Category: Amazon

One year ago tomorrow, Friday:

Well, after 20.63 years at Sun, I have been caught up in today’s RIF (Reduction In Force). As of 5pm today, I’m out of here.

One year later, I’m living in a new apartment, in a different city, working for a different company, on a different and fascinating collection of problems. And I’m having a blast.
Not surprisingly, one of the dominant qualities of Amazon is the sheer scale of the operation. Normally I encounter this in a relatively abstract way – transactions, servers, gigabytes, bandwidth. Numbers. Numbers on a screen, on a piece of paper. But later this month I’ll get a chance to experience scale, when I visit the Fernley fulfillment center (automated warehouse) in Nevada. Here’s a piece from Business Week about the place.

Back in September I reluctantly gave up my trusty Treo 650 for a Blackberry 8700c, because at the time the only way to get remote access to Amazon’s IT services was through RIM. The 8700c was fairly reliable, though there were some annoying UI glitches, and it wasn’t very fast. The scroll wheel seems like a good idea, but try navigating Google Maps with it! (Hint: use Alt+wheel for left-to-right movement.) More seriously, I became increasingly frustrated with aspects of the enterprise integration, with calendar updates being notoriously hit-or-miss.
Recently Amazon IT started trial support for Windows Mobile devices, and when I was in California 9 days ago I got a chance to check out Steve‘s new phone. And so this Saturday I switched: I’m now the proud owner of a Cingular 8525 PDA/phone. It’s a full-blown 3G device: tri-band UMTS/HSDPA, and quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE. It’s really fast!! It has WiFi (which was trivial to set up), a decent camera, and a slide-out keyboard. Memory expansion is via micro-SD card: I’m not exaggerating when I say that the 1GB card that I bought is the same size as my little finger nail.
It’s going to take a while for me to get used to this beast: it has a lot of built-in applications, and there’s a thriving software ecosystem out there for Windows Mobile (unlike the Blackberry). I’ll let you know what I find. I’ve already been able to rip and scale a DVD into a format that I can play on the 8525.
Meanwhile, I’m going to sell my 8700c to an Amazon colleague – although when he sees the 8525, who knows….?
UPDATE: The 8525 is a version of the HTC Hermes device. Lots of details here.

I’ve just arrived back in Seattle after my trip to the San Francisco area. Although I don’t generally blog about the who, what and where of all my business meetings (different company, different culture), I can mention that today I visited the A9 team in Palo Alto. They asked me to speak at their weekly all-hands, and so I took the opportunity to go over some strategic material from a recent presentation in Seattle. I’m not sure if they’d had an opportunity to see the video of the earlier talk, but as we all know a video is a poor substitute for a live presenter who can be questioned “in real time”. I think it was useful and (hopefully) provocative.
While I was at A9, I ran into my former Sun colleague Claire Giordano. It was the first time we’d talked since just before I joined Amazon, when I was quizzing her about the difference between the Sun and Amazon cultures. But there wasn’t much time to chat; the schedule was full, and it was only fear of the inevitable traffic jam on 101 between Palo Alto and SFO that brought proceedings to a close. We got to the airport, went through the ritual – turn in the car, check in, check through, eat, wait and board – and I fell asleep until I heard ATC on channel 9 directing our flight to “turn right to one three oh and join the localizer for runway one six centre; caution wake turbulence, you’re following a Boeing 757”.
And rather than waiting for the bus, I got a lift from my colleague Colin (thanks!), so that I was home by 11:40pm.

Like several of my colleagues, I’m reposting this piece from Werner’s blog in an effort to get it in front of as many people as possible:

Computer science icon Jim Gray mysteriously disappeared after a solo trip with his sail boat outside San Francisco Bay. The coast guard has been searching for 4 days but has not been able to locate anything, not even debris. On Thursday 3 private planes searched through the coastal areas and they also returned unsuccessful.

Through a major effort by many people we were able to have the Digital Globe satellite make a run over the area on Thursday morning and have the data made available publicly. We have split these images into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned visually and stored into the Amazon S3 storage service. We then created tasks for reviewing these images and loaded then into the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service.

This is where you come in. We need your help in reviewing these images to see whether you can locate Jim’s boat in any of these images. Please go to the Amazon Mechanical Turk site and help us find Jim Gray.

The weather conditions were not ideal as some areas were cloudy, but we can still look for him in those places where there is a somewhat clear view. We hope to get more satellite data in the coming days of a wider area. The current images are panchromatic with a 0.82m, and Jim boat would be about 6 pixels in size. Please visit the Amazon Mechanical Turk site for more details.

