Geodog

Geodog is back

I am back up and running, after a week's absence. What a pain it has been. For some still unknown reason, the Berkeley DB that Movable Type uses got corrupted. See my posts on the MT forums if you are really interested in the gritty details of how I figured this out. My hosting provider, phpwebhosting, who usually does a pretty good job, claims that nothing changed on my server. I am not aware of any "out of disk space" errors. So why or how did it get corrupted? Shades of my old experiences with Radio, which is what made me move over to Movable Type.

In order to recover my blog, I had to go through all my old posts and convert the information into the form required by MovableType's import format. At this point, I discovered I had made some unfortunate choices when editing my templates, such as getting rid of the seconds in the time format.

An alpha geek might have whipped up a perl script to do this in an hour. A sensible person might have just resigned himself to a long evening or two of tedious of cutting and pasting and retyping.

In my case, not being sensible person, and being a wannabe geek instead of a real alpha geek, I decided to take the opportunity to learn the macro language of my text editor, NoteTab Pro. Side note: I have been using NoteTab for years now. It is the Swiss army knife of text editors. Versatile, simple to use, but also very powerful. Highly recommended.

Add problems with my neighbor's new 802.11b wireless network putting mine out of commission and a child with scarlet fever, and it has taken me a while to get back up and running. But I am back up now, having reinstalled Movable Type, this time running on MySQL, with an additional 100 Meg of disk space purchased, and plans to back up on a regular basis. The only thing that seems to be lost is the majority of comments. Sorry Mom, and sorry guys who disagreed with my position on SUV's.

What I learned:
Sh*t happens, especially with tech. But I knew that, right?
Phil via email, Robert on his blog and Girlie on the MT support forums are really helpful, but when you are screwed, you are screwed. Thanks for trying, folks.
NoteTab is a powerful program with decent documentation.
Movable Type is a powerful program with great documentation. As someone who wrote tech doc in a previous incarnation, I know how hard it is to write good tech doc. The Trotts succeeded.
It could save you a lot of time in the future to take a look at the import documentation, and make sure that you produce the data required in your archives, even if it is just within an HTML comment.
Back up regularly. But I knew that, right?

I'm SOL. Hope to be back up by Wed, Jan 29

Well, I got the final word from an engineer at sleepycat:

If recovery can't recover the databases, use the salvage flags

(the -R and -r flags to db_dump).  For more information see the

db_dump utility documentation, included in your download package

and also available at:


	http://www.sleepycat.com/docs/utility/db_dump.html


Of course, it's pretty frightening that recovery isn't managing

to put the database back together -- please let us know if we

can help you understand how that might have happened.

I've tried, but it turns out my database can't be salvaged, either. I am curious myself as to how this happened, since my host claims nothing happened, and the only thing I know that could have caused this was posting to the past, but it seems like time to admit defeat and move on. I'm about halfway through writing Notetab Pro macros to extract the text out of my HTML archives, and hope to be back online by Wednesday.

This section hand entered by Tim Bishop

Anybody know anything about getting data out of corrupt Berkeley Databases?
If so, I could use your help

After raving about Movable Type for so long, I ran into my first problem with it, and it's a bad one. The Berkeley database that my blog entries are in got corrupted somehow :-(. My bad for not having a recent backup, and for not having switched over to MySQL. But here I am, and if you have any idea of what I can do to recover my data, please email me at Geodog at cyberdude dot com

Here is what I have tried to date, with the results:

[mech db]$ db_recover -V

Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 3.3.11: (July 12, 2001)


[mech db]$ db_recover -cv | more

db_recover: Recovery complete at Sun Jan 26 02:52:11 2003

db_recover: Maximum transaction id 80000000 Recovery checkpoint [0][0]

[mech db]$ db_verify entry.db

db_verify: Page 27: Invalid prev_pgno 183

db_verify: Page 171: Invalid next_pgno 183

db_verify: DB->verify: entry.db: DB_VERIFY_BAD: Database verification failed

[@mech db]$ db_dump -p entry.db

VERSION=3

format=print

type=btree

db_dump: DB->stat: DB_PAGE_NOTFOUND: Requested page not found

This section hand entered by Tim Bishop

Adventures in debugging

I live with someone who, while she couldn't fairly be called at Luddite, has as much interest in how computers work as she does in the workings of a can-opener. A computer, like a can opener, is a tool -- it should just work - who cares how? Given the state of computing, she is grateful to have what she refers to as her personal MIS department.

