Kate's Blog
The Anonymous Web
Some advice I've received is to make check to see from time to time to see what people would find if they search for you using Google. When I last tried this a few years ago, I found I turned up on about page 2 or 2, with this blog, my PhD thesis, the list of past students for Jeffrey Ullman, and, if you dig deep enough, a contribution I made to X11 in about 1987. Not stellar, but definitely present.
But today, I found - nothing! Not surprisingly, the #1 search result goes to Kate Morris, Holistic Search Engine Marketing Consultant. Well, if you're in the search engine business, you'd better show up first on the list. There's Kate Morris "a self-confessed 'beauty junkie'" (nope, not me). There's also at least one photographer, an author or five, a holistic health practitioner, a "Miss Kate Morris" who seems to have been the source of Nigerian spam email two years ago... the list goes on. There's even a Kate Morris in IT who worked for a bank in Sydney (my home town) and a movie "Kate Morris, Vice President" (not me either). Some of them lead far more interesting lives than me: a sky diver, a hammer thrower, St. Patrick's Day Parade queen...
When I started constructing my digital identity, I was careful. The 'net was small - and the few women on the net sometimes attracted unwanted attention. I didn't use my full name when posting to newsgroups, and was careful about what I committed to email. Even now, I am careful to try to separate the "business" Kate from my personal life. It's not that I am absent. I'm on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, AIM, Plaxo and Naymz (though the last two are not updated currently). I'm also on some special-interest groups, like Ravelry. Google finds other people who share my name on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo and Naymz, but not me.
Today, I'm wondering if there is a point to all of this secrecy. If you are just another tree in a forest, do you really need to try to keep a low profile? Once everyone is connected, it becomes very difficult to single out any individual person.
PS: On page 20 of the search results, I finally found The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Katherine Morris - which is definitely me. Of course, it is also 18 years ago! It's another 20 pages until you find another link to me. It works better if you search for "Katherine" rather than "Kate", though Google helpfully includes "Katherine" in the results for "Kate".
Posted at 10:35AM 05 Jun, 2009 by Kate Morris in Personal | Comments[1]
Lucky the vegetarian cat
Last week our family adopted a house rabbit. Or perhaps the rabbit adopted us, it's sometimes hard to say. "Lucky" (*) is like a vegetarian cat - but friendlier than many cats I've known.
European wild rabbits were introduced to Australia in the 19th century by "naturalization societies" as part of an attempt to make Australia more like Europe. The wild rabbits were intended to provide food for the foxes (also introduced), and the foxes were meant to provide entertainment (fox-hunting) for a new kind of landed gentry, the free settlers.
Well, of course, it all went horribly wrong. Rabbits in Australia are a major pest, destroying crops, grazing land and habitat for native animals. They have been controlled by shooting, as well as deliberately introduced diseases such as myxomatosis (in the 1950s) and, more recently, calicivirus (also known as Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease). Attempts were made to fence off large areas in Western Australia to eradicate rabbits in grazing land, pushing them into desert areas (the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence is not about rabbits, but it shows the extent of the fence). In true mythbusters style, explosives are sometimes employed. You can read more about the history of rabbits in Australia here. Growing up in Australia, we didn't see rabbits as cute little bunnies - they could be food, sometimes, but were usually a pest. Stories about car drivers swerving to run over them were common (though due to limited road access to rabbit warrens, it is not very effective on a large scale).
So, I would not have considered a rabbit as a pet. Growing up, we kept guinea pigs, dogs, cats, budgerigars, and a horse - but never rabbits. My kids have pet guinea pigs, but these live outside and don't have much to do with us, really.
So, how did we end up with a house rabbit? Some friends were walking their dog, and found a white rabbit cornered by off-leash dogs. They scooped up the rabbit, and carried it to our house - since we have pet guinea pigs, we had a spare outdoor hutch. We spent a week trying to track down the owner, but failed. Meanwhile "Lucky" began her campaign to move into our house. She moped inside the hutch, but greeted us enthusiastically when we checked on her. When brought inside, she hopped around, sniffing us inquisitively, and didn't make a mess of the carpet. It was clear that she likes people, and is used to living indoors. She also is afraid to walk on polished floors, and prefers carpet. So, we bought a rabbit cage for indoors, and she uses it for food and as a litter box. She hangs out most of the time on a rug under the coffee table - this arrangement is great, because there are no power cords or stray cables lying around the coffee table. She likes being brushed, and is very affectionate.
