CQ2

I finally broke down and decided to get surround sound for our family room television; the speakers that came with our cheapo screen are terrible and with my poor hearing I’m always saying, “eh? Whatdidshesay?”  Which, understandably, drives my wife nuts.  But she doesn’t want eight ugly speakers strewn around the room and neither of us wants to spend too much money on another audio system, so I did some research and bought separate pieces rather than a HTIB (home theater in a box).  I ended up choosing a cheapo Onkyo receiver and three small Boston Acoustics speakers: right/center/left.  I figure I can get the subwoofer later.   Onkyo and Boston Acoustics are both good value brands and this is a decent setup given our constraints.

The receiver came the other day; setting it up was wholly daunting.  The back of the thing looks like engine room of the Millennium Falcon.  But today, the speakers arrived, just in time for track & field at the Olympics this weekend.  And beer!  Woohoo!

I was a bit surprised when the UPS driver told me there were two 70 lbs boxes plus a small box for the center speaker; I was going to try to hang the right and left speakers on the wall and they were advertised as bookshelf size.  But it turns out that Boston Acoustics shipped me two surround sound systems (each with five speakers plus a subwoofer) instead of two speakers. I checked my credit card and they had billed me correctly, but they had shipped the wrong items, a $1,500 mistake.

So, being the nice Catholic boy that I am, I dutifully called up Boston Acoustics and said that they’d made a mistake and that they should come and get their equipment.  I told them, though, that I wanted to open up one of the big surround sound system boxes and pull out the L/R speakers that I had, actually, ordered. And the very nice CSR, who I think understood the situation, said that I couldn’t do that because it would reverse the polarity of the dilithium crystals or something.  Sigh.  She wanted my username and password to login to my account and re-order the speakers because the return would have to be handled as a refund and on and on.  You know how it goes.  I got stuck in a script.

So instead of being evil and making money on this deal — keeping a whole surround sound system for myself and selling the extra one on eBay — I get a hassle.  I’ve got the damn boxes sitting unopened in my entryway, taunting me.  And, worst of all, I’m going to say, “eh? whatdidhesay?” through another round of Olympics swimming.

The box arrived this weekend. Setup was trivially easy; it found our wireless network and we were watching movies within ten minutes. Quality is fine, as far as I can tell, with the included RCA cables. I have an HDMI cable on order from Monoprice which I guess will make it better. No skipping or delays in playback. The fast-forward and reverse is a little funky but usable. The value is outstanding, I think; really outsized value. I watched Blade Runner and Herzog’s My Best Fiend on Saturday night, movies I wouldn’t have watched (again) if not for the little box.

I wasn’t expecting to have to manage my queue from my computer; I can’t add movies from my couch. But it’s an acceptable design tradeoff to me. At the moment there are ‘only’ 10,000 movies available and nothing recent. But the catalog is only going to improve; after all, they didn’t name it “DVD-flix,” right?

On an impulse, and very uncharacteristically, I bought a Roku Netflix box, which should arrive next week, although they are experiencing shipping delays because of the volume of initial orders.  The little $100 set-top box connects to your television and out to Netflix via an Internet connection, either wired or wireless.  It uses the Netflix website as its interface (smart!) and lets you watch their back-catalog of, currently, 10,000 movies and TV shows.  It’s not HD but will be Real Soon Now via software upgrade.  For me, the combination of low price (no subscription fees beyond what I already pay in a Netflix subscription), no limits on the number of movies we can watch, and the idea of a small single purpose box was enough for me to want to try it out.  We currently have no cable or satellite TV; only broadcast HD, which I’ve found to be adequate, and of amazingly high quality.  I mean, TV basically sucks anyway.  This box might justify my Neflix subscription.

So there’s a nice new IBM P-series midrange available, the p570 with the new POWER6 processor. Over at spec.org they have the lowdown; running the same operating system (SLES 10 SP1), the p570 blows away the fasted x86 machine available, a Dell R900 with a Xeon E7720 processor. Here are the specs:

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But, the P-series lists for $466,000 (that gets you 8 cores at 4.7GHz and 64GB of memory) and the Dell is only $8,400 (8 cores at 2.93GHz with 16GB memory). So you could buy 55 Dells for the price of one of those P-series boxes. Fifty five!

