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

I was born in Missouri (seriously). I doubt it's a nuture over nature feature (especially with only 6 months of midwest residency) that made me cranky and skeptical. However, I certainly like to hang the "show me" sign up as much as possible.

Our latest Innovating@Sun podcast takes "show me" to the street, discussing Sun's Try and Buy program in a two-part audiofest featuring Sun's Christine Beury (who owns the program) and Dale Williams, CEO of Sun customer DigiTar (who experienced it). Innovation comes in many flavors, from the chips on which we build systems to the systems design that make blue computing more green to the processes by which we get those innovations into the hands of customers, both new and old. Sometimes the disruption comes from the how, and not the what, of the products -- particularly when you show me (and I'm forcing myself to avoid Peter Frampton allusions here).

Pork roll is the quintessential New Jersey food. More commonly known as Taylor Ham, it's the right combination of curing agents, nitrates, salts, pig parts, additives, meat fillers, and food coloring to start your day. Don't ask, just enjoy, particularly with eggs and a hard roll.

I've now stayed up past 1:00 AM three nights of the past four to watch the NJ Devils lose every game in the Golden State. There's nothing to enjoy here. Doesn't matter what the ingredients are, they aren't making anything too tasty. I posted the full-blown diatribe on fixing the Devils to my personal blog, but I'm cross-posting it here (slightly edited) because this is not the way I've wanted to start every day of the last week:

The season is a bit past the quarter post, and the Devils look like the leftovers on an Atlantic City buffet table. It's just not pretty. Seven goals in a five-game road trip, three points out of a possible ten, and they're looking at the Islanders' tail pipe in the standings. It's not a lack of talent or a lack of leadership. It's finding the right combinations. Like pork roll.

So here's my completely non-expert, biased fan's view of how to fix the Devils. I am not a coach, nor do I play one on television, and my hockey expertise is limited to beer league and running the clock at youth hockey games. But I've spent almost the equivalent of a new car on Devils tickets in the last decade, so I'm entitled to my shot at being Lou For A Day:

Fix the lines for at least three games. You don't learn anything by having guys rotate through lines. How do you know that Elias is more likely to pass than shoot if he's on the off-hand side of the slot (versus having the goal to his right from the left hash) unless you've been on the ice with him? So this means "fix" in both repairing and retaining senses. My personal line card would have Gomez centering the first line, Langenbrunner and Elias on the wings, because you have the most speed and two of the best finishers on the team. Yes, Gionta had more goals, but they were of the tip-in or deflection variety (more on that later). Second line: Parise at center, Zajac and Gionta on the wings. Sorry, Travis, but follow Brylin's lead and move to wing. The Zach-n-Zaj combination gives you great playmaking capability. Checking line is Madden at center, Pandolfo and Brylin on the wings. Brylin and Pandolfo are two of the most under-respected players in the league, and Brylin can score when it counts. Always has. Fourth line is a combination of Rupp, Dowd, Jansen, and Rasmussen, although I'd love to see Barry Tallackson come back from Lowell.

Shoot the puck. Sounds obvious, but it's not happening nearly enough. In the three California losses, the Devils had between 22-24 shots a game, with half of them coming in the third period. The Devils had a dozen shots total in Anaheim with over 35 minutes gone in the game. A short every three minutes means a shot every 3-5 shifts. The puck needs to move more (see above), and the shots need to get on goal. The latter is the bigger problem -- shooting from the point is great if you can get deflections in front (Gionta's signature) but if you can't park someone in the low slot you need more cutting below the hash marks. There's been a Bermuda Triangle of lost Devils from the center of the slot to the edges of the crease. Puck movement up and down the boards and along the blue line is pretty but pretty ineffective.

Give Marty a night off. Better yet, send Clemmenson up I-95 to Lowell and bring Frank Doyle down for some games (sorry, KK, but he is the heir apparent). If Clemmenson isn't solid enough to play against Phoenix or Los Angeles, two teams that aren't exactly smoking the league, then get help. Marty's performance in the shootout last night can be summarized in one word: tired. True, the schedule that had the team going from La-La-Land to Silicon Valley back to Hollyweird didn't help, and travelling in California is stressful at best, but three games in four nights over a holiday weekend is a bit much.

