Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

Like a lot of folks, I use my Sun blog for work- and technology-related things, and keep my personal rants, raves, faves and professional sports bordering on mythology thinking over on a personal blog. In addition to having a never-ending notepad for writing ideas, it's a playground for tweaking PHP code, WordPress themes, and mySQL databases. That's the good news -- the bad news is that I've been using iPowerWeb to host it, and they are suffering scalability issues.

I believe there's a common misperception that deploying open source software is somehow easier or less difficult than putting commercial databases and web servers into production. The acquisition cost is less, but the deployment engineering is the same. This is hard work -- network engineering, scalability design, reliability engineering, recovery design, user self-help and ticketing systems, and instrumentation so you detect problems before your customers come calling. Or try to.

I spent 47 minutes on hold tonight with the iPowerWeb support line, only to get an "expediter" rather than a technical specialist. And the only reason I called is that the trouble ticket that I opened online hadn't received a response in over 72 hours. And what prompted the whole "I need support" blog existential crisis is that since iPowerWeb moved my snowman over to their new hosting architecture, performance has cratered. I use "crater" with such derision that the Moon and/or parts of Arizona might take offense; upwards of 30 seconds to load the WordPress index page and 90 seconds to insert a new entry in a single category, with only 2-3 tags and a modified timestamp seem excessive to me. It's nota WordPress, mySQL or underlying OS problem, because two other sites hosted by the same company on their down-rev infrastructure are still snappy and happy.

This is, I believe, a case of virtualization gone south, in a big way. Whatever they did in separating out the mySQL servers in an attempt to build a more efficient, multi-tenant database engine has resulted in something that's bad for everyone. It can only end in an ABEND (in particular an S522 for those of you who spent undergraduate Saturday nights waiting for jobs to complete).

I'm fond of saying that computing is getting more transparent. Your mental image of the "computer center", a big brick building with the mainframe and some high speed line printers, is a Currier & Ives view of how people interact with computing devices. We're all socialized to the idea of small, portable, personal devices with rich computing platforms, but we haven't really tested the limits of rich, interactive computing on a small scale. I won't count the dozens of microprocessors in my car as a "rich" environment, because I can't (and really don't want to) code to them.

Enter Squawk, the micro embedded Java virtual machine and development environment from Sun Labs. In the latest Innovating@Sun podcast, principal investigator Eric Arsenau and I get really small and talk about embedded programming from a technical, financial and cultural perspective. SunSPOTS, the sensors based on the Squawk technology, have a vibrant user community already: my favorite application so far is the UhlerBot because it is a viable robotics platform built out of hobby store parts.

The cross-disciplinary possibilities for small devices encompass social sciences, environmental sciences and the arts; by open sourcing the platform and the hardware specifications we hope to see creative new applications driven by the transparency of the technology and its consumption.

I stopped reading package ingredients a few years ago, after getting regularly depressed that what I considered a "snack size" actually contained an entire day's worth of calories, fat, sugar and not nearly enough vitamin content. Let's face it: when you pop open one of those airport snack packs, you aren't thinking about how you'll divvy it up into three servings; you're looking for a sugar fix and you're less concerned about what other things it drags along. Not exactly heart-healthy and aligned with the much-rumored new year's resolutions for 2008, but immensely practical.

Packaging and abstraction drive use. If something is easy to consume, you'll consume more of it, and if it presents an abstraction that hides the ugly {technical, political, nutritional} details, you'll find it easier to use. That, in a (healthy) nutshell, is the motivation for Project Caroline, a Sun Labs effort focused on simplifying service deployment and delivery. (For anyone questioning my failure to craft a pun around Sweet Caroline, it's an anti-New York Rangers sentiment bubbling through the otherwise sugary stuff here).

VP of Advanced Development Rich Zippel and I sat down with our USB microphones to record another Innovating@Sun podcast, extolling the virtues of Caroline in all of its nuts and bolts, from the motivations for a simple service platform to the derivation of the name (again, no Neil Diamond, thankfully).