I installed a wireless network at home about two years ago, and after seeing it work flawlessly for about 6 months, she let herself be persuaded to use it to connect to my AT&T cable modem. She loved the fast web browsing, and her connection worked flawlessly, until this week. All of a sudden, her network connection was dog slow. Web browsing was impossible. The AT&T POP3 email server kept refusing to let her pick up mail, spewing some mumbo jumbo about "name not recognized," or about "time outs." She told me, "I haven't changed anything" and gave me that "the machine is screwing up and I hate it look" that always makes me feel like I have done something wrong.

So I sat down to try and figure out what was wrong, reaching deep into the memory banks to remember the commands and configuration, since she has a Win'98 box that she doesn't want to upgrade. (It works, doesn't it? If I upgrade it to Windows 2000 for her, can I promise that everything will work? No.)

I double checked the POP3 and SMTP settings for her mail client, and re-input the user names/password. I turned off virus checking. No difference. I (painfully slowly) browsed the AT&T network status page. What a joke. I pinged Yahoo. Sure enough, I got >100ms delays, and some dropped packets. So I started with the 3 finger Ctrl-Alt-Del Windows salute, then did the winipcfg release/renew dance, then stopped and restarted the wireless card. I rebooted the router/wireless access point. No luck. I decided to try and find the network bottleneck between her computer and AT&T's mail server. Since she doesn't have any nifty windows utilities on her machine, I try and remember what the Win98 version of traceroute was. I finally get a DOS window open and type "tracert". Over 20 hops to the mailserver. "What are these idiots at AT&T doing," I think. Then I look at the hops more carefully. The first 3 have pacbell.net (California's telephone monopoly) suffixes. Slowly, the light bulb begins to glow dimly. I dash upstairs and do a traceroute from my desktop machine -- sure enough, the first three addresses have attbi.com suffixes. I log onto my router/access point, and change the SSID from "default" to "open," then run downstairs and do the same for the wireless card. Sure enough, suddenly her net connection is as fast as greased lightning, and the 86 spam messages that have accumulated for her at the server download to her machine in a flash.

Who knew that some neighbor setting up an open Wi-Fi network could screw up my open Wi-Fi network? For whatever reason, her wireless card latched onto the new weaker signal from next door in preference to the stronger one coming from my access point. I suspect we will be hearing more of these stories in the days to come, as home Wi-Fi networks become more ubiquitous. Of course this problem might have been easier to spot if I had software like Boingo's running, but our cards are so old (2 years) that they aren't supported. And who would have guessed this would be the source of the problem?

Shameless

I don't think I could add anything to this NYT story, Effort to Dilute New S.E.C. Rules:

The staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission plans to recommend that the agency soften proposed rules that would impose new obligations on lawyers and accountants, government officials said today.

After an onslaught of lobbying, the commission will complete work this week on regulatory proposals that were required under a law passed by Congress nearly six months ago to address a spate of corporate scandals.

Earlier proposals had been intended to instill investor confidence by imposing the new regulations....But some of the toughest proposals appear to be dead, watered down or postponed, S.E.C. officials said today. ....

Read on for the details and be amazed. These guys don't seem to understand that for capitalism to work, the owners of the companies (investors) need to be able to figure out what the company is spending its money on. I guess that isn't how crony capitalism works.

In honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.

