MtnVwPilot

There's more at http://www.toad.com/facesaver/loukatz/gif/, if you remember anybody's email address from the late 80's...

I just got back from Sweden, where I spent the past couple of weeks helping the IETF use Netomata Config Generator (NCG: the open source software that I've been developing lately) to set up and manage the network for their thrice-annual meeting last week in Stockholm. More details about that on my professional blog, if you're curious.

jan_can_too went, too, and got to do lots of sightseeing while I was hanging out in the IETF NOC; there's more about that in her LiveJournal. I did manage to spend a little bit of time playing tourist, and had a great time at the Vasa Museum, Kunga Slottet (the Royal Palace), and Nobel Museum. One of the conference social events was at the Stockholm City Hall, which is where the Nobel Prize banquet is held each year, and is absolutely spectacular inside. We had a fantastic dinner for my birthday at what is reputed to be the best smörgåsbord in Stockholm, at the Grand Hotel. We stayed at the Sheraton Stockholm, overlooking the water and Gamla Stan (the old town, where the Royal Palace is), which was a very convenient and pleasant walk to both the conference site where I was working and all the tourist attractions; our room was on the side facing the Stockholm City Hall, which is quite a lovely view.

We also got out of Stockholm for a few days at the end of our trip, to visit Malmö and Kalmar. We went to Malmö primarily to visit the Fotevikens Museum (the Viking Preserve, a "living history" village of Viking buildings and craftspeople), and then we drove across to Kalmar, where we stayed overnight and then visited Kalmar Slott. Then we drove back to Stockholm for one more night before flying home (and boy, are our arms tired! ;-) ).

I really liked Sweden in general and Stockholm in particular. The weather was nice (better than it was at home, it sounds like), the food was good, the prices were reasonable, the city was beautiful, and the people were friendly. I'd love to go back sometime when I'm not there for business, and spend more time just bumming around.

We're in Sweden. Faced with the prospect of paying outrageous hotel laundry rates, I decided to check around for local laundromats. I found a web site for a place that I'm pretty sure is a local laundromat, but the web page was only in Swedish, so I decided to feed it through a Swedish-to-English translation service that I found on the web. What I got back was this:

Welcome to [name of shop]. We's is expert on modification in hide. We's am changing while yous am awaiting. Have you somewhatas requires fräschas up ors wash? Welcome in to ourselves!

Today, I made the first public beta release of the open source network automation tool that I've been working on for the past few months, the Netomata Config Generator (NCG). Now we'll see if anybody but me is interested in this problem, and this approach to solving it... ;-)

Dave Hitz is one of the cofounders of NetApp, which is a Silicon Valley success story, and has been with the company since 1992. I just finished reading his new book, How to Castrate a Bull: Unexpected Lessons on Risk, Growth, and Success in Business, and I highly recommend it.

In the book, Dave tells the intertwined stories of both his professional history (which included a stint as a working cowboy on an isolated cattle ranch; thus the title of the book) and the history of NetApp, and he shares many of the insightful lessons that he has learned along the way.

Dave is a natural story teller, and besides being fun to hear, his stories usually manage to memorably convey some point of wisdom. He's also a very nice guy, which is unfortunately rarer than you might wish in Silicon Valley. I've had the privilege of knowing Dave socially and professionally for a number of years, and I'm always pleased when I run into him at some industry or social event, because I know that a fun and interesting conversation will likely ensue.

The book is a great peek into what it takes to grow a startup from scratch to 8000 employees and billions of dollars in annual revenue, while also making it one of the most respected Silicon Valley companies and a fixture on every year's Fortune Magazine Best Companies to Work For list. He talks about the various stages of the company's growth, from the early product development days ("beat Auspex!"), to the hyper-growth phase (double the company's size and revenue every year for several years in a row), to the dark days following the dot-com crash in 2001 or so, to today's renewed growth in "The Age of Data".

Dave especially focuses on how NetApp has built, maintained, and continues to evolve the positive corporate culture that is one of its major strengths; that didn't happen by accident, and Dave discusses how they did it (and why!).

Strongly recommended.

I've officially launched my new company, Netomata, with a first post in a new blog there...

