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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 8, 2011

Wired or Wireless?

Filed under: Networking,Random Thought,Uncategorized — Tags: — Nate @ 9:58 am

I’ll start out by saying I’ve never been a fan of Wifi, it’s always felt like a nice gimmick-like feature to have but other than that I usually steered clear. Wifi has been deployed at all companies I have worked at in the past 7-8 years though in all cases I was never responsible for that (I haven’t done internal IT since 2002, at which time wifi was still in it’s early stages(assuming it was out at all yet? I don’t remember) and was not deployed widely at all – including at my company). I could probably count on one hand the number of public wifi networks I have used over the years, excluding hotels (of which there was probably ten).

In the early days it was mostly because of paranoia around security/encryption though over the past several years encryption has really picked up and helped that area a lot. There is still a little bit of fear in me that the encryption is not up to snuff, and I would prefer using a VPN on top of wifi to make it even more secure, only really then would I feel comfortable from a security standpoint of using wifi.

From a security standpoint I am less concerned about people intercepting my transmissions over wifi than I am about people breaking into my home network over wifi (which usually happens by intercepting transmissions – my point is more of the content of what I’m transferring, if it is important is always protected by SSL or SSH or in the case of communicating with my colo or cloud hosted server there is a OpenVPN SSL layer under that as well).

Many years ago, I want to say 2005-2006 time frame, there was quite a bit of hype around the Linksys WRT-54G wifi router, for being easy to replace the firmware with custom stuff and get more functionality out of it. So I ordered one at the time, put dd-wrt on it, which is a custom firmware that was talked a lot about back then (is there something better out there? I haven’t looked). I never ended up hooking it to my home network, just a crossover cable to my laptop to look at the features.

Then I put it back in it’s box and put it in storage.

Until earlier this week, when I decided to break it out again to play with in combination with my new HP Touchpad, which can only talk over Wifi.

My first few days with the Touchpad involved having it use my Sprint 3G/4G Mifi access point. As I mentioned earlier I don’t care about people seeing my wifi transmissions I care about protecting my home network. Since the Mifi is not even remotely related to my home network I had no problem using it for extended periods.

The problem with the Mifi, from my apartment is the performance. At best I can get 20% signal strength for 4G, and I can get maybe 80% signal strength for 3G, latency is quite bad in both cases, and throughput isn’t the best either, a lot of times it felt like I was on a 56k modem. Other times it was faster. For the most part I used 3G because it was more reliable for my location, however I do have a 5 gig data cap/month for 3G so considering I started using the Touchpad on the 1st of the month I got kind of concerned I may run into that playing with the new toy during the first month. I just checked Sprint’s site and I don’t see a way to see intra month data usage, only data usage for the month once it’s completed. The mifi tracks data usage while it is running but this data is not persisted across reboots, and I think it’s also reset if the mifi changes between 3G and 4G services. I have unlimited 4G data, but the signal strength where I’m at just isn’t strong enough.

I looked into the possibility of replacing my Mifi with newer technology, but after reading some customer reviews of the newer stuff it seemed unlikely I would get a significant improvement in performance at my location, enough to justify the cost of the upgrade at least so I decided against that for now.

So I broke out the WRT-54G access point and hooked it up. Installed the latest recommended version of firmware, configured the thing and hooked up the touchpad.

I knew there was a pretty high number of personal access points deployed near me, it was not uncommon to see more than 20 SSIDs being broadcast at any given time. So interference was going to be an issue. At one point my laptop showed me that 42 access points were broadcasting SSIDs. And that of course does not even count the ones that are not broadcasting, who knows how many there are there, I haven’t tried to get that number.

With my laptop and touchpad being located no more than 5 feet away from the AP, I had signal strengths of roughly 65-75%. To me that seemed really low given the proximity. I suspected significant interference was causing signal loss. Only when I put the touchpad within say 10 inches of the antenna from the AP did the signal strength go above 90%.

 

Looking into the large number of receive errors told me that those errors are caused almost entirely by interference.

So then I wanted to see what channels were most being used and try to use a channel that has less congestion, the AP defaulted to channel 6.

The last time I mucked with wifi on linux there seemed to be an endless stream of wireless scanning, cracking, hacking tools. Much to my shock and surprise these days most of those tools haven’t been maintained in 5-6-7-8+ years. There aren’t many left. Sadly enough the default Ubuntu wifi apps do not report channels they just report SSIDs. So I went on a quest to find a tool I could use. I finally came across something called wifi radar, which did the job more or less.

