Category: Very Berkeley

In an e2e discussion on the loss of data integrity on Oracle TNS gateways that still exists today, one wag said “When Network General was adding more SQL decodes to the Sniffer(r), in the ’90s, we had a presentation on the Oracle transport (TNS) underlying SQL Net traffic. TNS rode on Netware SPP, or TCP, etc. The fellow went into packet fields in detail and explained how Oracle also made gateway software available for Sun boxes to go from an Oracle system to an IBM SNA db system. The gateway received SQL on TNS on TCP on IP on Ethernet (for instance) and spit out SQL on TNS or whatever IBM wanted. As he expounded on TNS pkt fields, a few hands went up — “What’s the checksum field for if it’s always 0?”…”It’s unimplemented for now”. “Well if it’s unused and your gateway has bad memory, how do you know the data going into the db on the other side will be good?” Answer: “I don’t know”. (Thanks to Alex Cannara).

Of course, if the Oracle tech guy had gone to the Microsoft Research school of obsfucation, he would have said “The probability of this event occuring such that the reliability of the underlying link layer is impaired by an improbably low memory bit error at ten to the minus 12 excluding thermal radiative factors and charge displacement is so low as to be impossible, hence the question is irrelevent”. Now, that’s the way to talk the talk. I guess that’s why Oracle is always Number 2 to Microsoft. 🙂

I was struck by the contrast in reporting of two very different women in Silicon Valley. Matt Marshall writes of Joanna Rees-Gallanter, aka “Alley Cat”, as she goes through a tumultous rolling close of her new venture fund at VSP Capital. As Matt puts it “She’s got an interesting story, and it reveals the kind of grit it takes to get where she is. She told us about how people laughed at her idea of starting a venture firm, and how hard it was to transition from a non-traditional background. She even tried restaurants.” It really is hard in a very male-dominated industry like investment to make inroads. My take to Matt: Rolling closes and last minute sells. Been there, done that. Stress city. I’m glad to see a positive story about a woman VC who’s put together the team and closed the fund. Can’t wait to see what she does with it. Keep these stories coming”.

A very different view on Richard Koman’s piece about Analee Newitz, who thinks the only reason people worked on TCP/IP or open source projects like 386BSD or Apache was to facilitate access to porn. Figures she’s booked with O’Reilly – I suspect this reflects their inside view on women in technology loud and clear. As I put it to Richard: “Hey, so the open source movement has finally got a woman speaker – but instead of a real woman developer or researcher they’ve got a girl talking dirty. Wow! How enlightened they are… However, this strange exhortation to love porn has nothing to do with the real reasons for why new architectures and design in technology are developed, nor does it speak to the motivations of the developers. Just because pimps and johns are ready to exploit any technology at any opportunity doesn’t mean it has anything to do with innovation, provides any value to society, or has any lasting impact.”

“I doubt we’ll soon see porn queens getting Nobel prizes, writing books of merit, or developing new solutions to problems of hunger, poverty, and injustice. But we will see lots of opportunists jump on the bandwagon as technology changes our society, proclaiming themselves as the “true” innovators as they gull the rubes. This hucksterism has always gone on. After ten thousand years of civilization, it’s amazing anyone sees this for anything less than some oddball carnival sideshow – briefly entertaining, somewhat freaky, and definitely unimportant.”

And that’s why it’s tough to be a woman in Silicon Valley. For every serious woman in business, technology, and investment, there are fools ready to say and do anything for their 30 seconds of Internet fame, and a huckster ready and willing to exploit them. While the Analee’s of the world come and go, it’s time we showed how annoyed we are – using our money – drop a line to O’Reilly telling them you didn’t buy the Perl book and come to an open source conference to hear a woman talk about porn. You bought the book and came to the talks because you want to hear about the tech. Man or woman, demand they book real technologists who love open source. Don’t settle for anything less.

Rick Bentley, a Berkeley physics alum, has been written up by Mike Cassidy of the Merc in a really great article on Rick’s experiences in Baghdad and running a security startup, Connexed. Not that I’m surprised – I introduced Rick to Mike and got to sit in at the California Cafe as Rick told stories while sipping a chocolate malt. I also enjoy seeing a real journalist at work, and Mike writes some really great stories that blend business with the human element in Silicon Valley. It was a pleasure to watch him work.

