alanc @ sun.com

Too many dry eyes in the house

I've been falling further and further behind on blogging for a while - maybe I'll catch up someday with the cache of posts I have stored in my brain half written (there's a new issue of the X11 DTrace companion, a post on the recent X server security fixes and MIT-SHM regression they introduced, several posts for the OpenSolaris elections which are too late now, and a post or two on X in Indiana bouncing around in there).

This post on the other hand, may actually be early, since Sjögren's Syndrome Awareness Month isn't until April, but I'm posting now since the 2008 Salt Lake City Sjögren's Walkabout is this coming Saturday, March 29, 2008. My mother is one of the organizers, and my sister was going to be one of the walkers until she broke her leg last month. I'm still pledging money to the Sjögren's Syndrome Foundation for both of them though.

For those who haven't heard of Sjögren's — and that included me a few years ago — the About.com article What is Sjögren's Syndrome? and the Wikipedia page on Sjögren's Syndrome can tell you far more than I can. If you're a female who has been noticing problems with dry eyes or mouth, or you know one, you probably want to read more about it, as those can be early symptoms of something far more serious. The foundation estimates 4 million Americans suffer from the disease, and that women are approximately 90% of those.

Even as widespread as that is, it still sounds like one of the random auto-immune disorders they throw out every week on an episode of House and then rule out and you never hear of again. For my wife and I though, it became a permanent part of our lives several years ago when coincidentally both my mother and my wife's mother were diagnosed with it, and they became active in trying to raise awareness of the syndrome in their communities (as you can see in those two articles).

While they've had to adjust to the dryness in many little ways, such as always carrying a water bottle and really appreciating a gift of saliva-inducing Xylitol gum, the constant tiredness is what has really affected them most. They were both busy professionals (a pediatrician and a dental hygenist), active in professional organizations and volunteering in their communities, but have had to cut back as they just didn't have the energy to keep doing it all any more.

Our bodies are mostly water, so you can imagine the problems that happen when various parts start drying up, and that's where the real dangers of the syndrome come in, as the body's immune system starts attacking other systems. While there are treatments available for the effects on some parts of the body, there is no cure, and the Sjögren's Syndrome Foundation is devoted both to research and to spreading the word so that sufferrers can be diagnosed earlier and begin treatments sooner.

So what can you do? If you want to join me in donating, you can do so at either my mom's firstgiving.com page or directly on the foundation's web page. If not, just remember what you've read here the next time you hear a woman near you complain her eyes or mouth are always so much dryer than they used to be and pass it on.

Posted at 01:12PM Mar 26, 2008 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

Kinda like microblogging meets slow-mo IRC...

I was trying to explain twitter to my wife and the best I could come up with is “kinda like microblogging meets slow-mo IRC,” which didn't make any sense to her. After a bit more trying, “like a web forum with short posts” made more sense to her, but my personal dislike of web forums kept me from thinking of them like that. Fortunately more prolific and more widely read bloggers than I have spent a lot of time describing twitter and it's impact, so you can go read them for a better description.

Twitter is starting to gain popularity at Sun too, both as a new communications method to explore, and as a Solaris-hosted Web 2.0 service. They even have recently been a example of using DTrace to improve the performance of their Ruby-on-Rails platform.

So now you can also find me at http://twitter.com/alanc . I can't promise anything profound or in-depth in 140 characters, but it should get updated a bit more often than this long-form blog.

Posted at 10:23PM Jun 10, 2007 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

Military usage of FOSS

Sergey, while the thought of software I'm writing being potentially used in military applications to kill others is not pleasant, before you propose a license change to ban military use, have you considered how much they've given back to open source software? Will you be giving up all software that was funded by various national Defense Departments? Start by dropping TCP/IP from your life and let us know how it goes from there.

Posted at 10:26AM Dec 21, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  |  Comments[2]

Unique?

HowManyOfMe.com

There is: 1 person with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

This site claims that my name is unique in the United States, at least based on their interpretation of Census Department statistics, though I've been asked before in blog comments if I'm “the Alan Coopersmith that co-authored Quadpan with Guppy while at Lockheed in the 80s? A Brown math PhD?” (No, I'm not - I was in grade school and high school in the 80's and have only a Bachelor's degree from Berkeley.)

