CQ2

Of contested provenance, the term sart refers to oasis-dwellers of Chinese and former Soviet Central Asia.  It’s the antonym of ‘nomad.’  At one time it might have had a connotation of “Persian-speaker” but that’s not the current sense of it.  Possibly also pejorative.  V.V. Barthold, the Gibbon of Turkestan, I think had much to say on this matter.  (Gibbon is the Barthold of Rome.)  Wikipedia notes that “the Muslim, Mongol-speaking Dongxiang people of Northwestern China call themselves Sarta or Santa. It is not clear if there is any connection between this term and the Sarts of Central Asia.”

Recently, a colleague of mine referred to “Harvey balls” when I knew he mean “Booz balls,” those quarter/half/three-quarter filled circles that graphically represent low to high scales.  If you need to show, say in a table, a set of values, you can use these Harvey/Booz balls instead of numbers; they make it easy to scan the table.  Consumer Reports uses them, for example.

They’re a consulting staple, and I call them Booz balls because, I have always assumed, they were first used at Booz, Allen, Hamilton.

But why Harvey?

Wikipedia has the answer: Harvey Poppel, a Booz consultant, invented them, so you either honor the man (Harvey balls) or his employer (Booz balls.)

There’s even a very useful Harvey balls font, from a former Booz consultant of course, which gives you a lot of flexibility to use them in, say, Excel.  (For presentations, I think you’re still better off using a graphic.)  You have to be aware of how to use them, though, because in the example above the balls represent one to nine; five and above are variations on one to four, not actually higher values.

Your browser may not represent these properly, but there are also Unicode values for Booz/Harvey balls:

○ ◔ ◑ ◕ ●

Now — and this is really a large piece of awesomeness — you should be careful not to confuse Harvey (Poppel’s) balls with Harvey Ball, the inventor of the smiley face.

The other day, because of an ATC glitch, air traffic on the east coast shut down at 1:30pm.  For someone like myself, seated in 30B (center seat, back of the MD88) on a flight from Atlanta to Boston at 2:30pm, this presented an opportunity to:

(a) lose two pounds in sweat

(b) learn unwanted personal details of the family in the row in front of me

(c) read three Economists

(d) all of the above

If you guessed (d), you would be correct!

A good unit of measure for me of air travel (a function of distance and time) is how many issues of The Economist I can get through.  It’s the perfect reading material for Airportlandia because of its density — many thin pages of text versus thick pages of photos — and because of a certain timelessness to the writing.  I don’t read it to find out what happened yesterday, I read it to find out why it happened.  So the timeliness of the issue is not critical; the date on the newspaper is usually its most important descriptor, but not for The Economist (which, oddly, claims to be a newspaper.  Whatever.)  Even though I’ve been a more-or-less diligent reader since college, for many years now I’ve had the habit of primarily reading it on airplanes; I think I would have to buckle my seatbelt at home to read it in my lounge chair.

An indication of the quality of the ‘newspaper’ is the way it deals with issues that I’m familiar with; I usually find that I agree with their analysis on things I know about, which increases my trust in their analysis of things I don’t know about.  (Unfortunately, the ratio keeps shifting as I realize I know less and less.  Separate problem.)

Gartner’s ‘magic quadrant’ ranking of vendors shouldn’t matter as much as it does, but it does.  So it’s good news that the new MQ (as, I think, previous ones) for user provisioning puts Novell’s Identity Manager product in the leader’s quadrant.

To me, the question of vendor choices in provisioning pivots crucially around experience.  If I was in the market for an identity solution, the key question I would ask, and probe on, would be the total number of actual like-sized deployments in production today.  Not sales, not roadmap, not ten-person deployments, but real enterprise-class (or whatever size you are) deployments.  In other words, yes, the technology works but who is actually using it?

Burton, Gartner’s specialist identity competitor, wrote a paper recently (I don’t have it at hand; I’m working from notes) about the provisioning market and the number of actual enterprise customers.  They surveyed the vendors and found that there were, in my analysis of their analysis, four tiers:

(1)  Novell and Microsoft each claim thousands of customers.  I would say that there is a definition issue here, because Microsoft, due to their ubiquity on the desktop, is always going to be a major player in this market, but that their offerings are not nearly as robust as the other vendors.  But, you know, I’m biased.

(2)  IBM, Oracle,  Sun, and each claim several hundred.  IBM — Tivoli, really — is a strong competitor.  Oracle is being Oracle, very aggressive, although it’s not clear that their products work nearly as well as their roadmap.  They have significant integration issues to overcome, but they certainly have a seat at the table, especially since it’s hard even for most IT people to distinguish between a relational database and a directory.  I would say that Sun, for whatever reason, has in the past year or two fallen off of its game in this market and is less aggressive than in the past.  Maybe it’s the departure of the Waveset management, maybe it’s a change in focus; I don’t know.

