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Tuesday December 20, 2005

Motorola RAZR I liked my Sony Ericsson T616 for its Bluetooth connectivity, software design in general. Especially loved using Salling Clicker to flip slides. But the mechanical design was rickety, call quality and call handoff quality were poor, and there were times when I couldn't get the phone to turn on. The day finally came when it just wouldn't turn on at all

I scrambled to the Cingular store to get a RAZR phone for an upcoming trip.

My review of RAZR:

Awesome mechanical work. It is very robust without the creaking and groaning of the Sony. Has Bluetooth (I care about) and VGA camera (I don't care about). The software is poorly designed though. The Java stack is not standards-based so I can't run Clicker. The menu navigation is fast, but extremely nonintuitive and innefficient. Some examples:

The nice display has enough room for 9 menu items, but only shows 4
Address book doesn't support addresses, emails, or IMs.
Calendar will not show notes about meetings
There's no "profiles" feature to change ring behavior. To silence the phone you have to (noisily) reduce volume a step at a time till it's off.

So the first day I was convinced that I'd be returning the RAZR, but someone coached me through the undocumented ability to modify menu ordering and phonebook display. So now I'll probably keep it. I wish they'd support a standard Java stack so I can run Clicker. Pleeeeeeeeeease???

I work with 10 people here, any of whom could each solve all the above problems in a weekend's work. Is it really that hard for Motorola to figure that out?

( Dec 20 2005, 09:01:03 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday November 14, 2005

Wobbly knees I find that if i haven't ridden in a 2 weeks, then get on the bike, I have a hard time finding a rhythm and my knees feel wobbly. By that I mean it seems like I'm having trouble re-discovering my nominal knee track around the pedals. Amazing that muscle memory loss can be so pronounced so fast. I wonder if the pros can feel the difference in as little as a day or two of downtime. ( Nov 14 2005, 04:08:38 PM PST ) Permalink

Wednesday September 14, 2005

Reno Diary 9/14 Got back into town 11pm last night from MSP. Qualified in this morning's short session at 187 mph, slower than last time by 4 mph. Hmmm what's up with that? That put me 2nd in Silver as far as pairings

Our first race at 1405 had me starting in the last row due to the inverted start we all voted for last season (it makes for lots of passing and therefore better racing). It was a total cat fight. I passed about 5 airplanes and missed winning by 0.2 seconds over the 6-lap (~20 mile) race. Another 100 yards and I would have had it. No Maydays, no sketchy moves. Just good racing.

We really have to think about incentives and inverted starts. In the semifinal, noone will want to win because it places them in the back of the starting grid for the finals. Already talking about handing out the money in different ways to prevent people from just flying around at MCA hoping to lose.

Just got back from our banquet tonight. Basically another excuse to drink beer and tell "There I was flat on my back" stories. Wayne Handley was there talking about crashing the ag-cat in the box canyon and his various other crash experiences. Overhead someone else telling their midair supersonic F104 ejection over Vietnam story. There's so much aviation depth in this group I wouldn't even dare to try. "uhhhhh, one time my dipstick fell out...." ( Sep 14 2005, 09:03:44 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Reno Diary 9/12/05 Briefing at 0700, fly at 920. Was able to fly in the first group because I had to get to RNO for a Northwest flight to MSP (Minneapolis). Meeting in Eagan.

With all the mods and the new prop, the plane went all of maybe 2 mph faster. It's always a bummer when lots of work only nets a couple mph. I'm seeing 3100 rpm and 190mph on the straights, whereas I should have seen 3160rpm and 193mph. People are qualifying today and tomorrow, and I know there are 4-5 airplanes right in the 190mph range. I could very well qual out in the Silver class (the field of 24 is broken down by speed into 3 groups of 8 planes; gold, silver, and bronze). Half the prize money comes from qual position, so qual'ing in Silver costs me money, but on the other hand I have a reasonable chance of winning Silver and getting a ride in the fire-truck.

