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

Here's a reason not to like Mondays that Bob Geldolf missed: taking an inventory of what hurts. It was not a good weekend for pain accounting - our little Devils lost on Saturday on a goal that was deflected by one of our own players (one that I'm proud to call my own). Our big Devils lost on Saturday night. Our little Devils played a great game against a greater team on Sunday, losing again, dropping us to the lower third of the conference standings. At least we have consolation that the team that shares our practice ice (the $34 million dollar Devils) isn't faring any better this season.

Sunday night was game four in the Hockey North America season, 2nd place Ice Dragons (my team) versus the league-leading Moose. An early 1-0 lead for the Dragons vaporized when I lost my check behind me, and he flipped a nice pass in to tie it. We ended up losing 2-1, the same score with which the weekend started. Afterwards, the locker room conversation was about how it was a good game, about lots of bumping but no complaining, how we were lucky that the Moose hit four posts (it could have easily been 5-1), and that we should repack our home whites for our next game in a mere 48 hours.

Monday morning my body tells a different story. My back feels like someone opened a door into it, which I think is what happened when I accidentally hit the door latch while jumping the boards, and fell over the open door. Bumping in the slot is reflected in sore shoulders and forearms today; I'm a pathetic vision of adult hockey, typing hunched over the keyboard.

What I told my son on Saturday's drive home is that mistakes happen, especially when you're on the defensive side of the game. Nobody sees the wingers' mistakes because they don't show up on the scoresheet. Lack of effort can be criticized and corrected, but momentary failure should only result in another shot at success another day. That's the lesson I took (complaining loudly and eating Aleve like M&Ms) into work this morning. It's hard to cast your mental state as something eerily similar to perpetual beta, but that's the carbon-based production world -- you fail, you correct, you try again.

Monday night saw the inaugural presentation of the CNBC Technology Leadership Awards. Sun was a sponsor of this year's program, so I had the pleasure of attending the awards dinner and got a prime table assignment with Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, business news anchor and emcee for the night. Caruso-Cabrera is funny, insightful, a Mac user (I tried selling her on OpenOffice for the Mac), and capable of carrying on at least three conversations at once. Best quote of the evening: "I've interviewed powerful Wall Street executives who are embarassed by their kids when it comes to technology." I've claimed the same things when touting the changing economics of software but Michelle is a TV person so it must be true.

The downside to the night was that I had to write a sub-3 minute speech introducing an award winner. Talking isn't a problem for me; limiting speech to an average television break poses a challenge. I went through the Cliff Notes version of this for live audience, but I've transcribed the unexpurgated version for those who are bored at work on a Friday.

Technology leadership is one of those funny phrases that can be interpreted as required. As a technology vendor, we recognize leadership in terms of creation -- patents, innovations, market disruptions. End users of technology, though, apply those new innovations to reshape a business or create new opportunities. I'm reminded of something I learned coaching youth soccer -- good players create space, and then kick the ball into the open space to create momentum. It was my delight to present an award to an end user of technology that created quite a bit of open space in a crowded market.

The CNBC Leadership in Finance award went to Kurt Woetzel of the Bank of New York. Nowhere is the confluence of the social aspects of our networked society -- real-time, 24x7, location and geography independent communications -- married to the very real bricks and mortar world than in financial services. This is even more true when you run technology for a 220-year old bank that was founded by Alexandar Hamilton. Face it, when your founder's picture is on the US $10 bill, you have to take business continuity quite seriously. As most people know, Alexander Hamilton ended up on the losing end of a duel with Aaron Burr that took place on the proper side of the Hudson River, in Weehawkin, New Jersey. The event was auspicious for three reasons: it was the first ever recorded fight over IT governance, it was the first time something ascribed to New York really went down in New Jersey (think Jets and Giants here) and Hamilton was quoted as saying "Don't change anything until I return."

BONY is a leader in custodial services, foreign exchange, straight through processing (STP) and clearing functions, for which the bank has received numerous awards. Kurt has promoted a policy of global consistency, such that applications are the same from Chicago to Mumbai. One out of six employees of the bank are technologists, creating both a large talent and a large opinion pool. Kurt's technology leadership over the past 20 years has helped deliver the Bank of New York to a financial services leadership position today.

Sometimes it pays not to listen to the founder. After all, it's Scott who says "Better to seek forgiveness than ask permission."

