Bob's blog
The blog of Bob
Speed matters
"Speed seems to solve a lot of problems" Geoff "Deaner" Kabush
There's a famous quote attributed to Gary Fisher (and maybe others) that says "Better, Faster, Cheaper - pick two". You can optimize for some variables but it's difficult to optimize for all within a given set of constraints. That's part of the challenge in today's infrastructure when the application designs can move very quickly. I was talking with a customer last week who told me that he's moved to weekly updates for his applications so that they can keep up with the business needs. Clearly, the waterfall method of application development wouldn't come close to meeting their needs. Speed matters in business and you need to find flexible ways to support that through application development.
They're definitely not alone. The pace of iterative software development and increased demands pushes the systems administrators to get as much performance of the systems as possible. It's not enough to simply look at each server and storage unit but rather, the system as a whole to increase throughput and decrease latency. I met with some customers in our Menlo Park EBC and we started to talk about performance tuning best practices. One of the senior guys had been a Solaris sysadmin back in the days of "Virtual Adrian" or the SE Performance Toolkit. At that time, there were some clear tuning parameters depending on the application - networking parameters for a web server or disk blocks and I/O size for a database. The limitations on then current hardware meant that you were very careful about tuning and configuration.
That's not to say that tuning and configuration are not still important. However, if you're able to define performance parameters in advance then you can make sure that the hardware if capable of supporting that performance. Solaris 10 already has the most common performance parameters set in advance. You will still need to tune the operating system for specialized applications but system parameters now have default settings that minimize the need for that. We had several speakers talk about the performance work today and there is plenty that's being done to optimize applications and platforms. A great example is the work on Web Stack project. I've had customer searching for Solaris versions of common AMP stack applications who were very happy when I pointed them to the Web Stack binaries. And that's all work that is done so that a user's applications just run better which is certainly better than talking to a virtual friend.
Posted at 02:47PM Sep 03, 2008 by bs in General |
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 |
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 2
Well, we're into the last day of CEC and it's been a busy week. Yesterday was a lot of fun - good speakers and a cool product launch. You can almost see the launch stage from the back of the room, but the new Ultrasparc T2 processor-based servers were really exciting. The performance numbers and features are very interesting, especially for applications in the web tier.
I also had the chance to listen to presentations from Dave Douglas and Jonathan Schwartz. Both were very positive and everyone seem pleased to hear the messages. The afternoon was good, including setup a podcast from the video room at the Paris Hotel. It was pretty fun and I happy to get the help from Seeley to get this done. Thanks!
Then, it was on to a customer dinner and off to the CEC party. More fun before it was time to leave Las Vegas.
Posted at 08:55PM Oct 12, 2007 by bs in General |
Vegas, Baby!
Welcome to Las Vegas - I'm here for the 2007 CEC where Sun's customer engineers from all over the world gather to meet, learn and have some fun. Yesterday was the first full day of the conference, but my second day in Las Vegas. I had some meetings on Sunday, so I left my house bright and early to get here in time for my afternoon meetings.
Monday was a very full day of content - we heard from our Global Systems Engineering leadership team about where we've been and where we're going. The picture is from a video that at the start of the keynote session. It's just what I thought Hal's avatar would look like - he had to be wearing a NJ Devils jersey. The messages were good - leverage the community, there's a long tail of expertise and interest at Sun - find creative ways to use it.
And a most profound message from Jim, "Rethink 'Stuff!'". We've got some very interesting systems and approaches that demand us to think about how to we do things differently to take advantage of innovation. How does your approach changes with systems based on Niagra chips or a X4500 server/storage or a Blackbox? One of the things that attracted me to Sun was the quality of the people. Over the years, I've been amazed by the talent. Yesterday, was no exception with presentations from Andy Bechtolsheim and Marc Tremblay. The roadmap and features for new systems and SPARC chips is very exciting.
After the keynote, I had a full day of sessions including a cool session on Project Darkstar, our new open source gaming server. Darkstar provides a scalable, flexible platform for online gaming. It's a great idea for companies that would rather spend their time being creative on the games interface than worry about how to scale shards and manage users. In fact, part of the scalability comes from not having to worry about shards and zones. Plus it provides persistance and failover capabilities for the game environment. And, Jeff's Bunny Hunter game demo was awesome.
Lots more yesterday, including a belated Happy Birthday to my co-presenter - Tom! We had an unconference and speed geek session in the evening which led to a well deserved night out.
We're back in session bright and early this morning. Should be another fun day in Vegas!
Posted at 11:59AM Oct 09, 2007 by bs in General |
A Day to Remember
September 11, 2001 was a beautiful, sunny September morning. I had a nice bike ride through the Great Swamp and thankfully chose to work at home that day.
Six years later, I'd hoped for another bike ride but it was a rainy September morning instead. Somehow fitting. I remember calling my wife and telling her that a plane hit the building next to mine and then minutes later calling back to tell her that a plane hit my building. I remember seeing my kids come out of school that day and being thankful to see them, although they were confused that so many parents were there to greet them. I remember being thankful that our entire office got out safely and I remember that so many others were lost, including one of our own from Sun - Phil Rosenzweig.
