Adam Carolla and Me

I guess it's safe to say that I am a huge Adam Carolla fan. I've listened to him on Loveline, watched him on the Man Show and the Adam Carolla project, listened to his CBS radio show, and never miss a podcast (even listen to Car Cast, where I am actually learning about cars).

That being said, I couldn't believe I didn't know Adam Carolla was coming to San Jose! On Thursday afternoon, I caught a tweet from the San Jose Improv and canceled our previous plans and asked my husband if he wanted to come with me (as I was going, alone or not!)  We got there early for dinner, which got us front row seats.  It was like having a private conversation with the Ace man for nearly 2 hours. He was funny, charming and brought lots of new material to the stage.  Having the extra component of a slide show (so we really could see exactly what Adam was ranting about) made it all that much more entertaining.

I even nodded along as Adam ranted at me that, as a woman, I need to know that when my husband just starts saying "will do. will do.... will do." (ala Dr. Drew Pinsky), it means he wants to get off the phone.  Don't worry, Adam, I promise I will!



I am a good/bad audience member (depending on your perspective), because if you're funny, I will laugh uncontrollably. Thursday night, I nearly went into coughing fits due to my manic laughter :-)

If you get a chance to see him live, don't miss it. It's a great show and Adam takes the time after the show to meet, greet, sign books, and take pictures (as long as you're quick!)

Get it on!

Oh, and thanks to my husband, for being indulgent, riding his bike home at a frantic speed so we could make the express train to San Jose, and holding my place in the autograph line while I ran to the bathroom :-)

Security Friday for Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11

Dan Anderson, performance guru extraordinaire, has written up some great articles on enhancements he made to the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework for Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11:

• Intel AES-NI Optimization on Solaris, provides background on the AES algorithm and describes how he was able to leverage Intel's AES instruction set built into the chip in order to boost performance.
• Carryless Multiplication Optimization for AES GCM Mode in Solaris, an excellent overview of what exactly GCM mode is and how this feature in the Intel chipset can be leveraged for better AES performance in the kernel.

Both are great reads and a good window into the innovation we are still doing on the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework team. Thanks, Dan!

Dancing with the Stars mini-rant & question...

Spoiler Alert.... if you didn't watch last night, then don't read this.

Before I start my rant, anyone know who the dancers were for Annie Lennox's "Universal Child" performance? They were amazing!



Bristol Palin somehow, yet again, was at the bottom of the leader board and sailed into the next round - this time, the finals!  Sure, she is charming and an "every day person" - not a celebrity (but, why is she on Dancing with the Stars in the first place if not for being famous?). I get that. She seems like a wonderfully sweet young woman, but her dancing is not up to par. Routinely she freezes in the middle of the routine and stops dancing, and yet she makes it into the next round.

Last night she claimed that her success of moving forward was not politically motivated, yet there are actual political sites running 'Vote for Bristol' campaigns.  Come on people, this is a dancing competition! I've always loved it for not turning into a popularity contest, and it's worse now that a contestant is moving forward based solely on her mother's political affiliation.

Okay, it is only a TV show, but one I really enjoy watching. Great music, great performances and real personal journeys without fake drama.

... for now.... :-)

Neil Young's LincVolt has gone up in flames

I was sad to hear the news today that Neil Young's 1959 Lincoln Continental that he had converted into a hybrid caught fire and burned up. Seems that not only is this neat car that Neil brought to the Sun Menlo Park campus for a visit gone, but so are some of his other memorabilia from his long and interesting career. Luckily, nobody was hurt and the team seems to have learned something about the charging system.

Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11: Trusted Platform Module

Wyllys Ingersoll wrote a great post today on the new Trusted Platform Module, and the plugin, pkcs11_tpm.so, that hooks it all into the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework in Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11.  You can enable and disable the TPM provider via cryptoadm:

# cryptoadm list -p provider=/usr/lib/security/\$ISA/pkcs11_tpm.so
/usr/lib/security/$ISA/pkcs11_tpm.so: all mechanisms are enabled.

