Every morning, I take the subway from GCT to 23rd St in Manhattan, which is near the NY Police Academy. Over the last year and a half that I've been working again in NYC, I've noticed the young men and women police cadets as they too ride the same subway, exiting at 23rd St. If you pay attention, you can see gentle change. First, the are just in their uniforms, maybe with their "New York Police Academy" duffel bags. Over time they eventually get a nightstick (or whatever they call them these days.. maybe a RMASIRCD ? "Rigid Mass for Alleged Suspect Influence via Rapid Contact Deceleration") which is neatly attached to the side of their NYPDA duffel with velcro straps clearly designed for such purpose. Very unthreatening. Then come the patrol pads, large, leather covered pads that they are required to carry in their right back pocket, which seems specifically tailored for this purpose.

After the pads come "the book", this *massive* binder which I can only assume is the penal code applicable to street policing. It's huge. Dragging these around, you'd think they were Marine recruits undergoing some sadistic boot-camp routine at Parris Island. Obvious jokes about "throwing the book at 'em" come to mind... Then comes the "utility belt" - gunless of course - that gets attached to the duffel bag strap. And so forth.

A few weeks ago, the cadets disappeared. Budget cuts? Shipped off to Iraq under some "It's not a draft.. really... they willingly sign their stop-loss orders..."-type Pentagon program? Some silly DHS drill harassing the aged and infirm at airport security checkpoints? Graduation? :)

This morning, coming down the stairs to the downtown subway platform, I noticed suits. Now, at 6:30am, there aren't a lot of suits riding the 6 downtown from GCT, just a lot of construction workers, software engineers, and other blue-collar types, so the density of suits were noticeable. And as I looked I noticed that they were somewhat I'll fitting and wrinkled - like that suit you had in high school that fit for the wedding you had to go to in your Junior year, but didn't work so well in your Senior year. And everyone had a duffel bag, but all different. And I caught them eyeing each other, but without real recognition. Well dressed terrorists, pretending to not know each other?

I stood next to one on the subway, and asked him :

"Excuse me..."
"Sir?"

"Sir?"? This is NYC. Who responds with "Sir?" in a NYC subway other than tourists? Did I run into a missionary group? Maybe the terrorist theory has some merit...

"Well, I couldn't help noticing the suits..."
"Yes sir"
"And it can't be a coincidence that a multi-cultural group of young people in somewhat ill-fitting and uncomfortable looking suits, each with a random duffel bag of similar size and contents - judging from the shape - happen to converge on the downtown 6 platform at 6:30 in the morning by sheer coincidence."
"No sir...."

This was the new academy class. They hadn't been issued their uniforms, and clearly they hadn't been instructed to dress to blend in. I spent a few more minutes talking to the young man - what his hopes are (working with the Transit Authority), if he's afraid ("Well, NYC is better than it used to be...") and how to cope with the danger ("You just have to always be aware"... "Isn't that tiring?" ... "I guess it will be..."). I couldn't imagine doing what he's doing.

I didn't get his name, and I doubt he'll ever read this. (I mean, even my friends don't read this...) But either way, to that young man and the rest like him on that train and trains to follow - thanks. You're brave and we're glad you're here. I'm sure you'll make a fine officer and I wish you the very best in your new career.

And yes, I'll be watching for the bag, the pad, the stick the belt and the book. And once again, I'll make the "throw the book at 'em" joke. And I suspect I'll hear a very polite "Yes sir."

(We managed to tie the standing FOO Werewolf record. End of sat was 6:15am. Never trust Jane after 5am.... Imagine you find yourself in a world separated by time and space from your own, where you are a humble villager, seer-less, healer-less, werewolf-less... gets confusing awfully fast....)

Until now I naively believed that self-destructive doomsday machines were fictional devices found only in James Bond movies. I never believed that anyone would actually create and activate one in real life. I guess I never knew about Yang and the Yahoo Board.

I can never get time back. I can always make another $20.