But mostly, I remember to be thankful for what we have.
Posted at 11:28PM Sep 11, 2007 by bs in General |
Communities in the rain
I attended the first opensolaris users group meeting in New York City last night. They say that rain at a wedding is good luck, so the downpours in New York should be a very sign for the success of the new user group. Sun's office is on the east side of Manhattan where there were power outages and subways out of service. Despite the difficulties with transportation, there was a good group that showed up for the first meeting (and free pizza, of course).
There were some good presentations on opensolaris in general and Crossbow. Isaac took us on a field trip of the opensolaris and genunix websites. The audience was engaged and agreed to meet monthly to continue the conversation. The group was a good mix of Solaris users, developers and Sun employees. If the rain was any indication, this should grow into a very strong group.
Posted at 02:13PM Jun 28, 2007 by bs in General |
Surf's Up!
Okay, maybe that's the old Web-guy in me - maybe "interacting" is a better way to look at it. It's been an interesting week - two early breakfast meetings in the city (which reminded me why I don't schedule those anymore), lots of customer meetings, a quick trip to Henry Stewart DAM Conference, more conference calls and a little time to catch up on some reading and interacting.
So, where have I been?
- Joost
- Twitter
- Doppler
- Boing Boing
- Media 3.0 with Shelly Palmer
- Techie and the Media
Of course, it's not all work: Daily Peloton and VeloNews are good too.
Have a great weekend!
Posted at 11:34PM Jun 08, 2007 by bs in General |
Growing the digital media community
I had breakfast at Gracie Mansion this morning (that's not a sentence that I thought I'd use to start a blog entry).
Katherine Oliver, Commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting, hosted a breakfast along with a panel moderated by Shelly Palmer. The group was gathered to discuss digital media in New York and how to grow the community. There are unique challenges that digital media companies face in the city but the benefits can be tremendous. There's a strong media and advertising community that would like to be able to leverage local digital media talent.
I was encouraged to hear about some of the programs for small businesses that both the City and New York State have to offer. The most exciting news for me was some of the educational opportunities that they are planning for city schools. There's already new Acadamies planned for NYC schools that focus on Arts & Media including web technologies and digital media. The ability to offer new opportunities to home-grown talent is an excellent plan.
It was a very interesting session for me, but I have to leave time for a tour with the docents next time.
Posted at 09:57PM Jun 04, 2007 by bs in General |
It's a video world
It seems like there's a new user generated or collaborative video site coming on-line everyday. The sites may not be proliferating that quickly, but there's been a tremendous number of announcements over the last few months from both community-oriented and corporate-sponsored web sites.
It's hard to say where this all started - was it with YouTube or are the roots of the community/"reality" programming further back? I think the first dedicated show based on user generated content may have been America's Funniest Home Videos with host Bob Saget which started in 1989 making it the second longest running show on ABC. Although, Wikipedia calls Allen Funt's Candid Camera one of the earliest reality shows.
The question isn't really where or when this started, but rather where is it going? There's room for many different business models so I don't think it's a choice between YouTube or AOLVideo or Google Video. It's not really even a choice between Joost or NBC or the CW.
There will continue to be a need for linear television programming for the near future. The audience, network programmers and advertisers will all demand that. But, the increased availability of on demand content will continue to drive alternate viewing models for both time shifted and place shifted content. As content owners and distributors continue to embrace video delivered over IP, consumption models will expand and proliferate. Each view will determine their own mix of ad supported, subscription and free content to consume where and when it's appropriate.
These factors will continue to drive change as users have more options for their entertainment time and money. There's some very compelling content online that's available for free (and some's even legally obtained - check out Hal's t-shirt). But the key question is what viewing circumstances will cause you to choose free or paid content? If you're paying for the right to view content, what do you consider when looking at sources of content and viewing options. I think it's more about access and personalization and trust. You'll look at recommendations from your friends or the community for video from user generated content and you'll pay for content where you find value (for example, a live baseball game). There's a very low barrier to sample content, you can find shows or parts of shows and many web sites to see if it's interesting to you. If it is, that's when you decide how and when you'll watch that content.
There's been a lot of progress towards viewing content more flexibly. That's only going to get better as more content is created and made available for access in many different ways. How you access the content will be your decision.
Related note: I saw Hal Stern's blog today and found this when I followed the link:
Posted at 01:34PM May 30, 2007 by bs in General |
Happy Memorial Day!
I know that it's almost summer when Memorial Day weekend arrives. The weather cooperated this year with some hot, muggy summer-like weather and a few brief showers for good measure.
This is also prime bike riding season for me, so I was happy to ride every day. We found a couple of new routes on the road and also rode the trails in the woods too. The weather cooperated this morning and I was able to finish a quick 31 mile ride before our local Memorial Day parade. We're fortunate to have a good parade through the middle of town and spent a nice hour or so in the heat enjoying everything from the local police and fire departments to the circus and Shriners!
Posted at 07:21PM May 28, 2007 by bs in General |
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