Wednesday December 13, 2006

Sun held its biannual Distinguished Engineer promotion review meeting this week. All of the DEs and and Fellows convened in Menlo Park for a 1.5 day meeting to review candidate cases and to recommend promotions to Distinguished Engineer. We reviewed more cases in this session than in any other I've attended.

For those not familiar, the process works like this. First, a candidate's Vice President or Director decides to nominate an employee for consideration. A case is prepared without the knowledge of the candidate, following established guidelines that have been published on the DE website. Case materials are distributed to the DEs and Fellows in advance of the in-person review meeting. At the review meeting, each candidate's Director or Vice President spends about twenty minutes presenting the candidate and then spends about the same amount of time fielding questions from the attendees. Once the questioning is completed and the speaker has left the room, an internal discussion ensues, followed by a formal vote.

As a participant, I form an initial opinion based on the reading of each case prior to the meeting. That opinion can be affected (positively or negatively) by the case presentation and then again (positively or negatively) by the detailed private discussion prior to the vote.

At this session, I entered the meeting with a tentative determination that I would vote Yes on 30% of the cases being considered. After presentations, that percentage had risen to 60%. After discussions, I ultimately voted Yes on 75% of the cases. The presos and the discussions matter a lot in this process, as you can see.

Promotion announcements should begin rolling out soon.

Okay, so maybe everyone in California knows about BioBags, but I'm from Boston where we tend to be considerably less enlightened about green alternatives. But how cool is this? Bags made of a biodegradeable and compostable corn-based bio-polymer called Mater-Bi.

In addition to shopping bags, BioBag offers kitchen bags, lawn & leaf bags, and several other related products.

Tuesday December 12, 2006

Promotional Image

I had a chance to play with the Sony Reader, Sony's new handheld device for reading ebooks, at the Borders in Palo Alto this weekend. The display uses E Ink's electronic paper technology and it is drop-dead gorgeous. The monochrome display looks much more like paper than anything I've seen before, with an almost 180 degree viewing angle and excellent contrast and resolution. Except for one glaring problem, I'd be tempted to buy a Reader.

The problem is an annoying flashing each time a new page is displayed. Ironically, this problem seems to be a direct result of Sony's choice of the E Ink technology. The net effect makes the unit feel slow and kludgy enough to blunt categorization as an object of desire. You can see the update effect here on YouTube.

Monday December 11, 2006

For engineers, the patent process may seem to end once a patent has been granted, but that is far from the truth. You inventors should understand that your work and your innovations continue to play important roles for Sun by highlighting Sun as an innovator and through other means.

Patents have traditionally encouraged individuals and organizations to innovate by granting exclusive rights to inventors. Sun has pursued two complementary paths by building both a strong patent portfolio (see the latest IEEE Spectrum patent survey) and by building a strong track record of participation and donation to the open source community. Our patents give us certain rights for our commercial products, but they also play an important defensive role when negotiating patent cross-licensing agreements with other companies.

Over the past year or so, I've been acting as a technical advisor in a series of cross-licensing meetings with another company that will not be named. We've spent considerable time in these meetings discussing patents whose inventors are friends and colleagues of mine at Sun. I thought I'd explain briefly how such meetings work for those not familiar with the process.

In negotiating a cross-licensing agreement, each side seeks to demonstrate to the other the strength of their patent portfolio by mapping one or more of their patents onto the other company's products. For each such attempt, a proof package is presented. The proof package is a set of slides that introduce a patent and the demonstrate in detail how the other company's product(s) implement every element of a representative claim chosen from the patent. To map successfully, all of the multiple elements of the claim must be shown to exist within the product that is alleged to infringe.

Over a series of meetings, rebuttals to proof packages will also be presented. As you'd guess, a rebuttal is an attempt to demonstrate why a previously-presented proof package was incorrect. It might be incorrect due to a misunderstanding of a product's functionality, or due to a demonstration that the product in question was created using prior art.

The aim in these meetings is to score as many credible hits as possible in order to demonstrate the strength and relevance of one's patent portfolio so as to put one's company in a position of strength when negotiating the particulars of the cross-licensing agreement. Patents are the essential bargaining chips in the negotiation.

There's a bit of a MAD flavor to all of this. Hits that map onto a company's products can be expensive, depending on the product and the impacted revenue. The most effective way to neutralize such a situation is by scoring hits in the other direction to achieve a balance of sorts. The logic of this is simple enough: Patents are important as a defensive weapon because without them Sun would be at an extreme disadvantage in situations like these. Basically, if someone is shooting at you, you had better be able to fire back with something of equal or better weight. While the defensive aspect isn't pretty (can't we all just get along?), it is a reality that Sun cannot afford to ignore. It's a tough world out there, boys and girls.

Saturday December 09, 2006

I've found the following short format works well for pointers to Amazon merchandise. It is certainly much more compact than the URLs you'll get by cutting and pasting from your browser window. The format is:

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/XXXXXXXX

where XXXXXXXX is the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) or ISBN (International Standard Book Number) of the item, which you will find on the item's description page.

For example, the ASIN of a random object of desire like the Sony KDL-46XBR2 46" Bravia XBR 1080p LCD HDTV is B000H6I7EI, and so the compact reference would be http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/B000H6I7EI.

