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

I stand corrected: Jonathan Scwhartz can use sports analogies, and use them appropriately, without scripting or coaching, in real time. Jonathan gave his keynote at today's Customer Engineering Conference event sporting a stylin' Dallas Mavericks jersey. To be fair, it was part sight gag, part good fun in return for bringing 3,000 Sun engineers to work on a Saturday morning. For an hour, he answered employee questions about everything from how we deal with partners old and new to how we make funding priorization decisions to how long it takes to effect change in the market. His opening comment was that the only thing he had in common with the Dallas Mavericks is that he and the Mavericks owner, Mark Cuban are both bloggers.

One of the themes that Jonathan repeated was that blogging allows him to reach a worldwide audience on a regular basis: it's not advertising, it's not editorial content, it's a mass communications vehicle. You hear exactly what Jonathan - or Mark Cuban - may be thinking on any topic.

What Jonathan did in handling Q&A, however, lets me draw another parallel between him and He Fine Me: they listen to their employees. After buying the Mavs, Cuban decided to invest in keeping his players happy. In a simple locker room improvement, Cuban invested in oversized, high-quality towels for his players. When you're pushing seven feet on the vertical axis, your standard Bed, Bath and Beyond issue doesn't work, no matter how much "beyond" you reach for. Large-scale towels have a certain cachet, so much that they appear in the visitor's locker room as well. And for those that are appropriated along the way: it's free advertising. Like a visual blog.

Now that I've had my fun, it's only a matter of time until Jonathan suggests that I do a guest stint with the Mavericks ManiAACs. Or I get skewered in his blog. Either way, it's free advertising.

Thanks to Bill Walker's blog I've discovered some new toys for my desktop. It's cool to be a snowman, but I'm merely a monochromatic guy -- this USB snowman is a bleedin' quad-chromatic (to borrow a line from Roger Daltrey).

I wonder if it's an FAA-approved electronic device?

Unless you worked for DEC for many years, you don't get to see things from a reverse perspective (that was a byte-swapping joke, folks, the best I can do at 7:00 am local time). Today is the opening event of CEC05, and I got to spend about an hour backstage. As usual, we had to produce a slick, interesting set on a tight budget, so the cool props this year are these multi-color light bars The lighting tricks are driven by LEDs coupled with colored glass,
the same technology in the new super-bright traffic signals and car headlights. It's a great effect with very little heat dissapated, which is wonderful when you're on stage. It's no fun feeling like you're in an EZ-Bake oven powered by 10,000 watts of light bulbs.

T minus 40 minutes: Jim Baty and I arrive, I take some pictures while we rehearse our executive introductions. Nothing worse than making good jokes and then stumbling on your own boss' name.

T minus 20 minutes: Bob MacRitchie and Marissa Peterson, who not only are our direct managers but also pay for the event, arrive and walk the stage.

T minus 15 minutes: I realize as I'm greeting Marissa that my microphone is turned on and fed through the house audio system, so I'm reverberating through an empty Moscone center. Fun turns to terror as I realize it's time for a last-minute potty run and I really don't want to redefine "engineering peer" (funnier with a Boston accent, I promise) over the public address system.

T minus 10 minutes: House doors open, people start streaming in from breakfast. Music is up, video is rolling. Jim and I get to relax in the "green room". I'm reminded of the scene in This is Spinal Tap where the band gets lost under the stage. It's pre-show ritual for me to holler out "Hello Cleveland!" before going on stage, my own way of shaking off stage fright.

T minus 5 minutes: Marissa is nervous. Don't tell her I told. House is filling, only the wings of the right and left sections have empty seats. This is cool.

Showtime: Opening video, produced by the attendees, for the attendees (think nerdly FuBu), rolls. Laughs 90 seconds in, which is good -- the audience is warming up. Jim and I better not suck.

T plus 15 minutes: Show is moving, keynote speakers are on the stage, time for coffee and breakfast. Next job: introducing Jonathan. There's no business like (technical) show business.

One of the most fun parts of my job as CTO for the Sun Services business unit is to co-host the annual Customer Engineering Conference (CEC). What started out as a way to get services engineers together has grown into a 3,000 person, 4-day training and networking event that draws from everyone with a customer-facing engineering job. Jim Baty, CTO for our Global Solutions Organization, is my co-host, and we have some fun surprises planned.

This is the only Sun event, besides the analyst conference, where every business unit Senior VP and CTO speak to the entire audience. We've modeled it roughly after a USENIX conference, with about 700 papers submitted for roughly 300 speaking slots. Our invited talks segment includes each of our CTOs talking about where they're taking their business (N.B: Technically, the SVPs are taking the business somewhere, but in a technical audience, the technologists rule).

Jim and I have been working for the past year to emphasize the "E" in CEC. We try not to make a distinction between product engineering and "the field"; whether we're doing applied engineering in customer situations or more pure computer science in product R&D, it's engineering. Part of my prickliness around the subject comes from spending many years as a UNIX system administrator. Sysadm is an applied engineering discipline, documented at USENIX and LISA and SANS conferences, but not widely acknowledged. Many of the attendees at our CEC05 event are, were, or may be in the systems administration world, and this event gives us a chance to embrace a diversity of engineering perspectives.

Hockey can frequently be a game of bounces. When they go your way, the hockey gods are in your favor, and you feel lucky. Other days, the puck couldn't find the opponent's net even if it was tied to the back twine and reeled in.

