Jack Vaughan: Tech

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 01:45:48 GMT

Hey the radio thing is over and out. Have moved blog to http://www.moontravellerherald.blogspot.com.

Cant say will be there that long. It has flaws of the technical order too. But it does not have the same flaws that tire me here. Hard to upload and synch. A site where question marks have replaced apostrophes going back three years. I voiced my complaints [on synch arch] to Radio HQ. But interaction is not human. Its mechanical mouse machine missives.

Looking back on Radio Weblog: Some decent stuff. But scattered. Scattered notes in desk drawers was what I hoped to better. This is only slightly more neat. Got complaints from my readers about too much computer stuff. But what the hell else can I write about? So may fork into two sites in future. Good news is RSS and XML are here and the Web is ready to explode again. Short Google! Remember the words of Manny Ramierez: "I dont believe in no curses. You make your own destination."

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 03:11:59 GMT

Blistering attack on Open Sores
"My ambition, with producer Mary McGrath, is to thread the seeming chaos of the Web into a coherent skein of ideas and argument," says Lydon. "We want to launch the smartest, most wide-open, democratic conversation anyone's ever been invited to join, in any format. The Internet transition we're living through is a boundless opportunity. It extends the rim of the roundtable and the range of the give-and-take to the whole planet."

Christopher Lydon is something of a Boston institution. He is relaunching his career with a radio show with the high concept of merging blogs and radio, not a bad idea.. but not easy to do. That's him talking above in ital.. and here's more

"Open Source will be the first radio program truly fused to the Internet, and it will have a lively Web presence. We expect to create a community online that can take part in the production process before, during, and after the program, helping us to surface new views and new voices."

The trouble with the Open Source show is that Lydon constantly has to bring in the blog concept. As if explaining the show concept. A story on DeLay, eg, has a blogger among guests, and when Lydon turns to him he says something like "So what's the word for the blogosphere on DeLay?" and the guy has to be cool, or course, and he says something like "I cant speak for the blogosphere." Last night Lydon: "Web, Dresden Dolls, what's it mean." Like McLaughlin seeking context.

Friday, Oct 7, 2005

John Tushcen died this summer
John Tushcen died this summer. When I got to Madison, he was the top poet. For my part, there was great envy. I thought he was like Joe Dallesandro, only articulate. When Jeff invited me to join in a Madison poetry bash {Paul and Jim joined in the music} in 1988, John was also on the bill, which made it great. Lotta Robitusson over the sidewalk curb since then. Now he is with John Berryman.

JS Online: On Madison's longtime poet laureate
http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/aug05/347027.asp

John's Under Construction page
http://members.aol.com/jjtuschen/poet.html

The Capital Times chimes in
http://www.madison.com/tct/news/stories/index.php?ntid=49786&;ntpid=1

Poeticvoices.com July 1999 Feature: John Tuschen
http://www.poeticvoices.com/Features/9907Tuschen.htm

MadPoetry John Tuschen pages
http://www.madpoetry.org/madpoets/tuschenj.html-
Thursday, Sep 29, 2005

Dylan on PBS
The whole family sat down and watched Dylan the American Master miniseries on PBS last night. As I suspect many of the Whole Sick Crew across America did too. It was very fulsome, Lowell.

I liked the considerable access to Dylan..and the characters he grew up with. Tony Glover, Paul Nelson, Al Ginsberg [mighta liked to have heard from Bobby Vee], Maria Muldar [the Jug Band footage was priceless], Liam Clancy and Dave Van Ronk... all of interest. Footage of influencers Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie eerie.

Fun:Van Ronk desribes how Dylan took his version of House of the Rising Sun and kind of hurt his feelings..and how he couldnt play it anymore..and how gladly he chorttled when Eric Burton and the Amimals took it .. so that Dylan couldnt play it anymore..

The bits on the cold snowy Midwest resonated...and him listening to radio signals in the night. The influence of cabaret show biz on his style [by way of people he shared bills with] became more apparent as it did in Chronicles.

It seems this is apt topic for Gangomine blog .. so how do you make that community thread stuff happen? PBS is giving helpful questions for wouldbe coffee klatchs --

Dylan began dissociating himself from fame at an early age. Do you think it helped or hurt him? How? What is your favorite Dylan song? Why do you find it appealing? If Dylan had come onto the music scene 10 years later, do you think he would have had the same impact? Why or why not?

But that dont make it. I think maybe I will ask..do y0u remember a time when you saw Dylan perform?

Actualy the PBS people are setting up a Flash map to absorb such stories.

Maybe I will ask if and how Bob Dylan music/poetry changed your life. I remeber vividly Jim Cusuamno saying "I would have been a lawyer if I hadn't heard Dylan."
Tuesday, Sep 27, 2005

When we were seven and a half up on Baltimore .. still we worried
So tony c. his comeback fails
And rico’s disabled with migraines

So fred lynn hasnt seen his mother in 12 years
And pole’s face with his vision shattered

Pudge fisk is unlucky and
theyll call the spaceman insane if he ever stops winning

Derron johnson smokes too much
And tiant just throws the baseballs
He dont know the politics

Like roger moret 4am in connecticut
Before the biggest game in his life

Like the yaz-razzer
wants to beat his wife

Our red sox are handicapped heroes
Our red sox are no bigger than life

Our faith in them is not undiluted
Can we forget that they fall apart?

