Sun Microsystems Laboratories Blogs

Katy Dickinson's Blog: Grange Hall

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:05:24 +0000

I was recently in a Lions Club meeting at the Prunedale Grange Hall on California's central coast. These halls are buildings of The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, a fraternal organization for American farmers, founded in 1867. The Grange is the oldest surviving agricultural organization in America, important politically after the Civil War.

Meeting in a Grange Hall felt a little like doing business in Boston's Faneuil Hall, a building still in use but suffused with history. On the wall was this Mission Statement:

The Granges of California provide opportunities to enhance your communities today for the generations of tomorrow by promoting growth through family, community, and grassroots legislative action.

The dents in the wooden floor were testimony to heavy use of the Prunedale Grange.

Katy Dickinson's Blog: Famous Women in Computer Science

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:17:14 +0000

I recently read a University of Bristol (UK) web page about women behind important advancements in Computer Science: "Famous Women in Computer Science". I don't know the University of Bristol's selection criteria (other than "women" and "Computer Science") but their list seems too short. Last week, I sent email to Sun's Women in Engineering to ask, for curiosity's sake, "Who would you add to this list?"

Below is the original list, the names added by the Sun women, plus some references. The list is uneven and I am sure there are many more who should be added but here is what I have so far...

Original List (alphabetized, not original order):

Frances E. Allen, 1st female IBM Fellow, 1st female recipient of ACM's A. M. Turing Award (2006), WITI Hall of Fame 1997, IEEE Fellow 1991, ACM Fellow 1994
Anita Borg, founding director of the Institute for Women and Technology (IWT), which became the Anita Borg Institute, WITI Hall of Fame 1998, ACM Fellow 1996
Carly Fiorina, CEO Hewlett-Packard 1999-2005
Adele Goldstine, authored the Manual for the ENIAC in 1946
Shafi Goldwasser, RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and of computer science and applied mathematics at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award 1996
Grace Murray Hopper, developed the 1st compiler for a computer programming language, US Navy Rear Admiral, in 1973 became the 1st person from the USA and the 1st woman of any nationality to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, IEEE Fellow 1962 (1st woman awarded)
Augusta Ada King (Countess of Lovelace), 1843 wrote a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is credited with being the 1st computer programmer.
Barbara H. Liskov, Ford Professor of Engineering in the MIT School of Engineering's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, 2nd woman to win ACM's A. M. Turing Award (2008), 1st US woman to be awarded a PhD from a computer science department in 1968, ACM Fellow 1996
Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jennings, and Fran Bilas, original programmers of the ENIAC, WITI Hall of Fame 1997
Jean E. Sammet, IBM computer languages FORMAC and COBOL, ACM Fellow 1994
Erna Schneider, in 1971 awarded one of the 1st software patents ever issued, at Bell Labs, she became the 1st female supervisor of a technical department
Eva Tardos, Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Cornell University, ACM Fellow 1998
Meg Whitman, CEO eBay 1998-2008

List Additions (suggested by Sun Women in Engineering)

Carol Bartz, President and CEO of Yahoo! (starting in 2009), previously Chairman, President, and CEO at Autodesk (1992-2009), WITI Hall of Fame 1997
Lenore Blum, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Safra A. Catz, President Oracle Corporation since 2004, CFO Oracle since 2005, Member Oracle Board since 2001
Diane Greene, VMWare co-founder and CEO (1998-2008)
Helen Greiner, 1990-2008 Co-founder, Board Chair of iRobot, Anita Borg Institute Woman of Vision - Innovation award winner 2008, WITI Hall of Fame 2007
Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, 2008 ACM President, 2009 Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), 2009 elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
Mary Lou Jepsen, Founding CTO of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Founder and CEO, Pixel Qi, WITI Hall of Fame 2008
Maria Klawe, 5th president of Harvey Mudd College (1st woman in that role), previously Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, 2002 ACM President, ACM Fellow 1996
Sandra Kurtzig, founder and CEO of ASK computers (1972-1991)
Susan Landau, Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer, Anita Borg Institute Woman of Vision - Social Impact award winner 2008
Evi Nemeth, Associate Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Co-author of the best-selling UNIX System Administration Handbook (Prentice Hall, 1995)
Radia Perlman, the 'Mother of the Internet', 1st Sun Microsystems female Fellow, 1st Anita Borg Institute Woman of Vision - Innovation award winner 2005, IEEE Fellow 2008
Janie Tsao Co-Founder of Linksys (1988-2003), 1st Anita Borg Institute Woman of Vision - Leadership award winner 2005
Jeanette Wing, President's Professor of Computer Science (former CS Department Head), Carnegie Mellon University, Assistant Director, Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, National Science Foundation, IEEE Fellow 2003, ACM Fellow 1998

