Author: geoff

The essay that Mearsheimer and Walt ought to have written

In an article in the New York Review of Books entitled The Storm over the Israel Lobby, Michael Massing looks at the furious debate over “The Israeli Lobby”, the essay by Mearsheimer and Walt about AIPAC and America’s policies towards Israel. He reviews the essay and the reaction that it provoked, and then goes through a devastating review of its weaknesses. He concludes this (the first third of his piece) thus:

Overall, the lack of firsthand research in “The Israel Lobby” gives it a secondhand feel. Mearsheimer and Walt provide little sense of how AIPAC and other lobbying groups work, how they seek to influence policy, and what people in government have to say about them. The authors seem to have concluded that in view of the sensitivity of the subject, few people would talk frankly about it. In fact, many people are fed up with the lobby and eager to explain why (though often not on the record). Federal campaign documents offer another important source of information that the authors have ignored. Through such sources, it’s possible to show that, on their central point—the power of the Israel lobby and the negative effect it has had on US policy—Mearsheimer and Walt are entirely correct.

And he proceeds to do exactly this. He describes the way in which AIPAC “facilitates” the flow of money from donors to PACs, and from PACs to those Congressional candidates who toe the AIPAC line. The analysis is clear and overwhelming. The number of congresspeople who were unwilling to be identified because of the likely consequences is depressingly large. This is the essay that Mearsheimer and Walt ought to have written. However Massing gives them the credit which is owed to them. By breaking the taboo against discussion of the topic, they have opened the way for writers like Massing to make the true case.
Recommended.
—
[Via Majikthise.]

Blog entry 1,000: a retrospective

So this is the 1,000th entry in my blog since I began on December 20, 2003. I thought I’d use this opportunity to revisit some of my favourite entries and the discussions that followed. All of these entries are tagged “1K”. The criteria are purely personal.

  • We have always been at war with Eastasia….
    I wrote this piece about the rapprochement between Sun and Microsoft in April ’04. It attracted a number of comments; more significantly it was also linked by Andy Orlowski of The Register. While this isn’t as severe as being Slashdotted, I rapidly hit the puny bandwidth limits on my old hosting service, and a couple of months later I rehosted on Steve Lau‘s grommit.com.
  • On the difficulty of keeping on topic….
    This piece was just a little rant about how hard it was to avoid over-complication and distraction when trying to understand a relatively simple problem. (I simply wanted to understand the kind of transaction rate generated by an RFID-based warehouse and shipping system.) To my surprise, it became one of the most-linked-to pieces in my blog.
  • Java, open source, standards, and conformance
    I’ve come to the conclusion that software engineers are divided into two camps: those for whom the truth is the code, and those who believe that the truth is the specification. I’m in the latter camp: I believe that it’s important for there to be multiple implementations – interoperable and substitutable – of any important technology. Monocultures are dangerous. The way to avoid them is to create good specifications and build (and test!) various implementations. That’s why I’ve spent much of my life working on standards: X/Open, IETF, NFS, WinSock, W3C, FIPA, etc.
  • How people see Sun
    Inevitably many of my blog entries have been about Sun Microsystems, and this is one of my favourites. In it I drew on my experience of talking with customers and the ideas from The Cluetrain Manifesto to identify one of Sun’s problems: how to translate conversations about technology into purchase orders. These ideas became even more important after I became involved in the StorageTek integration effort, because storage involves a quite different kind of conversation.
  • Interrelated aspects of interaction (and Interaction: Typing)
    There are some interesting, almost paradoxical ideas floating around in distributed computing. They involve things like type models, composition, static vs. dynamic binding, autonomy. In these two blog entries I started to discuss some of these ideas, but I soon came to the conclusion that a blog is not the best medium for such things. I still like this stuff, though: I guess I’ll just have to write a paper, or something.
  • Debating WS-*
    Getting referenced in The Register isn’t nearly as much of a traffic generator as “getting TB’d” – getting a mention in Tim Bray’s ongoing. In September 2004, I took a crack at the slow-motion train wreck of the bloated web services “standards” process. It’s not that I’m against standards, as I’ve already noted. The point is that the governance of the standards process is just as important as the specifications themselves, and Microsoft’s hegemony was (is) in nobody’s best interest.
  • The Anthony Flew brouhaha
    Of all the subjects I’ve blogged on, the one that has generated the most discussion is the sad case of the English philosopher, Antony Flew. The short version: eminent atheist philosopher (Antony Flew) gets taken in by a charlatan (Gerald Schroeder) peddling an “irreducible complexity” argument about DNA; eminent philosopher concludes that this may be evidence for a designer; triumphalist creationist huckster (Roy Abraham Varghese) persuades Flew to go public at a conference; creationists crow about the “conversion of the most famous atheist”; Flew talks to some real scientists, and makes a half-hearted retraction, apologizing that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
    This first piece attracted 53 comments; later entries included More on Antony Flew, Carrier on Flew, and Antony Flew: at last, the book. The discussion ran on from December 2004 until May 2005, and I was still getting email months after that.
  • To Prius or not to Prius…
    Last spring, I wanted to replace my car, and I blogged about my choice: should I get a Toyota Prius or a Subaru Legacy. Eventually I chose the Subaru. The odd thing was that even though this was a non-obvious choice – I had to consider fuel economy, the value of AWD on our hill in the winter, availability, and so forth – it attracted a ton of email either scolding or ridiculing me as a “sell-out liberal who doesn’t have the courage of his convictions”. Weird.
  • Wrong premise, misleading conclusion, and Jini, Indigo and the “Highlander Fallacy”
    Two of my favourite blog pieces were written in response to a Microsoft blogger who argued (crudely) “we learned from all of Jini’s mistakes, and Indigo is the One, True Way for future distributed computing”. I thought I did a pretty good job of refuting his arguments, and others agreed: I received lots of appreciative feedback.
  • On the guilty pleasure of reading a really bad book
    No, this wasn’t a reluctant confession of an addition to Robert Ludlum or Dan Brown. I bought a technical book while on a trip last June, and discovered to my dismay – and then delight – that while it looked superficially plausible, most of the prose was entirely meaningless! The book was a dead loss – but the resulting blog piece was enormous fun to write.
  • My thoughts on Indian traffic
    Regular readers will know that I’ve visited India twice in the last year, and it made a great impression on me. (You can find lots of my blog entries and photographs from those trips.) I was particularly impressed by the Indian approach to traffic, and I tried to distill my impressions in this short essay. Dozens of my Indian friends and colleagues have told me that I captured the gestaldt of Indian traffic to perfection….
  • RIF
    If the Antony Flew affair was the most commented-on series of blog entries, the second was clearly the group that followed my getting laid off from Sun. The announcement was followed by my thanks (including my slides from the party), the FAQ for those who couldn’t understand how this could happen, and finally clearing out. As for what comes next, just bookmark my RSS feed!

