Wednesday June 27, 2007

Sun Constellation System and Andy in NYT

Terrific article on the new supercomputer and The Man.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/technology/26sun.html 

Sunday June 17, 2007

Rebel Island rocks!

I recently finished Rick Riordan's Rebel Island, and it was terrific. I've written before about my admiration for Riordan's Tres Navarre series of Texas detective novels, and this one lives up to his high standards. I really enjoy when an author pays homage to another author's work by recycling one of her plots, but in a new and entertaining way. Actually, Riordan does a mashup of two famous works, Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None, and John Huston's film Key Largo. Both use the device of a group of people stranded at an isolated island hotel, who suddenly realize that there is a cold-blooded killer among them. Key Largo adds a violent hurricane into the mix.

In Rebel Island the island is off the Texas coast, beyond cell phone range, and a lot of the guests are hiding guilty secrets. Between a murderer on the loose and hurricane-driven waves washing over the island, will anybody live to see the dawn?

I got my hands on an advance copy, but the regular edition will be published August 28. Plenty of time for you to read the first six books in the series before you set sail for Rebel Island.

Saturday June 16, 2007

Ollalieberry Pie - yum!

BW and I stopped in at Pie 'n Burger in Pasadena today to pick up our annual Ollalieberry pie. Ollalieberries are sort of like blackberries, only better. Ollalieberry pies are seldom available outside of Southern California, and their season is very short, so you have to snatch one when you can. We think Pie 'n Burger has the best ones. Sun's Monrovia office is near Pasadena, so if you happen to visit here in the month of June, treat yourself to a slice. I'll go with you.

Friday May 25, 2007

Buying an ARC

Can't wait for the next book by your favorite author to come out? There's a semi-secret way to get your hands on a copy before everyone else.

I've mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of Rick Riordan's Tres Navarre mystery novels. The next one, Rebel Island, is scheduled to come out on August 28. Publishing is an excruciatingly slow business. I know from Rick's blog that he delivered the manuscript to his editor nearly a year ago, and yet I still have to wait for three more months. Arrgh! I've got a hunch that the reason may be that Rick is even more well-known as an author of bestselling children's books, so it may be that the publisher was avoiding publishing too close to the release of one of them.

 However, I have a way of getting around this this delay. Publishers often produce "advance reading copies," or ARCs, and distribute them to reviewers and book stores in advance of publication in order to build buzz for the book. These may not be as slickly bound and decorated as the final product, but true fans like me don't care. The text is what counts!

ARCs aren't supposed to be sold, but there is an active gray market for them on eBay. Late last week I scored an ARC of Rebel Island for $10.25, including shipping. Hee-hee! Since I am helping build buzz for the book myself, I've got a hunch that the publisher's "prohibition" on reselling ARCs is more of a nudge-nudge-wink-wink ban, and that they actively hope they'll circulate. A rabid fan like me will buy the true first edition for my collection when it comes out anyway, so my conscience is clear.

Wednesday May 23, 2007

Marriage of computer science and origami

What happens when one of the world's great origami practitioners decides to go a step further with the help of a computer? Check this out. Almost unbelievably, there are no cuts, only folds.

Wednesday April 18, 2007

Microsoft catches Black Box fever!

Hee-hee! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Microsoft data center guru James Hamilton has just posted a slide show touting the virtues of portable data centers like Project Black Box. It's a little known fact that MSFT is getting into the data center business in a big way, as with this huge project in San Antonio. Maybe they'd like to buy some Sun hardware for it? To his credit, James includes a nice photo of Project Black Box in his presentation.

Thanks to CBS MarketWatch for the nifty story that turned me on to this.

Tuesday April 10, 2007

I love Kayak.com!

Every once in a while, I fall in love with a web site. I can't stay away from it -- I find myself accessing it just to hear its little voice saying, "Am I not I cool?" The last site I felt this way about was Google Maps. My latest infatuation is Kayak.com. In case you haven't seen it, it is an amazing airline aggregation site. You put in your travel dates and destination, and it searches almost every airline site, and also the big bargain travel sites like Orbitz, Expedia, CheapTickets, etc., for available flights. It lists all the flights, and then you can sort them by cost, duration, number of segments, airliine name, etc. You can also filter by number of segments, or by any subset of specific airlines. BW is going to Dubai in a couple of weeks, and I got her a great deal on British Airways through Kayak. One thing that is especially cool is that you just click through to the airline or Orbitz, etc., itself and book through them, not through Kayak, so you know you're not taking a risk with a site you may not trust.

