Life happens the way it happens. Seems rather bizarre I haven't blogged in such a long time, but it's time to get back to it. I'm still mucking with QEMU on Solaris, but not much these days as I've been working on extending the open solaris zyd driver (USB 2.0 WIFI). Funny how a $15 device can make you spend weeks of time trying to make a driver work for it, especially when the openbsd folks basically have all the bits. Oh well. it's moving forward. I just wished I'd known what I was getting into when trying to expand a driver whose hardware encompasses something like 70 different vendors, 2 chipsets, and at least 5 known working radios. Other fun stuff has been sticking a USB 2.0 card in the 64-bit, 66Mhz slot of the LX50 I just loaded up with Solaris Express B84 and Ubuntu 7.10 so I can do some performance testing on the zyd driver. Now if I could only get the Radeon 9100 actually displaying in the 66Mhz slot, since Ubuntu saw it in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file.

Was over at a friends house last night and came in to him watching his collection of Penn & Teller's syndicated Showtime series called "BullShip!" (well, that's not quite the title, but work with me here). Actually, the collection is just a temporary loaner from NetFlix, which he makes heavy use of.

Anyway, Penn and Teller have been around for quite a while. My first memories of them were doing magic tricks on television specials, and then they debunk how they did it. I guess that's how they got their start into their Showtime series. Penn Jillette has also done a fair amount of writing, and I'd forgotten where I'd seen it until I had gone further into their website where I realized he had written for PC-Computing magazine for quite a few years. More recently, I was out at the Server Consolidation and Storage Symposium last summer in Las Vegas, and Penn was the special guest speaker near the end of the conference. If there's anyone who is dedicated to making people open their eyes, I don't know who it is, or I haven't heard or seen them. It was a real pleasure to see his monologue in person.

The funniest of the programs we watched last night was on Water. They'd actually setup a water steward at a restaurant and printed up a water list, and were pushing these $3-7 bottles of water and listening to these folks go on about the water. Meanwhile, they keep cutting back to the water steward filling up the P&T created bottles with a garden hose from the patio of the restaurant with a manical smile on his face. At the end, they informed their paying customers that all the different water they had drunk that night had come out of the same garden hose out back. Maybe they ought to do the same with wine and see how some of the wanna-be wine snobs do. I doubt they could trick the real wine experts though.

Me, I drink club soda with lime. I get free refills that way, and mostly what I taste is the lime. But occasionally I will opt for a bottle of Peligrino if someone else is paying. I think I quit buying bottled water in a restaurant when I realized one night that I spent more on bottled water than I did on the $6 desert.

Mr Bill always seems to have the most interesting web tidbits on his blagh. This South Park characature editor is actually the most interesting of the self tests and such. It's not based on some web persona's interpretation of how you answer a bunch of questions, but how you decide to create the character. Now if doing things like manipulating the image to have a transparent background was as easy as creating the South Park character persona... (at least until I found a more pleasing background).

Ben

Somehow I just think I've made a bad decision. I just signed up to put my personal thoughts on the corporate sponsored blarg site, and I am not one to sit back idly and keep quiet. I'm sure a bunch of people who know me would agree. I don't know why I've not bothered up to this point. I've been posting on Usenet and other mailing lists for years, and with things like google, everything I might have ever written is kept someplace. Yeah, that makes me really happy. I think back to all the stupid posts when I thought *I* knew it all, had really bad days [the kind that makes people think you didn't take your medication], or was just being argumentative to the point of flames, and just shake my head. At least after all this time, I've realized the futility in arguing with folks who already have their minds made up, and just try to help those willing to ask for help or at least consider an alternative. For the most part that's worked. I've met a bunch of folks in person, both inside and outside of Sun, from my dealings with mailing lists such as the Yahoo Groups SolarisonX86 list and while it may just have been a lunch with a guy in Dallas in the West End, or a long phone call from someone in Canada whom I'd never talk to before who thought I was having a really bad day, I'm happy to call those folks friends. It makes me realize how very lucky I am, despite the fact that we don't have much interpersonal interaction without influences of a sequence of zeroes and ones.

But since I just did my first ever presentation, at CEC 2005 in San Francisco, I realized I'm now officially published with something more than a stream of consiousness response in a public forum. With a deck of slides I put together by myself with Star Office, and the requisite head-banging having to learn the ins and outs of Star Present, formatting help from some co-workers and a fair amount of reviews from peers, it's official now. Obviously, the CEC selection panel must have thought I had something important to talk about. So here I am, jumping into the deep end of the blarg. Great, now I have to think about what I say and how I say it. Thank goodness for "Save as Draft" At least if I'm not talking technical, I can write without having to go check the list of "do's" and "don'ts" to make sure I haven't violated rules of the blarg. (And wondering if my English professor from WVU would approve of my grammar. I have a tendency to run-on...) Unless I'm talking about something like how things work, what management is doing (which by the way, is one of the great reorg-ing mysteries of the world) or the big list of "do nots", I hope I can stay below the blarg police radar.

But, other engineers in the company are doing it, and it's a fairly innocuous way for other folks who don't troll mailing lists in the company to see what guys like me are dealing with from a corporate, technical or social perspective. Another way to get published. And as I sit and write this stuff, I realize I'm now going to have to learn HTML, something I've been avoiding for at least 10 years. What's a systems guy to do? I didn't get a degree in English, Creative Writing or Desktop Publishing. My degree is in Computer Science. The stuff in my head is all very technical and process driven, and up to this point, I've never really considered how to pretty it up on a web page. Heck, it's not like there's 10,000 other pieces of technology that I need to learn for my job. And this past weekend, even mangement has admitted they don't know what an "Engagement Architect" is supposed to do, which is now my official job title having originally been re-hired as a "Systems Engineer" after being RIF'd as a Cluster Services Methodology Developer. :-(

So will anyone really care what I have to say? Probably not. There's a bunch of stuff going on in my life that won't appear here because it's not really an appropriate forum for it. But folks will care about the technical content, which according to the blog stats, is what seems to tweak the public's interest.

CLB: may as well start early.

So what's the point of $7.6B in cash if the GAAP rules won't let you spend it because it comes off an asset? I'm really getting tired of that story, especially because I've come to realize all it is, is "spin". As far as I'm concerned, it's just a virtual carrot. It doesn't really exist other than to serve up as good press for the employees to hear at corporate meetings to believe that the company will stay afloat. The constant reorging, rifs, travel restrictions and expense reduction policies only serve as a warning sign. Yes, this is a technology business and the market changes very quickly. Hardware is more and more becoming commodity, and the JES software licensing at $100/head only validates the point. So where is Sun going? Services seem to be a very good way to bring in recurring revenue of substantial margin, but the mantra we hear is that "we don't want to become IBM GS". I look at their stock price and I have to wonder. The model of recurring revenue streams in services works really well if you get the long term contracts, even if the going rate is less. Having to do a couple of weeks at a time only incurs the overhead of creating, funding, staffing and implementing a project. The only thing the $7.6B in cash probably does is stave off someone buying Sun for $6B in cash and floating a $7.6B loan for the duration of procedures. In that context, I wonder what the future will really bring.

Enough rantings of another pony-tailed geek. Later!