Category Archives: about me

Sharks win, finally!

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In 1984, a goaltender named Steve Penny, created my life long lover affair with the game of hockey. His, surreal, goaltending lead a mediocre team to the Conference championships where they lost to a much better Islanders team. In 1986, he would be gone from Montreal driven out by an even greater hockey legend Patrick Roy. However, the damage, as they say, was done.

Even though I left Montreal for good in 1987, I remain a Montreal Canadiens fan. I will never forget Patrick Roy’s performance in 1993, when thanks to his goaltending, the Habs won 11 straight over-time games.

After moving to San Jose in 1996, I couldn’t embrace the Sharks because it felt like a betrayal.

11 years later, I can freely admit, that I am a Sharks fan (although if the Habs and the Sharks are playing for the Stanley Cup, I think I am still going to wear my Habs jersey, and party with the folks in San Jose if they win). And after watching them lose the first three games I saw at the HP Pavilion, it was nice to see them win …

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Go Sharks Go!

My dog, the foodie.

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When I go to the Mountain View farmer’s market, I end up buying a lot of stuff. And because I love my dog, I end up buying him some apples from an organic apple farmer.

My dog, who is a Labrador Retriever, is not the most discriminating eater out there. He will eat cat poo, if presented with the opportunity.

Imagine our surprise when we tried to feed him a supermarket grown apple and after one bite he walked away it.

My dog, the foodie, only eats organically grown apples.

Fixed a typo.

Where did these people come from.

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One thing that has been bugging me of late are the comments on my blog about the iphone.

I can’t imagine that there are so many people out there who read my blog. I have to believe there is some serivce that scans blogs and directs folks to topics they are interested.

I know that I push my blog to technorati, so maybe that’s where they get their information.

Explaining what we do at NetApp

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So Mike’s right. At the end of the day, you have at least the following four basic motivations when you pick your first job:

  1. Work on something important
  2. Work on hard problems
  3. Work with intelligent people
  4. Have your contribution matter

We assume that you are making enough money, the job is in a field you are interested in, the cultural fit is real etc.

So why work at NetApp? Because at the end of the day we work on important hard problems. The individual contributions do in fact matter. And you get to work with very intelligent people.

But what do we do?

Let me tell you a story. My wife takes lots of pictures. Our old Dell was dying and the Buffalo Link station we were storing our photos on was making ugly whirring sounds. Since I work at a storage company I am too familiar with how disks can fail. (I sometimes worry that I am like one of those people who watch too much House and think that they have contracted cancer every time they have an ache or pain). I, therefore, decided since I was tasked with the miserable job of buying a new computer that her new computer would have some form of RAID. I bought my computer from Dell because I had a reasonable amount of success with them over the years. The machine was configured with two disks that were mirrored. Now it turns out that Dell also sold (gave) us a copy of Norton Ghost, a disk-to-disk backup utility.

When the machine arrived, the RAID-1 disks were partitioned into two partitions, an active file system, and a backup partition. The active partition was 170GB and the backup partition was 50GB. I was confused, because typically you need more backup space than you need primary, but I figured that there must be some rhyme or reason. Maybe Norton Ghost was clever enough to only copy the “My Documents” folder. Maybe it did compression. Maybe it did something really cool.

Well it turns out that Norton Ghost just does a full partition copy from one partition to another. And it turns out that the minute the used space in her primary partition exceed 50GB her backup software stopped working.

After looking into the problem for several hours, it became clear that the partition scheme Dell invented was useless. Most of the time investigating the problem was spent trying to find some reasonable rationale for their division of disk space. There was none. Finally, I decided that RAID-1 was probably good enough to protect her data from hardware failures, and a USB hard drive would be good enough for backups until I bought a StoreVault.

What was a simple problem for my wife: give me some reliable storage and make it easy for me to backup my data, turned into a complex problem of finding the right technology and configuring the software and hardware appropriately.

