Greg Luck's Blog

While having a few drinks with some French-speaking colleagues at  Le Meridien hotel in San Francisco during JavaOne 2010 I realised that French speakers have a cool name for a load phenomenon of online systems

It is difficult to tune an online system for the average daily traffic volume because it varies a lot during the day. Specifically in my experience it is common to see demand rise in the morning to a midday peak then lull somewhat in the afternoon to be followed by a lower mid-evening peak. Things then quiten down. Now my experience is in travel systems. The explanation we had was that though some of the usage was business related, a lot was leisure. And users would tend to search and book travel at lunchtime and then after dinner.

It turns out that French speaking people have come across the same phenomenon but were clever enough to give it a name: The Elephant Curve. The reference is to Le Petit Prince, a best-selling children’s story from  1943 which has been published in 190 languages. In the book a boa constrictor swallows an elephant. The silhouette of the boa then becomes an elephant curve. Though I did not read the book at school it seems that many people have.

Here is the elephant curve illustration from the book

So I plan on calling the E-commerce daily double spike the elephant curve from now on like the Francophones do. I am going to add this as a slide in my talks and to my Caching Theory chapter on ehcache.org.

Thanks to Ludovic Orban (Belgian) and Alex Snaps (German/Belgian) for appraising me of this.

Online Petition

This year’s JavaOne was a dismal affair. Crammed into the Hilton hotel and Parc 55, the feeling was that Oracle had ruined the conference. And the dual conference idea also caused Java people problems: those that tried to attend the key note at Moscone with JavaOne passes were turned away – instead needing to go to the Hilton ballroom to see it televised.

Last year, Larry shocked many with a goof ball suggestion to port OpenOffice to JavaFX. This year attendees were shocked to hear of the cancellation of JavaFX. Those giving and attending sessions on the topic felt it was futile. I was never convinced that JavaFX would be able to get the sort of dominance required to make it work as a browser platform. But what of Java 7, something I am interested in? The beer talk I heard at the Thirsty Bear, was that the JCP has stalemated for the past year on Java 7 over Oracle wanting to add a “restricted field of use condition” to it restricting the OpenJDK to desktop and server, not mobile. One possibility is for Oracle to abandon the JCP and just release it. The other rumour floating around is that future free versions of the JDK will be reference implementations, with higher quality or more fully featured versions only available under commercial license.

All of this suggests to me that Java as we have known it is over. Should we wait for Java to lose momentum and popularity to other languages? Or should we as a community step up and go in a new direction. I prefer the latter. Following is a sketch of how this could be done.

What to call the fork

Java is famous for coffee but also for volcanoes. So let’s call the new fork Lava.

Lava Foundation

We don’t want one company to take over the fork. What would be best is if  a foundation, like the Linux Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, or Eclipse Foundation be formed. This group would be funded by corporations with deep enough pockets to make it work such as Google, IBM, HP and RedHat.

It would be a non-profit foundation.

It would  perform the following duties:

Write Once, Run Anywhere

So how would we maintain this guarantee? The Lava compiler and Virtual Machine would remain backwardly compatible with Java 6. That way the vast array of existing code would work. Then depending on IP restrictions, Lava versions could add support for new language features in later versions of Java. If IP restrictions would preclude that it stays with Java 6.

The question then becomes whether developers would write to the new Java versions or to the evolving Lava. The answer likely would depend on market traction. In favour of Oracle is that it is the real Java. However  if you need to pay license fees to Oracle for the higher quality implementations you would likely want to run in production, then that would come at a cost. If enough commercial companies supported Lava so that it was very high quality, then developers would follow. And developers would want the open source version to win.

I am interested in what the community thinks of this idea. Ping me at gluck AT gregluck.com.

Updates

October 7:

Stefan Asemota created a Lava Foundation facebook page here.

October 14:

Well, some interesting developments have occurred in the last week. IBM and Oracle jointly announced that IBM was switching from project Harmony to OpenJDK and would:

work with IBM and others to enhance and improve the JCP.

What does this last one mean? Trink Guarino clarified this for me:

This includes improving the collaboration with other standards bodies, increasing the participation in the JCP processes and expert groups as well as improving the efficiency of the specification process.

A close reading of the various corporate blogs and press releases shows that the approach between the two companies was made after the reaction to this blog. So, here is hoping that IBM, by negotiating in it’s own interest, will also open things up for the community.

Finally, what about the conference? Happily I was asked to give some feedback on JavaOne, which I did in great detail. Beyond that I am going to Devoxx 2010 and will be speaking there on “The essence of Caching”. With Google there, and hopefully the European non-attenders of JavaOne this year, it should be a bumper conference and may well be the largest Java conference this year.

