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by admin on June 26, 2006 11:00am
Every now and again, you read something that sticks in your head like tree sap.
Something that gets you thinking deeply about the future, your life and work… something that keeps you up at night with ‘monkey mind’, as the Zen folks like to say. 2020 Science did just that to me a couple weeks ago. 2020 Science is a look into the future, a “report that contains the initial findings and conclusions of a group of internationally distinguished scientists who met over an intense three days in July 2005 to debate and consider the role and future of science over the next 14 years towards 2020, and in particular the importance and impact of computing and computer science on science towards 2020.”
When I studied computer science I was fascinated by the Grand Challenges in science and mathematics, so this report fascinated me as it approaches many similar grand challenges and – specifically – looks into how computer science can help across these various disciplines.
The paper/roadmap looks across disciplines to understand how the various sciences interact and how they together can propel this 2020 science vision. I particularly enjoyed the coverage on multi-core cpu architectures, data ‘issues’ (association, aggregation, visualization, etc.) and I think the ‘computational thinking’ quote on page 12 (also here) by Professor Jeanette Wing, head of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, is one of the most well articulated statements about effective problem solving that I’ve read.
A 3D model of the human brain © 2005 Malcolm Young, University of Newcastle.
The second part looks into many disciplines and topics, global environment, molecular computing, software platforms and tools, the brain, bio-hybrid chips, genomic research, and communities. Far too much to cover in a blog entry – read this paper, it’s worth the time.
In my role, I often get asked to compare open source software to the software that Microsoft builds. There are many ways to answer as it’s not a simple question. However, on occasion I spend time with folks in Microsoft Research (MSR), and I’m also fortunate to meet many different leading thinkers in academia around the world. As a lifelong computer science ‘student’, I am always surprised at how easy it is for people to focus just on present tense and forget where we as a society want to go in the future, and what it takes to get there. When I read through 2020 Science, when I visit universities around the world, or when I wander across the 520 highway to visit friends in MSR, I’m reminded by the grand challenges that we are challenging on a daily basis. Some problems are hard, very hard and often require very specific skills and new ways of thinking to attempt to solve. Some problems require innovation, some require invention. Some challenges need today’s tools, some require new tools. There are problems that require certain models to solve: by itself, OSS is often not appropriate for some of these problems, nor, at times, is only commercial/proprietary development (read the ‘new communities’ section on page 24). Problem context is crucial to framing the approach. Even IBM’s Linux strategy ‘godfather’, Irving Wladawsky-Berger (Vice president, Technical Strategy and Innovation) commented recently on this community appeal issue as it relates to certain types of problems:
“Generally, proprietary software tends to be higher volume, higher levels of transactions, and higher levels of security, and vendors have very focused teams to do that. And the layers of software that I would associate more with Internet culture are the most likely candidates for open source communities. Remember, in a community, you have to want to work as a community. There are certain kinds of problems that appeal to people to do that, and there are others that don't.”
In addition to having spent my career in both OSS and commercial software environments, I see this ‘model context’ issue in my current work and every day I’m more convinced that choice and evolution of models (and formats, standards, tools, software, etc.) will be the path both science and industry travel on to reach the 2020 vision.
-Bill
by admin on June 23, 2006 06:12pm
Due to popular demand we are going to start posting our interview content with a transcribed text version. Each week, until we catch up, we'll be releasing three transcripts from interviews that are already available on Port 25 in video format starting with the oldest and working our way forward. Comments and feedback on these transcripts are appreciated! Interview: Faces from the Collective: Shared memory anyone? Date: 3/31/06 Description: Sam Ramji sits down with resident UNIX guru and Microsoft Architect Jason Zions to discuss the history of Windows and UNIX interoperability. Download Transcript
Interview: Stuff we think is cool: Improving the Windows experience, it's elementary! Date: 3/31/06 Description: Ben Canning, Group Product Manager from the Office team talks Watson and how this unique solution is helping improve the Windows experience. Download Transcript
Interview: Partner Spotlight: Do your directories play nicely? Date: 3/29/06 Description: Directory specialist Jackson Shaw from Quest Software joins Sam Ramji from the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft, to talk Active Directory and interoperability. Download Transcript
by admin on June 21, 2006 01:02pm
Last week we announced the formation of an Interoperability Customer Executive Council. This is something many folks here at Microsoft have been working on and thanks go to a wide variety of people. I was involved from an OSS perspective and will continue to be active with both our internal groups and this customer council to help this mission succeed. As you can imagine, interoperability is a very wide and loosely defined word – it can mean many things to many people. Particularly when you produce a lot of software! Rather than try to ‘pick’ certain areas to focus on (believe it or not, Microsoft is constrained by time and money like all other businesses) we decided the most effective and beneficial path would be to have our customers drive this conversation. Thus was born this council, formed by customers of different sizes, business types, and geographic location, in order to provide guidance on interoperability issues that are most important to customers, including connectivity, application integration and data exchange.
Interoperability in a heterogeneous environment doesn’t happen accidentally, nor does having your code open make everything ‘just work’ together. It takes thoughtful design and architecture; it takes time, effort and engineering discipline. It requires working closely with partners, competitors and customers. It also requires mature understanding that all things don’t necessarily require interoperability, and frequently those things that do, sometimes require different types of interoperability. Point being: it takes focus, energy and commitment. This council is a great step and example of this commitment from Microsoft.
I’m very excited by this step forward, below are some further news stories about this:
CNET News.com
Clients to advise Microsoft on software linking
http://news.com.com/Customers+to+advise+Microsoft+on+software+linking/2100-1001_3-6083664.html
eWeek
Microsoft Customer Council to Focus on Interoperability
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1976394,00.asp
by admin on June 20, 2006 05:51pm
Not long after I blogged about “disambiguating open” as a research issue, a debate erupted on Slashdot about “How Open Does Open Source Need to Be?” Three different criteria for deciding whether something could legitimately call itself “open source” seemed to me to dominate the discussion: the level and terms of source code availability; whether or not there was a community organized around the code; and compliance (or not) with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) definition.