So now imagine if I had to resolve the same problem on 10 machines, or 100 machines. What took several hours might take several days. And before you know it I am being swamped trying to figure out how to setup backup for each individual user.

So what does NetApp do? NetApp sells reliable storage, that performs well. What differentiates our storage from our competitors is our simplicity. Many of the time consuming painful tasks that people normally have to perform with other people’s reliable storage, are just simpler using NetApp. The magic in our simplicity is not just in a pretty GUI. A lot of the magic is in our core platform. Although some of our user interfaces are pretty slick.

I’ll try in another post to explain why what we do is hard.

Fixed some grammar.

Why what we do at NetApp is important.

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One of the questions I ask myself on a regular basis, is what I am doing important?

Today, I was reminded about what why what I do is important to the people who use NetApp products.

In 30 years there are going to be those people who have pictures of themselves as children and those who don’t. And the ones who don’t are the one’s parents did not make backups.

What I do is make sure that the data our customers consider very, very important never gets lost. And if the data is a picture of you pulling your little sister’s hair, well that’s a digital memory that you never, ever want to lose.

Sympathy for my professors.

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One of the recent challenges I was faced with was explaining to graduating CS majors why Network Appliance was a place they would love working at. And the challenge is not that I don’t think NetApp is a great place to work. The problem is that I think it’s a great place to work because we are growing at 30% a year, are working on the most important and hardest data management problems out there, have the best executive team out here and will work with some of the smartest people in the industry.
But if you’ve never had a job, are 21 years old, just got a degree in CS, I just might as well have said:

Network Appliance eivai isws n kallntern etaireia stov kosmo gia kapoiov pou molis teleiwse to pavepistimio. Megalwvei 30% to xrovo, ta problnmata pou lunoumai eivai snmavtika, exoume tromera avwtata stelexoi, kai para polous e3upvous upallnlous.

Which brings me to my challenge. Sometimes what you are trying to explain is so basic, that you don’t realize that it’s actually pretty complex and it’s only basic to you because you’ve been living and breathing it for years.

This reminds me of a professor of mine who in class had the following dialog with a student:

Student: Why can you add and multiple nxn matrices but not divide them?

Professor: because matrices and integers have the ring property.

Student: Huh?

Professor: integers and matrices are both rings

Student: ???

Professor: Integers have the ring property as do matrices

The problem was that the Professor just did not get that the student had no idea what the word ring actually meant.

It turns out that going to that place where you have to explain what the ring property is, is a hard thing to do. And everytime I try, I keep going back to: well the integers are a ring.

So to the professor I mocked mercilessly for years, I apologize. Understanding what the gap is and explaining it, is a very, very hard thing to do.

Stupid is as stupid does.

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Many years ago, I was having lunch with a bunch of friends who were doing a Ph.D in Computer Science with a focus in theory and algorithms. And somehow the conversation got around to talking about various practical algorithms. So I, of course, said:

You want an algorithm that finishes in a finite amount of time.

So to set the record straight, almost 8 years after the fact, what I wanted to say was:

You want an algorithm that terminates in a reasonable amount of time otherwise it might as well never terminate.

There is honour among thieves.

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Several years ago, my dad had his Mercedes stolen.

On the day it was stolen, as part of the process for getting his money from the insurance company he was required to place an advertisement in the Greek Newspaper of his choice announcing the loss and asking people if they found it. This is a pro-forma task, that is usually followed by a modest insurance payout.

Surprisingly, the thief called and said on the phone:

Prof. Roussos, I am a serious business man, a respected man of society. Stealing your car is an inconvenience to us both. I have to take it to Albania to get it cut into little pieces to resell the parts, you have to buy a new car. How about we arrive at an understanding? You pay a modest fee and I’ll return the car.

My dad agreed on condition that he see the car first.

So my dad was taken along with a bodyguard to see the car. Upon inspecting the car he discovered that the car had some scratches and was dirty.

When the thief called later, my dad complained about the defects. The thief replied:

Damn! I’ve told my employees not to damage the customers merchandise. I’ll make sure it’s fixed before you get the car.

