Friday September 29, 2006

Welcome, Platform Software colleagues. This entry is a public continuation of an article on blogging in the current edition of our internal departmental newsletter. Since I'm suggesting why you should consider blogging on blogs.sun.com, I thought it appropriate to make my case on our external blog site so people outside of Sun who would like to comment can add to the discussion. And, of course, the many Sun employees who read Sun blogs should feel free to contribute as well.

OK. So why blog on blogs.sun.com? Because Sun's customers will benefit, Sun will benefit, and you will benefit.

Good For Sun Customers

Sun's customers will benefit because the people in Platform Software are the experts in many technical areas that are both important and interesting to our customers. To name several: firmware, service processors, fault management, system management, security, performance, PCI, system bring-up, high performance computing, and virtualization. Anyone out there reading this blog think it might be interesting to hear directly from Sun engineers working in these areas?

Of course, as members of Sun's System Group, we do need to use our common sense (and also read Sun's blogging guidelines) when blogging externally since we have access to all manner of proprietary information about future system designs and schedules. We can't talk about future product releases. So, for example, I can't say much at all about the cool prototype systems I saw in Tushar's office recently. But you'd be surprised perhaps at some of the things Sun has talked about externally. For example, both the ROCK and Niagara 2 processors have been discussed outside Sun. I also just noticed a Wikipedia article on ROCK. So, talking about future products is a tricky, but discussing technology is a lot easier. And you folks know technology. Our group has centuries, maybe millennia, of collective experience at the Mothership of Unix working in all of the above technical areas. I know you'll find an eager audience for what you have to say.

If you are wondering what subjects are worth blogging about in our part of the software stack, you can get some idea by looking at other Sun blogs. For example, Mike Shapiro's blog on debugging, reliability, and fault management. One of his recent entries discusses SNMP and gives a pointer to a newly-defined MIB for readers to enjoy. Fairly low level and fairly geeky. And check out Brian Cantrill's blog as well. Don't miss his OpenSolaris Sewer Tour, one of my favorite entries. As he says, the open sourcing of Solaris is like having tourists suddenly flock to your hometown. A lot of you grew up there, too, and it's now okay to talk about your favorite corner of the OpenSolaris code base.

Good For Sun

All this blogging is good for Sun as well. Why? Partly because it shows what we mean by the Participation Age. But more important, it helps people outside Sun get a better appreciation for the huge amount of technical work and innovation happening at Sun. And a better appreciation of the technical depth and breadth of our engineers. That's the 'cool' factor that helps Sun's general reputation. It's also the case that a many Sun bloggers are sharing information that is directly useful to our customers and others. And that's good for Sun, too.

These are tiny examples, but I'm surprised to see people still reading information I posted a year ago about getting Solaris running on my Tecra laptop. And I'm still getting regular hits on my Dtrace entry.

Good For You

Blogging can be a lot of fun whether you decide to stick solely to technical entries, or prefer to mix it up a bit and add more personal and eclectic content. I know we have a lot of interesting people in our group: astronomy buffs, racing car drivers, beer brewers, new parents, gadget geeks. And I know at least one of you growing up had Howard Stern for a summer camp counsellor. There are interesting stories to tell.

There's a more serious reason to consider blogging as well. Don't underestimate the value of developing or enhancing a personal brand for yourself. At the very least, developing a reputation as a knowledgeable practitioner in a particular technology area across a broad community of people outside and inside of Sun is useful for your career. Blogging can help. If you look at blogs.sun.com, you'll see that the top hundred or so blogs regularly receive thousands of hits per day.

My proposal to you: Sign up for a blog and start writing. Realize that you may feel a little awkward and self-conscious at first, so give yourself some time to get comfortable with the process. Commit to writing, say, one entry per week for a few months and then assess whether you'd like to continue. If you find even this daunting, consider starting a group blog with some of your colleagues to cover a particular technology area. My guess is that whether you blog individually or as a part of a group, you'll find the experience to be worthwhile and even fun.

To start blogging, register here.

Related entries:

• Read Dan Lacher on Dan's Blog: For What it's worth
• Read Sean Dillman on DILBLOG
• Read Bruce Hill on EXOTERIC - Information Worth Sharing

Thursday September 28, 2006

I met a Participation Age guru at Sun's Global Technology Leadership Conference in Bangalore, India this summer. He is the Honorable Mr. Justice Yatindra Singh of the Allahabad High Court.

Justice Singh is an active advocate of openness and participation at a court which itself has a history of advocacy and participation. The Allahabad High Court was the first court in the world to interpret the "person clause" to include women when it enrolled Cornelia Sorabji as its first female legal practitioner on August 24, 1921.

