William Vambenepe's blog

My work phone number is a typical US 10 digits number. In addition:

• a) My office is in the same area code as Stanford University.
• b) The area code appears twice in my phone number
• c) The number of the beast doesn’t appear in my phone number.
• d) An even number can only be in an even-numbered position if the value of that number is also its position (the leftmost digit is in position 1).
• e) The number of occurrences of non-zero numbers is always less than the value of the number.
• f) The answer uses as few different numbers as possible to meet all these conditions. For example, if 123-123-1231 and 123-412-3412 both met all the constraints above (which they obviously don’t), then the answer would be 123-123-1231 because it only uses the numbers 1, 2 and 3, while the other uses an additional number (4).

Asking your Oracle-employed brother-in-law to look me up in the employee phone book is considered cheating…

[UPDATED 2009/1/23: Clarified last bullet with an example, based on reader feedback.]

I follow Coté for his coverage of the IT management market. He also covers the so-called RIA (“Rich Internet Application”) playground, so through his blog (e.g. this post today) I involuntarily get news and comments about Flash, AIR, Silverlight and other I-hate-the-Web technologies. And I keep thinking “I hope they won’t mess up the Web too much for the rest of us on their way down to failure”.

Every time I run into a “no Flash, no service” site, I have a flashback (if you think the pun is funny then consider it intended) to 1995. That’s when Jean-Michel Jarre (the French musician, of Oxygène fame) launched his first web site, jarre.net (now de-commissioned). As a pioneer of electronic music, it wasn’t surprising to see him be one of the first artists to use the Web. As someone who likes to illuminate entire cities with laser beams, it wasn’t surprising to see him use overkill technology. So his Photoshop-wielding consultant created an entire site where each page was just one big image, with embedded text. It took forever to load and the stupidity of the approach shocked me so much that I remember it 13 years later. All the links were based on server-side image maps (the x/y coordinates of the pixel that you clicked on get sent to the server where a map links these coordinates to a target URL). The way HTML was at the time, you couldn’t use fancy fonts, colored text and elaborate wrapping (but you could blink!). And we all know that you simply can’t provide dates and locations of upcoming concerts without colored text, twisted fonts and a fancy layout.

The Internet Archive doesn’t have a copy of this original Jarre site, I don’t know if it has survived anywhere other than in my scarred-for-life brain. And if you go to JM Jarre’s current site, guess what? It is a Flash-only site. With my non-Flash Firefox all I get is a black page with a sentence (in French only, and not even grammatically correct) pointing me to the Flash download page. Looking at it with my Flash-enabled IE confirms (after a long wait for the Flash content to download) what I expected: other than a few videos (which could indeed use a simple Flash player embedded in the HTML page), there is no value whatsoever in using Flash for this site. The photos of his 80’s haircut would look just as good/bad in HTML.

Just like there are some usages for which image maps are appropriate, there are some for which Flash and friends are the right tool. But if they were only used where they belong, there wouldn’t be nearly as much hype around them. Poor Coté would have to spend more time with boring IT management geeks and less with Flash hipsters.

We IT management geeks are pretty familiar with data at different “meta” levels. For example:

• The content of a configuration record: data
• Who can access that content: metadata
• Who can set access permissions on that content: meta-metadata
• etc…

Trying to keep the layers separated (good luck Savas) is tempting for performance reasons but it’s like trying to shore up an ever-leaking levee in the face of a major storm. Semantic technologies get a lot of power out of the fact that they don’t even try.

I was prompted to write this because I recently learned that it also happens in medicine:

• Hypoparathyroidism: low parathyroid hormone
• Pseudohypoparathyroidism: normal parathyroid hormone levels, but a problem with the parathyroid receptor such that the symptoms are the same as those of hypoparathyroidism
• Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism: normal parathyroid hormone levels and a normal parathyroid receptor, but presents with the same symptoms as pseudohypoparathyroidism (but without the consequences)

Good luck getting your health insurance to cover a pseudo-disease. Don’t even bother calling them about a pseudo-pseudo-disease.

[UPDATED 2009/5/1: For some reason this entry is attracting a lot of comment spam, so I am disabling comments. Contact me if you'd like to comment.]

Earlier this evening I was listening to a podcast from the Commonwealth Club of California. The guest was Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council. It wasn’t captivating and my mind had wandered on another topic (a question related to open source) when I caught a sentence that made me think that the podcast had followed me on that topic:

“If we are not at the table we are on the menu”

In fact, she was quoting an energy industry executive explaining why he welcomes upfront discussions w/ NRDC about global warming. But isn’t this also very applicable to what open source means for many companies?

