Thursday September 16, 2004 
James C. Liu's Weblog
Thursday September 16, 2004
Triple Boot Laptop, Finally
I've finally gotten off my lazy derriere and put together a Triple boot laptop. Surprisingly, the hardest part of the whole thing was installing the new, larger hard drive. My primary laptop is a cheap $750 Toshiba unit with 20 GB disk that I picked up about 3 years ago on sale with some big coupon, plus it had a $50 rebate. It was one of those non-expandible FRUs (Field Replaceable Units) with drives that couldn't be upgraded. But I purchased it at the time thinking otherwise.
Being a geek entitles me to feel overly confident about any piece of consumer-rated computer hardware, even though I may have no clue what the heck I'm getting myself into. And as Murphy's Law would have it, you bet I spent a good 3 hours the other day poking around the clam shell before giving up and calling Toshiba's Service Center to get a quote on how much it'd cost to install a new 40GB drive I'd supply. I got a pretty prompt reply: $89 labour. Or for $129, they'd transfer data to the new disk and extend warranty on the whole laptop for another year.
Uh... price was way too high. 'Okay, time to really put some brain cells to use and figure this problem out,' was what I thought to myself after getting the price quotes. As luck would have it, I did find out how to open the case, plus I didn't break anything doing it. The secret was to attack the screws holding the top LED panel cover over the LCD hinges. There are 4 screws in total, two 6 mm long and two 3mm long with mini phillips head. With a flat, thin prying blade and the LCD panel bent back until it was almost fully open 180 degrees, I could pry and pop of the LED cover plate. It revealed 6 more screws that anchor the keypad and top half of the clam shell to the bottom. I removed the keyboard as well, and then turn the laptop over and remove the dozen or more long 18mm screws around the edges of the clam shell. 4 more large screws anchor down the LCD panel, which I remove as well. Then there are 3 more in the mid-section that hold the clam shell together. With enough screws taken out, I could open up enough panels to gain access to the floppy and hard disk drive bays. With almost everything taken out, I decided to clean the built-in mouse track-pad and buttons. In total, I think it was over 48 screws, or at least felt that way; just keeping track of all pieces and screws was pretty hard. I definitely don't recommend you do this with young children around.
I actually got pretty lucky re-assembling the unit. The first time, I only had 2 screws left uninstalled. We all know that having extra screws pretty much sucks; you never know if it's some critical structural or disk drive screw. But I looked at it from a positive point of view. I could have forgotten way more screws. I took the laptop apart again, and this time found where the screws were supposed to go and filled 100% of the empty screw holes.... well I think I filled them all...unless the kids took some of them..
With the hard drive in, installation of software is pretty straight forward. I had to install WinXP first. The WinXP software is a recovery only type of install. It formats whatever disk is in the main drive and then creates one monster partition and sticks WinXP on it. The Win32 install makes a lot of assumptions that it owns the laptop, and thus, doesn't have to care about installing other OSes or playing nice. It will overwrite and hose everything else on the laptop.
But that's not a problem. The Open Source community has come through with a SysRescueCD image that contains a mini Gentoo Linux distro and nifty partitioning utilities that come on a bootable CD. Size is about 110MB for the iso image. Two included utilities, QtPartEd and NTFSresize are very helpful and low cost for resizing FAT-32 or NTFS partitions.
To make a triple boot system, I needed to first shrink the disk slice used by Win32/NTFS, then configure the remaining space into three slices, one for Solaris and the other two for Linux. Solaris needs to install before Linux for several reasons, one of which is that I want the Linux Grub boot loader to boot all three OSes.
I used QtPartEd to make these three additional partitions, okay technically I have to do 4 operations. First operation is to create a primary Solaris partition adjacent to the NTFS slice. I don't need to further sub-divide this slice for Solaris swap and Solaris UFS because Solaris will do it for me during the install and stay within its slice boundaries. The rest of the disk, I make a big extended partition. And inside the extended partition, I make two slices, large Linux ext3fs and small swap slice. Just the additional two big slices were enough. QtPartEd doesn't have a way to create and format Solaris UFS partitions in its menu. And after a first glance I wasn't sure what to do. But I recalled that Solaris x86 partition IDs are the same as Linux swap, 0x82. This can present a problem when installing Solaris and it sees Linux swap. It will try to use them and mount them as Solaris primary partitions, possibly installing on them. To avoid this possible snafu, we create an extended partition and put all the Linux partitions inside. The Solaris installer won't look inside the extended partition. So Linux swap inside the extended partition is safely hidden from Solaris.
Installing software was pretty straight forward. All the distributions came on CD, so the standard mode of sitting around and inserting the next disk are in order. WinXP recovery has 3 disks for my Toshiba. Solaris and Linux each have 4 total for the full distribution with documentation and multiple Locales. Installation time was about an hour for each. And WinXP and Linux each have over 500 MB in updates and additional software to download and install, such as service paks, updates, additional browsers, email, office utils, etc. Solaris 10 has yet to ship and so doesn't have a big list of updates, it may suffer from drivers or lack of them. Hopefully driver problems won't impact folks out there. The graphics and network drivers are often the culprits and the key is to bypass the graphical install and move on and fix later. I'm impressed because Solx86 has come a long way on x86 drivers in the last 3 months. This Friday Sep 17, Sun's Alan Duboff our Solaris x86 Technical Ambassador, will host another install-fest internally. I'm eager now to try the Solaris OS update features on the latest builds.
Some interesting observations about the other installations: WinXP Home took about 5 hours to fully install. The first thing it did on boot was to notify me of extremely urgent OS updates that were super critical to the health of the computer. To some, this is a great feature, but to me, it was kinda scary. I felt quite vulnerable during the first boot as I madly scrambled to download the patches and then startup the Network control panel up to block all further incoming connections from outside. I had to fork over money too. It's $50 to download Norton AntiVirus 2005 and get it installed. But I guess I didn't want to wait to head out and buy some OEM bulk copy for the 2004 version for $10. Definitely boot a fresh install of WinXP from behind a firewall/NAT router. Make sure it's the only Win32 machine running on the private net. Don't connect it to even a LAN that might have viruses active because if you haven't had a chance to reboot with network on to set the firewall one in XP, then you could be infected by some RPC virus right off the bat. But I guess that's the cost of doing business with Win32. In retrospect, the download of XP SP2 took so long, maybe I should have headed out to buy the OEM virus protection.