What struck me about this debate was, first, the fact that it was happening because “open source,” in this case, was regarded as a favorable characterization (and thus in the interest of a software producer to apply to their bits) and that favorability was rooted outside of any producer’s application of the term (in contrast, it’s unlikely such a debate would occur if one of the parties had chosen to label their product “cromulent” for example.) Put another way, the operative assumption is that calling your product “open source” piggy backs on a store of perceived value among potential customers built up by others, which may be in a technical or moral sense be “undeserved” and (at worst) might actually result in dilution of that store of value.
What I thought was missing, however, was some empirical perspective on the ways in which states of the three criteria above might in fact add to or erode that perceived store of value when the so-called (or not-so-called) “open source” product was actually consumed by customers. This reminded me of Perspectives on Open Source Software (2001) from Carnegie-Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, where the authors do a great job of describing why the answer to “how open” software needs to be will almost always come down to “it depends...”—if we’re thinking of “need” relative to optimizing for the resulting customer experience (as opposed to the relative ease of calling something “open” for marketing purposes or conforming to a check-the-box definition.)
The report describes “open source software” as
“at the most basic level simply[meaning] software for which the source code is open and available.”
Which they define as:
“open--The source code for the software can be read (seen) and written (modified). Further, this term is meant to promote the creation and distribution of derivative works of the software…available--the source code can be acquired either free of charge or for a nominal fee”
And they contrast this with the Open Source Definition (OSD) from the Open Source Initiative (OSI) noting:
“Under OSI (strictly speaking) a software product is in fact open source if and only if it conforms to the OSD…Upon reviewing the complete text of the OSD, it is interesting to point out that the definition does not pertain specifically to the source code itself, but rather to the license under which the source code is distributed. Therefore, in strict conformance to the OSD written by the OSI, a software product that conforms to only eight of the nine criteria is not OSS.”
They raise a few points relevant to distinguishing meaningful customer requirements for the software :
The authors of the report conclude that:
OSS [is] a viable source of components from which to build systems. However, we are not saying that OSS should be chosen over other systems simply because the software is open source. Rather, like COTS [commercial off-the shelf software] and CSS [closed-source software], OSS should be selected and evaluated on its merits…Caveat emptor (let the buyer beware): the [software] product should be chosen based on the mission needs of the system and the needs of the users who will be the ultimate recipients.
To me, reading the discussion thread and then mulling over the SEI’s examples bring me right back to what gets me out of bed every (work) day: there is rich field of inquiry about what makes software successful for its developers and users. Neither any one commercial vendor nor organization has it all figured out and trademarked yet—if caveat emptor is good advice to keep in mind, salus populi suprema lex esto (“the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law “) is a good motto to live by.
(Incidentally, SEI authors Chuck Weinstock and Scott Hissam revisit some of the findings and analysis in the SEI report in a chapter in a great new book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (MIT Press) –I’ll blog more about the book soon.)
by admin on June 19, 2006 02:28pm
I’ve been traveling in Brazil recently, one of my favorite countries, and meeting with various customers, developers, IT professionals, government officials and topping it off with a talk at Linux World Brazil in Sao Paulo. On my flight over I was reading a translated version of TEMA magazine which discusses the Brazilian federal government’s IT spending. An interesting statistic from a 2003 study by the Department of Logistics and Information Technology is that Microsoft is just barely on the ‘top spend’ list of commercial software providers to the Brazilian Federal Government. In terms of money spent by the government on software, Microsoft comes in at number eight. Many would believe or would guess that Microsoft is the ‘big gorilla’ in the Brazilian market, which is why the Linux/OSS versus Microsoft debate in Brazil always seems so dramatic in the press. But, alas, we are number eight, in terms of money spent by the state.
According to this study, the biggest software suppliers to the Brazilian federal government (in Brazilian Reals):
Of course, this is just software costs you can imagine what that IBM number looks like if you add in services and hardware.
The reason, I believe, for the misperception that Microsoft is the single ‘foreign’ vendor is because most people ‘see’ Microsoft everyday on their desktops. So Microsoft becomes a singular metaphor (or poster child) for commercial software. The misperception even carries to the academic world, such as Benkler’s Wealth of Networks from Yale Univ. Press, where he discusses the role of free software, giving governments, “freedom from reliance on a single foreign source (read, Microsoft)” – page 333. But if this is true, shouldn’t free software also reduce reliance from the other sources of commercial software in Brazil (players 1-7 above)? Of course it should, but that’s not the general perception because some of these others, such as IBM, have put on the cloak of ‘open systems’ to market themselves as free software loving champions. But if that were really true, I wonder where all that money is coming from and then going to? So the bigger question is: how much do these commercial companies generate for the Brazilian software economy relative to what they are profiting?
This is very important for Brazil, particularly as it relates to exporting to developing nations; for example, from 2002-2005 Brazil has increased total value of exports to Africa, Middle East, and Asian from US$13.4 billion to $28.8 billion (Ricardo Neiva Tavares, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Economist, 27/5/2006). Generating revenue to Brazilian companies through software exports will be an important part of future growth in this area.
From a Microsoft perspective, we are seeing real value for Brazil using our software to build their software ecosystem, a few statistics about Brazil and Microsoft:
In my time here in Brazil I will have an ear out for how people are using OSS and how they are interoperating with commercial software – the best lessons are always found ‘in the field’ – and it will be interesting to test how much ‘what you see everyday’ effects the perceptions and how this holds up to reality in the cold light of day (or maybe a little warmer light of day here in Brazil).
