The Lone Sysadmin » General Rambling

Three Organizational Decisions That Help Me Virtualize

Bob Plankers — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:55:55 +0000

Over the last ten years my organization has come a long way with its IT policies and processes. We’ve gone from the wild, wild west of IT where personal heroism ruled the day, to a place where there’s just enough process to make sure that communication happens correctly and things like our Configuration Management Database (CMDB) stay up to date. It’s been a lot of work, but I am actually really proud of where we’re at.

There are three fundamental decisions we made a long time ago that, had they not been made, would have drastically changed how virtualization has proceeded here.

1. Clearly defined maintenance windows.

Knowing exactly when someone can do maintenance on server has been crucial to getting things done in our virtualization environment. There are many adjustments you can & should make in virtual environments, but if you can’t ever take the VMs down to make the changes you’re stuck. We’ve been able to do physical to virtual migrations, performance tuning, VMware Tools upgrades, vSphere upgrades, and a whole slew of other things in relatively short timeframes because we have this all worked out already. This also lets us “right-size” our VMs — rather than deploying huge VMs just in case they need the CPU or RAM, we deploy smaller ones and then can take an outage to add CPUs and RAM if we need to. The maintenance windows for a server are negotiated between the application/service admins and the system administrators when a machine is put into production, we track it in our CMDB, and any member of the whole team supporting the service can take the maintenance window, as long as they follow some rules about notifications for the change (timeframes, etc.).

2. Use of load-balancing technologies.

We use application load balancers (layer 4 of the OSI model) to decouple services from individual servers. Not only does this allow us to take a host down without affecting a service, but it also lets us spread the load out more among the physical hosts we have in our virtual infrastructure. In a lot of cases having more, smaller VMs results in better workload scheduling by ESX and DRS, especially on smaller ESX hosts.

Of course, this also plays nicely into the other points, because it’s very liberating to be able to do what we call “rolling maintenance” on a service, just taking one machine down at a time so that customers are not impacted. It also means that system administrator quality of life goes up, for now we can do maintenance tasks during the day instead of on weekends and off-hours. Doing maintenance during business hours has a couple of benefits. First, it means that the maintenance will actually get done. If you try to use someone’s personal time to do work they tend to opt out of that work. Servers go unpatched, tuning doesn’t happen, lots of things that should get done don’t because people will choose their personal time over work. Second, it means that if something goes wrong there are others around to help out. Doing work at 5 AM on a Sunday is fun, but if things go sideways you have to wake someone up or try fixing it yourself. Doing work during the day means you have the rest of the team around to lend a hand.

Third, it gives you a way to make incremental changes and then watch the effects. This has been particularly awesome for performance tuning of applications and our virtual environments themselves. Testing tuning changes is often hard, because test suites and test load generators are synthetic and often don’t compare to real load. But because the load is spread out we can make a change to one VM, or one ESX host servicing one VM, and keep an eye on it. I’m not advocating being a complete cowboy — you still have to do testing — but the risks to your production environment are a lot lower if you can catch problems on one VM first.

There are usually some other benefits to load balancers, too, that make them virtualization-friendly. Many will offload SSL processing, so your VMs have less work to do. Others have features, like iRules in F5′s products, that let you rewrite network traffic on the fly, which has some really neat implications for security, monitoring, and service delivery. And if you don’t want to buy a piece of hardware you can often get a virtual appliance from these vendors, though the physical appliances are usually a lot faster.

3. Commitment to operating system and application patching.

It is a fundamental belief of mine that one of the best ways to stay secure is to keep up on your patching. My organization agrees, and by using load balancers and defining maintenance windows we’ve made it easy for ourselves to keep our hosts up to date with regular patching cycles. Because we can take servers down without taking services down, and because sysadmins know exactly when a server can come down, we can schedule maintenance cycles easily, whether it’s six months out or two weeks. We can also respond very rapidly to emergency situations, like recent remote execution vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, by rolling patches out to development & test hosts, then QA & production, over the course of just two days if needed.

Keeping up to date with patches not only keeps you secure, it also lets you take advantage of new features that are added to operating systems. For example, Red Hat keeps adding new virtualization-friendly features, like kernel interrupt clock dividers. Being a kernel parameter you can’t just change it on the fly. And if you have to reboot, but can’t get a time to do it, you won’t do it. For us, we just rolled the change into one of our patching cycles and reduced the load on our infrastructure dramatically. Meaning more VMs per physical host, and a quantifiable amount of savings from just a small change on each machine.

