"Geek-to-geek" at SeeBeyond

Last September I wrote about the “geek-to-geek” event that I organized at StorageTek: an opportunity for several dozen senior engineers from Sun and StorageTek to meet each other, network, discuss issues of mutual interest, and so forth. That event seemed to work well, so yesterday we held a second one, at the Monrovia, CA facilities of SeeBeyond. SeeBeyond was the premier vendor of EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) software that Sun acquired last year.
The basic integration of the organizations and product lines is going well: we’ve announced the Java Integration Suite which brings together the key integration and composite application capabilities from both companies. However we wanted to broaden the horizontal connections: to bring in people from various parts of Sun to learn from each other. And in particular Greg Papadopoulos joined us for the first half of the day to lead a discussion of the “software as service” ideas that he presented at last week’s Sun Analysts Summit.
We followed the same format that had worked in Louisville: a series of 5-minute self-introduction presentations, open discussion to capture issues of interest, a working lunch, and then afternoon breakout sessions. (And for Sun employees: all of the materials will be posted on my internal blog by the end of the week.)
Herewith a few pictures; full size images are in my gallery:
g2g#1
g2g#2
Jerry Waldorf making a point. (Yes, the classroom layout is sub-optimal; this approach works better if you can arrange people in a circle or horseshoe. But it wasn’t a big problem. And yes, I did PhotoShop one image a bit to remove whiteboard contents.)
g2g#3
Greg attacks a virgin expanse of whiteboard, while Mark Hapner looks on.
g2g#4
The result: I actually prefer this to the version in Greg’s slides. Maybe we need a “scribbled whiteboard” template in StarOffice….
Thanks to all who helped make this happen, especially the intrepid “day-trippers” from northern California, and Judy for pizza and logistics.

Men in white

And now, the explanation of that picture.
When Sun acquired StorageTek, it added a number of technologies, competencies, and lines of business to its portfolio, and many of these were completely new to Sun. A simple example: Sun is now a developer and vendor of mainframe peripherals and software. We have developers in Louisville, Woking, and Canberra, working on a code base of hundreds of thousands of lines of IBM Assembler and C. (Don’t knock it: this is a really good business to be in.)
In order to give Sun’s leading technologists a more detailed view of the full range of technologies that StorageTek brings to the table, we organized a meeting of TAC in Louisville last Friday. (TAC is a body chaired by Greg Papadopoulos, Sun’s Chief Technology Officer, and includes the CTOs from the various lines of business – software, servers, service, etc. – as well as the Sun Fellows. “High powered” doesn’t even begin to describe it!) In addition to presentations and discussions on various hardware and software programs, we took the TAC members to see another capability that StorageTek brings to Sun: microelectronic manufacturing.
StorageTek (now Sun) has always been one of the cutting-edge developers of tape storage systems, and at the densities and speeds we’re talking about you can no longer rely on commodity components. There are no standards (for servo patterns, encoding schemes, and so forth); you have to do it yourself. Even the tape media is specially formulated for each system. As a result, we design and manufacture thin-film read/write heads in our own facility. It’s not quite the same as semiconductor manufacturing – we’re dealing with exotic cocktails of metals designed to tune the magnetic properties of various components – but there are many similarities. In particular, the plant is divided into three zones, including “clean room” and “nearly clean”. (My colleagues can correct my terminology!)
Because of our tight schedule, we decided not to tour the clean room itself, although it would have been delightful to see some of my colleagues in full “bunny suits”. Instead we toured the “nearly clean” area, which only requires hair nets, beard nets, booties, smocks, and safety glasses. We split up into three groups for the tour. Here’s my group, just about ready to go:
group 1
And here’s another group, including Greg Papadopoulos. (Picture by Jim Hughes):
group 2
You can see all the pictures here in my gallery. Although I only took pictures while we were suited up, it’s worth mentioning that some of the most fascinating material came later, when we saw just how you go about debugging the design of such a component. (Hint: it’s relatively easy to contain electric current – insulators work pretty well – but it’s remarkably difficult to make a magnetic field do what you want it to.)
Many thanks to Richard Dee and the staff of the thin film facility for their time and knowledge.

Computer museum pics

This lunchtime I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It’s the first time I’ve visited it since it opened here. The Computer Museum started out in “The Mill” at Digital, then moved to Museum Wharf in Boston, next to the Children’s Museum. Eventually it was absorbed by the Museum of Science in Boston, and most of the significant artifacts were transferred to the Computer History Museum. However I still think of it all as “Computer Museum 1.0” and “Computer Museum 2.0”, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
I’ve posted a set of pictures that I took, mostly of stuff that has some relevance to my 38-odd years in the business.

