He was the principal designer of the C programming language and along with Brian Kernighan, co-authored the first authoritative text on the subject simply titled “The C Programming Language” more commonly known by its nickname “the K&R.” His work didn’t stop there as he was also the co-inventor, along with Ken Thompson, of the Unix operating system. If we stop and think for a moment about the impact of C and Unix on IT, or for that matter, the world in which we live, Ritchie’s influence looks nothing short of astounding. If you take a close enough look, you’ll find that these two technologies are simply everywhere.

The software which powers the Internet; you know the stuff like TCP/IP, web servers, e-mail, etc. Nearly all of it started out written in C or one of its variants (e.g. C++), running on some version of Unix or its variants (yes Linux, I’m looking at you). That desktop operating system that you love to hate? You know, the one created by those people in Redmond. Yes, that’s written in C and C++. That desktop operating system that you love to love – Mac OS? Yeah that’s Unix under the covers, written in C and C++. The iPhone? Android phones? Little Unixes (Unices?) all of them. Perhaps no other two technologies on the planet can claim such ubiquity. Not bad as far as contributions to the world go.

And speaking of the world, let’s not forget “Hello World.”

For anyone who has ever written their first “test program” in some new programming language, the phrase is a well known meme. To this accidental success, we can also give Dennis Ritchie some credit, at least in part.

So on this day, it’s perhaps only fitting for the world to respond in kind with both a heartfelt “Thank You” and a fond Farewell.

I’ll do my part here:

main( )
{
printf(“thank you, dennis and farewell. your work lives on”);
}

In the wake of Steve Jobs’ passing I can’t help but go back to a conversion from just yesterday with a colleague of mine. It was about the pros and cons of the new iPhone 4S. While he and I are very much kindred spirits with respect to our passion for all things technical, our mobile lives reside on squarely opposite sides of the fence. I am an iPhone owner and he an owner of an Android device (it should also be noted that in a small bit of irony, he is an Apple stock shareholder and I am not). Amongst our topics of conversation were the specifications of the iPhone device. This invariably led my colleague to point out how many of the Android devices are either already exceeding, or will soon exceed the newest iPhone on raw hardware specs alone. As as result, my friend wondered allowed if the market was now Google’s (or Samsung’s) for the taking. His musings were based on only the iPhone launch, as our conversation occurred several hours before the sad announcement from Apple of Steve Jobs’ passing. And while he may end up being right about where the mobile market may go (though prognostication in that brutal space is dicey), I didn’t exactly buy the “specs argument” and offered some very strong opinions about specs as a technology barometer.

Though I never knew or met Steve Jobs, I feel confident enough to say that he didn’t fret too much over how gaudy a product’s specifications list was. It just didn’t seem his style to tout laundry lists of processor speed, memory, megapixels and the like. Sure, features were extremely important to him and sometimes these very features were directly attributable to specific hardware implementations. But at the same time, I firmly believe that hardware specs were not things which got him going. That is unless a hardware spec somehow translated into a game-changing human-to-computer interaction, in a direct and profound way. Along these lines, I am confident that very few would doubt that it was the human side of the technology equation that most motivated Steve Jobs. And it is this hyper-obsessive focus on the human-to-computer interaction that may well be Jobs’ greatest legacy.

Around the time that the iPad was released, I recall reading (in a post that I can sadly not remember enough to reference) that somewhere around 60 to 70% of the hardware (or hardware costs perhaps?) was dedicated to the HID (human interface device) features of the iPad. For me that number was an eye-opener. Fast-forward now to the recent iPhone launch hosted by now-CEO Tim Cook and think about the things which were put front and center. Sure, they discussed things like the revamped camera and the 8 megapixels but what they were most impressed about (and wanted you and I to be impressed about) were perhaps two key points about the camera feature:

1. That the iPhone is the most used camera device for Flickr uploads
2. That the new iPhone camera will allow you to take and re-take pictures faster than on any competing phone’s camera, by a large margin.

In a nutshell it is not only extremely important to Apple that a certain feature is being widely used by many people, but it is also extremely important to make sure that the continued experience of using the feature far out-pace that of its rivals, megapixels bedamned. So, if it happens to mean that a revamped sensor is part of the equation (and that it happens to be 8 megapixels), then so be it. But that megapixels stuff, to Jobs, was only the means to an end.

And then there’s Siri.

Apple made a huge investment to acquire this company and its software. To Apple, Siri is a game-changer. They may very well be right. No doubt, the need to not only acquire and focus on Siri as the centerpiece of the launch is classic Jobs. I can imagine a fictitious (or not) strategy session where discussions of what to include and what to cut took place. If ever there was a “should we revamp the case and screen or include Siri to deliver on time…?” discussion, the answer would be a no-brainer for Jobs. Incrementally keeping up with the competitive Joneses was not his thing. He was the Joneses and then some. To him, technology was a people-first business and nobody – NOBODY – had their finger on the pulse of the human-to-computer interaction better than Steve Jobs. He paved the way for everyone else, time and again, and we may never see another like him.

