Cyclocross Gran Prix event comes to town
It's Cyclo-cross season and today there was a US Gran Prix race in Longmont, Colorado over at the Xilinx campus. I was very surprised to see two USA ProTour cyclists being announced as riders in the elite race: Chris Horner and (Fast) Freddie Rodriguez, both members of Belgium's Davitamon-Lotto team. These guys are regulars in all the big races on the European road cycling circuit, including the Grand Tours (like the Tour De France) so what the heck are they doing in a race like this, riding on dirt, carrying their bikes over telephone poles, and jumping ramps on the course? Having some fun in their off-season, I guess!
A high-tech campus becomes a cloud of dust for an afternoon. The second rider is Fred Rodriguez.
Fred, (second rider again), crossing the logs in the course with another rider.
Chris Horner far far away from Porrentruy Switzerland where he won a stage victory earlier this year at the Tour De Romandie.
Ryan Trebon, the eventual winner is dominating the Grand Prix this year. Tall riders rejoice; Ryan is 6 foot five. Full results may show up here.
Posted at 07:10PM Nov 04, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sport |
TV Software Updates, as a Service, continued
Steve Hastings, Engineering VP for Update Logic provided some answers and insight to some of the issues I mentioned about a new service being deployed that updates software on digital TVs. Thanks, Steve!
Isn't blogging great?
A key point that Steve clarifies is that the Update Logic pipe is uni-directional, not bi-directional like I wrote.
About the household appliance software update issue, where I may need the OS in my microwave, Elmo doll, programmable thermostat, and dishwasher to be updated, Steve mentions that these devices can probably participate in the DTV-based update service if they have an embedded digital TV tuner. Since that may take a while, how about some sort of residential gateway device that has a DTV tuner on one side tuned into various update channels, and Wifi on the other for speaking to my Home-Area-Network (HAN) of devices/appliances that will someday be capable of being updated via wireless?
Posted at 01:47PM Nov 03, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sun |
Coming Soon: Automatic Software Updates to your TV
Digital TVs are essentially becoming computers - they now run various levels of complex software including operating systems, device drivers, and firmware. Since there will be software bugs and new features introduced among all of those layers, how do you get software updates distributed and applied to potentially tens or hundreds of millions of fielded TV sets? Today these updates may get done by mailing USB drives to customers (US $30) or sending technicians to residences (US $250). Either way, these software update methods are too expensive and don't scale.
Another solution rolling out soon in the USA uses the ATSC A/97 Software Data Download Service (PDF version available here) that provides a bi-directional MPEG-2 transport channel for moving software bits, which works over TV broadcast and cable networks (Sun Microsystems is a member of the ATSC). A software agent (all too familiar with anyone who has done work in the computer systems management arena) lives on the TV set and happily "tunes into" the software update stream periodically to receive new bits, and then proceeds to apply them to the set.
One such software update service provider (SUSP?), Update Logic, will be rolling out their UpdateTV service as early as this December, and will be using PBS spectrum and facilities to carry the update channel. Participating TV set manufacturers that are already signed up with Update Logic evaluation contracts include Sharp, Samsung, Mitsubishi, and Hitachi.
Software update services are common in the computer industry, like the Sun Update Connection or Apple's MacOSX Updater. It will be interesting to see how the TV update services handle the typical computer software update challenges, such as:
- Privacy Are consumers ready to have a bidirectional management channel coming into their TV set? What bits are coming into my house, and maybe more importantly, what's leaving? If I'm not comfortable with the answers to these questions, can I disable the agent except for when I want updates?
- Security Just how secure is that software update channel? Is it encrypted and authenticated to protect me from malicious code getting deployed into my TV?
- Reboot Scheduling If a major software update becomes available that requires my TV to be rebooted, when does the reboot happen? Not during the second overtime of the World Cup Final, I hope.
- Backout Protection If a particular TV software update does not perform or degrades my experience, how do I back out the change and revert to the previous software bits?
- Extendability Why limit software updates to just TV's? Other devices in my house, like my washing machine, might want to be updated as well. How can other appliance vendors participate in this software update distribution mechanism?