[updated w/table]

Michael Nygard has his head in the computing clouds, suggesting that not only is cloud computing in our future, but that there’ll be many of them. He’s right.

Everyone who runs a large data center is today faced with the same set of interconnected environmental problems; space, power, and heating/cooling. And these are environmental not just in the sense of tree-hugging but also in a straightforward practical sense: there is no more space, there is no more power, there is too much heat and not enough cooling. These problems were the domain of junior people a few years ago, worrying about where, physically, to locate all the new Windows boxes. Then it was middle managers trying to sort out power and HVAC issues: “If we deploy a new phone system in our building we won’t have enough power to do any upgrades in the data center,” that sort of thing. Now environmental issues are front-and-center for senior IT management and if you’re a “red-shift” kind of company, for senior corporate leadership too.

You can cloak it if you want to in green terms but businesses are faced with real operational issues that they need to address regardless of their perspective on global warming or riverine dolphins.

Alongside these environmental issues, data centers are also facing a crisis of manageability. A large enterprise data center is a staggeringly complex thing, too complicated. Also, if the truth be told, most of them are not that well run; would you expect, for example, that an auto parts distributor would have great technology management skills? No, of course not, and the fact is that they probably wouldn’t want to spend the money to acquire that talent and technology even in they could; their differentiation, the competitive advantage of their business, lies elsewhere. So they have a complicated, and sub-optimized, technology infrastructure.

The answer to all of these problems — Monday edition — supposedly lies in virtualization. Novell gets brought into these conversations because inevitably data center managers have a roadmap that looks something like this:

(more…)

I just got back from two weeks of vacation, which was nice. The header on this blog is a panorama of a cove in the Ahihi Kinau Natural Area Reserve on Maui, taken last year. This year, we went back again (my wife’s from Maui) for more, including more snorkelling with our five year old. One of the best parts of the trip was that my laptop broke on the second day, and despite my best efforts — and the Novell help desk — I didn’t get it repaired until I got to an office yesterday.

Fortunately, my dear wife had just bought me an iPhone.

The bads

The iPhone really is not suited for a corporate environment. It wasn’t designed for it and it shows. Calendering is broken. Contacts don’t work very well. The pull email isn’t as good as RIM’s push. Typing on the screen is terrible; I haven’t gotten past the index finger method, while I’m a thumb demon on my old Blackberry.

The calendar is a particular problem; for those of you not in a big company, you don’t realize how important that is. Novell, of course, uses our GroupWise product, which has a good calendaring function, but the situation is the same for Outlook/Exchange. So, for example, I missed a couple of important meetings that I had planned to attend during my vacation.

AT&T is really trying, but they still suck; my activation was moderately complicated but required what felt like dozens of phone calls. Each time I had to give the friendly rep my phone number and explain the situation again. And then when I wanted to call my mom in Spain for her birthday it turns out that international dialing wasn’t enabled and the office I needed was closed, etc. etc.

The battery’s not that great, especially if you make a lot of phone calls. I don’t like the non-standard audio jack, which requires a stupid adapter. The EDGE network is dial-up slow.

The goods

The iPhone is absolutely gorgeous. It’s the first innovation in mobile telephony since, I don’t know, ever? It’s the first phone I’ve given a crap about in forever. I don’t even really think of it primarily as ‘my phone’ — it’s more like my likkle computer that does WiFi and maps and the rest, plus make calls.

The gesture controls are very cool; flicking through photos or album art is elegant and intuitive. Having a usable internet browser at all times is pretty amazing. The screen is as bright as I’ve ever seen. The integration between different components could be better but as it is it’s already great. Regular email works perfectly. Gmail integration is great — in fact, Google in general is very well done on the iPhone. I don’t normally use Google Reader, for example, but it’s my default on the iPhone.

