Monthly Archives: January 2008

Moving Up and Down the Stack

Posted on January 28, 2008 | Leave a comment
Which level please?

This has been going on for quite some time. Companies which have traditionally specialized in certain areas are forced to examine related areas in order to grow. Once a tech company grows past a certain point (perhaps when it reaches close to the market saturation point), it needs to understand what will help it grow further.

Obviously the business that they are in has other players. These businesses are assessed and decisions are made about whether or not to invade that space. This can happen from acquisition or from brute force development. It’s usually much easier to acquire a seed company than to start from scratch.

If you were to look at Citrix around 8 years ago, you would see a business revolving around providing access to applications remotely in a efficient manner. This product was called MetaFrame and it did well for Citrix and the customers that used it. The sales curve for this market has continued to rise but not as fast as it was in the beginning. Obviously when a new reserve is tapped, it is going to grow really fast. Eventually things level out in a way that make it clear that it is time to tap other areas.

Citrix’s initial attempt at bridging to a new market came with the acquisition of Sequoia. The thinking at the time was that the portal was going to be a big business area. Citrix spent around 300 million dollars for the company. After it was acquired, Citrix rushed to make it work with Citrix software. There was a major investment put into the effort after the acquistion. Internally, there was a big push to see the portal as the future and that less focus should be put on presentation server. It was explained that the investment was already so high in CPS that it was time to move on to invest in other products. Any key message from that time is that we didn’t want to be a single product company.

The end result was that it failed. It is hard to classify why it failed. From my own observations I would conclude that the Sequoia and Citrix cultures did not mix and that the resulting blend was not suitable for the portal market. Major players like Microsoft had their own ideas about portals and made a much more convincing story than what Citrix had.

Citrix learned from this mistake and was much more cautious with its next acquisitions. It had a major success with Expertcity. They would be called the new Citrix Online division and they would not provide software but rather service. The market was similar but targeted users using the Internet and using a different remoting technology. Another key move was to isolate the company away from the main engineering group. It was perceived that mixing engineering with other acquired companies tended to cause strife.

When the X-1 project rolled onto the scene, a new vision was put forward. Instead of just looking for individual new products, Citrix would instead strive to have an end-to-end solution. This meant that Citrix would be seriously looking at providing elements from the network stack layer. It also meant that Citrix would be looking for ways not to get squeezed out the multiuser business.

This act of going down the stack was important since many customers want to solve problems with as few providers as possible. This act makes sense it makes it easier to deploy and vendors are less likely to blame other vendors if there are less vendors involved. I would equate the idea to having a car built from many different vendors. Supporting this model in a consumer business would probably just be insane. I was first exposed to this as a reseller in 1997 when customers told me that they only worked with Microsoft and did not want to deal with another vendor as well. This was across the board and obviously not just for remote access.

Things get much more competitive as time goes by. Companies that historically have not competed heavily are forced to compete either because newcomers have arrived or they have decided to venture out of their space. A couple of months ago I was surprised to find that Cisco was venturing into Citrix territory. Yes, they still have a bias towards comms as can be expected but they have proven a real effort into understand the desktop space. The most obvious overlap is WebEx (which they own) but there are newer areas that strive to making more things remote. The Telepresence product is very interesting and even though it is too expensive right now for the average business, it does present a very good option for doing meetings in the future.

Microsoft is constantly hungry for new markets. They still acquire companies just to get a foot in that business door. They are incredibly persistent and even though the first few releases might fail to address the competition, rest assured that they will not stop until they have gained the upper hand. Several struggling products have been bolstered by millions of dollars and years of work to produce something that gains widespread acceptance.

Much of this is driving by Wall Street. The market forgets the past and expects continued growth. It wants the most it can get with the least amount of capital. Big companies like Microsoft struggle to satisfy the demands. It is like a big fish struggling in a small pond to find enough to eat so that it can grow further. There is only so much the fish can do before it loses touch with reality and starts seeking things that don’t make sense. So far, Microsoft still has a great track record for pursuing its future. Given time, it will eventually falter. It is the name of the game.

