Geoff Arnold

On not mounting the horse, and dressing to confuse

Zoomed up 880 to Oakland this evening to have dinner with Steve, Wendy, Chris and Celeste. We ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant with the unlikely name of Le Cheval on Clay Street. (OK, I know, it's the French colonial influence - but it still seems odd.) Just inside the door is a large bronze horse and a sign bearing the admonition noted above. The food was wonderful, from the firepot soup and the green mussels to the banana flambé desert. (Fire featured prominently, come to think of it.) And the wine list was varied, satisfying, and modestly priced. (Steve and I couldn't resist the Solaris Pinot Noir, for obvious reasons.) Highly recommended.

Before we ate, there was much trading of goodies. I'd recently completed Stephen Baxter's novel Evolution (B+ for science, B- for narrative, C for character development) and I traded it to Steve for Franklin Foer's How soccer explains the world. (Of course it does!) The "confusion" refers to an item that Chris had picked up for me: a royal blue, long-sleeved polo shirt proudly bearing the name of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in gold script. (There was also a Graduate Theological Union t-shirt for Merry.) So let's see, I wonder when Carson Kressley would recommend that a hard-core atheist should wear a Divinity School shirt?

A thoroughly enjoyable evening, to be repeated at the next opportunity. (Perhaps the end of September?) There was talk of sushi in Berkeley....

Has it really been eleven years?

This evening, I finally got around to doing something that I'd wanted to do for eleven years: visiting my old colleague and friend Rick and his family in Boulder. Some background: Rick joined Sun back in 1986, working with me on the 386i workstation. He and his family moved to Palo Alto, and then to Boulder, where they built themselves a house just outside town on a 7000' ridge overlooking the Front Range. That was eleven years ago, and despite my best intentions my travels never took me in that direction. Rick left Sun a few years ago, and we drifted out of touch with each other.

A few weeks ago, when I knew I'd be travelling to this part of the world, I contacted Rick, and this evening I finally made it. The house, and the location, are spectacularly beautiful (see sunset picture); what was even more delightful was that all of us slipped right back into our easygoing friendship as though it had been eleven days instead of eleven years. (I say "all of us", though the two children I remembered have sprouted alarmingly, and have been joined by third.) And as the rest of the family retired to bed, Rick and I rapped on: about music, about Macintoshes (he has a 17" PB, I have a 12"), about the computer business, about their amazing power system (imagine a five day UPS for your entire house!), and about old friends. And finally I took my leave, and drove down the narrow gravel driveway, to the dirt road with the wicked hairpin, to the canyon road, and then through Boulder and back to my hotel.

(But I shouldn't have waited eleven years. Friends this good are worth staying close to.)

Oxgate Gardens, London NW2

I love FriendsReunited. I don't make many contacts there, but every few months something comes up in a serendipitous way. Sometimes it's a happy serendipity, sometimes not. For example, I came across the name of someone that I was at school with back in 1962-3 at St. Benedict's School in Ealing. I sent off an email, received no reply, and thought nothing of it. And then a few months later I had a message from his account, written by his wife - or rather his widow. He had died suddenly, and she'd been cleaning up his electronic personæ and come across my query. That felt strange.

The most recent connection was just today. FriendsReunited have expanded from their original school and college contacts to include workplaces and now street addresses. Back in 1954-1963 we lived in a suburban semidetached house in north-west London: 75, Oxgate Gardens, London NW2. (Google Maps only shows the street; number 75 was on the north side, about three houses from the corner of Coles Green Road.) Just across the street and a few houses down there was a slightly larger three-storey house that had been converted into a small private school: Blenheim House. Both my brother and I went there between 1958 and 1962. (It's mentioned towards the end of this history of schools in the Willesden area; apparently it closed a year or two after I left.) I noticed that another FriendsReunited subscriber had lived at an address that must have been next door to the school, so I sent her an email. We exchanged messages, and it unlocked a torrent of memories from about 50 years ago. Delightful. Thanks, Sally.

And so let us lift a glass to toast incompetence....

Let us now drink to the occasionally beneficial consequences of incompetence. Without it, it seems certain that this morning's bombs in London would have taken many, many lives.

Deja vu, or a tape loop

'Twas spooky: I was driving to work, and at 9am EDT I turned on WBUR to listen to the BBC World Service News, and heard them talking about "incidents at three tube stations and on a bus". For a minute (probably less) it sounded as if they were replaying a tape of the news from 7/7... until someone made a reference to "the events of two weeks ago".

All of this is unfolding right now, and it seems likely that the final account will bear little relation to the initial reports, speculation, and contradictions. Right now the BBC is reporting that: "A number of Tube stations have been evacuated and lines closed after three blasts in what Met Police chief Sir Ian Blair says is a 'serious incident'." However further down in the same report we see that "Police in London say they are not treating the situation as 'a major incident yet'". Serious but not major. Let's hope that it'll turn out to be neither.

Frustrated that I can't give blood

I first donated blood way back in 1969, shortly after I arrived at Essex University in Colchester. My memory is that it was an amazing feeling: doing something that felt really good that also helped people. Over the next 20+ years I gave blood regularly, twice a year. Then came the "Mad Cow" (vCJD) crisis, and the American Red Cross added "residence in the UK" to the list of proscribed categories for blood donors. Deeply frustrating.

The other day, I received the regular email announcing the next blood donor session here at Sun. I was talking to a colleague, and he said, "Oh, I think they've relaxed the rules. Why don't you check?" So I did. Sadly, no. Here's the relevant text

At this time, the American Red Cross donor eligibility rules related to vCJD are as follows:
You are not eligible to donate if:
From January 1, 1980, through December 31, 1996, you spent (visited or lived) a cumulative time of 3 months or more, in the United Kingdom (UK),

So I still can't donate. And thinking about it, I know a number of US citizens whose UK vacations over that 16-year period would probably rule them out too.

DARWIN rules

Yesterday I installed the vanity plates (custom license plates) on my new Subaru. Obviously my main purpose in choosing "DARWIN" was to honour one of the greatest scientists of all time, especially at a time when science in general, and evolution in particular, is under attack. Coincidentally it also lets me pay tribute to the open source project associated with the kernel of Apple's OS X.

The space under the word SUBARU will shortly be occupied by a silver plastic fish with feet, bearing the legend "EVOLVE". (Not that anyone or anything has any choice in the matter, of course! Evolution is what imperfectly replicating systems do, pretty much.)

Dramatic changes

This morning I had breakfast at a Hobee's in Mountain View. When I came out of the restaurant, I noticed that there was a Supercuts next door, and that it had just opened. On a whim, I went in for a haircut. Maybe it was the breakfast burrito I'd just eaten; perhaps it was a side effect of the Flexeril I've been taking for a pinched nerve in my leg. Whatever the reason, I threw caution to the winds. Not only is the ponytail gone; I'm pretty sure that this is the shortest my hair has been in at least 20 years....

[UPDATED: In response to requests, I've added a crude phonecam pic. The beard's a bit fluffy around the edges; I won't be able to trim it properly until I get home.]

The art of cheese

As many of my colleagues have bemoaned in their blogs, the weather here in New England has been miserable for the last few weeks. However today dawned bright and warm, with a nice breeze: still a little humid, but otherwise a perfect spring day. So we headed down to the North End of Boston to poke around the Italian groceries and bakeries. We had lunch just across the street from the Paul Revere House, and visited it afterwards.

The people that "restored" it early in the 20th century seem to have brought more enthusiasm than historical rigor to the project. They actually reconstructed it as it had been first built at the end of the 17th century. To do this, they removed many of the features and additions that Paul Revere would have known when he lived there 90 years later. There's a lesson there, I feel.

Before heading home we stopped in Salumeria Italiana, a wonderful Italian grocery on Richmond Street, and picked up some bread and several kinds of cheese. Among these was a Blu del Moncenisio, which turned out to be one of those truly great cheeses that one encounters every now and then. I'm a sucker for blue cheese (preferably with a baguette and a robust red wine or port), and this was a marvellous example of the cheesemaker's craft. Recommended.

How do you find interesting new single malt Scotches?

Over the years I have gradually expanded my horizons where single malts are concerned. I started with Macallan, went down-market with Bowmore Islay (excellent value), then ventured into the salty mysteries of Laphroaig and Talisker. Glorious! And I've tried various others, never straying far from familiar territory. A few were disappointing, but none were undrinkable.

Last week I was in my local liquor store picking up gin and tonic, and I decided on a whim to get a bottle of Springbank, a 10-year old Campbeltown. I naively expected that a Cambeltown might be comparable to an Islay: peat, brine, a hint of iodine. After all the two are practically neighbours.

It was AWFUL: a cloying, honey-like sweetness that just wouldn't let go. I tried with and without water: it was no good. So yesterday I picked up some Laphroaig and started looking for recipes using whisky. Any suggestions? And how do I avoid this embarassing mistake in the future?

Help with Lupus (not money, just lobbying)

If you have a moment, please check out this Action Alert from the Lupus Foundation of America. They're not after your money; they just want a little help in getting the attention of Congress-critters who seem to have difficulty distinguishing between the urgent and the important. (Ritalin for all of 'em: that's my prescription.)

And thanks. Many thanks.

A quiet day

Still on vacation. This morning I closed the deal on the new car: I decided to go with the Subaru Legacy GT after all. Reasons? I spent a few days observing my driving style (with as little observer-induced change as possible), read the latest Wired magazine (all about hybrids), chatted to a few Prius owners, and decided that I really didn't have the right driving style/temperament for the Prius. Plus I remembered the advantages of AWD on our icy driveway in the winter. And finally our local Subaru dealer cut me a really nice sub-invoice deal. So I'm picking up the car first thing on Friday. (Not tomorrow, because I'll be in Cambridge all day.)

I spent this (unseasonably warm) afternoon at Tufts, working in the library and then going to class. The end of the semester looms, along with the due date for the term paper and the final examination. Lots to think about. Later. For now, I'm relaxing at the end of the day, watching Newcastle vs. Manchester United, sipping a finger of single malt, and ripping the Claude Challe Nirvana Lounge 03 double CD into iTunes.

To Prius or not to Prius....

I'm thinking of replacing my trusty Mercury Cougar (I've had it 7 years), and I've been doing some preliminary research. While I've always had a soft spot for the Subaru WRX, and the Scion tC looks like an amazing value, and the Mini Cooper is... well, a Mini, the geek in me keeps coming back to the Toyota Prius. Any Prius owner care to supplement (or contradict) the ecstatic opinions of the motoring press? Does that amazing powerplant work as well as they say?

(Of course the fact that my latest fill-up was at $2.29 a gallon has nothing to do with my thinking. It's the Prius's optional Bluetooth support....!)

Crumbs!

Merry complained that I'm always blogging about unpleasant things - why can't I blog about something nice? How about the crumb test dummy? I think that qualifies. Now, how do I get my hands on some of those McVitie's Milk Chocolate and Orange Digestives?

A moment in time

A quiet evening... sitting here waiting for the Australian Grand Prix TV coverage to start in about 20 minutes.

• Reading: "I, Lucifer" by Glen Duncan (author of Death of an Ordinary Man)
• Listening to: "No Roots" by Faithless. I love the way Maxi Jazz's quietly insistent raps cut through Sister Bliss's solid groove, how Dido adds ethereal gracenotes to the songs
• Drinking: a couple of fingers of 10 year old Talisker, a single malt that captures some of the qualities of my two favourite - but radically different - Scotches: Macallan and Laphroaig

What's on YOUR bookmarks bar?

I've been doing a lot of OS installations recently (Solaris, various kinds of Linux, even WinXP), and I'm gradually coming to realize that the shift from "preparing a system" to "using a system" comes after I've populated the Bookmarks toolbar of the browser (Safari or Firefox) with my favourite links. While there are usually a couple of system-specific things, the basic pattern is constant:

- Basics: My Yahoo, Gmail, my ISP webmail, Amazon, Sun's internal portal
- News: BBC, Salon, National Weather Service, and the Register and Inquirer
- Blogging: my blog, its admin page, and Planet Sun
- Fun: User Friendly, Doonesbury, Dilbert
- Academic: the Tufts Blackboard portal

Obviously that lot won't fit without some data compression; each link is just a favicon plus a couple of characters: "Y!", "UF", and so forth.

Feeling fated...

This semester I'm going back to school. I've signed up to take Dan Dennett's Philosophy of Mind course at Tufts, and the first classes are this week. I knew that it was going to be a challenge to fit classes and work into my schedule; I hadn't counted on the weather.

The first class was scheduled for Monday, but with the blizzard last weekend everything (including Tufts) was closed. So the next session was this afternoon, Wednesday, 4:00-5:15. Coincidentally, we're having another winter storm today. We've only had about 7 inches so far, but after the blizzard that felt like nothing. (Note the overconfident attitude.) So after finishing up a work (phone) meeting, I set out to drive the 12 miles from Brookline to Medford.

It was a nightmare. Even a major artery like Route 9 was deep in slush. Every time I touched the brakes I felt the ABS chattering to try and get a grip on something, anything. I'd only gone a couple of miles, and it looked like I would be lucky to average 10 MPH.

And then I cautiously stopped at a red light at the bottom of a hill, and looked in my mirror, transfixed, as a car slid down the hill towards me, obviously out of control. Somehow the driver managed to scrub off some speed by steering into the snowbank at the side of the road, and stopped inches behind me.

I pulled off onto a side street, called Tufts to explain that I wouldn't be at class, and then drove home very carefully. It's important to keep your priorities straight.

Pure self-indulgence

Grocery shopping on Sunday, I picked up a little sample cup of some white frozen stuff. Walked down the aisle, tasted it... and literally ran back to grab a couple of pints of it. Probably a New England thing. Usual disclaimers, etc. 'Nuff said.

Charity cards

It's that time of the Christmas/Hannukah/Solstice/New Year season when we go through all of the cards that we've received: updating addresses, reading individual or round robin letters, noting people to be added to the list or those who have not responded for a few years. If you ignore the commercial material, about half our cards are from people in the US, with most of the rest from the UK; there are also a few from Australia and Europe. And as I read through the cards, one thing struck me. More than two-thirds of the cards from the UK and Europe were "charity" cards, purchased to support organizations such as Unicef, Save the Children, Shelter, Scope, Oxfam, React, and so on; even Cats Protection got a look-in. Only a couple of the US cards were of this kind. It seemed like an odd cultural difference.

2004 - the Questions

Here are the questions to which these were the answers:

• Why did my wife cause our Scandinavian vacation to be cancelled?
• How did my mother's surgeon describe the tumour on her colon?
• How did my daughter announce that she was expecting her first child?
• What eyesore did we finally get rid of from the basement this December?
• What was my visit to Seattle at Easter notable for?
• What was "The Project"?
• What was the paradox in distributed computing that had me scratching my head all year?
• What was the best new music of 2004?
• What changed my life in 2004?
• How am I spending my Christmas?
• What's my answer to Jim Waldo's challenge: "Is there a notion of object which is independent of the language in which one is programming?"
• What was the greatest fun I had with my blog all year?

Happier New Year

Over the last 12 hours a flu-like bug has attacked, so while Merry goes out to celebrate with some old friends (as I insisted), I'm sitting here with a temperature of 101.5F and delirium-style tremens. Oh well, mustn't grumble.... Happy New Year, everyone.