I'm at RNO waiting for the MSP flight. Do they serve meals on this one or do I have to eat? ( Sep 14 2005, 09:02:59 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Reno diary 9/11/05 Mandatory briefing was at 0800 and course time at 1030. Managed to get the wing root fairings on before heading out. The wheelchair tug as usual drew a lot of stares and cameras, especially now that it was playing music. My wife was right, "Ride of the Valkyries" was the right tune.¬†

I was a little rusty on the pylons but managed to get in some good lines. Steve Dari and myself put the double pass on Marilyn. With the cruise prop I was running I could only get around 3020 rpm and 189 mph on the GPS. Looks like things are a little slower than 2 years ago when I last raced :-( Ok, the fairings are going on!

So I spend the rest of the afternoon going the rest of the way with race mods:
- Changed out props back to my 76/64 akro prop to get some more RPM
- removed h-stab struts
- removed slave struts
- bolted up top ailerons and taped gaps
- Added induction intake scoop

Feeling kinda burned out, went for a quick bike ride out Red Rock Rd, but only got 10 miles before cold rain opened up on me. I wasn't dressed for that, but at least the 40 minute ride felt good.

Returned for a beer with Frank and the gang, then back to Carrows for dinner, and to the hotel ( Sep 14 2005, 09:00:29 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Reno Diary 9/9/05 Friday 9/9
Took a WFH day today and ferried the Pitts up to Reno Stead (4SD), the home of the National Championship air races. Andrew joined me in his S2B so I could get a ride home. LVK was 2K overcast and most of the central valley south of Sacramento was overcast. We went under then over, which is a little disconcerting in a single engine airplane with the glide ratio of a 2x4. Few buildups over Donner Summit, lots of showery activity East of Stead, but the airport was fine.

Registered, got my annual graft: 1 "participant's plaque", 1 Breitling cap, a Breitling t-shirt, a race program, badges, wristbands, parking passes, Chairman's Club tickets, banquet tickets, the usual silver coin (this year with a T6 on it), and a copy of the waiver. The waiver of course is your ticket to violate every "no-fun" FAR regarding altitude, speed, aerobatics, and 'assembly of persons'.

Uneventful flight back in the B, and spend most of the afternoon filling the car with tools, propellers, chargers, wax, creepers, tape, oil, fairings, and my electric tug vehicle.

Saturday 9/10
Drove up with my stuff. Went straight to 4SD to dump all the airplane stuff, then back to the Days Inn by 8pm. Dinner at Super Burger. Ummmmm. ( Sep 14 2005, 08:58:05 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday June 06, 2005

Flew the Wheeler Express Got a chance to fly a beautiful composite called the Wheeler Express. It's a 4-seat low-wing, cruciform tail, IO-540, 3-blade MacCauley. The company has had its share of problems with a couple changes in ownership, and a couple crashes. But it's a great airplane that is close to the Cirrus in terms of ergonomics and performance. With 3 adult men and full fuel (92 gallons), we climbed 1500fpm and steadied out at 190mph IAS. Then we throttled back to form up with Erik in his S1C Pitts; at 5Kft 150mph and 15"/2400 we were sipping 7 GPH (nice!).
Cockpit layout was ok, although the instrument panel was too low (or the seat was too high). the stick felt too short but that's because I fly a Pitts, and because Wheeler's aileron forces were pretty high. Definitely a two-fisted airplane for doing steep turns or dutch rolls. Stall was uneventful with a right-breakoff and plenty of warning buffet. In general I overcontrolled the airplane, not because of control authority, but because of the long feedback period. In other words I'm used to an airplane that reaches steady state conditions 40 nanoseconds after control inputs, whereas the Wheeler definitely takes 5 seconds (depending whether it's pitch, roll, yaw). Super wide landing gear makes landings a piece of cake, although the brakes in this one were overly soft (I was suspecting the use of nylaflow lines somewhere)
All in all a nice cross country machine with an awesome useful load, and IMHO a more ergonomic interior than the Lancair 4, great performance on a fixed gear.
More info: http://members.eaa.org/home/homebuilders/selecting/kits/Express.html ( Jun 06 2005, 07:46:20 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]

Monday May 23, 2005

Deterioration of America's filmstock FILM HISTORIANS FIGURE THAT 90% OF ALL THE SILENT MOVIES EVER MADE AND HALF OF THE SOUND PICTURES MADE BEFORE 1950 NO LONGER EXIST IN COMPLETE FORM.

