Becoming an Executive: A Primer
I was promoted earlier this year and my new title is Distinguished Engineer. This is a technical executive position and although I’m still doing most of the same things I was doing previously I constantly struggle with new responsibilities and my own measure of accomplishment. Well, lucky me, I ran into a podcast from Despair.com. My sense of humour is so similar I enjoy all of their demotivators. Hope you like the Podcast.
The Art of Demotivation – Disconfirmation from Despair, Inc. on Podcast.
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What I did on my Fall vacation – CCCD Jamaica
In October I went to Jamaica to minister to deaf students at the Caribbean Christian Centre for the Deaf (CCCD) near Montego Bay, Jamaica. It was the culmination of a two-year attempt to minister to deaf outside of our home town (Cary, NC). Its easy to think you are going to minister to others but I think most that have done it will agree, you get far more than you give.
How did we end up in Jamaica? We started in 2009 when the class I attend and teach at for the deaf and hard of hearing decided we wanted to band together for a short term mission. Our original plan was to go to the Philippines to help out with some video editing and story telling to the deaf. God closed that door and re-directed us towards Jamaica and we established a relationship with a church near Kingston. We were all ready to head down for that trip but violence broke out in Jamaica in Spring of 2010 so the trip was cancelled. God is faithful and gave us a new opportunity to minister through CCCD to a school for the deaf located near Montego Bay. Of course, most people hear Jamaica and mission trip and figure you couldn’t pick a better spot. I couldn’t agree more, but probably for different reasons.
We arrived in Montego Bay Saturday night (Oct 22) and spend the next week ministering to the kids through teaching (Sunday church and three chapel sessions) along with some crafts and other activities with the kids. We also did some physical work that included painting, pressure washing, making screens, digging a drainage ditch and a variety of other small projects. You can see some commentary on the trip at the Colonial Web Site.
At the end of the week we were totally exhausted. Up at 0630 and in bed by 1000 and busy all the time in between.
Here is a link to the staff at CCCD singing and signing CCCD – I Love You Lord
Revving up an early-2011 17″ MacBook Pro to 16GB of Memory
I recently upgraded my 2009 17″ MacBook Pro to the newer 2011 model. I was torn on the upgrade because I’m losing some horsepower on a per-core basis (2.6Ghz down to 2.3Ghz) but I picked up two additional cores in the deal. That plus hyperthreading and we’ve got up to 8 parallel threads cranking at once. So, from a processor perspective I think its a positive trade.
Memory was the original 8GB from Apple but I saw that OWC had 8GB DIMMs for the Mac and putting in a pair of them gave me 16GB. That was quite a boost in terms of real memory. I’d say for most people its more memory than they need but for me I generally run a VM or two and 8GB is really not enough. Running Lotus Notes for e-mail, Sametime and other Java based applications tend to burn up memory pretty quickly. So, paging was bad for the SSD.
I’m currently running a Kingston SSDNow 512GB drive and it makes all the difference from a performance perspective. In my opinion, if you’re going to do one upgrade the SSD will give you the biggest bang for the buck in terms of overall performance and user experience.
I’ve been looking at possibly running two 512GB SSDs in the MacBook Pro by removing the DVD (never really use it anyway) and putting in a second 512GB SSD and running as RAID 0 to see if there is a significant performance boost. Should I run into and extra one I may give that a go.
At this point the Mac is working great and I’m not seeing any issues due to the memory upgrade. Here is what it looks like:
Now we’ll see what happens to my battery life.
It is what it is …
One of my favorite books of the Bible is that of Ecclesiastes. I think I like it because of its practicality and its honesty about life. A case in point is Ecclesiastes 11:3. In the NASB it is translated as, “If the clouds are full, they pour out rain upon the earth; and whether a tree falls toward the south or toward the north, wherever the tree falls, there it lies.” What in the world does this mean?
