Author: geoff

Getting away

Time to get away for a bit…. We’d originally planned to be in Scandinavia for two weeks (starting yesterday), but we had to cancel that trip for various reasons. Sigh So we’re just going to head up to Maine for a couple of days. No Internet… no blog.

"Learning Movable Type"

After spending far too long groping blindly around the Movable Type templates and Perl scripts that drive this blog, I’ve found The Source Of All Wisdom: at Elise.com. Thanks, Elise.
(Watch out for rampant and tasteless experimentation in the look and feel of this site!)

CD extra: "As Smart As We Are" by One Ring Zero

I saw a reference to As Smart As We Are on Neil Gaiman’s blog. I’m a sucker for the musically bizarre (as a teenager I was a great fan of Captain Beefheart), and the idea of a book/CD with lyrics by people as diverse as Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Rick Moody, and Neil Gaiman, set to klezmer music (well… sort of) was irresistible.
And it is. It’s bloody brilliant.
Further description could never do it justice. Listen for yourself. There are some MP3 samples on the website. But be aware of what a poor Amazon.com reviewer found:
Alas, while there are indeed some outstandingly clever pieces, a fair number of selections are R-rated, with vulgar and profane language and subject matter. I was looking for Monet and found Maplethorpe ! It is an unfortunate juxtaposition of 19th century instrumentals with the lyrics and subject matter of rap.
And the crowd went wild….

"Not appropriate for external use"

From Terry comes word of a statement issued by the American Library Association.
Last week, the American Library Association learned that the Department of Justice asked the Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents to instruct depository libraries to destroy five publications the Department has deemed not “appropriate for external use.” The Department of Justice has called for these five public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library.
The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA).
I have two immediate reactions. First, what are the constitutional implications of the government attempting to restrict access to the text of Federal statutes? Secondly, this seems to reflect obsolete (20th century) thinking. Presumably all of these texts are on line somewhere. If not, I’m sure that there are plenty of law students and librarians ready to crank up the scanners. So what’s the point? (Maybe that’s the answer – it’s simply intended as a distraction.)
UPDATE: The ALA reports that the Justice Department has rescinded its request. See also this Boston Globe story. From reading the latter, this whole affair looks like a simple case of bureaucratic myopia, but the fact that no-one questioned it at the time says a lot about the prevailing climate.
Thanks to Steve E. for the pointer.

How people see Sun

A couple of days ago I posted a piece entitled “No, but God, we’d love to!” which I said captured what I want Sun to be, and asked Jonathan if he was listening. He was, and he asked what I meant. So here goes.
Over the years, I’ve talked to many of Sun’s customers (as well as companies that ought to be our customers!). Now maybe it’s just because customers get bemused by my job title, but I find that most of these conversations follow a pattern. Quite simply, the customer expects to talk to Sun about how the hard problems in computing are going to be solved. Of course there may be contemporary issues to be discussed – a product release, a support problem, a pricing gap – but underlying it all is the expectation that Sun’s the company to talk to about the future technology of computing. Not just the future of business models, or the future of supply chain management, or even the future of intellectual property. Moreover the conversation is usually about the big picture, about a “we” that embraces Sun, our customers, and our partners and competitors. It’s not simply about Sun’s perspective, or Sun’s products. I get the impression (and sometimes the explicit assurance) that it’s a very different conversation from that which they have with IBM, Microsoft, HP, Dell, EMC, Cisco, or Oracle.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, of course. Ever since I’ve been with Sun, we’ve had noisy, energetic, contrarian technologists on the front lines – folks like Bill Joy, Tom Lyons, Rob Gingell, James Gosling, Greg Papadopoulous, John Gage, Andy Bechtolsheim, Jim Waldo, Whit Diffie, Michael Powell, Graham Hamilton, Hal Stern, Randy Rettberg, Bert Sutherland and many others. And they’re not just emeritus uber-geeks: they are building stuff. Cool stuff. Today. They’re changing the way people think about problems. And customers recognize that. The upshot is that when I visit [name deleted] we’re not just talking about the features of the next point release of a product; we’re discussing the big picture, the hard problems that we are all wrestling with, customers and suppliers alike.
Now of course the great challenge is how to monetize this. It’s no good if the customer takes the fruits of our conversation and buys a bunch of Dell 1Us, slaps Red Hat on them, hacks some JSPs on Tomcat and rolls out yet another DIYIT (“do it yourself IT”) solution. And (pace Slash-Dot) the answer isn’t for us to simply open-source everything and trust in the beneficence of Eric’s Bazaar. But neither is it to focus on proving that JES on Solaris on Athlon or Niagara can be as cheap as Red Hat (with the help of a creative pricing model). We need the pricing model, but if we lead with pricing instead of technology, customers will be confused.
Fundamental customer perceptions of a company don’t change rapidly, if at all. IBM is still “Big Blue” (“Father knows best”). Microsoft is still a PC software company; we got so used to rebooting regularly that we expect it. HP is still about printers and (deep down) scientific calculators. And Sun? We’re a company of creative, contrarian, imaginative, curious geeks. We’re the guys that zig when everybody else zags. We’re “The Network is the Computer”. We have to figure out how to leverage that, use it as part of our business model, while being careful not to behave in ways that blatantly conflict with that image. Because being seen as a the company whose response to a thorny problem is, “No, but God, we’d love to!” is priceless.

