RoboGeek's (David Herron) Weblog: co-developer of Robot and several other things related to Java testing.
Thursday January 22, 2009 There's probably going to be a few of these goodbye's posted on blogs.sun.com. Today is the big day when many of us are being set free to our fates, to roam the wastelands that exist beyond employment. Wish us luck.
I've been informed today is my last day of employment at Sun.
You can follow me at other blogs: davidherron.com, www.7gen.com, peaceguide.com, wwwatts.net, visforvoltage.org
Friday August 01, 2008 On The Register is an article discussing The Data Center's Green Direction is a Dead End... So, uh, gee... The argument is that "an ample supply of energy is necessary to grow any business over the long-term" and that there is no choice but be on a treadmill of ever-increasing energy use just so that business can grow. Uh, gee. If the 'energy' comes from the usual sources that will mean a lot of coal being burned, and fossil fuel resources are demonstrably harming the ecosphere in a way which threatens our very survival.
There's a flaw in thinking here. I do agree that for a business to continue growing, the physical capabilities of that business must also grow. In terms of storage the business must be able to store and process more data more quickly. The flaw is in assuming the increase in capabilities has to result in an increase in energy use.
More/faster can be done through using more efficient equipment such that more/faster can also be coupled with less energy use. This would be the equivalent to using compact flourescent lights in preference to incandescent, or even better using LED lights in preference to either of those. What the user of a lightbulb wants is to be illuminated by LUMENS. The Lumens can come from any light source, and if the light bulb is one which more efficiently converts electrons to lumens then there is an environmental and fiscal win.
I don't myself know enough about the storage industry to say exactly which equipment could result in more/faster and less energy use. What I wish to point to is the importance of doing so. There are needs here which are not properly measured by economic measures. Global warming is harming ecological niches all over the planet and it is nigh on impossible to put a monetary measure on their worth and so therefore those who are making decisions purely from economics spreadsheets are missing the big picture through being overly focused on their numbers and missing the real need.
Interesting point: "the Indianapolis 500 isn't won by the driver who can make the most laps on a single tank of gas" indicates an attitude that you can be thoroughly wasteful and use all the energy you want .. presumably because there is infinite energy available, and there are no harmful side effects from using energy. This however is false on both assumptions. First, almost every energy resource available to mankind is based on mining resources which are in limited quantity. Namely oil, coal, natural gas, not to mention the metals and other raw materials that go into making the computers. Every mined resource with limited quantity undergoes a "peak" effect one aspect of which is popularly known as "peak oil". However this effect applies to every such resource.
The observation over decades of monitoring oil production is that the capacity to produce oil from oil fields goes through a bell-curve of production quantity. It's not that an oil field abruptly runs out, but that after a midpoint it becomes harder and harder to extract oil from an oil field. A similar phenomenon happens with every other limited availability resource.
The paradigm of the race car driver throwing as much energy as possible into winning the race follows a pattern of rapid energy use, which in turn is going to rapidly use up the limited availability resource pool which supplies the energy.
The second assumption, that there are no harmful side effects, is also false as I noted above. Scientists have studied the exhaust of burning fossil fuels, they know all the emitted gasses, and they have demonstrated that the rise of those same chemicals in the environment matches the rising rate of burning fossil fuels. In other words there is a clear connection to harmful side effects from burning the fossil fuels which are overwhelmingly used to create the electricity that drives our beloved data centers.
The race car driver paradigm inexoribly leads us to using up the resource which drives the car, and in the meantime leads to poisoning the race car driver from the poisons emitted by burning the oil that drives the car.
The article asks a couple time what the customer really needs ... and, sure, there is a need for more/faster storage, but isn't there a more fundamental need all of us have to live?
Tuesday June 10, 2008 A tour of the gen's (gen.com's, that is)
Simon Phipps put up a link to 10gen.com and said something enigmatic about the founding team. Normally I would ignore such a thing because it's probably another of these boring startups full of leading edge buzzwords .. geez I'm such a curmudgeon today. Hmm, I was right, it's about cloud computing. Sheesh. Anyway my interest is because I own 7gen.com and it struck my curiousity who owns the other Ngen.com sites ...
