Spin on Cue

Earth Day: The Day After

2009-04-26T22:14:00.000-07:00

"We're not dropping out... we're infiltraing and taking over."

So the weekend has passed and news of Earth Day has quickly died off. No new press releases, fewer bicyclists on the road, and the general rabble from pseudo-environmentalists claiming everyone can save the earth by driving a hybrid resumes in the blogosphere.

Yawn.

Let me just come out and say it: All the hoopla answering "What can I do?" with "ride a bike" and "plant a tree" is absolute useless drivel. The correct answer is: "Go out and get a degree in engineering, math, or science."

Bear with me for a moment... The last time I went to India was 17 years ago in 1992. In two weeks we hit four cities: Mumbai (Bombay), Ahmedabad, Rajkot, and Bhavnagar. In all four cities, pollution was becoming a real problem. Cars, trucks, motorcycles, scooters, and rickshaws filled the road burning everything from diesel to kerosene. Amongst the very poor, the question wasn't whether it was the right fuel as much as it was whether the fuel was cheap enough. The resulting layer of hydrocarbons was imposing. I used to joke as a kid living in Southern California "you can't trust air you can't see." Forget being able to see the air... I felt like I had to carve my way through the pollution.

Everyone wanted cleaner air in India, but the reality was that legislation wasn't going to fix the problem. What were they going to do? Fine someone that can barely earn enough to eat? The reality was that there was a significant population that were constrained not by their desire to act and improve their living situation, but by the economics of it. Until doing the right thing either cost the same or less than their current options, getting a sufficiently significant change that would make a marked impact on the environment simply wasn't going to happen.

The answer was in Compressed Natural Gas (CNG). (Nice summary on CNG here.) In 1998, the Indian national government forced the city of Dehli to move their entire rickshaw fleet to CNG based on the availability and cost of the fuel. With an entire fleet moved over, the cost would come to a point that would make burning anything else pointless. The initial pilot, after some hiccups along the way, was eventually successful and the entire country and been making the plunge one city at a time.

The impact was significant. It was the difference between people needing to wear masks to walk outside and feeling like they could step outside and want to take a deep breath.

Now here is the key: The impact was not achieved by (forgive me my peace loving Bay Area friends) crystal gripping hippie freaks advocating unattainable livestyle changes. The answer was achieved by environmental sciencists disecting the problem (some of whom I had the privledge of working with), chemists and materials scientists figuring out the fuel and its container, automotive engineers figuring out how to burn it in cheap/hacked/modified engines, and so on. You get my drift.

There are an endless series of similar projects that need to be done. After all, there is a worldwide economy that needs to be rebuilt around sutainable engineering. And to make that happen we need more graduates in math, science, and engineering.

So the next time someone asks "What can I do to help?" Don't advocate dropping out of consumerism -- a change that simply won't take hold across a sufficiently significant enough number of people to matter. Instead, advocate infiltrating and taking over the way we build and consume. It's only when we make changes at the root causes do we succeed at making an impact.

MySQL's best days are yet to come

2009-04-21T16:59:00.000-07:00

Just because I'm running a fever and it feels like slightly under a billion degrees outside doesn't mean I'm losing my mind. I really do think MySQL has a lot more good than bad coming in its future with Oracle at the helm.

The difference between Sun and Oracle is that while Sun did grok Open Source (mostly), MySQL was never a particularly good strategic fit for them. One of the great values of MySQL is that it's very easy to get started with and runs well on a moderately powered x86 box -- you don't need to buy Sun gear running Solaris and ZFS to do that. Thus the synergies that Sun hoped for never emerged. Instead, the heavy handed approach to software management and release necessary for extremely large projects like Solaris and Java was applied to a moderately sized project (by comparison) and the results were not good. Developers coming from the startup environment and transparent development cycle slowly moved on and the project started languishing with the poor acceptance of 5.1 highlighting this failure.

Oracle, by comparison, does get value for MySQL.

Oracle has never been known for low end products. They do big enterprise databases and big enterprise applications. Their idea of a small CRM deployment easily runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. For a long time, there was simply a void at the low end that was never filled by upwardly mobile software.

That is, until Microsoft Access joined hands with Microsoft SQL server and sang happy songs of tight integration. If you're doing a small Microsoft application, using Access and MSDE is a quick way to do it with great links to the entire Office Suite. Now your upward migration as the application grows is clear: SQL Server. The other players don't have a real chance. (Yes, yes... Access does ODBC with connectors to Oracle, MySQL, and others, but come on... let's be realistic here...) And the cost of entry to this game? $175 on Amazon for a single user license, no additional discounts. If you're even a moderately large company, you probably already got it as part of a site-wide license.

Meanwhile, Oracle priced itself out of the low end and essentially gave the .com boom to MySQL which has bitten them ever since. What started as a small, simple, database has grown considerably with large noteworthy installments in the ecommerce space. This is showing the enterprise that MySQL can scale to support large, complex applications at a fraction of the cost. As a result, Oracle has been getting the bottom end of its market threatened by MySQL. Between clouds, SaaS, and an increasing number of applications that leverage MySQL, the market impact is starting to creep into Oracle's home turf.

While the bulk of Sun's value to Oracle comes from Sun's hardware, operating system, and Java holdings, I doubt that the ownership of MySQL is lost on them. Whereas MySQL lacked solid direction in Sun, Oracle will likely lay out clear vision and weave a compelling story that will put Microsoft and IBM on edge. MySQL will not be a second class citizen because it will evolve into Oracle's entry market with a compelling transition path to the enterprise class stuff that Oracle already sells. The good news for MySQL is that there is a lot of headroom for growth and improvement in this model since Oracle's current products start near the stratosphere and go up.

MySQL's best days are yet to come.

Polish

2008-04-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

I posted a small entry on polish over at BitCurrent. http://www.bitcurrent.com/?p=61.

Out with Norton Antivirus.

2007-10-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

Time for another example of "It takes ten atta-boys to get rid of one awww-sh*t," for us product types...

Usability is something that I take to heart and for a very long time, Norton related products generally got a nod from me. I especially recommended Norton security products (anti-virus, personal firewall, etc.) to friends and family since it did a good job with protecting their machines while being easy to use. The latter was especially crucial for family that would otherwise call me for help.

Over the last few years I've progressively seen the Norton family of security products get bulkier, slower, and increasingly tedious to use. Most recently I purchased and installed Norton Internet Security 2006 and used it for 10 months. This took the cake for miserable.

The most visible problem was performance. It was excruciatingly slow and made boot/wakeup times downright pathetic. My Pentium III-1Ghz which also runs Windows XP-SP2 was more responsive than my Centrino-Duo-2Ghz laptop! My grumble slowly turned into a roar - unless the new version that I planned to test drive was significantly better, it was the end of the road for Norton. But even with performance being sluggish for me, I hadn't completely changed my mind about my family yet. Did they feel the same pain?

Turns out they did. Both my sister and my dad who have relatively modern machines with ample memory and similar Windows XP configurations complained about the performance of their machines. I initially wrote it off as yet another application they installed, but after checking their machines over I realized that they were feeling the same pain around Norton that I was. Slow boot times and slow scan times topped the list. My dad felt the Outlook-integration pain that I felt as well. Basically, any application that had Norton integrated with it would slow to a crawl when trying to startup.

But isn't performance orthogonal to ease of use? No. It isn't. Work with anyone dealing with a slow application (whatever platform it happens to be) and the frustration they feel with a slow application is very similar to that of the frustration with a difficult to use application. The only way to make the situation worse is to make the application unreliable.

Norton, thankfully, wasn't unreliable. With exception of a bad drivers or bad hardware, I haven't had a crashing problem with Windows for years. (Literally, since I started using Windows 2000.) There are times when Windows get cranky, but no lost data unless the error was self inflicted.

As for the user interface itself, I qualified it as humdrum. If you left the default settings on, you were fine. If you needed to alter any of the settings, you quickly found yourself in a somewhat complex set of menus which required that I paid close attention. Obviously, the menus were nowhere near acceptable for my family of users.

So with 10 months of usage under my belt, it was time to take a look at the upcoming 2008 release and give it a shot. If they fixed the performance problems, I'd do the upgrade. As if the software was reading my mind, it popped up a little dialog box warning me that I was down to 60 days on my virus definition updates license. This is good -- it's one of the features that I like since it reminds me well in advance rather than surprising me when it runs out. Good for the family too. Even better? There was an offer to try Norton Internet Security 2008 for the remainder of my current license for free! Perfect -- a 60 day trial would be plenty long enough to really give it a test drive. I even mentioned to the Smarter Half that offering the upgrade as part of the remainder of my license was a great idea and made me optimistic.

Unfortunately, I went from optimistic to stunned in about 15 minutes. The upgrade went smooth enough, but ended with a note saying that the software wasn't licensed and I needed to cough up $50 for the upgrade -- immediately. I poked around for the UI element that allowed me to use my old license and for any mention on the web site about how to enable my old license. No luck.

So without fanfare, Norton Internet Security 2008 was removed. With license renewal coming up for my dad as well, I'll be telling him to skip renewal as well. The bait and switch move was out of line and I neither have the time nor energy to fight Symantec on the issue. I'm sufficiently annoyed that I've ceased recommending their products as well.

At casual glance, this may seem like an over the top tantrum. I was headed for paying the upgrade shortly anyway after all. But its a little more detailed than that:

1. The product has become incredibly heavy and slow. Since having removed the product, my laptop literally feels like it was been reborn. Everything responds much faster and sleep/hibernate recovery times are much faster.

2. The product security coverage is getting increasingly segmented. Symantec appears to have a different product for each kind of coverage (malware, spyware, rootkits, viruses, etc.) and each requires a different product. The product integration is tedious and keeping track of what products do what is not worth the effort anymore. How is the casual user supposed to keep up with this mess?

3. Symantec marketing has been tedious for a while, but the glitch in upgrade is inexcusable. Whether it was intentional or a bug is moot - I don't care and have no interest in fighting the matter. If I wanted to battle with my software, I'd run FreeBSD and compile everything by hand.

So if you're keeping score, Symantec is going to have to come up with some significant atta-boys to recover from this aww-sh*t. It's also a good reminder for us product types - these details matter. When there are competitors in the field and the core value isn't highly differentiated, the polish and performance matters. For anti-virus, the core value isn't different from any other anti-virus product out there so the differences fall immediately onto the soft touches.

I'm evaluating other anti-virus products now. Kaspersky is on the top of list and is currently installed. So far so good. Polished, lightweight, some nice features. A little more expensive, but for an extra $10, I'll keep my system performing well thank you. Look for a review/decision soon.

Marketing Must Reads

2007-09-26T08:12:00.000-07:00

One of my more interesting strengths centers around being a geek. I still get excited about nuanced technical things like operating systems, compilers, and algorithms for the same reason I get worked up about Alan Greenspan has to say: there be potential in those words. Being fluent in the lingua franca of technology and product marketing means I tend to meet interesting people with interesting technology that are baffled why "nobody gets it". Thus my opportunity: translate geek to marketing, marketing to geek, strategize, and drive execution.

Somewhere along the way, I find myself talking to a frustrated geek. We've translated his work into English which is essentially saying we've gone from logical to logical. However, translating the nuances of marketing isn't so easy because it isn't based on logic; rather marketing is based on the expected responses of humans and humans aren't always logical.

The essence of my conversation with the frustrated geek revolves around "Give me an algorithm! Give me a table! Please - wrap this stuff up in a pretty layer of logic for me to digest!" Unfortunately, it isn't that easy and I end up giving two pieces of homework: read Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind and Made to Stick. While Positioning can be a bit nauseating at times, Made to Stick offers that touch of cynicism that makes them credible. Made to Stick is also written by two mildly geeky guys which makes their use of language comfortable to the geeky reader. E.g., Gregorian vs. Julian calendars in date/time functions come up in chapter two.

Of course neither achieve the goal of wrapping logic around human response, but they both provide critical elements to understanding where we're headed and a lot of common stories for us to reference as needed. Both also give a series of concrete grips on an otherwise squishy topic.

After geeks have read both books, conversations on critical points that involve them almost always become more productive. Words like "simplicity" start to resonate much better and they don't get nearly as frustrated about the fact their buyer neither knows nor cares why most things work.

If you're dealing with a geek of your own or you are a geek looking to better understand the apparent lunacy of marketing, both books are recommended reading.

Random Aside: Burning Man

2007-08-26T20:29:00.001-07:00

I'm usually not a follower of ValleyWag, but sometimes you gotta appreciate the gems they post... Like this one:

"We've said it before, and we'll say it again: The only green Burner is a dead Burner. This year's Burning Man arts festival in the Nevada desert has an environmental theme. But an environmental analysis has shown that more than 90 percent of the carbon dioxide spewed by Burning Man participants comes merely in getting to and from Black Rock City, the festival's temporary site. So by all means, pack up your RVs, buy that planet-destroying bottled water, and run your stereos and air conditioning all week off of diesel generators as you celebrate the greening of Burning Man. Go ahead, claim that you're raising "awareness" -- at the same time that you're raising the planet's temperature. You're not fooling anyone -- least of all Mother Nature."

