Author: geoff

Back home

I got back home to Boston late last night after an 8 day trip to Silicon Valley. This afternoon we [my wife, daughter, son-in-law and I] headed up to the Museum of Fine Arts, since we had tickets for the Gauguin in Tahiti exhibit. As it turned out, none of us thought much of that show (a little Gauguin goes a long way, and his pedophilia is hard to ignore), but two other exhibits more than made up for it.

First, we saw the Japanese Postcards show. This is simply wonderful – see it if you get the chance. It’s drawn from a collection of thousands of Japanese postcards from the first half of the 20th century: New Year’s cards, art cards, humorous cards, cards celebrating the Russian-Japanese war, advertisements, Art Nouveau, Art Deco… just delightful. The one on the right is by Kobayashi Kaichi, entitled Woman Waiting for her Beloved at 2:25. We bought the book for the exhibition, and one of the staff confided that the Japanese Postcards book had been outselling the Gauguin in Tahiti catalogue by a significant margin.
The other delightful surprise was the exhibition by the English couple Tim Noble and Sue Webster. To quote the MFA: The artists integrate satire and punk strategies with the study of modern sculpture and a keen awareness of the self-importance of the London art scene. Responding to the media hype of the British art world, Noble and Webster find inspiration in pop culture and advertising, creating brilliant animated light displays, or illuminations, such as the fountain and dollar sign in this exhibition. By contrast, their �rubbish,� or shadow sculptures, are brought to life when a simple light is projected over a carefully arranged pile of domestic garbage. Tim Noble & Sue Webster explores the team�s mature work, including seven examples of illuminations, shadow sculptures, and their latest neon forms: a boy/girl couple covered with streetwise slang. The piece to the left is Excessive Sensual Indulgence. Exhilarating, and very, very English.
My favourite pieces were “Real Life is Rubbish” and “Fucking Beautiful”, shown below:

Tribal eyes? Interesting…

Tim Bray mentions in his blog that he attended a meeting of Sun’s Distinguished Engineers this week. As the organizer of that meeting, I was interested in his observations. One of the not-so-subtle reasons that I asked Tim to present was that I’d really like more of the DEs to start blogging: I think that they have a lot of interesting stuff to say. Only a few of us do right now – James, Eduardo, Jim, Dick, myself….
As Tim noted, getting to be a DE involves peer review, and many people assume that this means we’re really some kind of clique or a club. Nothing could be further from the truth. Technically we’re all over the map, from sub-atomic physics to petascale supercomputers, from the mathematics of component failure to the poetry of programming. Some of us have a broad technological or business perspective, others are wholly focussed on our particular area of specialization. Some are interested in talking about process, organizations, and leadership; others want to stick to “hard” engineering. And some are unfailingly courteous, while others are (let’s face it) arrogant SOBs. The two things that unite us are a passion for engineering, and a passion for Sun. It’s an amazing place to be (I joined in 1985) and it’s a privilege to work with such a team – DEs and everyone else.
As you might imagine, putting together a conference program for that crowd is something of a challenge. But we still had a good time, and got a lot done.

Ten mistakes on Iraq

There’s a transcript here of a speech by Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former commander of CENTCOM at the CDI Board of Directors Dinner on May 12, 2004. The whole thing is worth reading, including the Q&A that followed the talk. Here I’ll simply summarize the ten mistakes that he identified.
The first mistake that will be recorded in history [was] the belief that containment as a policy doesn’t work.
The second mistake … is that the strategy was flawed. […] the road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you’d be surprised what kinds of others things will work out.
The third mistake, I think was one we repeated from Vietnam, we had to create a false rationale for going in to get public support.
We failed in number four, to internationalize the effort.
I think the fifth mistake was that we underestimated the task.
The sixth mistake, and maybe the biggest one, was propping up and trusting the exiles
The seventh problem has been the lack of planning.
The eighth problem was the insufficiency of military forces on the ground.
The ninth problem has been the ad hoc organization we threw in there.
And that ad hoc organization has failed, leading to the tenth mistake, and that’s a series of bad decisions on the ground.

Simple, isn't it?

My last few posts have mentioned the importance of simplicity, so having praised IBM I now feel free to tease them.
A few years ago I went to a conference in Sydney, Australia, and I sat in on a session given by a (US-based) IBM marketeer. He was trying to sell the ease of deployment of some middleware product from IBM, and he kept on stressing the importance of “simplistic solutions” and “simplistic user interfaces”. Never “simple”, always “simplistic”. Most people were polite (and some, I’m sure, never recognized the verbal gaffe), but a few of us had red faces and watering eyes as we tried to avoid the hysterical laughter that threatened to overwhelm us….
Afterwards an Australian colleague asked me if “simplistic” had a different meaning in the US. I often wondered if anyone told the unfortunate speaker of his mistake.