P.S. – adding to this on my return home, after I wrote the above. Indeed the veneer of ‘free’ has faded in Brazil like it has in most countries as businesses enter into their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th ‘wave’ of Linux/OSS usage and realize that there are certainly still costs with ‘free’ software, such as in management, integration, security, people, etc.
by admin on June 16, 2006 01:21pm
Infrastructure Management and Strategic Design: Part 2 – Driving Network Efficiencies
Every computing device in existence today lives and breathes on some sort of a Network. Doesn’t matter if your Home PC is connected to a Cable Modem or if you’re office laptop is part of an extended WAN, your device is persistently living and breathing on the Network. From the minute you turn on your device, one of the very first drivers to be loaded are Networking drivers. Everything from DNS, DHCP to the simple sharing of email and office documents depends on the very basic function of the Infrastructure, the Network. So why is it that the same Network which is considered a Category-A asset in an organization is also sometimes at the very root of serious headaches for a Network Administrator. Thoughts about the faith and reliance we put towards Networking Infrastructure is simple staggering. Let’s examine why
If you’re a soccer fan like me, I am sure you have been glued to the World Cup coverage. As I sat with some friends and discussed our loss to the Czech Republic, I realized that in that group, it didn’t matter if you use Firefox or IE to get the game stats, you JUST wanted to know the score. The thought that followed was that maybe “Tools” shouldn’t be as hyped-up as they are sometimes as compared to the stream of “networking” that sustains them. Following that my thoughts turned to the topic of Net Neutrality and how Networks are ideally designed to forward packets regardless of their size, purpose and content. Hmm…this is interesting, I thought. My entire life as an Infrastructure Architect, I tried to come up with creative ways to manage and optimize network / infrastructure performance towards a better outcome for end users.
You see, some of the most perplexing problems for Network Admins is to control and manage “chatty protocols, broadcasts and bandwidth hogs”. How can we do that effectively? Let’s look at this closely: When I read a blog about Web 2.0 or something similar, some of the questions that pop in my head are “Have they considered what effect the implementation would have on their Network Performance” ? How far does the implementation of a new model go towards Application Bandwidth Testing and how inherently and intrinsically dependent we are on Networking.
Networking and the simple availability of bandwidth, wired or wireless, has become as much of an expectation as running water. A few months ago I remember someone saying “Network is like electricity – you don’t call up and thank the power company when you turn on the light, do you, nor do you ask them how much power you can use for your house”. Intriguing thought, nevertheless, for those Layer 2 and 3 warriors, the term “Port Saturation” should definitely ring a bell. Key contributors to reaching port density are instances when there just isn’t any more bandwidth to go around. To avoid choking up the network, I found some of the following tips helpful if you’re managing a small to medium sized network:
Alright, that’s it. I am logging off and heading to the movies to watch the Da Vinci Code. Will be back here next week and Thank You for tuning into Port25.
by admin on June 14, 2006 05:46pm
HOW-TO: CONNECTING SQL SERVER 2005 JDBC to JBOSS We have been working in the labs regarding testing and integration of jBoss talking to a SQL server 2005 backend.
We have seen some questions on how to connect a SQL Server in the Windows environment to jBoss. So I wrote a little how-to that describes just that.
It turns out that it is actually very simple.
Essentially, all that’s involved with installing the driver is:
<local-tx-datasource>
<jndi-name>DATASOURCENAME</jndi-name>
<connection-url>jdbc:sqlserver://DATABASE URL;databaseName=jboss;</connection-url>
<driver-class>com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver</driver-class>
<user-name>DATABASE USERNAME</user-name>
<password>DATABASE PASSWORD</password>
</local-tx-datasource>
NOTE: Substitute DATASOURCE NAME, DATABASE-URL, DATABASE USERNAME and DATABASE PASSWORD for your local values.
And that is all there is to it. jBoss now should be able to connect to the SQL Server.
Special thanks to Dan Simonton one of our penguins who did a bunch of the testing on this.
by admin on June 13, 2006 03:29pm
FreedomHEC trip report On Friday the 26th of April I attended the FreedomHEC Un-Conference (Yeah I am late with posting it). This was a two day conference which was held on the 26th and 27th. I only attended the first day. The FreedomHEC Unconference was billed as:
The hardware unconference where you'll learn how easy it is to make your hardware compatible with free, open source operating systems such as Linux, and available to new markets such as servers, next-generation entertainment devices, and more. Get answers on everything from kernel data structures to the fine points of licensing. Discover how participating in the Linux process is fast and simple, how the development process works, and where to get started.
The hardware unconference where you'll learn how easy it is to make your hardware compatible with free, open source operating systems such as Linux, and available to new markets such as servers, next-generation entertainment devices, and more.
Get answers on everything from kernel data structures to the fine points of licensing. Discover how participating in the Linux process is fast and simple, how the development process works, and where to get started.
It did not completely achieve this goal, but was very helpful to people who have never done device driver development for the Linux Kernel.
It was set up by Don Marti, and was attended by approximately 35 people of which 8 or so were current kernel maintainers. I think the enthusiasts outnumbered those people who would be writing company device drivers by 2 to 1.
The conference started with a suggestion session as to what people wanted to see so that a calendar could be created. As a result the first day calendar became this;
1. SYSFS OVERVIEW
2. LINUX SOCIAL ENGINEERING
3. SCSI Q AND A
4. ROCKETS
5. GETTING DRIVERS INTO THE KERNEL Q&A
Below are more details on the conference. My apologies if this at times is confusing, but I am working off my notes here...
This was an overview given by Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is the current Linux PCI tree maintainer (Among others he also does sysfs, kobject, debugfs and kref code). He works for SuSE Labs at Novell.
He presented a high level walkthrough of the sysfs subsystem (the /sys area) This is only available in the 2.6 kernels and is still evolving.
Sysfs (/sys) is a RAM file system, so anything created in there by humans after boot will be lost after any subsequent boots.
-sysfs shows all of the devices (virtual and real) and their inter-connectedness
In the past /proc has been used but /proc should be used for processes and not device drivers. /proc is the older method of creating device driver configuration files.
One of the reasons that /sys exists is to standardize configurations of various device drivers. /proc has been used/misused in the past for configuration representations/files/atributes, the data under this file system are different from programmer to programmer and device to device and are very hard to interpret unless you know the format.
/sys changes all that. It provides a standard method of defining and using device driver attributes. It is based off the principle of one value per file. And this value can only be a simple value, no histograms or large binary configurations (debugfs is specifically for this purpose!). Still people seem to break these rules at times.
Do a tree under /sys to see what the structure is, and cat the files for the values.
Power management used to turn things on or off, is not fully working yet. USB is getting there for power management; the rest, not yet. Put in a USB Pen drive for example and see /sys/block change real time (/sys/block/sda). If you unplug a device, udev will take care of cleaning up. You do not have to un-mount or do anything else. (If you do that to a drive you are writing to, of course you are on your own) You can also mount things by label easily.
