Bob's blog

Communities and stuff

I was in National Harbor, Maryland last week for Sun's sales meeting and technical training. It was a very long week with a lot of old friends but also some very good content. I helped with sessions that talked about everything from Project Darkstar to the Open Solaris Web Stack project. We had some amazing presenters and terrific content for the systems engineers from all over the Americas.

The end of the week was a session that included a panel discussion with a Snowman , a Doctor and a Mink . It was a lot of fun getting to lead a discussion with these guys about technology, architecture and open source. And yes, those are all hockey jerseys and mine does say "Sokol" in Cyrillic letters for the Sokol-Kiev hockey team.

Posted at 01:53AM Aug 13, 2008 by bs in Web.next  |  Comments[0]

Summertime, not so much in the city

I've been trying to follow Fausto Coppi's advice: "Ride a bike, ride a bike, ride a bike", which isn't all that different than Eddy Merckx's advide: "Ride lots". It's sometimes tough to follow their advice, but I've had some good motivation watching Le Tour de France this month. I think I actually had withdrawal issues afterwards, not having a new stage to watch when I got home. I didn't have high expections for the Tour this year, but it was pretty exciting - lots of changes in the yellow jersey, excitement in the mountains and a winner that could have changed until the very last stage.

After the Tour was over, I needed to focus on my big ride for the summer. This was my fifth time riding in the Princeton Event . I've chosen the century route every time and finished most of time, except when we got lost and when it was nearly 100 degrees and 100 percent humidity. It's a good, mostly flat course and goes through some beautiful farm and horse country. We had a little rain at the start but was a gorgeous summer day.

Now that the big event is done, I can get back to mountain biking and enjoy myself for the rest of the summer but not so much in the city!

Posted at 01:24AM Aug 13, 2008 by bs in Cycling  |  Comments[0]

Social, social, everywhere

I started off the week on a whale watch along with a lot of other people, I think. It was hard to tell, because it was a virtual whale . Monday was the start of the Apple WWDC and a lot of people were planning to follow and connect via Twitter. While the folks at Twitter talked about what they've done to increase their capacity, chances were that the volume generated by the conference would cause the fail whale to make an appearance. This wasn't quite as interesting as a real whale watch, but much less bouncy for me. That's because it wasn't me riding the waves, it was Twitter bouncing up and down. I'm not sure why, but do like that the FailWhale has a website and a fan group too.

It's a good thing that I was able to watch this from the air conditioned comfort of my home office, the heat wave in New Jersey was pretty bad earlier this week. It did give me a chance to catch up on some things I've been watching. As I get invited to more and more (and more) professional and personal social networks, I have to wonder how this will tie together. I think people are already making choices based on convenience or capacity. It's either more convenient to stay with a few networks or people just don't have the capacity to continually join more networks. I've drawn the line at any more social networks unless there's some compelling reason or business group that seems interesting.

I am fascinated by the number of different approaches to social networking and I am interested to see how this grows. There's clearly benefits to being connected - both professionally and personally. I've reconnected with co-workers from 20 years ago and found friends that I knew in high school who are now living nearby. But there are the also the social networks that haven't thought through what they offer or even how they offer it.

I do see this getting worse before it gets better. It's getting easier than ever to setup a community whether you use a hosted site like Ning or KickApps , or use a toolset like SocialSite to add features to your website. This is truly the long tail of communities in action, which is definitely a good thing. The ability for disparate groups to connect is one of the tremendous benefits of the web.

The capacity limit has caught up to me though. I really don't need another set of credentials to YASNS (yes, that would be yet another social network site) with redundant, although slightly different data about me and my friends/colleagues. There's got to be a better way to manage your data and coordinate access to different sites. It seems to me that OpenID had some traction, Data Portability has a lot of conversations and Open-foo -the next hot new thing - is probably coming.

