Wednesday June 23, 2004

Cleaning the Augean stables Just finished the periodic task of cleaning up my email. I'm on the Edgemail pilot, and there's a limit of 500MB per account. I'm glad to accept that restriction in exchange for the convenience of being able to access my mail from anywhere, inside or outside of the Sun corporate network. My mail client (Mail.app on my 12" PowerBook) barely skips a beat when I connect to any network: as long as SSL-secured IMAP and SMTP can reach the dual-homed server pool, it all just keeps working. I tend to clean up whenever my mailbox goes over 400MB, just in case someone dumps a bunch of multi-megabyte attachments on me. (We have plenty of tools for sharing stuff without doing that - I prefer Twiki - but some people never learn.) After archiving some ancient curios to a local folder on my laptop, and deleting stuff associated with past lives and projects, I'm back down to 350MB. For now. (2004-06-23 08:45:33.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Friday June 11, 2004

Me and Ronnie While everybody seems to be waxing lyrical (or apoplectic) about Ronald Reagan (and I did like Steve Bell's cartoon in the Guardian), I was reminded of a personal piece of synchronicity. We had just moved from the UK to the USA (for "just a few years," we thought - hah!), and it was my first day on the job, at Raytheon Data Systems in Mansfield, Massachusetts. I was joining the team to work on the OS for Raytheon's next generation minicomputer. It was March 30, 1981, and around 2:30pm, right in the middle of a meeting to get to know the rest of the team, everything stopped: Reagan had just been shot. From my perspective, as an outsider who viewed America as a pathologically gun-obsessed culture, it was an odd moment... what had I let myself in for?
(2004-06-11 05:54:50.0) Permalink

Monday June 07, 2004

General introduction For most people, their first blog posting is autobiographical; who am I to buck tradition? I'm Geoff Arnold, a Distinguished Engineer in Sun's CTO office; I work for Rob Gingell, the Chief Engineer of Sun. I generally work on "future stuff", but I'm also involved in matters affecting the engineering community at Sun. I've been with Sun since 1985, always in New England (despite occasional pressure to relocate to California).

My primary blog/website is at GeoffArnold.com, where you can read more about me and my professional background. The content is all over the map - personal, political, technical, whimsical, reflective, musical, occasionally professional. The first posting that got any attention is this one on the Sun-MS deal; occasionally I'll get TB'd which causes real bandwidth spikes.

And finally (in the spirit of full disclosure that seems appropriate for Sun's new blogging policy), I should mention that I am a huge supporter of both Java and Jini. Back in the early 1970s I worked with Simula 67 - arguably the first usable OO language - and I regarded the whole BCPL to C to C++ evolution as a colossal digression. When I finally got my hands on Java, I had a feeling of coming home. I'm also a distributed computing kind of guy: I worked on my first distributed OS in around 1979. Doing the first implementation of NFS for the PC in the mid-80s convinced me that the idea of network transparency, trying to make remote resources look as though they were local was just plain wrong. Everything is distributed. Even when it's local, treat it as remote. We can take a distributed system and optimize it for localized deployment, but the other way round just breaks. And Jini is, fundamentally, distributed Java done right - dynamic discovery, leases so that things will fail-safe, distributed events and transactions, interface contracts and private protocols. Those who don't use it are doomed to reinvent it.

That doesn't mean I don't believe in the value of XML web services. (I spent a year on the W3C Web Services Architecture WG.) But I do believe in using the appropriate technology for the job: I am suspicious of universal solutions. We barely know how to do real distributed computing; today it's mostly client-server stuff, synchronous, static, asymmetrical. Let's not pretend that we know the One True Way to do it.
(2004-06-07 14:37:11.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Saturday June 05, 2004

Getting started Just planning to beat the rush on Monday.... My primary blog is at GeoffArnold.Com; I'll have to see how I balance the use of the two blogs. (2004-06-05 06:02:06.0) Permalink Comments [1]