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

Turbulent weather, books, and new jobs

Weather issues https://mynorthwest.com/4010489/cliff-mass-warns-of-powerful-storm-approaching-western-washington/ have impacted the region recently. The power at my home was out for a few days but I was able to reach the office. While there I recall one conversation from a colleague "Power outages in India, not just this long." A similar sentiment was express by a Brazilian co-worker. I suppose the outage reflects the pleasure and peril of the Pacific Northwest with its significant old growth and above-ground power lines. One challenge this offered was having to take a 4am PST call from  the office to deliver a talk https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gbKhl3ncwRm0QB1ZD3xZhjhRFWxUp_dKtdnQemtpoX0/edit?usp=sharing to an open source firmware event in Germany at https://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/en.

Part of my Franken-prezo can be seen below. It was pieced together from old public slides spanning CanSecWest '15 in Vancouver BC through Hacker-to-Hacker circa late '23 in São Paulo, Brazil, viz., 

Recently a local university asked me to give their students a talk on BIOS. I agreed on the conditions that it wasn't at 4am PST and that it was in-person. If they had asked last week I would have added the additional proviso of not occurring during a post wind-pocalypse power outage :)

Given this is a blog that purports to cover musings on firmware and UEFI, I figured that I'd note that recent event.

Speaking of firmware, before this talk and continuing in the spirit of this blog's theme there was an Intel blog posting related to the Open Computing Project Summit recently about open source server host firmware https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tech-Innovation/Data-Center/Advancing-Open-Source-Firmware-on-Intel-Xeon-6-Based-Platforms/post/1636720 

Postings like this and recent work by 9e mentioned in https://www.phoronix.com/news/9elements-SkylakeX-Coreboot are always nice to see as they describe work with provides community choice and offers additional insight into how this class of platform is built. In addition, this work potentially heightens awareness of the circular economy.

This above-cited blog post-dated my time at Intel and pre-dated my time at.....at.....

As I mentioned in https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2024/09/reflecting-on-my-time-at-tech-company.html, I felt a bit nervous about retiring when everyone was telling me that I was 'too young.' As such, I cut my retirement a bit short and recently joined a new tech company

(ID# blinded in picture).

The Microsoft experience has been pretty interesting so far. The old and new commute only differ by a small distance shown below. In fact I had taken that trek a few times in the past, both walking during the summer months and driving during the rainy days when collaborating with Microsoft as an Intel employee.

And the Microsoft campus here in Redmond, WA is sprawling. I initially found myself using a maps application on my phone to navigate both walking through and driving across the campus. To my delight, one location I found was a physical library in Microsoft building 92. Real books, not epubs and mobis and pdfs and html renderings.....! And to my surprise there were a couple of familiar titles on the shelves, including a couple of host firmware texts - https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781501505751/html?lang=en and https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781501505690/html?lang=en. 

And now the latter has been YouTube-ized https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrkX4tdg49s.

When I related this library finding to former Intel colleague (now an eng at AMD?) he shared a snapshot of the books on his home office desktop, including https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-BIOS-Developing-Extensible-Interface/dp/1934053295/.

Speaking of firmware books, Jiming Sun's presentation https://talks.osfc.io/osfc-2024/talk/G8RDEX/  on firmware requirements from a CSP provided a unique perspective.

He also mentioned at the 11:10 minute mark some background on FSP and the embedded firmware book https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-0070-4, too. Therein he noted the popularity of the book by way of the site https://bookauthority.org/books/best-firmware-books. 

#1 firmware book? Fascinating metric. I'm not sure about the dataset used to generate that ranking. Although now at Amazon AWS, Jiming was a good collaborator during our joint tenure at Intel. 

On the topic of books, on the Weds workday ahead of the T-day holiday I found another surprise when a coworker dropped by my touchdown/temporary office with one of the firmware books in hand https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-7939-7

I like books. And doors on offices are another fascinating phenomena after several decades of largely living in a cubicle. 