Other References

ACM Fellows (award started 1994)
Ada Lovelace Day Collection, Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology
Hatch, Sybil E., Changing Our World: True Stories of Women Engineers Publisher: American Society of Civil Engineers (2006), ISBN-10: 0784408416
Pioneering Women in Computing Technology, from Women at the School Of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University
WITI Hall of Fame, from WITI (award started 1996)
Women in computing, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Women IEEE Fellows since 1962 (award started 1912)
Women of Vision award winners from the Anita Borg Institute (award started 2005)

Katy Dickinson's Blog: Chocolate Dinner for SMUM

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:35:18 +0000

On 17 October 2009, Saint Timothy's Episcopal Church ("St. Tim's") in Mountain View, California held a fund raising formal dinner and auction called "A Feast of All Things Chocolate" to benefit Santa Maria Urban Ministry or SMUM. Peggy Aoki was the head chef, assisted by Jennifer Ezell of St. Tim's. The cooks clearly had fun putting together the meal, especially the desserts. Both dark and white chocolate fountains were offered for dipping strawberries and cake. My favorite was the ganache in shortbread boats. St. Tim's youth served the dinner. The event was hosted by the Vestry (elected church leaders). We won certificates for two custom made cakes in the silent auction.

My husband John Plocher and I are on the SMUM Board of Directors and were asked to speak about SMUM and why we support it. Some of what we said:

Santa Maria Urban Ministry was founded as an outreach ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real in 1983, providing emergency food to the residents of San Jose's inner city. SMUM is a partner agency of the Second Harvest Food Bank, and has been designated to serve those in need within the eight Central San Jose zip codes. SMUM provides basic services to meet short-term needs, such as food, clothing and referral services, and by supporting long-term transformation through education, counseling and seasonal programs.

John and I have been helping mentor a dozen or so grade and middle school kids in the after school program for several years. During the school year, we focus on homework and computer skills. Last summer, we went on field trips to The Tech Museum of Innovation, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the San Francisco Zoo.

Due to a shortage of regular volunteers, the after school program is only open on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but we could be open every weekday if we had more adults available. Sometimes we have too many high school students earning service hour credits; what we need is adult volunteers. When we started, John's and my qualifications were minimal - a desire to help, a couple of hours a week and a willingness to learn Spanish from a first grader! Since then, the kids have stolen our hearts. Our Spanish is improving slowly.

SMUM now has an operating budget of about $200,000/year, of which less than 15% comes from the Episcopal Church. More than 100 families a week from come to the facility for basic foodstuffs to supplement what they are able to buy with food stamps. Dozens of homeless clients get hygiene packs and clothing as well.

Several dozen children are part of the preschool and after school homework/computer programs. Many Latino clients work seasonally in the central valley as fieldworkers and move to San Jose on the off season to work in the construction and service areas. Unfortunately, it is still somewhat the norm in that community for young teens to drop out of school to babysit younger siblings or to go out to work along with their fathers, brothers and uncles in the fields. SMUM's after school program has two goals:

Every child will feel safe and cherished.

Every child will be encouraged to complete high school.

A Feast of All Things Chocolate, Photos

SMUM, Photos

Jordan Slott's Blog: Reviewing Wonderland Code In-World

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:56:07 +0000

As the Wonderland core team, we spend a lot of time using Wonderland. We use it for meetings, we use it for collaborative work, and we even use the world for socializing. But this week we tried something new: a group code review in Wonderland.