Several days later the exchange was done. There was an aura of cloak & dagger about it. The money was placed near a phone booth in Athens, and then in another part of Athens the Merc was returned.

But the story does not end here.

Several months later, my dad got a phone call:

Journalist: Are you Professor Roussos?

Dad: Yes.

Journalist: I am a journalist for a ****.

Dad: Careful. What do you want?

Journalist: Did you have your car stolen and then returned for a ransom fee?

Dad: Why?

Journalist: Apparently the same crook stole all of my belongings and my car. He offered to return everything for a modest fee. When I started to doubt his honour, he suggested I call you up. That you would act as a reference for him. That he is an honourable man who will return my stuff.

 So my dad told him that he was an honourable thief. And who ever said there is no honour among thives.

The Lawn, again.

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Yesterday my wife and I re-planted the lawn.

Strictly speaking we over-seeded. The difference between re-plant and re-seed is about whether you decided to throw out all of the old grass, or just add grass.

So here’s what we did:

  1. First we raked the lawn completely, both to remove stuff off of the lawn and to dig up the dirt.
  2. We levelled the lawn further with a normal rake and this really cool oversized rake.
  3. We applied seed (Scott’s High Traffic Tall Fescue)
  4. We applied fertilizer (Scott’s Starter Fertilizer)
  5. We applied top-soil (Kellog’s Top Soil)
    1. Trying to add a layer of top soil on top of the seeds so that the seeds don’t get disturbed was a bit of a challenge. It works best with two people. One person drops the dirt in a pile, the other spreads it out gently using a rake.

The last thing we did got us an 30-40% coverage of the lawn. I am hopeful that this more methodical approach will get me closer to 80-90% of the lawn.

If that fails, the nursery I bought the tools from sells sod at 0.40$ a square foot. The total cost for the sod would be 100$ + some amount for installation. I have not yet given up hope.

Topical blogs

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An old and dear friend of mine whined recently that my blog is not topical.

His rant was not just directed at my blog but at the blogosphere in general. He observed that there were a wide variety of folks who used their blogs to just make random nonsensical remarks that had no point. That their blogs were an excuse to write random crap that was of no interest, not even to the author 5 minutes after they got posted.

I thought about that.

So my first observation is that my blog’s title is Day to Day Nonesense: Kostadis Roussos’ musings on a random world. The readers is warned that the blog contents are going to be both random and nonesense. Am I off-topic then if my blog is full of nonesense and random contents?

But that’s a cop-out. The real question is: Is a blog with my topic worth having on the web? Is the world serviced by such a blog or is it just my vanity? Am I like the annoying person at the dinner party that talks and talks and talks about something no one else cares about?

The meta-question is, would it be better if I had a topical blog? What if I picked a topic and focussed on it for a long time?

I ran into two challenges.

The first is that the time investment in a blog has to be small. I have a life. I have a wife, dog and friends. A column is a significant investment of time and energy.

The second is that I am not sure what I would talk about. World Affairs? Software? Technololgy? Maybe something very narrowly focussed like storage management and data management. Or maybe a hobby? Again, I am not sure one more blog on these topics would add much more value than my current blog. Dave Hitz’s blog adds a lot of value because he is the EVP of NetApp, the other horse in the two horse race in the storage market. His opinions carry weight because of his role and because of who he is. Knowing more about how Dave thinks is a proxy to knowing more about how NetApp thinks. About the only topic I add weight to because of my role is storage management and I can’t talk about that …

But I agree with my friend. A random blog about random topics is not generally interesting to most people.

However … I have a large distributed family that reads my blog. I can use the blog as a convenient way to share information about my life to them. And they seem to like it.

So I’ll keep with my blog. And as for my friend … well he’ll probably ignore this blog entry, but he has a point, I really should create a topical blog. Focussed on a narrow topic that might be more broadly interesting than the 30 or so folks in my family who read this blog.