More recently, due to the influence of Justice Singh, the court has continued its aggressive support of openness by adopting open source technologies and embracing new technologies to broaden the impact of the court. Specifically, all court IT infrastructure is now required to be built from open source components and the court has adopted the Open Document Format as its official document standard. In addition, the court publishes an RSS feed to announce all major judgments of the court, perhaps the first use of this technology by a court. Now that is openness and participation!

The Justice is an expert on open source licensing and cyber law and is the author of Cyber Laws, published in 2005. He was invited speaker at Sun's GTLC and spoke about open source from a legal and end-user perspective. While he was very positive about Sun's OpenOffice effort, he felt more attention should be paid to Solaris ease of use and to raising awareness of our open source efforts to people outside of the technology sector.

Justice Singh blogs at A Judge's World.

Friday September 22, 2006

NEWS RELEASES from the United States Department of Defense

No. 942-06 IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 22, 2006
Media Contact: (703) 697-5131/697-5132
Public/Industry(703) 428-0711

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing in action from World War I, have been identified and returned to his family for burial with full military honors.

This is the first time the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) has identified a soldier unaccounted for from World War I.

He is Army Pvt. Francis Lupo of Cincinnati, Ohio.He will be buried on Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2006, at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.

Representatives from the Army met with Lupo's next-of-kin to explain the recovery and identification process and to coordinate interment with military honors on behalf of the Secretary of the Army.

In 1918, Lupo participated in the combined French-American attack on the Germans near Soissons, France, in what came to be known as the Second Battle of the Marne.Despite heavy Allied losses, this battle has been regarded as a turning point in the war, halting and reversing the final German advances toward Paris.

Lupo, a member of Company E, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, was killed in action during the battle, but his remains were never recovered.

In 2003, while conducting a survey in preparation for a construction project, a French archaeological team discovered human remains and other items a short distance from Soissons.Among the items recovered were a military boot fragment and a wallet bearing Lupo's name.The items were given by the French to U.S. officials for analysis.

Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used mitochondrial DNA in the identification of Lupo's remains.

For additional information on the Defense Department's mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO Web site at http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call (703) 699-1169.

Thursday September 21, 2006

Voyager I left Earth almost 30 years ago to visit Jupiter and Saturn. It's now beyond the solar system and outside the heliosphere, a large bubble of Sun-created gas about four-times wider than the orbit of Neptune. It's cruising through the heliosheath and will be for another ten years.

Amazingly, Voyager is still sending back data. And it's been finding some very weird things out there. NASA has a nice article here that gives all the details, including instructions on how to simulate the heliosphere and heliosheath in your kitchen sink.

With respect to the mystery around the source of the so-called Anomalous Cosmic Rays, if they aren't being created by the inner boundary of the heliosheath as was originally thought, and are instead coming from deeper within the heliosheath, perhaps the question isn't WHAT is producing the rays, but WHO? (cue creepy music here) :-)

All kidding aside, that we have sent a man-made object some 10 billion miles from Earth is absolutely mind-boggling to me. What a truly wonderful feat of engineering!

Wednesday September 20, 2006

If you are interested in reducing your use of animal products, here's some information about New Balance shoes from their customer support department.

Thank you for your interest in New Balance!

ALL of the following models are made with synthetic materials. However. please note that we do use different types of glues depending on what is available. Also be aware that some of our glues will contain animal products as many glues do. Even though the shoe contains all synthetic leather does not mean it will be completely vegan. We do not mix real and synthetic leathers on any shoe. It is either leather or synthetic period.

Running Shoes:

Cross Trainers:

Walking:

Tennis:

Cleats:

All of these models are from our Spring 2006 Line. All models available in women's.

Sincerely,
The NB Consumer Response Team

Tuesday September 19, 2006

My friend Monty pointed me to http://www.BostonScienceAndEngineeringLectures.com, which is a nice aggregation of upcoming lectures in the Boston area of interest to science and technology buffs. The site is run by Fred Hapgood, who I judge to be an interesting guy, based on his website.

Thanks to Fred for putting together such a useful resource!

Monday September 18, 2006

For many people the question "What's the strategy"? is equivalent to "What's the roadmap?" In their view strategy is all about the What. In fact, there are other equally important elements to consider.

A successful strategy must embrace the Who and the How as well. It is only with competency in all three of these areas that a company will be able to deliver a truly WOW experience to its customers. Conventional wisdom is to lump How and Who together as Execution rather than Strategy issues, but that's a bug because the three aspects are intimately related and should be considered together.