Well it has been a very West Wing few weeks here in Australia. A hung parliament, with 6 reps deciding the future Australian Government. In the end it came down to Tony Windsor, the member for New England, and broadband.

New England is a region in the north of NSW which takes in Armidale right up to the Queensland border, which is where I come in. Curlew Retreat, my country retreat, is in New England. And I have worked from there quite a bit on Ehcache. Indeed people like me, and how we connect to the Internet and what we can do with it, were central to Tony Windsor’s decision.

Curlew Retreat is remote. It is about 30km equidistant from it’s nearest towns. It is in rugged country and is out of mobile phone service. So a reasonable proxy for problematic country Internet access.

Now, I know one or two things about networking, and have, over the last 3 years, worked through a succession of ideas for Internet access. When I first set up the retreat I was considering dial-up. There is an old Telstra cable which cuts through my property. However with a rooftop antenna I was able to get Telstra Next G Internet access. I got 1GB for $60 per month. In the end it was very unreliable. Atmospheric conditions would cause it to disconnect up to twice per minute. This would cause my base station to drop the DHCP connections which played havoc with connected computers. The Maxon modem and base station would also crash. I told guests to turn power off to the retreat and then turn it back on to reset it.

All of these problems led me to satellite. Due to the Australian Government’s “Broadband Guarantee” I was able to get around $3,000 of satellite equipment for free, fully installed. I purchased mine from Active8me. I get 2GB per month for $29.95. This service, and the modem, have proved to be very reliable. Problem solved.

Which brings us to the election. Tony Windsor, decided to join with the ALP, on the basis that broadband to New England would be better if done with fibre. The ALP’s plan, with fibre to the curb for 93% of the population (which is about the percentage that is urban) and then enhanced satellite for the rest, is budgeted at $43 billion. The Coalition’s is a fraction of that, which uses fibre for trunks between cities and towns, and then a market for local delivery.

Now, will Curlew Retreat get fibre to the farm? No. The only difference is that the Coalition was going to bring enhanced satellite earlier. So for Curlew Retreat, there is disadvantage to the ALP plan. And Tony Windsor, who represents New England, made his decision for the ALP based on this??

Finally, for what it is worth, what will people do with fibre to the curb? My prediction is HD TV and movies on demand. And porn. I expect 3D HD porn to emerge as a format and be the main app that requires the fibre. Certainly my svn commits do not.

The last time I was in the US a few months ago I was told that the grace period for the new ESTA US Non Visa Waiver program would expire in a few months. Because that time was not up, I did not apply.

While this is true the US Department of Immigration in addition requires all Air New Zealand travellers to use the ESTA program. So on attempting to board we had to apply. No problem.

I searched for “us visa waiver australians” and up came three “Sponsored Links”

1. ESTA Application Website

   www.estaaustralia.org Welcome to the U.S. ESTA Application Website.

2. ESTA Application Website

   www.ESTA-au.org Welcome to the U.S. ESTA Application Website.

3. Australian Travel Advice

   www.smartraveller.gov.au Check out the information that is not in your guidebook before you go

I filled out the applications on the first link. AUD53 payment was required for each which I provided by credit card.

Then back to the check-in counter. The applications had not come through which was strange. Then they said there is no fee. Finally they have leaflets for the site you are meant to use which is https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov

This smelt like a scam. Air New Zealand rang the US Consulate who confirmed that I had not been registered, and then pointed out that I didn’t need to be because the grace period was not over

Final call was to the Commonwealth Bank to cancel my credit card and dispute the payments. A fun boarding.

Welcome to the new Greg Luck blog, powered by WordPress and a new hosting company.

I will be importing my old blog entries along with comments in the next few days.

New Hotness

I am seriously impressed with Amazon’s cloud offering. You get a pick list of virtual machines of different sizes, a CDN, monitoring with elastic forking of new instances, fixed IPs if required, S3, attachable storage and the ability to release software as .amis for easy deployment, map-reduce with Hadoop, load balancing and a payment service.

Each of these is configurable via a RESTful web service. Each one has command-line tools that interact with the web services which you can easily script. And I can see that the new https://console.aws.amazon.com management console will bring this together into an easy to use package. Right now there is a tab for EC2 and another for Map-Reduce. Give it a few more months and I can see this populated with tabs for the other services.

Ehcache Server AMI

I love EC2 so much that I decided to create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Ehcache Server. It is marked public and is available for anyone to use. I see it being used in two ways:

• To quickly try out and demo Ehcache Server. If you have an EC2 account you can be up and running in less than a minute.
• As an example of how to deploy Ehcache Server. The AMI comes with an init.d script for service control and ipchains rules mapping ports 80 and 81. You can use it as a template to create your own AMI with your own cache configuration.