I decided to spend the time I usually spend blogging listening to some of the speeches of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Stanford has a nice collection of audio files. See

Popular Martin Luther King Requests. Whatever King's failings as a human being or scholar might have been, he was a true orator. Listening to the speeches still brings tears to my eyes, and is a wholly difference experience from just reading them. If you haven't heard his speeches, I encourage you to listen to them.

One of my nonsensical vanities is that I was at the "I have a dream" speech in Washington, on my father's shoulders. And I went back for the 20th anniversary March on Washington. I have lived and traveled in Africa, Europe, Central America and the Middle East, and no country I've been to is as screwed up about race as the United States. And yet somehow, lo these many years later, I still believe, that we shall overcome one day.

See Burningbird or Robert's entries for today for some more thoughtful and less sentimental writing.

Blog changes

My apologies, the front page on my webblog is getting kind of crowded. I got this neat feature idea, Last 10 Entries by Category, from a friendly guy with terrible politics, Richard Ames. I inserted the code he gave me and voilà, an incredibly crowded page. I tried to move over to a CSS based 3 column layout, but I couldn't get it to work with 800x600 screens. So I am going to have to go back in and either come up with a layout that gives back some white space and works for people, or rip out that feature.

One question -- does anyone actually skim the list of headings on the right to see if there is anything they want to read? Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Another kind of map

Found while looking for style ideas: War on Terror Map. Mildly funny.

Hard numbers on the Silicon Valley bust

I'm not a doom and gloom type person, but I did find some numbers on the Silicon Valley bust quoted in a survey in today's NYT Job-Rich Silicon Valley Has Turned Fallow, Survey Finds sobering:

Silicon Valley lost 127,000 jobs, or about 9 percent of its employment, from the first quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2002.

Software, semiconductors and computer and communications hardware lost 22 percent of their jobs from the second quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2002.

These are the first hard numbers that I've seen in a while, and they make sense from what I know anecdotally. It's rough out there. Some people are hiring, but not in any great numbers, and a lot of people are still being laid off. The country as a whole may not be in a recession, but we are locally certainly in a depression.

Still, there is a lot of exiting new technology being developed, and unless the whole economy tanks in a big way, people will still be interested in (and perhaps even buy some of) the crazy new things that us Bay Areans think up.

The survey itself doesn't seem to be up on the net yet, but it should appear on Collaborative Economics site or Joint Venture Silicon Valley's site in a day or two.

Update: Of course, it is all reading tea leaves. The Chronicle had an article earlier this week saying "Analysts: Some see beginning of turnaround."

Thanks to Scott Loftesness for the link.

Best domain name

Ever! www.authoritarian opportunists whocozyupto genocidal dictators-forpeace.org. What a hoot.

Karl Rove's nightmare

I read this poem again tonight for the first time in years, and thought it particularly apt for our current political situation:

...
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?

(How serious people's faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home so lost in thought?


Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.

And some who have just returned from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.


And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?

They were, those people, a kind of solution.

from Waiting for the Barbarians

By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933),
translated by Edmund Keeley

See also the Guardian article by the same title: "A once-great empire, Rome fell into catastrophic cultural and economic decline. Morris Berman on chilling parallels with modern America."

John Le Carré's rant

John Le Carré's article in the London Times, The United States of America has gone mad has been blogged by many people, but i just saw it. I don't agree with all of it, but it is a powerful piece of writing. Recommended.

It feels like America is losing friends left and right, due to the lunatic actions of the Bush Administration. Bush seems to believe that being powerful is more important than having friends. I fear not, and I suspect that we, the people, will have to pay for his maniacal actions.

Paul Krugman tells it like it is

Paul Krugman has a fabulous column on the Bush administration and deficits, Off the Wagon.

One of the things I really like about Krugman is that he doesn't pussyfoot around. In this article, he definitely doesn't pull any punches. A sample:

As a drunk is to alcohol, the Bush administration is to budget deficits.

Tell it like it is, Brother Paul.

