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August 31, 2011

DOJ files to block AT&T T-mobile deal

Filed under: General,Random Thought — Tags: , — Nate @ 7:49 am

Wow, I didn’t expect the government to do this, hopefully it sticks, but apparently the DOJ  has filed to block the merger between T-mobile and AT&T. Just a couple of hours ago some AT&T exec was on CNBC touting how good of a deal it was, how they’d bring back jobs etc, I couldn’t bring myself to watch or listen to him talk.

What I’m sure they didn’t mention was the leaked emails showing the public AT&T position was pretty much the exact opposite from what they were portraying internally. Some folks did calculations and determined that actual investment was going to go down with AT&T buying T-mobile, rather than up (don’t have a reference for that handy right now).

I didn’t like the deal to begin with of course, so hopefully it’s dead, and T-mobile will get a few billion in break up fees as a result (and some free spectrum! I forgot about the spectrum AT&T has to give them). I know some folks at T-mobile apparently internally they were convinced it was going through, and already started doing a bunch of stuff to prepare for it.

I can’t believe that some folks believe that actual investment would go down if the deal was blocked, in fact the same Wall street investors are buying up shares of cell tower companies like American Tower in response to the DOJ deal, speculating that investment will go UP. AT&T and T-Mobile of course will have to continue to invest regardless, it’s not as if AT&T is going to stop spending if they don’t get T-mobile, they still have to compete against the other carriers in the space.

The DOJ said in a speech earlier this morning, among other things:

As can be seen in the Department’s complaint, AT&T felt competitive pressure from T-Mobile.   One example cites an AT&T employee observing that “[T-Mobile] was first to have HSPA+ devices in their portfolio…we added them in reaction to potential loss of speed claims.”

Combine that kind of claim with the leaked emails and a little bit of common sense and it’s not hard to see how this deal would hurt consumers. Now there’s speculation again that Sprint may go after T-Mobile. I kind of hope they don’t, since their technologies are not compatible (CDMA & GSM). The Sprint Nextel deal was a real mess I think in good part because the handsets and networks were not compatible.

AT&T will have to rely on organic growth it seems – oh no, the world is coming to an end.

I say this as a new AT&T customer – somewhat forced to take the leap off of Sprint (after being with them for 10 years) onto AT&T in order to get GSM service so I can run more WebOS phones including the Pre3 by swapping SIM cards between phones.

August 29, 2011

Farewell Terremark – back to co-lo

Filed under: General,Random Thought,Storage,Virtualization — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 9:43 pm

I mentioned not long ago that I was going co-lo once again. I was co-lo for a while for my own personal services but then my server started to act up (the server was 6 years old if it was still alive today) with disk “failure” after failure (or at least that’s what the 3ware card was predicting eventually it stopped complaining and the disk never died again). So I thought – do I spent a few grand to buy a new box or go “cloud”. I knew up front cloud would cost more in the long run but I ended up going cloud anyways as a stop gap – I picked Terremark because it had the highest quality design at the time(still does).

During my time with Terremark I never had any availability issues, there was one day where there was some high latency on their 3PAR arrays though they found & fixed whatever it was pretty quick (didn’t impact me all that much).

I had one main complaint with regards to billing – they charge $0.01 per hour for each open TCP or UDP port on their system, and they have no way of doing 1:1 NAT. For a web server or something this is no big deal, but for me I needed a half dozen or more ports open per system(mail, dns, vpn, ssh etc) after cutting down on ports I might not need, so it starts to add up, indeed about 65% of my monthly bill ended up being these open TCP and UDP ports.

Once both of my systems were fully spun up (the 2nd system only recently got fully spun up as I was too lazy to move it off of co-lo) my bill was around $250/mo. My previous co-lo was around $100/mo and I think I had them throttle me to 1Mbit of traffic (this blog was never hosted at that co-lo).

The one limitation I ran into on their system was that they could not assign more than 1 IP address for outbound NAT per account. In order to run SMTP I needed each of my servers to have their own unique outbound IP. So I had to make a 2nd account to run the 2nd server. Not a big deal(for me, ended up being a pain for them since their system wasn’t setup to handle such a situation), since I only ran 2 servers (and the communications between them were minimal).

As I’ve mentioned before, the only part of the service that was truly “bill for what you use” was bandwidth usage, and for that I was charged between 10-30 cents/month for my main system and 10 cents/month for my 2nd system.

Oh – and they were more than willing to setup reverse DNS for me which was nice (and required for running a mail server IMO). I had to agree to a lengthy little contract that said I wouldn’t spam in order for them to open up port 25. Not a big deal. The IP addresses were “clean” as well, no worries about black listing.

Another nice thing to have if they would of offered it is billing based on resource pools, as usual they charge for what you provision(per VM) instead of what you use. When I talked to them about their enterprise cloud offering they charged for the resource pool (unlimited VMs in a given amount of CPU/memory), but this is not available on their vCloud Express platform.

It was great to be able to VPN to their systems to use the remote console (after I spent an hour or two determining the VPN was not going to work in Linux despite my best efforts to extract linux versions of the vmware console plugin and try to use it). Mount an ISO over the VPN and install the OS. That’s how it should be. I didn’t need the functionality but I don’t doubt I would of been able to run my own DHCP/PXE server there as well if I wanted to install additional systems in a more traditional way. Each user gets their own VLAN, and is protected by a Cisco firewall, and load balanced by a Citrix load balancer.

A couple of months ago the thought came up again of off site backups. I don’t really have much “critical” data but I felt I wanted to just back it all up, because it would be a big pain if I had to reconstruct all of my media files for example. I have about 1.7TB of data at the moment.

So I looked at various cloud systems including Terremark but it was clear pretty quick no cloud company was going to be able to offer this service in a cost effective way so I decided to go co-lo again. Rackspace was a good example they have a handy little calculator on their site. This time around I went and bought a new, more capable server.

So I went to a company I used to buy a ton of equipment from in the bay area and they hooked me up with not only a server with ESXi pre-installed on it but co-location services (with “unlimited” bandwidth), and on-site support for a good price. The on-site support is mainly because I’m using their co-location services(which in itself is a co-lo inside Hurricane Electric) and their techs visit the site frequently as-is.