Big Fish Little Bowl

A much smaller fish named Citrix understands this pattern and is doing its best to grown the size of the pond. Of course there are going to be other fish it will encounter that also want the same business. Good competition is more about understanding what the customer wants than what it takes to bring the other company down.

Regardless of how it is labeled, there is now more overlap between Citrix and other vendors that before. This translates to more competition but also a healthier relationship with the business of selling and supporting products to customers.

Personally, I think it would be better for companies to co-operate than to compete on everything. Sometimes it seems like just some kind of battle for the sake of battle. Sometimes it is better to admit that another company does something better and work with them and share your strengths. It creates a better ecosystem since there is less duplication and the best of breed can be focused on instead of everything under the sun.

In the real world, capitalism spells out that competition is best. The invisible hand works wonders but sometimes it is better to see what kind of waste the invisible hand is causing.

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Posted in Favourite, Observations

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Agent of Change

Posted on January 23, 2008 | 2 Comments

Sometimes I struggle to start the next blog post.  Tonight is one of those kind of times.  There are many different potential topics but it seems that not one of them is more important than the others.  Instead of fussing over this, I’ll just to coax out a topic in the first few paragraphs.

One topic is under the category “what would I do if I was in charge?”.  This is an affliction that hits many software engineers.  My case is historically bad because at one point I actually did have a lot of sway in what we did.  A part of me wants to be able to influence things again and perhaps that is why I started blogging.  I’m the kind of person that is attracted to causing a positive change and usually I am willing to voice opinions about what would help.

Sometimes this is seen as a negative attribute.  People in charge typically don’t like being told these kind of things and the more people you have, the more likely conflict will erupt.  In my own naive way, I usually ask if the decision is better for the customer or if it is better for Citrix.  Sometimes it works out to be better for both.

I do have a tendency to highlight problems and also can get a bit dramatic if it seems like no one is listening.  I’ve had some classic moments.  Back in the early days, I said something which was considered too damaging and that it could have been a CLM (career limiting move).  This happened back at IBM working on OS/2 around 1992.  I had been concerned about the perception of “Workplace Shell” by the market.  I had tried to argue with other people including the leader of the project, Tommy Steele (sp?).  The message didn’t seem to get through so instead I dropped a bomb stating that I thought that “Workplace Shell” was a mistake.  It was easy to see that saying this was a mistake after I had said it.

Later my manager, Barbara Odle, explained to me the seriousness of what I had just done and suggested that it might have been a CLM.  She was very patient with me even though I did have a lot of passion about what I thought OS/2 should be.

It didn’t take long to realize that I was on an ocean liner and that any kind of big change in direction was simply not possible.  All of IBM was like that at the time.  When the call came in for Citrix in late 1992, it sounded really good.  After visiting the office, it seemed like heaven compared to OS/2 development.  So, I just left.

The early years at Citrix were full of energy and also an abundance of passion.  We knew what we were shooting for and we went for it.  We took big risks and they paid off.  We disagreed at first on things but we always came together in the end after the debate was over.    Even if you lost, you still felt like you had your chance and that the others were aware of your concerns and your ideas.

As the years progressed, it became harder and harder to make a big difference.  It has gotten to the point that sometimes that I am on that big ship again.  Decisions are made and instead of listening to concerns, it is instead often viewed that the person doing the objections needs to be re-educated about the value of the decision.   Most decisions are held to the top most layers of the company.  From what I understand, projects are controlled in a big way by the Finance department.  In other words, funding is not under the control of the engineering group but rather the central planners.  It is incredibly difficult to build a team to do a project unless Finance understands the value of such a project.  I don’t know details but I do know enough to conclude that this is mostly true.  It is very rare to have a project solely based on input from the engineering group.  I find this odd considering that it assumes that other departments know more about the technology than the group that is going to implement it.

My favorite new word to apply is delegation.  The engineering groups should be able to budget new projects without having to prove everything to the highest levels.  It should be possible to build skunk projects based on business opportunities seen at the customer layer.

There are quite a few examples I could give of things that I don’t think make sense.  Somehow it is just expected that either we will see sense in it or that we will just keep quiet and do it anyways.