Google mainly finds just me, though it did turn up an “Allan Coopersmith” who was issued a patent for a dental invention.

The other statistics offered me about my name:

• There are 305,968 people in the U.S. with the first name Alan.
• Statistically the 204th most popular first name. (tied with 2 other first names)
• More than 99.9 percent of people with the first name Alan are male.
• There are 1,050 people in the U.S. with the last name Coopersmith.
• Statistically the 25874th most popular last name. (tied with 1020 other last names)

Somehow the gender breakdown doesn't surprise me, though I've been seeing female variants like “Alana” pop up more and more on TV shows and such lately.

[Technorati Tags: names, howmanyofme]

Posted at 11:18PM Oct 30, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  |  Comments[4]

Chuck Norris' fists are the ultimate unbreakable two-factor authentication.

I was wondering earlier this week what would happen if computer geeks had their own version of “Chuck Norris Facts”, and if so, who would they be about: Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs? Now I know - Bruce Schneier Facts. I have to admit I don't get a lot of them - not sure if they're just not funny or if I'm not enough of a crypto geek to get them. I do think that the top ten are some of the best. I especially liked “Most people use passwords. Some people use passphrases. Bruce Schneier uses an epic passpoem, detailing the life and works of seven mythical Norse heroes.”, “Though a superhero, Bruce Schneier disdains the use of a mask or secret identity as 'security through obscurity'.” and “Bruce Schneier once decrypted a box of AlphaBits.”

So that got me wondering who else could be immortalized this way. The Sun security commmunity could start our own Alec Muffet Facts for instance (“Alec Muffet can crack LiveJournal user passwords just by knowing whose ex-boyfriend wants to stalk her blog, but if you ask him to, he'll change yours instead.”), though we'd probably have to have a long discussion on the internal security mailing list about whether it is too soon to make jokes about what happens when you run Crack on your own ribcage.

A wider swath of the Sun community might have fun with Jonathan Schwartz Facts (“Cutting Jonathan's ponytail doesn't make him weaker, but would make his blog rank drop.”). Perhaps the Solaris community would be able to create a good list of facts about the DTrace team. (“Brian's DTrace probes can observe the state of Schroedinger's cat, but he won't tell because he prefers leaving it as a teaching example.”)

On second thought, maybe this was a question best left unanswered...

[Technorati Tags: geek humor]

Posted at 12:25AM Sep 02, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

Download these songs

As a close, personal friend of Al [1], I was priviledged to get notified by e-mail this week that the first single from his new album is now available for FREE download. Of course, because this is Weird Al, the song is Don't Download This Song, a send up of Internet music sharing, Napster, Kazaa, and the RIAA. While I enjoyed it, I still prefer the release from a couple months ago - You're Pitiful, a parody of James Blunt's Beautiful song, which was blocked from inclusion in the album by Blunt's label.

[1] It must be true - the e-mail said so...though anyone can become a close personal friend by signing up on WeirdAl.com.

[Technorati Tags: humor, Weird Al]

Posted at 01:22AM Aug 27, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

Just like running Windows

I'm in Ottawa for the 2006 Desktop Developer's Conference. I got here last night, about 3 hours later than originally planned - the first time our plane pulled out of the gate in Chicago they noticed a big crack in a tire on the front of the plane that they couldn't see during the pre-flight check because it was on the part of the tire touching the ground. A quick return to the gate was called for, and we sat on the plane for about 15 minutes while they jacked up the front and popped on a spare.

Our second try at takeoff we made it all the way out to the taxiway and were next in line for takeoff, but then sat and sat. Eventually the pilot got on the intercom and said that due to the previous plane “using too much power” our plane's on-board computer was malfunctioning. (I'm not quite sure how that happens - was everyone on the other plane pointing their portable electronic devices at us?) Another trip back to the gate so the maintenance crew could get on board and scratch their heads over it. One of them must have been an MCSE, because the next announcement was that they were going to try to fix the computer by power cycling it. And since it was so integrated into the plane, that meant shutting down the power to the entire aircraft, leaving us in the dark for a couple of minutes and then booting the plane back up.