Moving beyond the topic of books and continuing with co-workers theme, I see that another former Intel co-worker has left the blue building (Inside Blue to Outside Blue, departed the Blue Planet, gone from being an In-tel to an Out-tel?) is the other half of the 300-issued-patents duo of 2014 https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2022/09/new-milestones.html who has a new opportunity https://natcast.org/natcast-announces-dr-robert-chau-svp-research

I guess the lure of the 'enhanced retirement package' of September drew him out, too? Maybe it was the new job title and mission which both sound pretty cool.

Speaking of retirement, or now post-retirement, since landing at MS I've tried to look up some former collaborators like https://www.linkedin.com/in/vkurien/ mentioned in https://vzimmer.blogspot.com/2023/02/blue-hat-2023-and-uefi-secure-boot.html but noticed that he's been gone for some time. During this inquiry I observed an interesting aspect of his profile that includes a mention of our joint work, viz., "Co-invented UEFI secure boot with Vincent Zimmer of Intel. UEFI boot vulnerabilities were identified by a novel information flow modeling technique. "

I don't recall ever showing up in someone's LI experience listing. Interesting.

Although I started the blog grousing about weather maladies I really cannot complain so much. Another "Vincent Zimmer" has had it much worse recently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db9lTZiUgt8 it appears.

On the flip side, when I was leaving Intel, there was a session where the team was queried about what folks thought the imminent retirees would do post-Intel. One suggestion for me was a future as a patent attorney, and another suggestion was that I'd give a Ted Talk. On the latter suggestion it looks like another "Vincent Zimmer" beat me to the punch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKdCsk3Yw-U. I think that disqualifies me for a future Ted Talk - speaker name hash collision rule :) 

On the topic of the former suggestion of going back to school in the above-listed bon voyage meeting, I attended a Saturday conference https://con.racket-lang.org/ on the Racket programming language during my retirement windows between Intel and MS. During the lunch break-out at UW Kane Hall I expressed my interest in pursuing more formal graduate education when the PhD candidate to my left mentioned "yes, I'm in year 10 of my PHD program. I had to switch advisors and topics." Hmm. Given those types of statistics it would be a foot race between a PHD and Medicare eligibility for me. There were some interesting talks at the conference, though, including a keynote from the SICP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs authors

I really enjoyed their first-person view of technology and personal journies therein.

And the conference shared other other bon mots on programming.  Some may think Racket (and functional programming languages like Lisp in general) is so far from mainstream languages that there is little value in delving into these alt-langs, but I'm always surprised at the cross over of ideas from one language community to another or how a clean, pedagogic language can clarify your thinking on a subject.

Maybe I'll just continue the auto-didactic path and see if I can audit some uni courses of interest? I still remember Richard Ladner's https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/ladner late 1990's wisdom during my UW CS algorithms course - "What I teach you this quarter will become irrelevant soon, but what I can impart to you all is to teach you how to teach yourself and learn on your own." One of these AI sessions reminded me of this spirit in the slide below.

Speaking of gifts that keep on giving.....

Of course even Racket conference touched on AI, mostly via a spoof of LLMs by one UBC prof. 

On a more serious approach to AI, though, I did attend a few IEEE-sponsored IEEE AI events on the UW campus and in Seattle, too. 

I have to confess that the half-dozen LLM and AI texts & papers on my desk didn't receive as much, er, 'attention' (pun intended https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762), as I'd like to have applied during the 4 week retirement.

So this is nice symmetry. The blog opened with describing a talk to university students and ended with some wistful higher education sentiments. Not quite Finnegans' Wake of the first and last sentence running together, but good enough for JIT blog-writing I suppose.

I am still holding out using copilot or gemini or chatgpt or locally phi/llama/qwen/.... by way of ollama to create and/or polish these postings. I guess I like to maintain the raw, natural intelligence (or natural obtuseness) feel versus the polished AI-driven edits/creation.  I am curious about other's thoughts on the topic. Maybe I'm just another John Henry versus the machine on this one....But in other activities these tools are amazing....Maybe just for this blog I've leave them out and keep it's artisanal feel :)

And so much for a November posting. Churn in the weather and the tech employment scene seem to be the themes of this posting.