Software Updates: They're Not Just For Computers Anymore
Posted at 11:48AM Oct 28, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sun | Comments[3]
This year's crop
The tall one in the back weighs 91 pounds (41 kilos).
Posted at 09:22PM Oct 23, 2006 by Peter Schow in Personal |
RubyConf 2006 wrapup
RubyConf 2006 ended yesterday in Denver. A good summary can be found at this collection of blogs, which includes some question-and-answer transcripts. Ruby has some interesting next-steps in its evolution, as far as compatibility, governance, and virtual machine choices go, but that doesn't matter right now - enjoy version 1.8!
Other notes:
- The Erlang programming language got a lot of attention at the conference because of a retro video clip, Erlang the Movie that they showed at conference kickoff. Watch it yourself and see the Erlang folks editing with Emacs on a Sun-3. If you're still interested, check out a highly scaleable web server Yaws that is written in Erlang.
- Upper or lower-casing a string can't be done realistically in any programming language, in a locale-independent manner while preserving semantics says Tim Bray. "Just don't do it" is his best advice for those tempted to capitalize or lower-case a string. See Tim's presentation for more internationalization / localization topics around Unicode and Ruby.
- Check out open source effort Action Step for a different way of generating Flash content
Posted at 08:32PM Oct 23, 2006 by Peter Schow in Software |
RubyConf 2006, Day 1
Today was the first day of the Sixth International Ruby Conference in Denver, Colorado, also known as RubyConf 2006. It's a single-track conference which makes it nice because you don't have to make the hard decisions about which sessions to attend.
It was great to meet some fellow Sun employees there.
Posted at 10:22PM Oct 20, 2006 by Peter Schow in Software |
Solaris evolution and interface stability - Bob Sproull interviews David Brown
Sun Fellow Bob Sproull interviews David Brown in the latest edition of ACM Queue on the topic of nondisruptive system evolution and innovation (yes, you can have both) in Solaris, and in particular, the reasons why strict Application Binary Interface (ABI) stability is so important to customers, going back to 1994 for some lessons learned during Solaris 2.4 . Included is a good introduction to the the Solaris interface taxonomy, which you may see mentioned at the bottom of Solaris man pages, or in the ARC cases.
A good read for everyone, especially if you are joining the OpenSolaris community.
Posted at 09:25PM Oct 16, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sun |
Remembering the Grace Hopper speaking tours
Reading about Sun presenting at the Grace Hopper conference reminded me of when she was a regular visitor on my college campus, during her peak speaking tour years. Admiral Hopper would always be in her Navy uniform and would pass around a piece of wire, showing what a nanosecond looked like, in terms of the speed of light propagation. She'd also mention the team that found the moth that flew into the room-size computer and caused it to shut down. To fix the computer, they "debugged" it. I remember she was careful about not claiming to invent the term "bug", since it was already in use in the electronics industry.
A visiting female computer science speaker was a rarity back then, and you wonder how many women she inspired to enter or continue in the field, after hearing her talk? Also, in today's world where female enrollment in computer science is declining rapidly, who will be the next Grace Hopper?
Posted at 12:05PM Oct 04, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sun |
Twin Cities Marathon Weekend
Spent the weekend in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and on Sunday, ran the Twin Cities Marathon for the second time. The event has used individual timing "chips" for years, attached to runners shoelaces, but this year they added more tracking stations and had a neat tracking facility available on their web site (implemented nicely as a Java applet), to allow interested observers to track any of the 10,000 runners on the course in real time.
It started with a 5:30 AM bus ride to the starting line, at the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. Runners are allowed into the concourse area of the dome to escape the chill of the early morning, where we could see the crews transforming the field from the previous night's college football game, Michigan vs. Minnesota, to a baseball field, to get ready for the Twins game later that afternoon. The Twins, by the way, won their game and completed an historic comeback from being 12.5 games out of first on May 27, to outright winning their division.
There were actually two races that day, the marathon and a ten-miler. You could tell the difference between the two camps hanging around in the Metrodome before the race - the ten milers are more jovial, having fun while the marathoners look serious, not many smiles.