(3)  BMC and CA also claim ’several hundred’ deployments, although my experience doesn’t support that claim.  I’ve run into the second tier a lot in competitive situations, but not so much BMC and CA.  BMC has a compelling story to tell and Remedy is a big door opener for them, but I see them as perhaps a junior cousin.  HP, now out of the game, and Siemens each claim between one hundred and 250 customers. I never run into Siemens, possibly because their primary customer base is in Europe.  You could argue that tiers 2 & 3 ought to be combined, but that’s not the way that I see the market.

(4)  And then the rest — there are twenty vendors in the market according to Burton — each have something between fifty and one hundred customers.  Burton says that the actual number of deployments is probably half that, so a specialist vendor (less charitably, “a little guy with an idea”) probably has thirty or forty real deployments at actual customers.

Nothing against Barbara Bush or anything, but I’m practically beside myself that I can use the occasion of an article on a presidential candidate’s mother to refer in context to Clifford Geertz.

Via Language Log, there’s a must-read profile in Time Magazine about Obama’s mother by Amanda Ripley:

Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama’s mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.

As Benjamin Zimmer writes in Language Log, after he gets the principal issue of pronouncing Obama’s sister’s name out of the way:

So Barack Obama has a half-sister versed in Indonesian figures of speech (regardless of Barack’s own proficiency in Indonesian). Not only that, he has another half-sister, on his father’s side, who is trained in Germanic languages and linguistics. According to Spiegel Online, Auma Obama studied at University of Heidelberg’s Neuphilologische Fakultät before continuing her graduate work at University of Bayreuth in the Interkulturelle Germanistik program. Her dissertation was on literary reflections of the concept of labor. It’s a fascinating extended clan, though you’d never know it watching the Democratic Convention’s genericized depiction of the Obamas as an “all-American family.”

Ripley’s piece, neatly staged in three acts, is broadly sympathetic but expertly done and full of insightful detail; a thick description, to use Geertz’s felicitous phrase.  And an appropriate one, too,  given that Obama’s mother was — like Geertz — an anthropologist of Indonesia who wrote a thousand page disseratation on ‘peasant blacksmithing,’ a classic thick description if there ever was one.

I’ve recently moved into a new job at Novell, working on our strategy for worldwide services and planning for our next fiscal year is keeping me busy.  But I still, fortunately, deal with real clients and real problems too.  This one is classic: the client has several hundred old Unix and RHEL servers that they want to move to SLES.  Great!  We want to help.  So they negotiate the server deal and then want to know the cost to migrate.  How much is it going to cost, in total, to go from what they have today to what they want tomorrow?  They ask for estimates on a per-server basis; how many hours would it take to migrate a Solaris server to SLES?  Ten hours?  A thousand hours?  So they bring in the consultants, the dreaded consultants.  They’ve tried to avoid slowing down the deal but there’s no avoiding it now.

Well, you’ve done this before, they say, you’re grizzled veterans of the data center; is it two or ten hours for a server?  And the consultant — and I’ve been in this situation, believe me, it sucks — has to say, “Well, it depends.  It could be a thousand hours.”  Which is what everyone is expecting him to say because you can’t get a straight answer out of a consultant.  They’re always going to tell you “it depends.”  Right.

And even if there is all the time in the world, this particular answer needs to be in writing on the buyer’s desk by EOD today or the sales guy isn’t going to make his number for the quarter which means that he’s not going to make ‘club’ (his incentive travel event), which his wife is really looking forward to, so this damned consultant is not only not answering a simple, reasonable question from the beloved customer but they are also very directly making his wife mad at him, with the attendant consequences.

Perhaps you think I joke?  Or exaggerate?

Making matters worse, some nerd named Chad has downloaded OpenSUSE onto a machine in their testing lab and moved a couple of apps without incident (some directory changes, a few lines of code) and based on that experience has estimated that moving the three hundred servers will take approximately an hour each.  Seriously: we have clients who want us to tell them that moving unknown production workloads from one operating system to another will take less than two hours per server.

So the consultant sighs and starts to ask questions: What do the workloads on these servers actually do?  Online banking is different from warehouse management.  What platforms are they running?  (What version of J2EE?  What version of RHEL?  What version of Manugistics?)  Are they going to change anything else besides the operating system when they do this move?  Is the software custom or off-the-shelf?  What’s it written in?  If they say something like current Java apps running on a 2.6 kernel going to the same JVM on another distribution, that would be one thing.  If you are looking at non-ANSI C custom code on RHEL 3 on a complex multi-tiered app, that’s something else.  (Moving from the 2.4 kernel to the 2.6 kernel on any distribution is much harder than moving from one current distribution to another.)  What about storage, and backup, and disaster recovery?  Systems management?  There are a thousand more architectural details that you need to understand (one data center or many?  resource utilization?) but everyone is getting impatient with you and your endless questions.

