Mark's Blog

April 25, 2006

Just before the rain

Commuting last night and tonight, I've managed to miss the raindrops. The sky menaces however. I plan to be caked in mud at some point this week.

Posted by Mark at 08:40 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 24, 2006

941

Only 941 emails in my Inbox after a week... but that's after filtering out as many into various lists and so forth. I'm tempted to delete everything not addressed directly to me and wait for folks to retry.

Posted by Mark at 09:00 AM | TrackBack

March 31, 2006

Score:5, Insightful

Slashdot had an entry yesterday on Lowering the Odds of Being Outsourced.

Somebody with username rsilvergun had the first 5-rated comment:

So the best way to avoid being outsourced IT is to get into management? doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose of getting into IT? That's kinda like saying the best way to avoid losing your job in the steel mill is to get a degree in medicine.

I'm not sure working as a doctor is worse than pouring steel ingots, but I get the idea.

Of course wasting spare time on Slashdot is not going to lower your odds of being outsourced either. That's why you have to get Slashdot as a feed at Bloglines.com. RSS helps improve your effectiveness by enabling you to waste time efficiently.

Update: Somebody with username Captain Tripps came out with another nugget of wisdom.

Maybe it won't be possible, but if I have to go back to school to retrain, the last thing I'm getting is an MBA. I'm gonna look around for another career I like.

And concerning the folks who right now don't have to worry about being outsourced (until we find competent people even cheaper), somebody with username Gopal.V wrote this:

My first job paid about 250 USD per month before taxes. I stuck to it because I was a geek with no great academics to speak of, coming from an outside (read as - not from IIT or NIT) college and hadn't got the financial backing to follow up my GRE score. And in about seven months, I'd end up replacing my father in the earning capacity. It was so scary that I was grabbing at straws with my first job - I'd worked for more than 40 days at a stretch, working weekends and taking five days off to rush home every quarter.

Okay, I give up. Time to water the potatoes.

Posted by Mark at 08:36 PM | TrackBack

March 25, 2006

Hmm

Out of idle paranoia and curiosity today, I wandered over to Patty Wilson's site CareerCompany.com. I'm not actively looking for a different job, just wondering as a shareholder whether I'd throw myself out on the street if it were my decision. My shareholding is more than partly tied up with continuing there at my job, so if I were to throw myself out, I'd be diminishing my shareholder position, too. Thus I'm not totally objective. (Philip K. Dick described the mindset well in A Scanner Darkly.)

Anyway, Patty lets you take a FREE! 7 Step Career Scorecard test, which I failed dismally. As you start taking the test, you get worried about two things. First you're basically hopeless at selling your labor, woefully far behind where you need to be. Help with this is what Patty's selling, however, so that'll be all right as long as you can pay. Second, you get worried that you won't be able to overcome the cynicism you developed on the job, that in whatever interviews you do it will shine through to the interviewer that you want to do the job not because your deepest values naturally align with the content of the company mission statement, but because you need the money. If you're lucky -- as I have been for my current job -- you get to pick work that you find inherently interesting, which helps to keep your mind off the grovelling obsequiousness.

If the economic powers that be no longer can profit from my current work, then I hope what comes next won't be any worse.

Patty's site linked me off to a Myers Briggs test, too. (That was her other FREE! test.) The first time I took one of these, I came up INFJ (introverted-intuitive-feeling-judging), with extreme I and N.

This time about half the statements seemed almost impossible to answer with Yes or No. It was rough. I think I lied on a few of them, because I was in disagreement with myself. (More and more, I am in violent internal disagreement with myself.) I came up a fairly extreme introvert, but the rest was different. I'm still intuitive, but it's weakening. I'm still oblivious to the outside world. Only with great difficulty can I see beyond my own interpretations. But I don't trust my interpretations or feel I can rely on them either. They're mostly illogical garbage and inner gibberish. One of the strange superpositions that now happens from time to time is seeing us as primates in human-like situations. This sometimes occurs when I find myself in a group and my mind wanders off topic. We're all in Ein Bericht für eine Akademie.

Next time I hear someone use the words alignment or leverage metaphorically, perhaps I should start acting out the part, but in the other direction, grooming the person next to me. It would no doubt fall flat. Nobody earnestly using the words alignment or leverage metaphorically will have read Kafka.

The ex-feeling-judging me came out thinking-perceiving. Thinking came out moderately strong, stronger than intuition. Perceiving only weakly edged out judging, as though I couldn't make up my mind. Maybe Jung, like Freud, was simply good at elaborating verisimilar theories. (INTP: 78%, 25%, 50%, 22%)

Myers's book Gifts Differing would, according to today's outcome, let me go back to school this time to do research. There's still a residue of INFJ in me, which is the idealist. Idealism and pessimism make a bad combination. You'd think they'd weed themselves out by suicide, because the universe is unending failure and impending doom. Didn't Martin Luther's nasty patches touched off when his doubts got the upper hand on his faith?

Posted by Mark at 03:58 PM | TrackBack

March 02, 2006

VNC latency: bandwidth, VPN, hops?, part II

Tonight, armed with sufficient patience, I did manage to get through with just ssh and X11Forwarding.

It takes so long for the applications to appear, I was giving up and shutting down the VPN connection before seeing them. So I waited.

First I opened a terminal. Eventually the terminal appeared.

Then, in the terminal window, I opened the SGML editor. Eventually that appeared, too. Had time to get ready for bed while waiting. It's that slow.

Then I tried some editing.

Nope, it just won't work for me.

Posted by Mark at 12:02 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 01, 2006

Working from home

As you can tell from my last post, I'm trying real working from home, not just meetings and email.

VNC over my line just doesn't cut it. I fixed some man pages and things in a doc, very specific changes. It's agony compared to the regular LAN. So I'm going in to work.

If I could avoid the X traffic and instead work with copies of the files, it could be done. I could work from here. But I'd need a local version of our SGML editor, or I'd need other people in the team to somehow not screw up the lines. Arbortext's application reformats the lines for it's own purposes, the main one I see being vendor lock-in, so that although it's SGML, you cannot really use a regular text editor such as Emacs + PSGML in practice.

Posted by Mark at 11:16 AM | TrackBack

VNC latency: bandwidth, VPN, hops?

I'm at home over the VPN to access a remote desktop with VNC. Anything more advanced than an xterm just crawls. My DSL throughput is about 512 Kb/s, a little bit dampened, but not much, by the VPN.

Traceroute shows 6 hops between my system here and the system I'm connecting to down at work. What causes the latency that makes using the mouse a study in frustration?

Posted by Mark at 09:30 AM | TrackBack

February 28, 2006

Where the job growth will be

Forbes.com has another article on jobs, this one about where the good job growth will be in the US over the next few years. If you dream of working in teaching, health care, or software, you may be able to maintain gainful employment in the US for a little while.

It will be a messy process for job seekers to navigate through. Jobs will come and go. There is no guarantee that available skills will match the openings, or that the openings will be where the appropriate skills are.

In other words, stay on your toes. Hope you don't ever get too satisfied and no longer be able to dream of spending most of your waking hours with the dying, the ignorant, or the hopelessly unusable inanimate abstraction.

Posted by Mark at 07:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

87% disgruntled

Forbes.com is running an article entitled Finding Your Dream Job. The suggestions are if your fed up with your current job to define just how, write up a clear description of what you want in a job, make sure it matches with what you do well or can learn to do well, and make a plan to switch as long as it fits wtih your family.

One of the guys interviewed, "Garfinkle, founder of Dream Job Coaching in Oakland, Calif., says studies have found that 87% of workers are unhappy with their job."

Suggesting it's possible to find a dream job is about 87% wrong. If they cannot find people who'd do it for free, which is probably why they're paying, it's not going to be anybody's dream unless the nightmare they've lived so far makes it look good by comparison. Problem is a more realistic alternative title, Finding A Job That Doesn't Keep You Contemplating Suicide (or Homicide), wouldn't be too catchy.

Posted by Mark at 06:56 PM | TrackBack

What is identity soon

Finally listened to the second annual Identity Gang podcast, from Gillmor Gang at the tail end of last year.

Although I'm not sure to have take much that's concrete away from their discussion, I understood one thing in retrospect.

On one hand, the longer I live over here in the land of Descartes, near where Hegel and Nietzsche scaled intellectual peaks, the less I can get in tune with the overarching nature of Kim Cameron's laws of identity and meta identity management and the more I feel comfortable with Dick Hardt or Johannes Ernst simplifying things for us intellectual lightweights.

On the other hand, like the hypothetical users in the discussion, what I'm most worried about is interoperability and participation in my own identity. Maybe even Buddy Guy practices JS Bach lute pieces when nobody's listening.

Posted by Mark at 01:57 PM | TrackBack

February 22, 2006

Drudgery of planning

This morning and part of the afternoon I began to consider what I'd ask for if this were mainly a plan-based economy rather than a market-based economy. Easier said than done.

While out running I realized that the near totality of what I have is not so much what I want but instead what I thought I needed at some point. Even on my bookshelf I found almost no books I would have on my shelf even if there were a big lending library of English-language books nearby. I'd surely keep Philip K. Dick's book VALIS and the collection of stories by Borges called Labyrinths in English translation. Yet those are only two books. Why do I have multiple shelves full? (Couldn't I share some of this stuff? Books are useless when sitting on shelves.)

Once I started looking at what I sort of feel I have to have, but do not really want (house, car, furnishings, etc.), I realized that figuring out my hypothetical, first draft request was not only not going to be easy, it was also going to be drudgery.

The market relieves us of this particular drudgery. As you can tell after spending a few hours with children who watch television, enterpreneurs see advantage in figuring out for you what you want, whether you actually want it or not. They've done a good job for me, and my own ability to determine what I want has atrophied. I sit there staring at a blank piece of paper and all I can come up with is, "Running shoes to replace worn out pairs."

Would the drudgery of planning be worse than the drudgery of working extra hours for capital's rent? Certainly the answer is yes if I leave it up to central planners. But am I not doing something very similar to that by leaving my planning up to entrepreneurs and salespeople?

Posted by Mark at 08:20 PM | TrackBack

February 18, 2006

Die on the job

According to Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University, my kids will retire at age 85, BBC News reports. Shripad gives some sound reasons based on demographics, increases of life expectancy, and the cost of medical care.

In the US, the cost of social security and medical care would almost double if people retired at 65 under Tuljapurkar's scenario.

But an increase in the retirement age to 85 would bring costs down to today's levels.

(See the seminars at CEPR.net for an explanation of why I mention medical care, but not social security. In a nutshell, social security costs make up only a tiny part of social security and medicale care costs.)

Maybe he's aiming to get us to commit mass suicide. That would bring down the cost of medical care, wouldn't it?

Seriously, the thought of a whole society of people working 60-65 years under approximately the same conditions as now has me recalling what Ripley said in one of the Alien movies about an aborted colony planet that got infested. She said something like, "Nuke it from orbit."

Posted by Mark at 06:00 AM | TrackBack

February 17, 2006

Some vacation

We have 25 vacation days a year in France, plus 12 instead of a 35-hour week. Plus I think I have some days for seniority. Estimating based on the legal working year of 215 +- 2 days, for the last year I kept track, I worked approx. 50-hour weeks on average. Yet I am out of the office therefore more than most of my US-based colleagues.

Next week is one of those weeks. I've learned that when you take a week off, people route around you. When you take a day off, you have to catch up as if you'd just gotten a day behind.

What am I going to do with my time off? Take care of the kids, maybe work in the yard. I also have some longer term plans, but it'll probably be impossible to achieve anything, since the kids are on vacation as well. The alternative was to saddle Nathalie with the three of them full time. Not a fair fight in winter.

Posted by Mark at 07:51 PM | TrackBack

February 15, 2006

Reassuring words

Forbes.com has an article on how to get fired, Stupid Is As Stupid Does. The themes are that you have no privacy, due to backups of everything you do on the computer, and that you'd better, "Be in tune with the corporate culture," according to a CEO of a coaching and out-placement company.

Blogging the wrong way is identified as one of the things that can get you thrown out.

I'm amazed this article made it into the list of things to publish. Clearly all of us have fully voluntary work agreements with employers, such that working for them is a contract we enter into freely on both sides. Employers trust us to try to do the right things, and we trust them to work unceasingly in our best interests.

So why would it be so easy to get thrown out that all you have to do is, like Bloomberg's employee, play solitaire on your computer during business hours?

Posted by Mark at 08:59 AM | TrackBack

February 07, 2006

Broken Gnome

Been having a strange problem at work on the SunRay. I cannot login to a Gnome session.

The tech support folks I spoke with couldn't figure it out. They did tell me one nice thing to know about the SunRay. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace twice kills your X server, so you can get back out to the login screen to try something else. CDE is still there, if unsupported.

I ran a cleanup script we have, but wonder what it's not getting to. It deletes a few of the configuration directories under $HOME. Maybe it doesn't get everything.

At work on the SunRay I notice that when I login there always seem to be two gconfd-2 instances running at the same time. On the laptop right here there's only one. Hmm. Not even sure what to google for.

Posted by Mark at 08:08 PM | TrackBack

February 03, 2006

Imaginary burns

We ran a fire evacuation drill this afternoon. Didier and Bruno were on the phone in Didier's office. I completely failed to notice they were there. Christopher was doing the same hallway I was. I guess I noticed the door was closed and thought I'd seen it marked as closed with a PostIt, which is our code for defining a room as checked and emptied of occupants.

Had it been the real thing, the guys might have inhaled a bunch of smoke and died. Just to stay on the phone. Maybe they had the door closed to soften the piercing sound of the alarm. Next time I'll be more careful.

Posted by Mark at 08:54 PM | TrackBack

January 31, 2006

Going postal

If you were to walk down the street asking people about stressful jobs, what would they answer? Looks like another person who worked at the post office lost control. Terrible news.

Curiously, a bit of Googling for most stressful jobs brings me to another BBC article... about the stress of working as a librarian. Before the study leading eventually to the article, librarians were thought to have one of the least stressful jobs.

Posted by Mark at 09:18 PM | TrackBack

January 29, 2006

Children of multiple parents and XSL

One thing Matt did in his configuration mapping was to define a sort of object inheritence mechanism. Similar configuration objects inherit their attributes from abstract parents, so similar configuration objects can share children.

Big deal? Well, yeah, not really. Except in terms of how this works for documentation.

One of the output formats for the documentation of this configuration interface is man pages. My aim is to be able to let the reader type man configuration-object-name or man configuration-object-attribute-name and either way get the doc. The man command, at least on Solaris systems, supports two kinds of pages, regular pages, pages containing normal content, and shadow pages, pages that point to regular pages. Shadow pages can only point to one other page, however, not multiple pages. Thus for configuration attributes present on many objects, I created individual pages, which reference the parent configuration objects having the attribute as a child, but also document the child. Furthermore, the way the man command on Solaris systems works, I didn't want to reference the child-of-multiple-parent attributes in the RefName elements of the parent pages. That would've gummed up the works of our tools to build books from RefEntry elements, which is what I'm constructing.

Okay, if you're still with me, you'll see that I needed a way to determine which of Matt's XML children had multiple parents, and which did not. The language to transform his XML into SolBook (like DocBook) RefEntrys is XSLT. After struggling stupidly with XPath expressions for a while, I found somebody's email that put me onto the scent of xsl:key elements.

What I did in the end was first to write a first XSL transformation to flatten Matt's document. By flatten, I mean the first stylesheet leaves only concrete configuration objects that directly include their inherited attributes. Other than that it simply makes copies of the content. Making a whole new document is probably a waste in terms of system resources, but it sure makes things easier for the human being grasping to understand the problem.

Next I create xsl:key elements, one on the parents indexed by name, one on the children, indexed by name. Keys are created as top level elements. When I then come to the point in the stylesheet where I need to decide whether a child has a single parent or multiple parents, I can just select the parents of the child using the key() function. In the second stylesheet, I have the following:

<xsl:key name="children" match="child" use="@name" />
<xsl:key name="parents" match="parent" use="child/@name" />
...
    <xsl:for-each select="parent/child">
        <xsl:sort select="@name" />
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="count(key('children', @name))=1">
                <!-- Child is unique. Make a shadow page. -->
                <xsl:call-template name="shadow">
                    <xsl:with-param name="child" select="@name" />
                    <xsl:with-param name="parent" select="../@name" />
                </xsl:call-template>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>
                <!-- Child is a duplicate. Make a real page. -->
                <xsl:variable name="multiple" select="key('parents', @name)" />
                <xsl:call-template name="real">
                    <xsl:with-param name="child" select="." />
                    <xsl:with-param name="parents" select="$multiple" />
                </xsl:call-template>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:for-each>

Notice the count() function is the test to check whether there's one or multiple parents.

Posted by Mark at 08:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 27, 2006

XSLT once every six months

XSLT, a functional language for tranforming XML documents, is one of those programming languages I use for a couple days no more than twice a year. Each time I use it I get faster at learning it.

Matt wrote a big part of one configuration tool as an XML file mapping a public interface for configuration onto the private, internal interface. He's write to do the mapping in a declarative language. Furthermore I can generate reference documentation directly from his map file.

The biggest problem I have with XSLT in this case is that the documentation generated from his map file consists of multiple files. You cannot do that in a non-implementation-dependent way with the 1.0 version of the language. In 2.0 the functionality is there, but the tools don't seem to recognize 2.0, yet.

So I'm dumping it all into a single stream of output, then writing a tool to clip the big stream into little documents.

Another problem I found is how I don't really know how to think in a functional language where the basic unit is a tree. Took longer than expected.

Posted by Mark at 02:06 PM | TrackBack

January 24, 2006

No caffeine

Drank no coffee or tea today. Almost fell asleep in my chair once this morning.

On the other hand, my heart was relaxing apparently. Before we went for a run this noon, my heart rate was 47-50 beats per minute while standing around waiting for the other guys to come out of the changing room.

Posted by Mark at 08:21 PM | TrackBack

January 23, 2006

Disappointing checkup

Went to the annual work checkup. We have a new doctor, who declared me apte to work, but not to run. She said my blood pressure was too high. She also said that I should go to any pharmacy a couple of times over the month, then go see my regular doctor, tell him what I found, and have him try again.

I'm glad she told me that after taking my blood pressure again.

Will have to look into things I can do to bring my blood pressure down naturally, like not drinking enough coffee to keep me awake even through meetings, and not discussing work with anyone, ever.

Posted by Mark at 06:05 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 20, 2006

Informal Directory Server training

Gave a day's training today with the next version of Directory Server, based roughly on training Rob Byrne gave the doc team back in 2001 or 2002. Of course the concepts are mainly the same. I didn't try to cover all the new features in detail. By standing on Rob's shoulders so to speak I managed to prepare the whole day's worth of content in about an hour.

It helps if you already know what you're talking about before you start. In the same vein I never studied specifically for exams, and am awful at cramming. It's like cooking. If you have to follow a recipe step by step you're either making something completely new for the first time, cooking something that may well be too complicated to be worth it, or getting out of your depth.

When we get closer to releasing a public version of this software I should prepare of version of the training you can do at home. The new CLI simplifies life immensely. You'll be pleased once you get your hands on it.

Posted by Mark at 07:54 PM | TrackBack

January 12, 2006

Biking and frost, part II

The weather had warmed up tonight, although it was still freezing. This morning I was convinced they'd have to amputate my fingers and toes.

I thought about people riding to work in Chicago in the winter, or in Minneapolis. It could be worse.

Posted by Mark at 09:21 PM | TrackBack

January 11, 2006

Upgrading a SunRay

Fabio upgraded me from a SunRay 1 to a SunRay 1G. Steps:

1. Pull out the cables and JavaCard badge.
2. Switch SunRays.
3. Plug the cables and JavaCard badge back in.

It took about 1 minute. Didn't even have to log out, of course.

Posted by Mark at 05:04 PM | TrackBack

January 10, 2006

Biking and frost

Another bitingly cold morning commute with the bike and the train. My toes felt cold even after I had a warm shower.