Code reviews are an on-going process that we usually work on asynchronously: I email out the code for review, and the reviewers get back to me once they have gone through it. While this is effective for small changes, in this case we wanted to review a large amount of code with the whole group. So we decided to get together in world and discuss the code together, almost like a reading group.

The biggest challenge was getting the code into world. We could have brought a NetBeans editor into world, but that would force everyone to have the same view. Instead, we used Drew Harry's slide spreader app to display PDFs of the source code. We found it works much better when everyone has their own view of the source. That way we can assign people to break out of the main discussion and answer specific questions before joining the main group again. And by using the spatial layout, we can always see at a glance where everyone is. Here is what it looks like in-world:

Overall, it worked pretty well. We were able to explore the code both as a group and individually. And seeing the code sweeping off into the distance definitely gave a sense of how much there is to review!

There is still plenty of room for improvement. We had to make the slides very big to make them easier to read, but this makes it hard to align your view with the slides. It would have been great to be able to see the code in the HUD. Also, there is no syntax highlighting and no ability to jump to other parts of the code, which would have sped things up significantly. All this got me thinking it would be nice to have a lightweight shared code viewer -- maybe based on JSyntaxPane -- to use in world. Sounds like a new module to write...

Jeff Alexander's Blog: Replicated Replicants

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:07:39 +0000

Oracle has just recently released a new version of Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition including new High Availability features. These allow you to keep multiple database instances in sync (using a single master). Some time ago I was asked if we'd like to help evaluate a pre-release version of the code, and of course I said yes. We've been waiting for HA features to be available in the database to implement our own replication support so it was a perfect fit for evaluation. Some very insightful people had good things to say about it. Since we had a head start, I already have a working version of the AURA Data Store with replication.

The AURA Data Store has three tiers - the Data Store Head serves as the communication point to the outside world and also distributes queries to each of the many Partition Clusters. Partition Clusters each represent a single partition of the data, replicated across a cluster of Replicants. Until recently we only supported a single Replicant, but thanks to BDB-JE/HA we now have support for multiple replicas. If you're following along in the source code you'll want to update to the "replication" branch to see the work being done. Adding support was fairly straightforward once I got a handle on how each of the nodes in a replication group are connected to each other. We already had infrastructure that expected to work this way, so integration was smooth. When setting up the group, you specify how closely synchronized the replicas need to be, and when committing transactions you can specify just how far into the disk or network you want the commit to go before returning. So we commit to the master and in a few seconds we can expect to see changes in the replicas.

The only catch was that we maintain both a database and a search engine. We haven't put any support in the search engine for HA (although a single index can have multiple readers and writers if we were sharing it). So for the time being I have a thread that picks up any changed item keys from the master and informs the replicas that they should fetch those items from their respective databases and re-index them. What would be nice would be if we could get an event stream from the database in the replicas notifying us that a new or updated item just came in. Another option might be to actually store the search engine's data in the database and let it do the replication, but the nature of the inverted file doesn't really lend itself to this (at least, not with any hope of performing well).

Anyway, the real excitement here was that for the first time, we got to see our data store visualization show us multiple Replicants for each Partition Cluster:

This is a screenshot showing a very small ("two-way") data store. It is running with only one DataStoreHead, and the data is divided across two partitions. Each partitions has three Replicants. While the Replicants are drawn inside the Partition Clusters, it should be noted that they are actually separate processes running on separate machines. The grouping is just a logical view. I opened up the overall Item Stats display to show that we only have a small number of items. To make the screenshot more interesting, I'm running a 2,000 user load test that simulates the actual operations users would perform (basically, a weighted mix of getting item details, searching, and getting live recommendations) when using an application such as the Music Explaura.

As you can see in the image, we're distributing query load fairly evenly across all Replicants in each Partition Cluster. Replicants do most of the heavy lifting in terms of data crunching. In order to benefit from the greater amount of cache afforded us by the greater number of processes/memory, we distribute what queries we can based on the hash code of the item key, thereby asking for the same items from the same Replicants. The Partition Clusters are doing a little work in distributing those queries, and the Data Store Head is doing a little more work in that it needs to combine results from across Partition Clusters.

I plan to do some more posting about how BDB-JE/HA is integrated into the AURA Data Store, so stay tuned!

