33 years in the Panopticon, Books, et al

This is the inaugural blog entry of 2025. I used to try to have at least one posting per month, but the last couple of years have demonstrated something of a slowdown.

In lieu of my Anniversary.Next^ postings like https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2024/02/27-or-anniversarynext12-ai-runtime.html which tracked the latter portion of my Intel journey, I have to find another temporal indicator to inspire a posting.  

To that end, Monday 2/24/25 made 33 years of working full-time post undergrad (2/24/1992). Someone who I admired a lot and retired on the same day from MS contacted me recently to check-in. I told him that I re-entered the workforce and he replied with "RETIREMENT FAIL!" I opined that maybe it's a case of a prisoner that misses his prison cell? Speaking of cells, I now have a named one:

Another quote I recall was that if you are still working in tech in your 50's then you are 'doing it wrong.'  Oops. From Intel "Rule of 75" for retirement to the IRS "Rule of 55" for 401k's, quite a flurry of "Rules of..." these last 6 months.

To move from corporate and government 'rules' into levity, an icebreaker event that occurred a couple of months back was a bit amusing. It entailed a large business conference call where participants were asked to share their favorite reality TV show in the Teams poll. The host berated the crowd for the many mentions of Severance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_(TV_series) in the result stream as demonstrating a misunderstanding of the question. I personally don't believe the respondents were so confused after all. "Perks" anyone https://www.teamblind.com/post/Microsoft-Perks-7yf2EYnJ https://severance.wiki/perks?

BTW I've only seem fragments of Severance when passing by my younger daughter watching it so I may have have drawn some false equivalences from my scant data.  I'm just saying.....

Speaking of questions, the in-person q/a with sci-fi author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow were quite interesting at a local book store.

The q/a overlapped many of the points he made in https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/26/cory_doctorow.

I soldiered through the long line to get an autograph at the end of the evening

and mentioned that I worked on UEFI. I wanted to stimulate a conversation given some of the points he made online in venues like https://doctorow.medium.com/your-computer-is-tormented-by-a-wicked-god-e90205ed80d7 and https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/18/descartes-delenda-est/, viz., 

After I told Corey what I worked on, he asked where. After the latter response I could see that he tensed tensed up.  I eased situation by saying his voice was important, especially with the passing of folks like Ross Anderson https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2024/03/a-legend-passes.html and his positions on the topic https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2011/09/20/trusted-computing-2-0/.  

Doctorow had a lot of good quotes in his talk, such as "you cannot reason someone out of a position into which they haven't first reasoned themselves into." I should dig into my notes and share out a few other of the fragments from that evening.

From 3rd Place books back to one of my favorite locations at Microsoft, the Microsoft library

And visiting with some former Intel colleagues now working at AMD and non-Redmond MS site, respectively.

Again, sometimes on these cross-campus treks I stop at the Microsoft Library in building 92. It's interesting to see which of the firmware books have been checked out at various times, viz., 

Sticking to the topics of books, at my local building, co-worker Jose visited again after having 

our Thanksgiving time https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2024/11/turbulent-weather-books-and-new-jobs.html posting to get his trio of firmware-related Apress https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7974-8 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7939-7 books signed.

The security book I'm holding has a section on Rust https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4

as does https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7974-8

As such, it was nice to see Rust and firmware mentioned in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgptLwP588

Good stuff.

On a sad parting note on the topic of technical books, Stuart Douglas

passed away recently.

After a career at Intel working on things like RMX, he pivoted into technical publishing. He was my contact at Intel Press for a series of publications, including the 2006 first edition of Beyond BIOS https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Implementing-Extensible-Interface/dp/0974364908

the UEFI Shell https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1934053147/

Beyond BIOS 2nd edition https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Developing-Extensible-Interface/dp/1934053295/

the UEFI edition of the Intel Technology Journal (ITJ) 

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/research/2011-vol15-iss-1-intel-technology-journal.pdf 

the SIMICS ITJ edition that included the Driver Synthesis paper 

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/research/2013-vol17-iss-2-intel-technology-journal.pdf

and the embedded IOT book https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-0070-4

My participation in the 2013 ITJ was close to the end of Intel Press. The reason that the Apress book mentions Stuart and has so many Intel authors circa 2015 is that Intel Press closed down in 2014 os so. I chronicled some of the arc of Intel Press in https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2021/01/books-and-computers.html.  This closure was part of the austerity (SET or ACT or...?) under BK AFAIK. My final communication with Stuart was about the Secure Firmware Book https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4 book where he had introduced Jiewen and I to the Apress folks and helped with the proposal for that 2020 text

It looks like Stuart's Linkedin page is still active, though

And speaking of LI, I sometimes find 'interesting' bread crumbs of visitors to my site. 

A recent list of visitors looks mostly usual other than the USG viewer at the bottom

At least it was 'dept of state' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_State and not 'dept of justice' or some such :)

Speaking of web metrics, another milestone involves the PQC SPDM paper https://www.mdpi.com/2410-387X/6/4/48 reaching 10k views as of 3/25/2025.

And then there was 30

for my sporadic IEEE membership since my Cornell undergrad days.

