Author: geoff

The Netcraft toolbar

I recently installed the Netcraft Toolbar in the copy of Firefox that I use on my home machine. Hitherto I have mostly used Netcraft for their What’s That Site Running? service (as a remote ping or to check a netblock owner). The Toolbar is new.
Every time you hit a new site, the toolbar displays five pieces of information:
– a “risk rating” (questionable)
– the date that the domain name was first noticed by Netcraft (highly unreliable)
– the rank ordering of the site by hits
– a link to a “Site Report”
– the netblock owner
I have to say that it’s changing the way I surf the web. I find myself looking at a site’s ranking, trying to understand why it’s so high (or so low). For example, my blog ranking is (at this moment) 197836. Is that good? Well, here are the top 100. Other interesting sites: Neil Gaiman’s blog is 69787, Planet Sun is 126763, and Alec Muffett’s crypticide ranks 127559. But I’m closing in on Majikthise (182579), and I’m way ahead of Simon’s Webmink (807108). Meaningful? Of course not, but it’s fun. However it only aggregates at the domain level, so all of the Sun bloggers at blogs.sun.com are going to have to share their collective ranking of 19723….

SUNW+STK: now this is going to be interesting

We just announced that we’re buying StorageTek. Over the years Sun has bought a number of companies, but this is a new scale of acquisition for us. StorageTek is a 7,000 person $2.2B company that was founded in 1969 – the year after I got into the computer business, and 13 years before Sun was established. Integrating the two corporate cultures is likely to be challenging – and stimulating – for all concerned. Nevertheless this feels like the right move for Sun.

The greatest philosopher?

The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time is conducting a vote “to find out who you think is the Greatest Philosopher of all time”. You actually get to vote twice: the first time to nominate a candidate, and the second time to pick from the twenty most nominated philosophers. After seeing the large number who are choosing Wittgenstein (some for the strangest of reasons), I felt compelled to submit a nomination for David Hume.

"It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper told the band to play"

I just received an email beginning:

Dear Geoffrey:

Congratulations on your 20 years of service with Sun!

In recognition of this milestone, we are pleased to offer you an award for your contribution and dedication to our company. To view your award options, please visit the website below. [Etcetera.]

Who’d have thunk it? [And come to think of it, where did that expression come from?]

I remember one hot summer day going to see Barry Folsom at the Sun sales office in Waltham. Barry had just been hired by Bernie Lacroute to head up the planned-but-as-yet-unstaffed East Coast Division of Sun. I asked Barry if his job offer was still open (he’d tried to hire me into the Rainbow group at Digital); he responded by asking me if I had any thoughts about how to accomodate IBM PCs in this new Network File System stuff that Bill Joy, Bob Lyon and Rusty Sandberg had come up with. “Yeah, I think so; I’ve been looking at NFS for our [Mosaic] OS,” I mused, and the rest is history.

Some thoughts on a new gadget

I just got myself a new Sony PSP. psp-in-hand.jpgHere are a few random thoughts accumulated over the last couple of days.

  • Sheer computing power. Two 32-bit CPUs (MIPS R4000@333MHz), a GPU capable of 35 million polygons/sec…. More specs here.

  • As soon as I’d configured the WiFi to access my home network, the PSP phoned home for a software update.

  • Where’s the web browser? Yes, I know the trick with the embedded game browser, but that doesn’t count. My guess is that Sony will wait until they’re ready to support streaming video on demand.

  • Standards, bloody standards. The PSP manual says that it takes a USB cable with a “mini-B connector”. I bought one… it didn’t fit. Eventually I got a different “mini-B” cable that worked OK.

  • Several nice packages for the Mac to sync with the PSP, including PSPWare and iPSP. I’m testing them both before picking one and shelling out the registration fee. PSPWare is OK so far, though the iTunes integration needs work. (It only supports MP3, not Apple’s AAC, but if you give it a playlist of AAC files to sync it does nothing, silently. It could let me know….) It uses Quicktime to convert video files into the special MP4 format used by the PSP, and the conversion rate isn’t too good on my 867MHz PowerBook.

  • Video blogging?! I found ANT, which is very cool. Engadget has a piece on how to make ANT and PSPWare play nicely together. The result? PSP-casting…

  • The games, oh yes… I got Ridge Racer (auto racing) and Darkstalkers Chronicle (2D fighter). So far I’ve spent most of my time with Ridge Racer, alternating between game play and open-mouthed amazement at the graphics. I’m waiting for Ghost in the Shell, which looks like it’ll be the hottest FPS.