So that’s the 1,000th blog entry. For the record, it looks as if there are 1,603 comments in the system. Thank you for your contributions. (I wonder how many are undetected spam!) I’ve successfully negotiated the two big hurdles that every blogger dreads: rehosting on a new system, and changing from one technology (MovableType) to another (WordPress). I’ve enjoyed my blogging enormusly, no matter where I find myself, and I plan to continue. The Gadster suggested that I should speculate on what things might be like when I reach my 2,000th blog entry. At the present rate, that should occur around the end of 2008. Hmmmm….

Random 10 (#999)

This feels like a nice mix, ranging from the mid-60s to the late 90s:

  • “A Stone’s Throw Away” by Style Council (from The Collection…)
  • “A Woman Like You” by Bert Jansch (from The Pentangle Family)
  • “Feels Like” by Al Stewart (from Famous Last Words)
  • “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by the Rolling Stones (from Hot Rocks, 1964-1971)
  • “Just Like A Woman” by Bob Dylan (from The Essential Bob Dylan)
  • “Out Of Body (Logical Mix)” by the Orb (from Auntie Aubrey’s Excursions Beyond The Call Of Duty: The Orb Remix Project)
  • “Pass It On [Dstilld Remix]” by Keoki (from Jealousy)
  • “Saucers Over Chicago” by the Legendary Pink Dots (from Live At The Metro)
  • “Sick Of You” by Lou Reed (from New York)
  • “Flowers In The Rain” by the Move (from Psychedelic Years #2: Great Britain)

Counting up to 1,000

According to the WordPress dashboard, this blog entry will be the 998th that I have made. So what should I do for entry #1,000? Chris (who just arrived from California for a weekend visit) suggests that I pick out my favourite postings from the last couple of years. Any other suggestions?

The Divine Comedy: Regeneration

In a couple of earlier blog entries, I’d mentioned my interest in The Divine Comedy. and my puzzlement as to how I’d missed this wonderful music for so long. I’ve now managed to acquire all of the currently-available Divine Comedy albums. Absent Friends came from Apple’s iTMS, a local store yielded a CD of the Secret History “best of” collection, Amazon.co.uk supplied Fin de Siecle and Regeneration on CD, and I bought downloads of A Short Album About Love, Casanova, Liberation and Promenade from the group’s web site. (Purists will note that I don’t have Fanfare for the Common Muse or Rarities. Maybe one day.)

Among all these albums, one really stands out for me: Regeneration, released in 2001.

divine comedy: regeneration

Half a dozen times over the last 25 years I’ve heard a new album which I immediately knew was different, special, something that was going to be part of my life going forward. Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche 85, the Orb’s Ultraworld, The Seduction of Claude Debussy by the Art of Noise, the first October Project album, the LPD’s Maria Dimension, and Lightbulb Sun by Porcupine Tree.

The Divine Comedy’s Regeneration feels like one of these. It’s quite a bit heavier and more cynical than their other albums, and, as a couple of reviewers pointed out, there’s a hint of Radiohead in there. (But you’ll notice that OK Computer isn’t on my list: it’s outstanding stuff, but it doesn’t really touch me.) Songs like “Dumb It Down”, “Mastermind” and “Eye Of The Needle” really skewer their targets, and “Note To Self” makes you think….