I counted about 25 broadcasting SSIDs using wifi radar, nearly half of them if I recall right were on channel 6. A bunch more on 11 and 1, the other two major channels. My WRT54G had channels going all the way up to 14. I recall reading several years ago about frequency restrictions in different places, but in any case I tried channel 14 (which is banned in the US). Wifi router said it was channel 14, but neither my laptop nor Touchpad would connect. I suspect since they flat out don’t support it. No big deal.

Then I went to channel 13. Laptop immediately connected, Touchpad did not. Channel 13 is banned in many areas, but is allowed in the U.S. if the power level is low.

Next I went to channel 12. Laptop immediately connected again, Touchpad did not. This time I got suspicious of the Touchpad. So I fired up my Palm Pre, which uses an older version of the same operating system. It saw my wifi router on channel 12 no problem. But the Touchpad remained unable to connect even if I manually input the SSID. Channel 12 is also allowed in the U.S. if the power level is low enough.

So I ended up on channel 11. Everything could see everything at that point. I enabled WPA2 encryption, enabled MAC address filtering (yes I know you can spoof MACs pretty easily on wifi, but at the same time I have only 2 devices I’ll ever connect so blah). I don’t have a functional VPN yet mainly because I don’t have a way (yet) to access VPN on the Touchpad, it has built in support for two types of Cisco VPNs but that’s it. I installed OpenVPN on it but I have no way to launch it on demand without being connected to the USB terminal.  I suppose I could just leave it running and in theory it should automatically connect when it finds a network but I haven’t tried that.

So on to my last point on wifi – interference. As I mentioned earlier signal quality was not good even being a few feet away from the access point. I decided to try out speedtest.net to run a basic throughput test on both the Touchpad and the Laptop. All tests were using the same Comcast consumer broadband connection

DeviceConnectivity TypeLatencyDownload PerformanceUpload Performance
HP Touchpad802.11g Wireless18 milliseconds5.32 Megabits4.78 Megabits
Toshiba dual core Laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 and Firefox 3.6802.11g Wireless13 milliseconds9.46 Megabits4.89 Megabits
Toshiba dual core Laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 and Firefox 3.61 Gigabit ethernet9 milliseconds27.48 Megabits5.09 Megabits

The test runs in flash, and as you can see of course the Touchpad’s browser (or flash) is not nearly as fast as the laptop, not too unexpected.

Comparing LAN transfer speeds was even more of a joke of course, I didn’t bother involving the Touchpad in this test just the laptop. I used iperf to test throughput(no special options just default settings).

  • Wireless – 7.02 Megabits/second (3.189 milliseconds latency)
  • Wired – 930 Megabits/second (0.3 milliseconds latency)

What honestly surprised me though was over the WAN, how much slower wifi was on the laptop vs wired connection, it’s almost 1/3rd the performance on the same laptop/browser. I justed measured to be sure – my laptop’s screen (where I believe the antenna is at) is 52 inches from the WRT54G router.

It’s “fast enough” for the Touchpad’s casual browsing, but certainly wouldn’t want to run my home network on it, defeats the purpose of paying for the faster connectivity.

I don’t know how typical these results out there. One place I recently worked at was plagued with wireless problems, performance was soo terrible and unreliable. They upgraded the network and I wasn’t able to maintain a connection for more than two minutes which sucks for SSH. To make matters worse the vast majority of their LAN was in fact wireless, there was very little cable infrastructure in the office. Smart people hooked up switches and stuff for their own tables which made things more usable, though still a far cry from optimal.

In a world where we are getting even more dense populations and technology continues to penetrate driving more deployments of wifi, I suspect interference problems will only get worse.

I’m sure it’s great if the only APs within range are your own, if you live or work at a place that is big enough. But small/medium businesses frequently won’t be so lucky, and if you live in a condo or apartment like me, ouch…

My AP is not capable of operating in the 5Ghz range 802.11a/n, that very well could be significantly less congested. I don’t know if it is accurate or not but wifi radar claims every AP within range of my laptop(47 at the moment) is 802.11g (same as me). My laptop’s specs say it supports 802.11b/g/n, so I’d expect if anyone around me was using N then wifi radar would pick it up, assuming the data being reported by wifi radar is accurate.

Since I am moving in about two weeks I’ll wait till I’m at my new apartment before I think more about the possibility of going to a 802.11n capable device for reduced interference. On that note does any of my 3-4 readers have AP suggestions?

Hopefully my new place will get better 4G wireless coverage as well, I already checked the coverage maps and there are two towers within one mile of me, so it all depends on the apartment itself, how much interference is caused by the building and stuff around it.

