I am not even remotely sympathetic - 25 May 2023

The founder of the Oath Keepers extremist group was sentenced [today] to 18 years in prison for orchestrating a weekslong plot that culminated in his followers attacking the U.S. Capitol in a bid to keep President Joe Biden out of the White House after the 2020 election.

It was one of the most consequential cases brought by the Justice Department, which has sought to prove that the riot by right-wing extremists like the Oath Keepers was not a spur-of-the-moment protest but the culmination of weeks of plotting to overturn Biden's election victory.

Reported by ABC News.

Smoke has passed - 21 May 2023

Earlier this week, we had smoke in metro-Seattle that came from the forest fires in British Columbia.  At this writing, winds have blown the smoke to the interior, to central Washington, and cleared the air around Seattle and the Salish Sea.

If you look closely at the photo, there is a golden haze in the air, almost like a tint from an artist's brush.  This should set off alarms as those rhodies should be white, not off-white, and the evergreens should be a richer green and not be that brownish.  Smoke in the air.  This is early in the season for fires to be this big.  And the fires in Alberta are worse than those in BC; the BC fires just happen to be close to the border.  Not a good sign for 2023.

Trouble, right here in River City - 21 May 2023

Far from troubles made up in the mind of a con artist, I have been having technology troubles for the last couple weeks.  About the first of May, there was a Mac OS patch that was distributed.  Now, I need to be clear that I can only claim correlation and I am not asserting causation, but my add-on disk failed at this time.  I use a USB "sidecar" disk because I have far more photo and music data than will fit on the SSD integral to my MacBook Pro.  For a while, I used an outboard 2 Tby drive, then I upgraded to a 4 Tby drive.  After the patch, the outboard drive became unreadable.  I struggled with this for a while and finally decided to rely on Time Machine backups.

I reformatted the outboard drive.  Fortunately, I had just upgraded my Time Machine drive so that I could back up both the integral and the outboard drives.  I thought myself lucky and then I started up Time Machine to recover the contents.  It worked well for a while, then Time Machine complained that the outboard drive was case-insensitive and I was trying to restore Mac Photos files with mixed case. 

I stopped at this point because we had some traveling to do.  When I got back, I tried to restore again and got the same error from Time Machine.  I bit the bullet and re-reformated the drive to be case-sensitive.  OK, should be solved.  Unfortunately, by this time, it had been about two weeks since the original failure, and Time Machine no longer has backups that are pre-failure.  I have tried repeatedly over the last week, and I just cannot get Time Machine to cough up a pre-failure copy of the outboard drive.

I have been in a bit of denial, but cold truth is cold truth.  I was starting to think about how I could restore files from my off-site backup.  You have a three-level backup strategy, right?  A primary, a local backup, and a remote backup, yes?  Well, I do.  I have lost files before and I plan never to do it again.  Then I had a flash of insight.  I had replaced the 2 Tby outboard drive with a 4 Tby outboard drive toward the end of 2022, and I still have the old 2 Tby outboard drive.  It is not a whole backup, but it is better than dragging 2 Tby from my off-site backups.  

I am now in the process of copying over from the 2 Tby outboard drive to the 4 Tby outboard drive.  When that is done, I shall start recovering the last six months of data.  I am very annoyed at Apple, but I have a plan that I think will work.

Photo: we are in the midst of the rhodedendron season.

Travel to the Following States is Restricted - 9 May 2023

The headlines get ever worse.  Texas and Florida have been States of Concern for over a year.  Florida recently achieved Do Not Travel status when the legislature - led by the so-called governor - passed an unrestricted-carry law for firearms.  No license required, no safety training required, no background check required.  Texas achieved Do Not Travel with their string of (endless?) mass shootings, including the most recent shootings by a white supremecist in a shopping center.  

Today, Louisiana achieves Do Not Travel status with the shooting of a small girl who was playing hide-and-seek, straying into the neighbor's yard.  The neighbor promptly shot her.  Fortunately, she survived, but rampant firearms are not a joke.

I will not travel to or spend money in Texas, Florida, or Louisana until the state leaders demonstrate that they value life.

Cat photo for soothing purposes.

https://people.com/crime/louisiana-homeowner-accused-shooting-14-year-old-girl-in-the-back-of-head/

Amazon.com Hiring and Recent Revelations - 22 March 2023

According to news reports, internal documents obtained from Amazon show that they hired too many people.  Not as in "planned hiring was too high" but rather "unapproved hiring was too high".  From the article:

Amazon Web Services posted 24,988 job openings in 2022, but the department was only approved to recruit for 7,798 positions. The document addresses Amazon’s lack of governance as an issue that led to the disconnect between job listings and open positions.

When I worked at Amazon (circa 2000), this was generally true:  there were few, if any, business controls in place.  I did not see it at the time (having been raised in corporations that routinely imposed controls and audits for budgets, hiring, travel, and the like), so I did not exploit it, but it was obvious even then that there were really no controls.  I have always been astounded at the success of Amazon given the internal workings of the company.  On the other hand, recent examples like Credit Suisse and Silicon Valley Bank make me wonder if it is more a case of all-companies-all-the-time.