O sportswriters
with your documented breakfasts

O fenway junk hawkers
selling those pennants

O kenmore square
ratskellar

The trolley driver moans
to think of the ball game crowd.

Looking for one thing and found another. Oddly while i was watching sox play orioles. A way back poem of red sox.. Many of these players now mostly forgotten. It’s what i saw new to town looking. Great faith. Great doubt. In dance. I submitted this to Belmont-Watertown Sun through a former roommate who was editor...but he kind of punked out at last and ran it as a letter to the editor to my great disappointment. The sox have been in first most of the season but the yankees overtook them this week. The old town cogitates again on fate. On buses. At the office microwave. With car radios in traffic. At the dark brown watering hole.
Saturday, Sep 24, 2005

Entry for September 19, 2005
LA. Electricity was out. Walked at least five miles that day... just briefly during time was on bus. Up from my W Sunset motel to Echo Park. All the way to Staples Center. Was like old days, when I had no money but had time, was as then thinking about money, a penny for your thoughts. This is after flying cross country to cover Microsoft Professional Developers Conf. In evening on TV there was Perry Mason. Which was perfectly black and white, and confined drama as I would have it construed. But this cheap hotel is weird. Prostitute stares at my window for hours... just like out of the Twilight Zone. Is this where Sal Mineo died? I find out later; no. In San Diego for Tech Ed year before last I thought I’d ended up in the Hotel Lorraine. This life is getting too poor too poor just a little too poor to quote Detroit Junior. It is an insect life fixated on small matters.

--*--

Saw the Dodgers. That was fun. Dodger Stadium was as I expected. Friendly confines. Kept score for a few inning, Herb, just so I had a feel for the context, and was primed for alertness to detail and progress. Saw – I am sure for first time live – a suicide squeeze. Was executed by Dodgers. Saw fielding and running of bases all from stellar vantage. They played the Colorado Rockies, with Korean Kim, formerly RedSox, pitching, ensuring action – but unfortunate for Dodgers, Rockies manager knew to pull him after four.

Sat very high but directly behind backstop. Shared row of seats with nice folks doing Sculley talk.

What is Sculley talk? Well, it is a style of baseball chatter. Very positive, very endearing. Encapsulating essentials. Vin Sculley is one guy who should not retire. He has no partner. And his banter is thus more pure. It’s him talking to you –talking you through the innings of the game.. and he covers the game – and all is fun and clean and good there in the game.

So my bud down the way – and damn but I lost most notes – gave my program box score to a kid [well his mother for him] - bud grew up with this radio or TB chant – and this is him speaking...

“It got away on him.

“It’s a brand new game, 6-6.

“A long noisy out – that’s all that was.

“He ran a country mile for that one.

The old fellow sitting in my row gabbing a bit here and there like that with a young fellow – some kind of relative, because the alternate between wht the Indians and Red Sox are doing, the game at hand, and their shared blood relations’ doings ... is just talking Vince talk .. all of one cloth... and having a good time. This is the most fun I’ve had since first few times at Fenway, since old County Stadium, and since the day Jeff and I went to Wrigley.

Anyway leaving .. palms hear the bullpen.. the scoreboard viewed from behind haloed. As I score a cab. The Dodgers lose [per Sculley] a “wild game”, maybe 8-7, their pitching appearing worse than the Rockies.

“It got away from him”

Happy kids, many in blue, many Mexicans, alive to the buzz, and attendance at the game.

--*--

Strange trip to be taking...on Sept 12.. just slightly less strange than travelling on Sept 11... with the memorials on CNN and headlines in USA .. and a nice verbal brickbat warning from Al Kaline Queda to coincide .. disconcerting

I recall the days of Wescon .. an electonics convention-exhibition from 20 years ago.. the feeling that there were endless possibilities in semiconductors.. and capacitaors, and thermistors, and heat sinks, and design automation tools... I was new to the business and had the boundless hope of the youngster on the rise... now at the press room at PDC, with tech writer and scifi writer Jerry Pournelle pontifacting loundly [more oudly than in press room at Comdex in 88] and endlessly.. and providing an objective correlative for my inner doo-dad cowboy... I am tired.

Robert Wise, director of my favorite Sci-film, The Day the earth Stood Still, died...I learned this poolside with LA Times at a Hollywood bar [at the Roosevelt Hotel] on Hollywood Blvd..where I saw all the stars’ sidewalk images... Julie London, Scatman Crothers, Pola Negri...]

And Gatemouth Brown, one of Slim’s favorites too, passed.

There is stuff afoot in technology as always.. Rich clients from IBM and Microsoft are examples. Also of note: The Next or Semantic Web, as visible right now in blogs and RSS. Unfortunately, RSS is just like the early web was. You build it and hope they will come. Fair to say that, like the web, some will build and many wont come. Like email newsletters, RSS is a push medium. It's inflection point stuff.