If you want to look under the hood a bit, check out ITA Software. They are the guys who wrote the software that underlies Kayak, and they have a permanent beta on their site of the next generation of the program that you can also use to research flights. It has some extra features that some people might find useful. Beware, though. I compared it to Kayak once, and it did not produce as cheap a result. Of course, you rather expect that when you use a beta. According to ITA, their software is now being used by a lot of the major travel sites, so one might expect site results to converge over time, but I think I will stick with Kayak, my true love. For those who are really into sick relationships with web sites, check out FlyerTalk.com, the site for frequent flyer mileage junkies. It was there that I first learned of the ITA site, because mileage junkies use it to construct elaborate "mileage runs," to earn frequent flyer miles at low cost. Find yourself  in December with a couple of thousand miles to go before you qualify for Elite status on your favorite airline? No problem! Just use ITA or Kayak to construct a trip from New York to Miami via Omaha and Dallas on a cheap redeye, and fall in love.

Silo warning: Kayak does not search Southwest, so if you are flying to a Southwest city, you may want to check their site separately. I believe Sun's own travel agent, American Express, has the same problem with Southwest, unless you ask them to check it. I guess Southwest doesn't like to cooperate with search programs. Tsk, tsk.

Monday April 02, 2007

Cool new blog

My friend Tony Vigna has now added Blogger to his existing titles of  Technical Guru, Blues Guitarist, Raconteur, Philosopher, and One of the Good Guys. You can check his new blog out here.  How often do you see a blog that combines Athenian philosophy with modern economic theory? Definitely a must-read!

Sunday April 01, 2007

Cyber-bullies target Kathy Sierra

Very disturbing article in the LA Times yesterday about Internet trolls posting anonymous death threats and vile sexual remarks about Kathy Sierra, one of the luminaries of the Java world. She is a former Sun master trainer, the author of Head First Java, a founder of the JavaRanch web site, and the author of the marvelous Creating Passionate Users blog. It is on her blog that the first threatening comments appeared, followed by worse stuff on other sites.

The attacks caused Kathy to cancel her appearance at the O'Reilly ETech conference and may possibly cause her to stop writing her blog, which would be a loss for all of us who care about the profession of software. You can read her account of the incidents here. 

Besides being immoral and disgusting, posting threats is illegal, and posting threats against women is especially despicable. Just recently, some weirdo at my wife's gym was behaving in an intimidating way toward her. This took place over several days, and really caused her a lot of frustration and anxiety, so I can imagine just a little of what Kathy is going through. The anonymous nature of the Internet makes this kind of vicious behavior all too common, and all too easy.

Kudos to Tim Bray and Rich Sharples for talking about Kathy's plight on their blogs. My sympathies go out to Kathy, and I hope the pathetic losers who pulled this stunt get what they deserve in the ongoing police investigation.

Update: Tim O'Reilly has weighed in on the cyber-bully problem, calling for a self-regulated bloggers' code of conduct. Excellent idea, but I think it's clear that threats need to remain subject to criminal prosecution.

Tuesday March 27, 2007

Project Darkstar -- bwa-ha-ha-ha-hah!

I am not much of a gamer myself, but I know otherwise responsible adults who spend an inordinate amount of time hanging out in virtual online worlds. These people are burning through a lot of bandwidth, and a lot of CPU cycles on server farms. Wherever CPU cycles are being burned, you will soon find Sun. Nobody else can provide them as efficiently as we can.

Hence Project Darkstar -- a massive, soon-to-be-Open-Sourced gaming engine, developed by Sun and the community, and made available to the world to serve as a foundation of a whole generation of online games. Written in Java, natch.

Games are no longer frivolous (if they ever were). They have become an art form of both beauty and complexity, essentially turning the art of cinema into an interactive experience. When Sun gets involved with something like this, it moves beyond being a company, to being a major contributor to the planetary culture.

