I can tell him exactly when and how: October 2001. That’s when my association with the IMDb, and my six-year stewardship of its Quotes section, came to an abrupt end, and not an amicable one. The less said about that, the better.

While Quotes Editor, I enforced a style that Perich recalls fondly, one in which quotes were by and large pithy, could stand on their own with minimal context (e.g. stage directions), and stated something truly memorable: something about the human condition, for instance, or something that could whisk the reader right back into the emotional heart of a scene.

During my tenure we had no quotes from movie trailers, no quotes that could not be understood out of context, and few overlong scenes. The ones of those that I did include came from prolific and reliable quote submitters whom I did not wish to alienate by disregarding the work they’d put into transcribing them; and even then, I usually managed to carve them up into separate bite-sized quote morsels.

Problem was (as Perich rightly points out) that ensuring the accuracy and suitability of quotes that IMDb users submitted — in ever-increasing numbers, with an ever-decreasing signal-to-noise ratio — was nearly a full-time job all by itself; and when I agreed to take on the Trivia and Goofs sections too as a favor to one of my colleagues, and then software development on top of that, I was often at the point of despair. I was disappointed but not entirely unhappy when it came time to separate from the IMDb.

I don’t know who has held the Quotes Editor post since my departure, and whoever has, I do not wish to cast aspersions on the job they’ve done. It’s not an easy one, especially if their efforts are split between Quotes and any other part of the site. But as I’ve noted myself over the past few years (with the occasional sigh and sorry head-shake), it’s clear that they’ve abandoned the aesthetic that John Perich and I prefer.

Share

Now imagine that the driver of the car presses harder on the accelerator, and the car speeds up. The refueling truck speeds up too to stay with the car, but the trickle of gas stays the same — it doesn’t increase to compensate for the faster-running engine.

According to common sense — and the laws of thermodynamics — the level of fuel in the tank must now begin to drop. Right? Right?

Well, I’m now in week four of vigorous exercise almost every damn day, and the pounds are not coming off. I weigh exactly as much as I did when I started. My eating habits are the same as before, and my level of physical activity is notably higher. If I could build a car that worked like me, the world’s fossil fuel woes would be over.

In the past I’ve announced my weight-loss efforts on this blog as way to compel myself to stick with them (reasoning that I wouldn’t be able to let my millions of loyal readers down, natch). This time I kept it quiet, hoping for more success than in other recent attempts, so as to have a little momentum going when I broke the news here. Happily, sticking with my new fitness regime no longer seems to be the main challenge. Unhappily, the effect of all that exercise seems to be nothing other than an increase in the efficiency with which I metabolize my food intake. I have no choice but to change my eating habits. Let’s see if that does anything, or if I continue to defy the laws of nature.

Phase one: eliminating sweets for two weeks. This better work.

Share

1. Download Fedora 12 install-CD image.
2. Burn Fedora 12 install CD.
3. Shut down sendmail and Apache.
4. Dump MySQL database contents.
5. Dump Postgresql database contents.
6. Bring up new computer with temporary hostname.
7. Install Fedora 12 on new computer.
8. Create user accounts.
9. Copy all data from old computer to new, under /old tree.
10. Shut down old computer (permanently).
11. Take over old computer’s hostname and IP address.
12. Restore firewall config from /old.
13. Restore DNS config from /old, bring up DNS.
14. Restore sshd config from /old, bring up sshd.
15. Restore Maildir trees from /old.
16. Restore IMAP server config from /old, bring up IMAP server.
17. Restore sendmail config from /old, bring up sendmail.
18. Restore WordPress environment from /old.
19. Bring up MySQL, restore contents from MySQL dump.
20. Bring up Postgresql, restore contents from Postgresql dump.
21. Restore Apache config from /old, bring up Apache.
22. Restore Mailman environment from /old, bring up Mailman.
23. Bring up apcupsd.
24. Add printer.
25. Set up network printing.
26. Set up NFS.
27. Resume backups.

Naturally not everything went according to plan. So in addition to the steps above I also had to solve:

• Why all of my domains but one could be resolved;
• Why the firewall was getting reset at startup;
• Why inbound mail was not flowing;
• Why the Ethernet interface had the wrong parameters at startup;
• Why the monitor would not go into power-save mode;
• How to get the Flash plugin running under x86_64;
• Why the DVD-RW drive wasn’t visible some of the time.