Source: https://gizmodo.com/amazon-layoffs-andy-jassy-amazon-web-services-aws-1850251481 

Another clip from the article:

After Amazon announced another round of layoffs affecting 9,000 employees earlier this week, a leaked document from inside the company revealed that listing too many job openings and subsequently over-hiring in some departments may have been a part of the problem.

A leaked document obtained by Insider reveals that Amazon put hiring power in the hands of managers, and that the company had little oversight on the hiring process until 2022. This apparently led managers to recruit and hire more employees than they were approved to.

New Application of AI Technology - 21 March 2023

Applying AI technology to analyze banks and prevent blow-outs would be a useful application of Silicon Valley technology.  I wonder why the wizards of Silicon Valley overlooked this self-protective opportunity.

Nuclear Waste Production Plants are not needed - 12 March 2023

Some population of the "green" community has been demanding an increase in nuclear energy production in the United States.  While this may make some sort of sense in the short term, it shows a grotesque failure to understand how actions and consequences relate.  Let us get some terminology straight at the start of the conversation.

There is a common misunderstanding that people know how to build and maintain "nuclear power plants".  If we look at these facilities in the short term, the name "nuclear power plant" makes sense, but if we consider the long term, a better name becomes obvious.  The plants will operate and produce electrical power for 20-40 years, the short term.  Once exhausted, they leave behind nuclear waste that will last tens, hundreds, and thousands of years.  In this longer term, it is clear that their primary end-product is nuclear waste, therefore the facilities are more accurately called "nuclear waste production plants" and they have a brief surplus power in their early years.  

By and large, we have no idea how to deal with the legacy of nuclear waste production plants.  Coal-fired and gas-fired plants can be cleaned up, solar plants and wind farms can be recycled, and even dams can be safely breached.  There is a problem with coal mines and gas drilling sites, but we have general technology to deal with most of that residual.  But we have no technology or process that can handle nuclear waste. 

Nuclear waste comes in multiple types, and some will argue that we can process 90-95% of the nuclear waste from the nuclear waste production plants.  This is insufficient in the extreme.  We build large processing plants to remove threats from water so that it can be used near humans, but we have no technology for nuclear waste products.  The 5-10% remaining nuclear waste that cannot be processed can only be waited out while it remains toxic - waiting for thousands of years.  And even the faint technologies that we do have that can partially process this nuclear waste have proven to be very expensive.  So expensive that we have to ship the waste to the processing plant instead of processing the waste on-site.  No one wants to allow the unprocessed waste to travel nearby, so moving the waste to the processing plant is not possible.

As a result, nuclear waste production plants leave pools full of "spent" waste material sitting nearby, waste that will take thousands of years to become safe to handle.  

If it is not obvious by now, nuclear waste production plants do not generate enough surplus energy to justify their construction or operation.  They are so costly and risky that they cannot get private insurance to cover their construction and operation.  

We may develop nuclear fusion in the future.  Until then, we must continue to develop avoidance and convervation technologies, and we can only build using renewable energy production technologies.

Edit:  https://medium.com/predict/nuclear-power-is-the-future-heres-why-1901f8fa68e0

The Angels' Share - 4 March 2023

Cognac is an ancient city.  The city was well established when Francois I was born there in 1494 and his salamander is carved into many buildings.  Although built from a light colored stone, some of the buildings have a grey or even black coloration on the exterior.  This color comes from Baudoinia compniacensi, a fungus that grows where it can be fed by alcohol. The alcohol lost during the aging process goes into the air, from which it is consumed by B. compniacensi.  The quantity of cognac that has evaporated is known as the Angels' Share.  We were told that the buildings with the black coloring are showing that they are active aging houses.  

Cognac is on display everywhere and the largest cognac houses dominate the riverfront.  These include Hennessy, Martell, Camus, and Remy Martin.  Courvoisier is based in a small town about 9 km outside Cognac.

An odd thing about cognac that distinguishes it from many other grape beverages (wine, champagne) is that it has no vintage.  By definition, the cognac houses run a sophisticated process that produces a product that is consistent from year to year.  The process is based on repeated taste tests and blending to produce the particular flavor of each house.  As their marketing has gotten more sophisticated, the houses produce cognac products with distinct flavors, and may even occasionally declare a vintage, but the traditional products are consistent by design.  Thus, an "old bottle of cognac" has no particular significance other than an emotional tie.

A Shining Example of Bitcoin, Not - 3 March 2023

SBF, or Sam Bankman-Fried, was the head of the FTX exchange for bitcoin and other digital coinage.  He has been in the news for quite a while, starting as a wonder-boy who could do no wrong and morphing into a financial criminal of grand proportions (as alleged by the US Department of Justice).  It was revealed today that $9 Billion of customer funds is missing.  Sam is going to give Bernie Madoff a run for his money as they compete to be the masterminds of their respective "largest financial fraud ever".

https://gizmodo.com/ftx-sbf-sam-bankman-fried-crypto-1850183784

Gizmodo reports that "FTX Confirms $9 Billion in Customer Funds Vanished" via FTX and Alameda Research (Sam's other company).

Photo: deeper and deeper: measuring snow in Redmond WA on 26 Feb 2023.

