*scottstuff*

Back in 2004 or so, I desperately wanted a 8-10” tablet from Apple. Something that would let me browse the web and check my mail while I was away from my desk, without forcing me to lug my laptop around. Something that would let me play with new ideas over lunch. Something that could use to build cool stuff.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that it was never going to happen. There just wasn’t enough of a market for it, and the form-factor requires UI that is drastically different from desktop OS X. They’d have to start from the ground up to build it. It wasn’t going to happen.

So, every 6 months or so, when the Apple Tablet rumor popped back up, I just ignored them–they were obviously bunk–and they went away on their own.

That is, until a few months ago, when the rumors shifted dramatically, and it became clear that Apple really was building a tablet. So yesterday morning, I was watching 3 live streams of the launch to see what magical thing Steve and company were working on. And now the rumors and the hype have cleared, and we’re left holding the iPad. Which is more or less exactly what I was looking for in 2004.

And I’m amazed to discover that I don’t want one. Not now, not in 2010.

It’s not like I’m immune to iProducts. I mean, I was literally in a car, on the way to the Apple store halfway through the iPhone announcement. We had to turn around when he announced that it wasn’t going to ship for 6 months. As a family, we’ve bought 9 iPods and iPhones over the years, including the very first model.

So why doesn’t the iPad work for me?

1. It doesn’t do anything that I can’t already do. I have a laptop. I have a phone. I have a Kindle. The iPad can’t replace the phone or the laptop, and my Kindle doesn’t need replaced right now. Sure, it’s a better web-browsing platform than the phone, but not really all that much better.
2. It’s too closed. I switched from an iPhone 3GS to a Nexus One a month and a half ago, and I don’t really want to go back. The iPhone is prettier, and Apple has more useful apps, but the N1 is much more useful for me. It has a dramatically better interface to Gmail and Google Calendar. It multitasks, so IM works right. When the browser is too slow loading a page, I can go check my mail and then flip back to check on the page loading later. Random third-party apps sync in the background on their own. Apps can extend the core OS experience trivially; install a Flickr uploading app, and the ‘Share’ button in the existing camera app suddenly knows how to upload to Flickr. Heck, I even replaced the default home page/app browser with Slidescreen, just because it fits what I want out of my phone better. None of this is possible with the iPhone, and none of it will be possible with the iPad.
3. I think this is really the killer for me: the iPad is really just a media consumption device. I agree with almost everything Tim Bray has to say on the topic–the iPad is 98% oriented towards consuming existing content. Which is nice, sometimes. I mean, that’s all the Kindle is good for, and I love my Kindle. But it’s not what I want in a portable, always-with-me computer.

So what *do* I want in tablet-like device, or really any mobile computer, PDA, tablet, or phone? I want it to make my life better in some meaningful way. I want to build things with it. I want to look at how I do things in my life and create tools to make myself more powerful. And I don’t believe I can do that with the iPhone or iPad. They’re too tied to Steve’s View Of The World, and I’m not Steve. Almost everything that I’d like to have a device like this automate for me requires some sort of background processing, syncing with services online, and the iPad can’t do any of that right now. Maybe that’ll change in the future. Maybe iPhone/iPad OS 4.0 will fix that. Maybe the second-generation iPad will be able to do some of that. Maybe they’ll be able to convince me to fork over $100 just to write software for my own device. Maybe.

For now, though, I’m planning on sticking with my Nexus One, and I’ll probably keep an eye open for mid-sized Android tablets with high resolution screens. Android absolutely lacks the polish and shine of Apple’s products, but it’s moving amazingly fast, and it finally seems to be Good Enough for me. It’s reached a sort of critical mass, and it’s developing into a viable ecosystem of its own. At this point, the only thing that I really miss from my iPhone is the Kindle reader app, and I assume that Amazon is working on one for Android. Android’s not perfect, but it’s getting quite good. And while it lacks Apple’s polish and shine, it doesn’t have the same shrink-wrapped, pre-packaged, plastic feeling that so many interactions with Apple have these days.

I’m currently filled with self-loathing, as I failed in my attempt to be the last person in North America without a Facebook account. It’s still entirely unclear why I’d want to share a single social network with my grandmother, my neices’ friends, and a bunch of current and former co-workers. I mean, really–what could I possibly say that’s appropriate and interesting for all of them?

Bleh.

