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

It's been 13 months since I started blogging. I've discovered old friends (who have discovered me online). I've found interesting Google page-ranking algorithm effects that cause my blog to show up in the most amusing searches. I've received emails from Willie Stargell's niece, from Rick Wakeman (of Yes keyboard fame), and from a friend of Patrik Elias' who forwarded my blog post about the Devils star buying sneakers. I'm writing, I'm reading, I'm thinking about writing as I'm reading, and I'm taking many more pictures of everyday things that seem blog-ready.

Our family hero and NJ Devils star Patrik Elias graced the front page of this Sunday's Newark Star Ledger sports section. Word is he's getting better, and word might be that he'll return as the on-ice captain of the Devils. Word is he stopped in at our favorite pizzeria Saturday afternoon, and Elias sightings are a harbinger of good luck in our family.

Word is Saint Patrik can charm those Atlantic Conference snakes (our neighbors across the Hudson) out of first place, too.

I've finally finished moving into the new home office, after nearly 4 months of new home ownership that have featured fixing leaks, removing a two-decades old "media room" complete with lunar-lander sized TV projector, designing a new workspace, installing said workspace, and then migrating all of my compute equipment down two floors.

On Friday, the finishing touch arrived. Not the tres chic bit of Yes-related artwork I'm waiting on, but a Toshiba Portege laptop running OpenSolaris. It has its own bay, in between the bobbleheads and expanded filing section. Kind of a seat of honor.

I'm off to Massachusetts tomorrow (I have promised various sales reps I will not show up in costume, but the threat has made them quite helpful). Preparing for the trip involves synchronizing talks, music, appointments and other file-oriented devices. The OpenSolaris machine is up and running, and my 11-year old son sat down in front of it, not knowing what it was. "Hey Dad," he asked, "what is this?" as he moused around, opened up OpenOffice 2.0, checked out the file explorer, and generally decided it looked and felt enough like something he knows that he would not risk trouble by experimenting with it.

Rather than worrying about retraining costs, and "comfortable" user interfaces, it's time to start thinking about opportunity cost -- of fighting viruses, of therapeutic reboots (prompted by, say, the bug in the wireless network monitor on my Windows XP machine that causes it to balloon to 30 Mbytes every now and then, dwarfing the memory footprint of both OpenOffice and Mozilla), and of configuration tools that require a tweezers, bellows and a fish to deal with their fragility (for example, the bug in MacOS 10.3.9 that won't let me connect to an HP printer over the network; one fine $129 upgrade to MacOS 10.4 and my daughter can print).

I often say that we spend way too long optimizing for the pessimistic cases and not taking advantage of the optimistic cases. I'm full of optimism about OpenSolaris, and the fact that my kids grok it after about 14 femtoseconds of training tells me that I might not be wrong.

After snapping my twig in a practice, I decided it was time to upgrade various pieces of hockey equipment. Bought new Mission gloves, in Calgary colors so they match our Flames-based New Jersey Ice Dragons jerseys. Invested in a new blade for the stick, a little less fiberglass and a little more wood. We're supposed to wear black helmets as part of our color-coordinated uniforms, but I have grown too comfortable in my old white bubble. So an hour before game time I was sitting with a roll of black hockey tape, creating the illusion of black plastic. It looks more like a velvet cover for my head, but it works. When you toss in the black shell for the pants (real color = blue), I look like I got dressed at Build-A-Bear Workshop, but significantly less cuddly.

Whether it was the new gloves, new tape, new blade, new white home jerseys, start of a new Hockey North America season, or just good luck, I managed a power-play goal with 38 seconds left in our first game last night. The proper assist went to our defenseman Stu who put a shot on net that I tipped in, but I think it deflected off of the goalie and off of Steve (yes, the Steve who provided the leverage to break my stick in the first place) helmet before I got wood on it. That goal broke a 2-2 tie and gave the Dragons our first win of the new season. It's a far, far cry from having my own namesake bear or doing endorsements for Mission gloves, but it's a start.