Fortunately, the reboot fixed the problem, and the third time we left the gate we finally got to take off.

Posted at 10:25PM Jul 17, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  |  Comments[3]

MP3 Mirth

Now that Planet Sun is up again, I can be two weeks behind the rest of the world in noticing that Norm Walsh pointed to two pages with amusing MP3s - I liked the Code Monkey song better than the "Dance Monkey Dance" monologue, but found more amusement in the other routines by Ernest Cline, such as Nerd Porn Auteur (in which the ideal woman wants to make love until it's time to watch Battlestar Galactica) and his riff on the classic 80's show Airwolf, which I spent much time watching while doing homework in high school. Of course, the talk on working in Tech Support hit home, having spent too much time answering user questions in past jobs and having a number of friends still working in the tech support centers of various companies.

[Technorati Tags: humor]

Posted at 12:10AM May 09, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

ALS on ER this week

This week's episode of ER, featuring James Woods as a patient with ALS, particularly caught my attention for two reasons:

1) The flashbacks illustrating how his condition worsened over the years provided a better illustration of ALS (better known in the US as “Lou Gehrig's Disease”) than I could remember seeing before. My grandmother died of ALS when I was only 2, so I don't remember much about it - my knowledge of ALS growing up was mainly knowing it was why my grandfather was always one of my biggest sponsors in the MS Society read-a-thon in grade school.

2) It's the first time I'd actually seen an on-screen keyboard similar to the GOK on-screen keyboard for GNOME used with an eye tracker as it was designed for. I've seen Peter give demos using a mouse and most of our testing when we worked on the parts of X that had to interact with it was done in the same way. (I was amazed at how fast he seemed to be able to enter long complex phrases with only his eyes considering how clumsy and slow we are using it with full use of a mouse, but that is probably a mix of portraying familiarity with the technology and dramatic license to keep the flow of the dialogue moving.)

[Technorati Tags: ALS, ER, accessibility.]

Posted at 12:57AM Feb 05, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

Now that's a zoom lens...

Google's updated satellite images let you really get in the action - you can even see a football game in progress in the Cal stadium or the Chicago skyscrapers leaning on each other where they pasted together photos taken from different angles.

[Technorati Tags: Cal, Berkeley, Google.]

Posted at 11:08PM Jan 25, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

Where did December go?

Almost a month since my last blog post, though I didn't mean to go that long. I planned to write more about the Solaris Desktop Summit, but didn't. There were more good talks from people like Rod and Bart, who I'm fortunate to be able to grab in the hall for a chat most any time, but most of the JDS team members were getting their first in-depth time with them. Fortunately, while I failed to write more, other people there like Glynn, John, and Brian covered it well in their blogs.

I did miss much of one of the days of the summit for meetings back in the Menlo Park office, including interviewing a candidate to fill the opening in our group. Since the person we were interviewing had an interest in working for an "open source company" I brought him with me back to the summit, which was an interesting experience. In some ways, it was like a massive group interview, getting a lot of people he'd be working with to talk to him and for him to get a better sense of our place in the company and who we work with. Unfortunately we haven't been able to fill the position yet, and are back to sorting through resumés this week. (If you're an X hacker looking for a job at a old school Unix vendor evolving into a new school open source company, it's not too late to drop me a line.)

After the summit was done, it was time to work with the rest of the X.Org crew to finish up the X11R6.9 & 7.0 releases, which I was also going to blog about, but didn't find time to do. We got them polished off and officially released on December 21. It was three months later than originally scheduled, but the foundation laid in the 7.0 modular release should make it easier to keep future releases on schedule and easier to package and maintain in the future. Thanks to everyone who helped or sent in words of thanks and congratulations afterwards. Sun's “Chief Open Source Officer” even held up my role as X.Org release manager as one of the examples of ways Sun is actively supporting Linux by contributing to projects like X.Org, GNOME, and of course OpenOffice.Org.