Geeks preparing for nuptials

I spent yesterday evening at the Joe Bar with Chris and a bunch of friends, getting nicely mellow and shooting the breeze in advance of Chris's wedding to Celeste today. Jon Lasser (author of Think Unix) was there; he's already blogged about it, and posted a couple of pictures to Flickr. It was a nice, low key, geek kind of evening, with talk of music, PDA software, the benefits of seamless WiFi-GPRS, Unix file system APIs, and puppetry. Oh yes, and embarrassing confessions from all of us (like Chris admitting a fondness for the music of Garth Brooks, and a certain person's recollection of a schoolday "chastity pledge"....).

(The photo on the right was taken outside St. Dunstan's church in Carmel Valley last February.)

The science behind the earthquake

For those who want a more detailed explanation of the massive Sumatran earthquake than you'll get from CNN, the BBC, or the NYT, check out the US Geological Survey page for the quake. Not only was it a huge quake; it was the result of a huge shift: "Preliminary locations of larger aftershocks following today's earthquake show that approximately 1000 km of the plate boundary slipped as a result of the earthquake." The accompanying map shows the location of the plates and faults; the Indian plate is moving northwards into the Burma plate at 6 cm a year.

I couldn't find much on the web about seismic activity in this area. Roger Bilham's history of earthquakes in India is a reasonable starting point. If readers know of other good studies, could you link to them in comments to this blog entry? And please consider making a donation to the Red Cross, or the emergency aid organisation of your choice.

2004 - the answers

Many of my colleagues have blogged on the "best of 2004" (I particularly liked Hal's and Craig's.) I was thinking of doing the same. Then I thought I'd do it in question and answer format. Then I decided to skip the questions (for now). Enjoy.

• Because she woke up with a bat in her bed.
• It was a large one, but we managed to get it all.
• How d'you feel about being a grandfather?
• A thousand pounds of rusty cast iron hanging from the ceiling.
• Spending more time in church than since I was a 12 year old altar boy.
• Reading all seven volumes of Stephen King's The Dark Tower?
• The tension between autonomic behaviour and "choreography" or "orchestration".
• Groove Armada, Blackfield, Morrissey. (But why did Al Stewart have to slip?)
• Philosophy. Poetry. Blogging.
• Flying to Seattle for my son's wedding; then hanging out with The Fellowship watching the extended edition of "The Return of the King" while sipping Laphroaig.
• Yes - but only if there's a meaningful way of expressing semantics without simply showing us the code. Otherwise, no.

And finally:

• Nailing Robert Wright over the Dan Dennett interview.

I may not be blogging for the next few days, as I've explained in one of these answers. Have a great winter solstice, wherever you are and whatever you celebrate. (Memo to those who want to "reclaim Christmas": this celebration predates you by thousands of years. Don't be greedy.)

Building sci-fi?

When I first started reading science fiction back in the early 1960s, it seemed that all future cities were either shattered dystopias or cool, automated Jetsons-like worlds. This account seems typical: "Just swipe a prepaid card through a stanchion in front of an empty waiting vehicle, punch in the destination number, take a seat in the vehicle and our computer control system will sweep you non-stop to your destination."

(Via Salon.)

Lucy's

We've lived in various places over the last 30+ years: a year in Hayes, three years in Newcastle-on-Tyne, four years in Chesham, nineteen years in Foxboro, and now four years in Brookline. In all that time we've never really had a "local": a regular place to hang out and eat or drink. In England the "local" is usually a pub, but our nearest pubs in both Newcastle and Chesham were dismal places. And Foxboro was the kind of dormitory suburb without a centre, where most socializing happened at the homes of friends and neighbours. Oh yes, we've patronized various restaurants, but we never got to know the staff as friends.

But here in Brookline I think we've found our "local": a really nice, interesting, friendly restaurant called Lucy's. OK, it isn't very local - it's up at Coolidge Corner, about 4 miles away. But over the last year or so we've found ourselves eating there more and more often, or simply stopping in for a cocktail and a chat. The food is really good and always imaginative. This afternoon we were shopping at Coolidge Corner, and we found ourselves rearranging our schedule in order to be at the door of Lucy's when it opened at five. We had a martini and chatted with Mitzi (the proprietor) for about half an hour before heading home to deal with the trick-or-treaters. Sure feels like a local to me.

Lucy's. Recommended. See you there.

Halloween evening

It was one of the warmest Halloweens I can remember recently, and we'd put a carved and painted pumpkin outside, so I decided to sit outside to receive the trick-or-treaters. Although we got a lot of kids this year, they tended to come in gaggles, so I took a book out with me. I actually spent the time reading chapter 2 of Chalmers' The Conscious Mind on Supervenience and Explanation. Supervenience is one of those cool logical/philosophical tools that leaves you wondering how you ever got by with fuzzy notions like "depends on". Mind you, I am having difficulty working up a lot of sympathy for some of Chalmers' ideas about consciousness - specifically, I can't see why he finds phenomenal consciousness "surprising" and "troubling" - but as Dennett says, "explore before you deplore."

Celtics... then Pats... now the Red Sox

So finally, incredibly, the Red Sox have done it.

When I came to the USA 23 years ago, Boston sports was all about the Celtics. Larry Bird, Robert Parrish, and all the rest of them: although there were various pretenders (Philly? LA?) the Celtics were the natural champions.

Then came a drought. Occasionally the Red Sox would tease their fans, but everybody knew better than to take them seriously.

Then, quite unexpectedly, the star-less Patriots started winning; grinding out victories with a frightening implacability.

And now, from the depths of despair after three games of the ALCS, the Red Sox have swept to victory, under a total eclipse of the moon. Sweet. Stay safe, everybody.

How not to break a record

Like Steve, I was (on balance) glad that Manchester United beat Arsenal. Even if it did end the Gunners' record-breaking run, the Premiership is now really exciting. But not this way:

BBC SPORT | Football | Premiership | FA acts after Old Trafford battle: "Manchester United's Ruud Van Nistelrooy has been charged with serious foul play by the Football Association for a tackle on Arsenal's Ashley Cole.

Van Nistelrooy has been given until Tuesday to "deny or admit" the charge which will be heard on Thursday."

Two great streaks - one continues, one ends

Here in New England, the Patriots stretched their streak to 21 by beating the NY Jets. And back home in old England, Manchester United finally ended Arsenal's 49 game unbeaten run. All good things must come to an end....

That poetry thing

Per Terry, when you read this, post a poem.

Adlestrop
Yes, I remember Adlestrop -
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

It's by Edward Thomas (1878-1917). I learned it by heart when I was about 9. A couple of years later I actually visited Adlestrop Station (long since closed) while on holiday near Stratford-on-Avon. It was a hot summer's day, much as Thomas described in his notebook on June 23, 1914.

For years I remembered the poem almost perfectly (though I sometimes stumbled in the third verse). It was not until recently, when I was researching my blog entry on First World War music and poetry, that I discovered that Edwards' vision of a countryside full of life yet devoid of people was a comment on how the War, and the call-up, had affected rural England.

To me this is still a wonderful picture of the beauty of England as I remember it, but there is now a shadow across the sun, and the men who should be gathering the "haycocks dry" are far away....

Oh goody - another test

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Indus Women Leaders conference

My colleague Nausheen is involved in Indus Women Leaders (IWL), a national forum that develops South Asian women leaders. While South Asians are one of the most successful minorities in the US, there's a huge gap between men and women in that community, particularly in education. IWL provides South Asian women with the resources to achieve their life goals through goal setting tools, advocacy, networking, mentorship, and education. They're holding a Leadership Summit in Boston later this month. Sun's sponsoring the event, and it looks really interesting.

I'm in the wrong job

Computer technology is SO 20th century! It's time for a career change - to antimatter weapons!! Consider the example of:

...Gerald Smith, former chairman of physics and Antimatter Project leader at Pennsylvania State University. Smith now operates a small firm, Positronics Research LLC, in Santa Fe, N.M. So far, the Air Force has given Smith and his colleagues $3.7 million for positron research, Smith told The Chronicle in August.

Smith is looking to store positrons in a quasi-stable form called positronium. A positronium "atom" (as physicists dub it) consists of an electron and antielectron, orbiting each other. Normally these two particles would quickly collide and self-annihilate within a fraction of a second -- but by manipulating electrical and magnetic fields in their vicinity, Smith hopes to make positronium atoms last much longer.

Smith's storage effort is the "world's first attempt to store large quantities of positronium atoms in a laboratory experiment," Edwards noted in his March speech. "If successful, this approach will open the door to storing militarily significant quantities of positronium atoms."

It seems that Positronics Research is hiring. Woo-hoo! Move over, Edward Teller. You think your H-bomb was a big bang? You ain't seen nothin' yet....

Note for the humour-impaired: this is sarcasm. Frame your comments accordingly.

Equal rights for the secular

A thought for the day: from Fran Lebowitz's book Progress, excerpted in the October 2004 Vanity Fair:

Reversion of rights:
[...]
(3) All religious texts will be vetted and, if necessary, revised, by ad hoc committees composed of public librarians, English teachers, literary critics, and writers, in order to ensure that no representative of the secular community is in any way offended.

This seems only fair....

Update: Apparently I should have decorated this with :-) or otherwise indicated that this was intended in fun, as a reductio ad absurdum. Of course I don't want to vet religious texts, any more than I want religious types vetting, or censoring, secular texts. (And nor does Fran Lebowitz, I imagine.) I guess irony is out of fashion....

"Political Compass" test

Just took an interesting little test called The Political Compass. Yeah, I know it isn't new, but it's still fun.

I scored:
° Economic Left/Right: -3.38
° Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.03
pretty much as I'd have expected.

Why no US TV coverage of the Paralympics?

As Boing-Boing reports, quoting the BBC's Stuart Hughes:

The Paralympics will boast:4000 athletes. 140 countries represented.525 gold medals at stake. 19 sports. There will be no American TV coverage of the Paralympics. Let me repeat that. There will be NO AMERICAN TV COVERAGE OF THE PARALYMPICS. Not one hour of live coverage. Not one commentator. Not one Olympian on the commentary team. Nothing. This at the same time that a record number of journalists are preparing to cover the Paralympics."

This is really shameful. I just emailed my opinion to the NBC Olympics feedback address. I recommend you do the same.

Heading home

We're flying home to the States today. The day started with the hotel fire alarm going off at 6:20am just as I was turning on the shower. That was exciting. While we were sitting outside in the car, waiting for the all-clear, I read Robert Fisk in today's Independent on the third anniversary of 9/11. Powerful and pointed as always. (Hands up those who knew where Fallujah was three years ago.)

After showering and packing, I came over to the WiFi hotspot to log in. As I started typing this, Morrissey's America Is Not The World started playing over in the restaurant. I've heard it almost every day while I've been here. What a tragedy, that Bush and his henchmen should so totally squander, trash, and sh*t upon the worldwide compassion and empathy that followed 9/11. And how depressing that Americans appear unable to see Bush for what he is.

Talking to people over here, mostly professional or academic, I find a curious attitude towards the US Presidential election. Of course they are interested, and of course they hope that Bush is defeated, but it's not accompanied by any great expectations. It's almost as if they've written America off: it's a hopeless case, perhaps it will come to its senses some day, but there's no point in thinking too much about that. (I saw one op-ed piece that pointed out that since the actions of the US had such an impact on everybody around the world, maybe we all should be entitled to vote for the POTUS. And the lapsing of the assault gun ban was the occasion for the usual head-shaking about the suicidal insanity of a gun-drenched culture.)

Of course this raises more questions than it answers. But that's for another occasion.

Update: We're now home - but not before experiencing yet another fire alarm: this time in Heathrow Terminal 3. Every passenger in the terminal was herded into the structure that links the terminal to the more remote gates, while ear-splitting sirens blared overhead. It was 20 minutes before the Terminal was declared safe.

Lucky timing

This morning we went into Oxford to do some shopping - some more books (surely not?!) and some items for my mother. Lunch time rolled around, and we decided to try a place in the Covered Market that sells authentic Cornish Pasties. (No, nothing to do with costume accessories for West Country strippers..!) While Merry had a second cup of tea, I went round the corner to the Auto Model shop, with a vague idea of buying one more model.

In addition to the man who runs that branch, the district manager was there, ranting on the phone to someone. When he'd finished, and saw that I was about to buy a small bus model, he jerked a thumb in the direction of a pile of large boxes and asked if I had any idea what was in them. "Take a look at these before you buy anything," he said, and opened the top box to reveal a 1/24 scale Sun Star RM8 Routemaster model. This is reckoned to be the finest bus model ever produced for retail; only a couple of thousand are being made, and all have been reserved for months. But he had one cancellation... and so I bought it, for £99, and arranged for them to ship it to the US for me. It'll be the culmination of my collection; I doubt I'll buy many more bus models after this. But what a way to go.

American cars are boring

OK, not all of them. But when I was driving down the M40 yesterday towards Oxford and was overtaken by a couple of Vauxhall VX220s and MG TFs, I wondered what had happened to the American sports car. The Corvette? The Viper? And while I was musing on this, a Ford Streetka blasted by. Now that's just plain fun. Much more enjoyable than the typical American SUV (with the aerodynamics of a brick and handling to match).

Unclear on the concept

As I noted, the Little Chef next to my hotel has a WiFi hotspot. For some reason, they turn it off every night at 10 when they close. And the manager hasn't told the staff that turning it on is part of the regular opening procedure. So this morning I came over at 7:15 for breakfast and a quick fix of Internet, and the WiFi was down, and the poor minimum-wage school-leaver who had just opened the store and restaurant had never heard of "WiFi" or "network", and thought that the manager "might be getting in by 8:15." (He wasn't.)

Oh well, things are working now (mid afternoon). But I wonder why they turn it off at night. It probably takes less electricity than the Budweiser sign in the window....

On vacation... where's the hotspot?

I flew over to the UK on Friday for a week's vacation. Good points: Virgin Atlantic upgraded us from Economy to Premium Economy for free; service was excellent. Bad points: the flight was oversold, and it took Virgin an hour to sort out who's on and who's off. And it was a daytime flight - I was neutral, but my wife preferred it. After the event, I am no longer neutral. Daytime eastbound transatlantic SUCKS. Instead of having a short, broken night which stresses your body into taking up the new schedule, you have a short broken day, so it's impossible to get to sleep. Never again.

Normally when we come to Oxford we stay with relatives, but this time it wasn't convenient, so we stayed at a random motorway-type hotel at the A34/A40 intersection. On Saturday morning we walked into the Little Chef diner next door for breakfast, and I saw a WiFi hotspot sign. "Heaven, I'm in heaven..." So that's where I am now. (And of course the setup time on my PowerBook was just as long as it took me to type in a credit card number to buy a few hours of credit. Sweet.)

The weather here is perfect, and forecast to remain that way for our stay. So more anon, with pics (and perhaps video).

I'm being traded???

While doing a little vanity Googling (speaking of which...), I came across this page: the BlogShare page for geoffarnold.com. It seems to be some kind of fantasy stock market in blogs; apparently my valuation is B$3,481.90. What the hell does this mean? Tim's valued at B$96,968.51, which makes some (relative) sense, I guess.

"The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad and incomplete in the urban compound."

