A Business Meeting

Today, I had a meeting with a former colleague of mine.

Actually, he was my boss about 3 years ago, and both of us are now working for different companies from the one which we both worked for together.
Actually, it's often said that my employer and his employer are competing each other, but I think today we had very much constructive discussion. Granted that it's not clear the business could be put into practice at this moment, but I'm looking forward to working together with him. :)

Anyway, I have to hurry up my current work improving quality of a software related to cloud computing. That's the key factor, actually. :o

An Wedding Ceremony

Today, I attended at an wedding ceremony of a colleague of mine.
I worked together with him for five years since he joined to our company, and so I felt quite profound during the ceremony being as a witnesses of their marriage. :)

Actually, it's was the first time for me attending at Christian style wedding ceremony, and the sermons of the rector (father?) was very much impressive.

BTW, the ceremony was held at a very good restaurant, Ristorante ASO in Daikanyama, and the dishes were extremely good. IMHO, better than Enoteca Pinciori in Ginza.

P.S.
Hi, Uchikawa-san, are you reading?
You know the above guy and his father very much. I had a really happy time today. :)

IPSJ 72nd National Convention, Day 3

Today, I attended at a regular session at the IPSJ national convention.

https://www.gakkai-web.net/gakkai/ipsj/72program/html/program/P5.html#6E

Here are my notes.

6E-1
Hum... Their work looked like at very early stage. I'm not
sure why they did the presentation now...

6E-2
It looks like a part of METI funded national R&D project carried on
by NEC Laboratory. The work is about a new (?) cache data control method
for resource configuration information expressed in CIM. It's a variation
of LRU resource management techniques, I think, and their basic idea
is to use residual time before expiration of various resource
configuration information. The experimental results show the validity
of the idea, but I felt it's important how to choose the TTL values of
each resource configuration information. I pointed out it after their
presentation, but

6E-3
A work for realizing multi-tenant environment without
any modifications of user Servlet applications
done by Hitachi System Development Laboratory.
The essential point of the work is that keep using a single database. :o
I would have separate databases for each tenant and just modify DBCP
(database connection pool) configuration, but it looks like
the strong constraint they assumed came from GlassFish.
Technically, their implementation stores tenant level context information
in thread local storage, intercepts some SQL statements and rewrite
table names in the single database.
Performance impact seemed to be small, but it's better to make longer
pseudo application loads than they did.

6E-4 Canceled.

6E-5
Our work on cloud federation manager which I mentioned here several times.
Actually, what we thought was that we put too much information
into our paper. :o

6E-6
An interesting work on multimedia processing system by
NTT Cyber Space Laboratory. They have been working
on a huge scale stream data processing cluster engine called DMS for
several years, and this work "Niji-Gumo" (虹雲) which means rainbow
cloud is an implementation of a new frame work supporting intuitive UI
framework using DMS as its backend engine.

The work is interesting, but it was not clear for me what theme the presenter
wants to focus on. User interface improvement, multimedia data processing or
DMS itself...?

6E-7
A work on improving a multi-tier streaming data processing engine, DMS,
from the same organization with the previous session.
DMS is basically consists of 3-tier clusters, and the second tier which
is responsible for the most CPU intensitive processing *pulls* requests
from the front tier. Furthermore, members of the second tier do not
communicate with each. This structure comes from a motivation shooting for
maximum parallelism of course. But, it naturally produces a side effect
that sometimes a lot of the second tier servers try to pull requests
from one front end server which the called 'back-pressure problem'.
This time, they chose to solve the problem making a kind of waiting queue
in the front end tier servers. :(

I thought the resolution is quite ad-hoc and they should consider the puller
side resolution too because nowadays there are good algorithms for keeping
consistency in distributed environment.

IPSJ 72nd National Convention

Today, I went to the 72nd National Convention of Information Processing Society of Japan and attended at a special session on cloud computing.