On Monday afternoon, I temporarily passed James Gosling in blog popularity. Freaky thing, being in the stratosphere of bloggers, my fifteen minutes of fame in the top fifteen. I guessed (correctly) it was due to some exogenous force; some new readership flooding the gates.

Follow carefully, as this reasoning is as circuitous as that of people who tell you they are related to English royalty:

I blog about sitting next to Veronica Varekova on a trans-Atlantic flight.

Tim Bray, ATOMic genius and blogger with a readership about that of the Boston Globe, points back to my blog commenting about something completely non-hockey related.

A hockey bulliten board picks up on my post via Tim's reference, mostly because one of the moderators knows Tim from college days, and suddenly my Varekova-Nedved conjectures (sounds vaguely mathematical, and less romantic) are being held up to rationalize free agent signings or lack thereof. This is why metadata is going to reshape the way we think about data on the 'Net. It's most definitely a read-write network now, not just a read-only net where we download and read and parse, but one in which we can comment and edit and create derivative content. Meandering through that content is easier if you know something about the relationships between sources. Had you known that Tim Bray works for me, and that some of Tim's former graduate student contents are active puck heads, you'd be able to build a directed graph that neatly explains the sudden burst in my blog readership. Minus the relationship data, I'm just lucky.

Here's the genesis of my fifteen minutes of reflected fame from Veronica Varekova. I flew home from Spain via the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport imitation last night. When I plopped my backpack down and bemoaned the lack of in-seat power on the plane, the woman next to me noticed the collection of bendable hockey figures that adorn the zipper pulls on my bag.

"You like hockey?" she asked.

"Yes, very much."

"You must like the Devils," she correctly concluded upon discovering that home was in New Jersey. I avoided making Rangers commentary or derisive comments about the Flyers; you never know where allegiances lie, especially when you run into a fellow (observant) hockey fan in the (non-Minnesota) wild. And when your team is in the cellar, you don't have much cred in picking an anyone else.

"I married a hockey player." You know, my wife says that same thing, except it comes out "I married a nerd who plays hockey" (and those are all words of respect).

Our conversation passed friendly on the way to intriguing.

"He used to play in New York, but now he's in Phoenix." A more culturally aware person than me, someone who reads Sports Illustrated perhaps, would have immediately recognized my seatmate, but I live in a travel haze induced by two month old issues of Business 2.0 and Information Week. However, following NHL transactions through the summer left the answer to this puzzle somewhat near the top of the brain stack.

"Petr Nedved?" I half-stated, half-questioned. He shoots, he scores, +1 for the left wing from NJ for identifying the Czech superstar now playing for former Ranger teammate turned coach Wayne Gretzky.

While identifying current homes of various Czech hockey heads, we touched on the the downsides to being traded and free agency. My thoughts raced back to a half-written Devils fan bulliten board entry I've been toying with, chastising those of us who call on Devils management to trade or waive various players.

Imagine this scenario: you drive over to the house of one of your middle-ranking late 20-something employees. You ring the bell, and are greeted by two or three cute kids who want to know if you're the mean man from work. You tell your employee "We've traded you to (insert far-away city now)" and then you wonder how he's going to tell his kids and wife that they're selling the house, moving the kids to new schools, and changing time zones. Like in the next 24 hours. If you have trouble imagining yourself as the organizational ogre, you should have equal trouble calling on someone else to be the same. Trades and free agency are more than a tax on the hockey family; they're life-changing.

Varekova continues to live in the tri-state area while her husband works on a sheet of ice in the desert (how's that for contrast). She flies to Phoenix when she can, or meets her husband on the road. Her modeling career takes her on long hauls as well (including the flight next to yours truly). Move to Phoenix? What if Phoenix isn't the final destination on this hockey tour? What if another Rangers run is back in the cards? New rules have introduced divisional parity, more goals, faster play, success for quick defensemen, and a major dose of familial stress for those who find themselves in new neighborhoods of old friends.

We all, at some time, perform unusual acts under the banner of "work." The most difficult to perform always involve family balance, forcing us to place doing what we love on the scale with who we love. As I've written here before, hockey players are among the most human and approachable of all professional athletes; they have same travails du travail as the rest of us.

But you know I can't resist a chance to recruit: If Nedved ever wants to return to the tri-state area, a certain team on the left side of the Hudson featuring Patrik Elias could use another Czech mate.

