Frank Hofmann's Weblog Frank Hofmann's Weblog

I wonder who of all the smart people in Sun Labs + Engineering invented the time machine used to achieve this, but it's still great to know we're mentioned in the book of books - Ecclesiastes 2:20

Had a good laugh when stumbling over this one ;-)

Knowledge is power

And power corrupts, as we all know...

Thing is, the 20th century was the era when thinking independent thoughts, experimentation and pursuing knowledge was generally held in high esteem. There have been bitter lapses into totalitarism with horrible consequences of course, whether that'd be Nazism, Stalinism, McCarthy's anti-communism or others. But at all times, scientists, thinkers and do-ers had the possibility to evade politically motivated repression by choosing to go elsewhere - and would be received with open arms. For example, this special case in US immigration rules still allows bypassing visa requirements under certain circumstances. It's reasonable to say that for the most part of the last century, people were encouraged to experiment and research.

If you grew up in the 1970s / 1980s as I did, you might remember the days when your parents took you to that play farm where everyone got a few pieces of wood, hammers, nails plentiful, saws, drills and all sorts of tools to build that soapbox racer. The splinters of wood in your fingers, the throbbing thumb you hit with the hammer just when the last nail should go in or even the little cut when the saw slipped wouldn't bother you. The next day, you'd boldly brave the slope in your Ferrarini until you ran it into an obstable, it'd break and you'd get out all bruised but nonetheless happy. It was all part of the experience. As was, when you were a little older, being caught and fined by local police because you tuned your first motorcycle to go just a little bit faster than what it legally should ...

Or those days when you got to use your elder cousin's chemistry set. Remember what sort of a shock it was when you detonated the first electrolytic gas you made yourself and the bang was far louder than you'd expected ? How your eyes burned before because you got a bit too much of a whiff of the chlorine because you put too much salt into the water ? How your mother pushed back at you when the jeans had another hole etched in from nitric acid ? When you thought it might be a good show trying to get that magnesium strip to ignite in pure oxygen you created by heating permanganate, and it "ignited" a bit too well, blew the flask and the splinters cut your hand ?

Or the physics/electronics sets. Ah, that ozone smell from the home-made tesla generator ! It was a funny thing to throw a charged capacitor over to your unsuspecting friend, and see him dance after he "caught" it. And you got a bad cough when inhaling a bit too much of the fumes the tin solder (which was actually at least half lead anyway) gave off when you did that first circuit board of yours. Not to count the shocks and burns, those times you happened to touch mains power ...

And the computer - a fascinating device. You definitely did explore a bit of programming, typing in the program listings, or even - gasp - "hexcode" from Byte magazine. First you ape it, then you start to understand some of it, and you'd be proud once you've done the first "hack" of your own - even if it was no more than changing some program's startup banner to say "myself was here - gr33t1n95 !". Later at school, or maybe at College/Uni, there was that mythical beast of the network. Sniffing networks to get the teacher's password ... you were sent off for a day for that, but you eventually learned the IPX protocol as well.

Learning by doing - learning about danger by exposing yourself to it

And it was easy to get access to all these things. A good teacher actually noticed when you overstepped the 'care boundaries' and tried to get your hands onto the mercury flask in chemistry lessons (it was so marvellously heavy ...), and took you aside, telling you about the dangers and gave you a book to read about the stuff. Your mom got bothered about the hole in your jeans because that meant you wouldn't value them and wouldn't take care of yourself, not because it was some dangerous chemical substance that did it. Your dad took next week's pocket money when your electrical experiments had blown the flat's main fuse again - but you kept that electronics kit, of course. You'd be told to repaint the neighbour's garage door that got stained from the self-made gunpowder, and instructed to do that sort of thing somewhere else but in the courtyard behind the house. Punishment for my first hack at Uni was very simple - I was forced to become assistant system administrator, and the responsible prof would request progress reports on what sort of audit / penetration tests I did with what results.

