Tuesday April 29, 2008

Interview with the GSE Divas

The GSE Divas are Maria and Candace from New Jersey who work for Sun's GSE (Global System Engineering) organization as communication managers.

If you're into communication, you can hardly live without to blog, and so they keep the GSE Divas blog. One of their blog traditions is to interview GSE people and feature them as "Sun STARS" on a regular basis.

Today, I'm their victim number 15. Feel free to read their interview with me. Thanks!

This is probably the closest thing to an "about me" page for now. Every good blog seems to have an "about me" article somewhere, I should probably sit down and write such an article sometime soon.

Meanwhile, check out the other entries and Sun STARS in the GSE Divas blog, there are a lot of interesting people there, indeed!

P.S.: And yes, it's a pleasure to blogroll you :).

"Interview with the GSE Divas" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-04-29 00:54:46.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
aboutme blogging blogs gse interview life
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Monday April 28, 2008

Presenting images and screenshots the cool, 3D, shiny way

If you give a presentation about hardware products, it is easy to make your slides look good: Remove boring text, add nice photos of your hardware and all is well.

But what if you have to present on software, some web service or give a Solaris training with lots of command line stuff?

Sure, you can do screenshots and hope that the GUI looks nice. Or use other photos (like the one to the left) that may or may not relate to the software you present about.

But screenshots and photos (to a lesser degree) are so, well, 2D. They look boring. Wouldn't it be nice to present your screenshots the way Apple presents its iTunes software? Like add some 3D depth to your slide-deck or website, with a nice, shiny, reflective underground?

Well, you don't need to spend thousands of dollars with art departments and graphics artists (they'd be glad to do something different for a change) or work long hours with Photoshop or the Gimp (a most excellent piece of software, BTW),  trying to create that stylish 3D look. Here's a script that can do this easily for you!

You're probably wondering why my daughter Amanda shows up at the top of this article. Well, she was volunteered to be a test subject for my new script. The script uses ImageMagick and POV-Ray in a similar way to my earlier photocube script that we now use to generate the animated cube of the HELDENFunk show notes. It places any image you give it into a 3D space and adds a nice, shiny reflection to it. Let's see how Amanda looks like after she's been through the featurepic.sh script:

-bash-3.00$ ./featurepic.sh -s 200 Amanda_small.jpg
Fetching and pre-processing file:///home/constant/software/featurepic/Amanda_small.jpg
Rendering image.
Writing image: featurepic.jpg
Ready.

The size (-s) parameter defines the length of either width or height of the result image, whichever is larger. In this case, we choose an image size of a maximum of 200x200 pixels, so the image can fit this blog. You can see the result to the right. Nice, eh?

As you can see, her picture has now been placed into a 3D scene, slightly rotated to the left, onto a shiny, white surface. More interesting than the usual flat picture on a blog, isn't it?

The script uses POV-Ray to place and rotate the photo in 3D and to generate the reflection. ImageMagick is used for pre- and post-processing the image. The reflection is not real, it is actually the same picture, flipped across the y axis and with a gradient transparency applied to it. That way, the reflection can be controlled much better. I tried the real thing and it didn't want to look artistic enough :).

The amount of rotation, the reflection intensity and the length of the reflective tail can be adjusted with command-line switches, so can the height of the camera. Here's an example that uses all of these parameters:

-bash-3.00$ ./featurepic.sh -h
Usage: ./featurepic.sh: [-a angle] [-c cameraheight] [-p] [-r reflection] [-s size] [-t taillength] image
-p creates a PNG image with transparency, otherwise a JPEG image is created.
Defaults: -a 15 -c 0.3 -r 0.3 -s 512 -t 0.3
-bash-3.00$ ./featurepic.sh -a 30 -c 0.1 -r 0.8 -s 200 -t 0.5 Amanda_small.jpg
Fetching and pre-processing file:///home/constant/software/featurepic/Amanda_small.jpg
Rendering image.
Writing image: featurepic.jpg
Ready.

The angle is in degrees and can be negative. One good thing about rotating the image into 3D is that you gain horizontal real estate to fit that slightly longer bullet point in. It helps you trade-off image width for height without losing too much detail. An angle value of up to 30 is still ok, I wouldn't recommend more than that.

The camera height (-c) value is relative to the picture: 0 is ground level, 1 is at the top edge. The camera will always look at the center of the image. Camera height values below 0.5 are good because a camera below the subject makes it look slightly more impressing. Values above 0.5 make you look down at the picture, making it a bit smaller and less significant.

