Mikes Thoughts

There was this old saying in the military when I was there, “lead, follow, or get the Hell out of the way”. I bet you all know people you work with, who have management responsibility, who could become prime movers that seem to walk on eggshells. They’re afraid to do and their afraid not to do. What happens is that nothing gets done because fear is the twin polarity of their existence. What should happen with those types of people? In small companies that struggle for their daily dimes, someone has to step forward that can innovate and integrate. These people don’t know how to do that. They simper around and hate it because they have never had an original idea.

I built a manifesto for a emerging product we have which is based on Linux. I felt that the products were not understood, sold, managed at a few levels like our more entrenched windows products. Why? They need product management expertise at the basic level. Someone that could:

define their basic roadmaps, definitions, and goals
reach to a set of early stage companies that may have similar interests
build out a community based set of forums, bug reporting, and collaboration

What this does is align product management, engineering, sales, support into a common vision. You cannot sell something you don’t understand or grok or get. How do you sell something that is so foreign and different that even the people charged with support cannot manage supporting it. Its difficult. You need a product vision. I’m not saying I’m some visionary product manager. I struggle with basic premises of product management but I also know what I see. We cannot expect emerging products to suddenly be revenue generators. They take time to “sink in, become known, gain a following”. How does one do that?

Its damned difficult. But I’m committed to it above all else. I’ve seen many open source project like Open Office.org, Mozilla, The GIMP, reach critical mass. Why do they? Part of my so-called vision. They have a community behind them that sees and shares. I would argue that each of the products is “disruptive” in nature and to manage a disruptive product requires innovative and integrated thoughts, plans, roles.

Leaving Las Vegas (or SF…)

I’m leaving next Friday for Singapore to go to training on our products. I’m excited because I’ve never been there. I’m also going on to India to meet with our India development team. I’m flying out from SFO next Friday and I’m very thrilled that I work for a company with such a presence. I’m having fun at work and extending things to places I want to work while still supporting sales and SE activities.

Last Friday I took a day in San Francisco. Went to visit my friend Simon that does Product Management over at Groundworks Open Source, then went to visit another potential partner, and then on to GBs. GBs is one of the places along the Embarcadero in SF that holds many memories. Used to be I worked 50 feet from GBs for this small clothing company that’s there. Way back when, I worked for Ed there and we would meet on a Friday, have some cold Marzen, eat Hoisun Ribs. Times would move on and we both moved to this rather interesting start-up called Linuxcare and then we left that and actually did some technology consulting together up around Chico and Paradise, worked together again at Levanta, and somehow managed to last through that as well. Its amazing how the technology landscape manages to create networking sites that keep us together and I’m really glad to spend my bit of time primarily on Llinkedin. Its a great value and it lets me find people I somehow lost in all the shuffles. Thanks to the folks there!

But the real thing is it occurred to me after all the shuffling and career paths and dead ends; that GBs really had not changed. It still serves up great cold beer. The menu has changed and the peopel have in a major way. The MIS/IT staff at GAP would meet many Fridays and we would do team meetings as well. We used to sit out and jeer the Critical Mess bike rides last Friday of the month. Not because we hated bikes but because it was the lazy thing to do. We were sitting swilling micro-brewed beer and they were busy trying to run over pedestrians while staying away from cops and cars. After a few trips on the last Friday of the month, the name changed naturally from its regular “Mass” to our anointed name “Mess”. It did mess up traffic big time and it got people really pissed off. I never saw the value in something that was supposed to unite being so factious. But hey! We all gotta create our messes.

GBs was fun though and come to think of it it was the last Friday of the month! Hey!! I did not notice it because I rode BART that day. BART does rule in many ways and one of them is getting me into SF. At a lower level, I am always reminded of the DaveR when I go there unfortunately; but this time I felt I finally lost some of that memory. It takes a long time to get over someone’s passing I think and I will never truly get over it. I’ll learn some acceptance but I’ll always visit his blog and read the old posts.

Anyways, it was a good time and I felt really good after 3 hefeweizens there. I don’t eat the food because I strive for some moderation these days with my 90 pounds or so of weight loss. Food and beer are not my friends any more unfortunately. They can really mess me up if I don’t exercise due care and caution.

So that was my Friday and it was good. I’m planning a month long international business trip to Singapore and India next. Sidetrips will definitely occur.