My server is a single socket quad core processor, 4x2TB SAS disks (~3.6TB usable which also matches my usable disk space at home which is nice – SAS because VMware doesn’t support VMFS on SATA though technically you can do it the price premium for SAS wasn’t nearly as high as I was expecting), 3ware RAID controller with battery backed write-back cache, a little USB thing for ESXi(rather have ESXi on the HDD but 3ware is not supported for booting ESXi), 8GB Registered ECC ram and redundant power supplies. Also has decent remote management with a web UI, remote KVM access, remote media etc. For co-location I asked (and received) 5 static IPs (3 IPs for VMs, 1 IP for ESX management, 1 IP for out of band management).

My bandwidth needs are really tiny, typically 1GB/month. Though now with off site backups that may go up a bit (in bursts). Only real drawback to my system is the SAS card does not have full integration with vSphere so I have to use a cli tool to check the RAID status, at some point I’ll need to hook up nagios again and run a monitor to check on the RAID status. Normally I setup the 3Ware tools to email me when bad things happen, pretty simple, but not possible when running vSphere.

The amount of storage on this box I expect to last me a good 3-5 years. The 1.7TB includes every bit of data that I still have going back a decade or more – I’m sure there’s a couple hundred gigs at least I could outright delete because I may never need it again. But right now I’m not hurting for space so I keep it there, on line and accessible.

My current setup

  • One ESX virtual switch on the internet that has two systems on it – a bridging OpenBSD firewall, and a Xangati system sniffing packets(still playing with Xangati). No IP addresses are used here.
  • One ESX virtual switch for one internal network, the bridging firewall has another interface here, and my main two internet facing servers have interfaces here, my firewall has another interface here as well for management. Only public IPs are used here.
  • One ESX virtual switch for another internal network for things that will never have public IP addresses associated with them, I run NAT on the firewall(on it’s 3rd/4th interfaces) for these systems to get internet access.

I have a site to site OpenVPN connection between my OpenBSD firewall at home and my OpenBSD firewall on the ESX system, which gives me the ability to directly access the back end, non routable network on the other end.

Normally I wouldn’t deploy an independent firewall, but I did in this case because, well I can. I do like OpenBSD’s pf more than iptables(which I hate), and it gives me a chance to play around more with pf, and gives me more freedom on the linux end to fire up services on ports that I don’t want exposed and not have to worry about individually firewalling them off, so it allows me to be more lazy in the long run.

I bought the server before I moved, once I got to the bay area I went and picked it up and kept it over a weekend to copy my main data set to it then took it back and they hooked it up again and I switched my systems over to it.

The server was about $2900 w/1 year of support, and co-location is about $100/mo. So disk space alone the first year(taking into account cost of the server) my cost is about $0.09 per GB per month (3.6TB), with subsequent years being $0.033 per GB per month (took a swag at the support cost for the 2nd year so that is included). That doesn’t even take into account the virtual machines themselves and the cost savings there over any cloud. And I’m giving the cloud the benefit of the doubt by not even looking at the cost of bandwidth for them just the cost of capacity. If I was using the cloud I probably wouldn’t allocate all 3.6TB up front but even if you use 1.8TB which is about what I’m using now with my VMs and stuff the cost still handily beats everyone out there.

What’s the most crazy is I lack the purchasing power of any of these clouds out there, I’m just a lone consumer, that bought one server. Granted I’m confident the vendor I bought from gave me excellent pricing due to my past relationship, though probably still not on the scale of the likes of Rackspace or Amazon and yet I can handily beat their costs without even working for it.

What surprised me most during my trips doing cost analysis of the “cloud” is how cheap enterprise storage is. I mean Terremark charges $0.25/GB per month(on SATA powered 3PAR arrays), Rackspace charges $0.15/GB per month(I believe Rackspace just uses DAS). I kind of would of expected the enterprise storage route to cost say 3-5x more, not less than 2x. When I was doing real enterprise cloud pricing storage for the solution I was looking for typically came in at 10-20% of the total cost, with 80%+ of the cost being CPU+memory. For me it’s a no brainier – I’d rather pay a bit more and have my storage on a 3PAR of course (when dealing with VM-based storage not bulk archival storage). With the average cost of my storage for 3.6TB over 2 years coming in at $0.06/GB it makes more sense to just do it myself.

I just hope my new server holds up, my last one lasted a long time, so I sort of expect this one to last a while too, it got burned in before I started using it and the load on the box is minimal, would not be too surprised if I can get 5 years out of it – how big will HDDs be in 5 years?

I will miss Terremark because of the reliability and availability features they offer, they have a great service, and now of course are owned by Verizon. I don’t need to worry about upgrading vSphere any time soon as there’s no reason to go to vSphere 5. The one thing I have been contemplating is whether or not to put my vSphere management interface behind the OpenBSD firewall(which is a VM of course on the same box). Kind of makes me miss the days of ESX 3, when it had a built in firewall.

I’m probably going to have to upgrade my cable internet at home, right now I only have 1Mbps upload which is fine for most things but if I’m doing off site backups too I need more performance. I can go as high as 5Mbps with a more costly plan. 50Meg down 5 meg up for about $125, but I might as well go all in and get 100meg down 5 meg up for $150, both plans have a 500GB cap with $0.25/GB charge for going over. Seems reasonable. I certainly don’t need that much downstream bandwidth(not even 50Mbps I’d be fine with 10Mbps), but really do need as much upstream as I can get. Another option could be driving a USB stick to the co-lo, which is about 35 miles away, I suppose that is a possibility but kind of a PITA still given the distance, though if I got one of those 128G+ flash drives it could be worth it. I’ve never tried hooking up USB storage to an ESX VM before, assuming it works? hmmmm..

Another option I have is AT&T Uverse, which I’ve read good and bad things about – but looking at their site their service is slower than what I can get through my local cable company (which truly is local, they only serve the city I am in). Another reason I didn’t go with Uverse for TV is due to the technology they are using I suspected it is not compatible with my Tivo (with cable cards). Though AT&T doesn’t mention their upstream speeds specifically I’ll contact them and try to figure that out.