In the last decade both the web and open source movements have brought down many a sacred cow, but have done little to displace the Relational Database.  That said, I, like many others these days am wondering if cloud computing is the last piece that allows turn-key object persistence to go mainstream.  No disrespect to those technologies that claim/promise to do this today but nearly every application that I look at these days still has the tried-and-true RDBMS chugging away in the background.  And as long as that’s the case, there’s a relational data model somewhere as well as a DBA or two providing the care and feeding.

So what would define object databases “going mainstream” in my sense of the phrase?  This is something that may take more than one blog post to articulate, but here is a start:

• Elimination of O/R mappers as we know them today.  In fact O and R should actually coexist as opposed to being two separate dialects.  After all, classes of objects oftentimes relate in a way that is very relational except that the objects aren’t necessarily tabular in look and feel.
• A persistence lifecycle that is more object (almost document) oriented in flavor.  The chekout-edit-put lifecycle that is found in source-code control is a good start,
• A query language for objects that everyone can agree on.  In fact, a good place to start would be SQL but obviously with extensions to handle the richness of objects. Perhaps something like: Select
  Class1.fieldX.subFieldY,
  Class2.fieldA.subFieldB[1]
  From Class1, Class2 Where Class1.id = Class2.foreignKeyId

Granted this isn’t entirely new and yes there are OODB’s but the key point here is to get enough people to agree on such language such that all of the predecessors mostly fade away (remember Codasyl?).

NB: This fading away may also apply to XQuery.  Object graphs and hierarchical document structures are not too much different such that a unified query language can’t serve both.

Okay, so that’s a start but not the last word from me.  This is quite a loaded set of concepts with a lot to consider.  So in the not-too-distant future, I will be picking up this thread again in this space as I think of other things and/or evolve my opinion.

My turn finally arrived and to my dismay there was still no additional cashier on the scene. Being desperate, I (very) quietly asked if it was at all possible to have the booked gift-wrapped, all the while apologizing and saying things like “..but I totally understand if you can’t since this line’s so long…” then finally asking the cashier if she knew of a nearby card store where I could by a gift bag. At that moment a young woman who was behind me on the line spoke up and said to the cashier “I can do it for him if you can just call a manager to do the employee purchase.” As it turns out, the young woman behind me was an off-duty employee waiting to purchase something and simply decided to pitch in.

“Hello sir, this is Paula, who will wrap your gift for you,” said the now-arriving and much-needed second cashier. And by now you can figure out how the story ends. An off-duty employee (who also happened to be waiting patiently on line), simply decided to pitch in and go just a little bit above and beyond. To her it seemed kind of trivial but I can’t help but wonder if she realizes how rare such seemingly fundamental instincts are in the service industry. Being a small-business owner whose very survival depends on good customer service, I know first-hand how important such instincts are. Having seen things from both the customer and service-provider standpoint, I can attest to seeing more than my share of apathetic “on-duty” service personnel. Paula, it seems is different than these. Sure, in this economy, one might be inclined to shrug off such behavior as employee “survival instincts” during tough times, but I truly think this was just something that came natural (especially considering that she appeared to me to either be a student or at the very least young enough to not be worrying about her Borders retirement package). So here’s to Paula and others like her. May your efforts not go unnoticed.

Oops.

Microsoft won the browser war alright but it seems the real battle was elsewhere.  Sure there was lots of talk about the browser platform and its capabilities but what ended up being important was simply all of the information that was being created as a result of the WWW explosion.  Maybe this was crystal clear to Brin and Page on day one, maybe not.  In any case, their interface spoke volumes; one textbox, one button (though the latter has since doubled – Moore’s Law I suppose).  In other words Google was saying, as simply as technically possible, “tell me what you’re looking for.”  Perhaps that’s what started to first get the eyeballs away from Yahoo.  After all Google didn’t seem too wrapped up in all of the talk about “portals” that seemed to be consuming Yahoo, Netscape and, yes, Microsoft.  For Google, it was (and still is) all about the information.  Everything about their DNA was about getting the most relevant information to the end user as fast as possible, UI be damned.  Perhaps that was the differentiator between Google and the other established players in the space.  For the other guys, this concept so tersely labeled as “search” almost devolved into simply one of many features in the cluttered software and portal spaces.   For Google, “search” wasn’t a feature but the entire platform.  And the measure of the platform was neither hardware specs nor software features but quite simply, information.

So now that Google is the de facto leader in information brokerage, I wonder now what’s the next tectonic shift.  Sure we hear about cloud computing, mobile computing and the semantic web (i.e. Web x.0) but I can’t help but feel that these are all evolutions within the hardware, software and information stages.  Maybe that’s simply where we go from here or maybe IT just needs a new name.

