Dru Nelson

Back in the day, Ken Olsen, then CEO of Digital Equipment Corp. (or DEC), handled an interview badly and was quoted with the phrase:

[“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” ](http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp)

What he really mean is described in the Snopes article linked by the quote.

However, Ken was a big proponent of shared computing. He believed that most companies and individuals didn’t have enought “IT Skills” to manager their own computers well. (Backups, failures, etc.) I seem to recall that he even started another small startup company after DEC that was going to market such services to small businesses. But after that quote it was too late. He was branded. I bet he wishes he had a blog back then.

The concept of outsourcing it all is interesting. I remember Steve Jobs making the same claim when he was CEO of NeXT. He raved about how awesome it was to have his NeXTstation at home in Palo Alto with a T1 connection to his office. He raved about how he didn’t have to worry about backups since the IT guys at the office had all of his data on some expensive redundant NFS servers.

Now, we are here in the 2000’s soon to be to the 2010’s. As the tech people look around, they don’t notice too many changes. However, if you look at the user side of the house, more and more people are doing everything completely on the web. The browser is definitely the modern day 3270 (I used to call HTTP/HTML the VT100 of the 90’s, but the 3270 is definitely a better analogy).

If the only application that people use is the browser, it would be pretty safe to say that Ken was right.

I filed this bug on the ‘to_xml’ method of ActiveRecord

I filed this bug with low expectations. Previous bug filings at other projects generally don’t get a lot of attention since the developers are usually swamped. I was very pleased when I saw them address the bug and patch it. It is also interesting in that they upgraded its priority since these bugs are related to a potential security bug.

Overall, very cool. It feels good to know that in a small way, I have made the project just a tiny bit better for everyone… just like others have done so for me.

Paul Graham’s post on keeping a program in ones head.

I cannot stand distractions when I’m trying to get things done. It is always good when I learn that I’m not alone on this topic. For example, I’ve read this same story but for people in other fields that also require high-concentration.

In a video on Richard Feynman, he jokingly told the same story. His technique was to just not do his job and work on the things he wanted to. Eventually the other people would stop assigning him tasks and left him alone. (Note: it helps if you have already accomplished great things in order to pull this off).

Also, in a biography on Arthur C. Clarke, his relatives explained how he couldn’t be interrupted for “tea or anything” when writing. If you did interrupt him, this mild mannered fellow would blow up in anger. This led his first and only marriage to a divorce within one year.

Now, I’m not comparing myself to them, I’m just recognizing that knowledge work that requires memory doesn’t work at all with distraction. When great people who have accomplished great things say the same thing… then maybe there is something to what Paul is saying. You don’t have to dig to deep in the software industry to see that people are understanding this and starting to change things… which is good.

Wells Fargo, one of the nation’s largest mortgage backers, raised the interest rates on it 30-year, fixed-rate, non-conforming (AKA jumbo) loan to 8 percent last week. It is now up from 6.875 percent. Other lenders will probably follow the lead.

FYI, a jumbo loan for a single family residence in 2007 is $417,000. So, basically, just about everything in California 🙂

While Apple had a good day for press with their new product releases, Sun made a big announcement.

Today, Sun released the Niagara T2. They made some bold claims like, “The Worlds First True System on a Chip”, or “The Worlds Fastest Microprocessor”. I think those claims are a tad shady. However, if you look past the hype, there really is something there.

The chip has 8 cores that are each capable of 64 threads! Each core now has an FPU (compared to the 1 FPU on the Niagara T1) and 4MB of cache. There is also hardware support for crypto, virtualization, and I/O (2 10 GB network interfaces are on ide!). This is an impressive chip. Currently the top-end for Intel is quad-core, and they didn’t put as much effort into handling as many threads in hardware (hyperthreading supports 2 threads, compared to the 64 by Sun). If you had the right balance of cpu, memory throughput, and I/O (a network routing app, for instance)… you could imagine actually having 512 active threads running on this CPU. Amazing!

