Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Three flights, three business dinners, three cities, two analyst lunches and no running, I finally found my way to what I had been looking forward to all week. I checked into my hotel in Rio De Janeiro last night after 11 pm, left the curtains open, and awoke early this morning facing a beautiful view of my running path. Unlike some of my other favorite runs requiring elaborate directions, this one is easy, walk out of hotel, cross street, turn left or right, and run. The LED sign at the corner read 6:09 and 21 degrees, but the shade soon turned to bright sun and the next sign already read 24. I started slowly, paying for my sins of over-indulging in Brazilian seafood last night, not to mention three days with no exercise. But after about a mile, my usual pace returned.

Ipanema is a beautiful, wide, sandy beach, with both a coblestoned walking path and a smooth paved bike path running between the beach and the road. The small coblestones did not make for great running, but I quickly noticed that with few bikers out, most joggers were taking advantage of the bike path so I soon switched. The road was already filling with morning commuters, but thanks to the widespread use of flexfuel engines and gas stations selling alcohol based fuel for less than half the price of gasoline, I was not bothered by exhaust fumes. I should cross-post on Greenmonk, Rio is such a better place for conventions than Vegas for so many reasons.

I was going to try a technology free blog, but can´t resist. The Eco computing movement is not as prevelant in Brazil, the land of mainframes, as elsewhere. Not one single customer told me they were using mainframes to save energy. I find it striking that a country with one of the largest open source communities in the world is also one of the biggest users of mainframes. Of course the mainframe legacy is easily explained by anyone who has studied the history of the IT industry in Brazil, having been closed to most computer imports through the mid-eighties, Brazilian companies shunned locally produced minicomputers for mainframes. That legacy still lives on in many large companies here, but I have to wonder for how long? How many Brazilian open source programmers are developing for the mainframe? Even a large bank I met with yesterday commented that while they ran DB2 on the mainframe, it was increasingly hard to find DB2 developers and administrators while everyone they had hired in the last few years knew MySQL. I told the customer not to hold their breath for a mainframe port of MySQL.