*scottstuff*

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.

About a year ago, I tried to use the Gigabyte GC-RAMDISK/iRAM SATA RAMDISK and ran into horrible problems. I was looking for a non-volatile storage device that I could use for ZFS logs, so fsync() and friends could complete in a millisecond or two, but it was pretty clear that the iRAM just wasn’t going to work for me. Unfortunately, there really weren’t any alternatives on the market at the time; a few manufacturers made PCI NVRAM cards, but they were all OEM-only and I couldn’t find anyone to sell me one. What I really wanted was a device with around 4 GB of RAM, a CF slot, a SATA port, and a battery. It’d act like a RAM-backed SATA device, with fast I/O speeds, but when the power died it’d use the battery to copy everything from RAM onto the compact flash card. Then at bootup it’d copy it all back.

Amazingly enough, ACARD managed to sneak two of these onto their website in July. The ANS-9010B lists for $249 and has 6 DDR2 slots and 1 SATA port, while the ANS-9010 lists for $399 and has 8 DDR2 slots and 2 SATA ports. Neither one is widely available yet, but it sounds like they’re starting to trickle into the US.

I’d like to see a few benchmarks when they’re actually available. In theory a RAM-based NVRAM device should have substantially higher write speeds than a flash SSD, but it’s been screwed up before, and flash SSDs are widely available and constantly dropping in price.

So, here’s the thing: I’ve had Verizon DSL for years, and I’ve been waiting for FiOS almost the whole time.

Two years ago, they pulled fiber to within 3 blocks of my house. I was stuck waiting.

Six months ago, they tore up my front yard and put in fiber. I figured that the waiting was over. I called the phone number that they’d plastered all over the neighborhood and they told me that it’d be available for ordering around 4/15. So I waited a bit more tried to order. They told me that it’d be a couple more weeks, and they’d call me back around 4/28.

I’m still waiting. They never called back. Their online ordering system claims that it’s not available at my house, and I’ve checked every week since early April. When I call to see what’s up, I end up sitting on hold for 30 minutes and then someone rudely tells me to wait until they send someone around to hang “fiber’s available” fliers on my door and stop calling. Sometimes it takes extra time to get the office end of the circuit set up, and they won’t let me order until that’s done, you see.

Yeah, right–Like Verizon’s going to put fiber in the ground 6 months before they bother setting up all of their CO hardware if they have any choice in the matter. If I recall correctly, they’ve actually been grilled on that on their quarterly earnings calls before; putting fiber in the ground costs a lot of money, and they want to start recouping it as quickly as they can. The average that I’ve seen for other places is 4-6 weeks, not 6 months. So I strongly suspect that something’s wrong with their availablity database.

This morning I got fed up, so I entered my next-door neighbor’s phone number and address. Ten seconds later, Verizon’s ready to let me order fiber for him. It’s available next door, just not here. It’s the same cul-de-sac, there are no roads to cross. And I know that there’s fiber 30 feet from my current NTI, so it’s not even a tough run for them.

Ah ha! So I called the phone number listed on Verizon’s Business FiOS website (I need a static IP, so I need business FiOS). After 5 minutes on hold, an agent listened to my story and transfered me to the FiOS group. Which promptly announced “we’re not open, call back during business hours” and hang up on me. Without bothering to tell me what the business hours actually were.

You’d think that paying someone $100/month would be easier than this, right?

Update: Apparently waiting until after 8:00 PDT was good enough; the first person that I talked to on the second call has scheduled someone to come out and verify that I have fiber in the ground. Once that’s done, it should be orderable within 2–3 days.

Update Sep 16: By “2–3 days,” I think they really meant 2–3 weeks. I called back today and the 4th person that I talked to was very polite, but couldn’t do much to help me. She saw that the last call was in the system, but said that I should wait another week or two to hear back.

Update Oct 19: They called back at the end of September and left a message asking me to call, but when I returned the call no one at the call center had any idea why I was being asked to call. There was no status on my ticket, although it had apparently been closed. So they tried ordering another line inspection, and said they’d call back in a few days. Ha. Amazingly enough, when I checked the FiOS website this morning, it worked! It’ll let me order now. Unfortunately, FiOS business DSL won’t let me order a static IP online, and trying to order business FiOS with a dynamic IP leaves me stuck in a loop (“FiOS is available! Pick a package! Oh, what’s your phone number? FiOS is available! Pick a package!”). Oh well, I guess I can wait for their call center to open.

Update Oct 20: Ordered! Install date: 10/31, 8:00 AM.

I love my Canon 5D, but it’s getting really long in the tooth. It’s basically a Canon 20D with a vastly improved sensor, and the 20D’s replacement’s replacement has now been replaced by the 50D. While the 5D was once the top of the market, Nikon’s D700 now outclasses it in almost every way. There have been rumors about a 5D replacement for years, and none of them have ever went anywhere.

It looks like that has finally changed. Canon’s running a teaser ad showing a very 5D-like silhouette with the words “Destined Evolution”.

Personally, I’d be happy if they’d take the 50D, give it a full-frame sensor with about 2 extra stops of dynamic range over the 5D, and improve the AF a bit. I still miss my EOS 3’s autofocus, which is insane–it’s 10 years old, and it’s still better then any of Canon’s midline DSLRs. Rationally speaking, I understand that they’ve been keeping the 1-series’s 45-point AF unit for their top-of-the-line models, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense now that the D700’s on the market. Canon got lazy, and Nikon’s passed them up. They can’t afford to leave features out of their semi-pro models just to protect their (slightly lackluster, compared to the D3) top-of-the-line.