But at least I wasn't sitting in traffic, which seemed backed up all along the autoroute. With gas at 1.215 euros/l, it'd be a shame to sit there getting annoyed while puffing even more exhaust out into the valley.

Posted by Mark at 09:32 AM | TrackBack

January 09, 2006

Star Wars in Paris

Didier told me he took Johan to Star Wars: L'Expo at La Cité des Science in Paris.

Tim wanted to know all about it. Unfortunately I'd not grilled Didier for enough detail, so I didn't have the answers. I guess we'll have to take him at some point when we're visiting up north later in the year.

Posted by Mark at 08:58 PM | TrackBack

January 03, 2006

An overabundance of patents

Jo sent a link to a Business Week online article about "The Patent Epidemic:"

Massive overpatenting, the professors say, "creates an unnecessary drag on innovation," forcing companies to redesign their products, pony up license fees for technology that should be free, and even deter some research altogether.

Apparently some companies are getting into thickets of patent infringement suits. Some are the same companies who pay their employees to come up with patentable ideas. I wonder how much a patent lawyer's firm gets when a patent the firm has written up gets accepted by the patent office.

This page about What things cost suggests it's a boatload more than the inventors get. Hmm.

Posted by Mark at 08:52 PM | TrackBack

December 26, 2005

More procrastination

While out riding, I thought more about Paul Graham's essay on procrastination. He's right about good procrastination being that you, "work on ... something more important," than the other things you could be doing with your time.

But I couldn't figure out how you decide what's important. Paul says you should drop the small stuff:

What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary.

That's good in the sense that it fits for things like TV watching. Don't tell the kids yet that they don't have to go to school anymore. Maybe they shouldn't, but they might not come to the decision about careful reflection on their own obituaries...

...or about whether doing things that get into a eulogy are also procrastination, eulogies being governed by conventions and what we think other people would think is proper. Doing things you think other people will think was proper sounds to me like travel on the road to hell paved with good intentions. Paul writes of "the most dangerous form of procrastination" being getting a lot of the wrong things done. He leads back to the big question:

What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

He ends up suggesting, "Let delight pull you." Dad used to suggest that I aim to do work I enjoy; Paul is suggesting that work also be ambitious.

So far my work, like the rest of my life, is the dangerous type of procrastination.

Posted by Mark at 06:42 PM | TrackBack

December 25, 2005

Why not to write reports

Paul Graham wrote up something most of us realize about procrastination. It can be both good and bad.

Most of my procrastination is bad. Going to "work," cooking, jogging, reading, blogging, chatting with friends, etc. Some of it I've convinced myself I almost cannot get around doing, like working for money. That seems like the central time-waster around which we organize the rest.

Within the bad, there is however at least one tiny hopeful gleam of good. I've given up sending email status reports. That sort of coincided with awareness of how much time I was wasting in email. It was an instinctive move, but now I have Paul to back me up.

Posted by Mark at 09:18 AM | TrackBack

December 23, 2005

Constitutional, cultural differences

Nul n'est censé ignorer la loi, so you should already know this, but the current French constitution includes a prevision to legalize striking for most workers. In practice it seems like transport workers are probably more likely to strike than people in other sectors. I assume that if I ever went out on strike, my employer would either just find it amusing -- since all my work would still be there for me when I went back -- and laugh at me, or fire me on some pretext, or both. (I'm pretty sure my employer would in fact realize I was out, because the law requires that you give formal notice of your intention to strike.)

According to the BBC News, this is not the case for NYC transport workers:

The union had been faced with fines and jail terms for its leaders, as the law bans transport workers from striking.

You'd have to be in a difficult position indeed to want your crappy job so bad that you're willing to risk fines and jail for it. BBC News said the transport workers went back to work without a contract. Here in France, the talk is not about amending the constitution, but instead about mandatory minimum service. The idea is that you can continue to strike as long as you do the work anyway.

My take is that our management should go out on strike, threatening to come back only when we all agree to be easier to manage. They'd be out for quite a while, but we'd probably get a lot done in the meantime.

Posted by Mark at 09:47 PM | TrackBack

December 16, 2005

Reading light

The little headlight I clip onto my handlebars has a tendency to die pitifully, always at the beginning of the ride back to the train at night. I have not yet learned to anticipate how long the charge will last.

But last night, as this morning early, the moon was so bright and the sky so clear it almost didn't matter. This morning in particular one could read a book in the moonlight. Last night it was very slightly cloudy at about 7 pm when I rode home, though. I wondered what would happen if some utility vehicle had dropped a load of wood or bricks and forgot to pick them up before sundown. Or if a limb had fallen off a tree along the trail. Or if the cold had caused one of the persistent puddles to ice over right in the middle of a trail.

Posted by Mark at 07:48 AM | TrackBack

December 15, 2005

Short deadline

After uncovering a misunderstanding in the team that left us without much time to put things right, I volunteered to hack through a whole new document in a few hours. It ended up taking me a couple of days to get everything done and in place, but was refreshing to have a short, stretch deadline for a change, rather than longer ones.

In a short race you don't have to pace yourself as much. You also can leave email until after the race. I'm not sure that was the best part, thought.

The most fun I had was learning about, playing with, and then explaining a new part of the product I was only vaguely familiar with as late as last Tuesday. It's actually really cool. Too bad we cannot go public with it, yet.

Posted by Mark at 10:12 PM | TrackBack

Christmas at work

Yesterday the CE at Sun had the annual Christmas party for kids. We'd ordered their presents in June. Teko was Santa Claus; kind of funny for the kids to have a young, althletically built, black Santa.

Diane got a tent with plastic balls to kick around inside. Emma got a set of things to fix her hair. Tim got a microscope. Emma was terribly jealous. I told her not to worry, that Tim would soon forget about it and she would get a chance to use the microscope. But it's tough to wait when you're 6.

They also had a movie, complete with popcorn, for the big kids. For the little ones they had a special spectacle. Mom says it was too long. The kids were all up moving around and losing interest after the first half hour.

Posted by Mark at 10:06 PM | TrackBack

December 12, 2005

New stop in Lancey

The train was 10 minutes late this morning. I descended in Lancey up the road from Didier's house, where they're fixed up the station to open it to the public.

The ride's about as far as the ride from Gières, but unfortunately on a more travelled road. Felt like I was breathing salt for the first 3 km. Then I picked the wrong trail along the Isère. Should either have turned left before the bridge, or stayed on the foot path. The path for cars and trucks was like Minnesota, Land o' Lakes.

So cold my fingers hurt, then hurt more when I got to work and warmed them up. Had me gritting my teeth. Maybe somebody makes cycling mittens.

Posted by Mark at 10:36 AM | TrackBack

December 11, 2005

Must haves, part II

Metcheck.com predicts a wet week in Grenoble. But the commute should be all right. See the mud guards:

More worrying is the chain, which is already rusted. Hope it lasts the winter. I only clean it once a week. Probably should do that every night the weather is wet.

The SNCF is opening the station in Lancey today. Same distance to work, but 8-9 minutes less train ride. It's not clear however that I'll want to take the train from Lancey in the evenings. The 18h33 from Gières runs straight through to Pontcharra, whereas anything that stops in Lancey also stops everywhere along the way except for the stations that are normally closed to the public.

Posted by Mark at 12:29 PM | TrackBack

December 08, 2005

Adverse weather

The commute was reminiscent of the marathon in Lyon. Snow mixed with rain, strong winds, more mud puddles than semi-dry patches. Was already chilled just leaving the train station. Need to go beyond windbreaking fabric to GoreTex. And get the Comité d'entreprise to buy us a clothes dryer.

Posted by Mark at 08:55 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 07, 2005

SolBook with Emacs & PSGML

At work we have a great simplified DocBook subset DTD called SolBook. Internally we use tools on the network to perform checks and automate many tasks.

Sometimes I'm not on the network at work. Other times I have jobs that seem easier when done in a general purpose text editor. So I use Emacs & PSGML. I've started writing notes on the setup for SolBook (in SolBook).

If you can help with the chapters on customization or setting things up on Windows, let me know.

Posted by Mark at 10:14 PM | TrackBack

December 05, 2005

Winter commute

Rain's better than snow and ice. When I got to work, though, they asked me if I'd come cross country, like I'd swept the muddy water away with my face. Hope it doesn't freeze this evening.

Mick and Jeanne have agreed to let me sleep over before the Paris half-marathon in March. Now all I need is a recent certificat medical. If I go in to see the doctor right now, my cough might be taken as a reason not to run. Still cannot quite completely catch my breath.

Posted by Mark at 09:01 AM | TrackBack

December 01, 2005

More free software from Sun

It looks like our executives have announced in public that, "Our entire server-side software portfolio will be free of charge and open source. Not pieces, all of it."

You can download to your heart's content from Sun's website. Apparently you only have to pay if you want fasttracked fixes and support.

It was already possible to get our Directory Server software free, but it appears the license was for evaluation only or something like that. The news is that you can now use all this software as long and as widely as you want without paying. Pretty good idea. All we need now is to make it dead simple to install and configure so developers and sys admins at small sites can easily hack away at it.

Posted by Mark at 10:22 AM | TrackBack

Defeat

Took the car again today. It feels like a defeat, giving in to a technology I like less and less. Funny how three of the big technologies that led to huge build outs are in fact irritants: railroads, telephones, cars.

At any rate it's still tough to get my breath. My head's stuffy and achy. Great day to come to work.

Posted by Mark at 08:33 AM | TrackBack

November 29, 2005

Kudos to subversion

Recently I changed my password at work, the definitive version of which is stored centrally. I'd rather have one oft-changed password stored distributively, but we're still on Web 1.0.

After I did that, my mail knew to ask me, and my browser usually knew to ask me, but lots of applications that stored my password somewhere for their own purposes didn't. cvs was one of those applications. Maybe that's fixed in a more recent version, but I don't care to go upgrade my version just for that. subversion on the other hand did know, and prompted for the new password. How useful.

Posted by Mark at 01:33 PM | TrackBack

November 25, 2005

What I missed

This looks like the commute I missed this morning by taking the bike and the train instead of the car. Of course it took me more than twice as long to ride as it usually does, but there were lots of folks coming into work late. I think Christopher spent about 75 minutes going 10 km.

Too bad Nathalie didn't take any still pictures of the kids. They apparently played in the yard all morning. She shoveled out the driveway... a couple of times. Quite a bit of snow fell during the morning.

The folks who own businesses that depend on downhill skiing are probably feeling pretty optimistic at this point.

Posted by Mark at 08:29 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 24, 2005

When the NFS server dies, part II

After the server with my $HOME came back, Gnome was doing some really weird stuff. Boy, is there ever lots of stuff you have to delete to get rid of Gnome and start over...

Posted by Mark at 02:44 PM | TrackBack

When the NFS server dies

When the NFS server dies and nothing can be read in my $HOME dir, my ability to get things accomplished at work grinds to a crawl. That's a sign that I'm still in the industrial part of the economy, rather than pure services.

If I were pure services, like a manager, I could continue with just browser, email, and phone access. I would create product documentation, but would only enable others to do so.

Posted by Mark at 10:57 AM | TrackBack

November 23, 2005

More thieves and liars

From the ISP providing DSL, I got email that started out this way:

Pour plus de transparence et de simplicité, Wanadoo fait évoluer ses Conditions Générales de Vente au 21 décembre 2005.

11 pages of legalese with no change bars. I probably do have the old version somewhere, so I could spend a weekend afternoon figuring out how what they're doing.

The root problem is, you have no choice. If you're just a normal individual, you remain naked and defenseless compared to those with lawyers. If you're an ISP, you hire a lawyer to protect you from your customers. If you're a big customer, you hire a lawyer to protect you from your suppliers... and your own customers. We do it to our customers as well, giving them reams of contractual crap they have to agree to before using our products.

Isn't the rule of law great? It used to be even worse, though. Now they take you to court rather than beating you up.

Posted by Mark at 10:46 PM | TrackBack

Spellcheck duel

Jean Véronis examined the spellcheck capabilities of the French version of OpenOffice vs. the French version of Microsoft Word. It turns out that OpenOffice, the free-as-in-beer derivative of Sun's StarOffice product, does about as well as Word, which costs money. In fact, Microsoft Office 2003 Standard Edition seems to cost 400 euros at Amazon.fr. Hmm.

Posted by Mark at 03:24 PM | TrackBack

November 22, 2005

A compliment

Joachim came up to me after the presentation Monday to say I'd managed to do an interesting presentation on a boring subject. He thought that was commendable.

Nobody fell asleep. I wonder if they do fall asleep while reading my documentation.

Posted by Mark at 02:11 PM | TrackBack

November 21, 2005

Inconvenienced, part II

Looks like the strike's planned for only about 36 hours, at least on the line I take to work. The tough part riding in today was the cold. It's frigid out there. Even my knees were cold from the outset.

But at least I don't have to sit in traffic. Guess I'll be doing that tomorrow morning.

Posted by Mark at 08:58 AM | TrackBack

November 20, 2005

Inconvenienced

After having avoided the car 5 days in a row last week I might have to take the car to work this week. For an hour I've been looking for the lightweight, windproof hat I wear underneath my helmet. Without that riding at subzero temperatures will be truly, almost dangerously unpleasant.

Also there's a strike starting Monday night. I cannot determine from the information online which trains will be affected and for how long. There's a chance it wouldn't make sense to buy a ticket tomorrow, since I might only be able to use it Monday.

Posted by Mark at 08:58 PM | TrackBack

Working from home

A guy needs an office. With a padlock.

I was trying to finish up my slideware with two girls climbing on my desk, one little guy trying to get me to read about how to catch bees and to write out my part of his homework-related interview of me, the TV blaring some Disney movie, my wife asking me to decide which cooking utensils to buy, and to sign the kids notebooks from school. Meanwhile, I was supposed to be making lunch. Some of the time was less interruptful than that, but I'm not misrepresenting overall conditions.

Posted by Mark at 01:48 PM | TrackBack

November 19, 2005

Slideware blues

This morning while Diane is rolling around watching TV, I'm doing slideware to present Monday morning at work. OpenOffice 2, Firefox screen captures, and The Gimp are my tools. Easy to work with.

But it's not going to be a screencast. How much longer would it take to do that instead? What tools should I use (that work on Solaris and Ubuntu)?

Posted by Mark at 10:47 AM | TrackBack

November 14, 2005

Don't see what is there

The commute this evening was... different. I have a reflective vest, head light, tail light, warm gear. But I couldn't see much, and couldn't hear anything given the wind noise.

The first long road I take was dark, although the moon is shining tonight. Riding a mountain bike is a good idea under these conditions, because you cannot avoid gravel and other crud when you cannot see it. My head light's dimmer than the head lights of oncoming cars along the autoroute where that road runs. Glad I'd already taken that road many times.

Next I leave the road and ride along the Isère around the university campus. It turned out to be more effective to navigate by moonlight through the trees, and avoid looking at in the dim glow of my head light altogether. The eyes can become accustomed to very little light. I left the trail for the road before it turned entirely to loose gravel.

When I got to the train station in Gières another rider who lives in Chapareillan and who takes her bike every day told me she'd heard they're planning to pave that gravel area in the next two weeks. Looking forward to that.

Posted by Mark at 10:06 PM | TrackBack

November 07, 2005

A record

Record time for driving the autoroute from Crolles to work this morning: 1 1/4 hours. That's less than 10 kph. Don't really know why. Maybe there'd been an accident.

Posted by Mark at 09:36 AM | TrackBack

November 02, 2005

Peace & quiet

Work has been relatively quiet in the last few days, I now realize. I've been able to sit here and hack at examples and doc for LDAP client developers without more than a few interruptions per day. It must be too good to last.

Posted by Mark at 05:36 PM | TrackBack

October 30, 2005

Schema Repository, part XIV

Joanne has more man pages to generate from schema objects. At first we thought it was just two pages for attributes, but then we noticed a configuration object class we'd missed, and the two attributes we'd seen were something like two out of twenty.

Joanne would like to go ahead and use my repository, in case we need to touch the whole batch of pages again. Maybe I never should've done something so complicated. But I can still see how this thing could be useful. So in a way I want to work on it.

In the meantime, I'm going to have to explain to her how I hack the LDIF to load into the repository, and how I fix errors afterwards with an LDAP browser, then save the content of the repository to LDIF.

I also need to show how I have a global variable for the repository deep within one of the classes, and out of disgust with doing the job only halfway have left it there, so probably nobody but me can use this thing.

Ah, software! So hard to do anything useful to other people that won't make them want to write it over themselves. I take my virtual hat off to all of you real developers out there.

Posted by Mark at 10:01 AM | TrackBack

October 28, 2005

Jini starter kit with Apache licensing

Integration Developer News has an article about the new Jini starter kit which the folks at work have put out there under the Apache 2 license, on the theory that it makes it easier to contribute to the technology.

Nigel was telling me the other day about the distributed transaction model they have in there. Sounds amazingly cool to have abstracted it out in a way that other software could just plug in, but there's a question still in my mind about how you get distributed transactions to be as performant as possible without undue wizardry. Would actually using the API get the mind tied in knots, like it can with security?

The LDAP model basically says, "We give you best effort, rather than distributed transactions." So the model is loosely consistent, generally returning a response to the client of the service much faster than if it were to guarantee transactions. There are ways then to hide the complexity behind a point of entry to the service, but it still gets very hairy for somebody.

One thing Nigel said to me was that the folks actually coming to the Jini table and wanting real involvement were not first time distributed system builders. In many cases they'd tried and failed before, and now wanted to benefit from a model that had been thought through by experts.

Posted by Mark at 08:25 AM | TrackBack

October 26, 2005

Tag URI

Unique, human-tractable URIs, called Tag URIs, are apparently now defined in RFC 4151. If I made one up for this entry, it might be:

tag:mcraig.org,2005-10-26:mark:blog:2

The sticky part seems to be the suffix, mark:blog:2, which could be a lot of other things. How can I make sure that's easy to handle?

Posted by Mark at 01:28 PM | TrackBack

October 20, 2005

Fun runs starting next week

On my way around the 6 1/4 km circuit today I passed Jerome running the other way. He was on time; I was late. Then I met him back at work.

We decided one of us should send out a mail to commit to running Tuesdays and Thursdays at lunchtime. So I did. I decided to call them fun runs, since most people at work probably associate me and running with grimaces, wheezing, sweat, and pain. That's training. This is different. We'll see.

Posted by Mark at 09:28 PM | TrackBack

October 14, 2005

Revolution OS

When documentaries about OSs win prizes at film festivals that are not apparently only for geeks, what can we conclude people are forgetting to pay attention to?

Posted by Mark at 04:33 PM | TrackBack

October 12, 2005

Repository API

The LDAP schema repository grew until I managed to do what I wanted, but since then I've not gone back to finish it.

Sombody's blog took me to a newer version of the specification written up as JSR 170, Content Repository for Java(TM) technology API. So there's a standard proposed API that perhaps I should use... but the spec runs to 297 pages and stays completely generic. Hmm.

Posted by Mark at 10:52 AM | TrackBack

October 11, 2005

First flat on the new bike, part III

No flat this morning, so I rode the bike and train in.

When I was almost ready to leave, Nathalie said, "So you're going by bike." I said goodbye to the children. She asked, "Do you trust your bike?"

It didn't seem to be worth saying anything but, "Yes." Yes, technically I have to trust the pieces of my bike to work in the way they're assembled.

What I do not trust is my own ability to assemble and adjust them correctly, or to notice when I've done something that will cause a flat. But now that I think about it, why should I trust the components to function the way I expect them to? After all, somebody else built them, probably under adverse corporate conditions.

In the end I should say that I trust the components more than I trust my capability to keep them in adjustment. And I try to abstract away from that while riding so as not to get so scared I have to get off and walk.