I kept the motherboard/cpus/ram from my old server, my current plan is to mount it to a piece of wood and hang it on the wall as some sort of art. It has lots of colors and little things to look at, I think it looks cool at least. I’m no handyman so hopefully I can make it work. I was honestly shocked how heavy the copper(I assume) heatsinks were, wow, felt like 1.5 pounds a piece, massive.

While my old server is horribly obsolete, one thing it does have even on my new server is being able to support more ram. Old server could go up to 24GB(I had a max of 6GB at the time in it), new server tops out at 8GB (have 8GB in it). Not a big deal as I don’t need 24GB for my personal stuff but just thought it was kind of an interesting comparison.

This blog has been running on the new server for a couple of weeks now. One of these days I need to hook up some log analysis stuff to see how many dozen hits I get a month.

If Terremark could fix three areas of their vCloud express service – one being resource pool-based billing,  another being relaxing the costs behind opening multiple ports in the firewall (or just giving 1:1 NAT as an option), and the last one being thin provisioning friendly billing for storage — it would really be a much more awesome service than it already is.

August 21, 2011

Windows Phone 7 is dead

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 7:03 am

That is the headline of this news article, and as I read the article, and more importantly the comments I couldn’t help but think about the parallels between both of those and HP’s now defunct WebOS (yeah I know officially HP has committed to continue support but most people expect nothing to come of it unfortunately).

Here is part of the list, see the article for the rest

  1. Sales are plummeting – Same was said for WebOS
  2. Mango (new version of Windows phone 7) is taking too long – Same was said for WebOS 3, Pre3, and the Pre3’s lack of running WebOS 3
  3. Customer’s don’t care – Similar things said about WebOS
  4. Nokia doesn’t matter – HP at least believed the Palm brand didn’t matter since they killed the Palm name earlier in the year..

I’d say a good 8 out of 10 of those points could of applied to WebOS/Palm as well. I also suspect that the same could possibly be said of RIM as well.

But the comments from the community responding to the article were much more similar to what the hard core WebOS community would say than I would of expected and thought that was fascinating.

Maybe it’s coincidence, but I have seen more than one suggestion from the WebOS community that Windows Phone 7 is the closest user experience to WebOS.

I was never a strong defender of the WebOS platform, I used it for myself, thought it was a solid product line, never tried to talk someone else into using it, though often times I wanted to try (unlike some other products/companies I talk about on this site). I suppose deep down I knew they needed “more” to appeal to more users so I was patient  – waiting until the day they had those core elements completed, HP wasn’t so patient though.

For me, I ordered a pair of unlocked Pre 3 phones from the UK for about $500 each last night in the hopes they will ship. Far more than I’ve ever spent on a phone before, but given the retirement of the hardware and no future prospects of new hardware at this point, ironically it was a pretty easy decision to make. I just hope they have stock. The price point almost assures there won’t be a mad dash to buy them like with the Touchpad. If I get lucky and HP has a fire sale of the remaining stockpile of Pre3s in the US, I’ll pickup more. My only real concern is batteries – what’s the best way of storing a battery if your not going to use it for a year or more ? Should it be fully discharged? Should I keep it on the charger the whole time? Maybe it doesn’t matter what I do.

At this point I guess I’m glad HP left the Pre 3 with WebOS 2.2 where there was/is a stronger development base on the Mojo(?) SDK with many more applications. WebOS 3 by contrast that runs on the Touchpad uses another, incompatible SDK Enyo.

One of the strange decisions HP/Palm made was when they built the original SDK they didn’t take into account large screens, so when the Tablet came around they had to re-do it. Unfortunately for some reason they didn’t make the new SDK good for small screens for some reason (I assume that reason was lack of time and resources for the schedule), so developers were stuck having to use two different ways of writing apps to support the Phone vs Tablet, not a good way to attract developers from competing platforms.

But like most of the faults I believe it would of been fixed at some point in the not too distant future(~1 year or so), once Palm had the ability to stabilize and catch their breath from the break neck pace they’ve been working at for years now.

I think what hurt Palm/HP/WebOS more than anything is they didn’t have enough resources to pull off what they needed to in the time allowed. I have little doubt they tried to hire like crazy after HP bought them but there just wasn’t enough time to develop these 3 products, and ramp up hiring / get people familiar enough with the platform to be really productive at developing by the time they had to launch their products.

Made me think back to this post about a year ago.

The main difference between WP7 and WebOS, as I’ve mentioned before, is that Microsoft is not going to give up on their platform. WP7 may die, or may not, I don’t know. But if it does MS will re-work it, and try again. I had expected and hoped, as mentioned before, HP was going to do the same with WebOS.

August 19, 2011

Touchpad fire sale starts tomorrow

Filed under: Events,General — Tags: , — Nate @ 4:57 pm

UPDATED HP has apparently given their partners notice to liquidate everything – 16GB Touchpads will go for $99, and 32GB go for $149 according to Pre Central.

 

HP Touchpad

Sale starts tomorrow apparently, I will go get some 16GBs myself, 3? 4?  5? Not sure yet..

Even if you use it for nothing other than web browsing (or watching video) it’s a nice device. Pair it with a Touchstone (I love the Touchstone technology) and you got yourself a high resolution picture frame that can do far more for about the same cost as a 1024×768 standalone frame. I assume the accessories for the Touchpad will be dirt cheap as well.

Beats the hell out of a fire sale Android tablet I saw on Daily Steals recently.

Apparently some users in Europe received the Pre3 already, so they have manufactured  some, hopefully I can get my hands on a couple.

UPDATE – I visited about a dozen stores in the bay area none of them had any Touchpads in stock this morning. Best Buy is refusing to participate in the fire sale and I think supply is generally constrained. I suspect mostly what is happening is most stores probably have single digit numbers of Touchpads in stock, I’d be surprised if in many cases employees weren’t buying some of those right away, then all it takes is one or two customers to consume the remainder of the stock. More than one place I went to today had others like me racing around the area trying to find stock.