I know that I’ve been on the road a lot lately, but TripIt just made it a bit more real when it told me that I’ve travelled over 21,000 miles so far this year. The Earth’s circumference seems to be around 24,900 miles, so I’m only 3900 miles short of making a round-the-world trip this year. And that’s without the 3 trips left on my travel schedule–Mexico next week, Vegas the week after, and Dublin a few weeks after that. It looks like I’m going to end up covering around 30,000 miles and will have spent over 60 days on the road in total.

And, frankly, I doubt that next year will be any different. If anything, it might be busier.

It looks like today’s shaping up to be really a really entertaining day for product announcements.

First, Canon just announced the 1D mk IV, which may finally close the lead that Nikon opened with the D3 a couple years ago. The big news with the mk IV is ISO 100-12800, with the ability to go up to ISO 102,400 in a pinch, which is more or less the same as the D3s that Nikon announced last week. If I was in the market for a new camera (and I’m not completely convinced that I’m not), the mk IV is interesting. It doesn’t have a full-frame sensor, but in all other respects it looks just about perfect.

Next, Apple’s due to announce a boatload of stuff at any minute. Current rumors suggest new iMacs, a new Mini, a new Airport base station (with multiple antennas, and maybe multiple radios), a new mouse with iPhone-like touch scroller, and some sort of desktop touchpad.

Finally, for some reason Barnes and Noble decided that today’d be the perfect quiet news day to get loads of press coverage for their new ebook reader. We’ll see how that works for them.

I wasn’t exactly one of the first people in line to buy an iPhone when they first came out, but I did own and use a first-generation iPhone for about a year and a half. It was a great little phone, but 3 things bugged me:

• It’s slow. Oh, man, so slow. Apps open slowly. Things download slowly.
• It doesn’t have all that much storage space. 8 GB just isn’t enough. It was always full.
• The camera sucked.

Earlier this week, I gave in and bought a shiny new iPhone 3GS. So far I’m really happy. It was cheaper than the first-generation iPhone was, and the camera seems better. Plus the reception is slightly better in my new office. And it’s actually kind of zippy, while the old iPhone had felt sluggish since I upgraded it to 2.0 or so.

I’m headed off to New York next week, and I hate dragging a real camera along on business trips, so I’ll see if the 3GS is enough to make me happy on that front.

The past two months have been nerve-wracking at work–I’ve been working on a big project that should be completely invisible to users, but should make life a lot easier for those of us who run things behind the scenes. The potential for failure was huge, and I did everything I could to prepare and test and tweak the process. Fortunately, it looks like it’s all paid off; things went off almost perfectly yesterday, and unless something catastrophic happens this week, I’m going to be able to move on to a pile of new, more interesting, and hopefully less stressful projects. That’s the penalty for success, right?

I kind of regret missing Gnomedex this year, as looks like a lot of old friends were there, but I just couldn’t afford the time away from work in the middle of things. Maybe next year. In fact, I’m not quite sure where my summer went–I’ve been concentrating on this since early July; there are a huge pile of home improvement projects that didn’t get done last year and I’d put off until spring or summer this year, and I haven’t even touched them yet. Hopefully the weather will hold through the end of September, and I’ll be able to get a bit of yard work in.

I’ve been too busy traveling and reading my Kindle DX to get around to writing up the review that I promised last month. Since it’s been out for a month now and people have been reviewing it the whole time, I’m just going to cover the things that have made me especially happy and unhappy.

In general, the DX is a nice step up from the Kindle 1. The larger size is, as expected, a mixed blessing. The bigger screen is great, especially when reading PDFs, but the extra size and weight makes long reading sessions slightly less comfortable than the Kindle 1. I almost exclusively used the Kindle 1’s left-side page changing buttons, and I’m amazed that Amazon left them off of the DX.

I took my DX to Boulder with me last week and read 4 books along the way. The DX may be larger than my old Kindle 1, but it’s so much thinner that it’s easier to travel with. It’s easy to slip it into airline seat-back pockets and it fits into my laptop bag much better than the Kindle 1 did.

A few gripes:

• It’s crashed a couple times on me. Holding down the power button forced a reboot.
• With the wireless on, the battery life’s kind of short. Don’t expect more than a few days between charges, even if you aren’t using the DX every day.
• The Kindle DX really needs a set of left-hand next/previous buttons.
• The Kindle 2/DX software is a nice improvement over the Kindle 1, but it still needs work. It’s great for reading books, but once you give it more than 100 titles, you’re going to be doing a lot of scrolling. Amazon needs a better way to manage your library.
• Wikipedia is ugly and slow on the Kindle. Amazon should spend some time building a Kindle-optimized version of Wikipedia. A bit of CSS and then optimizing the HTML a bit would go a long ways towards making it more usable.
• PDFs with lots of small text are hard to read. Beautiful Security from O’Reilly is rendered in a tiny little font that’s readable on the DX, but it’s so small that it’s uncomfortable and it kills my reading speed. Removing the whitespace around the outside of the PDF would help with this; I’m going to look for a PDF post-processor to do it for me, but the Kindlle should really be able to handle this on its own.
• The page tilt sensor is dumb. It’s prone to rotating your book for you while you’re busy reading. Fortunately, it’s easy to turn off.

