Presidential Education

In case you haven’t heard by now, President Obama is scheduled to address the schools of the United States on Tuesday. The aim of this speech is to encourage students to stay in school and take responsibility for their education. Personally I find this approach more suitable than the “No Child Left Behind” (or “Everyone Gets Screwed”) program that the Dubya Administration implemented as the be-all, end-all of education reform. Of course any time President Obama tries to do something different, the conservatives and right-wing nuts start yelling about fascism and socialism .. but I don’t hear them offering any better ideas. Before I address that, let’s go over the state of our educational system.

(Much more to follow)

Windows 7 Upgrade Path(s)

I ran across this link to a blog post about Windows 7 upgrade options:

It does seem a little overwhelming, but it’s really quite simple: out of the 66 options for moving between Windows XP/Vista and Windows 7, you’re screwed 78% of the time. Granted, many people won’t fit into those corner cases that require “custom installations” .. wait a second, anyone running Windows XP requires a custom install for ANY version of Windows 7? Anyone running a 32-bit version of XP OR Vista and wants a 64-bit version of WIndows 7? That would include just about anyone who wants to use more than 3GB of memory, which is pretty much required if you install Vista^H^H^H^H^HWindows 7.

One would think that after 8 years of development, Microsoft would have figured out a way to do an in-place upgrade between a 32-bit and 64-bit OS. Ubuntu does it quite handily – install a 64-bit kernel and 32-bit compatibility libraries, reboot, then start installing packages from the 64-bit package repos. Requiring anyone running XP to perform a “custom install” to move to Windows 7 is just plain wrong, especially since it is 95% the same as Vista. Did they honestly believe that *every* XP user would be able to (or want to) upgrade to Vista in the less than 2 years it has been on the market? I can imagine the hair-pulling at every corporation across the country as IT system administrators are trying to figure out how to forklift their entire Windows XP environment to Windows 7 .. or maybe they should just forklift to Linux, since it would be about the same amount of work ..

When did socialism become a bad word?

Why does “socialism” have such a negative connotation these days? Every time it is mentioned, people think “welfare” and start talking about how bad and evil socialism is. “I don’t want to pay for someone else to slack off!” is the common argument I hear, even among “educated” individuals. Oddly, I hear this from a lot of middle-class workers, who could at any time be in a situation where they depend on others for subsistence.

Socialism is an economic theory where the state controls means of production and distribution of wealth and services. Like many things in life, there are varying degrees of socialism. However, people who argue against socialism always pick the extreme cases, where all of your wages go to the state and the state decides what you do at all times. Fortunately, life is not like this, and anyone who has lived past age 5 should be aware of this fact.

For the common American who is against socialism, think what would happen if only people who paid X amount of taxes were allowed to:

1. Go to school (K-12)
2. Receive basic immunizations
3. Receive emergency medical care
4. Have a place to live
5. Drive on interstate highways
6. Call 911
7. etc .. think of anything you use that you don’t directly pay for

The fact of the matter is that any progressive society depends on socialism to survive. I know there will always be people who take advantage of the system, but you can’t make a blanket statement like “Everyone who makes less than $15k a year doesn’t deserve food, clothing, basic education and medical care.”

The current hot topic in the US is health care, and people are so worried about having to pay for someone elses medical treatment that they are against socialized medicine at all costs. Never mind that countries like Canada, France, Norway, etc. have higher standards of living and less out-of-pocket expense than US citizens. It doesn’t matter that people who are currently insured will experience no change in quality of care or personal expenses. C’mon people, start thinking big picture, instead of what affects your immediate family and vicinity.

We are all in this together, whether you like it or not. We can all succeed together, or we can all fail together. If you don’t like this idea, please move to a 3rd world country and let the rest of us move forward.

DIY Tub Repair

I live in an apartment that seems to have issues with level bath tubs. I have been in 2 different apartments in this complex, and they both had the same problem: the tub is tilted outwards, so any water that drips down the walls ends up on the floor behind the toilet. This results in a constantly wet floor and water damage, which ultimately costs the management money but looks like hell the whole time I am living here. When I complained about it, maintenance installed a little splash guard that didn’t work because the water would just pool up behind it and flow around the end .. a better solution was needed.

After a few trips to Lowe’s I found a product called “Magic Bath Seal”, which is intended to be used between the tub and the tile so you don’t have to caulk anymore. It is self-adhesive and has rubber edges to seal against the surface of the tub. Honestly I don’t think it would work very well for it’s intended purpose, but it fit my needs just fine.

I also bought some white Silicone caulk to seal the end against the tile and also ran a bead along the whole edge to make sure water wouldn’t leak underneath. This will work for any cheap tub that doesn’t have a raised edge to prevent just this problem, and there are two strips per package if you have more than one bathroom.

