Author: geoff

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.”

First new music in months

I’m not sure what happened. I used to buy a new CD every couple of weeks, deliberately mixing it up between the familiar and the new. But for the last few months my only new music has been Marillion’s Marbles, which arrived unexpectedly from the UK, and a mix CD of Japanese pop and anime theme music from Hannah. Marbles was more or less expected – I’d been one of the thousands of fans who pre-ordered a copy to help the band fund the production of the CD, and our reward was a double CD with the names of all the supporters.
But that was weeks ago. Today I wandered round a CD store unable to find anything that fit my mood. And then I realized that the reason I was dawdling was that I was half-listening to the music playing in the store, and that the voice was familiar and insidiously seductive. And so I bought it: the new CD by Morrissey, You Are The Quarry. Wonderful. The best since Viva Hate, in my opinion.

Dammit… first Pat Buchanan, now George Will

In this piece, George Will gets to the heart of today’s quagmire in Iraq: accountability:
The first axiom is: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.
Leave aside the question of who or what failed before 9/11. But who lost his or her job because the president’s 2003 State of the Union address gave currency to a fraud — the story of Iraq attempting to buy uranium in Niger? Or because the primary and only sufficient reason for waging pre-emptive war — weapons of mass destruction — was largely spurious? Or because postwar planning, from failure to anticipate the initial looting to today’s insufficient force levels, has been botched? Failures are multiplying because of choices for which no one seems accountable.
Indeed. And for Rumsfeld, Will summons up the bard….
One question is: Are the nation’s efforts in the deepening global war — the world is more menacing than it was a year ago — helped or hindered by Rumsfeld’s continuation as the appointed American most conspicuously identified with the conduct of the war? This is not a simple call. But being experienced, he will know how to make the call. Being honorable, he will so do.
He knows his Macbeth and will recognize the framing of the second question: Were he to resign, would discerning people say that nothing in his public life became him like the leaving of it?

I hate it when Pat Buchanan is right…

Don’t you just hate it when a blow-hard bigot like Buchanan [corrected – thanks Paul] is simply right – and eloquently so – as he is here on The meaning of Fallujah? Fortunately he is irrepressibly WRONG in many other ways elsewhere on his site, so my feelings of cognitive dissonance aren’t too severe….

So who reads these things anyway?

Two days ago Glynn Foster asked the question that is the subject of this thread. I’d like to respond in the first person singular, rather than attempting unsupported generalizations.
The main reason that I think about who reads my blog is that I’m interested in attracting readership from a wide variety of different groups. I find that this leads to opportunities for interesting and unexpected follow-on discussions, whether in blog comments or via email. It also gives me reasons to think about, and post about, a much wider range of subjects. Some topics may not interest you personally, but I hope that each one will amuse, or infuriate, or stimulate at least one of you.
Why? Well, I think about my own blog reading. I know the kind of blog that I tend to linger over, to bookmark, to return to, to link to from my blog. And I know the kind of blog that makes me shudder and hit BACK as quickly as possible. (Entries longer than a screenful tend to do it – sorry Manfreet.) I guess I’d like to make my blog a “go to” blog for others. It’s a modest enough ambition. As long as I don’t blow my bandwidth allocation, I’d like to increase my traffic – why not? I watch my site stats (my provider uses Webalizer) and trackbacks for any hotspots. But all of this requires that I think about who’s reading my blog – not just my family, and a few friends from Sun who see it scroll by on the PlanetSun aggregator, but the rest of them, out there in the blogosphere. Cthulu help me if they find it boring and tune me out!

Mine's a pint of ESB….

A good friend just pointed me at the lyrics and MP3 of a song to bring a lump to the throat of every English expatriate – Let The Symbol Of Our Nation Be A Pub. Brilliant! Whose round is it?

This whole sickening Iraqi prison situation, from someone who knows about such things

An e-friend from the Al Stewart mailing list, Terry Karney, has posted a couple of detailed articles on technical/legal issues arising from interrogations in the prison in Baghdad. He knows what he is talking about: he was over there, in military intelligence, until he was evacuated for medical reasons.
As he writes elsewhere:
…right now I am ashamed of my profession… I’m an interrogator, and while only MPs and officers… have been implicated, it was said to be in the interest of people in my line of work…. I feel dirty, unclean, with spotted hands.
The full piece is poetic, tragic. My heart goes out to him.