Thought it was kind of funny, one of the office supply stores – forgot which – had little advertisements with the reduced pricing (though for them it was $129 for the 16GB), and said good from now till the end of the year while supplies last – only the supplies didn’t even last through the first morning.

I read many similar stories on Pre Central in other parts of the country. Then I saw a link mentioning the HP SMB store had Touchpads available for order (the “Home” store lists them as out of stock).

So I tried to order — and was confronted with out of memory errors on the HP servers

again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and

I’ll save you the next 100 lines of that, and just say I was pretty persistant, working for more than two hours to try to get an order through. Not long after I started I found that Firefox and Seamonkey which I normally use in Linux was not rendering the billing address page on HP’s site, I suspect the page was somehow broken because HP’s servers are in a hissy fit at the moment. So I tried Opera – fortunately Opera was able to render the page. After trying again and again and again and.. I finally got an order confirmed for 4 x 16GB Touchpads for $99/ea.

I hope HP honors it, I suspect they will have enough to ship given the massive numbers of units they will be receiving from Best buy (apparently something like 250,000 units).

Woohoo.

Though earlier today I was really thinking to myself it really would of been nice if HP had given preferential treatment to those early adopters, give them the opportunity to buy more before the rest of the public. I suppose there wasn’t any time, and possibly wasn’t anyone around that cared enough to try to arrange something like that. I just hate the idea that small numbers of people may be able to buy large numbers of touchpads (I saw one report of a person buying 35 of them at once), and trying to profit off of it on eBay (reminds me of a lady that mortgaged her home and tried to buy every iPhone at a store one day only to be told she was only allowed to buy one). For me I will use one of the four for work use only, at least two more will likely be gifts for family I think they will like them a lot, and the 4th I haven’t figured out yet, probably a spare unit or something, since HP apparently is not going to honor warranties on these units (though I believe they are honoring them on the ones sold at full price).

Since I was in such a rush to order – I’m contemplating trying to go through the process again to get a 32GB touchpad – so I can return it to best buy for $599 (what I paid for my current TP). I thought about just returning my current one but migrating the data and stuff would be a pain – and I know my current TP works great – there’s always a chance that a replacement might have a glitch.

Best buy extended the return period for Touchpad to 60 days, which gives me about 11 days if I wanted to return mine.

UPDATE 2 Just checked and HP charged my CC .. so I should be good to go

UPDATE 3 Best buy changed their policy again and is allowing customers to buy 1 per customer while supplies last, reports seem to be stores selling out within minutes or stores haven’t gotten the word yet, Best buy removed the SKUs from their systems and are having to put them back in again. See more info here. Looks like they’ll refund the difference in price for my launch day 32GB TP, just need to find that receipt…

HP in trouble..

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 7:23 am

HP is certainly not going to die any time soon, but it seems that a large number of people(some of which are investors) did not like what they heard from HP yesterday sending their stock down about 21% to levels not seen in what seems more than five years.

Myself I don’t agree with their strategy either in trying to get rid of their PC business as well as kill WebOS – a market that is growing faster than anything else right now and most people seem to think is the future (mobile computing stuff). Speaking of mobile, I was surprised last year when looking at their site that the iPAQ was still around – I recall that as being a popular device about a decade ago though haven’t heard the brand mentioned in many years. I wonder if HP will keep that stuff around or kill it with WebOS.

Then there is the acquisition of this Atonomy software company for $10B, never heard of the company myself, looked briefly at their web site and am not familiar with the space. I saw, or read yesterday that Atonomy is on track for $1B in revenues this year.

I’d of course prefer HP invest $10B in WebOS that would be a much better strategy in, as previously mentioned, a much faster growing market.

It is nice to see investors punishing the stock today, after writing about WebOS yesterday I saw that HP had indeed replaced roughly half of it’s board members as well as the CEO since the acquisition of Palm last year.

Another interesting flip flop that the CEO of HP did is indeed on the consumer products, saw earlier on CNBC this morning one of the anchors of the show dug up a quote from earlier this year where the current CEO of HP said the consumer unit of the company gave HP “an immense competitive advantage” (his exact words). Now, barely six months later they can’t wait to get rid of it.

I know really nothing about their consumer PC stuff – I wouldn’t ever buy one of their laptops (prefer Toshiba now that IBM Thinkpads are gone), desktops are pretty generic no matter where you go, printers..whatever. PCs aren’t going away any time soon.

Unfortunately – it seems like in general more signs of short term thinking a problem that plagues both our public an private sectors, and only seems to be getting worse as time goes on. HP’s previous CEO was known for gutting the company of R&D and cutting costs..

To me it sounds like too much of a knee jerk reaction. As a local reporter here put it

What a waste.

July 25, 2011

Netflix acknowledges significant customer backlash

Filed under: General — Tags: , — Nate @ 5:16 pm

Was watching some CNBC recently and they were talking about the upcoming Netflix results and how much of an impact their recent price hikes may cause.

I wondered over to Yahoo! and came across this:

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Netflix Inc. is bracing for customer backlash that could result in its slowest subscriber growth in more than three years amid changes to its online video and DVD rental service that will raise prices by as much as 60 percent.

[..]

The shortfall stems from an anticipated slowdown in Netflix’s subscriber growth amid the most radical change in the company’s pricing since it began renting DVDs through the mail 12 years ago.

Nice to see. I don’t blame Netflix for the price hikes, I didn’t like them so I quit the service, but it seems clear they are losing money pretty badly (apparently they’ve been using fancy accounting things to try to cover this up), and their licensing costs are about to skyrocket.

Netflix spent nearly $613 million on streaming rights in the second quarter, a more than nine-fold increase from the same time last year. The company so far has signed long-term contracts committing it to pay $2.44 billion for streaming rights.

So they’re doing what they have to do. Though I’m sure most everyone agrees they could of handled the situation far better than they did. They also apparently face some stiff competition in the latin america markets where they are expanding to, places where bandwidth pipes are smaller(making streaming less feasible), and cable bills are much cheaper than they can be here in the states.