How to Lose a Job

Start with a nice engineering job at a reputable company. Health care paid 100%, matching 401k, flex time scheduling, 15-21 vacation days per year and free trips to the annual Christmas party.

1. Call in sick on a regular basis, even after you’ve exhausted your PTO.
2. When you do make it in, show up late and leave early, especially for customer engagements.
3. Take a 20-30 minute smoke break every 2 hours. See #1 due to the health problems associated with chain smoking.
4. Complain about the heat, your bad back, being too old, etc.
5. Details, schmetails. Engineering doesn’t have to be THAT exact, does it?
6. Ignore any attempts by your peers and supervisors to improve performance and make you part of the team.

Nearly every one of my company’s competitors is laying off and firing people because of the economy, so everyone here is pretty darn happy that they have a job at all, and really lucky that it is at a company that actually plans on growing this year. One would think that this would be motivation to work a little harder to make sure the unemployment line is not in your future, but I guess some people just don’t get it.

The Planet in Plano

I had the opportunity today to attend the ribbon cutting and tour a brand new collocation facility that The Planet is opening in Plano, Texas. This is the first new data center that has opened up in the Dallas area in quite some time, and The Planet certainly did it right. The building is an abandoned warehouse that covers 106,000 sq ft total. The entire inside was gutted and rebuilt to accommodate the high tech power and cooling infrastructure required for today’s high density computing platforms. Currently, they only have the first phase of 12,000 sq ft finished and ready for servers — the next 4 phases of equal size are ready to be built out. I think overall this is larger than nearly all the data centers out here, except for maybe EDS, Perot Systems, and AT&T.

A very important metric in a data center is power density. The Planet has built out power infrastructure to support 400 watts per square foot. This is double the power density of any data center I’ve worked in. The high power density was planned in order to make sure there would be enough power to go around when customers start using high-density blade systems and storage arrays. There is nothing worse than having floor space you can’t populate due to power limitations.

With all the power you need some way to cool it down. The Planet had two massive chiller plants from Turbine Air Systems installed, each of them with enough cooling capacity to keep 2 phases of the data center cool. The temperature was about 60F when we were there for the tour, and one of the techs told me the system was only running at 12% at the time. When they cranked it up to 100% for load testing, he said the floor tiles started vibrating. They also planned the floor space so that the chillers and piping did not share floor space with servers. There is an isolated gantry between each phase to house all the piping, so if something were to break then there is no threat of water getting into the server space.

The redundancy built into the system is equally impressive. Currently there are twin 2 gigawatt generators on-site, each large enough to handle two phases. There is room for a 3rd generator for when they open up the new phases, and possibly even a 4th. The chillers are designed the same way, so there will always be n+1 redundancy on power and cooling when they expand. They also have 28,000 gallons of diesel on site and 30,000 gallons of water, so they are covered in the event of total loss of city utilities. Both power and cooling systems are designed so equipment can be isolated and repaired without interrupting service to any other equipment (the water piping looked like something out of a nuclear submarine).

To top it all off, even with all this power and cooling crammed into one place, The Planet has managed to build their most efficient data center ever. Since they had a clean slate to work with in the warehouse, they could plan and coordinate all of the technologies involved to make sure everything worked together in the best way possible. The Green Grid has proposed a metric called Power Usage Effectiveness, which describes how much power is used for infrastructure vs servers. The less power your infrastructure (UPS, chillers, CRAC, etc) uses, the higher the rating. A “good” rating for a data center is 2.0, an “excellent” rating is 1.6. The Planet has engineered their infrastructure down to a 1.3 PUE rating.

Right now I’m looking for an excuse to need a colo cage, suggestions are welcome ;) If anyone wants contact information for the colo account manager, feel free to send me a message.

Apple Whiners, Part II

I like Apple. They are masters at interface design and know how to make something look good and keep it functional at the same time. You don’t find a lot of junk hardware in the Apple line — even after enduring a severe car crash, my MacBook Pro still works like a champ. The iPods are very durable, and after the initial screen scratching issue with the iPhone, I haven’t heard many complains about them. The thing that annoys me about Apple are its users. They have such a broad range of users, from clueless noobs who can’t operate a toaster, to technogeeks who can disassemble a MacBook in 30 seconds. Many of them, noobs or geeks, have a sense of entitlement that puts them above my annoyance threshold.