All in all, I’m happy with my DX. I’d buy it again tomorrow if I had to (and if it didn’t have a ~1 month waiting list at the moment). If you’re looking for an ebook reader that can read PDFs and handle complex documents, then it’s the best thing on the market, *IF* you can live with the price and you don’t want to put more than 100 documents at a time on it. If you need more than that, then expect to spend a lot of time scrolling through the list of available books on the Kindle.

If you don’t care about PDFs, then I’d recommend that you just buy the Kindle 2. It’s way cheaper ($299 instead of $489), lighter, and smaller, and it’s more or less the same size as a paperback book. If you can handle cheap paperbacks, then you can live with the Kindle 2’s screen.

I’ve owned an Amazon Kindle for almost a year now, and I’m still really happy with it. A few highlights of the year:

• I’ve read at least 80 Kindle books. 68 of those were purchased from Amazon, a few were free books from Tor, and a few were purchased from Baen.
• Of those, probably 10 were read via the Kindle app on my iPhone. It’s a lot less enjoyable than reading on my Kindle, so given the choice I’ll always grab the Kindle first, but I can keep my iPhone in my pocket and pull it out at lunch or while I’m stuck waiting in line. Since it syncs with the Kindle over the air, I’m able to hop back and forth between the two devices and still have the right page sitting and waiting for me.
• By and large, I’ve found that I enjoy reading books on the Kindle substantially more than I enjoy them on paper. I’ve probably only read 5 paper books over the past year.
• My original Kindle broke in February. I came home from work and picked it up, and half of the screen was dead. I called Amazon’s 800 number and they overnighted a replacement to me. Everything synced over to the new Kindle and I was back in business.

I’m about 95% happy with my original Kindle. The button placement is still kind of annoying, but over time I’ve gotten better at not pressing the forward and back buttons accidentally. It’s slow startup is kind of annoying, and mine crashes about once per month and needs me to pull the battery to get it working again. Over all, though, I’m happy enough with it that I’d willingly buy it all over again.

Although, if I was going to buy one over again, I’d buy a Kindle DX. When I originally bought my Kindle, I’d carry it with me everywhere to read when I had spare time. Now I mostly only bring the Kindle when I’m traveling and keep my iPhone in my pocket, so the DX’s larger size isn’t a liability. At the same time, the DX’s larger screen will make it usable for reading technical books in PDF form, which never really worked right on the Kindle 1. The DX starts shipping next Wednesday. Mine’s due to arrive on Friday. I’ll let everyone know how it goes :-).

One of the things that made last year so interesting at work was the amount of travel that I did. For the previous 8 years, I flew maybe once per year for work, either to visit remote offices or for conferences. Last year was a bit crazier–I think I had eight business trips between April and October.

This year’s been a bit tamer so far, with only one trip to New York and one to California, but the slow stretch is over now–I’m spending all week next week in Mountain View, and then heading to Boulder at the end of the month for three days. I’ll be back in California for almost two weeks late in July and early in August, and then I’ll probably be in New York in early September.

This will be my first trip to California in a while where I’ll have some free time; if anything cool is happening next week, please let me know :-).

At some point in the next couple months, I’d like to buy a new media-center system to go with my new 50” living room TV. Right now, I have a slightly older MythTV install in the basement, and I’ve been watching video via a pair of Xbox 360s. They both have a few issues, though, and I’d like to find something better. I’ve considered customizing a newer MythTV build, and I’ve played with Boxee on a Mac, but before I invest a bunch of time and money into this, I figured I should look for advice. Here’s what I’m looking for:

I need the ability to:

• Talk to a SMB or NFS file server.
• Play video in .avi, MP4, VOB, MKV, or OGM files with common codecs.
• Play back content up to 1080p without stuttering.
• Change audio tracks and subtitles for files that have multiple tracks.
• Control the whole thing via a remote control.
• Play video via HDMI, or DVI plus optical audio out.

