Author: geoff

'Bye Rob – and thanks

gingell.jpg

After over 19 years working at Sun, you might think that I’ve seen it all. But last week I experienced a personal “first”: my boss, Rob Gingell, left the company. I was so gobsmacked that I checked back to make sure that this was indeed the first time that this had happened. Of course many of my former bosses have left the company (or, in the case of Phil, been tragically snatched away from us on 9/11), but in every case they’d had the decency to wait until I was no longer working for them.

I’ve never really understood why we’re always so secretive about people leaving companies. (I actually held off writing this piece until Rob had assured me that his mug-shot was on file at his new company.) After all, people come and go for all sorts of reasons, and it shouldn’t be a big deal. Rob, like me, had been at Sun since 1985, and after 19 years it’s hardly surprising that he was interested in doing something new. But we never announce these things, even internally (unless the person is retiring), and I think this has two unfortunate consequences. First, people tend to interpret secrecy as meaning that you’re trying to hide something. (“Oo-er! Rob just quit! I wonder why?! What did he know that I don’t know? Should I be worried?!”) 99% of the time, the answer is, quite simply, no. (And the other 1% there isn’t anything you can do anyway.) Second, by keeping things under wraps we lose the opportunity to celebrate the person’s accomplishments and thank them for their contributions to the company. Sure, a few of us may take them out for a drink, but that’s inadequate recognition for someone who’s touched as many lives as Rob did.

Having violated the taboo, let me say a few words about Rob. I think I first ran into him in 1986 when he was giving a talk on the recent rewrite of the virtual memory system for SunOS (the BSD-based precursor to Solaris). I remember two things from that: his distinctive speaking voice (with the pitch rising steadily through each sentence), and the elegance of the design he was presenting. Over the years we met frequently, particularly after I became a DE in 1991. He was instrumental in the mammoth Sun-AT&T Unix unification effort that became SVR4 and then Solaris; he was a passionate advocate for Java and the community process that underpinned its development; he became the CTO of the software organization; and then in 2002 he was appointed to a newly-created position: Chief Engineer, reporting to the CTO, Greg Papadopoulos.

Rob talked about his new job in an interesting interview with David Berlind of ZDNet, in which he identified his charter as conceptual integrity: “My goal in life is to make sure that all the brains [at the various Sun campuses] are effectively employed and create as much as they can. If only one person creates the ideas, you only get one person’s worth of ideas. I’d much rather have 30,000 people’s worth of ideas. […] I actually hope that it’s never true that the herding cats phenomenon vanishes from Sun. Some of the chaos you’re referring to is what makes us interesting and vital, and keeps us from getting locked into a “we’re doing this because we did it last week” mentality. That level of chaos, while it’s annoying at times, is also fairly powerful because it’s the product of having all those brains usefully applied. Where it’s a negative is when you have no way of arbitrating the chaos […] which I did locally in the software group for many years. It’s a new scope expansion to consider doing it for everything all at once.”

In the same interview, Rob spoke about his vision of how Sun was evolving. “When I say we’re working on our second-generation systems, our first generation was about practicing this [developer feedback] loop with Unix. […] The Solaris applications catalog is essentially 100 percent of any Unix applications that exist. […] When we talk about the next generation, we’re just talking about another instance of this circle that’s based on Java, where the developer number is already at three million. The apps space is only beginning to appear in some areas like your Java phone. […] All of our initiatives around things labeled SunOne are really about translating that into market share for us so that we can start to see this develop into a self-sustaining ecosystem.” It was this vision of Sun’s “second-generation” of Java-centric network computing that led me to come to work for Rob a year ago.