The Preacher is on a roll

The Preacher has three great stories posted this week. This man can write!

DRM Conference in Berkeley

The upcoming Digital Rights Management Conference in Berkeley on Feb 27-March 1 looks pretty interesting. A lot of serious thinkers presenting. I'd love to hear Bruce Schneier talk (and learn how to pronounce his last name). Since it is in my own backyard, is policy oriented, and is a lot less pricy than the O'Reilly ETC, I'll probably attend. I hope to see some of my blog buddies there.

Funny weblog?

Something is wrong with Google if Geodog's MT weblog is the number 1 choice for funny weblog, based on this old post. I appreciate the complement and the traffic, but I fear it is false advertising. I try to be clever, and occasionally witty, but I don't think I am that funny. At least not intentionally.

Something must be rotten in the state of Googleland.

Bruce Sterling on book tour

I went and saw Bruce Sterling at Cody's Books tonight. I had never seen or heard him before, and didn't know what to expect. It was apparently the last stop on this part of his tour promoting his latest book, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, and, as he confessed to us in the beginning, he was fried. He was still wickedly funny, and somewhat combative with the audience. He has a very sharp tongue, and he either has quite a few bon mots stored up, or he thinks incredibly fast on his feet. A few nuggets gleaned from his talk:

Software is headed to where book publishing is now, a shabby impoverished gentility.
Now that I hang out with industrial designers, I can go into WalMart without being revolted by the vertigo of consumer excess.
[Belief in the afterlife is] a psychotic misapprehension of reality.
Having bolts through your head would be better than getting Alzheimer's.

While Sterling was very funny, I actually didn't get much of a feel for the ideas in his book. Based on positive reviews I've seen elsewhere, I've ordered it from the library (once again using Jon Udell's bookmarklet), but I would not have bought it based on his talk.

Note to self: write a very nice thank you letter to Jon for saving me all this money with his bookmarklet.

SUV's, Redux

A self-proclaimed regular reader of Geodog's weblog who enjoyed the pointer to Ariana Huffington's ads sent in pointers to two reviews of NYT reporter Keith Bradsher's new book, High and Mighty: SUVs--The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way. I haven't read the book myself, but Stephanie Mencimer's review in the Washington Monthly, Bumper Mentality makes it sound like a lot of fun, in the way that information that confirms all your worst fears is fun. Sort of.

According to Mencimer, all the stereotypes about SUV drivers are true: "SUV is the car of choice for the nation's most self-centered people; and the bigger the SUV, the more of a jerk its driver is likely to be." Brasher also details how unsafe SUV's are, both to the people around them and to the people inside them. According to the review, "the occupant death rate in SUVs is 6 percent higher than it is for cars – 8 percent higher in the largest SUVs" and the "kill rate... for SUVs is simply jaw-dropping. For every one life saved by driving an SUV, five others will be taken." The review, and presumably the book, are filled with infuriating statistics like that. Clearly, driving a behemoth SUV is an antisocial act.

Gregg Easterbrook also has a long and very positive review in TNR, Axle of Evil: America's Twisted Love Affair With Sociopathic Cars, which goes into a lot of detail on the regulatory environment that shaped this phenomenon. Easterbrook's observation on the political response to the book: "Members of Congress, for their part, have so far responded to this extraordinary book as they have responded to the entire issue: by hiding under their desks."

The book is definitely going on my wish list. I've ordered it from the Berkeley Public Library using Jon Udell's bookmarklet, but there are apparently 4 people ahead of me on the waiting list, so I may actually buy it.

Traffic bump

I noticed a little traffic bump today and wondered where all the visitors were coming from. PBS.org of all places. Seems like a link I submitted after reading about the blogging documentary showing on PBS has gone live. It gives me a big kick, since I hardly ever watch TV and am a big supporter of the TV Turnoff Network.

It seems like my life is destined to be intertwined with TV, no matter what I do.

