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November 30, 2012

Oh how I love the spin

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 3:23 pm

So last night one of my friends sent me a link to an article saying that one of my former employers (whom I left more than two years ago) was closing one of their main business units and laying off 33 employees.

I’m quite out of touch with what is going on over there from a business standpoint, though I do know there’s been a ton of attrition since I left (the team I was on has turned over entirely at least twice, and has had at least 3 different directors to lead it). I was really frustrated in 2010 which some of my posts at the time were pretty obvious, so I got out.

A few days after I left another guy started (he wasn’t supposed to replace me but rather work on a project that I told the VP I refused to be a part of). I interviewed him even a few weeks before I left.  He tried, hard I imagine. I haven’t talked to him but have talked to others who have – he left almost a year ago for similar reasons that I left – management. I’ve heard tons of stories about what’s gone on there since I left, most of them very funny (wouldn’t be if I was still there though). Sometimes you can’t help but laugh.

The person who was in my position before me left for the same reason – these days I am VERY careful about finding management that is good to work with/for, it’s more important than any other aspect of the job for me – I learned the hard way.

I can’t count how many companies I have talked to or how many stories I have heard that have people being driven away by management decisions. It’s just sick, it really is. I’ve talked to multiple companies where entire teams have turned over in very short periods of time (at least five in Seattle alone). Hell, I’ve been part of two of them at consecutive companies myself!

At one point this business unit that they are closing was responsible for a large portion of their revenue. I don’t know where they stand today for revenues, I liked to tell people 2009 was the best year for the company – since then – not so much. Things really did look promising in 2009…..

I tried while I was there – I did – originally I was going to leave in December of 2008, barely 6 months after I started. But I decided to tough it out a bit more. I had some fun while I was there, management issues aside. Learned a few things, had some good experiences, met some cool people/friends. Considering it was literally across the street from my apartment at the time, it was difficult to beat that kind of commute.

They laid some folks off in early 2011 too (can’t find news article) including two of my co-workers who both were begging to be laid off so they could collect unemployment.

Big surprise huh – anyway, I just look at the spin they put on the whole thing how it’s a good thing for customers, good thing for everyone that they are making this decision.

I came across another article, which I found amusing:

To be honest, we’d never heard of AudienceScience before, but it is indeed a global digital marketing/tech firm that houses offices ranging from the U.S. to India. [..]

A web site seemingly focused on advertising agencies, hadn’t even heard of them before.

I do own stock in the company – I only got it so I’d have a memento, I never bet anything on stock options.

We now take you back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Is the Surface destined to be the next Zune for MS?

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 12:35 pm

First off  – sorry to my three readers I haven’t posted in a bit, there just hasn’t been a whole lot interesting going on. Obviously I am excited about HP’s storage announcements that are coming in a few days, I expect some posts out of that 🙂

Anyway back to Microsoft’s Surface. One of the rumours is Microsoft had halved orders for the Surface RT due to less than anticipated demand. Other RT-based tablets have performed similarly poorly.

I just was thinking about the time when Microsoft brought out the first Zune, they were not satisfied with how their partners were unable to compete against the iPod, and in a stroke of brilliance brought out their own product along with a new music store which broke compatibility with all other Windows media players on the market. The thing that I remember most about the Zune, well pretty much the only thing was it’s squirt feature.

[..] Steve Ballmer in his infamously disturbing interview in BusinessWeek that evoked horrible images of brown Zunes squirting all over each other:

“Guys who can touch us in multiple places probably matter more than guys who can touch us in any one place.”
“I want to squirt you a picture of my kids. You want to squirt me back a video of your vacation. That’s a software experience.”
Zunes squirt, and don’t you forget it Robertson, or there might be a chair headed your way.

So here we are again, Microsoft is once again frustrated by it’s partners not being able to compete effectively against the iPad, and they believe they can make a more effective user experience. So enter stage left the Surface and Surface Pro. Dell has recently launched an advertising blitz for their XPS 12 touch enabled Windows 8 Pro UltraBook Tablet. I swear when I was on the website yesterday it claimed a ship date of early next month, but now it claims a ship date of Jan 3 2013, and an entry level price tag of $1199 for 4GB RAM, 128G SSD, Intel i5 processor in a 3.35 pound package, that is a really heavy tablet (when it’s in tablet mode of course).