Two games into the 2005 Fall Classic, and I keep thinking about Albert Pujols. In Game 5 of the National League Championship Series, the Cardinals needed a monster hit, and Pujols delivered. His body language at the plate said "gopher ball"; he can be forgiven for an extra slow start toward first because, well, even he wanted to see how he crushed that pitch. Yes, the Cardinals lost in six, and yes, Pujols goes another year without a World Series ring. But he does so with amazing grace and dignity, and only after assuring that NL pitchers are a bit more afraid of him that last year.

The more I think about the big A from the Midwest, the more I think about the big A from the Bronx -- Alex Rodriguez. Let's say, hypothetically, Pujols hit a grounder back to the box in Game 5. Would he have attempted to slap the ball out of the pitcher's glove? Would he have taken an extra fast start toward first? How you lose your last game defines how you're seen for the first game of the next season.

Having a great player on a team makes everyone better. Not because that one player can always pull you out of a tight spot; those players set the bar for everyone else. Want to know why the Yankees were watching the ALCS, not playing in it? Nobody was setting that bar. Nobody delivered when it mattered - not Jeter, not A-rod, not Matsui. The Yankees tradition of winning (or of greatness or of sportsmanship or of whatever) looked, honestly, a lot less like the highest payroll in baseball.

I'm all for tradition -- it holds our dispersed families together; it creates a framework for looking back on four years at Princeton; it's why most of us cheer for the same teams as our parents. As traditions develop and take root, they become initial points. Tradition is a cause and not an effect.

Tradition begets respect. Respect begets sportsmanship. Sportsmanship begets leadership. Leadership begets winning. In four months we'll see how far back to the basics the Yankees have gone.

Just finished Michael Lewis' Coach as I sat waiting for the plane from Minneapolis back to Newark. The book is, in short, a must-read for every parent. If you have kids playing sports at a recreational level, on a travel team, in high school or in college, read the book. It's not, as some narrow reviewers have suggested, a memoir evolved from Lewis' salad days of playing high school baseball. It's about what happens when parents lose sight of the fact that sports are played (a) to have fun (b) as a team and and (c)to win or lose. In that order.

It was a happy night in hockey land. Devils won, Rangers lost, and LA Kings forward (and NJ Devils Youth alum) George Parros notched his first goal.

First goals are great memories; something akin to first steps except you're mentally developed enough to remember the replay later in life. My son's first goal came on a Bobby Orr-style shot, as he was being tripped in front of the net. He has the puck while I have the picture. My first goal came on Princeton's Baker Rink, on a Tuesday night in the dead of November. I was skating through the left face off circle, and Tom Chatt fed me the puck which managed to bounce off of my stick and into the net. Intramural hockey at its finest. I didn't keep the puck, because our club team had only three of them. Given a choice between buying a beer after the game or another puck at the University Store, I went for beer to celebrate. I remember the goal (but not the beer), and wish I had the puck.

Here's hoping that the refs fished George's first goal out of the net and kept the puck for him.

Laminates and composite materials are the plastics of the current decade. Hockey sticks, auto body panels, golf clubs, and bullet proof vests benefit from a mix of kevlar, graphite, and other arrangements of long chain molecules. But if you want to mash-up an old school feel with a new school material, you end with what this picture used to be: a wood laminate blade on a rubberized grip graphite composite hockey stick. I captured the feel of a puck on a wooden stick through the high-pressure stacking of an exterior fiberglass grip, an outer shell sporting the perfect European curve to which Patrik Elias lent his name, and the inner core of something stiff (that's the technical term).

About an hour into last Sunday night's hockey practice, I was beat, and decided to hook my buddy Steve and have him tow me. I got my stick across his midsection, until someone else skated by using Steve as a pick and hit my laminated blade glove first. The ensuing "pop" had the sickening sound and fury of a carefully built balsa wood radio controlled airplane hitting a tree at a scaled Mach 2. What you see is what I got. It didn't just delaminate under pressure; the blade practically exploded.

