started charging me to use it, I'd probably drop the service. If they got my telco to price it into the subscription model, maybe I might just pay, but maybe I'd switch to a new provider too. Or, maybe, I'd charge Google back for spidering my websites since my existence benefits them too... hmmm.
I know when a very popular online Free Email provider tried to charge me $30/yr for POP access, I cut my ties and migrated my Mom, Dad, Wife, and In-Laws to my server at home too. As the number of mailboxes I host increases, the move looks smarter and smarter. Plus, I'm getting better privacy since now I'm in control of my mail, and it ain't some lowly paid employee admin hack that can sit around and monitor my mail. And plus, I use the same open spam site filters that these guys use. Of course, I have to remember that not everyone knows how to host their own web/mail servers and that I do spend more in ISP costs. But even if I couldn't host my own email, My Dad and Inlaws currently use Access4Less.NET, a $5.95/month Nationwide no-frills and zero-support dialup ISP. POP mailboxes are included with that subscription. So there's no need to mess around with any of these freebie email providers that aren't really free.
So, if these free service dotCOMs aren't making money from me, it's an interesting question where the money's at. Maybe from a speculative position, lots of investment banks are simply waiting for secondary markets to buy up shares before they cash out and make off with a measely 100% profit. Small compared to investors during the dotCOM boom when investment banks and underwriters at even the second/third round were getting a hold of stocks and making 1000% in just a year. But I could be wrong and there is a business model in all this... August 18, 2004 02:43 PM PDT Permalink
Tuesday August 17, 2004
Introductions - Hello World from PostickerGuru
Welcome to my first Sun blog. I had been reading the blogs from other colleagues for a while now but just never got around to putting up one of my own. The hardest part was figuring out the type of blog and picking out a handle that represented the gist of my existence.
Well, late last night, I couldn't figure out anything else more brilliant than PotstickerGuru. Afterall, my mailserver inside Sun (yes, I'm one of the few that hosts his own mail) is called Gyoza, and my main development workstation is a SunBlade 2K called Yumcha, and I have supporting backup and hot-archive systems in the office and at home named Shumai, Wonton, and Charsiu. Not that I have a food-fetish, but I think it's more appealing that say a Star Trek theme for hostnames, or stuffed-animal-disney-character theme, or smart-alec-unix-shell-command hostname theme. And after all, I am known within certain circles as a Master Potsticker maker - I even roll my own skins and I don't need a tapered rolling pin like some of the PSG-wannabees who can't pass muster with a straight rolling pin.
As some background info, I'm considered a senior engineer at Sun, going on 9 years now. Work has taken me to some interesting places around the world. I'm in the business of helping Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and some customers and partners architect and build software. After they build it, I help them tune it to make it run faster. I used to be a C/C++ guy, but for the last 8 years or so, I've been focusing on Java more, and mostly at the application level. Only in the last couple of years, management has been kind enough to put me closer to the OS/Kernel where I've been looking more deeply at platform/OS provider performance. Rarely a dull moment here, and it keeps my brain from going senile.
Prior to coming to Sun, I was a real geek locked up part-time at Berkeley and then Livermore designing and simulating Thermo-Nuclear blasts in Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF - aka Laser Fusion) Reactors. My dissertation was a long tome that included Analytical, Experimental, and Numerical work in multi-dimension simulation of blast wave propagation in Gas-continuous Two-Phase Media. I wrote some open source code called TSUNAMI (later limited in access for security reasons) which was an acronym for Transient Shockwave Upwind Numerical Analysis Method for ICF. I thought the acronym alone deserved a Ph.D., but my Professor at Cal wasn't as amused. But I must say, all that coding and work with C/C++ on Macs generating post-calc movies of the 250 microseconds after blast worked wonders with the DOE. They decided to fund the National Ignition Facility ($1.8Billion) at Livermore in part due to that work, and I think there are still a number of grad students and researches trying to improve my model and computational kernel even more than a decade later. Ironically, I'm now at a company that's trying to sell those guys the computational horse-power to run those simulations, and all my Physics and Math skills aren't put to intense use.
But my interests in working at Livermore after graduate school took a turn when Bill Clinton took office. He stalled the budget that year and I wasn't assured of any openings at the National Lab, so instead, I worked in Tokyo for 2 years. I spent the first year Post-Doc'ing at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Kogyo Daigaku) in O-okayama - a better Engineering school than Tokyo University (at least the Faculty tell me that :-)). And anyway, exceptional singer Oda Kazumasa of "Tokyo Rabu Sutori" (Tokyo Love Story) fame graduated from Tokyo Tech. I did a lot of systems and network administration while running Computational Fluid Dynamics calculations on SunOS and AIX clusters. I was trying to develop faster running multi-dimensions Turbulent models.
One day, on a train, I bumped into another Gaijin (foreigner) who was the head of IT at Solomon Bros. Tokyo Office. We got talking and somehow, I got connected with some head hunters looking for Wall Street "Quants" who could program and do sysadmin. It wasn't long before I joined a small Tokyo outfit, Fusion Systems Japan and they put me on a bunch of projects building equity and fixed income trading systems, derivate risk management systems, and new GUIs, servers, and failover mechanisms. It was long hours, but really rewarding. The internet was just starting to boom in Japan and I even had a chance to work in NTTData's Ueno ops-center when the first batch of Ciscos and Ascends showed up. I helped startup an ISP in Tokyo too. All that scientific stuff faded in a year of doing finance.