--*--

A poem courtesy of LA cabbie:

Big town – everybody’s a machine

Nobody has time for anyone.

--*--

http://searchvb.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid8_gci1123253,00.html
Links to page with technical stuff I wrote on Microsoft PDC.
Monday, Sep 19, 2005

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 02:58:02 GMT

Lets go back to GOD!

Ernst Mayr dies, aged 100
Sysematics, his specialty, I only came across yesterday. It was as historian that Mayr got my attention. Mayr got my attention and influenced my thought, that is for sure. I made point as a grad student in science communications get some history of science under my belt...all there was avaialble was one course, on Darwin, but lo and behold, Mayr's The Evolution of Biological Thought was just newly vailable and I shelled out the bucks and bought it, and got a decent grade in a course that was way over my head. Mayr's view was like James Burke' Connections, but significantly deeper. He showed how thoughts or thnkings intermingle and grow, bounce and resonate, pointing the way toward an explanation of the dialectics of science. Today blogs kind of form a dialectic; probably informed by Burke; but also probably informed by people who know people who read Mayr. The cat , he was long time harvard hadn, liived til a hundred and was scheduled to do a lecture in Bedford Jan 25 [it snowed big time that day]!
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4486887
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=66948

As Orwell Foresaw
Of interest: 'No Place to Hide' - By Robert O'Harrow Jr. - NYT's MICHIKO KAKUTANI writes: Brain waves with ''noninvasive neuro-electric sensors are just part of futuristic surveillance statethat is post-9/11 America, as described in Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s unnerving new book, ''No Place to Hide'' -- an America where citizens' The digital revolution of the 1990's exponentially amplified trends enabling retailers, marketers and financial institutions to gather and store vast amounts of information about current and potential customers. And as Mr. O'Harrow notes, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ''reignited and reshaped a smoldering debate over the proper use of government power to peer into the lives of ordinary people.'' Orwell was right about this, Big Brother just arrived some two decades later than Orwell predicted. - NYT, Jan 25, 2005

UNRELATED
HP crossbar threatens transistor hegemony -Reuter, Feb 1, 2005
Morse code of cells -BBSRC.ac, Jan 10, 2005
Eisner departs -NYT, Jan 2, 2005
Space probe enters Titan's atmosphere CBC News, Dec 22, 2004

Kansas Town Is Launch Pad for Bid at Flight Record

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 03:01:32 GMT

Robot ships on other moons big news last year
Will we have such trips to view again? Maybe not in life time. Doors open and close as Apollo taught. Many years later the moon remains a mystery. Particularlly how it causes humans to misbehave. It is very hard to map.

Thrilling explorations of other worlds -USA Today, Dec 27, 2004
US share of the Human Genome Project complete - The Register, Dec 23, 2004
Burn start for Cassini-Huygens - SpaceRef.com
Meet Bose - PopSci, Dec. 2004
Water on Mars: THE Story - TechNewsWorld
Graham Glass weblog
Ray Ozzie looks back, looks ahead – December 6, 2004
The rise of the green building -The Economist Special
Sony to Disclose Details on Computer Chip - Forbes, Nov 29, 2004
Moon remains a mystery - Daily Times of Pakistan, Nov. 28, 2004

Web community flow machine history at IBM

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 02:38:54 GMT

Air-Breathing Test Plane
A small, air-breathing test plane will attempt to blaze into history on Monday by flying at nearly 10 times the speed of sound. The hypersonic craft is one of three built by NASA for its $230-million Hyper-X project, established in 1996. At 3.7 metres long, the new type of plane reaches rocket-like speeds but is more efficient because it does not need to carry oxygen to ignite its fuel supply - it takes oxygen from the atmosphere. And unlike jet plane engines, which use fans to compress air to light fuel for propulsion, the vehicles' engines use no moving parts - the shape of their bellies sucks in and compresses air at supersonic speeds.
NewSci, Nov 12, 2004

Northrop, Boeing plan joint bid for shuttle replacement - USA Today, Nov 10, 2004
Solar sail update - USA Today, Nov 9, 2004
The Persuaders - PBS, Nov 8, 2004
Ion-drive module arrives at the Moon -Nature, Nov 8, 2004
Dali In hollywood - Pete Times, Oct 10,2004

Wed, 20 Oct 2004 01:17:46 GMT

Research: Operations
Among other matters, "Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture" looks at "Technology as Systems, Controls, and Information, and addresses the large-scale complexity that defined engineering in America after the Second World War. Hughes focuses less on the ideas of the system-builders themselves. He charts the rise of the military-industrial-university complex and presents the origins of operations research and theories of feedback and control.
Read review -AmSci, Nov-Dec 2004

Also
Sun, Texas U. fahion large-scale data visualizer -UTexas.edu
Flawed drawings caused spacecraft crash - Nature, Oct 18, 2004
I sing the body electric! NTT researchers use body as medium - EET/CommsDesign, Oct 15, 2004
A lighter approach to computer control - New Scientist, Oct 4, 2004