With Linux, it would have taken quite a while, except I archived updates on a server at home with lots of disk. There were 400 MB in RPMs and this includes new multimedia packages. I use YUM, the YellowDog Linux Update Manager, to download these updates. It's quite brain-dead easy. But the tip here is to run YUM once configured to download and preserve RPMs after installation (rather than blowing them away) and then archive the RPMs and install other machines with updates to save on bandwidth and time. That's why it pays to keep all desktop systems in a home or small business updated to the same revision of OS. By default, the Windows Updater obscures where it puts temporary packages that it stores for updates. Each machine therefore has to run its own update. I guess it helps eat more bandwidth, which may or may not be a good thing. On the flip-side, Win32 is so insecure, would I really trust a home machine to store archived updates? Not if my Dad was a user. He has all the spyware and virus blockers and anti-spam filters, yet he still gets about 1 nasty spyware per month and it's saved and runs out of the IE cache. I haven't upgraded him yet to Firefox because I never have the install media when I'm over at my parents' house and they use dialup so downloads are out of the question. Again, it's a huge cost of doing business, even for home users, on Win32. If I weren't around to provide tech-support, he'd be toast and so would his online stock portfolio.
Well, I've got my Triple boot system. It was pretty straight forward to do. Just a few small procedures to follow and I now have a small buffet of OSes. With a 40 GB drive it's possible to create a shared user-data partition in extended space and install quite a few OSes in smaller, 4 GB slices which then all access that shared slice for home directories. I've debated configuring a laptop this way. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes more costs too much. Sometimes paranoia sets in about the integrity of that data partition if the wrong OS were to boot and mount it. One thing is for certain. In a year, I'll revisit the whole decision again and probably re-install something else. September 16, 2004 11:52 AM PDT Permalink
Wednesday September 15, 2004
Foobar at the School District
Most of the folks living in Silicon Valley should count themselves lucky, or at least their kids lucky because the California STAR (Standard Testing And Reporting) scores have been published now at the end of the 2003-2004 academic year. At last night's school board meeting, the district administration had these test scores as one of the major agenda items for discussion.
I'm in the Cupertino/Sunnyvale School District ( http://cupertino.ca.campusgrid.net/home ), a pretty good school district and while my 2 and 4 year old kids aren't even enrolled yet, I thought I might attend these meetings to learn more about the public schools. And considering the dire news in the other districts in and around the Bay Area, I'm glad that our school board is at least competent.
I'll get to the STAR scores in the district later. But let me say that the popular news media doesn't quite capture what's going on in the schools that affects teaching quality and school education. In fact, I think most news reporting does a real disservice to the public. For example, the news often talks about class sizes in California and how it's really growing and reducing individual attention that teachers give to kids, and there's the complaint that schools aren't getting enough monies from local, state and federal gov'ts.
To some extent, district budget does affect how good the students are, but above a certain point, budget is no longer relevant; demographics are perhaps more important than anything else. Some school districts must be ripe with corruption. I have no proof, and it's hard to catch these district administrators in the act, but a few years ago, with the dotCOM boom bringing in extra Millions if not tens of Millions of dollars to budgets, some districts, like West Contra Costa (a.k.a. Richmond) and the Oakland School Districts continued to run large annual deficits. I talked with one relative who works in Sacramento state gov't and he joked that these crooks at the districts simply write checks to bogus companies for bogus work and cash the money. Millions disappear this way and since no technology is implemented to track the transactions, the money just simply disappears and the accountants simply can't tell you where the money went. That's how our tax dollars are spent.
Another issue that made headlines was the big California Teachers Layoff. Yes, many districts, faced with less budget, laid off teachers. But what the news media didn't tell you was how the selection was made. Some very good teachers lost there jobs. Why you ask? Because the school districts don't actually have the power to select who goes or stays. They cede that to the Teachers Union. In fact, if you can download or get a hold of the Union Arbitration docs that our school district hands out, it would scare you. Basically, it says that the California Teachers' Union is the SOLE negotiator of teachers contracts with the districts. Why you and I in the public may think our school boards have quite a bit of control over the district to review policies and set direction, in fact, it's all a sham. The Unions negotiate all aspects of Teachers and employees used as teachers. For example, the Union specifies business work hours. They specify tenure rules (which are not merit based) and they don't have the same accountability standards. During this last lay-off, it didn't matter which teaches they laid off. The Union rules protect the older (more expensive) teachers. So they laid off the Young, Idealistic, and More energetic teachers to meeat negotiated budget requirements. Somehow, the news media didn't quite explain that in the 30 second spot they devoted to this important issue. And I don't want to bash the Unions, but I will because their stupid rules are hurting a relative of mine. They have a special needs child with Autism. The child needs personal counselling and therapy which the District shall provide according to California Law. However, the District is withholding funding for a private therapist which they only co-fund. Why are they not paying their obligation? Because the teacher's Union says the Therapist is covered under their negotiation and arbitration contract and thus the employee must be subject to the Union, and follow Union rules. So instead of a tailored program in the interests of the child with a therapist that works just 4 hours from say 3 - 7pm, the Union allows them to only work until 5pm. No weekends. Stupid and mean spirited and unhelpful.
Another example in point is the lack of foresight of some districts. Mine included. Last year, they got an announcement that PBS, a major educational video supplier to the schools would cease subscriptions on VHS video tape. Instead, going forward, to reduce costs of production, they would burn the content on high quality DVD for classrooms. PBS is short for Public Broadcasting System, the gov't funded stations of which there are like 3 or 4 in the Bay Area. KQED, KTEH, KCSM and maybe one more. They have shows like Nova, Science, Nature, Scientific American Frontiers, and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer (formerly the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour). I would donate to them if they weren't such a Liberal, half-nonsense organization, but my taxes go to them anyway. But I digress. My kids' school district mentioned at a board meeting that they were short of DVD players in classrooms. They hadn't budgeted for this and so kids might be missing out on educational video content because some classrooms might be short of DVD players.
