My favourite review of the film of that pathetic "Da Vinci" novel

The BBC quotes David Sexton from the Evening Standard: “The movie of The Da Vinci Code has one inestimable advantage over the novel. Utilising the moving picture, it has effectively eliminated most of Dan Brown’s plodding prose.”
(Dan Brown has the distinction of being the only author who has provoked me into flinging a book across the room in sheer annoyance. I was brought up to treat books properly, but this was too much. I bought one of his so-called “thrillers” to read on a cross-country flight, abandoned it after a few chapters, rediscovered it when I got home, and decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. It didn’t deserve it.)

On the role of a CTO

Part of the recent re-org at Sun was a new role for Greg – or rather, a de jure codification of what should have been the de facto all along. As Jonathan blogged:

Now as you may have heard, I gave Greg a new title recently. In addition to being Sun’s CTO, he’s now Executive Vice President of Research and Development. Why’s that important?
[…]
So as a part of this change, the product group CTO’s, the sentinels supporting the line executives who run our businesses, will also report to Greg. In the world of human resources, that’s known as a “dual hard line” reporting structure.

So what exactly do these “sentinels” do? Or, perhaps more important, what should they do? Here’s what I wrote to a colleague a few months ago:

Back in the mid-90s, Hal Jespersen and I were co-CTOs in the Network Software Group under Terry Keeley and then John McFarlane. We found that the job involved both inward and outward facing activities, as you’d imagine. The outward included:

  • Customer facing work, both tactical and strategic. Familiar stuff.
  • Other business-related stuff: analysts meetings, press, etc.
  • M&A [merger & acquisition] up to the point of acquisition (due diligence, selection, etc.).
  • Strategic partnering (remember the various strategic alignments attempted with XXX,YYY etc.?).

These are fairly straightforward. They are business-critical, usually interrupt-driven, with no obvious tempo. By contrast, there are a number of inward facing activities for which it is important to develop a predictable process, a cadence:

  • Portfolio planning and MRP [Medium Range Planning – Sun’s budget process].
  • Technical reviews of projects – regular, in person, with [at least] the tech leads, every 3-6 months.
  • Business reviews of programs, supplying an independent voice on the state of the technology.
  • M&A from the date of acquisition until effective assimilation
  • Setting technical “big rules” if absolutely necessary
  • Taking care of the engineering community, from a retention, skills inventory, and development perspective
  • Coordination with CTOs in other business units

(In addition, the CTO *may* be responsible for AD [Advanced Development] within the BU [Business Unit], in order to shield the budget for this from being traded off at the project level. Where AD belongs – within each program, at BU CTO level, or in the Labs – is something that needs to be worked out carefully.)
All of these roles are vital, of course. 🙂 The one that should not be skimped on is the regular technical project reviews. VPs and directors in charge of programs will routinely fudge (lie about) the technical state of their projects; that’s just the way things are, no big deal. The CTO has to understand the technical status of the programs, has to be in a position to identify gaps, overlaps, and duplications across the portfolio.

Obviously one person can’t do all of this: you need a strong, outgoing leader with a small staff of experienced engineers and process people. (The “co-CTO” approach that Hal and I used in NSG was a good “in the small” example of this.) Above all, you need someone who is respected and trusted by the BU EVP but relatively independent of him or her. That’s the value of the dual reporting relationship that Jonathan described.
Of course this only works if all of the BUs have CTOs….

Après le déluge

Just returned from a quick postprandial walk around the block. The rain has let up enough to make it feasible, and the torrents of rainwater have retreated to the gutters. We’ve been relatively lucky: I think we’ve had just under seven inches of rain here. (Logan had 6.68″ by 3pm.) North of us, things are much worse: according to the NWS, Andover has had 10.5″, and there’s street and stream flooding all over the North Shore. The various graphs on the AHPS (Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service) pages show that the Merrimack valley is in for some major flooding. (At Lowell, flood stage is at 52 feet; right now the river is up to 54.25 feet, and they expect it to crest at 60 feet by tomorow afternoon.)

