Author: geoff

Blogs, blogs, blogs everywhere you look

My employer, Sun Microsystems, is now hosting blogs for all employees (and interns – nice touch) at blogs.sun.com. The site opens for business on Monday, so I thought I’d get in ahead of the rush and grab the name geoff. I’m not sure how I’m going to balance the usage of the two blogs, but sufficient unto the day….

George W as Henry V – a fascinating parallel

Arianna Huffington has just posted a wonderful piece in which she compares George W. Bush with the 15th century English King Henry V, as portrayed in Shakespeare’s play. The parallels are striking. Ex-frat boy ruler engages in a war of choice, in part for revenge (“tennis balls”), in part for reasons of domestic politics:
The dying Henry IV had told his son to engage in foreign wars to distract the people from domestic crises: �busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.� The invasion of France is supposed to turn frivolous Hal into a strong leader � his youthful indiscretions a thing of the past.
Both men surrounded themselves with those in favor of going to war: Bush with his neocons, and Henry with the churchmen my fellow debater David Brooks dubbed the �theocons.�
Highly recommended.
[Update 2004-06-05 11:32:00] As a writer to Salon commented, there was one big difference between Henry V and George Bush: Henry actually led his troops into battle. He may have been irresponsible, but he was no chicken-hawk.

Change of plans

I had planned to report here on a delightful and unusual evening out, attending a gala fundraiser for the Lupus Foundation of Massachusetts with special guest Lily Tomlin. Those who know me will realize that I rarely don a jacket and tie (and even cufflinks!), so this was going to be something special.
…Except that it wasn’t – not for us. anyway. The event was being held at the home of a local TV personality in the wilds of South Natick, MA, down a long, narrow, twisting lane. We turned down the lane and soon found ourselves in a stationary line of cars that disappeared around the bend into the distance. The house was nowhere in sight. Other cars pulled up behind us, then others. From talking to passers-by, it became apparent that at our present rate we wouldn’t reach the house until well after the main event started, and that if the parking was LIFO we were unlikely to get away before 1am. Clearly someone had goofed. So after waiting patiently for 40 minutes, and making little progress, we turned around, abandoned our Very Expensive VIP Tickets, and headed off to a nice Indian restaurant for a quiet meal.
I’m glad they raised a lot of money for a worthy cause. But I’m pretty pissed off about the rest of it. Except the pudeena lamb. And the Louis Jadot Beaujolais that we had as an aperitif.
[Updated 2004-06-04 20:53:56] I received an immediate email from the VP of the Lupus Foundation apologizing for the situation, explaining how it had arisen, and offering either a full refund or four tickets at another upcoming gala fundraiser. I was impressed by this response. As it happens, the forthcoming fundraiser doesn’t fit our schedules, and we’ve decided not to ask for a refund.

Spam statistics

As I mentioned a week ago, one or more spammers are now generating spam with my (work) address as the sender. Since I left work last night, I’ve received 80 messages on my Sun.COM account. Of these 40 are “Undeliverables” of some kind, and 20 are spam (not caught by the corporate filters). The signal to noise ratio is declining rapidly….
I wonder how quickly they will move on to some other address to avoid spam filters. I also wonder if any of my legitimate email is being lost because of filters that have “learned” my address.
On a related topic, I still haven’t done anything to block blogspam on this account. It seems manageable for now: two or three times a week I’ll get a comment notification email for blogspam, and it only takes a couple of clicks to delete it. I wonder if tweaking the comment template would help….

Annual musical rituals

Although I have a large and diverse collection of music, there are only three acts that I ALWAYS go to see when they’re playing in my neighbourhood. They are Al Stewart, Porcupine Tree and the Legendary Pink Dots from Nijmegen in Holland. On Tuesday night the Dots were playing at the Middle East in Cambridge, and I went along as I do almost every year.
The Dresden Dolls opened for them, doing a short “acoustic” set. I’d been waiting for a long time to hear Amanda Palmer sing, and I was not disappointed. In addition to several original songs, she covered the Swans, Leonard Cohen, and (her tour de force) Jacque Brel’s “Amsterdam”. Stunning. I think the Dolls are in Lollapalooza this summer, so check ’em out.
The Dots are an institution for me. I first came across them in 1991 when I picked up a copy of their newly-released CD The Maria Dimension in a record store in North Wales. Even though I’d never heard of the Dots before, I just knew that this was something special. So I bought it, unheard, and I’ve never looked back. These days I must have 50 CDs by the Dots and another 20 solo albums by their leader, Edward Ka-Spel. They are incredibly prolific: I bought four new CDs this evening, one by Edward and three by the Dots.
The performance was excellent, as usual. Much of the material was from the newest album, Whispering Wall, but they included several oldies including (oh joy!) Casting The Runes from the 1988 album Any Day Now, and We Bring The Day from 1993’s Malachai (Shadow Weaver Part 2).
I used to find it odd being (by a considerable margin) the oldest attendee at Dots shows. These days the audience is far more diverse, in terms of age and style. Of course there are still the inevitable Goths (though why I don’t know – the Dots hardly fit the “Goth” stereotype) and fans of Ministry, KMFDM et al, complete with leather and chains. But most attendees are just plain folks of all ages from 18 to 60. And even some of the younger crowd wear ear-plugs, as I do now. Standing in front of the speakers, I feel the music more than hear it….

