Hans Muller's Blog: September 2003 Archive

I noticed that Chris Campbell's blog often includes a note about what music he was listening to as he wrote. This seems like a nice personal touch so I thought I'd copy it. I'm listening to a funny John Prine song about predicting the future and the chorus goes like this:

We are living in the future, I'll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper fifteen years ago
We're all driving rocket ships and talking with our minds
Wearing turquoise jewelry and standing in soup lines

As we get closer to the future this seems less funny. It's not because I don't like turquoise jewelry or because my rocket ship seats seven - but not comfortably. Here in Silicon valley the software business is changing. That's not saying much, it's hard to imagine any business that's changed as much as our has in the last twenty years. What's not funny is that much of the work is leaving for other places and other countries where it can be done more cheaply.

A long time ago, when I was in college, I had a front row seat for the final act of the Disappearance of the Steel Industry in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. It had become cheaper to manufacture steel elsewhere and to have the work down by other people. It never occurred to me that the industry I was hoping to join might suffer the same slow fate. Of course it is, just as surely as one can increase profits by cutting costs. Last week the local paper's technology section included a column that gleefully warned the "Larry Lunchpails" of Silicon valley that their mid-level technology jobs were headed to Beijing and Bangalore. This is hardly a breaking story, in fact I noticed that the most popular java.net blog from August is a call to arms about the very same topic.

If current trends persist, one has to wonder what will become of the software engineering business here in Silicon Valley. Will an aging Ross Perot announce that he has finally found the source of the "giant sucking sound" he first heard back in 1996? Will some industry pundit finally be right about the biotech industry? Will there be souplines? I'm thinking that the answer can be found in Microsoft's market share and in computer viruses.

Microsoft's software runs on more than ninety percent of the computers connected to the internet. It has become the dank fetid breeding ground for computer viruses, a mosquito infested swamp that needs to be drained. And why are our Microsoftware computers so vulnerable? Why is it that each successive computer plague leaves an even bigger infestation than the last one? It's not (just) because Microsoft has a unique talent for creating the gaping security holes that computer viruses flow through. It's because their success has created a monoculture and any farmer will tell you that monocultures are highly susceptible to disease epidemics. Our computer farm lacks variety. Which brings me back to Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley is a diverse place. We're multicultural on many levels, from the places we come from to the places we think technology should go. Silicon Valley boosters will tell you that we're more innovative or that we work harder (but please don't say "work smarter") or that the entrepreneurial spirit is stronger here than anywhere else. I'm glad to believe that it's all true however I think the reason we're going to thrive in spite of the gravitational pull generated by lower costs is because of our differences. I don't know what idea is going to trigger the next economic boom however I'm confident that creative thoughts buzzing around in the brain of each technology dreamer here in Silicon Valley are unique. Most of those ideas will fuel little more than insomnia however thanks to large numbers it's inevitable that a few of them will be great. Insanely great. And because they're here, the individuals who possess the great ideas will not be able to avoid bumping into neighbors and friends and aquaintances who will help them get the next gold rush rolling. Right here.

LinuxWorld Tradeshow Shows Desktop Java

Posted by hansmuller on September 03, 2003 at 07:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A few weeks ago I attended LinuxWorld up in San Francisco. I marched around the tradeshow and took notes about what I saw, notably the impressive collection of desktop Java applications on display. If I was a good blogger or even a disciplined one, I would have immediately collected my impressions and published them. Sadly I'm easily distracted and rarely disciplined and so my little collection of observations has been gathering dust. Just now I'm sitting on an airplane bound for San Jose and the person seated in front of me has graciously (and inexplicably) kept his seat upright, leaving enough room for my hulking laptop to open. So it's time to get this little item written.

HP has a new storage rack named HP StorageWorks NAS 8000 which comes with a Swing administration UI deployed as an applet. In addition to displaying and setting administration parameters it allows to bring up a performance monitor that graphically displays parameters like network traffic etc. The representative I talked with said the engineering team used Swing because they really wanted to do some "hardcore coding". I'm happy to report that they've produced a nice GUI however it's always troubling to hear this kind of work described as challenging. We need to find ways to make it easier.

I saw a bunch of nice looking Swing GUIs in the Veritas booth and also in Dell's booth. Dell was showing the Veritas Cluster Manager front-end. Most of the Veritas administration front-ends were Swing, some of them looked pretty slick.

Computer Associates had a nice Swing GUI for their "eTrust AntiVirus App". The CA representative on the floor showed me a similar and much older Motif GUI running on Solaris. I voted for using the new Java GUI on Solaris, I'll look for that next year.

Appro was one of the many companies showcasing a big dark intimidating rack of servers and storage. They've got a very good looking remote management GUI for their "BladeDome" (even the name sounds ominous) HPC product.

Novell was showing their Swing GUI for the "GroupWise" Personal Information Manager (PIM) front-end. Apparently they've got a native Win32 PIM and they use the Java version to reach the Mac/Linux/Solaris markets.

I talked with a very tired but very friendly and helpful representative from Arkeia about the very futuristic Java front-end they've built for their backup system. It looks more like a custom MP3 player than a backup admin console - definitely the most exotic admin console I've seen.

GenaWare is a small map visualization company. They've got Swing client called "GeoVisJ" that based on a custom vector graphics map renderer. The GUI isn't going to win any beauty contests but map data is always interesting, and they've got a lot of it.

I'm sure you'd like to see screenshots of some of these apps. We'll try and collect a nice set in an upcoming Swing Sightings column. Don't miss the current column (yes, this is a shameless plug), you'll find it here on the Swing Connection site at http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc .

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