Tech Your Universe

Microsoft today announced that they were going to be "opening up" their platform.

Microsoft today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice. These changes are codified into four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions: 1) ensuring open connections; 2) promoting data portability; 3) enhancing support for industry standards; and 4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

More info here.

My take?

This is a good step in the right direction, even if it’s just talk. It helps address the "Key reason #1″ on the list of reasons why Yahoos won’t work for Microsoft.

To that end, very strategic timing. Could they be trying to make Yahoo employees feel better about their historical anti-open source stance?

With this news Microsoft gets 10 goodness points.

I work for Yahoo! (YHOO), and I have had to explain to a few people recently why the Microsoft buyout talks are so troubling for Yahoos. They don’t seem to understand the severity of the impact that a Microsoft takeover will have.

There has been a lot of talk about "cultural differences" between Microsoft and Yahoo!, and analysts seem to trivialize this as just a difference in the level of professionalism or "fun" at the respective companies. The perception is that Yahoo! doesn’t want to be owned by Microsoft because they are stuffy and Yahoo! is fun. This may be true, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. The cultural impacts are far more severe — I estimate that 1 in 10 Yahoos will refuse to work for Microsoft.

Why the intense feelings? Why is the thought of working for Microsoft so awful?

Key reason #1 - Microsoft is anti open-source, Yahoo! utilizes open source technologies extensively. There is a strong divide between the open source community and Microsoft. Microsoft is the antithesis of the open source community, the company all open source developers love to hate. Yahoo! instead embraces the open source community, with almost all of its infrastructure powered by open source tools. Industry experts from these technologies have been gainfully employed at Yahoo! for years, which has propelled the technologies into widespread usage.

• Jeremy Zawadny, a mysql industry guru works for Yahoo!
• Douglas Crockford, a javascript industry guru — the inventor of JSON — works for Yahoo!
• Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP, works for Yahoo! This has been a huge boost for PHP as a technology.
• Sara Goleman, a leading expert on PHP extensions, author of Extending and Embedding PHP, works for Yahoo!
• Yahoo! regularly submits back to the open source community
• Yahoo! has contributed to Squid by paying for developers to build features needed by Yahoo!, and then paying them more to have them contributed back to the Squid code base.
• While yahoo uses it’s its own version of Apache, yapache, they have made some important contributions back to the Apache development group.
• Yahoo uses memcached extensively, and has supported memcached hackathons
• Update on Feb 18th. A commenter pointed out: "I’d like to add that Yahoo! also contributes and heavily supports two large open source projects Hadoop and Pig.

Yahoo provides open source technologies with a well resourced environment with top-talent and a high scale proving ground. If Yahoo! is taken over by Microsoft, many of these high profile open source developers will leave. Some of them have already announced this and made it clear. This will be a big blow for open source. Is Microsoft intentionally trying to disband this pro-open source environment?

Key reason #2 - Microsoft is evil, Yahoo! is not. Yahoo! is the most trusted brand on the internet. Why? Because Yahoo! has continually demonstrated that they hold integrity above profits. Microsoft has continually demonstrated that it wants to win, at any cost. Microsoft competes by hurting it’s competition. The United States, European Union, and other government entities agree.

Yahoo! continually gives back to the community, treats its employees well, and is well respected in the business community for fair business practices. Yahoo! holds integrity as one of it’s core principals, and I am proud to say that I work for Yahoo!.

On the contrary, Microsoft is unscrupulous and has continually proven that making money and dominating the world are the top priorities. As an example, look at how they have handled this merger — a complete disregard for Yahoo! and its employees and the impact on the rest of the world. It’s all about winning, building Balmer’s Legacy, and "maximizing shareholder value".

In fairness, Microsoft is less evil then they used to be. After the governments of the world have beat them into playing nice with lawsuits, they are now very careful about anti-trust issues. And now that Bill Gates has more money than he knows how to spend, he has become very philanthropic.

Key reason #3. Microsoft technologies suck. Their server software does not scale, is not stable, and is full of security holes. Large scale websites are not built using Microsoft technologies. I do not know a single developer that would recommend running Microsoft Servers.

On the desktop front, Windows is inferior. I used it for years, and now I’ve switched to Apple Macintosh, and I will never go back. Apple makes far superior desktop machines.