Getting Started

1. Create a new virtual machine. Select ami-3512f45c from the Community AMIs tab. Select a security configuration and a machine size (small is fine) and start it up. Ehcache Server will start automatically.
2. To test it, hit it with http://amazon_instance_address/ehcache/rest/sampleCache1. From there, try writing a client. See the Cache Server documentation for sample client code in several languages.
3. To make configuration changes log into your machine. Ehcache Server is insatalled in /root/ehcache-server-0.7.

Video Tutorial

I have put all this in a video tutorial.

Me:decoded

Ancestry

Mitochondrial & Y DNA

Compared With

Susceptibilities

Ever seen the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles? Some travelers are caught up in an unbelievable snafu trying to get home for Thanksgiving.
Well, Brett Dargan, a colleague, and I had our own version of this over the past two days. We came down to Sydney to run an Architecture Away Day. All went well. We were sitting at the Swiss Grand Resort and Spa looking out over Bondi beach, knocking down beers with the attendees after the event about 5:30pm when the waiter (server for my US readers) pointed out a big storm brewing to the South. I felt the first unease.
Then a few minutes later I received an ominous SMS from Virgin Blue to tell me that my 7pm flight had been delayed. I rang up Customer Service, but of course several hundred other people were trying to do the same thing, so I gave up after spending 6 minutes in the queue. More beers. Brett then rang up 15 minutes later and got through. We were now on a 9pm flight. So, off to the Cricketer’s Arms Hotel in Surrey with Nugget for Tapas and more beers.
Having a good time at the Cricketers Arms. Catching up with some former colleagues and enjoying some great Tapas: Chorizo, Lamb Kofta and Grilled Haloumi, washed down with Pure Blonde low carb beer. Mike Edwards, a fellow drinker mentioned “Great lightning show out there”. Sure enough the storm that had been brewing was now coming close and looking bad. So I checked http://bom.gov.au and saw that there was a severe weather warning for Sydney over the next few hours, with heavy rain and damaging winds.
At this point I was beginning to think that it could be a bad night. By now it was time to go to the airport, so we said our goodbyes and went outside – right into a massive rain downpour. We managed to flag a taxi who, when we said the airport for our destination, said no, then drove 20 metres down the road, and then waved to us to get in. The street was a river by now, with 5 cm of water over the asphalt. We both got soaked to our ankles. From there we had an uneventful ride to the airport.
All went well until we got on our plane. We sat and waited, and waited, and waited. Then the steward, who was already looking well harried, made an announcement that a Flight Instrument was broken, and engineers were trying to fix it. This went on for half an hour, after which were deplaned. More waiting at the gate and then it was announced they had a plane for us at the opposite end of the airport at the JetStar terminal. We all trudged through an airport whose shops were closing up down there and eventually got on another plane. For non regular Sydney visitors, note that Sydney has a flight curfew of 11pm. Anyway the we got on, the baggage got loaded and were taxied out and waited to access the runway. And waited. And waited.
By now it was 10:30pm. Then the harried steward came on the Intercom and said that we were waiting for some other flights to land (I guess they take precedence when you get close to the curfew) before we could take off. He mentioned that we would be cutting the curfew close. After that we had regular updates every 5 minutes, as we moved inexorably towards the curfew time.
Now it was 11:02 pm. It was not looking good. Then the captain came on with encouraging news: we were now after curfew, but we had a flight clearance and could take off on the East-West runway out over the ocean. We were waiting for a few other planes.
At this point we allowed to move around the cabin. The harried steward kindly explained that the snafu had started at 3:30pm while the weather was still fine. He blamed short staffed Sydney air traffic controllers.
A few minutes later he came back on to say the cross-winds were too high, and we, along with several other 737s were waiting for them to abate. The larger planes were getting away.
You can guess what happened next. The captain announced the winds were not abating and we were going back to the gate, just as soon as a gate was available, because of course most of the airport and Virgin Blue staff had gone home. 10 minutes later we deplaned into a enclosed gangway. One problem: the door to the airport was locked. We sat in there like rats in a trap for a quarter hour before we were finally let out.
Back at the gate we sat around and waited, and waited, while Virgin Blue figure out what we all going to do. In the end they announced we would need to sleep at the airport, because “the delay was weather related”. I guess it was apart from the broken plane which caused our particular problem, which was in their control, and the airport issues which were not.
At this point Brett and I ran for a taxi to try and get a local hotel. Three hotels later I realised that other flights had already been bounced by the curfew ahead of us. We ended up back in the city at the Grace Hotel. The Night Auditor was checking us, and a horde of other stranded travelers in. I imagine this scene was being played out all across the city.
So, as I write this entry, I am sitting at Gate 39 at Sydney airport for a 12 noon flight. It was just announced over the intercom that our flight would be delayed due to our cabin crew not having yet arrived…