Florida governor Ron deSantis - 2 March 2023

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is an idiot. Large chunks of the Florida legislature are, too, if they support this legislation.

https://www.wfla.com/news/politics/florida-bill-would-require-bloggers-who-write-about-governor-to-register-with-the-state/

Restoring honor to politics - 16 February 2023

I am so old that I remember when an affair, a lie, or a bribe could bring a politician's career to a shattering end.  There were always exceptions, but by and large, corruption or malfeasance would mark the end of a career in politics.  A recent report in NPR asserts (correctly) that shame is no longer a motivator.  

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157049312/george-santos-politics-of-shame

"There was a time when shame was a powerful force in American politics. That time is not now." [NPR]

George Santos (he of many names) is flagged in the article as the poster child of the moment, but there are so many recent examples (McCarthy, Scott, Cruz, Gingrich, Nixon, and more) and new ones continue to arise (Luna).  However, I think the positioning of the assertion is wrong and I want to flip it around because I think a different perspective sheds more light on the consequences.

Honor was once a force in politics, but honor is now dead in American politics. [me]

Where once people would serve in government from a sense of honor, when once their behavior was guided by a sense of honor, that was a time when government was a productive factor in life.  Remember Eisenhower who built the Interstate Highway System?  Remember Kennedy who inspired the lunar landings?  Remember Johnson who brought voting rights to oppressed peoples?  Even Nixon brought us clean air and water through the EPA (although he failed in so many other ways).  

Then came Nixon and Gingrich who discarded honor for self-advancement, who left shame on the sidelines to achieve dubious ends.  Their descendents - from Trump to McCarthy, Gree, Gaetz, Cruz, Rubio, Scott, and others - these people seem to have embraced shame and willful stupidity as badges of honor (irony just died.  Again.)  

When honor is restored to government, then shall we have the government we deserve.

Greenland paddle from a tree, Step 1 - 19 January 2023

Birch trees, particularly silver birch, seem to be popular for landscaping in our area.   Unfortunately, they seem to have a short lifetime as trees go, something around 40-50 years in our area.  To be honest, I am not sure the particular trees I am talking about are silver birch, but that is my best guess.  About 40 years ago, the builder of our neighborhood put three birch trees in our back yard as specimen trees.  They formed a nice contrast against the dominant evergreens (cedar, fir, and a redwood or two - I think the redwood is a specimen tree, too, by the way), but the birches never really liked out winters.  At least, they were constantly shedding smaller branches, but the snowloads would bring down major parts of the tree. 

In a winter storm about five years ago (c. 2018), the two larger trees were snapped off.  One was badly damaged and I removed it, while the other was severly damaged and I was hoping it would recover.  Well, after four years, I decided it was not going to recover, that it was worsening to the point that it was threatening to fall on the house, so I took it down.

Most of the 40-foot-plus tree became bark mulch or firewood, but I kept a 12-foot section from the base of the tree.  My plan is to make a Greenland paddle from it.  With luck, I might even be able to get two paddles from it.  I hope to be able to get an 8-10-foot 8x8 out of the trunk that I can use for the paddles.

I started by leaving the trunk on sawhorses outside the garage.  While this was convenient and gave me free space in the garage (workshop), I think it greatly slowed the drying of the wood that is required to work it.  I used a small chainsaw to remove one side (hidden on the bottom in the photo) in a crude styling of an Alaskan sawmill, but that did not work well.  I finally decided my only option was to bring the log inside the protected space of the house - the unheated garage will keep the log out of the rain.

The log has been sitting in the garage for about two weeks, and it is already looking drier.  This could be wishful thinking; likely is wishful thinking.  As an experiment last night, I took an electric planer and started trying to remove the bark as a poor-man's jointer.  The chainsaw was faster but I think the planer produces much better results.  The resulting wood is prettier than I expected.  All the talk of Baltic birch brings plain grain to my mind, and this looks to be more interesting.  The interesting bit may be planed off in the end.  We shall see.

Unofficially, my moisture meter shows 34%.  I suspect this is optimistic as most of the readings are "off the charts" - too moist to measure.  I hope a few more weeks in the garage will show the needle moving in the right direction.

Speaker of the House 2023, part deux - 15 January 2023

Mr. McCarthy has won his Speakership on the fifteenth (15th) voting round.  This is a 100-year-old record, that is, more voting rounds required than any Speaker in 100 years.  In fact, it has taken one (1) voting round in each opportunity in the last 100 years.  The final holdout seems to have been Matt Gaetz, R-FL.  The House immediately adjourned and then took up foolish votes on the Monday when they returned to the chambers.  We now face a vote on the debt ceiling and the Republicans are again threatening a default.  Yes, there are a few playing games that border on default (e.g., "pay debt interest, military, Social Security, and Medicare bills first" and some are proposing to postpone paying foreign debt holders), but none of these proposals are taken seriously.  In particular, the US payment obligations are so complex and intermingled that it is not clear how to separate out these types ("interest, military, ...") of payments from other types of payments.  Mayhem.  

There have also been a handful of Secret documents found in old offices that were used by President Biden after he left the VP position.  Biden has promptly searched for additional documents and handed them all over.  This is in sharp contrast with Trump's troubles wherein he keeps documents that he is supposed to turn over, and he does not seem to look for documents when asked (he says he looked for documents, but then a search under subpoena finds more documents).  Anyway, Trump obstructs, Biden complies, and the press seems to think the two are somehow equivalent.