Nice round #'s to close this inaugural 2025 blog entry.

fin

books and computers

Saturdays are interesting, especially working for a multinational company with colleagues across the globe. I may have shared this sentiment before, but I still recall the tale that resonated with me from a currency arbitrage trader https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currency-arbitrage.asp. The person mentioned that he was working whenever a market was open. Luckily Saturday is the one day without any market open so he would use that day to do laundry, go grocery shopping, and follow-up on other chores. Feels like the work life of many in Friedman's flat world :).  Thus stealing a few moments on the Saturday nadir of activity for a quick blog.....

I'll commence this blog with observations about books, starting with my most recent  https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484261057

Ir is not quite small, weighing in at 930 pp.

It's the 7th physical book / printing I have in hand. It culminates a stack of dead trees spanning 3 editions of Beyond BIOS, two of the Shell, security, and embedded. Publishers of this stack range from Intel Press (shuttered 5 years ago) through De Gruyter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Gruyter and into Apress. And I also had 8 different co-authors spanning employers past or present including Intel, Phoenix, Insyde, Google, ARM, retirement, Sage, and Amazon. I've been at Intel the whole course of the book runs, though. The mountain of paper is shown below.

[from top down]

https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/526433

https://www.degruyter.com/view/title/526442

https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484200711

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Implementing-Extensible-Interface/dp/0974364908

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Developing-Extensible-Interface/dp/1934053295/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1934053147/

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1484261054/

Now for a bit of history of Intel and tech books, at least as far as I'm aware. Prior to Intel Press, Intel technical books were done through McGraw Hill in the 1980's. Below is one example from my nearby shelf.

https://www.amazon.com/Programmers-View-Intel-432-System/dp/0070477191

                     

Then in the 1990's there were McGraw Hill / Intel joint imprints, such as the RMX and 486SL books below. 

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Time-Systems-Programming-PCs-McGraw-Hill/dp/0070674663

https://www.amazon.com/Intels-Architecture-Designing-Applications-McGraw-Hill/dp/0079113362

I especially like the the drop-e in the logo of those books which was removed in 2006 by Intel.

And in the 2000's Intel Press published both books https://openlibrary.org/publishers/Intel_Press https://www.intel.cn/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/developer-reading-list.pdf and the Intel Technology Journal (ITJ). I still recall reading the first IT issue https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/research/1997-vol01-iss-3-intel-technology-journal.pdf when I joined the company in 1997. I was happy to have the opportunity to lead the creation of the only printing in 2011 

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/research/2011-vol15-iss-1-intel-technology-journal.pdf. It made me feel like a small part of the technology history of the company.

In that 2011 issue I co-authored 3 of the papers, including networking and security

which was referenced in the Apress firmware security book, as shown below.

And luckily the Intel Technology Journal PDF's were all archived on Intel.com after Noggin.intel.com and Intel Press were closed down.

Another notable reference in the Apress security book was http://netlab.cs.ucla.edu/wiki/files/shannon1949.pdf

which excerpted some of the principles of cryptography

and had the citation

I regret that only this final Apress book had rich citations. The other books were a bit light on the references. I'm still amazed by the longevity of Shannon's work on information theory and security.

Speaking of Apress, the publisher is actually an imprint of Springer Verlag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Science%2BBusiness_Media.  In 2009 I wrote a chapter for Springer

with original Beyond BIOS co-authors.

Outside of Intel presentations or patents, the 2004 "Update at Intel" article is the first of prose describing firmware. This was part of a series of articles posted on the Intel website about recent technology evolution. I still like the fact that it described the XScale ARM port I did in 2001 and had a Pentium 4 in the block diagram. This same XScale work was elaborated upon the 2006 Beyond BIOS book code fragment, being placed by a mobile internet device (MID) in the 2010 2nd edition of Beyond BIOS, and finally turning into a Intel FSP example in the 2017 3rd printing of the book. Interesting evolution of the platform across the decade and a half.

It's also the only publication with a 'drop-e' that I created, too.

in its many translations:  English, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, and Russian.

I still fondly recall the CDSA and ACSFL update articles, but unlike the ITJ, these pages have not been archived on intel.com, the wayback machine of archive.org, or other computer history repositories of lore such as bitsavers.org. For work that never made it to open source, I wonder how much interesting technology history is lost every year? 

In the spirit of the written word, and despite questions of the demise of print https://www.stamats.com/think-print-dead-think-again/, it's nice to see that Grove, the CEO 

when I joined in 1997, and Gelsinger, upcoming CEO this year, expressed both their technology and business insights via writing. 

[from top down]

https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp/0679762884

https://www.amazon.com/Only-Paranoid-Survive-Exploit-Challenge-ebook/dp/B0036S4B2G

https://www.amazon.com/Juggling-Act-Bringing-Balance-Family/dp/1434768740

https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Technology-Semiconductor-Devices-International/dp/0471329983

https://www.amazon.com/Programming-80386-John-H-Crawford/dp/0895883813

Writing books is one way to scale one's knowledge that transcends the utility of (cough cough) blogs, streaming video and podcasts IMHO.

Regarding the writing process, I am not sure about how easy of a time either my co-authors or luminaies like Grove and Gelsinger had in writing their tech and business books, but I feel like the following when trying to get the pages out.

So much for this Saturday typing. Here's looking forward to market openings and meetings commencing tomorrow.