After all that, I was ready to go offline for the week-long year-end holiday Sun US employees get off from Christmas to New Year's, and so didn't catch up on any missing blogs then either. The closest I came to anything productive that week was working with my wife on both preparing to move our spare-time project website to a faster server/new ISP, since the old 300Mhz server it's been on the last five years is really showing it's age, and on building the 1500+ piece 3-D puzzle of San Francisco she bought for Christmas. (Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of ours assembled, so the one here is from the puzzle maker's web site.) Of course, the puzzle assembly was done by putting together a lot of little modules and then rolling it up all the pieces into a big interlocking finished product, so even there I couldn't completely escape the echoes of the X.org modularization process.

So now it's January, and I'm back at work, rested and refreshed and with enough projects on my "Todo Now" list to keep me busy all month long, including (in no particular order):

• Checking in the X11R6.9 final release to Solaris Nevada (done today!) and then backporting to Solaris 10 Update 2. (See this note I wrote to the xwin-discuss at opensolaris.org mailing list for details on the X11R6.9 & 7.0 plans for Solaris.)
• Helping the Solaris x86 Platform Drivers team get the nVidia Accelerated Graphics Driver for Solaris integrated into the Solaris install.
• Working with the Solaris Trusted Extensions (formerly Trusted Solaris) X team to take the XTSol multi-level security X extension port they did to Xorg 6.8.2 and make it ready to integrate with our Xorg 6.9 builds and port it to the Xorg 7.0 modular builds in preparation for releasing it as open source.
• Finishing up the work to release the Solaris Xorg modifications, build scripts, and packaging to the OpenSolaris X Window System Community.
• Doing the dtlogin and xscreensaver pieces of the "CoolStart" project for Solaris you'll see more about in a bit.
• Watching Stuart go crazy getting everything ready for next month's X.Org Developer's Conference in Santa Clara.

I almost called this post Wake Me Up When December Ends, but then while radio-channel-surfing in the car on the way home caught the end of the song whose title I'd be twisting, followed by a sound I think might be one of the signs of the apocalypse: "You've been listening to Green Day on the John Tesh Radio Show" and I couldn't bring myself to do it any more.

[Technorati Tags: Xorg, X11, Solaris, Solaris Trusted Extensions, OpenSolaris.]

Posted at 11:43PM Jan 05, 2006 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

Cylons using Sun Ray technology?

Craig asked a bunch of questions yesterday as he was trying to catch up on the new Battlestar Galactica. I posted a comment with some answers, but I realized this evening while making dinner that I missed a point that would really appeal to Craig - the Cylons are, like Sun Rays, ultra-thin clients. If the hardware is damaged beyond repair, the memories and consciousness (as much as a cybernetic being can be said to have one) is instantly transferred to a replacement hardware client. You don't even need to plug in a smartcard to the new Cylon body - it's automatic session migration.

Of course the problem with this is, it puts Sun on the wrong side of this galactic battle - for in the universe of the modern BSG, the network isn't just the computer, it's the very fabric of the Cylon civilization. Our ragtag team of survivors trying to escape genocide at the hands of the Cylons, however, is led by a ship designed to be completely non-networked, with all systems as isolated as possible to reduce the damage that can be done by a network attack. Oh well, you can't win them all (though the highly networked Cylons seem to be winning a lot of them so far).

(So who is going to make a back-and-forth red LED display add-on for the Sun Ray 170 so we can all have our own personal Cylons? It could even be functional - make the speed vary with the amount of bandwidth being used by the Sun Ray or the packet loss rate for remote deployments.)

[Technorati Tags: Battlestar Galactica, Sun Ray]

Posted at 09:54PM Jul 11, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in General  |  Comments[3]

Tasty bookmarks from del.icio.us and Yahoo

Many of the Sun bloggers have also discovered the social bookmarking site del.icio.us and a bunch have written about it (see for instance blog posts by Claire Giordano, Claire again, Danny Malks, and Bryan Donovan - amazingly, none of them mentioned that the del.icio.us database server is running on a set of Sun dual-opteron machines). I've been using it for a while both to store and share links, and by subscribing to RSS feeds for a couple tags, to discover new links. Having a common place to store links that's available from my laptop, my home computer, my Sun desktops, and any other computers I'm near is very convenient. So when I read about http://de.lirio.us, a del.icio.us clone that was built using the open source Rubric software, I thought it would be great to use it to build a social bookmarking site inside Sun's firewall, to help people organize and share links to the thousands of web sites and pages inside Sun's firewall. It took a couple of months to find enough spare time to do it, but I finally got it all ready last month and sent out e-mail to our internal bloggers e-mail list. (It turns out quite a few people had the same idea, but I was simply the first to get it all put together and tell others about it.)