I don’t think that I would give up my laptop just yet, but the iPhone, for all of its shortcomings, really saved me on my vacation from completely stressing out about not being connected

Introduction

Lazyweb, we need your help!

Niel Bornstein and I came up with this idea on the proverbial napkin in a bar. The problem that we wanted to solve is common in our line of work: we were working on a project (a data center Linux strategy and architecture) with a team of a half-dozen people at a client site without Internet access. The client was (overly?) concerned about data security and wouldn’t let us onto their corporate network and we didn’t have any other mechanism for getting out to the public Internet. Yes, there are places in the world without broadband wireless. Yes, we did find a coffee shop with wireless.

Niel and I thought that a good solution to this problem would be to have a small physical box that we could all connect to and use for collaboration. It would need to have some kind of storage and either wired or wireless connectivity. We thought that we could load it up with useful information ahead of time (templates, previous projects, code snippets, interview guides, and so forth) in addition to a standard set of collaboration tools (messaging, calendar, wiki, etc.) Niel, I think, jury-rigged a prototype together out of a spare HD and WRT54G router, but the idea never went anywhere.

Description

The ProjectBox is a small portable computer and (optional) wireless router which provides several services for short-term consulting teams. The requirements are:

• Network segment infrastructure
• DHCP
• DNS
• Print spooler
• NAT (for when the client network allows connection)
• Central file storage with revision control in a standard directory structure
• Collaborative document creation
• Presentation rendering
• Shared calendar for project tasks and meetings
• Directory infrastructure for Novell and client team information
• Web-based access and administration
• Offline synchronization

Accordingly, the ProjectBox will have the following services enabled:

• DHCP/DNS
• Apache
• FTP server
• Subversion (too heavyweight? alternatives?)
• Shared calendar (caldav?)
• OpenLDAP? for contacts, or maybe just flat files
• Twiki
• s5
• CUPS
• Storage with standard directory structure and templates

A key requirement is the price point: less than $200

As much of the functionality as possible must be available as open source software.

The Project Box hardware could be a small laptop with a decent-sized hard drive, or it could be a small PC. (Could we use something even smaller/lighter?) A small ethernet hub or wireless router is also required.

Web-based interface requirements

• Configure networking; set offline/passthru mode
• File management
• Create project structure
• Upload file (with revision control)
• Download file
• Synchronize files
• Contact Management
• Add contact
• View/Edit contact
• Delete contact
• Calendar Management
• Add appointment
• View/Edit appointment
• Delete appointment

Hardware options

1. Linksys WRT54G (or comparable) wireless router running Open WRT (or Tomato, my new favorite)
Pros:

* Pretty cheap
* Known to run Linux

Cons:

* No USB ports for attached storage

2. Mini-ITX
A very small, quiet PC that could run SLES10

Pros:

* Fanless, so it’s quiet

Cons:

* They don’t tend to be very durable
* Not cheap

3. Linksys NSLU2
A cheap NAS appliance that can run Linux

Pros:

* Cheap cheap cheap

Cons:

* Storage not included
* Storage enclosure not included
* Wireless not included

Proposed Architecture

So, given all that, here’s what the proposed box might look like.

Hardware

• CPU + Router: Linksys WRT54G
• Storage appliance: Linksys NSLU2
• Storage device: any USB drive

Software

• Operating System: OpenWRT/Tomato
• Additional packages: * *

References

* http://xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-M…

The wireless part is optional, but the router part is required, I think.

The only custom developed part would be the web front end, correct?

I would prefer to use, instead of a full-on PC, a modified wireless router running Open WRT or something similar, with a hard drive in an external exclosure. Is that possible?

The wireless router as CPU is a nice idea, but it seems like attaching storage will be difficult at our price point — most of them do not include USB ports. Maybe a better way to go would be a gumstix, Mini-ITX, or similar very small box for the processor, with external storage and external wireless router.

Interesting new ‘community’ site from Dell, “Ideastorm.”

[Later: Jon Bultmeyer points to a similar site at Salesforce.com.]