Well, Marshall McLuhan's quotation may be accurate, but sometimes the car feels like Heracles' tunic steeped in the blood of Nessus. All of which is an absurdly pretentious way of saying that I took my car in to the dealers this morning, "unwontedly" as it were. I carefully described the shudders from the transmission that I had felt on my way home last night, and pointed out the blinking (and undocumented) icon that had appeared on one of the dashboard displays. And after a protracted examination, it was announced ("Do you want to sit down first?") that the vehicle needed a replacement transmission, which would cost $3,000. ("Of course, you could opt for a transmission rebuild for about $2,500, but...", said the service manager, shaking his head slowly to imply that only a palooka would do something so foolish.)

I rather wish that this was an uneconomic thing to do; that I could simply say "Hell, no!" and get myself a new car. Sadly, the car in question (99 Mercury Cougar 2.5V6) only has 65K miles on it, and the price to repair it is less than its trade-in value (Kelly gives $5,000, NADA gives $6,175), so I guess I'll bite the bullet.

But I feel Heracles' pain....

[UPDATE: Several friends have urged me to look into getting the car fixed at a specialist transmission shop like AAMCO. I'll think about it, but the logistics are extremely complicated because of travel commitments.]

Art Deco at the MFA

We just got back from the Boston MFA (Musem of Fine Arts) where a new Art Deco exhibit has just opened. It's organized into three sections, roughly 30-50-20 percent respectively. The first presents various ideas and styles that influenced art deco - everything from Classical Greek and Egyptian, through African and Meso-american patterns and colours, to Russian ballet costumes.

The second section is art deco proper: the tsunami of styles - individual yet linked - that were launched on the world at the 1925 Paris Exhibition. I felt that the organizers of this show cast their net a little wider than I would have done. Man Ray's Electricity, while brilliant, doesn't feel as though it has anything to do with art deco. Nor do the wonderful miniatures (postcards, really) of Josephine Baker; not everything in Paris in the 1920s qualified as art deco. But enough quibbling: overall, this section was superb. My favourite piece was Tamara de Lempicka's stunning nude La Bella Raphaela (shown above; click for full size). The scanned image doesn't do justice to the work, particularly the breathtakingly sumptuous reds of her lips and the cloth she's lying on.

The final section showed the impact of art deco on design in the USA. (Recall that the USA was offered a place at the original 1925 exhibition, but, as the MFA's program notes, The USA declined to participate on the grounds that ‘there was no modern design in America’.) There are some gems here, illustrating especially the distinctive "streamline" twist that America introduced. And the huge boxwood model of the Rockefeller Center shows how art deco ideas were incorporated into the design of New York's skyscrapers.

Overall, a very cool show. I bought the t-shirt.

I may be distracted for a few days weeks....

I just picked up a copy of Doom 3. My investment in an ATI Radeon 9600 when I bought this PC is about to pay off. (Of course I could always step up to an x800 XT Platinum and crank up my pixel fillrate from 1.3Gpixels/sec to 8.3Gpixels/sec. A snip at $499... which is almost as much as I paid for the rest of the PC! Yeah, yeah, yeah....)

Actually, the choice of a 9600 was deliberate. I didn't want to have to upgrade my power supply to 300 Watts, which a 9800 would have required. I wasn't just being a cheapskate: I'm a software guy, and I don't do hardware upgrades.

Ogunquit rocks

I've spent some time exploring the fascinating rock formations here at Bald Head cliff in Ogunquit, Maine. For those who want to follow me, I've put together a 2.2MB Quicktime movie with some overview and close-up shots of the complex stratification.

Ogunquit sunrise

Sunrise was at 5:42am, and I came out onto the rocks below the hotel to watch it. I was fascinated by the heavily striated rocks, which have been folded so that the strata are vertical. Differential erosion makes the surface rather hard to walk on (which is why the horizon isn't quite level...).

Click the images to bring up 1600x1200 versions.

Is emigration to the USA out of control?

I just spent a fruitless half-hour on the United Airlines frequent flier website, checking availability of round-trip award flights from BOS to LHR.

Is everybody leaving Europe for the USA? Permanently????

How else can I explain the fact that for every date pair that I tested in August and September, I found one or two eastbound flights with available award seats, but zero (none, nada, zilch) westbound returns?

Of course there is an alternative explanation to "mass emigration", but I'd prefer not to go to bed in a cynical frame of mind...

Phone frustration

Frustration is...

1. Calling a hospital ward in the UK


2. Being given a phone number so that I can call a patient directly


3. Discovering that since it's an "07" number I can't dial it from the USA.....

First NASCAR race

I went with my son-in-law, Mark, to the New Hampshire International Speedway in Loudon, NH, to see my first ever NASCAR race. I've enjoyed motor racing since I was a kid, both in the UK and USA, but I've always gone to "road courses": I like to see drivers turn left and right!

The race was sold out (the NHIS seats 91,000 101,000), the weather was warm and sunny, and it was a good race. The only frustrations were the number of cautions (a dozen, each requiring track crews to come out with ambulances, wreckers, and street sweepers to clean up the circuit), and the stupid restart system which deliberately mixes slower, lapped traffic into the pattern. The effect is to significantly penalize the 3rd place and subsequent drivers compared with the first two. Only after the very last caution of the race, a couple of laps from the end, was there a simple uncomplicated restart, and it led to some really close racing.

I had a dilemma: who to cheer for? I know little about the NASCAR circuit, and have no strong affiliation to any team, driver, or sponsored product(!). On the other hand, watching a sporting event "in the abstract" isn't very satisfying. Needing a hat, I wandered over to the trailers selling memorabilia and decided on Matt Kenseth, last year's champion in a Ford "Taurus". (They use the names of street cars, but don't be fooled.) I bought a hat and a model car, (shown here) and returned to my seat to watch the race. Matt had qualified poorly, back in 31st position. It was fascinating to watch him fighting his way up through the field to 4th place, coping with lapped traffic, overcoming a mistake in the pits, and so forth.

And just for the record, Kurt Busch (Matt's team-mate) won the race from Jeff Gordon, with Ryan Newman (who led for the first 170 out of 300 laps) coming in third.

I'll be going again. Thanks, Mark!

A phone feature I'd really like

Whenever I'm hosting a meeting, I always ask people to turn their cellphones to vibrate mode. This reduces distraction, but it doesn't help when someone does receive a call: they have to answer it in furtive whispers as they scramble towards the door. Here's a better way:

1. Incoming call, phone vibrates, callerid displayed.

2. Press key on the phone. This picks up the call, mutes the speaker and mic, and plays back a recorded message. Examples of messages:

"I'm in a meeting right now, but I do want to talk to you. Please stay on the line while I excuse myself and step out of the meeting."

"I'm sorry, but I have guests and it's not convenient to talk to you right now. Your callerID information has been saved. If this call is urgent, press 1, and my phone will page me. Otherwise, press 2 to leave me a voicemail message."

Nokia? Ericsson? What are you waiting for?

Kabuki review

Yesterday evening my daughter (Kate) and I went to see the final performance of the Japan Society of Boston's presentation of Kabuki at the Cutler Majestic theatre in Boston. The performance was given by the Heisei Nakamura-za Kabuki Troupe starring Nakamua Kankuro, who are touring New York, Boston, and Washington DC this summer. (There's a fascinating interview here, in which Nakamura Kankuro talks about the challenge and opportunity to bring kabuki to the United States.)

The troupe - actors, singers, musicians - performed two pieces that showed different sides of kabuki, Bo-Shibari ("Tied to a pole"), and Renjishi ("Dance for two lions"). There's a detailed description of each here, with comments by Kankuro. The performance was in Japanese (obviously), and there was no printed or simultaneous translation, although Peter Grilli, the president of the Japan Society of Boston, provided a short introduction to the pieces. But the language was not a barrier.

The result? It was glorious - visually stunning, dramatic, funny, clever, musically exciting, challenging, dramatic, exuberant, and just plain fun.

One point of note was that the audience included many Japanese, mostly living in the Boston area (though some had travelled a long way to attend the show). As a result there was much bowing as people met. There was even one woman in a beautiful pink kimono, with all the trimmings.

Weekend plans

Saturday evening, 7:30. I'll post a review on Sunday:

It'll all come out in the wash

I was just reading Neil Gaiman's blog (always a delight), and he was talking about how he's making progress on his new novel, "Anansi Boys". And then he said:

The weirdest thing about the book is that it begins as a comedy, then slowly shades into something a bit like horror, and I realised a couple of days ago that the rules of fiction mean you have to tread slightly warily as you go, if you're going to do something like this. In a comedy, part of the underlying agreement is that good people and bad people will get what they deserve, and that happy endings will be earned, and the universe rewards nice people and sensible ones. In horror the underlying agreement is that there is no justice and that good people may be fed to the lions at authorial whim. Which realisation induced a moment or two of panic, and then I shrugged and figured it would all come out in the wash.

And it struck me how well that describes many of the engineering projects I've been involved in recently....

Partying like it's 1999... on the other side of the galaxy

OK, I admit it: I was a fan of the 70s sci-fi series Space 1999. And I always thought that the their spaceships, the Eagle class, really looked the part - much more so than Gerry Anderson's earlier designs, such as Fireball XL5 and the Thunderbirds. I even preferred the Eagle to Matt Jefferies' original Enterprise. (Heresy!)

The Eagle looked as if it had been designed by a mechanical engineer rather than an artist. No swooping curves, bold colours, or mysteriously pulsing "warp coils": the Eagle was a grey, utilitarian, tubular framework with a series of uncompromisingly functional modular assemblies bolted on. This utilitarian style soon appeared in other 1970s sci-fi films and series, exemplified by the U.S.S. Cygnus in Disney's disastrous Black Hole, the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica. It's probably no coincidence that this was the period when the Pompidou Centre was being constructed in Paris, with all of the plumbing, pipework, cables and service ducts on the outside of the building. Be that as it may, I thought that the Eagle looked just right, as did the Hawk variant that appeared in one episode.

Over the years fans all over the world (but especially in Japan) have kept the Space 1999 series in syndication, and I see that it's now out on DVD at (ouch) $199. I know, I know, it's 48 episodes on 16 discs, but even so.... Anyway, an unexpected package arrived today from the BBC America shop: a detailed, foot long, diecast Eagle. Cool! And thanks....

(Yes, the transporter pod does snap out. And I see that a Rescue Eagle version is now available. Hmmmm...)

(Update: It seems that medical and freighter Eagles are on the way too.....)

Fond memories

Back on May 4th I posted a piece about colleagues who had been caught up in the most recent round of layoffs here at Sun. What some people didn't realize is that the process was not completed back in May. For reasons associated with the reorganization of the systems business, some of the layoff decisions were deferred... until today.

I want to mention two people who were RIFfed today who had been at Sun almost as long as I have. Since I haven't cleared this with them, I'll just call them Dave and Don.

I worked with Dave on the 386i ("Roadrunner") workstation in the 1986-1988 period. I did software, he did mechanicals. Where we came together was designing the keyboard. For those of you who have not experienced it, working on a keyboard design team is the most miserable job on the planet. Everybody, and I mean everybody, knows how to do your job better than you do. Nobody, and I mean nobody, will be satisfied with what you decide. Too soft, too hard, too clicky, not enough feedback, "you moron, how could you put key X in position Y".... Dave was unfailingly patient in the face of all the brickbats (and the occasional compliment). In the end, I think we did a bloody good job, even if everyone hated us for it.

Don joined the PC-NFS team back in... oh, hell! I can't remember: it's like he was always there. He was the guy who made the mysterious stuff happen: that ineffable transition from the first alpha build all the way to getting it into customers' hands. You know what I mean: the product stuff; training the network ambassadors; preparing the support organization; getting the part numbers; the alpha and beta and omega of making a software product happen. These days it all happens according to a tightly-scripted process; back in the 80s we were making it up as we went along. (A PC software product?! From Sun!?!@!? Hah!) Eventually Don even wrote a book about how to turn our product into a real customer solution. He had [HAS! What the hell, he's not dead!] a sense of proportion, and of the absurd, which kept him (and us) sane through many releases, and millions of copies sold. Thanks, Don - for everything.

Just two names. Many other colleagues, friends, and acquaintances of mine left Sun today, some gladly, but most before they were ready. Thanks, everyone, and the very best of luck. You deserve it.

Visualizing systems

I've always been interested in ways of visualizing complex systems. Simply displaying a fairly literal graphical representation of a bunch of state variables seems unsatisfactory. The correlations and causal relationships are rarely apparent; on the other hand our pattern-seeking brains are all too likely to see relationships where none exist. I remember attending a conference on agent technology (specifically "social" software agents) in which a speaker said that her team was looking for ways to "construct a narrative" that corresponded to what was going on in the system. That feels about right.

But anyway... when I want to visualize a really complex system, I head over to Passur's site for BOS, pick a good time of day (18:00 works well), and click Start Replay. (The reason to watch a replay is because then you can click on individual aircraft to display their information. That feature is disabled for the live feed, ostensibly for reasons of security. There's also a random delay on the live feed.)

At the 10 mile setting you can watch the way the air traffic controllers set up the streams of aircraft for arrivals. (At that setting my house is in the lower left corner, below the "J" of Jamaica Pond.) Zooming out to 90 miles you get a nice sense of how the large-scale airways system feeds into the arrival streams. And each one of those icons represents an autonomous agent, with one or two independent planning subsystems, and less than perfect communications, interpreting the wishes of a bunch of ground-based planning systems....

(Passur's Airport Monitor is available for a number of airports. You don't have to watch BOS. But if you too have a soft spot for Logan, check out this article from Salon.)

[By the way, the applet doesn't work quite right on the Mac. Not sure why....]

Self-referential blogging

Last month I wrote about why I blogged, and what I hoped that readers would get out of it. Today my colleague Richard Giles posted a reference to John Hiler's piece from March, 2002 [and doesn't that seem a long time ago?] on The Tipping Blog: How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic. As the title implies, Hiler applies the ideas of Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point to blogging, pointing out how different kinds of bloggers play the key roles of what Gladwell calls Connectors and Mavens. (Tim Bray seems to be the quintessential Connector - eh, Tim?)

And of course this blog entry simply contributes to what Douglas Hofstadter called a "tangled hierarchy" of self-reference! In fact, I wonder how many blog entries are actually ABOUT blogging - all the way from the simple Getting started, to comments about PG-13 content, to angst-filled discussions about blogs in politics. The title that my colleague Josh Simons chose for his blog seems particularly apt.....

iSight

I just bought an iSight FireWire camera for my PowerBook. Now all I need are some buddies to chat with.....

(Seriously, there's a chance I may have to spend an extended period of time over in England, and I wanted to be able to videoconference with colleagues in the US.)

Journalist=terrorist?

If you live outside the US and plan to visit, check the small print on your I-94W (visa waiver) form very, very carefully. If you're a journalist, even a casual freelance contributor, you are liable to be detained, interrogated, strip-searched, handcuffed, frogmarched through the airport, locked up, and deported. Read this Salon story carefully, and then Elena Lappin's account in the Guardian of how she was treated when she recently flew in to Los Angeles.

Apparently if you're a "nonthreatening" reporter (whatever that means) you may be allowed to use a visa waiver - just once. After that, you need a special "I-visa".

