Donald Ferguson Blog

I visited Tokyo last week and gave a keynote at the Japan Java User Group.  I have posted a copy of my presentation to my site. I tried to focus on the evolving world of WS-*, .NET, PHP, etc and Java (application servers). Comments are welcome.

The trip was interesting. It felt very much like I still worked for IBM. My host was the same colleague/friend that hosted me on all previous trips. He translated during my presentations and one-on-one meetings. I went out to dinner with my friends from IBM.

One IBMer told me that “He still considered me a friend, and hoped I felt the same way.” The answer is YES, and this is true for all of my friends from IBM and Microsoft. All I did was change jobs.

One IBMer also told me that his management told him not to list me as a reference in his promotion package. My endorsement would not be well received by management. I doubt and fervently hope this is not the case. I have written recommendation letters and been references for several promotion packages since I have left IBM.

The friend who hosted me and translated for me reminded of a funny story. I was presenting at an IBM SOA forum for customers and my friend was introducing me. Since the conference was a funded event for customers, IBM arranged a simultaneous translator. I had an earpiece to allow me to understand any questions from the audience.  But, this also meant that I could finally understand my friend’s introduction for me. He stated that “Don always looks mad but he really is not.”

I guess this is true. People ask me to smile. I tried it once. It is not everything it is cracked to be.

This entry does not have any end-to-end theme.

I was razzing my girlfriend this morning about Harry Potter. I asserted that Dumbledore’s bad experience with Berti Bots Every Flavor Beans was a foreshadowing of Rowling’s description in the final book of Dumbledore’s life. Dumbledore had a bad experience with the beans early in life. He swore off the beans but not off candy. He still liked and ate Acid Pops.

This foreshadows the revelation that Dumbledore sought power early in life. He swore off of executive power, for example becoming Minister of Magic, after his pursuit lead to the death of his sister. Dumbledore did achieve an alternate form of power by becoming Hogwart’s Headmaster.

My girlfriend told me that  I am an idiot (She is just figuring this out?). She said that my theory would get a C in any freshman English class. Perhaps it would, but what better way to start they day than an argument. Anything else I do today seems reasonable.

I am listening to the book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature  by StevePinker. I think that a constrained, structured human language would make an ideal approach to  enable business/model driven development. One of the key ideas from the book is Conceptual Metaphor. Conceptual Metaphor applies an observation in one domain to reason about another. The book that I studied in graduate school for VLSI was Introduction to VLSI Systems by Mead and Conway. The text provide a high level explanation of circuits through the analogy of water flowing through pips (Maybe the wacky senator from Alaska was right. The Internet is a set of pipes).

Another topic in Pinker’s book is patterns for how we create new words. There are many interesting examples. Analogy/metaphor is one. The creation of spam is an example, coming from the Monty Python skit about a restaurant serving “Spam, spam, lobster, spam, spam.” This analogy applies a set of mostly unpalatable things that also contains something palatable to mail inboxes. Inbox is another example of how words form. This pattern applies operators to words and syllables. In this case the “+” operator applied to two more basic concepts. There examples of the “cut” operator and the plus operator. An example is the recent word “preheritance,” which describes that act of giving money to heirs before death.

There are some more basic patterns. One example is creating a word based on a sound fragment. Snub and many others words come from the “snort” or looking down the nose at something.

I hypothesize that:

1. Various business domains can have a concise and precise business vocabulary.
2. Business rules and policies explain what could, cannot, must, etc happen using nouns and verbs.
3. Conceptual Metaphor templates, word formation operators, etc can define the policies.

I may pursue this if/when I retire from industry and teach.

Just some random diary entries today.

I like watching The National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, etc.  There has been an increase in the number of shows about future catastrophic natural disasters. This increase has occurred over the past couple of years. These disasters are going to wipe out humanity. Examples include a super volcano under Yellowstone National Park and the ever present threat of asteroids.  The interesting new twist is a recent set of shows on what the earth would be like “after humans.” I think the recent book “The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman started this theme.