In order to continue the growth of social networking sites, I think that users will demand some changes. In fact, I'm probably not alone in being ready for some change. The big question is how this will be resolved. I think that some of the loose concepts around federation are very useful to help solve this. Depending on what kind of personal information you want to share, some it can be quite sensitive. Because of this, you want to be certain about how it's stored and who you've given that data. The idea of a feed-based mechanism with a personal datastore like a Mine! can be quite compelling. In the end, the ability to manage and track my own data is the goal. The mechanism needs to be fairly straightforward and provide the ability for existing sites to adopt the functionality. In the short term, there may not be a lot of incentive for social networking site to adopt such a mechanism but it's crucial for growth in the long term.

Posted at 03:00PM Jun 13, 2008 by bs in Web.next  | 

The Start of Internet Week NY

I was invited to a reception at Gracie Mansion last night with Mayor Bloomberg and Katherine Oliver, who's Commissioner of The Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. It was a lively, crowd with a very full house, but a great chance to see Gracie Mansion on a beautiful day and talk to some people that I haven't seen for a while.

Internet Week NY is a great city-wide unconference to celebrate technology and the internet in NYC. There's over 50 events scheduled for the week, culminating with The Webby Awards next Tuesday. As Mayor Bloomberg said last night, New York has a strong history with Technology companies from Silicon Alley to new technology companies starting in the city and that "there is no better time to celebrate our digital media sector".

I'm excited to see so many activities from interesting breakfasts to career panels to Diggnation happening over the next week. It's a great way to showcase what the city has to offer and I hope that this starts a long tradition of Internet Week in NYC.

Posted at 06:13PM Jun 03, 2008 by bs in Web.next  | 

The Internet in Middle Earth?

I'm not sure if it's Middle Earth is in the Internet (which it surely is) or that the Internet is part of Middle Earth. It's not a huge leap to think that there are Lord of the Rings fans on the Internet. But, I apparently missed the bigger connection.

I saw an article on TechCrunch about "Old Media" and discussions from the Mediabistro Circus last week in New York City. It sounds like I missed a good session given by Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired. He talked about the relationship and interactions between traditional media sources and user generated content along with corrosponding ad cost models. Chris has been talking about The Long Tail for nearly four years now and has some interesting thoughts on where the money is. He has a robotics site DIYDrones that's hosted on Ning. It's a not a large study, but I believe it shows the value of niche or "long tail" sites - he sees greater than ten-fold revenue for his ads on that network versus the standard rates on MySpace. His advice at the conference to help drive that: “Be the tallest dwarf.”

From dwarfs to Digg, at the same conference. Daniel Burka talks against the "notion of One Page To Rule Them All," even with Digg which brings together headlines from around the web. It's an issue of control or the lack thereof. There's not single source for information that can cover everyone's interest. Yes, you can search for the information but the idea of a central portal is long gone. That's why custom tools and aggregators like FriendFeed are becoming more popular. I get my news and feeds from a variety of sources and I fully expect the number of sources to grow. There's no way for traditional media to keep up and try to control those interactions.

Other than the Lord of the Rings references, the theme at the conference was about accepting and embracing the conversations that the web enables. That not only adds value to social networks but the traditional media. Enabling that conversation keeps readers engaged and helps make the experience more valuable for others. I didn't see any references to hobbits but I'm sure that I can figure out where Frodo fits in...

Posted at 11:40PM May 27, 2008 by bs in Web.next  | 

RESTful Drafting

I had a great bicycle ride today, even better since I thought it was going to rain all day. It fixed a bad case of spring fever that started a few months ago, when I wanted to take this ride but just haven't had the time or weather to take a 40 mile ride. If you've only seen the New Jersey Turnpke, you've missed a lot of beautiful areas in the state. One of my favorite routes is through the Watchung Circle because there's little traffic and nice rolling hills, mostly rolling until you have to climb over the ridge of the Second Watchung Mountain to head back home. I was driving through with a friend from Colorado and told him about riding over the crest, but he was having a hard time considering that a mountain. Nevertheless, the Watchung Mountains did serve their purposes and shielding General Washington during the Revolutionary War. That's the other part of New Jersey, Washington slept everywhere around here.