Get butts in seats. Think the Devils like playing in front of empty seats, in an arena that needs about 14,000 voices to get epsilon louder than the ventilation system? This is a positive feedback loop -- fans encourage the team, the team plays for the fans, the team plays better and more fans come to games. Give out vouchers for the upper level to every school, youth hockey program and youth group in the state. If the tickets aren't sold, what's the downside? Get some fans in the building and they'll buy concessions and add their noise to the mix. Encourage season ticket holders to resell or trade games they can't use. I'd gladly trade games I'm stuck with for 4 or 6 seats to other games, if the Devils make the trade. The San Francisco Giants "Double Play" system pretty much assures that season ticket holders get their full value out of their seats, by getting butts into them. Create demand, and the fans will come. If there's insufficient demand, start by giving things away. iTunes is free. WAPP-FM was free for one glorious summer. Solaris is free (sorry, had to put in the plug).

Tell Patrik Elias to have fun again. In seasons past, when Patty missed a shot or a pass went wide, you'd see Patty holler something funny (as evidenced by the smile on Gomez's unshaven face) or laugh himself. He's A-Rod serious now. We need the guy who used to pick up the trainer's scissors to give Gomez an impromptu haircut. Perhaps it's wearing the "C", or perhaps it's trying to figure out how to get the team to settle down, but Elias should lead the way he always has -- have fun, carry a big stick, and shoot the puck. He doesn't have to be Scott Stevens, because he's not Scott Stevens. He's Patty. He's a soccer playing, Euro cool, well spoken, dumpling-loving oenophile (how is that for statistically improbable phrasing?)

Everyone will relax, the goals will come, the game will open up, and the fans will return to watch grown men playing a simple sport that's incredibly fun. Want an example? Here's an open invitation for the big Devils to stay after practice this Saturday to watch the youth Devils play. Let the kids sign autographs for you, instead of the other way around, and sit on the bleachers that give you cold metal burns on your butt, and cheer for our goalie who wears #14 (because he worships Gionta), and our defenseman nicknamed Big Bird because he has the same look and disposition (but a much better slapshot) , and our third-line center who broke his foot but comes to every game to sit on the bench and cheer for his teammates. We share a rink, we share a jersey crest, so why not share in some fun?

DARPA announced that Phase III of the High Productivity Computing System has been awarded to Cray and IBM, ending Sun's involvement in the project at the conclusion of Phase II this past summer. We've been saying for a while -- and much more vocally lately -- that we believe in building general purpose systems, and much of what we developed and learned in the HPCS project will converge into those systems.

Some of the work, such as Guy Steele's FORTRESS programming language is already public. Guy's description of FORTRESS is to do to FORTRAN what Java did to C/C++. Is safe, simple parallel computing important? Only answer "no" if you can find a CPU roadmap from any vendor that doesn't include multi-core and multi-thread processors in multi-chip systems.

If you want the word from the top, listen to the podcast with Jim Mitchell and David Douglas of Sun Labs who talk about life after HPCS for Sun. It's part of our continuing Innovating@Sun podcast series, and if you're wondering why we all sound so chipper, this is one we did not record at 7:00 AM.

When the Boss sang about the change made uptown that let the big man join the band, I don't think he meant these two guys.

They're on the corner of 9th Avenue and 50th Street in midtown Manhattan, not quite on Tenth Avenue, and not quite in the freezing weather, but definitely a sign of things to come. It's snowman season, evidenced by frost on the windshield this morning and the fact that "my guy" in my favorite parking lot said he expects to be full up every day until New Year's Eve.

Yes, I took this picture from my car, en route to a meeting in our midtown office, but I was stopped at a light and not attempting to drive, take pictures, and talk on the cell phone at the same time.

In the midst of the press conference and analyst calls about the open sourcing of Java SE and Java ME, I got to sit down with Alan Brenner and Laurie Tolson from Sun's Software products group and talk in-depth about the size and shape of this announcement. Our podcast of the chat is available as part of our Innovating@Sun series.

