Author: geoff

On how to react to good news

Back in January, Andrew Sullivan announced that he was taking a break from blogging, and so I stopped visiting his site. (A degree of “political burn-out” may also be responsible.) But today, I popped over to see what was new, and I came across an email that he’s received that captured my feelings exactly. I have no idea who sent it – I wish I knew – but I hope it’s OK to quote the entire thing here:
Respectfully, Andrew, I beg to differ on the alleged churlishness of Democrats on progress in the Middle East.
Let me explain what’s maddening to Democrats: no matter what happens that is progressive in the Middle East, Republicans and the Bush regime not only claims credit for it, but also claim that the war in Iraq is the reason for the progress. Libya doing a deal on weapons and Lockerbie so it can back into the international oil market? Must be because Bush invaded Iraq! Lebanese reacting with revulsion to Hariri’s assassination, probably by Syrian agents, and demanding Syria’s exit from their country? Must be because Bush invaded Iraq! Progress in the Palestinian-Israeli peace effort as a result of Arafat’s death? Must be because Bush invaded Iraq! Who’s really peddling nonsequitors here?
In short, what drives Democrats batty [is] the tendency to take partisan political credit for anything progressive, and to blame anything retrograde on political enemies (both foreign and domestic) who “just don’t get it.” Never is there any recognition that Bush’s international strategy even MIGHT be responsible for the negative radicalization we’re seeing in places like Iran, North Korea, and maybe even Venezuela — not to mention alienating essential partners in nation-building.
And what really kills Democrats is the way that Bush not only takes credit for everything that is going well, and denies any responsibility for things that are going badly (and, when we’re honest, how many people really feel that the world is, on balance, headed in the right direction?) — it’s that he then claims these false credit as the basis for “political capital” to spend on what Democrats feel are retrograde domestic policies.
The result is that the first reaction any Democrat has to good news in the Middle East (or anywhere else) is to think, “How can Bush be denied political credit for this, since you know he’s going to claim it.” And the important thing to emphasize is that it is Bush’s own political habits that have created this dynamic, and it started right after 9-11.
Exactly.

SEED meeting

I’m involved in Sun’s engineering mentoring program, known (inevitably) by its acronym SEED (Sun Engineering Enrichment & Development), and today we’re having an all-day meeting for the participants, both mentors and… hmm. What word should I use? I know that some people use mentee, and I’ve even seen it in a dictionary, but it doesn’t work for me.
Anyway, we’ve got various speakers scheduled, including executives and domain specialists. There’s also going to be a session consisting of short presentations by the mentees program participants. As I blog this, Greg Papadopoulos is reprising his CEC presentation “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be”, in which he highlights the shift in software/service business models and the implications for innovation within the company.
Naturally this is a distributed meeting. Most participants are in our Menlo Park campus, and the agenda runs from 9-5 Pacific time. There are five of us in a conference room here in Burlington, Massachusetts; we’re going to have to decide whether to stay until 8pm, taking into account the winter storm that is bearing down on us….
[UPDATE: After a careful risk analysis, I drove home around 3:20pm; it took me about an hour. It started out as snow; by the time I got home it was ice, ice ice. And now I’m dialled back in to the meeting.]
[Blogged on my Ferrari running Solaris 10, using the web interface to my blog. Now I need a good Solaris blogging tool, as good as MarsEdit on my Mac. And despite Alec’s comment. I don’t regard EMACS as an alternative. Maybe it’s a platform on which to build a solution, but…]

Formula 1 the way it's supposed to be

I just watched an excellent Grand Prix in Australia. [My sympathy for my SunUK colleagues: if they stayed up to watch, it’s now 4:45AM over there.] Close competitive racing, plenty of passing, general uncertainty because of all the new rules…. In the end Fisichella scored a solid win for Renault, while Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari was in the garage.
I’ve always been a David Coulthard fan, and I was disappointed when McLaren let him go at the end of last season. While it was gratifying that the new Red Bull (ex-Jaguar) team picked him up, nobody expected very much from them. I was therefore delighted that Coulthard was able to hold on to 3rd for most of the race, and finished 4th, ahead of the Williams and McLaren drivers. Stunning!

A moment in time

A quiet evening… sitting here waiting for the Australian Grand Prix TV coverage to start in about 20 minutes.