Throughout all this, I frequently had to pause to locate and install needed software packages and Perl modules that weren’t part of the default Fedora setup. For good measure I also had to replace an external hard drive that was about to fail. (Thanks for the warning, Palimpsest!)

Happily all these things are now done, except that the monitor issue is a bona fide bug in the xorg video driver (duly filed) that someone else will have to deal with. Until then I just have to remember to switch the monitor off when I walk away.

This may all sound like deep wizardry, but it doesn’t feel like it to me. Having spent a lifetime coping and communing with these sometimes-cantankerous machines, it’s just busywork. Then I think of the number of other people in the world who could do all of this single-handedly and I become impressed with myself.

Share

What is the date (day, month, and year) at the beginning of The Pirates of Penzance?

Solution follows.

The Pirates of Penzance is the story of Frederic, a reluctant pirate’s apprentice. As soon as he turns 21 his apprenticeship is over and he promptly leaves his pirate comrades for a more virtuous life on land, where he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Mabel.

Later, the Pirate King, Frederic’s erstwhile captain, shows up to enforce the terms of his indenture, which (no one had realized) specify that Frederic is to serve not until his 21st year but until his 21st birthday. As the Pirate King points out (in song, natch):

For some ridiculous reason, to which however I’ve no desire to be disloyal
Some person in authority — I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal –
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty
One year in every four, his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty
Through some singular coincidence (I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy)
You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap year on the twenty-ninth of February
And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you will easily discover
That, though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet if we go by birthdays, you’re only five and a little bit over.

Frederic, an admitted “slave of duty,” reluctantly agrees that he is still bound to the pirates. Breaking the news to Mabel, he sings to her,

In 1940 I of age shall be,
I’ll then return and claim you, I declare it!

From that you might conclude that, if his twenty-first birthday is in 1940, then he’ll be 84 that year (21×4) and that he was therefore born in 1856, but you’d be wrong!

Everyone knows that leap year comes once every four years, but not as many people know that it’s more complicated than that. It’s a leap year if:

• The year is a multiple of four;
• But not if the year is a multiple of one hundred;
• Except when the year is a multiple of four hundred.

1996 was a multiple of four, and not a multiple of 100, and not a multiple of 400, so it was a leap year. 2000 was a multiple of four, so it would have been a leap year, except that it was also a multiple of 100, so it would not have been a leap year, except that it was also a multiple of 400, so it was a leap year — and because of that, it allowed some people who believed “every four years” is the complete rule to continue believing that.

So by these rules, 1900 was not a leap year. If Frederic had been born in 1856, then 1940 would have been only his twentieth birthday, not his twenty-first. For 1940 to be his twenty-first birthday he had to have been born in 1852.

So the action at the beginning of The Pirates of Penzance takes place on 1 March 1873 — the first day after Frederic’s twenty-first year. (Assuming Frederic was aware that 1900 would not be a leap year when he told Mabel “1940″ — which, being such a stickler for the rules, he surely was.)

Share

We have some Apple products in our household. Also, I’m an employee of Google.

“Don’t be evil” is not bullshit. I and a lot of my colleagues work there precisely because of that mantra, and many of us are prepared to pack up and leave if we ever discover Google straying meaningfully from it. Gratifyingly, opportunities arise often in which to apply “don’t be evil” to a business or engineering decision, and a culture of vigorous and principled internal debate helps to ensure we choose correctly. Not all cases are black and white, of course (though some are), and it’s possible to err, but on the whole we do pretty well, non-evil-wise, especially compared to, well, every other publicly traded technology company.

In short, I take your remark as a personal insult, not to mention a telling comment on your own sense of right and wrong and, by extension, that of your company. I would welcome a sincere retraction, failing which I will have to reconsider continuing to be an Apple patron.

Thanks,
- Bob

Share

But then my friends started having bar mitzvahs and I got jealous. So some time in 1979 I informed my parents — who had left the decision up to me, and who thought they were getting off the hook without planning a bar mitzvah — that in fact I wanted to have one and that it had to be before the year was out. I didn’t want to be the only one of my friends whose bar mitzvah spilled over into the next decade!