Friday December 08, 2006

Take a few minutes (heh, heh) and be amazed by some of these 67 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena, courtesy of Prof. Michael Bach. There are some truly stunning illusions and most are accompanied by explanations and references to help you understand what's happening. It's a fascinating site.

My favorite is Motion Induced Blindness. WOW!

Thursday December 07, 2006

Reading John McPhee's new book about the transportation industry, Uncommon Carriers, I learned something surprising about UPS. It turns out they are a lot more than a package delivery company.

For example, when you call 1-800-TOSHIBA to return a Toshiba laptop for repair in the US, the unit will be picked up by UPS and shipped to its main hub in Louisville. And then it will be repaired by UPS technicians and returned to you, having never left the UPS network.

UPS also acts as a giant cache for companies that would prefer for reasons of efficiency or necessity to store their inventory in the distribution network. The UPS central facility has the largest depot of Bentley automobile parts in the country. They also repair certain printers, and refurbish certain cell phones. And when you order underwear from Jockey.com, they ship directly from a UPS warehouse.

UPS (which no longer stands for United Parcel Service, by the way) has built an intelligent network that includes interesting processing and storage capabilities within its distribution infrastructure. Seems like a smart move that positions them for growth.

Wednesday December 06, 2006

New York City has enacted a ban on the use of trans fats in the city's 20000 or so restaurants.

Listening to a discussion on NPR this morning, I was struck by how the issues are so similar to those being addressed by the computer industry as we work to conform to the RoHS (Removal of Hazardous Substances) requirements imposed by the European Union. As of July 2006, new electronic equipment is required to be free from lead, mercury and a list of other environmentally nasty chemicals. If it isn't, it can't be sold in the EU. Sun has been working hard on this for some time (see our statement here).

A transition like this is far from trivial. First, it involves a complete reevaluation of ones supply chain to ensure all components used in the manufacturing process are themselves RoHS compliant. This may entail switching to new vendors who are best able to supply compliant parts. In some cases, entirely new manufacturing processes may be required as the underlying chemistry is made compliant. And a lot of effort is required to ensure that the quality of final products is maintained through the transition, which can be quite difficult given that a number of very well understood processes with known quality profiles have been discarded. For example, lead solder has been ubiquitous: No more lead, no more lead solder. So the industry is now gaining experience with new soldering techniques.

Restaurant owners face similar challenges. Are the foods they use in their recipes free of trans fats? If not, they will need to work with their suppliers to fix this, or find new suppliers. Recipes are another issue since they may need to be re-formulated to use different ingredients to offer the same quality dining experience to customers. Some kinds of food will be more difficult to reformulate than others, but, hey, I guess those are the ones that are really bad for you anyway, right?

I'm generally not a fan of heavy-handed government, but our country is careening out of control from a health perspective and there are few to none naturally occurring forces that combat this slide. If this is what it takes, then so be it.

In closing, a piece of trivia for you to use in your next discussion with friends about the ban. Canola oil is often cited as a much healthier alternative oil to replace trans fats. Many people do not know that "Canola" is an acronym for CANadian Oil Low Acid. Canola oil is actually a kind of rapeseed oil.

Tuesday December 05, 2006

As described in a previous entry, I took my 1999 Toyota RAV4 to Jiffy Lube just before Thanksgiving for an oil change and ultimately ended up at my local Toyota dealership to get my hood latch unstuck and to have about $1000 worth of transmission repairs done to fix a fluid leak spotted by the Jiffy Lubers.

Parts were ordered to fix my transmission and I got an email notification each time a part arrived at the dealership. Most of the parts arrived within a few days, but one had to come from Japan and took longer.

Last Wednesday morning, I received an email about the final part. On Thursday morning, I called the service person handling my repair and left him a message asking for status. No response that day, or on Friday. I called the dealership on Saturday to get a status and was told my repair was done except for the paperwork, which could be finished in 10 minutes.

About an hour later, I arrived at the dealership to pick up the vehicle. The two cashiers were totally confused I was there to pick up my vehicle on a day "my" service person was not working. They couldn't find the paperwork. It took another 10 minutes for them to get unconfused, let me pay, and return my keys.

In retrospect, Toyota's spiffy new email notification option actually reduced my overall satisfaction since it exposed the underlying slowness and inefficiencies in the their service delivery. I'm sure, for example, I would have had to wait till this week to hear back from my service person that the RAV4 was ready for pick up. Which would have been really crappy since we had our first snow here this morning.

Given that any service person can apparently check my account for status, and can also cause the appropriate paperwork to be generated upon completion of repairs, I don't see any value to the customer in having service people assigned to specific accounts. In my case, it did nothing other than slow the entire process.

Monday December 04, 2006

Sunday December 03, 2006

I bought my Apple Mac Book Pro back in March and have been waiting ever since for the opportunity to give Adobe $650 for a copy of Photoshop CS2 that supports the Intel Macs. Waiting and waiting.

I'm done waiting. I've taken another look at the GIMP, the popular free image editing tool, and it looks very good. Much more sophisticated than the simple tool I remember from years ago. It has support for Layers, for example. And more transforms than I'll ever use. It also supports, via a separate free plug-in, Canon RAW format. I installed both the base Gimp.app and the UFRaw plug-in. The installation was both simple and smooth. I'm still learning my way around the program, but it looks good so far.

Yesterday, I bought a copy of Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional by Akkana Peck, which looks like a good introduction to the GIMP. My only expenditure so far.