Ken Weissman, Head of film preservation, Library of Congress...
"The thing that disappoints me the most and the thing I'm most concerned about is the fact that star wars needed to be restored. This is a film that I saw when it first came out in 1977, ok and 20 years later it had to be restored because of the fact that it hadn't been properly maintained, in that 20 year interim. What exists now is star wars a new hope, which is a different movie. It has different effects in it, it has different footage, because some of the original scenes were lost, as far as the quality and they couldn't maintain them, couldn't bring them back, so alternate cuts were used. Thankfully, george lucas had those in his own private collection, and those were better maintained than what the studio had maintained on those, so, you could legitimately make the argument that star wars no longer exists." ( May 23 2005, 03:43:00 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday May 11, 2005

Thoughts on "The Participation Age" The 1990's democratization of technology and the democratization of information (otherwise referred to as the Internet Age), leveled the playing field worldwide for global cultural, economic, political, and social transparency. Now we are seeing a transition to a new model that we will be referring to as The Participation Age. I'm not sure if we know what that means yet, but we are clearly at another inflection point in the globalization of society.

If the Internet Age was about connectivity and communications, pipes and routers, The Participation Age is about leveraging that connectivity for empowerment, employment, and efficiency. It's about security, access, scalability, accountability, and new models for leveraging the potential value of enterprise data.

I firmly believe that Sun is right to move us beyond the "Internet Age" to the "Participation age". It reflects that the digital divide is no longer a challenge of merely providing worldwide connectivity to individuals. Although plenty geographic, political, and economic barriers exist (Asia has 34% of the world's Internet users with only 8% penetration), the technology is there. In the participation age, we shift focus from the connectivity of individuals (the data demand side), to governments, service providers, and vendors of goods that provide their services to the world (the data supply side). The global intertwining of these traditional businesses with the globally connected society is the new "digital divide".

There is tremendous inertia around legacy business models, technology models, and cultural models that makes it difficult to adapt these systems to the new globally intertwined society. Limitations around perceived and actual security, scalability, and accountability of today's systems is also a barrier to widespread participation by the enterprise and content owners in this promising global system.

What does "participation" mean in the context of participation age?
- Better and easier-to-access information in the hands of individuals
- Vastly higher participation in politics, and robust e-voting systems for free (and non-free) countries
- New markets and opportunities for micro-lending
- Even small vendors of goods and services with robust global sales channels
- Even small vendors of goods and services with robust supply chains
- Globally homogenous economic communities with that recognize the need to preserve local culture and community
- Virtual corporations
- Increased organizational arbitrage: Outsourcing corporate or government functions to lower-cost labor pools
- Utility computing: plugging into the wall for your computing resources
- Content owners and rights holders aggressively working to overcome the sticky distribution barriers of license and copyright.
- Recognition by data owners that Internet's breadth can assure a profitable distribution mechanism, even for marginally valuable data.
- All data is available, forever, all the time.
- Increasing recognition that "the data is the business". Wal-Mart's core operational differentiation gets recognized as data management.
( May 11 2005, 11:50:12 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

Thursday March 17, 2005

"The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get," Gary Player
I thought this was a great story from Frank, who is helps companies figure out how to validate and ramp up new products...

Concrete Technology Corporation in Santa Barbara, CA was a development stage company with what seemed a crazy idea: use concrete to make biodegradable fast food containers.

"Who will buy it?" I asked the CEO, Essam Khashoggi, and his team.

"Well...ah, McDonald's," Rich Hulme, the VP Operations said.

"OK. Call them," I said.