  • Reading: “I, Lucifer” by Glen Duncan (author of Death of an Ordinary Man)
  • Listening to: “No Roots” by Faithless. I love the way Maxi Jazz’s quietly insistent raps cut through Sister Bliss’s solid groove, how Dido adds ethereal gracenotes to the songs
  • Drinking: a couple of fingers of 10 year old Talisker, a single malt that captures some of the qualities of my two favourite – but radically different – Scotches: Macallan and Laphroaig

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds…"

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of” RJ-45 connectors and CAT-5 wiring. Thanks to the folks at Sun’s Beijing office, the internal WiFi on my Ferrari is now working. Only in 32 bit mode at this point, but I’ll take it. Now for suspend/resume (he said hopefully).

[Since Broadcom doesn’t release specs or source code for its devices, we’re using the “ndiswrapper” technique, in which a Windows-style NDIS driver is wrapped in a little bit of magic to make it work like a Solaris driver. Wonderful what they can do nowadays, eh?!]

[UPDATED: Curses… foiled again. The drivers worked fine at the office earlier today, but when I tried to boot up just now to use my home network, I was unable to plumb the bcmndis0 interface; some kind of binding error. The only obvious difference was that I was running on batteries, but that shouldn’t affect things. Oh well, more testing….]

[UPDATED: It turns out that it was inadvertent operator error: where the instructions said 43XX, I was supposed to use 4320 or 4324, depending on configuration. I have no idea how it could have worked yesterday. Anyway, 32 bit mode is working fine; I’ve tried the 64 bit drivers, but there are a number of issues to be resolved there.]

One more thought on Koch

I know that I shouldn’t get hung up on terminology: these things are just arbitrary labels, aren’t they? Well, no – we can’t simply ignore the everyday meanings of words. So when Koch (and Block too) went on about the NCC, or neural correlate of consciousness during the symposium, it felt wrong. It was as if a biologist had been talking about the CCO, the chemical correlate of organisms, instead of cells. Yes, cells are made of chemicals, but no biologist would indulge in such a crude reductionism.
Talking about the neural correlates of consciousness sounds respectfully non-committal: after all, it just talks about correlation, nothing causal. But to my ears, there is certainly a strong implication of stable correlation, rather than (e.g.) a pattern that is stable at some higher level but is not bound to any specific neural elements. If such patterns exist, the minimal NCC would presumably encompass the entire collection of neurons which could potentially support them; this doesn’t sound like what Koch is getting at.
In general, I would prefer to adopt a more flexible systems-oriented language for the working of the mind, and explore the constraints and preferences that flow from the properties of the neural substratum. It is easier to capture the relationships between concepts at several levels of [evolutionary] design than it is to tease apart a single idea into multiple elements at different levels.
(In computing we call this refactoring: it’s hard enough at a single level, extraordinarily difficult when multiple levels are involved.)

Consciousness 2005

Excellent symposium at Harvard Medical School this afternoon. A few observations follow. (Interesting how it’s easier to write about the positions with which you disagree, isn’t it?) And a nice bonus was finally getting to meet Bryan Bentz, a long-time fellow member of the Al Stewart mailing list.