Personally, I’d be happy if they’d keep the resolution the same as the 5D at 12 MP, but that’ll never happen. There’s just too much marketing pressure to crank it up, even though it ends up hurting the image quality. I suspect that most of their users would prefer 12 MP with a D700-like ISO 6400 over 21 MP with too much noise to make 6400 usable.

It’s been a busy week at work. We launched Chrome to the world on Tuesday, after a last-minute change of plans. The launch managed to temporarily suck me back into my previous job at Google; I ran all of our download servers for about two years, so I know more about debugging download problems then just about anyone else around. We’ve been planning for this launch since early Spring, and it looks like all of the hard work paid off–I haven’t seen a single complaint from someone who tried to download it and had a bad download experience. Everything seems to have Just Worked, with is really all you can hope for in this line of business.

If you run Windows, then go give it a try. They’ve put a tremendous amount of work and creativity into it, and they’ve advanced the state of the art in a number of ways. Now if only the Mac version was available already…

(all opinions are mine, not Google’s, etc)

Well, that’s a whole lot of fun. I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket today and discovered that it’d been rebooting silently in my pocket for at least an hour. It just kept cycling through a boot cycle every 30 seconds or so, showing an Apple logo then turning off, then showing the logo again, then turning off. I plugged it into my laptop and it booted up just fine, but it immediately asked me if I wanted to power the iPhone off. It seems to work as long as it stays plugged in, but it’ll start rebooting again as soon as I unplug it.

Digging around a bit, I think the lock button on the top of the phone is broken. While it’s plugged in, it’s almost impossible to get it to work, and I end up getting the ‘Do you want to power off’ screen more often then a locked iPhone. Trying to get back to the home screen from inside of apps by pressing the big round button doesn’t always work; I end up with a screen shot instead, which is a sign that the lock button is being pressed.

Wonderful, what I really wanted to do today was to run to the Apple store and try to get a non-existent replacement phone.

Update: An Apple store 20 minutes away had a Genius Bar opening in 30 minutes, so I signed up for it online and jumped in the car. It took them about 3 minutes to decide that I needed a new phone, so they grabbed out out of the back and sent me on my way. Total time to repair, including travel time: about 50 minutes. Not too shabby.

So, after thinking about it a bit, I went out and ordered an Amazon Kindle ebook reader. It arrived last Tuesday, just in time for me to take it with me on Wednesday’s flight to California. The Kindle let me leave 5 lbs of books at home and cut a couple inches off the thickness of my laptop bag, which was a pretty substantial improvement over the previous week’s flight.

Over the past 5 days, I’ve read 3 complete novels on it–Thirteen, All Tomorrow’s Parties, and Slaughterhouse 5. All three were purchased from Amazon and downloaded to the Kindle over the air; I’ve also stuffed the Kindle with a few free ebooks from tor.com; their moble editions convert perfectly for the Kindle via Amazon’s free email converter. After reading 900-ish pages on the Kindle, I’m about 95% happy:

• The screen’s great. The print quality and contrast feel slightly better then a mass-market paperback. Yeah, the background’s kind of grey and there’s a very small amount of roughness to the letters, but you have to go looking for it to see it. It’s a 160 DPI display, just like the iPhone. I haven’t clocked myself reading, but it doesn’t feel any slower then reading paper books, and it hasn’t left me with a headache or anything. It’s substantially better then reading novels on a laptop (which I’ve done at least 3 times this year).
• The software’s pretty good. It’s better then anything I’ve seen from a non-Apple, non-Tivo consumer electronics product in years. My only concern is the book selector UI–it turns into a big cluttered mess once you get more than 30 or 40 items on it. I’d love to be able to organize books by read/unread status, genre, etc., but that’s not really possible right now. Instead, you get a list that you can sort by access time, author, or title. It’s okay, but not great. Considering that I could probably cram 2,000+ books onto a SD card in the Kindle’s SD slot, a simple sorted list really isn’t good enough. On the other hand, with a couple dozen files total it’s not a huge issue, and it’ll probably be fixed in a future software update.
• It’s reasonably fast. Waking from sleep takes around 10 seconds, and flipping pages takes a second or so. In either case, it’s not really any slower then picking up a paperback, stowing the bookmark somewhere, and figuring out which page I was on, or simply flipping pages. It’s not instant, but it’s fast enough for now.
• The overall size is fine. It’s almost exactly the same size as a DVD case, so it doesn’t fit into most pockets, but it’s still easy to keep around.
• The next page/previous page buttons are too big. They make it hard to pick the Kindle up without accidentally flipping pages, and they constrain the number of ways that you can comfortably hold it in your hand.
• The DRMed book selection from Amazon is still kind of small (around 130,000 volumes, or the same as a mid-sized Barnes and Noble store), but it’s not horrible. I haven’t had any problem finding books from my to-read list on Amazon’s Kindle store. In addition, a number of publishers have released free books in Kindle-compatible formats (like Tor and Baen. I have 4 or 5 Tor books on mine ready to go when I get a chance.

All in all, I’m happy with the Kindle. It’s Good Enough. As things stand, I’m probably going to switch to buying most of my books in Kindle-compatible formats going forward, partly because they’re more portable, and partly because I’m getting tired of the sheer size and physicality of regular books. I’ve ripped all of my CDs and most of my DVDs and I haven’t looked back. It’s just easier to have them in electronic form, and I’m happy to have the space back that all of the disks took up. I used to have 2 or 3 shelves full of disks, but I still have an entire room full of books. I’d be just as happy if I could get most of them in a DRM-free ebook form, but even DRM-encumbered Kindle files are still an improvement for most of my reading.

I should have planned this better. I’m going to be one a plane to NYC (and therefore completely out of touch) during the WWDC keynote. That means that I’ll have to wait hours to learn about all of the exciting new iProducts that Steve is trying to sell me.

The scary thing is that I’m not sure if I’m joking or not.