The next day I got a call from Rich. Sounding almost out of breath, he excitedly said, "Frank, I did what you told me to do. I called Chicago information and asked for McDonalds' corporate headquarters. (This was before the internet.) I called. 'Good afternoon, McDonald's,' the receptionist said. 'Hi. Who's president of McDonald's?' I asked. 'That's Ed Rensi,'she said. 'Transfer me please,' I asked. 'Hi, this is Ed,' he said. I was stunned. But you'd have been proud. I stayed cool. 'Oh, Mr. Rensi, I didn't know I'd get you. I'll be brief. I'm calling because we have an idea for making a biodegradable fast-food package,' I said. 'Call John Smith. Tell him I told you to call him,' he responded. I did. We're meeting next Friday."

Was Rich lucky? Of course, but the harder you work the luckier you get. And with a systematic effort, the luck is predictable. Within three referrals of the CEO's office in a company of 100,000 people, you're 80% likely to end up at a decision maker or key recommender. Concrete Technology Corporation changed its name to Earthshell Packaging.

Morgan Stanley took it public (ERTH) based on the McDonald's relationship.

What's the point? After you get an idea, if it's 80% feasible, see if someone wants it. Don't sit in your basement or your boardroom dreaming or listening to naysayers. Phone people with the problem you solve. Visit them. Get their fingerprints on your idea early and line up their business.

Frank Robinson
Product & Market Development, Inc.
Frank@ProductDevelopment.com 
805-969-3835

( Mar 17 2005, 01:49:29 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday March 14, 2005

CAS is dead, long live CAS!

There's lots of interest among customers and suppliers about CAS and how to address the CAS market. All that interest is not misdirected, because the CAS systems that have been marketed to-date have interesting properties and solve customer problems. However, their interesting properties have nothing to do with the fact that they calculate crypto-hash checksums for the files being stored.

Here are the interesting properties of today's so-called* CAS systems:

They are clustered designs that can be scaled horizontally
Physical location of files is abstracted, allowing transparent migration & healing.
They tend to heal themselves, reducing the need for service
When a file is stored, they generate their own unique name for the file.
The primary access model is via API, although secondary access via file systems is often supported
They are immutable (files cannot be modified)

There is nothing in these valuable benefits about hashing or hash algorithms. These are the properties of Object Archival Storage Systems, which is a far more appropriate way of describing the breed. Dare I propose a new acronym OASS? Well the SNIA committee charged with standardizing these things is working hard on their own answer, and I'll defer to them. They used to call themselves CAS Solutions Initiative (CASSI), but they too have seen the light.

*A point of fact, but none of the CAS systems on the market today are actually CAS. CAS implies that the stored objects are accessed using a hash value computed from the file's contents. But there are not commercially available systems that do this today. For example, EMC's Centera uses a "C-clip" as the object handle, which is an amalgamation of a metadata record and the object hash. Other CAS/OS systems may use other more reliable ways of creating unique object identifiers that have nothing to do with the hash value.

So it would seem that the term "CAS" is meaningless, and we all hope it dies. But Object Storage is here to stay due to its propensity to solve unsolved problems of scale, reliability, and TCO. Somewhere in there is a role for computing hash values, but that feature will be less and less visible to customers, especially as Object Storage moves into a primary storage role.

( Mar 14 2005, 11:22:11 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday March 07, 2005

Different Models for strategic asset archival

I spent last Tuesday near London participating in a very interesting meeting of the PrestoSpace organization. Prestospace is organized mainly by the good folks at BBC, but it is intended as a knowledge sharing forum for a variety of government and commercial owners of "legacy" media collections. They are putting their heads together to solve some of the challenges of how to take old collections of media (film cannisters for example) and convert them into archives for both preservation and to improve access. What should be made clear is that not all archive applications are the same.

In fact, I describe the various implementation as belonging to 4 categories, each of which will impose slightly different requirements on the storage and serving infrastructure:

1) Heritage archives:
Digital versions of historic or culturally important artifacts including video, images, documents, audio, etc. The data in the heritage archive represents in many cases the primary data of history. There is an increasing expectation that our children should be able to randomly surf this data as they form their own opinions of historic events, uncolored by the author of a textbook. Unfortunately many of these collections are already eroding to dust, unrecoverable from their original celluloid, silver nitrate, wax, or papyrus forms. Curators are now in a race to preserve these artifacts in digital form to protect them for future generations. Customers building heritage archives are particularly worried about cost, long-term data integrity (beyond the life of the media), and changes to their organizations required to support new digital workflows.