The GPL licensing model seems to be the hook that's catching people looking at this effort, but it makes perfect sense in balancing the needs and requirements of the open source communities (and yes, there are several), commercial developers, and companies that want to embed a Java environment in a device but not expose the implementation details. Sun announced the intent to open source Java during JavaOne, and back in May I postulated some balanced views of rights that I still think hold true. It allows for OEM manufacturers to maintain their rights (through a commercial license), but more important, will stimulate innovation of the type called for by Peter Yared's open letter regarding this very issue.

I'm a huge fan of densely packed information. The Hockey News is my faithful companion, and the Barron's market data tables filled a void in my social life before the Internet. I have a new favorite, with a bullet: Hockey Recap, both a web site and a subscription style daily newsletter. It aggregates just about anything you can think of: production time (their own stat, how long a player goes on the ice between points), milestones (who knew Jamie Langenbrunner popped in #150 last night? Not the Fox Sports New York broadcast crew) blogroll-like headline summary of hockey news, and highlighted per-game statistics from every game played the previous day. Want to know who had the most shots in the Devils-Senators game (Zach Parise, with 5, check the yellow box) or which players are at the top of the points leaders board (they're highlighted in the box scores as well). It's a perfect example of a mash-up in front of the net, warped to the particular needs of those of us who are data-driven.

Part of my unnatural proclivity to seeing the hockey world through spreadsheets comes from my new boss, Executive VP of Global Sales and Services Don Grantham, who has instituted the same kind of data-driven discipline in looking at our overall customer engagement (not to be confused with sales, which is a trailing indicator). Inspection drives results, or at least analysis that precedes those results. Jonathan Schwartz likes to quote Louis Brandeis with "Sunlight is the best disinfectant". But he's never tried to fumigate a hockey bag.

Volker Seubert, who is our Global Systems Engineering HR business partner in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), has a great HR blog. While many people see HR as the fun-removing enforcer of rules, a good HR partner really creates fun, creates opportunity and makes sure the rules are appropriate.

This is a first and probably a last: I'm going to write about football. Not the kind of football that my boss (Don Grantham) plays, but the American kind, the subject of analogies (except for Jonathan's) and great coaching stories and quarter-century retrospectives.

Start with New Jersey jokes. Slather on a healthy dose of random naming (Rutgers, The State University: people actually pronounce the comma to make the point that it's the most strangely named state university). Dump on top a football program that was so bad, so horrendous, that opposing teams wished there was an NCAA mercy rule (at one point, an opponent was up by half a dozen scores at the half, put in the freshman, told them not to pass the ball, and yet they still scored touchdowns). Add the tasty dessert topping offered up by Greenie on ESPN Radio this morning: You went to nowhere, took a left, and then got to Rutgers.

For a short while, for a brief shining moment, New Jersey is in fact the center of the universe that deserves all due respect, Tony Soprano style. Rutgers 28, Louisville 25. The Empire State building was lit up in Rutgers scarlet red last night, the first time ever that New York has acknowledged that anything of interest, especially football, happens in New Jersey. I mean, the New York Giants and New York Jets play in New Jersey, but a university team lights up the Big Apple's landmark with a King Kong sized win. Today, the entire state is cheering for Rutgers.

There are so many facets to this it's hard to know where to begin. Maybe it was one of our assistant hockey coaches, who managed to get a last-minute ticket to the game, and sent the single most excited email I've ever seen from him. Or the 10,000-plus who lined up for tickets to the game as they were released. Perhaps it was the fact that I attended the last Princeton-Rutgers game, an intra-state rivalry that ended 111 years after their first - and the college game's first - meeting, because "Rutgers was going big-time". We came home with our Tiger tails between our legs on that day in 1980, but we were in a small minority for quite a few years.