I've been meaning to announce that I've joined a new startup, 10gen. I'll write more about the change later. The upshot of 10gen should be well explained on the site (and if not, let me know so I can fix it), but in brief, we're developing a "platform" for what is very loosely called "cloud computing". I say "loosely", because the term encompasses a very broad range of technology and services, from basic grid computing to AWS to AppEngine to SalesForce to EngineYard to ... I'm working with some very smart and accomplished people (ignore the guy at the bottom of the page) and I'm lucky - we appear to all share the same views on code, agility, process, technology, product, etc.

What we're building is ambitious - an application server and a database that are designed for infinite scalability. In addition, we're building developer tooling, application libraries, and management infrastructure to help people develop, debug and deploy applications to said scalable application platform. A similar example is Google's AppEngine - it's an app server with a kind of database to which you can write applications, and those apps will run across the Google's resource grid. The 10gen platform is an app server with an object database (keep reading :), and this platform will run across a variety of resource grids - you can run it on Amazon's AWS, across standard managed hosting providers like Rackspace etc (even multiple ones, for geo and vendor diversity), or even run on your internal computing resources.

A key feature of our platform is that we're multi-language. We're focused on Javascript and Ruby at the moment for writing applications, but we have no religious or political convictions here - we're interested in supporting languages that people want to work on. (We are also dedicated to making such languages and related frameworks run fast.) The constraint is that we think that to get internet scalability, standard programming models have to change a little - you can't just toss a LAMP stack or Java EE server onto AWS and expect infinite scalability. While the benefits of AWS are clear - zero capex for infrastructure, dynamic resource availability, reduced operations personnel costs - you still have whatever scalability limitations you started with in your LAMP stack or Java EE server. Don't get me wrong - this isn't a ding on LAMP, EE, or AWS but just a recognition of the challenges we're all facing with our standard tools.

On the database side, yes Virginia, it's an object database. When I first heard this, I had what I imagine is the standard reaction by people that have only used RDBMSs - "huh?". But after playing with it, and thinking about the problem space, I'm convinced that this kind of database architecture is not only nice, but required. Clearly Google and Amazon think so too as their data stores are either object stores or tuple stores. Sure, you can run a RDBMS on at Amazon, but that's just as scalable as your current config. It's clear that an ODBMS isn't going to be the right database for all applications, but I think that what we have is very "fit for purpose", and the RDBMS isn't the right database for all applications either. (Think of how much time we all spend as programmers trying to deal with the RDBMS in a sane way via JPA, Hibernate, iBatis, JDO, Linq, ActiveRecord, ActiveTable, Django, SQLAlchemy, Storm, DataMapper, DataXtend, etc)

Anyway, we're looking for really good people to join the team. We're focused on hiring in our New York office on 20th Street in what is colloquially known as "Silicon Alley", but I'll consider other arrangements. We have some really big and interesting problems to solve, and we need people of all experience levels and backgrounds. The app server is written in Java, and the database in C++. There are all sorts of scalability, grid and management issues to solve. Our application libraries and frameworks are written in Java, Javascript and Ruby. We want to build tooling for Eclipse. We're going to be open sourcing major parts of our codebase. I need core appserver and db engineers, application library and framework engineers, Ruby and Ruby on Rails engineers, Eclipse plugin engineers, QA engineers, QA technicians, technical writers, community leaders and managers, developer relationship managers, etc. The list goes one. I could formally list the job specs, but I think that if you've read this far, our time would be better spent talking. Just drop me a mail at geir at 10gen dot com. If you have my phone number, call me.

This is an exhilarating, terrifying space with exhilarating, terrifying problems to solve, and we have an opportunity to make a real impact. Life is too short to be bored :)

I'm guessing he won't mind - it will support his conference and T-shirt business.

They modified the login page, at least here in Manhattan, to explain. In doing so, they modified it so that it doesn't work in Firefox on a mac - the login form doesn't render. I actually had to boot Safari.

I probably won't miss you.