Steal This Wi-Fi
It’s always cool when you are doing something that people feel is unconventional, and then you discover that one of the more respected minds out there basically thinks the same way. This was my happy discovery today as I read Bruce Schneier’s Steal This Wi-Fi, having gone through pretty much exactly the same thought process. I still find it truly bizarre to think of access to the Internet as the gatekeeper of sorts. The bottom line is that getting on to the Internet is trivially easy, even if your name is Osama Bin Laden. There network is just too large and too unregulated. The trick is limiting what unauthorized people can do once they are on the network.
Someone Get Me a Weather Report For Hell 1
Thank <insert benefactor of choice here> for the EU. The impossible has happened. I’d write more, but I’m speechless.
As If You Needed Another Reason to Have an LWN Subscription
Run, don’t walk, over to LWN to read the first article in new series by Ulrich Drepper entitled What every programmer should know about memory. It is very detailed and well written: in other words, the kind of content I always expect when I wander over to LWN. They are an outstanding group producing quality work for far too little money, so I encourage anyone who doesn’t have a subscription to get one (as little as $2.50/month). Sure, you could wait for Ulrich’s article to be released and read it for free, but if you sign up you can read it and content like it a week before everyone else and know that you are supporting this kind of quality work.
Netgear Goes Open Source
Just wanted to pass along Ted’s discovery that Netgear is now selling a wireless router that is expressly marketed as an open source router. I know that is the main reason I haven’t purchased a Netgear router, so it is a smart move on their part.
What Search Tells Us About How To Run a Business
One of the most ironic experiences of working at a web search company is just how awful our internal search is. People just assume that if you can build a great web search engine that delivers highly relevant results, you’d of course have a great search engine for your company’s intranet that delivers highly relevant results. It turns out that there is almost no correlation between the two, and the primary reason for this should be making companies rethink how they go about their business.
If you talk to the experts, this is not a case of the cobbler’s children having the worst shoes. The primary reason that a search engine that provides highly relevant results might not do so when targetting an intranet is that intranets do not have the extensive cross linking that you find on the web. Without this, Google’s famous PageRank becomes mostly useless.
Basically, employees tend not to spend a lot of time generating web pages, and the pages that are generated tend to have limited cross-linking between groups/projects/etc. Consequently, a typical corporate intranet has very little meta data to help a search engine out.
Here is the crazy part: what if you took those same intranet pages and put them up publicly on the web. I’d bet you’d find some tiny fragment of the web would start linking to various pages and voila! suddenly search engines can start doing a great job of showing highly relevant pages.
Of course, companies don’t publish their intranets because there is all kinds of valuable proprietary content there that they don’t want to share with the rest of the world. That makes a lot of sense until you’ve spent some time working in a reasonably sized company. Then you discover something else: most of a company’s intranet is not made up of valuable proprietary content. Sure, the information is useful, but it doesn’t necessarily provide a competitive advantage. However, most companies (and particularly those in my line of work) work on the assumption that by default all internally generated information should be kept proprietary, because IP is so valuable and a secret, once shared, can never be a secret again.
That mentality makes a lot of sense, particularly once you involve lawyers and phrases like “fiduciary responsibility”. However, I think it is rooted in an old school mentality that fails to recognize that there are huge benefits to making said information available to the public. Just given my intranet example… how much more valuable would it be for a company’s intranet content to actually be searchable, with truly relevant results coming out on top? How much value would there be in seeing what the public finds most interesting about this data and what meta data they assign to it?
Open source software is probably the best example of this new reality. The vast majority of software out there doesn’t provide competitive advantages to companies, but merely helps them to get things done. A lot of it is written in house and therefore by default kept proprietary. Occassionally though, you see companies (out of wisdom or ignorance) make their code available to the rest of the world. The outcomes tend to be as follows: a) nobody else cares about this problem, so the code just lies there, b) someone else has built a better solution, and so nobody uses the code and it just lies there, or c) people start using the code, and magically the code becomes ported to multiple platforms, new features get added, bugs get fixed, etc. None of those outcomes leave you worse off than when you started, but the upside of option c) is huge.
A friend of mine put up a site a while ago that tried to fully explain a problem in the web server business. At some point he remarked to me that the best way to become an expert on a subject is to publish a web page on the subject along with some contact info, and then wait for the feedback to roll in. Pretty soon you’ll have all the relevant data on the subject sent to your inbox. Voila! Instant expert. This is basically what Wikipedia is today.
I am starting to suspect that just like innovations before it (the GUI, the personal computer, e-mail, etc.), the corporate world has embraced the Internet in the last decade, but needs another decade to really understand how it changes how business works, and this may be the critical realization: information becomes more valuable if you make it freely available without restriction. That flies in the face of decades of “silo” mentalities that you find in corporations, where sharing information even within the company is seen as exposing you to risk rather than providing you with a benefit. The notion of sharing data on an even wider basis is heresy.