Deja vu at the NYT

After reading today’s piece by the New York Times public editor (i.e. ombudsman) entitled Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?, I was moved to reply to him by email:
Congratulations to both you and the present NYT editorial staff on the courage to confront the isssue of the Times’ coverage of the WMD issue.
And yet, and yet…. As I read your description of the dysfunctional system, the coddling of anonymous sources, and the lack of scrutiny about the motives of sources, I could not help but be reminded of Whitewater et al. From things like Jeff Gerth’s notorious front-page piece of March 8, 1992 on “Clintons Joined S&L Operator…” through the Starr inquiry and the impeachment, there is (now) substantial evidence that uncritical New York Times reporters were manipulated by “sources,” and that exculpatory or debunking material was supressed.
Is it not time for the New York Times to examine its role in this matter in the same spirit of honest self-assessment?
Geoff Arnold
I was actually a bit hasty in sending this off. On re-reading it, I should have added something like this: Even a skeptical reading of accounts such as Joe Conason’s “The Hunting of the President” would suggest that the New York Times failed to meet the standards which you and the present editorial staff now champion. (The fact that other newspapers such as the Boston Globe and the Washington Post behaved even more recklessly should be irrelevant.)

Nobody expects the….

When I started this blog, I thought I was safe going with a budget hosting account that was limited to 300MB/month. So far this month I’ve served up 217MB. Time for an upgrade, I guess….

Tim seems to have passed his OS X infection to me…

No sooner does Tim Bray report that his OS X bitrot has been cured by 10.3.4 than I suddenly find it affecting me. Specifically, iChat refuses to launch; it bounces in a desultory fashion a couple of times and then exits. I’ve deleted all of the obvious prefs files, repaired permissions, run the iChatAV update… nothing. And none of the log files [why does OS X have so many of them?] shows anything untoward….
People may tell me that this is an excellent excuse to start using Adium X, but I’d prefer to make the move voluntarily rather than in desperation.
[Update: Adium is working fine for me, but I wish I knew why iChat is broken.)

Java, open source, standards, and conformance

[Revised 5/30/04]
My colleague Simon Phipps has just posted a lengthy piece entitled On Java and Openness. I agree with him pretty much 100%.
A lot depends on whether you approach compatibility and interoperability from a “standards” position or not. The “standards” viewpoint is that there are going to be multiple implementations, that this is a good thing, and that you need to make sure that these implementations can interoperate. This was always the IETF approach: a proposed standard with only one implementation was viewed as problematic, because you couldn’t distinguish between the intention of the standard and the accidents of implementation.
I started at Sun in 1985, and my first job was to do an implementation of NFS for MS-DOS from spec. All of the previous implementations (for various types of Unix as well as VMS) had been based on the source code, so I guess that I made Rusty Sandberg and the other spec-writers pretty nervous. But it worked. Later I worked with folks from FTP, Microsoft, and JSB to develop the Windows Sockets specification, and we recognized from the start that the conformance verification model was going to be key to acceptance.
I’ve always taken an object-oriented approach to standards: I believe that a standard is an object with one method, bool Conform(implementation i). If an implementation, i, conforms to the standard, I can use it. Of course this presupposes that the standard is adequately specified and the Conform() method is trustworthy, but that’s why doing standards is hard work. It also explains why the Reference Implementation (RI) is such an important concept – that if (or rather when) the language of the standard proves inadequate or ambiguous, there is an authoritative answer: the standard is what the RI does. Critically, the RI is not supposed to be the only implementation; it should be optimized for clarity and conformance rather than performance, size, efficiency, etc.
Everything that I’ve seen about the open source movement suggests that it is designed to encourage group participation on a single code base, rather than the creation of multiple independent implementations. Where’s the 100% compatible clone of Perl, or Apache or Sendmail? In that respect (paradoxically?), open source leads to a monoculture, just as much as Windows does. When you actually have multiple implementations, you have to face the question of whether compatibility is important or not. For platform technologies – systems that other people rely on to make their software work – the answer seems to be yes. And despite the absolutists that Simon cites, there is no evidence whatsoever that a free market approach can sustain compatibility, except by preferring one choice and allowing the others to wither. To me, monoculture – even a free monoculture – seems dangerous. Diversity is good.