Sunday March 18, 2007

Piracy can be a good thing

Viacom's decision to sue Google over pirated content stored on YouTube seems particularly shortsighted to me. Free, on-demand content is the future of television, and it will be delivered over the Internet. If this is so, why would a content owner object to others helping them out by distributing the content on their own servers?

Of course, Viacom objects because they haven't figured out how to monetize their content other than by showing it in a controlled broadcast where the viewers are supposed to watch the advertisements that the content sponsors have paid for. This implies that what they really object to is their content being shown without the attached commercials.

But suppose the commercials could not be separated from the content? Suppose they were contained in a crawl on the bottom of the screen? Or suppose they took product placement a little further, so that the main characters drank Cokes with the labels carefully facing the camera, and ran around in Nike caps the way they do on the PGA tour? Or suppose the two female leads shared a girlfriend moment where they mentioned how much they like Revlon lip gloss? Or suppose everyone's favorite show was called "Pepsi American Idol," the way shows were named in the fifties? Then Viacom and the other content producers could charge for commercial time not only based on Nielsen ratings, but also by Internet viewing frequency, and encourage pirates instead of hounding them. Everyone would be happier.

Thursday March 15, 2007

Poor man's TiVo

I have seen the future of television. 

I was bummed that I had missed a couple of episodes of one of my favorite TV shows (Jericho, if you must know). Then I discovered, on CBS's Jericho web site, that all the episodes of the series are available for viewing on demand. I was skeptical. I expected an irritating, YouTube-like jerkiness and annoying delays for buffering.

Boy, was I ever wrong. I don't know how they do it: it was fast to load, there were no buffering delays or gaps, and the quality was pretty good. There was an occasional built-in pause, at about the point where you would expect a commercial, and I think they may use this for buffering. It wasn't intrusive at all. They did have commercials, but not as many as one would see on broadcast TV.

The image quality was fair. In the default-size viewing window it looked good, but full-screen on my laptop showed some degradation, especially during fast movement. Still definitely enjoyable.

Why buy a digital video recorder when you can watch like this? Once again, the network is winning versus on-site processing and storage. This is the real Web 2.0. There must be some major server farms making this possible. I've got a hunch television is going to be a big part of Sun's future.

Wednesday February 28, 2007

Dell responds to the Linux community

I like Dell's response: fast, respectful of the community, and contains a concrete commitment to certifying Linux:

"It’s exciting to see the IdeaStorm community’s interest in open source solutions like Linux and OpenOffice. Your feedback has been all about flexibility and we have seen a consistent request to provide platforms that allow people to install their operating system of choice. We are listening, and as a result, we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations. This is another step towards ensuring that our customers have a good experience with Linux on our systems.

"As this community knows, there is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux. In the last week, the IdeaStorm community suggested more than half a dozen distributions. We don't want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another. We want users to have the opportunity to help define the market for Linux on desktop and notebook systems. In addition to working with Novell, we are also working with other distributors and evaluating the possibility of additional certifications across our product line. We are continuing to investigate your other Linux-related ideas, so please continue to check here for updates."

Hmm. I wonder if  "additional certifications" could include Solaris? 

Friday February 23, 2007

Note to Sun: Call Michael Dell

Dell has started a new web site that is pretty cool, definitely Web 2.0: Dell IdeaStorm. Anyone can post a product idea that they would like Dell to implement. Then, users can vote continuously for their favorite ideas, which are displayed in order of popularity. Guess what the most popular idea is? PCs with pre-installed Linux (75,000 votes). And the second most popular? Pre-installed OpenOffice (46,000 votes). 

This is huge. I can't imagine a better way to promote OpenOffice as a corporate standard. It's already hit the news media. I hope Dell listens to their own users, and I hope Sun follows up on this opening. Simon Phipps has already blogged about it, and I hope the idea reaches the right ears.

Sunday February 18, 2007

Dell only sells direct -- NOT

 Isn't it fun to find a secret channel to acquire the products you like, a nifty back door the manufacturer doesn't want you to know about? It seems that Costco is the computer industry's back door for getting rid of overstocks. Last year, when Apple switched over to Intel processors, a small mountain of the newly obsolete Power PC Macs appeared at our local Costco.  Now it seems that Dell, the strongest proponent of only selling direct, has joined the party at Costco. Check this out.