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 01:43:25 GMT

Blackouts: The Power
Causes fascinate us. But secondary effects can be more important. The ongoing studies of last year's NE power black out may indicate that the second or third chain in that chain reaction were more virulent than the first, at least in the sense that the systems worked as they were programmed to work. The network was viruently doomed by design, if this is the case, because certain system elements were built to grade or degrade, but not degrade gracefully. That the power net is an assortment of local formerly automonmous - and still somewhat automomous - nets is a factor. We'd assume it was like the Internet, which, we assume so far degrades gracefully. Writes Mathhew Wald: "The disturbance spread so quickly ... largely because hundreds of components acted exactly as they had been programmed to do."
Read: The Power Grid Is Too Sensitive for Its Own Good - NYT, Aug 10, 2004 [Arc -fee]

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 17:21:57 GMT

Mainframe Integration Tips for Java, .NET
Web services could give new life to old-fashioned "screen scraping" styles of client-to-mainframe integration, according to an enterprise apps consultant speaking at the recent SD 2004 Best Practices event. Anura Guruge told attendees that a new wave of web services-based approaches can be used to extend mainframe assets throughout the enterprise, sparking new interest in IT pros who can deliver "mainframe modernization."
Read the rest of this story on Integration Developer News site - IDN, Oct 13, 2004
Also see Avoid 6 'Gotchas' in Enterprise Mobile Dev - IDN, Oct 8, 2004

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 16:29:45 GMT

Q&A: Call on optimization
ADT staff did this. I was the "I" [Q: "I don’t see too many flights that aren’t packed. Is this a result of software like we’re discussing here?] which/who talked with iLog's Lustig about optimization of processes, which is a modern extension of Taylor's work. . "Like we're discusing here" .. who in the world talks like that?

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 00:56:48 GMT

Apologies to friends and colleagues .. I took some excerpts from recent personal emails to populate this page. Strategies for blogging are still experimental.

I've been searching
Seems like there has been a tremendous amount of activity in the 'search' world all of a sudden. I have had an interesting time working with Amazon's A9 site and MyJeeves. Also, the commentaries about these efforts have been of interest. "Searchblog" [http://battellemedia.com/] is especially deep with info. It was new to me .. but there is a lot there about publishers' uses of search. Not all is new, of course; some of this reminds one of Northern Light circa 1998.

Related
Searchblog
A9
myjeeves
vivisimo
clusty
LookSmart buys Furl -ZDNet, Sept 24, 2004

Waterman
Recently shook hands with Dick Waterman who managed Muddy, Bonnie Raitt, Skip James, Son House, many others… Carrie Bell was playing good stuff … It was the Boston Blues Fest …. So, Dick Waterman’s got cool book out based on his experiences [see link below]. We linked to Smithsonian stuff before from this site. From Herald piece, Waterman talking on Son House performing: "He hypnotized himself to another time and place. When the song was over, he'd bow his head, nod, bring his eyes up, refocus. It was mesmerizing. I knew I had a majestic responsibility to make sure this man's greatness was seen and heard."

Am listening today to John Hurt, Son House, Skip James… reading same [via Erick Sacheim], and Corso and Su Shih … also discovered Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant.

Related
Waterman photos put legends in focus -- Boston Herald, Sept 23, 2004
Dick Waterman site
Google search on Ray Charles

http://www.bobdylan.com/index.html

Chronicles
You! Can you believe Dylan actually wrote a book about his life? And cryptic curtains will part? It's daunting so far to read [Newsweek excerpt] as he points to how fans messed up his attempts at happy home.. and I know we as young youths panthered after him, and were not adverse to entering his alley, just like the dweebs of Aquarius he describes. Sorry! I was so much younger then!

Related
Bobdylan.com
Excerpt - Newsweek, Sept 29, 2004

Quoted:
"A record seemed like a magical artifact -- somehng that came fom America." -Sting, Lennon's Jukebox, PBS

Noted
Toutatis asteroid gets real close - BBC, Sept 29, 2004
IBM supercomputer sets world speed record - NYT Sept 28, 2004
Spector of Phil - NME, Sept 28, 2004
Lowell celebrates Kerouac 2004
Tommorowland DVD is coming NPR

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 17:40:04 GMT

RFID - Embed with another menace?
Embedded systems developers are like spies at the great barbecue party that is modern commerce. All sorts of useful, neat, or just ornery devices enter the world, but how they are made doesn't interest the typical barbecue goer. People ask what you do for a living; when you say 'develop embedded systems,' the topic moves on to other matters.

This notion will change, sensor guru Kevin Ashton said in a keynote at this week's Embedded System Conference in Boston. That is because, he said, RFID will drive a type of embedded systems ubiquity not seen before. READ THE REST OF THE STORY.

The conference was intriguing, as embedded software and hardware folks wrestle with same problems as everyone else, but with a different perspective. Power consumption is a big one. So is design abstraction. Enjoyed hearing Jack Ganssle on really really realtime; a Loring Wierbel session on emedded network security isues; Fred Heurtebize and the PolySpace Technologies fellows who use and Abstract Interprettin model tocheck runtime errors and get around test case writing; and Dan Saks on C; and just generally seeing some of what I would call the old gang. Embdedded and non-embedded developers could learn a lot from each other. The whole system is the thing [well once things are working, anyway.]