The real problem is  Representative George Santos, R-NY.  He appears to be a serial liar, have some real money problems, and running from Brazilian authorities for fraud there.  So Santos hogs headlines that should be about Trump's problems.  Santos is also important because he was a critical vote for McCarthy (in the opening paragraph), and it is not clear McCarthy would be Speaker today were it not for Santos and his vote.  As a result, McCarthy and his team are just ignoring the Santos problem.  The Santos Problem?  Yeah, a demonstrated liar was seated as a Republican Representative in Congress.  The seating of Santos should have been postponed until the legal troubles were sorted out, but this would likely require a replacement and the replacement would likely be a Democrat and so McCarthy et al are just ignoring the problem.  with Republicans, it is always projection.  Today, fraud, tomorrow voting fraud, and so on.

Speaker of the House 2023 - 5 January 2023

Nine votes and Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) has yet to meet the required majority for a win as Speaker of the House 2023-2024.  The BBC has a balanced summary of possible outcomes, McCarthy wins (eventually), McCarthy withdraws, or Dems join up with "centrist" Republicans to select a compromise candidate (Republican). Finally, many commentators are saying that a McCarthy loss (either the second or third BBC conclusions) would lead to the end of McCarthy's political career.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64170729

Although I respect the BBC and generally agree with their analysis, many commentators are falling into the trap that the current crop of Republicans in Congress are old-style politicians, willing to be pragmatic and compromise.  The last few years, indeed, the last few decades since Gingrich, have demonstrated that the old-style Republican no longer exists in Congress and the Tea Party Republicans (including QANON) have taken over.  As a result, we can not use reasoning or pragmatism to predict their behavior.  The current Republican party is dominated by burn-it-all-down members.  Rather like the dog that catches the car after chasing it, they do not know what to do nor how to govern.

McCarthy wins.  I have to see this as the most likely end game.  McCarthy (and his MAGA/Tea Party opponents) have never recognized a loss.  McCarthy will keep pounding until he wins.  The others will finally succumb to loss of honor and give in.  This is the only real way that the Republican House can get to the desired games of investigations, impeachments, and other foolery that they want to pursue.  Eventually, they will give in at this round and advance to the next round.  Advance to the next round?  Well, move to the next round.

McCarthy withdraws.  Although this might make sense with an old-style Republican operating on pragmatism, that does not describe McCarthy.  After two years, Trump still refuses to acknowledge that he lost, and there is no reason that McCarthy should.  Like Trump, he should simply call his fellow Republicans corrupt and object to the cheating voters!  Oh, wait.  Nevermind.

Democratic-Republican compromise candidate.  Again, this makes sense in an old-style Republican pragmatism, but the MAGA and Tea Party wedge of the Republican party would never let the resulting leadership function.  The Democrats might get some committee chairs, some rules changes, and other benefits, but the MAGATs and Qanoners would burn down the Congress.  The "moderate" Republicans that might join this D-R group might argue for compromise to advance their agenda, but there are three problems with this compromise.  First, there are no more moderate Republicans; they are extinct.  I think McCain may have been the last.  Second, the MAGATs and Qanon wedge would stop all progress.  And third, who would want the job?  No Democrat would accept and there are no Republicans that could handle it (no credible alternatives to McCarthy).  Boehner and Ryan were the last two to try, they gave up, and neither of them was a shining example of anything in the first place.  Trump has shown that he is toast, has no weight anymore in the Republican party.  Any Democrat that tried would suffer worse than McCarthy from Boebert, Goetz, and Goser.  

Not considered by the BBC, but there is discussion that an outsider might be selected as a compromise candidate.  Perhaps a now-retired Republican congressmember or Trump himself might be put into nomination.  I really cannot see that.

Somehow, this will all get sorted out and a Speaker will be elected.  Then we descend into the madness that is today's MAGA-Tea Party.  There will be an endless display of regressive investigations, unsubstantiated impeachments, and pointless government shut-downs.  Good times to come.

Photo: Spencer Ridge (view from), Eugene OR, December 2022

Server Consolidation and Virtualization with IBM CDAT - 4 January 2023

In times gone by, I worked for IBM and managed a development group writing system software for Windows running on IBM x-series systems.  This was about 2001-2005, give or take.  We started to do a lot of systems work with VMware and Microsoft on virtualization.  VMware was independent (a start-up) and Microsoft bought "the other" virtualization start-up for x86.  The Microsoft product is now Azure, basically.  

IBM had a lot of customers totally immersed in virtualization, but on mainframes.  Because IBM more or less created virtualization (as a product), their monitor software was called "VM".  You can do that with names when you are first into the market.  But virtualization was a strange, new beast in the x86 world.  (Remember that x86 was still almost pure 32-bit, and AMD64 had only recently been announced; Intel had Itanium as their 64-bit architecture.  But that is a conversation for another day.)  

