Kebe Says - Dan McDonald's Blog

If the oddsmakers and pundits are to be believed, my two favorite NFL teams (my current-home Patriots and my childhood-home Packers) will be facing each other in a couple of weeks at the Super Bowl. Remember I said *if* the oddsmakers and pundits are right. If they are, I'm going to have to hide my Packers sweatshirt for the rest of January. And worse (well, worse for the football fan in me), I'm going to miss the game 'cause I'm on vacation with my family!

So what am I going to do? Simple: Root for Michigan!

Huh? Sure Dan - Michigan won their bowl game already... showing the SEC that not ALL Big Ten teams are pushovers, and sending Lloyd on with one more bowl win. What's this got to do with the NFL conference championships?

Well let's see here:

• Chargers - Well, nobody's perfect!
• Giants - Amani Toomer, who SI's Peter King calls, "one of the good guys... also one of the underrated guys.
• Packers - Michigan Heisman winner Charles Woodson (who I saw at the 1997 Rose Bowl). The last Heisman winner Michigan had also spent some of his late career with Green Bay... and Desmond Howard took home a Super Bowl ring!
• Patriots - Sitting on the bench at that 1997 Rose Bowl was a 6th round draft pick named Tom Brady.

No matter who you're rooting for this weekend, I've two words for you: GO BLUE!

Oh my am I exhausted! I hoped to have most of the text of this completed before my flight got back to Manchester last night, but that didn't happen.

I keep telling people I know that Michigan is a hardware school (in spite of having some great software people - see my post from Monday). We Solaris developers at the Sun table were brutally reminded of this yesterday. Lots of EE's with Verilog and/or VHDL experience. Many of them asking about architecture and/or verification, but a surprising number who have never heard of SPARC, the UltraSPARC T1 (aka. Niagara), or that they can see the entire source for the Niagara with OpenSPARC. Almost every business card of mine I handed out to folks had the word, "OpenSPARC" on the back so they could Google it later.

We also tried to make sure everyone had OpenSolaris disks. There are four binary distributions of OpenSolaris on that set of disks: Solaris Express Community Edition (see the previous link) - Sun's current OpenSolaris vehicle, Nexenta - which is probably going to be one of the more comfortable ones for Ubuntu Linux users to land in, Belenix - which is optimized for Live CD use, and Schillix, which was the first non-Sun distribution of OpenSolaris, by Joerg Schilling of "cdrecord" fame. I hope some of the students went home and had success playing with OpenSolaris. You all should visit opensolaris.org and engage the community discussions with your feedback and questions.

I mentioned Monday about how much like a geezer I felt. I had more of that yesterday not only saying, "Class of '91" a few times, but also when Professor Quentin Stout visited our table. My only graduate-level class I took at U. of M. was his Parallel Algorithms class in the fall of 1990 (during Football/Marching Band season). Back in the day it was all theory - we discussed how to partition problems using the abstract PRAM (Parallel Random Access Machine). It was the ONLY parallel ANYTHING class offered when I had an available slot. This was when shared-memory multiprocessors were experiments or startups (anyone remember the BBN Butterfly, the Sequent Balance, or the Encore Multimax?). I mentioned to Prof. Stout I took his class back then. He then proceeded to tell me how the class is far more practical now. He told me all about stuff like OpenMP, and other high-level constructs that as a systems' programmer I just don't get to use all that much. I still, however, felt pretty smart for seeing the future back in 1990. I hope I have as good luck 17 years later.

Anyway, I had a great time in Ann Arbor, and I hope to get back there sooner rather than later. If anyone who visited our table is reading this, leave a comment, and don't be afraid to be honest. :)

I mentioned I was going to be at the University of Michigan's Engineering career fair, and here I am!

I got in yesterday (Sunday) afternoon, and did some things to re-orient myself. I visited my fraternity house first, and quickly, because rush began that night. In some ways things hadn't changed a bit - the house is still there and the rooms have the same names (my old room with a skylight window is still called Lighthouse). In other ways, they had - the TV is bigger and flatter, half of 'em had laptops, and the basement was being seriously renovated. The guys were pretty mellow, probably because of all of the post-beating-of-Penn-State celebrations. I then wandered around campus, eating dinner at Krazy Jim's Blimpyburger, where they give you burgers made of small, ground-that-day, patties. Yum!

When I flew in, the woman next to me on the plane explained the phenomenon she experienced when taking one of her kids to her alma mater. It all felt intimately familiar to her, even modulo some new buildings, but then she suddenly realized she was an old fart wandering campus. My kids aren't old enough to be shopping colleges yet, but I definitely felt the combination of familiarity and age. I saw buildings with new names, old names on new buildings, and just plain new buildings (esp. at North Campus). 20 years ago I was a freshman, now I'm literally old enough to be a father to a student in the incoming class of 2011.

This morning, I tagged along with Kais Belgaied as he visted some Computer Science faculty and grad students here. Our first visit was with Professor Z. Morley Mao, who's a new professor here. She has a lot of great ideas on how to exploit the Crossbow project for aiding intrusion detection (and mitigation), among other interesting ideas. We then talked to two other professors, Atul Prakash and Thomas Wenisch, and a few students as well. I remember Prof. Prakash from my time at Michigan (1987-1991), but the other two are new Assistant Professors. I'm confident from what I saw that U. of M.'s CSE division of EECS is going to be strong for a continuing number of years.

[Edit from Wednesday]Shoot! I forgot I also visited my old theory professor, Kevin Compton. He's a very good teacher, and helps even the most clueless undergrads (hem hem). He told me he's teaching a very popular undergraduate cryptography class, which is just too-cool, IMHO.

This evening several of us (Kais, Eric Kustarz, Bill and Sherry Moore, and I) gave a breezy tech talk about various goodies in OpenSolaris that we work on. We also had very yummy Pizza House pizza. Pizza House was "established 1986", which means it wasn't all that old when I was there, but it was good enough to have our host recommend it.

I'm now back in my hotel, squeezing packets over a flaky, but free, wifi. Tomorrow we will be spending the whole day at the table, taking resumes and answering questions. If one of you four readers of this blog is a U. of M. student, you don't have to wear a suit when visiting us. :)