Furthermore, our commitment to patching also extends to the virtual infrastructure itself, and we have a rule that we will not implement anything that breaks vMotion or Storage vMotion. Why? Because then it becomes very difficult to cope with ESX updates, or hardware failures, or any situation where vMotion could be used to prevent an outage. Sure, this means that we still need physical hardware for some applications, but it’s still just a fraction of the hardware we were buying years ago. This also makes virtual infrastructure easy to upgrade when the time comes, for new versions of vSphere, new storage arrays, and new physical hosts. Instead of planning outages on hundreds of VMs we just vMotion them, and nobody is the wiser.

Disclosure: F5 is a sponsor of Gestalt IT Tech Field Day, of which I have been a participant. I am not a customer of F5 at this time, though.

Youth

Bob Plankers — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 23:45:09 +0000

“Hey, do any of you guys have an old, full-height hard disk lying around?”

This was a relatively new person from another group in our organization. People occasionally come looking for random old equipment to use for training & examples, because they know we have things like original IBM PCs, Cisco AGS+ routers, token ring MAUs, and 1200 baud Multitech Multimodems on hand.

“Sure, I’ve got a full height drive, one second.” I produce a full-height 600 MB Imprimis SCSI disk. Made in the USA, so it’s pretty old. It’s a bookend on my bookshelf.

“What in the heck is that?” he asks.

“Um, a full-height drive?” I reply, really wondering what he thinks he’s asking for.

“No, man, I don’t know what that’s out of but it’s wicked. Full-height is like a couple inches tall, though.”

“And 3.5″ form factor, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Dude, that’s half height.”

“Nah, that’s full height, at least that’s what I’ve been told. So what is that?” he asks, as he points to my impressive specimen of early 1990s drive technology.

“What you were looking for is half height. This is a full height 600 MB SCSI fixed disk. Final answer.” I hope he didn’t learn full height vs. half height from someone he paid.

“I’ve never seen one of those before. Can I borrow it? The other guys will flip out when they see this thing.”

I wonder what they’d think if they saw 8″ floppy disks. Freakin’ kids.

Oregon Trail: The Movie

Bob Plankers — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:43:32 +0000

One would think this is off-topic, but for techies it really isn’t. I present to you the official trailer for The Oregon Trail. Very well done!

Makes me proud to have grown up in Minnesota (MECC == “Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium”). If you want to play it Classic Gaming has it and a copy of AppleWin.

Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

Bob Plankers — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:01:06 +0000

The Wisconsin DMV sent me my gift a day early:

And it was a present — I needed replacement plates but hadn’t ordered them yet. I’m glad I didn’t!

I often joke that I haven’t come up with an original solution to anything in years, thanks to all the other sysadmins out there who share their solutions, knowledge, and time in order to make the world better. Thank you all for everything you do!

Gestalt IT Tech Field Day Seattle

Bob Plankers — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:01:06 +0000

Apple iPad: $670

Wyse PocketCloud RDP/View Client: $14.99

One flight worth of GoGoWireless: $12.95

Posting on my blog via an RDP connection to my work desktop across a VPN from 30,000 feet: priceless.

I’m on my way to Gestalt IT’s Seattle Tech Field Day. I’m excited, for a lot of reasons. It’s an honor to be invited, nominated by some of the other delegates. I’ve spent little time in Seattle, and while I won’t have a lot of extra free time this trip it’ll be better than last time I was there. I’ll get to hang out at a bunch of high-tech places, and best yet, do so with a bunch of high-tech folks that, frankly, I’ve only read about. How cool is that?

Pretty damn cool, if you ask me. And you didn’t, I know. :)

Saturday Morning in Ohio

Bob Plankers — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:45:48 +0000

Photo courtesy Maitri, background on the Dell from Vladstudio.

It’s A Family Thing

Bob Plankers — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:07:08 +0000

I’m taking an off-topic break for a moment to express my delight in popular culture, for a change. Those of you watching HBO’s Treme saw something this week that is summarized quite nicely by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, in their “Treme Explained” post:

Antoine and Desiree barbecuing on a parade route illustrates an aspect of Mardi Gras that’s poorly understood by outsiders: The beads ‘n’ boobs “Girls Gone Wild” version of the holiday that Delmond briefly experiences elsewhere in the episode is largely confined to the French Quarter and almost exclusively perpetrated by drunken tourists, not that there’s anything wrong with that. For most local participants in the Carnival parade experience in New Orleans, the setting more resembles a family picnic.

