Quick post:

I updated last night to the new 2.0.1 iphone software… and it fixes a few of the bugs in 2.0.0 - namely the browser/other apps crashing regularly and randomly (this isn’t a huge issue in browser as it restarts and usually goes back to page you are looking at) - but since installation, this morning, I had zero crashes in one hour of surfing on the train to work.

So overall, I’d say if you have an iPhone, you want to install 2.0.1 asap.

This is in reply to the recent excellent blog post from Matthew Sparkes at PC Pro.

I too own a big camera (Nikon D80) + some long lenses (well a stablised 18-200mm + a 70-300mm depending on the occasion, + some fast smaller fixed lenses - the 200-400 is sadly just a dream).

Not that I’m a pap or a professional photographer, I just enjoy photography.   It seriously is starting to annoy me (as it is Matthew) when I’m refused entry to gig’s or told to leave camera behind - especially when pictures are for my own enjoyment and not publication on net or otherwise.    Its even more annoying as the tickets to gigs, nor anything online say you’re not allowed to take personal cameras  - and it is the goons on the door responsible for policing a unwritten rule.

I see people with higher megapixel counts in small cameras being allowed in (and with similar zooms, just smaller bodies) - yet why am I refused entry with what is only a semi-pro camera with a prosumer lens (I’m not taking a pro lens to a gig without being in the press box!!).

Now, I have a dilema, should I just forget taking my proper camera equipment places, and just stick to consumer cameras ?- or should I complain every time I go to a gig?

Or should I simply do as I’ve been considering a few months now and actually just get a real publication to sponsor me for a press pass - get my pics published - and go to gigs as a bona-fide press member instead?

I was advised by a Friend about the ElonexOne last week - its like the EEE, small, (well smaller), web surfing - but is a tablet/laptop hybrid instead of a pure Laptop like the EEE.    It’s also a lot cheaper, looking to retail at £99 in UK.   I’ll read the reviews when it appears though the friend mentioned already has a pre-order in, so I will have hands-on within a few weeks.

Personally I think this trend towards small useful tech is great - when travelling personally as discuessed in previous posts I don’t always want a full laptop… just one capacble of reading blogs, writing blogs, and doing basic text/image manipulation.   Ie, to keep me in contact with the wired world in an effective manner.

On the subject of which I’m buying a PSP slim and light in the next week - as my frequent train journeys have proven I ideally need something to play games, watch music on - and the screen on the PSP seems to beat most of the media players on the market….

Well, I have decided to build my own NAS with raid-1, as the chassis on the market just plain don’t do what I want for the price I want.

I want:

• min of 2 drive bays
• User installable disks

Looking online that left me with 3 options, a Dlink, a Qnap and a Linksys. All were resonably expensive when disks were added, and none really could recover from a lost disk with grace.. Also if the mainboard went I realised I’d be screwed if I couldn’t get an exact same controller in 3-4 years time (no mean feat).

Soo….

I’m building one. I’ve worked out prices for a system (including disks) are rough equivalent to a box without - if using a mini-itx box.. with 1.5 Ghz processor and 512Mb of ram, I can get case, cabling, mainboard, and memory + 2x 250 Gb disks for ~£220 (edited from original £150) - my calculations were a bit out.    With different parts sourcing I think I could get it down to £200 by sourcing the disks from an alternative.   Minus disks its still viable alternative to the Linksys and Dlink products (both going for £120-150 without any sata disks - and a lot more flexible).

Question is now freenas or go for a native Debian install (I’m prob going to do latter - purely as this allows me to add itunes etc server capabilities)!

And yes, to the nay-sayers, I know this will use a little more power than the linksys/qnap, but thats more than made up by the fact I can expand to 4 disks if necessary… such fun! And the box will be able to be ssh’ed into and run downloads remotely for me.. Such possibility.

Another downside though is the fact the case I’m getting is slightly larger, and thus will require me to free a little space. That said it does take 4 disks, not 2.

Upsides are of course in event of failure I can just replace mainboard with another mini-itx, powersupply etc easily. All bases covered, and equivlent price to a commerical soln, and a new home project.

(Note to all this is all in aid of getting the Sonos setup with a nas, as I don’t want the monster powered home PC with no raid acting as the server).

I don’t know if its me, but all these Christmas sales are just not interesting me right now…

Mostly the items are “B” stock, or stock thats not been out pre Christmas at all..

Worst however is the technical goods in which I like - yes there are a small number of genuine bargains to be had if you queue outside Currys at 7am Boxing day - but myself - I can wait.

In my opinion at least I think the real bargains will come ~ 20 Jan- 15 Feb when the current Furore has died down and companies want to sell goods to a nation who have just spent all their money in the sales.    Heres hoping that the Sony TV I want will drop to the price I’m willing to pay then (at the moment the sale price is only £30 less than the price last 2 months!)