I was surprised at how curious she is. She is also much less focussed on food than a guinea pig, and more interested in people (especially if you stroke her between the eyes). I had always thought rabbits' success in Australia was due to their fast breeding and lack of predators, but I'm now wondering if their willingness to explore has played a big part. Curiousity, along with the ability to breed fast, makes for successful colonisation. It's probably worth noting that there are no feral populations of guinea pigs in Australia - no surprise there.
(*) probably not her real name.
Posted at 10:23AM 16 May, 2007 by Kate Morris in Personal |
A Future World for Distributed Teams
My blog has been a bit quiet because I just spent 2 weeks in California. Since I work on a globally distributed team (see Working Around the World), it helps us to meet face to face once every 6 months or so to get the kind of interaction you just don't get over the phone. There are some problems that can easily be solved with a few hours in front of a whiteboard, yet take months of phone calls and emails - that's if we can negotiate the difficulties of remaining polite and considerate when it's 6:00 am for at least one of us. The PAO are the best team at working together remotely that I've been part of (I know they'll be reading this, but I'd say it anyway). I'm grateful for my colleagues' abilities at appropriately using the technologies available to us - email, IM, Skype, and of course the telephone.
Recently we had some discussions about whether Second Life could be useful to assist with team meetings, as Sun uses it for marketing events. But the public nature of Second Life seems a deterrent, and it's been a bit slow for some of us.
A side benefit of my trip to California was that this time - for the first time in a long while - I managed to attend the Open House at Sun Labs. Of course, it reminds me of how far I've strayed from R&D, which causes nostalgia rather than regret these days. There were lots of cool things to see. Paul Lamere is cataloguing music by analyzing its content (see Search Inside The Music), which could certainly help me manage my playlists better. There was some interesting work putting Java on set-top boxes, improving e-commerce security, and exploring alternatives to traditional HTML web interfaces. I didn't have enough time to see everything I'd have liked to see.
The project that I found most immediately relevant (well, once I have a faster broadband connection) was MPK20, a 3D collaborative work environment. Each person has an avatar that moves around the virtual building - the workspace. MPK20 combines high-quality audio with the ability to virtually walk around, listen in on interesting conversations, and share documents with colleagues. There are individual offices and team rooms, with whiteboards, web browsers, and other applications you can interact with. We could have a team meeting with a closed door, as well as open it to others when we want to share further, or we could post documents and websites outside our team room to allow others to comment. Perhaps we'd be able to leave notes for people, or teleport over to them if they're around. If they are in a public space (or a room with an open door), it's possible to listen in for a minute to see if the conversation could be interrupted or not. The avatars give a level of personal interaction (though not body language) that is not possible using IM and email. Of course, this is still a research project, and is not ready for our use yet. But I have hopes of being able to use it one day - sooner rather than later would be good!
Posted at 09:59AM 04 May, 2007 by Kate Morris in Sun |
Earth Hour
Last Saturday evening, from 7:30 to 8:30 pm, most of Sydney turned off their lights (and other electrical devices) to mark the first "Earth Hour". The Sun office in North Sydney turned off its neon signage, as did most buildings in the city. We went outside, hoping to see more of the evening sky, but although it was clear, the sky looked much the same as usual. The moon was too close to full and the street lights were left on, "for safety reasons".
We sat together and read books, did puzzles, etc. The kids were excited to be using candles, and I realised that while spending the evening reading is not unusual in our family, we normally use four separate rooms to do it (and of course we often are using computers as well as the lights). Before 7:30pm, we went around the house, turning off appliances. We turned the network off - which is a bit of a change, since we're used to being able to get a network connection by simply opening up a laptop. We usually leave our ADSL modem and Apple Airport Express turned on - yet it only takes a few minutes for the network to stabilize when it starts up. I know my previous ISP actively discouraged users from turning off their cable modems, and I wonder if the ISP had problems when they were suddenly hit by a wave of DHCP requests at 8:30pm. Ours stayed off until Sunday evening when I couldn't wait any longer to read email. It took me a day to get around to turning the microwave back on.