While Netflix’s price hikes have gotten quite a bit of press at least in the business news recently I am kind of surprised that the same hasn’t seemed to be true of the VMware price hikes (outside of the tech community at least). The outrage continues to build..

For me it all comes down to selection – increase the streaming catalog to at least match whatever they have on DVD now and I would probably jump back on board.. in the mean time I’ll stick to cable(+Tivo), I’ll pay more but I get a lot more value out of it.

July 19, 2011

Something I hope I don’t miss – Seattle Weather

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 11:09 pm

I’ve been seeing/hearing increasing numbers of folks in the area complaining about an apparent lack of summer round these parts. Myself I welcome the cooler weather, in fact despite the cooler weather I have had my ACs running almost non stop for at least a couple months now (compressors weren’t always running) with a target temp of 68 degrees.

Actually shortly after I moved here, I was watching a local newscast on one of the channels, and the weather guy was complaining about the weather every chance he got, apparently he hated being here, after a couple months I stopped watching them.

I never minded the rain here, much of my life I have spent time where there was roughly equal if not more annual rainfall than is here. I don’t mind gray skies, doesn’t really matter to me.

People tell me it’s less about the total amount of rain and more about how spread out throughout the year it is. I guess I don’t get out enough to notice.

I have been casually keeping track of the weather of where I am moving to, to see how much of an adjustment I may have ahead of me as a result of the move, after all I am moving roughly 850 miles to the south.

For the most part the temperature seems to be about the same, at least since I started looking in June. My new place is fairly close to both the Pacific Ocean and the San Fransisco bay which helps keep it cooler than if I was more inland.

I just got done watching yet another news report on people complaining about how cold it is here (61 degrees at the moment at 11PM). My own ideal temperature is highs in the mid to upper 50s, lows in the mid 40s (mainly because my apartment is fairly consistently 10-20 degrees warmer inside than out), and good sleeping temperatures seem to be in the 60-68 degree range.

 

10 day forecast for Bellevue, WA

Now the weather where I’m moving to –

 

10 day forecast for San Bruno, CA

 

A little bit more rain in the forecast up here, but not much. In my 11 years of living in Bellevue it seems it hardly rains here at all, it’s as if the rain went around the city (it rains a lot up in the northern Puget Sound region known as the convergence zone).

But as far as people up here complaining it’s cold, and not summer like.. I don’t know if the above weather is typical or not for where I am going, but given the close proximity to water on both sides, I am not surprised it stays cool.

Just a few miles to the south and further inland the high temperatures jump a full 10+ degrees, I almost moved there, but decided against it because of the ~1 hour commute in each direction.

I wouldn’t mind it being drier wherever I was, quite frequently we are above 85% humidity in the Seattle area, I don’t suppose that will improve at my new place.

July 18, 2011

What I’ll miss most about Seattle

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 10:46 am

[ I will of course miss all my friends more than anything else, this post is not about friends but rather places ]

I have been thinking about my move coming up – my last full day in the area is this Thursday July 21st. (originally was going to be Saturday but because of moving issues it had to be moved sooner).

I mentioned in my original post that I don’t like Seattle, I can’t think of a single part of Seattle that I like, I don’t like the one way streets, the lack of parking (which on a recent news report was the #1 complaint of tourists), the traffic, and really am not a fan of the culture in general, I don’t think as a driver anything gets me more frustrated than driving in downtown Seattle. I was there yesterday in fact to try to find something in particular, I ended up just coming back home in frustration, never bothered to go in any stores because parking was such a pain. Part of the culture in Seattle that I don’t like is they are increasingly anti-car. Which is a fine view to have – you just won’t catch me dead living there!. I do like the east side though (where I live). It is interesting because a lot of folks I know in Seattle are the opposite, they hate the east side but love Seattle.

So I tried to think of if there was anything I did like about Seattle. I came up with two places in Seattle that I do love, and will miss. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find a close replacement for either down in the Bay Area though.

The first place, which is far and away first place, there is no competition.

Cowgirls Inc

If you haven’t been to Cowgirls you really should check it out, words cannot properly describe the Cowgirls experience on a Friday or Saturday night after 9 PM. Don’t bother going in at 5-6-7 it’s pretty much like any other bar. After 9 things change though. I usually get there at 9, and by about midnight I have a tough time standing up so it’s time to go (I missed out on their 5th Anniversary party which I happened to go on that particular night but could not stay an extra 30 minutes to see the show because well I was destroyed). – oh and you’ll be doing a lot of standing as they remove the bar stools at around 9:30-10pm.

On these nights it is often wall to wall people, I stick close to the bar and defend my position (you’ll understand why if you go). The words kick ass don’t do it justice. I took another friend there for the first time this past Friday and he was blown away too, totally exceeded his expectations. I took another guy a couple of months ago he moved to Seattle last year, and he seemed like he was in shock most of the time he absolutely loved it.

I worked across the street from this place (which is on the corner of 1st and King street in Pioneer Square), back when it opened in 2004, though I was a very different person back then. We used to do software deployments that would start at 10pm and typically end around 2 or 3AM.

My co-workers liked to go there (at what seemed to be around 6-7pm) to play pool and eat the peanuts because they have you throw the shells on the floor and my co-workers loved that. The place is often pretty dead that early so no action.

My Favorite Cowgirl (moved away in 2010)

Even though I only went a few times a year the staff knew me pretty well when I came in, so that was nice. I am terrible with names and although I heard some of their names over the years I never retained them. My favorite cowgirl (left) was awesome, she did the craziest things including dancing on my shoulders on several occasions, the heels hurt the first couple of times but it was good pain 🙂

She moved away from Seattle last year which made me sad.

A funny story about the company I worked at that was across the street from this place. The last boss I had at that company was a really heavy drinker, one night him, the VP and a bunch of other folks (not including me I wasn’t at the company at that point) went to Cowgirls and drank a bunch.

The VP dared the director (my former boss) to jump up on the bar and start dancing. He apparently did it, and as a result one of the bouncers got pulled him off, got him in a headlock and kicked him out. Speaking of bouncers (they are called regulators there), there are quite a few, I would say upwards of 10 at any given time.