I have to stress that many individuals and companies are to thank for making this possible; many academics friends relentlessly worked around the clock to get access to the data, many industry friends of Jim functioned as connectors to hook up officials and individuals, and people from NASA, Digital Globe, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Amazon and others worked hard get to the data collected and available on a very short time scale. The Mechanical Turk team worked deep into the night to make this work.

Now it is your turn, go find Jim Gray.

UPDATE: Check Werner’s blog for the latest updates – there are new images to be examined, taken on a NASA ER-2 flight.

I just flew into SFO for a short visit to California: two days of family get-togethers in Berkeley and Carmel, then three days of business meetings. (Amazon has several software teams here in the Bay Area, including A9 and Alexa.) I flew down on a UA 737: the plane was full, and it left an hour late, but the flight was otherwise uneventful. (And once again I sailed through SeaTac security without waiting in line; I’m not sure how I do it.)
During the flight I listened to channel 9, read the latest Economist, and browsed the Sky Mall catalog. I noticed that they’re already cashing in on the “no liquids or gels in carry-ons” stupidity; they were offering “his and hers” kits of “essential items” – shaving gear, shampoo, toothpaste, and so forth, enough for a week’s travel. They’ll mail it to your hotel, marked “Hold for arrival”. I don’t remember the pricing, but it looked like something of a rip-off – but how much is it worth to avoid the hassle from TSA? Of course they could simply sell them at the airport: I bought some toothpaste after I’d gone through security, saving me the bother of hunting for a pharmacy near my hotel. (Or perhaps disposable razors are still forbidden…..)
As I pointed my rental car south on 101, I realized that it felt like a long time since I was last here. I just checked (blogs are useful for that), and it’s been nine months. Back in April I spent a week here and in Denver doing “intensive networking” as part of my post-Sun transition. I don’t think I’ve been away from Silicon Valley for this long since… wow, probably the mid 80s.

I’m back in Seattle after a long day’s travel. Door-to-door (i.e. Edinburgh hotel to my apartment) it took 22 hours 30 minutes. Segment by segment:

• The taxi to Edinburgh airport was wonderful. The driver was a great character: something of a social philosopher, with a wicked sense of humour.
• EDI-LHR on a British Midland A320, BD53: a classic business-person’s shuttle flight. Most people were clearly going to London for the day: suits were immaculate, briefcases full of the right papers. The striking thing was the depth of the cloud bank over the northern UK: we climbed out of EDI, entered cloud at about 400 ft. AGL, and didn’t break out into sunshine until 30 minutes later at about FL320. Of course due to the new British rules (“only one piece of carry-on baggage, INCLUDING laptops, handbags, purses, etc.”) I had to check my case. Inevitably it was one of the last ones off the carousel at LHR. I retrieved it, and headed over to Terminal 3.
• United occupies the remotest spot in Heathrow’s Terminal 3, and it’s always a hassle to get there. When I did, the self-checkin machine refused to check me in and told me to see a human. (I could have predicted this, since I’d been blocked at the same point during online checkin.) There was one person handling “Special needs”, and 30 people ahead of me in line. All of a sudden, my 2 hour connection time started to look awfully inadequate. Eventually I got checked in and headed upstairs. It was now 11. I was herded into a line, six people wide, running the length of the terminal building, just to get into the security area. 30 minutes later I reached the head of this line, showed my boarding card, and entered the serpentine queue for the X-ray/metal detector/pat-down screening. When I did reach the X-rays, I was pulled out for a thorough pat-down by a pimply youth who examined me as thoroughly as it’s possible to do without actually removing clothing. I smiled politely, retrieved my shoes, jacket, laptop and case, and headed for the gate. I arrived at 12:05pm; the plane was due to depart at 12:20pm. That is closer than I ever want to be on an international connection.
• The flight itself (LHR-ORD, UA949, 777, seat 22J in Economy Plus) was completely uneventful. We took a northerly route, just skimming the southern tip of Greenland, and things went very smoothly. There were a few noisy kids around, but I plugged in my noise-cancelling headphones and listened to channel 9. (During the oceanic segment, I dug out my iPod and chose two albums: the new Love mash-up of Beatles’ classics, and No Roots by Faithless. Both highly recommended.)
• ORD was efficient, in a kind of robotic way. After clearing Immigration and Customs and schlepping over to Terminal 1 [What idiot decided to have both terminals and concourses? I was departing from gate B5, which meant the B Concourse, which corresponded to Terminal 1. Stupid.], I got through security (third time of the day) hit the RCC and grabbed a gin-and-tonic before logging in to check email. Bad plan: I should have eaten.
• The final flight was UA949, ORD-SEA, B757, seat 12F in Economy Plus. I keep forgetting that row 12 is bad, because it doesn’t have a window. Never mind, it was dark, and I was tired. 12E was empty, so I spread out, kicked back, plugged into channel 9, and went to sleep. This meant that I missed the stupid “snack box” food for sale thing. I went back to sleep, as best I could, but it was a miserably bumpy flight: 170 kt. headwinds, continuous light chop to moderate turbulence, all aircraft hunting vainly for clean air. With that kind of weather we inevitably missed our 8:05pm arrival time, but it was OK: I’d carried on my bags, and so I was able to catch the 8:54pm bus (Route 174) and get home by 9:30pm.