Yesterday pricing was released for the Surface Pro, with keyboard the prices are roughly $1020 for 4GB RAM and 64GB SSD to $1120 for 128G SSD. Without the keyboard the Surface weighs in at just two pounds – or about 6oz more than one of my HP Touchpads.

Battery life on the Surface Pro is expected to be 4-6 hours, obviously less than ARM-based systems, but still a respectable number I think.

I am sort of surprised that something as powerful as a Core i5 is being used, rather than the Atom, which was supposed to be Intel’s go-to product for things like tablets. The processor they are using looks to have a 17W TDP, which includes an Intel video chipset. Compared to the latest and greatest Atom which has a 10W TDP without a video chipset. I’m sure the i5 smokes the Atom pretty easily, so probably was a good trade off for a few extra watts of power.

When I saw the price I was pretty shocked – I really expected the Pro to cost about $200 more.  Sure it’s not really price competitive with other Tablets out there but to me at least it’s really not a tablet – it’s a touch enabled Ultrabook, much like Dell’s XPS 12 offering. It’s running an x86 processor with PC applications being it’s key selling point. I would expect most people to not consider the Surface Pro to be in the same market as an iPad or Android tablets so direct comparisons will probably be rare after the initial launch is complete.

With each successive consumer operating system launch Microsoft has had over the past decade the level of excitement has declined – the one exception perhaps is Windows 7, people were happy to get that after being screwed by Vista.

I’ve been convinced since the beginning that the Windows 8 stuff won’t make a dent in iPad sales (unless you consider stemming the losses of PC sales a dent by shifting some of those losses to Surface).

What Microsoft has come up with hasn’t done anything for me at least to change my opinion (remember this is someone who has a ton of WebOS stuff – though was never convinced WebOS at the time had the ability to inflict anything upon Apple – it makes me sad in some respects to see OpenWebOS crawl along, I know with each passing day they fall further and further behind due to lack of resources).

I suspect the RT-based devices will do quite poorly as well, obviously the market has gotten along just fine over recent years without having Microsoft Office on a tablet. There have been many reports of organizations large and small doing massive deployments of iPads to support their businesses.

Microsoft did a huge disservice to their customers by not properly porting their Office apps to Metro, thus forcing two different user interfaces on the devices. On top of that they did a further disservice by consuming such a large portion of the internal SSD for stupid things like a recovery partition. Don’t we live in the world of cloud today? Even WebOS can recover easily just by connecting the device to a computer and running an application to do a full OS re-install, even if the device seems “bricked”.

I fully expected something like that for Windows 8, and for the surface perhaps something built in – perhaps a ~200MB rescue partition that has enough software to boot the device, connect to the internet and recover from the cloud. (though I’d still rather have it local since it can take a while). Or be able to put the rescue stuff on a SD card.

Microsoft does provide a means to recover via USB, but it’s far from straight forward (should be included in the new user startup wizard). Though from what I see they don’t go so far as to make the recovery information downloadable from the internet.

To create a USB Recovery Drive on a Surface RT, follow these steps:

  1. From the Start screen, tap the Desktop tile to open the Windows Desktop.
  2. Slide your finger in from the right to fetch the Charms bar, then tap the Settings icon.
  3. When the Settings Pane appears, tap the words Control Panel from the pane’s top edge.
  4. When the Desktop Control Panel appears, tap the System and Security section, then tap File History.
  5. When the File History window appears, shown below, tap Recovery in the bottom, left corner. Then tap Create a Recovery Drive when the Recovery window appears.

The Surface Pro does look like a decent product for the space – though I believe the space will flop significantly based on the expectations.

I suspect that Windows 8 (at least the metro side of things) will flop just about as much as Vista did. At least as long as there are the dual interfaces that are totally incompatible with each other (e.g. apparently Internet explorer in Metro and Internet explorer on the desktop are oblivious of each other). If/when Microsoft can figure out how to properly unify them they may have something. I suspect most developers will continue to target the desktop mode because of course there is a large market out there of existing pre-Metro operating systems.

It’s a decent first step for Microsoft getting their software ready for tablets, they still have a lot of work to do  – what is the old saying – by version 3 they usually get it right ?

This is version 1..