Another funny story about Cowgirls and VMware of all things – a local VMware rep was coming to meet me at the last company I was at, and his boss told him the wrong address(I gave the right address). So he called me up right when he was supposed to be there and asked where I was and told him he went to the wrong place. Here is how the conversation went (this was almost a year ago so the words are not completely accurate) –

  1. Him: so where are you located then?
  2. Me: on the corner of 1st and King street
  3. Him: where is that near?
  4. Me: it’s in Pioneer square
  5. Him: hmm, any more tips you can give?
  6. Me: It’s near the stadiums
  7. Him: Still not completely sure
  8. Me: Do you know where Cowgirls Inc is?
  9. Him: OH YEAH! Cowgirls!
  10. Me: I’m right across the street from that
  11. Him: I’ll be there in 10 minutes!

The place is run really smooth despite the crowds they really have it nailed down. I’ve never seen anything get out of hand while all the times I’ve been there. The staff is very talented, friendly and skilled at churning out drinks at a rapid rate.

If you go and have a good time don’t be afraid to tip big. Drink wise it’s a very affordable bar, even drinking with a friend I don’t think my tab(before tip) has ever been above $100. My tips at Cowgirls are anywhere from 80% to 130%  (+/- I don’t try to do percentages just come up with some number based on the bill). I also tip in cash, I have had on a couple occasions companies reject my tips on my CC bill I guess because they thought it was too much, can’t reject cash though! They are worth every penny.

There is really no other bar I’d rather go to, at least from ones I have been to in the U.S.  – It’s not a place to go to if you want to have a casual conversation, because you’ll just be yelling at each other to hear each other. So depending on the situation – perhaps go to a quiet bar first and talk about whatever you want to talk about then go to Cowgirls and have some real fun.

I have only two complaints about the place – one they don’t keep their web site up to date (they had a pop up running that was more than a year old at one point). The second, which has been more of a drawback for out of town friends than me is that they aren’t open every night. They are open every Friday and Saturday, and some other days if there is a sporting event on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve driven folks there on off nights only to find them closed.

I will miss the place greatly, I do plan to come back and visit. I’ve known several of the staff there for several years now so I should see some familiar faces if I am back in town in a few months to a year.

On to number two, it is a distant but solid second.

Pecos Pit

I was introduced to this place while I was working at that same company in Pioneer Square back in 2003. I don’t know how famous it might be but it is the only place I will order a pulled pork bbq sandwich from. I’m actually going there today at noon to meet some friends.

I don’t believe I had ever had pulled pork until I had it at Pecos Pit, I’m not even sure if I had even heard of pulled pork until Pecos.

 

Pecos Pit is located on 1st ave, about a mile south of the stadiums in Seattle. They are open Monday – Friday only as far as I know and hours are something like 11-3PM. Outdoor seating only (or take out). Parking can be limited at times, oh and it’s cash only too (there is an ATM across the street in a pinch though I’ve never used it).

Probably the main reason I love Pecos is the sauce & spice. My standard order (which some of the staff know me so well that I don’t even have to say it) is Pecos Pork, Hot, Spike & Beans. Yes I order the hottest thing on their menu, few people do but I have been having it for so long I got used to it a long time ago. I started out with medium way back when, but at some point it didn’t seem hot enough (I think they adjusted their recipe to make things less spicy but not sure). I switched to hot, and while it really is hot, for me at least it’s by no means too hot. Of all my friends that I have taken there or met there, I think maybe only one or two others have gotten hot, most usually seem to get mild(I know of at least one that complains that mild is even too hot).

I live in Bellevue, very close to Dixie’s BBQ which is much more famous in the area because of the man. While the man passed away a year or two ago they still have the man sauce, which really is the hottest thing I have ever had. I enjoy the heat it gives but I really do not enjoy the flavor. I also don’t generally enjoy the flavor of the pulled pork at Dixie’s either. I’d much, MUCH rather drive to Seattle and get Pecos over Dixie’s. The only reason I would go to Dixie’s myself is to get a jar of the man sauce to use at home, they sell, what I think is 2 ounce jars of the sauce for something like $10. While I haven’t used it at home in many years, the time when I did, one jar of that stuff literally lasted me a year. I would apply it with toothpicks to meat to get the heat inside the meat and cook it. Really was good (and very hot). The man sauce I would have to say is probably 3-4-5x+ hotter than what the hottest is at Pecos.

I’ve had pulled pork at a couple other places as well but for me, nothing compares to Pecos (I’m sure real bbq from down south or east or whatever is as good or better but I haven’t been able to try any of that). So for the most part when I see pulled pork on a menu I don’t bother ordering it, unless I’m at Pecos.

Pecos is not a place to go if your not a meat eater, their menu is limited to pork, beef, and beans for the most part(which have meat in them). I’ve never tried the beef, never felt the need. I have heard that sometimes they run out of pork if the days are really busy but I haven’t come across that myself. Lines can be long on good weather days so be prepared to wait.

Well there you have it – there are more places I will miss from up here, but they aren’t unique and I’ll be able to find replacements for them pretty easily down in the Bay Area.

These places will be harder. I know there is a bunch of other bars that are sort of like Cowgirls around the country, I haven’t been to any myself, one of my friends who travels a bunch does, and told me at least of the ones he’s been to, nothing compares to Cowgirls Inc.

July 11, 2011

The Decline of Mozilla

Filed under: General,Random Thought — Tags: — Nate @ 11:45 am

It’s quite possible that Firefox (and Mozilla in general) may of peaked already.

There’s been a lot of discussion and reporting recently on some pretty big changes either being implemented or being pushed by influential members of the Mozilla organization around their flagship product Firefox.

 

Ad for Firefox v4 viewed a short time ago

 

Much of the controversy is around one vocal member of Mozilla saying they should move to a much faster release cycle and not be afraid of breaking things for users in the process because it’s what’s best for the Internet.

It seems that Mozilla’s shift in policy is because of Google’s Chrome browser which already does this and has been gaining market share among those who don’t care about their privacy.