As someone who rides with the Krewe of King Arthur each year this is the number one thing I have to explain to those who ask me where I’m going for two weeks in late winter. I’m really glad someone is shining some light on it, for maybe it will reduce the “Oh, you go to Mardi Gras? That’s okay with your girlfriend?” comments in my future.

Maybe.

As a side note, and slightly back on topic, my coworkers will be able to tell when I’ve had it, because I’ll start naming servers after New Orleans geographical features. Like Tchoupitoulas (chop-uh-too-luss) Street, Marigny (MARE-uh-knee), Treme (trah-MAY), etc. Even something as seemingly simple as Calliope is really “CAL-ee-ope,” and Burgundy more like “burr-GUN-dee.” Mean? Yeah, I know. Though I really would delight in naming something after the OPP.

Links:

- NOLA.com’s “Treme” explained.
- Krewe of King Arthur
- Continued hat tip to Rafe Colburn’s Essential Reference posts. Good stuff.
- The “Back of Town: Blogging Treme” blog also has in-depth commentary by NOLA locals.

Test My ISP

Bob Plankers — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 04:13:59 +0000

Test My ISP is a new program from the FCC to measure the speeds people are getting from their ISPs:

Together, the FCC and Samknows are setting out to provide US consumers with reliable and accurate statistics of their broadband connections. If you are interested in using one of our units to measure your home broadband connection, then please sign up below. You will get to play a part in changing the face of the American broadband industry and you also get a free high-speed wireless router!

I think it’s great they’re doing something like this. My AT&T DSL connection never goes 6 Mbps, which is what I’m paying for (and want). However, it probably won’t be hard for the smart folks at these ISPs to figure out where these devices are, what kind of traffic they generate, and how to make the traffic high-priority. Especially since every big ISP probably has someone signing up for one of these devices right now. “Evil will always win, because good is dumb.”

Test My ISP

Thanks AMD!

Bob Plankers — Tue, 18 May 2010 21:31:23 +0000

Holy crap, server pricing has come down a lot in the last month!

Four weeks ago a Dell R810 with 256 GB of RAM, dual Intel 6550 8-core CPUs, and the standard complement of drives, warranties, etc. was almost $28,000.

A couple weeks ago the AMD-based Dell R815 was released, featuring the AMD 8- and 12-core CPUs. A similar configuration to the R810 above comes to almost $17,000, and that’s with more cores in the host than the Intel.

Now the Dell R810, same configuration, is a little over $18,000.

I’ve not been a big fan of AMD’s technology in the past, because of caching bugs, OS incompatibilities, general BS, etc. However, for what they just saved me by keeping Intel honest I might buy a test server based on their CPUs and take another look. :)

Also, the Dell R910 can have 1 TB of RAM in it now. A fully decked-out R910 with 1 terabyte of RAM and 32 CPU cores is $72,000. Depreciated over 5 years (which is the maximum hardware warranty), that’s only $14,400 each year.

I really want one.

The Kind of Day I’m Having

Bob Plankers — Fri, 14 May 2010 17:12:35 +0000

Me: “I wonder when Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will actually get released.”

Coworker: “What is ‘exactly one month after it would have helped you solve a problem’?”

On Lost iPhone Prototypes

Bob Plankers — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 05:30:11 +0000

I’ve been reading the comments on Gizmodo’s “How Apple Lost the Next iPhone.” I have a few observations in response to a few of the types of comments.

“I can’t believe someone like Gray Powell would have a prototype phone out in the wild.”

I can. It makes perfect sense for the guy who writes the baseband controller firmware to have one out for personal testing. When there’s a problem he can dump logs, etc. while it’s happening. There is sometimes no substitute for being able to see a problem in action, and having the guy eat his own dog food is a great way to do that. I, as an iPhone user, appreciate this level of testing.

“I can’t believe someone with a prototype phone would be that irresponsible.”

The whole point of field testing is to take it with you everywhere, and use it like you would use it normally. Sure, it sucks to lose your phone in the process. But you know, from the sounds of Mr. Powell’s last Facebook status update he was new to drinking German beer, and underestimated its quality and ass-kicking nature. I, as a German beer drinker, can’t fault someone for trying something new.