The marathon starts at 8 AM in higher-than-usual temperatures. In honor of the CEC 2006 conference which also started on Sunday, I'm wearing my collector's edition STS-2001 hat, you know, the orange one. The scenic course (PDF) winds its way through downtown Minneapolis, through some prominent lake districts south of town, then along both the west and east sides of the Mississippi River, and finally along a seven mile almost straight shot into St. Paul, along historic Summit Avenue. Highlights for me on the run included seeing Minnesota Justice and former NFL great Alan Page playing his tuba on the course around mile 4, getting fanatic crowd support as we moved through the neighborhoods, taking in the great fall scenery, and finally getting a glimpse of the finish line in the distance, at around mile 25.8!
Next day picture of Lake Calhoun, around the six mile mark.
This is a gradual uphill around mile marker 22 in St. Paul, on Summit Avenue, looking east (also taken the day after the event). Summit Avenue is lined almost the entire way with Victorian houses (often quoted as "the best preserved Victorian boulevard in America"), mansions (including the governor's residence), and a few universities.
Finishing time was 4:18 on a seasonably hot day, with the temperatures in the upper-70s at finish time. Eight minutes better than last time - woo! To deal with the usual cooler weather, they always hand out these "space blankets" to all runners immediately after they cross the finish line. We got them again this year, although they weren't needed - the medical crews were kept busy with heat exhaustion problems instead.
No visit to the Twin Cities is complete until you visit the Minneapolis Sculpture Gardens, in the shadows of downtown, where you'll see the famous "cherry and a spoon" sculpture. The cherry itself weighs 1000 pounds and the entire sculpture had to be built at two shipyards (Maine and Rhode Island) because it is so large.
And another stop (not too far from the airport if you have some time to kill) is the historic Minnehaha Falls Park area.
Posted at 09:24PM Oct 02, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sport |
Ditty Bops at the Tour De Fat in Ft. Collins
Music, Beer, and Bicycles. That's a summary of the travelling (7th Annual) Tour De Fat festival put on today by the Fat Tire beer folks, at their home base in Ft. Collins, Colorado.
The Ditty Bops wow'ed the crowd with their catchy throwback style. They just finished up a tour in which they cycled across the USA to promote cycling and clean air.
Lots of bikes, sculptures, costumes, and beer of course.
Posted at 06:46PM Sep 23, 2006 by Peter Schow in Music | Comments[2]
Hiking the Appalachian Trail barefoot
As part of an awareness campaign, former Marine Ron Zaleski (age 55) is hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail barefoot! From the map, it looks like he is somewhere in Virginia now.
That's Maine to Georgia, 2174 miles total, averaging about 16 miles a day. My feet hurt just thinking about this.
Posted at 08:55PM Sep 19, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sport |
50 Marathons/50 States/50 Days
Tomorrow (Sunday) in St. Charles, Missouri, superman endurance freak Dean Karnazes kicks off his campaign to run 50 marathons in 50 USA states, in 50 successive days. He ends the tour at the New York Marathon on November 5 and will have completed 1310 miles in the process. If you live in the States, check out the official event site (aside: looks like some web designers just learned about Flash - someone take their authoring tools away from them - they've abused the privilege) to see when he is visiting your area. Inside the continental 48 states, he'll be travelling with his parents, wife and kids in a fleet that includes an RV and a travel bus. The most grueling travel segment looks to be the four days of the Alaska-San Francisco-Maui-Phoenix legs! He's blogging throughout the tour if you want to follow his thoughts.
Before I go on about Dean, you should probably know that another guy, Sam Thompson already quietly finished his own 50/50/50 marathon campagin this summer, to raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims. It's apparently not a competitive situation, as both runners acknowledge that the pie is big enough for both of them to share, and they actually have the same sponsor (North Face). Also, both of them admit that this feat could have been previously done by others; nobody knows.
Rock and rollers will remember that George Thorogood and The Destroyers did their own 50/50/50 concert tour in 1981, travelling the 48 continental states in a Checker car! I don't believe this feat has been duplicated by any touring band since.