Mozilla gets a very large percentage of their revenue from the little Google search bar on the top right of the browser(and just in case your wondering yes I do block all of Google’s cookies). Apparently this contract deal with Google expires later this year. Who knows what the new deal may look like (I’d say it’s safe to assume there will be a new deal).

Google obviously wasn’t too happy with the lack of progress in the web browser arena which is why they launched Chrome.

Now Firefox feels more threatened by Chrome so appears to be trying to stem the losses by adopting a more Chrome-like approach, which has upset a decent part of their user base, whom, like myself just want a stable browser.

The web standards world has been clearly lagging, being that HTML 4.01 was released in 1999, and we don’t have a ratified HTML 5 yet.

And despite what some folks say, version numbers are important when used properly at least. A major version number for the most part implies a high level of compatibility(hopefully 100% compatibility) for all minor versions residing under the major version.

When used improperly, as with the Firefox 4 to Firefox 5 migration it causes needless confusion (also consider MS Win95 – 98 – XP – Vista – 7). If version numbers really don’t matter then perhaps they should use the release date as the version number so at least people know about how old it is.

Stories like this certainly don’t help either.

It is unfortunate that Mozilla seems to lack the resources of a more traditional model of developing both newer more feature full versions of software while being able to simultaneously being able to provide security and other minor fixes to more established, stable versions of the product.

Combine the factors of what will likely be a less lucrative contract with Google, with the rise in Chrome, and the alienation of (what seems to me at least) a pretty large portion of their potential market out there(whether or not they are current users), it really seems like Firefox, and Mozilla has peaked, and likely will face significant declines in the coming few years.

It is sad for me, as someone who has used Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.3, and have been using Mozilla Seamonkey for a long time as well (usually put “work” things in Seamonkey so if a browser crashes then it only takes a portion of my stuff away).

There are a few plug-ins I use for Firefox (by no means is it a long list!) that for the most part has kept me on Firefox otherwise I probably would of jumped ship to Opera or something (originally stopped using Opera on Linux what seems like almost 10 years ago because of memory leaks with SSL).

I can only hope that the various long term distributions Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu LTS etc can band together to support a stable version of Firefox in the event it’s completely abandoned by Mozilla. Ubuntu has already mentioned they are considering Chrome(?!) for some future release of LTS.

The privacy implications of Chrome are just too much for me to even consider using it as a browser.

While there are some bugs, myself I am quite satisfied with Firefox 3.6 on this Ubuntu 10.04 laptop.

At one point it seemed plausible that the engine that powers Firefox, Gecko was going to take over the world, especially in the mobile/embedded space, but it seems that it never caught on in the mobile space with most everyone going to Webkit instead. In the mobile space, again Opera seems to have poured a lot more work into mobile versions of their browser than Mozilla ever did. I was just looking at my Sharp Zaurus’ a couple of days ago before I give them to a friend before I move, and saw they all had a mobile version of Opera going back to the 2003-2004 time frame.

If Firefox simply wanted a bigger version number, they could’ve just pulled a Slackware, and skip a few major version numbers (Slackware was the first distribution I used until I switched to Debian in 1998).

The big winner in all of this I think is Microsoft, who is already not wasting any time in wooing their corporate customers many of which were already using Firefox to some extent or at least had it on their radar.

I guess this is just another sign I’m getting older. There was a time when, for no real reason I would get excited about compiling the latest version of Xfree86, the latest Linux kernel, and downloading the latest beta of KDE (yes that’s what the screen shot to the left shows! – from 1998)

Now, for the most part, things are good enough, that the only time I seek newer software is if what I have is not yet compatible with some new hardware.

(Seeing that Ad on Yahoo! earlier today is what prompted this post, ironically when I clicked on the Firefox 4 link it took me to a page to download Firefox 5. Apparently Firefox development moves too fast for advertisers.)

July 2, 2011

HP Touchpad – first thoughts and tips

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — Nate @ 12:46 pm

I have been anticipating the release of the HP WebOS-based Touchpad for several months now. I picked one up yesterday at Best Buy shortly after they opened. As I expected there was no line around the block to get them, I got there about 10:45 (they opened at 10) and I believe was the first person to buy one, they hadn’t even unpacked the pallet yet. There was one other person there that was looking really closely at the Touchpad, other than that not many customers in the store.

I have been using it for a few hours and wanted to post a early review of it as well as a tip which seems to work around a bug related to copying files to the device  (at least in Linux).

I’ll preface this by saying – I don’t like Apple, I don’t like Google, and am not that fond of Microsoft either. So that said, WebOS is a natural choice for me, and it was one of the reasons I decided to pick up a Palm Pre a couple of years ago(the other being the ability to run ‘classic’ PalmOS apps in an emulator – this option is no longer available on current models). Turns out the OS was quite a bit better than I was expecting and I came to like the software quite a bit.

 

 

I have spent probably a grand total of 10 minutes of time using the iPhone (from various friends), maybe 5 minutes using Android phones, and probably 3-5 minutes using an iPad 1. So I can’t speak from the angle of other products may be bad because of X, or WebOS is better than Y, because well I haven’t used them, and really have no plans to.

But what I can say is the Touchpad has actually exceeded my general expectations for the device, being a day 1 adopter (I think this is the first time I’ve ever bought something the day of it’s release normally I wait a few months at least). The reviews around the net were by no means very positive, so that kind of got my hopes down in the last couple days leading up to the release.

It’s a pretty snappy tablet, audio works really well, good web browser, has integrated skype (integrated so well I spent about 15 minutes trying to find the ‘skype’ app only to figure out it’s built into the messaging application). It also has the ability to integrate several different sources into your contacts, for me that is LinkedIn and Skype (it supports many others but I don’t use them). It’s really neat to see all of the contacts integrated in one place, if there are duplicates(different names from different sources) it handles them seamlessly.