“I can’t believe someone took the phone instead of turning it in.”

The somewhat inebriated line of thinking is usually that you’ll take it and call the guy in the morning. Anybody commenting about finding a lost phone at a Starbucks and turning it in to the barista hasn’t been drinking. Logic does not apply.

“The guy that found it was intentionally malicious the whole time, else he would have returned it right away or left it there.”

It was bricked by the time the finder was sober, and there wasn’t a chance to apply logic to the situation. Personally, I would have posted to the guy’s own Facebook wall right away, but again, that’s logic and doesn’t apply when you’ve been drinking. I think the decision to brick it immediately caused more problems than just going with the flow for a few more hours and waiting for a call. Hell, send it a text, “hey, if you have my phone can you call me so I can meet you?”

The best way to avoid suspicion is to act like nothing is amiss.

“This is a big ad for MobileMe.”

I doubt it was intentional, but heck yeah, I’ve got a demo MobileMe account I haven’t played with much and now I’m really going to check it out. I’ve always been afraid of what might happen if my phone leaves my possession, maybe I have been overlooking something.

“Why didn’t Apple just remotely find the location of the device and go get it? Deliberately not recovering the phone was intentional.”

First, this isn’t the movies. Second, I’m not 100% sure of what MobileMe can ascertain about the device but finding the actual location of it was probably less important, and less possible, than securing the device. When it was discovered what happened, Apple had two choices. They could actively seek out the device, which would arouse suspicion and cause news stories, especially if they tried to use law enforcement channels. Or they could just assume that the device is in a lost and found box somewhere and that nobody would know the difference. Mr. Powell could retrace his steps and retrieve it, and nobody would be the wiser. I suspect Apple decided to play it cool and just assume that the server at the bar, who was the most likely to recover it, wouldn’t do a thorough examination of it and just put it in box in the office already full of lost hot pink Motorola RAZRs, Blackberries, and other iPhones in hot pink cases.

It’s a gamble, and in this case it didn’t work. Why? Because there are a lot of curious techie-types in Silicon Valley, and because Apple didn’t think like a bunch of curious techie-types who had been drinking.

It’s also very possible that Apple wasn’t involved in the initial response to the situation, and the bricking was just a “CRAP CRAP CRAP I’m so fired” response by Mr. Powell. He called the bar, they weren’t open or didn’t have it, and he continued freaking out. Irrational thinking, but totally understandable. It’s also a good argument against him being fired by Apple, by the way. That sort of additional pressure just makes mistakes bigger, and makes people more apt to try hiding a mistake, neither of which are productive.

“Why didn’t it just get turned in to Apple?”

From the story, it sounds like they tried, but ended up with a support ticket. To me, having worked in a help desk, this says that either the person reporting this wasn’t very clear about what they had, or that the person taking the call wasn’t properly empowered to escalate this to someone that could have handled the situation. It’s likely the caller didn’t know what they had at the time, because a nice, clear “I have a prototype iPhone that was lost and want to give it back” would have probably made the point, loud & clear.

“This has been seriously destructive to Apple’s marketing plans for iPhone 4.”

Doubtful. It’s not like it was working when Gizmodo had it. And what did we learn? We learned that everything we suspected would be in a new phone revision is, and that we can’t use our 3GS cases on the new phone. Big frickin’ deal. Steve Jobs can still do all the demos of the thing this summer and we’ll still be in awe. After all, the iPhone is way more about software than hardware.

Actually, it’d be pretty funny if Apple had Mr. Powell participate in the presentation this summer.

“Selling & buying stolen property is a dumb idea and Apple should prosecute everybody involved.”

I suspect that the legal status of the iPhone is questionable at best, and the people that found it can reasonably say they tried to notify the owner of the loss. If I were Apple I’d just want this whole incident to go away soon. Taking legal action against people isn’t a good way to make it go away quickly, but it is a good way to seem like a bunch of litigious jerks, and that’s not a good choice.

The other thing is that, given the prevalence of iPhones in the wild, why would someone finding one initially assume it’s a prototype? And unless it had a sticker on it saying “This is the property of Apple Computer” there is also no reason to even think it belongs to a company. iPhones are not popular with enterprises, yet. Frankly, beyond waiting just a little longer to brick it, a sticker would have helped immensely:

“This device belongs to Apple Computer. If you have it the person with it has obviously left it somewhere. Could you please call 1-800-whatever and we’ll arrange to get it? We’ll give you an iTunes gift card as a thank you.” That’s nice & non-suspicious.