1gen.com - it's a registered domain but no web site answers to my browser. The registration is pretty curious.
2gen.com - it's registered and a placeholder website comes up. Interestingly it's hosted on pair.com, interesting because that's where I host 7gen.com.
3gen.com - Not exactly good company I'm keeping.. they're providing database etc services to the 'Direct Mail Industry' (a.k.a. the snail mail equivalent to spammers except the fine people at 3gen.com would likely bristle at this association)
4gen.com - well, I can't say it any better than they: 4Gen helps companies transform complexity and confusion in IT business management into collaboration and clarity. With our suite of proven services, we allow you to integrate the IT disciplines that are essential for achieving your business goals—and that results in greater predictability, better value and improved IT performance.
5gen.com - It's registered and there's a placeholder site written in German.
6gen.com - 6Gen Services offers computer services in Staten Island.
7gen.com - Again, this is one of my sites and a domain I've owned since 1996 (?1995?), well before I even dreamed of working for Sun. There are perhaps 3,000 pages of postings on subjects ranging from politics, calls for the impeachment of the current U.S. administration, the yearning for technological sanity, electric vehicles, alternative energy and more.
8gen.com - There's something there, a flash animation with catchy music, and some text in a language I don't recognize (?Danish?) ..
9gen.com - Another placeholder site this time with a simple file listing.
10gen.com - See above - cloud computing - ho hum.
11gen.com - Does a redirect to 11gen.de and that site is full of German but it's clearly for "11Gen Design".
I'm going to stop there because 12gen.com is a search spam site.
It's not a real stunning neighborhood my site is occupying, none of my neighbor domains are all that hot. It does make me wonder what drives someone to choose an '#gen.com' domain name and perhaps my reasoning for 7gen.com might be illustrative.
At the time I registered 7gen.com I was hanging out with a Reiki teacher who also had a strong connection with native american spiritual traditions and routinely talked about "7 generations". At the same time I was a happy user of products made by the Seventh Generation company. The whole idea of 'In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations' appeals to me in multiple ways, which is why I'm a happy user of their products. However they did not invent that slogan, it's part of the bylaws of the Iriquois Confederacy.
In any case, back to why 7gen.com ... simple, 'gen' is short for Generation or in this case to keep the paradigm of "seven generations" front and center. I suppose the owners of the other #gen.com domains have some generational reasoning behind their name choice. Maybe. Who knows.
Thursday April 03, 2008 I'll have to try this new title on.. am I a 'Clogger'?
Kodak sucks the coolness from blogging discusses how Kodak has entered the brave new world of corporate blogging and has become so cool that they have a 'Chief Blogger'.
But along the way new terminology is proposed. Is "corporate blogging" any different than any other sort of blogging?
That's a really curious thought, isn't it? Yes there are lots of corporate bloggers, we have a lot of them here at Sun. But is corporate blogging any different than regular blogging? What would make a 'clog' different from a 'blog'?
One way would be those faux blogs which are really marketeer activities in disguise. What makes a blog different from any other web site is the style of presentation and writing style. Supposedly blogs are supposed to be direct and personal, a style that's foreign to most marketeer types.
Besides that I do practice blogging differently on my personal blog(s) than on this site. But that's simply so that I have more freedom to post whatever I want such as calling Pres. Bush a traitor and calling for his impeachment. While that's supposedly within Sun's blogging guidelines I'd rather not tie those opinions to Sun and it's much more straightforward to make those postings on my own time on a hosting account where I pay the bill.
In other words -- to me, writing on a clog (corporate blog) makes me some kind of corporate spokesperson. This corporate blog (clog) is on company property (blogs.sun.com) and written using company equipment and written on company time, so it seems fair to me to think of my clog postings as being tied to the corporation I work for. If I have something to say which I think my company has no business saying, well, that's why I have my own blog sites.