In any case, all are welcome here at Geodog's weblog, although I would warn you,

It's not Minnesota

At home, we are currently reading On the Banks of Plum Creek, from the Little House on the Prairie series. I never read the series as a kid, being under some mis-impression that it was "girl stuff", whatever that was. My loss. The books are wonderful, filled with all kinds of detail about the life of homesteader. Anyone who thinks that life is simpler now than it was in the 19th century should read these books. The amount of domain knowledge required to be a successful homesteader was enormous: how to trap animals, how to build a house from logs, how to build a house from sod, how to make soap, how to raise various crops, how to care for horses and cows, how to make shoes, etc. But I digress.

The part of the book we read last night details the joys of a Minnesota winter. Blizzard follows blizzard follows blizzard. Pa has to tie a rope between the barn and house so he doesn't get lost when he goes out to feed the animals. Children freeze to death. Breaks between blizzards are spent frantically cutting more firewood. I shivered just reading the descriptions. How anyone could choose to live in that climate is mystery to me, but then again I've always loved warmth and the sun, and hated cold.

I woke up this morning to find one of those days that reminds me why I love living in the Bay Area. The sun is shining, and it has warmed up to the point where the streets are crowed with people wearing shorts. From the right hill, you can see all the way across the bay.







Photo is from the Lawrence Hall of Science webcam

At the moment, I couldn't imagine living anywhere else, although I'll have to set up a cron job to remind me of this when I'm kvetching his summer about the second month in a row of cold, clammy, fog every morning and afternoon.

Update: This post was originally entitled "Eat your heart out, Minnesota," but after thinking about it I decided that was quite mean spirited and changed it. My apologies to anyone offended by it.

I also couldn't resists adding two more photos that I took, but decided to spare visitors to the home page and so stuck them on the extended entry page.

Across the street from my house.



Looking towards Oakland from El Cerrito.

An optimistic look at the political scene

I often feel unrelieved pessimism about current politics, for reasons that should be clear to anyone who has read much of what I have written. I've actually gotten to the point where I don't write about a lot of the news I read, because it is so depressing. A là Robert K Brown, a lot of it would be funny if it wasn't so serious. That's why it was a pleasant surprise to read Anil Dash's changing the channel . Anil argues that seen in historical context, us lefty/liberals are winning. For example, he cites the Trent Lott affair to make the point that now, "association with racist ideas is just plain unacceptable for people in public office." He has a bunch of other examples:

George W. Bush put out a message from the White House in honor of Kwanzaa. We're winning.

It's probably that sense of a slow, inexorable loss that makes conservatives terrified, causing them to respond with a desperate clinging to the past that only serves to further doom their cause. The best solutions, of course, lie in the future.

The future is what America's about. This is not a country about Traditions. Slavery was a tradition. Servitude to patrilineal monarchs was a tradition. The closest thing America has to a tradition is the phrase, the philosophy, "F**k You".

You get the idea. I'm not entirely convinced, but it was a refreshing read. Recommended.

Emerging Technology Conference schedule posted

The upcoming O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference just posted its schedule, tracks and speakers. It looks fascinating. About half the speakers from Supernova2002 will be there -- I'll be interested in how the discussions I heard at SuperNova2002 and on the weblogs following the event will evolve.

I'd love to go, but the $1145 fee is a *significant* barrier. I'll have to try and find a way to mitigate it or get around it.

Update: Glenn Fleishman of WiFi news fame disagrees about the similarity between ETC and Supernova -- he says it will be "more academic and more technical," and less about policy. ETC "is about technology coalescing into the future."

In any case, I suspect that it will be way interesting.

Shrub, the director's cut

From the too-much-time on their hands department: Someone with a taste for pyrotechnics, foul language, and beautiful photography has put together a funny re-cut of Bush's state of the union speech which has him saying some pretty strange things. Check it out if you have 5 minutes to kill. It is scary - if it wasn't for context, I would have no way of knowing that this wasn't his last state of the union speech.