To prove this isn’t a complete Microsoft bash, here are a couple of things Microsoft does well:

1. Gaming machines - Yep, if I was a hard core gamer, I would own a Microsoft Windows machine, because that’s what all the games are written in. Oh wait — that’s not something Microsoft has done well technically, that’s just a market share issue.
2. Hardware - ah yes, really this time, it’s something Microsoft does very very well. One Microsoft product that is great and I will continue to buy - Microsoft Keyboards and Mice. I love Microsoft input devices, they are the best.

While I have tried facetiously to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, we all know that the reason why Microsoft has its current market position is because of superior business management, not because of better products.

I have a sincere appreciation for Bill Gates’ ability to win — he has quite a track record and his company has been extremely successful. But on every front, there are technically better products available than Microsoft.

I love Yahoo!, and I am proud to be a Yahoo! I will not work for Microsoft. I’d be embarassed to admit that I worked for Microsoft, and having it on my resume would be detrimental to my career.

If Microsoft is successful in its hostile takeover of Yahoo!, it will be a sad day for Yahoo!, a sad day for open source, and a sad day for Yahoo! employees, including this one.

Update on March 28th: I’ve decided to leave Yahoo! because of the impending Microsoft takeover.

What’s Steve Ballmer really up to? 

I kept thinking to myself, Steve can’t seriously be considering this. He can’t possibly be ignoring all of the issues of a combined company:

1. Culture shock — A lot of Yahoo!’s, self included, are Linux people. We will be embarrassed to have Microsoft on our resume, and some will likely leave
2. Integration challenges — I won’t list them all out
3. Anti trust — Given Microsoft’s history, Steve should know that the government will certainly take issue with Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, MSN Messner and Yahoo Instant Messenger, and others.

I’m calling your bluff Steve. We both know you don’t really want to buy Yahoo!. Why the offer then? Let’s speculate. Sometimes in business, you ask for much more than you really want. Then, when that doesn’t happen, you still win by conceding on something smaller. So he comes in with a threat to buy/takeover, and will settle for something less. What is the "something less" that he could  be after? I haven’t figured that part out yet, but here are some ideas:

1. A partnership to team up against Google. Not a takeover, but a tangible deal that aligns the two companies together as a team.
2. A meaty advertising deal
3. Better product interoperability. Have services such as Hotmail and Yahoo mail work better together

Let’s see what happens, but I don’t think that it’s about a takeover — even Microsoft knows that’s a bad idea.

A Finnish man has grown a new jaw for himself from stem cells. I’m happy to see this exciting forward progress with stem cells, as the implications for humanity are profound. Soon we will be able to grow our own replacement organs instead of getting transplants from others. Once we have a president in the United States that legalizes stem cell research, we should see even more forward progress.

View the complete story on news.yahoo.com

Microsoft made an official offer to buy Yahoo! last night for $44.6 billion dollars. See the story on news.yahoo.com. Is this what the new logo would look like?

Kidding aside, here are my thoughts:

1. Bad for Yahoo! employees. None of the technical folks would like the idea. Some will probably leave.
2. There goes Yahoo!’s high uptime reputation
3. Microsoft will add no value to Yahoo!, and the newly formed Microhoo! will NOT better positioned to take out Google.
4. It’s just about improving Microsoft’s share price. Read: Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates’ ego stroke.
5. The integration of the two teams will be a *huge* mess.
6. I like the positive effect that it had on the Yahoo stock price this morning.
7. I also like the effect it had on Google’s stock price, because I had it shorted! w00t!

Will it go through? I think that the recent layoff announcements eerily coincides with this, which makes it easy for one to assume that they were "trimming the fat" to make it more attractive to sell.Also, Terry Semel stepped down yesterday. Odd timing?

And finally, in Steve Balmers "offer", he hints that he will take aggressive measures if necessary. If Microsoft wants something and money is the only thing in the way of it happening…I give this a 75% chance it will go through. I’ve heard that if it does, they want it to happen in the "second half of 2008″. Some interesting times ahead for all Yahoos.

Royal Pingdom has assembled this collection of photos of very well done cables. Here’s one sample:

See the complete gallery

I appreciate someone who takes their work this seriously. I also wonder how much time this takes over doing it the easy way. And then I cringe at the thought of one of them having to be pulled out. Shouldn’t function be considered as well?

Oh well. They are still neat to look at.

Rumor mills are circulating that there are major layoffs coming soon. Since I work at Yahoo! (YHOO), I’ll document some thoughts.

I think a layoff at Yahoo! would be a good thing.