Posted by Mark at 11:18 AM | TrackBack

October 10, 2005

First flat on the new bike

I'm not on the train right now. My front tire went flat on the new bike. Haven't investigated yet. Nathalie thought it would be better to come pick me up than to wait for me to fix it and have me come home much later.

Posted by Mark at 06:32 PM | TrackBack

October 07, 2005

Stinks so bad

At work we have shower rooms. Pierre went in there and about passed out.

Some of us who get out and run or ride, play soccer regularly leave our stuff in the shower rooms. Apparently that's a no-no. Stinks too much.

Luckily the potential conflict between people who do sports and therefore have stinky clothes best not kept in our (shared) offices, and people who do not do sports and therefore get upset about other peoples' sweaty sport clothes has been intelligently resolved by the folks elected to handle hygiene issues at work. We'll have to clear the place out on a couple of days notice each time, "It stinks so bad the stones been chokin' and weepin' greenish drops," as Frank Zappa put it.

Posted by Mark at 06:39 PM | TrackBack

October 06, 2005

Mud, part III

While riding into work this morning, I managed to fall off my bike for the first time in years. Riding a mountain bike really is like being a kid again. I foolishly tried to ride lengthwise up a long, high stretch of gravel workers have dropped onto the bike path they're repaving down by the university. Couldn't get my feet out of the SPD pedals fast enough, and fell over to my right side. No pictures, sorry.

Posted by Mark at 09:15 PM | TrackBack

October 05, 2005

Mud, part II

The pressure's still more or less on at work. We're at the point of the project where I can now see just about how much more I bit off than the team can actually chew in the time left.

So on my commute today I looked for opportunities to get off the road and ride like a kid again. Almost made it up the trail I failed so miserably on the other day. Matt's right about riding offroad. The intensity varies much more than it does on the road, or running. My legs were burning and I was wheezing when I got to the top of that incline.

And I had mud splotches all over me. Although it didn't rain today, there's plenty of muck around.

Posted by Mark at 08:47 PM | TrackBack

September 30, 2005

Looking for work

Nathalie's looking for work now. It's keeping her busy. It's curious to watch and to try to help someone who is clearly competent to do lots of things, but who has been out of the paid work force for so long.

It reminds me of what Joanne said about her fears of starting to work again after her boys grew up enough to go to school. Once she got back in, she realized there's not much to it. But when you're not working it seems so daunting.

At some point I'll be looking actively again. Not that I'd like to leave the team I work with now, but that thorough documentation is going to become a luxury people won't want to pay for. At least not while the people paying are CIOs and folks at that level. Our folks at that level and their folks at that level will figure most useful info can be gleaned either with Google, or somehow through support. It could be made to work, especially the second one. Though I don't know if it'll be easy to make money from that and to slam IBM for doing so at the same time.

Hope Nathalie finds something she likes.

This evening I took the car home because I had to be here in time for Nathalie to go to school for a parent-teacher meeting. France Inter was broadcasting a program of interviews with social workers and employment agents who made it sound like their jobs were mainly to get people off the unemployment lists one way or another. More than one of them claimed the oft-repeated idea that France has plenty of jobs, people just don't want to work, is false, or at least misleading. There may technically be employers who're willing to take people in if they'll work hard under rough conditions in a precarious position far from home at bad hours for a pittance. But those positions are going unfilled.

Most of the interviewees thought the criteria would eventually push more and more people off the unemployment lists one way or another, usually leaving them in dire straits. Hard to see how that might turn around.

Posted by Mark at 09:01 PM | TrackBack

September 28, 2005

Valence plage

A while ago Roch, Gilles, and I were joking over coffee about trying to guess the new sea level just right and buy a house in the Rhone valley, somewhere like Valence. If you did it just right, you'd have beachfront property in 2050 or whenever.

The BBC's now running an article about disappearing Arctic ice:

[Scientists] say that this month sees the lowest extent of ice cover for more than a century.

The trend graphed over the last 27 years makes it look like everything will have melted by 2080 if current trends continue. Yet they show a spike in there in the mid 90s when ice coverage reached the same extent as the early 80s. I guess you have to be an expert to understand the trends in detail.

Posted by Mark at 09:24 PM | TrackBack

September 26, 2005

Running club, part II

I finally went and got a map. My plan is to trace out some shorter routes using the map wheel and set up a schedule. Would be so much easier if Google had better maps in France.

There seem to be lots of us who could use a couple of runs a week. With an additional bit of exercise, it should get you into the minimum maintenance neighborhood (30 Cooper points). That's what I'm going to plan anyway.

Lana's in town. She says we all look older. Said she and Stu went to a film with Larry, and that Larry's working himself to exhaustion. Called Stu Saturday afternoon at around 6 pm to check the show time to see what was the latest time he could leave work.

Larry probably has nightmares about business angels coming to take his soul as collateral.

Posted by Mark at 08:57 PM | TrackBack

September 25, 2005

Recovering

Last night at 9:10 pm I couldn't read anymore, so I turned out the light, got under the covers and fell asleep. Woke up first when Tim came into our bedroom complaining of a stomach ache, but rolled over to sleep again quickly after that. Nathalie told me last night I looked ill.

This past week I guess I went near the limit of how much exercise and work stress I can handle simultaneously. Did manage to let email slide for the most part. Was thinking of adding to my .signature, as a sort of disclaimer, "If you said it to me orally or in email, I've already forgotten it." I'm tempted to state, "If I cannot find it in our project plan, our bug tracking system, or using Google search, I've already forgotten what you said."

I'd love to keep track of all those little things in my blog, but Jonathan reminded us recently not to share confidential information. Apparently somebody leaked something. I get to leak about 5000 pp. of documentation, but only when we eventually release, if we do. Right now it's confidential. You have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. I think we have to invite you to look. If you really do want to review the Directory Server docs before they're fully baked, send me mail at work (first dot last at sun dot com) and I'll see whether it would entail so much legal work that it's not in fact possible. You'd probably need to be invited into the customer acceptance program or whatever it's called. (I promise not to forget what you write until I have it somewhere I can track it, and hope this has been a sensible way to share unannounced company information.)

Anyway, I'm recovering. Not so sore, but still tired. I finally got up a while after 5 am, which was 8 hours. The odd thing that happens to me after a 20-miler or further is that my digestive system seems to slow down. Doesn't get back to normal until the next day. Yesterday afternoon I had occasional heartburn. All that banging on the heels must throw the insides slightly out of whack. I don't know how those folks running 100 miles per week do it.

Posted by Mark at 06:39 AM | TrackBack

September 23, 2005

3:09:00

The biking during my commute for four days this week amounted to 80.16 km in 3:09:00. So the average speed was 25.4 kph. But I'm generally either over 30 kph or for, all practical purposes, stopped.

This evening the students were going back home. Our train was so packed I could hardly board with my bicycle. The aisles were full of seated kids.

Right as I came through, some guy from the SNCF was passing out 1-page surveys. I had my hands full of frame and handlebars, so didn't take one. The girl next to me in the corridor was writing what seemed to be an angry note in the comments box.

True, the train's been late a lot in the evening, especially up to the middle of this week. The SNCF seems to be replacing the rails around Domene and Lancey. Between the flood and the tramway construction, they're falling behind between Grenoble and Brignoud. I can understand everyone's frustration. The flood days would've been even more frustrating if I had no car to take.

As it stands, I'm still glad to get the extra exercise and the time to read or relax while somebody else drives.

Posted by Mark at 08:39 PM | TrackBack

September 22, 2005

Huh?

A less well garnished version of Luke & Rob's whiteboard. See huhcorp.com.

Posted by Mark at 05:58 PM | TrackBack

September 21, 2005

Master of my tiny world

No real writing today, except email that'll potentially get lost. That's often what happens when you send something that could cause work for someone else, even if it's legitimate.

Instead, I wrote shell scripts and Makefiles to package man pages, making them easier to install. (Thanks to Christopher for his suggestions. It's great having your main customer right down the hall.) If you don't know what a man page is open a terminal window and...

$ man man

That's actually supposed to be a sort of UNIX joke. If you cannot open a terminal window, you no doubt do not need to know what a man page is. But you're probably missing the key feature of UNIX, which is a special brand of humor.

After that I worked out (with Eric and Armand, mainly Eric) much of what we need to know to be able to do online help with the doc tools in use at work, so we can also use those tools to localize it. I was muttering under my breath about our convoluted way of handling things, how tough we sometimes make things for the user.

Eric said something edifying at that point, "Solaris isn't an OS. It's an API."

That's actually literally true, because that's what people are buying. You get Solaris, and the API is stable in a rock solid way. It's so stable that you can generally just upgrade the system and all your applications will continue running, as will all your scripts. Not like GNU/Linux distros, where you expect your applications to survive to the next update only if you check everything or use only absolutely de facto standard stuff.

Of course that's a big pain in the keister... for the developer underneath the API. Developing underneath the API is like having unprotected sex. Lose continence for a moment and you pay forever after.

The "master of my tiny world" idea is the feeling of working in shell. You issue commands, one after another. That's all you do. And the system just executes whatever stupid orders you give it. It's worse than a cynical employee, because even a cynical wage slave won't just take any stupid idea you have to its logical conclusion, no matter how many important files are destroyed.

Posted by Mark at 09:16 PM | TrackBack

September 20, 2005

Overwhelmed

We're at a point in the project where I've become a bottleneck again, but it's a great excuse to focus on the work. Writing, scripting, playing with the latest builds, all things much better than email, meetings, slideware and stuff like that.

Unfortunately I seem to get much more of the latter than the former. The higher you go up the ladder, the worse it gets. By the time you take a Director's job, you do nothing interesting any more at all.

Posted by Mark at 08:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 19, 2005

Blackhole in time

Email. Get near it and it sucks time in. How did we ever decide it was such a good thing? It could be worse, though. We could still be stuck with telephones only.

Posted by Mark at 10:44 PM | TrackBack

September 17, 2005

2:22:27

2:22:27 is the biking part of my commute time for 3 days this week. That's a total of 2032.8 km since I got the odometer hooked up.

I'm not nearly as much of a biker as Dana, more of a runner right now, as shown by my actuals updated for this week.

Posted by Mark at 10:55 AM | TrackBack

September 14, 2005

Trying Windows

We have shared laptops at work. I was having a hard time with the stupid little knob in the middle of the keyboard causing the mouse to drift, and was not managing to turn that off in Xorg without also deactivating the touchpad. Furthermore, I wanted to try out the wireless network at work.

So I'm trying Windows. First thing that happened when I got on the network was a virus attack. I guess you do need an antivirus program if you aren't using Solaris or Linux or some other some other UNIX variant.

It's okay, but I wouldn't want to have only Windows. All the good applications of course have to be installed by hand. The default shell is awful. They hide the configuration files in the browser. It's a pretty nasty user experience.

Posted by Mark at 01:56 PM

September 09, 2005

2:00:31

2:00:31 is the time I spent cycling this week. I'm at 1972.4 km on the odometer, but am running more than I'm biking. This week I rode only 52.53 km (32.65 mi), whereas I've already run about 54 km and still expect to go out for a long run tomorrow morning.

Posted by Mark at 08:59 PM

Stinky

Joanne and I were at a demo of some new functionality in the server this afternoon. She noticed the room stank. I guess it's hard to get everything clean in there.

I told her that was nothing compared to the guys' shower. Even though I didn't wear my t-shirt every day I ran, it still smells like a wet dog. And I'm just one of many guys using those facilities.

Some guy wanted to use the gals' shower because it stank too much in the guys'. Joanne wouldn't let him in. She didn't want him slobbing up the place.

I was thinking about Dawkins's birds later on. If society were dominated by women, would the guys' shower smell better? Would I have to shave my legs, too, and get the little bit of fat by my belly button and on the top of my buttocks, fat that won't go away, liposuctioned? Matt suggested I have that fat liposuctioned off my midriff and injected into my lips to make them more generous and smoochy.

Posted by Mark at 08:37 PM

Sport

This morning, with my rear wheel repaired, I felt a burst of energy riding in to work. The nice thing about biking is the sense of speed that you actually are generating through your own power.

Hope it didn't overdo it for my run later today, or for tomorrow morning. Still have 48 km to do this week in two runs this noon and tomorrow morning.

Posted by Mark at 09:55 AM

September 08, 2005

Another flat

As I wrote this morning, I didn't take my bike to work. After dinner I had a look at the flat rear tire.

The hole in the inner tube was one of the smallest I've seen so far. It was small enough that I almost missed it, even when I held the tube under water. Repairing it with a patch turned out to be impossible. The only patches I have are twice the diameter of the 19-23 mm inner tubes.

Hope it doesn't go flat tomorrow. The tire has 3 deep cuts in the surface, one all the way through to the inner threads and two that stopped at the layer of Kevlar or whatever it is that lines the tire. That's why most people who weigh 83 kg (183 lb) don't commute on road bike tires.

Posted by Mark at 09:26 PM | Comments (2)

September 06, 2005

Unproductive time

I'm reading an article at C|Net by Ed Frauenheim in which he interviews Bill Coleman, senior VP of compensation at Salary.com.

Apparently Coleman found surfing to be the primary time wasting activity, with interoffice visits and personal business fairly far behind. The average US worker responding to the survey wastes over 2 hours a day, which is an hour more than managers expect. I haven't looked at the survey itself.

My guess is that estimate is off by a bit for software development. We can spend engineer years doing ostensibly productive work that turns out not to be of much value. You can go into the office and see smart people working very hard at great personal sacrifice wasting time. That's probably true in other industries as well. With the right strategy, the actual waste may be 20%. With the wrong strategy it can be 100%.

One other thing I see in the office is that people waste less time when they believe in what they're doing. Adults are better at smoothing that out, but if you don't believe me have your kid clean his room. Then let him do something he likes. If you try to work on efficiencies in getting the room cleaned, you waste not only his time but also your own.

Posted by Mark at 09:22 PM | Comments (1)

September 05, 2005

Traffic jam

Armand gave me a ride home under the rain. We had a huge traffic jam, probably due to an accident, on the stretch between Montbonnot and Crolles. I'd've gotten home faster taking the train. Oh, well. I got to stay at work a few more minutes and send some more email.

I'm thinking about spending a week at work without reading email or going to any meetings. The downside is that after a week like that, it would be hard to explain my normal productivity level. The upside would be that they'd never find out about my productivity. Since I'd be off email and out of meetings, I'd probably cease to exist outside my own mind. Nathalie could pinch me when I'd get home to see if I'm not dreaming. Or I could just check the showers for corpses.

Armand had to pick his daughter up in Chambéry. I told him to drop me off at the autoroute exit, and biked home. He was already about 20 minutes late.

Posted by Mark at 08:47 PM

September 04, 2005

Rainy days and time pressure

I may have made a mistake buying a train ticket for this week, despite gasoline prices at 1.30 euros/liter. Metcheck.com is predicting rain Monday and Tuesday. Also I have a 86 km week planned, though only one day of speedwork.

At work the stress levels are normal, but the workload is heavy, and will remain so for at least the next few months. Meanwhile I feel inhabitually tired, and now must take the 7:52 am train instead of the 7:00 am to help get the children ready for school.

None of the individual stresses are a big deal, but add them all up and they might be more than I want at once.

Posted by Mark at 08:50 PM

August 29, 2005

Not a dam, part IV

The tracks through Domène and Lancey have been cleared. I couldn't see them from inside the train. We went on time right through to Gières.

Somebody must've done a huge cleanup job. I wonder if they finished before the rain last Saturday.

Posted by Mark at 09:44 AM

August 26, 2005

3:26:42

This week's commute has been disasterous. Due to problems on the rails that prevent the train from going through the Domène - Lancey area, the train trip includes a bus ride.

The first day I got caught in that scenario, I just rode most of the way. That was Wednesday, when I decided as well not to run. Had a delivery at work anyway that day.

Yesterday I knew the rails hadn't been cleared, so I took the car. Today I rode down to the station for the 7:00 am train, but found out that the estimation things would be resolved "Wednesday evening at the earliest" actually didn't mean anything like "Thursday evening at the latest." It now appears that perhaps they'll be able to get it resolved before Monday.

So I rode back to the house, put my bike in the garage, and took the car. Nevertheless, I've ridden 3:26:42 this week.

Posted by Mark at 09:56 AM

August 24, 2005

Toast

Already, climbing on my bike to come home I felt tired.

By the time I got halfway up the hill just before Barraux, I was toast. At one point I looked down at the speedometer. I was moving forward at something like 8 kph (5 mph). Guess I'll have to take it easy if I want to enjoy running Sunday.

Or just take it easy Sunday.

Posted by Mark at 08:35 PM

August 22, 2005

Broken dam

My commute home this evening left something to be desired.

It started out with a damp ride to the station in Gières. After waiting for a few minutes, we saw the chef de gare come out and talk to people waiting. My neighbor said it didn't look good, since the lights in both directions were red and stayed that way.

The chef de gare said there would be no trains between Grenoble and Chambéry, as the station in Lancey was flooded. That was a surprise, since it had only been sprinking all day and a bit this weekend. It was hardly a torrential downpour. I called Nathalie and suggested she meet me if she could in Brignoud in the car, halfway down the valley. It wasn't that I couldn't just ride the hour or hour and a quarter home, but it has started to get dark earlier and I've run out of batteries for my headlight and lost my little tail light.

The road on that side goes through the center of Lancey, which is uphill from the station. So I figured there would be no problem riding on the Belledonne side of the valley up to Brignoud. I took off at a brisk pace as it had started to sprinkle and I was cold. Riding hard, I got to Lancey fairly quickly. The rain was starting to come down harder.

In the center of Lancey, the traffic was backed up and people were turning around. I soon found out why. The main street down to the station was literally a muddy river. The firemen were evacuating people in a large, high truck with tractor tires. Other people were standing and watching, taking pictures or talking on their mobile phones to explain the situation.

"Yes, we heard the dam broke. There's water everywhere. No, you won't be able to meet me coming the other way. The whole road is blocked. The water is 50 cm deep in the middle."

I decided not to chance it and rode back towards work, where I found a pay telephone and managed to get Nathalie on her mobile.

Now I have to go clean my chain again.

Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM

August 19, 2005

3:08:01

This reflects my time biking for 4 days of commuting this week. I rode 80.62 km (50.11 mi) at an average speed of 25.7 kph (16.0 mph).

As usual, the time and thus average speed includes any time the bike computer considers the bike to be moving, which therefore counts not only the downhill in front of my house where I maxxed out at 67.4 kph this week, but also some time logged at approx. 0 kph maneuvering the bike around inside train corridors.

This morning I felt jumpy. Must've had too much coffee before leaving. On the stretch along the Isère behind campus I decided to pick up my speed to what was roughly average Tour allure, about 47.6 kph (29.6 mph). On the flat that's so fast for me I probably couldn't keep it up for more than about a kilometer. Hard to imagine riding 4 hours at that speed, even if I could do much of it drafting on somebody else's rear wheel.

It's similar to the speed at which the top runners do marathons. 20 kph (12 1/2 mph) is the speed at which I run 200 m intervals. Maybe I could keep it up for 400 m. Once.

Posted by Mark at 09:06 PM

Bug scrubbing

The latest colorfully ironic technical term* to come to my attention at work: to scrub a bug. It means doing what you have to do in the bug tracking system to move the bug out of the "nobody responsible has even looked at this yet" state, to a state where although nobody responsible has actually looked at the problem in question yet, the bug report appears to show that somebody accountable has taken it around their neck. That is, for a scrubbed bug the bug report identifies a throat to choke if the excrement hits the air conditioning.

Bug scrubbing is closely related to hog washing, an utterly useless occupation undertaken primarily for the benefit of people observing from far enough away and only in such circumstances that they may indeed think pigs are mostly pink and fuzzy instead of covered head to hoof in grime most of their lives.

* We have lots of colorfully ironic (Orwellian?) management terms. In fact there are so many of them with half lives so short that Rob and Luke filled so much of their whiteboard they had to start erasing terms to be able to work.