I’m happy I have stuck with ethernet for as long as I have at my home, and will continue to use ethernet at home and at work wherever possible.

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).

June 29, 2011

Adjust CPU power in 1 watt increments

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 2:09 pm

Saw this over at the AMD blog recently, certainly sounds pretty neat, the ability to control the power usage of your CPU on a per-watt basis, which is significantly more effective than current power limiting strategies available today.

Well, let’s say that you have a maximum power draw on your fully configured server of 300W, and you have 42 slots in your server.  The simple math says that you have 12.6Kw of power load that you need to be able to support.  Now, if your power budget only allows you to bring 12Kw to the rack, you essentially have 2 slots that need to be left open in the rack because you can only support 40 and not 42 servers. But, by utilizing a custom TDP, you could drop the max power that some servers could draw, bringing you in under the limit of 12Kw and still getting 42 servers in the rack.

No mention on whether or not the processor will turn off cores once you hit certain thresholds (say you reduce a 80W 12-core cpu to 60W of power, it may be better to run fewer cores with higher clock speeds than more cores on lower clock speeds depending on the workload).

Oracle picks up Pillar

Filed under: Storage — Tags: , — Nate @ 1:56 pm

Most people have been expecting this for a long time, and have wondered why it didn’t happen sooner, with Oracle ditching HDS as an OEM partner almost immediately after acquiring Sun.

I have read, and heard over the past year that Oracle has been for the most part destroyed in the storage market (servers doing badly as well) as a result since their Sun storage products just are not competitive. Many larger customers have been leaving to the likes of HP and IBM who could offer the “one stop shop” for servers and storage (even before HP bought 3PAR, HP had and still has their OEM’d HDS equipment).

In some informal talks with some HDS folks last year they seemed quite happy that Oracle was no longer an OEM, saying that the people over at Sun/Oracle weren’t competent enough to handle the HDS stuff (*cough* too complicated *cough*), and so HDS just went in direct with most of those customers that Oracle walked away from.

Finally someone at Oracle woke up and realized there still is, and will continue to be for some time a big market for traditional SAN systems, far bigger than the market of customers willing to risk putting their data on cheap SATA controllers on servers running ZFS with high failure rates and poor performance.

So it finally happened, Oracle is buying Pillar. At first look however it really does seem like an odd scenario, from their SEC filing –

The Earn-Out therefore will only be paid to Mr. Ellison, his affiliates and, if applicable, to the other Pillar Data stockholders and option holders if the Net Revenues during Year 3 of the Earn-Out Period exceed the Net Losses, if any, during the entire Earn-Out Period.

There’s no specific mention whether or not Larry is going to pay himself back for the $500M+ in loans he has given to Pillar over the years, so I suppose not. In any case it won’t be until the end of 2014 when we might discover what value Oracle has placed on Pillar. One commenter on The Register mentions Pillar’s revenue as $29M per year, don’t know where that came from though, doing some searching myself I found references to roughly $70M in revenue, to $3B in revenue (if that was the case they would of IPO’d)

I think it’s a good deal for Pillar to, they get much better validation on their products in front of customers.

I’ve gone through quite a bit of the information on the Pillar web site and to-date I have not seen anything that would make me want to buy their product, and have yet to hear any positive words coming from the people I know in the street/industry (granted my community is limited).

But it sure as hell beats anything that Oracle has been offering their customers recently, that alone may be enough to drive a decent amount of sales.

Pillar posted some updated SPC-1 numbers recently, a significant improvement over their original numbers, though nothing ground breaking from a competitive standpoint.

In other news, two early social media giants have fallen – MySpace being acquired for $35M, and Friendster re-inventing itself as a gaming site with Facebook authentication. I’d bet the infrastructure behind Myspace is worth about $35M by itself – Newscorp really wanted out!

June 23, 2011

Microsoft Sync not so hot?

Filed under: General — Tags: — Nate @ 10:20 am

Ford has been plastering the nation (and probably world) with advertising recently which included giving lots of props around Microsoft’s Sync technology. I’ve never used it, and haven’t talked to anyone who has mentioned using it so I don’t know a whole lot about the product.

But a short time ago survey results from JD Power were released on initial car quality. A big source of complaints was the technology features in the cars. But what I thought was interesting and how it may tie into Microsoft’s Sync technology is the fact that Ford practically fell off a cliff on this survey dropping a full 18 positions to #23 on the list.  If you asked me to name 23 auto brands I couldn’t do it. Maybe I could come up with a dozen or fifteen.

Here is a couple articles on the list.

