We’re finally settled down in a house (not an apartment) and have the rest of our stuff out of storage. I haven’t written anything because I just didn’t feel like it. I haven’t even been reading much, including other blogs. We’ve gotten stuff unpacked, and have even gone on a couple of day trips when the weather was nice. I feel like writing again
Continue reading Settled Down
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Morning Edition carried a very sad story this morning. It was a commentary by a soon-to-be new father in Baghdad. His final words were
It made me cry.
I’ve just spent a lot of the weekend trying to sort out the problems I created in ballfam.net. I tried to add a module that would let me post the Roseate article for family only. I didn’t succeed in that, but one of the modules I was trying out killed the picture gallery. I had to find the offending module (an experimental process) and then recover the data base from before the time I added it in. A lot of time went into understanding how these web tools work. The interfaces aren’t really isolated very well at all. That’s geekspeak for “Everything interacts with everything else”. It makes testing a nightmare, with the results I saw here. I was very glad to see that our political system is still working, and can catch the country before it goes too far wrong. In my opinion, that’s the great strength of democracy. It has all sorts of faults, but it usually catches us before we get too far out on a limb. That’s more than the other systems have ever managed. Oh yeah, there was that little thing with the war between the states, but we survived even that. I went to an interesting talk today. Dave Patterson from Berkeley was talking about the near-term future and many-core chips. He’s talking about hundreds of cores on a chip, with perhaps a couple of heavy-duty processors to handle the serial parts of the code. They have an interesting wiki that pretty much covers the talk, so you can read it yourself. They also have a simulator, called Ramp, built out of FPGA’s, to let researchers get started before these chips appear. You’re going to have to face it eventually, so you might as well start learning about it now. Incidently, one of the approaches that looks promising to me is being developed at MIT. Check out the Cilk Project for an interesting approach to using lots of threads.
In the mean time, go buy the magazine, they deserve support.
We did have a trip to a real winery, complete with original art and dinner in the cave where they age the wine. See the pictures for more on that. Overall, it was OK, and I did get to meet a lot of interesting people. I think they were trying too hard to entertain us, and would have done better just to let us talk. MicroSoft sent the Developer Division software architects to a meeting in the Napa Valley. I’ve described the resort in a personal blog entry. This entry is to talk about the professional aspects. Sun used to send the senior technical people on technical conferences, and they ranged from great to deadly. This one was pretty much in the middle. The good part was meeting my peers, learning about what they are doing and what’s going on elsewhere in the company. The best part was just talking with them, and I wish we had had more time to do it. One interesting thing was meeting people whom I hadn’t seen for decades. Somehow, MS has gathered up lots of the top people in the programming tools industry. We talked about why, and we all told pretty much the same story. If you want to work on tools, and particularly if you want to do something innovative, MS is almost the only game in town. The computer manufacturers aren’t investing much in tools, and the few third-party tools vendors are either in very small niches or barely hanging on. Some people blame it on open source. I think it’s not so obvious. There were absolutely silly “team building” exercises, like croquet and wine blending contests, and I wish they had just skipped them. I sat out the croquet (I have a bad foot) but had some very interesting conversations sitting around watching them. Why not just schedule conversation time? The wine blending was the sort of entertainment best enjoyed after drinking a significant amount of the product. Then there were the sessions when we were supposed to talk about the “pressing problems” that we each had. We decided on a few to discuss, then broke up into small groups. Now, these problems have been vexing the industry for a long time. You know, questions like “How should we support multithreaded computation in a programming language.” Do they really expect a breakthrough in an hour? There were none; it was a waste of time. It reminded me of one of the Sun meetings when the Sun Sigma crew split us up into groups ad ordered us to “think outside the box”. They seem to expect magic to occur. Finally there was the obligatory business methodology consultant. The less said about him the better. His book is going straight to the library book sale. I admit I have a slightly guilty conscious about that. Perhaps I should destroy it instead, so no one will be led astray. So we had the good, the bad, and the decidedly ugly. delivered in a beautiful setting. There were some interesting discussions, I’ll have to find out what it’s OK to talk about before I write about them. |
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Copyright © 2010 Mike Ball - All Rights Reserved |
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