Everything below is off-topic for this blog.

To be fair, I should clarify that not all Commonwealth Club podcasts (here is the RSS feed) fail to keep my attention. While I am at it, here is a quick listener’s guide to recent recordings (with links to the MP3 files) in case some of you also have a nasty commute and want to give the CCC (no, not that one) a try. Contrary to what I expected, I have found panels discussions generally less interesting than talks by individuals. The panel on reconstructing health care was good though. The one on reconciling science and religion was not (in the absence of a more specifically framed question everyone on the panel agreed on everything). They invite speakers from both sides of the aisle: recently Ben Stein (can’t be introduced in a few words) and Tom Campbell (Dean of Haas business school at Berkeley) on the conservative side and Madeleine Albright (no introduction needed) on the progressive side. All three of these were quite good. As I mentioned, the one with Frances Beinecke (NRDC president) wasn’t (it quickly morphed into self-praises for her organization’s work, including taking a surprising amount of credit for Intel’s work towards lower power consumption). Deborah Rodriguez, (director of the “Kabul Beauty School”) was the worst (at least for the first 20 minutes, I wasn’t paid enough to keep listening). Thomas Fingar (Chairman of the National Intelligence Council) was ok but could have been much better (he shared all the truth that couldn’t embarrass or anger anyone, which isn’t much when the topic is the Iraq and Iran intelligence reports on WMD). In the process he explained what the intelligence community calls “open source intelligence” and he wasn’t referring to the RedMonk model. Enjoy…

Here are the first three thoughts that came to my mind when I heard about Microsoft’s bid to acquire Yahoo (in order, to the extent that I can remember):

• After XBox this will take their focus further away from enterprise software. Good for Oracle.
• I wonder how my friends at Yahoo (none of which I know to be great fans of Microsoft’s software) feel about this (on the other hand the stock price rise can’t be too unpleasant for them)
• Time to get ready to move away from Yahoo Mail

Turns out I should have added an additional piece of good news to the first bullet: after this they won’t be able to afford SAP for a while. This I just realized after reading this New York Times column which argues, in short, that Microsoft should acquire SAP rather than Yahoo.

A few quotes from the article:

• “you’ve probably never heard of BEA“: this obviously doesn’t apply to readers of this blog.
• “it’s not much fun hanging out on the enterprise side of the software business“: ouch. If it’s fun you’re after, try the IT management segment of enterprise software business.
• “to find the best acquisition strategy, ask, ‘What would Larry do?’“: does this come as a bumper sticker?

Of course if Microsoft gets Yahoo and things go really badly, then it could be SAP who acquires Microsoft…

According to this article, the Universal Postal Union is in talks with the ICANN to get its own “.post” TLD. Because, you see, “restricting the ‘.post’ domain name to postal agencies or groups that provide postal services would instill trust in Web sites using such names“. If you’re wondering what these “groups that provide postal services” are, keep reading: “the U.N. agency also could assign names directly to mail-related industries, such as direct marketing and stamp collecting“. I have nothing against stamp collectors, but direct marketing? So much for the “trust” part. Just call it “.spam” and be done with it.

I doubt that having to use a “.com” name has ever registered as a hindrance for FedEx, DHL or UPS in providing web-based services. And these organizations have been offering on-line package tracking and other services since before many of the postal organizations even had a way to locate post offices on their web site. That being said, http://com.post/ would be a great URL for a blog.

If the UPU really wants to innovate, what would be more interesting than a boring TLD would be a URI scheme for postal mail. Something like post:USA/CA/94065/Redwood%20City/Oracle%20Parkway/500/William%20Vambenepe but in a way that allows for the international variations. That would be a nice complement to the “geo:” URI scheme.

Now, should I categorize this as “off-topic”? What would the IT management angle be? Let’s see. Maybe as a way to further integrate the handling of virtual and physical servers? Kind of a stretch (being able to represent the destination as a URI in both cases doesn’t mean that delivering a physical server to an address is the same as provisioning a new VM in a hypervisor). Maybe as an additional notification endpoint (“if the application crashes, don’t send an an email, send me a letter instead”)? As if. Alright, off-topic it is.

For those of you who still have my @yahoo.com personal email in your address book, now is a good time to replace it with the more portable one composed of my first name @vambenepe.com. This way there won’t be any problem when I move away from Yahoo (which is where my personal emails are currently redirected) after the Microsoft acquisition.