So read the article, and tell Mike to keep more like this coming. Oh, and stop by Rick’s company site – security is important these days, and unlike some armchair CEO, Rick knows what it is like to live in a insecure world.

Very funny little item about Friends of Frank and deals in the urinals. Of course, how could I not remark on this amazing way of meeting and greeting – “Urinals”, huh? Well I guess that’s one way to have an all-male “members-only” club. :-)”.

On the German side, a discussion of venture capital in Germany by Dirk Riehle and his concern that Germany is “facing a venture capital deal market failure” reaches a rather startling conclusion: “From the data some of the VCs presented, it seemed clear what’s wrong with Germany, startups, innovation, and venture capital: There are not enough VCs”. Given the terrible IRR’s in recent years, I’m sure that several of the funds could “spare” their nonperforming VCs on a “permanent loan” status, kind of like the way museums get musty old pots out of their basement and off to someone else’s collection.

But to get some balanced feedback, I asked William Jolitz what he thinks about this supposition, since he’s the guy who handles the investment and international business side. “It isn’t a lack of VCs that causes capital to be restricted. It’s because of a lack of capital that there are few early-stage VCs due to the bubble burst – you have to make the dogs invested during the bubble perform before you’re allowed to invest again”.

“There’s no difference between being a VC and a loan shark”, as an east coast CEO likes to tell me, “except for the ties”. 🙂

I just heard from Rick Bentley, a Berkeley physics alum – he’s back here in the good old Bay Area from Iraq, trying to get back into CEO stuff at his security startup. Talk about “culture shock” – from meditations on bullets and murdered colleagues and finding yourself alone and unarmed on the wrong side of the Green Zone, to Silicon Valley startup and bizplans and product specs. Yet that’s the way it is nowadays – the world is a much smaller place.

I like the weblog he’s done talking about his experiences. So many startup execs today are extremely narrow in their outlook – maybe Stanford biz school and a few preppie connections, or perhaps locked up in an academic lab creating some new RFC. It’s rare to find someone (especially in security) who actually learns what it’s like for most ordinary people to survive in an unsafe world.

Personally, I prefer dealing with people who have developed some empathy for their profession through real-world experience, such as when the doctor for my daughter’s broken wrist talked about his family’s history of scoliosis while he was binding her injury and said “that’s why I became interested in orthopaedic medicine”. It’s living life that matters most.

Well, the fallout from Carly’s involuntary termination by the BOD of HP is continuing. John Pazkowski in his GMSV blog today quoted many agonized “What will HP do now!!!” analysts acting like the world ended while they bid up the stock at Carly’s ouster. My fav is “They need someone to do what Lou Gerstner did for IBM, but it isn’t obvious who that person is”.

Hey, maybe he’s on to something. What HP really needs is Lou Gerstner, but younger and with hair.

Well, it seems fitting that we end the week, not with a bang but with the hard slam shut of a Macabee gopher trap. You heard me – gopher traps. Turns out at the Los Gatos History Museum roundtable last night we got to hear how Los Gatos was the leader in innovative gopher traps, and it’s rather humbling to learn that after one hundred years they still are selling them. This certainly contrasted with Gary Dahl’s Pet Rock (another Los Gatos invention), which didn’t last more than a year – but oh, what a year it was. I still remember all those silly rocks sold in stores and thinking how crazy adults were to buy them.

One of the more amusing moments of the roundtable occurred when the moderator carefully presented all of the other speakers, and then forgot to present their star speaker Steve Wozniak. But Steve more than made up for the lapse by talking nonstop about innovation, his time at HP, and why he loves building things. And I suppose that was the motivation for everyone sitting in that room – we all like to build things and make things better. Oh, and the free food behind the gopher trap display after the chatfest helped.

In other news, the scientific impact of the Indian Ocean tsumani is just beginning to be grasped – “NASA scientists using data from the Indonesian earthquake calculated it affected Earth’s rotation, decreased the length of day, slightly changed the planet’s shape, and shifted the North Pole by centimeters.” Simply incredible.

Finally, Internet video is finally making real inroads, especially among women. iVillage announced that it has redesigned its Web site and “visitors to the women-focused site now see video offerings on each Web page”. According to Peter Naylor, SVP Sales, “Demand is outstripping supply. I would love to get more video inventory”. Videos are preceded by a 15-second ad from the likes of Kraft, Microsoft and NBC.

