I was reading a bit about some of the open source activities out in the wild and I stumbled across this blog post:

http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2008/04/15/the-wonderful-world-of-leadville/ 

It was very cool to see someone writing a post about something we worked for many years on. Thanks Matty!

Folks,

I need a code review. Randy, one of my whiz developers is ready to integrate his MPxIO for tape changes in build 93. This is a cool project and pretty bleeding edge. Great work and we need a code review. C'mon... Give a guy some help!

http://cr.opensolaris.org/~rralphs/review/

Best code reviewer gets a gift package from me. Cool Solaris stuff. I decide who the best code reviewer is. My decision is final and can not be swayed unless the review is delivered on the hood of a brand new car. (OK, minivan, I have lots of kids now..)

Seriously, help a guy out. Heck, post the review in my comments section... Just make sure you include your email address...

Dan

This made me laugh out loud, and a nice break from a busy couple of weeks. My boss just -9nd me for the rest of the day....

I have spent the last week swathed in swaddling clothes, diapers, prams, 8 year old super hotty bomb outfits, and questions along the lines of "Do you like my hair?" and "Daddy, how does this dress look?" My daughters (all three of them) are lovely and sweet and not boys. It is wonderful, but, I do have the occasional urge to cover myself in automotive grease and cleanse with gojo.

Anyway, about two weeks ago my Audi started yelling at me about brakes. No big deal, until the ABS light came on and the brake light started flashing maniacally. Oddly it was flashing to the tempo of the Pink Floyd song Money. Yes, everything is expensive to fix on this car. Anyway I started wondering what the problem could be as the ABS light is a totally useless symbol. All it does is tell me to go to the dealership and automatically give them $1000. I hooked up my OBDII reader to see what was going on. Totally useless message of course (rough road). So I scratched my head and tested the brakes. They seemed to be working just fine.

In comes the internet. By reading a number of the Audi forums I get the gist that this is pretty common, involves usually a deffective ABS module and it will run me about $1200 to $1500 to replace. However, someone suggests pulling it myself and sending it to a company for a rebuild. The company offers instructions to pull the module and they ship it in three days. I decide that I would rather replace with a rebuilt module and ship the core back to the rebuild company. $225 and two hours later my car no longer yells at me. NICE!

This experience made me think that as the systems get more complex, it is extremely likely that all the dealerships are doing is replacing the parts on these cars. There is little or no diagnostics (Pull the OBDII code and replace the part) and rather it is much more a replacement culture than a fix culture. Interesting. As long as you have the tools, probably much of the work can be done by the individual again. If you don't have the time or the willingness, you can pay for it. Sounds like another model I know quite well.

So, here it is about 1:45AM MT and I am running on about 4 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours. Mom is doing well, baby is doing well, kids are struggling a bit with the new world order, but all in all very well. Thanks to all of those that sent congratulations, way too many to count reached out and sent me a kind word. It means a tremendous amount to me.

I got to thinking about how much easier things are this time then they were the first time around. I think partly it is because I am older, but, partly it is because I understand the system. In the CS lexicon, there are inputs, outputs, some range of variable checking, and only a few simple interfaces for baby 3.0 (Licensed under CUDDLE by the way. This is a minor modification to CDDL, pronounced the same way). 

Partly this is written tongue-in-cheek, but partly quite seriously. Since I have familiarity with the standardized interfaces for infants, I don't have to relearn everything all over again. The system isn't proprietary (most babies enjoy the same inputs and outputs) and instead of spending my limited time trying to figure out what could possibly be wrong, I simply run through the available options (assuming the systems are happy path of course.) So, the last two days have been pretty easy so far. Of course as the systems gain complexity, there will be discoveries, but for now, a well fed, warm and a dry system seems to equate to relative peace and harmony.

If I wasn't so tired I could come up with a clever convention linking babies to Solaris, but, suffice it to say, Solaris by open sourcing, seeks to minimize the amount of effort required to consume standardized interfaces. As your systems get more complex, you may need help scaling to the enterprise space (don't we all?), but for now, Solaris is a good way to keep your data warm, dry and well fed. If you need to burp your systems, well, we can help with that too.

We met this morning at about 6:30 AM for the Go No go decision. The product boss gave a Go and we decided to launch the new product today, a day early. The release engineers are assisting and the final product is being evaluated by manufacturing. We should have a launch in the next 6 hours or so. Preparing the press release and the go to market strategy now.

Stay tuned for the marketing brochure... 

Occasionally things just work out. I was sitting down to watch a little hockey at about 8PM tonight when my wife wandered down and asked me if maybe the pilot light had gone off on the hot water heater. It has been pretty windy so I figured it was a possibility. I ambled down to look at the hot water heater and started wading through the water that was all over the basement floor. Yes, the pilot had gone out, but, really it was the cracked water heater that was the issue.

 After an hour of dorking about with the old hot water heater I determined that it was well and truly shot and would need to be replaced. My 5 minute job was going to be much more than that all of a sudden.

Oddly, I had a spare hot water heater in the garage (don't ask).  So, I get busy draining the remainder of the old hot water heater, powering the new one down into the basement (all alone) and start looking at what I need to hook it up. Of course, I don't have the right connectors and so I sprint for Home depot. I get there 10 minutes before it closes, I get the parts I need and I race for home.

I move things around, install the new hot water heater in the right spot and I hook things up. Nothing leaks, the gas pilot light works the first time and I bleed the system. I have hot water about 4 hours after I determined that there was a leak and it only cost me $11.

This never happens to me. It always cost $500 and there are always leaks and things to tighten and do over. Except tonight, and frankly, I needed that. Best of all? My wife quite nicely recorded the hockey game and so I can watch a little hockey just before I hit the rack. Nice! A really big bummer just turns into a few hours of work and Hockey delayed is not hockey denied.
 