The reflection intensity (-r) goes from 0 (no reflection) to 1 (perfect mirror) while the length of the reflection (the fade-off "tail", -t) goes from 0 (no tail) to 1 (same size as image). Smaller values for reflection and the tail length make the reflection more subtle and less distracting. I think the default values are very good for most cases.

Check out the -p option for a nicer way to integrate the resulting image into other graphical elements of your presentation. It creates a PNG image with a transparency channel. This means you can place it above other graphical elements (such as a different background color) and the reflection will still look right. See the next example to the right, where Amanda prefers a pink background. Keep in mind that the rendering step still assumes a white background, so drastic changes in background may or may not result in slight artifacts at the edges.

You can also use this script with some pictures of hardware to make them look more interesting, if the hardware shot is dead front and if it doesn't have any border at the bottom. Use an angle value of 0, this will place your hardware onto that virtual glossy carbon plastic that makes it look nicer. See below for an embellished Sun Fire T5440 Server, the new flagship in our line of Chip-Multi-Threading (CMT) servers.

This script should work on any unixoid OS, especially Solaris, that understands sh and where a reasonably recent (6.x.x) version of ImageMagick and POV-Ray are available.

You can get ImageMagick and POV-Ray from their websites. On Solaris, you can easily install them through Blastwave. The version of ImageMagick that is shipped with Solaris in /usr/sfw is not recent enough for the way I'm using it, so the Blastwave version is recommended at the moment.

The featurepic.sh script is free, open source, distributed under the CDDL and you don't have to attribute its use when using the resulting images in your own presentations, websites, or other derivative work.

It's free as in "free beer". Speaking of which, if you like this script, leave a comment or send me email at constantin at sun dot com telling me what you did with it, what other features you'd like to see in the script and where I can meet you for some beer :).

"Presenting images and screenshots the cool, 3D, shiny way" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-04-28 00:44:56.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
3d cool effects howto imagemagick imaging photos povray presentations script
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Monday April 21, 2008

On Knowledge Management, Community Equity and Ontologies

Last week, I attended a meeting of the BITKOM Working Group for Knowledge Engineering & Management at the Sun Frankfurt office. The meeting was very nicely organized by Mr. Weber, Mr. Neuwirth and some colleagues from Sun in Germany (Hi Hansjörg, you should really blog!) and Peter Reiser from Sun in Switzerland. Therefore, I got to play host of the meeting without having to do too much work :).

Peter asked me to present his work on Community Equity (see also this interview with Shel Israel and this other one with Robert Scoble) and the CE 2.0 project to the group. The working group was very interested in how to encourage communities to participate and how Community Equity mechanisms can be used towards this goal. We had quite a few positive discussions during the breaks.

But, some people seem to be concerned with tracking community contribution and participation on an automatic basis, for example, see Mike's post on the subject and Alec's reaction to Peter's interview. These are all very valid thoughts, and indeed nobody wants to see their work or life be reduced into a couple of numbers.

As always, the threat is not in the technology, but in the way we use it:

• Measuring stuff is a good thing, if you know what you measure and how accurate that measurement is.
• Telling people how their work is being received is also a good thing. I always get a kick out of the HELDENFunk download statistics (We should probably start publishing them), or my own blog's metrics. This is a huge motivator.
• Telling people about how other people's work has been received is also a good thing. Nobody would put the kind of trust into eBay if it weren't for their rating system. How many books have you bought on Amazon based on other people's recommendations, stars, etc. on their site?
• Web 2.0 style commenting, crosslinking, social networking, tagging and rating is also a good thing. Much of the web 2.0 world today would be untrusted, unnavigationable and unuseful if it weren't for those mechanisms.
  
• The next step is to take these concepts, and apply them to an enterprise context. This is what Peter's Community Equity work is all about. The goal I see here is: If you do a good job, others should be able to notice (including, but not limited to, your manager). If you're looking for an expert on topic X, you should be able to find people that may be able to help you. If you are talking to person Y or if you run into that person as part of a team, you should be able to see what kind of work that person has contributed to the enterprise before and what others are saying about them. Think Amazon and eBay and LinkedIn ratings, recommendations, tags etc. as a tool to better navigate the social network and knowledge base of your enterprise.
  