But most important of all - you got a feeling of pride from all this. Your parents would smile at you when you told them how much fun that latest experiment was (although you knew better than to tell them it involved explosives), what you had learned. They'd tell you how proud they were of you because the teacher had put a special remark in your half-term report saying your interest in sciences/math/computing went beyond what's normally being taught. When you came back from playing football all bruised and battered, the question that mattered was whether your team had won it, and you'd beam in spite of the pains.

To sum it all up: Anything remotely interesting involved certain dangers. Not even the girls liked it if they'd be told off "go doing girls stuff" when there'd be the daring exploit that they wanted to be part of. Finding out where the boundaries between experienced, seemingly careless activity and recklessness lie was an essential part of late teens and young adulthood. It laid the basics for the study of sciences, math or computing that eventually got you where you are today. Most important, you weren't reproached for the pursuit of knowledge - you were reproached for having forgotten to take care when you did overstep. It was simply accepted that minor accidents would happen, and they were too insignificant to fret about.

The nanny system

Enter the 21st century. We've come to a state now where experimentation and pursuit of knowledge is considered a danger. To yourself - and your parents could decide to sue your teacher because of the existance of a flask of mercury at school, instead of giving thanks for telling you about the dangers involved with such things. To your parents, because the landlord might want to sue them for keeping dangerous substances at home since your chemistry kit contains sodium bicarbonate. You're a public enemy if you know anything about explosives, or worse, have actually detonated something self-made in the local park. If your friend happens to be Turkish, you're definitely a terrorist threat. You're a danger to the world, an official criminal, if you sniff network packets, no matter their content, and performing a portscan on your neighbours unsecured wireless network could get you jailed since he'll sue you for "hacking" if you tell him how insecure his configuration is. Hey, even your sports teacher could get into trouble if you came home exhausted, because your parents might sue since he dared to push you to the brink of collapse.

Don't authorities and parents see where this leads to ? It discourages experimentation, creativity and independent thinking if everything not predefined in a rulebook, not written down in a set of guidelines or explicitly sanctioned by the law will lead to a punishment likening a harmless activity to a heinous crime against humanity. With this mindset, noone can really claim to be surprised if the interest in technical occupations and scientific research is going down. If you are not allowed to feel proud about knowledge you acquired in a nontrivial and maybe even somewhat dangerous way, but instead are issued a behavioural order or even a criminal record, would you want to continue experimenting ? Eventually, even the biggest curiosity will be curbed. And of course, what's worse, even if you get support from your parents or teachers, you'll eventually run into legal pitfalls because some laws have been issued marking things as criminal activity that are anything but. And you can't go anywhere. The whole world seems to have fallen for that "security" prank, ban everything that's potentially dangerous.

At the same time, authorities and business leaders claim to be short of engineering and research talent. I do genuinely think they deserve it. And they're not short enough of it quite yet. Because a lawyer's salary is orders of magnitudes above that of a researcher, developer or teacher. And because companies still haven't learned the 40-year-old lesson from the mythical man month that the biggest demotivator to engineers is to define how to work instead of what to work on, and give career paths and prospects to managers that engineers can only ever dream about.

I genuinely hope that our society will get back to its roots, and encourage young people to experiment - because experimentation is the necessary first step to innovation. An overregulated environment that discourages experimentation by meticulously defining every rule of how things are to be done, where the only innovation explicitly encouraged is the one that defines a new set of rules for something that used to be unregulated, such an environment is doomed to stagnate.

And I do hope that Sun management will recognize the same. We don't need business processes that outline the correct way to perform every tiny step of any small item of work. We've come to be what we are because we dared to experiment, we dared to make mistakes. Rules made to prevent making mistakes can easily overshoot and stifle innovation.

About blogging ...

Blogging is a bit like writing a diary, and in fact many people just use a blog for exactly this purpose these days. Why don't I ?

Strangely enough, although I'm what most people would comfortably call a "computer geek" I'm still very conservative in my own use of technology. I do positively hate mobile phones, for the simple reason that they're providing so many features that I don't want to use, with no simple way to reconfigure the menu structure in such a way that it suits my taste and shows only the options/menu items that I actually want to use. In that sense, I do understand Apple's success with the iPod - and I'd never get a video iPod or a mobile phone with integrated radio and media player. I want a dedicated, targeted device that's efficient and simple at what it does (if it's shiny - the better), not an egg-laying, milk-giving woolly flying pig.

