The truth is that blogs require both time and energy. During that timeperiod between the end of my collegiate career and the beginning of my professional one, I had an abundance of both. Once I started work at Sun, it didn’t take long for that energy to be redirected into my career and my increasing number of responsibilities.

I have repeatedly told friends and family that someday my blog will return. In order for this to happen though, I need to readjust my attitude and strategy. If my blog is going to survive a second launch, it needs to be more than just a side hobby that I get to when I have time. It needs to be ingrained into my schedule — a regular event, but not a chore. It needs to be part of who I am and what I do. If it’s anything else, than it will burn out again as just another passing obsession.

There are still some things that I need to do before rejoining the blogosphere. Stay tuned though, Owen’s blog will return!

Well the dot-com’s are back. This time though, there’s only one dot-com, and this time the company has developed a solid business model through years of being a private corporation before turning to public investment dollars. Of course I’m talking about Google which made it’s initial IPO August of last year at $85 dollars a share. Since then it has almost quintupled in value at $400 dollars a share and the stock keeps going up. My question now is how high can they go? Will Google’s bubble burst? So far they have held true to their “do no evil” model by centering almost their entire revenue stream around advertising thereby allowing them to offer services for free. What has made them so popular and unique, however, is that not only are their services useful, they’re also bleeding edge, the best out there with features that people want. They have revolutionized webmail (the Gmail “conversation” feature is a simple concept but a true innovation); they have blown away all other mapping services; they have embraced and contributed to the Web 2.0 social revolution (although I would say the “Web 2.0″ is something that has evolved independently of Google); and of course they have redefined the concept of search and information finding.

Just recently, Yahoo released a beta of their new mapping service. One thing that is immediately apparent is that the rendering engine that they use looks oddly identical to Google’s. They’ve also replicated Google’s “draggable” interactive interface and included other features like traffic monitoring (not quite ready for primetime), and point-to-point driving directions (which is actually quite useful and something that Google does not have). In any case this raises the question, when will Google cease to be the best at everything? They’re trying to take on all of the giants including Microsoft (Google Desktop), Yahoo ([insert Google web service here]), and there have been rumblings of a service in the works (Google Base) which will pit them up against eBay. I’m waiting for them to come out with their own media distribution service and ruffle the feathers of iApple.

We’re seeing Yahoo react to Googlemania. We know that Microsoft will react (since that’s all they do). Can Google take on all of the giants of the tech world and still come out on top? I’m not so sure. Oh and as an aside, where are the highway exit numbers on these maps? Google? Yahoo? Mapquest has had them for years. Let’s try and keep up.

In any case, today at least I have a tidbit that some might find intriguing. Browsing around I stumbled across this name popularity tool. The applet pulls information from a database of names given to babies as reported by the Social Security Administration. Give it a name and it will display the popularity of that name over time since the late 1800’s. (Although I’m not quite sure how that works since if I’m not mistaken the Social Security Administration didn’t exist until FDR was president). In any case it’s a neat tool to play with. Interestingly, my name has shot way up in popularity in recent years. According to the tool, I was one of only 100 or so Owen babies the year I was born. This past year it looks like there were close to 2000.

While it is usually not hard to judge what is and what isn’t suitable material to publicly publish, it is considerably simpler to just privatize everything. On the other hand, I am certain that nothing I have blogged about thus far would reveal any company secrets or proprietary information. Thus perhaps I need to rethink my blogging strategy. I am considering trying to implement a “multi-blogging” system where I can feed blog posts to owenkellett.info, my internal Sun blog, or both. Although, I am not particularly fond of the software used by Sun (Roller) as it is buggy and not as robust or feature rich as WordPress. In any case, it is for posts like this one that such a system would be useful as it is suitable for both of my blogs:

As I’ve been becoming more comfortable with my responsibilities at Sun, I’ve also been growing more accustomed to the tools that they make use of. In particular, I am growing increasingly fond of Perforce, the version control system that we use. Previously, my only exposure to version control has exclusively been CVS, which I have used in a number of projects in the past. For the unititiated, version control software is a tool that coordinates the concurrent modification of a source code by multiple developers. Thus for example, if Joe Programmer and Cathy Hacker are both working on different segments of the same source code file, the version control system helps to cleanly integrate these modifications and all modifications made by a number of users at once. The general mechanism used to do this is by keeping a centralized repository of the source tree on a server, and each user checks out their own individual copies of this tree. Users than make changes on their individual trees, and check them back into the central server when they are finished. The checkin process controls the merging of individual files to keep the source tree clean.