I have a few observations about this trend in television programming. First, why are some of these shows on The History Channel? The History Channel had evolved into “The Rampant Speculation Channel” and focused on wild speculation about what happened in the past, e.g. concepts in “The Da Vinci Code.” It is bad enough that The History Channel speculates about what probably did not happen. Does the HISTORY channel really need to speculate on what probably will not happen any time soon?

Second, these shows freak my kids out. The descriptions of how devastating the disasters will be are graphic and apocalyptic. I have to keep assuring my kids that the world is not going to end any time soon. The youngest points out that an asteroid did kill the dinosaurs and could kill us. How do you explain the concept that the event is unlikely to affect her if the average time between strikes is 50 million years?  If these TV channels are going to scare my kids, they can at least do something useful. End the show by stating that the only way to prevent an asteroid strike is to eat your vegetables.

Third, all of these shows on how the planet is trying to kill us have changed my perspective on global warming. My belief has changed to “The more global warming, the better.” The planet is trying to kill us. We need to get it first. The best defense is a good offense.

Finally, did the people who write these shows study any math at all? The shows state that asteroid strikes happen about once every N million years. The last one was approximately N million years ago. Therefore, we are all going to die tomorrow.  Thinking like this is how Las Vegas makes money. I need to keep rolling the dice because “I am due.”

I have a business trip to India at the end of May and am extremely excited. I went once before and loved India and the people. I have taken many trips during my career. I like to remember the trips by one funny incident or sentence that I say or hear. This makes recounting the trip much less boring than uncle Leo’s slide show to the family after Thanksgiving dinner. An example is “You can’t toast with crabapple juice. It will kill you.” Sometimes India is a bit surreal to Americans, or at least me. There were dozens of possible sentences. I thought that I had found the sentence on the first night.

My IBM colleagues and I arrive in New Delhi late at night. We were going to fly to Bangalore the following morning. We stayed in a hotel in Delhi the first night. The hotel was excellent. I wish I could remember the name so that I could recommend it. My inability to remember the name is probably irrelevant, however. The hotel is almost surely out of business due to me.

My colleagues and I had a quick meal in the 24 hour restaurant. The buffet and service was excellent. We went up to our rooms after dinner and some conversation. I was able to fall asleep for a while but woke up after about two hours. I could not get back to sleep. I was very tired and had vertigo from the long plane flight. My thinking was too woolly to due any work. (This statement must seem strange to people who know me. They think my thinking is terrible most of the time.)

I decide to watch TV. There were several shows in languages that I did not understand.  I found CNN International and watched it for a while. The stories started repeating after an hour. I decided to look for another channel. I found Discovery India, which was showing a leopard walking through a jungle. I like the Discovery channel and like shows on animals. I decided to watch Discovery India.

The show’s image then switched to an apartment building complex. This seemed odd. It turns out that leopards were killing and eating the residents. Adults were too big and the leopard was most killing CHILDREN. Leopards had kills and eaten 83 people in the Mumbai are in the previous year – 83 people in Mumbai alone.

I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing.  I am finding out about killer leopards on the Discovery Channel in the middle of the night. Imagine what would happen if bears were killing people outside of Chicago. CNN would be running “Bear CRISIS day 11.” There would be exploding graphics and loud music. I cannot even imagine what Stephen Colbert’s Threat Down would be like (www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=68809).

The authorities decided to do something about the leopard killing people. So far, so good. The authorities hire a hunter to kill the leopard. So far, so good. The hunter stakes out a goat in the courtyard and then perches in a balcony overlooking the courtyard. Excellent. The hunter gathers witnesses to the attacks. This seems a bit odd. Are they going to pick the leopard out of a lineup?

A leopard starts to cautiously creep into the courtyard and approach the goat. The witnesses start arguing about whether or not this is the leopard they saw kill the children. Is it the right size? Does it have the right spot pattern? You’ve got to be kidding me. I am American. My dad was a Marine. Dad felt that there was not problem that he could not solve with a rifle, shouting and perhaps properly sized explosives. I being talking to the TV. “Kill the leopard. Shoot the leopard! SHOOT THE %*^@% LEOPARD. IT’S EATING CHILDREN!” This went on for a while. The hunter eventually shot the leopard. The goat was pretty happy. It was the happiest goat I had ever seen.