In working with customers to understand requirements for virtualization on x86, it became clear that customers did not really understand it.  The customers were used to a business model in which every Windows server application got its own (physical) machine.  It was said that "Windows apps do not play well together."  Server-class PCs were consider cheap, about $10K (USD) or so, cheap compared to mainframes based on purchase price, so a new app or new capacity on an existing app meant that the business would buy a new server.  Thus, there were file servers, mail servers, web servers, and business app servers, and each of these was a physical server in a rack.  As capacity demands rose, buying a new physical server became more expensive, so some organizations started looking at virtualization as a solution.

The first problem they faced was estimating capacity.  Since every PC server ran its own app, there was always plenty of performance headroom - well, until there was not.  Capacity was usually easily solved by buying a new, bigger server.  With the march of Moore's Law, this was usually a no-brainer.  As the old server ran out of capacity and warranty, then buying a new server got one all sorts of benefits - faster CPU clock, more memory, faster disks, bigger disks, and a new warranty.  This worked pretty well on a server-by-server basis, but it became clear that replacing all the servers every 2-3 years was expensive across the server-room.  Virtualization came as the answer - buy fewer new servers.  Pretty good, but how many to buy?  Nobody bothered to collect performance data on PC servers.  Until a server started running out of capacity, no one cared becasue each app was on its own server.  No competition between apps means no problems.

Back to my software development group.  There was a delay in the hardware schedule that caused a couple of software engineers to have nothing to do for a couple of months.  I kicked around some ideas for short projects with two colleagues, Jim and Ted (I cannot recall Ted's real name, so let us just run with Ted).  I do not recall which of us actually invented the idea, but our conversation converged on a Windows-based tool that would reach out to Windows servers and collect performance and capacity snapshots, collect the data into a database, then analyze the database to recommend virtualizationo consolitation plans.  This became the Analysis part of the tool.

One of the simplest customer problems was that they lacked actual inventory data - they had no list of servers or applications that they were running.  Well, running through lists or ranges of IP addresses and poking ports for responses would quickly and easily find and identify the Windows Servers.  This became the Discovery part of the tool.  

Consolidation using virtualization was the objective, so the tool took on the working name of CDAT, for (server) Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool.  I regret that we did not get clever and call it something like "BlueScope", "BlueWindow", or some other IBM blue-colored name, but we were engineers and we missed the opportunity.  Seriously, I regret missing this obvious hook.

Customers loved it.  IBM could walk in with a laptop, plug into the customer's network, and run silently and unobtrusively to collect the data required.  The customer needed to enter some network passwords, but that was about it.  The tool did all the data collection automagically.

IBM sales folks love it.   In the x86 Server space, IBMwas an also-ran.  HP, Dell, and Compaq ran the x86 Server world.  IBM got a chance when HP bought Dell.  Customers usually sought three competing bids, so when Compaq "disappeared" into HP, IBM became the their option, even if HP and Dell were the only "real" players.  To exploit the new foot-in-the-door to become the third bid, the technical support engineer could collect data for a day or a week, spend a little time with spreadsheet and make a highly tailored proposal for the customer.  In contrast, HP and Dell salespeople came in with generic, one-size-fits-all proposals (e.g., 4:1 consolidation for everything).  In contrast, IBM could propose that certain apps remain on dedicated servers, that a middle class of apps could be consilidated at various ratios from 2:1 to 8:1, and a third class of apps could be consolidated at 20:1 or higher.  

The customers were consistently stunned with the IBM proposal.  The proposal named systems that the customer recognized.  It gave supporting statistics for consolidation ratios.  The data could even be sorted the customer's servers into convenient groups according to their resource demands:  memory consumption, CPU consumption, and network consumption.  

As a special deal, I could look at the data and give them the names of apps that were memory leakers and CPU runaways.  I was using a bit of probability, but any Windows app that consumed all 4Gby of memory was either a database server or had a memory leak.  If the admin checked memory usage after the next schedule reboot, they could tell quickly (low memory after boot on a high memory consuming server meant memory leak).  The CPU looper was more speculative, but very few x86 servers actually needed their CPU capacity - most apps were (literally) 1% utilization or less.

As a result, the IBM salespeople presented the customer with highly detailed recommendations that could ben supported with data.  Recommendations that were tailored to the customer's actual needs.  Far better than one-size-fits-all from the other vendors.

Customers loved CDAT.  They would often quickly agree to a prototype - buy 5-10 servers from IBM xSeries and apply part of the consolidation plan using virtualization.  If this worked, the customer was positioned to buy more servers from IBM, ultimately replacing their server hardware.  

In the first year of CDAT use, IBM xSeries used it to secure about $10M in business.  The second year, $20M, and the third year, $40M.  Pretty good.  So good, that CDAT was eventually expanded to cover pSeries AIX systems for server consolidation.  the 

I have two regrets coming out of the experience.  I mentioned my poor choice of names above, and that is big.  Names like "Watson" or "BlueSphere" resonate with people.  The other regret is that I did not push and advocate CDAT as much as I should have.  My attidude was, "yeah, theis is cool, but it was pretty easy."  Bad answer.  The customers loved it, and I should have pushed hard to increase the exposure (within IBM) and add features.  My team could have been seen as the core of a $50M/year business.  Instead, we were neglected.  In retrospect, a missed opportunity on a large scale.  Not smart.

So that is the story of CDAT.