Somewhere in the middle of the ride, I found a nice headwind and thought it was awfully early in the season to be battling the wind without friends. I wasn't with my usual group today where we would've formed a paceline to help draft against the wind. It's a loosely coupled group with some structure and functions for moving in the paceline. For some reason, that got me thinking about web sites and RESTful applications. Which in turn, got me thinking web architectures and loosely coupled designs. I've been having more discussions lately about modular, flexible architecture choices.

The beauty of Web infrastructure today is that there are lots of choices. There are choices in development languages, choices in deployment platforms, even choices in open source databases and filesystems. I've had a lot of discussions lately about choosing the right development language and how to build an interesting web site (by the way, the interesting part is up to you). The good systems engineering answer is always a resounding "It depends", but we can have a good conversation along the way. What's different now is that there doesn't have to be a singular choice, you can pick the best of all worlds. If you want to use Ruby for flexibility on the front-end servers - great. If you want to use Java for scalability in the mid-tier - terrific. A flexible platform for user interactions can be driven by flexible choices for building it.

This may not seem like the best thinking for a good bike ride, but it worked for me today. Tomorrow I'm going for a mountain bike ride. Let's see what the mud makes me think about.

Posted at 10:53PM May 17, 2008 by bs in Cycling  | 

London in April

I spent most of last week in London or travelling there. I arrived Tuesday morning for the Internet World UK conference , held in Earls Court. I took the redeye Monday night so that I'd arrive with some time to rest before my session on Tuesday afternoon. As they say about the "best laid plans", rest was nowhere to be found before I had to present. I was really happy with the attendance at the conference and the room for my session was almost full. There was a good crowd and some interesting questions, although my references to Diesel Sweeties and xkcd were not completely familiar to the audience in London.

My session was titled "Web 2.0 Scale" and talked about some concepts and expectations around the web sites today, especially how community and participation can impact your strategies for applications and scaling. The concept of architecture has changed from Web 1 where we talked about architecture in terms of "blueprints" to provide a firm foundation to Web 2.0 where the focus has shifted to patterns and dynamic services that have a more loosely coupled foundation but retains the same requirements for stability and scalability. The toolset is very important to help build and maintain the application and infrastructure, so I reviewed a bit about NetBeans and OpenSolaris.

I spent the rest of the week in the office and meeting with both customers partners, plus I was able to explore a little bit of Chelsea. It's a great neighborhood with a lot of history. There's a lot of interesting old houses from the 18th and 19th century that are really remarkable. I walked by the Chelsea City Hall where some celebrities have gotten married and I did like the sign on the drinking fountain. They did tell me that the area used to be country and was somebody's hunting lodge nearby.

Posted at 11:35PM May 04, 2008 by bs in Web.next  | 

Girls in the city

Last week with Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day and I was happy to have the opportunity to take my younger daughter with me. For some reason, I'm usually traveling that week and haven't been able to participate in the past. For those who haven't heard about this, it's a chance to for kids to see what their parents do at work and for kids to get an idea about life in their parent's office. It's not really meant to be a career day but a chance for kids to see what happens in a welcoming environment.

Our New York City office was the scene of a vibrant and interesting day for the 20 or so children that attended. There were talks about Sun and what jobs people at Sun have. I had the opportunity to talk with them about what Sun does for internet and gaming companies and little bit about the technology that helps to support that. The kids were engaged and interactive - although questions ranged from "How long is this going to last?" to questions about the Mars Rover (talked about how it uses Java) and Facebook.

The kids all seemed to have a good time, which was great since there was a big range of ages from elementary school all the way through high school. The program ended at lunchtime and would have usually been time for a nice lunch in the city, but we had to settle for a quick deli lunch since it was still Passover. I'm glad that my daughter was able to join me and I think that I still owe her a good lunch in the city for coming with me.

Posted at 09:44AM Apr 30, 2008 by bs in General  | 

Really virtual or virtually real?

It's been a really interesting week for me, especially since it didn't involve any sort of plane travel. There were a few trains and a bit of snow though. Unfortunately, the snow and the ice were both real which made for some interesting mountain biking this morning.