Virtual Machines vs. Bigger SMP

2007-08-26T13:42:00.000-07:00

Okay, I admit it. SMP is cool. More processors in the machine makes coolness rise exponentially, not just additively.

So why don't we have a bunch of big SMP machine running the enterprise? Well, actually, we do. While 90% of the servers are at most 2-way x86 machines, they only represent about 50% of the server revenue as of Q4, 2006. The other 50% of the revenue comes from big SMP beasts that cost quite a bit more but represent far fewer machines. So big SMP is not only there, but it is quite alive and kicking.

Why is it though, that we have come to the point where the ratio of physical machines is 9:1 in favor of small servers?

Ahhh... here is where a little IT experience goes a long way. :-)

IT, like any organization, has all of the pros and cons of being run by humans. One of the cons is that humans, for the most part, prefer small succinct solutions to point problems. This makes the problem easier to comprehend and it makes the solution more malleable. A server dedicated to DNS for instance is easy to digest. I know exactly what expertise I need to run the server and the interaction between the environment and the application (DNS) is clear and well defined. There aren't other applications creating complexity. It is this same logic that has created the market for network appliances - one application with one hardware/OS combination with one owner that understands the whole system inside out. Thus, there is only one finger necessary when things go amok and that finger cannot be passed along to others.

Big integrated "God boxes" by comparison are a bit of an uphill climb. They require that the administrator truly grok all of the elements and their interactions. The adoption of a God box happens in one of three situations: (1) The interaction between the elements is so complex that it is clear to the administrator he will never comprehend it and thus an integrated solution with one vendor is preferred, (2) The interaction between the elements so well understood that the benefits of a highly integrated solution can be seen, or (3) There is a cost benefit that is so astounding that the administrator would be foolish to overlook it.

Integrated fax/printer/scanners are an example of this - the elements and their interactions are well understood and there is a significant cost benefit to using it. This makes an administrator overlook the risk of losing all three functions if one of them should go bad. Integrated networking systems are in a similar boat where there is a combination of cost benefit as well as simplification of an otherwise intensely complex system. By abstracting the complexity to within one system, there is now one vendor to point at.

In the world of systems administration, such integrations from vendors never really emerged. A support contract with Sun for instance guarantees that they'll replace/fix hardware and provide software bug fixes, but configuration hiccups are my own problem. If I choose to run many services on a server at once with a complex interaction, I'm responsible for their configuration and management.

In the early 90s, with no appliance vendors to speak of, the solution to derisking complex configurations in Unix servers was simple - buy a few small servers instead of one large one. Each small server could then provide a single function thus reducing complexity. If there is a problem with the software, there is no question regarding configurations interacting poorly with other applications. The rise of x86 based servers running Linux and Windows drove the transition home. Today, only those applications which mandate large SMP systems get them.

With servers doing fewer things and servers getting more powerful, the market for virtualization was created. We want to keep the compartmentalization of the application but gain the benefit of running multiple applications on a single CPU. As a result, the non-SMP to SMP ratio is likely to remain high and possibly get higher.

So amongst the SMP crowd, is there opportunity to eat into that market? Possibly... There are two approaches to further removing the need of large SMP systems: (1) SOA-ification of applications, and (2) Creating virtual SMP clusters with commodity x86 hardware.

Let's start with item 2 first. Historically, creating virtual SMP machines has been a tough sell. The technology has been around since the early 80s in the form of MOSIX. Efforts around distributed shared memory in the early 90s furthered the process. Unfortunately, these efforts largely stayed with the academics. That is until Qlusters came around in the early 2000s. Part of the team that started OpenMOSIX created a company around their effort so that they could sell a commercially supported implementation of MOSIX. Early adopters were in the HPC crowd that needed the massive scalability x86 clusters but didn't want to have to adopt their applications to use clustering software like MPI or PVM. With MOSIX, they just wrote their program as if they had infinite processor and memory space - a much easier proposition, especially for people that weren't programmers by nature. (e.g., scientists, mathematicians, etc.) However, none of these projects ever really took off in the enterprise. This is most likely due to the fact that large ISVs never supported the configurations.

Another issue with virtual SMP clusters is that of host to host latency. If you have an application that needs to do a lot of random memory accesses, getting memory from another host becomes a very expensive part of the equation. Low latency fabrics like LLE and Infiniband help with this, but add significantly to the cost of the overall solution.

Item 1 by comparison is gaining serious momentum, especially with the ISVs. I've written about this before -- the use of SOA is partially the creation of Microsoft with their push on the .Net side as well as the overall industry making a move to XML for everything. The great thing about SOA is that is compartmentalizes things in a way that classic system administrators like - one server doing one thing really well.

Which wins in the end? Well SOA is without a doubt going to be a big part of the solution, but I'm not ready to write off virtual SMP yet. I think there are some startups doing some neat work here and there is the VMware card as well as they are well poised to extend their virtual SMP model across multiple physical hosts.

Let the games continue...

Social bookmarking in business

2007-08-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

I've been using del.icio.us for a few weeks now and I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised. Social bookmarking is a far more efficient way to pass around links to associates, friends, family, etc. than popping open another email since the links can be pulled off the web site or taken from an RSS feed. Especially nice is the fact that readers can pull feeds by tag. For example, if I tag a link as "Sangeet" (meaning that the link is for my niece), my sister simply goes to http://del.icio.us/djsteveoid/sangeet. Now my sister has the link bookmarked and she can skip all of the other links that are unlikely to interest her.

Unless of course she is interested in a pragmatic QoS solution for wireless mesh networks.

Hint: she isn't.

But a business associate I'm working with is. He has to make a significant business decision and needed to understand some details around wireless mesh networks in order to make that decision.

This started me thinking about social bookmarkings' use within business. We pass links around every day to coworkers and associates. We pass around useful things like articles related to our business. Occasionally we even pass around slightly less serious stuff like how math nerds have solved checkers. But each time we pass something around, we add to the email noise pollution. Even worse, readers on their Blackberry and Treos are unlikely to follow through on links - even if the links are relevant and important. Bottom line: if the reader can't click on a link and immediately browse there on their desktop machine, they are unlikely to follow through. Plain and simple.

With the use of RSS feeds growing amongst the ranks of business users, the ability to plug my del.icio.us links into someone's RSS reader means they are seeing the links when its convenient to them - not when they're hopping cell stations on a fast moving train that dives into and out of tunnels on a moment's notice. It's easier to get back to. It's easier to be reminded of the next time they pull up their news reader/bookmarks. It's easier because the link is no longer competing with 200 other incoming emails that arrived the same day. It's easier because by subscribing to the feed, they're implicitly saying that they care about those links because they control who they have to subscribe to and who they don't. Something they can't do with email.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding. This is a change in how people work and I don't expect it to take off immediately. The fundamental step is accepting the use of RSS feeds - something that, ironically, the business side of technology companies have been slow to adopt. However, the notion of feeds are here to stay. Heck, some folks are even using it to deal with... *gasp* email overload.

I'll be trying it with some of my cohorts... stay tuned...

(if you subscribe to my blog's RSS feed that is...)

The Upper Right Corner

2007-07-28T20:57:00.000-07:00

While chatting with a friend in the business, the topic of graphs in marketing data came up. I put my "unix sysadmin cynic marketing and sales are all evil" hat on and belted out this snarky comment:

"You always go with the guys in the upper right corner."

"What does the upper right corner mean?"

"Who knows. But when has the upper right corner steered you wrong?"

The discussion sparked the memory of the first graph I made as a marketing guy. Technically, my position was titled "Director of Product Performance and Benchmarking" - but it was really just technical marketing without the marketing name. Being a fresh engineering convert, I was still a little unclear on my role and the expected material I was supposed to produce so I did what I always did: wing it.

The first order I got was to get accurate performance numbers on the product. So after getting a lab setup, I proceeded to run a performance test - the first one done outside of engineering's auspices. The data I collected was requests/second vs. object size. In other words, how many times could I ask for a file of a given size per second. The data was great! The product screamed at 20,000 requests/sec for 1k files. As expected, the number of requests/sec that could be made went down as the file sizes grew. The result was a graph that sloped from the top left to the bottom right.

Proud of my first round of data, I wrote it up and sent it to a few sales guys. Chaos promptly ensued.

"I can't sell this!"

"When is it going to be fixed?"

"Is this in all shipping versions?"

One of the sales guys that I had a better relationship with swung by my office and asked for details. I tried to explain it to him - the graph was a good thing! He countered, "Look, I really don't get what you just said. All I know is that performance is going down and I can't sell this."

The conversation was a real eye opener.

With the cc-list growing exponentially and a small posse with fire laden torches looking for who was at fault for this catastrophe, I scrambled to find a solution. I couldn't articulate why at the moment, all I knew was that I had to make the same data go up. Up is good. Up is always good...

While conjuring spirits of graphs past, I found inspiration in the configuring panel of the testing tool - clients. How many clients are needed to generate how much load? It was a problem we struggled with in getting the lab setup with enough machines together to generate enough load in the first place. With more clients, there was more load. More load was a higher number. More load was a graph that went up.

Taking the data and reformatting it as requests/sec vs. clients, I graphed pure happiness. A line that went from the lower left to the upper right -- a line that went up. Up, after all, is goodness. A cut, paste, and resend later, peace returned on the email trail. Torches were extinguished. The posse dispersed. Ever since then, I've fixed countless graphs to make sure they go up.

Up, after all, is good.

Who is MY David Pogue?

2007-07-15T12:06:00.000-07:00

The networking world's press is in some serious turmoil these days. No terrible surprise here - it's been something that has been in the works for quite some time now. Any observant reader has probably noticed that some long time names have outright left the industry. Niche markets are especially struggling with very little in the way of print. The future is clearly going to be defined by web driven content.

So who is our new David Pogue of networking?

It's actually quite ironic that the networking industry itself has been so slow to establish online personalities and create a hierarchy of sorts. There has simply been no real set of people who are setting the tone leaving it to be a free for all. Of course, I'm sure it's a matter of time before a new set of people emerge, but the fact that we aren't already there no speaks volumes.

Application Streaming on Linux

2007-07-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

On the weekend before July 4th, I wanted to needed to install a Perl module so I could play with RSS feeds - just a little "left brain" side project. Other programs that parse RSS feeds would use the same module. Over the next several days, I unraveled some ugly details...

- Because FOSS developers only test on their own machines, they make some grand assumptions about what the base system has and thus don't list out *all* of their dependencies, just the ones that they noticed. These assumptions are often wrong on other distributions or slightly older distributions.

- The step from large FOSS projects like Apache to the next rung down is a doozy. They have a significant number of dependencies including numerous small projects. These small projects are not nearly as well tested, thus while the top line project may work well enough, the dependencies are a crap shoot.

- It's not hard to hit an "artery of dependencies". If one library/module/app depends on a major package being updated, it's possible to end up with a slew of large system level upgrades. E.g., Updating perl requires a new version of FreeType which breaks older versions of ImageMagick (depended on by countless web apps). New versions of ImageMagick needs a specific feature of the latest X-Windows which needs updated text processing tools to build its documentation files. The updated docs text processing tools need an updated version of gcc/g++ and XML libraries. The XML libraries need a newer version of libtools, etc. In short, it takes "DLL Hell" to a whole new level.

- While this specific experience was on FreeBSD 4.9, the issues clearly apply to anything where a new distro comes out and not everyone upgrades. Friends who use Linux as a desktop confirmed that they regularly run into these things. While they don't get grumpy about a lost hour hitting the apt-get utility, I believe that the same task thrown to an enterprise IT administrator would be a frustrating day+ ordeal. Take one of the many CMS implementations available that are largely written in either Perl or PHP. New version of the CMS which fixes a critical bug? You may find that it needs a new module to go with it.... Rinse and Repeat.

On the Microsoft side of the world, application streaming is coming of age. Microsoft's acquisition of Softricity and Citrix's Presentation Server 4.5 are the leading contenders with a number of similar plays from startups like AppStream and Ardence. The market is completely open for Linux. Right now, virtual machines are being used in a similar way, but it will not be long before IT administrators realize that they don't want a virtual machine on a per-application basis, especially if they need two applications on the same machine to work with one another.

Does Green IT Really Impact Bottom Line Green?

2007-07-07T21:52:00.000-07:00

Articles like this one from BusinessWeek are abound. Big dollars are to be saved by by going green in the datacenter and every company's operations group should be taking a careful look at their own usage.

I'm generally suspicious of this kind of math because I've used it myself. Nice, careful selection of numbers and wham-o... big dollar savings that are hard to ignore. Wes Wasson referred to these kinds of numbers as a "BHAC" - Big Hairy Audacious Claim. The irony, he once noted, was that the more extravagant they get, the less they get questioned. To his credit, Wes stuck to numbers he could back up but being a good marketeer, he was quick to identify gems when he saw them.

