Jim Grisanzio

Likability poll bad news for Kerry — This is probably one of the most absurd things I’ve seen lately: “The survey asked respondents to rate 20 political figures on a ‘feeling thermometer’. The warmer or more favorable they felt toward a person the higher score they gave them on a scale of zero to 100.”

Fascinating to see Europe take to globalization even more than the United States and Japan — Europe Surpasses U.S., Japan in Reaping Gains From World Trade. Some really surprising quotes in this article, too.

China and Korea are rapidly increasing in the number of hits to the OpenSolaris Jive web discussion forums. I can see it in the conversations that fly by every day,  I saw the interest in Shanghai, Beijing, and Seoul recently, and the growth is starting to be reflected in the numbers. China is now comfortably in second and pulling away from the others and Korea has moved into third just edging out Germany.

1.		US
2.		China
3.		South Korea
4.		Germany
5.		UK

I’ll collect the final forum numbers in a few days when the month is actually done, but so far it’s looking like another record month for conversations on opensolaris.org.

Nice quote here from Matt Asay — “You have to burn the boats” (BusinessWeek on business model innovation):

Sometimes you have to read right to the very end to find the best stuff. Which is where you’ll find this paragraph. I was hooked all the way through, though.

I love this quote from Sin-Yaw Wang — “Meditation first clears your mind. It then allows you to think on one subject, or to plan on one project. With a clear mind, you don’t need to write your thoughts down. You remember them.” Very nice. I’m just trying to imagine life without a to-do list. Wonderful.

I took some pics today. Imagine that. You know, I rarely know what I’m shooting around here. And I rarely know when I’ll stumble on something that I want to shoot, so I basically carry my camera where ever I go now. These are from a temple called Myorenji a few stations from our apartment. The last few are from a little shrine we found on the side of the road near the temple …

Fascinating piece in the NY Times about brands — What We Talk About When We Talk About Brands. It seems that we regular people talk a lot about brands. Those busy little marketers can prove it, and they are finding new and innovative ways of listening in on our conversations to get at this intelligence. It’s interesting how all these “word of mouth” marketeers are always trying to eavesdrop on their customers but they are much less inclined to actually get involved with their customers. Obnoxious. Anyway, that’s not why I liked the article (though I did find that part as amusing as usual). What got me hooked was way at the end. Go down to the last paragraph and you’ll find this little gem — “It turned out that people with high incomes were not talking about the brand, but people who made less money were talking about it a lot.” Fascinating. So, what do the rich people know that we don’t?

The guys at the Federal Reserve are experimenting with a new computer program to help improve economic forecasting — Bernanke’s Programs May Dilute Greenspan Intuition. They call it the “Factor Model” and it analyzes more than 150 different economic indicators. Interesting stuff. I had always assumed that the Fed used computers, but maybe this is an entirely new application. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke is leading the effort, and there seems to be some success with the application. But the program is not yet up to the quality of human analysis, they say. For instance, check this out from the Bloomberg article:

Really? I’m not so sure the “Fed officials are better than software….” After all, were all of those 17 consecutive rate hikes necessary? Especially the last three? We will know the answers to those questions when Fed starts lowering rates because they went too far and the U.S. economy has stalled as a result.

From Stephen O’Grady — Will the Spurned CDDL Come Back Stronger?

An interesting observation. I’m not sure it’s counterintuitive, though. I think it’s pretty accurate.

I never really bought the criticism of CDDL because other open source projects using MPL-based licenses seemed to be quite successful and also seemed to escape the flames that flew our way. To me the stress around CDDL had nothing to do with the value of the license or the issue of proliferation and had everything to do with the political and economic situation at the time. Go back a few years: Solaris and Sun were both supposed to be dead. Competitors were circling. Many developers were skeptical. The language blowing around out there got harsh to say the very least. During this time, our open source interactions were confusing at best. Also, Sun was simply not performing in the market, so poor numbers placed us in an even more compromising situation. No amount of honorable intentions (which we certainly had) or even perfect communications (which we certainly didn’t have) could have solved those problems. We had to just tough it out and defend ourselves while we got things back in shape at home. And we did. Fast forward: absolutely everything has changed. Also during this time, the company’s core technologies were opened: OpenSolaris, OpenSPARC, Java. I’d like to think that since OpenSolaris went first in this sequence that we may have made it a bit easier for OpenSPARC and Java, and I’d also like to think that since they went out under GPL that things may be a bit easier for us as well. These are complex technical and business issues for Sun, but the communities of people forming around these technologies all have tremendous value no matter what license is used.