Noted news bits
Theme park takes visitors to RFID-land - cnet, Sept 14, 2004
Taking the Xeroxing out of Xerox - The Inquirer, Sept 14, 2004
The death of microprocessors -ESP, Sept 4, 2004
Mentor's Accelerated Tech group releases Eclipse IDE for embedded dev - mentor.com, Sept 4, 2004

This just in - Mellor's Executable UML firm in Mentor camp - Mar 4, 2004

Sat, 11 Sep 2004 19:51:05 GMT

Cheaper by the dozens
Working in Wisconsin in the early '70s, down by the Great Lake industrial part where I came from, you didn't come up on piecework too much. Even if you worked in a non-union shop, the unions were strong, and they insisted that you got paid by the hour. Yes, there were counters on machines, and management had quotas in mind, and you would be out if you lagged them too badly, but you got paid by the hour, not by the piece.

No one was more associated with the concept of piecework than Frederick W. Taylor. Beginning in the late 19th Century, he endeavored to apply scientific principles [most especially, the idea of measurement] to industrial tasks. He laid the foundation for the likes of Peter Drucker, and a whole nation of consultants. Time-and-motion, get the notion?

In "Frederick W. Taylor: The Father of Scientific Management - Myth and Reality" [1991] Taylor comes across as a son of the upper class, traipsing from one consultant engagement to another, stop watch in hand [or later on, stop watch somehow disguised so as not to upset the floor workers], a little humorous in his actions as he mucked about as something of an anthropologist going into the lost world of factories and loading docks.
Read the rest of the story.

Of general interest
Saturn reveals new ring and moon - ABC, Sept 10, 2004
The capsule with sun dust that fell to earth - Universe Today, Sept 9, 2004
Calif sues Diebold over voting systems - news.ft.com, Sept 9, 2004
Gehry car of the future - PopSci, July, 2004
Gehry car of the future on display - MIT.edu

Wed, 08 Sep 2004 17:32:07 GMT

Inflection happens
Complaints about powerhouse Intel have largely been laughable - yeah they missed estimates. Why quibble about ability to forecast the future? The path was straight forward. Client PCs needed ever more chips so what were a few hiccups along the way, especially as the 386 architecture made inroads on the server side?

The great state of chips would roll on...

But this view is changing. Intel looks like a Technology Mighty that finally gets a comeuppance. Its long-running Itanium escapade played out badly. Its move into servers, though successful by many measures, seems to have left it playing catch-up on the desktop. It seemed to have taken its eye off the ball, and it is a fair guess that a rare management shakeup may result.

This week at the IDF, Intel's Paul Otellini described the company's move to dual-core microprocessors. Unfortunately for Intel, rival AMD demo'd a 386-architecture dual-core chip prior to Otellini's announcement. Thus, Intel will not enjoy any particular lead in this new chip battle. Otellini is able, and looked a logical successor to Craig Barrett - who always appeared more like a colonial governor than a Silicon Valley mogul - but missed ship schedules for chips are becoming familiar on Otellini's watch.

CTO Pat Gelsinger and a host of Intel scientists must stand accused too. The company's fixation on processor speed, to the distress of other factors, especially power and heat, tripped it up. What constitutes "good computation" for a micro-computer is every changing.

Maybe two-core processors were too obvious! Too simple. That's surprising given the great advances Intel made over the years with simple PLL clock doubling. The Itanium excursion more and more looks like an i860 sidetrip. IBM did the double-core tango with the PowerPC a couple of years ago. What must Andy Grove think!

His "Only the Paranoid Survive" described a company that smelled money and kept it simple. But organizations tend to institutionalize success, often to detriment. These days, AMD seems more paranoid, and wise. Inflection happens.

Related
Intel Plans to Exploit Chip Trends - WSJ [sub req], Sept 8, 2004
At IDF: Intel opts for multiprocessor cores - Sept 7, 2004
To IDF Otellini, Gelsinger keynotes - Sept 7, 2004

Also
Xilinx, Sandia tools
Here is a combo that somewhat relieves "single-event upsets" for harsh environment applications. Good for those occassions when one bad event can ruin your whole FPGA. This is cool stuff: Xilinx's X-Triple Module Redundancy tool automatically generates redundant and associated voting circuitry. - Sept 8, 2004

Briefly
Inside Ratyheon skunk works - WSJ [reg req] Sept 8, 2004

FPGA-giant Xilinx organizes to push DSP - Sept 6, 2004

High-speed serial interface IC designer gains funding -EET, Sept 6, 2004

Thu, 02 Sep 2004 15:42:22 GMT

Reporter’s Notebook: Going up the stack
The story of the technology business has always been about moving up the stack. The story’s tenor changes with each new uptick, lately BPM. BizTalk Server, Microsoft’s play in this area, continues to bear watching. -ADT, Sept 2004

Also
Special Report: Inside IBM’s software plans by Mike Bucken & Jack Vaughan -ADT, Sept 2004
BI today: One version of the truth by Peter Bochner & Jack Vaughan -ADT, Sept 2004
Q&A with Emmet B. Keeffe III, iRise by Jack Vaughan -ADT, Sept 2004

Unrelated
Using X-Rays to view bacteria -NYT, Aug 31, 2004

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 14:15:45 GMT

Analysis: Microsoft’s Rudder’s settings

[August 25, 2004] - Microsoft seems to make steady advances beyond its desktop base in many businesses. This is not good news for other players in the software business who sell specialized software to do the ‘backroom’ computer work of mid-sized and large corporations. Obstacles to growth for Bill Gates and company are many and should not be downplayed. Yet, it appears that only IBM is dependably competitive with Microsoft now. Read analysis.

