Jim Panttaja

Over our years of coming to the festival, we have seen five or six of August Wilson’s play. He wrote a cycle of plays, one for each decade of the 20th century. They have always been a highlight of our week. Fences is set in the 50s. The acting was perfect. The set incredible. The story is somewhat difficult. As you watch the lead mistreat one of his children, and mistreat his wife, you have a hard time at the end accepting his wife’s observation that he was doing the best that he could. But as his son came around to this observation, so did I. I was intrigued that though he had an affair, and that affair was important in showing his faults, it wasn’t what the story was about. It in some ways wasn’t important to the story. On the same day we saw The Clay Cart. This is an Indian play. The new artistic director wants to present new traditions to his audience, including world theater. The production is beautiful (and as always, the actors wonderful). The story is not elaborate, and fits with Shakespeare’s comedies with mistaken identify, and one person who is killed - but isn’t really dead. I wish I had more context for the play. I am thinking back to my comments on Our Town, and realizing that I need to make sure that I don’t believe that with this play I now understand Indian culture. I have gotten some small glimpse - but don’t know nearly enough to understand how to extrapolate my knowledge. It was interesting that on the same day that I saw Fences, this is another play where there is what we would view as infidelity (it is mostly a love story - but it turns out the man is married). But again, that infidelity is not really essential to the plot. Friday was also the opening of the outdoor theater season. We had viewed all of the outdoor plays earlier in the week in their last preview. But there is an extra buzz around the festival, and for dinner, the Feast of Will. This is a benefit dinner put on by the local Lion’s Club. We enjoyed a chicken dinner sitting in the park, with bagpipes and a choir. And after dinner, the Green Show included the renaissance dancing and musicians that we used to watch when we first started attending the festival 20 years ago. It was still enjoyable. Along with much of the rest of the audience - I had missed this music and dancing.

I was recently looking around my home office, and realized that there was a desktop computer I hadn\’t used in months. That reminded me of the two desktops out in my \’music room\’ (think piccolo and you will realize why you might want a music room that isn\’t connected to the house). And when I looked at the two desktops, there was a printer. And when I disconnected the desktop, I saw the UPS that has had a dead battery for a couple of years (it was on its third battery over a 15 year period). And there were two monitors…\r\nIt turns out that their is a place that takes electronics for recycling. There is a fee for many items, but it beats hauling them to the landfill, stuffing them in your garbage can (so someone else will take them to the landfill), or leaving them in your music room.\r\n\r\nGreenCitizen has a location less than a mile from my office just off 2nd Street in San Francisco, with convenient parking while you drop stuff off. They have another location Los Altos, and offer pick up service in the immediate Bay Area (see their site for details).\r\n\r\nOn my way, I mentioned to a colleague that I was disposing of some machines, and he took (and has repurposed) a desktop and monitor. Even better…

One of my mentors passed away this week. He was my first manager - and one of the best that I have had. Dick was a Boy Scout. He was a Scouting Professional. I was very involved in Scouting in Barstow, then San Jose, and finally (at least finally as a boy member) in Sonoma Mendocino Area Council. Dick was the scout executive for Mendocino County at the time, and the Camp Director of Camp Navarro.

I didn’t think I was going to write about this - but today on my bike ride through San Francisco, I encounted not one, but two banana slugs. If you look for images of these guys on Google - they are not cute or cuddly. But they always make me smile.

Dick hired me for two summers to be the Camp Naturalist. Why he thought a math and computer science major should run the nature program at camp is something I never understood. But it was the job he picked for me. And in the redwoods, there are banana slugs. We always claimed that the orange ones (I will generously call it ‘umber’ - but the color almost demands a less attractive name) were vanilla, the dark brown ones chocolate, and the spotted ones were butterscotch. We had many a young camper convinced that this was true. So comig across two (vanilla) banana slugs today - in San Francisco - was enough of a sign that I should write a little bit about Mr. Hacke.

Dick knew how to motivate, and how to read the staff. We were paid almost nothing (I think I got $30/week), but there were people clamoring for jobs. We would work until we were tired - and then Dick would know it was time for a swim - or a game of football - or the best of all, a water fight.

