The Register just gave Scott some space to share his Xmas dream. Although it’s pretty goofy, it’s nice to see the old familiar Scott back. (A little gentle bashing once a year isn’t going to hurt.) Memo to Jonathan: the “11 words” are necessary but not sufficient. And Scott clearly has his priorities right: he wants “an NHL hockey season ticket and a new set of irons to knock a couple of strokes off my handicap” I think he’d settle for just one NHL game….
A blast from the past: CaveBear (a.k.a. Karl Auerbach)
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, when I was working on NFS, Windows Sockets, and other TCP/IP related stuff, I would often run into Karl Auerbach, network tools wizard and latterly ICANN member-at-large. Many of our encounters took place in the NOC during that strange, timeless period the night before the opening of each Networld+Interop show. The first Interop took place in San Jose, but as it grew, and merged with Networld, it moved to the Moscone Center in San Francisco and eventually headed off into the desert at Las Vegas. Over time it went the way of all trade shows, and puffed itself up into a content-free carnival, whereupon I stopped attending and lost touch with Karl.
Today a serendipitous blog chain led me to the following gem, reproduced in full:
CaveBear Blog: Sartre meets ICANN
I notice that ICANN issued a press release with the title:
ICANN successfully concludes Cape Town Meetings
Which makes me wonder: What would an unsucessful conclusion be? Would the ICANN board and staff have to be trapped forever in the meeting room like the characters in Sartre’s play No Exit?
It’s an attractive proposition, isn’t it?
An embarrassment of riches…
One of the joys problems with all of this cool stuff that we have at Sun is figuring out how it all fits together… or doesn’t. Case in point: I was reading John Clingan’s piece about Zones on an E25K, and I started to think about how one might use such a beast. Suppose one was running a horizontally-scaled load-balanced Sun Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition 7 2004Q2 (surely there must be a simpler name) configuration on a cluster of V880s. Can I rehost this in a collection of zones on an E25K? What works? What breaks? How much of my administrative model carries over, and how much has to change? (Everybody talks about ABI compatibility, but compatibility of administrative models is just as important. It’s one of the major issues with Linux today, and it’s bound to affect how we run Linux apps in Solaris x86.)
And that got me thinking about clustered data bases (we use the Clustra technology to support App Server failover), and from that to storage and file systems. (I’m an old NFS guy.) One of Sun’s hidden gems is QFS (OK lawyers, Sun StorEdge QFS software), a massively scalable high performance file system. Although designed for (and mostly used in) high performance technical computing, it’s getting a lot of attention in other applications, due in part to the symbiosis with SAM-FS (Sun StorEdge SAM-FS software), a policy-based archiving system. (Think SarbOx. Think Infinite Mailbox.) Do QFS and SAM-FS work in zones? I turn to the on-line documentation: Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Solaris Zones: “Mounting File Systems in Zones: Options for mounting file systems in non-global zones are described in the following table. Procedures for these mounting alternatives are provided in Configuring, Verifying, and Committing a Zone and Mounting File Systems in Running Non-Global Zones.” Followed by a long table, which doesn’t include SAM-FS or QFS. Hmmm. Can’t tell from this. More reading required, I guess. And so it goes.
There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s just an inevitable combinatorial explosion, exacerbated by our commitment to preserve backward compatibility. (In other words, you can never take a feature out of Solaris.) The challenge is in managing unrealistic expectations. (It isn’t all going to work together seamlessly from day one; in fact some combinations may never work together. It all depends on the business case.) The upside lies in the opportunities for serendipitous synergy. (Or should that be synergistic serendipity?)
What Social Security 'crisis'?
In today’s Boston Globe, Robert Kuttner nails the myth about “The Social Security Crisis”. It’s just that: a myth. There is no crisis. Key quote: “In June, the bipartisan Congressional Budget office used more realistic assumptions about economic growth. CBO puts the first shortfall year at 2052, not 2042, and it projects Social Security’s 75-year shortfall at only about four-10ths of one percent of gross domestic product. Currently, that’s about $40 billion a year, or one-fifth of the revenues that the Bush administration gave up in tax cuts for the wealthy. Simply restoring pre-Bush tax rates on the richest one percent of Americans could bring the Social Security system into balance indefinitely, without reducing promised payouts by one penny.”