Sun, 15 Aug 2004 22:16:59 GMT

Teaching crazed quality
Toyota rose to automotive prominence, and seems headed to dominance, due mainly to a fanatical home-brewed cult of quality that produced incredibly dependable cars. But as it grows, the company is hard pressed to continually recreate its special potion for quality, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Key to the Toyota way is the notion that perfection is elusive but improvement is always possible. Continuous improvement or kaizen is the mantra. A major domo of this particular cult was Mr. Taiichi Ohno, who drew inspiration in part from 1950s-era [?] observations of American supermarket shelf-stocking methods.

But Ohno and crew’s own methods of teaching quality don’t seem to lead straight to reproducible processes. Or to readily span borders. You see, the gurus of Toyota quality have long taken a craftsmanlike, you might even say zen-like, approach to teaching. Efficiency, precision, and perfection methods were not put down in manuals, or taught in classes. Expert coordinators instead taught by prowling factory floors, attacking inefficiencies as they occurred, or by throwing their trainees into the water so to speak, ordering them to stand and observe a production line process until they discovered how it could be improved.

All well and good, but as the automation church fathers of Japan’s Toyota die, retire, or go to work for competitors, the whistler’s melody strays from the original song line. Moreover, different cultures, at least the Toyota brethren seem to claim have a different uptake on this stuff. “What was it we were supposed to do?” - the Kentucky shop crew asks, 20 years after Mr. Ohno’s last visit.

Toyota Production System gurus who return to a long-active factory – and these days they must traverse the world to hit all the Toyota plants – reportedly find that shop-floor leaders begin to spend too much time in their offices, rather than panthering about the factory floor invoking kaizen and cheerleading the assemblers.

* * *

How many generations will it take for the scientific culture of operations to become international? Til last robot pulls last monkey wrench out of last factory humanoid’s bloody fingers, maybe. For over a hundred years now we have been familiar with the concept of society as a machine. And reflexes and machine-like qualities are valued by Americans. But it has also been very American to show some independence, and to demand some equality. We alone created the Road pictures, The Marx Brothers, and Mash, the latter a template for workplace attitude americana.

* * *

I remember once the difficulty C. had in a brief job as an assistant to an Italian harpsichord maker, who seemed pretty much mute. Let’s call him Harpo. Nothing she did was right, and nothing was corrected. We were in quandary until a more traveled journeyman explained Harpo’s problem - well part of his problem – by telling us this fellow’s own training would have been in an apprenticeship where he spend years before he could work with tools – years during which his only job was to hand the next tool to the piano maker just when he needed it. ‘If he handed him the wrong tool he was hit with it.” Non-Mystic telegraphers need not apply.

The idea of staring at process all day, I know that. It's far away from mysticism - totally mundane. When you are working on the assembly line, you have to at least begin to think about how your labor could be eased. But in my experience there I would usually draw a blank. It was the engineer class that knew the secrets of the cogs. And man they looked like the cast out of Houston Control in Apollo 13. An engineer would come down to the floor – this is my youth at the wax factory working on some of the oldest lines they had -- and watch me work, and come back in thirty days with a mechanism to do my chores.

The guy I remember who figured out how to put the lids on the wax cans with one guy instead of two was Earl. Today, Earl and Neil Armstrong have merged as one visage in my memory bank. There was a general unease when the engineers would prowl, and I can understand why Toyota might discover its American shop-floor samurai are too often in the office. They'd want to avoid the workers' beady eyes.

Waxing mnemonic: I remember when they took some Japanese engineers through the factory circa 1969. They took them very quickly past the paste wax conveyor oven that was my lot in life at the time. Of which I was glad. Also I remember – the man with the chronometer [switching to the small foundry here], the QA guy, always lurking, checking tolerances. “How long have you been putting out these parts?’ he would snarl.

* * *

The goal for Toyota now is to set up more formal teaching systems, and to find a way for local factory folk to run ‘the Toyota way’ without relying totally on the Japanese priesthood.

