AlexHopmann.com

As Kat has pointed out the honeymoon with the Q is long over. I was in to the Verizon store for like the 4th time to get it fixed. A couple of months ago the phone locked up and this is my third replacement. To be honest I’m not sure if the issue is the Windows Mobile OS, the drivers that Motorola creates / their custom stuff, or bad hardware. But the latest phone was especially annoying- after about 30 minutes of being on it would lose its ability to send or receive calls. Try to place a call and it just locks up.

To Verizon’s credit, their service so far has been very good with one exception. The previous time I was in there the tech looked at the phone and decided I had an old version of the OS on it and told me to go home and update it. When I did the update it just told me I already have the latest version. But other than that every tech has been happy to exchange the phone right away. Its a bit slow- they have to do some messing around with their computer and transfer my contacts. I brought a magazine this time so I wouldn’t be stuck reading their lame promotional materials. But in the end they have been willing to replace them no question (except for that one guy) so I’m happy with the service level.

On another note- today is iDay. Many blogs have made fun of Verizon’s attempts to counter-market against the iPhone and AT&T. Mostly it is a lost cause, but I did notice the Verizon store was more crowded and staffed than I’ve ever seen it (and in the middle of the afternoon when its usually pretty dead). It has to sting for AT&T that just about every iPhone review metnions the lamest thing about the phone is their service.

This looks very cool, via Engadget.

Over on the Jackson Fish link blog Hillel comments on this post about how companies increasingly need to compete on their ability to maintain complex hardware systems that “As best I can tell this is only true for an ever-shrinking category of very large software companies. The virtual hosting companies are scaling to larger and larger heights and making even very large deployments more cost-effective to outsource. I don’t know that this trend will stop any time soon.”

Hillel, Walter and I were talking about this over lunch the other day and it feels like a pretty interesting topic, partly because the industry is in such flux over these issues.

Maybe its a cop out, but I’m going to fall back on “it depends”. It depends on the technology you want to deploy, it depends on the business requirements and costs of your situation. Just as some people make a mistake in approaching web-development in a “do everything with some specific approach and a relational database” mindset, a one-size-fits-all approach to hosting is a mistake, at least at the moment (its possible that technical and business progress will change this eventually).

If your business needs only require mostly static web-sites, heck, you will probably be fine with one of the $10/month hosting accounts. On the other hand if you need a very dynamic environment where for one reason or another you potentially need to host multiple things in different virtual machines with the ability to scale things up (storage in addition to CPU), I’m not sure that any of the existing hosting solutions will meet your needs. My experience with them is that they tend to have some degree of inflexibility, either in storage or in adding additional compute resources. If they do let you scale up your needs, are they as cost effective once you are using the whole box instead of a time-slice of it? Can they support load-balance across more than 1 machine when you need more resources than a single box can handle?

Furthermore, its fairly important to look at these things in terms of the business situation. What’s the cost of being down for 8 hours? What’s the cost of having to do a few extra days of development to fit into the constraints of a hosting system? What’s the cost of hiring the ops guy to run your own machines? How much ops support are you really getting from the outsourced host? These factors can go either way- if you have a good hosting provider that matches your technology stack pick, that can be a big help. Or Hillel and some other friends have even pointed out that it often is a good business decision to pick the technology stack based on what you can host efficiently. Realistically development for whichever stack is mostly similar (at least in efficiency- there are plenty of other issues) today, so pick the one you can run well.

Let’s analyze some cost issues. I had a cheap low-end hosting account but have moved most of my services over to a rack-server that I own in a data-center. My server cost me $1600 initially and I pay $60/month at the moment for my co-location service. This server is currently a 2×2ghz Woodcrest system with 2gb RAM and I’m running 3 virtual machines on it for various ventures/web sites. I look at hardware investments are depreciating over pretty much 2 years. By 2 years from now its pretty hard for the hardware to be worth the space in the rack (at least the way I’m paying for it- once you have a bunch of machines the math can work out slightly differently). However I did fairly carefully pick out a system where for an additional $1000-$2000 I can increase my CPU capability by 4-6x, RAM to 6GB pretty easily and I can put in 4TB of disk space. So the depreciation isn’t straight, but I’ll still write-off (in this model) $800 cost to the box this year. So my total monthly cost is $125.