If a change is made to a device attribute in /sys, an event is triggered that programs like hal can get real time. General guideline, if you write a user space program/driver, tie it into hal.
Also, /dev is now a RAM file system in 2.6 (Some distro’s might not have implemented this)
If you want to add proprietary drivers, they will live in /lib/usdev/devices, this is when they are not sysfs aware. This location is persistent.
This presentation was given by Randy Dunlop, A past USB and Kernel Janitor and maintainer.
The presentation was given to give people an overview of do’s and don’ts when they start submitting code to the kernel. A lot of the information given was common sense but a lot of people do not follow the rules. (e.g Rules so Obvious that they are not followed)
The presentation was very much in Bullet form and so are my notes on this, so they might not flow as well as they could.
SOCIAL ENGINEERING
(Meritocracy) Development.
Massive amounts of open communication via email etc.
LINUX CULTURE
LINUX DEVELOPMENT VALUES
THINGS TO AVOID
WHEN NEW INFRASTRUCUTRE IS NEEDED
DRIVERS FOR NEW HARDWARE
NEW DRIVER DEV
COMMUNICATIONS
MAILING LIST etiquette
GENERAL
In all the presentation was a crash course for people who have never done collaborative development, and tried to prepare people what is ahead and what kind of commitment will be needed to be part of the Linux kernel development.
Led by James Bottomley SCSI Subsystem maintainer.
I do not have many notes on this part because not much was said to keep notes on, a few things that I did write are as follows (Second item is of great interest)
If you want to get an idea of how SCSI drivers work, check out the 53c700 which is an excellent driver to learn from. It is older but continuously maintained.
There is kind of a new concept called a Target driver. Target drivers make it appear to the outside world as if it is a driver (A virtual driver more or less), but instead connects to the actual physical device drivers. Allowing, for example, to turn a Linux box into a RAID device. Then you can talk to the target driver as if it is one device. Not many of them out there yet, but there is one from IBM which James did not think was a very good. And there are a few on the way. There are two people (names escape me currently) that are actively developing them. In my opinion this is a pretty interesting concept that allows you to do a whole bunch of cool things. (e.g Network routers, Cheap raid devices etc)
You can (should?) write SCSI drivers in user space.
A lighter presentation was given by two students from Portland state. They are using Open source hardware and software to build rockets. Some interesting reads can be found on that project here:
http://psas.pdx.edu
This was pretty much done by Greg.
Some source code control software of choice of the Kernel Maintainers
Testing Kernel code is hard, but crashme is used by the maintainers be used for (stress) testing kernel stuff.
Greg was very adamant that they take any device driver. No matter what HW it uses, as long as you or somebody else is willing to maintain it they will take it. Old/New it does not matter. Even if there is only one user for it they will take it.
That’s all folks.
by admin on June 12, 2006 07:12pm
Peer Review, Port 25 and Good Things to Come The peer review system is a much revered and reviled system within academic circles. Tim O’Reilly’s recent comment on Nature magazine’s fresh look at peer review piqued my interest. Interest piquing is always bad, because its sets off the oft dangerous process of “thinking”!
There is a great description of peer review on Wikipedia. I encourage you to read the complete description, if only to get a sense for the issues involved in peer reviews.
In short, the peer review process:
ensures work submitted is commented on by experts in the field exposes the possibilities or the mistakes in an intellectual approach improves research quality in most cases even where the experts misunderstand the research! Pre-history of Peer Review
I did all my research in the Internet/Arpanet era, but I am old enough to be able to see the tail end of the paper based peer review process. Talk about snail-mail!
First you send off a request for re-prints for all the papers that you think you will need for your research. Each of them costs about $$ in reprint costs. Of course you order a lot of them since you don’t know which ones you will find useful. Then you write your paper (it takes a couple of months for you to get all those re-prints btw!) and send them to the editors of journals, referees in conferences etc. in those nice brown paper envelopes. The reviewers send you their comments (this is a couple of months later). You modify your manuscript and repeat the process. I am surprised the world made any progress at all!
The predecessors to the World Wide Web include FTP, WAIS and Gopher. The first wide use of all these technologies was for distribution of research papers. (That may be just my bias speaking, since I was a computer science graduate student in the 1990s and that’s all I could use these technologies for!). Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web based on the vision of peer collaboration between scientists after all!
With the advent of the Internet peer review was now potentially much more efficient. Research papers and reviews could now be retrieved in near real time. However it has taken a little bit of time for the academic greybeards to catch on. My personal opinion is that the way forward on peer review was shown by the Open Source community.
Here comes Open Source
The first thing that comes to mind when talking about peer review in the OSS world, is in the realm of development. You know the usual story, person develops code, throws code for peer review, corrections and comments come back, code is unstoppable! My friend and colleague Hank Janssen does say (see his handsome visage) “OSS world peer review delivery can be very brutal. The social aspect of peer review is not very becoming many times”. But that is what it is!
However there is another peer review system within the OSS framework and that is called OSS Intelligence. OSS Intelligence means the application of collaborative principles developed by the Open Source Software movement to the gathering and analysis of information. Wikipedia is an outstanding example of this, but any of the major discussion boards supporting OSS users are also examples of this.
Now academia is catching up – and Nature magazine is trying a new peer review process in which a manuscript is thrown open for public peer review and the authors are invited by the editors to reply to comments from the public.
Peer Review and You
That got me thinking (remember the dangerous activity I alluded to before?). Aren’t our Port 25 readers our peers in ensuring that we have great, interoperable, easy to manage, easy to install, easy to maintain software that changes the world? Why not use this forum for peer review of what we do in our lab?
The proposal is that we open the Open Source Lab project planning to the Port 25 community. The project research methodology would be proposed on the site with methods, experiments, hypotheses and data sets all laid out for “peer review”. Please be gentle - on second thoughts this is dealing with the Open Source community, so just be natural! We will open this for a period that makes sense. Then we will carry out the research based on what we hear back from our peers right here on port 25. The Open Source Lab will carry out the research and put the conclusions and feedback back to the Port 25 community for review. We will then publish this “peer reviewed” content in its final form.
