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Memories of Sun

The EU has approved, the Sun/Oracle deal all but done, waiting for China and Russia. James Gosling’s post shows the poignant side. How long, I wonder, will the blogs.sun.com website still be available? How long to give space to memories and reminders?

Some of my own memories of Sun, in roughly timeline order:

Working on the Sun booth at CeBiT in Germany (I was working for a Sun reseller at the time). Watching the US marketing video at the after-closing party, since the German marketing team decided the video wasn’t appropriate. I still have the “Power of Sun” music CD, and a scarf with images of Sun workstations.

Wondering why Sun didn’t support Motif properly, when all the other Unix vendors did.

Finding a position at Sun that made use of the skills I have.

Meetings at Menlo Park; long, involved discussions on all sorts of security and identity subjects.

Sitting outside the cafeteria at the Menlo Park office, talking to people.

The Sun-internal innovation conference, mixing intelligent, innovative, hardware, software, and operating system people together, with dinner on the beach.

The most fun I’d had at work in a long time on a good project with great people, that unfortunately fell victim to the Great Financial Crisis.

Really good people, knowledgeable. Sun seemed to have a lot of people with integrity and dedication. Also its share of less-knowledgeable posers, of course, but the trenches were filled with good people.

There are lots of memories out there; Sun was one of those companies with an influence larger than its nominal size. Those of us who were part of it, even if for a short time, won’t forget it quickly.

2010 01 21 Technology Comments (0) Permalink

Moving to Windows 7 – Part One

The motherboard on my old Windows XP box quit while I was taking a break for lunch one day, and I decided to replace it with an updated Windows box. So I’ll keep on using a Snow Leopard laptop, OpenSolaris server, and Windows 7 as well.

Maybe I was asking for trouble, going with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional, but with a quad core Intel box it seemed a shame to not do so. Most of the tools I use every day (like Firefox and Pidgin) are easy to reinstall and thus ignorable. But there are some that cost me a little more time to figure out. Admittedly, it’s a somewhat eclectic collection.

First off, mail. I use Pegasus Mail, have for many years, and it suits the way I work. Every time I’ve upgraded, it’s worked flawlessly. This time, it took a while before I figured out that I needed to not take the defaults in the install, but rather uncheck the “create user configuration” box, and then in the following configuration step select “single user only”. After that, copying across the mail and configuration file worked perfectly to set it up right.

The Palm desktop presents more of an issue. It turns out that you can’t use a USB connection to synchronize under the 64-bit version of Windows 7, so I’ll have to get a bluetooth adapter to synchronize my Treo 680. Or get a new phone. I’m still mulling the options on that one.

Printer: the HP Color Laserjet CP1510 drivers and software won’t install from the CD. This isn’t really an issue; the default Windows 7 driver works fine but doesn’t show you the toner status etc. Fortunately, the HP.com website has an updated “advanced” driver. Except for, it doesn’t do all the status stuff either, apparently. Oh well.

The scanner is an ancient one from Canon, the 3000F. The scanning application won’t install. There are no drivers or updated applications on the Canon web site for Windows 7. The toolbox application for scanning and copying shows up on c|net, at http://download.cnet.com/CanoScan-Toolbox/3000-2094_4-10972136.html (it may be a dead link by the time you read this), but without the drivers it isn’t much use. Hunting around on the web showed that this is a case for the Virtual XP mode. This consists of 2 downloads, the first of which is 500 MB. The current estimate on our currently floaky DSL link is almost 2 hours to go, so I think I’ll go and do some real work while waiting for it to trickle in, and continue this post when I’ve made some more progress.

2010 01 19 Technology Comments (5) Permalink

Meeting Productivity

Some months ago, Time magazine published an article called Why the Office Oddball Is Good for Business, about how really productive meetings need someone in them to stop too much consensus too early. The article starts

Want to get the most out of your next brainstorming session at work? Bring in an oddball. If you can’t find an oddball, try a naysayer or even a mere stranger — anyone who can keep things vaguely uncomfortable. If that sounds like a prescription for one of the worst meetings you’ve ever had, suck it up and go anyway. It might also be one of the most productive.

It does sound like the recipe for an active meeting, one in which everybody has to be on their toes, listening for the real meaning behind the words. A meeting in which those catching up on their email will miss something important. A meeting which may not produce agreement, but will produce more clarity on precisely what it is you disagree about. If you’re going to have a meeting, isn’t that what you want? A meeting to produce results, not just nods around the table from people who aren’t really paying attention?

Which is not to say that every meeting should be uncomfortable; lots of meetings are to hash out details where people agree on the basics. But it’s amazing how often people think they agree about something until they’re challenged to explain it in detail, which is where they discover they disagree on the explanation.