It's a bit similar with blogging. When you meet me, you might well find me chatty and openminded to a degree that it may seem embarrassing. But I'm not extroverted enough to put the story of my daily life online, for the simple reason that there are thoughts in my mind and things that I do which are, quite frankly, completely unrelated to work and not suitable for the general public to know. It's called "having a life". Some people are able to pursue computer-related activity, work or spare time, with an amount of dedication that I admit I admire, and who seem to be able to play the publicity card to the gain of both their crowd and themselves.

That's positively not the case for me. I'd rather be a wallflower. Yes, it's kind of stage fever, the thought that stepping out and becoming a messenger, a leader for something, and - gasp - a public figure is paralyzing to me.

So you know now why this blog isn't growing frequently. It's about things at work, and therefore bound by the constraints of "spare time at work". I do keep an old-style written diary for hobby, fun and things dear to me, but I haven't chosen the blog name ambiguous for no reason. Blogging for me is about letting people know the interesting things I work on, if time allows. My blog will never become an encyclopedia of sorts, as I think, like the iPod/cellphone example, blogging misses the point there. And my private life is that - private. I'm not really expecting this to change significantly. Some of the things that I do, like for example this article series about how to write Solaris Filesystem drivers, or the Crashdump Analysis book I wrote, or my activities with the Czech OpenSolaris users group are therefore not featured here but in other places - it's far easier working with the community directly, using mailing lists and wikis, than trying to attract people to your blog and telling them "watch this for the latest news on ...". I might incidentally braindump here about things noone asked for, but rather normally will do that in a targeted fashion, via interactive channels.

I rather want you to participate in the community, talk to the community, not to cheer (and/or bother) me ... so go to OpenSolaris.org, register yourself for the discussion lists - I promise you we'll get along very well there !

So why do I even tell you that ? Well, I was surprised today when I put my name (which isn't _that_ unique) into google.com, my blog came up at #3 - and that for a page that has been stale for a year ? My sense of duty kicked in to give a little explanation those who obviously read it about what (and what not) to expect here. Maybe more than there was in the last 12 months, but no promises ...

All the time when I wrote my blog entry about how Solaris/x86 "fakes" hostIDs, I had this deja-vu feeling of sorts. I finally found what this story reminded me of - this old DrFun cartoon.

Introducing myself

Being new to the blogging community, I guess it's a polite thing to say a few words about myself before I overwhelm you with that stream of thoughts of mine.

As so many of my "learned" profession (I've graduated in Physics back in '97), my path lead me away from research and into computing. Having done system programming and administration on a HP/UX monoculture in the institute of physics for several years, I shunned that HP offer and joined Sun instead (hey, even after all these years of Sun not exactly doing well I'm still happy about this decision)...
So from Sun Service to Solaris Sustaining I went over the next years, and I'm still there - bugfixing Solaris, as my job description says I should spend around 80% of my time on.
The big advantage of the Sustaining Engineering role is that you come to see a lot of different places in the Solaris Operating Environment over time. So I've worked on the SPARC kernel, various filesystems, threading, VM, even OBP, and since we turned our focus back onto x86 also on the x86/x64 kernel. If it weren't for the urgency-to-patch of escalated issues that now and then interrupt the cosy "what bug can I fix today" state, life would be paradise ...

There is a life outside of work; as far as that goes, I'm first and formost into astronomy.
I've started stargazing as a kid - the first book I ever owned was titled Eine Reise zu den Sternen (A journey to the stars), consisting of little stories where grandpa explained the constellations to his grandson over the course of a year, one at a time and always directing to the next based on those having been shown previously. A wonderful book, it kept me enthralled for a few months. I keep it to this day, and no it's not for sale. Like none of the other Astro-gear that I own :)

I do like to travel and see foreign places. And I like good food & wine, if you happen to be German, Wine-Lover and in the Farnborough/UK area, contact me about having a bottle together.

But now, on to more interesting things !