November 20, 2012

NEWSFLASH: Autonomy sucked

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 8:34 am

HP came out this morning and told the world what most of the world knew already, the acquition of Autonomy was a mistake, resulting in a $8.8B write down. This is basically hot on the heels of another $8B write down on their EDS acquisition.

$17 Billion in losses

That number is just staggering. People say government is bad at waste, HP (among others) shows that the private sector is just as good at waste.

I suspected something with Autonomy was up when I saw a post by someone I know on LinkedIn saying he was laid off along with 200 other people – he was at Autonomy, I was not sure if the rest were part of Autonomy or not(I assume most were).

Imagine if they skipped out on Autonomy – and instead invested that $10B in mobile, a market that dwarfs that of Autonomy. Instead they prematurely killed Palm – who was widely regarded as having the best user experience at the time.  Most people knew it was going to take billions of further investment in Palm to see if they could make it work. Palm was broke when they were acquired, so it obviously lacked the resources to do it themselves. The best example of this is Microsoft’s mobile platform. Floundering for more than a decade at this point. But they don’t give up! Because they can’t give up.

HP’s cash reserves are low – which caused a credit reporting agency to cut their outlook.

I guess the good thing that is coming out of this is HP is admitting their mistakes. Hopefully they can run things better going forward.

It is fascinating to me how many large companies are doing so poorly in recent years. Part of the reason for these companies to be as big as they are is they are diversified much more than their smaller counterparts. Whether it is HP or Dell in the PC space, or the once high flyer consumer electronics makers Sony, Sharp,  Panasonic and NEC. IBM by contrast of course is doing quite well, they are doing stuff HP and Dell are constantly struggling to try to copy. Apparently Korean (I believe) makers Samsung and LG are eating the Japanese lunch. I suppose at some point this will shift further west to China decimating the Koreans.

People were convinced that Japan was going to take over the world in the late 80s and early 90s – and they never did, nor are there signs they ever will. For some reason I’ll probably never forget I was a freshman in high school in Palo Alto and one of my friends was the grandson of one of the founders of HP of all places. As a second language course I took spanish – naturally because it was supposed to be easier. He took Japanese. I asked him why and he said because his father thought it was the business language of the future. Now it seems the popular language to teach is Chinese. Anyway getting off topic.

I haven’t seen recent mention of whether Hitachi – one of the other Japanese conglomerates is having issues other than these lay-offs a few years ago. For some reason or another I get the sense Hitachi is more industrial than the others so aren’t as impacted with the shift to Korea for consumer electronics.

Next I’m waiting for Ballmer to get the boot for the abortion that is Windows 8.

November 6, 2012

Off to Seattle again Nov 15th – 26th

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 8:39 am

Woohoo – going to head back up to the Seattle area to visit friends and my favorite hangouts. I am driving again of course – hoping to leave the Bay Area around 5AM on November 15th, go up to the Crescent City, CA area, and refresh my pictures of the California and Oregon coastline with the new camera I bought earlier in the year (42X optical zoom!!). Stay the night in Vancouver, WA(expecting about ~16 hours of driving total for the day), before heading up to Seattle (well Bellevue) on Friday, November 16th which is my b-day.

Party as hard as I can while I am there before heading back on November 26th, just in time for my Jury Duty on November 27th(just found out about that a couple of weeks ago).

If that wasn’t enough driving – I’m driving down to Orange County on Friday night (returning on Sunday) for my sister’s baby shower. This was more last minute, as I told her I’d go down there for the baby shower or Thanksgiving but not both. Since Thanksgiving moved to a week earlier than I expected this year it turns out I wasn’t going to be able to make it down there this time around so I’m going for her little party instead.

I walk to work most of the time(0.9 miles away from home) so I hardly put any miles on my car, but I make up for it with these road trips!  Though one of my co-workers says his car is only 11 months old and he already has 27,000 miles on it!! (mostly from commuting which is 70-90 minutes each way). I have almost 22,000 miles on my car and I bought it about 21 months ago.

October 4, 2012

IE – Do not track and false senses of security

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 9:52 am

Came across another article on slashdot which talks about advertisers blasting Microsoft for setting the default option of do not track in IE 10.

Someone in the Apache organization went as far as to submit a patch that would cause Apache to ignore the setting if the browser is IE 10, it seems more people think the patch is a bad idea based on the comments.