This virtual topic is pretty timely given the innotek announcement this week. It adds a great developer desktop tool to the xVM portfolio. I've been playing with Parallels and the latest OpenSolaris developer preview build, so I'm excited to try VirtualBox.

But that was really only a part of the virtual topics that I've been talking about all week. It all started innocently enough when I met a friend for lunch to catch up on some of the projects that we're working on. He's a master at connecting people and has a both an active blog and a series of networking breakfasts with interesting panels. The funny thing is that I met him seven years ago when he was at a start-up and we've just recently reconnected via another friend. So, we talked about the reach of the virtual world and how easy it is to keep updated via tools like Facebook or LinkedIn. However, sometimes you need the in person interactions to have those spontaneous and unexpected results. I'm going to be travelling for a while, so we can switch back to virtual communications now.

I also spent some time talking about virtualization as a feature of utilization vs. virtualization for management. We've heard the about the low average utilization on a per server basis and how server sprawl grows as individual servers are provisioned for individual applications. We've done a lot of work looking at server consolidation whether it accomplished via domains or LDOMs or zones or some combination. We have the ability to manage those virtual systems and their associated applications, networking and storage and there are tools to help plan and manage that.

What's really interesting is virtualization for management and how that can help with large scale web infrastructure. Project Caroline is a SunLabs project designed to programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. It can help enable software-as-a-service to help make systems dynamically available and scalable. While this is still a project, I like the approach because it's not only about scaling but also about managing. There's a tendency for fast growing sites to continue to add resources without reviewing the existing architecture. This is absolutely understandable because of the time to market pressures and need to meet user demand quickly. However, I think the ability to add an abstraction layer that can take dynamically grow resources would give sites a chance to better leverage their infrastructure.

As virtualization technologies continue to mature, I think that capabilities will grow in both areas. This becomes more important as we get more cores and threads in a single server. As for the personal virtual interactions, I'm fascinated to see where that goes. In the meantime, lunch meetings in New York are always good.

Posted at 12:28AM Feb 16, 2008 by bs in Web.next  | 

Happy New Year (again)!

I know where I've been, but I don't how how January went by so fast. Not to mention Groundhog Day, Mardi Gras and now the Chinese New Year. This year, I'm glad to wish Happy Holidays from home and not by trying to navigate the Beijing Airport during the peak of the holiday season (something that I strongly recommend you leave to the local residents). But, I did have a nice trip to Beijing and Tokyo last month and while in Beijing saw the local Tsinghua Science Park Newsletter with some familiar logos:

I started the year after a nice two week winter break by heading to Las Vegas for CES. I did get a chance to walk the show floor and see lots of flat panel TVs, but I was there for the HANA booth and demos. I was happy to see the progress that was made this year on the specs and features. The demo showed HD content from a single source distributed to multiple TVs including one connected by wireless HDMI. It looked really good. I'm definitely excited to see where HANA will be at the next CES.

The reason that I was in China (and Japan) is that I've been traveling to meet with Sun Systems Engineers around the world to talk about the Web Industry Group at Sun and how Sun and open source technologies can help their customers. I've been in five different time zone and had attendees from ten different countries talking about web architecture and how they can help support customer requirements. It's been really interesting listening to their experiences and discuss different approaches. Of course, that conversation got very interesting with the announcement about MySQL. I was forwarded a copy of Marten Mickos' recent post talking about their decision and he had some fascinating comments about the MySQL culture and their impressions of Sun. It's worth reading the whole article, but I really like these two from his top ten:

3. Sun has become the world's strongest proponent of free and open source software. We are happy to be part of that!

9. Sun is a bold and fun disruptor again, and we see a huge upside in its strategy. I am not saying that success is a given, but I am saying that Sun's new strategy is one of the most exciting this industry has to offer. We are all in!

This week included a quick trip to Boston for me. I had a mercifully short flight and landed at Logan around lunchtime, which meant that I could stop at a local landmark for lunch on the way to Burlington. Kelly's Roast Beef has been an institution on Revere Beach since 1951 and was always the perfect stop for a midnight snack during college. I did have some work and got to meet with some interesting start ups while I was in the neighborhood. It's great to see all the innovation around the Bay Area and some really cool ideas and events.