One of my worst project experiences comes from how Product Managers  (PMs) are handled.  They are supposed to play a certain role but it is often hard just to get their attention.  It is common for PMs to be re-assigned many times during a project.  Historically, it has been very difficult to get them to produce what we need.  Many times, we have had to build our own requirements documents simply because we couldn’t any PM to work on it.  When they do get involved, it is often too late and with many dubious requirements.  The overall message I get is that they are completely unaccountable.  I would almost classify them as being untouchable.  I’ve never heard of any PM getting in trouble for missing deadlines or making major mistakes.  Part of the problem seems to come from the fact that PMs report to different groups.  I would almost swear that the switching happens between PMs to reduce the exposure to any one PM.  It is incredibly frustrating to see your project deflated by a defective PM.  It happens way too often.  Even when you get a good PM, you are often not allowed to keep them based on some weird internal policy that I don’t understand.  I know of a project close to home that has had at least 15 different PMs.  Honestly, how can this be allowed?  How can any PM be effective if he or she doesn’t stick around?

Obviously there are two important steps to fix this.  First, the PM needs to report to the same group at the same location as the engineering departments.  Second, the PM should be assigned for the duration of the project.  Any changes should only be a special exception.  Accountability and reliability are the goals.

My final CLM option of tonight is the name changing game.  Engineers work hard to build new products.  Projects are usually designated by a codename until it gets closer to being released.  Towards the end, but not too late, a marketing name is announced.  This happens for most projects but sometimes things go a bit wrong.  In the same project that had so many PMs, it had several name changes.  Most people that create name changes must assume that it has zero cost.  The truth is that it can be quite expensive since things are reworked with the new names, built, and tested.  Sometimes the name changes actually lead to breaks.  It can take around a week to clear a name change through the process.  Don’t quote me on that.  The concern happens when the name keeps on changing.  It becomes clear that nobody is quite sure what the name should be and instead of waiting for some kind of final decision, someone pushes the name change button with the hopes that it will stick.

This game is a crazy game to play.  Not only does it waste a lot of time, it doesn’t get any closer to what the real name should be.  The image of people getting together and fighting over names doesn’t seem good for the project.  It can get worse when different levels of management fight over it.  The early victors lose to higher level managers.

It is just a name.  I guess that is why it is easy to dictate changing it.  It would be much harder to get involved with technical aspects and have some good input at the beginning of the product cycle.

The engineering group concluded that it would be far better if only one name was ever specified.  This would force the managers to have their act together and only fire the button once basically to announce what the real name is going to be.

No one ever seems to get in trouble for excessive name changes.  In fact, in the last couple of years it seems to be encouraged behavior.  It seems that this thinking should not be tolerated and that names should be preserved during the product lifetime as much as possible.  Besides confusing customers, changing names can be an expensive marketing proposition.  Just think of all those materials that need to be tossed and new ones printed.

My ending comment is this.

Have you noticed that the Citrix dots have gone black?

Internally it was a point of contention last year.  Since then, radio silence.  Obviously the dark dots won.  Accept it :) .

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Posted in Angst, Citrix Internal Issues

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Working From Home

Posted on January 20, 2008 | 2 Comments

Since 1999, I have been working from home.  This was a necessity since there is no nearby office for Citrix.  There was the option to move to Sydney but it just didn’t make sense for us.

Working from home can be a complicated.  Mostly this is true because there are no clear lines drawn between home and work.  Either world can interfere with the other.

The good news is that it does give you a better balance than typically found with most people working.  Kids grow up around you and they can share their special moments almost as quickly as they have happened.  Or, perhaps there is some big spider in the house that only Dad catches.  I’m on some kind of bug duty here.  Some of the spiders can get quite large in Queensland.

Fairly big Huntsman

These kind of spiders don’t show up very often but it is pretty exciting when they do.  I can always tell by how much the kids scream.

The kids have grown up enough that two of them are in school full time.  Only one child is still at home.  Once everyone is at school, it will most likely be true that I will be home the most of the family.  And also strangely it will also seem a bit too quiet.

One of the best aspects of being a remote worker is that lack of any driving time.  My office was designed for its role when the house was built in 2003.  It is not particularly big and could be converted back into a bedroom without too much modification.  So that puts the commute to less time than it takes to reach the kitchen.