After the cut...
( Read more... )

Design Patterns in Ruby, by Russ Olsen (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2007, ISBN 0321490452)

If you're already a programmer, this book an excellent way to learn Ruby. It shows how to apply a variety of common and largely language-independent programming structures ("design patterns") in "the Ruby way". Along the way, you get a great introduction to what makes Ruby unique, and the idioms commonly used in the Ruby community. I especially liked that the author often showed multiple implementations of each pattern, each implementation being more elegant and Ruby-esque than the last, and included a discussion of when each might (and might not!) be appropriate. I also appreciated the helpful discussion of the ways you might shoot yourself in the foot with each pattern in Ruby, as well as the pointers to where you could find the pattern used in Ruby "in the wild" (in various software freely available on the Internet).

Before I moved to San Francisco in April 2006, I was working out 3-4 days a week with a physical fitness trainer, and it showed in the strength that I'd built up. While living in SF (from April 2006 to July 2008), I never found a trainer I worked well with, so I kept up a solo gym routine. Solo workouts are fine for cardio, but my strength suffered, partly because I don't like working out with heavy free weights without having somebody to spot for me (it's a safety thing, at the heavy weights I work out with, especially since my workouts tend to push the limits of my capabilities in order to extend those capabilities). I did the best I could by myself with the Nautilus machines and such, but that's just not the same as working with free weights. Anyway, by the time I moved from SF to Alameda last summer, I'd probably lost about 20% of my max strength ("1RM", or "one rep(etition) max", in gym lingo).

Well, I'm back to working out with a trainer twice a week, and I've been working on rebuilding that strength. And, I'm happy to say that I seem to have accomplished it, getting back to about where I was when I moved to SF:

Paul Graham (one of the partners in Y Combinator) recently posted a great essay on the subliminal messages that cities send, how that relates to personal ambitions, and why this leads to certain cities becoming and remaining centers for particular endeavors. Very thought-provoking.

Here's the opening; it gets even better from here:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to.

When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

That's not quite the same message New York sends. Power matters in New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone.

Last weekend (Memorial Day), jan_can_too and I went camping in the northern Nevada desert for the Black Rock Rendezvous. We had a great time!

This annual event is held in the same general area as Burning Man, and is a gathering of various folks who share an interest in the Black Rock Desert; there were some Burning Man folks like us, but also scientists (archaeologists, paleontologists, biologists), historians (several of the emigrant parties enroute to California in the 1840's and 1850's passed through here), high-power rocketry enthusiasts, off-road enthusiasts, and general desert rats. It's a much smaller event than Burning Man (about 300 people, versus Burning Man's 40,000), and far more informal: no fee, camp wherever you want, and none of the standard restrictions that apply during Burning Man (driving on the playa, guns, fireworks, etc.). We spent most of our time chilling in camp with our friends, and doing a couple of off-road drives through some beautiful landscape.

( More details, and pictures, behind the cut )

There's a particular box of staples that's been in my desk forever. It's not like it's been lost in my desk, either; it's the box I've always turned to for replacement staples every few weeks, when I run out. It's just taken me a long time to work through it! I think I've been working my way through that same box of 5000 "Swingline Standard Staples, SF-1 Sharp Point, 210 per strip, fits all standard staplers" staples for at least 20 years, perhaps since I first went to Berkeley as an undergrad. It has outlasted several staplers (none of them red, alas). It has been with me through 10 homes, 2 continents, 5 startups, and countless consulting jobs. And I just removed the last strip from the box, to reload my stapler.

Goodbye, old friend; farewell.

A friend of mine is seeking a spare wifi router, if you happen to have one lying around being indolent... Her current one is being insolent, instead.

Your results:
You are Chewbacca

Chewbacca 79% Qui-Gon Jinn 76% Obi-Wan Kenobi 68% Boba Fett 65% R2-D2 62% Yoda 62% Lando Calrissian 62% Han Solo 60% Darth Maul 57% Luke Skywalker 56%

Sure you're tall and hairy, but you've got heart!

So, the trailer leveling ramp that I spent all weekend building a couple of weekends ago? Today was going to be its first use... Before I left the house this morning, on my way to run some errands and pick up the trailer, I rolled the ramp out to the curb so that it would be handy when I came back with the trailer. A couple of hours later, when I came back with the trailer after running my errands, it was GONE! And I hadn't even gotten to use it once yet!