I had always known how to program in a little C/C++, and I even had some tools experience with compilers and source control/build systems, and I knew a lot of UNIX. But I was never an O-O programmer or a real Systems programmer until my 2nd year in Japan. I owe most of that credit to four guys - first a Brit named John Tumulty who was first at CSFB in Tokyo, then he jumped to Goldman-Sachs - introduced me to the NIH class libraries and taught me the elegance of O-O. Second was a guy named Joe Diperna. Originally from the Fusion NYC office, but he came out to Tokyo to head up engineering for Fusion Systems Japan - he taught me all about product and build schedules and QA test automation. And third, Finn Christensen - a Norwegian with ties to Strustrap - the original guy who wrote the book on C++ - he taught me lots of basics about coding O-O network programs and Financial engines. Last, was Gary Arakaki - a Univ. of Hawaii transplant to Tokyo with a Ph.D. in CompSci. He specialized in the SunOS kernel and taught me tonnes about threads and scheduling and OS service providers - we analyzed the early concurrency models in Perl when it first came out with O-O support. There was a fifth guy, Jason Bloomstein, from Hal Computers who was doing a stint at Fujitsu back in the early 90's. I met him at a bunch of Gaijin parties and Potsticker-Making parties (which I hosted) back then in Yokohama/Kawasaki - my 3 bdrm, living/dining/kitchen (3LDK) in Japan was just in Kawasaki on the Nambu line, close to Futako-Tamagawa-En station. He often criticized me for being a dilettante with Operating Systems. He didn't think highly of application programmers and instead loved to put me down by asking simple CompSci test questions that any upper division Stanford student would know. Well, I admit, I am a Cal Berkeley grad, and I was a world-class Nuclear Engineer and Computational Physicist, and not a CompSci major, but at least I could configure circles around his DNS and hack his systems if he wasn't careful! Sometimes, folks just gotta recognize that not everyone goes through an academic route to become a good computer scientist. Some, like me, get it from the school of hard knocks. But Jason's criticisms have made me stronger, I think, and that's good, even if he is a Stanford grad!
In early 1995, I was on site at First National Bank of Chicago in Hibiya. I can't remember if I was still on site before or after the Tokyo Subway Sarin gas attaches by Aum Shinrikyo, only that I was in Maui giving a paper on Internet, Web and Networking at the time and noticed on the news that it was the train station I usually get off to go to one of my customers' offices. I couldn't help but think it could have been me dead or paralyzed for life.
Around that time, Sun released something called Hotjava Browser and the Java Development Kit. I was caught up in the excitement and while on site at a realtime data provider, I wrote my first stock feed applet. The Java applet ran in HotJava Browser and accessed a CGI script on a system that was authorized to connect to the datafeed. I demo'd the system to others, including the folks at the data provider. To my dismay, they rejected the idea and told me I was in license violation, even if I was ready to give them the concept and source code. To make a long story short, the data provider suffered major financial losses in the follow 2 years, and no longer charges $2400/month per seat for real-time data,, and others have undercut their derivatives risk-assessment desktop tools so anyone can leverage a Java applet to get those tools from any discount online trading house. And ironically, 18 months after that demo, I was invited back to Japan and the same guys who had been chastising me about license violations were bowing and asking "James-Hakase" to provide them some architectural guidance.
It was inevitable that I joined Sun. I have used their technology since the 80's and love it. I believe that better technology should win, but I think I understand the market well enough to know that the best technologies don't always win, because some technologies aren't quite self-evident, or they come out too soon. For example, Sun produced the first diskless workstations that were flat panel mono-chrome monitors with the computer built in that worked fairly well back in the 1990. It's now almost 2005, and network computing is finally mainstream 15 years later; monitor-based and Tablet PCs are now going more mainstream. But admittedly, not everything we produce rocks the world. Lots of it fails to gain any market because the technology isn't appropriate. But that's why working with ISVs has been so rewarding. ISVs are brutally focused on the market and provide solutions to enterprise customer problems. It's cool knowing that your ideas may be impacting a big corporation that will then impact millions of people around the world, either every time they stick their Bank Card into an Automated Teller, or when folks go online to order Fishing Tackle or a Fishing License to fish, say, in the state of Florida.
But back to Potstickers. Yes, I do have an illustrated recipe. You can get it [here] . The recipe requires lots of labour. Yes, I'm a do-it-urself kinda engineer. I roll my own potsticker skins and stuff them with my own filling just because it's a self-satisfaction thing. I think of the line in Repo Man when Emilio Estevez's character comes home and whips out a can of generic food, opens it and starts to eat it out of the can, and his Mom hollers, "Put it on a plate dear... it'll taste better."
Yeah, the feeling is kind of like that. Yes, I like to fix my own cars, wrap my own fishing rods, lace my own wheels on my bicycle, and install my own French Doors. I also run my own static IP network out of my house, host my own virtual servers, build my own Whitebox PCs, and run Linux and Solaris at home. But I understand if not everyone adheres to the same standards for Do-it-urself. I cheat too. So it's okay if some of you sneak off to Costco and buy a bag of 50 potstickers and grill them up yourself. They taste okay and I won't call you a dilettante.
Happy reading. I'll be back...soon. August 17, 2004 01:46 PM PDT Permalink
