Note: I started this post back in August and time just got away from me. I think it is useful to reflect back on what I was doing in August, and so, a little bit of sharing....

21 August 2007

It has been a little more than a month since I last posted. It has been a very busy month, both personally and professionally, and as I sip my coffee I feel reflective this morning.

In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato describes about the ideal form using the voice of his mentor, Socrates. He asserts that the essential quality of a thing may be known only by knowing the form of the thing. For instance, we can only know a chair if first we understand what a chair is supposed to be. I am forced to conclude that Plato was a C++ programmer and he loved polymorphisms. His base class 'chair' was instantiated in the form of 'cave wall chair'. Anyway, Plato asserts that we must search hard to know the truth of a thing, and so claw our way up and out of the cave.

As I said, busy month. My daughter Sasha and I rode the "Courage Classic" together. It was my 8th time doing the classic and it was Sasha's first. I started doing the Classic shortly after my first daughter was born because I hoped I would never have to need Children's Hospital. So far we have been lucky to avoid anything very serious and so I consider it a wise investment. Additionally, my trooper of a kid knocked out 35 miles on her bike and climbed a steep hill up from Keystone. I am very proud of her, and I hope we do it a lot over the course of the next few years.

In the group space we have made great progress on COMSTAR  (open sourced here) as well as our Leadville training class, iSCSI activities and even open sourcing MPxIO. Life is that way some times. You make investments and sometimes a lot of them pay off in a very short time. When I look at what we have accomplished in the last few months, I am a bit stunned. Lots of very good people doing a lot of interesting work. If the reader will indulge my return to Plato, in The Sun Analogy Plato argues that the virtue of light (The Sun) is that it is used to illuminate the ultimate world of reality. I think this is our open source strategy. By showing the world how we do what we do, we help drive the code towards an ideal state (such as it is) and we enable our customers to "know" their code.

Today is the first anniversary of the day I returned from the cave back into the Sun light. I am glad to be back and I am glad to be here.

9 December:

A bunch has changed since August. I now work with the Honeycomb team and I am putting together a strategy for embedded software. We have opensourced COMSTAR, and Qlogic has created the first target mode driver with blazing fast 8Gb FC speed. StorageStop, a blog that Deirdré Straughan manages for my organization, has rocketed to the #76 most popular blog for all of Sun (at least for November), and we put back error recovery for tape into build 79 of Nevada (Step 2 of 3 in true tape multipathing MPxIO). 

Notice that we have plunged full force into video.

We have much to be grateful for. We have worked hard this year and I hope my staff manages to knock back a slug of eggnog for the holidays, celebrate(d) diwali and is having a great time getting ready for the Year of the Rat.

Oh, and: it's a girl.  Whoo hooo!

Dan