Here is a Computerworld article from 2007 that describes CDAT for public consumption.  As I left in 2005, CDAT outlived me by years.

https://www2.computerworld.co.nz/article/497013/ibm_takes_server_consolidation_tool_smbs/ 

Dated November 2007, the article reports in part:

IBM takes server consolidation tool to SMBs

IBM has just launched an analysis tool that it believes will help businesses find under-utilised x86 servers that could profitably be consolidated.

The vendor believes that server consolidation using virtualisation technology can save up to 60% in IT costs while quadrupling computing utilisation.

Big Blue has expanded its Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool (CDAT) to allow IBM resellers and integrators to evaluate smaller environments of 50 servers or fewer. IBM says it is also providing an additional end-user service, Server Consolidation Factory, at US$500 (NZ$655) per 50 servers, which it claims is "up to five times less expensive than competitive services".

As an example, IBM integrator Mainline Information Systems performed a successful CDAT evaluation for a 575-employee client, Frankenmuth Mutual Insurance Company, a US-based property and casualty insurer, which has since virtualised its server farm.

A Quiet Week - 1 January 2023

Tradition dictates that the last week of the calendar year is a quiet one, and 2022 has been no exception.  We spent some holiday time in Eugene, OR (source of the photo is Spencer Butte) after a delay due to an ice storm (freezing rain).  It was a quiet drive home and some quiet days since.  We did get miscellaneous wind storms that required clean up and a snowstorm that required a bit of shovel work, but nothing serious.

Along with the clean up from the windstorms, I have continued pruning.  Yesterday, I pruned Grandma's climbing rose by our back deck.  We took some cuttings from the original Grandma's rose at Keats Island, rooted them, and planted them by the back deck.  I say "planted" - it was barely more than sticking them in the ground.  The cuttings have happily taken to their new location and provide color in the spring.  I plan to build a rose arbor this year to allow them to better flaunt their colors.  The original rose at the cabin continues, having survived the trauma of construction and the repeated attacks of local deer.  It is now on an ad-hoc trellis that keeps the bulk of the plants above the reach of deer, so it is also quite happy.  The Keats trellis was very much a spur-of-the-moment design from lumber on-hand, so I am now in the mode of continuous repairs.  Last summer, I had to realign a couple timbers and re-screw them together.  I tried to find a recent photo of the trellis but I seem to have focused my photographic energies on other interests.  I will have to get out the large ladder to accomplish anything in 2023.

To anyone reading - Happy New Year!  May 2023 bring successes and peace.

Twitter Blizzard - 21 December 2022

There has been a blizzard of commentary about the Musk takeover of Twitter and the consequences thereof.  My personal experience is that Twitter took a massive nosedive in the quality of the content and I have migrated to a Mastodon instance.  There remains a tumultuous debate about alternatives that replace Twitter, but there remains a singular problem that Twitter has solved and that is a barrier to entry for all alternatives.  Scale.

The "magic" of Twitter is not who owns it, who moderates it, or who subscribes.  These are all interesting and important factors, but they are not the key differentiator that made Twitter successful.  The key differentiator is that Twitter exchanges messages among millions of users in fractions of a second and creates a storehouse of comments that can be served up in seconds.  I could write code that collected short comments, microblog entries, and redistributes them, but it would handle a few hundred users, tops.  Much  more than that, and my little empire would fall over.  The good folks at Twitter have spent the last decade learning how to collect new entries, sort out subscribers, and redistribute those messages - and how to be efficient about it.  The blockchain/bitcoinage people designed a system that was intentionally inefficient while Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the others were seeking ultraefficiency at the scale of millions.  Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon.com) used to say his strategy was "get big fast", but I think it would be more accurate to say "get big AND fast".  If you want a counter example, insurance companies and banks are big but hardly fast.

'Tis snowy outside.  Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

Coffee as a metric of business success - 13 December 2022

Coffee was not always my favorite beverage.  For a long time, I drank tea, both hot and iced.  At some point in college, I learned to drink coffee.  It would be more accurate to say that I trained myself to drink coffee for in the early days I did not like the actual taste of coffee; I merely tolerated it because of the caffeine and the warmth.  

I was an engineering co-op student in college.  At Purdue University, this meant that one alternated semesters of work and school.  Freshman and Senior years were two semesters and the intervening Sophmore and Junior years were spread across three years' duration with work semesters filling the time.  In my case, I worked During one of the work semesters and decided that I needed coffee to keep up with my work and social plans.  This was reinforced by the fact that the company provided free coffee.  

The company was a small company that made medical computing equipment.  Today, we would call them a start-up, but then it was simply "a small company".  Several departments were under one roof - business, marketing, manufacturing, test, and engineering - and there was a designated cafeteria.  There was no food service, no microwave ovens, no refrigerators, and no vending machines, but there were tables, chairs, and a coffee pot.  It was the kind of coffee pot that used paper filters to hold the coffee grounds that was brewed into glass carafes.  A coffee service provide packets of coffee containing the proper measure of grounds.  I quickly learned how to brew coffee as I tended to come in (relatively) early, and this got me warm and moving in the morning.  

The company made medical equipment and computers.  The computers generated a lot of heat and needed to be kept cool.  Because they were all minicomputers, there was no computer room - the computers were everywhere and so the entire building was kept cold.  I took a sweater to work even in the summer, because it was so doggone cold.  To help counter the cold, I decided to start drinking coffee.