This is a much bigger deal than a research project and an attmept to rationalize the array of interfaces presented to deployers, not just service developers. The biggest challenge for data center designers today is not choosing a virtualization platform or a networking switch vendor or even a cooling technology. Those are implementation details (large details, to be sure, but details). The challenge is balancing the needs of the CTO or VP of Application Development to "go fast", creating more value in IT for the business, with the needs of the CIO, who wants to "go slow," controlling the rate of change, mananging risk, and squeezing as much utilization (and efficiency) out of the computing assets as possible. The path to achieving this balance doesn't involve Xen (sorry) as much as thinking about abstraction across the entire array of applications: networking, computing, storage, sessions, data caching and persistence, and language.

Moving up to a higher level of abstraction for the data center means that you're less concerned about how it's built and more concerned that it "just works" -- an artifact of what Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos calls "Network Scale Computing." That's the intent of Project Caroline, and it's a message that has resonated with every CIO with whom I've met in the last two months.

For two decades we've heard various theories about how computers were going to change education: make us learn faster, learn more, or expose us to new educational techniques. The bottom line is that computers have served to reinforce the social side of learning -- finding people with similar questions and problems, locating specific answers to specific questions, and making it far easier to detect potential plagiarism using search techniques. While we still learn through most of the approaches that have worked since Biblical times -- small groups, discussions, subject matter experts sharing their knowledge -- technology offers us significant opportunities to improve the context for learning.

Moodle is an open source course management system -- a blend of content management and educational logistics. "Moodle" has become vernacular around our house, as both of my kids use it daily for homework, after school class discussions, and to retrieve notes that would have been on infamous purple ditto sheets in my day. The audience for course management is tough -- they're used to iPods, video on demand, wireless service, and game consoles, so anything that is slow to respond, has a funky user interface or isn't reliable is going to generate a homework excuse. "The DHCP server ate my homework" hasn't popped up yet, but it's a matter of time.

Earlier this week Stuart Sim, CTO of Moodlerooms, joined me for an Innovating@Sun podcast to talk about how they're building out Moodle instances for the most demanding consumers of all (teenagers), at maximum scale, and making money from this open source project all at the same time. Our after-school program covers the spectrum from Moodleroom's use of Niagara-based servers to why term papers might become an historical artifact once and for all.

Greetings from Hollywood, California, home of the silver screen, recording studios, Doctor Demento, and earthquakes. I'm speaking on a DRM panel hosted by the media business law firm Foley and Lardner. I'm one of three technology folks in the room, and I'm going to talk about avoiding legal and technical decisions that limit our future rights, opportunities and markets. I don't think I'm going to be popular; perhaps I should not have worn my Diesel Sweeties pirate shirt; "pirate" foments a violent reaction among this group of legal media ninjas.

And if you surf over to the good Doctor's web site, you'll see that he's switched from a nationally syndicated, advertising supported model to a subscription service. Dr. Demento was a Sunday night staple, fitting into the time slice of my teen years between the Wonderful World of Disney and Sunday night NFL games. The shift away from national syndication doesn't mean that there's no longer an audience for his particular brand of wackiness, but rather that audience isn't sitting by the radio on Sunday night, aggregated in one time slot. Now you can listen to what you want when and where you want, without the FCC's censorship. But it's not "free" in the sense of advertising supported radio being free. If you're willing to spend $2 for a sophomoric laugh when you need it most, it's a good deal.

If you've spent any time with Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, you know that he's very, very high bandwidth. Once he gets going, he's a stream of pure information. This makes conversational style content pretty difficult, because you don't want to slow him down and lose bits. So I opened up our Innovating@Sun podcast with Andy by comparing him to Madonna and Ichiro -- two players who don't need surnames to move mass markets.