Posted by Mark at 07:42 AM

August 18, 2005

Blogging for work, part III

David Lindt mentioned in a meeting a couple of blogs around NetBeans done by writers.

So why don't I show you more Directory Server scripts and examples in this blog?

Hmm. That's a good point. Obviously if embarassment were an impediment, I'd never leave the house in the morning.

Posted by Mark at 05:13 PM

Rainy commute

This morning it was raining when I first woke at about 5:48 am. So I went back to sleep, and ended up missing the 7:00 am train.

It was barely damp in Barraux when I went to catch the 7:52 train in Pontcharra. From Gières to Montbonnot, I rode through the aftermath of rain showers, so my chain may be rusting as I write.

For the run the sky was heavy but nothing came down. Now it's raining. I'm sure the ride home tonight will be a wet one. Should've looked at the weather forecast before leaving home.

Posted by Mark at 09:52 AM

August 16, 2005

Chilly

The commute into work was chilly. Got up too late to catch the 7:00 am train, but caught the 7:10. Shorts and a jersey weren't really enough. Most riders and even some walkers were wearing long pants and windbreakers. And it looked like rain.

But it's better than August 2003. Great for running.

Posted by Mark at 08:52 AM

August 13, 2005

Ubuntu, part IV

Got the VPN client working on Ubuntu. Eventually I found out that I had to make a symlink:

/usr/src/linux -> linux-headers-2.6.10-5-386

I also had to find a version of the VPN client that was more recent than what worked for the 2.4.21 kernel. That one couldn't handle the 2.6.10 kernel on Ubuntu.

Works okay now though. I can start moving everything off the old Red Hat 9 system.

Not only that, but the camera works fine, even automounts like the MP3 player. (Though I did have to edit /etc/fstab a while back.) I was doing things out of order. The way to do it on this system is to plug in the USB connection, then start the HandyCam and move it to the play/edit mode.

Posted by Mark at 04:23 PM

August 12, 2005

3:02:50

That's a slightly low estimate, probably by about 5 minutes, of how much time I spent riding during my commute this week, over 4 days. Yesterday I didn't ride, but instead took the car, as I had to collect Nath and the children from the train station at 10 pm.

Three hours is also roughly the time it would take me to commute in the car, barring any traffic jams. (There wouldn't be any traffic jams here during the week in August.) I probably also spent about only slightly less than 3 hours in the train, however. In addition, I loose a few minutes each time I catch the train because I'm uncomfortable cutting it too close.

So taking the train roughly doubles my commute time, though it costs less than half as much.

My impression is that if we could catch the train at the station in Domene or Lancey, neither of which is currently open to the public, my costs and time would both drop. I was talking about that with a woman also doing the bike/train combination, but coming from Chapareillan and going to Meylan, though she sometimes works in Montbonnot. She felt Montbonnot was really too far from Gières, and that was preventing more people from taking the train.

She probably has a point there. Other than Serge, I know of no colleagues at Sun who take the train in from Pontcharra. Despite the traffic in the valley and the high costs of running a car in France it's more convenient for most to drive.

Posted by Mark at 09:12 PM

Dead legs

Commuted in on dead legs this morning, pushing the bike pedals around. When I go to run today I guess I'll see whether I have any oompf.

Posted by Mark at 07:52 AM

August 10, 2005

Blogging for work, part II

Jen sent around a link to an article on Yahoo news about corporate blogging:

It is difficult to imagine today's I.T. buyers relying on nothing but a corporate blog before a purchasing decision.

At least that wouldn't be what that buyer covered his butt with afterward, "Well, it was supposed to be good. I read it was good in this corporate blog entry."

So loosen up. What you write in your blog can still get you fired, but at least it won't become the excuse when somebody buys the wrong thing.

Posted by Mark at 04:14 PM

Blogging for work

More people at work in my neck of the woods are wondering about blogging. If you're not a manager or a marketing dude and you're going to blog for work, I recommend checking out The Observation Deck. Not so you can do what Bryan does, because you probably cannot, but so you can get the idea of what blog entries for work might feel like.

You still might want to blog on a non-work server, though, especially if 99% of your entries are about cooking, running, family, home, etc., and only 1% cover things happening at work. Perhaps fewer people will browse to your individual entries, but if they're worth reading and Google can get there, people who need them will find them.

Posted by Mark at 11:34 AM

August 08, 2005

The function of meetings

Another entertaining essay from Paul Graham, the link to which Roch sent around. Paul explains a bunch of things, including the function of meetings:

Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little. And yet all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a day. When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement comes out the other, something has to give. And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack.

Hmm. Don't tell anyone else. It's funny how most of the people around here who really go to lots of meetings take the laptop with them. They're busy doing the other activity big organizations use to soak up the time you spend as a presence in the office: email.

As though there were not enough time in the day to do all the non-work we have to do, let alone the work that would actually be valuable to someone.

Posted by Mark at 09:40 AM

August 05, 2005

2:17:54

I rode and took the train into work only 3 days this week. Tuesday and Wednesday it was too wet and sloppy.

The new tracks at Gières/Université now extend past the train station itself. Looks like it'll be possible in the coming months to take the tram into Grenoble from and out to the train station there, though the bridges to take over across the river are not yet particularly convenient for folks going to Montbonnot.

Posted by Mark at 07:59 PM

August 02, 2005

Aging

Our health insurance provider is upset with us. People seem to be getting older, going to the doctor more. One person even had the nerve to die, and event that, because of the coverage that person had, siphoned off quite a few euros from the premiums we and our employer pay. I wonder if some of our provider's actuaries got called up on the carpet.

Probably not. The ones who did the original calculations back in the 80s or whenever, back when stock options were like a money press and people were younger with no kids, good eyes, and whiter teeth, probably went on to higher and better things. Maybe they fired them all. Maybe actuaries got laid off. They're probably awfully expensive to keep around, quiet mathematicians sitting in front of PCs with statistics programs, putting confidence intervals around our life expectancies and how often we'll have children, get ill, or have a cavity that needs to be filled. Maybe they put the salespeople on commission.

If I were in sales, I'd go for that. Find someone in good shape this year, sell them the big plan, security, the whole 9 yards. Then get my commission and get out. Five years later the excrement would of course hit the air conditioning as Vonnegut wrote, but by then I'd be a Vice President in some quite savings & loan.

If you stand back and look at the situation, you'll notice how obviously reasonable the handling of it is. You get too old, your coverage costs too much. We'll have to cut you off since you're ruining our margins. All for one and everyone for himself, that's why so many of them call themselves "mutuals." Notice this is also the approach we're going to be taking more and more as entire societies as well.

Posted by Mark at 03:41 PM

August 01, 2005

Patch

Believe this or not, I'd never had to use patch before. Then I found I'd been fixing Javadoc in the wrong workspace and had to move all those niggly little edits. patch came to my rescue.

One thing to keep in mind: If you want to work from a cvs diff, try cvs diff -c.

Posted by Mark at 05:45 PM

Taking the train, part VI

The temperature this morning was wonderful for a gentle bike ride. Furthermore, I could come to work on the 7 am train since the kids, on summer vacation, don't need to be anywhere at any particular time today. Arrived at work having barely broken a sweat and my mail's already taken care of (so far).

A guy on a recumbent rode past me on the way from the Gières station past the university. He seemed to be moving faster yet working even less than I was. His was one of those recumbents with the feet up high, out front. That's the first one I've seen along my commuter route.

Posted by Mark at 07:48 AM

July 28, 2005

Overflow, part III

Upon returning from vacation, I had about 3700 messages. Today I reduced that to 230 of which I probably only need answer a few.

My intent is to reduce time spent reading, writing, and responding to email from about 1/3 of my job to less than 1/5. I'd like to reduce it to 1/10, but am not sure that's really feasible at a company whose culture is so clearly email centric.

Posted by Mark at 09:24 PM

July 02, 2005

Overflow, part II

Last night waiting to watch a late movie, and today while capturing a couple of hours of video onto disk I continued email triage. I've almost caught up with the backlog; only 30 emails that need action remain in my Inbox at work.

Email's a boon and an epidemic, similar in some ways to desktop publishing and blogging. Most of us are guilty of letting quanity squelch quality. Any long term solutions to the problems must take that fact into account.

Posted by Mark at 08:15 PM

June 30, 2005

Working hours

From June 30, 2004 until today, June 30, 2005, I've attempted to keep track of my hours worked and what I did using my aging Palm Pilot with Hours for PalmOS.

The total comes to 2160 hours 50 minutes. Early on I tried to count in 5-minute intervals, but soon resorted to counting nothing smaller than a 15-minute interval, so there's probably a bit of rounding error, but it's not too far off. The count includes work done outside the office.

Of that count a whopping 609 hours was spent on email!

During the year, I also spent 100:30 eating lunch at work, and 241:05 running and showering. Those of course are not included in the 2160:50. I also didn't count the time it took to commute.

Posted by Mark at 09:18 PM | Comments (2)

June 27, 2005

10 years old

Sun's running another JavaOne event. The celebration is around the 10th anniversary of the Java language. You have to be a hard core nerd to get excited about the 10th anniversary of a programming language. Maybe some of you will take that as a compliment. I might.

Anyway, Ludo was listening to some music then a keynote from John Gage at work this afternoon. I decided at least read a little bit about what's going on this year.

I'd hardly gone far when I saw Patrick Keegan's guest blog for the JavaOne conference at the top of the list of blogs! I got that sudden breath of fresh air feeling you get when you actually share an occupation with someone who's been famous for 15 minutes.

Posted by Mark at 08:25 PM

June 24, 2005

4:46:28

This was the time spent commuting this week, including one errand to Grenoble. I averaged 25.5 kph (15.8 mph), including the minutes inside trains and stations at near 0 kph, and one max. speed peak at 70.5 kph (43.8 mph) down the hill leading up to the house.

Theoretically speaking according to a web page suggesting how to calculate cycling calories, I burned about a pound of fat doing those 121.8 km (75.7 mi).

Posted by Mark at 08:55 PM

June 22, 2005

1 character per hour

Andy found me complaining to him in email about how our DTD at work, SolBook, supports underscores in entity names and attribute values, and how PSGML mode for Emacs doesn't. So he told me to fix it.

I don't know Lisp, and am slow anyway. Ludo helped me a bit, but I found the suspicious bit myself. It was in the range of line 300 in psgml-parse.el:

(mapconcat (function (lambda (c)
             (modify-syntax-entry c "w" sgml-parser-syntax)))
           "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrtsuvwxyz" "")
(mapconcat (function (lambda (c)
                       (modify-syntax-entry c "_" sgml-parser-syntax)))
           "-.0123456789" "")

Ludo told me about C-h f, to get the doc about mapconcat and modify-syntax-entry, and saw this mapping alphabetic characters to w (word) and numeric characters to _.

So I added an underscore to the SEQUENCE:

           "_ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrtsuvwxyz" "")

This seems to have done the trick. I could now load and parse our DTD in PSGML mode.

Too bad it took me so long to understand. At one character per hour, it should only take me 128 years to write the next version of our Developer's Guide.

Posted by Mark at 08:30 PM

June 20, 2005

Deadlines

Aren't we glad nobody writing docs over here needs this level of pressure to meet deadlines?

Posted by Mark at 08:21 PM

June 18, 2005

4:32:35

That's the time I spent this week cycling to and from work, including a trip to Decathlon for brake pads, 117.25 km (72.87 mi).

My average speed over that time is only 25.8 kph (16.0 mph), but there's wide variation, from probably less than 1 kph maneuvering in the corridors inside trains, to 63.7 kph coming down the hill on the road in front of the house.

Posted by Mark at 10:16 AM

June 17, 2005

Overflow

We're in one of those periods at work where I don't really get through my email. Periods like this are perhaps more the rule than the exception.

Posted by Mark at 10:13 PM

June 16, 2005

Too many cooks

This afternoon we were in Eric and Helene's office sort of redesigning something on the whiteboard after a suggestion from Seb, who's in QA. Eric didn't take part. We seemed to be getting to him.

Eric I overheard later was going out on vacation tomorrow. He's been working pretty hard trying to keep the cats herded. I get the impression he has so many other interruptions he cannot find time to do the work he's set aside for himself.

He should've been less polite. Probably should've thrown us out. Some of us cooks in his kitchen were standing around talking about what we'd do with ingredients none of us can afford. Others were ready to rewrite the menu entirely.

Posted by Mark at 08:25 PM

June 15, 2005

Cycling and pace

My work day is gradually getting condensed. Taking the train does that. I'm starting to get used to thinking in terms of needing to finish at a certain time in order to catch a train home in time to eat dinner with the children and put them to bed. I've been worse than usual at answering mail, too. It's the lack of time. (Mail should be easier when we move work mail to the edge and I don't have to get on the VPN to get mail from work.)

Matt also suggested I take more time riding to and from the train. He says you can easily work too hard and ruin your training. It would be cool to rearrange my day, work from home sometimes all day. Maybe I can make that work when Diane goes to school in the fall.

Posted by Mark at 08:31 PM

Wet

Pulled on my biking clothing to head off for work today and noticed that although it's only Wednesday morning everything already stinks. I already smelled like a wet dog on Tuesday evening.

Then I looked at my bike. The brake pads are shot. If I don't find time Saturday morning to shop for new pads, I'm going to ruin the rims. Not sure I should be braking even now.

Posted by Mark at 09:01 AM

June 14, 2005

OpenSolaris launch

It was supposed to be announced by blogs. It looks like the press is picking up the story.

It'll be interesting to see how it goes as we open source the docs.

Posted by Mark at 05:18 PM

Bad wager

Bet against the rainstorm this morning and took the train + bike. Things stayed dry until Gières, then I lost. My socks were squelching when I arrived at the office.

The weather's warm enough now that you don't freeze riding in the rain. Knowing I'm going to have to clean and oil the chain tonight.

Posted by Mark at 08:50 AM | Comments (5)

June 10, 2005

Working from home, part II

Today I was in a hurry to do this 6:30-7:30 pm meeting around docs for OpenSolaris on the phone and PC at home, so I'd be home already when it finished.

Anyway, I was going to catch the 5:20 train and get here with time to do mail. Started on my bike. The back tire was completely, utterly flat. There was a big cut around the valve.

Daniel ended up giving me a ride home. Very cool of him. But I didn't get quite 5 hours of riding in this week yet.

Posted by Mark at 07:23 PM

June 09, 2005

Another look

When I wrote about Tantrums, you could imagine the mail I sent to Mom and Dana. I've got no problem with folks in India getting good jobs. More power to them. Let's hope they quickly arrive at European income levels. Let's hope we can all still breathe when that happens.

So I agree with Melanie, who used to work here at Sun in Grenoble, as Tilly chronicles in her blog.

It hardly makes sense to disagree with Friedman's analysis that our system is ever more winner-take-all. Sure, we see more and more of that.

I do however disagree that this particular instance of the system is inevitable, as if there were no point it attempting to fix it. If we consider this system inevitable, our obvious conclusion is that we must win at all costs. Or if we're really feeling charitable, we may help out some of the losers. Maybe that strategy pays off for people who read the New York Times.

But you can do better than that. It's been about 25 years since Buckminster Fuller wrote Critical Path and we're still stuck in scarcity mentality. Scarcity. That's why we compete in the economic sphere. Look it up. Economy comes from the Greek meaning "household management."

The reason we need New York Times columnists to write hagiographically about the movers and shakers of aggressive household management is that if they didn't stoke the fires, people would eventually get sidetracked, look at each other, wondering, "What the heck were we competing at that for? And with such high stakes!"

Posted by Mark at 09:02 PM

June 08, 2005

Working from home

Rode in on the train+bike today. I got stuck with meetings at inconvenient times and had to ride home all the way like a madman, knowing I was almost late. There was a strong headwind coming down the valley.

Got home, called into the meeting conference, still breathing fast and sweating. Nobody.

Open my email... the guy leading it had cancelled the thing only minutes after I left work... I should've given in and stopped at Ludo's in Crolles.

Posted by Mark at 06:30 PM

June 07, 2005

Email account phishing

There's been really a lot of this lately:

Subject: Your Email Account
Once you have completed the form in the attached file, your account records will not be interrupted and will continue as normal.

As far as I can tell, almost all of it has been on 3 internal aliases. Somebody must be running an infected PC.

Posted by Mark at 02:44 PM

Focal reviews

At the close of each fiscal year at work we do what is called a focal review. We review how our performance matched the goals agreed on during the year. The employee writes a summary at the same time the manager writes a summary, and the manager's job is to compare, contrast, and complete the final summary.

I'm sure everybody everywhere does this. Why do I dislike it so much?

Posted by Mark at 09:55 AM | Comments (2)

June 01, 2005

Schema repository, part XIII

I have this odd, high-entropy relationship with the half-baked bit of schema repository foundation I've hacked together. Cannot muster the activation energy to finish the job as it should be done, making a web application out of my mess. So far it works fine to generate documentation covering the schema elements, but I couldn't hand it off to anyone.

In fact I'm not sure I could explain why I did it. On the weekends I sometimes think about playing with it while Diane's sleeping, but then get interrupted. Since I'm so messy, interruptions are fatal. All of the context flushes out of my mind and then it takes forever to get back into it. So it's difficult to get into that very satisfying state where I can actually create something. Wish I could do it more often.

In the evening I'm just too tired to concentrate. So I keep putting entries into this silly blog...

Posted by Mark at 09:50 PM

Keeping track

This is the last month of the year I plan to track what I do at work with hours on the old Palm Pilot.

By now I've completely lost interest. I probably won't be able to salvage anything from what I've done, other than how many hours I worked in the past year, and how many I exercised. Although I do some project "management" at work, I'm not a manager at heart.

Posted by Mark at 06:16 PM

May 27, 2005

Coming out

The whole Netscape DS going open source story finally got slashdotted.

There are lots of comments. Some people have a clue. Others don't yet in true Slashdot reader fashion go ahead and comment anyway.

Neat to see that folks are using SLAMD to compare directory performance for their applications.

Posted by Mark at 01:15 PM

May 26, 2005

Taking the train, part V

There's a lot to do at work right now. It seems like I'm falling behind.

This morning it felt that way on the bicycle as well. But on the stretch around the edge of the university I was holding it at around 40 kph (25 mph), which is quick for me. Arrived at work sweating quite a bit.

Got too busy today, and had to go to lunch with colleagues, so I decided to take a rest from running.

Left work at the end of the day with 22 minutes to make the train, but made it 5-6 minutes ahead of time. I'm going to have to recalculate my marathon training schedule if I keep riding like this to work, headaches or no headaches.

Posted by Mark at 09:40 PM

May 25, 2005

Taking the train, part IV

Going into the middle of a third week of taking the train, I find myself riding as if it were a workout rather than a ride to work. Today's an easy day for running training with a gentle 5 km recovery run planned.

But on the bike I keep getting this urge to do what I can to hold the pace over 32.1 kph (20 mph) in all the straightaways. Hal Higdon warns that improved riding speeds will be at the expense of running speed. Taking the bike computer off so I cannot know with much precision how fast I'm going would be admitting that I cannot learn to be patient, and I'm too stubborn for that.

Posted by Mark at 07:40 AM

May 24, 2005

Off road biking, part II

In the biking vein, Joanne and I were having a cup of coffee, talking about riding around. She decided to get one of those contraptions to raise her handlebars up. Said it made riding much more comfortable. She's thinking about getting a more comfortable seat as well.

Nathalie would've liked a more comfortable seat the day we spent on Porquerolles. Gary walked up to the coffee machine and agreed with Joanne that she should get a nicely padded, wide seat. He feels life is too short to have painful bicycle seats. Janetta suggested the recumbant bike posture is the right overall solution, but agreed it wouldn't be right for off road biking. I told them that Dana eventually decided in favor of a recumbant and was pleased with his choice.