I’ve read several commentaries and considered the various interpretations provided by those more scholarly than I. Some have speculated that this verse is intended to instruct people not to interfere in God’s affairs, others have said that it refers to the troubles in this life that one cannot control. I have a slightly different perspective.
I think it simply means that some things in life happen and they are out of our control. We can want them to be different than they are but wanting them to be different doesn’t change the way they are. In fact, if we are so frustrated by them they can lead us into a situation where we get angry or frustrated and lead us into a variety of different sins. What this verse simply means is, “It is what it is…” Nothing more, nothing less. Take the things that are outside your control and work around them, do not let them get in your way or foil your plans. Focus on what you do have control over, like your emotions, choices and behaviour.
I have a friend who is a pastor in Winston Salem that said something similar. He said, when people’s expectations are greater than their reality the difference can easily end up being discontent. You need to reconcile and adjust your expectations based on reality. It doesn’t mean give up, it means, be practical and remain positive.
So, the next time it rains on Saturday and ruins that family outing, perhaps a good alternative is a good game of Scrabble or something else. Take advantage of the opportunity to make lemons into lemonade.
Measuring Clouds: Managing Efficiency and Expectations
One of the things humans like to do (we’ll most of them) is to measure things. We like to know if we’re better off after we do something. If so, we do more, if not, we’ll likely do less. This same process that has plagued mankind continues to plague IT managers over whether their investment in IT is a good business value. The question is, “How do we measure our efficiency and balance that measurement against our expectations?”
Jerry Cuomo recently posted on this topic at IBMDeveloperWorks in an article called “Measuring the Performance of your Cloud.” One of my current projects at IBM is optimizing WebSphere Application Server in a variety of environments. Most notably has been focused on deploying WebSphere onto a cloud over the past few years and now its deploying AND optimizing WebSphere in virtualized environments. But how do you measure if something is optimized or not? In virtual environments its more about efficiency and expectations.
In his article, Jerry talked about multiple dimensions to measuring a cloud.
Its interesting to consider the shift from performance being a feeds and speeds discussion to more of one around expectations. Different people have different expectations and I think the list you outlined helps to cover the list of expectations from several perspectives.
His dimensions are:
- Time to Deploy
- Density
- Elastic Scale
- Resiliency (Security and Isolation)
- Runtime Performance
- Time to Genesis
I have some comments on the dimensions below:
Time to Deploy Interested parties: Developers
Time to get new solutions up and running. This generally means from OS deployment to application running. This can have a dramatic improvement on developer’s productivity as well as efficiency of other interested parties (like the guys that have to scale a workload)
Density Interested parties: CIOs, Operations Mgmt, CTOs,etc.
The metric can be applied to a number of objects. For instance, it could be the number of OS instances hosted on a physical machine, number of processes per VM, users per application, etc. Cloud providers are also very interested in this metric as its a good indication of the value being derived from IT resources.
Elastic Scale Interested Parties: Line of Business Owners, Cloud Providers and Operations Mgmt
Elastic Scale refers to the property used to bring resource to service an application (or set of applications). Its an indicator of how quickly the movement of resource can be achieved.
Line of Business Owners are people who sponsored the development of the application and most likely pay for the hosting services. They want to make sure that the application is available and can scale to the needs of their users / customers.
Just like Line of Business Owners, Cloud Providers are interested in Elastic Scale as it is a differentiator they can use to show superior infrastructure and services. Cloud Providers can also be private cloud providers like existing IT shops are today).
Resiliency (Security/Isolation) Interested Parties: who doesn’t want good solid isolation and security?
This becomes somewhat of a tradeoff as we need to measure the risk of high multi-tenant Platforms (running lots of users in the same VM / JVM) as opposed to high multi-tenancy via virtualization of many OS instances. There won’t be one right answer for all.
This is the category where people need to most explicitly challenge reliability, raw performance and flexibility.
Runtime Performance Interested Parties: Everyone
Although this one gets more complicated. Traditionally this drove a lot of discussion about speed but today, with heavy virtualization, to support a highly multi-tenant environment, we will need to start ordering which priorities mean more to us than others.