In this case, the market being reshaped is that of "commodity computing." This isn't anything new to Andy, since the very first Stanford University Network workstation was a composition of a Motorola processor, a commodity Ethernet chip (at the time) and the commodity operating system for the then-popular DEC VAX systems, BSD Unix. The emphasis isn't on the commodity components; they are defined by intersecting supply, cost and demand curves. It is, as it has been, about building a computing environment that scales in terms of power, space, cooling, reliability and sustainability. Andy goes through everything from common chassis and physical design to the convergence of servers and storage controller architectures to why it's good to have developers for your routers. He speaks from authority, having done just about everything in the list personally, at, by and for high bandwidth.

Commercial college radio provided me with my first experiences in sales. As an advertising sales "rep" for WPRB-FM, Princeton's student-run radio station, I had to pitch ideas, produce ads, write copy, frequently voice the ads myself, manage our cash stream and do demand generation. It was a great way to finance my growing record collection. There are only a handful of commercial college stations; most are either financed by the affiliated institution or through listeners, much like the Public Broadcasting System ("supported by viewers like you").

But WPRB-FM has a long and technologically illustrative Tiger tale. As the first FM college station, it received a broadcast frequency of 103.5 FM, later swapped for cash and the equally useful 103.3 FM. Most student-run stations are banished to the lower end of the frequency spectrum, where they're less likely to be found by "dial twiddling", something that worked in favor of listeners in the Trenton-Princeton-New Brunswick Route 1 corridor who let go of the tuning knob when something on the radio make them tune in a bit more closely. A broadcast format that included classical and jazz provided an advertising platform for local businesses: jewelers, travel companies, the University Store, and some higher end eateries. The station was, and is, self-supporting without any assistance from Princeton University aside from the use of space in a dormitory basement, and (at the time) a spot for the broadcast antenna on top of the same building.

Afternoons and evenings featured WPRB's "progressive" format, today probably known as alternative, eclectic, or just fun. It included everything from truly obscure local bands (like Regressive Aid and their conjoined one-show band with The Groceries, the aptly named Lunchmeat 2000) to bands that nobody had heard of (at the time) like REM. Our listeners were as varied as our on-air programming; I'm sure that most of my classmates who frequently voiced "WPRB plays crap" as we spun U2's Boy now own copies of Bono vox and How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb. We had shows that featured reggae, art rock (think Yes, Genesis and King Crimson), metal and alternative, and during one weekend when we were moving a wall, all 20-minute plus tracks so that we could swing hammers and not just bass lines. Our varied programming after lunchtime let us pick up "punk clubs" (King Tut City Gardens) and various other counter-cultural havens as advertisers who had no other routes to listeners.

College radio, powered by a desire to disrupt convention, and expose listeners to something new, is the epitome of a long tail. Only through college radio could my friend P hear Alaskan punk band (don't ask) "The Anemic Boyfriends" on WFMU-FM and declare them high art. The essence of Chris Anderson's long tail economics is to drive more overall volume by first expanding the "tail" of a distribution curve, and then moving demand from the head of the curve (smash hits) to the tail (future micro-smashes). The problem in the 80s was distribution -- as desperate as P was to find the 45 RPM single of The Anemic Boyfriends, it took nearly a year and a trip to the ferro-ciously good used record store in Ithaca, New York, to find the vinyl.

No matter how long the tail, at the end of the distribution curve, there's another distribution curve of even more refined, more obscure listeners. It's what led Dave, one of my managers who knows I have a penchant for being a Yes-man, to point me at Porcupine Tree as the Yes of this generation. He's right, and I spent $45 on content I would have never found through any other channel. And at the transitive closure of those distribution and demand curves, you'll find Indie Rock Pete from Diesel Sweeties, afraid to like anything with a positive listener count.