It’d be nice if it could:

• Play YouTube and Netflix videos.
• Play DVDs or maybe Blu-ray disks.
• Be controlled via HDMI-CEC.

I don’t care about:

• Recording or playing OTA or cable HDTV signals.
• Ripping disks
• RSS feeds, weather, etc.

I don’t really care about Linux vs Mac vs Windows in this case. I’d be okay with some sort of appliance, but I’ve never found one that actually works right. I have a Popcorn Hour A-100, and it’s about an order of magnitude slower than what I’m looking for, plus it tends to crash or lose audio sync on a lot of the more obscure files that I’ve thrown at it.

Any suggestions?

All I can say is that right now, I really wish I hadn’t given away my last copy of To Serve Spammers, if you know what I mean.

As mentioned a few days ago, I’m using Vyatta for my home router software. Vyatta is amazing; it’s a complete open-source router platform based on Linux. It’s something that I’ve been looking for for the last decade. You just boot up the CD image and wham–it’s a router, with a Juniper-ish command shell. Type configure and you’re in router configuration mode, with context-sensitive editing. Type a couple more commands and it’ll copy itself off of the CD and onto your hard drive or USB drive. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

At the same time, it’s impressively powerful. It still lacks a few features that upper-end Cisco or Juniper routers have–no MPLS, no policy routing, and IPv6 support is weak. But it’s a huge step above any of the Linksys or D-Link routers that I’ve seen. It supports BGP and OSPF, plus reasonably flexible NAT and ACL settings. I’ve never benchmarked my router, but after 2 weeks of uptime it claims that it’s spent 99.9% of its time idle while copying almost 750 GB of data between interfaces. Vyatta claims that a 4x2.66 GHz Intel CPU can route 3 Gbps of 512 byte packets, and I see no reason to doubt that.

Vyatta is open source, but it has a company behind it (also named Vyatta), selling support to anyone who will pay. I’m always conflicted when I run into projects like this. I’m happy that they’re available, and that they’re making progress forward, but they only rarely develop any sort of community around them. Maybe Vyatta will prove me wrong.

Have you ever noticed how almost all of the computer virus hysteria in the press is a product of anti-virus companies’ PR?

It looks like McAfee is trying to drum up anti-spam business now:

A report being released Wednesday by security company McAfee Inc. finds that spammers are a scourge to your inbox and the environment, generating an astounding 62 trillion junk e-mails in 2008 that wasted enough electricity to power 2.4 million U.S. homes for a year.

…

McAfee says it takes users about three seconds to view and delete a spam message. Although most spam doesn’t get through because of sophisticated spam filters, people spend a lot of time - 100 billion user-hours per year - dealing with the messages that do land in inboxes, McAfee estimates.

Maybe it’s just me, but those two numbers–2.4 million houses worth of power and 100 billion user-hours per year–both strike me as laughably stupid.

I did a bit of digging, and it looks like “uses the same power as 1,000 houses” claims invariably use 1 kW per house as their metric. So, McAfee is suggesting that spam uses 2.4 GW of electricity. That’s impressively massive, and equal to about 1/3 of 1% of the electrical capacity of the US in 2007. Even better, it’s about half of what Pingdom claims that US datacenters consumed last year.

Even if the US has only 1/5th of the world’s datacenters, that’d still mean that 10% of the world’s datacenter power was spent on spam. Which seems unlikely.

Even better, the 100 billion user-hours per year number is just insane. Estimates suggest that there are a bit over 1 billion email users, world-wide. If every single one of them have the same spam load, then each user would spend 100 hours per year dealing with spam. That’s 2.5 weeks of 40 hour/week work time, or around 5% of the work year. The it looks like the average US worker gets around 13 vacation days per year, which suggests that they spend nearly as much time deleting spam as they do vacationing.

I don’t know why I read articles like this. They leave me mad every time.

So, my only real dot-com tech splurge in 2000 was a set of 3 shiny new Athlon 700 systems with 30 GB drives and 256 MB of RAM. One was a desktop, one was a web server, and one was a file server.

The desktop started gathering dust when I bought my first PowerBook in 2002. The file server survived a bit longer before it failed. The web server, however, is still in use, 9 years later. It’s been maxed out on RAM for about 6 of those years, with a whopping 768 MB. At one point, it was my router, web server, mail server, bittorrent client, jabber server, and Asterisk VoIP server, all at the same time.