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Time to Genesis Interested Parties: Cloud / Infrastructure providers
Time to Genesis is the time it takes to bring new Cloud resources online. This includes not only the time to setup a new environment, but also the ability to scale the environment by adding more hardware (compute, net or storage) seamlessly.
Measuring people’s expectations and the infrastructure efficiency will become more challenging, not easier, as time goes on. Cloud delivers an unparalleled access to dynamic environments, new services and features. It almost feels limitless. However, all IT budgets are constrained and driven by service levels for the business. Many businesses will continue to build their own “private clouds” and they’ll also learn new ways to measure their efficiency against their expectations.
Cloud: OSes are the new Processes
Having done some work on exploiting virtualization to create a “cloud” which really ends up being a collection Virtual machines which are not really different than our old architectural view of an OS with a few exceptions.
Notably, each OS typically thinks that it owns the hardware it is running on and such an assumption makes its use of the hardware inefficient since it really doesn’t own the resource. For example, use of timers, memory scavangers, etc. end up giving the illusion that the VM is using resources that it is actually not, but trying to manage them efficiently. This is because the context of a VM’s actions is difficult to determine from the hypervisor that is hosting it. I call this the application syndrome.
The application syndrome is where you can view a stack of components. Like a hypervisor, OS, Java, Tomcat, etc. To every component in the stack, the thing above it in the stack (that it doesn’t understand) is an application. To the hypervisor its the OS, to the OS its Java, and to Java its Tomcat. To Tomcat its whatever Webapp its hosting. Basically, the thing above you in the stack you don’t understand is “an application.”
So, how do we get context? For timers and the such, we can begin to delegate the services it traditionally hosted locally to the hypervisor so that machine resources can be more effectively managed.
Do we need a whole new OS like a cloudOS? I don’t think so, new Posix APIs that will properly delegate services as appropriate makes more sense to me.
If we look at the hypervisors as a kernel to an OS VMs are really more like processes than full blown OSes going forward.
Out of the Dustbin
I had a shuffle of machines at home and my blog was on a machine that has been inactive for a while now. I had trouble with the RAID controller on that machine (the battery went dead) and as a consequence I had to take manual action to restart the beast. The good news is I replaced that system with a Mac-mini running OS X Server (Snow Leopard).
Now that you’re seeing this I’m back up and online again. Moving from Linux to Mac OS X for WordPress was really pretty easy and I ask myself why I procrastinated for so long. All I had to do was to copy the old WordPress files from my Linux bos to the Mac. Setup MySQL and restore the old database. Do a quick upgrade from 2.2 to 3. whatever I’m running now and whala, here we are.
Let’s see if my blogging occurs more than once a year 
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Links for pics to previous posts need to be done and I promise (grin) to do them this week.
I was going to doc my setup at home for those poor unfortunate souls that want to brave hosting their own systems.
Let it Snow !!
We had a bit of inclement weather in the Raleigh / Durham area this week. It started on Friday night and is continuing into Saturday. I know a lot of people in North Carolina do not like the weather too much but I’m digging it.
Because we are snowed in I’ve been able to catch up on a number of things at home that I would normally have left to later because of normal Saturday goings ons.
So, today, Zac and I worked on his First Lego League project and made lots of progress. I was able to spend 5+ hours working with him to fine tune a robot he and a set of teammates have been building for the past few months. If it hadn’t been for the snow, I would have probably been catching up on errands.
From my perspective, the snow is giving me time I otherwise would have spent in another way, so, I say, “Let it snow!”
New Geronimo Book from Packt Press
I was contacted by Packt press about a new book they’ve written about Apache Geronimo. They are sending me a copy to take a look at. If you are interested in the book here is a link. The book is entitled “Apache Geronimo 2.1: Quick Reference” and written by a couple of Geronimo committers I’ve known for a few years. Personally I prefer quick references rather than wordy explanations so I spect this will be a useful tool for those that are interested in getting going quickly.
