SunMink

Simon Phipps's other Weblog
(a WebMink in the Sun)

DST Gap Again

Just a reminder to my American friends that the UK ended Daylight Savings on Sunday and so we are back to UTC - that means this week there's just 7 hours difference between California and the UK, for example. If you're expecting a meeting with me and I'm not there, you may wish to call and check we're both expecting the thing to happen at the same time.

Vacationed

The blog went quiet over the last few days and the reason was that I went with my family for a short break in Rome. Very hot, and apart from the huge distances walked very relaxing. We had some fine meals, most notably as guests of Dana and Alex at The Library very near Piazza Navona yet amazingly far away from the crowds and the hawkers. We wholeheartedly recommend the ambiance and, if you mention my blog, Dana will be pleased to bring you a complimentary glass of Prosecco on arrival.

As you'll see from the photos, we covered a lot of ground in a long weekend and I now want to go back for a longer, more relaxed break. One more thing - anyone know the story of the pillars in the picture above? They are opposite the Colosseum on the edge of the Forum. They appear to be translucent and I'm guessing they are part of an art installation.

CIX Outage

Seems there is a hard disk failure at my hosting provider and all my web sites apart from this one have been down for about 10 hours. More news as I get it.

Update, 11am BST: Seems to be back up.

Got to China

I've reached Guangzhou in China ready for the China Open Source World conference tomorrow where the organisers have arranged a stunny line-up of speakers. The journey here was pretty ugly - Lufthansa cancelled my flight, put me on Air France via Paris and then the connection was delayed too, making it touch-and-go right up to midnight. I'll be pretty busy here and in Seoul on Friday for LinuxWorld Korea so my apologies if I'm not very responsive in the busy thread here and on OSNews.

Don't-care

Is it just Apple UK? Or is the quality of Apple service degrading locally?

I have been using a Mac for nearly 5 years now. In that time, I have had cause to call Apple for help only a few times. Each time I have called them for help, they have gone out of their way to keep me going - especially when my old Powerbook failed in November 2005, when the manager of the Valley Fair Apple Store was overwhelmingly helpful and accommodating, way beyond what was required of him. Today, seeking support at a Genius bar in the UK for the first time, I met my first Apple jobsworth and I'm furious.

The problem is that the display is gradually failing on my Powerbook G4. I have Applecare, so I'm entitled to service. But the guy I spoke today took each opportunity presented him to be negative, and ultimately found a way to choose to interpret a clause in the Applecare terms to deny me repair service.

I'll stop there (at least until I am no longer furious). However, I'm wondering whether this is a UK effect or whether it represents a general downward gradient - I have noticed a similar difference in service attitude between, for example, Avis in the US and the UK, so it may just be I should stick to Apple US for service.

Summer in Europe

Quick note to my friends, colleagues and critics in America: Europe has switched to "Daylight Saving Time" (we call it Summer Time here in the UK, so the abbreviation is "BST" for British Summer Time) so we're back on normal time differences again. Please keep on being sensitive to those 8 or 9 hour differences though!

Watch Before You Spring

A bright good morning to all my American friends and colleagues, and welcome to Daylight Saving Time. I am delighted for you that your government has decided to start summer before the equinox and wish you every happiness.

However, those of us over here in Europe would like to remind you that we'll not be starting with summer time until after the equinox. That means we're not the usual 8/9 hours away this week, so all those carefully planned meetings we have worked out now fall in all the wrong places. It's going to be messy, and it's going to be messy for two whole weeks, until March 25th, while we are 7 (to UTC) and 8 (to CET) hours apart.

So, on behalf of all of Europe, I'd like to ask you to look carefully at the calendar and make sure everyone invited to those meetings knows when everyone else is expecting to show up. I expect you'll blame us for all the times we aren't there when you're expecting, but remember, it was you that moved - this is your government saving energy and enhancing Halloween, after all.

[Fixed an impossibly stupid error in my first attempt at this posting! Usually the DST switch happens in Europe first so the 9 hr gap happens in spring and the 7 hr gap in autumn, but with the switch moving 3 weeks in the US it's reversed. Saving the first version for Autumn...]

Mail Truce

In the spirit of Dr Lessig, this is by way of admission that I just archived around 4000 messages from January among which were at least 400 unread. I spent time travelling every week in February and I have just got so hopelessly behind that I'm calling a truce (February mail is still being digested).

If you sent me a message before February 1st and you have still not heard back from me chances are I have just archived it and you should write again if the subject is still important. Apologies if I have left you hanging there, mea culpa.

At SkyCon

Yesterday was spent travelling by car to Limerick in Ireland. You know, it's a very long way. What with two hours on the ferry, it took 14 hours door-to-door. The reason for the trip was to give a keynote at SkyCon, the birthday conference for the University of Limerick Computer Society. I'll be speaking after Val Henson to an audience (including Alan Cox) who have no idea why I am there - I didn't show up in the advance publicity, quite unusual for a keynote! Hope it works out...

Happy New Year!

The new year has already arrived here in the UK. Happy New Year to you! I'm hopeful that 2007 will be a breakthrough year for Free and Open Source software in general, for the great people working to make it real and especially for the communities of which I am a part, including OpenSolaris, OpenOffice.org, OpenSPARC and OpenJDK. My resolution for 2007 is to make things better, one step at a time, throughout Sun's engagement with FOSS.

Happy Christmas!

