Month: October 2022

Memories, Dreams and Refractions: Sun Microsystems Part II

I recently came across a Hacker News article that was just a pointer to a copy of the SunOS version 4.11 source code. This led me to want to add my first comment to Hacker News but the UI of my browser (Harmonic) defeated me. Visiting the main web site (https://news.ycombinator.com) didn’t help. So I said to myself “heck with it, I’ll publish it here”.

Ironically rev 4 of SunOS was the version that was a steaming pile of bugs  and the developers were emulating the OS360 misadventure: adding bugs as fast as fixes. It was this disaster that led to development of Sun's Software Development Framework (SDF). When I joined in '97 the kernel development standards were amazingly high and continuing to improve. PSARC (Platform Solaris Architecture Committee), headed by Glen Skinner, rode herd over the interfaces for most of the time I was at the company. The single coolest aspect of the Sun SDF was acknowledgment that one size fits all doesnt work together with support for local dev process customization. They also included celebrations of milestone completions. It was written in a joyful tone and my copy of this document is a personal treasure.

I joined Sun in 1997 when Encore Computer Inc, an early SMP pioneer that morphed into a smart storage vendor, was acquired. Steve Goldman and I, based in a hole in the wall office in Cary, North Carolina, were chased out of the storage division of Sun at the end of 1998 when division director Janpieter Shreeder put out an edict that everybody working for him had to be in locations A-D. Jenny and I, with daughter Emily a babe in arms, visited the Broomfield Colorado Sun site but decided not to move. We got our layoff papers but as that was happening an angel employee behind the scenes informed us of an opportunity in the Java Technology Group (JTG) of the Solaris Software Division. We “interviewed” at the Burlington Massachusetts site to join the runtime group within the java virtual machine development organization. I quote this because our reputations preceded us and the meeting was just a formality. I was very sick while getting over a severe sinus infection but shared in the upbeat enthusiasm of the Java VM Runtime department that hired us.

The first assignment given to Steve and I was to evaluate the Hotspot virtual machine and the Solaris Java Exact VM. We did a very thorough job and by the end the Exact VM and Hotspot VM camps hated us equally. We declared Hotspot the technology Solaris Software should adopt in place of Exact VM and one of the Sun Labs researchers quit on the spot and there were a lot of hard feelings. Steve and I regretted this being our introduction to the division, but we were old pros and respected for how we handled it. We and a few of the other runtime group members proceeded to port Hotspot to X86 Solaris before upper management realized they would want that to happen. That was an amusing summer and fall of upper management befuddlement, but our line manager Laurie Tolson was THE BEST and gave us her full support.

Janpieter had been director of Solaris Software before taking over Storage. During one visit to Burlington Steve and I were told that in the former era, prior to Janpieter visiting that site a manager had to visit the mens rooms and make sure his picture was removed from the bottom of the urinals. That’s how much they loved Janpieter.

Racing was a model for my life

June 2006 Wheelie

Five minutes of the Isle of Man TT racing created by Don Novak. Play it LOUD with full screen video.

IsleofMan2012WithinTemptationFaster

Motorcycle racing was an important model for my life. Motorcycle racing epitomized best practices and best prepared equipment leading to achievement of a goal. The idea of racing and the excellence required to win became the north star of my life. I carried with me this model of becoming completely prepared to do tasks meaningful to me to the best of my ability. Early in my life I developed the habit of finding and testing limits to know just how far I could push myself in a broad range of situations. In many cases this made me a maverick and I gradually got used to that. It also made me develop and yammer the old saw that “I’ve worn out guardian angels”, and worse, “If it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing”. I believe my drive to excellence has its roots in the influence of my father: a man who gladly taught me as much as he could about how to thrive until I was well into my teens and christianity became his be-all to end-all. Dad was fearless in a great many circumstances and taught me how to be prepared well enough to perform at a very high level without fear. Alas, fear of failure and performance anxiety caught up with me and plagued me for major chunks of my life but I seem to be past that now.