Walter was pointing out that you can get shared space on a virtual server for probably $35/month. This gives you 1/16th of a box that is probably much less powerful than the one I’m running on and fairly limited RAM and storage (I think 256mb and 20GB. I need to double check with him on these stats). I’ve seen others that give similar capabilities for more like $75/month. BUT (a) if you aren’t using the extra capability, it doesn’t matter. My box is probably averaging less than 5% utilization, so there you have it. (b) if the hosted box isn’t fully used by the other people sharing it, you get to burst CPU higher than your 1/16th. So one of the nice things of my overcapacity on my box is the response time of my sites tends to be very good because the machine isn’t busy doing other things. Its one of those interesting things with networking technology that once a machine is loaded requests queue up and they all slow down just like a traffic jam. Both of these situations can benefit from this, although in the shared hosting situation you don’t have control over it- if other people max out their 1/16ths, your machine is under load, tough.

The other difficult factor for analysis is of course the human costs. My solution only costs $125/month (including hardware depreciation). But to get it setup I had to build the machine, go down to the data-center, and install it. I have to manage OS updates (security patches and similar fun), although conversely I get to manage OS updates and don’t need to worry about someone else destabilizing my machine with a new version of something that I’m not expecting. It doesn’t take a lot of hours of work to make the economics look much worse. But just because someone else is doing the hosting doesn’t mean that you won’t get stuck with this- I’ve spent way more hours messing around with the 1and1 servers than with my own- I’m happy to say that since I put my data-center server up last December I’ve never seen it in over 6 months and only very rarely have I had to touch it.

Some other questions to consider if you are relying on someone else for hosting. What’s their backup plan? I’m not saying that mine is great. But if the CPU hosting your service dies, what happens? Are they actually going to be able to get you back online in less than 24 hours? Do they have redundant storage? Do they actually test the backups? Do they have the excess capacity?

The thing is- I’ve never seen one of these hosting outfits that really explains clearly their procedures for all this stuff. Look, you are paying them less than $100/month. Sure they all say they backup. They have redundancy. But to be clear, without a detailed technical document explaining how they manage all that stuff and/or some form of financial arrangement where they compensate me for downtime (which would be unheard of in this price bracket), I just don’t believe it.

Now, the big disclaimer on all the above. This is a space where the technology and business framework is changing rapidly. Its pretty easy to imagine how services like Amazon’s EC2 and other grid compute services will evolve into a space where they can really provide automatic, flexible, scalable pay-per-use computing that can be used to host commercial web-sites and web-services. I’m just saying it smells like its a couple of years away from this stuff being really ready for many commercial applications.

Until that magic service really gets perfected another alternative suggests itself for small companies, although I’ve never seen it work. I could imagine a bunch of the Seattle area startups getting together, investing in a 1/4 rack, 4-6 machines, and a half or quarter time ops person. With virtual machines, a bunch of folks that trust each other, and the right smart design you could pull of something that is both inexpensive, but also really robust, flexible, and safe. Just a thought.

Cool!

The BBC has posted videos of most of Glastonbury 2007. This link should take you to the Hold Steady show but it looks like they are all online there.

I went ahead and bought the Gigabyte SilentPipe GF 8600GTS for my existing media center box. I noticed that the fan had frozen on the existing card in the box and that could certainly explain some of the failures of that machine. Plus I’m hoping that this card will move into the new media center machine in a fairly straightforward way. It was a bit risky to get the Nvidia one before the benchmarks on the ATI Radeon 2600 XT came out. Those benchmarks came out today and the 8600GTS beats the 2600XT in just about every test, although for now they still only have the gaming tests (grrr). The media tests are yet to come, and those are the critical ones I feel for the cards in this price / utility segment.

The NVidia card from Gigabyte has been working great. The construction seems very solid and while it does take two slots it seems to do a good job of cooling without a fan. Somehow while installing it I managed to fry the on-board networking on my media center, so I had to get a card for that. With the two-slot video card I was out of normal PCI slots, but I noticed there was a PCI-express 1-lane slot that was open. Luckly DLink makes a PCI-express ethernet card which has also been working great. Still, it was pretty amazing that there is pretty much only one PCI-express networking card that exists in the market.

I’m joining the chorus of folks pointing to Marc Andreessen’s new blog. To be honest, if you had asked me a few months ago I would not have predicted to find great stuff coming from him, but I’m genuinely impressed by how insightful most of his posts are. Back in 1998 there was a book published by two business school professors called Competing on Internet Time that was based on lots of interviews with folks at Netscape about their wonderful business and technical innovations. Its unfortunate that this book was published more or less right away because from my perspective most of the insights in this book were complete crap. Many of their best strategies were (from my perspective being right in the middle of the whole Internet war of the late 90s) directly related to their downfall (not that going from $0 to $6B is a failure, but Netscape the company failed at most of their goals of that time frame).