The telecomputing is key to being able to do this work.  Many people assume that it would be difficult to development work remotely only because of assumptions about the current model.  Perhaps people assume that the bandwidth would not be good enough or that the equipment not up to par.  It does seem that when I tell someone new, they reach certain conclusions very quickly about what it must be like.  Honestly, they are often wrong.

The Internet has changed the cost of working remotely to be very low.  This trend will continue to the point that it could be possible to do computer work almost anywhere in the world for a software company.  Many people already do it but it just has not been widely accepted within Citrix.

Before 1999, it was impossible for software engineers to work remotely within Citrix.  The previous CEO, Roger Roberts forbid it.  His philosophy was “if they aren’t seen, they aren’t working”.  He really did believe this.  The irony was that our technology going back to the very beginnings made it possible for Citrix employees to do work from home.  As programmers, we often joked about how silly this rule was given that we specialized in making it work for other companies.

When Roger left, a door opened to the possibility of working remotely.  Given that I was in Australia, this possibility was very exciting.  I started asking around the people I had worked with just two years before (in 1997).  No one was quite sure how it would work out.  The turning point is when Mark authorized working from home and Sydney was interested in hiring me.  This was about June 1999 when I had decided that the reseller business was not for me.

I interviewed and got the job in September 1999.  The contract stated that I needed to come down two days a month and that I would work as if I was in the office.  There was a special two week period that I stayed in Sydney at the beginning.  This was when Sydney office was located in Pennant Hills.  The two weeks went fine and when I got back the machines were shipped to me.

Initially it was a bit of an adjustment.  In those first couple of weeks it was very hard to get motivated.  When you know no one is watching, your first impulse is to be distracted by whatever you can find.  However, something interesting happens.  You get bored.  You get so bored that work actually seems like a great thing.  It’s hard to explain this transition and I certainly don’t want to give anyone a wrong impression.  The point is that it is possible that you will goof off at first.  In fact, expect this.  After a career of constantly being monitored (in one way or another) the freedom is bound to trigger some kind of quiet rebellion.  The best analogy is when you are a teenager and your parents leave you in charge of the house for the first time.  Anyways, this phase wears out pretty quickly.  In my case I was extremely bored.  Others might be inspired by the lack of productive results which might lead to a negative review.

This brings on the other view of how this works.  A boss is going to assume that the employee is goofing off.  However, if the employee is doing all the work and do it consistently, the real question is whether or not it matters.  Said another way, if you get the results you want, does it really matter how they spend their time?  I can sense the clash with the industrial world wanting it to be fully under control and visible.  The truth is that this kind of lack of trust is very limiting and does not bring out the full potential of the employee.

Because I am at home, the distractions are far less.  Some of my co-workers have expressed mild jealously about being able to focus on one thing for long periods of time.  I’m less likely to be in meetings or to have conversations distract me.   As a result, my productivity can benefit.

One area that is definitely lacking is human contact.  It is sometimes way too quiet with work and I’ll have to start calling people just to catch up.  I feel bad about this sometimes because I know that I’m distracting them and that I tend to talk more since I don’t talk enough about work from home.  I tend to do it in bursts.

In the early years it always felt like I was being tested.  Kind of like people were just waiting for me to prove that working from home wouldn’t work.

But this is not true.  Working from home has been great for me and Citrix.  What I have never understood is why it is not more common in the current time.  It is almost like it is only done based on the exception rule.  For a company that still makes this possible, it is hard to understand why it has not become more main stream within the company.

I figure that it comes down to trust and what Roger said all those years ago.  I would still put “Working From Home” in the trial stage for anyone doing programming/engineering work.

I’ll end this by saying that there are many Citrix employees that work from home that are not software engineers.  It is common for Sales, Marketing, and Systems Engineers to be located in different regions and also often with no regional office.  The Sales and SEs have been doing this since pretty much the beginning of Citrix.  And yes, they use our technology to access all of the corporate information.  This was true all the way back to Multiuser around 1991-2.

To the people that would like to try it, I would highly recommend doing it.  To the bosses that authorize it, I would encourage you to trust more and let the results speak for themselves.   There really isn’t much to lose at all.