Katy Dickinson's Blog: 1007 Circle Park, Knoxville, Tennessee

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:14:41 +0000

My mother, Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson, grew up at 1007 Circle Park Drive, Knoxville, Tennessee. This address does not exist any more. In the mid-1960's, the whole neighborhood was torn down to make room for the University of Tennessee. You can check out Circle Park on Google Maps: the satellite view shows that Circle Park itself is still there but the round street around it is now called Circle Park Drive SW or Circle Park Drive. Originally, Circle Park was a private open space owned by the houses around it.

It is surprising how much of a presence a house that does not exist still has. 1007 Circle Park stood on its own acre of land. It had towers, secret passages (an air gap between inner and outer walls), and a teardrop-shaped carriage drive in the side yard with a porte-cochere to keep the rain off. There were stables and three servant quarters in the back. My great grandfather, Walter Van Gilder, bought the house around 1910. It was ornate Victorian in style, built around the time of the American Civil War.

After 1965, when Evelyn Van Gilder Creekmore and Robert Elmond Creekmore (my grandparents) knew that their home would be torn down, they took as much of the house with them as they could when they moved. This included doors, architectural trim, windows, banisters, and ironwork as well as furniture. Over the years those pieces have been installed in a variety of our family's houses in California and Tennessee.

My husband, John Plocher just finished bolting the extremely heavy black iron fireback (featuring Poseidon and seahorses) into the exterior wall of his new workshop. In our house, we also have furniture carved by Ellen Bolli Van Gilder (my great grandma), a parlor screen with six paintings by my ancestress Mary Esperandieu, the newel post from the 1007 Circle Park staircase, a heater grate, a metal fire screen, several panels of stained glass and clear leaded glass, and a variety of mirrors that Walter Van Gilder made himself for 1007 Circle Park.

The bottom left photo shows the front door of 1007 Circle Park on the day my mother married my father in 1952. In the picture, she is being escorted to the wedding by her father, R.E. Creekmore, flanked by my other grandparents (B.W.O. Dickinson and Gladys Grace Oakes Dickinson) and Ellen Bolli Van Gilder. The doors and stained glass panel in the back of that 1952 photo are the same doors and stained glass panel in my parents' house in San Francisco now, shown on the right with my mother at the door. Walter Van Gilder made the glass panel.

Karl Haberl's Blog: Slipstream: A Framework for Building Scalable Games

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:23:25 +0000

Developers using Project Darkstar to simplify the development and execution of horizontally scalable online games should check out a new project focused on effective programming for that environment. Slipstream presents a framework for game development with Project Darkstar and includes both an open source code base and a detailed programming guide providing examples, patterns and best practices. Slipstream is intended to help Project Darkstar developers focus on how their game logic can be more easily designed to build better, more scalable applications. The guide lists effective programming practices, and the code uses specific interfaces like Game, Player or Region to give clear direction about how to use Project Darkstar and implement the guide's best-practices. The goal of the framework is to make it extremely easy to write a first game, and then extend and expand that game as it needs to grow. Grab the Slipstream code and read through the guide to simplify and improve your Project Darkstar game development project. For more details, start with the forum post where the project was announced. Have fun!

Katy Dickinson's Blog: Geek Heaven - HSC Electronic Supply

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:51:08 +0000

HSC Electronic Supply of Santa Clara, California is geek heaven. The better-known Fry's Electronics is a pale shadow in comparison (Fry's sells steam irons and manila folders as well as motherboards). According to the New York Times in their 4 February 2009 article "A Haven for Spare Parts Lives On in Silicon Valley", by Ashlee Vance:

"For close to 50 years, Halted has supplied the do-it-yourself electronics enthusiasts so common in Silicon Valley with just about anything they could imagine. Like the many electronics stores once populating the area, Halted helped turn entrepreneurs’ inklings into huge success stories. These days, however, Halted caters more to hobbyists than titans of industry because much of the fundamental computing manufacturing has moved to Asia... Apple’s co-founders, Steven P. Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, shopped at Halted, hunting down parts for their first products."

My husband, John Plocher and I were at HSC the other day looking for parts for his HO-scale model train layout. If you like putting together your own electronics, you will be happy at Halted.