Of course its unfair to judge someone by their perspectives from a decade ago. I’d certainly hope that people would give me a chance to show that I’ve learned a few things over time and Marc’s recent posts hit it out of the park. One of his most recent is on The Moby Dick theory of working with big companies. I can confirm many of his observations. Working inside Microsoft things were often internally much more chaotic than our smaller partners would think and as he observes, we were usually focused on our big competitors (incidentally this is one of the things Netscape did wrong, putting itself onto the big competitor radar sooner than it needed to). We would work with smaller companies attempting to be benign- I can’t think of a time that we ever really thought of a small company as a threat although it would be pretty easily to accidentally stomp on several of them (just through the availability of massive resource to tackle any problem that looked interesting to the big markets). Some times we were especially nice and would even explicitly discuss trying to watch out for the small companies. For example, when launching the technologies that become .NET 3.0 back in early 2003, we knew were were a ways off from shipping (although no one would have guessed it would take until the end of 2006 to ship) and wanted to be careful that we didn’t encourage some small company to jump on board too quickly and potentially be stuck without products they could take to market. Still in the end there is only so much you can do, since you don’t want to express doubt about the products you are launching and as I said no one internally would have thought it was going to take nearly that long to ship. Imagine the fate of the poor company that based their strategy around building on WinFS?

On the other side I can confirm the small-company side having observed how we dealt with our AOL relationship at Pure Networks. Pure cut a deal with AOL early on (before I joined) and that deal was pretty complicated waters for us to navigate, between trying to read the tea leaves of AOL reorgs, trying to understand their motivations, and of course the hurry up and wait phenomena where after months of ignoring us they would suddenly decide they needed something right away and then just as quickly go back into silent running. I do think management did a pretty good job of keeping people focused on not letting the AOL deal take over the direction of the company.

This weekend on our way back from the Grand Canyon we stopped in Vegas for two nights. Saturday night we had dinner at Robuchon’s “The Mansion” at the MGM. I’ve been to L’atelier de Joel Robuchon several times and its been pretty much my favorite dining experience in the country (or at least up in the top couple), so trying out Robuchon’s high-end place was pretty exciting.

Overall the meal was fantastic. From the excellent service, to the selection of 10 kinds of breads (including one with bacon! Bacon goes with everything…), to the candy selection at the end with like 40 different choices of little bites, it was a great, over the top experience. I wasn’t in the mood to take pictures of everything or take notes, but there were a number of highlights including some great caviar, a great combo of sea-food dishes, and a veal in herb-jus.

There are two other notes worth mentioning. The first is that I was surprised by what felt like a bit of kitsch with the meal. Maybe its an attempt to fit in with the general kitsch-nature of Vegas, or maybe it was just trying to be fancy somehow in a slightly clumsy way. One of the seafood dishes came out on a little net, with some shells. Many of the plates were beautiful, but some were just a bit over-done and distracting. Plus the music was pretty cheesy- again, we aren’t sure if it was a plan or an accident but during some of the main seafood dishes they were playing a musak version of one of the songs from the Little Mermaid.

Its kind of funny, but it makes a difference whether it was an intentional “Vegas” joke or just clumsy. When I first went to Vegas I pretty much hated it and it was years later that I came to appreciate it for all the cheese and neon and fake other-parts-of-the-world. Done in that context stuff can be really fun that would be just lame somewhere else like Seattle, Paris or New York. I’m hoping that is what was going on.

The other note is that I’m feeling pretty jaded/burned out on over the top meals. I suppose its not surprising, but a 16-course thing like this doesn’t have the same wonder that it used to. It certainly isn’t something I could do that often and 95% of the time I’d probably enjoy the Atelier more for its cool and more approachable style. We also went to Craft Steak the previous night which with its focused, more simple preparations seemed more in tune with my mood lately. Having said that the meal at the Mansion was great and I’m really glad that I finally got to experience it.