Then you start getting into the enterprise-y aspects, which is where the real time and cost come in.  There’s a difference between Chad moving an app from one platform to another as a technical exercise and the actual time that it takes production applications to go from one to another.  What’s the testing regime?  I would expect that production code moving from one distribution to another would require real testing (stress/performance, UAT, etc.).  Would you include that in the estimate?  What about security?  Does the new OS have to go through a security audit at the company?  (Answer: yes, and it’s going to take a long time for the online banking app, believe me.)  Documentation?

This is all super-boring and bureaucratic and definitely not technical so the nerds aren’t interested and think it’s worthless and the sales guy is hearing his wife screaming at him and the buyer is saying, “Why is this so complicated?”

So, should we skip the backup part?

Really, the way to do this kind of thing is to do a quick assessment and figure out some kind of prioritization and rough sequencing, but that would require the client to spend time and money helping you to figure out how much to charge them and they are naturally leery of such a thing.  You desperately want to avoid getting locked into a fixed figure because you still have no real idea how complex the problem your being asked to solve is, but that is what the client and the others are asking for.

So you end up with a fudge; you commit to moving some edge servers and a cluster of supposedly simple apps and you sign up to do a security-approved core build and an assessment for the rest so that the project can get started and the customer can show progress to their boss and the sales guy can make his number.

Now you’re faced with months in the lab at the client site with Chad explaining to you how completely screwed up their environment is and how there’s no way that he’s going to give up his Solaris servers and anyway they’ve tried to do this themselves a bunch of times already and it never works because it’s not really a current release of Manugistics and they did some customization that they probably shouldn’t have…

Ronnie Drew, 1934-2008.

I finally broke down and decided to get surround sound for our family room television; the speakers that came with our cheapo screen are terrible and with my poor hearing I’m always saying, “eh? Whatdidshesay?”  Which, understandably, drives my wife nuts.  But she doesn’t want eight ugly speakers strewn around the room and neither of us wants to spend too much money on another audio system, so I did some research and bought separate pieces rather than a HTIB (home theater in a box).  I ended up choosing a cheapo Onkyo receiver and three small Boston Acoustics speakers: right/center/left.  I figure I can get the subwoofer later.   Onkyo and Boston Acoustics are both good value brands and this is a decent setup given our constraints.

The receiver came the other day; setting it up was wholly daunting.  The back of the thing looks like engine room of the Millennium Falcon.  But today, the speakers arrived, just in time for track & field at the Olympics this weekend.  And beer!  Woohoo!

I was a bit surprised when the UPS driver told me there were two 70 lbs boxes plus a small box for the center speaker; I was going to try to hang the right and left speakers on the wall and they were advertised as bookshelf size.  But it turns out that Boston Acoustics shipped me two surround sound systems (each with five speakers plus a subwoofer) instead of two speakers. I checked my credit card and they had billed me correctly, but they had shipped the wrong items, a $1,500 mistake.

So, being the nice Catholic boy that I am, I dutifully called up Boston Acoustics and said that they’d made a mistake and that they should come and get their equipment.  I told them, though, that I wanted to open up one of the big surround sound system boxes and pull out the L/R speakers that I had, actually, ordered. And the very nice CSR, who I think understood the situation, said that I couldn’t do that because it would reverse the polarity of the dilithium crystals or something.  Sigh.  She wanted my username and password to login to my account and re-order the speakers because the return would have to be handled as a refund and on and on.  You know how it goes.  I got stuck in a script.

So instead of being evil and making money on this deal — keeping a whole surround sound system for myself and selling the extra one on eBay — I get a hassle.  I’ve got the damn boxes sitting unopened in my entryway, taunting me.  And, worst of all, I’m going to say, “eh? whatdidhesay?” through another round of Olympics swimming.

The CoolIris image browser plugin for Firefox is slick; a pseudo-3D coverflow view of images from Google image search, Flickr, etc.  Worth checking out.

Well, here’s one way not to do it:

In reply to: How do you secure sensitive data on your computer? by Marc Bennet

I require a password to access my computer, but to top that off, I try not to store any sensetive [sic] data on my computer. Lists of passwords however, I HAVE to store on my computer, and what I do, is I encrypt them. The simplest way to encrypt something is to type it up in word, then take a screenshot of it, and save the PICTURE as an unknown filename, then of course, you put that in a password protected .zip file.

That password protected zip file really isn’t secure, but the sheer inconvenience of this awkward security-through-obscurity method is what makes it so remarkable: a screenshot of a Word document!