Michael A. O’Neill

Author: Michael

  • Desiccated corpses

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    El Museo de las Momias was a little bit disturbing. It wasn’t the desiccated cadavers that I found alarming. It was how obsessed I became with photographing the naturally mummified corpses of people so poor their families could not afford to bury them when they died over a century ago. Children, pregnant women, the old and infirm, all preserved right down to their pubic hair. My intention had just been to finish off the role of E100VS still in my camera. But when it was done. I stuck in a roll of black and white and pushed two stops in case the flash wasn’t sufficient.

    Since the bodies were all behind glass, this brings up a useful photographic trick. When shooting through glass with a flash, you have to shoot at an angle to the glass to prevent the flash from reflecting into your shot. Yes, you may still get some reflected light, but it won’t dominate your picture.

    The other trick is to use your polarizing filter. Yeah, I know, the polarizer effects of range of colors, mainly by deepening the blue of the sky. It’s really supposed to be used outdoors, so why should it make a difference? Well, it also reduces reflections and glare–you can use it to take pictures of fish underwater, for example. If one were ever to spot that, which I haven’t.

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  • Kadima and the Wall

    Kadima’s recent "victory" (meaning barely 25% of seats, the largest bloc in the deeply fractious Knesset) combined with the discussion of 1990s crime perception in the US in Freakonomics, has reminded me of one of my most uncomfortable political agreements with the right-wing in Israel: the need for a wall.

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  • Freakonomics

    A friend, Heather, recommended a book called Freakonomics–she suggested it focused on incentives, agency conflicts, game theory, etc., which is the part of economics that really interests me. The human behavior part, rather than market forces or industrial organization.

    A surprisingly fast read–I started and finished it on the three-hour flight to Dallas. Good, light reading. Also surprisingly old news to me, at least some of it. The crack-dealer salary study I had read about a while back in The New York Times. Same for the abortion-crime relationship–I remember the controversy when the research first came out.

    On the other hand, I hadn’t heard about the ineffectiveness of Head Start, though it made sense just with just the salary data. The broader regression analysis was the nail in the coffin. Having some data to attack school vouchers is nice: fix the existing schools. Parents who would elect to use the vouchers already provide enough motivation for their children that they will succeed. The better school doesn’t make a difference statistically speaking.

    But two bits are near and dear to my heart: online dating and children’s names. Names are, w/o a doubt, a status/fashion phenomenon. But the author predicted that the names Finnegan and Ella–which are only popular with the over-educated at present–will become very popular in ten years. (My nephew and niece have those names).

    As to online dating–as a participant in online dating on-and-off for three years now, I’m personally familiar with the hyperbole: women weigh twenty lbs less, men are four inches taller, and everyone is beautiful. I am absolutely fascinated with the incentives and economics of this sector of the internet economy. I’m sure I’ll expound on this topic ad nauseum at some future point, but it just makes me wonder if I should lie on my profile? Add two inches to my height?

    Nah.

  • My hat

    Off to a good start already: wasn’t paying attention to the time and walked out of the house w/ four minutes to make it to the Bullet. I can bike it that fast, but not run it. Definitley not with luggage. And in the rush, I forgot to bring a hat to protect my forehead from the inevitable sunburn. Which is the reason I’m even blogging: I miss my hat. Not the one I forgot this morning. The one I left on a United flight to Paris in 2002. It was an Australian-outback style hat that my parents bought me for my birthday back in the 90s, probably in college. I thought it was stupid initially, but later, I realized the pinned-back flap on one side–while not effective in keeping my face dry in the rain or protecting one side of my face from the sun–kept the hat from looking ridiculously big on my slight frame.

    I loved that hat.

    Here’s to hoping there’s a big mall at DFW that sells hats!

  • Firedrill in a torrential downpour

    All I can say is that it better NOT have been a firedrill. I just spent the last 30 minutes standing outside of Oracle Plaza. When I went out, it was just a few drops of rain here and there. It picked up a little bit, so I wandered under a tree to stay dry.

    But there were no firetrucks or police cars–not even sirens in the distance–and I couldn’t see any smoke, so I figure it was just a drill, and there was no point in walking across Ralston to another building. It’d only take a few minutes.

    Then some *$&%^# security woman told me I had to move from my spot of relative dryness. I found another tree, but it’s canopy wasn’t as dense. My newspaper was soaked in five minutes. I cozied up with a colleague or four who were hiding beneath one person’s umbrella.

    All I can say is that if this was a scheduled firedrill, then whoever let it go off isn’t thinking things through. Aside from the inconvenience, this is going to kill productivity. Probably a third of Oracle Plaza employees are going to go home right now, at 1 pm, because they don’t have any spare dry clothes at work.

  • TSSJS: Ted’s keynote on open-source

    Ted Farrell, Oracle’s Chief Architect, gave our keynote address at TheServerSide Java Symposium today (coverage in InfoWorld).

    Ted’s remarks reminded me of a fourth characteristic of open-source–or at least, of successful open-source projects–that I neglected to mention in my post on what makes open-source. Whether a project makes a tedious, repetitive task easily, provides functionality that would be difficult for an individual developer to support, fills an key business need, the project has to be cool to succeed.

    Ted also had a few more models of how open-source projects get started. In some cases, a developer is working on something individually that s/he does not have the time to finish. Or a company decides to move in a different direction and no longer maintain or support some piece functionality that is in use in the market (perhaps its not profitable, or its becoming commoditized).

    Doug Clarke provided another option: a bunch of developers love some commerical product but the license is so expensive that they can’t get their employers to purchase it. So a couple of them start a project to replicate their functionality, hoping that there is a large enough community frustrated with the license to provide the resources to complete the project.

  • What makes open-source?