Of course the argument is if enough people say don’t track me then the value of advertising goes down and advertisers will stop honoring the setting, something that many advertisers already say they don’t plan to honor.

Two big associations, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Digital Advertising Alliance, represent 90% of advertisers. Downey says those big groups have devised their own interpretation of Do Not Track. When the servers controlled by those big companies encounter a DNT=1 header, says Downey, “They have said they will stop serving targeted ads but will still collect and store and monetize data.

I can’t help but think this whole DNT thing is somewhat of a conspiracy, to induce users into a false sense of security that they are not being tracked. Even if the advertisers didn’t admit to not tracking you – why trust them?

Instead these privacy advocates(assuming that’s who is pushing this initiative) should promote better methods of stopping tracking on the user’s end, and not relying on the advertisers to play nice.

If you haven’t tried this recently – I suggest you do – clear your browser cookies, enable the function in the browser that prompts for every cookie, and go about your normal day, the growth in tracking cookies over the years is just insane. I’ve had my main browser set to prompt me for many years now.

The worst offender of a regular site I visit at least is the Cyanide & Happiness comic strip, while the comics are wonderful, they must have signed up every ad serving company in the world because I can’t leave the page open for long without getting hit with a cookie from a domain my browser has never seen before. Ads are one thing – I’m just going to make it more difficult for you to track me by not allowing cookies.

Sometimes I get in trouble, when I reject a cookie that somehow breaks site functionality and I have to go and try to track it down and re-enable cookies(or in some cases I use another browser that accepts all cookies), but the number of cases of that is pretty rare, I guess I am a little surprised how much cookies are used while at the same time how most of the web remains fully functional even without them.

I worked for a internet behavior targeting company a few years ago, they are still around, though their stuff never really took off. For them at least they were pretty honest about tracking vs not tracking etc. There was a little uproar about a year ago when they, amongst other companies were found to be setting tracking cookies even when you opted out. I emailed the developer (*the* since there is only one) that works on that product and he quickly shot back saying it was a bug and they fixed it within hours of being notified – and that even though the cookie was being set the back end was not using it, so it was more cosmetic.

At the end of the day people don’t value their privacy very much at all on average, I think I saw a survey at one point recently that showed people would sell out their privacy on line for less than $1, if this is the case what’s the point of Do not track ? Give people a choice do they want to be tracked or do they want to pay a fee to use Facebook? or Google? or whatever. Obviously 99.9999999999% of people will choose to be tracked.

For me I will keep blocking cookies and doing my part to make it just a little harder to track me (at least at the advertising company I was at there was no attempt to track via IP etc, if you didn’t have the cookie you weren’t tracked). At the same time I do not use any Ad blocking software, though I do have a plugin called Remove it Permanently, where I can right click on an object (Ad or whatever) and remove it.

Checking on the cookie settings I have here in Firefox –

  • 296 hosts or domains that I accept/trust all cookies for
  • 2,186 hosts or domains that I accept cookies “For session only”
  • 6,071 hosts or domains that I reject cookies for

I don’t visit many sites either, most of the ones I visit are tech related and a lot of them don’t even have ads on them(blogs, documentation etc). The addiction I had to the Internet (more IRC than anything else, for those that used it) in the mid/late 90s is long dead(died along with the IRC places I hung out at whithered along with the first tech bubble). Sort of ironically I saw recently that some medical folks were going to start including internet addiction as some sort of formal problem now. I sort of see the Internet like many see TV – billions of channels and not much happening.

You want my attention? I think back to all of the internet ads I have seen over the years, and honestly the only one that I can remember that I clicked on, and made a sale actually was from that X10 home automation company. This has got to be probably back in 1999-2002 time frame. I think the ad was on one of the internet tech news sites (Not ‘el Reg, more like Ziff Davis type of site). Why did it get my attention? Hooters!  After I clicked on it and saw what the technology was about it looked pretty neat so I got some of their wireless video stuff. It was interesting and I used it off and on, though it never worked quite as well as I would of liked, picture quality was not so hot.  I’m sure there have been some others that I have made sales on as well, though none of them have stayed in my memory like that X10 ad 🙂

I’ll end with – good job Microsoft, can’t believe I’m giving Microsoft more kudos, but I think it’s a good setting to have as a default. It’s one less thing the user has to click when running their computer.