In a move that seems a rarity for 2006, I am actually at home today with my family in Southampton celebrating Christmas. It's been an amazing year and I am truly thankful of the privilege of being in charge of Sun's Free and Open Source software strategy in the year that both SPARC and the Java platform were liberated. It's left me exhausted so I am not too much fun to be around, but everyone else is bouncing with energy so no-one will notice!

I hope the holiday season proves refreshing and joyful for you! If you feel need for some perspective, Minitaure Earth can provide all you need.

IT Guy on YouTube

Early on at Sun I noticed that there were plenty of people around who liked less-than-serious videos. I just found my favourite to date up on YouTube, along with three others I'd not seen before (of varying funniness), all under the title "The IT Guy". Give these a try:

• Episode 1: "Good Enough" is still Good ... Right? ("Xeon Roasted")
• Episode 2: More Is More ("Ice Station Xeon")
• Episode 3: More Is Never Enough ("Ginormabytes")
• Episode 4: Out Of The Box ("Xeon Sauna")

Seems someone has decided uploads are good - there are a whole load of more serious videos from Sun up there.

Thinking Inside The (Black) Box

"Your new datacentre is here, sir."

I had the chance to prowl around the new Project BlackBox datacentre-in-a-box today in the car park at Sun's offices in Menlo Park, and I must say I'm impressed by it - it's not just a load of gear thrown in a container. Danny Hillis has done a stunning job designing the optimum use of a shipping container as a computing unit.

All you have to do is connect three-phase, networking and chilled water and you have a working, 250-U data centre up and running in just a few minutes. The internal packing density is incredible - by aligning the servers front-to-back in two racks along the sides, water-cooled air is blown through them and that combined with their already low heat dissipation (it's packed with Sun low-energy servers) is enough to keep them happy. The detailing is great - lots of creative thinking on environment, management, contingency (fire, particle contamination, water and shock are all allowed for) and flexible yet efficient space usage.

I can easily imagine this thing providing end-of-year computing to a business, or an emergency datacenter in a disaster or a drop-in facility for a special event. What's more - and I think the point the designers were getting at - it makes the value of utility computing clear. This is unit-compute-power; big unit, yes, but as Nick Carr points out, just the same sort of unit power as was Edison's business in the transition from bespoke electricity to utility electricity.

This was a market that did not know it existed until today. Now it does - the phones have been hot all day and the market is alive. Just think of these pre-loaded with a full stack of open source software, waiting to be switched on on-demand. Seems plenty of people can already imagine that.

More Photos

Startup Camp

You may recall that I recently wrote about attending FOO Camp, the archetypal "unconference" that Tim O'Reilly runs each year to cultivate the community that powers his publishing business. An unconference is a gathering of the sort of people you'd find at a conference doing the sorts of things people at conferences do when they aren't in sessions. I wrote:

Unconferences are less about deconstructing authority and more about expressing the connectedness that comes about when "the network is the computer" express itself when people come together too.

I'm not saying the more structure sessions weren't valuable ... But the world will be changed by the relationships formed at FOO this year, not by the sessions that were presented. That's what good unconferences do - rescue us from content and return us to the power of relationships.

So I'm delighted to say that Sun is supporting an interesting new unconference that's being organised by the people behind Mashup Camp, David Berlind and Doug Gold. It's Startup Camp, and registration is open now. The event will be held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on November 2nd and 3rd 2006. I hope I'll be able to find a way to be there, not least becuase I want an open source startup to win the Best Startup Contest. And yes, Robert, you are welcome at this one!

Unconferences and the Return of the Relationship

I've been meaning to write about FOO Camp for a while now, but life has just been a blur from about 5 days before it until, well, the end of next week actually! I was fortunate enough to be invited by Tim O'Reilly to attend his three day garden party along with about 300 other people. It was a totally different experience to the EuroFOO I had attended before. At EuroFOO, all the attendees were in hotels or student dorms, and the weather was cold and wet, meaning we all met only for meals and sessions. US FOO, on the other hand, was an all-camping affair (well, a few weaker souls sloped off to hotels), with everyone on-site all weekend.

The result was much more of a house-party atmosphere, with the chance to drink and play with others all the time. This is actually the aspect that makes it such a rich experience. People tend to focus on the idea of lectures and such, but really FOO is all about mixing socially with the brilliant, the famous, the rich, the promising and the werewolves (sometimes with more than one label applying to the same person!).

While there's some of that at other unconference events, the relaxed and social atmosphere that FOO achieves over three days is what makes all the difference. I went to some excellent sessions, but the real highlights were the people I sat and ate and drank with (yes, one or two even to excess) until four in the morning each night, learning about each other. I'm still recovering from the physical impact, but I really appreciated the opportunity to meet people like Stewart Butterfield who I'd previously only written about.

It was clear from his closing session that Tim understands this. His skill in inviting a blend of key people is essential. Yes, an unconference style allows everyone to bring their own sessions and present them, but it's much more important to leave room for people to meet and become friends because out of those sorts of relationships, innovation flows. Unconferences are less about deconstructing authority and more about expressing the connectedness that comes about when the network is the computer express itself when people come together too. Check out Imran's list and you'll see it's all about people, not content.

I'm not saying the more structure sessions weren't valuable - I really enjoyed discussing the meaning of meaning, and it was a pleasure to discover the session on "Open Data" that Stewart and I planned still happened even though we both forgot to turn up for it! But the world will be changed by the relationships formed at FOO this year, not by the sessions that were presented. That's what good unconferences do - rescue us from content and return us to the power of relationships.