War and morality

I just stumbled across a very thoughtful piece by Paul Savoy in The Nation entitled The Moral Case Against The Iraq War. Here's how Savoy frames the issue:

The problem opponents of the war have had in responding to President Bush's claim of moral legitimacy [...] is that they have addressed the moral issue in the terms the President has framed it rather than reframing the issue in their own moral terms. Talking about the world, or at least Iraq, being "better off" avoids confronting the civilian carnage caused by the war.... [W]e should be wary of talking about the overall good of society or of a particular country. There is no social entity called Iraq that benefited from some self-sacrifice it suffered for its own greater good, like a patient who voluntarily endures some pain to be better off than before. There were only individual human beings living in Iraq before the war, with their individual lives. Sacrificing the lives of some of them for the benefit of others killed them and benefited the others. Nothing more. Each of those Iraqis killed in the war was a separate person, and the unfinished life each of them lost was the only life he or she had, or would ever have. They clearly are not better off now that Saddam is gone from power.

There is only one truly serious question about the morality of the war, and that is the question posed more than fifty years ago by French Nobel laureate Albert Camus, looking back on two world wars that had slaughtered more than 70 million people: When do we have the right to kill our fellow human beings or let them be killed? What is needed is a national debate in the presidential election campaign that addresses the most important moral issue of our time. It is an issue we are required to face not only as a matter of moral obligation to all those Iraqis killed in the war, but to the 772 American servicemen and -women who, as of May 10, had lost their lives and the more than 4,000 US soldiers injured in Iraq.

Warning: Savoy describes some of the consequences of military action in graphic detail. It will turn your stomach. (If it doesn't, you are beyond hope.) But as he writes,

Judging from the poll numbers after the fall of the Iraqi regime, the seven or eight out of ten Americans who backed the war were prepared to build the edifice of freedom and democracy on the broken bodies not of one, but of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Iraqi children killed or maimed or burned in the conflict.

[Updated: This is a useful source of supporting data, even though it only covers a few months last year.]

This is a blog entry that I hope I'll be able to delete

I'm posting this entry in the fervent hope that I will be able to delete it when it's been shown to be false. But I have a horrible, nauseating feeling that I won't.

Seymour Hesh spoke at the University of Chicago a little while ago. I haven't seen a transcript, but according to various reports (including here, citing Rick Pearlstein), "[Hersh] said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...' then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened."

Blogs, blogs, blogs everywhere you look

My employer, Sun Microsystems, is now hosting blogs for all employees (and interns - nice touch) at blogs.sun.com. The site opens for business on Monday, so I thought I'd get in ahead of the rush and grab the name geoff. I'm not sure how I'm going to balance the usage of the two blogs, but sufficient unto the day....

George W as Henry V - a fascinating parallel

Arianna Huffington has just posted a wonderful piece in which she compares George W. Bush with the 15th century English King Henry V, as portrayed in Shakespeare's play. The parallels are striking. Ex-frat boy ruler engages in a war of choice, in part for revenge ("tennis balls"), in part for reasons of domestic politics:

The dying Henry IV had told his son to engage in foreign wars to distract the people from domestic crises: “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” The invasion of France is supposed to turn frivolous Hal into a strong leader — his youthful indiscretions a thing of the past.

Both men surrounded themselves with those in favor of going to war: Bush with his neocons, and Henry with the churchmen my fellow debater David Brooks dubbed the “theocons.”

Highly recommended.

[Update 2004-06-05 11:32:00] As a writer to Salon commented, there was one big difference between Henry V and George Bush: Henry actually led his troops into battle. He may have been irresponsible, but he was no chicken-hawk.

Change of plans

I had planned to report here on a delightful and unusual evening out, attending a gala fundraiser for the Lupus Foundation of Massachusetts with special guest Lily Tomlin. Those who know me will realize that I rarely don a jacket and tie (and even cufflinks!), so this was going to be something special.

...Except that it wasn't - not for us. anyway. The event was being held at the home of a local TV personality in the wilds of South Natick, MA, down a long, narrow, twisting lane. We turned down the lane and soon found ourselves in a stationary line of cars that disappeared around the bend into the distance. The house was nowhere in sight. Other cars pulled up behind us, then others. From talking to passers-by, it became apparent that at our present rate we wouldn't reach the house until well after the main event started, and that if the parking was LIFO we were unlikely to get away before 1am. Clearly someone had goofed. So after waiting patiently for 40 minutes, and making little progress, we turned around, abandoned our Very Expensive VIP Tickets, and headed off to a nice Indian restaurant for a quiet meal.

I'm glad they raised a lot of money for a worthy cause. But I'm pretty pissed off about the rest of it. Except the pudeena lamb. And the Louis Jadot Beaujolais that we had as an aperitif.

[Updated 2004-06-04 20:53:56] I received an immediate email from the VP of the Lupus Foundation apologizing for the situation, explaining how it had arisen, and offering either a full refund or four tickets at another upcoming gala fundraiser. I was impressed by this response. As it happens, the forthcoming fundraiser doesn't fit our schedules, and we've decided not to ask for a refund.

Annual musical rituals

Although I have a large and diverse collection of music, there are only three acts that I ALWAYS go to see when they're playing in my neighbourhood. They are Al Stewart, Porcupine Tree and the Legendary Pink Dots from Nijmegen in Holland. On Tuesday night the Dots were playing at the Middle East in Cambridge, and I went along as I do almost every year.

The Dresden Dolls opened for them, doing a short "acoustic" set. I'd been waiting for a long time to hear Amanda Palmer sing, and I was not disappointed. In addition to several original songs, she covered the Swans, Leonard Cohen, and (her tour de force) Jacque Brel's "Amsterdam". Stunning. I think the Dolls are in Lollapalooza this summer, so check 'em out.

The Dots are an institution for me. I first came across them in 1991 when I picked up a copy of their newly-released CD The Maria Dimension in a record store in North Wales. Even though I'd never heard of the Dots before, I just knew that this was something special. So I bought it, unheard, and I've never looked back. These days I must have 50 CDs by the Dots and another 20 solo albums by their leader, Edward Ka-Spel. They are incredibly prolific: I bought four new CDs this evening, one by Edward and three by the Dots.

The performance was excellent, as usual. Much of the material was from the newest album, Whispering Wall, but they included several oldies including (oh joy!) Casting The Runes from the 1988 album Any Day Now, and We Bring The Day from 1993's Malachai (Shadow Weaver Part 2).

I used to find it odd being (by a considerable margin) the oldest attendee at Dots shows. These days the audience is far more diverse, in terms of age and style. Of course there are still the inevitable Goths (though why I don't know - the Dots hardly fit the "Goth" stereotype) and fans of Ministry, KMFDM et al, complete with leather and chains. But most attendees are just plain folks of all ages from 18 to 60. And even some of the younger crowd wear ear-plugs, as I do now. Standing in front of the speakers, I feel the music more than hear it....

Deja vu at the NYT

After reading today's piece by the New York Times public editor (i.e. ombudsman) entitled Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction?, I was moved to reply to him by email:

Congratulations to both you and the present NYT editorial staff on the courage to confront the isssue of the Times' coverage of the WMD issue.

Geoff Arnold

I was actually a bit hasty in sending this off. On re-reading it, I should have added something like this: Even a skeptical reading of accounts such as Joe Conason's "The Hunting of the President" would suggest that the New York Times failed to meet the standards which you and the present editorial staff now champion. (The fact that other newspapers such as the Boston Globe and the Washington Post behaved even more recklessly should be irrelevant.)

Tim seems to have passed his OS X infection to me...

No sooner does Tim Bray report that his OS X bitrot has been cured by 10.3.4 than I suddenly find it affecting me. Specifically, iChat refuses to launch; it bounces in a desultory fashion a couple of times and then exits. I've deleted all of the obvious prefs files, repaired permissions, run the iChatAV update... nothing. And none of the log files [why does OS X have so many of them?] shows anything untoward....

People may tell me that this is an excellent excuse to start using Adium X, but I'd prefer to make the move voluntarily rather than in desperation.

[Update: Adium is working fine for me, but I wish I knew why iChat is broken.)

Java, open source, standards, and conformance

[Revised 5/30/04]
My colleague Simon Phipps has just posted a lengthy piece entitled On Java and Openness. I agree with him pretty much 100%.

A lot depends on whether you approach compatibility and interoperability from a "standards" position or not. The "standards" viewpoint is that there are going to be multiple implementations, that this is a good thing, and that you need to make sure that these implementations can interoperate. This was always the IETF approach: a proposed standard with only one implementation was viewed as problematic, because you couldn't distinguish between the intention of the standard and the accidents of implementation.

I started at Sun in 1985, and my first job was to do an implementation of NFS for MS-DOS from spec. All of the previous implementations (for various types of Unix as well as VMS) had been based on the source code, so I guess that I made Rusty Sandberg and the other spec-writers pretty nervous. But it worked. Later I worked with folks from FTP, Microsoft, and JSB to develop the Windows Sockets specification, and we recognized from the start that the conformance verification model was going to be key to acceptance.

I've always taken an object-oriented approach to standards: I believe that a standard is an object with one method, bool Conform(implementation i). If an implementation, i, conforms to the standard, I can use it. Of course this presupposes that the standard is adequately specified and the Conform() method is trustworthy, but that's why doing standards is hard work. It also explains why the Reference Implementation (RI) is such an important concept - that if (or rather when) the language of the standard proves inadequate or ambiguous, there is an authoritative answer: the standard is what the RI does. Critically, the RI is not supposed to be the only implementation; it should be optimized for clarity and conformance rather than performance, size, efficiency, etc.

Everything that I've seen about the open source movement suggests that it is designed to encourage group participation on a single code base, rather than the creation of multiple independent implementations. Where's the 100% compatible clone of Perl, or Apache or Sendmail? In that respect (paradoxically?), open source leads to a monoculture, just as much as Windows does. When you actually have multiple implementations, you have to face the question of whether compatibility is important or not. For platform technologies - systems that other people rely on to make their software work - the answer seems to be yes. And despite the absolutists that Simon cites, there is no evidence whatsoever that a free market approach can sustain compatibility, except by preferring one choice and allowing the others to wither. To me, monoculture - even a free monoculture - seems dangerous. Diversity is good.

Back home

I got back home to Boston late last night after an 8 day trip to Silicon Valley. This afternoon we [my wife, daughter, son-in-law and I] headed up to the Museum of Fine Arts, since we had tickets for the Gauguin in Tahiti exhibit. As it turned out, none of us thought much of that show (a little Gauguin goes a long way, and his pedophilia is hard to ignore), but two other exhibits more than made up for it.

First, we saw the Japanese Postcards show. This is simply wonderful - see it if you get the chance. It's drawn from a collection of thousands of Japanese postcards from the first half of the 20th century: New Year's cards, art cards, humorous cards, cards celebrating the Russian-Japanese war, advertisements, Art Nouveau, Art Deco... just delightful. The one on the right is by Kobayashi Kaichi, entitled Woman Waiting for her Beloved at 2:25. We bought the book for the exhibition, and one of the staff confided that the Japanese Postcards book had been outselling the Gauguin in Tahiti catalogue by a significant margin.

The other delightful surprise was the exhibition by the English couple Tim Noble and Sue Webster. To quote the MFA: The artists integrate satire and punk strategies with the study of modern sculpture and a keen awareness of the self-importance of the London art scene. Responding to the media hype of the British art world, Noble and Webster find inspiration in pop culture and advertising, creating brilliant animated light displays, or illuminations, such as the fountain and dollar sign in this exhibition. By contrast, their “rubbish,” or shadow sculptures, are brought to life when a simple light is projected over a carefully arranged pile of domestic garbage. Tim Noble & Sue Webster explores the team’s mature work, including seven examples of illuminations, shadow sculptures, and their latest neon forms: a boy/girl couple covered with streetwise slang. The piece to the left is Excessive Sensual Indulgence. Exhilarating, and very, very English.
My favourite pieces were "Real Life is Rubbish" and "Fucking Beautiful", shown below:

Tribal eyes? Interesting...

Tim Bray mentions in his blog that he attended a meeting of Sun's Distinguished Engineers this week. As the organizer of that meeting, I was interested in his observations. One of the not-so-subtle reasons that I asked Tim to present was that I'd really like more of the DEs to start blogging: I think that they have a lot of interesting stuff to say. Only a few of us do right now - James, Eduardo, Jim, Dick, myself....

As Tim noted, getting to be a DE involves peer review, and many people assume that this means we're really some kind of clique or a club. Nothing could be further from the truth. Technically we're all over the map, from sub-atomic physics to petascale supercomputers, from the mathematics of component failure to the poetry of programming. Some of us have a broad technological or business perspective, others are wholly focussed on our particular area of specialization. Some are interested in talking about process, organizations, and leadership; others want to stick to "hard" engineering. And some are unfailingly courteous, while others are (let's face it) arrogant SOBs. The two things that unite us are a passion for engineering, and a passion for Sun. It's an amazing place to be (I joined in 1985) and it's a privilege to work with such a team - DEs and everyone else.

As you might imagine, putting together a conference program for that crowd is something of a challenge. But we still had a good time, and got a lot done.

Eric Idle's FCC Song

Eric Idle has just put a little ditty called The FCC Song up on the Monty Python web. The lyrics may be found on Lisa Rein's website (which is also an essential repository of Daily Show and Bill Moyers video clips).

Simple, isn't it?

My last few posts have mentioned the importance of simplicity, so having praised IBM I now feel free to tease them.

A few years ago I went to a conference in Sydney, Australia, and I sat in on a session given by a (US-based) IBM marketeer. He was trying to sell the ease of deployment of some middleware product from IBM, and he kept on stressing the importance of "simplistic solutions" and "simplistic user interfaces". Never "simple", always "simplistic". Most people were polite (and some, I'm sure, never recognized the verbal gaffe), but a few of us had red faces and watering eyes as we tried to avoid the hysterical laughter that threatened to overwhelm us....

Afterwards an Australian colleague asked me if "simplistic" had a different meaning in the US. I often wondered if anyone told the unfortunate speaker of his mistake.

Book recommendation: Autonomic Computing

I've just posted a review on Amazon.com of Autonomic Computing by Richard Murch. Yes, I know it's an IBM Press publication, so dial up your "self-serving bullshit" filters - but not too high. Overall this is a really useful book. While it's targeted at CIOs and their staffs (folks who have read, and bought into, the Autonomic Computing Manifesto), it's not afraid to dive the details and point at source code to back up the architectural diagrams. It discusses what's going on in the research community and what competitors (including Sun) are up to. And I like the way the author models "customer maturity"; the readiness and ability of customers to take up some of the things described in the book. I disagree with some of his numbers, but without this kind of model the temptation to believe one's own propaganda is irresistible.

There are a few goofs (mobile agents? please, no), as well as some yawning gaps (systems modelling and policy languages). And while it's reasonable to skip the IBM-heavy business stuff at the front on a first reading, don't put the book away without going back to it. In particular, don't skip chapter 2, on the costs of complexity. As I noted in an earlier blog entry, simplicity and staying on topic is key.

Recommended.

The other other side of spam

Spammers harvest addresses for two reasons. The most important is to generate targets. A secondary use is to fake the From address.