The real reason I'm touched by the daylight celebration of the Scarlet Knights is because it reminds me of a similar day precisely 25 years ago, when Princeton faced an unbeated Yale team on a dreary day that was only slightly happier than the general mood around Palmer Stadium. Yale was on the verge of being nationally ranked, Princeton was already tanked, the highlight of the season being a tie against Harvard. After falling behind 21-0, Princeton came back, aided by a defensive pass interference call near the Yale goal line. I remember -- vividly -- hollering with the other fans who stayed in the stands, screaming for Princeton's Bob Holly to pass the ball once again. But Holly tucked the ball under, and perhaps on the wind of hot air coming from the home side of the stadium, ran it in for the winning touchdown. His 501 passing yards in that game stand as a Princeton record. Princeton ended a 14-year drought against Yale, Bob Holly went on to play for the Washington Redskins in the Super Bowl, and a quarter of a century later we all have great memories of that weekend.

Rutgers is not likely to play for the BCS Championship, although a Buckeye State-Garden State matchup would be a great battle of the big reds. Years from now, though, everyone will remember a Thursday night under the lights in New Jersey when the ranks of the unbeaten were thinned, and "big time" meant "our time."

I spoke on the "Innovation At Speed" panel today hosted by the Suffolk University Center for Innovation and Change Leadership. Great panelists around me:

Kory Kolligian, Chief Operating Officer, Design Continuum

Angela Kyle, Director, TIAA-CREF

Robert Wong, Executive VP and Creative Director, Arnold Worldwide Advertising

Robert Zeytoonian, Chief Executive Officer, Zorian Bat Company

Beate Chelette, Director, Corbis Images I got to spend some of the pre-panel time with Bob Zeytoonian, who was a minor league baseball player, coach and currently makes bats for ballplayers of all ages. By researching local hard woods, focusing on quality and consistent manufacturing, and sigificant person-to-person marketing, Zeytoonian has developed several hundred custom bats, including those used by Big Papi, David Ortiz of the home-town favorite Red Sox.

My most recent experience with baseball bats has been with the aluminum variety, through five years of coaching Little League, and I've been strongly in favor of the lighter, bouncier sticks because they let the smaller ballplayers get the bat around. Despite some of the safety concerns focusing attention on aluminum bats, I've stood my ground on the basis of making the game more enjoyable for the youth player. It's more fun when you can hit the baseball, and wooden bats are simply too heavy for most 8-12 year olds to swing with sufficient speed and accuracy. Or so I thought.

Today, a man with a big stick changed my mind.

Bob's key points were that a bat should sound like a bat; it should be the crack of the bat and a thunk, not a plink, as the ball comes off the swing. He also added that aluminum bats send the ball into the infield more quickly, changing the game from a defensive perspective as well as an offensive one. Switch to wooden bats with a deadened ball rebound, the infielders get an extra step to make the play. Finally, he argued that you can't use technology to change the national pastime. Turns out that the man who turns bats for a living knows his wood, and Zorian Bats makes youth size and weight sticks. I stand corrected: you can make a youth bat that lets everyone play, on both sides of the ball.

But hopefully the ideas we shared on the panel changed Bob's mind about technology and baseball. Technology won't change the national pastime by changing the tools of the trade, as Bob fears. Instead, it changes the way we interact with the sport. Baseball was the first sport played under lights, paving the way for generations of young players to enjoy spring and fall games that weren't broadcast during school hours. More recently, mlb.com provides live game casts, statistics, video, images and news to fans of all ages, geographies and loyalties. Again, it's not about changing the sport but innovating to bring the sport to as many fans as possible, in as many ways as possible. Everybody plays.

Part next of the Innovating@Sun video podcast fun is available. This segment was incredible fun to produce, because I had unedited, unscripted time with Jonathan Schwartz and Greg Papadopoulos to talk about how Sun funds R&D, or, quite literally, what Greg gets to do with an allowance of about $2 billion a year.

There are plenty of themes that come out in our little video act, including what it means to be under-served by Moore's Law and why commodities are a good thing if you can make money from them. My two favorite moments, though, came out of what I thought were subtle semantic differences that have a lot of not-so-subtle thought behind them.