I did some recent work with respect to power savings in networking and I have to say that a lot of the claims aren't nearly as outrageous as they initially sound. In one particular analysis, I calculated that saving 6W of power per blade in a fully populated 49U rack (the tallest rack that APC makes) across a 10,000 sq. ft. datacenter full of 7Ux16 blade servers in San Francisco saved $750k/yr in power and cooling costs assuming 35% rack density. Granted, it's unlikely a 10,000 sq. ft. datacenter is only going to house blade servers and nothing else, but given that the typical rack can consume upwards of 20-30kW, the fact that shredding 672W per rack (2.24% of a 30kW rack) can generate such a significant savings surprised even me.

Now consider that most datacenters are 20-30k sq. ft. and many new datacenters are 100k sq. ft. and you can start getting a sense of what kind of impact a mere 5% power savings can have on the bottom line.

Book Report Catchup

2007-07-01T10:12:00.000-07:00

While I haven't posted a book report in a while, I've still been reading. Chalk it up to other work keeping me busy... :-) So here goes an abbreviated report of a few books I've finished as of late...

The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau

Here's an oldie (1980) that I heard recommended numerous times over a few years so I thought I'd give it a shake. Joel's attempted premise is that North America is really broken up into nine small nations, each with its own -isms and a clear divide between them. These clear divisions define their culture, economy, and local government in very distinct ways.

Okay, interesting premise. However, Joel then proceeds to ramble for a few hundred pages using isolated anecdotes to prove his point. Cute, but lacking any kind of analysis it's really a travelogue. Nothing wrong with doing a travelogue, but if I wanted a travelogue I would have explicitly gone and found one. After about 2/3rds of the book, I stopped and let it go.

To Joel's credit, his division of North America is (in my opinion) an accurate observation and one worth exploring. Even 25 years later, I believe that the divisions are still there and the lines would not be adjusted.

Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

This is technically a preliminary book report since I'm only about 3/4ths done, however given that I've been slogging through this book for about two years now I figured it was time to make some mention of it.

Andrew Hodges writes an extremely detailed biography of the late, great, Alan Turing. For those of you not familiar with Alan, he is considered the true father of the modern programmable computer. (Wikipedia: Alan Turing) His mathematical insight was revolutionary at the time and led to extraordinary work by the likes of John von Neumann. Alan was also the key to breaking the Enigma which became the crucial turning point for the Allies in World War II. Countless lives were saved by this single breakthrough.

I haven't gotten to the point where Alan being gay creates the social pressure leading to him taking his own life. As interesting as his life should be, Andrew Hodges' writing style has a density that makes it a much more tiresome read than I expected. As a result, I'm left to picking up the book every once in a while only to put it back down after 20-30 pages. I hope to actually finish the book by 2010.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath

I skim through a lot of marketing/business books. The reason is that most of them suck. I mean, really, truly, suck. Unless I'm pressured into reading something because it's "the latest thing" and I want to understand it better, I generally skip most books that come my way. Made to Stick not only passed the "this doesn't suck test", it's something that I recommend for everyone to read.

The book's premise is that making a message stick is formulaic. In reviewing countless sticky stores from urban legands to advertising programs to successful teachers, they bring their message down to six elements: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories. What makes the book itself sticky is that the authors don't make themselves out to be creative geniuses. In fact, the point out in numerous cases that it's the lack of creativity that often makes for the most sticky material. They go on to highlight an impressive number of well recognizable stories and advertising campaigns and reverse engineer them to see what made them work and categorize their elements.

The authors themselves apply their formula to the choice of stories they use for making their point. This of course makes their own stories and results equally sticky. In dissecting approaches I've used in the past, I can see where my better wins fell into these categories whereas others either missed the point, were too complex, or lacked a crucial element. At the same time, I'm working on applying the techniques to my own work and have seen pieces where it works. It's not a perfect game yet, but I've walked away feeling much more focused about my approach as a result.

All said and done, a big thumbs up. Highly recommended.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte

Over the last few years, I've become increasingly aware of how information is presented in addition to the information itself. A recent project where I started aggregating a lot of market data into a single powerpoint for reference was especially eye opening in terms of how some charts and graphs shout out exactly what they wanted to show and others left me puzzled. At the same time, I started following the Visual Complexity and Information Aesthetics blogs both of which really highlighted how powerful charts can be. A quick search around and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information was clearly the grand daddy of The Books to get.

This book rocks.

Published in 1983 before the age of PowerPoint fiascos but after the introduction of computer graphics, Tufte manages to assemble a timeless book that not only shows what excellent charts should look like, but also what horrible ones do look like. He especially takes to task "graphical truth" in publishing with an especially evil eye towards magazines and newspapers that create misleading charts to sway public opinion. Some charts leave him sufficiently annoyed that he even prints corrected versions which would have a drastic impact on how the story is interpreted by the casual reader.

Ironically, there is much to learn for how to create manipulative graphics as there is in how to create clear, correct graphics with significant depth. Tufte of course wasn't trying to show how to be evil, but enough years in marketing and everything gets put through that jaundiced lens.

Edward has numerous other books as well, including an updated second edition. I of course plan to look into a few of those. He strikes a good balance between prose, examples, and making his point.

For anyone that needs to create graphs, this is the grand daddy of charting books and should be required reading.

Last but not least...

McGraw-Hill/Osborne asked me to write the fifth edition of Linux Administration: A Beginners Guide. Unfortunately, I'm no longer the right guy to be writing this book. While I can still do many of the day to day tasks of a Unix administrator, I've become too distant from the day to day experience to be a lead author on something like this. Wale Soyinka, my co-author in the fourth edition has agreed to write the whole thing for which I'm grateful. The book is still close to my heart and giving it up was a tough choice. However, I trust Wale to do an excellent job and maintain the quality. Look for the first printing sometime in early/mid 2008.

Let the Apple Hacking Begin

2007-06-13T09:02:00.000-07:00

I'm an old-school fan-boy of Apple's. I could (can, probably) tell you all about how a 6502 at 1Mhz is just as fast as a 4.77Mhz 8088. I can tell you about how your PC clone will melt down in the face of a IIgs' graphical superiority. I can still tell you that poke 44033,x (4<=x<=17) will change the catalog track of an Apple DOS 3.3 floppy. Hell, I still excited by little things like a 6502 Assembler in JavaScript.

Although I still occasionally forget that Wednesday is trash day.

Earlier this week, Apple released their Safari web browser for Windows. Their intent, of course, is to pick up some market share in the larger browser battles so that web developers start including Safari in their browser support matrices. As it stands, the lack of support has made even my Apple devotee wife switch over to Firefox on her Mac.

Her opinion on the switch? "Can [Apple] make it not suck on the Mac first?"

Personally, I'm ambivalent towards the whole thing. I use Firefox because it had tabs first and now I'm used to it. I've tried IE 7 and on the surface it doesn't appear to be terribly different than Firefox. In the end, I just want something that works. (Before the Linux Kids speak up, let it be known that I'm familiar with the topic.)

The Safari bit, however, has given me something to chuckle over. Steve Jobs was pleased to announce how Safari 3 would create a secure platform for development on the iPhone. Given Apple's track record on security, the claim was an invitation to the security community and boy have they had fun. Two 0day announcements on Safari 3 in the last 36 hours alone, and they aren't going to be the last. The community as a whole has especially been amused by the fact that the bugs are rooted in basic functionality that should have long been dealt with on the Mac version.

Can Apple fix it and make significant inroads? That remains to be seen. I believe that they need to make some cultural changes first, especially in the area of security. Namely, they need to establish a working policy for how to deal with the community and drop their aggressive stance. If Microsoft can make friends with the security community, Apple can too.

In addition to security issues, Apple is going to have to succumb to The Windows Way on some aspects of the user interface such as fonts. Windows users are used to a certain way of doing things and for them to adopt a new browser means you need to make the transition feel like they are going to something they are already familiar with.

In the end, these are not small cultural changes to overcome, but Apple has the history showing that it can make these kinds of changes can happen. In the meantime, I'm just hoping that they don't bundle Safari with iTunes. iTunes is painful enough and I really don't want another browser on my system.

Random Aside: Graphing Friends

2007-06-01T12:31:00.000-07:00

An interesting use of graphs to enable conversation at a wedding. Kind of a codified one line introduction for everyone and to answer the common question: how do you know the happy couple?

Scaling big web sites

2007-05-31T21:20:00.000-07:00

Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease blog contains a nice list of presentations from a few big Web 2.0 properties. Definitely an interesting read, especially given that I've worked with some of the largest of properties through my time at Citrix/NetScaler (e.g., Google, eBay, Amazon, MSN, etc.) and as a result have typically seen this discussion from the networking side. Most of the presentations listed take the view from the application developer side which is indeed a different beast.

It's Like the BMW 5-Series...

2007-05-30T23:47:00.000-07:00

xkcd had an amusing comic strip the other day referring to Godwin's Law. In case you're not familiar with the law, it states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

In the spirit of Godwin's Law, I'd like to propose Steve's Law:

As a marketing discussion grows longer or involves an increasing number of people outside of marketing, the probability of a comparison to some aspect of a car approaches one.

I've lost count of the number of times someone has tried to compare the realities of selling a complex piece of networking gear to an (occasionally) educated enterprise customer to some aspect of a car. I understand how this happens -- it's an easy parallel to try and draw and most likely everyone in the room will be able to follow it. Ditto with using the iPod as an example.

The problem with doing such a comparison is that the analogies are usually bogus. No matter how hard you try, you can't make a firewall an ultimate driving machine.

In general, I'm loathe to draw comparisons between consumer focused products and their marketing campaigns and selling high tech to enterprises. The two are completely unlike one another. And don't give me that line about enterprise buyers being a subset of the consumer space. That isn't true and you know it.

To start with, a consumer is generally making a purchase that only impacts himself or possibly his family. With rare exception (e.g., a house), a consumer is typically spending an inconsequential amount of money. If the purchase is wrong, he may be pissed off, but it is unlikely you're going to be changing his life in a measurable way. By comparison, an enterprise buyer is likely to affect a significant number of users and their ability to get work done. A bad buy not only costs the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, but possibly millions of dollars of lost productivity. Screw up bad enough and your job is in on the line.

In addition to impact comes education. Someone looking to commit a few million dollars into a storage area network is going to do homework on the topic first. He's going to get a handle on the market, who's who, learn about the technology itself, and possibly even sit down and assess what features really matter to his business. When selling to this person, you assume a level of education and given the potential price tag, you spend the time making sure they understand the ins and outs of what you're pitching. This is not the same as going to Consumer Reports, seeing what they picked for the best spatula, and then heading down to the local Spatula City.

The differences go on. And really, if you're still not sold, you haven't read this far anyway and are probably working on an email to me about how your pre-chasm-crossed-blue-ocean-long-tail-enabled-technology is so much like the BMW family line that you're using the same product numbers.

There are of course valid exceptions to the Steve's Law. There are times when a good consumer based example highlights an element of a marketing campaign that you're trying to explain. For example, in a positioning exercise where everyone in the room may be struggling with the very idea of what marketing positioning is, there are some excellent consumer based examples worth highlighting. They give a baseline to point out what a market position is, why it matters, and why it is not the same thing as a tagline.

Just don't try to show how 7-Up being the un-cola is the same thing as iSCSI the un-Fibre Channel.

Ugh, I had to control my gag reflex just typing that...

DKIM Correction

2007-05-25T13:44:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of some comments from yesterday's DKIM post, my commentary doesn't matter because the CNET article was wrong and I missed this fact while looking around DKIM's web site.

Richi Jennings's blog explains the essence of DKIM quite nicely. To summarize, Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) is simply there to protect against forgeries. This means there exists an easy way to know whether an email that claims to come from paypal.com really is coming from Paypal. Of course, this does nothing to protect users from getting email from similar-to-paypal.com, nor is it meant to. DKIM is one part of what is to become a larger solution to establishing a scalable web of trust that does not require complex end user interaction, unlike PGP or S/MIME.

Interesting? Kind of. Long term usefulness? Well, I'm not sold on it yet.

Why DKIM Will Fail

2007-05-23T10:29:00.000-07:00

CNET reports that the Domain Keys Identified Email (DKIM) project just got preliminary approval from the IETF. The usual suspects in the open source crowd (e.g., Sendmail, Postfix) have added support and a few closed source guys have too. In addition to software support, the big names in email providers (AOL, Yahoo, etc.) have added support on their end.

Notably missing is Microsoft which is significant given that most of the corporate world runs on Exchange.

Here are two reasons why DKIM is destined to become yet another irrelevant standard:

Without Microsoft's backing, DKIM will lack the wide scale adoption necessary to be effective.
Spammers will simply sign their spam.