Tip o' the hat to David Weinberger for the link.

Discover your physical neighbor's virtual presence

I love geography, I always have, which is probably why I find the new mapping technology so cool. Here is the satellite photo of Geodog's roof, courtesy of my new-found neighbor Jeff Poskanzer and his ACME Labs. Do you want to see where my physical neighbors from the virtual world are? Just click on my . Or check out the RSS feed. As I said, very cool. Imagine the cross connects between the virtual and the physical. I am looking forward to discovering neighbors that I didn't know I had.

Tip 'o the hat to Jeremy (unfortunately 40 miles south) for leading me down this wonderful path.

Welcome back, Stavros The Wonder Chicken

Stavrosthewonderchicken is back, leading off his return with a great post on the situation on the ground in Korea, Cloudy, Strong Chance of Rain and a screed about our legal drug pushers.

I discovered the wonderchicken 6 months or so ago, when he cracked me up with his wonderful "I invented weblogging" poster, then he enlightened me with his stories of Korea, and finally saddened me with the story of his friend Rick, who died in the Bali bombing. He has one of the truly distinctive voices writing on the web today, sort of a cross between Hunter S Thompson when he still had brain cells and Arianna Huffington in her current left phase. Highly recommended for a daily read.

Thanks to Robert for leading me to Jonathan who let me know StavrosTheWonderchicken was back.

DMCA unintended consequences

The EFF has a beautifully written compendium, entitled EFF Unintended Consequences: Four Years under the DMCA, describing many of the ways in which large corporations have used the DMCA to threaten, harass and stifle people exercising their fair use rights under copyright law. The examples show how often the DMCA is used for anticompetitive purposes that have nothing do with copyrights as traditionally understood.

This is legal writing at its best. Clear exposition in readable English with numerous examples proving a point: Congress and the Courts went too far with the DMCA. Recommended reading.

Tip o' the hat to Mike of Techdirt for the link.

Relative fonts are a pain

I spent way much too much time this weekend implementing Mark Pilgrim's relative size hack. Hours. Who knew that I.E. 5 and I.E. 6 implemented font-size="small" so differently? As a result of implementing the hack, I need to be careful when using blockquote to make sure that a paragraph is always stated afterward. I also hacked some funny stuff with taking out lots of padding, and using negative padding for the titles, in order to reduce the space between titles and entries, which was driving this old typesetter nuts. I'm not sure if it will work with all browsers. I still need to go into the template and stylesheet and change my blogroll and entries, so that each has as space after. At least, unlike Radio, the programs never crashed on me. The old days of specifying absolute font sizes were certainly a lot easier. I wonder if this could possibly be worth it. All this work because one user from my *huge* (Hi Mom) readership sent me mail telling me that my fonts were too small in Mozilla.

I ask anyone that happens to stop by, especially if they are using a Mac, Linux, or something else other than Mozilla or I.E. 5 or 6 on a Wintel PC, to leave me a comment if the fonts are too small or if something is obviously broken. Thanks.

P.S. I couldn't have done any of the work without a wonderful CSS stylesheet editing program called TopStyle Pro from Nick Bradbury. Highly recommended.

TiVo is God's machine?

Michael Powell, Federal Communications Chairman (and son of Secretary of State Powell) was quoted today as saying "Tivo is God's machine." If I watched much TV, I bet I would like Tivo, but I don't know about loving it. While I know a lot of geeks who do love their Tivo's, I suspect that the deity may have other preferences. In any case, I suspect this quote will delight Silicon Valley and put fear into the hearts of Hollywood.

Bush suppressing dolphin info?

The Bush administration will suppress information on anything that it fears will reflect poorly on its goals, even something like research on dolphin stress levels. Give me a break!

I wish they could just be honest and say we want to give Mexico something, they are a really important country to us, it's worth the decline of a species of dolphin, and argue the case on its merits. But that kind of honesty doesn't appear to be in the gene pool of this administration.