So, in some ways I agree with Stephen — that due to Sun’s being seen in a better light these days, CDDL may get a second look from those who need or want to use an MPL-based license. That’s great. However, I think it will take some time for CDDL to be accepted by those who so strongly critizied it when it was released. And that’s probably a bigger issue than the perfect storm from which we just survived. I also think there’s more than enough room in the world for CDDL. It’s certainly done well by OpenSolaris, hasn’t it?

I’m continuing to scan bunch of old pics because the negatives are gone and the images are really fading fast now. All things must pass, I guess. But it’s fun going through all the old memories, though. Here are a couple from a really close call about 20 years ago. That used to be my little Jetta there. Diesel. Nice little car. Great mileage. Ok, it vibrated a bit — a lot, actually –  but it got great mileage, and I’ve always driven high mileage cars. Anyway, it was just sitting there quietly parked in front of our house in New York, as it was every night. That is until some toad ran off the road one bitterly cold February morning and wrecked it. He was drunk, and he fell asleep. Nice. He wasn’t hurt that badly, as I recall, but my car surely was and I wasn’t sympathetic to him at all. But what’s interesting about this is that I can still remember the sound from way upstairs on the second floor of our house. Instantly, I knew exactly what happened. That ever happen to you? Just from a simple sound you immediately know the entire story? If I had been in the car, as I would have been shortly, and experienced that sound first hand, I bet I would have been shaken up pretty good. Cars usually go around 40 or so on that road. Oh, well. I got a nice new Toyota truck out of the deal.

I actually get the creeps when I look at these two images, though. This is about half the level of damage that I actually experienced on Rt. 101 in Silicon Valley in 2001 when some kids cut my Honda Civic basically in half and put me in the hospital for a few days. They, too, weren’t paying attention. But for that one, I was in the car. It hurt. A lot. Car crashes are so much more violent then you think. I don’t own a car now. And that’s a good thing. I really don’t miss it that much, either. I’m getting great mileage these days, too.

Fed points to soft landing for economy — “They talked openly about the need to assess whether they should be raising rates at the next policy meeting in December.” Amazing. In a rapidly slowing economy these guys are thinking of raising rates. Almost as dumb as raising taxes.

I scanned some more images tonight and updated these construction pics. I dug a lot of holes back when I ran my own little excavating business, but I only have a few pictures to show for it. I should have thousands, but this was way before digital cameras.

That’s my 15-ton Caterpillar 953 track loader. It was a beautiful machine. Extremely flexible, powerful, responsive, and jet fast. Fast as bulldozers go, anyway, and only a $130 grand in 1985 money. The hydraulics could spin the entire machine 360 degrees in seconds (but if you do that, make sure no one is behind you). Perfect for working small lots as well as even some pretty big jobs. I got lost in large and complex commercial jobs, though, where a 15 ton machine felt rather small. I almost killed myself on this thing a few times, too. I even rolled it over. Twice. Oh, and it sinks pretty quickly when the surveyor lies on the engineering site specs and you dig just a tad too deep and hit water. It cuts electric cables beautifully, too, and makes lots of sparks. But then again the electric company shouldn’t be feeing 500 homes with juice flowing through underground cables 35 feet from where they were supposed to be. Should they? Then there was the time I came within inches of impaling myself on a tree that whipped around and smashed through my window. I didn’t see it due to the snowstorm. The 953 slides on ice, too. Quite nicely, I might add. You’d be amazed. And then there were all those fights with the unions. Fun times …

Construction.

Japan issues tsunami warning after quake — “Japan is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries because it sits atop four tectonic plates.” This is so true. It’s like living on a boat. The place is always moving. I’ve already lost track how many times I’ve felt the ground move around here. The tsunami warning was for the northern part of the island, but it it’s still humbling to know that these things are no longer far away.

I scanned some barefooting shots from when I was a kid. I’m going about 45 mph here, which isn’t too bad. But at times I got up to 60 mph doing this stuff. Barefooting is actually easier at higher speeds, but water takes on an entirely new texture when you go that fast. Basically, it becomes rock hard, so learning the proper way to fall is critical. I rarely had soft landings back then, though.

Petr Sumbera posts some OpenSolaris images from OpenSolaris Day in Prague. The OpenSolaris World Tour continues.