On the first point, you have to stop and think about how email as a market is segmented because raw numbers alone are misleading. Email is broken down into two major categories: enterprise email and everything else. The everything else bucket includes the big email providers like Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail, as well countless hosting providers. User for user, the everything else bucket is *huge*, but largely consumer based. While they can make the C2C and B2C worlds move, they can't make the B2B world move. Thus the kicker: enterprise email is dollar for dollar more significant.

The people willing to pay the hosting providers for services tend to be businesses that need services above basic email and are willing to pay for it. These businesses need to communicate with everyone and unless all the other enterprise users start using DKIM, Yahoo and friends will need to continue allowing non-DKIM email. After all, hosting providers are not going to anger their highest margin customers.

As for the second point, spammers have long adopted the hit and run approach to spamming. There are two approaches to working around DKIM. Approach 1: Get a legitimate domain with a legitimate signature, spam until the signature is not trusted. Ditch the domain and get a new signature. Approach 2: Leverage botnets to send email from users that have trusted accounts through trusted email servers. Continue until either the user is not trusted and the ISP shuts them down or the user cleans up their machine.

Either way, spammers will get a signature and users will continue to see spam in their inbox.

At this point, I believe that spamming is going to be an indefinite problem much like how junk mail is an indefinite problem. The most effective approaches to blocking spam will continue to be content based filtering and the arms race between content filtering technology and spammers will continue. Anti-spam companies know this -- despite DKIM and countless other "stop them at their source" projects, anti-spam's long term prospects continue to look good.

Time to go update SpamAssassin...

Random Aside: C2C at DMC 2004

2007-05-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

It's Friday afternoon and time for a quick break from the norm...

As I've mentioned before, I DJ as a hobby. You can even hear some of my mixes, if you're so inclined. One of the stranger side effects of having practiced this skill for 13 years now is that I tend to listen to music with an ear towards production with an electronica filter. I hear layers. I hear loops. I hear segments of music as if they were to be assembled and post-processed. I can even fall out of phase with a beat which is very odd thing to experience. It makes listening to albums like Brothers Gonna Work It Out by the Chemical Brothers quite fun.

That said, hearing a live album with all of the little warts that come with it is always a good time. Hearing a live DJ do something creative -- even better. Now this video is just stunning...

C2C, the winners of the 2004 DMC competition have their video posted over at YouTube. This is absolutely incredible. Five turntables, four mixers, and four DJs, assembling a unique song by piecing together elements of other songs in real time. The individual elements are very simple, short segments of various other songs in their elemental form (e.g., just a piano piece, just a drum loop, just a vocal sample, etc.) so they usually have three to five turntables adding to the final song at any given moment. Even if you don't regularly listen to electronica (or it's many sub-genres), it's worth giving this five minute video a spin. It's true artistry with musical influence from many other genres, including some (really) old school Bollywood.

A Quick Security Reminder

2007-05-17T23:41:00.000-07:00

Salon has a nice little article titled The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found. How exactly did the author's 8-year-old find these documents? If you guessed Microsoft Word's mark-up feature, you would have guessed correctly.

Over the last several years, there have been all kinds of little jewels like this that have cropped up. I used to pull up old versions of people's resumes by simply viewing Word documents using the Unix strings command. A previous employer changed their negotiation tactic with an OEM after clicking through undo a few times. And then there was that contract I rewrote for RSA... That was one of my favorites. Their legal department must have been steaming as they red lined the terms I added for charging them every time they used one of my new and improved contracts.

In case you haven't figured out my point yet... don't send Word documents around when you don't want to risk someone playing with it. Use PDF when you can. If you absolutely have to send a Word document, cut the entire document and paste it into a new document when you're done to get rid of all of fast saves, undo, and markup metadata.

What is SOA?

2007-05-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

Big news. Gartner predicts the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) market to explode.

I'd provide a link to the article, but really... Is anyone surprised that Gartner is predicting the explosive growth of anything?

Okay, let's be fair here. The problem isn't whether Gartner is right, although in this case I happen to agree with their assessment. The problem is the definition of SOA. If you poke at it enough, you'll quickly find that SOA as a technology expands far and wide. Anything with an XML interface is going to fall under the definition of being SOA enabled as far as the vendor is concerned. This little detail makes the market definition tricky.

Taking the market analysis hat off for a minute, the bottom line is that an enterprise looking to break their application architecture up into bite sized modules that communicate via web services, SOA is the hot tip. You want to know why? Dust off the history book, it's time for a quick read...

When application development software started back in the 1960s, there was really no significant network to communicate on. Application software was written as monolithic blobs of code and modularity was enforced at an architectural level. As applications became increasingly unwieldy and the size of servers grew, the justification for object oriented programming came with it. Modularity beyond objects took form as intra-process communication on large SMP servers. Networks being relatively slow weren't the ideal choice for using as a intra-process communications. Unless you could afford an extremely low latency specialty network, it just wasn't a practical solution.

Now come around to the mid-90s. The 100Mbps Ethernet standard had taken shape and the cost of network infrastructure for it was relatively affordable. The Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) libraries and the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard emerged in 1989 and 1994 respectively, which made software development for distributed software much easier. The result was that cluster computing had a genuine shot at taking down the requirement of large and expensive SMP machines for the first time. It also meant that intra-process communication had really standardized in a cross-platform way.

The problem with MPI and PVM, however, is that they stayed largely aimed at the High Performance Computing (HPC) space. Furthermore, while it is possible to use them in an object oriented context, they don't easily lend itself to that model. Now pause this development for just a second and hop over the XML crowd.

Mid to late 90s saw the resurrection of SGML in the simpler form of XML after HTML had become the black sheep of the SGML children. In 1998 saw the first development of SOAP as an XML based intra-process communication mechanism. SOAP really started seeing the light of day when Microsoft made a big push for their .Net architecture around 2002/2003.

So here you have it... Applications are getting big. Networks are fast and relatively cheap. Big iron SMP machines are getting more expensive while clusters of cheap PCs running server class operating systems are readily available. The web movement showed that breaking up applications into horizontally scalable solutions is not only doable, it is preferable. But enterprise applications are still missing their version of MPI. Their version to make machine to machine communication really click.

Microsoft may have dropped the ball with the .Net marketing campaign, but it did get enough developers on the .Net bandwagon that critical mass was reached. Finding a .Net capable programmer that understands how to leverage web services for intra-process communication means visiting your local HR department, not hunting down some obscure HPC deployment doing atomic bomb simulations. Lucky for for us marketing-types, IBM picked up the ball and did a stellar job of coining SOA and making it fully buzzword compliant with CIO visibility.

So going back to the original question... What exactly does and should the "SOA market" constitute? Really, I don't think it matters. What matters is that SOA, or more accurately, SOAP, is the key enabler to make big applications easier to modularize across clusters of small (virtual?) machines in a datacenter. Over the next 10 years, I believe that this has the potential to put some serious hurt on the SMP market (10% of server units, 50% of server revenue). SOA may be fully buzzword compliant, but I genuinely think it's going to change the way applications are written.

Of course, if you really need a market number... Cite me. Rising Edge Consulting puts the SOA CAGR at 134%. I'll be happy to discuss my findings. Did I mention I was a consultant for hire? Contact me, and we'll discuss your needs.

Oh, and tube socks... Even bigger. I have a whole team of researchers working on that.

The Death of Infiniband

2007-05-14T09:31:00.000-07:00

I've always wanted to predict the death of something.

Today is my lucky day - I predict the death of Infiniband.

Yeah, sure. I'm not exactly going out on a limb here. Consolidation onto Ethernet has been an ongoing saga in networking as one LAN technology after another dies and is replaced with Ethernet. FDDI, ATM, Token Ring, and even early AppleTalk. The list goes on...

However, there have been some things that even Ethernet hasn't mastered yet and low latency is one of them. The market for low latency networking has continued amongst the High Performance Computing (HPC) crowd where researchers who can't brute force their way through gigabit Ethernet or afford big SMP machines end up with either Infiniband or Myrinet.

The problem with the HPC space, however, is that it isn't very big to start with and the growth rate just isn't there. As is traditionally the case, the real growth opportunity lies in the enterprise. The challenge with the enterprise for high speed interconnects is that they aren't ready to blow off their investment in Ethernet. As a result, Myrinet has already announced a 10G Ethernet product. They've made their position pretty clear: we aren't going to beat'm, so we'll join'm. They'll still offer their uber-low-latency products, but administrators will have a choice.

Mellanox, the Infiniband poster child, may be pushing their Infiniband story in the press, however they recently backed a 40G Ethernet proposal. I'm not a genius, but if that don't hint to a roadmap, I don't know what does.

In the end, the only player that will be left for the foreseeable future will be Fibre Channel (FC). This isn't because FC has the magic touch that will make it invincible to Ethernet, but it is because FC has a significant installed base that isn't going to toss their investment so quickly. But... If FC over Ethernet (FCoE) takes off as expected, it is only a matter of time before straight up FC goes the way of SNA.

Does all this death create a significant opportunity for low latency Ethernet? That remains to be seen. To date, I have only seen low latency claims achieved through RDMA and I don't buy that applications are going to change to accommodate the protocol shift. Does intra-datacenter latency really matter then? Will people put money behind reduced latency Ethernet that doesn't require changes?

Good questions. I believe that the answer is yes. But that's for another blog entry...

Vyatta gets round B

2007-05-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

I just caught wind that Vyatta just received round B financing to the tune of $11M thus totaling $18.5M. The latest round comes courtesy of Capital JP Morgan Partners, Comcast Interactive, ComVentures, and ArrowPath Venture Partners.

Vyatta, in case you haven't heard, does open source routing. I've written about this before. In summary, I'm suspicious of the open source on a stick business model.

Here's my problem with Vyatta. The assertion is that because the development cost is lower, they are going to be able to offer their products for cheaper than other vendors. There are few problems here... The features that go into a low end Cisco (or similar) router are relatively simple and have long been paid for their total router sales. Furthermore, the large number of units sold by the established vendors in routing make their COGS very low. So if the engineering for Cisco is relatively low cost since the bigger products do most of the work and the low end teams need to package/refactor, they're going to have the same (if not greater) benefits than an open source router.

Take a Cisco 2801 branch office router with the VoIP software. Street price is around $2,500. A Juniper J2300 has a street price of around $1,500. A Vyatta appliance with software and support is $2,200. The Vyatta appliance has nowhere near the feature set of the 2501 and no promise of those additional features anytime soon. The software goes for between $600-$1500 depending on support. Assuming an ASP of $1000, they have to sell 1,000 units just to make $1M. For a startup, moving 1,000 units of anything is not easy especially when the "big" vendors are selling for around the same price, possibly cheaper (e.g., the J2300 vs. the enterprise Vyatta appliance).

In the end, the average user doesn't care if the source is open. The casual IT administrator can't do anything with a pile of C code on an operating system that he isn't familiar with. It's just gotta work and at the cost of a PC, if it breaks or the vendor is being flakey, it's often cheaper and easier to simply move to another vendor than to fight the problem.

I of course wish Vyatta the best of luck. However, at this point at least, I don't see a bright future for them.

Book Report: Moneyball

2007-04-26T09:57:00.000-07:00

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (ObAmazonLink) follows the Oakland A's baseball team through the 2002 season and explores how their GM, Billy Beane, has transformed their approach to team building from a method based on emotion and "old school baseball knowhow" to one of logic and math. The result is the creation and management of one of the cheaper teams in the MLB that manages to consistently hit the playoffs. Since a team's ROI is based on ticket sales vs. salaries, the more games you play, the more money you make. In 2006, the wins to player cost ratio was 126. The Yankees are 46 and the Giants are 79. In order to improve their total revenue to player cost ratio, the A's are building a new stadium that is expected to draw a significant increase in crowd size due to the closer proximity to Silicon Valley. (More detail over at Forbes.)

Michael Lewis does a great job of setting up the story with sufficient but not overwhelming background on the team and Billy Beane. Lewis then details several facets of the A's approach by following the draft and several trades. In essence, the book is proof by example.

Highly recommended for anyone looking to better understand the business of baseball through a good story.

Good UIs, Good Marketing...

2007-04-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

A "shout out" if you will, to a good UI. Today's winner is ZEvents which powers the San Jose Mercury's Events Calendar. It's a simple, clean, and fast events calendar that takes standard English text queries as part of its date parameters. This means I can type in "Monday" and it'll look up next Monday's calendar without me having to figure out dates in my head. ("Today" and "Tomorrow" also work.)

On the marketing side, the folks over at Will It Blend? get a pat on the back for being an effective marketing tool for Blendtec Blenders. They understand the power of viral videos and have done an excellent job at creating interesting content while remaining transparent (but not in your face) about their motives. Their web site is now a regular visit on my "once a week" blogs. Their "Don't Try This At Home" is especially entertaining.