A couple of days ago, a spammer sent out a message with my address as the From. As a result, I've been getting bombarded with email from spam filters, mailer-daemons, and so forth. So far I've received at least 300 such messages. For perfectly good reasons, these don't get flagged as spam.

This last happened to me about 4 years ago. Back then, I got a few vacation-daemon replies, a few angry human-generated replies, and not much else; it was all over in 24 hours. What I've noticed this time around is the wide variety of software-generated responses, and the way that the responses just keep coming. In part, of course, this reflects the diffeent responses from MTA and MUA based spam detectors. However I'm also seeing patterns that suggest that many people must be using mail services with really long latencies. A "mailbox over quota" three days after the event suggests that normal deliveries to that user are likely to be equally slow. Odd.

Bush as Iran's proxy: how ironic, how tragic, how stupid

As Newsday reports,

The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.

"Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein," said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.

When the history books are written, this may well turn out to be one of the greatest deceptions of all time. How ironic that they chose this moment to release the film Troy, which centres around one of the Barbara Tuchman's quintessential follies. More from Newsday:

Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency's Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi's U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. "They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to," he said.

"I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work," he said.

Your tax dollars at work, funding an Iranian disinformation and agit-prop campaign, manipulating a U.S. president into finishing up the Iran-Iraq war. (Didn't we used to be on the other side of that one - supplying Saddam with intelligence and WMD materials?) This has been a bit like those incidents in Afghanistan where one tribal warlord would tell the US that his rival was "Taliban", calling down an air strike in furtherance of his vendetta. Instead of calling in an AC-130 gunship, Iran was able to "call in" the entire Imperial might of the U.S. military. Just amazing. When the smoke clears, and the U.S. has been forced out of Iraq, will we find that Iran has won?

Reality sinks in....

I hate it when Pat Buchanan is right...

Don't you just hate it when a blow-hard bigot like Buchanan [corrected - thanks Paul] is simply right - and eloquently so - as he is here on The meaning of Fallujah? Fortunately he is irrepressibly WRONG in many other ways elsewhere on his site, so my feelings of cognitive dissonance aren't too severe....

So who reads these things anyway?

Two days ago Glynn Foster asked the question that is the subject of this thread. I'd like to respond in the first person singular, rather than attempting unsupported generalizations.

The main reason that I think about who reads my blog is that I'm interested in attracting readership from a wide variety of different groups. I find that this leads to opportunities for interesting and unexpected follow-on discussions, whether in blog comments or via email. It also gives me reasons to think about, and post about, a much wider range of subjects. Some topics may not interest you personally, but I hope that each one will amuse, or infuriate, or stimulate at least one of you.

Why? Well, I think about my own blog reading. I know the kind of blog that I tend to linger over, to bookmark, to return to, to link to from my blog. And I know the kind of blog that makes me shudder and hit BACK as quickly as possible. (Entries longer than a screenful tend to do it - sorry Manfreet.) I guess I'd like to make my blog a "go to" blog for others. It's a modest enough ambition. As long as I don't blow my bandwidth allocation, I'd like to increase my traffic - why not? I watch my site stats (my provider uses Webalizer) and trackbacks for any hotspots. But all of this requires that I think about who's reading my blog - not just my family, and a few friends from Sun who see it scroll by on the PlanetSun aggregator, but the rest of them, out there in the blogosphere. Cthulu help me if they find it boring and tune me out!

Mine's a pint of ESB....

A good friend just pointed me at the lyrics and MP3 of a song to bring a lump to the throat of every English expatriate - Let The Symbol Of Our Nation Be A Pub. Brilliant! Whose round is it?

This whole sickening Iraqi prison situation, from someone who knows about such things

An e-friend from the Al Stewart mailing list, Terry Karney, has posted a couple of detailed articles on technical/legal issues arising from interrogations in the prison in Baghdad. He knows what he is talking about: he was over there, in military intelligence, until he was evacuated for medical reasons.

As he writes elsewhere:

...right now I am ashamed of my profession... I'm an interrogator, and while only MPs and officers... have been implicated, it was said to be in the interest of people in my line of work.... I feel dirty, unclean, with spotted hands.

The full piece is poetic, tragic. My heart goes out to him.

It's official

SOA book review at Amazon

As some of you will know, I'm professionally involved in service oriented architecture, distributed computing, web services, and stuff like that. So you shouldn't be surprised that I posted a review of Thomas Erl's Service-Oriented Architecture : A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services over at Amazon.com. Since all reviews become the property of Amazon, I'll let you go and read it yourself. Or I can tell you that the title of my review was "A thoroughly misleading title; useful for a limited purpose", and let you draw your own conclusions.

Goodbye to friends

A sad day here at Sun, as the previously-announced layoffs (involuntary severance, reductions in force, downsizings, pick your euphemism) started to take effect. On some previous occasions I have been a manager, and have therefore had some insight into how the process unfolds. This time I was just another individual contributor, and had no advance warning of any kind. The managers and HR department are (unfortunately) getting quite good at this kind of thing - it's not a skill that I would wish them to cultivate.

I have no particular wish (nor, per Sun's Policy on Public Discourse, would it be appropriate) to discuss the business issues surrounding the layoffs. Nor is it time to discuss the consequences of all of the project changes and cancellations that accompany a RIF, although some of my colleagues whose blogs are syndicated on PlanetSun have done so. Instead, this evening I find myself thinking about the friends and colleagues whom I will miss going forward. The familiar (if distorted) face at the other end of a video conference. The presence on the mailing list always ready with a sardonic quip or a helpful suggestion. The now-empty office that used to be a rendezvous when I travelled out to Menlo Park or Santa Clara. (But not empty for long - space consolidation will swallow up empty offices rapidly.)

Tonight I'd like to thank all of the people that I've worked with over the many years that I've been at Sun, particularly those who are no longer with the company and whose departure was involuntary. I wish you were still here. You know who you are.

On my next vacation

DisneyWorld is totally passé (whether in Florida, France, or Japan). I want to go to Suoi Tien Park! Or I do if it's as much fun as it looks from the web site. I'm particularly interested in the Unicorn Palace with Hell Ten courts inside, a unique and magnificent way of education for people. I understand that this incorporates ten highly imaginative kinds of hell, designed for people guilty of different kinds of sin - shades of Dante. I'm not clear on how interactive the experience is....

Book chain

"The crew numbered nearly a hundred and served a dozen or so guests, who had come from Britain via Paris, where they had stayed at the Ritz." From A Peace To End All Peace by David Fromkin.
Posted in accordance with Dave's instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book,
2. open it to page 23,
3. find the 5th sentence,
4. post its text along with these instructions,
5. point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads.

Hand held devices (long)

On the occasion of my acquiring a new hand-held computing device, I thought I'd try to list all of the little computers that I've used over the years.

I'm not too sure about the order of some of these, but never mind. Back in the mid-1990s, I was CTO for the Network Software group under Terry Keeley, and I was travelling a tremendous amount and needed mobile email. I obtained an HP-200LX, an MS-DOS system with an 8088 clone, 4MB RAM (some for program memory, some for RAM disk), and apps like Lotus 1-2-3 in ROM. I had a Motorola wireless modem which used the RAM wireless network to exchange email (slowly!).

Like everyone else, I got a Palm Pilot soon after they first came out. Unlike most, I managed to get hold of the ultra-cool clear plastic case version. Over the years I had a number of other Palms and clones: a Palm III, a Palm V, and a Visor Edge.

I played around with Microsoft's fumblings in this marketplace, buying both clamshell and palm-style Casio Cassiopeias. I never really liked any of them, and by the time Microsoft and Compaq got it right with the iPaq, I'd moved on.

I was inevitably intrigued by the idea of running Linux on a hand-held system, and so when rumours started appearing about the Agenda VR-3 I was one of the first to plonk down my dosh. I joined the developer group, set up the toolchains, rebuilt the kernels, the whole bit. As an experiment, it was great. As a practical PDA, it was useless. Oh, well. I understand that a new company has bought up the assets and is making a new attempt to productise it.

Hard on the heels of the Agenda came the Sharp Zaurus. Surely with the weight of a major consumer electronics company behind it, this was going to be a different kettle of fish. I bought an SL-5000D developer unit, set up the toolchains, downloaded all the pieces, rebuilt everything, did the whole Linux geek bit, played with the embedded Java VM, got a CF 802.11 card for it, and was able to surf the web, send and receive email, everything. It's still running, sitting on my desk next to my PC. I just opened a terminal window and typed uptime, and it reported 45 days. So why don't I use it every day? Well, before I get on to that, I have some more units to discuss.

I've always been intrigued by the idiosyncratic British computer industry. 20 years ago it seemed that only the US, UK, Japan and USSR were actually developing original computer architectures. By the turn of the millennium, it was down to the US with a minor role for the the UK and a stealth move by the Japanese to change the rules using videogames. But in the UK there was still ARM, who seemed to own the embedded CPU architecture space, and Psion, with a range of hand-held systems in various form factors. A few years ago the US company S3 decided to try its hand at PDAs by OEMing Psion's entry-level model, the Revo. They called it the Diamond Mako. The effort was a fiasco, and in short order there were Diamond Makos available for chump change. So of course I bought one. It's actually a very nice little machine, perfect for note-taking because of the beautifully-designed keyboard. Unfortunately the synchronization software is a bit lacking. This machine is also in almost daily use, as a game unit: there are a few games on it that my wife really likes.

PDA functionality is one thing, but what about communications? My HP-200LX had supported wireless email, and I still needed that capability. Unfortunately the RAM network was no longer available, so I looked around for alternatives. After using a variety of unremarkable cell-phones, I was an early customer for the Neopoint NP-1000, probably the first phone to have a really big screen with high text resolution. It also had a good suite of PDA-style applications and PC synchronization tools. Unfortunately it turned out to be excellent at everything except telephony! (Reportedly it was let down by a certain large supplier of telephony chip-sets....)

After bouncing around from provider to provider, and trying a variety of phones, I wound up with a Nokia 3650 GSM phone with AT&T. I find with this that I can access all of my email accounts (work, home, and Yahoo), I use the built-in calendar for my personal appointments, and my business appointments are handled through automated (scripted) text messaging. It works with my laptop using Bluetooth, for remote control, as a wireless modem, and to share files and pictures.

Which brings me back to the why of all this, and then to the new kid on the block. I tend not to use a PDA any more, because it's just too much stuff to carry. My phone and my laptop do it all, and I can't do without either of those. I guess I could move to something like a Treo 600 (the current alpha geek toy), but only because that keeps the number of tools to just 2.

One reason to keep the number of tools down is to make space for toys. I have an iPod, which is essential when travelling (but not at work, because everything on my iPod is also on my laptop). I used to carry a digital camera; now I only do so on vacations, because for ad hoc pictures my Nokia 3650 is quite adequate. And now I need to make room for my latest acquisition, a Game Boy Advance SP. I'm intrigued by the idea of a sub-$100 system with a 32-bit ARM CPU, GPU, 96KB VRAM, 32KB fast RAM, and 256KB external RAM. (Good grief, there's even been work on porting Linux to the beast!) But yes, first and foremost this is a games system - and despite the size, some of the games are really compelling.

I've actually been thinking about this for some time, but wasn't sure whether this would work for me. I got lots of sound advice from the 8-year old son of a colleague in California. Then my friend Hannah was good enough to lend her Game Boy Color to me to get some first-hand experience, and I rapidly concluded that the form factor was right, the games were good, but my 53-year old eyes needed the larger screen and the back-lighting of the GBA SP. And when all's said and done, it's just a $99 dollar computer - a slightly bizarre notion, but what the heck.

Anyway, I must now get back to my persona in Golden Sun: The Lost Age. I believe my party of adventurers is under attack....

A face from the past

Check out this picture. Click on "Section 3". Mouse over the face in the top row, third from the left. Was that really me? I guess so.... over 36 years ago.

Spring cleaning, and a whiff of nostalgia

A little while ago I posted my thoughts on spring cleaning and how best to avoid it. Well, today it finally caught up with me, and I decided to take a hard look at my closet. At the back, neatly arrayed on hangers and covered with tissue, were all of my oldest Sun t-shirts, dating back to 1985. The collection included a dozen different shirts for PC-NFS, dating from 1986 ("PC-NFS: More fun in the Sun") to 1996 (the tenth anniversary of the first customer shipment). Some were a bit threadbare,a few had yellowed with age, some of the silk-screening had faded....

Also in the stack was the notorious "grilled chameleon" shirt. Way back in the early 1990s, a little software house called NetManage was going around claiming that it had invented a bunch of PC networking technologies. Those of us that had actually done the invention (from companies like Sun, FTP Software, Beame & Whiteside, and Microsoft) were more than a little ticked off at this. So the guys at B&W came up with a shirt showing a bunch of geeks (tolerable likenesses, actually) barbecuing a chameleon, which was NetManage's logo. We all signed copies of the shirt, and a couple were raffled for charity.

[Note: I just checked out NetManage's website, and they are still repeating the lies about their involvement in the Windows Sockets work. Just for the record: the authors of the WinSock spec were Mark Towfiq (then of FTP), Martin Hall (JSB), Dave Treadwell and Henry Sanders (both Microsoft) and myself (Sun). We started by considering the implementations from our four companies, plus that of NetManage. The result was different from all five. There never was any "reference implementation"; interoperability was worked out at a series of multivendor testing sessions. The engineers from NetManage admitted that their claims were baseless, but told us that Zvi (the founder) insisted on them. Sad that one of the first genuinely collaborative initiatives of the Internet era should be turned into a pissing contest. Oh, well.]

Anyway, enough with old shirts that I'll never wear. Out they all go.

CNN's rules of engagement

I just finished reading P. W. Singer's fascinating article Warriors for hire in Iraq, and the follow-up piece Outsourcing the war. I strongly recommend that you take a look at both of them.

One particular paragraph caused me to look twice in disbelief:

Each firm determines its own standards and procedures, and there is no formal regulation or even an industry self-regulatory mechanism to establish them or to police and punish those who fall below standards. While the best firms will blackball rogue or incapable employees, the industry has grown so huge and the clients remain so clueless that such tagging offers minimal recourse. For instance, industry insiders could only shake their heads when one firm invited CNN "Crossfire" talk-show host Tucker Carlson to ride along on a mission into Iraq. Not only did the firm's personnel give the conservative pundit an AK-47 to wield in the middle of a volatile war zone, but when they needed gas, Carlson and crew took over an Iraqi gas station by holding local civilians waiting in line at gunpoint. (One hopes he wasn't wearing his trademark bowtie, which would have only added to the local insult.) Carlson described the incident with proud delight in Esquire magazine, apparently not understanding the multiple industry sins that had been committed.

Hmmm. This is CNN, not Fox. I wonder if CNN has any comments on this kind of behaviour by their "journalists". I shall ask them.

Are there any rules about blogs?

In a long thread of comments attached to my recent posting about Easter, I ventured an opinion that this thread was closed, that I didn't think blog entries should generate permathreads. Susan expressed good-natured frustration and asked if there were any rules about such things.

Rules in the blogosphere?

Well, the blog owner presumably has a say about how his or her resources get used. I don't think by allowing comments a blog becomes a common carrier or anything like that. As for the thread in question, I guess I could simply ignore it and let others use it to discuss the topic. I know at least one Sun colleague who makes a point of posting infrequent, thought-provoking articles and then never contributing to the follow-up discussion. Personally I'd rather be discussing what's happening to the company that's such a big part of my life (Sun), or pondering depressing questions like this.