In the case of virtualization, I have often wondered what if the hypervisor model could invert itself.  In other words what if it could also aggregate nodes into a cloud space while still offering the “commodity” image of an unmodified OS?  Would this not be the “chocolate and peanut-butter” moment for virtualization and grid?  While not to minimize the complexity necessary to accomplish such a thing (and my somewhat limited view into what it would involve), I can’t help but think that we should be close.  Node-binding technologies are everywhere these days and many of them would play a role. Technology like Infiniband, and perhaps more specifically RDMA (with or without InfiniBand), I would think must be building blocks.  We have clustered databases becoming mainstream such that I would imagine a cross-node, commodity-based hypervisor has to be in a lab somewhere.

I proposed this idea during the discussion last week and was a little surprised that the reaction from the group, while positive at times, was still somewhat mixed.  That is until I fully understood the reasons for the alternate views.  Essentially there was a suggestion that maybe the OS as we know it is not necessary to get to the next game-changer.  I then modified my view somewhat to be a bit more inclusive.  “Okay,” I said, “so what about a Java cloud?”  That question was greeted a bit more positively.  I was then taken back to a moment I had experienced with one of my customers about 18 months ago.  I recall the look on his face when I had mistakenly suggested that Azul Systems was based on commodity hardware. It was the “let’s get it in a lab” look. You see, this customer had already looked at Azul Systems before and had essentially turned his attention elsewhere largely because it was based on “proprietary” hardware.  Hearing the misleading suggestion that it had gone the “commodity” route had renewed his interest for another look (NB: use of quotes for both “proprietary” and “commodity” – these definitions can be philosophical rat-holes). If this customer could fire up a few nodes of his own to kick the tires, he would certainly divert resources to put the product through its paces.  While one may argue whether the proprietary vs. commodity argument was a good enough one or not, there’s something to be said about wanting a low barrier to entry and not being tied to a single vendor’s hardware.  What if there was a JVM that could work much the same way as Azul Systems’ JVM, except on hardware already existing in most data centers?  Sure, you would still need some first-class engineering to get it right (as in the case of the clustered DBs) but think about the up-take in this case.  Then imagine a service offering where you’re given your own slice of a JVM cloud (living on who knows how many nodes) and dropping your entire application, unmodified – web (e.g. Jetty), database (e.g. Derby) and whatever else it needs – into the Java cloud.  You’d still likely need some JMX based services for management, some handle to your file system for your Java DB and other file-based content (ZFS might play a role here) as well as some encapsulation of how the network is exposed to you but if it were done right, such a service offering would be compelling.  This is especially true when one also considers that a JVM is not just about Java anymore (as Tim pointed out by citing the DaVinci project).  I would also imagine that since a cross-node JVM has already been made to work on one type of hardware, it should be possible to make it work on another (e.g. x86_64, Sparc CMT, etc.). I also can’t help but think that this might be easier to achieve than the “unmodified” cloud OS (again limited-view disclaimer applies – and  by “unmodified” I mean that the dependent bits do not have to be recompiled to take advantage of the service).

So whether you believe the unmodified cloud OS or the unmodified cloud JVM are the next real game-changers (I see roles for both), or you believe in something entirely different on the horizon, it would be great to hear from you.

Which brings me to the first topic of discussion – the title of the blog itself.  The day before yesterday, while talking to my oldest son I suffered an instance of this blog’s name-sake.  My son had recently come to discover a hidden talent for the art of picture taking.  The photography teacher in his school was suitably impressed with his portfolio that she urged us to get him a film camera to help him “develop his eye.”  I dug out my old Minolta SLR with its 28-200 zoom lens and showed it to my son.  He looked it over, thumbed through the manual and really started to warm to it.

“So where do I preview the picture?”

“Um, you really can’t do that with these.”

“Are you serious?! How do I know how the picture came out?”

“Well, you have to get them developed when you’re done with the roll and then you’ll see.”

“Done with the roll?”

“Yeah, there’s a roll of film that gets developed in a dark room which by the way means you can’t expose it to sunlight…”

And on and on.  Eventually he sort of got it, but was of course shaking his head at how “lame” it must have been to take pictures “back in the day.”

And so was born the analog moment.  While this was technically not the first such moment for me (the vinyl/CD discussion had taken place years before), it was nonetheless the first moment of mine so named (notwithstanding the possibility that others might have independently arrived at the same epiphany).  I had heard how aging could be marked by “senior moments” of brief forgetfulness but felt comfortable/hopeful that mine were some years away.  The conversation with my son was an ironic age marker, especially considering my very digital trade and the fact that my son is favoring the fine arts as a field of study. There I stood, the analog dinosaur, working in the very trade that makes these analog moments possible.  Across the baby boomer to gen X continuum lies a large group of us for whom there exists the very full experience and understanding of both worlds.  Perhaps we are the only ones who will ever make such a claim.

So join me in saluting the analog moment by sharing some of yours.  Because after this post, my musings will be taking on a more distinctly digital flavor.