Tuesday October 23, 2007 So, um, on the bloggers mailing list there was a request that we from Sun sign up with Dopplr. I went to the Dopplr site and it was yet another of these services that are so cool they don't have to explain what their purpose is. That is, there's somewhere around zero information describing what they do or why I might want to use their "service". But I signed up anyway, only to find out it's a service for sharing information about trips I'm taking. Namely, sharing that information with other people and there's a hint that by knowing about each others travels you can more easily hook up while traveling.
Having done a bit of traveling I do think it would be helpful to connect with people. Traveling alone is, sometimes, lonely.
But I don't get what the big deal is. It seems like much ado about something that's not entirely useful, and I just sent them a request to cancel my account. Seems that being so cool they don't have to explain themselves, they're also so cool you have to beg and plead to cancel the account.
(2007-10-23 11:16:23.0) Permalink
Wednesday July 11, 2007 I'm reading a CNET article .. Democrats criticize AT&T's exclusive iPhone deal .. It's talking about a U.S. Congress committee meeting that was supposed to be about "wireless innovation and consumer protection". But iPhone-mania hit the Congresscritters with Republicans claiming the iPhone is an example of consumer choice in action ...
I dunno about you, the reader, but I'm more than astonished. I see Apple's move with this phone as a way to interfere with consumer choice. And in general the cell phone market is all about interfering with customer choice. Want to switch providers? Nope, you're in a locked in contract. Like your phone but want to use it with a different carrier? Nope, the phones you can buy are locked to specific carriers. And the iPhone is even worse because it's design, while using GSM under the covers, has specific features that are only going to work with Cingular. This all goes together to prevent the customer from having choice.
I think in other countries customer choice is free-er, in that you can buy phones and SIM cards as separate objects, and can insert the SIM card into phones based on your free choice. Since I don't live outside the U.S. my exposure to this is limited, but a few months ago I was in St. Petersburg and my colleagues there bought a SIM card for me to try in my U.S. Cingular-locked phone. Unfortunately the experiment didn't work out in that the phone didn't recognize the SIM card they bought.
Wednesday July 04, 2007 Revisiting the Declaration of Independence Earlier today I had an inspiration to compare the Declaration of Independence with current events. It's spooky the parallels, and just makes me wonder all over again, where's the rage? Why aren't people more in arms over the current behavior and actions of the U.S. Administration? Revisiting the Declaration of Independence. (2007-07-04 14:52:24.0) Permalink
Monday June 11, 2007 Huh? Can someone explain why ?? Safari is such a crappy browser to begin with. Why would anybody want to use it at all?
UPDATE: The first comment received was "First step to iLife on Windows" and that's kind of where I am with it. As a mac user I'm having fear that Apple is getting distracted by the huge income they get from iPods/iTunes, and potentially huge income from the iPhone, that they're going to ditch OS X and focus on their real money maker(s).
But then I found A Suggestion for Apple in 2007 which suggested, last January, that they release Safari on Windows. That it would give Windows users a peek into the life of Mac users, and it would give web developers who use Windows a reason/capability to test their web sites on Safari.
Hurm.. The first reason is suspicious to me. I know dozens and dozens of Mac users who ignore Safari because it sucks. So, Safari is not a very good demonstration of the life of Mac users. The second reason works pretty well for me. Maybe web sites would more often work well in Safari if the web developers suffering from using Windows were able to test their sites on Safari. Hurm...
Sunday May 06, 2007 OpenJDK Thoughts Podcast, episode#1
At JavaONE this year I am planning to record the thoughts of people regarding the OpenJDK project. I will post these recordings here. Attached is an initial episode which I recorded earlier today.