    InfoWorld reporter Matt Asay posted a column recently about Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (XE), our lightweight database product built on our commercial database engine that is completely free to develop, deploy and redistribute.

    In addition to saying some very complimentary things about a colleague of mine, Monica Kumar, Matt asked, "[W]hy not just open source the whole thing, Monica, and let people pay you for a supported, certified version?"

    This raises an interesting discussion about what open-source is. Is it the free software that matters? The open source code? The community of developers?

    I think the first thing to consider is how "open-source" begins. I see four main models:

    1. Organically built community turns into corporate support model
    2. Corporation builds new community and starts with fresh code base
    3. Corporation takes existing closed-source code base, donates it, and attempts to create a community around it
    4. Corporation takes existing closed-source code base, finds an existing community, and donates the code to that community.

    JBoss follows the first model: an entreprenuer looks at a community of developers working on an open-source project (first release in 1999), and founds a company (2001) to provide commercial support for that project. JBoss continues to replicate that model by identifying active, successful open-source development communities, then hiring the lead developer(s), and creating a support organization.

    The Eclipse Foundation comes from a completely different direction (the second model). IBM decided that it wanted to make a major impact in the market for integrated development environments that developers use on a daily basis. So IBM a) endowed a foundation, b) assigned a bunch of its own developers to start writing new code from scratch, and c) allocated marketing resources to start building a community of non-IBM developers to join the project. There is still a great deal of debate about how much control non-IBM Eclipse contributors have been able to wrest from IBM, but the Eclipse Foundation has on the surface, opened up the project a great deal.

    The third open-source model can be found in Beehive, a proprietary, closed-source project developed by BEA that the company ultimately donated to the Apache Software Foundation as a completely new project.

    The fourth is seen with Oracle ADF Faces–a family of over 100 JavaServer Faces components–which is being donated to the existing Apache MyFaces project.

    It looks, then, like there are three main characteristics of open-source:

    1. Free software
    2. Open source-code (ability to fix bugs or customize on your own)
    3. The community of developers dedicated to the project

    It’s that last point, the community of developers, that I think Matt has forgotten about. Anyone can offer free software. Anyone can offer source code. The community, however, is what matters, what takes time and effort to build, and what, I believe, will ultimately determine if the project is successful. Without a community behind it, you’re just dumping commercial software into an open source project and hoping for the best.

  • Stamps from Palestine

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    A brief addendum to my post about selling my Dad’s stamp collection.

    The man saved everything. He even saved an envelope I sent him when I was in the West Bank.

    Now, before I left Ramallah, I had planned to buy a few blocks of Palestinian Authority stamps, because I was so deeply amused to see Arafat’s ugly mug on a stamp. Of course, I forgot.

    But Dad saved the envelope, including this stamp.

  • Unintentionally secretive

    I’ve been debating about putting my last name and hometown on my blog. Identity theft is such an issue. Anyway, still won’t mention it in the blog, but it’s sorta obvious from the name of the newspaper…

    But my resolve evaporated with this interesting article by Marjorie Censer in one of the local papers on Joe’s efforts to negotiate with the University over its contribution to Borough tax revenues (the University is a non-profit, so does not need to pay taxes, even though it consumes a massive amount of Borough resources).

    I just can’t resist posting the article, because of this one line that Marjorie wrote: "Council members said they heard from [Joe] only sporadically, and some felt like they didn’t know what was going on."

    One council member, Roger Martindell, went so far as to say that Joe’s negotiations were "undefined, undisclosed and not institutionalized in
    any way."

    My mom was so pleased that others felt Joe was secretive!

    Of course, it wasn’t that Joe was secretive, as mom admitted after her initial delight and amusement had faded. It was just that Joe didn’t share if he didn’t feel a need to. He didn’t deliberately keep council in the dark. It just didn’t occur to him to share.

    Like the time he asked a fellow Jesuit at Aquinas House in P——-n for a ride to the bus station one summer in the late 1960s. His colleague, who shared the responsibility with Joe for giving Mass that summer, asked where Joe was going.

    ‘To the airport,’ Joe said.

    ‘Oh, where are you flying?’

    ‘Germany,’ Joe replied.

    ‘For how long?’ asked his increasingly alarmed fellow Jesuit.

    ‘All summer.’

    It’s not like Joe was hiding anything. I mean, he asked the fellow for a ride, and answered all his questions. It just didn’t occur to him to tell him sooner.

  • A Fine Collection

    That’s what this fellow, Wayne Gehret, said of my father’s stamp collection when I sold it to him today.

    Joe started collecting as a kid in the 1930s, steaming canceled stamps off of envelopes and pasting them into a hand-made book. For many of the stamps, he had actually cut off the little… chads, I guess… to make the stamps a much cleaner square.

    He became a bit more serious about it later in life, probably after he and mom had settled in P——-n and weren’t worrying about money so much anymore. Most of what he had came from his lifetime, and the majority of that from the post-war period. Wasn’t worth much more than face value. But he had some blocks of stamps dating from the 1890s to 1920s that were worth something, and I sold the entire collection for just under $5,000. Joe, of course, alleged the collection was worth twice that, but as the collector, he would be prone to overvalue things. Add in that I would have to sell each block individually to get top dollar (and he had hundreds of blocks of stamps), selling to a dealer at a discount made sense.

    Wayne asked if there was any story behind the collection. I felt like I was depriving him of part of the experience because I didn’t have a story to share. Stamps were something Joe did on his own. He tried to get me interested, but it never took. That was it, really.

    I spent some time looking through Joe’s coin collection, too. Except for some worn, circulated silver peace dollars from the 1920s and a couple of Indian head nickels, everything dated from 1970 onward. Worth a few dollars for each set.