In general, a blog reaches a narrower audience than a mailing list. A comment thread on a particular blog entry reaches an even narrower audience: those people who read the blog and are sufficientlyinterested in the top-level entry to dig into the comments. It seems an oddly unproductive use of one's time to post lengthy contributions which so few people will read, and even more unproductive if you have reason to believe that the blog owner (the one reader you can count on) won't be sympathetic to your thesis.

Finally, you can always start up your own blog, write an article on your favorite topic, then post a comment to my blog referencing that article. That way, people who really want to debate the symbolic meaning of nails in the Crucifixion can go hog wild, while I can move on to something more important, like whether painting your roof white can save you big bucks on air conditioning..... [Another gem from those good people at BoingBoingBlog.]

Back to the Future

On April 4 I posted a piece in which I discussed my reactions to the Sun-Microsoft deal. This week I was in California for meetings at the Sun Menlo Park campus when the news broke about the big reorg. As the dust begins to settle, I thought I'd blog my initial reactions to this. After all, I've been at Sun nearly 19 years, and it's a big part of my life.

First, let me summarize the announcement (since some journalists still couldn't get it right even after the press flash, the analysts' call, and widespread discussions). Before this change, Sun was organized into a number of business units. ESP built mid- to high-range SPARC servers; VSP built low- to mid-range servers based on SPARC, Xeon, and Athlon processors, as well as SPARC workstations; PNP designed SPARC chips (fabbed outside); NWS did storage systems; SW did software: Solaris, Java, middleware, desktop, N1, identity, embedded.

After the change, NWS and SW are essentially unchanged (so far). Throughput Systems absorbs ESP, PNP, and the SPARC-based products from VSP. Network Systems gets the Xeon and Athlon lines from VSP, plus the Kealia acquisition. My guess is that Nauticus will also go into NS, though I haven't seen anything definitive.

My thoughts on all this. First, I think it's a step in the right direction. In the past, there have been charter issues about exactly where ESP and VSP should draw the line: now we'll have a single division responsible for a (hopefully simplified) range of SPARC based products. The big debate about the roles of MPs versus blades in systems remains - after all, it's not just a Sun thing - but it should be easier to get the balance right when it's not seen as a turf issue any more.

Second, I want to understand exactly what the NS value proposition is. The announcement talked about low-cost horizontally scaled systems with off-the-shelf components that leverage industry economics. Does that mean a low-margin model, or a high-value one? If the latter, there needs to be a substantial investment in software to complement the off-the-shelf components. Does all that get done in SW, or should we split SW and move certain pieces into NS?

We've tried various ways of organizing SMI over the years. I regard the new structure as SMI 4.0. Here's the taxonomy:

SMI 0.x: The original Sun with Scott, Vinod, Andy, Bill and the small gang of obsessive crazies who wouldn't take "no" for an answer and got Sun off the ground. Led to...
SMI 1.0: when Bernie Lacroute came on board in 1984. Strong, relatively centralized engineeering and operations, with Bernie as effective COO. In this period we laid the foundation for real growth: SPARC, the AT&T deal to unify Unix, strong engineering processes under Rob Gingell. This was also the era of the 386i workstation (with which I was involved), and the infamous "Larry Garlick Memorial Decision" not to get into the router business. I think the last of these may have been one of the things that precipitated...
SMI 2.0: The era of "The Planets": a core computer business (SMCC) surrounded by a number of independent business units: SunSoft, SunConnect, SunPics, SunSelect, and so forth. I remember Fortune magazine hailing this as the breakthrough model for the 1990s. It allowed us to enter and exit certain markets fairly painlessly - who remembers SunPics, the Sun printer business? - but it confused customers, because each BU had its own sales force and we couldn't coordinate the customer-facing activities. Plus each BU was really very independent, and there were armies of people doing nothing but negotiating intra-Sun transfer pricing. (There's a lesson here for bureaucracies that try to achieve efficiency though "internal markets": they don't work.) So during the 1990s there was a gradual shift to...
SMI 3.0: The defining characteristic of this version of SMI was the move to a single sales force. Because this changed the nature of the BUs, and led to a degree of functional rationalisation, it was tempting to see functionalism as the driving force, but it wasn't. Behind the single sales force, the various BUs remained (?fiercely) independent. And the functional organization was never as total as it might appear. Scott might tell me that he'd "put all of software under Jonathan", but these days engineering is software, except for a bit of physics, and there was (and is) software development going on all over Sun - appropriately so. The fact that Zander was COO for a while, and a few high-profile people came and went, and we went through the bubble, didn't really change this model. But the decision to put Jonathan Schwartz in as COO, and his "activist" managerial style, definitely signals a shift, to...
SMI 4.0: Maybe this should be SMI 3.1 instead, but never mind. This model has a strong Back To The Future feel: Jonathan Schwartz gets to play the part of Bernie Lacroute. One sales force, internal units organized for operational efficiency and execution rather than along business lines.

It's never boring.

Music for flying

Just flew down from Seattle to San Francisco. Due to ATC restrictions at SFO, we left late and had to hold for a couple of orbits at Point Reyes. This gave me the opportunity to listen to one of the best bands you've never heard of: Family. English, hippie, musically eclectic. They released a couple of brilliant albums at the end of the 1960s called Family Entertainment and Music From A Doll's House. A couple more albums followed, but IMHO they never recaptured the genius of those first two. Anyway, those two albums have been released as a double CD, and I have them on my iPod. Listening to Processions and Face In The Cloud while gazing down upon beautiful Point Reyes was delightful. (And the former seemed so apposite - how far I've come from the teenager who first listened to that record in my student dorm at Essex University all those years ago.)

Anyway: highly recommended.

Easter, part 2

I didn't mention where I was staying in Seattle. It's a new Silver Cloud hotel at Broadway and Madison. I love the slightly freaky cosmopolitan character of Broadway, and yet we're only a few minutes walk from Pioneer Square. Highly recommended.

So this morning I met up with Chris and Celeste for coffee, and eventually we headed over to the Cathedral for the 11 o'clock service. One of Chris's jobs as acolyte was to to be one of three manipulating 12 foot long poles (actually more like fishing rods - really flexible and whippy) with long streamer ribbons on the ends. As the Easter procession snaked around the pews (accompanied by a satisfying amount of incense - that takes me back a few years!), they twirled the ribbons above the congregation. The whole effect was like something out of a painting from the Italian Renaissance.

Bishop Warner gave a nice sermon in which he quoted various poets including John Lennon, citing (without any irony) "imagine there's no religion". The folks at St. Mark's don't seem to want doctrinal issues to get in the way of being nice to each other and building a community....

The other cool thing about the service was the music. I grew up on Palestrina and plainsong, and I've found much of what passes for "religious" music these days to be about as moving as "I'd like to buy the world a Coke". The music at St. Mark's was delightful, both as music and in context. From a performance perspective, the organist, trumpet soloist, and percussion were superb, while the choir was very good (but not great). As for the compositions, much of the music was written by one Peter Hallock. I'd never heard the name before, but the style was striking and effective - and very English. Strongest influences were clearly Britten and Warlock, though there were touches of Saint-Saens. I visited the Cathedral shop and bought a CD of his works after the service. I gather that he has been associated with St. Mark's for years, and was responsible for arranging their renowned Sung Compline program.

After lunch, we split up, and I did some serious power-walking - from the hotel down Madison to Pioneer Square, up 1st Street to the Public Market, then over Pike Street to Broadway and back. After that I was too knackered to do much else; Chris and I met up for a drink and then retired. (Memo to self: my drink was a strong English cider by Aspall. Stunning.)

Tomorrow morning to SFO on Alaska Air, and so to work.

Easter with Chris

Just got back to my hotel [in Seattle] after the Easter service at St. Mark's Cathedral. No, I haven't gone and got religion; I was there with my son, Chris, who was being confirmed. A long service (started 8:30pm, finished about 11:15pm, we left the post-service socializing around 11:30pm), and a beautiful one. For the first 2 hours the church was lit only by the hundreds of candles the congregation and celebrants were holding. Now maybe I'm just an old fogey, but they don't make candles like they did when I was an altar boy! These skinny little things burned down in around 45 minutes for most people, around 30 minutes for me. (No idea why mine burned quicker than usual.)

Chris's sponsor was a really nice ex-teacher called Steve. During dinner before the service he and I got into a nice discussion about the relative importance of tradition and integrity (as in, why do Christians not cut out all of that blatantly un-Christian stuff from the Bible? Cue Thomas Jefferson...). Ironically, most of the readings during the first part of the service (before the baptisms, confirmations, and reaffirmations) were Old Testament passages of really questionable relevance to Christian values and beliefs. Steve had the good grace to acknowledge the fact....

Ah, well. I must head to bed, so that I can get up and meet Chris and Celeste for breakfast before tomorrow's service when Chris will be an acolyte (complete with white robes and coloured streamers).

[By the way, religious proselytizers need not waste their time posting comments about religion. I've heard them all before, and I'm not interested.]

My best places to live

Inspired (as so often) by Chris, I checked out Sperling's Best Places to see where my ideal place to live might be. Of course, this only looks at the US, so thoughts of London, Oxford, Paris or Melbourne will have to wait. My top ten:
1 San Francisco, CA
2 Boston, MA-NH-ME
3 Long Island, NY
4 Washington, DC-MD-VA-WV
5 Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA
6 New York, NY
7 Pittsburgh, PA
8 Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI
9 Chicago, IL
10 Stamford-Norwalk, CT

I could have guessed the first two, but it's interesting that a fairly complex multivariate analysis came up with the same results. Dunno why Los Angeles in in there - maybe museums and music.

On the road ag- Wait, I've already used that title...

I'm about to resume my twisted love affair with the Boeing 757. On Friday morning I'm heading off to Seattle to spend the weekend with my son, Chris. On Monday I'll fly down to San Francisco, and I'll be in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area through Thursday for a series of business meetings. I'll fly home on Friday the 16th.

Not always an early adopter

Those who know me as a geek par excellence, owner of lots of hand-held computers (including two different models running Linux - is that geeky enough?) may be surprised that until now I've never purchased a camcorder. In part, this is because I mistrust electromechanical devices - the mechanical bits tend to fail - and I'm well aware that I am unlikely to use the device very often. I'm not the kind of guy that has boxes of family photos and videotapes of "precious moments" stored in order to be used as unconventional weapons against unsuspecting visitors. I tend to scurry around looking for a camera right before I head off on vacation, and if I haven't transferred all of the pictures to my computer the day I get home they're likely to languish in the camera in the closet until next time.

But enough of that. Inspired by a crude video that my son-in-law took at my father-in-law's 80th birthday bash, I have acquired a Mini-DV camcorder, a Panasonic PVGS9.It cost $349, plus a FireWire cable and some tapes. Circuit City threw in a tripod and a camera bag. The tripod is nice (but will I remember where I put it when I need it?), the camera bag is useless. It was designed for the last generation of camcorders but one; this baby is tiny (3.38 x 2.75 x 4.38 inches). It would be lost in the bag.

While charging the battery, I read the manual. There are dozens of weird and wonderful effects built in, none of which I will ever use. I plan to suck the video straight into my PowerBook and edit it using iMovie (which has wonderful effects and simple drag-and-drop composition, editing, sound track addition, transitions, and so forth). Then I'll burn it to DVD using iDVD, which will allow me to do the titling, menus, etc. A simple test suggests that I should be able to edit, title, and render a simple 30 minute video in around an hour, which feels like the right input-output ratio. The camera did its job really well: nothing unexpected happened, it just worked. I'll let you know how it goes.

Didn't want to imply....

My last post about Iraq might have given the wrong impression about the troops over there. Just because things are fraying at the edges doesn't mean everybody's cracked. I've been reading A View from a Broad to get a soldier's perspective. Most eye-opening comment: about the poor XXXXXXXXX troops:

If you want to take some of the time and attention you've been giving to me, you might want to think about the XXXXXXXXX soldiers who provided help, support, and first aid to our lost soldier. They have been stranded here without pay for six months, and lack even phone cards to call home to rectify the situation. They helped a dying man at the scene of the accident, and now it would be nice to return the favor. Some of the toiletries various people have been nice enough to send will be going to them.

Edited: The original poster has just deleted the nationalities of the soldiers involved for "security reasons. I'll do the same, although deleting stuff from the web is a pointless exercise.

Music

Remember the scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian:
BRIAN: Look. You've got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves. You're all individuals!
FOLLOWERS: Yes, we're all individuals!
BRIAN: You're all different!
FOLLOWERS: Yes, we are all different!
DENNIS: I'm not.
ARTHUR: Shhhh.
FOLLOWERS: Shh. Shhhh. Shhh.
BRIAN: You've all got to work it out for yourselves!
FOLLOWERS: Yes! We've got to work it out for ourselves!

Most of us like to think that we are independent thinkers, that we won't follow the herd and latch on to each new craze. On the other hand, if the "new craze" is really good....?

All of this is an elaborate way of saying that I'm hooked on the eponymous first album by the Scottish group Franz Ferdinand. I heard a review on NPR's All Things Considered, was intrigued, received a rave recommendation from a friend, and bought it. Now I'm helping to spread the meme.... As for a description, imagine what would have happened if XTC hadn't lost the recipe. There are definitely overtones of the Dukes of Stratosphear, the alter ego that XTC created to fool around with music from different genres and eras. But lyrically the FF songs are superior to XTC's, and that's saying something.

We have always been at war with Eastasia....

If you visit Amazon.com and look up "1984", you'll see a review which begins with the following words:

Airstrip One is part of the vast political entity Oceania, which is eternally at war with one of two other vast entities, Eurasia and Eastasia. At any moment, depending upon current alignments, all existing records show either that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia, or that it has always been at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia. Winston Smith knows this, because his work at the Ministry of Truth involves the constant "correction" of such records. "'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"

I was reminded of this when I saw the photographs of Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer, laughing and shaking hands last Friday. I've worked at Sun for nearly 19 years, and during that time Microsoft has always been the "Eastasia" with which our "Oceania" was at war. It was particularly awkward for me in the early years, because I worked on PC-NFS®, a software product that enabled DOS and Windows PCs to use Sun's NFS [network file system] to share files. This obviously involved down'n'dirty systems programming hackery of Microsoft's operating systems. I can still remember my first visit to meet the SunOS (Unix) group in California back in November, 1985, and their reaction when I told them that the NFS and UDP/IP software in PC-NFS was written as a 64KB device driver in x86 assembly language. And in the spirit of "using what you write", I was always a PC user, attacting odd looks from colleagues with their Sun workstations. (I'm still an odd-ball, with my Mac PowerBook rather than a SunRay.)

Initially I think the competition with Microsoft was healthy for Sun - it certainly helped us punch above our weight in the marketing game. However, over the years the rivalry intensified and by the late 1990s it got w-a-a-y too heated for anyone's good. It all culminated in various nasty lawsuits over Microsoft's forking of Java and other monopolistic practices. My view was that the suits were thoroughly justified from a legal standpoint, but that it wasn't clear that they were helping us in our primary rôle as a commercial enterprise. It probably distracted our customers, and I know that it distracted us. I'm sure that psychologists have a term (and a DSM IV category) for people who define themselves by what they are against rather than what they are for, by who they are not rather than who they are. Anyway, it became an institutionalized thing, much like the Red Sox and the Yankees, or Glasgow Celtics and Glasgow Rangers.