If you cannot attend JavaONE, or otherwise cannot find me, you may leave messages on my Skype line: robogeek1
(2007-05-06 21:23:12.0) Permalink
Friday April 27, 2007 This grand experiment in corporate blogging at Sun has been going for three years now. Looking back it seems I got on this bandwagon early, in June 2004 with a pathetic first post. I know there are a lot of blogs who contain only that kind of posting as their first and only entry, fortunately I kept up at it. It helps that I publish several web sites of my own, and one of them has a 12+ year history. But looking back what helped the most to feel comfortable with blogging is having been a Usenet denizon during the 1980's. Around 1986 I was a system administrator and student at the University of Kentucky, holding a student job working for the Mathematical Sciences department working on system admin to a network of Vax's running 4.2BSD. It's wasn't quite a typical student job in that we supported those systems from the bare metal on up, because DEC didn't quite like people running anything other than VMS on their hardware. Yeah, the technical support guy from the local office would come out and swap boards etc, but he wouldn't do any of the operating system maintenance, which left that to us. One thing I managed was to learn about Usenet .. one of our gang had graduated and gone to work for Bell Labs, and sent back a tape full of postings from the Unix-Wizards mailing list as well as several others. From those I gathered that this thing called Usenet existed, figured out what UUCP path addressing was, and around that time I had the job to set up a UUCP link between our system and a system at the ANL-CMS lab in Chicago. Using those pieces I found my way through Usenet to land an email to Mark Horton and managed to get our systems connected to Usenet. And then proceeded to totally enjoy life chatting with people all over the world ... until our university was connected to the Internet at which time the enjoyment skyrocketed.
In a large way the blogosphere is very much like Usenet but with even more autonomy. What I mean is the very personal style of writing, because clearly a blog owner generally is writing in their very own and usually highly controlled space. I very much think of my Usenet experience as giving me experience with and exposure to writing that would be astonishing considering my history of English/Writing classes during school.
My most interesting moment blogging for Sun was when Tim Bray called me at 11 AM on a Sunday morning. There had been a slashdot article about Kodak's lawsuit against Sun, where they claimed we violated some patents. The suit was still in the process of being settled, but I had a bee up my butt about software patents and posted some opinions which were probably pretty good .. but .. as Tim pointed out when he called me, it's in violation of my employment contract to talk about ongoing court cases. And so, I pulled the posting grumbling about corporate interference with freedom of speech.
What to make of that ... well, there's several angles to this. First, is some aspects to freedom of speech by an employee. Employees have traditionally been told not to talk to press at all, to not talk in the open at all, and to leave that for the professional PR and Marketing people who have the specific training to know the right things to say. That leaves most employees of a company mute and unable to speak. But what about an employee who is witnessing some illegal or immoral act. Their employment contract probably forbids them from speaking about company proprietary stuff. Further the employer is the one giving them money, so the employee has an incentive to keep quiet, or their flow of income will stop, as will the food, shelter and other primary needs provided by that money. ..etc.. so all those things and more go together to to maintain an air of employees not speaking out. But if a company really is doing something illegal, shouldn't an employee have the freedom to speak out about whatever their employer is doing? Isn't this harming society by keeping employees beholden to and muted by their employers?
Another is the sensitivity of negotiations that happen between corporations, especially when there are court cases involved. The stakes can be quite high, in that case with Kodak it was many many millions of dollars. So there is a real need for many types of information known by an employee to remain quiet.
Another is the sort of gamble our company management has taken to allow everybody in the company to do this blogging thing. It represents a sea change in the mindset of the typical role of employees. That stereotype of employees unable to say anything is gone, replaced with a "use your best judgement" guideline. Corporate transparency is a good thing, I believe.
Thank you to the blogs.sun.com team, and to the management at Sun for having the bravery to do this.
(2007-04-27 14:25:19.0) Permalink
Thursday April 12, 2007 Testing bloged, and "offline" blog editors I'm trying out bloged to handle blog postings. A few days ago I posted a rant about the experience of posting a blog entry through a web browser. I'd found a blog posting written by someone that sent me on a train of thought which took perhaps a half hour to craft into a blog posting. This was edited in the login session in this blogs.sun.com blogging account. Then I went to click SAVE to publish the posting, and was greeted by the login screen telling me that my posting had been lost.