Whether any person raising uncomfortable issues is welcome depends on who’s running the meeting, whether they’re looking for results or, instead, looking for uncritical approval of what they want. I’ve also seen cases where the person running the meeting claims to want the uncomfortable questions asked, but in reality doesn’t. it’s hard, allowing the difficult questions. Answering them is tough, admitting you don’t have answers to all of them can be tougher. So the tendency is to squelch the questions, usually by squelching the questioner. I suspect this tendency contributes to a certain number of business failures.

2010 01 05 General
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Dead Links

In the general spirit of tidying up before the Christmas/New Year period I used a link checker on my blog (Integrity on the Mac, I’ve also used Xenu on Windows). And discovered a bunch of 404s. Some were to sites that still exist but either reorganized without setting up 301 redirects, or deleted the content I linked to. Some were to sites that don’t exist any more. I guess part of the price I pay for being part of the spidernet that is the web is making sure my little bit of it is reasonably tidy, so I’ll be deleting dead links (though not content) over the next little while. This does raise the issue of the content in cases where I may have referred to, say, a business that doesn’t exist any more. I’m thinking I’ll make a small note in cases where it seems to matter, with the determination of “seems to matter” being somewhat arbitrary.

I installed and activated the WP Minor Edit plugin for WordPress and will mark all these changes as minor, so this shouldn’t lead to the Atom feed being discombobulated.

2009 12 09 Technology Comments (1) Permalink

lynx and mod_security

I’ve been implementing more web sites recently; it appears to be one part of the technology market for which there is still demand. One of the things I push when I meet with clients is accessibility, so I figured I should test my own sites and make sure they’re reasonably accessible. Lynx is one tool to use to check accessibility (as well as being a good basic text-based browser). I was a little flummoxed when I got back a 406 http error, which usually means the user agent can’t read the character set, language, or encoding the web site uses. Even the most basic text html page was rejected.

It turned out that my ISP had mod_security enabled (good) and configured in such a way that lynx was banned (not so good). Banning lynx seems to be a fallout from a quick way of configuring mod_security by filtering out keywords that might be used in hacking attempts. Personally I can’t see the point as lynx can be told to use a different user agent string if need be, and people who want to hack your site will likely know how to do that, and I can’t understand how people use lynx to hack a site either. Mind you, I don’t hack other people’s web sites, so I don’t know the tools people use who do. Anyway, the ISP cheerfully took out the filter causing the problem, but in the meantime my IP address had been flagged by mod_security for trying to bypass the filter too many times, so I was completely banned from my own site, as well as every other site that happens to be hosted on the same server.

Eventually we cleared up that little problem as well, and I could get back to tweaking my style-sheets and HTML to be more accessible. There’s a bit more to do yet, but I’m getting there. And I’m grateful for an assiduous ISP (Canadian Web Hosting) with a support team that works late on Friday nights.

2009 12 07 Technology
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Coping With a Strong-Willed Child

One of the unforeseen advantages of having an Amazon affiliate account is the positive loop it introduces. In this particular case, I reviewed books about raising children, people clicked on the links, they bought other books from Amazon that showed up in my reports, I looked at those books, etc. I call it a multi-level recommendation service; I’m sure there are more “official” names for it.

Anyway, in this particular case someone bought Parenting the Strong-Willed Child: The Clinically Proven Five-Week Program for Parents of Two- to Six-Year-Olds, and since my daughter is strong-willed (much more so than her brother at that age), I thought I’d take a look. I also ordered When Your Child Has a Strong-Willed Personality from the library and read both the books at more or less the same time.

Parenthetical note: are there ever a lot of books out there on how to cope with strong-willed children!

Both the books have anecdotal/illustrative examples, which mostly served to make me grateful for my child. After that, the books have the same basic ideas at the core, but go about the message in different ways.

The “clinical program” book has an actual program in it that you’re meant to follow, which consists of spending 10 minutes each day doing the program for that week, before starting the next week on the next phase. This would probably be useful if there is a serious problem; condensing the program and combining steps worked out fine for us. The first step is simply paying attention to what the child is doing for those 10 minutes: no questions, no orders, just saying “now you’re stacking the red blocks” “now you’re colouring with blue crayon”. The “do you want to try…” etc comes later, after you and the child have got used to the idea of your paying attention to what the child is actually doing rather than what you think they should be doing, for that small amount of time. Personally I think this is the most important step – it’s so easy as a parent to get into the “now we have to do this”, even if it’s under the guise of encouraging the child to do things “properly”, and fail to take the time to pay attention to what’s really happening. The other steps in the program are also reasonable, nothing stupendously different to what other books say.

The “strong-willed personality” book is more general and does not come with a 5-week program, so is likely less reassuring if you have a serious problem. It points out strongly that the worst problems come with a strong-willed child and a strong-willed parent battling and advocates the parent to not quibble over small issues, but to seek ways to defuse potential situations, and let everyone save face.

Both books counsel kindness and respect for the child’s point of view as ways to defuse conflict, and give methods or tips to help. Variations on some of the techniques would probably also help with dealing with co-workers.

2009 11 26 Books
Family Comments (3) Permalink