So how does Dean's campaign work? First on Sundays during the 50-day span, he is entered in real marathon events, including US flagship races like Chicago, New York, and the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, DC (Sun's own MaryMary is also an entrant here). On the other six days of the week, he runs sanctioned marathon courses with whomever wants to run with him, complete with police escort. You'll have to pay for that privilege, and at US $100, it ain't cheap!
Dean Karnazes is not fast by today's elite running standards but he is the real deal when it comes to endurance. Just this summer, he completed some brutal ultramarathon races, including the Leadville (Colorado) 100mi, Badwater (Death Valley) 146mi, Western States 100 (Squaw Valley, CA) events, and he outright won the Vermont 100. Most seasoned runners would be glad to finish just one of these in a lifetime. Given the miles he has already put in, I have no doubt that he can do 26.2 miles a day in his prescribed 4.5 to 5 hour allotment. He has hired Lance Armstrong's trainer, Chris Carmichael for diet recommendations to help his daily recovery, so he should be all set.
Karnazes has said that he's doing this to promote fitness, health, and outdoor activity given the oft-mentioned USA struggles with obesity. No problem with that, and the sport of long distance running needs all the publicity it can get. I'd like to see, however, the USA's elite distance runners get more attention but they don't have Dean's marketing machine that has landed him on Letterman, 60 Minutes, in GQ and Esquire magazines, etc. How many Americans have heard of Meb Keflezighi, Alan Culpepper, or Deena Kastor? It's different in other countries, like in the UK where Paula Radcliffe is a national star, of perhaps LeBron James fame proportions here in the US.
Finally, it's a free world but you have to wonder if Dean Karnaze's obsessive-compulsive tendencies will take him past his limits. He's talking about pedalling a Hydro Bronc across the Pacific Ocean, from California to Hawaii, and also paddling 40 miles around the white shark-infested waters of the Farallon Islands (off California) on a surfboard. And much riskier - he wants to climb Mt. Everest with no oxygen or transport assistance. It's a question the Crocodile Hunter had to answer all the time, but what's the balancing point between the next risky endeavor and maintaining the existing family life that he's built? For a guy like Karnazes who has admitted that "he can't sit still", let's see if he'll know when to stop.
Posted at 04:11PM Sep 16, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sport |
Longmont Criterium cycling race
Once a year, on a summer Sunday, my hometown Longmont, Colorado, USA shuts down a few streets downtown and hosts the Longmont Criterium cycling race. The racing goes on all day, in various categories and age groups, and the weather was mostly ideal, with a touch of Fall in the air. It's not the Vuelta a Espana of course, but it's a good opportunity to watch some talented riders from well-known USA continental teams like TIAA-CREF, HealthNet, and Vitamin Cottage take on the 0.7 mile (1.2 km) loop course for over an hour, at speeds of 35 miles per hour (56 km/hour).
What's the big difference in watching a cycling race in person vs. on TV? Easily, it's hearing the sound of the peleton whizzing by you, along with the mechanical noises of chains and gear switching, and also hearing the riders talking among teammates, sometimes shouting instructions to each other. All of this is missed when watching a cycling broadcast.
Some pictures from today:
Lead group of the men's category 1 and 2 pro race. That's Scott Moninger on the left in the lead for now, fresh off his win at the Tour of Utah. The eventual winner was actually from Longmont and I think I know his name, but don't want to post any misinformation. Maybe I'll update this when the official race results are out.
The men's pro peleton, strung out at this point, rounds a tricky corner. There was a crash at this very point in an earlier stage (see next picture).
All eyes are on a crash scene, twenty seconds or so before this picture was taken, in the men's category 4 race. This was near the end of the race with only a few more laps to go. The emergency medical technicians (EMTs) from the Longmont Fire Department were on hand almost immediately, arriving on bikes, of course.
Professional categegory 1 and 2 women at the starting line.
Leaders of the pro women's race along Thompson Park, a few laps into their event.
Posted at 06:42PM Aug 27, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sport | Comments[1]
Ruby on Rails on Solaris 10 Howto
This has been obsoleted by newer instructions
Installing a Ruby on Rails development environment on Solaris 10 just got a lot easier now that that the latest version of Solaris 10 comes with a fully integrated PostgreSQL database including libraries and header files. No more needing to separately install a database system!