To have a bar mitzvah I had to be able to read Hebrew, which meant going to Hebrew school, something that bar-mitzvah-bound kids began doing at age eight or nine; and here I was already pushing thirteen, the bar mitzvah age. Forest Hills Jewish Center, a conservative synagogue, wouldn’t take me, because I was too old. (A year later, Yoda would make the same complaint about training Luke Skywalker.) But Temple Sinai, a reform synagogue (now The Reform Temple of Forest Hills), did.

I was the biggest kid in the class but a motivated student. Within just a couple of months I was reading Hebrew fluently — which is to say, I learned the alphabet and the pronunciation, and so could make all the right sounds. Comprehension was something else altogether.

Rabbi Irvin Ungar set my bar mitzvah for the fifteenth of December — just made it! — and began my training. I started attending sabbath services each week to become familiar with the sequence of events and the liturgy. I learned how to chant my Torah portion (“Vayeshev”) and my haftarah. It was my first serious exposure to ritual and I took to it like a duck to water. Combined with Rabbi Ungar’s learned and gregarious mentoring style, and influenced by the involvement of my friend Chuck with his synagogue, I became a surprisingly observant Jew, to the delight of my parents (who, as noted above, were not themselves particularly observant).

While I was receiving religious instruction, my parents were busy planning the reception. They booked a ballroom at the Sheraton in Elmhurst and sent invitations to the extended family. I invited some of my new Hunter friends and a few from my elementary school days. A couple of months before the event, I stopped eating chocolate and fried food entirely, determined that this was the best way to ensure blemish-free skin on the big day. (And it worked!)

The party needed music, and my parents began looking into bands and DJ’s. One musician (with the memorable not-to-be-confused-with-the-auto-repair-chain name Lee Myles) offered to come to our house with a videotape of his band performing — and to bring along a videocassette player, which in 1979 almost no one had. I was beside myself with excitement at the prospect of seeing one of those contraptions in operation in my very own living room, and when he arrived, everything he said to my parents was just so much droning. It took forever before he finally stopped talking and hauled the enormous player out from its carrying case, along with its multifarious cables and adapters. That’s when I finally joined in the conversation, chattering away about the relative merits of coax connectors versus spade lugs, VHS versus Betamax, tuning via channel 2 versus channel 3, etc. In the end we got to see about thirty disappointing seconds of fuzzy video footage before all the equipment got disconnected and put away.

We didn’t hire Lee Myles.

Everything finally came together on this date thirty years ago.

That’s me in the white turtleneck. Also pictured: three future lawyers.

I conducted my parts of the Saturday-morning service so well that I was invited to become Temple Sinai’s first official “rabbi’s assistant,” a position I held for many weeks thereafter. I delivered an original speech about Judaism and becoming a man and so on that I remember not at all, but that was received (atypically for a bar mitzvah speech) attentively and with disbelief that I’d written it myself. And the reception, though mostly a blur, was memorable at least for the poster-sized cartoon wailing wall that my father drew and stood on an easel for my guests to sign (and that became a wall-art fixture at home for years); and for the moment that my friends took me aside and welcomed me to official manhood by literally showering me with foil-wrapped condoms (which were far more giggle-worthy then — and embarrassing to buy — than they are in this age of strident safe-sex awareness).

Some months later, Rabbi Ungar moved far, far away. His replacement, whatever his virtues might have been, was a zero in the motivating-young-people department. My scientific bent (and attendant religious skepticism) reasserted itself, the novelty of a Dixie cup of sweet wine each Saturday morning wore off, and my tenure as rabbi’s assistant, and my flirtation with a devout life, ended soon after.

Postscript. Helen Keller was one of my mom’s heroes, and The Miracle Worker, the story of Keller’s relationship with the blind teacher Annie Sullivan, was one of her favorite movies.

In trying to find a web link for Temple Sinai while writing this article, I ran across an article entitled, “Helen Keller: Citizen of Forest Hills.” It was the first I’d ever heard that my mom’s hero lived in the same neighborhood where (years later) she raised me; I’m not sure my mom ever knew. But more than that — the article reveals that Helen Keller’s Forest Hills house later became the very site of Temple Sinai!