In the mid-80s, WPRB went through a financial change brought about by the confluence of an expanding New York radio market making our 103.3 FM frequency more of an impediment to our neighbors on the dial who wanted to go bigger. Through several years of negotiations, FCC filings and long meetings, WPRB was able to expand its broadcast area and received a cash infusion at the same time. Numerous exhaustive and exhausting discussions ensured about the financial models that would govern how and where the money would be spent in future years. We debated the risks of investment strategies, regulatory issues and continuity of student leadership, and yet it was forces exogenous to the broadcast industry that reshaped WPRB 20 years later.

When you mix podcasting, blogging, and social networks as ways for students to share their musical likes and dislikes, the on-air pulpit is less appealing. Running a commercial station with a unique value proposition is much harder when that same value-through-unique programming can be obtained with a combination of Google and iTunes. WPRB has switched from a commercial format to a listener supported financial model, still maintaining the quasi-independence of Princeton's direct sponsorship and the fiercely independent creativity in its programming. College radio is far from dead. It does, however, rely on direct support of listeners who delight in hearing something new, finding a reference to it on a web site, and monetizing that interest almost immediately, without intervening ads for unrelated products.

Hall of Fame 2.0 The National Baseball Hall of Fame is a physical and emotional experience. In addition to honoring the great players and builders of the game, it's a repository for the artifacts of great accomplishments, records, and the culture of baseball. As the only team sport measured in defensive success, not on a clock, it encourages us to think of time as malleable, our thoughts drifting between this year's excitement and the youthful memories that first made us fans.

Unfortunately, the Hall feels like a museum, which it is, rather than a glimpse into the collective memory and celebration of the National Pastime. Less than 10% of the balls, bats, bases and beauty of the collection is on display at any time, and the organization of the displays makes it hard to formulate a story out of what's there. Baseball tradition, like religious tradition, is passed on through storytelling and personal action; it's parents telling their kids about famous players, great plays, or playing the sport. It's my father telling my son about a mutual friend who played for Honus Wagner in Pittsburgh, or me telling my kids why and how Willie Stargell inspired me to choose #8 when possible (even when going through toll booths), and at some point in the future, my daughter telling my grandchildren about the night we went to the Giants game to hope that Barry hit 756 into our section of the bleachers (we were a night early, but the memories will remain sans asterisque). It's the equal mix of seriousness and silliness that led me to hand out free ice pops to any Little League baseball or softball player wearing jersey #8, provided they let me say "for Willie Stargell".

Walking through the three floors of the Hall, I found Willie Stargell's plaque, a solo shot in the 1988 inductee class. Around the corner is one of his baseball cards as part of an exhibit geared toward younger kids, and upstairs in the legends of the game alleys, you'll find a Willie Stargell jersey paired with an exhibit about Roberto Clemente. So far, so good, and again, what anyone would expect from a first-rate museum. But on the third floor, the subtleties and opportunities for telling stories emerge. A 1970s World Series program has a page showing the buttons worn by Pirates fans, including "Chicken on the Hill," Willie Stargell's off-season employment and passion. Around the corner, there's the bat Stargell used in the 1979 World Series, where he was voted MVP, next to one of Kent Tekulve's Pirates hats. Sewn around the bucket-shaped lid, and across its top, are "Stargell Stars", player recognition given out by Stargell for particularly good play.

What was most disturbing was the lack of informed help at the Hall. Twice I asked logo-wearing employees where I might find Ron Bloomberg's bat (used in the first at-bat by a designated hitter), and was told it probably wasn't on display (it is, on the third floor in the records room, behind that of 1969 Met Art Shamsky, another item we sought). Conversely, every visitor had his or her own reasons to search something out, to tell its story of relative importance, and to take pictures that will highlight the next time those memories are revisited. While the inductees are selected by the Baseball Writers, it is the individual scribes of the game that truly relate the history of the game.