Computing versus computers. Computers, computing, compute, what's the difference besides the possible mis-use of a gerund? What pointed me down this track was a Really Big Announcement from 1986, when I worked at Princeton University's Computer Science Department, and the university announced that the building formerly known as the "Computer Center" would become the "Computing Center." I'd like to say that this was the motivation for other minor changes in nomenclature, such as Prince (no relation to town or gown) changing his name to the Artist, but I digress. The point was that the computer center implied it was a big building with a lot of computers in it, and the computing center was the place you went to do computing.

Both are wrong. Computing is where you are (very Buckaroo Banzai, I realize). It's location neutral, building neutral, and in most cases, increasingly device neutral as well. You're computing while sending messages on your cell phone, driving in your car, watching your Tivo-time shifted television, and of course actually sitting in front of a computer. Computing and computers are different things. Computing is about an experience; it's about providing a real-time, high-quality user experience on the network no matter where or when you're computing. Computers -- and more properly, systems of computers, which include software, services, storage, servers, and systems engineering (shameless plug!!) -- are the ingredients. Computing is the result.

The digital divide is about information. Whenever we talk about the "digital divide" as part of Sun's mission and vision, and how we want to bridge that gap, people immediately are drawn to thinking about economic divides. The digital divide is about information haves and have-notes; it's about who can get to the information they need when they need it. Very computing-oriented, and not just a semantic distinction.

Lots more content and discussion in our video.

I'm on a bit of a James Campion kick right now, having recently subscribed to his email list which supplants the need to read the Aquarian (and being in North Jersey, it's nearly impossible to find that long-standing tabloid anyway).

His obituary for punk club CBGB is required reading for anyone who listens, has listened, or might listen to the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, or the Clash. What other American club is cross-referenced by the Talking Heads?

What I find both sad and humorous about the decline and fall of CBGB is that punk rock was supposed to lead to the decline and fall of "real rock". I'm not quite sure how that was reflected in real life, since real NJ rocker Bruce Springsteen gave a hit song to punk NJ rocker Patti Smith ("Because the Night"), and the attitude ensconced in punk seems to have re-appeared in rap, hip-hop, grunge, industrial, and a metallicized renaissance. I'll admit I was as taken aback by System of a Down (on first listen) as my parents were by the Ramones. That, I believe, is the point: push the boundaries, challenge common perception, make music.

Art that is safe hangs on your wall. It's there for the duration. Art that challenges your perceptions requires a few passes, and probably some repeated listening. Perhaps network distribution of music will replace the need for small clubs like CBGB, because you'll be exposed to a wider variety of art with less travel, late night hours and parental scorn. But the dispersion of culture electronically will never replace the creation of culture through the physics of a tightly packed space so eloquently described by JC.

The latest Innovating@Sun podcast is available, focusing on the digital rights management interoperability work called Project DReaM. This was another fun episode to put in the can, working with Tom Jacobs from Sun Labs.

There are a host of issues wrapped up in digital rights management (DRM), interoperability, and copyrights. First, DRM affects everyone. If you create anything, from a slide deck for use in a staff meeting to editing your least favorite relative out of a digital photograph, you're a content creator. You should have full control and long-term ownership of your own output. Long-term is the key phrase here, because our ability to create, view, and edit content is becoming increasingly dependent upon how the content is encoded. Even mechanisms designed to supposedly add security to our own private content fall under the domain of DRM, and are regulated by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States. Ignorance of the law is not healthy nor a defense when you find yourself divorced from your own bits, unable to use them again until you license the appropriate piece of DRM technology.

It's been a long week, but I think they always feel like that when you start off sick and then play catch-up for days. Had a few conversations about long-term sustainability, ranging from an interview with John Fowler's internal systems group communications team to preparation for a panel next Wednesday at Suffolk University Law School in Boston on Innovation and Speed To Market. I'm going to talk about the need to balance flat-out innovation with long-term thought about maintaining what's been invented. Long-term thought was what occupied my mind as the week wound down.

I spent this Friday night the same way I've spent the last half-dozen, watching my son volunteer as a junior coach and mentor in the Devils Youth Hockey Primary Program. He's on the ice with the under-8 set, getting to learn coaching style, and not just playing style, from his own favorite coaches. Tonight I had the added bonus of being asked to babysit for two of the coaches (who are married to each other), as they had their not quite three year old on the ice, practice jersey knotted behind her so she didn't trip on it. I got to entertain their little one, bringing back some pleasant memories of bouncing babies of my own. Fastest 45 minutes I've spent in a long time.