Attempting to reduce your energy footprint does raise some interesting questions. Why doesn't the LG digital settop box / hard drive have a dimmer on its display - and in fact, why does it need to display the time even when it's turned off? The Onkyo A/V receiver and DVD player are much less intrusive, and probably use much less power. How many clocks do you have in your house? The microwave, the clock radios, the stereo, the home theatre, the battery operated clocks, alarm clocks, watches... just about all of them powered by batteries or mains power. Does a Sony PlayStation 2 really need to display a red LED when it's turned off? All those transformers get very hot, even when the devices they power are off... more wasted power. At least here in Australia we have a switch on each power outlet so you don't have to physically unplug a device to turn it off.
Next year the organizers hope Earth Hour will be global. It's a symbolic act rather than a solution - to solve the problem, we'd have to change how we live and work as well. But it's a reminder that reducing the world's energy usage takes small steps from many people (and companies).
Posted at 12:55PM 04 Apr, 2007 by Kate Morris in Personal | Comments[1]
Bicycle hacking
So, I mentioned in yesterday's blog entry that I bought a new bicycle to replace my old rusted out hybrid bike. The old bike had always been a bit large, in spite of the fact that it had a custom frame which should have fitted, and I was never really comfortable with the handlebars. Over time the gears and brakes had become unreliable, and needed replacing. It's now been donated (via Freecycle) to someone who will weld it together with other bits and pieces to make a rickshaw. Why a person would want a rickshaw in Sydney is another question, but good luck!
My new bike is a Trek 4500 WSD (women-specific design). It's a mountain bike - which takes a bit of getting used to, since it's definitely slower than the touring bike with dropped handlebars I had at Stanford. The low gears are great though, and easy on the knees when going uphill. My local bike shop (Renegade in Lane Cove) was very helpful in setting it up. I use a below-knee prosthesis on my right leg, so I can't bend that knee as much as my left. Most mountain bikes have long cranks, and I couldn't get my knee to bend enough to let the pedal get over the top. Hacking the prosthesis is always an option, but I didn't want to make changes that could affect its reliability when walking. So, we "hacked" the bike:
I now have a nice sporty bicycle that is comfortable going up hills, and quite stable on sand and gravel. It's not much use for speeding on the flat, though - definitely not for racing. Now all I have to do is to get my younger son off training wheels and we'll be set...
Posted at 01:20PM 28 Mar, 2007 by Kate Morris in Personal |
back to blog
Well, I fell out of the blogsphere for a while there, but I'm back.
Here's what I've been doing:
Looking at web 2.0 (and CE 2.0) and how it will affect how we work both within Sun and with Sun Partners in future. Take a look at Peter Reiser's blog for more on this.
Reading "How to Survive a Robot Uprising" by Daniel H Wilson - now I've managed to get it back from my 7 year old son, who really should have better things to do. Daniel is a PhD candidate at CMU, according to the back of the book, and this guide is one of the better examples of PhD procrastination I've seen (as well as a serious introduction to robotics). Way to go, Daniel! And no, I won't be sharing tips the procrastination techniques I used while completing my PhD.
We went to see TEZUKA: The Marvel of Manga at the Art Gallery of NSW last weekend. It was great, and both my sons loved it (as did their parents). The exhibit does have some adult manga , so be warned if you are concerned about taking your children to it. It's interesting to contemplate whether manga could have developed anywhere other than Japan. It is far more complex than the Superman comics I used to borrow from my cousins when I was a child. The exhibit closes in Sydney soon, but it will travel to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco in June.
I bought a new bicycle, to replace one that we foolishly allowed to rust out after our second child was born and we were faced with the reality of trying to transport two young children on bicycles in a city. More about the bicycle another time.