Share

At its peak during the dot-com boom, my ownership of Amazon.com was worth millions. Thanks to the dot-com crash and some bad planning, I ended up extracting only a fraction of that value, and I still haven’t entirely gotten over it. But it’s hard to feel too bad: it was a great ride, and with the proceeds we bought some cool toys and took some fun trips. It allowed me to earn practically nothing while launching another startup, where today my wife and several others earn a comfortable living. With Amazon money we had a terrific wedding, got a cozy home, and started an amazing family. Like George Bailey, I am the richest man in town.

Here’s lookin’ at you, Amazon. Thanks for everything.

Share

The Hiptop and its cloud-like service were designed by Danger, the company I joined late in 2002 just as the very first Hiptop went on the market. I worked on the e-mail part of the back-end service, and eventually came to “own” it. It was a surprisingly complex software system and, like much of the Danger Service, required continual attention simply to keep up with rising demand as Danger’s success grew and more and more Sidekicks came online.

Early in 2005, the Danger Service fell behind in that arms race. Each phone sought to maintain a constant connection to the back end (the better to receive timely e-mail and IM notices), and one day we dropped a bunch of connections. I forget the reason why; possibly something banal like a garden-variety mistake during a routine software upgrade. The affected phones naturally tried reconnecting to the service almost immediately. But establishing a new connection placed a momentary extra load on the service as e-mail backlogs, etc., were synchronized between the device and the cloud, and unbeknownst to anyone, we had crossed the threshold where the service could tolerate the simultaneous reconnection of many phones at once. The wave of reconnections overloaded the back end and more connections got dropped, which created a new, bigger reconnection wave and a worse overload, and so on and so on. The problem snowballed until effectively all Hiptop users were dead in the water. It was four full days before we were able to complete a painstaking analysis of exactly where the bottlenecks were and use that knowledge to coax the phones back online. It was the great Danger outage of 2005 and veterans of it got commemorative coffee mugs.

The graphs depict the normally docile fluctuations of the Danger Service becoming chaotic

The outage was a near-death experience for Danger, but the application of heroism and expertise (if I say so myself, having played my own small part) saved it, prolonging Danger’s life long enough to reach the cherished milestone of all startups: a liquidity event, this one in the form of purchase by Microsoft for half a billion in cash, whereupon I promptly quit (for reasons I’ve discussed at by-now-tiresome length).

Was that ever the right move. More than a week ago, another big Sidekick outage began, and even the separation of twenty-odd miles and 18 months couldn’t stop me feeling pangs of sympathy for the frantic exertions I knew were underway at the remnants of my old company. As the outage drew out day after day after day I shook my head in sad amazement. Danger’s new owners had clearly been neglecting the scalability issues we’d known and warned about for years. Today the stunning news broke that they don’t expect to be able to restore their users’ data, ever.

It is safe to say that Danger is dead. The cutting-edge startup, once synonymous with must-have technology and B-list celebrities, working for whom I once described as making me feel “like a rock star,” will now forever be known as the hapless perpetrator of a monumental fuck-up.

It’s too bad that this event is likely to mar the reputation of cloud computing in general, since I’m fairly confident the breathtaking thoroughness of this failure is due to idiosyncratic details in Danger’s service design that do not apply at a company like, say, Google — in whose cloud my new phone’s data seems perfectly secure. Meanwhile, in the next room, my poor wife sits with her old Sidekick, clicking through her address book entries one by one, transcribing by hand the names and numbers on the tiny screen onto page after page of notebook paper.

Share

Suppose fully 5% of this office’s patients have names ending in “stein” (surely a very generous assumption). The odds of three of those patients showing up in a row at random are slimmer than 8,000 to 1 — and they only get slimmer if the proportion of “stein” patients is less than 5%, as seems likely. (At 2%, the odds shoot up to 125,000 to 1 against.)

The likelier explanation is that it was “stein” day at this particular office. Gratifyingly both Mr. Milstein and Mr. Epstein pronounced it STEEN like I do, not STINE like Drs. Franken- or Ein-. What are the odds of that!

Share

I next heard of Dr. Lee in the 90′s, when he was a senior researcher for Microsoft. He made headlines when he fled Microsoft for Google — just as I did a few years later.

Now comes the news that Kai-Fu Lee is leaving Google. That’s too bad for Google, but at least we still have Al Spector — who was Nathaniel’s old boss and mine at the ITC!

Share