Following my colleague Pat Patterson, I’ve added a BlogMap to my blog – you can find it at the bottom of the sidebar. Click on the Bloggers nearby: total to see a map of other registered blogs. It feels slightly weird to translate this abstract web-stuff into the physical, but no matter.
"How America Lost Iraq"
I just finished Aaron Glantz’s How America Lost Iraq. Essential reading. Like many others, including Glantz’s editors at Pacifica, I opposed the war. What Glantz’s account suggests is that – contrary to my prejudices – the U.S. actually had a chance to win the peace. They squandered the opportunity, and then came Fallujah…. What a stupid, incompetent, callous waste.
From Publisher’s Weekly: The failure of the American adventure in Iraq is all the more tragic for its promising beginnings, according to this engrossing memoir of the occupation and insurgency. Glantz, a correspondent for the progressive Pacifica radio network, arrived in Iraq immediately after the fall of Baghdad. Against his editors’ expectations, he discovered that, although tried by the chaos and lack of basic services, most Iraqis applauded the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Returning in 2004, he found that goodwill squandered, as Iraqis grew increasingly angry at the continuing absence of electricity and clean water, high unemployment, anarchy in the streets and mass imprisonment of innocent people by American soldiers who couldn’t tell insurgents from civilians. With the brutal sieges of Fallujah and Najaf in April 2004, Glantz contends, the transformation of the United States in the eyes of Iraqis from liberator to oppressor was complete.
25 years on: Serendipity and "Death of a princess"
I just noticed what my local public television station is showing tonight: frontline: death of a princess: “It was perhaps the most controversial film in the history of public television — the story of a young Saudi princess who was publicly executed for committing adultery.” It wasn’t just controversial: it changed my life.
Back in 1979-1980, we were going through a tough patch financially. (Most people were – this was the era of “stagflation”.) I had a decent job at CMC, but I really needed something that paid a bit more. At that time most of the oil companies in the Middle East were starting to ramp up their IT and HPC activities, and the trade papers were full of advertisements for positions in Saudi Arabia. The typical deal was fairly complicated, but extremely lucrative. Contractors (male only) lived in company housing, were paid tax-free through numbered Swiss bank accounts, worked their tails off writing Fortran and PL/1, and got two 2-week vacations a year (either at home, or wherever the family wanted to holiday). The minimum contract was two years, with a nice bonus for extending. There wasn’t much to do except work, although I had an idea of getting a personal computer (a Commodore PET or similar) and doing some applications development.
I contacted one of the “body shops” that handled the contracts, went through all the interviews, and was accepted. I was perhaps a week away from giving my notice at CMC and fixing a travel date to Riyadh. And then the BBC showed Death of a princess. The next day (May 7, 1980), the agency called me to say that the Saudi government had broken off diplomatic relations with the UK and had frozen all visas for UK nationals; my contract was therefore cancelled. A few weeks later I saw an ad for a job in the USA… and the rest is history. But it could have been very different.
The Netcraft toolbar
I recently installed the Netcraft Toolbar in the copy of Firefox that I use on my home machine. Hitherto I have mostly used Netcraft for their What’s That Site Running? service (as a remote ping or to check a netblock owner). The Toolbar is new.
Every time you hit a new site, the toolbar displays five pieces of information:
– a “risk rating” (questionable)
– the date that the domain name was first noticed by Netcraft (highly unreliable)
– the rank ordering of the site by hits
– a link to a “Site Report”
– the netblock owner
I have to say that it’s changing the way I surf the web. I find myself looking at a site’s ranking, trying to understand why it’s so high (or so low). For example, my blog ranking is (at this moment) 197836. Is that good? Well, here are the top 100. Other interesting sites: Neil Gaiman’s blog is 69787, Planet Sun is 126763, and Alec Muffett’s crypticide ranks 127559. But I’m closing in on Majikthise (182579), and I’m way ahead of Simon’s Webmink (807108). Meaningful? Of course not, but it’s fun. However it only aggregates at the domain level, so all of the Sun bloggers at blogs.sun.com are going to have to share their collective ranking of 19723….
SUNW+STK: now this is going to be interesting
We just announced that we’re buying StorageTek. Over the years Sun has bought a number of companies, but this is a new scale of acquisition for us. StorageTek is a 7,000 person $2.2B company that was founded in 1969 – the year after I got into the computer business, and 13 years before Sun was established. Integrating the two corporate cultures is likely to be challenging – and stimulating – for all concerned. Nevertheless this feels like the right move for Sun.
The greatest philosopher?
The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time is conducting a vote “to find out who you think is the Greatest Philosopher of all time”. You actually get to vote twice: the first time to nominate a candidate, and the second time to pick from the twenty most nominated philosophers. After seeing the large number who are choosing Wittgenstein (some for the strangest of reasons), I felt compelled to submit a nomination for David Hume.
"It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper told the band to play"
I just received an email beginning:
Dear Geoffrey:
Congratulations on your 20 years of service with Sun!
In recognition of this milestone, we are pleased to offer you an award for your contribution and dedication to our company. To view your award options, please visit the website below. [Etcetera.]