Laminates exist in the software world, but we refer to the component pieces as having "sedimented" into another layer. That's a nice way of saying the pieces are glued together and we don't want to pay attention to the boundaries any longer. "But," you say, "aren't laminates strong?" Strong, yes. But they don't do well under sheering forces. As Jaron Lanier has pointed out for the past 8 years, software becomes brittle when too much of it sediments. That mash-up -- brittleness as a result of layering -- seems to contradict the common thinking around sedimentation. When the edges are glued up and neatly finished it becomes resistant to change. Apply significant pressure -- to upgrade, update, improve security, or integrate something else -- and the laminate tends to disintegrate in unpleasant ways.

Don't take this to mean that I'm opposed to integrated software stacks or assembled applications. Integration and assembly, particularly when done according to a software architecture with well-defined interfaces, are not lamination problems. Loud objections issue in response to "sedimentation", because I want to focus on the architectures for assembly, not the mechanisms by which products are compressed together. It's easier than cleaning up after a laminate is put under too much pressure.

Stream of consciousness blog from post-it notes scribbled before and after the September 16th U2 show in Toronto.

The Edge's guitar playing is outrageous. Mix feedback, echo, and sheer strength. Heard Robert Fripp of King Crimson sound check at Princeton University's Alexander Hall - same unbelievable big sound. Includes its own echo, no need to let it reverberate to fill the room, forced its way into the air.

Ran into Arati there but she's introduced as Kate. Know her from Princeton engineering. Talk of kids and jobs and banks and shows. Saw her last when U2's third album (and it was on vinyl) was released. Choose the name for the context, after all, Bono comes from an ad for bono voce microphones. The good voice. More appropriate now than in 1982.

Band rips into "Bullet the Blue Sky" from Joshua Tree. One of my faves. Fighting and wrestling with our problems, local global and national. "Jacob wrestled with an angel and the angel was overcome." Genesis 32, it was my daughter's Torah portion for her Bat Mitzvah. In Hebrew it's vayishlach, translates to "and he sent" - 400 of Jacob's men to meet his brother; an angel to meet Jacob.

Bono recites different poetry, editing out "all the colors of a royal flush." Love that phrase for the contrast. Royal flush is only one suit, one color - all red or all black. Faces of royalty on cards done in primary colors, except for the ace. One. The individual commoners? Like Jacob, we take the next action.

I am thinking clearly pro bono.

I'll admit to being a bit giddy tonight. Having 15 opening night games is akin to March Madness - I don't know what to watch first, or which highlights will really be tomorrow's ESPN gems. The remote control got an outstanding workout.

Zach Parise: game-winning goal for the Devils. Sidney Crosby: an assist, but on the losing end of a 5-1 Devils victory. Alexander Ovechkin: 2 goals in the Capitols 3-2 win. Jeff Halpern: assisting on all three Caps goals.

However, there's no data coming out of the Dallas-Los Angeles game, so it's hard to check in on George Parros. Word to the NHL: let the fans blog, at least we'd know what's going on even if there's no official scoresheet posted.

In exactly one hour, the doors to the Meadowlands (sorry, the Continental Airlines Arena) open for the first NHL game of the Devils' season. It's the first night of "real" hockey after nearly sixteen months of hiatus. Game on. It's about time.

I am celebrating by donning one of my "formal" Devils t-shirts. What makes a t-shirt formal? No, not one of those silly tuxedo t-shirts. This is one I can wear to the rink. I can wear it to Dunkies. It doesn't have holes or stains, and it hasn't shrunk from too many washings to become an unintentional belly shirt. The only thing formal about it is that it sports the tail and horns of our home town hockey heads.

On the left coast, sporting #57 in a purple, black and white LA Kings uniform, will be George Parros, making his NHL debut tonight. Parros is a Jersey boy, having played in the Morris County rec league, with the NJ Devils Youth Hockey Club (where yours truly is the head manager) and four years at Princeton University. He was drafted 222nd overall by the Kings, and wasn't given much of a chance of playing in the bigs. But he works hard -- the same school of hard work (literally) that helped fellow ex-Tiger Jeff Halpern land a spot with the Caps.