2) Compliance archives:
Compliance archives are digital repositories that are employed to support mandated data management policies handed down by various regulatory agencies. Regulations are imposed to insure well-documented business processes or to insure responsible and legal handling of individuals personal information. Example are SEC17a which requires immutability and auditability of trading records. HIPAA requires quality records retention, but it also works to protect individuals' data privacy. Sarbanes-Oxley does not mandate requirements for storage systems, but encourages good archival and audit practices that benefit from archive deployments. In Compliance applications, specific storage features such as immutability (WORM) and retention policies may be required to guarantee regulatory compliance.

3) Repurposing Archives:
These archives are typically found in media markets where an online archive provides the distribution leverage for generating incremental revenue or for lowering the cost of existing workflows. For some media companies with aging collections of master assets, preservation may also be a consideration. In many heritage archives, repurposing eventually turns out to provide tangible ROI as unpredicted distribution models provide opportunities for monetization. An excellent example is the GM Media Archives which were scanned and put online in a revenue generating asset management system. Another example is commonly found in film production where images, characters, and other assets are far easier to leverage for promotional materials or even future film productions if placed online in digital form.

4) Digital Distribution repositories:
Sometimes called origin servers, these are large scale storage systems that are built to facilitate more widespread digital distribution of assets that are otherwise available on library or enterprise shelves. Although digital library initiatives (see diglib.org) often concern themselves with preservation, the bulk of their material is simply books and journals that deserve the benefits of wide-area electronic distribution. It's not a surprise for example that Reed-Elsevier, the leading publisher of scientific journals deploys massive storage repositories. The digital distribution repository is also the core for next generation video-on-demand repositories being planned by broadcasters to provide random access into millions of hours of broadcast video or audio.

If we are to derive a specification for a storage system that is going to serve all of these applications, we need to tackle the following problems:
1) Initial deployments may be small, but grow significantly over time as ROI models are proven.
2) Capital budgets are the most significant barrier to archive deployment, and can vary from year-to-year.
3) The customer cannot afford sophisticated specialists for managing and maintaining the storage.
4) The collection may be too large to back up.
5) The life of the archive is longer than the life of the media. Migration should be easy and painless.
6) The life of the archive may be longer than the life of the data format.
7) Metadata is critical to finding and organizing data.
8) Cost and throughput of scanning efforts are continuing headaches.

So isn't the answer obvious?
We think so.

( Mar 07 2005, 03:18:57 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday February 23, 2005

Hash cracking and storage Announcement of SHA-1 crypto hash cracking here.
Bruce Schneier has a nice dialogue on hash cracking here.

Ancient chinese proverb: "It's not about the algorithm, it's about how you use it."

Storage vendors are continuing to discount market concerns about hash collisions by saying "the odds of hash collision are infinitesmal". Well, I know a customer with 2B objects in storage. Is 1/2,000,000,000 small enough? Yeah I know, 1/(2^80) or something of that form is the statistical answer. The point is that storage systems have to do better. If there is a non-zero probability of hash collision, then the system must accept and welcome hash collisions!

Hashes cannot be used in exclusivity to validate uniqueness of a data object.

( Feb 23 2005, 09:03:35 AM PST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday February 16, 2005

Did it again - cowl rework Geez my wife is going to kill me. So the fiberglass cowl off my Pitts S1 is causing the firewall flange to gradually fail, because the shape isn't quite right and it prestresses the flange. Then throw in a couple hundred hours if high-G pulls and pushes and the thing starts to fail. So for annual, I pulled the cowl off for some quick reshaping so that it matches the firewall. I can never get it through my thick skull that nothing in fiberglass land is "quick". steps:

create a female pattern of the firewall

transfer it to plywood

mount the cowl to the plywood to force the correct shape

fill the cowl with expanding urethane foam

Cut a good size section out of the cowl

reshape it with Bondo or sheetrock compound, making sure exit area is correct

apply mold release

lay in 3-4 bid of glass/carbon/whatever

tear out plug

Fill and finish glass

repaint

reinstall

But every little step has a series of problems that causes the whole thing to turn into a 10 week project. Out of foam, out of bondo, foam is shrinking, mud takes a day to dry, header clearance, ratio pump broken, wait for glass, bla, bla, bla. Someday I'll learn a lesson from Storage system development (nothing is as easy as it looks).
Sorry Honey. ( Feb 16 2005, 02:34:25 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [3]