And there’s more rain to come over the next few days….

Weekend sports TV frustrations

There were three big sporting events scheduled for this weekend:

  • The England vs. Sri Lanka Test Match
  • The F. A. Cup Final between Liverpool and West Ham, and
  • The F1 Spanish Grand Prix from Barcelona, with the Spanish World Champion Fernando Alonso (in front of his home crowd) taking on Michael Schumacher.

For the first, I knew there was no chance of getting any TV coverage. Unless you have the gear to pull in the right satellite feed, cricket in the US is a non-starter. Football? (Soccer to you Americans.) I watch the Fox Soccer Channel regularly, but I’d seen no announcement of local coverage of the Cup Final. Not until half an hour after the match had started (and after an email nudge from Chris) did I discover that it was available on cable pay-per-view for $25. Being a bit of a cheapskate, I decided not to pay up. Had I known how exciting it was going to be, I might have done differently.

Which left the Grand Prix. I watched the qualifying sessions on Speed TV yesterday, and was looking forward to seeing the race live on Sunday morning. I checked the schedule for the start time…. Nothing. Further searching showed that the race was being shown on CBS at noon.

[RANT ON]
Every year, most of the Grands Prix are shown live on Speed. However CBS Sports always buys the rights to a couple of the races and shows them tape-delayed. Obviously any tape-delayed sporting event presents a few problems: you have to be careful to avoid news and blog sources which might reveal the result. But with CBS it’s a lot worse. First, they clearly don’t understand motor sports, and the coverage and commentary really sucks. Second, the local CBS affiliate doesn’t treat it seriously, and supplements the regular commercial breaks with random newsflashes and even more commercials. The result is shambolic. I wound up playing Civilization 4 on my PC and looking up on the rare occasions that there was some Formula 1 action on the TV.
[RANT OFF]

Oh, well. Congratulations to Alonso for driving an almost perfect race, and to Steve Gerrard and Liverpool for their tenacious performance against the Hammers. As for England vs. Sri Lanka, despite brilliant work by Pietersen, Hoggard and Mahmood it looks as if it will all depend on the weather….

Equivocation

Over at Dispatches From The Culture Wars there’s a discussion about the relationship between evolution and atheism:

There is the Dawkins/Dennett position […] And there are people like me, Wesley Elsberry and Eugenie Scott, who take the position that while evolution is certainly incompatible with certain forms of religious belief, it is not incompatible with other forms of religious belief […] But many [intelligent design] advocates believe that people like Wes and Genie and myself are just pretending to think that they’re compatible, and that really makes me angry.

As I commented, it seem to me that this is an inevitable consequence of a massive (historical) equivocation on the word “god”. Everybody picks the high-level dichotomy: “atheism” vs. “some form of ontological commitment towards something that the believer chooses to label ‘god’“. But in terms of belief-clusters, the difference between one self-avowed believer and another may be huge. Remember that the Romans called the early Christians “atheists”….
Personally, I style myself as an atheist because there is nothing that I believe exists that I choose to label ‘god’. Of course there are plenty of things that I do believe exist that other people have chosen to label ‘god’, but I prefer not to play the equivocation game. When Frank “Omega Point” Tipler and Pat Robertson both use the word “god”, how much overlap is there? Precious little, I suspect. (Semantic or ontological!) (And don’t get me started on Freeman Dyson!)
When a non-atheist challenges my atheism, my response is usually along these lines: “Over the centuries (and even today), so many people have used ‘god’ in so many different ways that I honestly don’t know what you mean by the word. Do you mean ‘sol invictus’, or ‘Odin’, or ‘Osiris’, or ‘the god of the Pentateuch’, or ‘infinite mind’, or ‘Gaia’, or something else? Define your god, tell me in what way it exists for you, and I’ll tell you if I believe in it.”