Posted at 11:37AM 27 Mar, 2007 by Kate Morris in Sun |
Bushfires near Sydney
The Blue Mountains, where I grew up, are a World Heritage listed area to the west of Sydney. Bushfires are a common feature of summer there. As I write this, there's a fire burning out of control near where my mother lives in Mount Victoria. 80 km away, in Sydney, the sky is tinged with orange from the smoke. It's a familiar sight to anyone who has spent a summer in Sydney – the first reports were from 1788 when the British first sent convicts and settlers here, so it is clear that the Koori (Australian Aboriginal) inhabitants experienced it too.
It's difficult to say if the fires have become worse over the past few years – one of my early memories is being evacuated to Sydney because of bushfires. My father was a member of the local bushfire brigade – of course, now they use the more professional sounding term “ Rural Fire Service” - but look at their URL and you'll see they haven't changed that much. Before the fire swept through the Lower Blue Mountains where we lived, I remember the smell of eucalyptus smoke in the house for weeks – he would come home from work at 6:30 pm, then go out “ fire-fighting” until midnight, back to work the next morning (I suppose he must have slept on the train). A fire can smoulder away in almost inaccessible places (like the Grose Valley, where the current one is) for weeks at a time, then, when conditions are right – generally a hot north-westerly wind – it will jump the gorges and gullies and burn until it reaches the Nepean River at the foot of the mountains. In the Blue Mountains, most houses are built on the top of the ridges, where the fire is hottest, and houses are regularly damaged or destroyed.
Today looks like being one of those days where the fire may “run”. The fire has already broken the containment lines, and a strong westerly wind is forecast. You can see photos of the fire at the RFS site, and read the latest status here.
The current fire was started by lightning strikes a week ago, but often they are started by people: either deliberately set, or when a “safe” fire gets out of hand. Most plants in the Blue Mountains are adapted to bushfires, requiring fire for the seeds to germinate, so they have been a normal feature for a long time (we know that Kooris deliberately set fires to attract game to the lush new growth that appears after the fires). But on days like today, the fire will burn too hot for many plants and animals to survive. Hopefully this fire will be stopped, or at least no people will be injured or property destroyed.
Posted at 09:52AM 21 Nov, 2006 by Kate Morris in Personal |
You CAN take it with you - off-line access to a wiki
Wiki technology is a tool my workgroup has adopted enthusiastically. Sun has a number of wikis used internally by technical (and not-so-technical) staff to share documentation, best practices, etc. We use mediawiki, the software used by wikipedia, "the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet", as they say.
It is far easier to use wiki to update documentation than edit a file when you have many people authoring content. But let's face it, there are times when you just can't be on-line to edit your pages (I'll worry about printing another day...). I wanted a way to be able to take my pages with me, create new pages, and edit without needing internet connectivity. Export to HTML is good for reading, but I wanted to edit.
Fortunately, I found some help at the mediawiki site. What I did was to download mediawiki, and install MAMP. MAMP is a "Macintosh, Apache, Mysql, and PHP" bundle (for Macs, obviously - there are similar packages available for Solaris, Linux and Windows, but a Mac is what I use every day, so that's where I needed to run it). The instructions for configuring the database were a little opaque, but a few tweaks had it working (the trick was to use MySQL running from MAMP to create the database user and database, rather than doing so from the mediawiki installer).
Copying pages between wikis is still a manual cut'n'paste task - I would like an easier way to do this without mirroring the entire wiki to my laptop. But for now, I create a link to the page I want to edit from the main wiki page on my laptop. In one browser window I edit the page I want to copy, select all the source text, and in the second browser window, I paste the source into the wiki on my laptop. Generally I only need a few pages, so this isn't too bad. Of course I have to reverse the process to put my changes back, including any new pages I create.
In summary, it's a bit of a hack, and it'd be better if it could merge changes and do the import and export automatically, but it gets the job done for now.
Technorati tags: wiki
Posted at 03:04PM 15 Nov, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun |
Working around the World
Work-life balance on a global team? I work in one of Sun's global teams. Since we support the Sun's field organization with processes and tools for solution delivery, being globally distributed means we are closer to our customers, and we can effectively cover Asia, Europe and the Americas. It means, though, that our team meetings are held at 6 am for me and my colleague in Sydney, and quite late in the evening for our colleague in Germany. Scheduling calls can be a challenge! So, here are a few things I've found that help:
Work in sub-groups. It is easy to schedule calls between any two locations on the planet, without requiring someone to be working much outside their normal working hours. Throw in a third location and it becomes much trickier.
