All quiet on the northwestern front…

May 12, ’07 10:21 AM

It’s been a quiet week online, principally because I’m heads-down on my dissertation proposal after returning from Austin. It’s going fairly well, but slow because I’m also reading a ton of academic literature I missed during the decade I was away. The archaeology portions are the toughest, actually, but it’s more idiosyncratic — it’s a matter of looking at the evidence and people’s analyses of it, and it doesn’t necessarily have a “structure” you can work out. Paradoxically, I find the literature on evolutionary theory, game theory, and the evolution of cooperation much easier to absorb in bulk, because once you figure out the underlying mathematical structure of the various models, a lot of the literature is easy to “slot in” and move through rapidly.

The weather is getting good up here, and that means more grilling on the deck and weekend guests, which I’m looking forward to. I like the contrast of the winter, with a bit more quiet time enforced by the wet, cold, grey weather, and the bright summers with plenty of visitors. I’m probably cutting back on Seattle time over the summer, to maximize my time up north while it’s so beautiful, but I’ll still be down in Seattle for short visits fairly often.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I’m headed to Fire in the Sky, the spring high-power rocket launch in Mansfield, WA, with my friend Bill Barnes and his family. You can check out the stuff I’m building for FITS here. Either this, or the smaller Public Missiles Phobos will be my Level 1 certification flight, after which I hope to launch a couple more times over the weekend if all goes well. It should be an interesting, if incredibly nerdy, weekend. But a little bit of engineering is a good thing occasionally.

Back to the proposal…

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The Great Seattle Madeira Tasting

May 3, ’07 1:52 PM

Back in January, Roy Hersh hosted a Madeira tasting here in Seattle, bringing together 15 people (including myself and friends Chuck Miller and Marc Olson) to taste some of the oldest and rarest Madeiras in our collective cellars. Peter Reutter, a Madeira expert from Germany, joined us, as did guests from Canada, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C.

The wines ranged from sercial to moscatel, with a smattering of terrantez in the mix, with ages ranging from the 1827 Quinto de Serrado Bual, through 1927, with an average age of 133 years old.

Our host, Roy Hersh (who runs For The Love of Port), just finished his article on the event (with pictures and tasting notes), and I recommend it highly if you’re a fan of these special and rare wines, are interested in getting into Madeira, or are just curious about what old wines such as this are like.

The Great Seattle Madeira Tasting – For The Love Of Port

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May Day Pig Roast on San Juan

May 3, ’07 10:32 AM

Tuesday night, I hosted a pig roast here at the house, to celebrate the (near) coming of spring weather, and of course it was May Day, the international leftist labor holiday (which is always good to celebrate somehow).  Madden had lined up two suckling pigs and Jason, a butcher on the island, came out Monday to help us with the "prep" work — which meant dispatching the little guys and dressing the carcasses (pics of most of the process on Flickr).Wholepigchoucroute
 

Madden and I brined both pigs overnight, one in a straight sugar/salt solution, the other in a smoked paprika/herb brine for a Spanish-inspired effect.  On the day of the roast, we got one on the rotisserie (the Spanish one) and the other into the oven to roast.  The latter was served on a bed of Madden’s sauerkraut, along with homemade crepinettes and spaetzle, which were stirfried in a wok with brown butter.  The spanish pig was served with homemade chorizo-inspired sausage and paella-style rice, along with a beef cheek and cannellini bean soup. 

15 people showed up and made short work of the two pigs, a mountain of food (including numerous salads and other contributions), and a gigantic pile of wine bottles.  Marc flew up from Seattle with another wine group friend, Justin, bringing some excellent wines including a Raveneau, a Leflaive, a Corton Clos du Roi, Chave St. Joseph (estate bottling), and a PX 1927 for a sticky finisher.  The weather cooperated and we were able to hang out on the deck until quite late.  It was a terrific evening, and one I hope to repeat many times as the weather gets better. 

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SAA Meetings in Austin

May 3, ’07 10:22 AM

Last week, I attended the Society for American Archaeology conference in Austin, for the first time in several years. Austin was a great town for the conference, but sad to say I didn’t get any truly good BBQ. IronWorks was OK, and Stubbs was fine for lunch, but we didn’t have a rental car this time and Salt Lick was out of reach. Despite this, we had a great time, and I caught up with folks I hadn’t seen in years, like Chris Pierce, who’s working on semantic web database technology, Terry Hunt, Lee Lyman, and many others.

Poster sessions were terrific this year, with plenty of space to walk around and see everything; increasingly I find that spoken talks are much less interesting, particularly when people have few slides and read their written-out talks in a flat monotone. How do people expect to convince or interest an audience without a strong presentation style?

Among the interesting papers I saw were two papers on costly signaling theory by Aimee Plourde (of UCL), and Jillian Galle (Monticello). Another paper by Colin Quinn and Ian Kuijt on signaling in the Natufian was also interesting, but I need to see a written copy to follow their argument on how they link Natufian burial behavior to costly signaling.

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Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty”

Apr 22, ’07 12:18 PM

This morning I upgraded my “development” desktop, a Dell Core2Duo, from Ubuntu 6.10 “edgy” to 7.04 “feisty.” I chose a complete reinstall, since there were aspects of the old setup and disk partitioning I wasn’t happy with. The install just gets simpler all the time, with a graphical wizard that asks fewer questions than the old Windows XP install.

Most important from my perspective is the new VMI kernel support for virtualization, which replaces the need for a recompiled Xen kernel, and consequent difficulties in getting the NVIDIA drivers working properly. Video is working perfectly in 7.04 with the NVidia cards that Dell ships, and everything needed for virtualization was easily installable via apt-get. This afternoon I’ll install both a Linux and a Windows VM under QEMU and see how it works.

Ubuntu 7.04 also includes a package-installable Sun JVM, through the “multiverse” sources. I was able to directly add Java 6 with no problems and it also switched the default JVM for the system, which is nice.

I have to say, thus far I’m impressed by the strides Ubuntu continues to make in creating a powerful yet incredibly friendly Linux distribution. Word on the street is that Michael Dell is even trying 7.04 on his personal laptop…

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My project at Microsoft: EMC Smarts and Operations Manager Integrated

Apr 15, ’07 8:43 PM

Last year I was at Microsoft before moving north and heading back to graduate school, and much of what I worked on hadn’t yet been announced (some still hasn’t been). But recently one of the projects was announced by both parties, so I can mention my involvement. Microsoft has licensed EMC Smarts network management and root-cause analysis technology to integrate with System Center Operations Manager 2007 (formerly known as “MOM”). I worked on Vij Rajarajan’s team and was part of a 3-4 person task force negotiating the deal with EMC. I’m very excited to see it announced and moving forward.

I’m particularly excited because I think both technologies are strong and are architecturally an excellent match. SCOM 2007 is very flexible model-based management technology, and EMC Smarts is the best of the “new generation” network management systems that inherently model root-cause and network causality. The merger of the two, along with injections of SDM/SML model technology and additional vendor-specific models written by equipment vendors will create a very strong management solution that finally will do more than “ring the alarm” when a symptom occurs. Model-based management has been in the works for years, and in our own way at Network Clarity we attempted to do MBM for network configuration and optimization, but the latter is an even harder challenge to do well in some ways.

So congratulations to Rich, Vij, Shawn, Christian, Ashvin, and others on announcing this deal and making the strategy a reality!

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/27/HNmsemcnetworkmanagement_1.html

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=120547

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