I’ve been alerted that I will be traveling soon. My boss wishes me to fly to Singapore and Chennai India to build out our sales and sales engineering networks and do visits with our offices there. I’ve never been to either place. This brings to mind a possibility of flying completely around the world which I simply cannot ignore since we also have offices in the UK so perhaps I should visit there too. I’m getting prepared for a month’s trip since I will probably be in India for at least a week and maybe longer. My Singapore time will be about a week to go over some product roadmaps, meet with engineering there, and just see how we do things there. I’m pretty thrilled about the whole thing.

Traveling internationally is interesting especially with these destinations. I will cover some number of miles and I’ve kinda considered what i want to do as far as flight times and locales and sidetrips even. I am going to stop over in Tokyo for a day perhaps to get acclimated and less-lagged and then fly on to Singapore. After Singapore, I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a visa for a visit to mainland China and take a few days there. I have an interest in seeing a few places like the Great Wall, some archeological materials here and there, and just the overall city locales around Beijing.

Next I will fly on to India and do my few weeks work there. After this is over, I intend on visiting Egypt. Since I am a has-been archeologist, you know I have an interest in world antiquity and the pyramids, the valley of kings, and Luxor all hold an interest. This gets me to a point where its probably easier to just fly on to New York and then back rather than go back the other way.

I’m going to build a few interesting images and upload them to the blog tomorrow to represent what I think i am going to do. To me, its a chance in a lifetime to see the world and have it paid for by work so I intend on doing what I can to maximize and see things.

Come back tomorrow or the next day and I’ll show some images of my travel plans. It should be fun to build out those images since I rarely post images here.

What a relief. Perhaps its just me but does iTunes really suck? Does it suck on MACs too? I bet it really does; but its a coolness and status thing for them. After all, they run that cool BSD’ish OS for a reason. To spend more money on the OS? Is it a silo itself? Don’t know; don’t care. I’m good with the AMD64 stuff myself. To replace iTunes and its clumsy, quirky interface, I submit that an iPod 80g Video does not need to call the mothership at all. I can Rockbox it. Then I can MediaMonkey it on my Windows systems or use whatever I want on Linux to hit my NFS server, samba server, whatever. Here’s an added extra. I point my install of whatever at the mounted file system of the Ipod and I can play all the music files through the laptop. Nice touch. Can I do that with iTunes? It means that the little drive in it that the Ipod has becomes a truly portable music center for me and it also means that the iPod and my other player are backups.

My advice? Ditch the iTunes. If you need downloads; get thee to amazonmp3.

I’ve blogged a few times about my habilis habits. A habilis (like homo habilis) is a tool-user. The originals lived some million years ago give or take a flaked-stone tool and were the earliest known hominid to make tools. A tool is either a subtractive or additive process. If you are making a flaked-stone projectile point, perhaps you reduce raw material to a workable state. Tools can also be an additive process. May be that a projectile point is both actually since you add some kind of delivery agent to it. But that’s what we basically do I think to this day with the tools we choose to use or not. Some tools we adopt to make something easier and when we learn it perhaps we move on or keep it or adopt a new tool. I have a hypothesis that tools exhibit their maker’s beliefs in many distinct areas. If we can identify a certain structure to what is called flaked-stone morphology perhaps we could even identify a specific tool maker.

Now lets hop in my archeological and anthropological time machine and jog to the present. I’m at a customer site over in Plano, Texas which has given me a brand new appreication of “man the tool user”. The customer site is a larger entity which does some interesting things around tubes and transistors and even calculators. I’m in learning mode so I sit quietly and watch the master tool users exhibit. I ask a question or two about a specific tool and how to reduce it or add to it. These guys are interesting and encapsulate my judgements on computers as a whole. They use the right tool for the job. If the tool requires open source technologies, they roll out Linux solutions or place open source tools on Windows systems. This is completely possible and I do it myself. If they need Solaris they use it. Windows too. Many people maintain multiple desktops that they VNC or RDP to. Both of these tools are enablers. They enable you to reach out to other systems, make use of them. But lets not forget the ultimate enabler. Secure Shell has to be the grand daddy of enablers. With SSH you can rule. You can adopt, change, move, copy, delete, merge, split. Its cousins SCP and SFTP make it a three sided coin.

Now I have met the ultimate habilis enablers. They reach and encompass all the tools and they embody my beliefs that I’ve blogged a few times. Its all about the tools, Luke. You must use the tools. Computers and OS’es are no different. Linux, Sun, Windows, and their tools all make a composite whole. I told a Microsoft guy I am working with today that view and he vigorously agreed.

So in the end, I am sitting in the cave entrance painting my blog. Recording the rush of antelope and the sunrises and strange bursts of color. I am traversing a desert scape and knowing where the best plants lie. I am the enabler; the ultimate enabler and my canvas is the world. I can use tools that make me better and I can adopt and adapt. Is that not the mark of successful beings? Evolution has a way of separating wheat from chaff.