When I sent out mail about the internal rubric site, one of the responses asked if sites like del.icio.us and de.lirio.us helped when searching for things. At the time I said that it didn't really - it helped me more in discovering sites, saving links for later use from multiple locations/compuers, and sharing links with others. Now though, Yahoo has added an interesting twist which may make social bookmarking more interesting in it's My Web 2.0 Beta, which takes a del.icio.us style tagged/social bookmark service and adds communities of people who share bookmarks, so you can search through the sites bookmarked by the people in your community. Right now it looks like it's limited to a single community per user, your contacts, but if this could be extended to have multiple named communities, such as an OpenSolaris or X.Org community, it could get really interesting.

(BTW, you can find my shared bookmarks on del.icio.us as alanc and on Yahoo My Web 2.0 as adcoopersmith. And the link currently bookmarked more than any other on our internal social bookmarking site? Why, BlastWave of course.)

[Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, de.lirio.us, rubric, social bookmarking, Yahoo ]
[Now playing: The 4400 ]

Posted at 10:24PM Jul 10, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

Acceptance speech

I've had this post sitting in my draft folder for a little over a month now, trying to figure out what to say, so I guess I might as well finish it up or delete it.

A few weeks ago, I was surprised to be called up on stage by John Loiacono in front of a room full of the leaders of Sun's Software division and presented me with the quarterly award for Collaboration for the January-March quarter. That's the quarter Solaris 10 shipped, and I was recognized for work that went into that release, primarily the integration of the Xorg server into Solaris. All I got to say at the time was "Thanks", which is probably best, since as an award for collaboration, I couldn't have earned it without help from my many collaborators, and it would have taken a long time to thank all of them. I'm going to try here, but even still will probably forget someone, and if so I apologize in advance.

The Xorg server project never could have been done without the hard work of the entire X engineering team, our colleagues in the x86 Platform team in LA, the Desktop and x86 Video QA teams in Beijing, and our tireless program manager Ray. And of course, without all the groundwork laid by the contributors to the original X Consortium, the XFree86 Project, and the X.Org Foundation to create the software, we'd have nothing to integrate.

Besides the Xorg server project, the announcement called out several other projects for Solaris: Implementing Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF) support for the xserver, PAM authentication and auditing in xlock, other security support in X, and updating and modernizing the Solaris xserver keyboard and mouse code. The internal Greenline community provided valuable help and suggestions in designing and implementing our SMF services. The xlock work couldn't have been done without the help and advice from Gary and Darren - especially the auditing support which Gary wrote for us. Casper's work on getpeerucred() made the localuser and localgroup X authentication methods possible on Solaris. As for the keyboard and mouse drivers, in large part they built on work done by the USB & PS/2 driver teams to add support for wheel mice, mice that report absolute coordinates, and the "virtual" mouse/keyboard project that's coming soon to handle multiple mice and keyboards seamlessly.

The award itself is an interesting bit of work, described as "Scrapyard Art", which was created by San Jose artist Noreen Rubay. I've posted a photo of it on flickr.

So given all this, what's next? Different types of collaborations, with different groups. I'm one of about a dozen people working on X.Org's Modularization Project. I'm working with the OpenSolaris team to set up the X Window System community on opensolaris.org for the upcoming launch. And in my spare time (yeah, right, like I have any), I've even been working on setting up a clone of del.icio.us inside Sun's firewall, to allow people to share their links to all the useful sites inside the Sun network. But it's getting late, and we've got new episodes of The 4400, The Dead Zone, and McBride on our TiVo, so I'll save the details on those until later.

Posted at 10:52PM Jun 12, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in General  | 

Amusing new google game...

Guess the Google - the game pulls images from a Google image search, and gives you 20 seconds to guess what search term pulled them all. My best score so far is 308 - still quite a bit short of the high score list, and probably helped a bit by a couple repeats of image sets I'd previously guessed correctly.

Posted at 12:05AM May 02, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in General  |  Comments[1]