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Posted in Australia, Remote Worker

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The Pursuit of the Perfect Machine

Posted on January 17, 2008 | Leave a comment

What is perfect?  Perhaps it is impossible.  Perhaps it depends on who you ask.  Perfection is more of an idea that an achievable reality.  Why is this?  As I have probably said, perfection would equate to the end of the line.  If it was perfect for all time, there would be no need for any more changes.

In 1983, IBM was working on a machine that was destined to be known as the IBM AT.   The name of the group was “The End of the World Gang”.  I was told that it was named this since the team thought that they could build a machine that would last forever.  Some team members seriously told me, in 1986, that the team actually believed that once they built and released the AT, there would not be a need for any more machine models.

I was surprised by this cockeyness in an area of technology that is always improving.  Clearly they were wrong, even in 1984 when it was first released.  It was sort of a an untold joke that they had to face the fact that the AT was not going to exist until the end of time.

So where does that leave us now?  We are certainly just as far from perfection since the computer industry began after WWII.  That doesn’t seem to stop anybody from trying to improve things.

The next step in computing will most likely coming from better duplicating the framework of our brains.  The writing is in the books that new forms of computing are on the horizon and they have little to do with our current silicon focus.  Obscure and distant researching will, at some point, strike gold and then we will be entered into the next wave of accelerating change.

And of course the young will be the quickest to accept it.  This is just a rule of age.  The greater the change gradient, the more likely that only young people will accept it.  I still have people in my family that are older that are reluctant to use ATMs let alone the Internet.

Most likely this raw power will go through a phase of “what do we do with it?”.  I remember this clearly with the 386 and how the newspapers were struggling to see what they could do with all that computing resources.  One paper advocated that perhaps it could provide good speech recognition.  This was 1986!  How long will it really take?

Then, someone will figure out how to better use the “brains” and the real use cases will come out.  In the 386′s case, it allowed for some radically new operating systems that would have never been possible on the 286.  Basically the 386 enabled computers to finally have graphical user interfaces that worked well.  That, even though it is boring, was a big step forward for users.

The next wave of unseen machines will probably specialize more in “thinking”.  Tasks which are difficult to do in current frameworks would be much easier if the computer could actually think for itself.  I could briefly give examples of pattern recognition, and the anticipation of user requests and actions.  “Thinking” software could more easily adapt to the challenges of the Internet coming from attacks and updating.  In theory, these kind of machines would learn in a way simply that is currently impossible.

Storage capacities will continue to skyrocket as new technologies focus on static molecular structures being repositioned against other structures.  Storage at the atom level is the goal and this kind of density is simply unbelievable.

Likely, memory also will expand.  Instead of being static rows and columns, it will transition to a more three dimensional architecture that would allow for processors to be within the structure.  Memory, too, is relative and will most likely come closer to duplicating how the brain works instead of just being a simple transistor flip flop model.

From time to time it is fun to think about what is coming.   The interesting question is why we need all this?

Progress for the sake of progress is not progress.  Progress for the sake of removing old barriers is more realistic.

However, we will never find perfection unless we judge what we currently have as being enough.  This is highly unlikely given that most everyone wants more for less.  Perhaps the greatest sin computer designers committed was to prove that it was possible to build machines cheaper and stronger.  Where does that leave future designers? :)

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Posted in Future

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Recovery

Posted on January 16, 2008 | 2 Comments

My main development machine is recovering.  I had an exception in Winlogon which is always fatal.  I had tried to fix the machine but things were not looking good until today.  After many different attempts, it turned out that doing a full Windows repair was the trick to solve the trap.

I had already proven that some of the files in Windows were corrupt.  Recent power outages were most likely the reason why.  Many of these files are used during the logon process but I was never able to find out which file was causing the problem.  Most likely it was a collection of files and I just couldn’t find all of them.

Given the nature of operating systems today, it is a surprise that it is not common practice to not only check for the existence of files but also their integrity.  The concept of how to do this is fairly straight-forward  and I would imagine that it has already been included in other operating systems.  Maybe it is already part of Windows and you need to configure it for that.  Regardless, it would make sense from both a security and stability point of view.