This is not a knee-jerk anti-Microsoft reaction. It’s just an intuition that their attempt to acquire Yahoo is driven more by lust for Yahoo’s audience than anything else (Tim Bray seems to agree). And that having acquired the audience, Microsoft is going to want something more for its $44.6 billions (or whatever the final price ends up being) than the few dollars I send to Yahoo every year for freedom from ads and a few additional services. Things like promoting Silverlight for example (did you hear that the Web broadcast of the 2008 Olympics will supposedly require Silverlight? Since I don’t own a TV, that would make me a little upset if I cared about the Olympics).

When the time comes (I am willing to give Yahoo-Microsoft a chance to prove me wrong), I’ll probably just move to my own server unless I find a provider who offers a great email-and-only-email service. It won’t be GMail.

In the meantime, whether this acquisition succeeds or not, thank you for updating your address books.

The New York Times published an article describing a plan to partially replicate the city of Lyon in Dubai. I wasn’t born in Lyon but I grew up there. At the cost of another off-topic post, I will take this opportunity to tell my American friends, whose itineraries in France tend to take them from Paris straight to the French Riviera, that they are missing out on a great city located half-way between these two spots.

The Lyon apartment building I lived in stands on what used to be a trading post for Gauls and Romans. Napoleon Bonaparte presided over the earth breaking ceremony for this building. A couple of windows in the apartment were later blocked with bricks because of a 19th century tax that was assessed based on the number and size of windows in your home (*). Through the remaining windows, the view from the apartment is over place Bellecour on which you can see a statue of king Louis XIV that was melted during the French revolution to make cannons and replaced during the Restauration period. There was also a guillotine in action there during the revolution. During WW2, the Gestapo took over the building (my elderly same-floor neighbor told me about being evicted by them – he came back after the war). And Antoine de Saint Exupery was born next door. That’s a lot of history for just one apartment building. Good luck replicating that in the desert.

Of course that’s not necessary and there is a lot you can be inspired by in Lyon without emulating its past (I don’t recommend cutting a few heads in public just to “capture the feel” of Lyon’s revolutionary history). The Times article lists a few challenges. The importance of pork and wine in the local cuisine is manageable. Once you accept that you’re not going to get a carbon copy, the challenge of Lyon-inspired cooking without these ingredients is one chefs could rise to (a generic prohibition on heavy sauces would be more problematic). The role of the rivers in the “feel” of the city seems more challenging to me. I lived in the peninsula formed by the meeting of the Rhone and Saone rivers. The rivers and the wide walking areas by their sides make for great (sometimes windy) walks during which you can see nice bridges and historic buildings (universities, a hospital, a courthouse and many Renaissance apartment buildings). And even if they manage to create an equivalent body of water in Dubai, the strong flow of the water coming down from the Alps is likely to be missing. There is a reason why the picture that illustrates the Times article shows a pedestrian bridge (looks like Passerelle Saint Vincent over the Saone river).

I am not sure what it really means to replicate an old city but there certainly is a lot to learned about urban life from Lyon’s long evolution. I am sure the people of Lyon don’t mind the money but even more they probably love being told that they represent a model to emulate. And it must feel good to steal the limelight from Paris just once. I don’t have millions to invest in the city like Dubai does, but I too am happy to speak highly of Lyon and encourage people to visit. Feel free to contact me if you plan such a visit and would like recommendations.

(*) the number of doors was also part of the tax calculations. The goal was to achieve some degree of proportionality in taxation since rich people presumably had more doors and windows in their homes. It wasn’t a new idea, Julius Caesar imposed similar taxes (called ostiarium and columnarium) on the numbers of doors and columns respectively. Looks like he didn’t care for McMansions either. Maybe it’s time to resuscitate the columnarium in US suburbia.

This is very much off-topic for this blog but if I read another article (like this one) that draws conclusions about the mind based on what areas of the brain light up under MRI, I am going to bang my head against the wall until my “anterior insula” switches places with my “ventromedial prefrontal cortex”. That should nicely mess up their models if I ever get in the MRI machine.

Brain science is in its early stages and there’s nothing wrong with that. Of course scientists need to progress step by step and for now MRI images might be the best we have. Go ahead and use the tool. But can we be spared statements about what area of the brain processes “soft-drink preferences”? These stories are so 19th century.

As far as I can tell, Flash is an advertising delivery platform for the Web. This is why I have not installed the Flash player in my Firefox browser. It saves me (especially when combined with the Adblock Plus Firefox add-on) from a lot of obnoxious animations. And a few security vulnerabilities too, (this latest one is what prompted me to write this quick entry to help readers protect themselves while retaining the option to use Flash).

