Monday June 20, 2005

Hasta La Vista Kali-four-nia This is my last week as a resident of California. I used the phonetic pronunciation above so you can read it like our Governator would say it. I hope he can turn the State around. California has been great to me and my family, but changing economics and telecommunications advances have culminated in a decision to relocated to Texas. At their same stage of life, my parents migrated our family from Florida to the "Golden State" in 1977. My father found double the salary and double the house price, but net-net it was a great move - and the weather.... Now, however the economics are not so good; perhaps it is still double the pay, but the house prices are quadruple or worse. We are forging our own path in the good old American tradition and starting anew in Austin. The hope is to settle into a neighborhood the kids can enjoy during all their growing up years just like I had in California. We have lost three quarters of our close friends and family in the last 5 years since the dot-com bubble burst. So we are hoping Austinites are less mobile folk. We already know they are a freindly lot. On all three of our trips there thus far, they have been extraordinarily welcoming of our intent to immigrate. We already know more about our future neighbors from a few conversations on our barren lot than we know about our current neighbors. Of course there is the weather.... I'll be blogging after the move and share my thoughts after the honeymoon wears off.

Leaving my buddies at Sun is the biggest downside to the move. An engineering team that I used to manage took me out to "Joy Luck" Dim Sum in Cupertino so I could enjoy chicken feet and jelly fish one last time before setting off to the land of barbequed red meat - which I have nothing against mind you.
Left to right: Brian "Yukfai" Lam, Tiep Vo, Matthew Montgomery, John "Hoffie" Hoffmann, Richard "Tony/Frosty" Welch, Mike Matsui and Venky "Venkman" Kumar.
Photo taken by our former colleague and longtime friend Gwynn (2005-06-20 10:10:10.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday June 17, 2005

DTrace for Java The benefits of DTrace have been extended to help Java programmers. So any Java developers going to JavaOne ought to take their code along on a CD or USB drive and you can have it observed!

Take the Solaris 10 DTrace Challenge at JavaOne Get a performance improvement on your Java application while you wait -- or you can win an iPod!

Good fun. I'd love to drop in and observe the observing, if I were in town, but more about that later... (2005-06-17 15:55:29.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday June 06, 2005

Kraftwerk's "Home Computer" - a redux I started cleaning out my office this morning in preparation for my relocation to Austin. Among the mess, I found some lyrics I wrote several years ago to the tune of Kraftwerk's "Home Computer". The original song starts out...

I program my home computer, 
beam myself into the future.

The hoffie redux...

I program my Ultra 60
Java on Solaris computes swiftly

Orient my objects in elegant hierachy
cronjobs orchestrate the desired chronlogy

Threads abound in the process
signals and interupts spin the mutex

Far removed from gates etched in silicon
I extend stubs and create singleton

Garbage collection is a Godsend
pointer arithmetic, a byegone trend

The JVM shields my UltraSparc
crashless computing hits the mark

Users appreciate the app's availability
System admins embrace the stability

Ant for build, tomcat for container
open source has become a no-brainer

Solaris stands as the king 
of symmetric multi-processing

Will the maturation of Linux end its reign?

Against legions of developers kernel hacking, 
Sun must change if it desires to remain

"Software wants to be free"
Java Business Expo 1999, Scott McNealy

Back in 2002, I had left the lyrics open-ended and unpublished, but today there are more answers than questions and I have this blog as a medium. Sun has answered the marketplace on several fronts. Solaris 10 has been open sourced and the Scalable Systems Group has doubled down on its SMP strength by funneling in-house chip development to Niagara. Those systems are supposed to rock, to the tune of 15 times today's performance. That will truely be music to many people's ears. (2005-06-06 12:52:55.0) Permalink Comments [0]