Of course it isn’t all dark. “Perfect Lovesong” is just what the name implies:
Give me your love
And I’ll give you the perfect lovesong
With a divine Beatles bassline
And a big old Beach Boys sound
I’ll match you pound for pound
Like heavy-weights in the final round
We’ll hold on to each other
So we don’t fall down

And “Lost Property” is sheer fun – and, incidentally, the first Divine Comedy I ever heard (on a Back To Mine compilation).

Anyway, there it is. Regeneration. Wonderful stuff. Enjoy.

Boston cloudscape

On Tuesday evening the rain subsided and the sun came out around 7pm. We walked around the block, and I took a few pictures, including this one of the Boston skyline. I love those clouds….
Boston skyline after the deluge
(There’s also a zoomed version of that shot: at full resolution, you can read the PRUDENTIAL at the top of the tower….)

My favourite review of the film of that pathetic "Da Vinci" novel

The BBC quotes David Sexton from the Evening Standard: “The movie of The Da Vinci Code has one inestimable advantage over the novel. Utilising the moving picture, it has effectively eliminated most of Dan Brown’s plodding prose.”
(Dan Brown has the distinction of being the only author who has provoked me into flinging a book across the room in sheer annoyance. I was brought up to treat books properly, but this was too much. I bought one of his so-called “thrillers” to read on a cross-country flight, abandoned it after a few chapters, rediscovered it when I got home, and decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. It didn’t deserve it.)

On the role of a CTO

Part of the recent re-org at Sun was a new role for Greg – or rather, a de jure codification of what should have been the de facto all along. As Jonathan blogged:

Now as you may have heard, I gave Greg a new title recently. In addition to being Sun’s CTO, he’s now Executive Vice President of Research and Development. Why’s that important?
[…]
So as a part of this change, the product group CTO’s, the sentinels supporting the line executives who run our businesses, will also report to Greg. In the world of human resources, that’s known as a “dual hard line” reporting structure.

So what exactly do these “sentinels” do? Or, perhaps more important, what should they do? Here’s what I wrote to a colleague a few months ago:

Back in the mid-90s, Hal Jespersen and I were co-CTOs in the Network Software Group under Terry Keeley and then John McFarlane. We found that the job involved both inward and outward facing activities, as you’d imagine. The outward included:

  • Customer facing work, both tactical and strategic. Familiar stuff.
  • Other business-related stuff: analysts meetings, press, etc.
  • M&A [merger & acquisition] up to the point of acquisition (due diligence, selection, etc.).
  • Strategic partnering (remember the various strategic alignments attempted with XXX,YYY etc.?).

These are fairly straightforward. They are business-critical, usually interrupt-driven, with no obvious tempo. By contrast, there are a number of inward facing activities for which it is important to develop a predictable process, a cadence:

  • Portfolio planning and MRP [Medium Range Planning – Sun’s budget process].
  • Technical reviews of projects – regular, in person, with [at least] the tech leads, every 3-6 months.
  • Business reviews of programs, supplying an independent voice on the state of the technology.
  • M&A from the date of acquisition until effective assimilation
  • Setting technical “big rules” if absolutely necessary
  • Taking care of the engineering community, from a retention, skills inventory, and development perspective
  • Coordination with CTOs in other business units

(In addition, the CTO *may* be responsible for AD [Advanced Development] within the BU [Business Unit], in order to shield the budget for this from being traded off at the project level. Where AD belongs – within each program, at BU CTO level, or in the Labs – is something that needs to be worked out carefully.)
All of these roles are vital, of course. 🙂 The one that should not be skimped on is the regular technical project reviews. VPs and directors in charge of programs will routinely fudge (lie about) the technical state of their projects; that’s just the way things are, no big deal. The CTO has to understand the technical status of the programs, has to be in a position to identify gaps, overlaps, and duplications across the portfolio.

Obviously one person can’t do all of this: you need a strong, outgoing leader with a small staff of experienced engineers and process people. (The “co-CTO” approach that Hal and I used in NSG was a good “in the small” example of this.) Above all, you need someone who is respected and trusted by the BU EVP but relatively independent of him or her. That’s the value of the dual reporting relationship that Jonathan described.
Of course this only works if all of the BUs have CTOs….

Après le déluge

Just returned from a quick postprandial walk around the block. The rain has let up enough to make it feasible, and the torrents of rainwater have retreated to the gutters. We’ve been relatively lucky: I think we’ve had just under seven inches of rain here. (Logan had 6.68″ by 3pm.) North of us, things are much worse: according to the NWS, Andover has had 10.5″, and there’s street and stream flooding all over the North Shore. The various graphs on the AHPS (Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service) pages show that the Merrimack valley is in for some major flooding. (At Lowell, flood stage is at 52 feet; right now the river is up to 54.25 feet, and they expect it to crest at 60 feet by tomorow afternoon.)

And there’s more rain to come over the next few days….