# cryptoadm disable provider=/usr/lib/security/\$ISA/pkcs11_tpm.so mechanism=all

# cryptoadm list -p provider=/usr/lib/security/\$ISA/pkcs11_tpm.so
/usr/lib/security/$ISA/pkcs11_tpm.so: all mechanisms are disabled.

# cryptoadm enable provider=/usr/lib/security/\$ISA/pkcs11_tpm.so mechanism=all

You can find out more about configuring the actual TPM device over on Wyllys's blog.

Wow, Solaris 11 Express is out the door!

It's hard to really describe all of the cool things that have ended up in the Oracle Solaris 11 Express release that came out this morning. I mean, you've all heard about the new packaging system, new installer, and encrypted ZFS, but what about all of the other smaller things that have gone in over the years?

Like sedimented strong crypto algorithms - so customers no longer have to manage separate packages and patches?  These were installed by default as of Solaris 10 09/07 (aka Update 4), but I took a very different approach for Solaris 11 - removing those old packages from the OS and making strong crypto just part of all the basic modules. This greatly simplified the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework source code and enabled a lot of projects to move forward, like libsoftcrypto and several projects in OpenSSL.

For the rest of this week, I'll try and highlight other Oracle Solaris 11 Express security features that we've all worked very hard on getting into this release.

GHC10: Friday Keynote, Barbara Liskov, Another Perspective

I did not originally blog on Dr. Barbara Liskov's Friday morning keynote, but found while writing up my trip report that many of the things she mentioned had really stuck with me so I wanted to share with a wider audience.

First of all, Dr. Liskov was an amazing and energetic speaker - enough to keep 2000 jet-lagged women wide awake through an intense technical walk through the history or structured programming languages at 8:30 in the morning. Fascinating and inspiring!

My notes mostly come from my twitter feed, as well as Teri Oda's, and the Grace Hopper Conference wiki. Hope you get something from them as well!

Friday morning was full of extreme technical talks, beginning with the 8:30 AM keynote from Barbara Liskov, Professor at MIT and 2008 ACM Turing Award Winner.  Dr. Liskov regaled us with the evolution of programming languages by describing a series of must-read papers and the advances she made to this are of the science.  She started in computer systems, and in those days, it was the job of the programmer to make up for the lack of
system resources and under provisioned systems.

Dr. Liskov's advice:

• "Reading programs is much more important than writing them." (she notes people will be reading your program for years to come and you only write it once - comment!)
• "Don't try to work on a problem when you get too tired. The solution won't come to you until you're rested."
• "Programmers think in terms of programming languages...if the language supports and idea it's much more accessible to them."

Dr. Liskov's recommended papers:

• "Dataless Programming", R. M. Balzer, 1967.
• "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", E. Dijkstra, 1968.
• "Definition mechanisms in extensible programming languages", S. Schuman, P. Jorrand, 1970.
• "Hierarchical program structures", O. Dahl, C. A. R. Hoare, 1972.
• "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement", N. Wirth, 1971.
• "Information Distribution Aspects of Design Methodology", D.L. Parnas, 1971.
• "Global variable considered harmful", W. Wulf, M. Shaw, 1973.
• "Programming with abstract data types", B. Liskov, S. Zilles, 1974.
• "The connections between modules are the assumptions which the modules make about each other." Parnas in Liskov, 1980
• "A design methodology for reliable software systems.", B. Liskov, 1972.
• "Data abstraction and hierarchy", B. Liskov, 1987.

Dr. Liskov was a pioneer in computer language development. Many of the concepts she was discussing with her peers in the 1970s are just now appearing in modern languages. When asked what her advice was on the best "first language", she said "Python is used a lot, but lacking features we
want students to learn. C# and Java have those, but are harder to learn."

[Update: Thank you, Kelly, for the additional papers!]