The reason why Winlogon traps are so nasty is that even though it is a user mode process, it is considered fatal if it dies.  You can never login to do anything and the machine is stuck in this limbo state until you decide to do something drastic.

Usually people just reinstall everything from scratch.  I didn’t want that and luckily I got my way.

It does seem now that space isn’t much of a concern (remember needing to use disk compression?), it would make sense to have operating systems that can heal themselves.  This would be a combination of signing and version control but the idea is to have directories to the side that maintain the “perfect” state of the operating system files.  These files could even be used as references.  If you have more copies of the same thing, the more likely it will stay intact.

The human brain, for example, copies information to many different places with lots of duplication.  Once you have the luxury of space, there is no need to be so stringent on the number of copies left around.  If I heard correctly, this idea is also true in DNA.  If a single part was damaged (brain or DNA), there is a good chance it would still function as a whole.  I would declare this as one of the next big leaps in computer science to realize that duplication can sometimes be a good thing.

As a student at university, it became evident that efficiency was the most important.  Nature doesn’t work that way (copying and more copying) and perhaps it is time for something like Windows to pick up the clue.

Amazing as it is, the Internet can be seen as a rudimentary brain.  Lots of duplication and of course lots of information.  It is better suited for survival because it is not incredibly efficient.  The chaos of the web actually makes it more resilient to going down.

Along this line of thought, Windows could use the Internet to get trusted copies of corrupt binaries.  Instead of a DLL failing to load based on corruption, Windows could be smart enough to use multiple sources to correct the error and avoid the pain and suffering of having a unworkable machine.

If any of you are aware of solutions in this space, I would love to hear about who is doing it and how it works.

This is my first official Citrix Blogger post on WordPress.  Thanks for following me to this new location.  Everything has gone very smoothly and I am quite happy that it is over.  I had been thinking about doing this for months and when it came time to do it,  there was very little pain and everything just worked.

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Posted in Angst, Ideas

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Time Marches On

Posted on January 7, 2008 | 1 Comment

Before I knew it, a new year was here. This inspires me to write about the past year and what will unfold for this year. For whatever reason it doesn’t seem important to dive into particular details but instead look at some general trends.

Over the last couple of years Citrix has really realized the value of investing in the workstation desktop space. This climaxed with the purchase of XenSource later in 2007. The idea is to bring many different pieces together to form a greater whole for the sake of a better user and administrator experience.

There are many core technologies in this venture including the ICA protocol, ICA stack, and the new pieces which brings workstations into the fold. This is now known as XenDesktop and should be a key step forward in 2008. The Beta program is ongoing and there is some general excitement about how this could be applied.

The Citrix trend is towards more virtualization. Having bought XenSource makes this pursuit much more evident. Citrix has managed to turn a situation around and become relevant in the virtualization space. There is stiff competition with VMware and it is always hard to compete with such an entrenched company. However, there is so much room for competition in this range and it is always good for customers when two or more vendors enter a space.

It doesn’t hurt that Microsoft is fully behind the Xen strategy and is using core technology in their new operating systems. It actually creates more of a bridge between Microsoft and Citrix related to the virtualization story.

Obviously the initial focus will be on providing more solutions within the server virtualization environment to ride the wave of consolidation and management benefits. There is much untapped potential in this space especially when it becomes more clear that performance is not the only concern.

This trend is more about duplicating the range and power first created on mainframes by IBM. The overall message is that once the virtual platform is established, hardware and software are no longer coupled. There are many implications of being disconnected but the main thing is that the virtualization framework turns out to be the most important with the hardware being even further commoditized and the software given new value with longer life and broader compatibility. The need for tossing the software based on it not working on the latest server platform becomes irrelevant if the virtualization platform can continue to run the old server platform.

Pairing virtualization with emulation gives the full spectrum coverage. If I can emulate a device and then run that emulated device on newer devices, the software at the top will not be aware of the difference. It is the ideal compatibility story. Most business applications don’t even care about the hardware at all. They just want the Windows model to be intact with its set of API and means of display, control, and printing. It’s a simplistic observation but largely true based on my experience with debugging these kind of applications.