Book recommendation: Autonomic Computing

I’ve just posted a review on Amazon.com of Autonomic Computing by Richard Murch. Yes, I know it’s an IBM Press publication, so dial up your “self-serving bullshit” filters – but not too high. Overall this is a really useful book. While it’s targeted at CIOs and their staffs (folks who have read, and bought into, the Autonomic Computing Manifesto), it’s not afraid to dive the details and point at source code to back up the architectural diagrams. It discusses what’s going on in the research community and what competitors (including Sun) are up to. And I like the way the author models “customer maturity”; the readiness and ability of customers to take up some of the things described in the book. I disagree with some of his numbers, but without this kind of model the temptation to believe one’s own propaganda is irresistible.
There are a few goofs (mobile agents? please, no), as well as some yawning gaps (systems modelling and policy languages). And while it’s reasonable to skip the IBM-heavy business stuff at the front on a first reading, don’t put the book away without going back to it. In particular, don’t skip chapter 2, on the costs of complexity. As I noted in an earlier blog entry, simplicity and staying on topic is key.
Recommended.

The other other side of spam

Spammers harvest addresses for two reasons. The most important is to generate targets. A secondary use is to fake the From address.
A couple of days ago, a spammer sent out a message with my address as the From. As a result, I’ve been getting bombarded with email from spam filters, mailer-daemons, and so forth. So far I’ve received at least 300 such messages. For perfectly good reasons, these don’t get flagged as spam.
This last happened to me about 4 years ago. Back then, I got a few vacation-daemon replies, a few angry human-generated replies, and not much else; it was all over in 24 hours. What I’ve noticed this time around is the wide variety of software-generated responses, and the way that the responses just keep coming. In part, of course, this reflects the diffeent responses from MTA and MUA based spam detectors. However I’m also seeing patterns that suggest that many people must be using mail services with really long latencies. A “mailbox over quota” three days after the event suggests that normal deliveries to that user are likely to be equally slow. Odd.

Bush as Iran's proxy: how ironic, how tragic, how stupid

As Newsday reports,
The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
“Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
When the history books are written, this may well turn out to be one of the greatest deceptions of all time. How ironic that they chose this moment to release the film Troy, which centres around one of the Barbara Tuchman’s quintessential follies. More from Newsday:
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency’s Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi’s U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. “They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,” he said.
He described it as “one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.”
“I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,” he said.
Your tax dollars at work, funding an Iranian disinformation and agit-prop campaign, manipulating a U.S. president into finishing up the Iran-Iraq war. (Didn’t we used to be on the other side of that one – supplying Saddam with intelligence and WMD materials?) This has been a bit like those incidents in Afghanistan where one tribal warlord would tell the US that his rival was “Taliban”, calling down an air strike in furtherance of his vendetta. Instead of calling in an AC-130 gunship, Iran was able to “call in” the entire Imperial might of the U.S. military. Just amazing. When the smoke clears, and the U.S. has been forced out of Iraq, will we find that Iran has won?

On the difficulty of keeping on topic….

Like a lot of people in the computer business, I am intrigued by the impact of RFID tags and other sensor technology on IT. But my interest is fairly narrow: I’m curious about what kind of workloads these technologies will impose on corporate data centres. To understand this, I want to get a handle on the numbers: the sensor event rates (both the flow rate and the burstiness), what kind of intermediate aggregation and filtering will be performed, and what the resulting datacenter workload will look like.
Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Not that it’s a simple problem, but we can construct some scenarios, assign some numbers, plug them into a queueing model, see how it looks. (Capacity Planning for Web Services: Metrics, Models and Methods includes some simple models.) The problem that I’ve found (repeatedly) is keeping people on topic whenever I try to discuss it.
“But we can’t ignore privacy issues.” “Centralized data centers are passe – let’s project the data centre to the edge.” (I love that – what on earth does it mean?) “Data centres – not data centre! Federation!!” Or we replace inventory control tags with hospital patient tags, in which case discussions of domain-specific issues rapidly crowd out everything else.
The general problem, which I’ve observed in various contexts, is that it’s increasingly difficult to keep people focussed on simple problems. Of course all of the issues that people raise are real, but in most cases they are either irrelevant or simply complicate the problem in incalculable ways. We need to focus on the simplified versions of the problems in order to use them as tools to analyze alternative architectures.
My dream is that one day someone will listen to my scenario and immediately propose a simplification, in order to make it more computationally tractable. Most of the systems that we’ve dreamed up over the last twenty years are far too complicated, and the analysis of the whole becomes even more problematic if we load even more complex application patterns on top of them.

Will Mukaradeeb prove to be the My Lai of Iraq?

From the Guardian newspaper:
It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.
“The bombing started at 3am,” she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. “We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one,” she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.
She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. “I left them because they were dead,” she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.
“I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn’t kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me.”
Mrs Shibab’s description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under fire while targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house.
She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings to rubble.
Another relative carried Mrs Shihab and her surviving child to hospital. There she was told her husband Mohammed, the eldest of the Rakat sons, had also died.
As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.
By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.
It seems that they need to teach the U.S. military about more than just the Geneva Conventions. How about Middle Eastern culture and the nomadic peoples of the region? I wonder if General Mattis will be quite so stupidly gung-ho at his court-martial:
Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. “How many people go to the middle of the desert … to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilisation? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive.”
When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child’s body being lowered into a grave, he replied: “I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don’t have to apologise for the conduct of my men.”