Who’d have thunk it? [And come to think of it, where did that expression come from?]
I remember one hot summer day going to see Barry Folsom at the Sun sales office in Waltham. Barry had just been hired by Bernie Lacroute to head up the planned-but-as-yet-unstaffed East Coast Division of Sun. I asked Barry if his job offer was still open (he’d tried to hire me into the Rainbow group at Digital); he responded by asking me if I had any thoughts about how to accomodate IBM PCs in this new Network File System stuff that Bill Joy, Bob Lyon and Rusty Sandberg had come up with. “Yeah, I think so; I’ve been looking at NFS for our [Mosaic] OS,” I mused, and the rest is history.
Some thoughts on a new gadget
I just got myself a new Sony PSP. 
Here are a few random thoughts accumulated over the last couple of days.
Sheer computing power. Two 32-bit CPUs (MIPS R4000@333MHz), a GPU capable of 35 million polygons/sec…. More specs here.
As soon as I’d configured the WiFi to access my home network, the PSP phoned home for a software update.
Where’s the web browser? Yes, I know the trick with the embedded game browser, but that doesn’t count. My guess is that Sony will wait until they’re ready to support streaming video on demand.
Standards, bloody standards. The PSP manual says that it takes a USB cable with a “mini-B connector”. I bought one… it didn’t fit. Eventually I got a different “mini-B” cable that worked OK.
Several nice packages for the Mac to sync with the PSP, including PSPWare and iPSP. I’m testing them both before picking one and shelling out the registration fee. PSPWare is OK so far, though the iTunes integration needs work. (It only supports MP3, not Apple’s AAC, but if you give it a playlist of AAC files to sync it does nothing, silently. It could let me know….) It uses Quicktime to convert video files into the special MP4 format used by the PSP, and the conversion rate isn’t too good on my 867MHz PowerBook.
Video blogging?! I found ANT, which is very cool. Engadget has a piece on how to make ANT and PSPWare play nicely together. The result? PSP-casting…
The games, oh yes… I got Ridge Racer (auto racing) and Darkstalkers Chronicle (2D fighter). So far I’ve spent most of my time with Ridge Racer, alternating between game play and open-mouthed amazement at the graphics. I’m waiting for Ghost in the Shell, which looks like it’ll be the hottest FPS.
Good grief, not another proprietary disk format! Will they never learn? (Probably not.) And why does Sony have to keep pushing its own flash memory format, the Memory Stick Duo? Yes, OK, prices are competitive (it comes with a 32MB card; I bought a 512MB replacement), but still….
Bottom line: it’s stunning. Graphics are better than the PS2, WiFi, audio. Please can Namco do a PSP SoulCalibur? Pretty please? The only potential weakness I can see is the battery: Sony’s claims of 4-10 hours have translated into 3-4 for gaming, less if the WiFi is in use.
On not knowing whether to laugh, cry, shrug and walk away, or gaze in fascination….
Dion Hinchcliffe is embarking on a project which I think I’m going to watch with morbid fascination: Taking Stock of Web Service Description. Specifically, he’s going to put up a simple order entry web service, and publish a description of the service in a number of different candidate service description languages (SDLs). The mind-boggling part is the list of candidate SDLs:
“The list of SDLs to try to use is: WSDL 1.1, WSDL 2, NSDL, SSDL, WRDL, RSWS, WADL, Resedel, SMEX-D, RDF, RDF Forms, OWL/OWL-S, WSML, and WDL.”
That’s fourteen different languages. Plus he’s going to explore how to use these with three different programming languages: Java, C#, and Ruby.
Back in the Craig McMurtry blog entry that I cited recently, he wrote: “One must grant though, that a primary and very good idea behind Jini lives on in Indigo. That idea is that there should be an excellent, simple programming model usable across any kind of networking infrastructure. In the years since Jini, though, we have learned a lot about how NOT to design those programming models, and those lessons suffuse Indigo.” With all due respect, Dion’s experiment demonstrates pretty clearly that there is no consensus whatsoever on the “how not to” question. It also seems to confirm what I said: that one size will not fit all, and that we’re going to need a variety of technical solutions ranging from Jini to WRDL and beyond.
My joke
Before the web, the best Internet jokes were disseminated via the Usenet group rec.humor.funny, run by Brad Templeton. A discussion on an internal Sun email alias just now reminded me of my one and only r.h.f contribution
Music, maestro
Seen in yesterday’s Parade magazine that probably accompanied a couple of million Sunday papers: an advertisement for a beautiful little scale model violin. According to the ad, it’s a 1/24 scale replica, measuring 8 inches long.Screw the violin, I want to see the fiddler who can tuck a 16 foot violin under his or her chin….
[This was posted to r.h.f on Sunday April 25, 1993, at 4:30 am EDT, apparently from my Sun workstation called tyger.east.sun.com. I wonder was I was doing at the office that early on a Sunday morning. Or maybe I was travelling, and logged in remotely. On reflection, I suspect that I emailed it to the moderator, Maddi, and she finally posted it to r.h.f. on Sunday. Just think of the mind-boggling level of detail that the web captures for posterity….]