October 3, 2012

Oracle doesn’t care if Sun hardware goes to zero

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 11:08 am

I saw an interesting interview with Larry over at Oracle yesterday. It was pretty good, it was nice to see him being honest, he wasn’t trying to sugar coat anything.

He says they have two hardware businesses – one that they care about (engineered systems), and another one that they don’t (commodity x86 stuff mainly though I have to think it encompasses everything that is not the engineered integrated products). He also says they don’t care if/when the Sun hardware business goes to $0. Pretty brutal.

This is somewhat contrary to some comments I saw somewhat recently where people were claiming Oracle was heavily discounting their software and keeping Sun hardware discounts at 0 so they could show higher revenue on the hardware side.

Given that is there any hope for what’s left of Pillar ? I suspect not, I suppose that funky acquisition of Pillar that Oracle did a while back probably won’t result in anyone getting a dime, and may or may not allow Larry to recoup his investment in the company, sad.

September 5, 2012

Setting expectations for WP8 and BB10

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 9:54 am

The more I read about Windows Phone 8, and BlackBerry 10 the more I am reminded of WebOS, especially the die hard community around both platforms.

I like WebOS myself, I still use my devices daily, despite my fondness for the platform I was not delusional about it – if HP had released the Pre3 when they were planning on it last year (right about this time last year), it would of been destroyed by the iPhone (I believed this long before I owned the hardware, now that I’ve been using it for the past year my thoughts haven’t changed at all). It would of been just embarrassing to see. Especially after the lackluster performance of the HP Veer, the world’s smallest smart phone at the time (perhaps still is), as far as I know the Veer never received even a single software update post launch which was sad(and there are some bad bugs in it). By contrast the Pre3 received several software updates even though it was never officially launched in the U.S. and had a tiny launch in Europe.

Anyways back on topic, Windows Phone. I have been loosely following the Windows Phone Central site where many of the die hard WP8 fans seem to hang out at for good reason. They were so excited about the launch of the newest Nokia phone, they raged against users who had lost faith in the platform, even raged against manufacturers that seem to be losing faith in the platform.

Microsoft and Nokia have tried to hype up the announcement that came today, and as I’m sure many expected, they over promised and way under delivered. This is the exact same thing HP/Palm was doing (I remember one comment from a HP/Palm person forgot who it was, who said they weren’t going to launch a product that wasn’t perfect – of course the only time they did that was when they shut down the Pre3 before it fully launched).

I feel they failed to truly impress at this event. All the leaks ruined it for me personally. All the new info was boring IMHO

Another user posted

So basically waking up and watching this event was pointless. Nearly everything that was “announced” has already been leaked anyways…seriously, their employees and partners are like swiss cheese when it comes to non-disclosure agreements.

In another article people reacted to the fact that there is no release date, no price, and no firm date for the release of Windows Phone 8 itself. The WP Central site tries to spin the news as positively as it can (much as the Pre Central, oh I’m sorry WebOS Nation site does and did for WebOS). One user wrote

this reveal was choreographed and edited to death.  really a bad demo.  Joe Belfiore just pisses me off the more he comes on stage.  Build 2012 in F-ing november…that’s over a month’s loss of sales opportunities.

I just don’t understand why these other players think announcing (or releasing) products around the time Apple does so is a good idea, it sounded incredibly stupid to me for HP and the Pre3 last year, and it’s even worse this year with Microsoft, Amazon and others trying to steal Apple’s thunder. Samsung did a great job in their latest Galaxy SIII releasing it in June. I have to assume it’s because they have been unable to adjust their product cycles to off set them enough with Apple, or perhaps they just want to try to drive some hype around the holiday season, but if your going up against Apple you really have to bring it. Microsoft/Nokia talk the talk, but they haven’t shown they can hold a candle up to an Apple product launch, so it’s sad to see them even try.

I just saw an interview with the Nokia CEO on CNBC and the only phone he picked up and sort of showed off was not a phone that was announced today, he seemed to focus on their dwindling leadership in the low end phone race.