Wanting No Child to be Left Behind, I went out to Costco Wholesale the next week, and picked up 10 Toshiba players at $69/each. I didn't buy the cheaper Koss players for only $49/each because they have a poor reliability record. But suffice it to say, I left work half an hour early, picked them up on the way home, and hand delivered them to district offices in Cupertino. This solved partly, the DVD crisis. While I did the right thing for the public good, one has to wonder what the priorities of the district are? They have a total budget of almost $80Million spent to education 15K+ kindergarten and elementary school kids in the district. That's over $5K/student-year. And this does NOT include Bond measures for Capital and Infrastructure enhancements voted and passed by the public in prior years. So oodles of $$$$ are flowing into our school district and they couldn't have the foresight to migrate old VCR decks to DVD players at $60-$80each in the last 2 years. And, I can't understand why they don't have budget.
They spent nearly $1.75Million last year on health services. In a presentation at an earlier School Board meeting, we got to meet the 3 full time and 4 part time nurses and the programs they run. They serve 16 campuses with 5 full head count. So the truth from the kids' perspective is that nurses are rarely there on campus when someone gets hurt. They are paged and then drive over to the school if a real emergency. Often, one of the school admins just does some simple first aid and the nurse doesn't even show up. But if you're like me, you'd be wondering where does $1.75Million get spent? Surprisingly, none of it actually buys health insurance for needy kids or their families. None of it goes to immunizations or shots, only the arranging and scheduling at low cost clinics. Most of it is spent on marketing and communications with parents in the district. But what really got me peeved was when the nurses each came up and presented their roles in the district. 6 of the 7 nurses had to read the names of their schools that they supported off of slips of paper. That's amazing. I've been only attending school board meetings for a year now, and I can name more than half the schools in the district. That $1.75Million sure could have gone to better DVD players and maybe some cash in the pockets of low income folks so they can shop and buy their own health plan.
Note: I'm sure at this point, folks in Socialist countries are rolling their eyes and wondering about US health care and why we don't nationalize it. I would support nationalizing it if we re-architected the AMA and allowed all Universities to produce doctors like they produce engineers and in order to practice anywhere in the US, there would be a standardized test. But as it happens, the AMA has a monopoly and like the lawyers and their Bar Associations, part of setting a high level is to prevent qualified candidates from being useful practitioners thus limiting supply artificially so Doctors and Lawyers can drive around in their Beamers, Bimmers, Benzes, Acuras and Lexae. But even while US health care is such a mess, we still have the most kick ass system that actually -fixes- people (who can afford health care). When I broke my ankle and shredded all the ligaments in Tokyo in 1994, the Doctors looked at my ankle and made a deep sucking sound and said, "Anooo....chotto...Eien arukenai to omoimasu yo...." or something like that, I can't remember; I was in agony at the time. Shortly translated, it meant something like (deep sucking sound), "...I don't think you'll walk again..."
Needless to say, I walk and I can cycle. No impact sports, but I walk normally. I sometimes set off metal detectors at OAK and SFO airports, but surprisingly, not at SJC. But I walk and do so comfortably. That's because in under 36 hours after the accident, United Airlines had me back in the US and I was visiting an orthopedic surgeon with 3 pictures of ex-San Francisco 49'er football (American Tackle Football - not soccer) players.
In addition, it used to be that the greater metro Seattle area had more CT scan machines than all of Canada (one of the best socialized medicine systems...that's now going bankrupt...you see all these folks with -Health Care-before-Winter-Olympics- bumper stickers on cars in and around Vancouver). Now Canada has adequate supply of CT scan machines. But that was old technology. They now are short of MRI machines compared to Seattle.
So the point is we have pretty good health care in the US; only it isn't free unless you're really, really broke and go into a public hospital for something critical. But for the lower, middle class, health care is scarce and expensive. But at $1.75M/yr, our school district doesn't actually buy any health care insurance. Instead, it pays for health care "awareness," whatever that is. I think that's wasteful too.
Another waste is energy. They get Macs and PCs donated from various vendors like Apple and HPaq. And some of these run 40W - 80W processors in systems with monitors sucking 200Watts each. The district and the kids don't need such big honking iron desktops which eat maybe tens of thousands of dollars more in power each year, even if they are turned off at night. By going with lower-power chips and chipsets, they can greatly reduce power consumption and save money. And I would wish it'd be that easy, only now the district is looking at hiring a consulting company to teach the district about energy education. Most of it is common sense. But somehow, by paying $100+K/yr for 4 years, the district thinks it can save more than $100K/yr and the consulting company guarantees it. If you don't save more money that you would have spent without them, they'll cut a check. I'm not sure how they can figure out the savings. I'm sure they probably do save more for the district through their educational programs. But why can't the district save more energy and NOT pay these guys? Can't the district go to our Utility and have them come over and educate staff regularly on conservation? But I guess if it's free, some executive administrators think it has no value. Sound familiar in lots of technology companies too.
And I can't believe the type of employee recognition that goes on in the district. It seems like every other meeting, the School Board has to have some opening celebration to award some district employee-of-the-month. Don't get me wrong. I believe in employee recognition. But only if it goes to deserving employees and only if it was a true accomplishment for the district. In this case, they gave recognition to some clerk in the district for discovering how ISBN numbers work and using them to Order books on Amazon, thus saving the district money. Those award presentations are not open to the public really for criticisms, but any one in the Valley has to wonder how hard it was to figure out ISBN numbers on Amazon and to save 15% - 40% on cover price for all books and get free 2nd Day super-saver shipping. Amazon has been around for over 8 years folks. Don't tell me, the district just figured this out now. You mean they were wasting our money on books for nearly a decade before?
But I don't want to end sounding like our District sucks. Far from it. The Cupertino Union School District is nationally ranked near the top. And with all the dire predictions of bankruptcy and schools losing funding and having Republican Arnold "Terminator" Schwarzennegar as Govenor, our school district actually ended the year with $700K more than they had budgeted. Hooray. Good fudiciary responsibility. I almost want to ask for a refund on those DVD players I donated since they got cash in the bank now.