Notice that the part where discussions become heated is not the technology one, it's the "what do we do with the numbers" part. That, of course, is where we need to be careful. We need to understand how the data is generated, how it has been processed (i.e. the exact rules and formular that is used to generate the Community Equity score) and what it does not tell us. You may trust your latest auction winner to transact with you on that particular sale, but you still don't know if she is actually a nice person or not :).

As long as the process is open, well-understood and transparent, using Web 2.0 mechanisms and Community Equity style metrics can be a very useful thing. You can generate a lot of useful information based on that kind of data: What are hot topics? Which documents are the most used, best rated, most re-used ones? Who are the company internal creators, connectors and consumers of knowledge? What topics have trouble to be picked up by the community? Sounds like fascinating stuff, if you're responsible for your company's knowledge...

Of course, this was only a small part of the BITKOM meeting. We heard presentations by other companies on different applications of knowledge management technologies in a customer service context. Interestingly, all of them (including CE 2.0) mentioned the term Ontology in one way or other. In a knowledge management context, an Ontology is the part of the system that relates "words" or other abstract data to real-world concepts and objects, resolving ambiguities, consolidating synonyms and clarifying user-errors. It's the part of the system that tries to bring in semantic knowledge as opposed to mere processing words.

Ontologies are very hard to do. That's why most of the times they are generated "by hand" which is very time and resource consuming. The holy grail of ontologies is when the system can automatically generate semantic meaning out of naked data by itself, without any help. Some of this systems are seeded with hand-made ontologies that can then expand somewhat automatically.

An interesting approach to generating ontologies might be to analyze web 2.0 style tagging data that has been created by users. An ontology system could then try to identify clusters of tags and assign them to a real world concept, then try to identify relationships between those concepts. As an example, the tags "LDAP", "Directory Server", "DS" all belong to the same concept and they are related to (but not the same as) "Identity Management", "IdM", and "Databases". A search engine then can use this data to find better matches for a user that is looking for "Identity Management and LDAP interoperability".

As you can see, even a seemingly dry and academic workshop on "Knowledge Engineering and Management", organized by an industry association can be an exciting topic, sometimes transcending the boundaries between technology, philosophy and anybody's daily web 2.0 style work.

"On Knowledge Management, Community Equity and Ontologies" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-04-21 04:10:00.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
ce2.0 collaboration community equity knowledge management ontology web2.0
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Tuesday April 15, 2008

SAGE@GUUG Web 2.0 Presentation

Yesterday, we had a SAGE@GUUG Meeting at the Munich Sun office.

In similar spirit to the USENIX SAGE, the SAGE@GUUG meetings are an informal gathering of system admins and Unix enthusiasts that like to talk about interesting computer-related topics. This time, I had the honor to host their Munich's group April meeting at Sun and the topic of the day was Web 2.0. Many thanks to Wolfgang for organizing the meeting, and a lot of thanks to Barbara, my angel from marketing for getting us food&drinks!

We began the meeting with this video:

Check out Mike Wesch's digital ethnography site for more information.

My slides were a slight modification from the GUUG FFG talk of the same name. As expected, the "PHP maintainability" slide with the large spaghetti photo triggered some agitated responses, but that's what provocations are for, and this is why Ruby is becoming more and more popular. I try to make my slides unusual and interesting, not boring eye-charts and bullet-point deserts. Let me know what you think of them!

We had about 30 people and the interaction with the group was great. Many people pointed out examples of their own on how the world is changing thanks to web 2.0, most visible in the way young people interact with media and technology.

After the talk, we saw an introduction by our favourite IT Guy to the new Sun UltraSPARC T2+ servers:

Which led us to a visit of the Sun Vision Center for some hardware show&tell, before going to the Fliegerbräu for some well-deserved beer.

"SAGE@GUUG Web 2.0 Presentation" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-04-15 02:02:46.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
community discussion guug presentation sage web2.0
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Sunday April 13, 2008

A Big "Thank You" to You, my Dear Readers!

During CeBIT, a guy came up to our Solaris and xVM demo pod and thanked us for producing our "CSI:Munich, how to save the world with ZFS and 12 USB sticks" video. He said he was a sysadmin and he showed this video to his boss who found it so cool, he instantly told him to try Solaris and ZFS out at their company. He thanked us for helping him evangelize Solaris and ZFS to his boss.
Two weeks ago, Mark and Aleister read my blog, asked me a ZFS question via email and Twitter about RAID storage and caching and I was able to help them by pointing them to the ZFS Evil Tuning Guide. They thanked me and said this "proved the value of social networks" and I should tell my colleagues that Sun's blogs are highly appreciated.
Now, this week I received email from Simon who thanked my for my ZFS blog articles which he found very inspiring. Simon now has a great series of articles around setting up a home server with ZFS of his own. Check them out, they are much more thorough than mine and very useful indeed!