What's missing from the exhibit room is a place for all of us to share our own experiences with these tools of the baseball trade. To borrow a phrase from Tim O'Reilly, the Hall of Fame lacks an architecture for participation, a Hall of Fame 2.0, where user-generated content including pictures, stories, and our own interpretations can embellish the tools of the trade on display. Here's my ideal Hall of Fame experience: Knowing that you want to revel in Willie Stargell legend and lore, you can find all of the references to "Pops" and plan your own exhibit guide. Posted on the Hall's website would be an email from Stargell's niece explaining how Stargell stars were the one item his family asked for, more than autographs or baseballs, a reward to be given out. It makes Tekulve's hat more impressive, and more personal, perched next to Stargell's bat. I'd have a link to the Chicken on the Hill dining experience at PNC Park where a bit of Willie lives on, so that the World Series program makes sense in contexts both current and three decades old. I'd point to my Facebook picture album of number 8s from around the world, for the same reason NASCAR fans put driver numbers on their rides? Over time, as Willie Stargell said, the number comes to represent you in real life and not just on the roster. And finally, we'd have real merchandising, a place to locate the stores along Cooperstown's Main Street that sell licensed Stargell t-shirts, something to make the 4-hour trip home more comfortable.

The Hall of Fame board of directors is full of baseball management and talent, but no fans. No participation. Not even a hint of technology, from a sport that has always raced to utilize technology for the good of the game. Isn't it time that the fans share their knowledge and emotion, sometimes with religious fervor, in the shrine dedicated to the game's long-term history?

I lived with a Dead Head for a year, and lived in his musical light cone for another year, so it's hard to say when exactly I first heard "Dark Star," one of the Dead's platforms for improvisation and fun (if you want a thorough treatment of the philosophical, metaphysical and less musical underpinnings of Dark Star, check out Steven Skaggs' essay on those very things).

Improvisation in code or in music needs a framework to carry it. It has to be accessible; it has to be easy to digest (at least for those not familiar with the rest of the author's work); and done well it both builds on the ideas of others and contributes new phraseology back. That's the end of the literal comparison between the Sun Labs gaming platform and its namesake Dead exploration.

In our latest Innovating@Sun podcast, I traded fours with Jim Waldo on how Darkstar hides some of the real-time and occasionally messy elements of building a game, how we can make it grow to "interesting" economies of scale, and why Java is well-suited for the highly charged (no pun intended) world of real-time development. Jim even runs with my obscure Grateful Dead references, which is fortunate since I was one step away from invoking the confluence of technology and John Perry Barlow by referring to Jim as the estimated prophet of Java.

We've just posted the second part of the Innovating@Sun end to end JavaFX podcasts. In part one Sun Software co-CTO Bob Brewin talks about the motivations for JavaFX, including the difficulty of making "write once, run anywhere" a reality when "anywhere" encompasses a variety of client devices. It's one of the edgier episodes we've done because Bob isn't afraid to take on any of the established engineering norms for building, deploying and evolving applications. While Bob discusses JavaFX from the perspective of the developer, product line manager Jacob Lehrbaum joins me in part two to discuss what really happens -- and will happen -- on the mobile handset. From the foundation of the SavaJ handset environment to the inclusion of telco stack elements, JavaFX Mobile delivers the other end in the end to end future of the rich network application.

A few years ago, after a long day (for a fifth grader) of studying long division, my daughter exclaimed that she saw no practical use for remainders. It reminded me of a similar day, sitting in a computer science class on computational complexity, of feeling that there was no practical use for knapsack problems. Both, it turns out, are the basis for many of the cryptography systems in vogue for online security and identity based systems. The exponential complexity that makes a problem intractable also makes it stronger in the face of brute-force attack, and the use of remainders (particularly the Chinese remainder theorem) makes it practically computable. Realizing that Professor Steiglitz was most egregiously correct (back in 1983) when he warned us that large prime numbers were in our futures, remainders, NP-complete problems and computational complexity all go "click" when I'm indulging my eBay habit.