And why do so many Democrats as well as Republicans use the language of crisis? Kuttner’s explanation is that “many well-meaning Democrats who defend the Social Security system want to be absolutely [certain] that its funding is rock solid. So [they] talk of its shortfall and offer different ways to make up the gap. Unfortunately, that tends to play into Republican hands.”
If Republicans are ideologically opposed to the idea of Social Security, that’s their right. But if the only way to argue for the position is to lie about the situation, that doesn’t say much for their case.
Now everybody will know about IP addresses
As all news-junkies will know, the press is reporting that: “Police zeroed in on Lisa Montgomery [by] tracing an IP address, 65.150.168.223, to a computer at her Melvern, Kan., home.” Which reminds me of a recent trip to California….
I was at San Jose airport, en route for Boston, and I was wearing my favourite ThinkGeek t-shirt: the one that says "There's no place like 127.0.0.1". As I was waiting in line at Starbucks, a PHB type walked past, read my shirt, and said, “Hey, that’s cool. Is that the IP address of your website?” And since I have no shame, I replied with a straight face, “Yes it is. And it’s the address of your website… and his (pointing), and hers (pointing), and Yahoo!, and….” And I walked up and ordered my usual quadruple espresso macchiato, leaving the poor guy looking terminally confused.
(Via BoingBoing.)
Must… resist… temptation… to say "I told you so"
Poll: Most Americans Think Iraq War Not Worth Fighting (washingtonpost.com): “[A]ccording to a Washington Post-ABC News poll […] 56 percent of the country now believes that the cost of the conflict in Iraq outweighs the benefits, while 42 percent disagreed. It marked the first time since the war began that a clear majority of Americans have judged the war to have been a mistake.”
(And they want Bush to fire Rumsfeld. Doh!)
A year of blogging
This blog is one year old today. This is the 360th entry, which translates into almost exactly one entry per day. Checking the logs, I see that there are 349 entries in the database, so I must have deleted 10 entries. (Most of these were due to blogspam incidents.) There are also 493 comments: a fair number of these are from me, but that still leaves around one comment per day.
I started out hosted at logjamming.com, and by the summer I was bumping up against the limits (bandwidth and operational) of my account there In August I rehosted at Steve Lau’s grommit.com – thanks, Steve! Bandwidth has continued to grow: the last complete month saw 55K hits and 616MB transferred. I have absolutely no idea how many readers I have, for two reasons. First, the vast majority of the hits are from software agents: search engines and RSS aggregators. Second, I know that quite a few people read me through the planetsun.org aggregator (and perhaps others – how would I know?). After all, that’s how I read most of my colleagues’ blogs.
I’m still using the same software – Movable Type 2.6.4 – that I started out with, and I have no plans to change. It’s pretty solid, and with the tweaks that I’ve made the blogspam problem seems to be under control. Most of my authoring these days is done with MarsEdit on my Mac, although I’m actually writing this using the native MT interface.
My overall impressions?
- I’ve enjoyed blogging even more than I expected to: it’s become a regular part of my life. I’m actually thinking of firing up a second blog just for technical (software engineering) stuff, using http://thecomputeristhenetwork.com. If I do, I’ll probably use a different software system – maybe MT 3.1, maybe Roller. We’ll see.
- I’ve spent less time on visuals, underlying technologies, tools, and so forth than I expected to. This is good: I’ve been able to focus on the content, and expressing myself, without the medium getting in the way. There are at least two consequences, however. First, the site is stylistically rather bland. I should tweak the CSS some time. Secondly, rehosting was A Big Deal. Even though both sites used Linux and Apache, each had slightly different configurations, virtual hosting setups, Perl versions, and so forth. If you have to do it, plan carefully, and test everything twice. And don’t even think of trying to do it without shell (ssh) access.