Last Saturday I took all matter of literary license with my job as team manager, and taped a note on the locker room door as my son's ice hockey team prepared for the NJ State Squirt "B" (Tier II) playoffs. On the note, in a protective poly sleeve, was one of my prized eBay finds, a Tretiak jersey card, having been saved for just such an occasion. Above it, I wrote "25 years ago the team that could not lose was beaten by a team that believed in itself." And below, "We believe in you." Not quite Herb Brooks in the moment of sending his boys out to skate versus Tretiak, but my best effort at one in the morning the night before.

The bounces went our way, combined with hard skating, preparation, and significant quantities of teamwork. Our goalie came up huge, stopping three breakaways and controlling rebounds behind or to the side of the net. Blend excitement, 50 screaming fans, 15 players, 3 coaches, and one slightly loud timekeeper (yours truly) with ice for 36 minutes, and our little Devils managed a 5-3 win, sending them to the state championship game.

Sunday's game saw the bounces go the other way. No matter how hard or frequently we shot the puck, we couldn't find the net, and we lost 4-1. Net net on the net, though, our team brought home the New Jersey State silver medal for our group, on the silver anniversary weekend of the Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid.

And when the renovations to our beloved South Mountain Arena are done, and the new trophy cases display the pride of the Devils, we have a spot reserved for our team trophy. Among my son, his teammates, and me, I'm not sure who will be most proud of this weekend, but the memories will easily last another twenty five years.

Many years ago, a certain Sun executive came to New York and, with less than 48 hours notice, asked for a pair of tickets for the musical "Rent" which had been playing (and insanely popular) for less than six months. I know this guy, who knows a guy, who, you know, knows a guy, who got the tickets. Such a sequence of guys is usually nothing more than the source of rumors, unless you're French Canadian and you can be more specific about the Guys.

Today there are rumors that the NHL Player's Association and the NHL owners are talking again, ignoring the chalk outline painted around the season on Wednesday. My guy-talk roundabout introduction merely sets the backdrop for why I give the rumors more credence than the average guy or Guy. While in New York today, I parked in my usual spot. I won't say where it is because it is, after all, my spot. I know this guy, and he always has a spot for me. Saturday evening, Wednesday before the matinees, early Friday morning, I get a spot. And this guy and I talk about hockey. He likes the Rangers, I like the Devils, we both like the sport. So today this guy mentions that there's this other guy, who always has a spot, and talks about hockey, but that's his job. And he was most definitely in da house today. So I'm hoping that the guy I know is right about the other guy he knows, and that that guy will talk to the guys he knows and you know, we'll be watching hockey again before baseball season starts. Otherwise tonight's blog entry is the first known case of using an elliptical clause with non-specific pronouns ending in "y" to hide identity.

I can't help but have hockey on the brain, because tonight is the 25th anniversary (to the day, not the date, it was a Friday night) of the Miracle on Ice. The team that never lost, defeated by a team that believed in itself first, and miracles after. There is a certain irony and symmetry to the date arithmetic. Nine hours from now, my son's team starts the New Jersey State Tier II hockey playoffs, seeded fourth, facing an undefeated team. NHL or not, it will be the most exciting hockey I watch this year. I believe in hard work, and in team work, and in preparation, all of which are on our side. The boys will give everything they have for 36 minutes, and then win or lose, they will line up and shake hands.

Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow could learn quite a bit from 10 year old boys who love this sport.

I'm back from Sun's annual Analyst Summit, in which industry, financial, and press people come to visit and ask tough questions in the course of their industrial and fiduciary responsibility to understand our business. The analyst summit begins a month-long series of intense events and meetings that concludes with our annual Customer Engineering Conference (CEC05). It's a veritable Oktoberfest for engineers, and the solid four weeks of geek-dom never fails to make me energized and excited about being here.

The "main tent" of the analyst's conference ends with the CTO panel, featuring the person changed with setting technical direction and often architecture for each of Sun's business units. This year's herd of nerds included Jim Baty, Andy Bechtolsheim, Tim Bray, Whit Diffie, Glenn Edens, Balint Fleischer, James Gosling, Graham Hamilton, Tim Marsland, Mike Splain, Mark Tremblay, and me. Milling about the stage before the panel, we discussed various potential seating algorithms: alphabetical, tenure, inverse of birth year, and employee number (not equivalent to tenure since Andy left and then returned to the same single-digit employee number). Forever the resident crank, I suggested we sort by Erdos number.

If you are laughing because you know what an Erdos number is, scroll ahead to read the punchline, otherwise, here is a short diversion on the mathematical entitlement known as an Erdos number. Paul Erdos was a prolific Hungarian mathematician. Your Erdos number is the degrees of separation, using co-authored papers as the links, between you and Erdos. Obviously, the root of the tree is Paul Erdos with number 0; the highest known value is 15. I am only aware of this personal graph theory overlay of graph theory personalities because of my friend and co-worker Pat Parseghian who has an Erdos number of 4. Given my proclivity for finding ways in which similarly interested groups are introduced or intermediated, this is right up my infinitely large Erdos number alley. Low Erdos numbers, like vanity license plates, are quite prized in some circles. Michigan resident William Tozier set up an eBay auction for an Erdos number of 5, where the winning bidder would co-author a paper with Tozier to enter the exclusive circular graph.

The Punchline: My seating algorithm proposal was overheard by Whit Diffie, who promptly responded "Mine's 3, can I sit next to Greg?" I'm still smiling about his response, and not just because Whit's timing and deadpan delivery were perfect. Much of the discussion on the CTO panel entailed how we see grid computing reshaping applications and consumption patterns for information technology, and how this may have shortened (or lengthened) our technology planning horizons. The vehicles that will deliver widespread grid computing-- reliability, cost, security, and scale -- are being guided at Sun by the techno-brand names above. Whit's vehicle -- security -- has a low-numbered vanity plate.