Posted at 01:14AM Feb 08, 2008 by bs in General  | 

Belated Happy New Year

Well, it's already mid-January and I'm just catching up. It was a busy 2007 with a new job and lots of interesting travel and customer meetings. I was away from Thanksgiving until winter break, so that's why it's been quiet here. I'm really looking forward to 2008 and hope to have more soon!

Posted at 12:17PM Jan 14, 2008 by bs in General  | 

Shake, rattle & roll

I was in Menlo Park this week for a group meeting and experienced my first earthquake in fifteen years of travelling to California. I guess that's not a bad record. We were at dinner in Sunnyvale when the quake hit - it was interesting watching the restaurant move. It took a few seconds for everyone to realize what was happening and then our foreign visitors were wondering what to do. It passed quickly enough that we didn't have to do anything except wait for it to pass. I was impressed that one of the guys at the table guessed the magnitude of the quake, but that really didn't mean anything to me since I didn't have anything to compare it to. They did say that it was the biggest in the Bay area since the Loma Prieta quake in 1989.

Here are the headlines from the local paper over the next two days:

Apparently, next October is the 140th anniversary of the big quakes on the Hayward Fault - and there's a major quake every 140 years on that fault. We'll have to wait and see...

Posted at 11:21AM Nov 02, 2007 by bs in General  | 

Scalability

I've been talking about scalability a lot this week, which is interesting in a country of approximately six million homes. That's not to say that there's not a need to support transactions and visitors - quite the opposite. There's some very impressive bandwidth to homes and mobile devices that helps to set user expectations quite high. If I were able to get over 14 Mb/second to my mobile phone, I'd want good response time too. The challenge is providing a robust basic level of service to support the bandwidth while giving application flexibility for compelling content.

The stadium in the picture above is the Melbourne Cricket Grounds which holds nearly 100,000 people - how's that for a high bandwidth requirement? Yes, I did take that picture which means that I finally got out of my meetings and had a chance to wander around Melbourne. It's a great city, very easy to walk and explore. I got a chance to see the Parliament Building, a JFK Memorial and walked along the quay. Unfortunately, time was very short and it was late by the time that dinner was over. Now we just have to work on the availability of souvenir stores late at night.

I'm looking forward to heading home tomorrow after an action packed few days. Hopefully, it won't be another 15 hours in a middle seat on the airplane. Either way, it'll be good to be home even if it's just for a little while.

Posted at 09:13AM Oct 19, 2007 by bs in General  |  Comments[1]

What happened to Monday?

I left Newark Airport Sunday afternoon heading west for Los Angeles. After a prolonged stop at LAX (thanks to traffic delays on the aircraft from JFK), we finally managed to take off for Sydney, Australia. We finally arrived late Tuesday morning and it felt very good to get off of the airplane. I guess that I had about 3 hours of early Monday morning at LAX but it was really lost for all practical purposes. After 40+ hours of travelling, I finally got to my hotel late last night.

Yes, the bridge in the picture is the one that you can climb over the top. According to Mauricio, the view is fantastic - especially at night.

I'm here to meet with some customers and have been given a terrific Australian welcome. For the Sun folks, that means scheduling every possible minute of the day but I'm happy that there's so many interesting people to meet with. There's a lot of interesting discussions about content and leveraging the power of the network. Compelling content and community continue to drive usage. I've had some interesting discussions but unfortunately not a lot of time to see the sights. I only had about 12 hours in Sydney and the bridge was about the most interesting picture that I could find.

We've got a couple of full days in Melbourne, hopefully I can get out to see the bike race on Friday. This is a very cycling friendly city and the weather is terrific. I'll have to find more time to explore on my next visit.

Posted at 08:46AM Oct 17, 2007 by bs in General  | 

CEC - Day 3

End of the conference for another year. CEC was a great time again this year, lots of good sessions and time to meet new people and see old friends. The final day was a quick session and then it was off to the airport. Can't wait until next year in Vegas!

Posted at 09:04PM Oct 12, 2007 by bs in Cycling  |