Life circumstances didn’t allow for me to ever get on a real race track with a motorcycle. But I created my own “track” of a seven mile loop of mountain roads in Huntsville, Alabama and I practiced on that pretend track a lot, mostly on Sunday mornings after delivering my newspapers. I always stayed in the right lane in case of oncoming traffic. There never was any in the earliest morning hours.

At age 11 I started delivering newspapers on a fat-tired single speed bike that weighed a ton. As I saved for a lighter bike with gears I started dreaming about having a motorcycle. Then when I found out that I could have one when I was 14 I started dreaming of riding it and I spent hundreds of hours reading and imagining myriad situations and how I would handle them. I knew a lot about riding before first sitting on motorcycle. I found magazines that covered grand prix (now “MotoGP”) motorcycle road racing and I started to dream about that. Then I found the ultimate road race, the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy and I started dreaming of taking part in that “some day”.

Yamaha 80 similar to what I rode from age 14 to 16
Honda 150 similar to what I rode from age 16 to 17. My riding buddy Bill Elston talked me into this ’cause (IFIRC) his parents wanted him to have this model vs the racy looking 160. I was an idiot to not get the 160.
250cc Bultaco Metralla cafe racer similar to the one I rode from age 17 to 19

Starting at age 14 and continuing to my sophomore year at university I wore out two motorcycles and put a lot of miles on the third . The pictures above are of the same make and models I owned.

To stay alive on a motorcycle takes practice. I practiced a lot.

In 2005 I played the final act in a tragicomic drama named JSR121 by telling a bunch of Euro techies that Sun was reneging on delivering JSR121 to the java.lang.isolate package (i.e. making it a required part of Java). After that my subconscious declared success and gave me a huge intuitive instruction to celebrate my achievement while my conscious mind contemplated the steaming pile the work seemed to be to me in relation to how it would have been if a reference implementation such as Miles Sabin’s, written in good time for Java 5, or that of Greg Czajkowski et al that could have been provided in Java 6. I could deliver the architecture but the politics of Sun “merely” having a reference that demonstrated one of the three supported implementation styles were mystifying. Completing the tasks in my power by telling the world that Sun was committing its users to classloader hell forever was a monumental achievement to my subconscious and a career-ending disaster to my conscious mind.

But for whatever reason in 2006 my subconscious declared it PARTY TIME to celebrate the years of effort I’d put into creating, organizing and conducting the JSR121 standards process and making two attempts to get a reference implementation approved.

600cc, 125 horsepower Yamaha YZF-R6 that I rode from age 56 to 59

This was my street bike in 2006. I rode it until 2009. I scratched the left bottom fairing on a curb at a fast food place but otherwise had no “incidents” with this motorcycle. It required absolute respect. It accelerated to 150mph without effort while giving the sensation of being in a military jet with the cockpit open. It stopped on a dime and gave nine cents change. It handled with high precision, allowing me to ride between highway edge lines and the surrounding dirt at illegal speeds. The ergonomics were hideous up until about 80mph at which point my weight was taken off the handlebars and it was comfortable. I practiced a lot of maneuvers away from traffic to get myself ready for the race track.

Full race Yamaha R6 sans fairing I prepared to race at age 56

This was my full race R6. In 2006 it had a nice fairing. The exhaust note was like something from the depths of Mordor. I bought it from a guy in Atlanta. He was amazingly patient dealing with someone two and a half times his age.

But I never got the race bike on a track. Instead of maintaining focus on this I went back to school to take a senior level honors matrix theory course. Then reality cracked open, I realized 2006 had been truly over the top and I fell into a bipolar II depression that gripped me tight for three and a half years.

So fast forward 15 years to spring of 2021 when I sat on a dear friend’s porch in Huntsville Alabama, waiting for the fateful appointment informing him that he was a dead man walking to end. I was talking with my daughter when it all of a sudden hit me that I could not, no matter how hard I tried, race a motorcycle at any point in the future. The reasons were obvious: their names are Jenny and Emily. I cried. Now, a good while after my friend’s death I’m ending this treatise on a dream that started at age 11 while using this sign over my workstation to help me keep myself tamed.