Of course you are always welcome to suggest what those projects should be!
As an example of the kind of information you will see, let us take a project that the Open Source Software Lab recently executed. This involved simulating RedHat and SUSE in a production environment and evaluating the patch management experience.
The research plan will describe:
The peer review feedback could let us know (just a sample):
Now in the best traditions of peer review – what do you think of this idea?
by admin on June 07, 2006 06:55pm
What is a guy like me doing in a place like this...?
Well, by now some of you probably saw my video interview on Port25, so I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you more about my background and what made me decide to work for Microsoft. For those that know me in real life, it came as a shock to find out that I decided to work for Microsoft. But more about that later…
I started in the industry about 20 years ago, more specifically working at AT&T and Philips who where in a joint venture at the time. I started working for them initially as a contractor and that is where I had my first exposure to Unix operating systems. Very quickly I started doing System Administration and tools development. Very early on this turned into full time development for Unix.
After a year or so, I was invited to transfer to the AT&T UK division and there I developed a database system that tied all AT&T field support offices together. This allowed any office in the world to contact any other office in a matter of minutes with any support issues that they had. Once transferred, these tickets stayed in sync no matter what organization(s) they were sent to. This system was 100% custom written. It had its own database system that I wrote from scratch. It is probably still one of the fastest custom database systems around. This whole system was written before the days of Internet, and high speed data links available to all. It was the time of uucp, rje and vt100’s for those who still remember that J…and Linux did not exist. 1200 Baud Rixon modems (sometimes even 300 baud) were a lot of the ways this system communicated. It was finally retired about 3 years ago.
AT&T in the US asked me to work in the US and modify and train other people to extend that product. That offered me a whole bunch of new opportunities in the form of area’s to work on. In that capacity I worked a lot on the modified Unix systems that AT&T used in their 5ESS telephone switches. As such I did part of the process handler that that version of Unix used for System V. I also worked inside AT&T on the customization of the X windows system. I met and got to work a little with Stroustrup and Ritchie.
I will fast forward a little here before people fall asleep. I ended up staying in the US. And after 6 or so years I left AT&T. After this I worked for Cincinnati Bell Information Systems. They, at the time, were the largest Cellular billing system service provider in the US and in the early 90s, I was the lead designer and developer on a real time Point Of Sale cellular phone activation system for Sprint. Now that is not such a big deal anymore. People find it normal that you walk into a store and walk out with an activated cell phone. At the time, this was the first and only system that did that. What was even cooler is that it was 100% based on an OSS operating system and development tools. It was deployed on one of the very first Red Hat releases. It took a lot of persuasion but we where able to convince the customer that this was the way to go.
Anyway, after this I worked on several other systems, a real time fraud management system that was based on OpenBSD, and I did a bunch of Device driver work for that as well as a lot of work in cellular billing systems. These are systems that process 15+ million records a day.
For the last 5 or so years I have been a systems architect working on a variety of systems mainly used in the telecommunications world. For those who have worked in that area before, it is a world that has many different systems and interoperability is a very big concern.
All the systems were Unix based. And throughout my career I primarily worked with Unix, Linux and OSS products.
Now how does somebody with a background like this end up working for Microsoft??? Well, that is something that I am still shocked about every day.
In the past I stayed away from MS products because of various reasons. They where not fast enough, secure enough, did not talk to things other than MS products well enough, etc, etc.
But working in the industries I have been in I found that you have to be pragmatic, fanaticism about one product line or company or another product line and company does not work very well. People want to work with fast, secure and easy systems and every company I have ever worked for has a large variety in products and OS systems. Yet, having said that, I love working with Linux and OSS products.
So, when a call came a few months ago from a company that presented this job to me I was very much torn. A few weeks went by, and more agonizing took place. I kept on coming back to one thing; it is very easy to make comments and go home at night, it does not take a lot of effort. But what do you do if somebody gives you an opportunity to, in some way, change the things you have always complained about? It sure isn’t easy, but it puts me in a place to put my money where my mouth is.
So after I got to talk with people at Microsoft (Bill Hilf and Sam Ramji to name a few) I was very interested to find what they thought this department should be. And it very much fit with what I wanted to do if I ever ended up working at Microsoft.
So what will I be doing and focusing on primarily inside Microsoft??? Well my primary area is research into Linux and OSS Applications. We figure out what makes them tick, and we figure out how we can better interoperate with them. There are some interesting things coming down the line from us in the future that might surprise people.
So, I am very much looking forward to constructive criticisms, suggestions from you all and I am very excited to work you in future. Drop me a line and give me your suggestions as to what you want us to look into or help you with.
by admin on June 06, 2006 05:49pm
New friends from Linux World Brazil I’m recently returning from Linux World Brazil where I presented on ‘OSS and Microsoft.’ One night in Sao Paulo I had the opportunity to chat with two of the leading OSS technologists in Brazil – Cesar Brod and Helio Chessini de Castro. Cesar has an interesting background, working at Tandem from 1992-1998 and at various companies throughout Brazil, including his own consulting company. Cesar is involved with Linux International and was also one of three finalists for the Free Software Community Award in 2004. Helio is well known in Brazil as one of the key developers of Conectiva and a prolific KDE and Linux developer and instructor. He currently works for Mandriva (who acquired Conectiva to form the Mandrake+Conectiva distribution). If you’ve spent time in the Conectiva or KDE developer world, you certainly have heard of Helio. We had a great conversation about the Linux/OSS environment in Brazil, particularly the history of this community. Cesar echoed a statement I’ve heard from quite a few other OSS developers about those who ‘do’ actual technical work in the OSS community and those who ‘talk’ about it. His point was that there has always been a developer community in Brazil – before OSS hit the scene – and Cesar has tried to keep this community focused on the real work, not simply the rhetoric and politics. Cesar is a well regarded OSS participant and has some great stories about his early days at Tandem, how he discovered Linux (an alternative from flying back and forth from city to city to use a Unix machine) and how the OSS community has evolved. Both Cesar’s and Helio’s pragmatism, honesty, and open mindedness show their experience and wisdom – I hope to continue our discussions in the future. Cesar was also kind enough to introduce me to his friend John “Maddog” Hall. Maddog is well known in OSS circles and although we’ve heard about each other, this was the first time we had the opportunity to meet face to face.