Messaging to the world on Honeycomb

Honeycomb is a storage project that started under the management of Bill Joy and Greg Papadopolous in the CTO organization. It started with the assumption that even so-called next-generation storage systems being proposed still don't solve the underlying problems in the large-scale file-storage marketplace.

Here are some highlights from an exhaustive market engagement program that began the same time we began our design.

Customers need more economical storage - to buy and own.
The growth of on-line data, especially “fixed content” data is explosive. Many large scale customers have already passed the Petabyte boundary. For these environments, it's important to reduce the cost of the storage platform by using commodity components. Furthermore, large-scale storage today is more expensive to maintain than it is to purchase. Our customers simply cannot continue to add sysadmins as their data grows, and we need to dislocate conventiontional wisdom on "how many TB can be managed by a single Sysadmin?".
Customers need improved reliability, availability and serviceability.
In today's systems, these characteristics add to storage acquisition cost and to TCO. In the future, RAS needs to be improved while lowering both ownership and acquisition cost. That means a system that will tolerate lots of failures and heal itself appropriately without anyone needing to show up at 2am on a Saturday.
Customers need transparent and non-disruptive scalability.
Our customers are demanding “just in time” storage provisioning. Customers should only have to pay for storage as it's needed, and when it's deployed, scaling must not cause any disruption to the customer's application or clients. The problem is particularly acute for archival applications that scale steadily over time. Utility pricing (the ability to charge monthly just for the GB used), helps in this regard by eliminating the capital budgeting process for customers.
Customers need to more easily organize and find data.
It's clear that when we're talking about millions or hundreds of millions of files, the management and protection of metadata (data about the data) is as important as the management and protection of data. All storage systems today ignore application metadata, and in order to find their data, customers deploy external databases with search capability that carry substantial costs and management burden. If these data attributes are damaged or lost, the data itself is effectively lost. In addition to application attribute metadata, customers increasingly need to track whether the data is obsolete, current, ownerless, mission-critical, or in need of regulatory treatment. Today, expensive humans manage this, but the right system architecture can greatly simplify the process.

What is Honeycomb?

Honeycomb is a collection of hardware and software technologies that solve problems around next generation large-scale “data hungry” applications. That includes better methods for reliability, availability, scaling, and even searching and organizing data. Honeycomb's features were explicitly designed to address the customer problems articulated above. Currently, there is not a technology solution offered that addresses the following customer pain points effectively. Honeycomb is being designed to fill this void in the market. Honeycomb can be deployed as technology components that complement existing NAS products, or even as a standalone storage system.

Why is Honeycomb being developed?

Honeycomb demonstrates Sun's dedication to solving next generation data storage and management problems. It's not about simply beating competition, it's about giving customers strategically powerful data management solutions.

Why is Sun better positioned to lead in this marketplace?

LAN-attached storage, inclulding NAS, CAS, HSM, and other file-based services calls upon the ultimate convergence of CPUs, OS, protocols, and networks. All of these things are core competencies of Sun. If we think towards next generation devices, we look to clustering, cryptography, consolidation and grid capabilities, load balancing, database, utility models, and a host of other areas, again all core competencies of Sun. The challenge is to make them all work together to solve unsolved customer problems. From Jonathan down we are committed to making that happen and that's why I work here.

I know what you're thinking..."the devil is in the details". Well, the details above are all I can provide until later this year when the NDA covers can be lifted a bit. Stay tuned for more.

( Feb 16 2005, 02:11:19 PM PST ) Permalink Comments [2]