  • Good grief, not another proprietary disk format! Will they never learn? (Probably not.) And why does Sony have to keep pushing its own flash memory format, the Memory Stick Duo? Yes, OK, prices are competitive (it comes with a 32MB card; I bought a 512MB replacement), but still….

  • Bottom line: it’s stunning. Graphics are better than the PS2, WiFi, audio. Please can Namco do a PSP SoulCalibur? Pretty please? The only potential weakness I can see is the battery: Sony’s claims of 4-10 hours have translated into 3-4 for gaming, less if the WiFi is in use.

On not knowing whether to laugh, cry, shrug and walk away, or gaze in fascination….

Dion Hinchcliffe is embarking on a project which I think I’m going to watch with morbid fascination: Taking Stock of Web Service Description. Specifically, he’s going to put up a simple order entry web service, and publish a description of the service in a number of different candidate service description languages (SDLs). The mind-boggling part is the list of candidate SDLs:

“The list of SDLs to try to use is: WSDL 1.1, WSDL 2, NSDL, SSDL, WRDL, RSWS, WADL, Resedel, SMEX-D, RDF, RDF Forms, OWL/OWL-S, WSML, and WDL.”

That’s fourteen different languages. Plus he’s going to explore how to use these with three different programming languages: Java, C#, and Ruby.

Back in the Craig McMurtry blog entry that I cited recently, he wrote: “One must grant though, that a primary and very good idea behind Jini lives on in Indigo. That idea is that there should be an excellent, simple programming model usable across any kind of networking infrastructure. In the years since Jini, though, we have learned a lot about how NOT to design those programming models, and those lessons suffuse Indigo.” With all due respect, Dion’s experiment demonstrates pretty clearly that there is no consensus whatsoever on the “how not to” question. It also seems to confirm what I said: that one size will not fit all, and that we’re going to need a variety of technical solutions ranging from Jini to WRDL and beyond.

My joke

Before the web, the best Internet jokes were disseminated via the Usenet group rec.humor.funny, run by Brad Templeton. A discussion on an internal Sun email alias just now reminded me of my one and only r.h.f contribution

Music, maestro
Seen in yesterday’s Parade magazine that probably accompanied a couple of million Sunday papers: an advertisement for a beautiful little scale model violin. According to the ad, it’s a 1/24 scale replica, measuring 8 inches long.

Screw the violin, I want to see the fiddler who can tuck a 16 foot violin under his or her chin….

[This was posted to r.h.f on Sunday April 25, 1993, at 4:30 am EDT, apparently from my Sun workstation called tyger.east.sun.com. I wonder was I was doing at the office that early on a Sunday morning. Or maybe I was travelling, and logged in remotely. On reflection, I suspect that I emailed it to the moderator, Maddi, and she finally posted it to r.h.f. on Sunday. Just think of the mind-boggling level of detail that the web captures for posterity….]

European Grand Prix (Nurburgring)

The story today is about tyres and gravel. It used to be the case that gravel traps were supposed to stop cars, quickly and safely, but in today’s race car after car was running off the track, through the gravel, keeping going, and able to drive back onto the track. Schumacher, Alonso, Raikkonen, Massa…. And the tyre problems for Raikkonen, Massa, and others were spectacular. First, watching a strip of rubber from Massa’s left front slice off the end-plate of the wing, and then just now, as I’m typing, Raikkonen’s crash at the start of the last lap, while he was leading; his flat-spotted right front tyre vibrated so much that his suspension finally failed.

My man DC wound up in 4th place (beating Michael Schumacher!) after leading at one point; he might have been 3rd if he hadn’t incurred a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane.

Oh yes, the result. Alonso/Heidfeld/Barrichello.

The art of cheese

As many of my colleagues have bemoaned in their blogs, the weather here in New England has been miserable for the last few weeks. However today dawned bright and warm, with a nice breeze: still a little humid, but otherwise a perfect spring day. So we headed down to the North End of Boston to poke around the Italian groceries and bakeries. We had lunch just across the street from the Paul Revere House, and visited it afterwards.

The people that “restored” it early in the 20th century seem to have brought more enthusiasm than historical rigor to the project. They actually reconstructed it as it had been first built at the end of the 17th century. To do this, they removed many of the features and additions that Paul Revere would have known when he lived there 90 years later. There’s a lesson there, I feel.

Before heading home we stopped in Salumeria Italiana, a wonderful Italian grocery on Richmond Street, and picked up some bread and several kinds of cheese. Among these was a Blu del Moncenisio, which turned out to be one of those truly great cheeses that one encounters every now and then. I’m a sucker for blue cheese (preferably with a baguette and a robust red wine or port), and this was a marvellous example of the cheesemaker’s craft. Recommended.