Author: geoff

SOA book review at Amazon

As some of you will know, I’m professionally involved in service oriented architecture, distributed computing, web services, and stuff like that. So you shouldn’t be surprised that I posted a review of Thomas Erl’s Service-Oriented Architecture : A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services over at Amazon.com. Since all reviews become the property of Amazon, I’ll let you go and read it yourself. Or I can tell you that the title of my review was “A thoroughly misleading title; useful for a limited purpose”, and let you draw your own conclusions.

Goodbye to friends

A sad day here at Sun, as the previously-announced layoffs (involuntary severance, reductions in force, downsizings, pick your euphemism) started to take effect. On some previous occasions I have been a manager, and have therefore had some insight into how the process unfolds. This time I was just another individual contributor, and had no advance warning of any kind. The managers and HR department are (unfortunately) getting quite good at this kind of thing – it’s not a skill that I would wish them to cultivate.
I have no particular wish (nor, per Sun’s Policy on Public Discourse, would it be appropriate) to discuss the business issues surrounding the layoffs. Nor is it time to discuss the consequences of all of the project changes and cancellations that accompany a RIF, although some of my colleagues whose blogs are syndicated on PlanetSun have done so. Instead, this evening I find myself thinking about the friends and colleagues whom I will miss going forward. The familiar (if distorted) face at the other end of a video conference. The presence on the mailing list always ready with a sardonic quip or a helpful suggestion. The now-empty office that used to be a rendezvous when I travelled out to Menlo Park or Santa Clara. (But not empty for long – space consolidation will swallow up empty offices rapidly.)
Tonight I’d like to thank all of the people that I’ve worked with over the many years that I’ve been at Sun, particularly those who are no longer with the company and whose departure was involuntary. I wish you were still here. You know who you are.

On my next vacation

DisneyWorld is totally passé (whether in Florida, France, or Japan). I want to go to Suoi Tien Park! Or I do if it’s as much fun as it looks from the web site. I’m particularly interested in the Unicorn Palace with Hell Ten courts inside, a unique and magnificent way of education for people. I understand that this incorporates ten highly imaginative kinds of hell, designed for people guilty of different kinds of sin – shades of Dante. I’m not clear on how interactive the experience is….

Book chain

“The crew numbered nearly a hundred and served a dozen or so guests, who had come from Britain via Paris, where they had stayed at the Ritz.” From A Peace To End All Peace by David Fromkin.
Posted in accordance with Dave’s instructions:

  1. Grab the nearest book,
  2. open it to page 23,
  3. find the 5th sentence,
  4. post its text along with these instructions,
  5. point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.

Spring cleaning, and a whiff of nostalgia

A little while ago I posted my thoughts on spring cleaning and how best to avoid it. Well, today it finally caught up with me, and I decided to take a hard look at my closet. At the back, neatly arrayed on hangers and covered with tissue, were all of my oldest Sun t-shirts, dating back to 1985. The collection included a dozen different shirts for PC-NFS, dating from 1986 (“PC-NFS: More fun in the Sun”) to 1996 (the tenth anniversary of the first customer shipment). Some were a bit threadbare,a few had yellowed with age, some of the silk-screening had faded….
Also in the stack was the notorious “grilled chameleon” shirt. Way back in the early 1990s, a little software house called NetManage was going around claiming that it had invented a bunch of PC networking technologies. Those of us that had actually done the invention (from companies like Sun, FTP Software, Beame & Whiteside, and Microsoft) were more than a little ticked off at this. So the guys at B&W came up with a shirt showing a bunch of geeks (tolerable likenesses, actually) barbecuing a chameleon, which was NetManage’s logo. We all signed copies of the shirt, and a couple were raffled for charity.
[Note: I just checked out NetManage’s website, and they are still repeating the lies about their involvement in the Windows Sockets work. Just for the record: the authors of the WinSock spec were Mark Towfiq (then of FTP), Martin Hall (JSB), Dave Treadwell and Henry Sanders (both Microsoft) and myself (Sun). We started by considering the implementations from our four companies, plus that of NetManage. The result was different from all five. There never was any “reference implementation”; interoperability was worked out at a series of multivendor testing sessions. The engineers from NetManage admitted that their claims were baseless, but told us that Zvi (the founder) insisted on them. Sad that one of the first genuinely collaborative initiatives of the Internet era should be turned into a pissing contest. Oh, well.]
Anyway, enough with old shirts that I’ll never wear. Out they all go.

CNN's rules of engagement

I just finished reading P. W. Singer’s fascinating article Warriors for hire in Iraq, and the follow-up piece Outsourcing the war. I strongly recommend that you take a look at both of them.
One particular paragraph caused me to look twice in disbelief:
Each firm determines its own standards and procedures, and there is no formal regulation or even an industry self-regulatory mechanism to establish them or to police and punish those who fall below standards. While the best firms will blackball rogue or incapable employees, the industry has grown so huge and the clients remain so clueless that such tagging offers minimal recourse. For instance, industry insiders could only shake their heads when one firm invited CNN “Crossfire” talk-show host Tucker Carlson to ride along on a mission into Iraq. Not only did the firm’s personnel give the conservative pundit an AK-47 to wield in the middle of a volatile war zone, but when they needed gas, Carlson and crew took over an Iraqi gas station by holding local civilians waiting in line at gunpoint. (One hopes he wasn’t wearing his trademark bowtie, which would have only added to the local insult.) Carlson described the incident with proud delight in Esquire magazine, apparently not understanding the multiple industry sins that had been committed.
Hmmm. This is CNN, not Fox. I wonder if CNN has any comments on this kind of behaviour by their “journalists”. I shall ask them.

Are there any rules about blogs?

In a long thread of comments attached to my recent posting about Easter, I ventured an opinion that this thread was closed, that I didn’t think blog entries should generate permathreads. Susan expressed good-natured frustration and asked if there were any rules about such things.
Rules in the blogosphere?
Well, the blog owner presumably has a say about how his or her resources get used. I don’t think by allowing comments a blog becomes a common carrier or anything like that. As for the thread in question, I guess I could simply ignore it and let others use it to discuss the topic. I know at least one Sun colleague who makes a point of posting infrequent, thought-provoking articles and then never contributing to the follow-up discussion. Personally I’d rather be discussing what’s happening to the company that’s such a big part of my life (Sun), or pondering depressing questions like this.
In general, a blog reaches a narrower audience than a mailing list. A comment thread on a particular blog entry reaches an even narrower audience: those people who read the blog and are sufficientlyinterested in the top-level entry to dig into the comments. It seems an oddly unproductive use of one’s time to post lengthy contributions which so few people will read, and even more unproductive if you have reason to believe that the blog owner (the one reader you can count on) won’t be sympathetic to your thesis.
Finally, you can always start up your own blog, write an article on your favorite topic, then post a comment to my blog referencing that article. That way, people who really want to debate the symbolic meaning of nails in the Crucifixion can go hog wild, while I can move on to something more important, like whether painting your roof white can save you big bucks on air conditioning….. [Another gem from those good people at BoingBoingBlog.]