Here are my memorandums:

• Hadoop at Yahoo, Today and Tomorrow, Owen O'Malley, Yahoo!
• Need to look into "Oozie", a workflow engine under development at Yahoo
• Need to check "Zebra", a column oriented data store used in Pig
• Append feature of HDFS will not be included in 0.21, but under development :)
• Generating spam filter is one use case of Hadoop as machine lerning
• Cloud Computing in Government: Standards, Security, and Early Experience, Charlie Catlett, ANL
• Need to check "Magellan" project of NERSC
• Computers and Networks, Coming closer each other by cloud computing, Hideo Miyahara, NICT
• Architecture = Science + Technology (The guy stated so, but I don's subscribe to this point of view...)
• To check what is AKARI project at NICT

HHK Came Alive!

Last Friday, I wrote about my 10 years old Happy Hacking Keyboard.

I thought it was dead because of electrical trouble because I spilled green tea on it.
But, after 2 days interval, it looks like come alive. :)
I guess it's because it dried up completely, and anyway I'm feeling happy today. :)

IT Architect?

I'm running a twitter clone system at work, and I was a bit shocked seeing a tweet today. :(

Well, the guy who tweeted it is known as an really excellent engineer inside us, and his specialty covers mainly software architecture. Thus, he has been in charge of middle ware level framework such as Spring or so. Recently, he also worked on cloud computing, and thus I thought of course he knew what is GAE, Google App Engine, including Pros/Cons.

But, it turned out that he didn't know that GAE does not have support of RDBMS so far!

Of course, I believe that today he understand the essential things on GAE and do right things.
But the problem is, that even I, mainly in charge of infrastructure layer, knew such a basic issue more than 1 year ago, and he is one of lead software architects of us.

I'm wondering where my employer is going... :(

P.S.
Ohta-san, I'm not talking about Masatani-san. Other guy whom you don't know.

Happy Hacking Keyboard

At work, there are three Happy Hacking Keyboards on my desk.
But, the oldest one which I bought more than 10 years ago finally failed. :(
Of course, it's because I spilled green tea on the keyboard.

Now, I'm wondering if it comes to life by drying it out...

Cloud Network Symposium

Today, I attended at a symposium titled, "Cloud Network Symposium" held in Otemachi, central Tokyo, not as just an attendee but an organizer. :o

As its subtitle "Possibilities of Secure Cloud Networking Technology" shows, the symposium was partly intended for announcing results of an R&D activity funded by the ministry of internal affairs and communications in FY 2009.

Thus, most of talks were technology oriented, but actually the most impressive speaker was Mr. Yong from Saga prefecture saying "Consider what you want/should do using cloud computing. In most of the cases, BPR is more important than technology when you try to apply new technology to your (business) system." :o

XORG

Today, I attended at a kind of network operators and researchers group inside my employer's companies group. Here, X of XORG is one of 26 alphabets. Above is a snapshot at the party after the meeting.

There I made a short presentation about cloud computing and actually I was not sure if audience there were really interested in cloud computing movement because most of the audience are working for network carriers. But, after all, it turned out that not a small number of the people are interested in the huge hype of cloud computing and thinking their business seriously.

Since I joined to the current employer of mine, I was not sure if the companies under the same holding company are sharing the same goal or not. Frankly speaking, I thought they are competing each other. :o But, today I felt some kind of sense of unity. :)

Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum

As I wrote recently, I will be working on a new R&D project embarked by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan about three years.

Today, a new standardization forum named "Global Inter-Could Technology Forum" was announced, and I will be there. Actually, there are several similar forums around the world, and even in Japan, there are at least two. Thus, the situation is a bit chaos, but anyway I'm looking forward to seeing various people in the standardization activities because in a sense I was confined within an internal organization at work fully these three years.

Secure Cloud Networking Project

Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan embarked new research and development activities recently.
Among them, there is a three years R&D project on cloud computing named "Secure Cloud Networking." The project is a relatively big one and consists of 3 sub projects.

I'm working on one of especially "Cloud Federation" for about three years from now.
At this moment, I'm struggling with a bunch of paper works, but I'm really looking forward to seeing various researchers and discussing wide range of technical issues during the activity. :)

BTW, that means I'll be very busy at least 3 years from now, and I'm wondering if I can see the very much precious moments of my daughter... :o

Axsh with Wakame?

