Open Distributed Challenges – Words Matter

I had an interesting exchange with Dez Blanchfield from Australia on twitter recently. At the time, based on his tweets, I assume Dez was an IBM employee. He isn’t and although our paths crossed briefly at the company in 2007, as far as I’m aware we never met.

The subject was open vs open source. Any longtime readers will know that’s part of what drove me to join IBM in 1986, to push back on the closing of doors, and help knock down walls in IBM openness.

As a society, #opensource is built into our DNA – it’s also built into the mainframe, which has the most secure #linux environment out there! Check out my conversation with @tinatarq on this week’s launch. https://ibm.c/2EqFvoc #DezchatswithIBM #IBMPartner #IBMz #LinuxONE pic.twitter.com/kc9kWErtvh

— Dez Blanchfield (@dez_blanchfield) April 11, 2018

2/ there is now some form of Opensource built into almost everthing tech wise these days, if it has an IP address, then it has Opensource going back to as early as 1974 in fact, even Windows uses Opensource across so much of their Kernel, Operating System, Network Stack etc..

— Dez Blanchfield (@dez_blanchfield) April 11, 2018

To be fair Dez, IP was an open standard in so much as it was first implemented on MVS and VM, they did not use open source. It took us until the late 90’s to start using an apache based Http server, around the same time the GNU tools port gave us an intro to Linux

— Mark Cathcart (@cathcam) April 12, 2018

At the end of our twitter exchange, the first 3-tweets are included above, I promised to track down one of my earlier papers. As far as I recall, and without going through piles of hard copy paper in storage, this one was formally published by IBM US using a similar name, and pretty much identical content, probably in the Spring 0f ’96.

It is still important to differentiate between de jure and de facto standards. Open Source creates new de facto standards every day, through wide adoption and implementation using that open source. While systems ,ove much more quickly these days, at Internet speed, there is still a robust need to de jure standards. Those that are legally, internationally and commonly recognised, whether or not they were first implemented through open source. Most technology standards these days are as that’s the best way to get them through standards organizations.

The PDF presented here is original, unedited, just converted to PDF from Lotus Word Pro.

Lotus Word Pro, and it’s predecessor, Ami Pro, are great examples of de facto standards, especially inside IBM. Following the rise of Microsoft Word and MS Office, Lotus products on the desktop effectively disappeared. Since even inside IBM, the Lotus source code was never available, not only were the products only a de facto standard, they were never open source. While in the post Lotus desktop software period considerable effort has been put into reverse engineer the file formats , and some free and chargeable convertors almost all of them can recover the text, most do a poor job or formatting.

For that reason, I bought a used IBM Thinkpad T42 with Windows XP; Lotus Smartsuite and still have a licensed copy of Adobe Acrobat to create PDF’s. Words matter, open source, open, and open standards are all great. As always, understand the limitations of each.

There are a load of my newer white papers in the ‘wayback’ machine, if you have any problems finding them, let me know, I’ll jump start the Thinkpad T42.

Open letter: CD Recycling

Dear IT Industry Colleague,

I’ve just moved house. In the process I realised that I had hundreds of old datas CD’s. Some of them with old backups, many of them used to copy copies of other CD’s some DVD’s with dumps of system folders and so on a so forth.

I figured I’d just dump them in the recycling, which gets collected bi-weekly. On checking though, not only are these not recyclable, but they are actually pretty hard to completely destroy. They also contain a large amount of toxic chemicals, and unless they are sent to a specialty recycling center, most end up in incinerators or landfill, neither is a good thing.

There is a good article here on the general problems with the creation and disposal of CD/DVD’s, from 2013. It says, among other things:

The discs are made of layers of different mixed materials, including a combination of various mined metals and petroleum–derived plastics, lacquers and dyes, which, when disposed of, can pollute groundwater and bring on a myriad of health problems. Most jewel cases are made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which has been thought to produce a higher-than-normal cancer rate within workers and those who live in the area where it is manufactured. They also release harmful chemicals when incinerated.

Having realized the problems, what did I do? First, when disposing old data CD’s and DVD’s you must understand there is an obvious potential security exposure. In principle, any data can be read from the CD. In practice, it may not be that simple if the data is formatted using specific backup programs, encrypted etc. But you do have to consider this before discarding them.

I came up with a couple of easy ways to make recovering data hard. One involved scratching the recording sides (remember, some are dual sided). The scratches can be removed but it’s a time consuming process and not something done by someone who casually comes across your CD.

The second process used a nail in a set of grips, I heated the nail and simply pushed a couple of holes through each CD/DVD. Again, some data could still be read by the determined, but very unlikely.

Once I was done marking all the media, I threw them in an old Amazon box, too them to the US Post Office, mailed them as “media mail” to the CD Recycling Center of America. The CD Recycling Center provides “certified destruction” of your CD’s.