In addition, what's impressive is that all the schools in the CUSD scored quite high on the STAR scores. Out of a possible maximum of 1000 points, Faria Elementary School scored 1000! Yes, aggragate for the school. And Portal, an English/Mandarin experimental language immersion school scored 991 out of 1000 over the whole school. And in fact, the lowest scoring schools in the district, De Vargas and Nimitz, still scored in the low 900's and high 800's respectively. Clearly, 12 of the campuses are in California's top 90th percentile or higher. And even the bottom two are above the 75-percentile. And it's no wonder. Faria kids are mostly Indian and Chinese in origin; two cultures where families and education are strongly emphasized. Portal Elementary is mostly Chinese. And in all schools, many parents are well-to-do, higher socio-econ types with technology backgrounds. It's no surprise as well, that De Vargas and Nimitz scored the lowest. De Vargas borders San Jose, and is in a lower socio-econ class. Nimitz is in southwest Sunnyvale, bordering on Cupertino, in a high rental apartment location. Nimitz actually got the lowest score last academic year and was the only campus to see regression in test scores - i.e. the scores actually decreased last year.
Some parents and School Board members are concerned and ask what they can do to improve De Vargas and Nimitz test performance. I'm not so sure I care that much. The impact seems to be mostly demographics; not budget. My theory is that Nimitz fell in test scores simply because the economy has been bad and rentals have come down in the area. Some parents, have tried to migrate from lower socio-econ areas in San Jose to this part of Sunnyvale where it's now affordable. And it's easy to tell this is the case. The rental units down the street now have 3 or 4 new rice-rocket honda civics/integras parked out front. These are lowered econo-box Japanese cars that have wide, low-pro tires, grapefruit-sized exhaust pipes, addition farings attached, sometimes a big spoiler and new paint job, and some Hello Kitty/Bad Batz Maru/Nishimura Racing stickers on the back windshield. If you drive one of these street machines, you know who your are! :-) There's been quite a few new street cars like this in my area and the renters across the street from me smoke and sometimes park their cars on our side of the street, and leave little mounds of cigarette butts on the street and litter the base of my shrubs with cellophane cigarette box wrappers and silver chewing gum foil; nothing my blowers/garden vac can't handle.
I personally attended a California 36-percentile high school. If I weren't 100kgs and 187 cm tall at age 16, I would have gotten my butt kicked daily by the 140kgs+ steroid-taking, drug selling jocks in weightlifting class. We didn't have individual gangs at our school - the whole school was one gang with lots of undercover Narcs (police officers posing as teachers to watch for drugs) and we were just one step up from the local Junvenile Penitentiary High School. So having kids in a 76%-ile school is like a dream for me. And anyway, I have nothing to fear about teaching my kids academics in all the basics of Reading, Writing, Math and Science. I'll do as my Parents did and spend quality time to teach them at home. What I do worry about, though, are what the other kids teach of a non-academic nature. But exposure should be good right? Like Gov'nor Arnie said in his Conan movies, "What doesn't kill you should make you stronger." September 15, 2004 10:48 PM PDT Permalink
Friday September 10, 2004 It's finally been cooling off after several warm days in California. At least I can say that because I'm in the Bay Area and we enjoy milder conditions than those folks who live inland. Summer is late this year, but finally here. Along with that hot weather were a couple of incidents this past week where the California Independent Systems Operators (California ISO) issued warnings to the public to conserve power between 4 - 7 pm. The high temperatures inland were creating a huge demand for electricity to power air conditioning and refrigeration units.
The reasons stated by most news agencies and the California ISO folks is that electricity demand has been rising and California state utilities have not constructed new power plants sufficient to fulfill the demand. This may be a relatively new revelation to some CA residents who've not experienced such shortages until the last 4 years. But I have to say that about 20 years ago, when I took my first Nuclear Engineering class at Berkeley, one of the first charts thrown up on an overhead projector was the rise in electricity demand relationship with GDP growth. The correlation is well known and understood by the Utilities and their watch dog Public Utilities Commission (PUC) organizations. In fact, managing the electrical generation capacity is also well understood.
In general, a large electrical utility has some constraints on how the electricity must be delivered. Usually there is some ANSI standard that defines such qualities, such as the AC power needs to be 60 Hz in frequency with no more than a small fractional change plus or minus, and the voltage sent over transmission must not vary by more than 10% either way. So ideally, Utilities strive to provide clean 60 Hz power at 110 VAC into most homes and businesses (single phase power). But the other challenge here is that power is not stored significantly in the grid. It must be manufactured pretty much at the moment that people use it. For a small household with a diesel or gas generator, when someone eats more power, the engine speeds up and burns more fuel and increases power to meet the need. This is no different. However, because of the large variation in power quality from a small generator, there's usually quite a bit of power conditioning circuitry built into the device so that it pre-conditions the power to meet the needs of electrical appliances. But such power conditioning does introduce some reduction in efficiency and loss of power, so we really don't want to do that much. This is also the issue with wind and solar generators. We need to condition the power they generate to be of sufficient quality and furthermore, if they are connected to our grid, we want to make sure they stay in synch with the rest of the power grid or else they may introduce some nasty harmonics that should cause problems with the main grid.
One way is to have a small resevoir for power, like a battery, or if we recall the Popular Science magazine articles back in the 70's, we could have underground, vacuum chambers with mag-lev kinetic energy coils spinning at 100,000 rpms to store power. Only, I never could understand how the kinetic energy thingamajigs would continue to spin at 100K rpms once we started to suck the power out again. Wouldn't we still need inefficient power-conditioning devices?
Well, yes, we'd still need power conditioning devices. And that's why large utilities are still in business. While they are big Monopolies that appear to have an evil ability to extort a monthly subscription fee, in fact, they are still a lower, and hopefully more efficient and environmental way to produce power rather than have millions of users in every locale running their own generators and storing them in chemically toxic batteries or explosively deadly hydrogen containers. Modern power plants are able to burn fuel to heat water to steam and extract work at much higher temperatures in turbines than any smaller commercial or private facility using diesel or gasoline generators. And this is governed by the maximum limits as defined by the Carnot Cycle (even though steam turbines operate on the Rankine cycle).