As I was returning our future 2022 US Women's Ice Hockey olympic athlete to the home bench, her father (more commonly known as Coach Adam) pointed out to the other coaches assembled in the office that I won additional brownie points for taking my son to see Godsmack. What struck me was that he only knew that little tidbit from reading this blog. So if I'm truly to comment broadly about community sustainability, I owe Coaches Adam and Theresa props in a place where they, and others, will see them.

In a variety of all-hands and staff meetings with peer organizations in the past three weeks, I've said that community sustainability -- building and maintaining a community of experts, of athletes, of volunteers, of any similarly interested people -- requires a few leaders who will put in the time no matter what, and a larger number of people who will follow their example. That's what makes our Devils hockey organization run over time -- the long-term efforts put in by people who are willing to do the community development. Ben skates with the primary program because he had fun as a participant in it eight years ago. Coaches Adam and Theresa were there every Friday night as well. He got up Sunday mornings at 5:30am, half-dressed in shin guards, socks and hockey pants, looking for a ride to the rink from any available parent or guardian, to skate in a half-ice game in the house league supervised by the two newlyweds. There have been a number of other coaches and contributors -- Big D, Coach Garry, Coach John and his wife Kelly -- who have pushed, cajoled, stretched, and molded my son into the type of kid who wants to spend the opening shift of his weekend with beginning hockey players.

I find it a nice touch that my son is able to be on the ice with his first coaches' daughter. I didn't know then that a few minutes of volunteer time here and there was going to turn into managing and a board position. My first "job" with the Devils organization was opening the bench door for players, or lifting them over the boards in those half-ice games. I managed, as best as you can, a swarm of 6 year olds and laughed about it afterwards for most of the day, especially when Coach Adam let the pre-dawn skaters call his new wife "Coach Crabby." Thanks, and happy anniversary wishes to my most hockey-astute blog readers.

Welcome to tonight's nested blog -- I started writing to draw some parallels between long-term sustainability of technology and other kinds of community efforts, and found out that my trusted iBook seemed to have lost its network connection. Then the kids chimed in: "Dad, the network is down." Nobody ever complains about the phone being busy in our house, but woe is me should we suffer DHCP failures.

Our entire house is wireless; we use a Linksys router in the basement and a variety of repeaters upstairs to get a 5-bar signal pretty much everywhere inside our stuccoed walls. Seems the Linksys decided to stop handing out IP addresses to the Macs. Tried a few resets, looked at some network traffic, and sure enough, the Macs were sending DHCP requests, the Linksys thought it was answering them, but the IP addresses were never assigned to the Airport network interfaces.

When things break, back track to the last thing you touched. In this case, I've been getting increasingly annoyed when the Linksys seizes up during periods of multiple high speed transfers (say, I'm reading email while one of the kids is sending homework to the wireless printer -- the best way to keep them from fighting over who has the last print cartridge is to make them jointly responsbile). Found a Linksys firmware upgrade, which I installed over lunch today. Felt like I had finally nailed this one. Until the firmware upgrade made DHCP expand to "Doesn't Have Connection, Pal" and DNS represent "Does Nothing, Stupid".

I have never, ever said this before and will never say it again, but I'm thankful I had a Windows XP box with a wired connection because that's the only thing that still was able to get an IP address via DHCP. Googled around for various combinations of "Linksys firmware" and "Mac OS X DHCP", modulo the very tempting bad words, and found the problem: the latest Linksys firmware doesn't seem to like Mac OS X 10.4.8 or higher. Got a pointer to a Linksys ftp site for some downrev firmware, installed it, and everyone was happily emailing their friends, playing games, and watching Dad on YouTube (seriously).

Life was good for about 13 minutes, then the Linksys seized up again. At the least the firmware downgrade was consistently broken. Does Cisco actually test this stuff on non-Windows computers? Because some of us consider the Windows requirement the harshest downgrade of all.