Related
As Toyota closes in on GM, quality concerns grow -WSJ, Aug 4, 2004 [sub req]
To come: Tootie

Black boxes
Auto black box behavior – EE Times Online (subscription) - Aug 9, 2004
'Black Box' in every garage - Guardian, UK - Aug 3, 2004
A Pandora's Black Box -Washington Post - Jul 26, 2004

Thu, 12 Aug 2004 15:26:38 GMT

Copies in Seconds
New Yorker writer David Owen's recent book looks at the life of Chester Carlson, inventor of the photocopy machine and force behind the rise of Haloid Xerox. Owen gets deep into the naunce of invention, which in the case of the "Xerox machinie" has much to do with envisioning something unseen. Cast light on dust so to speak. This technology is taken for granted today. But I can remember a boy from Wisconsin who was disallowed to check out a library periodical, and was told he could use the public copier, circa 1965, for a dime a shot. And when the duplication came out, Elation! Soon was xeroxing drawings. Xeroixing photos and making collages. Had previously used transparent paper, hand notes and grid patterns to duplicate. Of course our era of duplication is now cosmic .. is it useful to remember when? - On Xerography father Chester Carlson -WSJ, Aug 6, 2004 [sub req]

Making copies
Note: Copying is the engine of civilization excerpt. When he was 10 his favorite posession was a toy typewriter. Later he worked in a pirnt shop and publised Amateur Chemists' Press - he was impressed by the amount of labor involved in getting something into print. From interview with Ermenc of Dartmouth - Smithsonian. Aug 2004

Sat, 07 Aug 2004 02:50:34 GMT

Dvorak on Myth of Disruptive Technology
John Dvorak is the greatest high-tech columnit. Here he finds easily holes in the Clayton Chritensen Disruptive Technology story...but.... Clayton is the king of the class room. If you saw hime lecture on this stuff, you'd go for it, John, or see it in a little different view. What John rightly says is that Clayton's book, full of examples of distruptive technology, is full of holes. John, you are right, this is not an end-all and be-all suits-all-sizes formula.But John, did you notice print advertising slipping into the abuss, and the Web distrupting the media world as we knew it? Clatyon can tell you about what happen in the steel industry, which is similar. It didnt go away, it went away from Pennsylvania and Gary. -PCMag Aug 17, 2004

Gates of Redmond
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has rarely taken on the “visionary” role since he gave over his CEO hat to Steve Ballmer and took on the job of Chief Software Architect in January 2000. But he has focused on the big view of late in a meeting last week with financial analysts and at a session earlier this week for the Microsoft Research Faculty. -adtmag.com, Aug 6, 2004

The fit and finish of rich GUIs
It wasn't too very long ago that the Web browser became "the ubiquitous client." The immediate result was a shift to server-side development and a catch-as-catch-can approach to user interfaces. -Programmers Report, Aug 4, 2004

Clusters a’plenty
Changes in the computer room are afoot, and it is not just about clusters. The emerging ‘virtualization’ of software platform is near. Dan Kusnetzky is a real guru of this segment.- ADT, August, 2004

SOA what!
Moderated a Webcast on Service Oriented Arhcitecture with Mike Rosen and Mike Sawicki. SOA seems to be a case of something old something new something borrowed..and may be something that just might work better than what has come before. As for the webcast medium: For now, I prefer having a live audience in the room. You'd think it would be like radio to do a webcast ... July 13, 2004

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 04:22:42 GMT

Big Blue iron at sea
Attention [Reuters] is given this week to an IBM supercomputer that consists of 368 AIX computers connected together with a total of about 3,000 64-bit PowerPC microprocessors. It will be built for the U.S. Department of Defense for war simulation, weather forecasting and other applications, and be housed at the Naval Oceanographic Office Major Shared Resource Center in Mississippi. This machine would vie to join the Top 10 list of the World’s biggest computer. Bigger news would be to hear that IBM had surpassed the fastest computer, which is located at the Earth Simulator Center in Japan and is made by NEC Corp. A BW article from the Spring outlines the state of Supers. [sub req'd]

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 22:19:15 GMT

Turbo coding and Cassini
Economist discusses use of turbo code in Cassini Saturn probe. Such codes go back to Claude Shannon, but it is only recently that real codes have started to approach Shannon's theoretical limit for filling the channel of communications. Developments in coding theory made at the time Cassini was being assembled are now coming to fruition. The guess is that mobile phones, HDTV and more will be able to receive and transmit data at something close to Shannon's limit. Economist, July 12, 2004

Sat, 24 Jul 2004 22:04:13 GMT

I got lost in the secret palace of science
Read recently Tuxedo Park, story of Alfred Loomis. Loomis was something of a shady figure in 20th Century military-industrial-technological complex. He was a wealthy New York lawyer and investment banker whose hobby was science and technology. He took on a science patron's role, of a kind fairly common in the 19th Century, but one pretty rare today. He personally funded research in nuclear physics, radar, and neurology. The book centers on the private laboratory he supported in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. Author Conant has some personal connection here. Here family was prominent in U.S. science and education during the mid-20th Century - one of the most violent eras in world history, and one of the most fascinating times in turn for technological development.

The author carries the book’s narration forward from the point of view of an individual working at the lab, one who commits suicide as the book begins. Besides being a working chemist., William Richards was somewhat high-strung, a Depression boozer, and an artist. He read - and probably submitted stories to - Amazing Tales. At Tuxedo Park he came across brain tests, uranium research, more. His “Brain Waves and Death” was a roman a clef motif based on a Tuxedo Park experience that was basically very disturbing for him.

Conant the author sticks to the facts – the crazy serial pulp adventure that was Richards’s tale is always rather ahead of her story, which plods somewhat. But facts will do that. People with special interest in the history of technological development, or the doing of ’20-‘30s New York social set will like enjoy this book.