Our industry uses vast amounts of natural resources, it consumes rare minerals at an alarming rate, often mined in difficult, dangerous, and sometimes illegal conditions. Individually this is hard for us to do anything about. Please though, don’t throw old data CDs, DVD’s or any others in the garbage/trash/refuse and especially the recycling.

Yes, it takes a few minutes of your time; yes, it will cost you to box, tape, address and actually post the package back for destruction. Over the years IT has made me a lot of money, it is the least I could do. Please join me. Thank you.

 

VM Backup product comparison

Dell sponsored a VM backup comparison white paper. Those that remember my early 1990’s data protection work will remember the product shootouts I used to do at IBM, picking apart the features and rating the functions to make it clear which products were suitable for what.

If yours is like 52% of IT organizations, your IT stack isn’t 100% virtualized. This probably means you’re managing two backup solutions: one for virtual and another for physical. Virtual capabilities that were once cutting edge are becoming default, but how do you balance ease-of-use with staying ahead of the curve? We drew upon the best research to help you find the optimal solution for your organization.

This guide isn’t quite like those, but I had a read through earlier this morning and it’s worth reviewing if you have VM’s and want to understand how to backup and what products are out there. Yes, AppAssure is a Dell product. The paper is available without registration.

Why do Analysts blogs make it so hard to have a conversation?

One of the most eloquent parts of blogging is the simple use of pings and trackbacks. It allows blogs to do what the web does best, link related conversations and information.

After writing my most recent blog entry, I noticed something that hadn’t occured to me at all before. Very few IT Industry analysts blogs provide this facility. Variously they require you to fill in forms, answer captchas, register and worse. In deference to Roblin Bloor, he has already posted my comment on his blog. But why might do IT Industry analysts make it so hard, surely not because they want to control the conversation?

This is also a tip-of-the-hat to the boys over at Redmonk.com, whose blogs not only support pings and trackbacks, they also post tweets along with blogs entries. Nice one chaps.

Visible personal branding and the big company

I’m keeping busy at Dell, currently working on designs for both our 12g and 13g servers. My current motto is less is more, I’m trying to see what I can cut out to simplify things, as well as what can be automated. In my blog catch-up this morning I came across this excellent post, The psychology of social media: Can a visible brand ruin your life?

No, it is not another warning about posting compromising pictures on facebook, or blogging about doing outside work while telling your boss you are off sick. It talks about some of the issues and values of creating your own “brand” through social media tools. Now, back when Nigel Dessau and I worked together at IBM UK in the mid-1990’s, Nigel was quick off the mark creating content for, and getting involved with IBM UK and IBM Europes first web sites. I had the chance to work with him on some of the content and low and behold, the first Cathcarts Corner was published almost 13-years ago. Over the years, it moved, grew and contracted, and now is just this blog.

One thing I learned though was indeed the value of the perosnal brand. When reading Jennifer Leggios’ blog posting a few things rang true. One, it is worth thinking through before you launch into “just blogging”. It’s not sufficient to work out what you want to talk about and how you say it, but who your audience are, how you will reach them, your style and much more. Secondly, at many IBM Acadamey of Technology annual meetings, and often at other events, we were told by the business executives how IBM wanted the company to be more recognised for its innovation, for its technical leadership, and yes, they promised action. However despite the multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, there are and have never been almost any household names of technical leaders at IBM, or for that matter any major publically qouted company like Oracle, HP in the tech business, but also in other traditional NYSE style big companies GE, General Motors etc. Have there ?

In the second section of her blog post, entitled Workplace Impact, Jennifer talks how the corporation handles the rising, and visible brand that is a key spokesperson. I also worked with one of the tech industries most visible brands, Simon Phipps of Sun, now Oracle. It will be interesting to see where his “brand” goes once things get sorted out at Oracle. While Simon and I worked together at IBM, I was the Linux/Open Source guy, Simon was the Java guy, but he has done a much better job of communicating, and putting the case for open source than I ever could, and in the process created a brand through his blog, twitter and other contributions. I can’t see he’d have had the same success at IBM.

The point that Jennifer makes is it’s how the company reacts that makes the difference. My IBM UK managers where always very supportive of my personal brand, they definately empowered me. However, at a corporate level, unlike Simons’ experience at Sun, it’s my view that most companies practise what Jennifer describes as “talking out both sides of their mouth”. That is they realise that an engineer or technician that creates a personal brand is both getting distracted from their “day” job through their activities, and secondly, is a risk to the company if their exposure gets them unwanted attraction from competitors, start-ups and analyst companies who might offer them a better deal in order to capture the value from their brand.