But now the Ministry of Truth has spoken. We have always been at war with Eurasia, and Eastasia is our ally. It's going to take some getting used to.....

Cognitive dissonance

Press release from the White House:

Iraq Fact of the Day
Civic Pride in Iraq's Capital

The CPA, responding to a Baghdad City Council request, is allocating $10 million to brighten the city's public parks, squares and playgrounds. The funding will provide lighting in the capital's outdoor public places, new murals, sculptures, and landscaping. Revitalization of Baghdad's public areas shows civic pride and is another example of the Iraqis' faith in their future.

Source: Coalition Provisional Authority, Baghdad

A chilling experience....

A friend on the Al Stewart mailing list just posted a pointer to a strangely compelling and horrifying website, Kid of Speed. The author, Elena, is a biker (she owns a Kawasaki Ninja) who lives 130 kilometres from Chernobyl. The site is a photo-record of her journeys through the dead zone that is Chernobyl today. It goes on, and on, and on. Make sure you take the time to give it the attention that it deserves.

[Update: July 14, 2004: This may be a hoax. Maybe not.]

Why a Mac user?

No, not "why do I use a Mac". That should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of good taste. Someone asked me why I included that in my tag line at the top of this page. Looking at the list, I was struck by the fact that several of the roles that I claim represent minority positions, albeit fiercely proud ones. I'm an atheist living in a depressingly superstitious and hagiographic culture, a country where a self-avowed unbeliever couldn't be elected to public office. A Mac user surrounded by victims of mediocre software from Redmond, WA. A liberal in a society where many treat that as term of opprobrium.

In an increasingly homogenized world, claiming membership in a minority group seems like an obvious way to define oneself as different. We all do it, don't we? :-)

On the road again is getting to be déjà vu

Once again I'm in California, this time for a conference of Sun's software engineering leadership. Despite the constant phone and video conferences, there's no substitute for getting a bunch of peers together in one place for long enough to meet new people, eavesdrop on interesting conversations, and reinforce long-time relationships. While the trend may be towards highly distributed teams and working from home, management ignores the importance of face-to-face contact and social interactions at their peril....

This evening I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. I was a bit nervous because of Stephanie Zacharek's bittersweet review in Salon.com, but I needn't have worried: I absolutely loved it. This review by Mike McGranaghan captures it perfectly. Highly recommended.

I've also been reading Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies. (There are far too many essential political books coming out these days. Perhaps it's all a conspiracy by the publishers!) Clarke and his book have occasioned much debate this week, including flaming to the ombudsman of the New York Times by many people (including your's truly). As I've read it, I've been struck by four things. First, it's the first book I've read that pulls together the terrorist-related events of the last 15 years into a coherent narrative. Second, an awful lot of stuff went on during the Clinton presidency that was almost ignored because of the scandal-mongering of The Vast Right-wing Conspiracy. Third, Clarke comes across as a professional who is frequently annoyed, frustrated, and dismissive of the political amateurs that he had to put up with. And finally, while I'm sure that the book is occasionally self-serving, I'm equally convinced that it is a fundamentally honest account. Also recommended.

On the road again....

The recent hiatus in blogging was in part the result of a business trip to Denver.

I flew out there last Thursday and stayed overnight with some old friends who are now living in the back of beyond, 50 miles SE of the city. (35 acres, with deer, wildcats, and great horned owls for neighbours.) We had a wonderful time, and I got to see the house, the canyon bordering the property, and their three horses. (A gelding, a mare, and a really cute filly a few months old.)

On Friday afternoon I drove up to Denver to attend a Sun Microsystems technical conference. The employees-only meeting was attended by 3,000 field engineers and assorted hangers-on (like me), and it ran from Friday evening through Monday lunchtime. I was due to speak on Sunday evening, and to repeat my talk on Monday right before Scott McNealy's closing session.

I really like Denver, but it had been several years since I had last been there, and I'd been hoping to get a chance to explore a little... maybe meet up with some colleagues and have a nice dinner on Saturday night. However my boss, Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun, gave his talk on Saturday morning, and he pre-empted a lot of what I was planning to say. (It was a great talk, but I wish I'd seen it first.) So instead of relaxing over a buffalo steak and some good wine, I spent Saturday evening reworking 90% of my presentation to fit in with what Greg had said. Fortunately it all went well.

On Monday afternoon, I drove up to the Sun campus at Broomfield, CO to meet with some colleagues and check out the facilities. (It opened several years ago, but this was my first visit.) I had planned to return to Broomfield on Tuesday morning for more meetings, before flying home in the evening. When I got arrived, I had a few minutes and called my wife. "Check the Boston weather forecast," she said. So I did. Snow starting Tuesday afternoon, becoming heavy, gusty winds, possible blizzard conditions by midnight (when I was due to land).

Oops.

I finished my scheduled meeting, then got on the web and the phone to sort stuff out. After talking to our travel agents I was able to book on the first flight out of Denver on Tuesday morning, which was scheduled to arrive in Boston about 30 minutes before the snow was due to start. Of course they could only promise me a middle seat....

So that's what I did. I actually wound up with a window seat, with no one beside me. And I beat the snow home... just. In fact the only problem was that when I went to check out of the hotel (really, really early, and still half asleep) I went down to the lobby, hurried out of the elevator towards the front desk, slipped over on the freshly-washed marble floors, and came down hard on my left hand. It's still pretty sore, but fortunately I didn't break anything. (And yes, they did have warning signs up, but they weren't visible from inside the elevators.)

It's now Wednesday evening. The snow continues, making a mockery of the impending equinox. And on Monday I'll be off on yet another business trip - this time to Silicon Valley in California.

Robin Cook's Book

While I was in California over the last weekend, I picked up Robin Cook's Point of Departure, and read it in a couple of sittings. Rather than providing a detailed review, let me refer you to this review in the Guardian by Malcolm Rifkind, the last Conservative foreign secretary (and therefore a political adversary of Robin Cook).

Despite the obvious Iraq angle, this book is about more than just the rush to war. There are really three aspects to it:

• It provides an invaluable account of the debate within the British government during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
• It gives a detailed view of how "the mother of all Parliaments" actually operates at the beginning of the 21st century, from the point of view of someone who is both a committed Parliamentarian and a passionate voice for modernisation.
• In a lengthy coda, it sets out a strong case for the continuing relevance of a Social Democrat alternative to the prevailing market-centric neo-Liberal orthodoxy.

Tony Blair as Gladstone?

Salon magazine has just put up an interesting piece by Andrew O'Hehir entitled Lost in the Desert. It's about Tony Blair and his disastrous decision to support Bush's war, as portrayed in two new books: "Point of Departure" by Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair's cabinet over the war, and Philip Stephens' "Tony Blair: The Making of a World Leader". The article is fascinating, and Cook's book looks like essential reading - I'm gong to order a copy from Amazon UK tonight.

Another straw in the wind

I caught a few minutes of Lou Dobbs on CNN this evening. He was interviewing Catherine Mann, from the Institute for International Economics, on the subject of trade policy and outsourcing jobs (see my blog entry about my epiphany. She went on and on about the economic benefits of increased trade, and you could see Lou Dobbs getting more and more incredulous. Eventually he asked her about the practical consequences for those whose jobs were outsourced; seemingly surprised, she acknowledged "short-term dislocations" and the need for "workforce flexibility". Dobbs asked her if she was in effect saying that all we could do was spend a few extra dollars on retraining, but that otherwise this was inevitable, and she concurred.

Shortly afterwards, Lou Dobbs revealed the result of an instant poll on the CNN website: 93% of respondents said that outsourcing U.S. jobs is "a threat to the American way of life", 1% said it was "no big deal", and 6% said it was "the price of doing business today". He closed by quoting Thomas Jefferson: "The selfish spirit of commerce ... knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain."

This issue is going to have political consequences. "Sophisticated" people may decry it as crude populism (and may even attempt to characterize it as "class warfare"), but 93% is significant, especially in a medium where the audience tends to be skewed to the right.

P.S. In editing this blog entry, I Googled "Institute for International Economics" and noticed that Ms. Mann's latest publication is Policy Brief 03-11: Globalization of IT Services and White Collar Jobs: The Next Wave of Productivity Growth. This makes the point very nicely, I think: we're going to get people chosing sides on whether outsourcing is, first and foremost, "productivity growth" or "a threat to the American way of life". Which side are you on....?

I have an epiphany (revised)

Yesterday I was reading the latest edition of the Economist entitled The great hollowing-out myth. Now for me the Economist has an almost mythic status. Back in the period 1966-1970 I wanted to be an economist, and to write for the Economist. Even after I fell prey to the siren song of the computer business, the Economist remained the weekly journal by which all other journals were judged. It wasn't just the exquisite prose (though I still regard the written style of the Economist as something to which all writers should aspire); it was also the clarity of vision, of a future in which the muddles and distractions of the present might wither away.

Back to this week's article. It was about the consequences of "offshoring", the outsourcing of various kinds of jobs to India - a fairly common topic these days. As I read it, I felt sure that there was something missing. I finished it, and re-read it to be sure I wasn't dreaming. I wasn't. There was not a single reference to wages (or salaries, or income) of workers in the countries from which these jobs were being outsourced. "That's odd," I thought. "Surely a significant consequence of outsourcing is that workers on the margin - those whose jobs are candidates for outsourcing - will experience significant downward pressure on their wages. And that's going to have political consequences. All very well to go on about the Theory of Comparative Advantage, and about how the overall economy will benefit, but I've never met anyone who cast a vote based on an economic theory rather than their own wages and employment."

I was still puzzled. How could the Economist have overlooked such an important factor? And then I picked up the March edition of Harper's and read the piece by John Ralson Saul entitled The End of Globalism. And I realized that (drum roll) the era of the Economist is over. (Now that's an epiphany!)

John Ralston Saul's thesis is that for the last 30 years technocratic leaders have assumed that economics trumps politics, that globalism trumps nationalism. This, it was asserted, was inevitable, and so of course it provided an excellent excuse for not actually trying to solve real problems - problems such as the decline in real wages, third world debt, and the impending collapse of welfare and educational systems. And for a few years, everybody bought in to the idea.

Eventually a few daring countries decided to act in their own best interests, rather than what the IMF or the World Bank prescribed. Amazingly, the world kept spinning. And as the bubble popped, and the Twin Towers came down, it became clear that it's every nation state for itself. Saul suggests that with the responsibilities that this will bring, people and national leaders will find that they have real choices which will have real consequences. They are not impotent cogs in a globalist machine. It may not be pretty - some of the nationalistic movements seem to be throwbacks to the end of the 19th century - but it seems to be a fact.

As for my"epiphany": the Economist represents the philosophy of the era of globalism. That's why it seemed so exciting and forward-looking back in the late 1960s: it was a harbinger of a great change, a "New World Order" that lasted 30 years (which is about the lifetime of all such things). But today it appears increasingly myopic, unable to apply the incisive critical skills with which it dissected the pre-technocratic world to the present circumstances. Vision has become conventional wisdom, which has in turn become unquestionable ideology.

Anyway, please read these articles, and think about what they mean. As John Ralston Saul writes: History will eventually give all of these contradictory signals a shape. But history is neither for nor against. It just is. And there is no such thing as a prolonged vacuum in geopolitics. It is always filled. This is what happens every few decades. The world turns, shifts, takes a new tack, or retries an old one. Civilisation rushes around one of those blind corners filled with uncertainties.

Kerry on Iraq

In an earlier posting, I offered some language which I thought provided a reasonable explanation of Kerry's vote on Gulf War 2. I contacted the Kerry organization about this (and, to be fair, sent an equivalent email to the Edwards camp). Someone from the Kerry team replied quickly and pointed me at this piece from Truthout last December. Here's the relevant quote:

"This was the hardest vote I have ever had to cast in my entire career," Kerry said. "I voted for the resolution to get the inspectors in there, period. Remember, for seven and a half years we were destroying weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In fact, we found more stuff there than we thought we would. After that came those four years when there was no intelligence available about what was happening over there. I believed we needed to get the weapons inspectors back in. I believed Bush needed this resolution in order to get the U.N. to put the inspectors back in there. The only way to get the inspectors back in was to present Bush with the ability to threaten force legitimately. That's what I voted for."

"The way Powell, Eagleberger, Scowcroft, and the others were talking at the time," continued Kerry, "I felt confident that Bush would work with the international community. I took the President at his word. We were told that any course would lead through the United Nations, and that war would be an absolute last resort. Many people I am close with, both Democrats and Republicans, who are also close to Bush told me unequivocally that no decisions had been made about the course of action. Bush hadn't yet been hijacked by Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney and that whole crew. Did I think Bush was going to charge unilaterally into war? No. Did I think he would make such an incredible mess of the situation? No. Am I angry about it? You're God damned right I am. I chose to believe the President of the United States. That was a terrible mistake."

Pretty damn close, I think. Of course Kerry was wrong in one crucial respect - Bush had already been got at by Cheney, Wolfowitz et al, as Paul O'Neill makes clear in Ron Suskind's book. It would be interesting to ask Kerry about this.

Liberal and its opposite

I just realized that there was something missing from the tagline at the top of my blog, so I added it. Liberal.
Now "liberal" is an odd word in the US. Back home in England it has (at least) three meanings: "a member of the Liberal Democrat party", "large or generous" (as in "a liberal helping of roast beef"), and "free and progressive in outlook", as in "liberal democracy" or "liberal arts". In the US, the first of these is irrelevant, the second is rarely used, and the third has been twisted into a pejorative term by those on the political right - so much so that true liberals are nervous about describing themselves as such.
So to all of those that perversely and ahistorically seek to use the term "liberal" as an insult, I offer this challenge: if you despise the term "liberal", then presumably you must embrace its opposite - "illiberal", meaning narrow, mean-spirited, and ungenerous. Can I expect all of you to claim this odious term for yourselves and your political leadership? I hope so. It surely fits....

Where I've been

OK, Chris did it first, but imitation is healthy, right?


create your own visited states map




create your personalized map of europe
or write about it on the open travel guide

How Kerry can explain his votes on Iraq

Many folks (especially pundits, Howard Dean, and right-wingers) seem to think that Kerry's votes on Iraq mean that he cannot legitimately criticise Bush on the subject. I think that's utter nonsense. Here's one way he could answer those critics. I realise that this text may be a bit too strong -- after all, only 20% of Americans actually believe that Bush lied, while another 35% think he merely "exaggerated". Nevertheless what follows seems to me to be an entirely self-consistent position for Kerry to take:

"I voted to authorize the 2nd Gulf War because I believed the case that the Administration had presented, that Saddam Hussein represented a clear and present danger to the United States. The idea that the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser, and the Secretary of Defense would mislead the Congress and the people over such a crucial matter was something that never even entered my head. What kind of man would undertake a pre-emptive and unilateral war, and would order American troops into battle, to kill and be killed, to slaughter Iraqi civilians, to destroy our standing among the United Nations, and to dramatically increase the likelihood of terrorism against ourselves and our allies, without incontrovertible evidence?
Yet, tragically, I was wrong. The President had no such evidence. His own Intelligence staff warned him of this. Whether you consider him guilty of deliberate lying or merely of exaggerated and wishful thinking, the fact is that the President did not tell us the truth. He misled us in order to persuade us to support an unjust war, a war unconnected to the tragedy of 9/11, and a war which, according to members of his own Cabinet, he had decided to fight as long ago as January, 2001. I trusted the President -- we all did -- and he abused that trust"

From "The Price of Loyalty"

I just finished Suskind's The Price of Loyalty about Paul O'Neill's experiences as Treasury Secretary under Bush. It's a remarkable book. One particular passage really stayed with me. It's on page 292, and follows Dick Cheney's extraordinary assertion: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." I've taken the liberty of quoting the whole thing in the extended entry, here.