For the 17 boys on my team, and the 900 or so who play Morris County rec hockey, it's a chance to be proud as one of their own makes the big time. I'll be watching, because for every Sidney Crosby story, there are hundreds of George Parros stories waiting to be told. Everyone may want to be the next Crosby, but it's more likely you'll be the next George Parros if you want to play in the NHL. Either way, it's nice to dream on.

What started as a minor rumination on the end of the regular baseball season turned into a summary of an excellent question that was posted to me during a trip to Garmish, Germany last week. My answer involved drum memory and interoperability. Bear with me, we'll start with baseball.

In the course of unpacking my swag in my shiny new home office, I found the oldest baseball that I own. It was given to me by my mother, who received it (autographed) from a Cardinals minor-leaguer named Whitey Koppenhaver. You never heard of him because he never made the show; he played and then went on with his life. He currently runs a farm stand in north-central Pennsylvania, and still plays hardball fifty years later.

This has a lot to do with drum memory, I promise you.

Nobody can predict the future; sports figures certainly have made history when they have done so correctly. Ruth's digital signalling to the fence and Mark Messier promising a Game 7 win to his Rangers fans left their mark on New York. Signing his name on that baseball didn't make Koppenhaver a sure thing at short; but I use it to frequently remind athletes, young and old, that very few of us go on to the bigs, most of us play small ball and revel in the little victories our entire lives.

If the future is cloudy, and no secret incantations, wearing of unwashed heather grey t-shirts with the "lucky stains", or select couch real estate can influence the future (or even help the Jets complete a forward pass), then our positions as technologists must be built on things that we believe are reasonable future-proofed. That is, we understand that technical evolution happens, we encourage it to happen, and we make sure that the cost of evolving doesn't become a tax on running our businesses.

Not to sound like too much of a Unix codger, but I vaguely remember device driver entries for /dev/drum, the ostensible drum memory device (for backwards compatibility, of course). Nobody knows what drum memory is in fashionable computing circles, but it drove quite a few NASA missions, libraries and early computing centers. So let's say you have some data on a drum storage device and you want to read it today. You hope it exists in another format, or you're off to visit Weird Stuff looking for something you can hack. Evan Marcus and I actually discovered a (possibly apocryphal) story about some missing satellite images stored on rotating drum memory, which we relate in the High Availability book.

Assume you can read whatever physical media your long-lost document is in. Now you have bits. Big difference between bits and information -- can you use the bits with whatever application created them, or its modern equivalent? Can you turn the bits into a map, an image, a story, a piece of your family's or corporate history? If it's more than 10 years old and it's not ASCII email, I'd vote "no". Perhaps a minor problem now, but with increasing digitization of everything from photos to legal records to bank check images, it's an upcoming crisis. Anybody else remember XyWrite, WordMarc, WordPerfect, or VisiCalc? I used them all (I warned you, I'm a techno-codger).

Note that for some technologies -- TCP/IP, for example -- this isn't such a big deal. The standards are open, easily and freely implemented, and interoperability is done through plugging the new and old into the same network. If the transports work like this, shouldn't the data flowing on the transports have the same future-proofing? If it's not free to be viewed in the culturally hip app-du-jour, then converting it (or retrieving it) represents an implicit IT tax on the data. Somebody has to pay for making your data fungible.

The question posed to me in Garmish was about Massachusetts and its proposed requirements for adopting the OpenDocument format. This may be the first time Massachusetts, a state famous for taxation, has found a way around the concept. They aren't looking to exclude vendors; they're trying to future-proof the digital records of the Commonwealth. Earlier this week, Sun made a bold step in protecting implementations of OpenDocument format by making a statement to OASIS effectively assuring patent peace. Our Chief Open Source Guy, Simon Phipps captures the essence of the protections.

I see it as future-proofing my personal and professional data. My bits -- all of which are now created and edited with OpenOffice and persisted in OpenDocument format -- are just as secure as my atoms, including one dirt-stained Whitey Koppenhaver baseball.