The folks over at SSI have started their own series called Will It Shred? which features their really big industrial shredders taking on sofas, cars, and other things you wouldn't think to toss into a shredder. The SSI effort isn't nearly as well done as the Blendtec videos, but they are effective. Bottom line: both have something to teach the consumer world about effective use of the Internet in marketing promotions.

Unfortunately for the technology world, "blinky lights" when packets move just isn't as... um, amusing. Of course, I stand by my position that my suggestion for a "DDoS Big Red Button" would have made for interesting Interop antics, but alas those with the budget didn't appreciate why 10Gbps of SYN packets was cool.

Random Aside: LiveATC.net

2007-03-30T15:31:00.000-07:00

If you've never listened to the radio communication for an airport's tower, I highly recommend it. The experience gives you a realistic appreciation for the people that we put our hands into every time we fly. All without the dramatic tension. It also makes for great white noise while you're working.

http://www.LiveATC.net

Arithmetic

2007-03-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

This isn't news. It's barely a blog post. But if you can't rant about it in the blogosphere, where can you rant about it?

This particular "it" being basic arithmetic.

The folks over at Petco run a charity to help get pets adopted. They used to just ask for a charitable contribution of $1 at checkout, but I'm guessing too many people said no so they now offer to round your purchase up to the next dollar instead. Simple enough. As a supporter of this particular charity, I always say yes.

This change has apparently thrown the checkout folks for a loop. Since they couldn't do the round up in their head, Petco has placed a cheat sheet next to the cash register. It gets better... the young lady running the register I was at was intimidated by the cheat sheet. I'd make this up if I could (and I have a minor in creative writing!) but my imagination hurts when I think about it too much.

Apologies for being so crass, but WTF?

I'm not suggesting that everyone in society have wizardry status with their local mathematics department. God knows that I haven't busted out sin²+cos²=1 or anything I learned in differential equations since college. I am, however, suggesting that everyone needs a command of basic arithmetic. If you can't do 100-18 in your head (the round up necessary for my last purchase at Petco), then I'm confident that a little practice won't hurt.

Netflix just delivered Idiocracy by Mike Judge of Office Space fame. Talk about timing...

(ps. the answer is 82.)

Random Aside: The Amen Break

2007-03-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

The folks over at Coradiant sent me a link to this gem: A video explaining the world's most important 6 second drum loop. It's a tall claim to live up to, but it's a rare moment when the story lives up to the hyperbole.

The Era of Instability

2007-03-22T16:08:00.001-07:00

I had the privilege of hanging out with the founder of Transmeta on Tuesday. Over a tasty ravioli, we discussed the state of networking and its evolution from the just a decade ago.

In the late 90s there were some big changes afoot in networking. For most vendors in the space, doing a new product meant doing a new ASIC. The ability to build new features on a given ASIC either meant expensive respins of the chip or tossing a processor core into the ASIC. (Early Alteon hardware did just that.) The problem with the CPU on the ASIC approach is that there tend to be limits with what can be done in terms of performance, available memory, and of course third party software. There is some room for improvement here with Linux running on PowerPC and MIPS processors, but it's hard to beat Linux's flexibility on x86.

And we noticed that back in the late 90s.

The result was a wave of new appliance based products. My product at the time, the iSD SSL Accelerator, was an early entrant in appliance based networking and while it was nowhere near the flexibility offered by traditional networking products, it did prove that x86 networking was here to stay.

Fast forward a few years. The appliance market is booming and most new networking boxes are x86 server platforms running Linux. A few shops use FreeBSD. All the networking guys have moved over and started "fixing" all the code that was initially written by people like me -- people with application space Linux expertise. Us apps guys of course learned in the process and we watched our code migrate from multi-threaded beasts to single thread state machines built around classic networking ideology.

As the CPU megahertz game really picked up in the middle of the decade we watched the single threaded beasts make stunning -- and linear -- performance improvements. A networking engine that could perform n units of work in 1 second at 1Ghz was able to so 2n units of work at 2Ghz. Feature sets built around these engines and a significant amount of production infrastructure used these appliances.

As 2005 started winding down and 2006 was on the horizon, we had a small problem on our hands. The megahertz game was coming to a close the multicore computing was becoming a reality. As the media around us buzzed in anticipation of dual-core and quad-core machines coming out, a lot of engineers huddled around their cubes and asked what now?

At first glance multi-core doesn't seem like a big deal. Classic networking has long done systems with multiple CPUs. Except for one detail -- classic networking was doing a lot of stateless processing that required little to no inter-processor communication. When work did need to move from CPU to CPU, circular queues could be used to provide lockless data structures -- computer science jibber for saying that multiple CPUs could work well together for the same reason an assembly line works: workers don't need to touch the same thing at the same time.

For classic networking, the nature of the problems being solved allowed them to avoid a lot of messiness. But things had changed. The power and flexibility of being on a real Unix-like server platform meant that new and far more complex problems could be tackled. These problems are unlike older networking problems in that they are not easily divisible.

So what's next? If appliance vendors are going to figure out how to make the next generation of networking hardware, they are going to have to figure out how to take advantage of multi-core CPUs without losing existing features. And this means taking the time to carefully divvy up the work that is not easily divisible. When changes this drastic come down the pike, drastic risk typically come with it.

The next two years are going to be both an opportunity for startups and a curse for IT managers that have to deploy and support networking appliances. Startups that have the luxury of designing support for multi-core platforms into their architecture are going to be able to ship stable products from day 1 that scale as the number of cores go up. By comparison existing players are likely to ship a version or two of products that are simply not nearly as stable as their predecessors. Either way, IT managers are going to have their hands full as they are forced to deal with performance challenges posed by their end users and stability challenges posed by their existing vendors.

Time to look at some of these startups, eh?

Security Needs Speed

2007-03-12T10:25:00.001-07:00

The long standing rule amongst security heads is that security trumps performance requirements no matter what. And I've had a long standing belief that ignoring performance requirements in security is flawed security.

Here's the problem: End users are (generally) not graded by how secure they are. Rather, they are graded by how effective they are at their jobs, regardless of security. For example, if an employee forwards company confidential email to his personal Gmail box so that he can work on a document over the weekend, chances are that he'll be praised. He may very well have exposed all kinds of intellectual property to the public Internet, on another company's server, and then made edits on his virus infested home computer, but he'll still be praised. Security issues be damned, the document was completed in time for the Big Meeting^TM.

This is where speed starts to matter. When accessing a resource is painfully slow, users will come up with solutions of their own to circumvent the problem. Period. Email is the most common problem with the most available solution (public web mail), but the scope does not end there. Homebrew, unbacked up, security audit failing wikis are setup when IT administrators force sluggish installations of Sharepoint on users. Google Desktop search goes up when end users can't search document repositories fast enough.

The most ambitious effort I have seen was at a branch office that got tired of corporate IT's refusal to get them a faster connection. The local manager approved a DSL line to be put in and a $50 Netgear firewall to be installed to replace a 256Kbps WAN link. Users accessed the corporate network via their VPN connections for internal web and Oracle applications and external web access no longer had to go through the centralized proxy server. The "computer guy" has no idea if updates are pushed out or pulled down and doesn't appreciate how the Netgear's NAT can completely break that. To him, it's moot. "The damn things work."

As consumer tech brings increasingly complex and powerful tools to the masses, the number of workarounds to "make stuff work" is going to increase. As infrastructure professionals, we either make sure that our secure methods are better or we risk losing the battle.

The Linux Desktop is Dead

2007-02-21T15:00:00.000-08:00

ESR's rant is, surprise, surprise, making waves. Mostly unhappy ones that can be best summerized as STFU.

However, ESR is right.

I switched over to Windows as my primary desktop operating system in 2001 when I moved over to marketing. There were simply too many tools that I needed to use which weren't available under FreeBSD (desktop de jour at the time) or Linux. It was the first time that I had seriously used a non-Unix desktop since 1993 and I had to admit - I was surprised. Windows 2000 was stable, things just worked, and life was all around good. After a few weeks I noticed that I spent a lot less time managing my desktop and that above all else made me change my home machine over to Windows as well.

I still use Linux and FreeBSD. I just use them as servers and ssh into them as necessary. From time to time I take a peak at what the folks over at GNOME and KDE are up to, but to date I just haven't been all that impressed. As far as I'm concerned, the Linux on the Desktop effort is dead. Anyone that hungry for a Unix machine with a usable GUI environment is now buying a Mac.

In early editions of my book, Linux Administration: A Beginners Guide, I wrote something along the lines of "one of the great things about Linux is that it gives you the choice." I've since spent a lot of time caring about end user interfaces, being a user, and watching customers use my products, and I've come to the conclusion that unless you care about the technology itself, you really don't care about the choice. What the user cares about is the choice in whatever task they are trying to accomplish and if the action is passive (e.g., seeing a silly video on Youtube), then a choice doesn't matter. It just has to work. My dad is the perfect example of this: he just wants to see CNN's web site. He can click on the Firefox logo and he can click on the the Internet Explorer logo. But that choice doesn't matter to him -- he wants to choose what news he reads instead of sitting through 30 minutes of CBS.

If the Linux community wants to revive its effort for the desktop, it has to come to terms with the reality that my dad doesn't care he can choose between KDE and GNOME, or Firefox and Konqueror, or KWord and OpenOffice. He just wants to click on the 'W' logo and have something pop up that lets him get the job done.

Random Aside: No, I'm Not Linux!

2007-02-14T15:53:00.000-08:00

Most of the Mac vs. PC parodies going around are ho-hum. This series has proven to be pretty funny. This video in particular sums up the Mac, PC, Linux, BSD relationship quite well. (Audio is not safe for work.)

Free Coffee

2007-02-12T10:05:00.000-08:00

At one point in time, my Dad had more than a handful of people reporting to him. (Let's put some scope on this... he led project management for multi-billion dollar construction projects.) As a result, he managed non-trivial budgets.

An auditor once gave him a hard time about some of his line items. Free coffee for his floor? A copy machine with auditing turned off? No reports for fax machine usage? My word! My Dad is bleeding money! On a public project no less!

My Dad asked the auditor how much he thought was spent over 1 year of these frills. "Guess," he asked. "At least a few thousand dollars a year," the auditor responded. "Single digit thousands?" my Dad asked back. "Year. Probably."

At this point my Dad showed his staff turnover rate. "Compare this to the other departments and their corresponding HR chargebacks," my Dad challenged. The auditor had admit, my Dad’s chargebacks were considerably lower than other departments. "That's me not paying for recruiting fees," my Dad explained.

My Dad continued: "Now, would you say that telling my employees that I trust them enough with free coffee and audit-free copy machines is a much better deal for the state than paying for HR chargebacks? My team is happy with the place they work and the state saves money. Seems like a win-win to me. What do you thing?"

My Dad passed his audit. And the coffee remained free.

Not too long ago, I was looking into published numbers on stolen laptops. Usually, there is some degree of variability in things like this depending on who gets asked, when they are asked, and how they are expected to count the numbers. What struck me about the numbers around stolen laptops was the remarkable amount of consistency. It was almost like they were all citing the same source...

Following the trail, I found the source. A press release by a major end point security vendor for a study they commissioned by a one man research company. Yup, an entire industry forming around one person's unverified commissioned research. It was like the same group of bad ideas were circulating around and everyone just started writing about it.

Absurd, but at least the outcome pushed for better security of laptops. For a person making a business decision, check the numbers twice. For a person trying to advocate getting appropriate security for laptops (that should be there anyway) done, cite away.

Unfortunately, this same trend made its way around to recommendations for reimbursing mobile devices: don't pay for it all, those end users are making personal calls with it! I saw this recommendation in no less than three publications and my previous employer instituted the policy last year.

This is absurd. In case you're wondering why your employees hang Dilber t comic strips up, own calendars from Despair, Inc., and know all the lines from the movie Office Space, it's because of short sighted policies like this.

We ask our teams to be on call off hours. We want them to be on 5am conference calls in order to facilitate a global market. We want them to answer email in the evening. We want them to go above the call of duty. But we can't fork over an extra $30 a month for an employee's phone bill? The phone that they mostly use so they can do 5am conference calls and jump on weekend emergencies? Please.

"But the budget," I hear, "we can't be going around wasting money on calls that aren't work related!"

Fine. Can't stand to go above the call of duty for your employees when they go above the call of duty for you? Why not just hire another employee so you don't have to make employees go above the call of duty in the first place? They don't owe you. You don't owe them.

Oh right... That's because coughing up another headcount is far more expensive then coughing up a few bucks for a cell phone. So please... To all the CFOs out there – quit being a cheap ass and pay for the bill. Really. In the grand scheme of things, you're coming out ahead.

IM-Speech in Writing

2007-02-08T09:19:00.000-08:00

With another post getting a bit long in the tooth, I thought I'd at least get this off my mind...

Students using IM-chat lingo in schoolwork is becoming increasingly common. I'm not entirely surprised as I was guilty of BBS-speak leaking into my schoolwork many moons ago. Fortunately, my teachers killed that problem early, quickly, and with a ferocity that took me years to appreciate.