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." TR

We all have huge flaws as a human beings, for we suffer from that universal failing, being human. I think that I could walk out my front door turn left and give someone fifty cents and get them to come up with a list of failings that are both meritorious in their content and have a certain amount of validity. I think that is nearly true for everyone. Only a couple of people I know are truly perfect, at least in their own minds. It is easy to be critical. It doesn't cost very much to pick someone a part and lots of people want to do it. In fact, if I turn around with a blindfold on, I could probably find fifteen new critics of everything or everyone without looking very hard. The same can be said with coming up with reasons why something wont work. Sure, there is a chance of failure, maybe even a big chance. Everything can (and probably will at some point) fail. Easy to point out how the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly.

However, every once in a while, you find someone that is working hard to advance the ball and that has far more positive things to say. This kind of person looks for reasons to succeed, ways to find the best parts of everybody and strives hard to achieve. Next week Sun loses one of these folks. Joe is off to follow his heart and work with wood. I can't help but wish him the best of luck. He is one of those folks that you literally can't replace. Sure, I can find someone to write code like he can. I can't find his spirit, good nature, and can do attitude. This is a big loss.

Best of luck Joe!

 

I got a question from my mother the other day about the title of my blog. My mother is a retired English teacher and she reads my blog on occasion (much to her chagrin as my grasp of the mechanics of language considerably lags hers). Anyway, she is responsible for my love of language (the way a word rolls of the tongue or fits neatly in a phrase). My title is a bit obscure, unless you know me. So, let me explain the content of my blog title.

First off, I consider my time in the Army, Army National Guard and New Mexico Military institute to be one of the defining periods of my life. Duty to others and country etc... The military is rich with tradition, the cadence of life and an exploration of individual definition. Some have heard of the "Long Gray Line" and it refers to long line of cadets that have attended West Point, the United States Military Academy. It means, that there are those that have come before and there those that will come after. Each has a place and there is value in the continuity of duty, honor and country. Clearly I did not attend the USMA, but my school shares many of the same traditions and is called "The West Point of the West". So, to me, The long purple line represents a play on that same spirit of duty and tradition, but with a twist. We have a duty to our folks and we have a tradition of excellence in engineering. There have many before and there will be many after.

I chose the color purple because the logo at one time looked purple to me. I have since been corrected, and was told rather pointedly that the purple color is blue. However, I call things like I seem them, and to me it looked purple. Hence the purple connection to identify myself a true purple warrior.

And finally, a line is something one writes for a magazine or a newspaper. It is also something that one can deliver at a bar to the stunning looking Irish "Sheila" that I married. Never been a particularly good line deliverer but, I played on the line in football (you know, the great unwashed blokes that got their butt kicked in defense of the quarterback) and that kind of appealed to me. I like things with lots of rich content and deep meaning. 

So there you have it. Not a Da Vinci code mystery, but, rich contextual language none the less.

Every once in a while I get the urge to poke at these test that define me (NOT!). Anyway, accordingly, here are some of the results. What amuses me is that most people would claim I am an extrovert.

I just found out that I am a Slight Dorky Nerd God. Strange.

Years ago I was a contractor at Adaptec. At that time I was responsible for performance analysis on a product called WinStripe, essentially an early implementation of raid 0 for windows boxes. It was a cool job and I got to geek it up with lots and lots of hardware and some wicked fast (for those days) throughput numbers. However, I felt it keenly that I was a contractor and I didn't like it much. I felt like I was missing the secret knock and wanted desperately to be part of the crowd. When I converted, on November  18th, I was very very happy.

About a year ago I had the chance to reconnect with a colleague of mine from Adaptec and she joined my organization as a contractor to help manage my community. Together we launched Storage Stop (our blog about storage goings on), started editing and recording video of the projects we are doing as well as helping with our portal. I came up with the idea to start translating blogs, and  Deirdré came up with cool ideas to fund it. We launched an effort to measure our metrics and run analysis on our communication trafficking and wrote dozens of interesting presentations and storage related blogs. In one short year we helped change the face of our storage communication. Deirdré is responsible for a tectonic shift in the way we communicate and we are much more prolific in terms of messaging and communicating.

Deirdré has (sadly) left my organization to become part of our Business Communications team. I am a bit sad because Deirdré is a phenomenally good communicator and having her in my organization was great. We did a lot of cool things together. On the other hand, this is a larger role for Deirdré and I can foresee great things in her future. Additionally, since I run an engineering organization and not a marketing communications organization, it would have been difficult to convert her to a regular employee. In her new role, conversion was axiomatic. So, I am very happy for Deirdré, she is now a formal Sun employee, and it is great.

Welcome Deirdré (again) and thank you for all your help and efforts. Good luck with your new role and I look forward to working together (again) for many years.

A couple of days ago I received a SCA (Solaris Contributers Agreement) from the guys at Storage Switch. Turns out they want to help us write source for our flagship ST5800 or Honeycomb product. They have a few cool ideas about how we can leap into the future and they want to do it with us in the Open Source space. I could wax eloquent about partnerships and symbiotic relationships and moving the value chain, but, quite frankly, if you read my blog, you have heard it before. How about a different take on the same value statement?

Open source drives value and innovation for our customers. By working closely with people that leverage our value chain, we make it easier for customers to deploy our products. We increase visibility by having talented folks work with each other and turning out cool products. This enables the entire ecosystem, and, at the end of the day, if the customer benefits, because of tightly coupled development teams, we all win.

 Welcome Clark and Andy! We look forward to a profoundly beneficial relationship!