I know I speak for many at Sun when I say, “Thanks, Rob, for your engineering leadership, your inspiration, and your friendship. Clear skies and smooth rides…”

Poems: Mary Oliver

Through reading Roger Housden’s extraordinary “Ten Poems…” anthologies (starting with Ten Poems to Change Your Life) I have become aware of the poems of Mary Oliver. (OK, I’m slow… Google shows over 52,000 hits for her name. At least I got there eventually.) My first impression was of an impatient Walt Whitman: a combination of transcendent vision with a fierce and uncompromising urgency. These are Emergency Broadcast System messages to one’s inner heart: save the only life you can: your own. Consider the opening of The Journey:
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
But the message is not always a call to action: here are the opening lines of her Mockingbirds:
This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing
the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing
better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.
As I read more of Mary Oliver, I have come to reallize that those first few poems that I encountered in no way define or constrain her. There are many sides to Oliver’s work: romantic, visionary, organic, mimetic, mythic; above all grounded in nature. And yet I find myself particularly drawn to these direct, imperative pieces: Journey, the shocking West Wind 2, the absolution of Wild Geese, or the exhortation of Have You Ever Tried To Enter The Long Black Branches?, with its blunt question:
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Well? Are you?

Google censored?

Search Google images for abu ghraib, and you get 136 hits, with no explicit scenes of torture or humiliation.

Search Yahoo! Images for abu ghraib, and you get 4,035 hits, including the most notorious shots of abuse, torture, and dead prisoners.

What’s going on here? Perhaps we should abandon Google if we can’t trust it any more….

(Via Slashdot, where it was reported that google.co.uk doesn’t have these problems. Well, I just checked, and it does now.)

UPDATE: It now appears that the explanation is quite simple: Google is incompetent at indexing images. Even more reason to dump them.

On reading philosophy and "Three Card Monte"

As I noted earlier, I’m reading David Chalmers’ “The Conscious Mind”. Early on, Chalmers lays his cards on the table: “In this book I reach conclusions that some people may think of as ‘antiscientific’: I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible, and I even argue for a form of dualism.” He acknowledges that “Temperamentally, I am strongly inclined toward materialist reductive explanation […] I hoped for a materialist theory; when I gave up on this hope, it was quite reluctantly.”
Like Chalmers, I too am temperamentally inclined towards a materialist account of consciousness. As I read the book (and I’m still finishing chapter 2 on Supervenience and Explanation), I find myself watching closely to see whether or not he smuggles in some dichotomous assumptions which might affect his eventual conclusions. It feels a bit like watching a game of Three-Card Monte to see if and when a card gets creased or a misdirection occurs. There is plenty of exceptionalism flying around. For instance he concedes that “Almost everything is logically supervenient on the physical.[…] Conscious experience is almost unique in its failure to supervene logically.” It’ll be interesting to see how he justifies this.
So far, the only troubling section (p.75) has been the way in which he asserts that “…the facts about the external world do not supervene logically on the facts about our experience.” One would expect him to treat this as a big deal: after all, as he continues, “Idealists, positivists, and others have argued controversially that they do. Note that if these views are accepted the skeptical problem [due to Hume] falls away.” And so, I think, does Chalmers’ case that there is a “deep problem” here. But then with one bound our hero is free, Indiana Jones style: “In any case, I am bypassing this sort of skeptical problem by giving myself the physical world for free.” Well, maybe – but note that he explicitly means “the external world”, and the internal/external dichotomy remains. I have a suspicion that this may be at the root of the eventual dualism, but I’ll have to read on and find out.

Carnivals Galore!

Now here’s an interesting trend: blog carnivals. Here’s the intro from one of them: the Philosophers’ Carnival: “This site is the homepage for the Philosophers’ Carnival project, which aims to provide a forum to showcase philosophical posts from a wide range of weblogs. We are modelled upon Carnival of the Vanities and Tangled Bank. (See also Carnivalesque, a new carnival about the ‘early modern’ period in history.) Unlike those other carnivals, however, this one is restricted to philosophy-related blog posts.” The rest of the page describes the process of creating a carnival, and provides links to the previous Philosophers’ Carnivals, each of which was hosted by a different blog. There have been four so far; the fifth is in preparation. It looks like a promising collaboration model which avoids the usual dependence on one overworked editor.