Kevin Rollins was famously ambivalent about the consumer market. His ouster, Michael Dell’s return, and other recent changes, including Ideastorm, seem to suggest that they’re looking again at the consumer business. Ideastorm has a very Web 2.0 look and the early discussions are what you would expect from the same group of 25,000 people who try everything first: pre-load Linux(es), Open Office, get rid of the pestware that comes with new Dell PCs, etc.

I’ve written before that a bad support call made me swear off of Dell consumer products. I still like and recommend their enterpise-grade stuff, but when I needed to get a new desktop machine for myself, I ended up getting a sweet deal from EndPCNoise and never thought of going to Dell.

Interesting comparison of hardware vendors from a photo-sharing site, SmugMug:

Sun ended up winning their business, largely on the basis of the X2200 M2, which is interesting in of itself.  The list of pros and cons is worth reading.  Sun continues to be a fascinating company to watch, with great technology, but backed into a strategic corner with a questionable business model.

Separately, but also from Don McAskill’s blog, an interesting post on Amazon’s S3 service.  I’ve been looking around for a good S3-based backup offering but haven’t found one yet.  Jungledisk seems like it’s the closest, but I’d prefer something a bit more mature.

My father-in-law, a retired orthodontist, needed a new computer to replace his old Dell laptop. He’d been very happy with his old machine, which last seven years with nothing more than an occasional hard drive upgrade, so we spec’d out a new Dell laptop at the website. We looked at a couple of alternatives both on-line and at stores, but the Dell prices were ‘good enough,’ so we went with them. He wasn’t especially price sensitive, but didn’t want to get ripped off and Dell did not seem like a rip-off, which was good.

He’s no computer expert, but he has a few things that he’s accustomed to doing and he is an expert at those, so he wanted his new machine to look like his old one. I spent some time, the dutiful son-in-law, downloading Firefox instead of Explorer and configuring it so that he couldn’t tell the difference. Likewise with Open Office. We cancelled his AOL account but — very nice customer service, by the way, astonishingly — they let us keep his username and mail account, accessed via their website instead of through their client software. My father-in-law was happy that he was saving the $25/month but I found the whole thing completely confusing; I don’t understand AOL at all. Switching him over to the cable company’s Internet service instead of AOL-over-cable was equally easy. Getting his new wireless router to work was more of a hassle and required a few calls to the Phillipines for customer service; eventually, I gave up and swapped out his router for one I’m familiar with, the Linksys WRT-54 and that did the trick.

We did this all while on vacation, but I was fairly pleased that a day’s work had set him up for the next seven years, with better hardware and software. (I was afraid to go near his old machine, it was so infested with rootkits and viruses.)

So we leave his place and drive back to where we’re staying, 45 minutes away. We walk in the door and the phone rings. It’s David. “Ed, I’ve got a problem with the computer.” I think, ah, no problem; this is why, smart guy that I am, I told him to buy ‘configuration support’ from Dell, a week or two of unlimited phone help. Not so smart as it turns out. I suggest he call Dell. But he had already, because apparently minutes after we left his house he couldn’t find something — the tabbed browsing in Firefox? the new Gmail account worked differently than AOL?, I’m still not sure — so he faithfully called Dell. Their customer service helpfully walked him through some diagnostics and then decided that what he really needed to do was to re-install his entire system, a clean install.

Which he did.

That got rid of the problem, but he was having trouble finding the web browser and called me to ask for help. Of course, the reason that he couldn’t find it was because Dell had told him to wipe away my day’s work, all the carefully configured Explorer-like tweaks I’d done to Firefox, the copied bookmarks in the same place as he knew from his old computer, the wireless setup, the whole thing. I was so mad that I wanted to break things; I think that I threw my phone at one point.

I went back the next day and, more quickly this time, re-did his setup and added backup software to we could go back to good known images if necessary. But that one call to customer service made me swear off (and swear at) Dell for consumer-grade products forever. I still like them for servers and enterprise stuff, but no more Dells for my family.