I’m in a dilema on whether to buy a Macbook or Asus eee PC - or both.    If I got a Mac I’d still have to keep the work PC for use at work - but would work from home using Citrix just fine on the mac.

Reason for mac:
1/   I really want to move to a Mac - the form factor isn’t massive and the kit is reliable (unlike the Dells laptop work have issued me that I currently suffer with.    It seems to need constant maintance).
I’m doing a fair bit of JAVA/SOAP programming at the moment (at home) - and although OSX doesn’t currently have JDK/JRE 1.6 - that isn’t a big issue as everything I write is JDK 1.5 based anyhow.    I’m sure not all Dell laptops are as bad as the D610 I use (certainally at work with 5 of us with them I’m the only one who has had a new mainboard, system disk, memory, battery, and screen within 2 years) - and I’m sure my experience isn’t typical.

2/   With parallels/bootcamp I could run and develop/test the few Windows apps I have written in the past still using my spare MSDN XP license, but stay in a BSD environement the rest of the time as most of the kit I work on  just needs a serial console/web browser nowadays.

Downsides:

1/   The mac isn’t ulta portable.    eee basically is.
2/    I already have a work laptop - so when travelling I already take this - the personal laptop would be taken for personal photos etc whilst on road.     Would need a 2-laptop bag for the airport!

Upsides to the eee:
1/    It is ultra portable - wouldn’t need a 2-laptop bag for work trips.
2/   It runs linux.
3/   Excellent battery life.

Downsides:
1/   Small screen - too small?   Will need to see one first!
2/   Small keyboard - is it too small?
3/   Would NOT be able to run Windows apps on the box.    This could also be an upside.
4/   Limited ram/storage.    With my photography from one weekend sometimes taking 3Gb - I would need ot leave photos on mem cards when travelling rather than dumping to laptop - especially on an extended trip.
5/   Unsure whether I could do any Java work whilst on road.

So as the above - the macbook will do everything, but maybe be to big.   The eee is the right form factor, but won’t do everything!     I am not doing personal work on the office laptop - as experience ref: its reliability means I don’t trust it with my personal photos/data - let alone code I have toiled hours over.

Any suggestions on other things I should consider?    I don’t want the super mini Sony I think it is that I’ve seen with the tiny screen/tiny keyboard…    The OLP laptop looks interesting though once it is realised to the public - I’m just concerned how usable it will be for adults - its certainally a good rival to the eee.

I don’t know how many other IT pro’s are affected by this - but I find an increasing amount of my daily time is spent telling people how I don’t want a meeting about new product X as it will not be beneficial for either party as we are not interested in that product.

This was brought to a head last week, where I had to tell one vendor that if they continued calling the company I would have to get the company legal team to write them a letter advising of harrassment (and maybe take matter further).

Brief summation of what occurred.
Company X :    I am phoning to tell you about our great new product that manages DNS changes, DHCP, WINS and other directorys.     reduces time etc (2 min sales pitch)
Me:    We are not interested, none of the above presents us with management problems enough to justify your product.   Thank you goodbye.

Callback one hour later:
Company X:   I know we called earlier, but I don’t think I got the point across clearly enuogh about how much time this product with save your team (and thus reduced costs).
Me :   (cut off after 1 min when other end takes a breath) It was perfectly clear earlier thank you.   None of these problems are operation or management issues and do not take much of the teams time as it is, so this product is in fact useless to us.

Callback two hours later:
Company X:    Hello Mr Jones,
Me:    (recognising voice) No, we are not interested in product Y.     Please stop calling us, you are wasting my, and your time.   Goodbye.

Not surprisingly Three hours later, got passed a call via supplier management team from same company - and had to then tell them again to stop calling and played the legal card.

Most annoying, and to be honest now even if company X ever call back with a new super product I am unlikely to ever deal with them due to the above set of calls.

Apologies for the rant!

Is this is all occurring because cold-calling (or hot calling from companies who have my details) is outsourced now, and the person calling gets a bonus if a conf call or meeting is arranged?   I suspect so!

The past few weekends have been fun in a way - we have just completed 99.99% of decomissioning 2x football pitch sized computer rooms.    This is as of last weekend, and finally completed moving into what is a 3 row x 10 rack sized one.   One thing remains, which is to decomission the 6500 switches that ran the old room, but thats it!

Its quite sad, as when I joined the company 6 years ago the datacenter was buzzing with VAX’es (yes still), Alphas running VMS… + lots of 6-8U servers.

The 6-8U boxes were replaced with 2U boxes, then more capacity was added with 1U boxes over these years, so the floorspace stayed the same (although air-con was greatly increase as was power!).    This is now circa 2005.

So what happened?

Well 2 years ago the company made the decision to move to a different model, and thus the current computer room/space was deemed to need closing, with 75% of services moving to a US central datacenter, and the remaining 25% going to a new smaller room in another building (though on new hardware).   In modern terms consolodation.