RIM was sort of saved by further product delays, they did want to launch this fall, but due to problems with the platform they’ve had to postpone the launch yet again to sometime in 2013, more than a year later than the dates I heard originally tossed around a while ago. RIM is busy trying to keep their hype machine primed, offering to essentially bail out (for lack of a better term) developers that make $1,000 or more on applications to the tune of up to $9,000 (for a total of $10,000). If that doesn’t tell you they are bleeding developers like crazy I’m not sure what will. But kudos to them for going the extra mile to try to retain them.

Hopefully, for their sake, RIM can over deliver on their promises, but given how they’ve been for the past year I wouldn’t hold my breath. Nokia seemed to let out another massive disappointment with their announcement today, knecapping Windows Phone 8 before it even gets out of the gate.

One thing Nokia fans can get excited about I suppose is the Nokia touchstone, I mean wireless charging. The Palm wireless charging technology I’ve been using for the past three years is one of the key things I like about the platform. The main downside to it from a mass market perspective from HP/Palm at least is the wireless charging base station was not a cheap accessory, so I suspect many non techies did not opt for it due to the price (which could easily be $50-60 at product launch).

I really would like one of these platforms to do well, trust me I am not a fan of Android nor iOS, it’s just sad to see history repeating itself.

August 27, 2012

vSphere 5.1: what 5.0 should of been!

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 6:40 pm

I’m not going to bore you with all the mundane details about what is new, so many other folks are doing that, but here is a post from VMware which has links to pdfs as to what is new.

It looks pretty decent, the licensing change is welcome, though not everyone agrees with that. I find it interesting that the web console is going to be the main GUI to manage vSphere going forward. I found the web console in 5.0 severely lacking, but I’m sure it’s improved in 5.1. Anyone happen to know if the new console is backwards compatible with vCenter 5.0 ? Also I wonder if this web console applies to managing ESXi hosts directly (without vCenter)? I assume it doesn’t apply(yet) ?

I don’t see myself upgrading anytime before the end of the year, but it does seem strongly to me that this 5.1 release is what 5.0 should of been last year.

I find this race to a million iops quite silly, whether it is VMware’s latest claim of 1 million iops in a VM, or EMC’s latest claim, or HDS’s latest claim, everyone is trying to show they can do a million too, and the fine print always seems to point to a 100% read workload, maybe customers will buy their arrays with their data pre-loaded, so they don’t have to do any writes to them.

 

August 22, 2012

Are people really waiting for Windows 8?

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 11:04 am

UPDATED  – Dell came out with their quarterly results and their PC business wasn’t doing well, down 22% from a year ago.

A common theme I see popping up are people claiming folks are holding off until Windows 8 before buying their systems. Do you think this is true? I can imagine some folks holding off to buy the MS Tablet or something, but I can’t imagine many people (I’d bet it’s a rounding error) waiting for the desktop/laptop version of Windows 8 before buying their new PC.  Especially given apparently 70% of Dells PC sales go to commercial/government with only 30% going to consumer.

UPDATE – HP released their results and their PC shipments were similarly poor with revenues down 10-12%.

They’d rather not admit that a weak economy combined with the rise of tablets not running Microsoft software is probably where most of the blame lies. A market that Linux advocates long hoped to try to capture by being “good enough” to do things like browse the web, read email etc, but for many reasons was never able to really establish any foot hold. I remember my grandfather had such a Linux system, forgot who made it, but it ran entirely off of a CD, with perhaps only a few megs of flash storage (this was about 10-12 years ago). It was slow but it mostly worked, he certainly got far fewer viruses on that then when he eventually went to windows a few years later(Dell had to re-install his system several times a year due to malware infestations – he refused to stop going to dodgy porn sites).

What’s new and good in Windows 8 vs 7 that would have folks want to hold back on a new desktop or laptop? It’s pitched as the biggest product launch since Windows 95 and I believe that, though I don’t see anywhere near the leap in technology from Windows 7 to 8 that happened from Win3.x to 95. (sort of like my feelings on vSphere 3.5->4 vs 4->5).

I suspect it’s just an excuse, time will tell if there is a massive surge in PC buying shortly after Windows 8 launches but I don’t expect there to be. The new Metro (or whatever they are calling it) ecosystem is minuscule compared to the existing windows ecosystem. Hell, all other ecosystems pale in comparison to the current windows ecosystem.

Do you know if people are holding back waiting for Windows 8 on a desktop or laptop style device? If so I’d be curious to hear the reasons.