There is no doubt that CVS is very powerful, featureful, (and also very free). I am no expert of either CVS or Perforce, but I have noticed a couple things about Perforce that make it “safer” (probably the most suitable word to use):

• I seem to distinctly remember a situation using CVS when I made changes to a particular file, and then perhaps stupidly did a “cvs update” before a “cvs commit.” The result was the version of the file in the repository clobbering all of my changes. Perforce forces you to explicitly “p4 edit” every file that you want to modify. Therefore if you sync up from the repository before submitting your changes, it won’t overwrite all of your work.
• Perforce submissions are stateful. When committing changes to a CVS repository, if something screwy happens to your connection or the server mid-update, you could be left with a bunked repository. This can’t happen with Perforce as “p4 submit” operations are atomic.

On the other hand, Perforce costs money. I really need a lot more exposure to both systems to make any real assessments as to which one I prefer. However, these are just a couple quick things that I noticed that I thought were worth mentioning.

The European commission is warning that if a deal cannot be reached at a meeting in Tunisia next month the internet will split apart. . . .Viviane Reding, European IT commissioner, says that if a multilateral approach cannot be agreed, countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and some Arab states could start operating their own versions of the internet and the ubiquity that has made it such a success will disappear.

Not only is this a silly threat, but it shows a complete lack of understanding of what “control” in this particular context actually means. The control that ICANN possesses is of purely technical context. When you type a domain name into your browser, ICANN is responsible for coordinating the process of resolving that domain name into an IP address and ensuring universal connectivity. It is a centralized body created to maintain consistency in the protocols and processes that make up this system and it has absolutely nothing to do with the content or systems that literally make up front-end, visible piece of what is “the internet.” It is true that this should be controlled by some international body, but with a stable and working system already in place, it makes no sense to try and uproot this stability when the “control” being restructured isn’t anything that most average citizens even care about.

Let’s say the EU does actually act on this undoubtedly empty threat. They would essentially restructure the internet so that residents residing within the nations of the European Union would only be able to access websites that are located within these same nations. The result would be isolating and angering their own constituents because of a minimally important power struggle. That sounds logical to me. In truth the obvious, and probably inevitable course of action will be to gradually internationalize the responsibilities currently held by ICANN.

In any case, even though I’m still very much a newbie, I’m starting to get slightly more involved at work. One of the tasks that is currently on my plate right now is setting up a system to completely automate the process of installing a number of different potential Linux distributions (i.e. Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, etc.) from a remote server. The reason for doing this is to streamline the testing process for a new server system. Essentially, the design goal for this system is that it ultimately needs to officially support not only Solaris, but also several different versions of Linux as well as Windows. In order to automate the test process, we need to be able to sequentially roll out an installation of some OS, test that OS, and then move onto the next supported OS. All of this needs to be completely hands-off so that the actual testing process can be done any time (e.g. overnight) and without any user intervention.

A typical system that would be used to accomplish this task is a PXE server which meshes DHCP services for dynamic network discovery and configuration with TFTP services for hosting OS images for automatic download and installation. Now from my own personal research, the concept does not seem terribly difficult. One caveat, though, is that PXE is not often used for completely hands-off installations (i.e. users often must select menu options, etc.) and of course things that seem conceptually simple are always more complicated to implement. Additionally:

• Before a few days ago I had never heard of PXE.
• My boss does not have any experience setting up PXE services either. (Of course that’s why it’s my job to research and carry out an action plan)
• None of the people in the Automation group that I work have experience setting up PXE servers.

Now all of these facts simply make it a challenging task and force me to be resourceful. I have already met with one person from the IT department that has some experience with PXE servers and actually has one set up that we might be able to leverage for our ultimate goal. Of course working with him could prove to be a problem. Because he’s an “IT person,” that means he’s never in his office, has too many things to do, and is needed by 40 other people all at the same time. In any case, we shall see how it goes.