I get the feeling from these days in Texas that we must all become habilis and not ever have the view that just because its “this not that” its better or others that choose something else is worse. The paint I choose makes me more productive these days.

What do you choose to be more productive? As a side note, I would be seriously remiss if I did not mention that the fox came out with its latest yesterday or today. Way to go Mozilla team. You guys do good stuff and you have my thanks.

Some software out there (free, shareware, or commercial) just makes the difference; give you an edge, lets you communicate, see, or share. I’d like award a few companies or open source projects my first and only awards of Good Edge Software ™. So here goes:

VMware - what a novel concept! Boot one OS inside another OS. Not good enough, you say? Lets share OS’es across a network. Lets make it possible for teams to collaborate but all virtually. We can create whole virtual communities, worlds, networks. Its VMware dudes.

Hyper-V - but no one can own the sphere. Then there is Hyper-V from Microsoft that challenges and is a new kid so to speak. More on Hyper-V in my OS awards below.

Mozilla - Well, Mozilla deserves a spot for so many good reasons. Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird. You can use their products so many ways.

Office System - Office 2007 is coolness and I use it everyday. Outlook 2007 is light years better and the office group seems so much better, different, more involved; yet complicated in some ways. More to learn. Notice where we’re going here? See the pattern?

OpenOffice.org - a worthy alternative that I’ve used for some years. Great PDF export, great for work and play. But there is no collaboration and calendaring system. That may hurt. I don’t view Evolution as worthy really.

OS Systems

Linux 2.6 or Ubuntu - well, I’m not hinting that one really has become the other; but why would one want to run a RPM-based distribution if you can run Ubuntu? But I have a downside to this. Where is the true revolution here? I don’t see what the desktops want to become next. We have Gnome and KDE. But what are they going to be next? Honestly speaking, sometimes I see Linux as growing a bit more static with upgrades and updates not evolving but just revolving.

Vista - not really worthy of comment as far as I can see. It does not deliver just frustrates. No link here. Sure you can turn off UAC and do some stuff with SP1. I’ll just take XP instead for most things. That was until I saw the next thing…

Server 2008 - now this seems to be the core OS that Microsoft should have released and built upon for us all. Geez, Microsoft. Make it a desktop and shoot Vista and put it out of its misery. Server 2008 standard will let you Hyper-V if your system is worthy; but it comes bundled. It also seems responsive, fun, quick to please. You can make it into a desktop if you want. Check it out here.

Conclusions

The new breed of OS System goes a long way to make systems and servers blur their edges and I think that’s good. We want responsive systems and if they are server based, that’s okay too. I use Windows Server 2003 Enterprise 64b as a desktop too. Why? Because it just runs and does its tasks and I like it. I think Linux has to make a decision. What does it want to be? I will always be a Linux user but I have questions around where its going these days. It seems to spin out new kernels and software and libraries. But what does it want to be next? I’ll just continue to use Ubuntu 7.10 because I like how it works.

I’ll be watching as I move farther from the mainstream. Opposites attract though and in the end I foresee that Microsoft will need Linux and particularly Open Source and the same is true the other way. We need both and one will move one way and the other will be forced to adopt things it may think unworthy. I’ll be on the sidelines being a habilis boy and just using. Thanks to the guys everywhere that write the cool tools and systems for making it all available.

I read the news about Tim Russert with a degree of sadness. But I also want to make this point and perhaps I’ve blogged it before. I base this on a friend that I lost in 2006 while at Levanta, personal reflection, 2 years of a never-ending well checks, and my own beliefs at this point. Take care of yourselves all of you. Go see a doctor and get a well-check for heaven’s sake. If you need to change eating habits just change them. Its all difficult and I know. I went from a 46 inch waist to a 36 inch waist in a year. I dropped 90 pounds and lowered the BP that was almost pre-stroke in seriousness.

Here’s the thought in the main. You gotta watch out for you. Losing weight is still a day to day thing for me. I gain a pound, lose a pound, but I have this motivation. The motivation is I never want to be what I was before. It was very difficult and I miss some of the food, beer, companionship. Lets face it, a steak, potatoes, heavy duty beer, repeat if necessary is a companion for us. We can enjoy the feeling of fullness and stretch back in our middle years. But something can be waiting for us. Don’t let it claim you. Folks, 58 is young and if you are in your 20 somethings reading this, I envy you. You are indestructible; at least for a few more years.