What surprises me are the number of college educated adults that use IM-speak in emails. This trend isn't limited to techno-heads (programmers, etc.) that could argue Hungarian notation made them do it, but from executives that make their living by being communicators! The resulting emails are often painful to read, full of ambiguous statements ("ur"), and all around unprofessional.

So a call to the small handful of readers that I do have -- help me squash this trend. Really, I don't think Wyeth (the makers of Advil) produce enough pain relievers in a year to read many more of these emails.

Skunk Works and Startups

2007-02-05T08:30:00.001-08:00

I had an argument.

Not the logical kind, mind you. No, no, no... Those take thought and require that I actually care about the outcome. Rather, this was the irrational kind where you know you're not going to change the other person's mind. You see, those are fun from a cheap thrills point of view.

Topic de jour? The GPL, one of my favorites.

Now you have to understand something about baiting a good GPL argument. The key is citing industry norms, experiences, and trends. This works well because the "industry" premise is simply invalid in the eyes of a GPL fellow and the flailing that is the result is amusing.

(For the record, I happen to be on level terms with the GPLv2, disagree with the GPLv3, and believe that a developer is welcome to license his software as he pleases. If the license a developer chooses happens to be GPL, so be it. For users and extenders of the software, the rule is simple: if you use GPL software, it stays open. If you need something closed, don't use GPL software. Now quit posting to comp.os.linux.advocacy and do something productive with your life.)

Does this make me a bad person? Probably. But in all fairness, it takes a GPL diehard on a warpath to initiate the argument with me before my evil side is provoked.

One of the benefits of these arguments is that they are an opportunity to revisit memory lane and cite examples of things that worked while making a conscious effort to avoid the things that didn't. During this particular argument, we took a tour of development teams, their size, and their impact...

Accepted belief: Small teams are significantly faster and more effective at building new products than large teams. Corollary: Large teams are slow and ineffective at building new products.

There are a few well known proof points to this argument:

The Skunk Works was (is?) a highly autonomous team created in the late 1930s and led by Kelly Johnson. Under Kelly's leadership, the group created some of the best known military aircraft in the 20th century. His well known Kelly's Rules included the rule that teams are to be kept small "in an almost vicious manner." The F117 Stealth Fighter was a disappointment for Kelly in many ways because he felt that the team had grown too large which led to troublesome development and a late project. By contrast, all of his earlier projects were small, on time, and under budget. (Recommended read: Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Kelly Johnson)

Apple's best known products were created in a similar way. The original Apple II was almost completely the design of Steve Wozniak, all the way down to the board layout and ROM software. The original Macintosh Team had only a small handful of people. The Macintosh products of the mid-90s were created by much larger teams and lacked the "ooph" that gave the original 1984 Mac the edge it had. The number of models also reflected a "design by committee" approach in their product marketing ranks.

The best example of the corollary is the IBM 360 project from the 60s. The project spanned well over 1000 software developers and generated multi-inch binders of documentation on a daily basis. Fred Brooks, the 360's project manager, went on to write The Mythical Man Month which is a must read for any project/program/product marketing/manager, regardless of industry. The project had gone so awry that Brooks created the now famous "Brooks Law": Adding people to a late software project makes it later.

The conclusions drawn out of these examples is that large teams in large companies are ineffective. This is often, but not always true. What ends up getting tagged along for the ride is the belief that large teams cannot innovate because bureaucracy gets in the way. Given enough layers of indirection within a single chain of management and innovation dies.

But is it really bureaucracy that kills innovation? Are there not examples of innovation with large teams large companies?

Actually, there are. A lot of them really. The IBM 360 project is an excellent example of this. A large team in a large company that defined what multi-user operating systems should be capable of. MULTICS, Unix, VMS, and their kids all came later. For as challenging and expensive as the 360 project was, it set a high bar for others to follow and was a key reason so many industries stuck with big iron all the way through to the 90s.

What really kills innovation is a company's culture. A company need not be large for this culture to form. I've seen it in mid-sized companies and even some small companies. The defining aspect of these cultures is PIT'M: Prove It to Me. In PIT'M, innovation is pitted against proof points. Someone proposing an idea must do so with proof points based on established market data: analyst reports, past growth, customer interviews, etc. In other words, the market has to be on its path to being a billion dollar business. While it is still possible to innovate in billion dollar markets, typically most of the innovation has already happened. If a drastic change to technology happens, it typically happens outside of an established market (e.g., Application Firewalls vs. Classic Firewalls) or a "megatrend" emerges that gives new technology a chance (e.g., hybrid electric cars vs. traditional cars).

PIT'M based businesses aren't necessarily bad businesses. Cisco is a PIT'M business and they make no bones about it. Until a market has clearly shown its path to $1B, they don't bother making a play. When it's time to make a play, they don't hesitate to acquire the innovator. Smaller plays are either ignored or viewed for their potential to enable sales of their bigger brothers. E.g., NAC enabling sales of newer 802.1x capable switches.

The other end of the culture spectrum is one that supports Gut based decision making. Innovation thrives in these environments because individuals are allowed (if not outright encouraged) to read between the lines and seek new business opportunities. In these circumstances, there is often little in the way of proof points or market analysis available. The decision is based on a certain degree of market inputs, customer comments, and intuition. In other words, your gut. There is more risk here, but it's the only way to be on the front end of innovative ideas that gain traction.

Large companies use of small teams, like The Skunk Works, for localizing Gut based innovation not because small teams are inherently more innovative. They do so to foster a low overhead environment that in turn costs less to run. Translation: flesh out the idea with a lower risk profile. Smaller companies are often forced into this role because they don't have the resources to wait for $1B markets, the corresponding research, and someone else to cook up the idea before they can jump into the game. By their very nature, they need to be on the leading end of innovation in order for them to stand out and gain attention.

Bottom line: Are small teams more effective at building products? Yes. Are they necessarily more innovative? No. Innovation isn't a question of team size, it's a question of team culture.

Random Aside: Starbucks and CAPTCHA

2007-01-31T08:56:00.000-08:00

The 4 month break from travel came to a halt yesterday when I headed over to Sunny San Diego to give a presentation. Except that it was raining in San Diego and I was reminded of my proposal for new a TSA regulation:

Proposal: Speaking in the coffee line, especially by high pitched teenagers, before 7:30am is expressly forbidden. Violation is punishable by losing your place in line and having those who had to hear your drivel beat you with the designated "whacking stick".

On a security note, this "paper" (breaking CAPTCHAs) is being discussed on bugtraq. It's not exactly peer reviewed work and there are questions on its practicality. At a quick glance, I think it the attack could be automated and numerous CAPTCHAs that I've seen on financial sites could be broken with this method.

Quite frankly, I'm a little surprises that Identity Guard from Entrust hasn't picked up more steam as a cost effective way of providing two-factor authentication for B2C web sites dealing with high value data.

Long Tail for the Gear Head

2007-01-29T09:28:00.000-08:00

Many many many moons ago, I did systems administration work for an environmental research shop. At one point, I was asked to help port and improve a simulation program written in conjunction with Honda. To kick the project off, a Honda engineer flew in from Tokyo to spend a few days with us. All good except he didn't speak English and we only got a translator for the first half of the day.

It was summer time and the desert heat was causing brownouts. I went around and did the usual lap to remind my users to save their work often. That is until I got to the engineer from Honda -- amongst the few words of English he managed to pick up, "brownout" was not one of them. So how do you say it? After scratching my head for a minute I went to the whiteboard and drew a graph. On the Y axis, I labeled two points: 110V and 220V. On the X axis I wrote "t" with an arrow pointing right. In another color I drew a line at the 110V line and tossed in a momentary dip to zero and back up to 110V. To the right of the graph I put the command for saving a file in the editor he was using.

He nodded. I nodded. We both went back to work. I started checking on the time stamps for his files and sure enough he was saving every 2-3 minutes.

This morning I needed to explain The Long Tail to a programmer without making him gag. Translation: Assume a graph of c/x where the area under the curve is the available market where x is number of total number of products, y is popularity, and c is some sufficiently small subset, usually 2-3, of very popular products . Historically, the only money that could be made was for x<=c. The Internet has changed this so that niche markets (x>=c) can still make a healthy living.

It ain't rocket science (as some other gear head friends who are rocket scientists would tell me), but stirred up with some examples and it appeared that we had a translation win.

Slobber and Snot

2007-01-29T01:35:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago a radio talk show guy ranted a bit about how disgusting it was for parents to take their kids' slobbery cookies and eat them.

My son has had a cold for the last few days. This morning he fired off a nose clearing sneeze into my ear.

Kind of puts slobber on the cookie into perspective, don't you think?

English vs. American

2007-01-27T21:10:00.000-08:00

If you asked me what I thought of English back in the 8th grade, I would have told you three things: (1) The language is only there to torment me, (2) Mrs. Free and her classwork were the officially sanctioned tormentors, and (3) Code is a much more efficient method of communicating.

I somehow managed to flip a bit in college and ended up minoring in Creative Writing. (I think it had something to do with the 28 women and 4 guys in my Introduction to Creative Writing class.) I've since become a bit of a grammar Nazi.

Most of the folks that I've worked with have only known the "Steve who is comfortable with writing" vs. the 8th Grade Steve that hated it. So when I make a statement like "Make sure you write this in American", they are typically stunned.

"American? Didn't you mean English?"

No, I meant American. The two are different and when you're trying to communicate with an audience that isn't fluent in your lingo, the difference is important. With English, you can make statements that are grammatically correct but make no sense to the listener. A feat commonly achieved in the world of technology. Trying to make the same statement in American is not unlike trying to make your choice of words understandable by your grandmother.

In contrast to English, "American" has a limited vocabulary. The only words available are those that are used by typical adults in the US. (Adjusted of course, for the level of education you're targeting your statement for.) This means that the only technical terms are those that have managed to make it to the mainstream like web, software, email, Internet, and computer. American is a much more constrained language and doesn't let you communicate much if any detail, but it does the perfect job of separating those that have the background and want detail and those that don't care to know any deeper.

My favorite example of this comes from the way that I described the products from my last job. When asked by people outside the industry, I answered "My product makes web sites go faster." It's an ambiguous statement that drove some of my co-workers nuts, but for the overwhelming majority that weren't in my industry it was perfect.

The reason I don't care for the target of "being able to tell your grandmother" is because most people have written off their grandmother as being the kind of person they would even bother trying to explain themselves to. American on the other hand is something that you would tell your childhood friend that majored in something different.

If you haven't already, think about it... Can you tell your friends from college that majored in something different about what you do? Can you say it in American and have them "get it"? If you haven't tried to do this recently, I highly recommend it.

Text message based novel

2007-01-25T10:04:00.000-08:00

"A novel whose narrative consists entirely of mobile phone text messages has been published in Finland. " - Yahoo News

*shudder*

332 pages of "u", "ur", and the countless other bastardizations of a written language. I suspect the novelty of this particular novel will end after a few pages of intense squinting and asking "wtf?"

SaaS as a Business Model

2007-01-24T09:20:00.000-08:00

Over a few beers earlier this week, I got to talk about SaaS with a die hard believer. His argument went that the next generation of users have accepted and actively use software on the web. Thus, as they move into the workforce, they will not only accept SaaS, they will prefer it.

Not unreasonable. This has happened before -- Apple dominated the early education and home computer market because they put a few free machines in every school; AutoCAD became the standard for CAD/CAM because they made their software easily accessible to students and schools. Microsoft currently does this with cut rate pricing for education. The argument schools should use open source because it would cost $500 to outfit a PC with Windows+Office is silly as a result -- Microsoft sells media-less Windows licenses for $25 and Office for a few dollars more.

However, there is a catch to this. The reason these programs have succeeded is because they still met the basic requirement users have of their software: ease of use and scratching an itch. It is here that SaaS starts falling apart.

It's hard to get SaaS to beat a desktop equivalent, even with technologies like AJAX which push a lot of the hard end user experience work to the client so response times are quick. I'd argue that if SaaS for a particular kind of software succeeds, that says more about the poor quality of the desktop equivalent than it does about the SaaS.

"All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less."
-Michael Elkins, project creator of Mutt

In the case of Salesforce.com, the poster child of SaaS, the CRM software that it replaced really was terrible. Customers have long complained about the end user experience of CRM packages. They are slow, were written by people who would never use the software themselves, and very costly to install and maintain. By comparison, Salesforce.com offers a relatively straightforward interface, is incredibly cheap to start with and reasonably priced to grow with. If you need customization, they'll do it for a price. If what you want is useful to others and are willing to let them own the result, you can get it for cheaper. For a company that wants nothing to do with CRM aside from using it as a tool, this is an ideal situation.

But now let's look at online calendars, spreadsheets, and word processors... I'd link to a few of them, but besides Google, I expect most of them to have URLs that will disappear. (If that's not foreshadowing, I don't know what is.)