I started with everything to hid the tast of the coffee:  creamer and sugar.  The creamer and sugar helped to cut the acidity.  It was powdered creamer because we had no refrigerator for dairy products.  Over time, I eliminated the sugar and then the creamer and became a convert to black coffee.  

This rather stunning conversion was facilitated by the fact that the coffee was Yuban in foil packets.  The brand seems to have been lost, but Yuban was considered a premium coffee at the time as the foil packaging attests.  The foil sealed the coffee well and helped keep it fresh.  At the end of the semester, I wrapped up work and returned to my university studies.  When I returned, the company was still producing computerized medical equipment, but the business was not as high flying as when I had left: the development engineering of the new products was costing more than expected and competition had entered the market to grab for those sweet profits.  While I am sure there were many things done to control costs, the one that struck me as a co-op was the change in coffee.  From Yuban in foil packets, the supply changed to Folgers in plastic packets.  The corresponding change in coffee quality was noticecable, but I was not deterred and I resumed drinking black coffee.  After the semester passed, I returned to university, and then came back to work.  Competition was fierce in the medical computing business and more belt-tightening had been applied.  The coffee was still provided by the company, but it had been changed from Folgers in plastic bags to Mr. Nick-L-Cup in paper bags.  It was tough.  The coffee was not bad, but it really needed help.  I think I kept drinking it black, but I cut back.  By the time I returned to my studies, I had pretty much abandoned coffee and stayed that way for several years.  I went back to tea and did not return to coffee until I was able to grind and brew it fresh in my own kitchen.

The business metric in the title is a simple observation.  Companies are generous when the times are good, but when the quality and quantity of the benefits start dropping, it is a sign that the company is not doing well.

When I graduated, the company was doing well enough to make me an offer for a permanent position, but it was the lowest offer I received.  And, by that time, I was concerned about the future success of the company, so I took another offer.

Management by Objectives (MBO) replaced by Management by Skills (MBS) - 7 December 2022

Management By Objectives, MBO, is the traditional way to evaluate employees at ratings time, usually annually.  MBO might work well for routine work such as clerical situations, and it may work well for sales and support, but it fails when managing a research and development team.  For R&D, we need an evaluation framework that accounts for creativity, innovation, and unpredictability.  I have used Management by Skills for this purpose.

In the traditional MBO plan, the employee writes down a series of objectives for the rating period, about half a dozen.  Often the employee will be asked for four objectives, one per calendar quarter.  These objectives are "SMART" - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, and are usually written in the third-person voice.  Thus, an example might be "complete 100% of incoming requests within two working days".  The typical MBO embeds a lot of assumptions.  In this example, we assume the incoming work is enough to fill 40 hours per week, the individual tasks are not onerous (can be completed in a few hours), the incoming work is evenly distributed in time, how to resolve incoming tasks is well understood, and there is little or no prioritization of the incoming requests.  This simply does not describe an R&D environment.  In a research group or product development group, the tasks vary dramatically in scope and difficulty, some require invention while others are routine. The tasks usually arrive in clumps, and some tasks are much more important than others.  This variety is very difficult to oversee using MBO methods and metrics.

Furthermore, R&D is a career position and individuals want to grow, to get promoted.  It is not wise to promote someone for "just doing their job" - the manager will want to encourage people to learn and demonstrate new skills.  The skills can be specific, such as learning a particular technique, or the can be general, such as leadership or planning.  I addressed this by focusing on skills rather than objectives.

Management by Skills, MBS, defines a set of skills that are to be mastered and demonstrated by employees.  These skills are usually on a spectrum, from simple and small growing to complex and large as the employee's career advances.  The newly graduated employee cannot be expected to perform at the level of a 20-year veteran, at least not until that have had a chance to develop their skills.  The skills I identified for my team were derived from HR-provided documents and can be summarized as: flexibility, communications and listening, technical depth, technical breadth, scope of influence, leadership, and impact of decisions.  These may overlap in some situations but they describe important skills in an R&D workplace.  We take them one at a time.

Flexibility is required to survive the rapid pace of change in research and development.  The requirements for a project often change during the project as new information is uncovered.  Someone who is slow to adapt will fall behind as they work on tasks no longer relevant.  Someone who resists change will be eternally dissatisfied.  Those who embrace change and flex with it will focus on the right tasks and have the greatest success.  There is no convenient metric of flexibility and this skill is usually best measured using examples, both pro and con.

Communications and listening.  This is usually listed as "communications" and that can cause one to lose sight of the fact that communications is two-way.  A one-way communications method has a name - broadcast.  Communications also comes in many forms - written & spoken, formal & informal, in person and electronicly, individual and in groups of varying sizes.  In today's world,  a successful researcher cannot only publish and a successful developer cannot only use email.  One must learn to use successfully a variety of forms.  An employee who communicates only with peers may succeed but they will not likely advance until they learn to speak with management.  Finally, success at the highest tiers requires the ability to work with large groups, and someone who communicates a lot but has little effect will be left behind.  As before, there is no convenient metric for communications and listening; it is not sufficient to count papers, technical reports, pages written, or talks given.  This skill is usually best measured using examples where the communications had an impact.