No predictions for how I’m going to get through tomorrow. And speaking of tomorrow, Seattle is due for the same kind of weather as Edinburgh: blustery rain, with sustained gale force winds. Meanwhile the East Coast is basking in unseasonably warm weather……
But overall it was a really delightful trip. It was great to be with my mother for her 91st birthday, good to see my brother and get into Oxford, and a wonderful bonus to spend time with Alec. The Amazon Development Centre team in Scotland blew me away; I hope I don’t offend anyone in Seattle when I say that ADC includes some of the most imaginative engineers that I’ve met at Amazon. They’re a really cool team, and I learned a lot from them. (And special thanks to Joan L. for handling the logistics – it all went flawlessly!)

I’ve just finished a most enjoyable day of meetings here at the Amazon development centre in South Queensferry, just outside Edinburgh. It’s been very windy and (mostly) wet here, so I wasn’t able to get out at lunch to take any photographs. Also, the window of opportunity is small: at this latitude, this close to the solstice, there isn’t much daylight: sunrise is at 8:34am and sunset at 3:39pm.

Time to head back to the hotel (just the other side of a very busy roundabout, with lots of bridge traffic). I do have an umbrella, but from the howling wind I don’t think I ought to use it.

I’m heading over to the UK for a week, starting this Wednesday. I’ll be flying from SEA to LHR via ORD, getting in around 6am on Thursday. From Thursday through Saturday I’m going to be staying in Oxford, visiting my mother and brother (and hanging out in the city). Then on Sunday I’ll take a train in to Paddington, tube to King’s Cross, and a GNER train to Edinburgh. Amazingly, this is only my second visit to Scotland. (The first was a day trip in about 1975, when I was a post-grad student at Newcastle-on-Tyne.) On Monday and Tuesday I’ll be at Amazon.com‘s Edinburgh Development Centre for a variety of meetings. (Long-time readers will know that I’ve always been interested in the challenges posed by distributed development.) And I’ll fly home on Wednesday: BMI from EDI to LHR, then United LHR-ORD-SEA.
Now I just have to work out the crazy (and constantly changing) rules for carry-on bags on flights to and from the UK….
(It would be great to pop down to see some of my old mates from SunUK, but I don’t think the schedule will allow it. Plus I’m going carless on this one; I’ll be taking the bus from Heathrow to Oxford. Maybe next time.)

As an Amazon.com employee, enthusiastic Mac user, and life-long lover of Marmite, this story in the Register about “Amazon’s offer of a 12-pot pack of Marmite with a copy of Apple’s .Mac online service” is completely unsurprising. (Though I do wonder why it showed up in the Hardware news….)

Amazon uses Red Hat Linux for almost all of its servers and developer desktops – some lingering RH7.2, lots of RHEL3, an increasing amount of RHEL4 – and so I decided to play with the new Fedora Core 6 on my usually-WinXP laptop. Since my apartment network is entirely WiFi, I downloaded the 3.8GB ISO image to my PowerBook last night, burned it onto a DVD this morning, and tried installing it this evening.
So far, not so good.
As I mentioned, it’s WiFi only here, and I made the mistake of telling the installer to leave the Ethernet adaptor enabled. This caused the installer to hang, probably waiting for me to plug in a cable, and I had to power-cycle. Unchecking the Ethernet option allowed the installation to complete. However I wasn’t able to get the WiFi to work: I’m going to have to try again in the morning. The standard network configuration tool seems pretty lame: it doesn’t allow you to search for available networks, for example. A quick search just now suggests that there are some better tools out there; if so, I hope that they’re bundled, because I’m getting tired of sneakernet with CD-Rs.
Once it’s all working, I plan to install J2SE 1.5, NetBeans, and the full Spring distribution, and play with the sample Spring apps. I’m starting with NetBeans because it’s what I’m used to. Eclipse is more widely used at Amazon, but NetBeans is starting to get a little traction, mostly because of the profiler.