Online calendars are okay. I use the Yahoo one, but they are really behind the curve and I've just been too lazy to get authenticated SMTP on my mail server at home so I can switch to Outlook. (Or let it go and pay for any number of services that do mail hosting.) Others are better, but not significantly so. Their challenge is that they have to compete with Outlook's calendar which is actually quite good. It's easy to use, responsive, and integrates easily with email and tasks. For a group using Exchange, group functions are a breeze. Really, as an end user, I don't have pain with Outlook.

Online word processors and spreadsheets are still in their infancy and can't compare in either response time or usefulness. This can change, but it's going to be hard to compare with their desktop counterparts and the argument for price is weak -- if I'm that hung up on pricing I'll just get Open Office. Most importantly, even today's teenager has a notion of "their stuff" and having "their stuff" hidden away in some random computer on the Internet isn't nearly as satisfying as having the file on their laptop and being able to point to it. It will take a long time and significant strides in ubiquitous Internet connectivity before that changes. One only need to look at banking and the number of years it took before people were used to the idea of having money they never see. Even with the current state of banking, the gold coins business is still doing well because people like to see and hold their money.

Moderate successes are out there. Email as a service is doing well for personal use because most people consider their email as temporary to begin with. Those that have a need for heavy use or long term storage of their inbox use desktop packages and pay for the appropriate service. Email as a service for business users is still a very small market. Businesses that live and die by their email will pay for a service up to a few people, but it doesn't take many users before buying your own server becomes a better choice.

Coming back to SaaS as a business model -- I believe it can work. The caveat is that it will work for specific software niches where desktop equivalents aren't up to par. Until a SaaS implementation can meet both the end user experience requirement and scratch a real itch, it simply won't see wide spread success. There is still a lot of opportunity in SaaS and I periodically see a new application emerge that merits the business model. However, I doubt that it will achieve true widespread use anytime soon.

The Hive Mind

2007-01-17T08:52:00.000-08:00

Over at today's Long Tail, Chris makes a case for total transparency. His premise is not unreasonable: you can either have your own words represent you or have other's words represent you. Either way, you're inevitably going to have someone saying something about you on the Internet.

Another key reason he lists is the benefit of the Internet's collective intelligence. Specifically, "They'll have more and better ideas that [sic] you could have on your own, more and better information than you could gather on your own, wiser and sager perspective than you could gather in 1,000 years of living -- and they'll share it with you."

Right. Sorry, Chris. I think you're being way too optimistic about the Internet's collective intelligence.

The Internet generally suffers from a bad case of group-think with each niche suffering from their own themes. Marketing interests well repeat "The Long Tail", "The Chasm", and "The Hype Curve" in unison. Technical interests will repeat "Microsoft is evil", "FOSS is good", "Management sucks", etc. Even gear heads have group-think -- visit a Jeep discussion group sometime and say "it was a good thing we had the Hummer to get us out of the jam". The reaction will be not unlike driving a Chevy to a Ford event in the South.

To be fair, group-think isn't always wrong. The group got to thinking that way because it worked for enough people that others started trying to replicate the success. However, the smart ones know when the group is wrong and quietly do it their way. I believe it was Adam Corolla (a guy that doesn't hesitate to stray from group-think) that said "Extremists run the country because the moderates have sh*t to do." When someone is confident enough in their skills to do it their own way, they have better things to do than to go online and argue their points. They'll let their success speak for itself and wait for the group to adopt it.

Is transparency good? Sometimes. But if you're going to do something come high water or hell, there's little benefit from sharing it "in total transparency" until a success needs to be advertised. But please... that's just marketing yourself.

Family IT BSOD Tip

2007-01-15T08:59:00.000-08:00

Family not realize that you're serious about what the t-shirt says and still pegs you for IT help? The Smarter Half and I have thankfully narrowed our support list down to just our parents, the only folks that we don't mind helping. (Note that we still cringe... if they would just put as much care into their computer as they do their car...)

We've gotten rid of most of the problems by upgrading them to XP SP 2, turning on Auto-Updates, installing Norton Internet Security and turning on its automatic updates. Just in case, minidumps are enabled.

We still get the occasional weird one like my Dad started getting recently: BSODs at random intervals. He copied the BSOD screen word for word to read back to me but stopped after writing the hex digits associated with the STOP message. Now we have three choices here: we can play 20 questions while he struggles to find the part of the screen I want him to hear, I can ask him to open up the firewall so I can see his screen which is usually more hassle than its worth, or he can just send me the minidump file.

After I showed my Dad where the minidump was located, he attached it to an email and sent it off to me. A quick tour with WinDBG and I had my culprit: the drivers for his webcam. Another minute with Google and we had a solution.

Since the Norton/Windows auto-updates were enabled, BSODs were generally the only problems that turn up which can't wait for the next time we pack up the family and visit the grandparents, so today's hot tip: Turn on minidumps, download WinDBG, and take a read through Mark Russovich's presentation from 2006 Technet.

Same solution; less headache.

And Let There Be Routable Packets

2007-01-10T15:47:00.000-08:00

Our world is slowly coming back into order this afternoon after our DSL router bit the dust last night. The withdrawal pains were rough, but the Smarter Half and I made it through. I found another dealer, er, IP address over at a local coffee shop for a few minutes to kick off an email earlier today. This made the morning easier to deal with...

This afternoon the Smarter Half made it to Fry's and got a Diamond Multimedia DSL router. Who knew they made DSL routers? Anyway, after a little bit of struggling we got the thing to work. I was initially looking forward to having a built-in NAT, VPN, Firewall thingie(tm) but in the end we turned it into a bridge and dropped the old Netgear NAT/Firewall back into place. It turns out that the router doesn't support multiple "outside" IP addresses or any kind of 1:1 NAT which meant I'd have to wait until midnight for my mail server to come back online. A non-starter given that it had been offline since yesterday evening.

We need to revisit the closet this weekend anyway. The shelves are full of old gear that has probably outlived its usefulness (unless of course you know someone looking for an ISA sound card...) and I'd like to get a few things fixed up on the household network side. The Netgear NAT is 7 years old now -- I'd like to beat it to the punch before it kicks the bucket too.

2007-01-01T22:23:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas

2006-12-25T07:46:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas from Riverside, CA.

Dealing with Vendors

2006-12-13T07:14:00.000-08:00

Like a lot of people in the industry, the pile of magazines is high, unwieldy, and largely unread. At best, an issue is skimmed through with an article or two read. But with a cover article titled, "10 Things I Hate About IT" with lots of spit and venom pointed at vendors and their marketing (i.e., "me") I had to take a read.

A lot of usual suspects are covered; over-promising, over-buzzwording, support sucks, etc. The discussion around support issues reminded me of a rant I had not too long ago...

The Smarter Half has long held the belief that everyone in IT should have to take a project management course. It took a while, but I've come to agree with her on this one. Most of the challenges customers face with vendors, amongst other aspects of their organization, are due to poor project management. My co-worker and I were the fortunate ones that fielded most escalations as a result. Without fail, almost every single first step was to scream "STOP!" to get the bitter, pissy rambling to quiet down so that we could start collecting the specific issues in a spreadsheet.

These first discussions were often the most painful. I can handle the personal attacks, but wasting an hour on "issues" that can't be articulated in a clear, crisp sentence... Well, that just gets under my skin. This meant getting past "everything is broken" to "well, these n things are broken" and "chuck it off the roof and let my Glock fix it" to "well, fixing this bug will address problems 7, 8 and 9". Once we got past the circuitous rambling, we ended up with a list of specific issues that needed to be fixed to make the customer happy, assignments for who owns each item, and dates for follow-up.

So, below are my tips to IT buyers looking for resolution to their issues:

1. Get Organized

This seems simple. I mean, really simple. Yet, it's amazing how many escalations happen where after a month of "working the problem", no one can clearly articulate what they are trying to solve. If you can't articulate what's broken in a clear, succinct sentence, you're not going to get the right help from the vendor. For example, "It craps out which makes all of the servers time out waiting for it and you know that means Lumbergh is going to show up with his bleeding coffee mug asking whether a memo went out about the outage," is not a problem statement. "The system catches fire every day at 2pm which makes it shut down," is a problem statement. When you have a list of problems and what you define as fixed, the vendor can start working the problems and progress can be measured.

2. Stick to the Facts

When you stick to the facts, the vendor is forced to draw his own conclusions. If the conclusions are wrong, it's the vendor's fault. If you draw conclusions and give your assessment and the vendor goes off that information, then the problem becomes yours.

3. Be Ready to Invest Your Time Too

This is a tricky one -- if the product is broken, it's the vendor's fault and they should fix it. But the reality is that your time is going to be necessary to fix things. Your willingness to collect data and try things will go a long way to keeping the pressure on the vendor to reach resolution. Don't be afraid to push back on being the QA department, but remember that there are some things that are unique to your environment.

4. Pick A Point Person

If there are a team of people, communication between everyone starts getting tricky and confusion is ripe for setting in. Pick a point person on your team to deal with the vendor so there can be no excuses of "but I told this to so-and-so" and insist that a point person be assigned from the vendor's team so you don't have to piece together their organization.

Best of luck with your escalation. And if you insist on putting a bullet through the product, at least make it colorful and post it to YouTube.

French Toast

2006-12-03T09:57:00.000-08:00

I'm loathe to drive to Palo Alto to eat. It isn't that it's a horrible place -- quite the contrary it has great restaurants and nice atmosphere. But mention University Ave. to me and all I have are nightmares of trying to find a place to park.

I was however willing to take a chance that Saturday morning breakfast wouldn't be too bad. Aside from a few coffee shops, most of the eats around University Ave. are lunch/dinner kinds of places. So having seen the choices of bread there during a business lunch, I decided to take The Smarter Half and The Boy to Il Fornaio on Cowper and University. I stuck with the breakfast bread basket and coffee and the Smarter Half did the french toast.

The bread basket is just a variety of breads toasted up and served with jam. Good bread, good coffee. Wouldn't drive 30 miles just to have it though.

But the french toast. Oh My God, the french toast. Best French Toast, Ever. The genius that made this didn't just have toasted egg batter on top of bread. No, no, no... It was in the bread. Delicious, oh so yummy bread. The whole thing, with just a hint of syrup, melted in your mouth after doing the dance of joy. This, my friends, is a french toast worth driving 30 miles to eat.

If you have the opportunity to take a visit, I highly recommend it.

Virtualization

2006-11-29T09:31:00.000-08:00

It's not a big surprise anymore -- virtualization is coming and it's coming in a big way. What I don't think is nearly as appreciated is quite how fundamental of a shift this is going to become. The separation of resource to application is a huge change in how IT, especially in networking, works.

One of the more interesting elements of virtualization is the notion of a shared processor pool. Rather than having one CPU per application instance or per user, a pool of processors is made available. As a user needs to do something, their virtual machine is instantiated on an available processor. For example, if there is a shared pool of 10 CPUs in a company, a group can use them as necessary so that idle cycles don't go to waste. So if finance only really needs heavy CPUs at the end of the month, they can run their reports, use the CPUs, and then return them to the pool for others to use. Product development can then use these same CPUs during the day for heavy computational use. Since everyone's virtual machine is separated, there is no security concerns of engineers getting into finance servers, etc. If the 10 CPUs starts becoming thin, the pool can be expanded without changing how anyone works.

This concept has been best demonstrated in "lab management" software such as VMware Lab Manager. The traditional problem of machine hoarding so that other user's don't change configurations has been the root cause of significant server farms that largely sit idle because there are only so many testers doing so much at one time. The last time I was involved with creating a lab environment, we had 4-5 servers per-engineer. The heat and power consumption was off the charts and I know for a fact that most of the servers sat idle most of the time. A package like VMware Lab Manager would have reduced the total server count by a factor of 10 without sacrificing any of engineering's ability to work.

Virtualization... big fun on the horizon. :-)

Living in a Bubble

2006-11-20T17:22:00.000-08:00

Bill Gates gave a mildly interesting interview over at the Merc yesterday. I say mildly interesting because most of the content is really a rehash of things that he's been talking about for a few years now. The interview Time did when he, Melinda, and Bono were chosen as Persons of the Year was much more interesting and complete.

None the less, it was a good reminder that we live in an incredible bubble of security, comfort, and safety that isn't shared with significant parts of the world. The two most memorable visits to India for me were back in 1986 and 1992 -- during both trips I saw first hand what poverty looked like. The following quote from Gates snapped that memory back:

Do [people] know what visceral leishmaniasis is, that it kills 300,000 people a year? The way (the news media) documents things like plane crashes . . . I don't understand why are they running those articles, because that's not the tragedy that happened that day; it's the ongoing set of diseases, some of which are unique to these tropical countries.

So as we get more awareness of these problems, we can draw on more of the world's IQ, particularly if we can highlight what's missing. If we can get people who understand nanotechnology or software or instrumentation to see these problems that the market alone might not draw them to, because these are not rich consumers, then we just dramatically increase the chance of a breakthrough.