Every traveller's OTHER nightmare

If oversleeping is nightmare #1, a close runner up has to be losing a credit card. This morning I was having breakfast at a restaurant in Palo Alto, paid with my credit card (the one I use for much of my travel, with lots of accounts linked to it), and somehow the restaurant staff managed to lose it. I kept my cool; I gave them my name and cell phone number, and drove back to the hotel to start the process of cancelling the card. Just as I got there, the restaurant manager rang me to say they’d found it.
Not how I planned to spend Saturday morning – but at least I got a free breakfast out of it.

Simply unbelievable

As Susie says, you can’t make this stuff up. From the NYT:

The Energy Department will begin laying off researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the next week or two because of cuts to its budget.
A veteran researcher said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol. Those are two of the technologies that Mr. Bush cited on Tuesday night as holding the promise to replace part of the nation’s oil imports.

Bush's law-breaking: an update

There have been a couple of interesting developments in the Bush/FISA story. First, a group of lawyers have comprehensively demolished the attempt by the Department of Justice to provide a legal justification for Bush’s actions. Money quote:

The argument that conduct undertaken by the Commander in Chief that has some relevance to “engaging the enemy” is immune from congressional regulation finds no support in, and is directly contradicted by, both case law and historical precedent. Every time the Supreme Court has confronted a statute limiting the Commander-in-Chief’s authority, it has upheld the statute. No precedent holds that the President, when acting as Commander in Chief, is free to disregard an Act of Congress, much less a criminal statute enacted by Congress, that was designed specifically to restrain the President as such.

Second, Doug Thompson at Capitol Hill Blue has identified a fairly impressive list of Bush appointees who told Bush that his actions were “breaking the law” and “could doom your administration”. They include:

  • Colin Powell, ex-Secretary of State
  • James D. Comey, ex-Deputy Attorney General
  • John Ashcroft, ex-Attorney General
  • George Tenet, ex-Director of the CIA

Of course all are now “ex”….

First blog entry from 34,000 ft

If you know me, you’ll know that I’m a sucker for cool new technology. (However I do have some blind spots: I still haven’t got a TiVo. Perhaps I really do believe in network services, in which case TiVo is a short-term fad and a technological dead-end. We’ll see. More prosaically, I donb’t watch much TV.)
Anyway, Lufthansa now offers internet access from their long-haul aircraft, and so I decided to buy an hour of access for $9.95. Latency is quite acceptable, the sign-up process (using Boeing’s Connexion by Boeing) is very straightforward.
Right now we’re at 34,000 feet (FL340 if you prefer), just crossing the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and heading towards Iceland and Greenland. We left quite late – once again, a couple of passengers didn’t board, so we had to offload their baggage; then we had to de-ice which took longer than I expected. However with light headwinds we are told that we should arrive on time,
Reading material on the flight is Kate Fox’s “Watching the English”, a wonderful bit of rigorous sociology/anthropology disguised as a book “for the intelligent layman”. As an expat Englishman, it’s fascinating to explore where some of my weirder* behaviours come from – but also how much of my “Englishness” I’ve lost! For example, I now tend to tip the bar staff in a pub, which is terribly gauche. (Hell, I miss my local pub. I’d love to be a “regular” somewhere other than Starbucks.)
—
* By American standards, anyway, but then most Americans don’t understand the English.

Deja vu… vu… vu…

After a delayed flight from Prague (baggage loading, de-icing, then dense fog at Frankfurt) I’m back at the FRA Red Carpet Club for the third time on this trip. How did that movie “Groundhog Day” go again…? Anyway the next leg to DEN is the longest: about 11 hours, I think. I’m going to wander over to the gate and try to switch to a window seat on the right side of the plane: I want to get a good view of Greenland, and it’s easier if the sun isn’t in your eyes.
UPDATED: Well, actually it wasn’t the longest leg in flying time. FRA-DEN was just 9 hours 20 minutes; BLR-FRA took just over 10 hours. Several factors: FRA-DEN was close to a great circle, and headwinds were light. For BLR-FRA, we took an odd northerly route, rather than the direct path over Pakistan and Iran. And FRA-DEN was on a 747-400, which cruises quite a bit faster than the A340-300.