My road bike came with a slim, uncomfortable looking saddle that actually turned out to be better than any I can remember. Perhaps I have a pointy pelvis. Yet part of the saddle comfort's due to the handlebars being lower than the seat. Also if you're working hard and enjoying yourself, you tend to notice small discomforts less. If it's a choice between endorphins and boredom, I'll take endorphins.

Posted by Mark at 10:02 PM

May 15, 2005

Finding things

Martin Hardee mentions the "Gordian knot of web site complexity" he deals with at work. IMHO, he and the folks he work with do an amazingly good job given how many people in almost every corner of our company have something to add somewhere to our external site.

Although I'm guilty of adding regularly to the mass of information, most of what I create for the external web now again comes to the docs.sun.com formatting engines as SolBook SGML (actually equivalent XML). At least the folks in Martin's extended team can make it look like it should.

But how can they help you find things?

Occasionally I do navigate through websites I know, like ours. But when I don't know the three clicks to get to something, I go through a search engine. Don't you?

For example, if I want to find something in the Directory Server 5.2 doc set, isn't it faster to Google for:

"Directory Server 5.2" what I'm looking for site:docs.sun.com

than to remember where I put it? And that's even for content I wrote. You can bet I don't try to navigate often to content someone else put there.

Posted by Mark at 07:16 PM

May 13, 2005

Compression

This week I took the car two days and the train three. Tuesday I took the car so I could go to Chambéry to see the chiropractor straight from work. Wednesday I did again after the chiropractor told me to take it very easy.

The other days, I still found myself running almost late each time. Taking the train compresses my day, at least on both ends. And we have lots of work to do. I find myself jumping in and dashing off. Need to get used to the rhythm.

Posted by Mark at 08:42 PM

May 11, 2005

Donation

Didier drove German and me over to the hospital in La Tronche this noon for the three of us to give blood. Last time I went was before training for the Lyon marathon. I cannot run today anyway, doctor's orders.

Didier and the nurse thought I was going to faint, but I felt no weaker than usual. Didier and German seemed fine, but the nurse had to try both of Didier's arms before getting it right.

Posted by Mark at 01:31 PM

May 07, 2005

3:17:05

Didn't wear my heart monitor for this, since it was the time spent either riding the bike or walking it through the train stations at Pontcharra and Gières.

The distance for the week was 85.1 km, a little over 10 1/2 km each way going to and from work, since that represents 4 days.

I need to think about riding more slowly. Even though I took Friday off in terms of running, the 21 km I rode meant my legs didn't get total rest.

Posted by Mark at 11:07 AM

May 06, 2005

Silence

For the middle of the day we shut power down in the offices and labs at work. At lot of people are out today.

The calm had me thinking about the monks in the Chartreuse who had taken vows silence. Christopher put it this way:

The monks having taken vows of silence were permitted to utter one sentence, collectively, per year. So they agreed to take turns.

The first year, John's turn came around when the monks were having peas for dinner. "Mmm! Great peas," he said.

The next year, it was Greg's turn. "John, you were right about those great peas last year," he replied.

The third year, Fred had his chance to speak. "Guys, shut up about the peas for crying out loud!"

Posted by Mark at 03:21 PM

May 04, 2005

Taking the train, part III

The rain's only been a problem once in three days. The road however wants to knock the fillings out of my teeth in spots.

I've been trying to keep a cadence at 105 rpms, except for the last bit uphill to the house. My best time between the station in Gières and Montbonnot is about 15-16 minutes. I keep forgetting to check the odometer, but the average speed must be fairly high (for me). Couldn't keep the pace up for an hour.

On the train itself, if I catch one that goes from Pontcharra to Gières or vice versa without stopping, the train ride takes only 17-19 minutes. Not even enough to do much reading. Only once has there been plenty of space for all the bikes. So it's less convenient than I'd originally hoped.

Lastly I'm not yet organized enough. Always in a rush when it comes time to catch the train, and the workday seems uncomfortably abridged.

Posted by Mark at 10:19 PM

May 03, 2005

Taking the train, part II

This week I'm commuting with the train and my bike. At 15.60 euros, a train ticket valid for the week costs less than the tolls (about 20.50) on the autoroute, not to mention the gasoline (about 25) and the wear and tear on the car. Unfortunately, the trip takes more than twice as long door to door.

In a way I can think of this as additional cross training, since it's roughly an extra hour of exercise 5 times per week. There's some question as to whether I should continue to do it that way, however, and have to add two more showers each day, or instead force myself to ride so slow and avoid sweating. At cross training speed I arrive drenched in perspiration at both ends.

Posted by Mark at 09:40 AM

April 29, 2005

Hardware bugs

As bad as software bugs can get, hardware bugs can be worse.

Here at work the downstairs toilets have been malfunctioning. For the last 3 days we've had guys on their hands and knees with rubber hoses pumping unwanted liquids out of the building into tanker trucks in the parking lot.

Posted by Mark at 10:55 AM

April 27, 2005

Keyboard cleaning

At home I have a Sun Type 6 US QWERTY keyboard that connects by USB. The "G" got stuck. Last night I was typing extra Gs every time I hit an F, T, H, or B, and sometimes even without touching the keyboard.

Fabio showed my how easy it is to clean out the keyboard. You could probably do it with one Philips screwdriver and thick fingernails, but I also used a flat screwdriver. It took me about 10 minutes and the problem now seems to be solved. Very nice. I could even let the kids eat cookies while playing on the computer.

Posted by Mark at 08:15 PM

April 16, 2005

Earnings

Haven't listened to the earnings call yet, but I saw the numbers. We managed more or less to break even.

I also see IBM undershot analysts' estimates by a significant margin. Dell stock hit the skids. The market seemed to be having a bad end to the week.

Two writers from the hardware side were visiting the Grenoble site this week. One's from San Diego, the other from the Bay Area. My colleague from the Bay Area says things are getting better than they were. Instead of having to search for a year to get a job, it's now possible to find one in 2-3 months. A lot of seriously overqualified people are competing for junior positions, however. The people who were in junior positions are, "Slinging coffee at Starbucks."

Posted by Mark at 07:52 AM

April 14, 2005

Headache, part IV

Splitting headache by the time I left work today. It's gone now, but I also have a sore throat that crept up on me during the afternoon. Crossing my fingers...

Posted by Mark at 08:42 PM | Comments (1)

April 07, 2005

Headache, part III

My head hurt from the moment I woke up this morning. It only stopped hurting either with medication or during running. A long day at work. The medication I took gave me a stomach ache.

Posted by Mark at 09:08 PM

7 hours

7 hours of meetings today at work. Also spent another hour preparing a presentation and doing prework for one of the meetings. And since I was out yesterday, I also spent an extra hour catching up on email.

The most exhausting days are those where none of your accomplishments are concrete.

Posted by Mark at 09:03 PM

April 05, 2005

Laziness, part II

I'm finally getting around to installing Solaris 10 on a Toshiba Tecra M1 at work. The install seems to be going pretty smoothly. It'll be neat to see how it compares to Linux as a desktop OS.

Posted by Mark at 06:25 PM

April 04, 2005

Headache

Have had the same headache for three days now, getting worse late in the day. Last night it was bad enough that I had to lie down.

Cannot tell what it's from. Maybe I ate too many cookies at Emma's birthday party and haven't run it all off. Maybe I caught somebody's cold.

Posted by Mark at 08:41 PM

March 24, 2005

Hacks

Speaking of things in the eye of the beholder, from a certain angle all of UNIX is a series of hacks, including the stuff that built up atop it. What makes it worthwhile is that what's left over in that kind of system has been stressed and ground down by users sharing the culture of the hack, once explained metaphorically as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

The difficulty when you first come to the system is that you want to impose on it. You decide you shouldn't have to learn vi for example because it seems so archaic and user-feindlich. You continue to feel comfortable with files not based on text. You think, "I just want to use this, not have to understand it." You use other people's configuration files as is.

Later on you finally decide you need to swallow your pride and learn some vi, a bit of scripting and programming. You still run X, but you have more terminals open than anything else. You see both simple and hard looking problems as not understood yet. Other people start interrupting you for help, and you notice how little you know, but how little difference that makes, too.

My father-in-law, Michel, doesn't use UNIX as far as I know. He has the idea, however. Last time he came to visit he ran out of things to do, so he took an old washing machine apart to look for salvageable spare parts. I wonder how much stuff he would've accumulated in his home dir.

Posted by Mark at 08:53 PM

March 21, 2005

Real work, part II

Nathalie called me this morning, worried about a grinding sound in the left front wheel. Sounds like my real work wasn't done real right.

Posted by Mark at 09:57 AM

March 20, 2005

Real work

Although I have a paying job and get a reasonable amount of exercise, I don't do much real work.

This morning was an exception. At first I was feeling lazy after lying around reading Guy Carlier's book of letters he read on France Inter during the 7-9 a couple of years ago, waiting for Nathalie to get up. When she got up and could watch out for the children I spent nearly two hours doing real work, the kind that wears out your lower back and puts grunge under your fingernails that only detergents and scrubbrushes can remove.

First I turned and weeded a bunch of earth with a pitchfork so Nathalie could plant strawberries and I could plant rhubarb. Next I put the summer tires back on her car. Very manly stuff.

It took me almost 30 minutes on the couch eating peanuts and watching Carte postale gourmande to recover.

Posted by Mark at 02:06 PM

March 09, 2005

Localization and support

Ludo showed me Norbert Lindenberg's entry, Localization Reduces Support Cost. At first all I noticed was the graph:

Wow! Then I saw this was Sun�s Consumer Java Support team. Does that make a difference? It would be neat to see the results for software aimed at people who read man pages.

Posted by Mark at 09:51 PM

March 08, 2005

International Women's Day, part II

Failed once again. Tried to get out of work early enough to buy flowers, but was too late. I was trying to figure out doc impact of some new features we'd like to add to the next release.

So my very weak compromise was to let her wash the dishes instead of getting the three of them to brush their teeth.

Posted by Mark at 08:36 PM

March 03, 2005

Interface culture

A couple of years ago during a meeting in a library room on Sun's Menlo Park campus, I noticed the title on a book jacket, Interface Culture. I have not read Steven Johnson's book, but found out at Amazon.com that it was about computers more than culture. I had instead imagined something entirely different behind that title.

What I imagined was an explanation of US social culture as an interface production system. By that I mean a treatise on how social interaction in the US involves primarily interface definition and elaboration. We define what's yours, what's mine, and where the dividing lines are.

On either side of the interface, our underlying assumption is that we're free to do what we want on our individual sides. We may of course have some pointers for you about how to do things on your side. Yet we expect that in the extreme case of contention, we'll resolve things to a contract about the interface between us, and the rest remains free.

This social model stands in contrast to the models used in other places such as France. In France we seem more to consider how we can accommodate one another than at how we can keep apart. Here I see much more interaction and discussion concerning the model we share for how to live, than definition of how not to step on each others' toes.

The boundary between you and me is only a thin, imaginary line that we can probably redefine at any time, as long as we agree more or less on how we'll do it. Why spend so much time agonizing over the boundary alone, when we have so much to discuss and to learn from each other?

There can be an urge to want to determine which culture is better. This urge appears to arise when you plunge into an unfamiliar culture, or when you experience people from two or more cultures getting all twisted up misunderstanding each other. I don't think it makes sense to waste effort determining which whole approach to life is better in general, although it would be cool to know.

Posted by Mark at 05:55 AM

February 24, 2005

Netbeans 4, part III

In playing again with my schema repository idea, I've started to realize how cool some of the upcoming refactoring features in Netbeans will be. Most of my refactoring involves moving methods, and extracting hardcoded stuff into constants.

Something that might also be cool is extracting constants into an external Properties file and adding initialization code to load the properties.

Posted by Mark at 06:02 PM

February 19, 2005

Netbeans 4, part II

Netbeans 4 is fine, but the code I hacked together is a mess, strewn with hard-coded values, methods made public for no apparent reason, no doc.

I started with a task I could've done in any editor: write some doc, trying to figure out what the public interface to my schema repository should be. After a couple of hours, I've managed to see again what the original goal was, something only related to, not centered on generating reference documentation.

That vision led me to the realization of how far away I am from the intended endpoint. Next step is to write some tests and refactor. Netbeans should help nicely with that.

Posted by Mark at 04:03 PM

February 08, 2005

46 minutes

A fender bender after the St. Ismier entrance caused bumper-to-bumper traffic from the stretch after Crolles almost all the way to the exit for Montbonnot. What a mess. I should be taking the train.

Posted by Mark at 08:19 AM

February 07, 2005

Directory Server 5 2005Q1

As Ludo mentions in his blog, Sun's released an update of our Java Enterprise System with patches and some new features for Directory Server. Check out Ludo's entry for what's new, links to the software, and a pointer to the release notes.

Congratulations go to Heather, Janetta, and Joanne for this revision of the Directory Server (and Directory Proxy Server and Administration Server) docs.

Posted by Mark at 10:57 PM

January 31, 2005

Conversion

At work we've gone though a big conversion, moving content from books authored in FrameMaker to SolBook documents. The bulk of the work was done by Steve with help from Ron over in Menlo Park.

It's amazing how well they've managed to capture the content we had in Frame and dump it into SolBook. Still, there's cleanup to be done.

The worst of it may be refitting all the links. We're moving this content around as well, and so the linkend locations are changing at the same time we're doing the conversion and writing new material. Maybe now that we're getting everything into registered olinks, we'll someday be able to move to a more easily malleable format, like something derived from DITA.

The time has come for better ways to assemble smaller chunks. If you look at what Sun and others are doing with software, a lot of the same building blocks go into different packages. One could imagine a system where some work on the core content for small-grained features, others work at higher level to offer how-to material for particular markets.

What I don't know how to do is have the how-tos people would be paid for fit better than the how-tos people don't have to pay for, unless you hit the higher-end markets, without increasing the quality. You have to deliver the kind of doc that leaves readers feeling enlightened, not just something "technically accurate and complete." Readers probably perceive technically accurate and complete docs as only somewhat better than technically out of date and incomplete docs when the latter are written from the point of view of someone who obviously uses the software. Especially if they didn't have to pay as far as they could tell.

Posted by Mark at 08:44 PM

January 17, 2005

LDAP schema repository. part X

Joanne managed to build a reference with the man pages I generated. Apparently I need to pick a section number for everything to work properly. Still not sure to what section LDAP schema definitions should belong.

Posted by Mark at 08:28 PM

Laws of identity

Ludo suggested reading Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity, which Kim says govern the systems that can allow "distributed computing on a universal scale." Kim's already got responses from folks like Mark Wahl.

Posted by Mark at 06:09 PM

January 12, 2005

LDAP schema repository. part VIII

The problem last night turned out to stem from my misreading of the doc for Pattern.matches("regex", "string"). I was thinking grep, not match the whole string.

With that out of the way, I found a few mistakes in how I'd converted the old doc into the new LDIF, so I fixed those. Jarek Gawor's LDAP Browser/Editor came in handy to fix the broken SGML snippets in the repostitory which ldapsearch base64 encodes in the LDIF output.

I generated 311 man and shadow pages this morning. Those represent something like 20% of the schema objects we deliver, because we still support old ex-Netscape products. What we document is the standard schema supported and the Directory Server specific definitions.

Posted by Mark at 02:23 PM

January 11, 2005

LDAP schema repository. part VII

Hacking away some more today, I managed get to the point of generating man pages en masse. A little test program generated 245 man pages recursively from a single collection in a few seconds then got hung at the end of the attribute type pages and start of the object class pages.

Need to go away from it for a while. When I look at the same problem for too long, I can no longer see the obvious.

Posted by Mark at 09:43 PM

January 10, 2005

LDAP schema repository. part VI

Spent much of the day at work playing with the schema repository. I can write man pages in SolBook from SchemaAttributeType entries, and have a set of collections for the schema definitions we document at this time.

Because this is a prototype, I'm hacking along refactoring only when it's obvious that refactoring will be less work than copying and pasting. The whole thing only comes to about 1300 lines in 18 classes. (The accompanying LDIF is much larger.)

Posted by Mark at 10:48 PM

January 09, 2005

LDAP schema repository. part V

This morning's hack on the schema repository was to pull an attribute type's doc entry off the server and slot it into a Java object that I can dump (currently to LDIF, soon to a man page). Amazingly what I wrote seemed to work right away.

[mcraig@lethe schema]$ cat Test.java
class Test {
    public static void main(String [] args) {
        SchemaAttributeType sat = new SchemaAttributeType();
        try {
            sat.read(
                "ldap://lethe/schema-oid=2.5.4.38" +
                "ou=attribute%20types,ou=schema%20repository");
            System.out.println(sat.toLDIF());
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}
[mcraig@lethe schema]$ java Test
dn: schema-oid=2.5.4.38,ou=attribute types,ou=schema repository
objectClass: top
objectClass: schemaAttributeType
schema-oid: 2.5.4.38
schema-raw: ( 2.5.4.38 NAME 'authorityRevocationList'
 DESC 'Standard LDAP attribute type'
 SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.5 X-ORIGIN 'RFC 2256' )
schema-name: authorityRevocationList
schema-desc: Standard LDAP attribute type
schema-obsolete: false
schema-syntax: 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.5
schema-single-value: false
schema-collective: false
schema-no-user-modification: false
schema-x-origin: RFC 2256
schema-fulldesc: <para>Contains a list of CA certificates that have
 been revoked. This attribute is to be stored and requested in the
 binary form, as <literal>authorityRevocationList;binary</literal>.</para>
schema-example: <programlisting>authorityRevocationList;binary::
 AAAAAA==</programlisting>

[mcraig@lethe schema]$

That must not be my fault. The group of folks writing the Java language and the folks writing the LDAP SDK for Java have just managed to do something so simple even dummies can use it.

Posted by Mark at 09:14 AM

January 04, 2005

LDAP schema repository. part IV

This evening I was trying to dump the building blocks for our schema reference -- well, the building blocks for a new version that gets generated by machine -- into OpenLDAP. Ludo told me OpenLDAP's less permissive than our directory.

Sure enough, I learned something. In Java code, I was representing binary values for true and false with the strings true and false, unwittingly polluting the LDIF with that. But when your attribute value syntax is boolean, 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.7, it's TRUE and FALSE.

Posted by Mark at 10:06 PM

January 03, 2005

Return

Returning to work this morning. It's taken me an hour to feel normal here again.

The heater's not working right now. The thermometer in Daniel's office registers 16.6 degrees C.

Posted by Mark at 09:04 AM

January 02, 2005

LDAP schema repository. part III

In spite of many other things to do at work, I've advanced a little on the LDAP schema repository idea, with a bunch of undocumented code and a plan to generate man pages.

Someday we'll have to store all the documentation inside the directory itself with a model for extensions and ways to pull it back out through the console. Cuteness wouldn't justify the time spent, though.

Posted by Mark at 03:46 PM

December 14, 2004

Cutting down

During our weekly team meeting today, we discussed how to cut down on the interruptions that prevent us from writing. (Ostensibly writing is what technical writers are paid to do.)

Of 18 weekly meetings, we identified a third we can perhaps ignore except for the minutes, provided we have an agent representing us inside. We also think we might be able to rotate some email chores, having a weekly designated reviewer/responder for the key aliases to monitor and handle. I drew the short straw for the first round.

I'm not sure how things work out for contract writers. They seem to spend more time writing, but doubtless also end up having to produce when they don't know what they're writing about. I prefer the pressure of having too much information rather than too little, but we need to find a more productive balance.

Posted by Mark at 10:41 PM

November 30, 2004

Intellectual property, part VII

Our application may never be worth $92M to anybody, but it was worth a small fraction of that to us. Enough for each of us to think we ought to try again.

Posted by Mark at 08:09 PM

November 22, 2004

Looking tired, part II

Yet another person -- maybe it was Steve -- told me I look tired.

Nathalie bought me some vitamins that are supposed to reduce stress. B vitamins, magnesium, some mixture in blue gel caps. Could it be those?