I fear for Microsoft that Windows 8 will hit the ground with a thud. It’ll sell millions just because there is such a massive install base of Windows folks (Vista sold quite a bit too remember that!).  Unlike some other players (*cough* HP WebOS *cough*), even if it is a thud initially Microsoft won’t give up. I recall similar hype around Windows phone 7 and that hit with a thud as well and has gone nowhere. In short – MS is setting the expectations too high.

Something I did learn recently which I was not aware of before, one of my friends at Microsoft mentioned that the Windows Phone 7 platform was mostly acquired from another company(forgot which), Microsoft then went and gutted it and the result is what we have today. He had long lost all faith in Microsoft, in their ability to execute, stifling projects that have good prospects while promoting others that have none. I suppose that sort of thing is typical for a really big company. I don’t know how he (or others) can put up with it without going crazy. He didn’t have much positive things to say about Windows phone, nor did his girlfriend who also works at Microsoft. It was sort of “meh”.

They’ll keep trying though, Microsoft that is, throw enough money at anything and you’ll eventually get it right, it may cost them a few more billion, and a few more years, but it’s a big important market, so it’s certainly a worthwhile investment.

I do find it funny while Ballmer was out trying to destroy Google, Apple comes out of nowhere and takes the torch and runs with it, and it took Microsoft many years to regroup and try to respond.

I don’t hate Microsoft, haven’t for a while, I do sort of feel sorry for them though, their massive fall from the top of the world to where they are now. They still have tons of cash mind you.. but from pretty much every other angle they aren’t doing so well.

August 7, 2012

Adventures with vCenter, Windows and expired Oracle passwords

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — Nate @ 7:39 pm

Today’s a day that I could have back – it was pretty much a waste/wash.

I’m not a windows person by trade of course, but I did have an interesting experience today. I write this in the hopes that perhaps it can save someone else the same pain.

Last night I kicked off some Windows updates on a vCenter server, done it a bunch of times before never had an issue. There was only about 6-10 updates to install. It installed them, then rebooted, and was taking a really long time to complete the post install stuff, after about 30mins I gave up and went home. It’s always come back when it’s done.

I forgot about it until this morning when I went to go do stuff with vCenter and could not connect. Then I tried to remote desktop into the system and could not(tcp port not listening). So I resorted to logging in via VMware console. Tried resetting remote desktop to no avail. I went to control panel to check on windows update, and the windows update control panel just hung. I went to the ‘add/remove programs’ thing to roll back some updates and it hung while looking for the updates.

I tried firing up IE9, and it didn’t fire, it just spun an hourglass for a few seconds and stopped. I scoured the event logs and there was really nothing there – no errors. I was convinced at this time an OS update went wrong, I mean why else would something like IE break ? There was an IE update as part of the updates that were installed last night after all.

After some searches I saw some people comment on how some new version of Flash was causing IE to break, so I went to remove flash (forgot why it was installed but there was a reason at the time), and could not. In fact I could not uninstall anything, it just gave me a generic message saying something along the lines of “wait for the system to complete the process before uninstalling this”.

I came across a windows tool called System Update Readiness Tool which sounded promising as well, I was unable to launch IE of course, I did have firefox and could load the web page but was unable to download the software without Firefox hanging(!?). I managed to download it on another computer and copy it over the network to the affected server’s HD. But when I tried to launch it – sure enough it hung too almost immediately.

Rebooting didn’t help, shut down completely and start up again – no luck. Same behavior. After consulting with the IT manager who spends a lot more time in Windows than me we booted to safe mode – came right up. Windows update is not available in safe mode, most services were not started. But I was able to get in and uninstall the hot fix for IE. I rebooted again.

At some point along the line I got the system to where I could remote desktop in, windows update looked ok, IE loaded etc. I called the IT manager over to show him, and decided to reboot to make sure it was OK only to have it break on me again.

I sat at the post install screen for the patches (Stage 3 of 3 0%) for about 30 minutes, at this point I figure I better start getting prepared to install another vCenter server so I started that process in parallel, talked a bit with HP/Vmware support and I shut off the VM again and rebooted – no difference just was sitting there. So I rebooted again into safe mode, and removed the rest of the patches that were installed last night, and rebooted again into normal mode and must’ve waited 45 minutes or so for the system to boot – it did boot eventually, got past that updates screen. But the system was still not working right, vCenter was hanging and I could not remote desktop in.