1. Cut some fat - The company has a bunch of smart people, amongst the brightest I’ve ever worked with, but there are so many of us that most projects are overstaffed. How can something be overstaffed? As the number of people working on a project increases, so does communication expense. Everyone spends all of their time talking to each other and getting each other "on the same page". If you haven’t read the Mythical Man Month, I encourage you to do so. This concept is covered in detail.
2. Hunker down - Yahoo! should also prepare properly for the upcoming recession, brought on by the Subprime Lending crisis and 8 years of leadership by the worst president in history. Now is a good time to trim expenses and have more cash laying around.
3. An Answer Wall Street’s calls for major change - Heads rolling is often symbolic of a company that "means business" and is willing to take serious action for change. Having a big layoff will stop everyone from saying that Yahoo! Management isn’t doing enough.

Wait a minute! I work there. What about me? I feel pretty safe. I was recently promoted, I work on the companies current #1 top-secret initiative, of which I am an architect for an essential piece of it, and I just booked a trip to England to get to know the rest of my team better.

But even if I get the axe? I’d enjoy a nice severance package and the opportunity to look around at all the exciting opportunities in the Silicon Valley, like wikinvest.com, wikia’s new search, and other startups. I get 5-10 job solicitations a month — so the problem won’t be finding a new job, but deciding which opportunity is the best vehicle for my talents.

Sure, you have a Gigabit card, but how can you check to see what speed you are running at in Linux? All your networking equipment must be Gigabit for it to work. There are two tools to do this, /usr/sbin/ethtool and /sbin/mii-tool

sudo /usr/sbin/ethtool eth0
Password:
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ MII ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 1000Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: Twisted Pair
PHYAD: 1
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Supports Wake-on: g
Wake-on: d
Current message level: 0×000000ff (255)
Link detected: yes

Enjoy.

 I took some time to improve upon someone else’s squid init script for Linux. I’m sharing it here:

    http://www.techyouruniverse.com/squid-init-script/

   Notable improvements: 

• Added clearcache method for clearing the squid cache. Surprisingly, this isn’t built into squid, and when you restart squid, you only clear the cache that is in memory. This clears the cache that is on disk too. Usage:
  

  /etc/rc.d/init.d/squid clearcache      

• Added configtest method for checking syntax of config file, just like the one for httpd.
• Optimized restart/stop for minimum downtime. Notably, the stop was set to allow http connections to die gracefully. I wasn’t happy with this because it caused 10 - 15 seconds of downtime whenever squid was restarted. Changed to use squid -k shutdown instead of squid -k interrupt, which closes the connections immediately instead of waiting for them to finish. Shut down takes 1-2 seconds now instead of 10-15.
• Cleaned up config variables
• Cleaned up formatting of output

This script has been used in production for a while, but if you find any issues, please leave a comment so that I can address them. Other comments/ suggestions appreciated. By the way, if you are the original author of the script, I’ll gladly give credit, leave a comment.

I am eager to see who will replace Google as the dominant search engine. It bothers me that one company has this much control of the Internet. And now, even dating:

http://www.google.com/romance/

Recently I’ve been with SEO for www.wikinvest.com, and I’ve been shocked at just how much power and control Google has over a business’ ability to succeed.

I think the Google revolt has begun. I already see it happening in the Bay Area technology conspiracy theorists (1, 2. People are getting fed up with Google’s faux-evilness.

Some people say ask.com is a likely candidate, but I think it will be a non-commercial (open source?) initiative. I’d like to see and take a community driven approach.

dmoz.org tried, but has lost credit because of slow updates to their directory. I submitted a legitimate site nearly 6 months ago, but it’s still not there as of 12/03/2007.

We need a search engine that is powered by the community, and non profit, and doesn’t suck. The ranking algorithm will be open source. Businesses will be presented objectively, not based on who pays more. The community will work together to fight spam. Users will contribute content indexing bandwidth and processing power with a distributed computing platform that utilizes people’s PCs, ala seti@home.

Google is fine for now. It does a good job and most people are happy, and it’s not bad enough to start a revolt. But as they continue down the evil path of complete control and monopoly — *cough* Microsoft — users will revolt. People will start to bolt. And when geeks get pissed, they find away around the problem — witness warez, napster, deCSS, and bittorent.

Update 1/2/2008: Holy shit. Wikipedia did it, they created a community based search. I’m going to call it now. This is the next Google Search.

Wikipedia Founder Brings Search Project