Since I already had a Palm profile from my Pre, I re-used that and the Touchpad automatically synced all of the compatible applications from my phone (which is now retired because it’s on it’s deathbed) to the tablet. I had heard that some apps would be capable of “scaling up” to the higher resolution and others would run in a sort of emulation mode with a mini phone on the screen. To my surprise the apps that scaled up were the more complex games, rather than the simple applications. I was expecting the other way around.

I bought a bunch of apps and games in the HP app store to screw around with, also synced a bunch of music, photos and video to it to try out.

The media sync is where I ran into my first real issue IMO, but fortunately I believe I have figured a workaround (which is prompting this post in case it helps someone else).

I am using an Ubuntu Laptop as my source computer, so I don’t have a Mac or Windows system to test this with. The behavior that I see though is that there is a built in indexing system on WebOS that gives data to the local Palm-specific apps such as the Photos app and the Music app. I copied all of my MP3s over to the Touchpad, and the Music app saw nothing. I copied several hundred pictures over and the pictures app saw nothing. I rebooted the Touchpad just in case, nothing. I was doing the same process as I did on my Palm Pre which worked every time.

I ended up engaging support (there is a nice live chat on the touchpad itself), and chatted with them for about an hour or so, and didn’t really get anywhere. Then I saw a different behavior (I wasn’t doing anything different) when I unplugged the Touchpad from my laptop. Rather than gracefully going back to the main screen it paused for a while and said “OWW! That hurts! Next time please unmount the drive from the desktop.” or something like that before returning to the main screen. At that point the music and pictures started showing up (took a while to index it all).

That “OWW!” screen repeated several times during testing last night even though every time I sync’d the file system buffers and unmounted the volume before unplugging like I do with any USB device (I know sync’ing is done automatically during umount I do it out of habit).

This morning I copied over a couple thousand more pictures, and when I unplugged, I didn’t get that screen, and I didn’t get any new pictures showing up in the application. So what I ended up doing was plugging it in again, syncing the file system buffers and then unplugging it while it was still mounted, this caused the “OWW!” screen and then triggered the indexer – my pictures showed up.

It’s gotta be a bug of some kind of course, I saw something similar from a reviewer on PreCentral.

One thing I did look into was the VPN connectivity, since VPN support is built into the OS, I was eager to find out what kinds of VPNs were supported, and at this time at least only Cisco VPNs are supported. Though I plan to get something like OpenVPN installed to securely connect to my home network. Hopefully some of those web-based SSL VPNs work too.. I imagine with HP’s enterprise user base targets they will work to get as wide scale VPN support as possible.

Overall I’m quite happy with the device so far, it will be something fun to play around with. The only thing it is really lacking in my opinion (and I knew this going in) was a Mini/Micro SD slot for more storage. I can imagine it must be pretty trivial to have one on something this big. HP did make an agreement with some cloud company named box.net to give every Touchpad owner 50GB of free cloud storage for the duration you have a box.net account. My question is what would cause someone to lose a box.net account, I mean if your not paying for it how could you get to a point where you don’t have one?

Speaking of cloud I will be getting out of the cloud soon, I bought a more up to date server and just got it installed at a new co-location in the Bay Area. I was thinking again about off site backups, and looking at how much it would cost to back up 1.5TB to the “cloud” convinced me to go it alone once again, my new server has more than 3TB usable space with ESXi, and I will migrate everything to it in early August. I need to take it off line for a couple of days to do my initial sync, 1.5TB over a consumer broadband link is just not reasonable. Will write more about that project later.

Like pretty much all WebOS devices in order to get access to the underlying Linux OS there is no jail breaking, no hacking, no exploiting security holes, just type a simple code to enable developer mode, install some software on your computer (compatible with Linux, Mac, Windows) and type a command and you have a root shell.

One thing that I haven’t found yet that would be handy is a terminal application. I had one on my Pre a long time ago, not sure what it was called, didn’t find any on the Preware homebrew site, though I did install bash, and OpenSSH(client and server).

nate@nate-laptop:~$ novaterm
Spaz / # uname -a
Linux Spaz 2.6.35-palm-tenderloin #1 SMP PREEMPT 129.1.17 armv7l GNU/Linux
Spaz / # free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        941916     508700     433216          0      24496     141132
-/+ buffers/cache:     343072     598844
Swap:       524284          0     524284
Spaz / #

Some screen shots

Another tip: to reduce the default logging from debug to normal – use the phone application and call ##LOGS#, from that screen you can individually adjust logging levels for each application, looks very syslog-like.

Looking forward to the over the air updates HP says is coming soon to address some/many of the current software bugs with the device, I can’t help but think the launch Touchpads have probably not had software updates in 2-3 weeks since they started manufacturing them.

Looking forward to the Pre 3 as well, it will integrate with the Touchpad so you can do things like SMS, send/receive calls from the Touchpad through the Pre transparently via Bluetooth. What would be even cooler is if the Pre was able to share it’s GPS information with the Touchpad, since the Wifi-only version lacks a GPS. There is also the touch to share functionality which can transfer web urls between the Pre 3 and the Touchpad by touching them together.

True multitasking is nice as well, which has been native on WebOS since it’s inception. Since I so rarely touch the other platforms out there I keep forgetting that so few of them offer multitasking.

There is also a $50 mail in rebate for previous Palm Pre/Pixi owners, apparently all you need is a serial# from the original device, don’t need a receipt. Offer good until the end of July.

I’ve only been using it for a short time of course, but so far I like what I see, and still believe there are good things coming for WebOS. Especially given the situations that Nokia and RIM (especially RIM) seem to be in, there is a good opportunity for HP to capitalize on RIM’s scrambling to get their QNX stuff out the door, time will tell if they are able to execute or not and the level of commitment they have to the WebOS platform longer term. The smart phone, and tablet markets still have a tiny amount of market penetration, so it’s really a long term strategy.

I give it a thumbs up, though suggest if you are a particularly picky and impatient person and want to try the Touchpad, given what I’ve read on other reviews you may want to wait a month or two for first couple software updates to be released.

If your on the fence, and have the cash, go get it, you can always return it if it doesn’t work out. I bought mine at Best Buy and they seem to have a 14 day no questions asked return policy(not that I expect to return it).

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