Big power plants also offer better quality of power because they aggregate power demand into a statistically consistent electrical load - also referred to sometimes as "baseload." A single household might go from zero kiloWatts to 4 kiloWatts power consumption in 2 seconds, just by someone cooking dinner and some teenaged child blow drying her hair in preparation for a Friday night out on the town. But aggregated over say 500,000 households, the demand looks pretty consistent, and any one household's fluctuations will have infinitesimal impact on the frequency at which the turbines spin, just a miniscule short term voltage drop which the rest of the grid easily absorbs (which is why the lights dim and flicker slightly when the microwave goes on but recovers within a fraction of a second).
Typically, a utility has some historical data. Based on the time of day, day of the week, month of the year and current weather conditions, they can predict the power demand and hopefully meet all the needs. And to do so, they use some simple rules. Based on GDP growth, they can predict the long term demand and build out more power plants. Based on statistics on maintenance and operations, they also know how much excess capacity in power plants they need to keep available because at any moment, they might have a plant down for maintenance and service or usually warm or cold weather may increase demand for electric power. For most utilities, the magic number falls somewhere between 17% and 20% excess capacity OVER average PEAK load. Which means, take the biggest demand for power (in California, it was set just this Sept. 8th at over 45GigaWatts of demand). We had warnings issued Wednesday to turn off lights and shutdown unneeded systems inside our company. And it was a good thing to do. California only has about 2.5 GWatts of excess capacity, which is only about 5% - 6% over. A single shutdown at say, Unit 1 at Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E's) Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Station near San Lius Obispo could lose 1.1 GWatts-electric for the state and cause large shutdowns in many critical sections of the state's grids. A small but survivable 6.5 earthquake near the Central Coast could require both reactors to SCRAM and shutdown, leaving just a 1% margin in power. So typically it is wise to have a safe margin like 17 - 20%.
There are some ways we could offset some of the demand, especially in sunny California. We could require Photo-voltaics to be standard installations as roof tops on all new homes built after 2010. We could start today and mandate, say 10% of new homes or rennovations exceeding 60% of the homes value to include at least 1 kWatt of photo-voltaics. Some folks argue that photo-voltaics are actually quite unenvironmental because the energy required to make them may never be recovered in the expected lifetime they will be used for. There is some truth to that, but research by at least several folks at UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab may be changing the power balance equations. There is also the truth that solar panels are DC generators and we want AC. We need an inverter and thus it's less efficient. Still others suggest we forget the whole scheme and simply replace old outdated fossil fired plants, because like old cars, they're the big polluters and very inefficient. A newer plant burns cleaner and has a higher Carnot efficiency and is therefore better for the environment.
Personally, I think such discussions are all good. Perhaps we -should- replace old, inefficient power plants with new ones. We may even want to invest in cleaner power that doesn't put CO2 in the air, like nuclear fission plants, or maybe in 25 years, Inertial Confinement Fusion (mini-Deuterium-Tritium bombs shot into a chamber and targetted with lasers or actually heavy Ion beams at 8 times per second - c.f. HYLIFE-II - the High Yield Lithium Injection Fusion Energy design - LLNL 1993).
In the meantime, I wonder why we aren't seeking renewable alternatives, more. There are products that some entrepreneurial business guys could sell. For example, when the heck will I be able to buy a self-installable solar water heater from Home Depot or Lowe's? When will I see a weight-loss program that is actually a bicycle hooked up to a generator that you plug your TV into? If you wanna watch TV, you gotta pedal! 3 easy payments of just $59.99. Results guaranteed! And When are Utilities going to start installing power monitoring and harmonics arrestors plus a power shunt on every home power line to allow, say, upto 10 kWatts of independent power production from Wind, Solar, Kids on a bicycle generator, etc. It may not work in other parts of the world where it's hotter, muggier, still, and cloudy. But in sunny California (and some places breezy), we could have 2 or 3 GWatts of capacity by year 2010 installed in these home based systems that have 80% availability from 1pm - 6 pm most days and that could save tonnes of CO2 put into the air, and help provide more safety margin in our grid.
I'm not sure why we don't have these things. Maybe society is waiting for Java/Jini/JXTA to be installed on these energy appliances. I did work with a midwest Energy Utility before on embedded commercial air conditioning controllers that had a JVM and network stack. It's been a while since I talked to those folks. I'm not sure if anything ever panned out on their product side. Maybe quite a few of us are more focused on conservation and not looking at increasing alternative production. I'm not sure. I do know that I should conserve, and I should get back on my bike too. I might not save the planet with those actions, but I might just get healthier and save myself. September 10, 2004 05:41 PM PDT Permalink
Thursday September 09, 2004
Geekification of the Wife
We met a major milestone today in the history of my household. I carried on my first email exchange INSIDE our home with my Wife. Yepp. She was outside in the living room; I was inside the bedroom; and we had an exchange over this upcoming weekend's BBQ menu. Unbelievable. Separated by just 50 ft of hallway and a door, and she emails me. When I asked her why she didn't just come and talk to me, she looked at me seriously. "Sometimes, I talk to you while you're on the computer and you don't hear a word I'm saying. It's like words go in one ear and out the other. With email, I know you'll actually read my message."
Her words were very factual and contained no hint of condescension. And for the most part, she was right. However, I did have to make a correction in her statement. When she talks to me, words technically don't go in one ear and out the other. Rather, then enter one ear, then get redirected to /dev/null. I try to explain that I may look Chinese and have two-byte font and 2D graphics support for fancy Kanji bitmaps in my brain, but really, my audio processors are geared for English and the buffers don't work like an Infinite Stack. They work more like a limited sized FIFO; when the buffer fills up, the first stuff in is the first to get tossed.