Whatever wonderful attrributes you can say about this web2.0 thing, one attribute sucks big time. The usability experience of editing content in a web browser session is awful. Often you're stuck with a TextArea and having to write HTML by hand, or even worse it's some simplified markup language that's different for each different content management system. Didn't computer users go through this struggle in the 1980's to transition from editors that use a markup language, to WYSIWYG editors?
I've been publishing web sites for over 10 years and have used a variety of technologies to do it. In 1995 when I started vi and emacs were common, and WYSIWYG website editors were rare. But I did manage to use NaviPress for awhile and was hooked on the user experience improvement over handcrafted HTML (bleck).
But, in time, I found content management systems. I could write entries from "anywhere". I didn't have to run specialized software. It took care of creating navigational structures for the site.
This newfangled web2.0 world is full of sites where users create the content while using a browser session. There are a whole slew of usability problems, one of which is the scenario recounted above (user session timeout). Theoretically the advantage of a desktop application is the more mature GUI toolkit and user interaction experience. Some have done amazing things using Javascript, but even after 12+ years of development the HTML form elements and Javascript GUI elements do not have the maturity of decent desktop GUI toolkits.
So here I am trying out bloged. The user experience is a heck of a lot better than previous times I've used it. But it has several annoying issues. I suppose since it's an open source project I could download the code and start fixing issues. hmmm....
UPDATE: I just clicked the publish button. It looks pretty much like the WYSIAWYG view that bloged provides. Curiously there's some text at the end giving me a template for a new posting (e.g. "title goes here" .. "body goes here" ..etc). Another one of the annoying issues, I guess.
(2007-04-12 10:44:40.0) Permalink
The title of your post goes here
And it's body goes here.
You can drag an illustration for this entry onto the left hand pane. If you have just created this blog, don't forget to press the previous arrow to edit the blog header.
(2007-04-12 10:41:54.0) Permalink
Tuesday October 17, 2006 Vista flexes its power is about a supposedly new feature with Vista that allows companies to save energy. namely: "With Windows Vista, Microsoft plans to put machines to sleep after an hour of inactivity"
Sun to unveil data center in a box We are? That sounds cool, I hope that really is what we're unveiling later today. The article claims we'll be demonstrating a standard-sized shipping container containing racks of computer gear, water cooling system, air filtration system, etc. It's a box you can quickly deploy just by dropping it (literally?) into a vacant piece of land, run power, water, and network connections to it, and you're good to go.
Wednesday October 04, 2006
I don't get the attraction to bittorrent The other day Mandriva announced their new release, the 2007 version of their distribution. I've been wanting to try their system out so I went to the download page. A couple days prior I'd downloaded the RC2 ISO's and those were done with an FTP arrangement, but today the final bits are downloadable only with a bittorrent thingamajob.
Bittorrent is one of those gosh wow technologies that has the geeks glowing and saying it's the neatest thing since sliced bread. Supposedly bittorrent is a technology that would, if deployed by the media companies etc, revolutionize the distribution of multimedia entertainment.
Well, as a user of this technology I am completely and totally underwhelmed.
The mandriva distribution .torrent file specifies the downloading of four ISO's plus a small number of related meta files. I started the download yesterday afternoon, and 20 hours later the bittorrent client (qtorrent running on Ubuntu if that makes any difference) says it's only 50% downloaded, and there are 18 hours left to go.
Just a few days earlier when I was able to grab the prior ISO's using FTP they downloaded within an hour, and within two hours after that I had the ISO's burned to CD.
Seems to me that as a user of the two technologies, FTP (or HTTP "get" or the like) is superior over bittorrent, because I get quicker satisfaction.
So can someone explain the superiority of bittorrent?
Oh and to toss a few more worms into the pot ... Last year sometime I was curious what all the rage over the Azureus client was about. So I installed it, ran it, and to get some .torrent files I found the torrentspy web site. Good golly what a flashback to the unethical sharing of copyrighted content. Is that what bittorrent normally used for? The unethical sharing of copyrighted content?
(2006-10-04 11:10:10.0)
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