Bide the words and take care of yourself. You only have you. Enough said.

I’m going to be heading out to Plano, Texas in a few days on my first business trip and I’m kinda excited. Not so much about the destination; but about the going. I don’t travel for business that much these days so a trip wrangled to a big enterprise customer is interesting, fun, and paid for by this certain large software partner of ours. Thanks guys!

Virtualization and Paying the Bills

I’ve blogged a few times about virtualization and how it can be deployed, used, and we can sharpen up our skillsets with virtual iron. What I appreciate the most about virtual iron is its flexibility. The servers and workstations are big files and there are simple little files in VMware that drive them that you can edit. Its much like so many other things in Linux. And its one of the things I love about it compared to Windows. Linux is just common sensical and it arranges itself in files you can edit at “crunch time”. Windows has its flaky registry which can get unhappy and cause problems. I can make a Linux box unbootable and still boot into to it and rescue it most times. I can zero out the Grub boot loader and resurrect it or fix some boot issue. Power! Virtualization takes this to another level to me. We can create things within things and power them with virtual iron. Create realities that are fictitious but that perform complex acts when they are realities. Lets not even add up the power savings.

The 10-year old with the power of the ipod

I’m watching my daughter dancing around with a sansa mp3 player I bought her. I think I’ll stop blogging and just watch… See ya

This is primarily about my daughter creature. She is turning 10 now and its one of those wondrous, haunting, amazing times. She’s evolving from being single digits to double. I told her she was doing that and she just stared at me and gave me that “you are weird and we all know it” look. That’s okay. I’ve known that for awhile so its nothing new. But moving to double digits signals the beginning and end of a few things. Its a change in the force of life and the early years of the ones and twos are slipping away. Life is turning its first corner and letting you know you can still turn with it. Congrats my little pooh bear!

Turning 10 signals an arrival and a departure. I love you kiddo. You don’t even know I write this thing and if you did, you would just say “Its just a dadden thing”.

I always approach the weekends with a great deal of appreciation. I enjoy the work weeks immensely these days; perhaps even more than the Visa days. I’ve always felt good when there is some “need” and I can help fulfill it. At work now, we have basic needs which can be met with simple things up front. Our marketing guy wanted a way to stage the website so he could preview it before launching it. Enter VMware Server with a ubuntu image. One of our support guys wants to learn basic Linux so we created a new image and some monitoring and management solution and he got to start learning how Linux is different. Its fun at Celestix because we use Linux for a lot of things but we’re not a so-called Linux company. I think over the past years the best and worst of times I’ve spent has been with the so-called Linux companies. Its been nice to get away from that and go taste other realities. Its really hard to work for startups I think. They require a significant investment in time, energy, motivation and spirituality. I’m always willing for it. But when you combine Linux with it; it seems like the requirements all go up. I don’t have a problem with it overall; but I do like where I’m at now, how we use Linux, how I can make others appreciate it. Linux is a tool that can be appreciated and when you can roll out virtual images that get things done, make lives easier, and allow people to be productive; Linux fulfills a goal.

All that being said, perhaps I’m lazier and need to just kick back on the weekends. I spent Friday glued to a Linux box or two; did meetings on how we can grow some customer confidence, and also started working on new projects. Celestix is very hands on with things while Visa seemed separated by a degree or two. All in all, the hands on part of things is nice and requires an every day sort of commitment.

Linuxworld Expo

I’ve given some thought to attending Linuxworld this year. I guess my main question is “why”. Why go? I don’t have the feeling that there is a lot left for me to find there. Its evolved or changed or lessened to something that I don’t recognize. Yet I have a few friends that will go. I’ve also organized little get togethers and this is the first year to not do one. I just don’t feel the need any longer. The guys are still important; but years have gone by and I’ve kinda left the whole Linux mainstream thing farther and farther behind.

Other Bloggables

I like writing combination posts that sum up the things I’ve done or not. I reached my own milestones here with the blog and I wanted to just say thanks to a few tools like Apache, PHP, mysql, and wordpress. I’ve managed to keep this site online now for a few years with a few hundred posts or more. I’ve evolved my own blogging away from some belief its the social thing to do. Its more like its the “me thing to do”. I don’t believe there is a future any longer in it but there is a now. The social institutions we may cherish or hate or even ignore may not have a future either; but we all as writers, cataloguers, definers do. As much as the prehistoric rock art blogger told us an incomplete story; our blogs do the same. We are all evolving that story day by day. But lets just put them where they belong in our lives. Is it really about links and authority or about beliefs and ideas?