One thing was nagging at me, though. It has been a while since I looked at a Sparc, and I wasn’t sure if these were 32 bit cores or 64 bit cores. The only thing the site said was that the chip was UltraSPARC T2. Maybe they were using a 32 bit design to fit all of the cores on the die. I did a little research, and sure enough, the cores are the top-of-the line 64 bit cores. Quite amazing! The last time I had an UltraSPARC in production was in 1997 when they just came out. We used them for web-servers at four11.com, but only in 32 bit mode.

If Sun pushes these systems, they might have a chance at keeping their business alive. I like their technology, but sometimes that doesn’t win. There is a tremendous amount of momentum on Intel and Linux in the data center space. Also, my last experience with the Asterisk server taught me that getting Solaris up is still a heavy time investment. So, they are on the radar, but still not worth betting on yet.

Still, this is another example of competition creating a win for the industry. Lets see what they do with their advantage while they have it.

There is a lot of money flowing again… A LOT of money. It doesn’t take too much effort to see the companies being announced on Techcrunch today are exactly like companies of a different name mentioned from 1999. So the bubble is obious. Everybody else is writing about it. Fine, but I still want to thow my 2 cents in.

First, this company, PlayWidgets was announced on a blog today. The product struck a chord with me. Why? I wrote a similar app in Java 1.0 as an applet back in 1996. I wrote it with the free Java SDK and MS-DOS Edit or D-Edit. That was a long time ago. Here is the link is here. You will probably have to load it in IE, since the html doesn’t work in Firefox anymore. Also, I just loaded it and it looks like there is a bug. I remember contacting Paul Haeberli when I wrote it. Paul was one of the early graphics pioneers at SGI who would toss up some great graphics gems on the web when the web was practically nothing. He had a sample app that properly demonstrated double buffering in the cryptic Applet API. I asked if I could use his code… he said ‘sure’. BTW, if I recall, his app would take any JPEG and convert it to an impressionist interpretation. I have no doubt I will see such a widget pop up on someones MySpace page with the label.. ‘teh bomb’.

Second, although were are in a bubble, I’m not as pessimistic as I was towards the end of the last one. There are a lot of companies with great traction (ahem.. BrightRoll ). The internet is making a positive difference on a lot of problems. Yeah, we’ll have some royal flameouts (especially in the financial industry… again), but that will just help bring things back to reality… which is always a Good Thing.

the stock market tanked today, ouch.

Had lunch at Microsoft (nice). Met some interesting folks. I met the guy behind French Maid TV… nice guy from Hollywood. Terry then introduced me to Alex Tew. He’s the guy behind The Million Dollar Homepage… smart guy. He’s hanging out in the valley with the Bebo founder. I did look at his socks, but he wasn’t wearing the space invader socks today.

When I got back, the power went out in the city … like 5 times in a row. This basically sucked the productivity out of the entire day for everyone here. It also took down some of the major sites out there on the internets. Besides our time, the only other thing we lost was a RAID controller on a system. This wan’t a critical system and all other internal systems came back fine. We pulled the drives and moved them to an identical system that wasn’t heavily used. The ad-network was not affected at all. I think the day has shown that the results of some decisions made a while back have paid off really really well.

still… a ..weird day…

Maybe Give that EMACS a try again…

I don’t know why but I have had Lisp on the brain for the last few days. I think it was because I was thinking of switching back to emacs. How many times have you heard this story. “I used to use Emacs, but then after switching computers, I lost my .emacs file so I just switched back to Vi.” That’s me. After one quick look at the ubuntu app search, I found that they are on EMACS 21 and the world and all their new goodies (Rails on EMACS are on EMACS 22. After about 20 minutes of that thought, I happily went back to using Vi. When I have a spare week, I’ll spend the time re-introducing myself to EMACS and it’s internals… or so I thought.

LispBox & Web Serving

Later on that evening, I did read a blog entry on some lisp programming that pointed to Peter Seibel’s LispBox. Aha. He gets it. I don’t want to screw around figuring out stuff… I want a one click install to the magical lisp stuff. I’ve tried to setup EMACS in the past to have all the bells and whistles necessary to do C++ work. That isn’t an easy task. This was not going to be like that, so I gave it a try. Specifically I tried the Allegro Install since the disclaimers said it would have the most magic. I don’t mind commercial software and I want to see the polished tools.