She's only beginning to grock all this and optimize the use of my interfaces. Why she married me and how we even have kids can seem like a mystery, especially to my Sisters. They just don't understand. My Wife and I secretly have a Wireless Psychic connection to each other and it transcends the need a lot of times for verbal comms. In fact a great example of our psychic connection was demonstrated earlier in January when we did our taxes. After seeing just how much TurboTax said we were paying in Federal and State Income Taxes, we looked at each other, nodded and said out loud at the same time, "Better vote Republican this November." This wireless psychic feature in our relationship is great for playing mind games with our young kids. In fact, Psychically, she's telling me now that it's almost 8pm and I need to come home...but stop at Costco to pick up a case of bottled water and some diet soda....
Admittedly, it's been a longer journey for her to reach this point than it has been for me. She came from a pretty deprived childhood in working class San Francisco. Only one computer in the house. An old Packard Bell running Win95 with 16 MB of RAM and a not-so-whopping 1 GB of disk. The family had put quite a bit of investment into that computer in the old days, paying almost $1800 back in 1995 to get one with a 28.8kbps modem, even though they technically didn't subscribe to any ISP accounts. She was still living at home, studying part-time at SF City College and working full time to support her family and their Outlet Mall shopping bills up through the mid-late 90's when we met and I pulled her out of that barbaric, single node standalone computing environment (and I dare say calling it a "computing environment" was a stretch).
Her migration from San Francisco south to the Silicon Valley after meeting me introduced her to new computing environments and network technologies she had never imagined. These were her first experiences of virus free, stable, and long lived computing and the ability to use computers in a different room without actually sitting in front of those computers. I remember one of her earliest questions to me when she first came over, "You mean the computer doesn't shutdown and reboot after every few hours?" At that time, we hadn't established our wireless psychic link, so I was quite confused by her question. But she elaborated. "I thought the computers automatically crashed every few hours to save power and this gets you to stand up and walk around a bit; You know... get a cup of coffee while the system is rebooting."
It's hard for anyone at Sun to think of the benefits of a computer crashing. But evidently, my wife said that they talked with other relatives who suffered the same problems and most agreed that lock-ups, freezes, and crashes weren't really a problem ; just get into the habit of hitting Alt-F-Save, or Ctrl-F, or Alt-F-X-tab-tab-tab-S or whatever keystrokes each app used to save stuff to the disk. And when the system finally locks up, just hit the smaller button on thre front panel to reset and reboot. Plus they all agreed that a crashed computer saves power. And if she hadn't said that all so seriously in Cantonese, I would have died laughing or suffered major knee trauma from slapping it too hard. :-)
It didn't matter what her computing pedigree was in the past. I've always been tolerant of the lesser privileged, unlike some snobs I know. So, I useradd'ed her first NIS/YP Solaris/SPARC-CDE login account in 1997. She then mounted her first NFS home directory in 1998. And she got her first Linux login in 1999. But between school and work, she rarely leveraged the network, nearly missing the whole dotCOM explosion. But not all aspects of network computing were lost on her. She quickly figured out that computers eat power and generate heat. Great in the winter. But too hot in the summer. We got into some pretty heated arguments, and we spent quite a bit of money getting some portable Toyotomi airconditioning units. Still, I remember the times she said some pretty mean words - almost fighting words. "And Honey," she said then, "your machines are noisy and eat $25/month each in electricity. Maybe you should run Windows. At least they won't be running all the time and so our electricity bill won't be so high." I really can't express the level of frustration I experienced then with such statements. If we weren't married, I'd probably have broken up with her over such words.
Meanwhile, her family, still with the ancestral hardware suffered a set of losses. In late 1998, a friend of the family got the mistaken idea of upgrading the old Win95 box with a bootleg copy of Win98. The machine could barely run after the upgrade, and after spending quite the sum of money to increase the memory to 64 MB, the system crashed and corrupted the disk drive. The family was without computing power for nearly 3 months until they could reinstall the bootleg OS, but in early 1999, just as my wife learned the joys of Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps for directions and taught her family to use these web tools, their Canon Bubble Jet printer suffered a sudden and mysterious death.
Months went by and nothing happened. A year passed. One day, a baby shower invitation arrived for her family in SF. But not by Postal Mail - Instead, by Email. Attached was a PDF doc with graphics image of the Map and directions. The invitation was to a Chinese Ginger and Red Egg Party at Ming's Restaurant in Palo Alto. It was an unusual invitation already in that the venue was a fabulous Chinese restaurant outside of the usual venues of SF's various Chinese dominated districts. Legend had it that Ming's was located in a spatious lot east of Hwy 101 in beautiful and placid Palo Alto. Legend also had it that the food was quite good there, as good as any in the City. And Legend also said that Ming's had several hundred parking spaces and they were all free! But none of the SF relatives knew how to get there (most didn't even know how to drive), and most not having email meant that this invitation needed to be printed out and distributed.
Well, I took responsibility for fixing this broken computing resources, because mainly, I was the one responsible for sending out the invitation. You see, my Son was about to turn 2 months and all the Chinese almanacs said that that particular upcoming weekend was good karma for a Ginger and Red Egg party. We were over at my Inlaws for dinner midweek prior to the ginger party, because my wife's Mum is just a fabulous cook, better than my wife, even. And I had some Linux install CDs that just arrived in the mail from Cheapbytes.COM, a fairly new online company reselling various Linux distros at rock-bottom prices. The Inlaws' computer was defunct and had no data worth saving. So I wiped it clean of Win98 and migrated them to Linux. Everything just installed and worked. The modem, a controller-based USRobotics OEM model worked just fine and showed up like a normal 16550A UART. And the printer driver did support the older Canon bubblejet, but indeed the unit was dead and still we couldn't print the invitation.
While I may have painted a dismal picture of my wife's family, they weren't complete retro-grouches. They actually had Cable TV and two phone lines. The second was used as the fax/data line. My wife's younger sister had a student dialup account from the local State U. After setting up kppp to dial out, PPP worked like a charm. However I still hadn't figured out a way to print (with exception of buying a new printer), until a fortuitous phone call came in from Hong Kong. The relatives had been trying to fax something since very early in the morning their time, but the fax line was busy. Could someone check the fax machine? This gave me an idea. If all they needed was a semi-fine resolution fax with directions and map, then we could just send the image as a print-job to the fax-queue. And so with that, I setup a fax print spooler and sent the print jobs to the fax machines. And with that setup, we reached one of major milestones. My wife realized that evening that, indeed, the network was the computer, and the network could be anything - a simple phone line or a fast ethernet connection. Reliable client-server computing could lead to a happy family. Plus, we saved a little bit of money for now by not having to buy some new colour inkjet printer.