A modest proposal: Have the states tax the dividends

I've been thinking about Bush's desire that the Federal government stop taxing the income that rich people get from dividends, plus his belief in state's rights, as well as the news that the states are suffering their largest fall in revenues since the 1930's, it occurred to me that there is a simple solution.

Let the Federal government stop taxing dividends, and let the states tax people at exactly the same rate the Federal government did. That way Bush can claim a tax cut, the states get a huge revenue windfall, and everything stays the same for the taxpayer. Everybody would be happy!

Brilliant Ads: SUV's supporting terrorism

Arianna Huffington finally managed to get the ads she has been talking about doing produced, linking our obscene consumption of energy with sponsorship of terrorism, and they are brilliant. They are one sided and unfair in some sense, but they also open a debate that needs to happen -- what cost are we willing to pay for our energy habit?

You can see them online at The Detroit Project site. Check them out. Highly recommended. She also has some great follow up reading.

The next battle is getting the ads shown -- according to the NYT, some stations are refusing to show the ads, and of course they are all demanding top dollar. If you can afford to donate, please do so.

Thanks to Arianna Huffington for having the idea and following up on it. Whether I like it or not, we are a TV based society, and putting stuff on TV is how you get stuff noticed and debated.

Geoworks, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

From PR Wire: "Geoworks Cancels Special Stockholders Meeting Due to Lack of a Quorum. Company Will Explore Alternatives Including Bankruptcy."

A pathetic ending for a once great little company. There are enough stories behind that little press release to fill a book. Geoworks was founded 20 years ago, and went through more lives (and management reshuffles) than a cat. It had a lot of great firsts, but it was also a company that had a real gift for giving up on a market after shipping its first product, just before that market took off, e.g. one of the first commercial GUI OS's, GEOS; one of the first PDA's, the Casio Zoomer; and the first dedicated smartphone OS, GEOS-SC.

I put five years of my life into the company, spending many late nights in the office and many weeks in Japan. And I was part of some great things -- building a great embedded GUI OS, GEOS-SC, code name "Liberty," from scratch, shipping some of the world's first real smartphones, the Toshiba Genio and Dialo. I got to work with some really smart and good people. But I also got learn how greed and stupidity at the top of the corporate organization will doom the efforts of those below them, no matter how smart or hard the people below them work. Geoworks built up a world class engineering organization, but could never decide what it wanted to do with it (Geoworks eventually sold one part of it in Seattle to Amazon for a pretty penny). The founder was replaced with a series of executives who were smoother and would be more likely to please the market. Some of them were quite good at talking up the stock, but none of them were any good at leading a company. I worked with a lot of other people building up an OS business then watched it get thrown away, because it wasn't sexy enough for "the market," and because it supposedly wouldn't be as profitable as the wireless services business, which itself proved in the end to be a mirage.

I quit when I became convinced of the utter lack of integrity of my then boss, David Thatcher, the latest CEO at the time. He has now pled guilty to conspiring to commit securities fraud at a subsequent company, Critical Path, and is facing 1 to 5 in the federal pen, so I at least have the satisfaction of having my judgement confirmed.

Bitter? I sound bitter, but I'm really not. I had a great time, I worked with some great people, made some lifelong friends, and I learned a lot. I just rue the waste of all that energy, talent and drive. A lot of it was just thrown away.

Cheney = McNamara?

Josh Marshall is on a roll. It is hard to believe that he is getting any work done on his dissertation, with such a prodigious output of good political writing. His latest is a piece in the Washington Monthly, the Vise Grip, on Cheney's political ineptitude, and why it hasn't effected his reputation. Sample:

Not since the Whiz Kids of the Kennedy-Johnson years has Washington been led by men of such insular self-assurance.

What Marshall doesn't mention is that even though Time magazine and people inside the Beltway love (or fear) Cheney, most Americans don't trust him. See Time magazine loves Dick Cheney. Americans aren't so sure.