SCALE and Zumastore 2
I’m spending this weekend at SCALE. As always, the conference is great, and better than the year before. The talks are spilling out in to the halls, often multiple talks at a time (right now Chris DiBona’s talk has so many people attending and the spill over is so great, that it makes more sense to catch the mp3 of it at a later date).
One of the coolest things so far was my friend Daniel Phillips’ announcement of the Zumastor project. It looks like this Google sponsored open source project is finally going to give Network Appliances some real open source competition.
I was intrigued by a presentation on SystemTap. This is the first system I’ve seen that looks like it can give DTrace a run for the money, and most importantly it runs on Linux. It isn’t all there yet, but it’s close enough I’m going to start playing with it.
I was also impressed to see the Squeak folks making an appearance, both with a booth and a BoF later tonight. Looks like that project still has a decent amount of momentum.
Sun had a presentation talking about their open source stack (software and hardware). It was fun listening to just how much Sun gets the message that just five years ago I thought was falling on deaf ears there. It was also neat seeing a graph from a study that was done showing who was contributing to open source. Sun is the clear leader in terms of the amount of code and total man hours they’ve contributed (multiples of what most others have done). People don’t always grok that.
UPDATE: Found the study on who contributes to open source. Thanks to Matt Ingenthron (who did the presentation at SCALE) for getting me a pointer even before his slides make it out to the SCALE web site.
Hell Freezing Over
Now that the election is over and I’m starting to feel healthier again, I thought I should mention two events in the programming world that I think are very significant. They both involve two incredibly popular but often misunderstood and vilified programming languages who are forever associated with each other and the birth of the web.
The older news story is the Tamarin project, which is finally going to bring JIT technology to the world of Javascript in a big way (technically Tamarin was already in Acrobat’s Javascript engine, but let’s face it, most Javascript isn’t written for that platform). Word to the ignorant: up until now, Javascript has been painfully slow. Back when I was in the lab someone wrote a spring physics based graph-layout engine in Javascript. They were having problems with the algorithm, and being kind of weak in Javascript, I rewrote the thing in Java. After we got all the kinks out of both versions, the Java version appeared to be an easy 100x faster (possibly 1000x). Seriously.
Since then, I’ve looked a lot more closely at Javascript and discovered it’s not nearly as bad as I’d perceived it to be. It’s kind of a LISP-y language, with some handy little scriptisms in it, and SpiderMonkey makes it fairly easy to embed in C programs (someone needs to make a C++ interface that is like Boost’s Python library so I can say the same thing about C++).
The other big news is that today, Java is getting GPL’d. Specifically the HotSpot VM is being GPL’d along with Javac, with the standard libraries to follow (the VM is far more interesting as Java’s standard libraries tend to be only marginally better than what GNU Classpath has to offer). It will be interesting to see what comes of this, but the optimist in me hopes this will finally make Java more acceptable to the broader open source community and will lead to Java working better on more platforms. Myself, I want to see just how quickly I can hack a more async I/O style interface for Java’s IO libraries (yes, one could do this with JNI before, but you can do more interesting things with access to the full runtime). It’d also be fun to try to hack in an execution model that allows processes to share more of the Java VM’s resources, although that will undoubtedly take more time. I suspect more than a few people will be looking at ways add support for explicit disabling of bounds checking. The really most awesome hack to the Java VM has to be adding support for efficient unsigned arithmetic. That requires new byte codes, but man would it be wonderful.
The irony with both of these milestones is that in some ways they are both non-news events… except for how long it has taken for them to come around. Given Javascript’s popularity, you had to think that sooner or later JIT’s or some equivalent would become the norm. Instead, Javascript’s lackadaisical performance has helped relegate the language to “least common denominator status”, although AJAX allows you to offload work on to the only resource likely to be slower than your local Javascript engine: the web server. ;-)
As for Java becoming open sourced… Sun has been playing hot-and-cold on this one seemingly almost since the language was invented (a prize for whoever finds the oldest comment from a Sun executive which suggests that Java might in any way become open sourced). Based on what’s been in the press, this would have been a non-news event five or six years ago.
I have to say, I worked at Sun back when it was still getting sales by being the “dot in .com”, and one of the primary reasons I left the company was that it was clear to me that internally they just didn’t grok what was happening with open source and why what they absolutely needed to address this on the Solaris side of things in some fashion (either by the OpenSolaris route they chose or by porting Solaris tech to the Linux kernel and abandoning Solaris altogether) and simply make Java open source ASAP (while I thought what they did with openoffice was great news for the open source world, it didn’t strike me as indicative of a larger understanding). Gosling’s history with the free software movement didn’t exactly give one confidence that this was going to change either.
It’s good to see them coming around on this. I’m increasingly running out of reasons not to have a Solaris box at home. I’m about ready to look at the OpenSolaris hardware compatibility list and see just how cheap a box I can put together (I just don’t have enough RAM on my desktop to do Solaris justice with VMware).