“This was a plant.”

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

How To Submit Presentations To Conferences

Bob Plankers — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 04:29:20 +0000

With the VMworld 2010 call for papers out there I’ve been thinking about judging submissions to conferences. I’ve been fortunate enough to have helped judge papers for a couple of conferences, and it’s been pretty educational for me. I’ve seen a lot of good submissions, but also a lot of rough ones, too. I’ve kept some notes about what I’m thinking when I judge a presentation and I thought maybe it would be helpful to others.

1. If your presentation is just whipped together please say so, up front. Ideally you’d have spent some quality time with your presentation and submitted it in an excellent, finished state, but we all know how deadlines sneak up on us. It’s just that sometimes it’s really tough to figure out if a presenter thinks the slide deck is finished. A quick blurb about what you plan to do helps a lot, if only to reassure a judge that you know it needs polishing. You might also mention any graphics or demos you haven’t put in yet.

2. Submit your presentation in the form it will be presented, or in exactly the format asked for. Judges are being asked to figure out if the combination of you and your slide deck would be interesting to a bunch of people for 30 minutes. A ton of bullet points in Microsoft Word doesn’t tell them much about your ability to present your content to a room full of people, even if it looks like great stuff. Things like your font choices, slide layout, and general slide organization give judges clues about whether you’ll give a good presentation or not.

If the conference has rules about how to submit a presentation you should follow them precisely. Sometimes organizers want things in a specific format, to normalize the differences in presentation style or make it easier to distribute to judges. Don’t submit a PowerPoint presentation when they ask for only an outline in Microsoft Word 2007 format.

3. Skip the parts that are obvious to the audience. One of the biggest things I’ve looked for is whether the presenter has considered their audience at all. A great example of this is all the presentations at VMworld where the presenter spends 15 minutes telling the audience how great virtualization is. Well, duh! We know that, else we wouldn’t be at the conference. If your presentation is about how to optimize backup product X for virtual machines assume that everybody in the room wants to hear about how to optimize product X for virtual machines, and only that. Tell them things they don’t know on that topic only.

4. Don’t bring marketing presentations to a technical conference. Judges need about 3 brain cells to tell it was a marketing slide deck. How? Sometimes it’s because of the pros & cons slide that still lists how it lowers licensing sales as a con. That sounds like a pro to me, you sales droid scammer! Sometimes it’s because the presentation is about optimizing the performance of product X but the whole thing seems to be about why you should buy product X, or some add-on. Sometimes it’s just that there’s some sort of introduction by someone with “marketing” in their title. Let’s just say that I ask myself if I’d want to sit through each presentation I judge. If the answer is no, I won’t willingly make any of my fellow techies do so, either.

5. Delete markup & change tracking data. Microsoft Office products allow you to track the changes you’ve made to a document or slide deck, which can be a great way for a team to work on a document together. Get rid of that before you send it in. Believe me, you don’t want people to see that stuff.

6. Spell check your presentation. Grammar is one thing, but I’ve always been floored by the number of people that say “I don’t care at all” by not spell-checking their presentation. If you’re having trouble finding it the button looks like:

in the U.S.A. version of Microsoft PowerPoint 2007, and is usually near the top left of the window under “Review.” That is, if you’ve missed all the little red squiggles under the misspelled words and simultaneously forgot how to right-click. Or, maybe you’re a Mac user and don’t have a right mouse button… :)

7. Use less text. You’re giving a presentation, not writing a book, and the more text you put on a slide the less people will pay attention to you (and then leave to go download your slides). I’ve always been a fan of Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule: 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font. I like 30 point fonts. You can see them in back and on videos of the presentation, and it shows that you care about the audience reading your slides. If you want to put a lot of text on a slide for reference put it at the end, or put it in the notes for the slides.

One reason to put a lot of text on a slide is if you’re showing commands in a console. You might ask yourself if you need the whole screenshot. Is it important to show the formatting? Could you crop & magnify the image to make it easier to see in the back, but not lose the message? Or, maybe your audience just needs the command you ran, and not all the output, too.

