Disk Storage
Jim Grey is mailing disks and computers because it's a faster way to move gigabytes of data than sending it through the net. A fascinating interview with JG and David Patterson (co-inventor of RISC and RAID) at ACM Queue.

Key quote: “We have an embarrassment of riches in that we're able to store more than we can access. Capacities continue to double each year, while access times are improving at 10 percent per year. So, we have a vastly larger storage pool, with a relatively narrow pipeline into it. We're not really geared for this...the fundamental problem is that we are building a larger reservoir with more or less the same diameter pipe coming out of the reservoir. We have a much harder time accessing things inside the reservoir”.

The excess of capacity versus access is already having some interesting second-order effects, not the least of which is providing the raison d'etre for my new employer. I have to send this to some of the folks I work with. The implications are just huge. Among other things, I hope this is what will end the retrograde directions we're seeing in the database world.

Music and Poetry

The thing that gets to me
is how you're never free.
Though the spirit yearns,
the body is a prison

Neil Finn, Astro

Throw armfuls of emptiness
out to the spaces
that we breathe -
maybe the birds
will sense the expanded air
flying more fervently.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy

Iran and Afghanistan
Today is the 4th anniversary of the Iranian student protests in 1999. Iranian student leaders called off demonstrations today after being threatened with violent reprisals, but it appears that some protests went on anyway. Worldwide protests in support of the Iranian demonstrators were held today. Some are predicting the imminent fall of the regime.

USA Today has an article on progress in Afghanistan. This is in contrast with a story about the Pakistani embassy getting trashed by protesters in Kabul over alleged border incursions by Pakistan. As always, it's difficult to get a real sense of what the situation in Afghanistan really is.

Blogs, Books, Blockbusters
I don't watch TV anymore. I read blogs. I don't buy newspapers. I read blogs. As far as I'm concerned, I've traded up.

I still read books - just finished Hayden Herrera's biography of Frida Kahlo. I want to read W. R. Clement's Reforming the Prophet next. I had read Clement's previous book, Quantum Jump: A Survival Guide to the New Renaissance about 4-5 years ago and dismissed it as interesting but wrong in its predictions and conclusions. I re-read it a year ago and discovered that Clement's vision looked a lot sharper than it had during the Clinton Belle Epoque (to borrow a phrase from Bruce Sterling's latest). I need to read C.J. Date's Temporal Data and the Relational Model. It's a geek thing.

And I still see movies (recommended: Respiro), although I've missed all of the big summer blockbusters. I strongly suspect that I haven't really missed a thing. I really want to see Winged Migration, too. Then maybe I'll go see Matrix Reloaded at the drive-in (we still have one, here in the land that time and neo-conservatism forgot).

Software
Incredible messes in the software world:
SQL99/SQL3/SQL2003/SQL-XML
Web Services/SOAP/WSDL/UDDI/ebXML
Semantic Web/RDF/CDF/RSS/XML-RPC

I won't go into details about why these things are such messes. Life is too short, and there are too many interesting and worthwhile things to learn. But I will ask this question: Have any of the players (standards organizations, gurus, big companies, etc.) involved in any of the above produced anything simple, easy to use, and/or worthy of broad, large-scale adoption recently? As usual, the really interesting stuff is happening outside of the standards mainstream - weblogs being one obvious example.

Funny how so many of these things are tangled up, in one way or another, with XML. XML is here to stay, and it's very useful in some contexts. But the drive to make it the panacea for every problem in computing is doomed to failure. Perhaps I'm just getting old and crotchety. Then again, perhaps it all reminds me of the other failures I've seen in my career (CASE tools, Network Computers, Object-Oriented Databases, CMM, "Push" technology, CORBA, 4GL's, ASP's, etc.).

Things that are not as messy: (note that I don't think less messy is necessarily a good thing)
.NET
LAMP

Inalienable Rights
Read this wonderful essay by Thom Hartmann on what the framers of the Constitution intended with respect to our rights. Key quote: “...the Constitution wasn't written as a vehicle to grant us rights. We don't derive our rights from the constitution. Rather, in the minds of the Founders, human rights are inalienable - inseparable - from humans themselves. We are born with rights by simple fact of existence, as defined by John Locke and written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," the Founders wrote. Humans are "endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights...."”