* * *

Tuxedo Park is the actual star of the story. One lab building, done in modern style with latest in 1930’s automation features (including AC that failed at time miserably), seems to evoke the labs of The Black Cat and of Batman.

Craze-inducing Uranium, of course is still in the news today.

For info on Tuxedo Park on amazon

Palace of Science - Fortress of Solitude

Sat, 24 Jul 2004 21:05:55 GMT

I see Booch in Grapevine
[GRAPEVINE, TEXAS] -- The future of the world will involve more software, but not necessarily more coding, IBM Fellow Grady Booch asserted at the IBM Rational User Conference 2004 in a keynote alternately historical and futuristic. Booch's presentation provided something of a backgrounder on the history of computing -- from Hollerith cards to ENIAC and Java -- while looking forward to developments forecasted for the next 30 years. The grab bag of the future included development of nano technology, more use of biometrics, more surveillance cameras in cities near you, and the end of military air fighters piloted by humans. Booch's future included many welcome events as well as cautionary ones. Among the good stuff: On-demand printing, news and entertainment over the Web, and complete photorealism in motion pictures. -on adtmag.com, 7/21/2004

Also from Grapevine
IBM goes to college -adt, July20
Workplace arriving -adt, July19
Atlantic crossing -adt, July 19

Also
You must come, you shall go, even in black holes -July 22, 2004, NYT
Man on moon plus 35 Reuters, July 21, 2004
Ben Ratliff on Howlin Wolf - July 21, 2004, NYT
Elijah Wald writes on Leroy Carr - July 18, 2004, NYT
Bernard Ransil's own bio Sketch - nesacs.org

A great soundtrack record and jazz record is Kansas City. Robert Altman's 1996 movie placed itself in that wide-open railroad town, found the mood at the train station, and brought together a host of present day jazz turks to recreate the era of the Blue Devils, Basie, and Jay McShann. Players include David Murray, Cyrus Chesnut, Josh Redman, Don Byron, Nicholas Payton.

Mon, 19 Jul 2004 03:01:26 GMT

How Google works
This reporter got another take on "fast, reliable and cheap" deployments at Usenix in Boston in June. At a keynote there, Rob Pike described a Google application development mentality that led the company to take on the responsibility for developing its own fault tolerance. - adtmag's Programmers Report. July 14, 2004
Time line history of parallel computing cs.vt.edu
Brooks on Robots and computers t t ccc- the edge, May, 2002
Link to Brooks' Paper 'Fast, cheap and totally out of control' - mit. edu

Nanoscale MRI
IBM scientists have achieved a breakthrough in nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by directly detecting the faint magnetic signal from a single electron buried inside a solid sample. ibm.com, July 14, 2004
How it works in animation

Wed, 14 Jul 2004 02:33:00 GMT

EM car disabler talk
NPR's Robert Siegel talks with David Giri, president of the company ProTech, about a device that could effectively end car chases by zapping car microprocessors with a quick jolt of energy. Audio - NPR, July 12, 2004
This has a wierd familiarity. Once while tyring to place an article with Ed Sander's "Cattle Report" in late 70s I looked into use of EM zappers to disable electrical systems- in those day the whole electrical system was target. Seemed as though the Air Force had funded some research along those lines. We asked Dan Romanchik what he thought about this EM microprocesor disabler story. Skeptical was Dan. Says Dan: Well, I'd have to see this to believe it. The principle is simple enough, but the engineering is quite a bit more complicated. For example, as they alluded to in the piece, the antenna a police car would have to carry would have to be fairly big and directional, or else it will "zap" not only the target car, but many other cars along the way. Both cars are moving too, so that will have an effect on just how much electromagnetic energy gets coupled into the target car. Finally, the good doctor pooh-poohed the question about whether or not the target car would careen out of control, but I think that might be a real possibility. I'm just a born skeptic, though."

Unrelated
The Rings of the Saturn - SciAm, July 12, 2004
Howlin' Wolf's Blues Continue to Haunt - NPR, July 12, 2004 [Includes links, book excerpt, and music]
NYT Mag discovers graphic novels -NYT, July 11, 2004
Look inside the HomeLand Security Op Center -NYT, July 7, 2004
DeMark's profiled -Northcoast Jo.com, Mar 28, 2002
Strange Valve Dream Site -ominous valve.com

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 02:07:15 GMT

Operation everything
I went to a logistics society meeting once - guess it might have been put on by the Institute for Operations Research and the Managment Sciences, and was struck! This was cybernetics on a very large level - and probably operations is what cybernetics came to be. I headed out toward a special report on supply chain and ERP. The world little noted. Engines and algorithms. That seems to be what is discovered here by writer Postrel. She speaks with Irv Lustig of iLog. She shows the WWII roots of O.R. as a way of brining mathematical thought to warfare - which rings especially cause Jake and I recently watched The Fog of War with Mr. O.R. [Robert Strange MacNamara]. She shows its use in Monte Carlo bus schedules, in Walmart RFID strategies, and as a Liberal Science of the 21st Century.
By Virginia Postrel | June 27, 2004 | Boston Globe