Haven’t I always said “It’s the content”. And women, who are often viewed as less tech-saavy than men, seem to be leading the trend here. Not surprising – I’m a woman too. Have a great weekend.

I was feeling low on a rainy day, and then read Mike Cassidy’s story about a Santa Cruz family and their “reality” check on “trading spouses”. It really made me laugh. Check it out – it’ll chase those blues away.

Remember what the reality show biz did with the Amish last summer – “hey, let’s corrupt these Amish for a summer hit”? Well, we aren’t in Pennsylvania, so the best they could do was find a Taoist hippie bluegrass family and try to make them some kind of narrow control-freak isolated cult. But, hey, they got $50 grand, so what’s the big deal on a little video “license”, right? Ahh, the highs and lows of human nature – who could ask for anything more?

One of the reasons I developed ExecProducer was to allow people the ability to produce and create their own media inexpensively to frame their own images and memories, instead of relying on schlamazels with their own agenda. But I guess wave a few dollars and all good sense goes out the window. PT Barnum will always have a valued place in America.

Is everyone getting tired of the “stress” excuse. You know, the “I can’t make the meeting because I’m stressed out” or “I didn’t finish the project because I’m too stressed” or “I forgot to take out the scapel after removing your appendix because of stress”… And all you’re really hearing is “I don’t want to do anything for anybody, so I’ll say I’m stressed and act pathetic and you’ll let me off the hook so I can go to Starbucks and gorge on mochas and pretend I’m working when I’m really looking at porn on the web”.

First we had during our “season of sharing” Christmas stores refusing to allow Salvation Army Bell Ringers (you know, they stand with a kettle and ring a bell for the poor) to stand on their properties because they present “too much stress” to their customers! Even the bell was too disturbing, because it rings and they hear it and look at the silent ringer and the kettle for the poor and that makes them feel bad because they don’t want to give the poor anything. And customers who are ashamed of themselves aren’t gluttonous store customers, right?

Now, doing it one better (and who wouldn’t), it’s “stomp on a Girl Scout” time, in which CW Nevius voices the complaint of the Silicon Valley upper-middle-class whiner who is standing up and refusing to talk to little girls in uniforms about whether they’d like to eat a thin mint or shortbread cookie because they are just “too stressed”. Aren’t we all just wracked with compassion for these pathetic souls?

The Pentagon’s TIA (Total Information Awareness) super-secret spy-on-Americans program headed by John Poindexter of Iran-Contra infamy was a big deal a few years ago – until Congress killed it. Turned out Americans didn’t like the idea of their own government spying on them without cause, and even 9/11 didn’t change their minds.

Robert O’Harrow Jr of the Washington Post has written an interesting book postulating that TIA would have probably succeeded if they hadn’t chosen such lousy names like “Total Information Awareness” and a “creepy all-seeing eye for a logo”.

One of the things O’Harrow illustrates is the set of shadowy business alliances TIA formed with personal data reporting companies such as Acxiom, ChoicePoint and Seisint. While O’Harrow focusses on how this information could be misused, his implicit assumption is that this information is correct but private.

But the likelihood of the information being accurate and hence actionable is not very high – certainly not high enough to deny someone a home or a job without the right of appeal and seeing the evidence. These reporting agencies do not verify information submitted, as anyone who has had bad data on their credit report can attest. However, there is no penalty for these companies supplying inaccurate information, even if such false information results in a loss of a job, rejection for credit, or even false arrest!

Americans are extremely ignorant of how the nexus of information is woven throughout their lives and caps how far they can go (where you can live, where you can work, what school your kids can atttend, …), but one thing I hear consistently from people is how astonished they are when they discover they are a victim of false information supplied by a company that “appears” of veracity. Even correcting an error on a simple credit report is the responsibility of the consumer – even if they have had no notice that such information exists, because these companies are under no obligation to provide it (except in certain states where yearly “free credit reports” are mandatory, and even then the consumer must request one). Also, credit reports are only one piece of the puzzle – employers, colleges and universities, government agencies, and financial agencies increasingly rely on these companies to make / break decisions.

I hope more people will start to educate themselves on this subject. It’s a lot harder to do so after you are blackballed.