Still, we've come further over the last 7 years. We started webhosting our own family site and email out of our house in 1999. At first, it was noisy, hot and expensive. But with the advent of integrated chipsets, Linux and Solaris for x86, the cost of bandwidth and domain registration falling, and availability of low power and quiet systems, the computing landscape has evolved to make it much more ubiquitous at home, and with the whole family. In 2002, I learned about a new board form factor called mini-ITX with VIA's C3 low power processor. I spent around $400 and built a quiet server/desktop/router all-in-one system. And not long after, I built 3 more similar boxes that, today, save me about $15/month each in power bills. It wasn't long before one of the systems made its way to our bedroom. How many wives out there can say that they welcomed their husbands computers into their bedrooms?
Well, my wife can say that. I've "geekified" her. Hopefully, there's no turning back. September 09, 2004 08:07 PM PDT Permalink
Wednesday September 08, 2004 Phone Answering Image
In my youthful days, I was much more eager to please and be responsive, so I'd answer every phone call and voicemail religiously. I'd be at work by 7:30am and leave at 9pm. No girlfriend, no wife, no worries about greasy hair and personal hygiene except on days when customers or other colleagues were coming into the office for a face-to-face. Heck, we had vending machines and they carried Pork Rinds and Mountain Dew. What else did a single guy software guy need? But that's all changed, now that I'm married and more senior. Old age, wisdom and vanity are setting in. I'm forced to drink Diet Coke now. All the caffeine, without the sugar. In addition, I now have twill cotton, pleated front slacks (a.k.a. Dockers) hanging neatly in my closet. How my wife knows and finds my size is a mystery; however, old habits die hard and the slacks remain hanging in the closet because I still wear shorts to work most days, although my wife has figured out there are Dockers shorts too, like the kind Tiger Woods might wear if Levi's sponsored him.
In my seasoned experience, I've learned from other senior engineers to stop making myself seem too available. Otherwise, it might cheapen the way people perceive my value, and I wouldn't want that. Never mind that some poor fellow engineer elsewhere might be suffering kernel panic convulsions or performing rituals of self-flagellation at some ISV site so as to appear to be working on the problem, but I've learned that those guys can sweat a little and maybe they'll solve the problem on their own too. Because, heck, what would we know about that particular panic or crash dump? It's been so long since some of us have slung code or hacked UNIX, that most of us have forgotten the basics of looking at a crash dump by hacking the Temp or Swap FS. Some of us don't even know that we reboot a system after a crash, and while we wait for the system to recover from the crash, we pray that we have enough space in /var for the dump. Why, because the crash goes there. "What? You mean they moved the thing into /var/crash? When the heck did that happen?" is a common reaction by some real old guys that are still stuck on Solaris 2.5.1. But, you have to give us old guys some credit. Some of us have gotten really good at making slideware and using every known font and graphics transition invented by the StarOffice team. And another thing we do, is ration our phone calls - doling them out only to those that are worthy.
But I've always wondered who exactly would make a worthy caller. My Director? My Veep? Surely they are worthy, because I wouldn't want to make them unhappy by my unresponsiveness. But what about the rest of the world. I'd hazard a bet that most folks are like me and just wing it. My filters are driven quite frequently by my current mood or train of thought. I'm prone to answering even trivial calls when I'm meandering over a boring roadmap presentation or in a boring non-technical conference call. In fact, it's quite common for me to actually put the original caller on hold and take this new call coming in - whomever it's from. Never mind that my HOLD button might be pre-programmed with the latest lite-soft-baby-rock elevator music that the other 2 dozen callers will now hear, or that the mute button actually isN'T engaged on the desk phone if a call comes in on my cell. It's gotta be worthy, whatever that's supposed to be.
I suppose we could play psychological games with colleagues and managers by selectively not answering calls. For example, if lots of opportunities exist in other groups or outside, do we purposely not answer calls, just to get our management worried that we're a flight risk? Couple that with wearing long slacks, dress socks and penny loafers and suddenly, management might think you've planning on jumping orgs or at least interviewing. Nah. I would do it more often just as a joke, but having 4 servers in the office with a late summer heat wave outside mandates this dress code: shorts, t-shirts and birkenstock sandals.
Sometimes I wonder if this isn't a sad state of affairs that I need to spend so much brain power just on the subtle task of phone call screening. It sure seemed a lot easier in the old days when I answered the phone whenever I was at my desk, or answered voicemail as promptly as I could when I checked my messages. Helping others solve their problems seemed a lot simpler too, even if there were lots of calls and it seemed like drinking from a firehose. At least the firehose quenched some inner thirst for integrity and engineering passion that drinking this Image Kool-aid can't.
Sifting the Wheat from the Chaff
NOW HIRING. The signs are up and down the street. And even internally, while some folks are being RIF'd, we're hiring too. And to do due diligence, I need to sink a lot of time into sitting down and screening the half or full dozen candidates for just the one job opening.
And here, it's impossible for one person to do all the interviewing. But with teamwork, it may be possible to divide and conquer. And that's where our team of interviewers has learned to optimize on each others' skills. Some folks are masters of the Personality. They can size up the candidate and tell if they have the emotional and personal skills needed for our line of work. Others are masters of the resume. They can pick out inconsistencies and exaggerations in 30 minutes or less. Others are masters of the background check. Has this person committed a felony? Do his/her references provide supporting data? Did he/she graduate from the claimed school?
My part in the interview process is the technical evaluation. Having performed probably over 200 interviews in my 9 years, I've built up a way that I think can pretty much guage if someone has the technical resourcefulness to handle a job here at Sun. I'm no good at personality assessments because I don't concern myself with emotional fit. My goals are simple: Folks who get a thumbs up from me have a pretty good chance of technical success at Sun, and hopefully if I'm doing it right, we're always increasing our average IQ with a hire and not going the other way.