To acomplish this several techniques were used:

1/   WAN upsizing
2/   WAN Acceleration (for the US bound apps).   Will do a blogpost on just this in a few months time - needless to say it works very well (for 90% of apps - but we couldn’t move ALL apps as it isn’t perfect!)
3/   Move to blade servers.
4/   Virtualisation (including of the VMS platforms).    The Alphas remained Alphas.

This blog post covers 3/ and 4/

I’m sure we’re not the first datacentre to do this, but it does follow current thinking (and we hear every week of other companies doing likewise).

For virtualisation we chose VMware and done p2v migrations of all boxes, moving 100 servers onto 6 physical boxes, with the new dynamic clustering technologies just being deployed to maximise CPU usage amongst the cluster and give best performance (ie if a box is busy the non-busy boxes are migrated off that box to give them better performance).

For blades, we went Dell, and although not all physical boxes did get moved to blades in the original pass (a lot of 1U boxes remained), these are being replaced as time goes on.   The only thing keeping us currently on 1U boxes is the max disk size on the blades is currently limited (without using the SAN space).   The next generation of blades should address this apparently.

As its the end of the project as of this weekend we can look at it with rose tinted glasses, but when you look at what was achieved, it is truely amazing, over 1000 servers and services all moved between buildings, or across the atlantic - All with no downtime experienced by the end users apart from the usual scheduled maintaince weekends.    The team involved are notably proud of the achievement.

Of course there are noticable downsides in some ways - which I cannot exclude:

1/   We are now completely depending on transatlantic comms (this is mitigated in a way by using 3x carriers, using different paths).
2/   We have limited space to grow in the new room - in comparision to the old room.   We do NOT now have space to reverse the procedure.
3/   We have a greatly reduced hardware team - they have a smaller amount of hardware to support - but now due to virtualisation each box does run more.     If we lose over 2 vmware nodes, the rest of the cluster could not cope and thus a huge amount of servers would go off-air.

This is just my experiences of data centre shinking (summarised) in the real world - what are your experiences?

So its time for my holiday, so no blog activity for a few weeks as I lose my office ties and go  to Hong Kong/China/Macau - itinery is pretty fluid, I do have a return to office date that I can’t miss though.

Well tell a lie, I’m taking my smartphone, but work don’t have that number, and I’m leaving the office Blackberry and laptop behind.    I considered takign the laptop, but (most annoyingly) found my SLR and lenses + laptop do not both fit within the allowed cabin baggage allowance (mainly down to weight of a few large glass lenses rather than size, and a heavy laptop model (17″ widescreens do weigh more).   So instead of a laptop I am taking 8GB of various sized SD cards, a Canon Ixus, a Nikon SLR + 2 lenses, a smartphone, speakers.    The current cabin baggage allowance does annoy, in the old days a laptop bag + bagpack for SLR wasn’t an issue.   I will take a TV cable for the cameras to check the photo’s clarity on the big screen.

This “losing office ties” system generally leaves me refreshed - its not really the lack of technology that does it, more the fact the office can’t contact me for a few weeks - and the freedom from callout and work pressures.

In fun things to do in China, it will be buy buy buy on all manner of technological goods.!

Backnote:  I just spent 2 weeks in Hong Kong, including a side trip to Macau.

Hong Kong shows how IT and systems in general should work and well.    Perfect example is the Octopus card.     Oyster in London is similar but not as ubiquitous.     In Hong Kong you can use in all forms of public transport except taxi’s using one prepay card.    Can also use it in all 7-11 shops, most supermarkets, most vending machines, McDonalds…    Very very useful.    Most useful on bus’es where cleverly you just pay a set fee based on the bus (and where it is on the route), regardless of where you get off.   With my lowest bus fare costing me a massive 5p, and 90p at most… you get the picture.   Everyone has a card (even kids) and all use it.

My belief is the entire UK should adopt a similar system for paying for transport at the least  - you realise just how efficient it is when you drive locally around a city in England (not London) with no Octopus, and see how long the bus has to wait while people pay.    In Hong Kong that doesn’t exist - so adoptign such a system could be considered to assist with gridlock.   How many delays are caused by people paying for buses - I don’t know, but it certainally would improve some routes.

Of coruse its not just the Octopus.

Mobile coverage is amazing, the tube has 3g coverage throughout the ENTIRE network.    Totally amazing to see, people are polite and generally don’t talk so you can hear them in HK so its not as annoying as I thought it would be     Also the fact I kept a msn conversation up with someone I was meeting via my cellphone and was able to get them to meet me as I came off the train (they were also on mobile msn) (as it is cheaper than calling a HK number on a UK roaming phone).     Another example was on the boat to macau - 30 mins from HK, still perfect 3g data coverage, so was checking my email on the boat with my mini-keyboard.

More HK meanderings later in the week!