Today, I saw a demo of Wakame, a ruby based scale-out engine for Amazon EC2 created by axsh Co. LTD, Japan.

In a sense, it's similar to RightScale, and Wakame is still in very early stage. But the most important point for me is that it's open source. I mean that there is rooms working on it for me. :)

BTW, in Japanese Axsh is pronounced as 'Akushu' (あくしゅ) which means "shaking hand."
It's cool, and I like it. :)

Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2009

Today, I went to Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2009, and there I attended at the 6th lecture of Professor Maruyama's lecture series:

• http://www.itmedia.co.jp/enterprise/special/dev_marulec/2008.html

Basically, his talks are on cloud computing. But, the 6th lecture was titled "On the Latest Trend of Cloud and SOA."

That reminded me of my business trip to New York last year. :)
I attended at this conference there, and I was a bit surprised that in North America SOA looked like finally launching. I felt it would take roughly 2 years till the trend comes to Japan.

Maybe it's better taking SOA into account for the cloud computing related project which I'm involved on at work now...

New Workplace

Since the beginning of this April, I was relocated to a division working on R&D
activities at work.

Formerly I felt like a prisoner till the end of this March, but now I can see a lot of interesting people on behalf of the organization which I'm working for now.
So, although I've been a bit busy since then, I'm enjoying the current works. :)

A Personnel Change

In Japan, the end of March is the hottest season of personnel changes because most Japanese companies start their fiscal year from April.

For these three years, I was sent to a subsidiary and placed a bit complicated position.
There I didn't have any basis to justify doing open source community activity nor going out with my works outside the organization where I spent three years.

But, finally I will be released from the situation, and I can work on R&D related activities not only ones directly connected to(mostly troublesome) production systems.

BTW, the next main theme I'm working on is, cloud computing. :o
In a sense, I might be in a fog. In other word, I could be struggling with cloud-built things from this April. :o

Haijin?

Today we were preparing for moving of office location at work, and a snapshot at work today.
The Kanji in red on the label, "廃", means "on the scrap."

Haha...perhaps, I'm being on the scrap. :o

BTW, title of this entry, "Haijin" is in kanji "廃人" which roughly means a wrecked guy.
In this sense, "俳人" has the same pronunciation, but this Haijin means a Haiku poet.
Definitely, I'm not a Haiku poet. :o

Time to Say...

Today, I heard that one of my colleagues would leave our workplace next month.

I'm working for a special organization for one of the most bureaucratic and legacy company in Japan, and its purpose is putting together engineers working on the same kind of technology area from its subsidiaries and make their activities more efficient for all of the group companies.

The colleague is excellent in terms of skill driving an organization for a practical direction. Furthermore, he understands wide range of technologies sufficiently including from emerging ones without working on the new ones by himself to legacy ones. But, sad to say, according to traditional way of career track of the company, a person especially on the fast career track would stay at one place at most five years or less, and he is. Thus, he was also to move to other workplace. In a sense, it's time to say good-by for him.
Anyway, I hope he can get a challenging workplace from next month.

Here, recently I'm wondering what kind of actions should I do in my career path.
I quit a company about five years ago, and one reason why I did so was that there was actually no career path being an engineer not a manager in the company, and one of my bosses who interviewed me told me that they were trying to design a career path for those engineers. But, after all I'm feeling it's was an illusion.

Thus, I'm wondering if it's time doing something also for me recently.

New York

Haha, I got a chance visiting New York. :)



I'll be at this conference in June.

It's more than 3 years ago when I went abroad, and I lost the chance attending at Xen Summit 2007 Fall last year. I'm really looking forward going there. :)

BTW, I want to go to also VMworld 2008 held at Las Vegas.
But, I need to negotiate with my boss. :(

To be, or not to be

Recently, my boss asked me to be a manager.
Well, it's a promotion offer and a good thing because of several reasons.

1. Better income
• I have to bring up my daughter. :)
2. More authority
• Including budget (hopefully)
  

But, for me being a manager means retiring from the front line.
Especially, in Japan, it's not easy to be a playing manager.
(BTW, I know many praying managers. :o)

Thus, I've gotten a big problem.
To be, or not to be ... a manager. :(