Indeed.

Brute force can be better...

2006-11-15T05:56:00.000-08:00

You have to understand something about me. I was one of those lucky kids that grew up with technology. I wanted a computer since I was 8. I got my first computer when I was 12. I was hacking assembler by the time I was 13 and C when I was 15. By the time I graduated high school I was fluent in BASIC, C, Pascal (of the Turbo variety), and three different types of assembler (6502, 6809, and 8086). I wrote a program that was part of a commercially sold product when I was 17. Ask my high school teachers -- I was more fluent in C than I was in written English. Technology, as far as I was concerned, was the answer to everything.

The media coverage of the recent election and a question that we needed to deal with at one of my customers made me recall the first time I realized that technology, for all of its wonders, does not always improve our lives.

My first job was doing "tech work" for a small medical billing VAR in Southern California. As a four person shop, "tech work" meant just about anything. There was days when I put together new systems and installed SCO Unix and days when I physically cleaned Wyse terminals. By the time I was 19 I had added custom billing reports (C, AWK, and SQL) as well as database conversions to my resume. Good times.

One of the first tasks that I was put to was database monitoring, the ugly task assigned to newbies. Each month, a few dozen faxes would come in with reports showing how big every table had become. The print outs were 132 column and about 50 tables per page. You had to look at past tables for the same doctor and figure out whether the growth rate of the database meant that a resizing needed to be scheduled. Old school databases -- tables were a fixed size and needed to be manually enlarged. Nothing quite says "Party time!" like calculating growth rates and manually resizing databases.

The task was tedious as hell. I tended to keep the work for Friday afternoons when I was getting antsy for the weekend, support volume was low, and there generally weren't other things that needed to be urgently dealt with. What immediately frustrated me about the whole thing was that I knew it could be automated -- we were looking at three months of historical data and extrapolating a rate of growth. Take the rate, add it to the current month and see if it crossed the 90% threshold for the table capacity. Throw in a few heuristics to deal with things like growth spikes on certain tables. For example, a spike in the billing line items combined with growth in the doctors table meant a new doctor joined the group full time. Translation: drop the three month average and go with the last month only.

The bottom line was that this process could be automated. It should be automated. Damnit, I hated doing this task so I would automate this.

Except for one silly problem.

There was no reliable way to transfer the table size report from the doctor's machines to me without a human faxing it. Many doctors hadn't moved to electronic billing yet and thus had no modem. We didn't have HIPAA at the time, but we were sensitive enough to appreciate that you were very careful with who saw what. Auto-dialing another computer and sending database reports was dangerous.

The conclusion I came to was that each computer would run the program and then tell the office manager when to call us. In a fit of excitement, I told the owner of the VAR. "Roxanne, I can automate the database table checking. Think of the time we'll save!" Roxanne thought about this for a minute and then insisted on asking questions. Questions like...

"How do you plan on getting these programs on everyone's computer?"
"How do you plan to test this?"
"How do you plan on sending updates when new versions of the software change the database?"
"How do you plan to support multiple versions of software that have different databases?"
"Who does the office manager call if there is a problem with the program?"
"How are you documenting this so other people in this office can answer questions?"
[...]
"Finally, how long is all of this going to take versus just getting the faxes once a month?"

Pesky... pesky... questions.

I went back to think about the answers. Each answer made me increasingly depressed and the final answer was the topper. There was no practical way that I could beat spending an hour or two a month to just brute force the solution. Even if we grew significantly and I got to do more interesting things, it was more likely that we'd just hire another lackey to do it.

I didn't appreciate the business lesson in there at the time, but I certainly appreciated the lesson in brute force. There are times when it's just faster, easier, and/or more reliable to do it by hand. Technology, it turned out, wasn't the answer to everything.

Yahoo Widgets

2006-11-08T22:17:00.000-08:00

One of the fun things about getting a new computer is finding out what new features have been added into my staple tools. There have been a few little gems that have emerged from the usual suspects, but one of the more surprising has been Yahoo Widgets.

I was originally using Yahoo Widgets because it offered the least intrusive picture frame software that I could get on my desktop. This let me do the ObDad act of having a picture of the family on my desktop, without having to set the picture as my background. This is great as I find busy backgrounds to be tiresome on the eyes. Chalk it up to my time with monochrome screens in the 80s and my minimalist phase during college with FVWM. The Widgets based picture frame was perfect.

Now that I don't have Exchange to use, I've turned back to a lot of the Yahoo desktop tools for things like calendars, etc. Courtesy of Y! Widgets, there are some nice tools for making those apps visible on my desktop without having to keep a browser open all the time. One widget tells me when I have email, another gives me a dictionary, and a third displays my To Do list and calendar. Unfortunately, what was missing was something that would tell me whether I had new emails on my main RisingEdge.org mail server.

A quick poke around to see if something could pull up email counts over POP-SSL showed no hits. What I did stumble on was the developers guide. With small software on the mind, I started digging around -- anything interesting here that could be helpful with another challenge I was facing?

Turns out the answer is no on the challenge. However, Y! Widgets is remarkably simple to use. The whole thing is basically JavaScript, some XML for describing the UI, and an impressive list of events that can trigger actions. About 15 minutes of turning the first sample in the documentation into what I needed and I got my tool -- a widget that tells me how many unread emails are on my server. (Well, that and two minutes to get the server side piece. Details, details...)

...

Classic business tells us that we shouldn't find problems to match technology. Rather, we should let the problems define what the technology needs to be. But there's a small catch to that. Many times problems don't surface because we think that the solution's cost/benefit ratio is too far out of whack to justify the work. Keeping up with possible solutions to arbitrary problems is a great way to circle back and challenge the way you've looked at past solutions.

Anyone that has worked with enough customers has seen this. The customer rattles off their pain points, but they don't tell you everything because they think you can't solve certain problems. It takes a discussion about the solution and the possibilities before you can draw out really interesting opportunities. There's nothing quite like a discussion that starts with, "Wait... you can do that?"

Time to revisit some discussions... :-)

Good Times, Come to Me Now...

2006-11-05T11:09:00.000-08:00

The opening hook to "Reaper Repo" by 808 State (Amazon.com) is a great little sample... Good times come to me now... Good times come to me now... Throw that into a loop and use it to lead into "Everybody's Free" by Rozalla (www.rozalla.com). That's about where my head is now.

Well, that and thinking about COBRA payments.

Friday was my last day as a Citrix employee. It was a great three years that started as with NetScaler as a $10M company, grew to a $40M business, led to a $320M acquisition, and ended with having product line management ownership of all network security products. Not a bad run. During my time there I made a great number of friends that I hope to be able to work with again in the future. However, the time had come to take a stab at something new...

As of Monday, I have a few consulting gigs that I'm starting up. The work is a bit of a switch as the focus will be more around content creation for product marketing than product strategy. I'll be working on this approach for now as it affords me the luxury of trying out new things in well defined projects to start with. It also lets me spend some of my time looking into other opportunities outside of the immediate work. I expect the whole process to be quite a bit of fun. :-)

For more information about me as a consultant, take a look at my new billboard on the Internet: www.RisingEdge.org.

Strategic Security

2006-10-24T13:48:00.000-07:00

The folks over at CIO Magazine did an interesting article on the state of security in the enterprise. Overall, the numbers were pretty disappointing even though they don't surprise me -- a significant number of enterprises that I talk to want to have security, but they also want it in an enumerated list that can be tested with a series of check boxes. Got FIPS?

For a product manager, this is great. It means I can run down a list of certifications that I need to hit and make sure that I pass them. FIPS? Check. Common Criteria? Check. ICSA? Check. The list goes on -- but boy do they make writing product requirement documents easy. I think for my next release I'm just going to shout a bunch of RFCs and certifications across the building. Much easier than, you know, doing work and stuff.

But for a product marketing guy worried about the message he's trying to send, the fact that the enterprise hasn't figured out how to align security with their business means you're always chasing after a tight budget. Sure, security budgets are growing, but just as fast as you see head room over anti-virus, firewalls, and IDS', you've got anti-spyware, anti-malware, and personal firewalls. Endpoint security from the big guns literally require a dedicated isle at my local Fry's Electronics store. And if you haven't been to a Fry's in Silly-con Valley, let me just say that this is a store that's big enough to have a dedicated section for vacuum cleaner air filters and half an isle of various breadboards. Handy should you ever feel like hacking your vacuum cleaner.

In short, my homies over in the security department need to suit up and learn how to make a business case. The bottom line for any money spent in the company is how does this either save more money or make us more money? Nebulous fearmongering about botnets coming to take away your bandwidth
carry about as much weight as Weird Al begging you to not download this song. Until security teams succeed at aligning security needs with the business' goals, we're just not going to see security become any more important than the cost of buying a couple of licenses for anti-virus software and maybe a firewall.

Missing Things

2006-10-20T05:25:00.000-07:00

November 3, 2006 represents my last day with Citrix/NetScaler. On one hand, I'm incredibly excited about the new opportunities that lay ahead of me. On the other hand, I'm going to miss the place that I helped build over the last 3 years.

There are of course the people that make Citrix/NetScaler up. It's rare to work with a team that works together as well as this crew does. The experience spoils you in a way -- I've focused on silly things like being a product manager instead of worrying about politics, what the other guy is doing and other such time wasting sillyness. Being a part of the machine that would rally together during escalations, big sales opportunities, and other challenges was not only a great experience, but it was fun. There's nothing quite like the high of walking into a sales call where the person on the other side of the table says "I've already made up my mind, but my boss is making me evaluate three vendors" and leaving with the same person saying "this is amazing, when are we getting the evaluation units again?" And being able to pull that off only works when you know you have a team behind you that will pull through.

What has surprised me the most is that I'm going to miss my products. Being able to point to most of the Alexa Top 100 and knowing that most of them are powered by my product written by my engineers is just plain cool. Ditto with my SSLVPN.

Corporate policy dictates that wireless access be in our DMZ. Want to go anywhere? You need to login to the SSLVPN first. Since the first week I've been here, I've made it a policy that I do all my work through the SSLVPN. I can't claim that my customers can do that if I'm not willing to. As the expression goes, eat your own dog food. So what about my SSLVPN? Well, I'm really going to miss that -- it's fast, it's sweet, it works with everything, and the test engineering box that I use for access has been the most stable remote access product I've ever used. I'm really going to miss that.

But enough with the missing things... time to start thinking forward again. Good times are ahead. :-)

My DVD Player Segfaults

2006-10-12T09:23:00.000-07:00

Call it age, but my patience for the gizmo is starting to wane.

Not too many years ago I found a certain degree of pleasure in putting together my own PC. I could tune it to exactly what I wanted, down to the individual jumper settings on the motherboard. I mean, really, who wouldn't want to spend a Saturday afternoon futzing with BIOS settings? Good times, I tell you.

Then I started getting busy. With work. With life. With spending my Saturdays outside. If I weren't married to a fellow geek, there would have been a Dell under my desk a long time ago. No, it wouldn't have all the knobs and dials tuned exactly how I would like it AND I would have to pay more than I would have if I had bought the parts individually. But really, I was okay with that. I had my Saturdays to waste doing other things and I felt that to be a reasonable trade off.

This laziness started creeping into other aspects of my gizmo-hood. Instead of hacking together a DJ-friendly toolchain with my PC, I got equipment that did most of what I wanted out of the box. Ditto with the TiVo vs. Media-PC.

The Smarter Half, however, was not ready to give up her gizmo-hood quite so easily. The fact that she sends me daily links to interesting things on Gizmodo qualifies as the less than subtle hint with respect to where she stands on the topic. So when the DVD player started going a little freaky, she decided that a replacement appliance wasn't going to do what she deemed necessary. So now I have a DVD player that seg-faults.

Specifically, we now have a Mac-Mini under the TV. Cute machine. Looks great in the entertainment center as far as an computer "looks" go. But the thing is still a (relatively) big complex machine compared to a standalone DVD player that does nothing but play DVDs. The Mac can go into "appliance mode", but of course that eliminates a lot of the possible functionality which means The Smarter Half generally keeps it at the desktop. Now when I press "DVD" on the remote, I see a MacOS X desktop, complete with a few random files on the desktop itself. Joy.

Want to play a DVD? Well, hit the DVD button on the remote, then figure out the triple handstand magic key press with appropriate prayer to get the right screen. Once there, pray that some other aspect of the system doesn't start doing funny things that affects the playback of the video. Think I'm making a big deal of this? Well, the first DVD we played in there started stuttering... Heidi drops a root shell to the Mac in my lap and asks, "see anything wrong?" Great... can't watch a DVD without looking for rogue processes.

I'm sure I'll get used to it and eventually even grow to like some of the neat-o features. But in the meantime, I'm going to stick to being the resident Old Fart and remain angry at the fact that my DVD player can seg-fault and crash.