  • Dan Dennett (Tufts): Qualia, Unsplittable Atoms? If we want to go on using the term qualia, we have to give up the idea that they are ineffable and intrinsic. I drank that Kool-Aid a long time ago: no argument from me. A surprisingly direct rap at Block (citing his infamous jazz metaphor), and a nifty ju-jitsu move in response to Block’s attempt at a reductio in the Q&A. Thoroughly enjoyable.
  • Patrick Haggard (UC London): Voluntary Action: Conscious Intention and Neural Activity: Updating Libet’s classic experiments on the Readiness Potential, which measured the curious fact that your brain starts preparing to act physically up to a second before you are conscious of deciding to act. Elegant experimental design has a distinctive aesthetics; this was a delightful talk. (I was reminded of one of my favourite books: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Florman.)
  • Ned Block (BYU): Two Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Block proposes a distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness – roughly, the stuff that we’re aware of, and the subset that we can actually work with at the moment. This is a subtle distinction that some feel is either irrelevant (because in practice the categories coincide) or just plain wrong. My feeling is that Block overstretches when he tries to cite particular brain activation patterns as evidence of the distinction. (He also relies on Koch and Crick’s NCC concept – see below.) In addition, it seems to me (after insufficient thought, I’m sure) that accessibility crops up in other ways than this particular dichotomy: it feels more like a property of a mental event which captures one way in which it stands in relation to other events and functional systems of the mind. I’m not convinced by Block’s coupling of the idea to one aspect of consciousness, with a particular neurological implementation.
  • Christof Koch (Caltech): Studying visual consciousness in humans using microelectrodes, magnets, and TV’s: I guess that Koch is the kind of hyperthyroidal character that you either love or loathe. He’s not my cup of tea at all. At the centre of his talk was a series of experiments in which the brain of an epileptic patient was wired up to explore the use of fine-grained electrical stimulation to control his seizures; a side benefit of this was that the same system could be used to detect the state of a few individual neurons. Koch showed the patient (and hence us) large numbers of faces, particularly those of celebrities; he found that certain pictures provoked neuronal activity. (In one case he found that the printed name of he person produced the same activity….) Rather than interpreting this data cautiously and skeptically, Koch started going on about “the Bill Clinton neuron” and the “Jennifer Aniston neuron”. I wish I’d been able to ask him to admit that his catchy phrase “the XXX neuron” really stands for “a random neuron which plays an unknown role in a larger neural structure [the NCC, or neural correlate of consciousness] which is activated in some way by XXX”. Even if it was a detector of some kind, it might play a functional role (“big nose”, “green eyes”, “sexy”) or indicate some correlation (“like Aunty Flo”, “seen on TV”). But Koch seems to be a true believer. In response to one question, he railed against “holistic” and “emergent” positions, or theories based on “patterns”. He espoused “specificity”, which for him seems to go down to the level of the single neuron. Unconvincing.

CEC – pulling it all together

I tried real-time blogging at last weekend’s CEC (Customer Engineering Conference), using my Treo 650, but without a decent blog tool it wasn’t really practical. I found myself wrestling with the web interface to MovableType rather than listening to the speakers – bad idea.

So here are my collected notes from CEC (slightly edited, definitely selective), followed by a few closing thoughts.

SATURDAY MORNING

One of the great traditions of CEC is the collection of video clips produced by various geo and functional orgs. It would be invidious to pick one as best, but the French piece – a Ken doll scaling the heights of a server to fix it, and earning the fulsome thanks of Barbie and her friends – got most applause. (But NZ had the best lip-sync.) And US PTS nailed the “piggybacking” joke perfectly. Best music (including alpenhorn) from Switzerland.

Next, Jim Baty & Hal Stern. Moving to utility model, refactoring business. Feels like it’s 1995 – tectonic shift again. Key messages: Technology is cultural. Addressing the PE (principal engineer) role – align with DE model. Community is key – blogging, BOFs. At CEC: Engage – act – share. When you go home: Communicate – train – improve.

Bob MacRitchie – EVP GSO: Described evolution of sales model. Review progress of Project Genesis [reorg of sales, professional services, and field engineering launched 12 months ago]. Simplify, flatten, empower org. (I’d missed that the US sales headquarters is moving to Boston – most of our US sales are east of the Mississippi.)

Marissa Peterson – services: services revenue & gross margin are improving significantly

Jonathan Schwartz – who never uses sports metaphors – appears in a Dallas Mavericks shirt.

How do we grow? Sell more to existing customers, or steal other people’s customers.

What’s changed over 3 years?

  • Sparc vs. Itanium
  • Solaris
  • Storage revival – 6920
  • x86 – now #1 Opteron seller, more coming
  • JES
  • Utility computing & grid (compare with IBM OnDemand fiasco)
  • Java on devices

In response to Q&A:

  • How come the OSS community is never satisfied with Sun, while IBM can do no wrong? The GPL people will never be happy, but they’re a minority. Second, we’re going to open source everything – JES, N1, etcetera – and if IBM won’t opensource WebSphere or Tivoli, they’re going to be left behind.
  • OSS grows revenue. The key is developers, and they have no money. (Jonathan has only one button on his blog – Download NetBeans)
  • What about N1? The technology in N1 was right on; our mistake was in overestimating the readiness of existing data centers to buy in. They don’t call them “brownfield sites” for nothing. On the other hand, the N1 technology is going to be critical to successfully creating a utility computing business

Greg Papadopoulos, CTO (via video): Computing becomes a commodity, but (network scale) computer systems aren’t. Consequences: operational concerns dominate, scale matters.

Robert Youngjohns – utility grid: What we’ve done, where we’re going. Great presentation – more material at the Sun Grid page.