The problems with MyFord Touch — the latest generation of its heavily promoted and popular SYNC system of voice commands — are especially disappointing for Ford. Consumer Reports has criticized the new system repeatedly for being too complicated.

The technology in my new Juke has me somewhat concerned as well, it works fine, but I’m sure when it breaks, it won’t be cheap or easy to fix, so I got the extended warranty on it, and may very well not want to own the car beyond the warranty(I didn’t buy this car with the thought of driving it into the ground). I haven’t had any issues with the technology in my new car, aside from one time my GPS crashed, but that seems to have been a freak event.

The one thing I would like on my GPS though is some of those custom voices that are available for TomTom, I have disabled the voice output of the GPS because it was disruptive to my nightclub on wheels stereo, but it would really be fun I think(at least for a short time) to be able to have random famous actors or characters talking to me through the GPS.

Collecting taxes an Administrative nightmare?

Filed under: General — Nate @ 1:13 am

[sorry for the rash of non technical posts recently there just hasn’t been much going on in the tech world that has been interesting to me recently]

This has been pissing me off for a long time. Amazon trying to evade collecting taxes on behalf of states. I tried finding a report of this in text form but could only find one that had these words in video form from CNBC (yeah I’m watching CNBC shows my Tivo recorded at noon today at 1AM)

Amazon says the real issue is the administrative nightmare of collecting different rates for different states

That has got to be the most stupid excuse I have ever heard in my life. There is no administrative nightmare. There are several companies out there that specialize in exactly that sort of information so you don’t have to worry about keeping track of it yourself. I was using one such system going back as far as 2003.

It was called Taxware, and it handled everything for us (the link points to ADP, whom I assume acquired the company at some point, I don’t recall ADP being associated with Taxware at the time, assuming I have the right Taxware, it was a long time ago). Taxes can get pretty complicated, but complication is not an excuse when you have something like Taxware doing the hard work for you.

While my memory is foggy on the details back in the day I do recall coming across some very interesting tax things that went on at the time, and that Taxware handled just fine. I’m talking about tax breaks for certain kinds of products that only lasted a certain amount of time for example, and these could vary on a city by city or county by county basis it was that detailed! Because of those things you really had to stay on your toes with the data file updates which came regularly.

I have no doubt there are other platforms and services like Taxware.

If the small startup I was at at the time could calculate and collect taxes, there’s no excuse for the bigger companies to not be able to do that other than they want the competitive edge against local businesses in the state that are forced to collect taxes.

I can understand a small mom & pop operation  (maybe sub $300k in revenue a year) not having the resources to collect taxes, but even for them it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a SaaS offering out there that did it. Maybe they’d call it SpeedTax or something so it sounds fast and easy.

Most people don’t realize that we also have use taxes as well, in the event you buy something from out of state (assuming your state has sales taxes), and they ship the product to you without collecting taxes, or if you go out of state, buy it, and bring it back (e.g. those living on the border between WA and OR that exploit the tax conditions between the two states (WA having no income tax and OR having no sales tax)), you’re technically not off the hook for taxes on those products. Though enforcement has been an issue and your only likely to get caught if you are doing large scale evasion.

One thing I do agree with Amazon with though is we should have a national system, some law that removes all remaining avenues of escape or excuses for Amazon (and others) for collecting the taxes that they’re supposed to collect.

June 22, 2011

Buy your HP Touchpad at…a Furniture store?

Filed under: Random Thought — Tags: , , — Nate @ 10:53 am

I’ve been a fan of WebOS since I got my Pre. Contrary to what some may believe I had never owned a Palm product prior to that. Although I do have a pair of Handspring Visors which was pretty much a better palm than palm back in the day, eventually they got bought out by Palm.

I’ve been awaiting the release of both the HP TouchPad and the Pre 3 for some time now. I almost pre ordered the Touchpad then figured I will just go buy it when it comes out in a local store, like most, I am not expecting a line around the block of people waiting to buy it on the first day like your typical Apple product.

For no particular reason I was browsing the Palm site (aka hpwebos.com) and saw a list of the official places you can pre order the Touchpad.

Much to my surprise, was what seems to be a big furniture store out in Nebraska. Nebraska Furniture Mart – America’s Largest Home Furnishings Store.

I’ve never been to that part of the country so maybe it’s not uncommon, maybe it’s the only place people have in Nebraska to buy electronics from?

I mean of all the places to sell some new piece of technology. I realize now after looking at their site they have an electronics section(which I can’t view because I declined their cookie requests), but still of all the places to launch a product…….