Despite all the hype about Flash, I very rarely run into a page that requires it for something useful. A few sites are Flash-only (mostly restaurant web sites from my experience, apparently restaurant owners are easy preys for incompetent Web site designers) and when I find one I usually take that as a sign that I am saving myself a lot of frustration by taking my business elsewhere.

Still, once a while I need to view a Flash applet. Ideally, I would like to have Flash installed but disabled, such that I can enable it for a given page with a single click. This doesn’t seem to be possible (my guess is that Adobe knows very well that Flash is mostly used in ways that are not welcomed by users and that they would likely disable it most of the time if given the option). So here is a convenient way to achieve the same effect:

While I have not installed the Flash player in Firefox, I have installed it in IE. I have also installed the IE Tab Firefox add-on which allows one to switch from the Firefox rendering engine to the IE rendering engine within a given Firefox tab. It can be configured to place a small icon in the status bar. Clicking on that icon switches the rendering engine, which means that suddenly the Flash player is enabled for the page you are looking at. One-click enable/disable as requested!

You can also configure IE Tab to automatically switch to IE rendering for some pre-configured sites. So if there are Flash-dependent sites that you use on a regular basis, just enter them there and the IE rendering engine will automatically be used whenever you are on those sites. Again, this all happens inside your Firefox tab, it doesn’t start a separate IE browser. Enjoy.

[UPDATED on 2007/12/24: I wrote this entry to try to help readers and it turns out I am the one who's getting helped after all. Many commenters pointed to the Flashblock firefox add-on which is designed specifically to do what I get done in a round-about way with IE Tab. I looked for such an add-on some time ago and didn't find it, which is why I devised the work-around. Thank you all for the info.]

[UPDATED 2008/5/14: Another reason to keep Flash turned off: Crossdomain.xml Invites Cross-site Mayhem.]

[UPDATED 2008/6/9: Looks like Flashblock can be circumvented (in a way that my more basic FF vs IE setup cannot). BTW, I closed comments on this entry because for some reason it was attracting a lot more comment spam than all the others combined. Email me (see about page) if you want to post a comment here.]

What happens when a society gets hold of a new territory or a new technology? It usually starts by decimating the easy preys in that territory or by running wild with the technology. Using abundant resources (food, fuel or other) with abandonment, dumping waste everywhere. Then there is a crisis directly tied to this lack of restraint. Maybe an epidemic. Or starvation from the sudden disappearance of easy-to-get food (or fuel). Lack of clean water. Landslides from deforestation. Something is done to address that crisis and its direct causes. It starts with random acts of what is not yet called ecology. And then the best practices gets more widely adopted. But another crisis appears. Other changes need to be made. Eventually people start to look beyond fighting individual fires and towards managing the environment as a whole, in a way that aligns with the desired quality of life. Models are developed to better understand relationships and predict consequences. Comprehensive environmental studies appear. People take a lifecycle approach to managing the environmental aspects of development. Processes, policies and rules get defined. And of course, companies and consultants appear to help with these tasks.

This is a (widely) simplified description of how ecology appears out of necessity in developing societies and how its development is a gating factor for sustained economic development. Of course, this is the happy view, the one where the society is able to correct its course before collapsing.

Doesn’t this sound very similar to the way IT management appeared and is developing in enterprises?

When enterprises got hold of computing as a business tool, individual departments deployed applications with little planning and coordination, just to grab the low-hanging fruits of increased productivity. Then comes the crisis, a key system goes down and no-one knows what to do. Business suffers. Some early, localized, monitoring functionality is created to fix the problem. A random act of management that addresses a tactical issue. But more problems happen, the system gets more complex than niche management tools can address. Eventually people start to look at IT management more globally, to think of it as a way to align IT with business objectives. Models are developed to better understand relationships and predict consequences. People take a lifecycle approach to managing changes to the IT environment. Best practices, processes and even rules and compliance mandates get defined. And of course, companies and consultants appear to help with these tasks.

Does this parallel reveal any opportunity for one side to learn from the other? Will you hire Greenpeace to run your data center?

I am now an Oracle employee. My last day at HP was last Friday. I have a lot of excellent memories of my almost nine years there. And the company is (finally) very serious about software and investing a lot in it. HP Software is a very good place to be. But so is Oracle and the very interesting position I was offered convinced me that now was the time to go. So I am now in the Enterprise Manager group with the title of Architect. More specifically, I am in the part of EM that manages Middleware and Applications. Which also means that I’ll get to interact with the ex-Bluestone people who were my colleagues at HP Middleware and later joined Oracle’s application server team (like Greg). And I just learned today that David Chappell (with whom I collaborated on several specs) recently joined that group too. This is a happening place.