I talked to my next door neighbor, who has lived in this neighborhood for 20 years or so, to ask if he had any idea what might have happened to it... He tells me that anything left on the curb here is usually scavenged within hours, if not minutes. He said that one time, he set out an old-fashioned vanity/sink cabinet, and in the time it took him to walk from the curb to his rear yard and back to the curb with more stuff, it was gone and whoever salvaged it was out of sight.

Sigh. I guess somebody else needed a custom-made pressure-treated crown-compensating double-articulated box-framed trailer leveling ramp more than I did...

:-(

Current Mood: bummed

I had a great weekend... I spent most of it outside, finally carrying out a project that I've been contemplating for weeks: building a leveling ramp for the travel trailer that I bought a couple of months ago. While my hands were busy working on the ramp, my mind could wander...

The weather this weekend was simply gorgeous... The weather forecasters blew the forecast by 10 degrees, but in the good direction; it was in the mid-70's both Saturday and Sunday... ;-) I love living somewhere that I can comfortably wear shorts, in February. ;-) So one of the things I reflected on was how much I enjoy the climate in the Bay Area.

Another thing I reflected on was how thankful I am to have the construction skills that I learned as a kid in Arizona. While I'm by no means a master carpenter, I think I'm at least a half-way decent apprentice or maybe even a mediocre journeyman... I know how to design stuff that's solid and functional, and how to build it. I know the basic tools and materials of the trade; I know to use pressure-treated lumber for this project because it's going to be sitting in the perpetual puddle of water in the street out front of our house, and that you need to use specially-treated fasteners with pressure-treated lumber so that they don't corrode; I know when (and how!) to use a table saw vs. a circular saw. The tools I have are nothing fancy, but I get a certain satisfaction from knowing that they're mine, and how to use them, and how to take care of them.

Besides carpentry, I also have a basic working knowledge of plumbing, wiring, and welding. I understand how cars work, and what (almost!) all the components under the hood do. This is all stuff that I learned as a kid, mostly by living on either my grandparents' ranch or my parents' 2-acre horse property (complete with corrals, arena, workshop, and tack/feed barn that I helped my Dad build and maintain).

Some of these skills, I learned in high school Agriculture classes... My high school's agriculture classes were like an overview of all the other vo-ed courses in the school. In each semester, rather than a 15-week in-depth class on a single topic (carpentry, welding, or accounting, say), we got 3-week overviews of all of each of those topics and more. We got 3 weeks of basic frame carpentry (what you'd need to build or repair a barn), then 3 weeks of basic electrical wiring, 3 weeks of basic oxy-acetylene and arc welding, 3 weeks of basic plumbing, and 3 weeks of basic accounting. It was a great way to learn a little bit about a lot of different topics.

Since I spend most of my time at a desk, doing brain work, this weekend's project was a pleasant change of pace. I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy Burning Man so much every year; for me, at least, it's a chance to go and build stuff, using skills and abilities that I don't otherwise exercise very much.

Over on my professional blog, I just posted a mini-review of the NetGear ReadyNAS NV+ storage server for homes and small offices. For about $1000, I got .5 TB (500 GB) of easy-to-manage RAID-backed storage; for about $1500, I could have gotten 1.5 TB, but I don't need that much space right now. However, when I inevitably need more room at some future date, I'll be able to add more capacity in the form of bigger, cheaper disks; the thing has room for up to 4 drives total (I'm currently using 2), plus provisions for upgrading old, small drives with new, big drives.

Besides being a fileserver, the thing also has a built-in iTunes server, so if you put all your MP3s on it, you can easily share your music with other computers on your LAN via iTunes.

Immediately after our wedding reception, jan_can_too and I left for two weeks in Ireland and England for our honeymoon. The recap: 14 days 9 hotels 3 countries 3 currencies 3 trains 3 ferries 3 airlines 3 London Underground tube lines 2 rental cars 2 London Black Cabs 2 musicals 1 stage play 1 pony & cart

We had a great time, spending a few days in both London and Dublin, as well as making brief visits to Waterford, Blarney Castle (where Janet kissed the Blarney Stone), Bunratty Castle, Killarney, Galway, Inis Mor, and various points along the way. Want to see our travel slideshows? ;-)

• Janet's honeymoon photos
• Brent's honeymoon photos