(From left: Maddog, Me) Maddog’s keynote was right before mine, so I had the chance to see him present on ‘Total Value’ of software. It was interesting, and although I disagreed with some of his points (and the ‘blue screen of death’ jabs – come on, used any Microsoft software since 2003?), Maddog is a good presenter and hit some important points about standards, competition and choice that I agree strongly with. Shortly after our presentations I had the chance to talk with Maddog. We had a good conversation about change at large corporations (Maddog is a former Digital guy), and software trends. Despite the name, Maddog is a balanced industry veteran who I could talk to easily for hours, his perspectives and insight are valuable and although I think we may disagree on some points, there are many others where we find harmony. I have visited Brazil many times, and I was honored to speak at Linux World Brazil, but this may be one of the most useful of my trips as I was able to meet customers, partners, Microsoft teams, government officials and developers and thinkers in the OSS world. New friendships are always important to me, but it’s the cascade of new thoughts from all of these various discussions that keeps me awake on my flight back to Seattle. -Bill
by admin on June 06, 2006 03:30pm
Research Strategy Corner: Disambiguating “Open”
Disambiguate (transitive verb): to establish the true meaning of an expression, regulation, or ruling that is confusing or that could be interpreted in more than one way
I’m a Research Strategist with the Open Source Lab here at Microsoft. When folks ask what that means , I usually tell them the second-best definition of “strategist” I’ve ever head is “a researcher who gets to make stuff up”—but the first-best is “someone who establishes a series of steps to achieve a goal.” The latter is what my job is all about—in the process, because it involves synthesizing both technical information and insights from computer science, organizational science, and sociology research, I sorta get to make stuff up—as long as the math works (which is probably a little bit different from what the average civilian bystander thinks of as “making stuff up.”)
What’s the goal? The title of this post summarizes it concisely: disambiguating “open.” When the phrase “open source” is used for example, it could represent a simple descriptive statement of fact about code visibility (read any good mash-ups lately?); it could also be referring to software artifacts available under a fairly wide range of license types…or it could be intended to refer to something compliant with a very specific set of criteria like the Open Source Initiative’s ten-point definition (http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php). It could be referring to one of tens of thousands of single-developer projects on SourceForge—or to highly coordinated efforts like FreeBSD; and on the other hand altogether, it could be in marketing materials from big corporations like IBM or Novell (if this animation is still up on Novell’s site you can experience a dizzying array of suggestions for what “open means to your enterprise:” http://www.novell.com/solutions/?sourceidint=hdr_productsandsolutions ).
“Open” is one of those words that today in the software domain is increasingly becoming probabilistically uninformative…the word as applied to an endeavor (like a software development project) or an artifact (like a piece of software) less and less enables you to more accurately predict attributes of the endeavor or artifact—because attributes of the endeavor (like who built it and how) and the artifact (like architecture, coupling, interaction paradigm) may actually help you better predict what will happen now and further on down the road if you choose to take a dependency on something.
I don’t care how the characterization “open” makes you feel, whether it is nervous or giddy with excitement: my objective function is the ability to use one bit of information to reliably predict other bits of information. In this space I’ll share our efforts to go about doing that with regard to “open” and what we find in the lab and in the world of academic research—but first I’ll give you some visibility into how I start out structuring lines of inquiry.
There are a few different approaches you can take to things: for our purposes here, an analytic approach is like an argument from first principles—the position of Free/Libre software advocates is essentially analytic, as their argument is software should be a certain way given the set of principles they start from, and there really isn’t any evidence you could collectout in the world that would change their minds. This discussion isn’t particularly relevant to my day job. An empirical approach is all about data and probability: if you know foo you predict bar better. This is entirely relevant but is exactly what we don’t know enough about yet. A phenomenological approach (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ if you really want to know) starts with experience as it is experienced--and this is useful for starting to disambiguate open source. Here’s why: I don’t want to argue about what’s open and what’s not or about whether things should be a certain way—I want to build an informative base of data that lets me characterize and analyze endeavors and artifacts underneath this fuzzy term “open”. So we can start by asking: what would I—and, if there’s enough established shared meaning, other people—experience as a phenomenon that is certainly “like open source” versus certainly “not like open source.” I suggest two sets of statements along an axis shown in figure 1, below. Once we have this down, we have a starting for the collection of empirical data that ( if our starting point is right) will position endeavors and artifacts somewhere along a continuum between the two extremes.
Figure 1: Phenomenological approach to characterizing endeavors
I won’t start into operationalized definitions here, because to some extent that would defeat the purpose of capturing a top of mind response to the statements themselves. So what do you think: top of mind, as you experience these collections of statements, is the essence of like and not like open source represented? Do they raise questions? Controversy? Let me know and we can dive in to where some of these come from (yes, I said my experience-as-experienced, but remember, when I make stuff up the math has to work…there’s lot of great research out there that can help tune these characterizations).
Disambiguation: Because what you don’t know you don’t know probably will hurt you
by admin on June 05, 2006 03:51pm
Infrastructure Management and Strategic Design Part 1: Domains Portfolio Management
Thank you all and especially everyone who has been giving us very productive feedback on what you'd be interested in seeing us write about. Your input helps us tune our content to what’s important to YOU, our viewers. On that note I am kicking off a series of blogs towards Infrastructure Management encompassing suggestions, situations and pointers towards managing and maintaining a large-scale heterogeneous infrastructure. I’d like to start today’s blog on an “unsung” hero of the Infrastructure Service but yet one of the most important– Domains Portfolio Management.
Why is this important: Well, think about this for a minute - EVERYTIME someone types a url in their browser, it translates to someone having secured that url at some point and working with a registrar to purchase and lock it. I can literally write a book on how painful it has been for so many companies to sometimes purchase, acquire or secure something as small as a url and YET, the entire web presence of a company depends on registration of a simple url, a central place which everyone goes to.