As he walked back to his office, to prepare for that evening's flight to Rome and then Pakistan, O'Neill took Cheney's statement and started to pull it apart. Of course, one of the most significant things Ronald Reagan had proved was that deficits do matter - a fact that defined nearly twenty years of fiscal policy.

"I though that, clearly, there's no coherent philosophy that could support such a claim"; and then O'Neill pondered the difference between philosophy and ideology....

He started to deconstruct.

"I think an ideology comes out of feelings and it tends to be non-thinking. A philosophy, on the other hand, can have a structured thought base. One would hope that a philosophy, which is always a work in progress, is influenced by facts. So there is a constant interplay between what do I think and why do I think it....

"Now, if you gather more facts and have more experience, especially with things that have gone wrong - those are especially good learning tools - then you reshape your philosophy, because the facts tell you you've got to. It doesn't change what you wish for. I mean, it's okay to wish for something that's, you know, outside of your fact realm. But it's not okay to confuse all that....

"Ideology is a lot easier, because you don't have to know anything or search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It's not penetrable by facts. It's absolutism."

If awards matter...

The Golden Globes went to the good guys tonight. Lord of the Rings, Lost in Translation, and Mystic River all won in the film categories, while Angels in America cleaned up in the TV section. There were even a couple of awards for that bizarre British comedy series The Office.

The question I'd like to ask Tony Blair

As we approach the release of the Hutton report, and with more and more officials publically voicing the opinion that there were no Iraqi WMDs, Tony Blair has retreated to the position that it's all about his "integrity". Screw integrity: here's what I would ask Blair if I had the chance. "On February 26th 2003, you asked Parliament to support military action against Iraq. If you had known then what you know now - know for a fact, not believe or hope - would you still have asked for a vote to go to war? Yes or no." It's not such a hard question....

Film du jour: "About A Boy"

I picked up the DVD of About A Boy yesterday. It's based on the novel by Nick Hornby, one of the most incisive novelists observing contemporary England. For some reason I missed it when it was in the theatres. Anyway, it's beautiful - and very, very English. It's easily the best thing Hugh Grant (Will) has done, and the 12 year old Nicholas Hoult (Marcus) gives a performance that is both authentic and thoroughly polished.

Oddity: the DVD includes an "English to English" dictionary, to explain to US audiences the meanings of such terms as "bugger off", "bloke", "bloody", "barmy", and "get the wrong end of the stick"...

"Terrorists cause terrorism"

Driving into work this morning I was listening to the BBC World Service on WBUR, my local PBS radio station. In their response to Bush's State of the Union speech yesterday , several Democrats had expressed anger that Bush's policies had left the US isolated. In typical fashion, the BBC decided to follow this up and invited a couple of guests to discuss US isolation.

I didn't catch the name of the first man, an academic with an Arabic name at something like the Institute for the Study of Democracy. The second guest was Tim Spangler from the UK chapter of Republicans Abroad International.

There was about about 10 minutes of discussion, during which Spangler basically cheered on Bush, and the academic pointed out some of the problems of using the term "war" for something as diffuse and open-ended as terrorism. (Clearly he'd never come across the US War on Drugs!)

Quite suddenly, Spangler startled me (and the interviewer, and many others, I should imagine) by interrupting a question about the root causes of terrorism, and declaring, flatly, "We know what causes terrorism. Terrorists cause terrorism. The way to stop terrorism is to hunt down the terrorists and stop them." And though the other two tried to raise questions about political, sociological, and historical factors, Spangler wasn't having any of it. "Terrorists cause terrorism" - case closed.

I wonder if Spangler realized how crass, naive, rude, and simplistic he sounded. Sadly, I doubt it - his uncritical, unsubtle, black-and-white language seemed to come straight from His Master's Voice....

Book notes

On Saturday I went out and bought three new hardbacks:
» Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill"
» Paul Krugman's "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century"
» David Grossman's "Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years After Oslo"
This was rather silly of me, as I was just getting started on the monumental "Wars Against Saddam- The Hard Road to Baghdad" by John Simpson, and I'm still working through "J2EE Platform Web Services" by Ray Lai. But just as I picked up "The Price of Loyalty" this morning, my wife dropped a slim volume in front of me. "Weren't you asking about this?" she said. It was the Whitbread prize-winning "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" by Mark Haddon. The next thing I knew, I'd finished it in one sitting (pausing only for coffee). Brilliant. Essential.

Things to do on a snowy Sunday in New England

(1) Watch the Patriots win the AFC championship. Even though I don't really care for American football (I far prefer soccer and rugby football), it's hard not to be a Pats fan right now.

(2) Watch Millennium Actress on DVD. A wonderful award-winning anime film from Satoshi Kon.

Per ardua ad astra

Rejoice, part deux

According to the News section of Laurence Juber's home page, he's starting production on a new album for Al Stewart. This is consistent with the pattern noted by Fred on the Al Stewart mailing list:


I did predict an ALbum for 2004, based on a long-ago statement by Al that he releases one every US election year.
1972 O
1976 YOTC
1980 24P/C
1984 R&A
1988 LDOTC
1992 RinR
1996 SLAGIATT
2000 DitC

Of course, Al has also released albums in non-election years....

(To decode the abbreviations, please consult the discography.)

Rejoice...

The temperature just climbed back to 32°F here in Boston...

Sean Penn in Baghdad

Essential reading: Sean Penn's two-part piece in the San Francisco Chronicle about his recent visit to Baghdad. To me the most surprising thing (apart from how well Sean Penn writes) was his description of the role of private security contractors - or perhaps "mercenaries" would be more accurate - such as DynCorp.

Bone-chilling weather

Since it's all over the news today, I hardly thought it was worthwhile pointing out that it's really, really cold here. It got up to about 6°F today; right now it's -5°F in Boston, heading for around -9°F overnight. (Up in New Hampshire, the intrepid weathermen atop Mount Washington are anticipating temperatures of -50°F which will break the record set back in 1934.) All of this is accompanied by blustery winds giving us a wind chill of -30°F.

As always, I turn to the One True Source for all this stuff: the home page for the Boston area office of the National Weather Service. One bit that I particularly enjoy is the discussions page, where the meteorologists discuss the forecast, the relative merits of the various computer models, and whatever else strikes them as important, all in uncompromising meterorological jargon. If you read this (and other offices have similar pages), you'll understand much of of how that deceptively simple forecast comes to be made, and why and how things go wrong. Just remember: the "weatherman" on your local TV station is really just an entertainer: these guys are the professionals - geeks all.

Favorite blogs, redux [updated]

OK, I missed some really essential blogs.

First of course Wil Wheaton's. His comment about saving throw vs. Irritated Wife is just brilliant. Thanks.

Next, Ray Ozzie's. A geek's geek.

The Baghdad Burning blog is essential reading. I came across it in this article in Smirking Chimp.

Blogging makes you think about blogs

Here are some of the blogs that I find interesting:

• My son, Chris Arnold's somethingunderstood


• The author Neil Gaiman


• Allen Brill's Rightchristians


• Bruce Sterling's Beyond The Beyond

The kinder, gentler lawyer

Lawyers are everyone's favourite group to hate, and it seems that many lawyers feel much the same way. There was a really good piece in today's Boston Globe Magazine about lawyers who are sick of what they do and how they do it - sometimes physically sick, as in the case of one lawyer: "Every time she was due for court, she would vomit and have diarrhea." The article discusses a variety of groups that are looking for an alternative to "toxic law" - a modus operandi that's better for them and better for their clients. Encouragingly, they seem to be having some success. Recommended.

"The number of executions goes down pretty quickly" [corrected]

Quote of the day, from the Salon article about Howard Ahmanson Jr., the guy who's bankrolling the schismatics in the Episcopal church. Rushdoony (who died in 2001) was a loony racist type who was a formative influence on Ahmanson.

Rushdoony spelled out his philosophy in painstaking detail in his 1973 magnum opus, "Institutes of Biblical Law," which he self-consciously named after John Calvin's "Institutes of Christian Religion." In the 800-page tome, Rushdoony presents his vision for a new America in which the church subsumes the federal government and society is administered according to biblical law, or at least his interpretation of it. According to biblical law, he writes, segregation is a "basic principle," and slavery is permitted "because some people are by nature slaves and will always be so." Those who don't comply with Rushdoony's rules -- disobedient children, "pagans," adulterers, women who get abortions, repeat criminal offenders and, of course, homosexuals -- would be executed. Mrs. Ahmanson, who described Rushdoony as "quirky in some ways," qualified his extremism: "To impose the death penalty you need two witnesses. So the number of executions goes down pretty quickly."

My naivety is showing...

I was under the impression that the U.S. system of justice was a matter of public record - that if someone committed a crime, was arrested, charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced, these events would be in the public record. Of course some trial proceedings have to be in camera, some testimony or evidence has to be redacted for legal or security reasons, but I thought that the existence of the judicial events was a matter of public record.

Wrong. As this story in the Smirking Chimp (reprinted from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel) shows, there have been trials unconnected with matters of public safety or national security in which:

Neither case appeared on the court's public docket, where it would have been assigned a number and scanned into a computer file. As a result, the public had no way of knowing they existed. Hearings were conducted behind closed doors, and all documents and legal motions were filed under seal. The sensitive court papers were kept separately in a vault at the court clerk's office in Miami, according to attorneys familiar with the practice.

I thought such things only happened in police states....

My colour....

What would you like to see in 2004?

As my son Chris asked in his blog, what would you like to see in 2004? If you were a professional soothsayer (no shortage of those!), what predictions about 2004 would you like to become true?

I'll start with three:

(1) In spite of rampant paranoia, there are no 9/11 scale terrorist acts during the year.

(2) The US will undertake no new military action against another country.

(3) George Bush is soundly defeated in November.

Your turn.

TBL gets a K

Tim Berners-Lee gets a knighthood in the New Years Honours list. Well deserved, Tim.

The true meaning of rain....

Americans who learn that I'm from England often make some joke about the weather, usually something to do with rain. Now in my 20+ years in the USA I've experienced all kinds of rainstorms, including a memorable hailstorm while at a trade show in Atlanta which dumped inches of hail in a matter of minutes and left the streets flooded. Nor'easters, hurricanes, ice storms....

But today in California has left me feeling soggy through and through. The Pacific Ocean has simply dumped on the continental coastline. We've had a couple of inches in Carmel Valley, but just north of us a town got 6.5 inches in less than 12 hours. Streams everywhere are flooding; Interstate 5 in Northern California is closed by snow....

So lay off England, please. We will gladly cede top spot in the rainfall rankings to the USA. And remember: those tightly-rolled British umbrellas are just for show.

Oh yes, THAT was the place

I was doing a little egogoogling (Googling for my name) and came across an unexpected reference that took me back 40 years in a trice....

Yes, it's the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, which I attended from 1963 to 1968. This makes me an Old Wycombiensian or something like that....

A bit about me

I'm 53, and a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where I've worked since 1985. You can find a bit about me here. I'm married to Merry and we have two kids, both of whom flew the coop years ago. Chris lives in Seattle; Kate is married to a really nice guy called Mark and they live in Lynn, MA. We live in Brookline, just west of downtown Boston (but fiercely independent!)

When I'm not working or travelling, I'm either curled up in front of my home PC (which faut de mieux runs WinXP, just for the games, you understand), hacking away on my work machine (an Apple PowerBook 12 inch running OS X 10.3.2), playing Soul Calibur II on my PlayStation 2, reading, listening to music, or driving. Recent books include Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right and Clyde Prestowitz's Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions. Current music includes everything by Porcupine Tree, The Legendary Pink Dots, Al Stewart, October Project, the Art Of Noise, Faithless, The Streets, Pet Shop Boys, Marillion, OSI, Heart, and Underworld. A mixed bag, you'll say, and you'd be right. As for driving, my regular car is a 1999 Mercury Cougar, but my real love is my 1996 Mazda Miata, best driven with the top down and the wind in my hair....

Shakin' all over

So we're headed off to Carmel Valley in a couple of days, and this breaks loose. I called ahead: they felt nothing.

I'd like to feel a "safe" earthquake sometime. I've been around during a mild one (just enough to set a bowl of water rippling), but I've never felt the earth move in a non-metaphorical way....

Why a blog?

I first put up a personal web a few years ago. I authored it in MS FrontPage, developed the navigation, populated it... and then nothing. Or not very much. Maintenance became a chore, the site was cramped (only 8MB), I could only update it from my home PC, which was useless (I spend a lot of my time at work or travelling or both), and the carefully constructed navigation became an inflexible roadblock to doing anything more. Oh, yes: the fact that it was authored in FrontPage meant that the HTML was horribly opaque: I didn't actually understand the code on my own site.

Then my son Chris put up his blog SomethingUnderstood, and I was entranced by the simplicity of authoring. I tried out blogging at one of the various free blog sites, and found it straightforward but incomplete: I wanted a regular web alongside the blog. However by using a blog for primary content creation (both significant and ephemeral) I could develop the rest of the web using a much simpler structure.

I'm not sure that I'll really turn this into a diary, like Bruce Sterling's fun blog. Nor do I intend to use it as a soap-box for political screeds - though in today's society we must all be political animals if we are not to be sheep. Let's see how it goes.

On exhausting experiences

This weekend has been dominated by emotionally draining film experiences. First, I saw Lord of the Rings: Return of the King twice, on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon. The first time was with my dearest friends with whom I saw the first two LotR films - we call ourselves "The Fellowship of the Fellowship". The second time was with my 26 year old daughter and her husband, who really, REALLY wanted to see it with me.

Then this evening we found the time to watch the (taped) second part of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. We saw the two plays when they first came to Boston over 10 years ago, and thought they were among the best drama of the entire 20th century. The film is even better.

I refuse to try to compare them. Both are epics - three 210 minute films for Lord of the Rings, two 180 minute episodes for Angels in America. Both deal with huge, vital, essential issues of the meaning of life, of good and evil, of life and death, of what it means to be human, of how we relate to one another. And both are, quite simply, wonderful films. If Angels in America had been shown cinematically, the Oscar committee would have had no option but to award joint honours for Best Picture. But we don't have to deal with that. Phew!

Up and running

For the last few years I used the services of NetIdentity to manage my web presence at geoff.arnold.net. However they didn't support blogs (or anything requiring server-side stuff) and only gave you 8MB of web space - not even room enough to swing a cat. So I've started this site using MovableType, hosted by LogJamming. Let's see how it goes. Welcome.