Could it be that I'm waking up too early in the morning (6 am)?

Is my hair getting long and matted in the morning? Wrinkles getting more pronounced?

I Googled for look tired, but all I saw were blog articles. Except one article saying "aging is the culprit." And suggesting that I get plastic surgery.

Well, maybe not yet.

Posted by Mark at 08:49 PM

November 19, 2004

Interruptions, part II

A week of interruptions. What I like the least about working in a lead role is the feeling at the end of the week that you haven't even managed to answer your email.

It could be worse. Didier turned to me in one meeting to say that Bill Gates allegedly receives 4 million email messages per day. Didier said Bill has a team of people who help him sift through the mess. I'm happy to receive on the order of 1/10000 as much mail as Bill Gates.

If I had 1/10000 as much money as he has, I'd quit working and drop down to less than 10 emails per day.

Posted by Mark at 08:56 PM

November 18, 2004

Looking tired

Several people at work have remarked this week that I look very tired.

Yesterday evening Nathalie got upset with me when she was explaining what we should get the kids for Christmas, because she thought I wasn't listening. (I was. She was talking about a sort of electronic book reader for Diane.) Maybe I looked like I was drifting off.

Maybe it's better to look tired than to look angry. I saw myself looking angry in old videos of the kids.

Posted by Mark at 09:04 PM

November 12, 2004

High end

Over lunch I listened to Eve talking about clustering market segments. If you've never heard of a cluster before, it's a set of computers functioning together such that failures don't bring services down. A service is something that a server provides, like email delivery, database access, web access, directory access, etc.

Anyway, in the cluster world, Sun has traditionally provided solutions for high-end customers. High-end customers have businesses that depend upon their ability to provide continuous services. When their services stop, they immediately start losing money, often lots of it. So they are ready to pay architectural insurance, buying duplicate hardware, running extra software, accepting the cost of high-end machines. Sun has also been in the business of providing Directory Server to this kind of customer.

Some of the money we may have been leaving on the table comes from people buying what marketing calls good enough products, in that they're good enough for people who want protection, but either have to do it on a very tight budget, or aren't in a situation so serious that they cannot afford a little risk. We sell more of this low-end hardware now. In fact, it sounds like we sell it more cheaply than competitors.

Marketing would like us to focus some energy on good enough software that perhaps provides less disaster protection but is expected to run on cheap hardware. At least two difficulties come to mind here:

• How do we define good enough?
• Low-end customers are going to expect ease of use, but our stuff, being high-end, has traditionally been super configurable at the expense of ease of use. What tweakability is right for the low end?

It sounds like the answer to the first might be, "Listen carefully to prospects." We're doing a better job on that than we have been doing before. We can also benefit from looking at what our competition has settled for, since what we can do is often a superset of what they can do. And that sort of helps answer the second question. There's more to it than that, of course.

Posted by Mark at 03:08 PM

November 10, 2004

Mail server consolidation

At work, those of us physically far from headquarters are finally moving to our own Messaging Server. I wonder if we'll be able to get mail soon without having to get on the VPN.

Posted by Mark at 09:07 PM

November 01, 2004

Back to work

Mom and Dana left for Berlin today. Tomorrow, I go back to work. The kids still have a couple days of vacation.

Posted by Mark at 10:10 PM

October 14, 2004

Buz

Sun has a project going on that looks like a next-generation Hubbub. Ludo got me playing with what internally is Project Buz.

Some of the coolness, not all of which is implemented yet:

• People represented by their photos
• One-click phone conferences
• Meeting scheduler
• You can define multiple groups

Looks quite promising, but humans will have to evolve real time scheduling and multitasking capacities.

Posted by Mark at 01:49 PM

October 12, 2004

Games

Again, I've gone back to playing around with schema entries, and refactoring a bit to see what I can keep from my play. So I only need a little code to list the schema definition objects:

    public static void main(String [] args) {
        Hashtable env = new Hashtable(11);
        env.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,
            "com.sun.jndi.ldap.LdapCtxFactory");
        env.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, LDAP_SERVER);
                                                                                
        try {
            DirContext ctx = new InitialDirContext(env);
            DirContext schema = ctx.getSchema("");
            Attributes attrs = ctx.getAttributes(getSubSchemaSubEntryDN(ctx));
                                                                                
            HashSet schemaObjects = getSchemaObjects(schema, attrs);
            System.out.println(schemaObjects);
                                                                                
            ctx.close();
        } catch (NamingException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

Now, if only I could remember what I was trying to do before I started playing around...

Posted by Mark at 02:04 PM

October 11, 2004

Contrarian minds

Sun has a feature that's been going on for a while, Contrarian Minds. I didn't realize it was out on the external web.

Go ahead. It's almost infinitely richer than the eleven words.

You might want to potentiate your experience with some Kafka, Hesse, or Chomsky beforehand.

Posted by Mark at 09:41 PM

Indigence

The word of the day at dictionary.com is indigence: "A state of extreme poverty or destitution."

There would be a lot to blog about at work if I weren't in fear of getting read just in time to get fired. Maybe they could even use incriminating prose to fire me cheaply. There must be a clause in my contract whereby inappropriate sarcasm may lead to termination of employment without severance.

Posted by Mark at 09:33 PM

October 08, 2004

Intellectual property, part V

We received email confirmation today that our application is scheduled to be filed Tuesday. Will it someday be work $92M to somebody?

Posted by Mark at 08:34 PM

October 06, 2004

SLAMD open source

As Ludo mentions, Neil Wilson's stress testing engine, SLAMD, has been released under the Sun Public License. In other words, you can get the code.

As always, Neil's done a prodigious job documenting his work. And SLAMD has been in use stress testing big directory service deployments for a couple of years now. Check it out.

Posted by Mark at 03:56 PM

October 05, 2004

Intellectual property, part IV

Today, the patent lawyers contacted us with papers to sign concerning our application. Lana sent them back by mail.

As always with legal documents, I found some strange provisions when glancing at the fine print. Apparently we risk incarceration for getting our addresses wrong.

It reminded me of Frank Zappa as the Central Scrutinizer on Joe's Garage. Something about various everyday activities you may be performing that could result in the death penalty.

Posted by Mark at 09:37 PM

October 04, 2004

A good writer back

Andy came back to Sun to help with Java Enterprise System documentation. I spoke with him today and he sounded enthusiastic.

That's good news for Sun, though I'm not sure whether it's good news for Andy. He had a pretty nice idea started on the side.

Posted by Mark at 10:58 PM | Comments (2)

Red Hat buys our old server code, part II

Red Hat's VP of Engineering claims they needed ex-Netscape products to do stateless Linux and virtualization.

Maybe they are further behind Sun in blade computing and N1-style virtualization than I noticed.

Posted by Mark at 02:15 PM

October 03, 2004

Intellectual property, part III

Our boss believes in intellectual property. If I got raises, bonuses, and mountains of stock options under the same conditions he does, maybe I'd believe in intellectual property as well.

What if the foundation of our economy were not ownership? Would we all starve and freeze?

Posted by Mark at 08:57 AM

October 02, 2004

JDS iWork Client v2.0

Today I did some beta install testing for the new version of Sun's iWork client OS and software for PCs. It went even more smoothly than with the last version.

For this one, Sun IT has worked out issues like network configuration. It's now organized so you don't have to set preferences when you go onto the VPN. You can just browse or use IM without even considering proxies.

Some of us unfortunately cannot do that with mail, yet. (I still have to get on the VPN to get my Sun mail.) There's also a little inconvenience, maybe a bug, whereby my home dir does not get mounted automatically when I get on the VPN, but that's not a big deal.

Getting better all the time. I wonder how many companies around the world are looking at this kind of solution to their PC management problems.

Posted by Mark at 05:44 PM

September 30, 2004

Red Hat buys our old server code

For those of us working on a product shared until a couple of versions ago with the Netscape folks, today's C|Net article on Red Hat buying the code from AOL is interesting.

I wonder whether they'll ship the sources, maybe even outside of their Enterprise Linux product. I wonder whether they'll move the documentation into DocBook. I wonder whether it'll have any impact on our strategy with those products at Sun.

Posted by Mark at 06:00 PM

Taking the train

This morning, as threatened, I took the train into work, biking down to the station in Pontcharra, riding the train to Gières, then riding along the paths and back roads to work.

It almost took me longer to get my shoes, helmet, and gloves on than to glide down the hill to the station. At the station, however, the train was late and I was early, so I waited for about 25 minutes not moving, just talking with a couple of guys who work in Meylan and regularly bike and take the train. Unfortunately for them, they have no showers at work, so it's not too convenient in the summer.

One of the guys noted that my full-price, round-trip ticket for today -- cost 11 euros 40, roughly equivalent to the real cost of driving -- would nearly buy me a 1-week pass if I get my paperwork in order, to show officially that I'm using the train to go to work. And the cost may be even slightly lower if I get a monthly pass.

The ride from Gières is long enough that I need to shower, but not really long enough to be much exercise. I nevertheless wore cycling gear. Yesterday I bought full-fingered gloves and shoe covers both rated to be okay down to about freezing, and a cheap pair of cycling shorts to keep things from getting bunched up under my leggings. Never felt cold, but this morning it must've been a balmy 8 degrees C.

Important point: My Look pedals with soft plastic cleats are not the answer if I start commuting in earnest with the train. Too much walking involved.

Posted by Mark at 11:28 AM

September 27, 2004

Scary

If you haven't read the article in The Register on how the Feds not only managed to protect the US from Cat Stevens by diverting his plane to Maine, but also decided to tighten security as a result, check it out.

At work, we've all taken training on complying with export regulations, which help us protect the US from invasion by Albanians carrying sharp pencils, or something like that. It's very important that each law abiding citizen do his part to make the world safe for democracy.

Posted by Mark at 09:01 AM

September 26, 2004

Success

While we still slave over software at work, Andy succeeded in getting out of the rat race for a little while. If you're planning a trip out to the Hawaiian islands, he can guide you on some nice hikes. Check out his great hikes site for the beautiful pictures.

Posted by Mark at 08:34 AM

September 21, 2004

A record

In the past day, I've had 3 different guys as my manager.

Perhaps not a world-record, but probably a personal best.

Posted by Mark at 09:05 PM

September 20, 2004

Mission

When you look up the word mission at Google, one of the definitions found is:

the guiding vision of an organization that describes its goals and purpose (source)

So why is it frequently so difficult to figure out from our mission statements what the heck it is we're supposed to do?

Posted by Mark at 09:17 PM

September 17, 2004

Pay us to stay home

Buckminster Fuller observed in Critical Path that we'd probably be better off as a society if those of us doing jobs that don't contribute anything had the means to stay home.

I used to think that didn't mean me. Recalling that while reading a related observation in the middle of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, I must confess I probably burn up more wealth than I create.

First of all, I work on a team doing a multiplatform LDAP server. That's okay, because whether you realize it or not, LDAP servers are fine and useful devices. And ours is pretty good, especially for big jobs. Trouble is, we have duplicate functionality with several other similar servers out there. In fact, we intentionally work on duplicate functionality. This is called competition (as opposed to cooperation). We of course pass the costs on to everyone supporting us in our efforts not to cooperate.

Second, I write product documentation. I may read how others explain things, and I may cross reference their good explanations. But a lot of what I do is rework, reformulating things discussed or even written down internally, things that could be located using Google if only we weren't so busy trying to hold on to our intellectual property.

Third, most of the documentation I do write is written very early, before partners and customers get the "finished" product and start figuring out how to troubleshoot it in their environments. Let's face it, there are two times you definitely read documentation:

1. When you install the software without somebody around to help
2. When you try to fix the software and have nobody around to help

Since I don't write documentation with real users for real users, whether I cover the needs of people actually using the software is hit or miss.

Fourth, I spend a lot of time ostensibly working, but in fact going to meetings in which we discuss how to work without addressing any of the other points here.

Fifth, I blog and read email. (But today's technically a day off ;-)

Posted by Mark at 02:38 PM

September 16, 2004

Interruptions

I work in an office. At least I attempt to work in an office.

The more problems you know how to solve, the more likely all your time is spent helping other people solve problems, in contradistinction to the model proposed by Brooks in his book on the Mythical Man Month, wherein those most capable of problem solving are surrounded by a team of helpers who enable the problem solvers to do so.

Posted by Mark at 11:15 AM

September 10, 2004

Directions

If I believe that governance through hierarchical management does not work very well in our problem space, then you could say it shouldn't bother me not to have directions from management, nor should it bother me when management directions appear ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness, or when they seem obviously wrong.

That's not what bothers me. It bothers me when those upstream function as bottlenecks, or introduce overwhelming volumes of unnecessary noise. (I'd get more specific, but would need to be outside the system where those up the hierarchy control the resources.)

Do I create the system myself? If so, how to I change that?

Posted by Mark at 09:42 AM

September 09, 2004

Paris drop-in center view

Nice cliché.

Posted by Mark at 10:48 PM

September 08, 2004

Self censorship

We have an internal alias at Sun for people who are blogging, mostly people who are blogging at blogs.sun.com I guess. It's a pretty high traffic alias.

On one hand, this is a sort of encouragement to let it all hang out. Everything that's good for Sun, anyway. On the other hand, there's a whole lot of mind control going on.

Mostly the mind control is voluntary self control. People into their jobs enough to blog about them are likely to show enthusiasm about the company and what they're doing, to fall well within the boundaries of what we're permitted to think about. Some minor criticism of the system will come in entries like what Dave Levy wrote about Maximising Creativity, wherein Dave very mildly criticizes "hard arse" managers, and enourages them to let their employees think for themselves instead. But that's not exactly incendiary.

Some of the mind control comes from the authorities like Tim Bray. Tim's come out on more than one occasion to remind us vaguely of the bad things that might happen to employees thinking too far outside the box when blogging on a sun.com site or elsewhere. So we don't share inside information, and we don't air dirty laundry.

Those little reminders go a long way, no doubt. After all, we work under free-market capitalism, so nobody's afraid of losing his job. Not only that, but we all think it's normal to have signed contracts whereby Sun Microsystems, Inc. owns our thoughts and controls what we say and write. All of us believe unreservedly that power to the hierarchy will always remain the ultimate solution to governance questions, and that people higher up or having managed to gain control first should hog and hold sway over available resources. We live under democracy, not fascism, although we often hear at work -- the place we have to go to scrabble together our livelyhoods -- that, "This isn't a democracy."

Just gets you all fired up to work hard, doesn't it?

Posted by Mark at 10:25 PM

September 06, 2004

Shamed into it

Shamed by my admission yesterday that I still have Windows on a laptop, I decided to install Sun's Java Desktop System on that one, too.

In fact, it's the second time I've installed JDS on that system, and I'd forgotten that JDS doesn't recognize the PCMCIA CD-ROM, so I loaded my iWork CDs onto the desktop PC and am installing from that.

Few things are as boring as loading software onto a system.

Posted by Mark at 09:18 PM

Where not to focus

Not sure why I picked up Microsoft Secrets over breakfast this morning. Maybe it was my last blog yesterday.

In any case, it seemed like a different book from when I first read it back in the late 90s while working at Wincap. More likely the reader has changed.

What leapt out this time was not Microsoft's manager's views of how to write and test software, but a few paragraphs of Microsoft upper management mildly regretting how bad their middle management seemed.

Back when Microsoft was securing it's monopoly on the desktop and during the development of the business that made that monopoly possible, senior executives realized middle management at their company didn't rate highly... Apparently the problem was not worth trying to fix, nor did it have an impact in the grand scheme of things.

Posted by Mark at 09:43 AM

September 01, 2004

What is documentation?

A search for define:documentation at Google, returns many definitions, one of which seems wide enough to fit the whole thing:

(2) Instructions or descriptive information about a product or program.

It turns out we have evidence that readers consider anything they can get their hands on describing a product or program or how to use one as documentation. We do not seem organizationally to have figured out what this says about how we ought to work and what we ought to deliver, probably because this implies everybody writing mail is potentially creating documentation.

We put pressure on ourselves to publish as little noise as possible. Yet, the higher you set your standards to filter noise, the more likely you are to filter out relevant information. Also, if those producing the "noise-free" information have less of a clue than those generating "noisy" information, you end up with a situation where readers prefer noisy information channels to which they can apply their own filters (such as Google).

What does it all mean? Maybe we could save our readers trouble by doing 3 things simultaneously:

1. Scale back traditional documentation production to installation, migration, thorough reference, and troubleshooting
2. Turn up the noise to "publish" everything we know would fit the readers' definitions of documentation, leaving the filtering to readers; facilitate generation of good noise around the product
3. Focus documentation resource on improving writeups for heavily accessed noises, and for documentation customers are literally willing to pay for

This implies a much more reactive documentation effort than anything we've done so far. It also assumes we can make the measurements we need.

It does mean doing the bulk of the documentation work needed couldn't happen by design without real reader involvement, since what we document lastingly would be what people are trying to read about. It might reduce the complaints about lack of customer feedback.

Posted by Mark at 06:57 AM

August 31, 2004

Customer feedback

We've probably been complaining about lack of customer feedback since tech writing became a profession.

I'll admit it's tough to tell how they did with your docs. I've been writing for years now, knowing that writers need this kind of feedback, and I don't even write back to thank people who've done a fine job, like Andreas Eckleder who wrote a GnomeToaster User's Guide that's never failed to answer my questions, or Bruce Eckel for his book on Thinking in Java.

I almost never think of sending email when I get stuck, or have a great idea. For example, I'll blog that Movable Type doesn't have good doc for handling comment spam, but I've not fed that back to the development team. (Maybe they already have too many requests for features and want to concentrate on paying customers first. But MT-Blacklist still seems to exist, and for 3.0, too.)

When we have quick customer contact, they often don't have too much to say that helps us write better product docs in general. The best situations seem to crop up during long betas, like the one we had for Directory Server 5.2, where we sort of got to know to some extent what customers were trying to accomplish, and could start real email conversations.

Posted by Mark at 09:32 PM

Intellectual property, part II

We had our first phone conf with the lawyers handling SUN041335. One of them said he didn't expect anyone in the patent office to look at it for 2-3 years, at which point the person having a look would reject the claims, and our lawyers would have to defend them. In other words, the entire process would take several years.

So this is not a way of supplementing my income. Oh, well.

Posted by Mark at 09:14 PM

August 29, 2004

Olink browser

An olink (outside link), is a hypertext link from one XML/SGML source document to another target document, based on meta-information in the target document, such as the public ID of the target and an attribute identifying the link end. Such links can be managed with a link broker to prevent broken links in published output.

Our customized version of ArborText's Epic editor includes a link browser presumably related to the broker apparatus. The particular implementation leaves something to be desired. It looks like the author was an afterthought in the process of building the broker. A small project for someone like me?

Posted by Mark at 07:01 AM

August 27, 2004

One less meeting

Taking a tip from Scott Adams, we've leveraged some synergies and eliminated one of our meetings.

We're replacing the meeting with status reports to our manager. Maybe we can replace the rest of work with emailed status reports. Sounds like a good "invention disclosure" is hiding in there somewhere.

Posted by Mark at 07:45 AM

August 19, 2004

Homemade perl obfuscation

Dennis hasn't finished SolBook 3.0 support for the man command in Solaris 10, yet, but we do have support for SolBook 3.0 RefEntrys inside books. Before I realized that I'd written some RefEntrys in SB 3. Luckily, not much has changed. Olinks got all changed around. (SB 3 has gone to olinks for everything. Very cool.)