- Right now, there is no standard content interchange format. This means that unless you are prepared to (a) lose your old content or (b) do a lot of grunt-work with scripts, you’re going to be stuck with the software that you start out with. My original scheme of playing around with a free (blogger) account and then setting up my own one seems to have worked just fine.
- When Sun offered blogging at blogs.sun.com, I jumped on the bandwagon and grabbed myself a blog. It didn’t work. Trying to maintain two non-specialized blogs is just too much: what goes where? should you duplicate stuff? In the end I just put my b.s.c blog on ice; if they’re smart they’ll clean up all of those vestigial blogs some time.
- I’ve really enjoyed the interactions with those who have visited and commented or emailed. I expected more flames and bozos, but I’ve only had a few. I’ve reconnected with friends from my past, and established promising connections. It’s been a lot of fun.
Antony or Anthony? Confusion reigns…..
If you look at my two recent blog entries on “l’affaire Flew”, you will see that the first spells the philosopher’s name Anthony Flew and the second Antony Flew. Which is correct? I’m pretty sure that the answer is Antony Flew, but it’s by no means as clear as it should be. First, that unreliable but influential yardstick – the Google hit count – gives Anthony 36,300 and Antony 32,800. (Curiously there are 618 pages that include both forms!) How about publications? Amazon lists his books under both names, but I assumed that this was simply data entry error. But then I consulted my bookshelf, and found both forms!
Perhaps we should simply use the construction which appears in much of his professional vita: A. G. N. Flew (or even AGN Flew).
Turkey and the EU
I’ve been watching the current debate on EU admission for Turkey with a fair amount of confusion. Understandably, much of the discussion has revolved around such issues as European “identity”, religion, the effect on the labour market, human rights, Cyprus, Armenia, the military in politics, and so on. The question of precedent is also critical: if Turkey, why not Russia? Etcetera. Things have also been complicated by the insensitive meddling of the US administration.
Setting aside such issues, I am surprised that there hasn’t been much said about the sheer volatility of the Turkish economy. Even the Economist profile doesn’t discuss this as one might expect. The latest EU report makes sobering reading. Recent inflation rates between 28% and 101%; public sector deficits between 10% and 28%; exchange rates oscillating wildly, dropping 50% and then gaining 12%. In part this seems a consequence of the fact around 50% of all business falls into the “underground economy” category. It is hard to imagine how to integrate such an economy into a supra-national body that has been defined since day one by economic convergence.
More on Antony Flew
Update on my recent blog entry about Antony Flew:
The Raving Atheist published an unhelpful satirical piece, and in a comment to this someone posted a link to an interview between Flew and the philosopher/theologian Gary Habermas. In the interview, Flew accepts Habermas’ description of him as a “deist”, in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and other 18th century thinkers.
Perhaps the most disheartening statement by Flew was this: I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder�s comments on Genesis 1. [in Schroeder’s The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom] That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation. The idea that Flew believes Schroeder’s laboured interpretation of Genesis might be “scientifically accurate” simply shows how little Flew knows of science. Schroeder’s bizarre notions of probability would cause him to fail Statistics 101, and his howlers in genetics and relativity are equally juvenile. (For a thoughtful analysis of Schroeder from a religious – Jewish – stance, I recommend R. David Hazony’s review in Azure.)
Towards the end of the interview, Habermas asked: “Do you think any of [Bertrand Russell, J. L. Mackie, and A. J. Ayer] would have been impressed in the direction of theism? “ Flew replied, enthusiastically: “Russell would have regarded these developments as evidence.” On this, I think Flew is dead wrong. Russell was, first and foremost, a mathematician: he would not have been taken in by the innumeracy and illogic that pervades the works of Schroeder et al.
The bottom line seems to be that Flew has decided that the scientific evidence demands a designer. It’s unfortunate that he doesn’t seem to have bothered to ask any real scientists: cosmologists, geneticists, geologists. What a pity.