.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

SOA and Jini – Tom Barratt & Larry Mitchell: Nothing unfamiliar, just wanted to see how people were presenting – and reacting to – SOA and Jini. Basic background, ray-tracing demo. Excellent discussion, good questions, lot of interest.

N1 SPS/SJS App Server – David Ogren: Talking about AppServer 8.1 + N1SPS 5.0. We got what David called the “Fire and Brimstone” to “Nirvana” presentation… Plus a nice demo.

InstallFest and Demo Room: Lots of cool stuff in the demo room. Re-installed Solaris 10 on my Ferrari from the latest flash archive.

SUNDAY MORNING

John Loicano, SW EVP: Big emphasis on Solaris, tools, restructuring JES Suites (especially Identity Management with Identity Auditor) Tag-team with Juan Soto (SW CTO & MktDev) for a deep dive on leading with SW for opening new customers. Emphasized importance of Netbeans vs. Eclipse. (Netbeans nailed all the recent tools awards.) Impressive performance numbers on the new TCP stack. Great demos of Solaris 10 Predictive Self-Healing and Identity Auditor.

Mark Canepa – network storage: Data management is more than storage…. Industry survey, strategy, product overview. Nice discussion of synergy between Solaris 10 zones and 6920 virtualization. Head-to-head comparison against EMC. Plea for help in improving remote monitoring connectivity. Java Storage System – not a technology, but a JES-style busness model. [The idea is interesting; I’m not crazy about the name.]

John Fowler & Andy Bechtolsheim: network systems: John summarized NSG history & progress. Stunning benchmark numbers, unveiled Galaxy: 8 socket (16-way, with dual cores) in new 4U packaging. BIG fans. The dual cores are coming very soon – well ahead of Intel. Full product line from 1U 2 sockets up to 4U 8 socket. Also blades – but no compromise in performance. Blades will support virtualized SAN port sharing, will save huge dollars. (Low cost, low speed blades aren’t cost-effective because of software licensing costs.) Will mix-and-match AMD and SPARC blades. Box design is dramatically future-proofed. Also mgmt sw and Nauticus (N2000) switches.Many early sales have been driven by customer solution and Blueprint sales. Seed units work well. Challenge: every sale is an audition. We can sell the boxes, need to make sure service will be able to meet the challenge.

David Yen, scalable systems EVP: What’s the difference between NSG and SSG? Ultimately, competence in system packaging vs. competence in silicon. SPARC roadmaps. Lots of interesting stuff: I wish he’d skipped the umpteenth repetition of “how chip-level multithreading works” to spend more time on the new material. Oh, well.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

Real World Cluster Grids – Tony Kay: Disambiguating “grid”, all the way back to Foster & Kesselman. Important to match language with customer expectation – we say grid, they (may) say cluster, for example. Detailed discussions of HPC grids, especially oil & gas biz. Importance (or not) of various technologies: OGSA, Globus; cluster, MPI libs, network fabrics, file systems, specialized protocol stacks. Had a chance to talk to my former SunLabs colleague Bruce Daniels who’s now in PS.

ZFS – Nolen Hayden: (Jeff Bonwick was sick: his director subbed for him.) Interesting to hear the issues that were uppermost in the minds of the customer-facing engineers.

Grids for Financial Services – Alec Muffett: Intensely, relentlessly, and amusingly pragmatic and iconoclastic. But you knew that.

FINAL THOUGHTS

  • An excellent conference – kudos to Hal Stern and Jim Baty, and their team.
  • I really regret that I had to miss the Monday morning session, especially Scott’s talk.
  • While I understand the traditional focus on the field engineering organization, I really think that CEC has turned into something that speaks to all of engineering. How we could achieve this while preserving the value to the field I have no idea….
  • The openness of the whole event was remarkable. At lunch on Saturday, I asked Hal whether it was all bloggable. “Absolutely!” he said.

Consciousness 2005

This afternoon I’m heading over to the Harvard Medical School in Longwood to attend a symposium exploring the neuroscientific and philosphical aspects of Consciousness. The speakers are Dan Dennett from Tufts (my PhilOfMind prof), Patrick Haggard from UCL, Ned Block of NYU, and Chris Koch from CalTech. I’ve read enough of Dennett, Block and Koch to know that they’re pretty far apart on many issues, so it should be “stimulating”!