I’d never thought about it that way, but it certainly puts into perspective the legions of corporate Vice Presidents who march through the PR sausage machine and come out the other other side talking tech, only to disappear 18-months later when they move on to their next assignment and are replaced by the next [insert name here] VP. The only really famous technical person I can recall from IBM, from a public perspective is Gene Amdahl, and thats more legend than fact. Sure, I’ve known many others, but none outside their narrow specialist area and through personal contact rather than through their notoriety, promotion or brand. Can you name anyone ?

Jennifers article is a long, but worthwhile read on the subject of personal brands, and certianly made me reconsider some of my long held views.

Profiles in, err, courage

Back in March I caught an early morning bus on Saturday to downtown Austin to attend Bar Camp IV, suffice to say it’s mostly not a bar, and doesn’t involve camping(anymore).

I attend a few interesting sessions, I learned a few things about Windows 7, mobile development and attended a session on airships and blimps that I assumed was some kind of coded language for a session on clouds, but it wasn’t it WAS about airships and blimps and more.

Big-up to @whurley @sarad and @linearb for organising and to the various sponsors which included not only free attendance, but also free lunch and libations.

I was on my way out when I bumped into Texas Social Media Awards finalist and local tech analyst and sometime contact, Michael Cote from Redmonk. We passed the time of day, and he asked me if I wanted to be interviewed for a podcast, why not?

I learned a ton about Cote from the interview, mostly that he doesn’t forget anything. We’ve met probably 5-6 times in the past and he seemed to pull 1x question from each discussion. I mostly laughed the whole way through, I thought it was going to be a tech discussion, and we did touch on a few topics, but it was just a fun way to spend 10-mins. You can hear the podcast and read the liner notes here on Redmonk Radio Episode 55. – And no, I have no idea why the series was called “profiles in courage”, why I was selected, a why I giggled all the way through. It’s been a while since I did my press training, I don’t remember them telling us about giggling as a technique!

Moo cards II

When I first created “business” moo cards, it created quite a bit of a stir. So I figured I’d post the moo cards II the next generation design. Unfortunately I didn’t get organised early enough to get them for this weekends AustinBarCampIV, so I’ll be using the standard Dell ones if needed.

I actually found a useful feature of PowerPoint 2007. If you import the image(s). and the text on top, then select all the elements, you can export as a single file, rather than a ppt file or doing a screen copy and then saving with another program. Go ahead, make your own 😉

CV as a cloud tag

@epredator came up with a great idea, to create a tag cloud from your CV using wordle. The output wasn’t perfect the first run as it didn’t match Mainframe with mainframe, or IBM with IBM’s, but after doing a few global changes, here is what I got. Pretty good summary.

Click the thumbnail for a larger version, or try your own via wordle.net

I’ve had my collar felt

I got a call from the IBM IP Law dept today, it seems that having a DNS with IBM in it isn’t allowed. I knew this, but figured they’d let it slip in my case, apprently not. So for those of you with RSS subscriptions, and bookmarks, please change to using https://cathcam.wordpress.com until I work out the details.

printf(“Hello World”); Say “Hello World”

As I’m getting older my hierarchical storage isn’t what it used to be, I can’t recall things as well as I used to and the things I can recall are only event driven, still thats not a bad thing. So I’m using this blog to document work and technology related happenings, to help me remember, and to share a little light.

I started my first Cathcarts Corner, a read only blog in I think spring of 1996. I covered new technology for IBM servers and some of the exciting new emerging software technologies around the Internet. That same year I did the first ever demo of a web server with a Java applet linked to a backend CICS mainframe system at WWW5 in Paris, radical at the time, how far we’ve come!

For months, no, years, I’ve been meaning to restart my official IBM web site, Cathcarts Corner, but the time was never right. When I stopped updating it, it was because I was I’d moved into a key architecture and design roll in what was then a radical new area, not sure what I wanted to say publically or which way things would go, I decided silence was better than confusion.

After that the time never seemed to be right to restart. IBM’s adoption of Grid? Business rules workload management? The on demand operating environment? Virtualization? Web Services distributed management? I didn’t know where to start.

I moved to Austin Texas to take up the role of Chief Solutions Architect for IBM System p. at the start of October. A few people have asked me what the title means, what my role is, and the answer is, what ever I can do for the n+1 generation of IBMs’ Unix servers. I’m leading the effort to raise the thinking up above a purely hardware or software role to one of thinking about how customers will use the systems and what form, function and packaging would be appropriate in the timeframe for those systems.

Whatever the job title means, and yes I made it up myself, what I know is that now is the right time to restart a web presence. Rather than blog away on developerworks where many other IBMers hang-out, or or Livejournal where I keep my personal blog, I figured it would be good to give WordPress a test drive. Over the next few months I’ll get my ibm.com site updated and use it as a means to hold files, papers and presentations that I’ll link to from here, but this will be my primary professional blog.

++Mark.