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 in the final throes of getting ready for a 10-day trip Beijing and Seoul, including press meetings, two CTO breakfasts, all hands with the Sun engineering and field teams in Beijing, my staff meeting and perhaps some sight-seeing along the way. I tend to do at least one really long (by my intra-week standards) trip a year, which is about as close as I get to modelling a professional sports team talking about going "on the road" for a "critical swing along the coast."

I'm going to try out some new content and ideas along the way. Sin-Yaw Wang has promised to take me to the "Dogs Don't" dumpling place. I desperately want a t-shirt from the place, to join my "White House Subs" and "Primanti Brothers" gastro-clothing collection, so having Sin-Yaw with me to translate is critical. I also stupidly told SeChang Oh that he can bring it with the hot kimchi (my fault for suggesting that I can tolerate spicy food) but once the food intake is set, the engineering output can follow (very Dilbert-ish, I know).

I'm a huge believer in fate and coincidence, call it cosmic unconsciousness or karma or destiny, but my original plan was to fly out tonight. Unfortunately for anyone coming home from a week of vacation, there are half-day long delays at the local airports due to our first real snowfall.

Growing up in a reform Jewish synagogue, we always had a somewhat tangential relationship to the more traditional Jewish organizations and agencies; our rabbi had a pony tail (in 1970) rather than a long beard. One religious artifact that stuck with me was that each year, we'd give small amounts of money (tzedekah, Hebrew for "righteousness" rather than "charity") to buy "trees for Israel" through the Jewish National Fund. The JNF is dedicated to building out infrastructure and the long-term development of natural resources. It's not a conservation fund; it's about adopting a multiple decade view for a part of the world that has a history measured in millennia.

What got me thinking about the JNF and my grade school pile of tree certificates was a comment made by Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn at the annual nerd dinner that's part of our Analyst Summit. When asked why Virgin felt they'd be able to develop economically viable spaceflight, Whitehorn simply stated that private enterprise almost always outperforms government mandates. As a research or development area becomes more institutionalized, rules and regulations stagnate work. Whitehorn's point was that if you wait for regulation or oversight, work is reduced to meeting the letter of the law, instead of innovating to drive the spirit or intent of its creation. Whitehorn was implicitly dismissing NASA and other government-funded agencies who have "missions" but not economic development goals. Building on materials research and manufacturing interests outside of the Virgin empire, Galactic is going to build a spacecraft and then drive its economics through both supply and demand sides of the equation.

At the Analyst Summit, a number of people asked me about the motivations for Sun's eco-computing initiatives. It's not purely about the environmental aspects -- those are adjunct benefits, like having an old growth forest cultivated from the pocket change of school children. It's about driving real innovation and change in the development of our computing infrastructure, before government regulation establishes rules and boundaries that reduce the problem to an exercise in compliance. If we, as technology producers and consumers, choose to truly innovate in both the supply and demand sides of the computing equation, it means investment in reducing our net demand for power, space and cooling while allowing computing infrastructure to scale. Failure to do so means that rate limiting factors in data center scale -- those stemming from energy and space constraints -- will be the subject of government regulation.

Sun's eco-initiatives are centered on the costs of computing, but they're not limited to the silicon domain. The intersection of space flight and thinking about forests stemmed from a comment made by Dave Douglas in his SAS breakout: When Sun produced its annual report online, and skipped production of the glossy paper version, more than 99 million sheets of paper were conserved. That's the equivalent of 11,000 trees, or a small forest in any locale. Securities regulations dictate that we produce an annual report; innovation in how we deliver it to shareholders, potential investors and government agencies lets us challenge long-term views of the infrastructure required. It's seeing the forest through the regulatory trees.

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.

This week has been a wild one for creative and sometimes content-free financial news reporting. On Tuesday, a full 50 hours before Google announced earnings, Forbes.com ran a news-free piece that opened with the line "The Google gravy train is pulling into the station Thursday." Tuesday's piece recapped previous Wall Street estimates and added zero net news or analysis. Two days later, after Google announced that it snuck in under the expectations wire, the headlines tell a different story. Maybe the gravy train was arriving at Wrongville Station. Isn't there some sort of Pauli exclusion principle for financial reporting that prevents different financial quanta from occupying the same online news site? It's supposed to be news, which means it gets analyzed, interpreted and made more valuable than the raw data.

But here's an even better one: After Yahoo! announced earnings earlier this week, a number of financial analysts reduced their opinions of the stock's potential -- that is, once the bad news was out, they said "Sell!" If you followed their advice, you'd be shaking your head on Friday with Yahoo! Up! 50%! On! Microsoft! Bid! Analysts are supposed to do analysis - build models, make predictions, form opinions and derive a reasonable expectation for those variables controlling the stocks and industries they follow. Some of them do the work, in Mark Cuban's words, but some only replay the information underlying the news. Just because we can (and do) get news more quickly online doesn't mean it should suffer from quality or integrity.

I'm off to the Sun Analyst Summit in the morning, our annual conclave for industry and financial analysts -- folks who in fact do build models and ask hard questions. I usually give our Gartner folks a gentle ribbing since they only give breakfast a 0.9 probability, but that's the spirit of the event: good, open discussion of the market, products and strategies with a high probability of food being involved.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm much more of a hockey and baseball fan than a follower of the prolate spheroid. Four months ago, I went so far as to suggest that the Giants were done and that the Yankees had life. Right city, wrong sports analogies. This is great news for the Big Apple and environs (hey, the Giants play in New Jersey, in our favorite sporting swamp), and will help millions forget about public transit delays, subprime mortgage problems and even the current fate of the more proper spheroid-handling teams on both sides of the Hudson. We're all going to be walking around with goofy grins on our faces for a few days, even though most of us did nothing more than jump around in front of our televisions tonight.

Why?

Because 80,000 fans who tailgate in a parking lot overlooking the New Jersey Turnpike and a never-ending construction site, enduring rain, sleet, and failing escalators, never gave up confidence that the season would improve when it started 0-2 and nearly became 0-3.

Because perfection eventually ends, and when it does, we tend to remember the how and when more than we should. Perfection is one of those "none more black" states; it can't be one-upped, only lessened. A perfect ending is one you don't guess 19 weeks early, and it includes drama, hard work, and competitiveness.

Because this is the first championship won by a New York sports team since 2000 (yes, the Devils won the Stanley Cup in 2003, but I'm being geographically specific: that side of Lincoln Tunnel). When I was being snarky about donuts, I surmised a reversal of fortune for the Yankees, as they were the last to hoist a big pile of metal in victory. Right turn, wrong sport. But I'm not complaining.

No Red Sox-Patriots-Celtics sweep this set of seasons. 2007 is over and done; I'm thinking that the Devils and either Yankees or Mets should join the Giants in celebrating 2008. That would be a perfect ending.