Sullivan on Maher

I just watched the season finale of Bill Maher‘s Real Time on HBO. Normally I forget to watch it, and have to catch up via video-on-demand, but since Andrew Sullivan had blogged that he was flying out to take part I wanted to see if he’d say the same stuff on TV that he’s been blogging.
It was a weird show in some respects – Bill Maher was obviously still pretty angry underneath his bravado – but I was particularly struck by three things that Andrew Sullivan said.
(1) He attacked Bill Maher for losing the election for the Democrats by making jokes about people of religious faith that demeaned them. “If you demean them, how do you expect them to vote for you?” Say what? Look, I’m perfectly willing to concede that there are religious folk in the red states (and elsewhere) who are turned off by what they see as ungodly attitudes and actions from people in the blue states. But it’s been that way for years, just as there are secular people in the blue states (and elsewhere) who are turned off by Bible-based thinking and homophobia. For some people on both sides, these attitudes are deeply ingrained, and cleaning up Bill Maher’s jokes or Pat Robertson’s sermons isn’t going to have any effect. Each group offends the other simply by existing, by being themselves, and to argue that they should change seems to contradict Sullivan’s pleas for a return to tolerance through federalism.
(2) Why does Sullivan (and many others) froth at the mouth when anyone mentions “America” and “war crimes” in the same sentence? And why do they always argue how much better America’s actions are than those of Saddam? Is that the standard by which America should judge itself? From someone like Sullivan who argued so eloquently just a few days ago about the collective amnesia concerning Abu Ghraib, such jingoism seems inapposite.
(3) It is possible that Sullivan’s excitability was occasioned by the appearance on the program of Noam Chomsky, whom Sullivan accused of “making millions running around the world denigrating the United States”. (I may have got the exact words wrong: he certainly said “millions”, which caused a few eyebrows to be raised.) But why the outrage? Numerous legal bodies, including the International Commission of Jurists, have declared that the invasion of Iraq and many of the consequent actions of the USA and its allies violate international law. Logically Sullivan would seem to have only three options: refute the charges, accept them and agree that the USA should take responsibility for its actions, or declare that the USA is somehow above the law. Lashing out at an academic for exercising his freedom of speech, and saying that his views don’t deserve to be heard, does Sullivan no credit. (Whatever happened to Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s immortal dictum “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”?)
Of the other speakers on the show, ex-Senator Alan Simpson seemed determined to take offence, especially at the antics of Maher’s unruly audience. (They should fix that – it’s actually an embarrassment.) Susan Sarandon was frustrated and exhausted after all her campaigning in Ohio and Pennysylvania, and was a bit too paranoid about voter fraud (though I can sympathize with her). Comedian D. L. Hughley was OK but forgettable, and Pat Schroeder was as forthright as ever.
Despite Sullivan’s plaintive “God help me” about tonight’s show, he appeared to enjoy himself. His reactions to Bill Maher’s New Rules segment seemed to attract the camera like a magnet. I wonder how he’ll blog about his perspective?

Follow the bouncing ball

dollar.jpgDollar at record low against euro: “It seems now that the longer-term investors like pension funds and perhaps monetary authorities are either hedging their dollar risk or moving assets out of the United States. It looks like the dollar has further to fall…”

You can check out the historical data using Oanda’s FXGraph applet: choose “from USD“, “to EUR“, “since 6 Nov 1996“. Note the trend over the last four years, and extrapolate….

What will this mean for the US economy? Unless the budget and current account deficits are slashed, the probable consequences are rising interest rates, rising inflation, a depressed housing market, and recession. We’ve seen this before: it’s called stagflation. Welcome to the 1970s. Even the oil prices look familiar….

(Via the BBC.)

"Talk more, shoot less"? What a quaint idea….

Iraqis Say U.S. Should Talk More, Shoot Less: Iraq’s Deputy Foreign Minister Hamid al-Bayati said the insurgency was partly due to mistakes Bush made earlier. “Using force that kills civilians on a large scale is a mistake. The logic of occupation must end. Bush’s main mistake was not to let an Iraqi provisional government take power after Saddam was toppled,” he said. “The resistance operations were seen coming as soon as the United States kept acting as an occupier.”

(Via Yahoo!.)