I admit to being totally embarassed. Life imitates art again because I was completely blindsided by celebrity.

On the return leg from our customer advisory council meeting in Barcelona, I was seated next to someone who looked vaguely familiar. I recognized her but couldn't place her. She was exceptionally conversant (in English with me, in French with the flight attendants, in Czech on her cell phone), and our dialogue touched on existentialism (she was reading the Czech equivalent of Sartre), dealing with in-flight turbulence, ice hockey, family balance, learning Slavic languages, and life in and around the Big Apple.

After putting together some pieces of the puzzle I decided to capture my first thoughts for later blogging, and popped open my OpenSolaris (build 25) laptop. Had to show it off; demonstrated to my seatmate that it looked familiar (she professed to prefer the Windows user experience to a Mac), had office and email and web software, and it was fast. She's (rightfully) proud of her work (I inferred), and I'm proud of Sun's. I just carry my geekly portfolio with me.

Never once did my seatmate give me the "you should know who I am" look, or imply my relative cultural cluelessness for not recognizing her. On the one-year anniversary of ending up in a wheelchair due to a hockey injury, I was once again reminded that we should dismiss all pre-conceived notions about people based solely on the context in which they are first perceived.

It took me two Googles (a new metric for cultural status - props for that, please) to triangulate my seatmate's identity from the clues she politely pushed on the conversational stack. I am probably the first person to ever sit next to Veronika Varekova and recognize her husband (Phoenix Coyote Petr Nedved) first.

I had the pleasure of being one of the morning keynotes at OSBC East 2005, in Newton, Massachusetts. The town that gave its name to the Fig Newton is one of my favorite places, having lived, worked and even enjoyed lunch with Tim O'Reilly there in previous years. All that was before a few hundred people got together to talk about open source software this week.

Corporate marketing didn't get to do touch-up on me or my slides, which is why my collar is askew (honestly, my collar had been askew since my 6:30 AM breakfast, but that detracts from the setup). To borrow from Billy Crystal borrowing from Fernando Llamas, it's not how you feel, it's how you look. This was my look at trends in open source software:

Open source is not the cheese. I'll resist the strong temptation to make a hip-hop joke related to the cost of open source software, and simply state that the cheese stands alone, but "Open source" cannot. "open source" is a set of adjectives in search of a noun. "Open source software" or "open source projects" are acceptable uses. As soon as we elide "software" or "project" we forget that we're dealing with things that tend to have a deployment life of their own.

"Open" applies to source code, data formats and programming interfaces. They're all important. They define (in the words of Steve Deering) "waistlines" above and below which we can have massive innovation, if there's agreement (and consistency) on the boundary. Expect to see quite a bit of innovation around data formats, particularly XML grammars like FOAF and DOAP that express relationships between datum.

Modularity drives assembly. Assembly works well if you have an architecture to specify how the pieces fit together, and how you know when you've reached a stable configuration point. Whether it's open source software or not, you're going to be assembling pieces and need to consider how the software infrastructure evolves over the long term. Failure to think long-term leaves you with the architectural equivalent of downtown Boston -- a twisty little maze of streets so tangled that calling it "spaghetti code" is an insult to spaghetti code. Not the best analogy to use with the home crowd but it worked.

Security, reliability, performance and predictability are the currency of the system administrator. Open source projects don't really change this, although you probably want to establish a virtualization strategy to provide isolation, layering and some flexibility in deploying code over which you have minimal architectural control.

Perpetual beta isn't a bad thing. We need to stop thinking about software as a manufactured asset and rather as something organic. Manufacturing analogies work best when you can control the entire supply chain, and have visibility into the lowest levels of quality, instrumentation and assembly. Organic models allow for adaptation, rejection, and states of temporary balance.

Think about what happens when your favorite or most reliable constraint gets relaxed. Software has zero cost to acquire (but the cost of ownership is reflected in support services)? Project releases happen every two months, not every six months? Find an open source project that approximates something you've been building, and have to redistribute engineering resources?

I'm guessing that some of this resonated because I discovered online news coverage courtesy of Mark Tolliver at Palamida. He gives me a nice electronic friendship sound, which you can discount appropriately by knowing that I worked for Mark during the Sun-Netscape iPlanet Alliance days. If you didn't know that, then it's another argument for a little "ff-fuff", except we pronouce it FOAF.