Domains Portfolio Management as I understand it, encompasses managing all gTLD’s (Global top level domains such as .com, .net etc) and ccTLD’s (Country Code Top Level Domains such as .au, .in etc.) across the board. This involves managing, securing and expanding your Domain Portfolio credentials to give us a business advantage and to understand and leverage this often overlooked strategy. Let’s say you’re working for an organization that is geographically dispersed in major regions around the world. If you want to maintain, develop and build a strong Internet Presence portfolio, the dynamics of that space are changing very rapidly with the introduction of several new top level domains e.g. .mobi etc. I have spent a significant amount of time in my past life overseeing the several aspects of Domain Management and here’s the top three suggestions I would like to share with you:
1. Manage your Domain Portfolio: If you have more than 100 domains in your Domains Portfolio, it is worth every penny to build a database around these domains and enter essential information like expiration date, registrar details etc in it. This in itself will add years to your life as a Domain Portfolio Administrator. Other helpful suggestions are choosing more than one registrar for your portfolio. The phrase “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” has never been more relevant than at this point. Why you ask, well, think in terms of ‘TDRP – or Technical Disaster Recovery Planning”. You want to put measures in place such that you always have a backup Registrar/Registry that you have been working with and knows your portfolio intimately 2. Secure your Domain Portfolio: Sometimes, we “over-prepare” and I have seen Domain Portfolio Managers registering every single url in every single country in the world, even if they’re not known and/or are not selling a product or service in that region. So what does a good Domain Strategy look like. Well, start by maximizing your gTLD assets, make sure you have fully locked and secured your Domain Assets. Work w/ your Registrar and have them do a comprehensive Domain Audit and review for you. You are more than likely to get a visualization of where most of your Domain investment lies. Sit down w/ your Business and Marketing Team after that to review the findings and align your Domain presence with your core business goals. e.g. if your org is heavily centric in a specific continent or country, make sure your domain assets are maximized for that region. 3. Build a strategy around your portfolio: Once you have a solid strategy around what areas, regions and assets you need to invest in, you are more than likely to get your share of squatters (those who buy popular domain names and then sell them to the highest bidder), type-squatters (those who make their money by buying domains resembling popular / heavy-hitter names ) and some clear violations of your company trademark name. While you’re combing through these issues, “PICK YOUR BATTLES”. If a specific ccTLD is not that important to your company’s business expansion plans, just let it go. But make sure you invest heavily in keeping and securing the Domain Assets that your business model takes for granted.
1. Manage your Domain Portfolio: If you have more than 100 domains in your Domains Portfolio, it is worth every penny to build a database around these domains and enter essential information like expiration date, registrar details etc in it. This in itself will add years to your life as a Domain Portfolio Administrator. Other helpful suggestions are choosing more than one registrar for your portfolio. The phrase “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” has never been more relevant than at this point. Why you ask, well, think in terms of ‘TDRP – or Technical Disaster Recovery Planning”. You want to put measures in place such that you always have a backup Registrar/Registry that you have been working with and knows your portfolio intimately
2. Secure your Domain Portfolio: Sometimes, we “over-prepare” and I have seen Domain Portfolio Managers registering every single url in every single country in the world, even if they’re not known and/or are not selling a product or service in that region. So what does a good Domain Strategy look like. Well, start by maximizing your gTLD assets, make sure you have fully locked and secured your Domain Assets. Work w/ your Registrar and have them do a comprehensive Domain Audit and review for you. You are more than likely to get a visualization of where most of your Domain investment lies. Sit down w/ your Business and Marketing Team after that to review the findings and align your Domain presence with your core business goals. e.g. if your org is heavily centric in a specific continent or country, make sure your domain assets are maximized for that region.
3. Build a strategy around your portfolio: Once you have a solid strategy around what areas, regions and assets you need to invest in, you are more than likely to get your share of squatters (those who buy popular domain names and then sell them to the highest bidder), type-squatters (those who make their money by buying domains resembling popular / heavy-hitter names ) and some clear violations of your company trademark name. While you’re combing through these issues, “PICK YOUR BATTLES”. If a specific ccTLD is not that important to your company’s business expansion plans, just let it go. But make sure you invest heavily in keeping and securing the Domain Assets that your business model takes for granted.
In conclusion, I would like to say that there’s much more riding on your domain portfolio than most would ever imagine. Building an asset database, building a close professional relationship with your Registrar and always staying on top of the Domains namespace are hard suggestions I would like to make after having lived through managing this service. Have a great week ahead and THANK YOU for tuning in!!
by admin on May 31, 2006 12:28pm
But Then Face to Face I’ve spent many hours over the past few days combing through the comments on Port 25, and the comments about Port 25 on other sites (blogs, industry news, etc.). I was struck by the mix of hope and suspicion. When you don’t know who you’re dealing with, suspicion is a natural result, compounded in this case by years of mistrust of Microsoft’s motives. I realized while combing through the posts and discussions that I never took the time to introduce myself.
I have been a science geek for as long as I can remember – not great for one’s social life but at least I can say I’ve been kicked out of Chemistry class for discussing quantum physics in the back row…
I’ve worked in Silicon Valley for 12 years, and before that studied and worked in San Diego. My degree is in Cognitive Science from UCSD (a combination of neurobiology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology, founded by the great Don Norman). In the Valley I worked as a software engineer for several years, building desktop, distributed, and web applications in C++ and Java, including DCOM and J2EE. I worked at a couple of normal software companies, and worked crazy hours at 5 startups.
My best times in software engineering were at Ofoto (now Kodak) where I ran the web development and middleware engineering teams. We built a highly scalable photo service using Tomcat and Jakarta on Solaris and Linux, built our own Java-based persistence layer, and used XML for internal and external integration – old hat now, but this was in 2000.
After Ofoto, I went to BEA Systems as Web Services Principal Architect. I got the chance to work with the WebLogic Workshop team (aka Crossgain, the high-profile defection of Tod Nielsen and Adam Bosworth from Microsoft) and customers like Merrill Lynch on “web services architectures” – no one called it SOA back then. Workshop became open-sourced as Apache Beehive under the leadership of Carl Sjogreen (now a product manager at Google). In late 2002, I joined the WebLogic Integration team to do technical market development and product strategy. I learned a lot about software strategy and got hooked on the web services management concept, convinced the product management team to build Quicksilver, which eventually became the AquaLogic Service Bus.