I’ll pop a post out when I receve the book in a week or two and let you know how it looks.
What is religion? Can we all be right?
This election year it seems like there is more involvement by churches in terms of letting candidates speak as well as candidates speaking about religious issues than I recall from the past. My memory may be flawed but Saddleback Church hosted both candidates and asked both candidates about a variety of questions. This got me to thinking about the mix of religion and politics and how we often try to separate them.
What I mean by the separation is that our society seems to place a sense of error on those that have convictions that are derived from a faith based system. These convictions are referred to as “religious” and often given less weight because of the base from which these beliefs were derived. Values that have a basis from a religious text are considered antiquated, or inferior to “current thinking.” For instance, Barak Obama raises this point in the following video from YouTube . An intresting assertion is where Senator Obama is talking about his claim that we cannot enforce laws or govern based on religious arguments because “… in a pluralistic society we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to pursuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some level, religion does not allow for compromise.”
(Parenthetical comment here: By the way, I’m not picking on Senator Obama. I thought he was very articulate in this clip and although I can’t say I completely agree with his comments, they did get me to thinking. To be honest, every candidate that runs in the political systemhas to make choices about their value systems; many times when their values are in conflict with the mass opinion; it’s a tough job)
He’s right. Most “religions” do not allow for compromise over certain values that they hold to be foundational. And in many cases, these values can be in conflict. So, the question that arises is how do we resolve these conflicts? In a pluralistic society how do we choose our morality?
As stated earlier, we use the term “religious” to denote people who have a set of values based on some sense of a spiritual nature. For instance, Christians, Jews, Moslems and most religions say it is wrong to steal. There is little argument over this value and I would suspect that most, if not all nations, have some law that indicates there is a punishment for taking someone else’s property. No dispute, no long winded debates and no candidates saying “I’m for stealing and my opponent is against it.” We agree so its not a problem.
Where its a problem is where we do not agree. Abortion is an issue that has been debated for a long time and is probably one of the most polarizing issues we face in the US. Ms. Nancy Pelosi was asked a question on “Meet the Press” back in August. Here is what Tom Brokaw asked:
“Senator Obama saying the question of when life begins is above his pay grade, whether you’re looking at it scientifically or theologically. If he were to come to you and say, ‘Help me out here, Madame Speaker. When does life begin?’ what would you tell him?”
Ms. Pelosi answered, “I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. And Senator–St. Augustine said at three months. We don’t know. The point is, is that it shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.”
I’m not going to get into the politics of abortion except to say that we have several different view points on what the right answer is. Some say life begins at conception so abortion is wrong under any circumstances. Others say its ok if the pregnancy was caused by a rape or an incestuous relationship. Another opinion is that it is acceptable anytime before birth. Even our current laws seem to be in conflict on this issue as a person could be prosecuted for manslaughter if they caused an unborn child’s death but say its ok for the mother to terminate its life if its in the first three months. There are a lot of conflicting opinions about what the right answer is.
What is interesting is that many of the arguments against abortion are drawn from spiritual sources and most of the arguments in favor of abortion are drawn from societal desires, or morality of mass opinion. Does mass opinion trump spiritual morality? It would seem that societal morality is becoming the new religion. At least, what used to be considered moral absolutes are the spiritual minority.
My point is that whatever a person believes is derived from his religion. Whether that is the religion of tradition, spiritual enlightenment or mass morality or pure self interest; the basis for those decisions is their religion. The decisions people make about not lying, helping their neighbor or keeping the extra change a cashier accidentally gave them come from the core of their belief system, or better stated, their religion.
At the end of the day the only way everyone can be right is if there is no standard by which to measure right and wrong. I don’t think living in that world would be very pleasant. One thing is sure, every person on this planet will one day face death. In that day all the questions about morality, good and bad and who was right and who was wrong will be answered. Until that day, every one of us lives out his or her religion in the form the choices we make and the paths we choose. Choose wisely.