A company that pays attention to the Who ensures through hiring and skills development that employees will be ready and able to deliver the What. In practice, this requires an understanding of future skills requirements as they relate to the corporate strategy in addition to any current requirements. And skills are not the only issue. Those employees who will execute on the What need the appropriate context on which to base the myriad decisions they will need to make during a product's design and implementation phases. In particular, they should have an understanding of the state of the art as practiced by competitors and, if appropriate, the research community. Add to that a firm grasp of their customers' needs and an ability to distinguish when innovation is appropriate and when it is not.

A company can stumble as it executes its strategy even with the appropriate vision and people in place if attention is not paid to How products are developed. The methodologies matter. Achieving an appropriate level of quality, delivering a product quickly, and doing so without killing your development team is all part of the How. Other aspects of How that can yield benefits are maintaining a culture of data (e.g. a six sigma orientation), assessing the value of new development approaches like extreme programming or agile methods, and introducing formal inspection processes for code or other work products, to name a few. A focus on process for process' sake is not useful. Instead, focus on finding that level of methodology and process which is appropriate for the task at hand.

Saturday September 16, 2006

I suspect many business travelers are fairly well-heeled with a nice car or two in the driveway at home. Maybe a BMW, a Volvo, an Audi, etc. You probably have the latest safety features like ABS brakes, traction control, dynamic stability control, side-curtain airbags, etc.

Have you ever thought about the cars you rent when traveling on business? In particular, how rental cars may differ from what you are used to driving at home?

Maximum braking with ABS is fine--the computer will ensure you don't lose traction as best it can. With dynamic stability control (found on some BMWs) you can steer through a turn at speed under maximum braking and not lose control. But don't try such manoevers in a rental car. Rental cars don't generally have these advanced safety features and therefore need to be handled very differently under extreme circumstances.

Think about it. Do you really know how to drive the cars you rent?

Tuesday September 12, 2006

I recently ordered an item from a secure website and then received a transaction acknowledgement via email--a message that included all of my personal information, including full credit card number and expiration date. And I still see cases in which "Forgot your password?" procedures culminate in one's password being sent in the clear via email.

Who the heck cares what kind of fancy encryption they have on their website if the weakest link in the chain is an unprotected email message sent to me over the Internet?

What's going on here? Do implementers just not understand that email is insecure? Or do they just not care?

Sunday September 10, 2006

Here in Massachusetts, we've had trouble again this year with EEE (Eastern Equine Encephalitis), or Triple E as it's called. There have been several reported cases, including a nine year old boy who died.

Last week, a mosquito bearing EEE was found in my hometown, Canton. I heard from my parents that the town has used an interesting service called Reverse 911 to notify the more than 8000 households in town of the threat of Triple E, to provide information on protection from Triple E, and to announce that evening sporting events and practices have been cancelled until further notice.

That's a nice example of a local government doing an excellent job of reaching out to its citizens to ensure important information is heard broadly.

I noticed the other day that one of the extension springs on one of our garage doors had broken. These are the large springs that help the electric garage door opener pull the door into its open position.

I found a great site that sells all sorts of garage door replacement parts, including extension springs. They have a page that includes instructions on how to determine which replacement springs to order.

If the existing springs aren't color-coded, one must weigh the door. To do this one must disconnect any remaining springs, disengage the electric door opener and lower the door onto a bathroom scale. The procedure detailed on the website starts with the following step:

1. Raise the door to the full position and secure. The best way to secure the door in the up position is to snap a vice grip or C clamp under both the bottom rollers.

Well, the clamps were in the basement and I was in a bit of a hurry. I disconnected the one remaining spring. And then I pulled the release lever to disengage the garage door opener. And then the door--now freed--began to slide. Slowly at first. I'm very thankful that I moved too slowly to actually attempt to get under the door and catch it, because it accelerated quickly (9.8 m/sec^2, if I recall correctly) and closed with an impressively loud finish as it smashed into the floor of the garage. More precisely, it landed on the bathroom scale I had previously positioned for subsequent steps in the weighing procedure. This was a sturdy old steel bathroom scale. It's now in the trash--crushed and with a very noticeable dent furrowed across its surface.

After buying a new scale, I managed to carefully weigh the door and reassemble everything. I will soon place my order for the appropriate replacement parts.

I, of course, should have followed the directions. And I should have looked at the table of replacement springs more closely. It shows that garage doors weigh in the range of 60 lbs to 300 lbs.

For the curious, my garage door weighs 138.5 lbs.

Friday September 08, 2006

Barely five months after we released the eight-core, 32-thread OpenSPARC T1 design under open source, Simply RISC (whose website has been temporarily taken off line, as of this writing) has released the design of the open source S1 processor, a stripped down version of the OpenSPARC T1 intended for use in PDAs, set-top boxes, etc. SWEET!