God wars

In today’s Salon, Laura Miller reviews a couple of books that take very different positions on the role of religion in contemporary society. The two volumes are Alister McGrath’s “The Twilight of Atheism” and Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith”. After a reasonable and balanced assessment of each, she spoils it all with a final paragraph that provoked me into writing a letter to the editor. Just in case it doesn’t get published, this is what I wrote. (If it is published, I’ll replace this with a link.)
Laura Miller concludes: ” I have to agree with McGrath (and Stephen Jay Gould) that, ultimately, the existence of God can be neither proven nor disproven by means of conventional empiricism.” But the problem isn’t one of existence – it’s definition. To my theist friends, I say “define your god and I’ll tell you if I believe in it.” Spinoza’s god has little in common with that of the “Left Behind” novels. There is no coherence to what “God” is, and without such coherence talk of “existence” is pretty meaningless. And just to make it worse, she tosses in “proven”. What does this mean? Legally proven? Mathematically proven? Scientifically? Proven as a matter of logical necessity? Proven beyond a reasonable doubt? This is just a recipe for rampant equivocation.
I trimmed down what I’d originally written in order to increase the likelihood of getting it published, so let me clarify one point. The various notions of “God” that people espouse are manifestly inconsistent, often incoherent (contradictory), and even absurd (Credo quia absurdum, as Tertullian said). But people don’t acknowledge that and talk about “the existences of Gods”. They assume that everything can be collapsed into a singular “existence of God” question.
For theists, I imagine that each believes that their own definition is The One True meaning, and that everybody else’s is either a distorted view of the One True God or simply false. For secularists, such as Laura Miller, I can only assume that she gives everybody the benefit of the doubt and wraps them all up in some vague, woolly uber-God.
And don’t get me started on “proven”…..

19Y@Sun

I just noticed that an anniversary slipped by last week. My start date at Sun was July 29, 1985. Time flies when you’re having fun….
When I joined the fledgling East Coast Division, there were five of us: Barry Folsom (ex DEC, VP ECD), his admin (whose name I forget), Sharon (HR), and Kim (who, like me, was ex-Mosaic). For a few days we borrowed one room in the Sun sales office in Waltham; it held three chairs, so two of us had to be travelling at all times. Eventually we moved into some rented space up the road, on Winter Street in Lexington. Our offices weren’t actually adjacent, so we came by one midnight and strung some (unauthorized) Ethernet cable through the suspended ceiling panels. My desktop machine was a Sun-1, called “suneast”; my phone line doubled as our UUCP connection to the outside world. A few weeks after that we moved into a new building in Lexington, and I published the existence of suneast to the world. Life was good.

An item that you may have missed

[REVISED] This got almost no coverage. In Lancaster Online (the web edition of the Lancaster, PA Intelligencer Journal; minimal registration required), there’s an account of President Bush meeting with a group of Old Order Amish. At the end of the meeting, Bush said, I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.
“God speaks through me”?! Good grief. What un-Christian hubris. Even though I’m an atheist, I prefer what John Kerry said to the DNC: I don’t want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God’s side.

"No, but God, we'd love to!"

While surfing a random* blog, I came across a quotation that captures exactly what I want Sun to be. Jonathan, are you listening?
But there’s no reason why you can’t create a service organisation of people who all just “Get it.” Virgin do this brilliantly. I recently had to travel to Mumbai. I called Virgin and asked if they flew there. “No,” said the booking woman, “but God, we’d love to!”
In those few words you realise that this person (who can supposedly be replaced by a few lines of online shopping code) was actually party to the kind of decisions happen in Virgin boardrooms. Of course Mumbai fits their brand perfectly – a hip, glamorous town with the world’s biggest movie industry. She understood that as well as anybody on their board.
I’m not saying we should get all reactive, chase off in all directions and become defocussed. But there are many challenging and exciting problems out there, and we should WANT to try to solve them even if we pragmatically choose not to go there. Like the Elephant’s Child in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, I want us to have “satiable curtiosity”.
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* Well, not exactly random. This is the blog of Brian Millar, the guy who created the brilliant Powerpoint Hamlet, as well as other masterpieces such as the ultimate Father’s Day card.