Here's the instructions I used to get Rails up and running on Solaris 10, including Ruby and RubyGems. First, some preliminaries:
- This example only works with the Solaris 10 06/06 and later (it should work
for Solaris Express, too). Verify by looking at your/etc/releasefile and ensuring that you see "Solaris 10 6/06" (or later) - This describes a quick setup for personal prototyping; you'll want to be a lot more careful, like configuring your PostgreSQL database disk layout, and starting/stopping PostreSQL with the Solaris System Management Facility (smf) if you're doing anything closer to production.
- The target installation here for everything is
/opt/local. Whatever you use, you'll want to add thebindirectory to your$PATH, e. g.PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/binbefore starting.
Now to get started:
- Install GNU readline library (you'll want this for interactive Ruby)
- Install Ruby and friends (irb, erb, ri, rdoc)
- Install RubyGems (the Ruby package manager)
- Use RubyGems to install Rails and its dependent gems
- Install the Ruby PostgreSQL adapter
- Configure PostgreSQL for the first time (thanks, Robert Lor, for the help)
- Start PostgreSQL and create a role for your username
% wget ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-5.2.tar.gz
% gzcat readline-5.2.tar.gz | tar xf -
% cd readline-5.2
% configure --prefix=/opt/local
% gmake
% su
# /usr/sfw/bin/gmake install
% wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz
% gzcat ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz | tar xf -
% cd ruby-1.8.5
% configure --prefix=/opt/local --enable-pthread \
--with-readline-dir=/opt/local
% gmake
% gmake test
% su
# /usr/sfw/bin/gmake install
# /usr/sfw/bin/gmake install-doc
% wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
% gzcat rubygems-0.9.0.tgz | tar xf -
% cd rubygems-0.9.0
% su
# /opt/local/bin/ruby setup.rb
% su
# PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin
# export PATH
# gem install rails --include-dependencies
% wget http://ruby.scripting.ca/postgres/archive/ruby-postgres-0.7.1.tar.gz
% gzcat ruby-postgres-0.7.1.tar.gz | tar xf -
% cd ruby-postgres-0.7.1
% ruby extconf.rb --with-pgsql-include-dir=/usr/include/pgsql
% gmake
% su
# PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin
# export PATH
# gmake install
# groupadd postgres
# useradd -c "PostgreSQL User" -d /export/home/postgres \
-g postgres -m -s /bin/bash postgres
# chown postgres /var/lib/pgsql/data
# chmod 700 /var/lib/pgsql/data
# su postgres
# initdb -D /var/lib/pgsql/data
# su - postgres
# pg_ctl -D /var/lib/pgsql/data -l logfile start
# createuser your-login-name # This lets you perform DB operations
You're done! Now following the Agile Web Development With Rails book, try the "Hello World" example:
% mkdir work
% rails demo
{ in another window }
% cd demo
% ruby script/server # Start the built-in WEBrick web server
Now point your browser to: http://localhost:3000 and see if you get the "Welcome Aboard" page:
Of course, to do a real Rails app we need to use the database that we setup earlier. This example shows the setup of the Depot application, discussed in Chapter 6 of the book.
% cd work
% rails depot
% createdb depot_development
% createdb depot_test
% createdb depot_production
Now create a file:
work/depot/db/create.sql that looks like this:
create table products (
id SERIAL,
title varchar(100) not null,
description text not null,
image_url varchar(200) not null,
price decimal(10,2) not null,
primary key(id)
);
Note the change from the MySQL
auto_increment modifier, given in the book, to the PostgreSQL SERIAL type above.
One more change: Modify the work/depot/config/database.yml file to point to your PostgreSQL database. Ignoring the comments, it should look something like this, if lefty is your login name:
development:
adapter: postgresql
database: depot_development
username: lefty
password:
host: localhost# Warning: The database defined as 'test' will be erased and
# re-generated from your development database when you run 'rake'.
# Do not set this db to the same as development or production.
test:
adapter: postgresql
database: depot_test
username: lefty
password:
host: localhostproduction:
adapter: postgresql
database: depot_production
username: lefty
password:
host: localhost
Import your initial
products table definition:
% psql depot_development < db/create.sql
and generate the "scaffold" for your Product catalog, and start the web server again (make sure you stopped the previous one from the earlier test).