So what's my approach? On the outside, it looks pretty easy. I ask a set of questions that cover 5 technical areas: OS, Programming, Networking, DataBases, and General Problem Solving. Each area has its own score, and I evaluate one last area which is communications, based on my overall impression on how easily I could communicate the question and that the candidate could understand and relate questions or answers back to me. Certainly, correctness to the questions asked counts significantly in the score, as well as approach to answering the question. Most of the questions I ask could be answered in a sentence or less; some have more than one correct answer. The interview could be as short as 15 minutes if the candidate is so technically superior that he/she "Walks on water." Or it could go over an hour and end up badly if the candidate just isn't technically qualified.
Ironically, the questions I ask are actually quite simple. But from these simple questions I can effectively gleen a candidate's Self-Reliance, Current Expertise Level, and Computer IQ. The self-reliance I'm looking for is in fact an Emersonian self-reliance. It shows itself by the level of trivial tips and tricks one acquires in order to maximize one's own productivity with minimal effort. Most of these tips and tricks are learned either by practical on-the-job problem solving or late at night hacking on a home computer that runs some minimally support UNIX distribution. But knowledge gained in such self-struggle is often the deepest and best learned, unlikely to ever be forgotten. Those who have the Emersonian bug can't and won't let themselves give up. They won't quit trying to figure out something until the cold pizza and Diet Mountain Dew wears a pseudo-ulcer in the their gutts and they have no choice except to run off to the washroom and seek relief via one orifice or another. But they always come back and eventually master whatever they were seeking before. That kind of tenacity is quite desirable in working with complex technologies where we become the last line of support for our partners. They count on us to be the final authority on technology.
Time, however, is an enemy. It never stops marching forward. And so we must also identify the brighter and more gifted individuals who have the aptitude to learn fast and work fast. Afterall, as tenacious as we might be, if we're too slow-witted, we won't be able to keep up with our own pace of technical evolution; i.e. the dumb get dumber. Too often, there are also much bigger companies out there already entrenched with their global services guys at a partner's site. They are all neatly dressed in suits, pressed white shirts, ties, and wing-tips. Sometimes, the lone Sun engineer faces a flock of 50 pairs of wingtips and must engage in a battle of wits and implementation. The Kung Fu from the One Sun engineer must be stronger than the Kung Fu of those 50. And such Kung Fu isn't solely learned; It's talent already inside that we happen to discover and unleash. So the interview process must try to get candidates to reveal their resourcefulness; get folks to think on their feet.
For those of you who've survived a thesis or dissertation defence against a committee of "slaughterhouse" professors, you'll be familiar with the overall feel of the kind of interview atmosphere I try to create. Only, I'm no where near as harsh as my dissertation committee, and I try to set the mood and complete my line of questioning in no more then 45 minutes rather than 4 hours. But, like the Professors, I like to start with simple questions about underlying fundamentals.
For example, something so simple as moving a file system in UNIX from one machine to another can reveal a lot about any candidate. It's such a basic skill it has to be in every UNIX engineer's standard repetoire. And there are multiple ways of doing it; some being more robust than others. How each person does it can reveal whether they were a user or system admin; whether they had root or not; whether they shipped software source or packaged binaries, or even at which decade they entered and started using/learning UNIX. Such a question can also be pretty humbling to someone who claims to be a senior engineer but has to finally admit that he's never really transferred a filesystem in his life. He always called the ServiceDesk and had them move it for him instead. Such an admission is usually a major ding against the Self-Reliance score I'm looking for. In addition, such a statement casts all claims of software development experience into doubt. For surely, anyone here who's ever had to do any software coding or porting has inevitably run into disk shortages, disk errors, disk migrations, disk backup, and a plethora of other technical issues and this must have forced them to transfer filesystems. Either the candidate never did as many projects as claimed on the resume, or really was not a main contributor to the projects listed.
Another CV-Resume-Checkbox-Line-Item that I see a lot is expertise as a Java programmer. Many people claim it. Very few exhibit real expertise at Java coding that would make me feel comfortable about having them help a Partner architect a high-performance Object-cache based on SoftReferences. Here too, I can ask a simple question that can then reveal a lot of understanding and practical experience with Java programming. For example, I like to ask if:
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {}
defines a valid entry point method for a Java application. I remember one person I interviewed smiled and quickly answered, "Yes. I use this all the time. It's a shortcut so I can prototype some functionality without the hassles of all the try-catch blocks and curly braces." Bullseye! Exactly the answer I was looking for. He knew the answer because he had practical experience and he liked to discover shortcuts. I usually follow-up and ask why it's okay or not okay to add the clause throws Exception in the method declaration. Folks who program a lot know that the JVM ultimately catches all runtime Exceptions and the default behaviour is to stop execution, dump a stack trace and exit. So adding the clause is okay. For folks with less practical experience, or who've primarily played with Java not through source code, but through an IDE that autogenerated 90+% of their code for them, they wouldn't be so sure of the answer. The key again is I'm looking for self-reliance and some quick-wittedness. I'm seeking out whether the candidate ever did so much prototyping, especially for Java network and IO code, that he got fed up with Exception code blocks and the encumberance of code frameworks the IDEs enforce and was curious enough to try this little bypass to simplify his life. Curiously, among the 4 top Java coders that I've worked with inside my department, we all cheated this way at one time or another and we all discovered this trick independently.
I've got a whole list of other questions I ask. But I wouldn't want to give away all the goods in a public forum. Someday I might try to formulate this and write some web application to capture all the cool interview questions each one of our engineers asks candidates during interviews and what each interviewer should look for in the answer and what possible follow-ups are available. When that day comes, the technical interview should become a piece of cake for any interviewer, technical or not, and so they won't need me any longer. After all, I've always thought of the technical interview as the easiest and most objective part in candidate selection. The hard part is figuring out if that someone is actually possessed by the spirit of a deceased, volatile whack-nut gun collector who, in his former life, was a U.S. Postal worker in a cold, northern Midwest State. That's why we need top management talent for these interviews, too. September 08, 2004 05:43 PM PDT Permalink