Katy Dickinson's Blog: Sculptural Agave

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:02:40 +0000

Agave is one of my favorite plants. I am growing an agave hedge along the side of our driveway; in a few years, it will be taller than I am. The stiff and thorny strap-like leaves arrange themselves like a living sculpture. Weeding around agave is painful (I use very long tongs). Some photos of my agave just after a light rain:

Owen Kellett's Blog: Cannon Mountain

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:26:09 +0000

Owen and Katy atop Cannon Mountain

For several weeks, now, Katy and I have been hoping to knock off another 4000 foot mountain in our goal of hiking all of New Hampshire’s 4000 footers. With winter closing in, there aren’t too many weekends left before we would likely be hiking on a snow covered trail. With the recent unseasonably warm temperatures here in the Northeast, though, we planned a quick day hike up Cannon Mountain for this past weekend. Cannon Mountain is “across the street” from Mounts Lafayette and Lincoln, our first conquest, and is home to what once was the iconic Old Man of the Mountain. There are several routes up it, but we chose to start our ascent from the Lafayette Campground on the southeast side of the mountain.

The quality of the weather for this trip was in doubt right up until we took our first step on the trail. A significant rain event was forecast for all day Saturday and into Sunday morning, but it was unclear when things would clear out on Sunday. We were feeling optimistic, though, and were up before sunrise on Sunday and began the two hour ride to Franconia Notch in the dark and in the rain. By the time we reached the trailhead, the rain had stopped and patches of blue sky were trying to break through the low clouds and the fog. Things were looking up and we were on the trail at 8:40AM.

Katy navigating through some serious boulders

Even after deciding to start our hike from Lafayette Campground, there were still a number of interconnecting trails that could get us to the top of the mountain. On the way up, we hiked all the way out past Lonesome Lake via the Lonesome Lake Trail and continued our ascent up this trail to its northern terminus where it met the Kinsman Ridge Trail. The Lonesome Lake Trail was well maintained with a reasonably moderate grade as we ascended about 1700 feet of elevation in 2.3 miles. From there, we followed the Kinsman Ridge Trail to the summit. The most technically challenging and steepest part of the climb was definitely the section between the end of the Lonesome Lake Trail and the junction with the Hi-Cannon trail (about 0.4 miles from the summit). In this section we went up about 500 feet of elevation in less than half a mile, requiring quite a bit of scrambling over large boulders and roots. We reached the top a little bit after 11:00AM.

Katy doing a Matrix style pose at the summit

There’s a tramway and ski area on the opposite side of the mountain that we hiked, so the summit is fairly well developed with an observation tower at the peak. It was warm, even at the top of the mountain, with temperatures in the 50’s and we were able to enjoy at least some partial views with clearing skies and mountain tops peaking out of the clouds to our north and west. It was quite a bit of a different feel than our early October hike with fall foliage nearing peak season. This time around the trees were bare with evergreens peppering the mountain sides. There wasn’t much to see to the south and east, though, as some low, stubborn clouds had settled in, obscuring the views over to Lafayette and the Franconia Ridge. We hung out at the top for a while and ate our lunch before heading back down.

Owen overlooking Lonesome Lake on Hi-Cannon Trail

On the hike down, we decided to take a slightly different route. Instead of going down the steepest section of the Kinsman Ridge Trail to Lonesome Lake Trail, we decided to take a left turn at the Hi-Cannon trail. This trail was narrower and seemed a little less traveled. We had to deal with some quite steep sections of long, slippery rocks, including one ledge that was so impossibly steep that a ladder was constructed to assist hikers. Some trail descriptions peg the middle portion of this trail as the most difficult trail on Cannon Mountain. There were several neat lookout ledges along the route overlooking Lonesome Lake with views down the notch. The Hi-Cannon Trail met up with the Lonesome Lake Trail less than a half mile from the trailhead and we arrived back at the car at 1:40PM. Total time was about five hours round trip for six miles of hiking including our extended break at the summit. We drove back home, stopping for some food along the way and were back home before 6PM from a quick, but satisfying and enjoyable trip to the Whites with Katy.

For those keeping track, that’s 3 down with 45 to go!