Dick claimed that he only took a two week vacation each year (a claim I am pretty sure is accurate), and that two week vacation was spent taking whoever could make it on a two week backpacking trip in the Sierra. The year I went there were over 70 of us.

I also went snow camping with him, and tackled the Garcia, Gualala and Navarro rivers with him.

But it is the management insights that I carry with me. He really invented management by wondering  around (and a Boy Scout camp is a big place)[update - Mary points out that I probably meant “wandering around” - but wondering works too]. He would make sure that everyone knew that they were important to the operation of the Camp. He would find hidden talents (me - a naturalist - or a leader of songs at campfires?).

I still remember the day when I was riding with him on some task - to the scout office on Western Avenue in Petaluma. I addressed him as Mr. Hacke. He told me that I could call him Dick. And from that day forward he was Dick. What an honor and privilege to have spent quality time with Mr. Hacke, with Dick.

[If you knew Dick, a foundation has been set up in his name to support the camps that he loved]

Yahoo has a web site on Exceptional Performance and Steve Souder, Chief Performance Yahoo! has recently authored a book (O’Reilly) called High Performance Web Sites.

Yahoo also makes available a tool, YSlow, that helps you to assess how you measure up against the Yahoo guidelines.

The advice is clearly focused on sites like Yahoo - and as a number of blogs have suggested, you need to take the advice with a grain of salt. But it is a good starting list - especially if you look at some of the follow on blog entries (many of which are referenced from the Yahoo site).

Phil Haack’s blog describes his experience using Coral Distribution Network (it slowed down his site).

Jeff Atwood’s blog entry in Coding Horror is called YSlow: Yahoo’s Problems Are Not Your Problems.

Look especially at the follow on discussions on Jeff Atwood’s blog.

I now live in two places - one with a 40 megabit connection, the other is much slower (and I am now in my car - and seeing about 800 kbps). It is worth making sure that your engineers are not always running on the the high speed connection - with the servers next door. Sometimes performance problems are masked by really high speed links, or small development databases. You need to simulate the real world when you are evaluating your system. And it may be worth simulating something even worse than the real world. Several years ago, I was running an application that was developed with a development environment. I was trying it on a dial-up line (remember those), and noticed that the application always repainted the screen twice. It was a serious bug in the tool that no one had ever noticed - because on high speed networks, you couldn’t see the repaint.

Use other people’s advice (with a grain of salt), and do your own ‘real world’ evaluations.

Update:

A couple of my colleagues pointed me at some tools to facilitate load testing:

• JMeter
• Grinder
• Netem

Update:

The comments keep coming in. There is a post today on O’Reilly Radar  pointing to A Great Performance and Operations Blog called High Scalability by Todd Hoff. Lot’s of posts about Amazon, Twitter, Hadoop, etc.

And my friend and former colleague Jeff Dao comments:

Some of the suggestions I know of, and some I don’t – like get servers closer to the users, and order you load scripts matter, respectively. Bottom line is, distance and data size matter.

When thinking about this, I always think of water delivery system – pipe size, water volume and water pressure (bandwidth, data size and latency).

I always am amused by this bumper-sticker. I was reminded of it yesterday as we drove by Gray’s Lake in Idaho, and saw Sandhill Crane’s (see Mary’s blog on Tincup Creek for more comments on Gray’s Lake). I remembered my 9th grade English teacher, Miss Davies, teaching us a poem about the Sandhill Crane. She pointed out that the rhythm of the poem matched the gait of the crane. A fact lost on me at the time (not a lot of crane’s in San Jose) - but watching them walk - sure enough - the poem matched the gait.

Mary wrote an entry today about starting a business 20 years later, the similarities and the differences. It is still true that people are the core — and finding the right partners and team members is essential to success. Mary has written a lot about catching the updraft, and the importance of both your own, and your entire teams approach to the creative process. Starting a business is a creative process. You need to make sure that you and your team are working together to Envision, Align and Embody your results.

You can’t just grab a bunch of smart people and go. You have to get the right collection of smart people. The right skills, the right skills mix, the right view of the goal, and the common desire - make that expectation - of success.

What is different now, is that we know more - and know more people than we did 20 years ago.