Thank You 

I think it's really the other way round: Thank you, my dear readers, for reading my blog, for caring about what I write, for linking to my blog and its entries and for hundreds, sometimes thousands of hits every day. Thank You!

Getting feedback is hard, I know it from the HELDENFunk podcast, from other podcasters and from friends who blog. A few comments here and there, once in a while an email, that's it. There's not much I know about you, my dear reader, other than what you tell me through comments and emails and through personal contact.

So please, keep the feedback coming, tell me what you like, and what you don't like. Tell me what you'd like me to blog about, what topics you want me to expand, what else I can do to make this blog better for you. Post a comment to this entry or send me email at constantin at sun dot com.

Who You Are

Well, I do know just a little bit about you. Here's what Google Analytics and FeedBurner tell me about you, my dearest readers:

• This year, 6,891 different people visited my blog, more than 11,000 times in total, resulting in more than 15,000 page views. This is not much, compared to high-traffic bloggers or some news sites, but it's something I'm a little bit proud of. You come from the US, Germany, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, India and other countries, in that order (107 countries in total).
• About 41% of you are returning visitors, vs. 59% who are reading this blog for their first time. 14.24% of you have visited this blog more than 9 times, that's close to a thousand people! I should probably start a loyalty card scheme, maybe give out "Constantin Miles" to readers :).
• My most diligent readers (more than 5%) spend more than 10 minutes on my blog per visit. Thank you for making coffee, going to the bathroom or having a nap while reading my blog, it helps me enjoy my statistics even more. I also thank my 7.8% of my readers who enjoy 3 or more pages of my blog at once (that's not entries, 'cause I have multiple entries on most pages), making me feel like writing blog entries is actually useful to someone.
• About 50% of you have found this blog by searching for something on Google. Popular search keywords that lead to this blog are: "zfs iscsi", "easy starters", "email efficiency", "itunes solaris", "solaris iscsi", etc.
• The other 50% of you have either typed in its URL by hand (16%, good thing I've put my blog URL onto my business card and at the end of my presentation slides) or they have followed some link that the fine people at solarisinternals.com, opensolaris.org, virtualbox.org, swik.net, brad-x.com, c0t0d0s0.org and Google.com (yes, their websites, not the search engine) and more than 250 other referrers took the time to create for this blog.
• In the right column, you can find a list of your top 10 most popular entries. This list is based on data from Google Analytics and it's updated about once per month. I wish Roller had a feature to generate such lists automatically.
• Finally, I thank you for making this blog show up in the blogs.sun.com list of "Popular Blogs" more than once. Its top rank so far has been #14. Who knows, I may end up in the top 10 some day if you continue to read it that often :).

Tips for Bloggers

As you can see, there are a lot of statistics that website tracking services are able to provide. If you own a blog, set up one or more of these services and start collecting data about how your blog is being received. This is an important motivator: It enables a feedback cycle that makes you improve your blog on a continuous basis, it provides useful information on what topics you blog about are popular and why and it gives you the occasional endorphine kick of a nice spike in the statistical curve as a result of a good article you wrote.

Another important factor are search engines. A lot of your blog traffic will find you through search engines, so make sure these engines find your blog. SEOBook.com has an article on "The Blogger's Guide to Search Engine Optimization" and SearchEngineLand has "25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog...", useful and easy to follow advice on how to make your blog more attractive and efficient in the eyes of search engines.

After your readers have found you, it's your job to make their time on your blog a useful and rewarding one. Try to think like your readers, try to find out what they want to read, check out the statistics for some possible directions and try to post relevant content on a regular basis. 

But the most important factor is direct feedback from readers such as Mark, Aleister or Simon, or the unknown sysadmin from CeBIT. They tell you what's good, what they like, they ancourage you to continue and make your blogging experience a rewarding and motivating one.

So, again, thank you and keep the feedback coming!

"A Big "Thank You" to You, my Dear Readers!" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-04-13 08:15:57.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
analysis analytics blog blogging feedburner google seo statistics thanks
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.