The Perl obfuscations you can come up with just processing this stuff are hilarious:

#!/bin/perl -w
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# SolBook 3 is not yet supported by the Solaris man command.
# This script converts the DSRK RefEntrys to SolBook 2.
# This script is *NOT* a general conversion tool.
# Dennis is working on bug 5088606 to fix this.
# ---------------------------------------------------------
 
use Getopt::Std;
getopts("d:");
unless (defined($opt_d)) { die "Usage: " . $0 . " -d <sman1-dir>\n"; }
if (!grep(/\/$/,$opt_d)) { $opt_d = $opt_d . "/"; }
 
opendir(DIR, "$opt_d") || die "Cannot open $opt_d: $!";
@pages = grep(/\.1$/,readdir(DIR));
closedir(DIR);
 
foreach $page (@pages) {
    open(CURR_MANPAGE, $opt_d . $page) || die "Cannot open $page: $!";
    @lines = <CURR_MANPAGE>;
    close(CURR_MANPAGE);
 
    $file = join("", @lines);
    $file =~ s/\n/#~#/g;                # Replace newlines with #~#
     
    # Handle comments, copyright, and processing instructions
    $wcwq = "Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies...";
    $file =~ s/<!--.*-->/<!-- $wcwq -->/g;
    $copyright = "Copyright 2005, Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.";
    $file =~ s/(class\=\"copyright\">).*?(<\/refmiscinfo>)/$1$copyright$2/;
    $file =~ s/<\?.*?>//g; # Probably not necessary
     
    # Handle olinks, which differ significantly from 2 to 3...
    # ... mindless attribute translations...
    $file =~ s/(targetptr\=\")(.*?)(\">)/localinfo\=\"$2$3/g;
    $file =~ s/(targetdoc\=\")(.*?)(\">)/targetdocent\=\"$2$3/g;
    $file =~ s/(remap\=\")(.*?)(\")//g;
    $file =~ s/(type\=\"auto)(.*?)(\")//g;
    # ... $wcwq
    $target = "targetdocent\=\"SUNWDSRKTR\""; # Could we use "." as the value?
    $cite1 = "<citerefentry><refentrytitle>";
    $cite2 = "<\/refentrytitle><manvolnum>";
    $cite3 = "<\/manvolnum><\/citerefentry>";
    $file =~ s/(<olink)[ ]*(localinfo\=\")([-a-z]*?)-1(\">)(<\/olink>)/$1
$target $2$3-1$4$cite1$3$cite2 1 $cite3$5/g; # Dude, are you obfuscated yet?
    $file =~ s/> 1 </>1</g;              # Yes, I hardcoded section 1.
    $file =~ s/(<olink)[ #~]*(localinfo\=\")(.*?)(\">)(.*?)(<\/olink>)/$1
$target $2$3$4$5$6/g;
     
    $file =~ s/#~#/\n/g;                 # Replace #~# with newlines
     
    open(NEW_CONTENT, ">" . $opt_d . $page) || die "Cannot write $page: $!";
    # Fix the doctype declaration, using entities for hand-made .ent files
    print NEW_CONTENT<<HEAD;
<!DOCTYPE REFENTRY PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems//DTD DocBook V3.0-Based SolBook Subset V2.0//EN" [
<!ENTITY % commonents SYSTEM "smancommon.ent">
%commonents;
<!ENTITY % booktitles SYSTEM "booktitles.ent">
%booktitles;
]>
HEAD
    print NEW_CONTENT $file;
    close(NEW_CONTENT);
}

Makes even a tech writer's work look complex and secretly meaningful, doesn't it?

Posted by Mark at 02:26 PM

August 18, 2004

Cost reductions, part II

On the flipside of the telco cost reduction fire drill, we have some cost reductions possible about which a lot of us would just breathe a silent sigh of relief. Using Google boxes for intranet search for example.

Our execs don't even need to have a meeting or an offsite to come up with an ROI case. Google already posts one. So why don't we just get it?

Some ideas:

1. Employees counselling management whether to build or buy search technology themselves work on competing (and losing) search technologies.
2. Executives who'd decide about this don't search for stuff on our intranet.
3. Everyone building intranet sites used by our executives makes sure they get the usability right for their key customer, the executive(s) in question. (Other people, the ones attemping to use the intranet to get their jobs done, do not rank as key customers.)
4. Doesn't run on Sun.
5. We don't really want employees to be able to Google our intranet. They might dig up something dangerous.
6. Executives deciding on search technologies don't Google. (I sure hope that's not it.)
7. We're searching (without Google) for cost savings in traditional places, and therefore don't look to save where it gives us competitive advantage.
8. We just cannot get organized to make this type of decision.
9. Executive decision makers just haven't thought about it. They're busy saving money on cheaper toilet paper and phone calls.
10. We looked, but don't believe the ROI predictions.

Posted by Mark at 09:15 AM

Cost reductions

One of the messages in my inbox this morning came from our EMEA Finance VP, telling me I must complete web-based telco cost reduction training within 30 days. This sort of stuff reads like a subpoena, and consequently fires you up for the whole day. Admittedly, saving on calling costs looks like a good idea. The cost of creating, disseminating, and checking up people's progress on the training course must be outweighed by the ensuing savings or our finance VP would of course never impose such an irritation.

Since I work with the software development folks, it probably doesn't matter that this whole thing caught me off balance at the beginning of the day, when my head is most clear, to go spend the best of my energies on a fire drill. If I ever hesitate to pick up the phone, probability that Sun loses a sale must be quite low. We communicate so well with distant colleagues that it's unnecessary actually to talk with them, right?

What about salespeople? Do we really want every sales person in EMEA taking 45 minutes off from selling to customers so they'll hesitate to make calls they need to make. In some ways, this seems like telling marathon runners, "Careful with the water, folks. As a RunnersRUs employee, you are required to take web-based water conservation training within 30 days of receiving this message..."

Posted by Mark at 08:51 AM

August 13, 2004

Sarcasm in the ranks, part II

JIS even blogged about it already! Though I notice he didn't mention the back of the mug.

Wonder if that "enterprising Sun employee" will now become the cible of a carefully targetted reduction in force...

Posted by Mark at 02:28 PM

Sarcasm in the ranks

Tim Bray's been gently reminding us to keep within the party lines when blogging.

Nobody said anything about mugs and t-shirts. Yet. Check out the rest of the writing on the mug. (No, I didn't do it. I'm as amused as the rest of you.)

Hope it didn't take an executive leadership offsite at Pebble Beach Golf Club to come up with goal #1, however.

Posted by Mark at 01:58 PM

August 12, 2004

NameFinder, part II

Today I installed Solaris on an old PC, then installed Sun's Application Server and Web Server, then deployed NameFinder on both of them. This is all to update the documentation.

You can try all this software, downloading it from us at Sun. Get Solaris for your PC hardware, and get the Java Enterprise System for all our server software. Application Server's web-based administration interface suprised me with how easy it's become to deploy a web app. Just a few clicks and you're ready to go. I'm sure it can all be scripted as well.

One caveat: we don't seem to include the Java code for core NameFinder functionality. You probably do not need it, since you can adjust everything with the JSPs. But it would still be cool to be able to get it if you want to derive your own.

Posted by Mark at 08:19 PM

August 11, 2004

VNC, part II

In fiddling further with VNC over our VPN, I changed the depth setting in my vncserver script to 8, restarted the server. Then I ran vncviewer from home with piètre quality and 8 colors (I thought):

$ vncviewer -depth 8 -quality 0 server:1
VNC server supports protocol version 3.3 (viewer 3.3)
Password:
VNC authentication succeeded
Desktop name "login's X desktop (server:1)"
Connected to VNC server, using protocol version 3.3
VNC server default format:
  8 bits per pixel.
  True colour: max red 7 green 7 blue 3, shift red 0 green 3 blue 6
Using default colormap which is TrueColor.  Pixel format:
  32 bits per pixel.
  Least significant byte first in each pixel.
  True colour: max red 255 green 255 blue 255, shift red 16 green 8 blue 0
Using shared memory PutImage

What the heck is the TrueColor thing at the end? Am I really using only 8 bits per pixel?

Strangely, Epic came out looking better... but it's still almost too slow to use.

Posted by Mark at 05:33 PM

Converting bricks to a house

Following the big reorg, we're moving to convert all our docs to SolBook. This represents a fairly big move, converting tens of thousands of pages worth of documentation from semi-structured Frame documentation to something conforming to an SGML DTD.

Looking forward to relearning Perl and XSLT again. (Hope I don't have to learn WebWorks transform language.)

Posted by Mark at 05:24 PM

Installing software

I just spent an hour trying to install some beta software using a very heavyweight GUI. The first point at which the installer provided feedback about what happened was at the end of the hour. At that point, the installer told me nothing had worked.

Moralité : If you're going to apply a flamethrower to the user's goodwill capital, do it up front during installation. You'll never have a better chance to make him hate you forever.

Posted by Mark at 04:51 PM

August 09, 2004

VNC

Running the SGML editor we use at work, a customized version of Epic from Arbortext, through VNC over the VPN appears to work well for everyone but me.

Maybe I'm just running the VPN server with too many colors, but I certainly haven't figured it out yet.

Posted by Mark at 10:22 PM

August 08, 2004

LDAP schema repository

After thinking a little longer about what I'm trying to do, implementing everything suggested at The Schema Registry project at http://www.daasi.de/services/SchemaReg/ looks like:

• Overkill, since this thing needs prototyping, not standardizing yet
• An inadequate solution, because my own motivation for having such a thing lies mainly in being able to generate accurate, exhaustive reference documentation for users
• A mostly pointless exercise, since those folks have already finished their work

Besides, ignorance is bliss. So at least I'll be happy while reinventing badly historical artifacts other people have done well. Only if I'm too lazy to read all their docs, however.

Their schema registry service confirms my feeling about the second item in my list, namely that they don't include the kind of reference documentation I want to generate from the schema respository.

Posted by Mark at 03:32 PM | Comments (2)

August 05, 2004

Run Linux apps on Solaris

At work, we're advertising that "Solaris Operating System runs Linux applications easily." Looks like the idea is to get them where you can run DTrace on them. We claim, "The feature has a nominal (5 percent or less) impact on performance."

Posted by Mark at 08:57 AM

August 04, 2004

Post code, trash export license

Someone blogging for Sun wrote to an internal alias to ask about posting a Perl script written to HTMLize results of a SQL query. It turns out Sun employees put Sun's US export license at risk if they carelessly post even trivial code that somehow legally threatens whatever it is that puts a company's US export license at risk. As an employee, "Any code you write is subject to US export restrictions and Sun's export license hangs in the balance."

Not only does my employer own the thoughts occurring in my head, but my employer also has to review those thoughts before I share them, lest it lose the right to do international business. If I hadn't worked in software for the last few years, I'd be surprised at how much of a mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Posted by Mark at 09:19 AM

Them's fightin' ideas

About the same time I wrote about the notion of intellectual property, Slashdot ran another article covering Evan Brown's legally enforced forfeiture of his ideas to the kindly lawyers at Alcatel.

Property leads to fighting. Anyone surprised? (Not if you've ever watched young kids play with a toy everyone wants at once.)

Posted by Mark at 08:36 AM

August 03, 2004

Intellectual property

The second line on my pay slip for last month says SUN041335. The number comes from Sun's invention disclosure tool, a web-based internal app for filing patents.

So why would a guy who finds intellectual property an unecessary monopoly file patent applications his employer contractually gets to keep? The answer has something to do with why he works at all: He has not yet found the gumption to follow Henry David Thoreau to Walden.

That my work contract says roughly that all my useful thoughts belong to Sun hardly bothers me. What might constitute an alternative? Should I aim to negotiate the rights to ideas occurring inside my head?

Why should I label them as my thoughts in the first place? How many useful thoughts did I have prior to learning to speak, write, interact with other folks and with my environment? None. Thoughts become useful when shared, when they spark other thoughts and actions in ourselves and in others that lead to useful events and artifacts. If we cannot separate the usefulness from the sharing, why should we designate an owner separate from the sharing?

Without intellectual property, capitalism cannot survive.

Posted by Mark at 09:21 PM

July 31, 2004

Rumors

Slashdot ran an article yesterday, saying Lockheed is replacing 10k Sun workstations with Linux boxes.

A couple of folks from Lockheed commented "That's news to me and I work at a Lockheed branch." Maybe the story got inflated in the telling.

On the one hand if it were true, that might be a big hit on a potential repeat sale for Sun when all those Lockheed workers get around to replacing their SPARC workstations. On the other hand, it's not like they're going to over to the Dark Side. Heck, they could even drop the idea of getting Intel machines from Dell or whoever and decide to buy AMD from us with Java Desktop System (SuSE Enterprise Linux inside).

From a longer term view, may Ed Zander should've opened up Solaris on his watch. Or maybe they'll all come back when we deliver on throughput computing in another year or so.

Posted by Mark at 02:26 PM

July 28, 2004

Doclet heaven?

Boy, are there a lot of Doclets for generating output from Javadoc!

The question forming in my mind is this: How many of these really work?

Would it even be possible to create some sort of conformance testing suite for Doclets?

Posted by Mark at 02:02 PM

July 27, 2004

7 hours

Just noticed that I've done 7 hours of meetings today. That may be a record for a normal work day.

No wonder I haven't gotten anything done ;-)

Posted by Mark at 07:08 PM

July 26, 2004

No questions asked JDS, part III

Well, although I didn't manage to connect at home, everything works well from the office.

We even have a little video from Jonathan Schwartz right on the desktop when we login for the first time, explaining how Java Desktop System is strategic for Sun ;-)

Posted by Mark at 05:15 PM

July 24, 2004

No questions asked JDS, part II

JDS installation for iWork almost went smoothly. I encountered one little bug that means you cannot finish installation until you manually install a package from the 3rd of 3 CDs, but other than that, it went fine.

Cannot connect over to my other system. The firewall seems to be letting DHCP through, because get an address from my desktop. After that, nothing else works. Not ping, not ssh. Ahh, the joys of being your own sysadmin...

Posted by Mark at 11:24 AM

No questions asked JDS

Sun's iWork program lets us connect through VPN to our internal network, so we can more or less work from anywhere with an Internet connection.

The first time I installed Java Desktop System on a laptop, I configured everything to be able to connect to work. These days, Sun IT provides us with a version of our Java Desktop System with some extra tools to make it all work more smoothly. So I'm installing that.

Not sure how much simpler things will turn out with the iWork version of Java Desktop System, but this sure is the most straightforward OS install I've ever done. Even more streamlined than Solaris. You just drop the bootable CD in the drive and restart the laptop.

It's so smooth, I'm sort of scared that I won't be able to figure out how to do any of the system administration for the inevitable stuff that won't work the first time ;-)

Posted by Mark at 09:24 AM

July 20, 2004

Election at Bosch

This morning, I caught a few minutes of TV news, France 2. It seems the workers at some plant belonging to Bosch voted 98% in favor of a plan to extend the work week from 35 to 36 hours, without pay hikes. (According to my records using Hours for Palm OS, I worked 94:35 from June 30 to July 13, or 47:17:30 per week, not counting breaks, lunch, running, and so forth. I work in France, home of the 35-hour work week.)

The reporter made this sound like the wave of the future at a time when Raffarin's government under Chirac's orders wants to introduce more flexibility into the apparently overly rigid branch agreements around the 35-hour work week. The head of Human Resources at the Bosch plant claimed the vote was a big victory.

As an aside, perhaps for balance, the reporter explained the terms. Employees voting against the measure knew they would be laid off. (18 accepted that.) Had the measure not been adopted as suggested, Bosch would've delocalized to the Czech Republic where wages are lower, and closed the plant. In return for the vote of confidence, the management has agreed to keep the site open for a while and to look into ways of perhaps keeping it open longer. (Gee, I can think of one. How about working an additional day a week with no pay increase?)

Looks like a harbinger of what to expect in other branches. Need to learn to be even more flexible. That goes along with the ending to another reportage, according to which Turkey has a lot to offer, making the nation a great candidate for entry into the European Union. (The work week mentioned there lasts 45 hours.) According to the reporter doing that story on France 2, high unemployment in Turkey is offset by the growth rate that reached 10% last year.

Sounds wonderful... for professional investors and their wealthy clients. Surely the majority of the 82% of French voters who elected Chirac in the 2002 presidential election belong to one of those two groups.

Posted by Mark at 09:10 PM

July 18, 2004

Focus on the leader

Slashdot had a story yesterday with a link to Business Week's an article on how Scott McNealy's painted Sun into a corner.

This morning I threw out an old copy of Business Week with Scott sitting there grinning, back when we were making huge advances and the stock was flying.

The focus remains squarely on the top of the pyramid. Not that anyone would expect them to report on the likes of those of us at the bottom of the pyramid, nor that we necessarily make any difference either.

But it's somehow not quite right in the context of Sun to say the head guy is completely in charge, that it's either all his fault or all thanks to him, at least not in software. In hardware, maybe the whole 19th century organization as if we were an army makes sense. It software, it seems fundamentally flawed, which is why guys at the junction between software and hardware, like Erik Nordmark, once said to several of us who'd come to see what he does, "Ideally, we'd just interact directly with no management at all, based on the work we have to do."

We haven't been doing enough of that, partly because we have lots of middle managers who are thinking along 19th century organizational lines.

Posted by Mark at 03:02 PM

July 09, 2004

Looking out the window

Today's snapshot out the window at work.

Posted by Mark at 09:09 PM

July 02, 2004

Email as a way of life

Norman Walsh, of DocBook fame, was at JavaOne trying to get his email over a broadband wireless connection. It turned out he had so much spam he probably wouldn't be able to download only 28 hour's worth of backlog email before his laptop battery went dead.

Right after the passage I quoted from Understanding Media this morning, Noam Chomsky, some time between 1993 and 1996, laments the fate of his colleagues whose work has begun to suffer because they're too connected, spending too much time doing email.

At work, we theoretically spend no more than a few percent of our time handling email. Yeah, right. Start counting it up. For me yesterday it was 1/3 of the day. And I'm a nobody.

Posted by Mark at 02:43 PM

Face-to-face

In Understanding Power once again, chapter eight, a woman asks Chomsky what impact he believes the Internet might have on activism. This converstation took place somewhere between 1993 and 1996. One of his points describes why even an introvert such as yours truly considers Grenoble a good location to work for Sun, where people are constantly getting up from behind their desks and talking face-to-face:

I mean, there's something about human beings that makes face-to-face contact very different from banging around on a computer terminal and getting some noise coming back--that's very impersonal, and it breaks down human relations.

Sun management has not pushed our work from home program with the intent of keeping people even more divided and conquered. Yet, you can feel the effects of the program having been in place for a while if you work in Grenoble for a while, then take a trip to Santa Clara. Some people almost seem surprised when you show up unannounced at their office. If they're there.

It's true that face-to-face meetings can involve lots of non-work. If you measure results, however, you hardly care. People who engage in lots of non-work at work get to stay late and make up for lost (sic) time.

Posted by Mark at 06:40 AM

July 01, 2004

Cross-platform ID management

Luke Howard of PADL Software came in to see us today and talk about XAD, a cross-platform authentication and directory service. Cool stuff. He could run the entire demo on his laptop, which is a sort of nifty way to present it.

Sun's also has products for solving similar problems with Identity Synchronization for Windows and native LDAP naming for Solaris systems. I don't know whether you can run the demo on a regular laptop, but we have an architecture that really scales way up, with HA messaging underneath and everything.

We really do 18-wheeler, long-haul stuff well. It's the turn-on-a-dime, works-out-of-the-box, very-sleek stuff that I must admit Luke does well. You also get the impression he's a real fire-breathing hacker. Nice guy.

Posted by Mark at 08:57 PM

June 30, 2004

Blogging for dollars

Jonathan Schwartz started a blog, maybe timed to catch JavaOne. Who knows whether he'll have time to keep it up.

At least he knows enough HTML to code anchor tags. I find that somehow reassuring.

Jonathan reminds those of us blogging for work to "be responsible." (Suggestions summarized by Tim Bray.) Most of the suggestions concern writing itself. In a nutshell, the more you write something people want to read and the more you spin it into the ongoing conversation out there on the web, the more people will read it and think about it and link to it.