Already I’ve heard a few people say that certain applications don’t work on Vista. Most applications will get upgraded and a new version will be sold for Vista but some will not. The more on the fringe the application is with a lower install base, the less likely it will be adopted to the latest operating system quickly. The more specialized applications tend to suffer this lag to the point organizations will hold off moving to the latest operating system until there is some solution. It can get bad enough that people will actually uninstall Vista to install XP to get their stuff working. It is a pattern that follows every major release of Windows since practically the beginning.

Just recently I realized that it would be difficult to keep full compatibility based on an operating system changing. It is like a fingerprint that is unique to each release. If the fingerprints don’t match (which they won’t) it is just a matter of how sensitive the applications are to the differences. In the case of Vista, the fingerprint has changed dramatically based on new security concerns. Stuff like LUA can really ruin your day and yet keep you secure :) . Sensibly Microsoft cannot ignore security concerns but also cannot ignore the pain they are causing by making things “better” for everyone.

I have an old story about the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) here in Australia. I was assigned to work on a project for a test pilot in 1997 in Canberra. Essentially they were assessing the viability of deploying Citrix WinFrame within DSD to provide specific services. It was an eye opening experience on security and how far it could go. These guys were incredibly smart and obviously focused on cracking codes and intercepting signals. I would guess that they are sort of like the NSA from America. It was a bit daunting to enter the DSD premises based on strict security and the need to double check everything. One of the requirements was that no electronics were allowed to leave the building. Mobile phones and laptop computers would be confiscated if allowed beyond the entry desk. When I was working on the server, I was never allowed to be alone. The server was a powerful Compaq which was pretty advanced for the time. The pilot did not match their expectations (probably because it was oversold) but I did learn some interesting facts. First of all, according the security expert I dealt with, the only secure computer was one which was not connected to a network. Secondly, based on my own observations, they must have been involved in the Echelon program. I guess the main point is that there is no perfect security unless nothing happens at all. In other words, if your computer was completely secure, you wouldn’t be able to use it. Even if you think that you are secure hiding behind encryption, there is a good chance that someone else is listening.

As usual, it becomes more of a balance. You can’t have it be too loose and you can’t have it too tight.

This distracting topic was brought up in the context of virtualization. Please excuse the digression.

What I do see coming is virtualization for workstations. Just like how people have come to expect multitasking operating systems, I believe that they will also come to expect multitasking different operating systems on the same machine. This makes a single machine more like a mainframe in its ability to support different platforms at the same time. But why would someone want this? Good question. The easiest answer lies in being able to run different vendors operating systems or even different versions of the operating systems. Being able to run XP and Vista concurrently would obviously reduce the pressure to run either exclusively. Also, more obscure platforms like Apple could potentially supported alongside Windows. The point is that your computer is much more powerful now and would be capable of running much more than it does now. A compelling argument for workstation virtualization is bringing a balance of power to what is currently a monopoly game for which operating system was installed first on the machine. So many users just use what they are given whereas having a hypervisor which switches the operating systems would give this kind of choice back to the user.

Honestly, it is easy to see the trend and why it is starting with the servers first. The servers are actually easier and better known than supporting a plethora of workstation machines. Based on initial studies, the workstation environment is much more lucrative based on sheer volume of workstations out there.

So, anyways, welcome to 2008. It looks like it is going to be another interesting year.

Oh, and as one last controversial stir, did you know that citrite.org is slowly dieing? It will not be much longer now that I’ll have to seriously consider changing to something like WordPress. The original team was really good at citrite.org but has moved on to other things. Being that I am one of of the most avid bloggers on citrite.org, I am sort of sad to go but there really is no choice if things continue to be neglected.

Another deciding factor is the exclusion of personal posts from the main Citrix blog site. Personally I’m a bit offended with this decision and instead of complying with the policy with having groups which have to be specially approved (and managed) it doesn’t make sense to stick with this. I don’t know what drove this decision but it does look a bit suspicious. This bit of honesty is due to pent up frustrations. It seems my yearly summaries are the most contentious.

Let’s just assuming that I’ll be moving house within the next two weeks. I’ll announce the destination when it happens.

Thanks for listening.

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