8. Use black & white for text colors. High-contrast colors are easily seen from anywhere in the room and by people with color blindness. If you have to use another color do it sparingly, and keep it to a bold color like red or blue against a white background. Never use red and green together, or blue and yellow, because those are the most common types of color blindness. In fact, never use yellow for anything in a presentation because it cannot be seen, from anywhere, by anyone.

You’re at a disadvantage when you submit a presentation to conference organizers, because nobody can hear you talking and get a feel for the whole package. It’s very important, then, that your materials convey how you respect your future audience, their time, their knowledge and interests, and what they’ve done to get into the room with you. Do that and you’re set. Good luck!

Well Played, Google

Bob Plankers — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 07:39:34 +0000

Undoubtably you’ve seen the news about Google ending their censoring in mainland China:

Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong. Users in Hong Kong will continue to receive their existing uncensored, traditional Chinese service, also from Google.com.hk.

Personally, I love this solution, as it’s an elegant exploitation of the politics of China.

1. Remember that Hong Kong was turned over to China in 1997. According to Wikipedia, “The Basic Law [of Hong Kong] stipulates that Hong Kong shall enjoy a ‘high degree of autonomy’ in all matters except foreign relations and military defence.” This is how they kept all the people from fleeing Hong Kong, even though it went from a British colony to a Communist state overnight.

2. Continuing in the “please don’t leave us, we like your money” department China doesn’t censor Hong Kong’s Internet.

3. That hypocrisy is now biting them in the duff. Now they can either piss off a ton of their wealthiest citizens by forcing censorship on them, or risk insurrection by allowing open Internet access in the mainland.

Well played, Google.

Update: When I first wrote this I guess I didn’t think about Hong Kong being outside the Great Firewall. Blocking of search results is still happening, but Google is no longer complicit with it, which I think is good. Besides, it’s still planting a question in mainland Chinese citizens’ heads: why are people in Hong Kong better than me?

Immortals

Bob Plankers — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 06:40:06 +0000

It’s an interesting thing, this life. You’re born, you live, you die. And along the way there are certain epochs, milestones, that mark the journey. Early on you don’t remember these things, like learning to walk, or, just as crucial, going to the bathroom on your own. Sometimes you do remember them, like your first kiss, or holding your own offspring for the first time. Sometimes the events are obvious milestones, sometimes it takes years before you realize they were signs along the road.

Sometimes these milestones are like the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, though. As much as you know they’re a part of life you’d like to put them back, take a do-over, and go back to blissful ignorance. Like the day you learn, for sure, 100%, that your parents aren’t immortal. Now, don’t confuse this with learning that your parents are human. At some point we all figure out that parents are, to some degree, human, making mistakes and being grumpy and irrational and all that. But at some point it’ll occur to you that your parents won’t always be around, and that’s a huge thought all on its own.

We learned of my father’s stomach cancer late in October 2000. Six months later he was gone. I was in denial most of the time he was dying, that it could be happening at all, that it was possible for it to happen to someone I cared about. It took me years afterward to wrap my head around the idea that he was gone. In fact, if you go with the five stages of grief, I was stuck at “anger” for quite a number of years. But I still had my mom, and while I couldn’t ask her for advice on replumbing my house she kept the immortal flame of parenthood burning in all the other good ways.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. Not coincidentally, it’s been about that same amount of time since I was reminded, again, that my parents are not immortal. This time, a brain tumor. Possibly operable, likely quite treatable, but still a shock.[0] Doubly so because this is a threat to the last bastion of the old ways, the homestead, and the status quo of my family. My father’s death, and the ensuing nine years, have given me experience to deal with this sort of thing, but it’s still been this inedible lump sitting there for me to digest. And while I’ve been nibbling away at it I lost all my will to write, to do link posts with snarky comments, or to even update Facebook and Twitter. In fact, I missed my annual tribute to my father on his birthday, recycling some of his own snarky comments. I really feel bad about that, but I suspect he’d understand.

I don’t write all this fishing for sympathy or anything. I’m not. While it sucks, we all eventually go through it, and if anything talking about it helps me sort some of it out. This post is more of an apology for disappearing and a pledge that, since I’ve found some of my words again, I’ll post occasionally on the topic. After all, this blog is about technology, and a hell of a lot of it is being used on my mom, by no less than brain surgeons. Most importantly, though, this post is a plea, in the sage words of a billboard along U.S. Highway 151 between Dubuque and Madison: call your mom. I’m sure she’d like to hear from you.