But there are two suggestions in there that could be open to debate:

1. "Don't Tell Secrets .... it�s not OK to publish the recipe for one of our secret sauces."
2. "Think About Consequences .... it�s all about judgment: using your weblog to trash or embarrass the company, our customers, or your co-workers, is not only dangerous but stupid."

Concerning the first one, well, one could have a long discussion about intellectual property. A Google search for those two words results in about 7,670,000 hits. Basically, which is more important: humanity benefitting from a good solution to a problem as early as possible, or major stockholders getting a monopoly hold on the idea? (There, is that sufficiently oversimplified? ;-)

Concerning the second one, you have to read between the lines a little bit. It looks like the consequences are that your bad taste could somehow hurt the company, for example, when one of our sales folk is out there negotiating a discount and the customer is able to Google out your blog entry that the product in question sucks. (Why would the customer would even be talking with our sales folk about a product anyone thinks sucks? What would that say about the customer in question?) Between the lines, the fnords appear to say, "Think twice about coloring outside the party line. This whole warning has nothing to do with products and criticism of your peers' work, everything to do with criticism of your betters. Recall that we can lay people off, that your job category is moving to 'low-cost locations,' and that you need us more than we need you."

Odd how that last bit comes in at the same point in the article where news magazines put the nod-to-a-dissenting-view material. Close to the end, but not close enough that you'd read it if you just skipped to the end. And I'll bet Tim Bray did that almost by accident.

Posted by Mark at 02:58 PM

June 26, 2004

Solaris libre

Speaking today of software libre, I watched JohnnyL and Glenn on internal newscast yesterday talking about getting a license for Solaris that lets the open source community get all the code we can legally put out there. It seems to me we already allow you to get the code, but maybe that was not so well publicized. Apparently this video is going to appear on the Internet real soon now, but I cannot find it yet.

The guys look determined, but also a little uncomfortable with this move. Not a new thing. Ed Zander came to Paris in the spring of 1999, and did Q&A for employees. At the time, I'd just joined, so I asked him what Sun was doing around Linux. He answered that Linux probably wouldn't even have happened had we made it easier for people who became Linux enthusiasts to get Solaris, perhaps by opening up access to the sources in the mid-90s.

Not sure that Linux wouldn't have happened, but I get the impression that we (Sun) have understood the issues for a long time, that what we're struggling with is not understanding the problem, but reconciling the open source model with control over our "intellectual property." Scarcity thinking again. We even reportedly have some customers -- probably guys that go to the Pebble Beach Golf Club with Scott and our Executive VPs -- who are afraid that if we open-source everything, quality will go down.

You can ignore those fears about quality. You'll still be able to get a Solaris distro from Sun that's gone through all the rigor of all the Solaris gates, and been regression tested in many, many different configurations. You can run your business on Solaris.

I can imagine a lot of good things happening, however, if we get a license that lets top-notch developers take what they see as useful in the kernel and try it on Linux. And vice-versa in Solaris. There must be a number of not so lovely hacks around, but there must also be some really nice code in there in both places. A shame to have "intellectual property" issues stand in the way of comingling that.

Posted by Mark at 07:23 AM

June 24, 2004

15 minutes of fame

What does it all mean?

Just typed my name into Google and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky." I swear to you, loyal and adored reader, that I've never done it before. Honestly.

My Sun Software Forum persona came up with pointers to my answers on LDAP-related questions.

I then did it for the LDAP server architect I share an office with, and he of course came up... but not for LDAP!

Strange web topology.

Posted by Mark at 09:42 PM | Comments (2)

Homeopath

Luke gave me some advice yesterday to avoid caffeine, alcohol, sugar, chocolate, and so forth. I was having trouble sleeping.

I'd been drinking some Coke without sugar or caffeine. Luke wondered if I really though it had no caffeine. Who knows which vegetable extracts Coke really contains? (Read the label.)

"Besides, in really microscopic amounts like that, the effects can be homeopathic," he claimed. According to Luke at that time of day, when he looked tired, stressed, irritated that I wouldn't just catch on for crying out loud and politely leave his office -- no, he didn't know anything about JavaBeans(TM) technology -- many substances in minute quanties produce homeopathic effects.

This I ignored. Mostly. Echoes of Luke's advice produced a sort of homeopathic effect later on, however, that prevented me from getting to sleep. After watching Citizen Kane, I lie there awake, wondering what people say about me behind my back, imagining that I'd get an accurate picture of myself by triangulating on how people treat me to my face, how they treat me behind my back (if they even think about me at all when I'm absent), and how I see my own life.

I'd be better off working through Introduction to Mathematical Statistics...

Posted by Mark at 09:01 PM | Comments (2)

June 23, 2004

NameFinder

Sun employs this cool guy, Detlef Schmier, whose web app NameFinder has literally taken us all by storm. Detlef sent mail to the NameFinder alias last night mentioning that the version on our intranet has serviced 30 million queries, with about 2/3 of Sun people registered in there.

NameFinder gives you an easy-to-use web page interface to the information in your directory that just blows all client-side apps away. In other words, in two steps -- 1. Click NameFinder bookmark. 2. Enter name. -- I see somebody's contact details, calendar, location, reporting structure. In one more step, I get back a table comparing my calendar with that of the person in question to schedule a meeting this week. And there's more and more: alias expansion, orgchart generation, an interface for managing your calendar, ad-hoc group mailing, etc.

Got an LDAP directory for your organization? Then you gotta have NameFinder. Get it now before the marketing dudes notice how much of a killer app it is and start trying to prevent people from getting it easily.

Posted by Mark at 07:36 AM

June 18, 2004

More on upgrading the VPN

What's really not helpful about the log messages -- see Upgrading the VPN -- is how they say:

Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr1

And that's it. Nothing about why the gateway ignores you. No hint at what that reason might be.

Why tell you anything? They gave you the source code... for the kernel module. Not for the client.

$ grep "gateway" *
... (nothing with the string in question) ...
Binary file vpnclient matches
$ strings vpnclient | grep gateway
Lost contact with the security gateway. Check your network connection
Contacting the gateway at
$

And I wonder why Sun IT doesn't want to support it on Red Hat...

Posted by Mark at 09:46 PM

June 17, 2004

Upgrading the VPN

Sun's upgrading the hardware (or whatever) used for the VPN. At home I'm still running Red Hat 9, and I guess that's not a supported platform.

The software is from Cisco. Partially documented, documentation almost incomprehensible. I should probably just know what to do with this by osmosis or something, but I don't (real IP addresses replaced):

$ vpnclient connect holland
Cisco Systems VPN Client Version 4.0.4 (B)
Copyright (C) 1998-2003 Cisco Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Client Type(s): Linux
Running on: Linux 2.4.21 #1 SMP Mon Jul 28 18:39:02 CEST 2003 i686
 
Initializing the VPN connection.
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr1
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr2 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr3 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr4 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr5 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr6 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr7 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr8 (backup)
Contacting the gateway at sun.gate.ip.addr9 (backup)
Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client
Reason: Remote peer is no longer responding.
There are no new notification messages at this time.
$

What? I missed a step here...

When your VPN connection works, at it was a minor pain getting it working the first time, the last thing you want to do is upgrade the software to something even less scrutable than last time.

Posted by Mark at 10:27 PM

Scarcity

When I sat down to lunch yesterday, the guys were discussing guys who'd managed to strike it richer than they had. The usual animosity surfaced in the form of cynicism, etc. It's so natural.

Or is it?

If we're all constantly reminding ourselves there's not enough to go around, we get stuck in the capitalism vs. communism debates again. Yada, yada, yada. But what would a world without scarcity look like.

Posted by Mark at 06:48 AM

June 15, 2004

User and task analysis

Brian Ehret did some second-degree user and task analysis for Directory Server. By interviewing users with a moderate amount of experience, Brian got close to observing what these folks are doing with the software, and how often they're doing it. The picture that came back from the 6 or so interviews Brian did strikes me as similar to the 70 minutes of raw footage I had before starting to make the rough cut edit. You can sculpt at least one, probably several, stories from the raw material... which one best reflects reality? Is your story enough to constrain your design?

Right now, what I'm doing for the next big version of the product cannot reasonably be called user and task analysis. Hackos and Redish say user and task analysis starts with observing real users in situ, then continues with hypotheses, tests, more hypotheses, etc. to identify models for designing user interaction.

My aim is more modest. We have too much documentation today. I know the docs as well as perhaps anyone else, and even I have to use Google to find what I want. So perhaps I should call it task classification, or use distillation. Ideally, the end product is Elixir of Directory Server HOWTO. (Cures asthma, liver spots, postmodern anxiety, stinkfoot, and a host of other ailments, too.)

Posted by Mark at 10:55 AM

June 14, 2004

Reorganization

This current reorg is the first to significantly and directly influence my work. Reorgs before tended to mean only network repair and rerouting.

This time, an online help work group I chair needs dissolving into a larger effort. 14 of us have worked since last September to resolve divergence in online help authoring toolsets. Our goal centered on recommending a single toolset, and helping all teams converge as quickly as appropriate. Post-reorg, we no longer need to decide which toolset to recommend -- that's taken care of -- and the focus has shifted to getting everyone on this toolset.

We did manage to develop and weight over 100 objective criteria on which to judge prospective solutions, not including cost criteria. We have also nearly completed investigations of several toolsets so that we can evaluate them. We ended up doing this work fairly carefully, and should be able to reuse it in determining what capabilities to implement next for the common toolset.

(If you're wondering what took us so long, we meet for only 1 hour every 2 weeks, and we went through the entire process twice. It was almost March before we knew enough to throw out our broken work. If I had it all to do over, I'd more quickly accept "culling.")

Posted by Mark at 09:40 AM

June 11, 2004

A top entry at blogs.sun.com

The hottest blog at blogs.sun.com is by MaryMaryQuiteContrary, who's in marketing and started to blog to get the word out about our last show in China.

Mary's a newbie, and a non-technical person. She says people love pictures. So here, I'll upload a little one...

Here's my ugly mug: .

This Mary says is part of her job. I guess it should be part of our jobs as well. Bryan Cantrill, way down in DTrace for Solaris app perf tuning, told us all about guerilla marketing. Mary is out there doing it.

Posted by Mark at 05:25 PM

Tim Bray on blogging

Tim Bray's giving a talk on blogging right now at work. Specifically http://blogs.sun.com/. He says he was hired partially to get Sun blogging.

Blogging seems to be growing at a rate of doubling every 4-6 weeks. This reminds Tim of the early expansion of the web.

Tim says:

• Blog's are one to many (mostly), you know who you're reading


• You don't have to update often, but you have to provide a syndication feed and keep it kicking over
  If you don't know about newsfeeders, go to http://bloglines.com


• To be read, you need to interest your readers


• Some bloggers are more popular... but you don't need to be in the top-read to be successful. If you write hard-core tech stuff, you might not have many readers, but the blogging world still needs you.

Tim's rules on how to succeed come next.

Dos:

1. Write what you know about.


2. Point to other people. People link back.


3. Read the good blogs in your area so you can react.


4. Making it shorter takes time, but it's worth the investment.


5. Human interest stuff is okay, but look prof. and polished (spellcheck, etc.)

Don'ts:

1. Write what you don't know about.


2. Fail to show respect. Dis'ing customers or Sun or employees.


3. Tell secrets.


4. Speculate about product ship dates, financial issues, and stock prices.

Posted by Mark at 05:18 PM

June 07, 2004

Sun getting into blogging

Sun has apparently decided to get into blogging externally. We're using Roller Weblogger externally, which is a Java application. (I did not use a Java application for external blogging, since our ISP charges extra for Java and Servlet support.)

So I have two internal blogs at this point -- yes, I only use one -- and this one already... Do I want another. At least I'd be able to Google through that one.

On a more practical note, what's the point? Why are we getting into blogging? Is there some way this will lead towards collaboration? Is it the next email? (It's almost better writing to yourself, since no one gets upset if you forget to answer.) I just hope we don't see any of us starting 24 x 7 webcams of our desks or whatever.

Posted by Mark at 09:19 PM

June 01, 2004

Back at work

After a long vacation, to use up all the days that built up since French law brought about reduction du temps de travail, I'm back in the office.

The excitement this week seems to be about Directory Server Enterprise Edition, which will bring you everything you need to deploy and develop for massively scalable directory services, as the core data layer of your identity management solution. For now, it's mainly licence-ware, but we should be designing the architecture during the summer.

Posted by Mark at 06:48 PM

May 27, 2004

Sun's Identity Management software

CNet ran an article, Software maker unites Windows, Unix, covering Vintela Inc.'s software that lets you do single sign on and manage LDAP-based authentication on UNIX/Linux using Windows management tools. The writer's name appears as David Becker.

Maybe David hasn't heard about Sun's Waveset acquisition. Maybe he thinks you'd rather manage all your UNIX/Linux identities through Windows. Maybe you would.

If you'd rather have it the other way around, Sun has quite a bit of Identity Management infrastructure worked out already. Maybe we've spent too much time working on the software, and not enough time working on the advertising.

Posted by Mark at 09:12 PM

May 25, 2004

Online help years later

Since 24 September 2003, I've chaired a working group focused on bringing online help for all of Sun's Java System server products into line for use in our common web-based sys admin console.

In chairing this group, I've come to understand partially why Jon Bosak once suggested to go off and learn General Robert's Rules of Order. The chair's role should go to someone who knows how to chair working groups. Ready, fire, aim.

It appears Microsoft created WinHelp in 1990. Help online existed before then, but WinHelp looks like the most widely recognized grandfather of what we talk about in the work group when we say online help. We target JavaHelp as the help engine, and JavaHelp systems resemble WinHelp in the same way that HTML Help resembles WinHelp.

Anyway, when asked to chair a work group recommending something online help related, I wondered, What? Why didn't we take a decision on what to use years ago?

Part of the answer may lie in how UNIX folks approach problems, which you may describe with the adverb unregimentedly. Locally, you may find lots of discipline (although I somehow doubt it). Globally, it looks like Brownian motion (maybe it is Brownian motion). When we eventually get somewhere, the roads in and roads out shall have heavy traces of our passage.

Buckminster Fuller claims to have lived off precessional effects. Precession: Systems in Motion with Respect to Each Other Involving 90 Degrees. Off on tangents. This looks different from Brownian motion, which has a random character.

Perhaps Robert's Rules of Order can channel an essentially Brownian system into a precessional system?

Posted by Mark at 01:47 PM

May 24, 2004

More Directory Server docs

As I vacation, my teammates have published the final versions of Directory Server, Administration Server, and Directory Proxy Server docs, all of which belong to Sun's Java Enterprise System 2004Q2 release.

This release runs on both Solaris and Red Hat systems. You can download it from Sun's web site. The current license model lets very small businesses, less than 100 employees, get the license for free, although that does not include support. I guess that makes it a little like getting a Linux distro. We need some more evaluation documentation, though.

Posted by Mark at 09:02 PM

Estimations

Yet again I find my estimate of how long a task will take off by half. I expected it to take me two days to cut the hedges. It total it took 2 hours a few days ago, and 6 more hours today.

Because I do not keep track of my time, I simply guess how long tasks take. I often miss by a large margin. Good thing I do not have to guess right in order to eat or sleep inside.

http://hours.sourceforge.net/ seems like a possible way of keeping track of what I do. Maybe I should find the key to the cabinet where my Palm has been locked up at work for the last year.

Posted by Mark at 08:50 PM

May 15, 2004

Detached

Strangely, although I've been on vacation less than two weeks total, work email has started to lose it's interest. I've detached from my job.

If the interruptions were fewer, would I take the extra continuity to think? Between hedge clipping, painting, diaper changing, cooking, I've read almost to the end of Drucker's Best Of book. (Peter Drucker, not Tom Peters. Do not confuse these two guys.)

Drucker starts with an assumption that, since increasing standards of living have spread to the majority of those of us in developed countries, we cannot get by without more of the same. Either we push for further increases, or something falls apart. In other words, the plea for equitable redistribution instead of further increases does not reflect a request most of us want to make. Drucker has a point there. You have to live frugally around here to avoid using more and more. As Woody Allen joked, "The food's terrible. And such small portions."

If I agree with Drucker's assumption there, the path gets slippery. In the knowledge society, we have a great need for generalists. We call them managers. They organize specialist teamwork to produce the increases we cannot do without. If work concerns " the occupation for which you are paid" (because nobody would do it for free), and you seems to fall more into the generalist category than the specialist category, and you could do managerial work, maybe you should think about looking for managerial work.

Especially when other specialists do better specialized work than you do.

Rien faire, rien laisser faire, tout faire faire. If you do it right, it should get easier rather than harder. On the other hand, I've copped out twice. Maybe there won't be a third time.

Posted by Mark at 09:47 PM

May 08, 2004

ChorusOS and Jaluna

Sun acquired Chorus Systems in late 1997, apparently with the notion of using the Chorus microkernel as the basis for a Java operating system, but also to help Sun expand into the Network Equipment Provider market. The Chorus microkernel offers real time capability, hardware abstraction, and virtual memory. Above the configurable microkernel layer, Chorus provides support for distributed systems and different operating system personalities. In other words, you can have an incarnation such as ChorusOS 4.x, with a POSIX personality based on Free BSD, that gives you API compatibility with other UNIX systems, making it easier for Network Equipment Providers to have applications running all the way from the base station controller into the large backend systems, using the same code. Other incarnations provided PSOS APIs, for example. This has probably enabled compatibility with VxWorks as well, and of course means that you can port Linux on top of the microkernel.

At the end of the last century, the Network Equipment Provider market was expanding quickly. Sun folded ChorusOS into the Netra HA Suite for customers in this market. Netra HA Suite provides a level of API compatibility between ChorusOS and Solaris systems that lets NEPs write once, more or less, for applications running across their network infrastructure. Netra HA Suite also provides a distributed, container-based architecture for high availability across the network infrastructure. In other words, NEPs writing to Netra HA Suite can have applications fail over quickly and statefully from one hardware node to another, over the network, no matter what.

When the NEP bubble popped, and Sun was not in the market for devices, the folks who invented the Chorus microkernel went on to found Jaluna. Jaluna appears to have opened the source for the basic system, gone more heavily into Linux, and aimed at providing more functionality at the high end. An interesting historical wrinkle in all this: Tilly Bayard-Richard managed to take all the documentation we wrote in or had moved to Sun's SolBook format, a subset of DocBook, and use open source tools to rebrand and republish it without extensive modification to the content. You can see the results here at Jaluna.

Posted by Mark at 07:13 AM

May 07, 2004

CV with OpenOffice

Sun layoffs having gone into a third round recently, I decided the time has come to brush off my CV. So I tried the OpenOffice resume template. The result looks okay in StarOffice format, strange in PDF (on Red Hat 9 anyway), and downright ugly when exported to HTML (somewhat cleaned up version here).

Perhaps I should have another look at HRMML. I downloaded HRMML-recruit.zip, however, only to find that laying out the sample resume.xml with the sample resume.xsl does not work with xsltproc:

$ xsltproc resume.xsl resume.xml
compilation error: file resume.xsl line 1 element stylesheet
xsltParseStylesheetProcess : document is not a stylesheet
$

I can fix that, but then I get a whole bunch of errors like:

compilation error: file resume.xsl line 119 element value-of
xsl:value-of : select is missing

Does one have to roll one's own set of woodworking tools before one can put up a single shelf?

Posted by Mark at 09:41 PM

May 06, 2004

Reduction In Force

Sun has proceeded with another reduction in force, at least in the US. Our Director's job was eliminated, so she's leaving tomorrow. Strange to be out of the office while all this happens.

Today we met with Greg, who hasn't been in Grenoble since last summer, and with Mike Turner. This was Mike's first trip to Grenoble since Sun bought Waveset. Mike's working on instituting some changes in the way we offer software to our customers. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Seems like we could either return to the revenue-driven days before the bubble popped, or continue to wait for another hardware-purchasing wave to lift all boats.

May you live in interesting times, as they say.

Posted by Mark at 11:52 PM