Unfortunately, when you cram that many things onto one system, eventually the complexity comes back to haunt you. I couldn’t upgrade my blog at one point because a different service on the same box was incompatible with newer Ruby interpreters. Some days Asterisk will refuse to start after a reboot. Sometimes NFS causes kernel panics. Apache never shuts down right on reboot, usually forcing the use of the reset button. I can fix any one of these, but it’s like flattening out bubbles in wallpaper–new bubbles always pop up somewhere new. There’s a limit to how long you can maintain a single Linux install, and 9 years is way, way past this one’s sell-by limit.

So, once FiOS finally arrived in my neighborhood, I decided it was time to start replacing things. I didn’t think the old Athlon could really keep up with 20 Mbps of traffic, anyway.

So, I started by building a new router. I considered buying one, but getting a reasonably fast Cisco or Juniper with all of the licenses needed for NAT and SIP proxying turns out to be painfully expensive. So instead I ended up installing Vyatta on a cheap PC. Vyatta’s great–it’s a router-specific Linux distribution that gives you a Juniper-ish CLI for managing your router config. The hardware is vastly over-specced, with a 2.5 GHz dual-core CPU and 4 GB of RAM, but hopefully I won’t need to replace this one for another 9 years.

Once that was done, I needed a system (or systems) to run all of the other little services that had piled up over the years. I’ve always been a big believer in partitioning services onto their own servers, to provide more isolation and more control, but it’s silly to have a dozen physical machines sitting around the house. My experiments in virtualization in the past were never completely successful–I have a machine running Xen here, but upgrading Xen itself is always nerve-wracking, because there’s no good way to test changes that will break multiple VMs. I did a bunch of research, looking for a virtualization system that would let me run N VM instances over M physical machines, with a single interface for managing them and migrating VMs between machines. The enterprise version of most of the virtualization systems can do this, but I had a hard time finding anything under $3k that could do it. That is, until I stumbled across Ganeti.

Ganeti is an open-source Xen cluster management system, originally developed by Google. You give Ganeti a pool of servers, and you tell it about the VMs that you want, and it takes care of the details. If you want, you can set up VMs with their disk replicated between a pair of servers, and Ganeti will handle migrating running VMs between machines, so you can take the underlying hardware down for maintenance.

So, I bought a pair of cheap servers (Phenom II X3 720, 8 GB RAM, 500 GB disk, 2 GigE interfaces–about $400 each) and installed Ganeti on them, and I’ve been slowly moving services onto the new machines. I started with easy things, like recursive DNS service. I created a pair of VMs, one on each system, and set them up as basic recursive DNS servers. It’s overkill, but I’m a big fan of overkill, at least when it’s cheap.

Since then, I’ve moved my HTTP reverse proxy/load balancer over to Ganeti, created a local git repository VM, moved my blog, bittorrent, logging, and so forth over. I’m up to 10 VMs on Ganeti, with about 5 left to go.

My general rule of thumb is that if you have 2 servers, then using some sort of automated management platform is more work than it’s worth. With 5 servers, it’s probably still too much work. With 10, you’ll probably see a benefit, and beyond that you’re going to suffer if you have to manually manage things. Since I’m looking at 10-20 VMs eventually, I figured it’d be worth the time to look around and play with some new tools. I’m currently playing with Puppet. It’s not perfect, but it seems good enough to far. I’ve put together a set of puppet templates that describe a basic server, and then used that to define various server types (web server, DNS server, etc). So, setting up a new VM reasonably easy now–I ask Ganeti to build me a new Debian VM with some amount of disk and RAM, and then I tell puppet to take over. Puppet will install an extra couple dozen packages, set passwords, set up the right sudoers file, and so forth. My puppet config lives in git, so it’s revision controlled and replicated to multiple systems. Even better, puppet will keep pushing the same content out to my systems over time, making sure that all updates show up everywhere they’re needed. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for now.

So that’s where things stand. I’m actually really happy with the system at a whole. Vyatta makes a very nice router, Ganeti is great for managing small clusters of virtual machines, and Puppet does an okay job at corralling the VMs. I’ll write more on the specific details later, including some of my puppet configs, more on Vyatta, and how I’m doing load balancing.

I didn’t really mean to leave this blog unattended for six months. I’ve actually written a couple articles and discarded them, as there was no real point. Besides, every other article that I’ve tried posting over the past year has been a colossal pain to post, as my creakingly ancient Typo install was prone to throwing 500s for 5 minutes straight. Somehow, inserting single articles in the to DB was too much work for it.

As part of a massive clean-up, I think I’ve successfully upgraded from a July 2007-ish Typo to last month’s 5.3.0 release. If you’re reading this, than the upgrade was successful.