Fast forward a few years: large-scale compute grids enable brute-force attacks against weaker (shorter key length) crypto systems, and increasing the key length to stay one or two hops ahead of the bad guys means additional drains on power, performance and time. Particularly bad things if you're worried about securing a data path to your mobile device, where power and time equal battery life. What's needed is a crypto system that uses shorter key lengths to produce a stronger system, and the click-fitting math this time are elliptic curves, providing a more efficient way to tackle the factoring problems underlying crypto systems. The result - elliptic curve cryptography - is a promising step in making systems more efficient and secure at the same time.

Aside from reading Simon Singh's Fermat's Enigma, which neatly tied together modular forms, elliptic curves, Fermat's Last Theorem, and Princeton University, I am, in the words of Napoleon Dynamite, in the need of some skills. For higher math, bigger invention and practical applications of all of the above, I had Sun Labs Distinguished Engineer Vipul Gupta join me for our Innovating@Sun podcast on Cryptography Breakthroughs. It's the current equivalent of being told that large prime numbers are in your future.

I have time on the brain today. Rob Kolstad of USENIX once wrote that systems administration is one of the few disciplines in which you deal with time scales ranging from the microsecond to the year (megasecond), depending upon what you are dependent upon (memory, disk, grep output or purchase order). As human beings, we are real-time by nature, and living in the metropolitan New York area, those real time bounds are short and regularly tested (it's called impatience and marked by car horns).

Real time, historically, was the domain of embedded devices such as nuclear reactors, industrial controls, and medical equipment. If missing a time deadline meant melting down or flaming out, you had to worry about application architecture down to the level of scheduling sub-tasks. How long your application would run without stopping, how long it might sleep without handling data, and squeezing latency out of every routine made real-time programming slightly less oppressive and tedious than raking a lawn full of autumn leaves.

Real time is enjoying a renaissance today, thanks to (a) an increased emphasis on managing latency out of financial applications (b) the abundance of media and media manipulating applications available on the network and (c) the ease of developing applications that operate within hard time constraints. Greg Bollela, Distinguished Engineer in the Java software group, sat down with me for an Innovating@Sun podcast about real-time Java. Greg discusses how these Java libraries manage the time management for the developer, abstracting away the all-too-real bean counting at the CPU cycle level.

Applications are only as much fun as the data we have to feed them. What good is real time without a boundless supply of media types to synchronize, deliver and edit? With our ability to post videos of everyday life to YouTube, and better than hobby quality video editing capabilities on the desktop, we are enjoying a world equidistant between Andy Warhol's supposed universal fifteen minutes of fame and Spinal Tap keyboardist Viv Savage's motto to "have a good time, all the time."

We did just that -- Dave Cavena, systems engineer for many of the production and entertainment studio companies, and Bob Sokol, Chief Media Architect in our field organization, joined me to talk about what happens on the other side of the microphone, camera lens or sound board. We run the table from digital rights management, content transcoding, why tape (of all flavors) is still good, and what customer designs Sun has to offer in the digital content management space. It's fifteen minutes that preface delivering a customer or employee's online fame.

There's a Chinese proverb that goes something to the effect of "Seeing something once is better than hearing it 1,000 times." Video remains a killer app particularly for stimulating connections in your head to other reference points. As highlighted in the March issue of Wired magazine, we're likely to see more short-form video and thought provoking content (perhaps at the same time) in smaller, more individualized slices.

That means there are a lot of bits looking for eyeballs, and a lot of eyeballs looking for bits, ideally in something resembling the correct matching of feeds and sinks. It's a problem domain for which we designed the Sun Streaming System, and you can hear about it (literally) from the inside out through our Innovating@Sun podcast with Henk Goosen, engineering director, and Bob Sokol, media architect and techno-film savvy guy at the recent Tribeca Film Festival.

One of the questions I was asked frequently about this product is if anyone outside of media companies will buy it. Think about your own company: it does training. You have internal employee communications. There are probably a dozen semi-formed groups in the company who would love to show off their work, and only need a place to plug in the digital camcorder. Lots of videos, lots of viewers: a streaming match made in the heaven of Menlo Park.