About 30 minutes after the system booted I was able to remote desktop in again, not sure why, I kept poking around, not making much progress. I decided to take a VM snapshot (I had not taken one originally but in the grand scheme of things it wouldn’t of helped), and re-install those patches again, and let the system work through whatever it has to work through.

So I did that, and the system was still wonky.

I looked and looked – vCenter still hanging, nothing in the event log and nothing in the vpx vCenter log other than stupid status messages like

2012-08-08T01:08:01.186+01:00 [04220 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-a5fd1c93] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:08:12.535+01:00 [04220 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-12d43ef2] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:08:23.884+01:00 [04356 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-f6f6f576] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:08:35.234+01:00 [04220 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-a928e16] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:08:46.583+01:00 [04220 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-729134b2] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:08:57.932+01:00 [04328 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-a395e0af] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:09:09.281+01:00 [04220 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-928de6d2] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:09:20.631+01:00 [04328 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-7a5a8966] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:09:32.058+01:00 [04220 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-524a7126] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:09:43.804+01:00 [04328 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-140d23cf] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:09:55.551+01:00 [04356 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-acadf68a] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:10:07.297+01:00 [04328 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-e42316c] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:10:19.044+01:00 [04356 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-3e976f5f] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms
2012-08-08T01:10:30.790+01:00 [04328 warning 'VpxProfiler' opID=SWI-2734f3ba] VpxUtil_InvokeWithOpId [TotalTime] took 12000 ms

No errors anywhere, I believe I looked at the tomcat logs a few times and there was no logs for today.

Finally I dug into the tomcat logs from last night and came across this –

Aug 6, 2012 11:27:30 PM com.vmware.vim.common.vdb.VdbODBCConfig isConnectableUrl
SEVERE: Unable to get a connection to: jdbc:oracle:thin:@//DB_SERVER:1521/DB_SERVER as username=VPXADMIN due to: ORA-28001: the password has expired

I had encountered a password expiry on my sys account a few weeks ago, but didn’t really think much about it at the time. Anyways I reset the password and vCenter was able to start. I disabled password expiry per this page (I have used Oracle 10G and a little of 8/9i and never recall having password expire issues), which says defaults were changed in 11G and passwords do expire now.

I have had vCenter fail to start because of DB issues in the past – in fact because vCenter does not properly release locks on the Oracle DB when it shuts down the easiest workaround is to restart Oracle whenever I reboot the vCenter server (because vCenter is the only thing on the Oracle DB it’s just a simpler solution). When vCenter fails in this way it causes no issues to the rest of the OS. Just an error message in the event log saying vCenter failed to start, and a helpful explanation as to why –

Unable to get exclusive access to vCenter repository.   Please check if another vCenter instance is running against the same database schema.

What got me, even now is how the hell did this expired password cascade into Internet Explorer breaking, remote desktop breaking, windows update breaking, etc ? My only guess is that vCenter was perhaps flooding the system with RPC messages causing other things to break. Again – there was no evidence of any errors in the event log anywhere. I even called a friend who works at Microsoft and deploys hundreds of Windows servers for a living (he works as a Lab Manager), hoping he would have an idea. He said he had seen this behavior several times before but never tried to debug it, he just wiped the system out and reinstalled. I was close to doing that today, but fortunately eventually found a solution, and I guess you could say I learned something in the process ?

I don’t know.

I have not seriously used windows since the NT4 days (I have used it casually on the desktop and in some server roles like this vCenter system), why I stopped using it, well there was many reasons, I suppose this was sort of a reminder. I’m not really up to moving to the Linux vCenter appliance yet it seems beta-ish, if I ever get to move to that appliance before I upgrade to KVM (at some point, no rush). I have a very vague memory of experimenting one time on NT4, or maybe it was 3.51, where I decided to stop one/more of the RPC services to see what would happen. Havok, of course. I noticed one of the services vCenter depends upon, the DCOM Server Process Launcher, seems similar of importance in Windows 2008, though 2008 smartly does not allow you to stop it, I chuckled when I saw the Recovery Action for this service failure is Restart the Computer. But in this case the service was running… I looked for errors for it in the event log as well and there were none.

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