I look at the TouchPad myself is mainly a toy, something to play with, maybe I’ll find some good uses for it with work I’m not sure. Would be nice to see support for wide ranging VPN options as well as perhaps native versions of various HP management tools (looking at you 3PAR).  To those out there that say your better off with a notebook or netbook, I agree. I already have a netbook and a notebook.

June 15, 2011

Farewell Seattle!

Filed under: Random Thought — Nate @ 4:33 pm

Long story short: I’m moving back to California (this time the Bay Area) on or about July 23rd.

I moved to the Seattle area a bit over twelve years ago from Orange County, CA on a leap of faith for a potential job opportunity. That opportunity fell through but that leap of faith turned out to be the best life choice I have ever made. It was a big risk moving so far away from family and stuff at that age and my lacking job experience or higher education. I had some local friends who helped me get started and the rest is history. I can only hope my move to the Bay Area will bring me an equal number of opportunities (already have a great start and I’m not even there yet).

Being here has been a fun ride, learned such a massive amount I’m still trying to absorb it all, met a lot of awesome people, kept as many as I could as friends (am terrible at keeping in touch thankfully I have LinkedIn to keep that aspect handled).

Now it’s time for another change in my life, this time returning to near where I grew up (which was in Santa Cruz county in California), which I left in 1989 when I moved to live in China then Hawaii, then Thailand.

This time I’ll be in the north part of the bay, just south of San Fransisco, about 1.5 hour drive from where I spent most of my childhood.

I will miss Washington, but at the same time am pretty excited for something new. I don’t doubt I’ll be back at some point in the future.

(ok to be honest I hate Seattle, but I do like the east side, having lived in Bellevue for almost all of my 12 years here).

The company I am working for down there generated more revenue in 2010 than all of my previous companies combined (7 companies over the past 12 years) for any given year, and may very well be the first profitable company I’ve ever worked for, so I’m pretty excited for that aspect as well as the team I’ll be working with.

Could not stream Netflix HD for months – solved

Filed under: Random Thought — Tags: , — Nate @ 10:58 am

I have been a Netflix subscriber for a couple years now but really haven’t been using it much I can’t find much on it that I’m interested in watching.

One issue that cropped up several months ago for me was I was no longer able to stream in HD. No matter what various “internet speed tests” reported Netflix always resorted to SD streams. Most recently speedtest.net reported my pipe as having 27Mbps of throughput.

Since I don’t use it that much I didn’t care too much, and just stopped streaming stuff for a while (I stream to my Tivo Series 3). Today I decided to try to dig a little deeper, there wasn’t much help on the Netflix site, and calling them was not too helpful they just suggested I ask my ISP to perform a longer running test to see if the connection was stable and reboot the modem.

Before trying that though (well I did reboot the modem to no avail), I decided to run tcpdump on my firewall and see where Tivo was sending it’s packets, and then use something like mtr to measure latency to that destination.

I noticed within seconds my Tivo was sending packets to a Lime Light node in Miami, not exactly next door to the Seattle area where I am at. Sure enough the Miami node is 16 hops away and right at around 100 milliseconds of latency.

Why was this going there?! Well it has to be related to DNS, as I’m sure at some point I started forwarding all of my DNS packets to my personal virtual server(same one that runs this site) which is run out of Miami. So Limelight must be using BGP Anycast for their DNS which is common among other global DNS providers, but it ended up biting me in the ass.

I originally was routing all of my DNS traffic over to my personal system (across a VPN no less) because I don’t know what kind of crap might go on on my consumer broadband connection with Comcast (at one point I remember some ISPs doing funky things with negative DNS responses for example). Probably nothing but I thought what the hell, why not (the VPN is already in place, and I’m already running local caching name servers as well as a remote caching name server (not the same name server that hosts my domains externally those are different), it’s 1 line in a config file to forward the traffic).

Well now I know why not.. at some point I may invest the time to try to figure out how to send Netfix DNS traffic to a local site and the rest go to my server, but for now I’m not going to spend the time.

Once I disabled forwarding of DNS packets to my remote system, and restarted my name server to flush the cache, Tivo started using a Seattle Limelight node, and the hops dropped to 10, and latency dropped to around 15 milliseconds, HD streaming was now possible once again.

It’s also gotten me wondering how many other services that I use that may of been impacted by routing my DNS traffic 3,000 miles away. Though other than Netflix I have not noticed any ill effects, though the amount of data that traverses my connection is pretty minimal (62GB of data since the beginning of March until June 15th according to Comcast, that includes a pretty big backup I did of my personal server to my local network a few weeks ago).

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