I'm seriously behind in my blogging; my desktop is a scatter map of stickies (both the 3M and the MacOS kind). Planning for Sun's 2008 fiscal year, a few trips to California, and my son's Bar Mitzvah soaked up a lot of the time that would normally be spent hashing the English language into blog entries. So here's part one of catching up on the podcast, prompted by finding the (pictured) caret in an infrequently used piece of luggage.

Two months ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Stanford's Michael Keller about the future of libraries. I used the branding redirection as a misdirection; we ran the podcast covering Honeycomb, tagging, references and lots of copies only last week. It's fun to talk about libraries, and not just talk in them (without getting caught).

The somewhat rhetorical question is: when you have Google, who needs a library? The answer is that when you have Google, you need libraries and the organization they impose to an even greater extent. Some of the best memories I have of Princeton University involve libraries, either as a social setting (so if you have instant messaging, who needs the reserve room?) or a place to discover some layer of meaning beneath whatever was on my dorm room's desktop. Libraries exist to preserve our collected output, not in a jumble but in a semblance of order. The emphasis isn't just on imposing order; it's equally important to preserve what we know, particularly as content is kept in digital form and one truly egregious data center failure can wipe out some of those layers. That's the whole point of the LOCKSS project.

Libraries and the increasingly web-savvy librarians who run them also provide a critical foil to our increasingly search-driven culture: they tell us what we don't know. Using Google means you probably know the rough shape of the answer, and are looking for the box in which it is delivered to you. Using the library means you may not even be sure of the question, but you're eager to ask.

Number one question I'm asked by people who know me through Sun circles: How do I find the time to manage a youth hockey team, or (until recently) sit on the Little League board? The answer is in striking the right balance between home and work life, a process made significantly easier at Sun through Open Work, our flexible work space program. In our latest Innovating@Sun podcast, I sat down (remotely, of course) with Ann Bamesberger from our work place resources group to talk about the how and where of getting the job done.

Flexible work assignment is not, as we often point out, synonymous with "work from home." It means you work where you are, when you need to work, adjusting time and time zones to your advantage. It's similarly not a substitute for actually sitting in a room with co-workers, because that's frequently where the good ideas and brainstorms occur. My top three rules for having an open mind about Open Work:

Measure output. Some people can only be productive in an office. Others are far more productive when the creative process runs continuously, occasionally being bumped into batch mode by a carpool pickup. Measuring output means that you're continuously setting goals and checking how you're doing against them. I've had plenty of "wasted days" in an office, and some incredibly productive days buried in my home basement office. I was never one to study in the university library, for example, because I frequently walked around to see who among my friends was also using the library as a social nexus rather than a quiet reading place.

Get out and meet people. If you enjoy the flexibility of working in multiple locations, really utilize that freedom and go meet with people in a variety of places. Again, there is no substitute for sitting down in a room with a whiteboard and drawing, and you're more likely to maintain a work relationship with someone you know beyond their email address. There's almost no distinction between the level of effort required to maintain a friendship in the face of email and social networking, and what it takes to continue to invest in inter-personal work relationships. If you're only a virtual presence, your output will suffer. See above.

When at home, be there. As dictated to me by former Sun exec Pat Sueltz. This isn't really time management; it's about focus management. The slippery slope of working from home is that you're always working; sometimes you need to leave the cell phone and browser and be 100% with your family. I carry a miniature spiral notebook and pen with me most of the time, so if I have some insight (typically a joke for a blog entry) I write it down and turn it into output later. I'll be honest; I did record an internal podcast sitting on the steps of the Olympic ice rink in Lake Placid (but without the flexibility of work location, I never would have been able to go on the trip in the first place). Balance means declaring some time clearly non-work, and then being abundantly clear about any non-maskable interrupts.