I can only imagine what the guests in adjacent hotel rooms thought. One of my IBM colleagues tells a story about waking up to find rats in his room. IBMers did not stay that hotel again. I am sure that the IBMers told stories to their industry colleagues. This was bad for business for the hotel. I imagined a conversation at the water cooler that went something like this.

“India was great but you have to be careful about the hotel you choose. I had rats in my room.”

“Pff. That’s nothing. Leopards were killing and eating people in my hotel.”

 My hotel is probably out of business. My not being able to remember the name and recommend is probably the least of the hotel’s problems

My oldest daughter is in 6th grade, which starts to have health education. They are currently studying the negative health effects of smoking.  The recent homework was a two page summary of the dangers of smoking with blank spaces for terms taught in class. Basically, a “Health Class Mad-Libs.”

It was an interesting assignment. Some of the blank spaces were for terms like “bad breath” and “smelly clothes.” Other spaces were for “cilia” and “aveoli.”  I thought this was an interesting set of terms.

There were paragraphs on lung cancer, emphysema, etc. OK — so far, so good. Then it got weird. There was a sentence stating that “Some of the other adverse health effects of smoking are “bad breath,” “smelly clothes” and “death” (emphasis added).” You had to put the quoted terms in the blank spaces. I was a bit surprised that the school felt the need to tell my daughter that death is bad for your health.

Well, my daughter did something that indicated this might have been necessary. For some reason at that night’s dinner, she decided to

1. Scotch tape together two straws end-to-end.
2. Put one end of the straw into her soda bottle and the other end into her nose.
3. See what would happen if she sniffed.

 Maybe she needs some basic health education after all.

I had two other observations:

1. The homework stated that smoking is the number one cause of preventable death.  I think they meant premature death. I was not aware that death is preventable. Otherwise, I would start smoking and then stop to live forever.
2. The homework really could have been much shorter and simply stated, “If you start smoking your father will kill you to save us all a lot of future trouble.”

IBM SWG has a product divisioned named Rational. Please not how I phrased the previous sentence. If I were talking about WebSphere, I would have said “IBM SWG has a WebSphere division.” Saying that IBM SWG has a “Rational” division has strange connotations. I tried to use terms like “The chief architect of Rational” instead of the “Rational Chief Architect.” The latter would imply that the other chief architects were irrational. I am saying that this wasn’t the case, but using “chief architect from Rational” went over a little better with team.

CA has a brand named “Wily.” Now I work in a company where I have to avoid saying “the wily chief architect.” I cannot wait until my next job. I am going to look for a company with a “cunning” product line or a “inegnious” brand.

One of my astronomy goals is to see every Messier object. So far I have seen M45 (Pleaides) and M42 (Orion Nebula). These are two of the five brightest Messier objects. I am determined to see a Galaxy.  Andromeda (M31) is the brightest galaxy and the second brighest Messier object after Pleaides. Unfortunately it is too low and behind the trees right now. My house is in a bit of a “tree well” with a relatively small set of patches where I can see the stars. This would be good if I were (more) paranoid because it would mean that the aliens would have trouble seeing me.

I tried for M81 (Bode’s Galaxy) and M82 (Cigar Galaxy), and M51 (Whirl Pool Galaxy). Unfortunately, I failed (I guess “No Cigar.”). I have tried for M81/M82 a couple of previous times. It is theoretically easy to find them from the big dipper. M51 should also be easy to find relative to the Big Dipper. Tonight, I decided to use the Orion Intelliscope Computerized Object Locator. I tied using it once before before but it was so cold that the LED would not work. I consider using it to be “cheating.” Part of the fun(?) is finding the objects the hard way.

Following the instructions was pretty easy. I got the telescope in the vertical position using a level. I needed to find two stars. Regulus was very close to Saturn and easy to find, in theory. Regulus seemed to be to the right and above Saturn to the naked eye, but was below in the finder scope. The finder scope image is not reversed. So, I was a little unsure if I was finding Regulus. The second alignment star was Mizar. This is easy to find, and I discussed it in a previous entry.