More details available here.

The term "grid" has become confusing as the landscape has evolved, which is a shame because the ideas embodied in "the grid" and "grid computing" are extremely important. In my view, the essence of grid computing can be defined with three words:

In their seminal 1999 book, The Grid, A Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Foster and Kesselman defined "The Grid" as:

This is sharing on a grand or global scale across multiple organizations, across heterogeneous computing resources, across a wide geographic scale, and across trust boundaries. The vision was motivated at least in part by the desire by the national (and international) research community and, perhaps more important, by their funding agencies, to share access to the extremely large and expensive supercomputer sites being established around the country. The TeraGrid is perhaps the best known of these grids.

This vision of a global grid is alive and well in the Globus Alliance and Global Grid Forum and elsewhere. It is still mostly, but not solely, a vision being driven by the research community. And it is yet another example of pioneering work begun in the High Performance Computing (HPC) community that is migrating into the mainstream. Lots of hard problems get solved by the HPC community and we all benefit.

At Sun, we recognized the value of the big vision of the global grid, but also saw a need to define some smaller visions that would appeal more directly to our customers, both technical and non-technical. To that end, we talk about three levels of grid computing.

The lowest level is the so-called departmental or cluster grid, which is most often instantiated as a set of horizontally-scaled resources in a single machine room with access to those resources mediated by a software framework called a distributed resource manager. Our DRM is called Sun Grid Engine . A departmental grid is usually under a single point of administrative control--it is owned by a group or department.

The next level is the campus or enterprise grid, which embraces a geographically distributed set of resources--in many cases, a group of departmental grids. As in the case of a departmental grid, the resources within an enterprise grid are all within a single organization's firewall. Unlike a departmental grid, the resources within an enterprise grid are often owned by separate groups or departments, although they are all ultimately under the control of the enterprise or organization to which they all belong.

The third and highest level of the grid hierarchy is the global grid as discussed earlier. The resources in a global grid are widely distributed geographically and owned by separate organizations.

Q: Are the terms "cluster" and "grid" synonymous?
A: No, they aren't. The former refers to a set of horizontally scaled resources (a pile of boxes), while the latter is a statement about how resources are made available--a statement about sharing. A grid infrastructure can and often does support sharing of cluster resources. But a grid can also enable sharing of other resources like massive amounts of storage or very high-end visualization capabilities. When you hear "grid," think "sharing" or "participation."

Q: What about Sun Grid Engine?
A: Using Sun Grid Engine to mediate access to a set of distributed resources creates a departmental grid. Potentially a very large departmental grid with thousands of processors.

Q: Is the Sun Grid Utility actually a grid?
A: Yes, because the Sun Grid Utility enables resources to be shared remotely. But what kind of a grid resource is it? This is a bit tricky to answer due to our hierarchical definition of grids. Right now, access to Sun Grid Utility is via a portal through which users upload and launch their computations. To a user accessing the portal, the Sun Grid Utility looks like a departmental grid resource. As the Sun Grid Utility's capabilities continue to grow beyond portal access, it will be fair to view it as a global grid component.

Q: Is grid computing the same as utility computing?
A: No, it isn't. The initial choice of the term "grid" to describe sharing of distributed compute resources was driven by analogy to an electrical grid with power generated at large sites made available for local use over a wide area, ideally without the local consumer having to worry about the details of where or how the power is actually generated. That's the viewpoint of the utility consumer. When for-profit vendors think about a utility, they think about it from the provider's standpoint: they think about the billing model. Which I think has contributed to conflating the idea of utility computing with grid computing.

Grid computing is a statement about (let's all say it together) sharing, i.e., making resources available via remote access. Utility computing is a business model--it's about how you charge a customer for using your resources. Those resources might be extra CPUs or memory in a server that are made available to a customer on a metered basis. Or the resources might be a grid resource like the Sun Grid Utility.

Sunday September 03, 2006

This summer I sailed with friends around Cape Spear, the most eastern point in North America. It's just south of St. John's, Newfoundland. Here's the big cartographic picture, followed by two photos I took. The first photo was taken as we approached the Cape from the south, and the second as we rounded it, heading towards the St. John's outer harbor. The lighthouse here is the oldest surviving lighthouse in Newfoundland and Labrador. It and the surrounding site have been restored to its 1839 appearance. The Cape is also the site of Fort Cape Spear, a coastal defence battery built during World War II. If you look closely in the second photo, the dark area at the right of the photo and above the red rocks is where the battery was placed in a sheltered position.