% ruby script/generate scaffold Product Admin
% ruby script/server
Pointing your browser to: http://localhost:3000/admin should allow you to verify that you have your complete Rails development system setup correctly and integrated with your PostgreSQL database.
Want to learn more? Check out the Top 30 Rails Tutorials
Posted at 10:33PM Aug 24, 2006 by Peter Schow in Sun | Comments[1]
Rest in Peace, Bill Norris - computing pioneer/entreprenuer
Although it didn't get much industry attention, William Norris, founder and ex-CEO of Control Data Corporation quietly passed away this Monday in Minneapolis at the age of 95. Most know all about his chief engineer, Seymour Cray, but Norris' leadership contributions often get overlooked, especially when he gets routinely lumped in with the other BUNCH computer mainframe manufacturers of the 1960s.
Two books I know about have been written about Norris' legacy. One is a pure biography, called Portrait Of A Maverick and describes his very humble beginnings in depression-era Nebraska. The second book (and more interesting in my opinion) A Few Good Men From Univac is an engineer's perspective of the early Control Data Corporation years. Both books have me convinced that the Twin Cities area was the "Silicon Valley" of the USA during the first part of the 1960s, having taken the title away from Philadelphia. What made this geographical area special? Perhaps because Sperry-Univac was already there, as was Honeywell, but there was also a very loyal and large returning workforce from WWII, many of which were already exposed to technologies like CRTs (from radar), mechanical design, and refrigeration - all important components of computer systems at that time.
Some of Norris' contributions to the industry include:
- The way he partially financed Control Data Corporation as a startup in 1957, when venture capital for new computer manufacturers was near-impossible to obtain, by selling shares in the new venture for US $1/share (simplified pricing?) to friends and family at evening get-togethers in suburban living rooms. Sort of like a tupperware party, I guess, but more expensive (that's US $6.34/share adjusted to today), as individuals were buying hundreds of shares. Was this the first IPO of a major computer company?
- Pioneering scientific supercomputing (called "HPC" today) by focusing entirely on providing systems to weather forecasters, structural engineers, nuclear plant operators, jet manufacturers, oceanographers, university physicists and chemists, and any other communities who craved fast 60-bit floating point operations. If you ever attended the CDC User Group meetings (VIM/ECODU), these were the types of people sitting next to you.
- His approval of Seymour Cray taking his small team away from headquarters to remote Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where they could work free of distraction, leading to the development of the monumental 6600 and this very famous interchange in 1963 between CDC's chief competition and Cray:
Thomas J Watson, CEO of IBM: "Last week, Control Data Corporation... announced the 6600 system. I understand that in the laboratory developing the system there are only 34 people including the janitor. Of these, 14 are engineers and 4 are programmers... Contrasting this modest effort with our vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the the world's most powerful computer." Seymour Cray, CDC chief designer: "It seems like Mr. Watson has answered his own question."
It's reported that even Mr. Norris himself could not visit the Chippewa Falls Lab without prior authorization from Cray! - Risking the entire future of CDC by taking on IBM directly, and winning a landmark antitrust suit in the history of computing.
Mr. Norris certainly got his share of criticisms, such as "he stuck around too long", "he concentrated too much on social issues and activism", "he invested too much (more than US $1B) in productizing PLATO" (an online educational/authoring system developed coincidentally at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s, across the street from where the Mosaic browser would be born thirty years later), "he didn't see departmental computing coming", etc. I believe, however, that he'll be remembered for his many accomplishments and his fierce competitive drive which shaped the computing industry for a few decades, starting in 1957.
During the golden years of CDC, when they employed 60,000 people, you couldn't go from one Twin Cities suburb to another without seeing a Control Data building. That era is over now but I'm still reminded of the CDC empire whenever I'm in town and see those two somewhat-faded golden towers in Bloomington that used to serve as their headquarters.
Rest in Peace, Bill Norris (1911 - 2006)
Posted at 09:09PM Aug 22, 2006 by Peter Schow in Personal | Comments[0]