Earlier I mentioned looking at the Zalman HD135 and HD160 cases for the new media computer I’m going to build this summer. I was at Frys earlier today and had a chance to check them both out in person. The HD135 looked much nicer than the HD160. The HD160 doesn’t use thumbscrews to get the case off- you have to remove 5 normal screws to open the case. Now, hopefully you aren’t doing that often, but it sounds like a major pain when you do. The HD135 seems to have plenty of room for everything, tons of drives, and its a bit smaller height (although slightly deeper but that should be ok).

Via Engadget Seagate has introduced a 2.5″ drive, the EE25.2 that packs 80GB and is good to 16,000 feet. This might be a solution for a drive to use in unpressurized aircraft, although frankly 16,000 feet is a bit low- 25,000 would cover the territory much better since I doubt there are many folks going above 25,000′ without pressuraization. Then again, they brag about the previous generation being used on Mt Everest where base-camp is 17,000 (and the peak is 29,000ft). so they are pretty much advocating using it beyond-spec.

I suspect a SSD will still be a better solution for us pilots although there is no word on the pricing yet.

In a reversal of the usual “Boeing or Airbus builds it and the airlines get to pick between the two” model, EasyJet, a European low-cost airline has proposed a new aircraft design. I wonder if this is also a symptom of the reduced competition from only really having two manufacturers. It departs from the traditional of these two organizations in some really important ways and is telling about how the big guys aren’t innovating enough in aircraft design (although the 787 comes close).

EasyJet flies lots of short-hop routes and they presumably know that cruise speed has little impact on gate-to-gate time for most passengers. Fly 50 knots slower and you save a TON of fuel. Also by going with an unducted turbine (its not clear what the difference is between this and a turbine-driven propeller) you get better efficiencies in the mid-altitudes where there is a ton less traffic and less climb and descent times. Those atltitudes are fairly empty because traditional ducted jet engines are really inefficient until you get up almost to 30,000 feet.

Combine that with a composite design (like the 787 but it sounds like they are taking it further more like my Columbia), and a relatively small passenger capacity (for lots of direct flights, shorter bording / exit times) and it seems like you have a real winner. They seem to think they can get Boeing ot Airbus to build it by 2015. I hope those guys are paying attention since it seems like an airplane like this could be a real successor to the 737 (which so far is pretty much the most successful commercial aircraft design in history on a number of metrics from safety to production).

Meanwhile there was an interesting program on NPR this morning about the “overloaded air traffic system”. While I grant that there are some choke points where things get overloaded, it was really disappointing to see the bullshit from the representative of the Airline Transport Association. Most of the time, in most of the country there is plenty of extra capacity (although I’ll grant that the controllers are probably overworked and that we potentially have a serious issue with mass retirements over the next couple of years).

The ATA, representing the major airlines, is creating a “crisis” here to mask the incompetence of their larger members. The big airlines are so out of control for a number of reasons, including poor systems, business model flaws (the crazy pricing system), their hub system, and others, that they are flailing around to blame others.

Let me give some examples- I’ve looked at the arrival schedules at the major airports and the same airline will have 100 airplanes arriving in the same 30 minutes. Go figure they have some traffic problems? They are surprised they have delays from this? They also haven’t figured out how to spread to the other feeder airports in a meaningful way. They love to complain about General Aviation (GA) as being part of the blame, but for the most part we are using the OTHER 5000 airports across the country and are in completely different sets of altitudes (at least until that EasyJet design comes into play).

American Airlines is so incompetent that I have witnessed multiple incidents of an airplane arriving only to have no ground crew to meet it and bring it into the gate. Their overall network of flights is so complicated and messed up that every little delay they have cascades into others. You could hope they could figure out how to not have 40 airplanes push-back to taxi for departure at the exact same time at a major airport, possibly even requiring the different airlines to coordinate a bit? But not only can’t they do that, they can’t even figure it out within the same airline- I don’t get why I frequently see a line of 10 American jets wasting fuel in a line out there waiting to depart.

So the ATA guy blames it on the ATC running on “world war 2 technology”. Scary old stuff like radar. What’s so wrong about radar? The modern radar is displayed on fairly new terminals that give the controller lots of data, that automatically identify aircraft by N-number, and all that stuff. Radar is a very reasonable technology to use in conjunction with other stuff, and while granted there have been hiccups in deploying some of the new systems, its just obnoxious the way they try to pass it off as ancient.

Things won’t really get better for air travel in this country until the old air carrier system dies for real and is replaced by the nimble new-guys. Let’s hope that congress can resist continuing to bail these guys out and prolong the situation.