ZFS Pics

Really cool pics here from Jeff Bonwick. 

Posted: May 18, 2008

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One of my pet peeves about blog entries are those who create entries without clarifying the purpose of it. They assume that everyone in the world knows what they are talking about. "Really cool pics" points to another blog entry with only pictures of two unidentified people with a title "Casablanca" that has no apparent relationship to the pictures.

The poster apparently is targeting the blog to a small community who might know these people by face alone and make some assumptions about what "Stay Tuned" might mean. Although I am a Sun employee I had no idea who they were because I don't travel in the very small, elite circle of kernel programming gurus. Thankfully, comments posted by other let us know what "might" be going on here.

ARRRGHHH!.

Posted by Jim Laurent on May 18, 2008 at 10:47 AM JST #

hi, Jim. I agree but only to a point. To me, blogs are designed to be targeted to many /narrow/ audiences. For instance, in my case, if you don't know ZFS or Bonwick you're unlikely to click on the link I provided. I write my blog basically as a journal, so I pay very little attention to the concept of an "audience" out there. I made that decision a long time ago, and it works for me. But it can be confusing, though, very true.

Posted by Jim Grisanzio on May 18, 2008 at 11:31 AM JST #

You didn't know what Linus Torvalds looks like?

Posted by Aaron Gyes on May 18, 2008 at 01:03 PM JST #

Jeff Bonwick is a living legend - how can you not know who he is and what he looks like, if you had anything at all to do with Solaris?

Bonwick is probably the number one most famous Solaris kernel engineer, and the father of ZFS, as it happens to be.

Posted by UX-admin on May 18, 2008 at 06:24 PM JST #

Very Funny!

But yes, I don't know what either of them look like. It may not be obvious to non-kernel geeks that neither Linus nor Jeff have paparazzi following them around posting their pictures on the front of People magazine.

My point was, if you assume "everyone" knows what and who your are talking about, you are guaranteed to be wrong.

Posted by Jim Laurent on May 18, 2008 at 10:24 PM JST #

""Really cool pics" points to another blog entry with only pictures of two unidentified people with a title "Casablanca" that has no apparent relationship to the pictures."

Here's the relationship: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q0_S2J9c2H4

If you haven't seen "Casablanca", you really should.

Posted by Jason Lefkowitz on May 18, 2008 at 11:09 PM JST #

Ahhhh. Interesting.

Posted by Jim Laurent on May 18, 2008 at 11:18 PM JST #

Also, anyone remember the old 70s reese's peanut butter cup commercials?
One guy walking with chocolate runs into one guy with peanut butter.
At first they are frustrated.. until they realize that the mixture is quite nice.

Posted by SteveJ on May 19, 2008 at 12:14 AM JST #

I could guess something about ZFS on Linux, but was stumped about the Chocolate on Peanut butter references.

SteveJ: Thanks for the explanation about the chocolate + peanut butter commercial. I was born in '78, and live in India, and haven't seen this commercial :)

Posted by Sriram Narayanan on May 19, 2008 at 09:56 AM JST #

Jim, (L that is) for havens sake ... you know how Jeff looks like or have you been asleep during all those amb conferences? Shapen up man ;)

Posted by ulf on May 19, 2008 at 04:39 PM JST #

Jim, you are experiencing this irritation because *nix (especially WRT both Sun and Linux communities) attracts geeks. Geeks like to think they are smarter than you. If you don't "get it," then you are beneath them and not worth helping.{1]

Now, all this blogging seems to have changed that to a large degree. The articles here are typically aimed at both technical and quasi-technical audiences. There's a bit of this "insider" nonsense from time to time, but it's a far better situation than the non-helpful forums of days past (and don't even get me started on USENET groups!).

Sun's engineering is top notch. It's just as important that they develop both the cultural and marketing chops necessary to fully realize that innovation. As long as there's progress, these sorts of nuisances can be excused.

Charles

[1] This is one of the reasons we're developing ASP.NET over Java web apps - many of the Java/*nix "community forums" are haunted by Someone Smarter Than You (i.e. "assholes") who don't really help you out. Not so with other communities. You tend to get very genuine community support.

Posted by Charles Soto on May 20, 2008 at 06:13 AM JST #

Charles Soto: this sounds to me like "our incapable indian developers are unable to get free support".
the real assholes are the people that are unwillingly to even spend a minute searching a solution in the documentation or google and rather go to a irc chatroom or a forum and demand free support....

Jim Laurent: this is viral marketing ofc. but hey, you should know atleast one of them two....

Posted by Jonas Lerch on May 20, 2008 at 09:37 AM JST #

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