It sure is an interesting thing, this life.

———————

[0] Anaplastic astrocytoma. If you Google it realize that while astrocytomas are not rare catching them in this stage (anaplastic, or WHO Grade III) is. They’re usually found when smaller or larger. As such, there isn’t a ton of data about prognoses or treatment. In fact, it was only a few years ago that they started using radiation AND chemotherapy together on these tumors, and there isn’t a lot of published data on the survival rates now, mainly because those people are still alive. Can’t argue with that. :)

iPad vs. Netbook: Netbook FTW

Bob Plankers — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:38:03 +0000

I’m glad to see the iPad is announced. It looks like an interesting device, not quite a notebook, not quite an iPhone. I, however, don’t see how it’s anything beyond a portal to give Apple more money.

Please, if you see I’ve made an error here let me know in the comments. Thank you!

1. AT&T. Seriously, a “breakthrough” deal with AT&T is like being the fastest reader in remedial reading class. You’re still in remedial reading class.

2. No Flash. It’s astonishing how much stuff I watch in Flash on my laptop, and it being missing on this device is going to be a big hole. Lots of stuff is in YouTube, but not everything, and HTML5 isn’t going to solve this problem for quite a while, either.

3. You still need a desktop to dock this thing to, for anything beyond basic downloading or web browsing. Despite what some apps can do (including iWork), it really is just a standalone viewer of content.

4. The dock and keyboard setup is a kludge. It appears clunky, certainly not easily portable, and looks like it’ll fall over when you try to click on something by touching it. I’m skeptical. I think a netbook or cheap laptop will continue to smoke the iPad for anybody who needs to type anything. Heck, you can add an external USB keyboard and a mouse to a netbook.

5. E-books with DRM. There is no mention of being able to use anything but EPUB format books. I’d like to be able to read things from Project Gutenberg, for example, or anything that an independent party might like to push out. Furthermore, it looks as if EPUB doesn’t work well for technical books or books that need precision graphics placement (comic books, for example).

6. No user-replaceable batteries, though it’s not a huge deal because you can charge just about anywhere. If their battery life figures aren’t inflated it should be enough for a day’s use. Plus, with a tablet I’m anticipating third-party form-fitting add-ons that boost battery life. I worry about wear on the battery, though — after a year or so of daily charging batteries lose significant capacity.

7. It is still tied to the draconian App Store policies. Apple still controls who can put what on this device, and their policies are not consumer-friendly. Take Google Voice as an example. Maybe Apple should watch their first commercial, “1984,” and see what their message was then.

8. No multitasking. On a real computing device you can switch between apps and not lose your place. I understand the implications for battery life and whatnot, but I’d like the option to quickly switch between apps, like an SSH client and a web browser, and keep my sessions.

Looking at Apple’s list of things they think the iPad can do better:

Browsing: netbooks for the win. A netbook has Flash and can run any web browser, not just the Apple-prescribed browser and technologies.

Email: netbooks for the win. The external keyboard is a kludge, not portable, and I’m guessing they added it because typing on the screen sucks.

Photos: I’ve changed this based on new information in the comments. I didn’t realize that the iPad had a camera connector, so I’ll dub this a tie. Netbooks are more flexible and can run more software packages, but the display & interface on the iPad will likely smoke a netbook’s. What does remain to be seen is if iPhoto or something like it will be ported to Windows. If that happens it’s iPad FTW.

Video: netbooks for the win. Aside from the lack of Flash on the iPad, which disables most Internet video players, you are only able to watch video encoded with Apple-prescribed codecs.

Music: iPad. The iPod is the standard, and the iPad will draw on that heritage.

Games: iPad. The games for the iPhone and iPad are so-so, but netbooks really don’t have the ability or interface to play anything.

eBooks: libraries for the win. A paperback book doesn’t take any power, can be read in many differing conditions, isn’t made of toxic waste, isn’t locked to a carrier, doesn’t have a monthly fee (though one would argue your library has a fee in the form of taxes), can be loaned to your cousin, is available at millions of locations, has an easy-to-use interface, can be dropped on the floor or crushed in your luggage, and can be donated to or borrowed from a library or a book swap when you’re done with it.

I think, for now, I’ll stick with a netbook and a paperback.

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