Technical depth is usually what the more junior employees focus on, identifying all the clever tasks they completed.  Technical depth remains an important skill, but it must be evaluated in the larger context of the full set of skills.  In other words, the employee will not be promoted if they lack technical skills, but they will not be promoted if they show only their technical skills.  Technical depth has no easy metric and can be best evaluated with comparisons to (anonymized) colleagues and peers.  Technical depth can sometimes be measured using feedback from peers, such as from talks or papers, or using independent counts such as patents or peer-reviewed publications.

Technical breadth is often paired with technical depth.  An employee who is "a kilometer wide and a millimeter deep" will not succeed.  One needs to show a willingness to take on tasks that require one to learn new skills, and build on those skills.  As a positive feedback loop, skills in a new area can often be applied to familiar problems and generate new solutions.  Technical breadth has no easy metric and can be best evaluated with comparisons to (anonymized) colleagues and peers.

Scope of influence is an important skill to demonstrate.  Presentations given and papers published must be converted into research and development results.  An idea that never leaves the lab has little or no value.  This skill goes beyond simple formulas or techniques - the ability to influence another often depends on communications skills.  A good idea presented badly is unlikely to be adopted in practice.  Influence ultimately comes back around.  When people seek out the employee for advice and ideas, that employee has a broad influence on the organization.  The metric to use here is typically based on examples, especially when the employee causes existing practice to be changed.

Impact of decisions is closely related to scope of influence, but focuses more on the magnitiude of the resulting changes.  The metric can measure efficiency changes (e.g., process improvements), dollar impact on the business, or the scale of the change (local to a group or product to across an entire corporation or product suite).

Leadership is probably the hardest and most dynamic skill to measure.  It is even hard to define.  Early in one's career, leadership is often assigned by management, but later in one's career, leadership is earned.  In one's early career, an employee can be assigned to oversee an intern or a more junior employee.  As one's career advances, the employee will identify opportunies that need addressing and assemble the required skills and team members.  While the junior leader is assigned by management, the senior leader tells managers what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Evaluating employees is a difficult task and changes with the environment and the individuals participating.  This note summarizes some techniques that can be used for effective evaluations in a research and development environment.

Domestic Terrorism in the US - 6 December 2022

Headlines are buzzing with fragmentary reports of an attack on power substations in Moore County, North Carolina.   It could have happened anywhere, but the reports out of NC say that one or more people broke down a fence and shot up a power substation.  Well, two power substations.  This has resulted in power outages for 40,000 customers of Duke Power.  The exact methods of the attack are not very surprising.  It feels like every year a squirrel takes out a power substation, so using guns and trucks is not a major advance.  That it is human-done seems to be the surprise this time.

We should not be surprised.  In fact, we should have been prepared.

On 12 September 2001, we were back at work and wondering what could happen next.  What could the international terrorists do after the attacks on the Pentagon in Washington DC and the Twin Towers of New York?  My regular lunch crowd was sure that 9/11 was but the first of a series of attacks and we debated what would come next.  Perhaps someone would drive a truck of explosives half-way across a major hydro dam and blow up the dam, depriving Las Vegas and LA of power and drowning anyone downstream?  Perhaps someone would ship checked bags in airlines - good thing that airlines were grounded.  Perhaps someone would dump a truck full of chemicals into a reservoir and poison a city?  Trains, planes, trucks, cars, chemicals, nukes, gas clouds - we came up with quite a list.   After a bit of debate, because that is what engineers approach problems, we realized that the luncheon spot had gone silent and everyone was watching us, so we quickly changed to the latest baseball scores.  In the following days, it became clear that this was a one-shot attempt and that the terrorist group did not have a sustained plan of terror.  Airplanes were again allowed to fly and security at the airports was beefed up.

The aspect we did not examine was the international terrorist.  We took that as a given.  We never considered that domestic terrorists would play this deadly game.  The Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans, to name a few, have continued to attack the United States through cyber means but no one has really tried to attack using conventional means.  We must be honest with ourselves:  in the last 20 years, if a foreign agency had been determined to execute a physical attack, they would have launched it by now and there is a good chance that at least one attempt would have succeeded in doing some damage.  I certainly do not wish for this, but no defense is perfect for 20 years.

After watching the development of self-described "militias" in the US, it is painfully clear that one or more of them are going to do something stupid.  This particular attack in NC could be the result of excessive beer by some dimwits, but the synchronization of mutiple sites simultaneously indicates some forethought and training was pursued.

So I think there are two lessons here that must lead to action plans.  First, we need to watch the militias and bring them to heel.  I would argue the January 6 attack on the US Capitol is included here, but we know that these self-described militias (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the rest) are actively seeking opportunities to do something stupid.  We must find them and stop them.

Second, we need to strengthen the digital protections of our infrastructure.  This threat is greater than a power substation.  This threat covers power, water, gas, and communications.  The SCADA systems must be upgraded to block false access,  other computer systems must be self-policing, the physical assets must be hardened to prevent access, and surveillence of the physical assets must be improved.  

Some might cry out that these steps are an imposition by an overreaching government intent on control, but these are protective acts and not offensive actions.  We must protect ourselves against enemies, foreign and domestic.