The locator displays a “Warp Factor” to tell you how accurate your calibration is. 0.5 is the target. I kept getting between 2 and 3.6. I found 2 acceptable. I tested the locator by finding Saturn, which I had previously found (needed to locate Regulus). Saturn was clearly centered in the finder scope and visible in the high power (1oMM Plossl). So, a Warp Factor of 2 seems good enough.

One of the Web guides to the Messier objects states “M81 is one of the easiest and most rewarding galaxies to observe for the amateur astronomer on the northern hemisphere, because with its total visual brightness of about 6.8 magnitudes it can be found with small instruments.” Well, not for me. I used the locator to point the telescope at M81. It pointed to a patch of sky that was completely dark in both the finder and 10MM Plossl. That is not an easy thing to do. There are stars almost everywhere. I also could not find M51. I used the finder to navigate to “points of light” near where M81/M82 should be, and near where M51 should be. No luck.

Conditions were pretty good tonight. So, I do not know what went wrong. The conditions were so good that I could see the gap between the rings and Saturn, and one of the divisions in the rings (perhaps the Cassini Division).  Titan was clearly visible. I also saw two other moons, probably Dione and Rhea. The glimpse of the smaller moons was brief and slight atmospheric shimmer returned. The previous night, my girlfriend said that she could see a couple of smaller moons. I thought she was “mistaken.” I guess she wasn’t. Man, I am wrong even about Solar System. I hope she doesn’t find out.

I need to get knee pads. Moving around on the deck is pretty painful, especially when I kneel on a small stone.

My youngest daughter looked through the telescope last night; my oldest daughter could care less. She saw Saturn, and then said “Daddy, I see a star next to it.” I asked a couple of questions like “To the left or right? Above the rings or below?” She saw Titan.

She bought a “Shining Star” doll a few weeks ago. You get a star with the doll. She got one of the stars in the Big Dipper. I showed it to her, and think she managed to see it. I am not sure.

She wanted to look at the Moon. I told her that it was pretty low in the sky and we might not be able to see it. Her response was, ‘Don’t worry daddy. If you cannot find the moon, I will show you where it is.” She’s five; I thought it was pretty funny.

I looked at the Moon briefly tonight. I plan to start trying to identify features. I found three craters near each other forming a “snow man” with gaps between the balls. I think the biggest one might have been Petavius.

Last night, I could see slightly better through my left eye than my right. I use “mono vision” with my contacts, with one eye for reading and one for distance. The left eye is the reading eye, which explains why I could see better. I put the reading presciption in both eyes tonight and it helped.

My godfather was a Flying Tiger. Navigation was difficult and complex in those days. They used to use the acronym “IFR,” which in their stood for “I Follow Railroads.” The pilots would follow railroad lines when lost.

I am learning my way around the CA buildings. I get lost and confused a lot. I realize that my navigation system is “IFW,” which stands for “I Follow Walls.” This allows me to find window offices and conference rooms. I am in deep trouble when I need to use restroom. It is in the interior. Finding the restroom is important when you are as full of sh*t as I am.

I was walking to the coffee shop and remembered an incident on my school trip to Spain when I was 17. I am not sure why the memory arose this morning. I thought I would share it.

I spoke Spanish better than most of other students. So, I was the interpreter. We wanted to call our parents to let them know we were OK. This trip was before cell phones, calling cards, etc. We needed to make collect calls.

I did not know the idiom for “collect call.” I decided to translate, “I would like to make a call to the US. Please charge the number in the US.” The proper verb for this form of charge is cobrar. I thought the proper word was cargar.

Why did I have this belief? We read Don Quixote, who charged windmills. Thus, by using cargar I asked the operator to assualt the US on horseback.

I started a new job and career this week. I left Microsoft and joined Computer Associates. I loved my time at Microsoft and hated to leave. It is a great, innovative place. My decision to leave was personal and for my family, and because of the great opportunity at CA. My new email is donald.ferguson@ca.com. My personal email is still donff2@aol.com.