I ran the software. Very nice. It has the famous SLIME extension to EMACS already lit up. It definitely had that feel like… this isn’t your normal Editor/IDE environment. I’ve used EMACS in the past, this was a bit slicker. It reminded me a lot of the Smalltalk browser/eval system. This might be a little bit like what those old Symbolics guys would rant about. After I got over appreciating that, I immediately went to the chapter in his book on web programming. I tried out the examples. I got some web pages to serve and then after noticing the time, pretty much stopped there.

irb

I needed to get back to work on some other stuff, and that whole experience was fun for about 20 minutes. The next step for me is to spend some time learning about this particular REPL environment. I’m just not even remotely familiar with it to be productive. I need to learn the Ruby equivalent of… > “what is that Ruby method on a string?? hmm.. I’ll just do. > irb > “”.methods.sort > Oh yeah, that is the one.”

Done. This is not a Lisp failure, this is a me failure. I just need that tool in my tool chest before I spend any more time on this. Until then, it is good to know, though, that when I have the time, the environment is there waiting for me… all set up and ready to go.

Thought. Is there a Rails for Lisp?

My curiosity from the web exercise did leave me with a question. Was there an equivalent of Rails for Lisp. I’ll bet with a completely dynamic environment like this, there has to be something like Rails.The web stuff in the Practical Lisp chapter was pretty barebones. Any good web development framework today needs to be on par with Ruby on Rails. After a little searching, I found a few scraped together libraries. None were top-to-bottom frameworks. There were lots of posts on the Reddit ‘fiasco’. There are also a lot of good posts on Erlang which does have a Rails like framework called ErlyWeb (more on that later). There is also Arc… but we’ll have to wait until that comes out to see if that is going to be interesting. Nope, it doesn’t look like the community has anything yet.

Hung Up on Threads Again

One interesting thing to note. The lisp community (like a few other languages) seems to be hung up on having a multi-threaded lisp implementation for web serving. Why? If the LispBox sample is any indication, only a few of the frameworks were capable of performing the samples in the book. Also, from the Reddit fiasco posts, there was mention of the servers having deadlocking issues. Why are they hung up this? Do they really want to follow in Java’s footsteps on this? Unfortunately, this isn’t a ding on Lisp. A lot of languages have problems with the hosting environment. The only major one that doesn’t is PHP. In an old post on PHP, I elaborate a tiny bit on the benefits of the PHP multi-process model.

For the Lisp situation, I don’t know enough to understand why most of the web stuff requires a multithreaded common lisp system. Is it the sexiness of having all the data available as shared state? Maybe the warmup time for the runtime is quite high. More likely, it is the memory footprint. I took a look at mod_lisp, and it just uses sockets to communicate to a long running process. I think the community should look at multi-process based solutions if they want to have scalability and reliability. They could then use any of the runtimes that they have available right this moment.

Back to the Real World

Anyways. I resumed my work back in the real world. Towards the end of the day, however, I was scanning one of the iphone dev groups and found this post by Jesse Andrews. The subject was about a caltrain schedule app for the iphone. That sounded interesting and I could actually use it. So I checked out the post. As I got to the bottom of the post, he mentions that he found some “hunks of lisp” in the html of the site.

What? Lisp? Again 🙂 I got excited and raced to do the ‘view source’ on the page. What would it reveal about the framework that they used for their site??

(while (re-search-forward ” \n]>\)\([^\n<>]

\)”) (replace-match (format “\1\2″ “-” (car s) “-“)) (setq s (cdr s))) (or (looking-at “

“) (error “Foo”)))))

I’m not a lisp expert but that sure looks like EMACS lisp. So this doesn’t count as a lisp site. It might qualify for a daily WTF, though.

Hmm. Still, maybe I should look at EMACS again. 🙂