Alert – do not upgrade to Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2.

Apparently there’s some problem with the license expiration time and the workaround suggested by a Virtualization.Info reader is to set the date back to August 10 – which of course messes up your logs and any monitoring that you may be doing. No immediate solution forthcoming from VMware and in fact, good luck getting in touch with the company.

“At the moment it seems that the entire VMware Knowledge Base collapsed. Calling the support line customers can just receive a brief message saying that the problem will be solved within 36 hours.
Additionally, VMware removed the capability to download any affected product.”

However, I should briefly clarify Paul’s note that “blackboard systems historically used a single memory model (i.e. multiple threads or processes using a single machine’s memory model)“.

In fact, there were many blackboard systems, some more than a decade old, that used a distributed memory data-model. What I think Paul meant to say, and my apologies to Paul for being so literal, is that “blackboard systems originally used a single memory model (i.e. multiple threads or processes using a single machine’s memory model)”

John McManus, former CTO of NASA, wrote an excellent PhD dissertation in 1992, Design and Analysis Techniques for Concurrent Blackboard Systems. John’s thesis, now more than 16 years old, examined many details of concurrent blackboards where memory is distributed. For example, refer to Figure 2.3. Distributed Blackboard System with Distributed Blackboard Data Structure, page 36 of John’s dissertation.

Quoting directly from page 37 of John’s disseration;

Rice, Aiello and Nii [20] present several options for gaining speedups in a distributed blackboard system.

• 1) Eliminate the centralized scheduling mechanism
• 2) Optimize system design for a distributed memory, message-passing hardware
• 3) Distribute the data across the blackboard to reduce hotspots

Quoting further from the same page;

Poligon [21] is based on a distributed memory hardware model when each processor is viewed as a blackboard node. They define a blackboard node as follows: “a blackboard node is a process on a processor, surrounded by a collection of processors able to service its requests to execute rules.” [22] The implicit assumption in this definition is that all knowledge sources are rule–based systems. This assumption may severely limit the performance of systems implemented using Poligon, and limits the types of problems it is suited to address.

In Blackboards for Complex Event Processing, Paul concludes,

“One suspects the blackboard systems domain and terminology is overdue some updates thanks to developments in the Complex Event Processing space.”

If you look at the historical literature, I would say that the following restatement is more accurate:

“The CEP domain and terminology is overdue some updates because folks working in CEP did not reference or incorporate the advanced event processing prior art in a number of very important areas, blackboard systems being only one.”

On the other hand, commercial off-the-shelf rule-processing technology such as TIBCO’s BusinessEvents (BE), advances the ability to economically implement myriad complex problems that blackboard systems are designed to address.

“Linux is a movement, a philosophy, where programmers and technical people take control of their own destiny.”  — Tim Bass

Ref:  Email signature, Re: Future of 2.0.36, G.W. Wettstein (greg@wind.enjellic.com), Sat, 24 Oct 1998 10:09:27 -0500

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. 

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper. 

Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying. 

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them. 

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force. 

Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.

One unintended lesson I take away from Hunter's life is how important patience is. Obama is a politician and may yet disappoint us all, but I gotta believe Hunter would be seriously impressed. If he had waited another couple of years, he may have seen a lot of the stuff he fought for in 1968 and 72 come to fruition. Sometimes you are just 36-40 years ahead of your time and you have to be ok with that and figure out how to deal if possible. (Note - it sure sometimes feels this way in software security). Speaking of security:

Security 

by Hunter S. Thompson (1955). 

Security ... what does this word mean in relation to life as we know it today? For the most part, it means safety and freedom from worry. It is said to be the end that all men strive for; but is security a utopian goal or is it another word for rut? 

Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and initiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders. His ideas and ideals are those of society in general and he is accepted as a respectable, but average and prosaic man. But is he a man? has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar? If he thinks this is all well and good, fine, but think of the tragedy of a man who has sacrificed his freedom on the altar of security, and wishes he could turn back the hands of time. A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. Life has by-passed this man and he has watched from a secure place, afraid to seek anything better What has he done except to sit and wait for the tomorrow which never comes? 

Turn back the pages of history and see the men who have shaped the destiny of the world. Security was never theirs, but they lived rather than existed. Where would the world be if all men had sought security and not taken risks or gambled with their lives on the chance that, if they won, life would be different and richer? It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences. 

As an afterthought, it seems hardly proper to write of life without once mentioning happiness; so we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

A ship is safest at port, but thats not why we build ships.