Bush = Sharon?

I was reading an interesting article on the coming Israeli general election in my print copy of The American Prospect this evening when I ran across this statement:

Analyzed coldly, Sharon's tenure as prime minister has been disastrous. Curfews, roadblocks and "targeted killings" against suspected terrorists haven't ended attacks on Israeli civilians. Indeed, within Israel the death toll has climbed precipitously. Meanwhile, the economy has collapsed.

Yet Sharon remains popular. The public blames the Palestinians, not the prime minister. Terrorism creates public support for muscular answers that, even if they don't succeed, hold off the deeper fear of feeling weak. And a silent opposition allowed Sharon's policy to seem the best available.

Substitute Bush for Sharon, American for Israel, and that statement still sounds accurate. Although luckily we have (yet) to endure the kind of casualties that Israel suffers from, the parallels are erie. In both cases there is a posture of looking tough, a sly celebration of the use of assassination and torture as a replacement for a strategy, a refusal to address any of the grievances that are felt much more widely than just by terrorists, and extensive use of the security situation for domestic political purposes. In Israel at least the opposition seems to be getting off its back -- it is unclear if in the US, the Democratic politicians will ever have the guts to really oppose Bush.

As RKB says, the parallels would be funny if they weren't so scary.

Journalism: The herd instinct

John M. Broder wrote a dark piece yesterday on the Bay Area economy in the NYT.

"The Bay Area is waiting patiently for that tech bounce-back that may never come," said Edward Leamer ... "It has priced itself out of virtually any other economic function." The personal computer, software and the Internet are now mature technologies, unlikely to reignite the region.

While things certainly are grim at the moment, I don't think the picture is as bleak as Broder painted it. I remember people saying that software and the personal computer were mature technologies just before a little company called Netscape put the web on the front page of the newspapers. Word processing and spreadsheet software may be mature technologies, but there is a lot of innovation to come in the convergence of communication and computing. Just check out the SuperNova 2002 group blog for a sample.

There was one hilarious but also annoying aspect to the article. Broder used my old boss from Go Corporation, Jerry Kaplan, to represent unemployed technology workers.

Jerrold Kaplan, an Internet pioneer who said he made and then lost most of $500 million when the dot-com bubble burst ... "In my neighborhood, I would personally estimate that there's probably 40 percent unemployment among senior executives," said Mr. Kaplan, 50, who lives in Hillsborough, a wealthy enclave south of San Francisco. He has been out of work since his latest company, Egghead.com, crashed in 2001.

Jerry is a nice guy and a smart operator, but he is not exactly on his way to the poorhouse. He has been up and down the entrepreneurial cycle several times, and I am sure that he has a reasonable nest egg. In 1981, he co-founded an AI company, Teknowledge, that later went public. He moved to Lotus where he helped write Lotus Agenda, back when Lotus was the Goliath of the industry. He raised a huge amount of money for Go Gorporation, for what turned out to be Kleiner & Perkins' biggest loss, at least until the internet bust. He founded Onsale which was bought by Egghead. Last year he endowed his alma mater, U Penn, with a $500,000 chair.

By picking Kaplan to represent the unemployed high tech worker, Broder certainly isn't try to evoke any sympathy for Silicon Valley. There is this unfortunate tendency in human affairs, as old as the Greeks, to build people and their stories up, and then to tear them down. We seem to be in the tear down phase as far as innovation and technology goes. Journalists tend to be herd animals, and the current mainstream story is that innovation is dead and Silicon Valley is dead, and good riddance because they were all greedy frauds anyway. These kinds of stories are starting to get as annoying as all the stories about the 25 year-old geniuses who were going to transform business got 3 years ago.

William Gibson has a blog

Way cool. One of my all-time favorite science fiction writers, William Gibson, has a blog. He writes:

In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis.

Thanks again to RKB for the link.