In 2004 we started seeing real impact on the core business from JBoss, and my GM Chet Kapoor wanted BEA to get into the open source software game. Top management didn’t like the idea, and shortly after Tod Nielsen left the company, a few dozen directors and VPs followed his lead, as did Chet. Shortly after I’d joined Microsoft, Chet became the CEO of Gluecode and asked me to join. I couldn’t see how their business model could be defended, and stayed at Microsoft. Six months later, Chet sold the company to IBM and became VP of IBM’s Open Source group. I admit that I kicked myself.
I joined Microsoft originally to work directly with startups, in the hope that I could have a positive impact on people pouring their hearts and minds into risky technology bets. After batting 1 for 5 I know how tough it can be. Microsoft generates nearly all its revenue from partners (96%) but gets hammered on lack of innovation, so this seemed like a good fit. In Dan’l Lewin’s group in Silicon Valley (Mountain View) I got to meet and help a number of different startups. During this time, I saw advantages of open source economics for some of these companies, especially in SaaS. It was clear to me that something had to change in our licensing and pricing – two very challenging things to shift. I spent several months advocating within the company for change, with good results.
When Bill Hilf offered me the chance to join the Open Source Software Lab, I jumped at the chance. Open source is a pivot for the software industry at large as well as for Microsoft. I’m very curious to understand the breadth and depth of technologies available in open source, and deeply committed to driving interoperability between open source and Microsoft technologies.
This is longer than I’d intended, so I’ll stop here. For those who want more background, my blog is at http://samus.typepad.com, and I have to point out an interaction I had with Matt Asay, a smart and outspoken leader in the open source community.
PS: In my first post (“Why is it called Computer Science”) one reader pointed out the similarity of the topic to Paul Graham’s brilliant essay “Hackers and Painters”. While the point was made with a degree of suspicion, I’m grateful to the poster for leading me to Paul’s essay. Thanks, cblazek.
by admin on May 30, 2006 11:53am
‘Alone Together’ and a little economics
Time for some confessions. I’m fully addicted to World of Warcraft (abbreviate WoW). There, I said it. I’ve been a long time gamer, particularly Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and Real Time Strategy oriented games (I’ll take you in Starcraft *any* day of the week), but it’s been a while since a game has been able to interject heavily into my life. And although I balance fairly well with Call of Duty 2 on my Xbox 360, WoW is a great game that has me hooked.
I have a relatively busy life, so video game playing is usually relegated to the wee hours, typically after 11pm (I’ve never been a big sleeper), and I’ve even played at 35,000 feet on a wireless/satellite connection while flying on an SAS flight from Amsterdam to Seattle (yes, it’s that addictive). To make matters worse (or better?), when I’m not playing I often like to read about video game theory, particularly papers that research the sociological aspects of multiplayer games. I just finished what I think may be the best paper I’ve read thus far on WoW.
The paper, titled “Alone Together? Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games”, from researchers at Xerox Parc and Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, is a fascinating look at the sociological aspects of WoW, with some particularly insightful analysis into what really makes the game ‘work’ and succeed. What sold me on this analysis were their research methods: from the launch of WoW (Nov. 2004) the researchers were active WoW gamers and wrote some software extensions to the client side UI to capture interesting game statistics (every 5-15 minutes) while they played. So this study is based on data obtained from the game itself, versus interviews or surveys. This is what I call research! And you can tell just from reading this paper that these guy are real WoW players, not ‘observers’ from the outside.
I won’t recap the entire paper, but I will highlight some of their findings as I think it’s relevant for this forum of discussion on Port 25. Albeit a highly social virtual environment, the authors find that many of WoW’s players, play alone (thus the quote ‘Alone Together’), and their results discuss a different type of ‘social factor’ existing in WoW. The importance of an audience, a social presence and a spectacle are the three factors that they find explain the appeal of being ‘alone together’ in multiplayer games like WoW. In short, the authors tap the issues of what in film theory is often called the voyeur phenomenon – where the audience/viewer enjoys the ability to look inside someone else’s life. When movies truly succeed at ‘suspending disbelief’ it is often because the filmmaker has succeeded at creating a suspension in the viewers mind, convincing them that they truly are the ‘voyeur’ of the action onscreen. Of course, what interactive multiplayer gaming adds to this dimension is the ability to be both viewer and subject of voyeurism, which creates the appeal of ‘watching’ and wanting to ‘be’ the level 60 Night Elf rouge displaying their/your prowess in front of others. Here’s Sam, one of our own OSS lab engineers, showing his stealth-iness by sneaking into Undercity.
Name: Jbauer Race: Night Elf Class: Rogue Level: 60 Server: Frostwolf Guild: Dark Front
This phenomenon, as the paper identified, perpetuates both game play and game satisfaction (i.e., the ‘alone together’ trend).
So how does this relate to Port 25? A point raised at the end of the paper is the need for social navigation tools, to better understand certain dynamics in games like WoW (such as guild cohesion or churn rate). When reading this paper, I couldn’t help but think how this type of research in social dynamics might be applied to software development communities. Granted, when working on code, there are different dynamics than battling basilisks, but there are many principles and characteristics that are very similar – network-based, remote communication, level based grouping and different dynamics of interaction based on level and participation, satisfaction for continued participation in a group, etc. I think it would be interesting to look at possible correlations between these two social networks (MMOG’s and software communities) as it’s often at unusual intersects that we find meaningful patterns. If, nothing else, it will likely result in some useful social navigation and analysis tools.
Lastly, I’ve been doing a bit of flying lately so I’ve catching up on my books to read. I just finished David Warsh’s “Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.” In particular, in the second half of the book, Paul Romer of Stanford provides a very solid look at the economic issues that direct technological growth. I would recommend reading the section on the costs of ‘idea’ inventions and expected growth and returns. Many business books I read these days fail to recognize some of the essential economic principles Romer investigates – I hope to blog more on this soon.