United 93

I had lunch with Josh in Burlington today, and afterwards I decided to go and see United 93.
Yes, I had reservations. And yes, it’s hard to watch at times. Nevertheless, I’m really glad that I did. And I’m glad that the film was made, and that it was made now, and that it was done so well.
[I’ve been struggling for the last 15 minutes to find the words to describe why I feel this way, and I’ve given up. If you want to read reviews, you can see over 150 of them at RottenTomatoes.]
One thought: Other people can make 9/11-related films (about NYC firefighters or stuff like that), but I wish that this could be the only film about the hijackings themselves. We don’t need more than one. Yes, I know that this is about one particular flight, but it stands for all of them. And (selfishly) I’d rather not see an actor playing Phil on board American Flight 11.
Update: For a pilot’s perspective, check out the comments of Salon’s Patrick Smith. Like him, I noticed a few minor technical bloopers, but they didn’t spoil the film for me. And he found words where I failed:

“Tasteful” is the word being spun by critics and pundits. Of course, there are different ways of being tasteful, not all of which are acceptable to everyone. If you ask me, Paul Greengrass’ re-creation of the events aboard the skyjacked United Airlines 757, shot with a low-budget cast of nobody actors, including real-life pilots, flight attendants, military officers and air traffic controllers, is nothing if not triumphantly unpretentious. The skeletonized dialogue and jittery, claustrophobic camerawork create an atmosphere that is realistic almost to a fault. As a viewer, you feel as if you’re peering into the cabin of the actual doomed airplane — as though you’ve been sucked into the black box recorders and forced to bear witness to the horror as it unfolds, the theater itself wallowing aloft in the same unthinkable predicament.

99 Lead Balloons

After reading this, I don’t think I’ll ever use the metaphor of something “going over like a lead balloon” again. Jeff’s conclusion: “Thus to change gasses from helium to lead vapor, the diameter of the balloon would only grow by about 3 meters (with the lead vapor at a temperature of 2500K).”
Toasty….
—
[Via the latest Tangled Bank]

SGI, chapter 11

From Reuters:

Computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after a round of restructuring measures failed, according to court papers filed on Monday.

Of course this comes as no surprise; indeed, my initial reaction was, “FINALLY!! And about time too!” But the stated reason is odd. Among the possible interpretations:

  • Restructuring measures were implemented, but failed to yield the intended results.
  • Restructuring measures were proposed, but failed to win the support of, e.g., the existing creditors.
  • Restructuring was started, but could not be completed – “we tried to lay off the marketing department, but they wouldn’t leave”.

Ah, well. A salutary lesson for those who believe that “if you build it, they will come” despite all evidence to the contrary. And as for Itanium… well, at least Intel won’t have to worry about the special version of Montecito to work with SGI’s NUMA.
(And yes, I realize that “Chapter 11” is not the same as “defunct”. But in this case….)

Rebooting the bike?

Here‘s Alec (not on his blog) discussing a problem with his BMW bike. The thread begins:

I just got ferried home by BMW recovery’s agent in Warwick; long story short I was riding from Preston (Lancs) to Farnborough, making fuel and rest stops as I felt necessary.
I pulled into Sandbach, stopped, fitted-up for rain gear, had a bite to eat and pulled off bound for the motorway. I got about 200 meters down the M6 when I suddenly lost power, freewheeling somewhat. I pulled in the clutch and tried a rolling restart, but the bike wasn’t having it, the rear briefly locked (so grab the clutch in and roll!) and thus I pulled to stop on the shoulder.
I tried rebooting the bike…

The subsequent discussion points the finger at “a dodgy firmware update”. It’s the kind of analysis we’re used to seeing in the wonderful world of PCs, cellphones, and similar gadgets, but I had fondly (naively) hoped that other engineering disciplines had more, well, discipline. A better attitude to quality. How disappointing.
Can the BMW 1200GS display a BSOD?