Take advantage of geographical distribution. If something is required by Monday morning US Pacific time, and we only find out on Friday (US Pacific), remember that APAC has all day Monday to work on it, and Europe will be working for hours before the US Pacific starts work on their Monday.
Be available to the team, but not 24x7. We all need to sleep sometimes. It's not possible to get focussed work done without some time free of interruptions, or enough sleep and "real life" time. I don't set my email to notify me every time I receive mail - I check it every hour or so while I'm working, when I get to a reasonable time to stop what I'm doing. On the other hand, I usually sit on IM, and if anyone on the team need me urgently, they send me a quick message and we then move to the phone.
Work from home. None of this would be possible without the ability to work from home (or the airport, or a hotel room...). The Open Work program at Sun is great enabling technology for this. Sun saves real estate costs, and it means I don't waste time or energy commuting. I can fit late night / early morning calls around the rest of my life. It increases employee loyalty due to level of trust and autonomy given to employees.
The timezone ready-reckoner. We need to know the time anywhere in the world so we can schedule meetings. I use a little spreadsheet that I can print out, double-sided so I have one side for summer / daylight savings time in the Northern hemisphere and the other for the northern winter. There are numerous websites that do the same thing, but I like having a piece of paper that can sit on my desk.
Posted at 01:05PM 20 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun | Comments[0]
Taking a break
We camped with another family at Dunn's Swamp in Wollemi National Park for a few days last week - plenty for the kids to do, climbing on pagodas - large rocks (5 - 7m high - a bit nerve-wracking for us parents), canoeing, swimming, bushwalking. But also a chance to just sit still and observe patterns of light and shadow and do, well, nothing much. We didn't see much evidence of the wettest water on earth, but the water was definitely cold.
We found one large scribbly gum (Eucalyptus haemastoma) that had been blown over. 
It had grown in shallow soil in the lee of two 5m boulders. When it grew high enough, about a week earlier, a combination of heavy rain and wind blew it over, taking all the soil and compost with it and leaving bare rock, ready for the cycle of building up soil to begin again.
The scribbly gum gets its name from the larva of a moth that lays its eggs between the layers of new and old bark - the scribbles are tracks drawn by the larva as it eats the bark while growing. You can see them pretty clearly here:
The lines get thicker as the larva grows. The moth itself is tiny and rarely seen.
Posted at 12:25PM 19 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Personal | Comments[0]
CEC closing session
Sun's stock price and that ponytail...[Read More]
Posted at 04:13PM 05 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun | Comments[0]
Partners and cryptography at CEC
On Monday I gave the presentation that paid my way to the conference - "Delivering projects with Sun's Partners". And, not surprisingly, a few partners turned up! Since I live in Australia, most of the presentations I do are delivered over the phone - no audience feedback, or very little. Because people can't see you, they tend to listen patiently and not interrupt with questions. Presenting live meant I could watch the body language, adjusting my presentation as I went along - much more energy, I was almost sorry when I reached the end!
The initiative I've been working on should make it easier for Partners delivering solutions with Sun to collaborate with Sun staff they are working with on projects - of course, with security, protecting both the Partner's IC and Sun's IC. Many people had good feedback for me, and overall it was very useful.
One of the highlights of the day, though (for an ex-techie like me... my manager is laughing at this point...) was attending Radia Perlman's talk on the use of encryption to protect your backups (ensuring that they are securely deleted when you are finished). You can read more about it on http://research.sun.com/minds/2005-0208/ . Crypto is about as geeky as you can get, of course - it's probably the best argument for teaching pure mathematics there is. I felt privileged to hear from one of the pioneers in the field. Radia was nice enough to skip over the mathematics slides - so, I didn't have to try and remember my university mathematics.
Technorati tags: cec2006
Posted at 11:28AM 04 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun | Comments[0]
CEC welcome reception
or, how to impress people without spilling your drink.... [Read More]
Posted at 05:02AM 03 Oct, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun | Comments[0]