Internet as a Utility

Score one for the consumer! There have been a couple cases in the last year where a telephone company has taken on a local community over the privilege to provide Internet access to their residents. Time Warner Cable and Embarq (formerly Sprint High Speed) sued the city of Wilson, NC because the town started their own ISP. Why were TWC and Embarq upset over this? Because they can’t compete on price with a utility company that isn’t interested in making profit, only in providing good service.

The latest case comes from Minnesota, where TDS Telecom sued Monticello, MN over installation of their own fiber network. TDS used a different tactic, stating that it was illegal for Monticello to use city bonds to provide Internet service because Internet service is not a utility. TDS claimed that Internet service cannot be a utility because it does not have “near universal usage”. Fortunately the court of appeals does not agree with TDS, and stated it was illogical to determine utility status simply based on how many people use it. Monticello also went ahead with the fiber installation anyway, without using bonds, since the lawsuit was just over whether or not bonds could be used to pay for it. I think it is also important to note that Monticello setup an interconnect station so that other ISPs can use their fiber, so it’s not like they are completely locking everyone else out of the Internet business in the area.

TDS can still appeal to the state Supreme Court, which would be very inconvenient for Monticello but could turn out better for everyone in the long run. If the Supreme Court rules against TDS, it sets an important precedent that other towns can use to start rolling out their own fiber networks for their residents. This also changes the network neutrality game, where common carrier status assigned to utilities could completely negate the “tiered Internet” approach that large ISPs are pushing.

If you’re not part of the solution ..

.. there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem. This is the tagline of one of my favorite demotivational posters from Despair.com. The poster refers to consulting, but it can be applied to other areas of life, such as economics and government. If you don’t think that pharmaceutical companies are evil and opportunistic entities, check this out: Pfizer wants to offer free v**gr* to the unemployed. That’s right, you have no means to make money, but someone wants to make it easier for you to have sex and, most likely, children. Hooray for capitalism.

To be fair, they are offering 70 of their products to *existing* patients who have been on the drugs for at least 3 months, so it’s not like they are trying to drum up new business. However, why pick THIS particular drug for the marketing headline? What about all of the other medications that serve much more useful and life-enriching purposes such as controlling blood pressure, hormone levels, diabetes, pain, etc. None of those other drugs have consequences that could worsen your economic situation, unless you consider living to be an expense you can do without.

Ever get the feeling that if all of our problems were actually solved, society as we know it would collapse? If we cured all disease, the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry would disappear. If no one was overweight, the diet and nutrition industry would collapse. If people stopped working themselves to death, they would lose weight, get sick less often, have sex more often, and not need 90% of the drugs that are pushed on us through radio, TV and the Internet. Oh yeah, and if everyone was financially responsible and paid off their debts, the U.S. (world?) money supply would vanish overnight because it’s all backed by promises to pay back money that never existed in the first place.

Network Neutrality and Common Carriers

Anyone who is involved in networking and Internet technology has surely heard about the debate over network neutrality by now. The basic tenet of network neutrality is that the Internet should remain free (not as in beer) – IP carriers should not filter or throttle access to any part of the Internet. The problem is that ISPs are looking for new ways to generate money, so they came up with this idea that Internet access should be tiered: you get basic Internet for $20/mo, but if you want to access “enhanced” content like streaming audio and video, then you better start paying more. Not only that, they want to charge the content providers, not just their own customers, for the bandwidth used by these applications – every byte transferred gets paid for twice.

The argument from the ISP side is that they cannot afford to innovate and expand their networks if they don’t have some incentive to do so. Why should AT&T put a million miles of fiber in the ground if they can’t charge more for people using it? If the future is IP communication, then they need some way to recover the investment in improving the technology. The downside for consumers is that their ISP would now have the ability to decide what part of the Internet they can see – which many would consider to be a violation of free speech rights.

From the consumer point of view it looks and feels just like another way for the ISP to nickel and dime their customers. Time Warner recently caught a lot of flak for wanting to implement tiered pricing based on data transferred, but their revenue numbers conflicted with their argument that they were losing money. Broadband penetration was up and revenues were up as well, so what is the issue? The next step after pricing based on data transfer is pricing based on what you can do with your bandwidth. P2P traffic is frequently throttled by ISPs, often without telling their customers (though there are ways to tell).

Personally I think this all comes back to what is referred to common carrier status in the telecom business. This means that phone companies are not aware of and not responsible for what traverses their networks. In this regard, telephones are a utility, much like electricity. If someone is using a Bell South telephone to setup drug deals, then Bell South can’t be implicated in the crime. Likewise, if someone uses electricity to grow or process drugs, the power company is not held responsible simply because they provided power.

I think one could argue that Internet access has reached the status of a utility – nearly everyone needs it and it has become a part of everyday life. A growing trend is for utility companies to provide Internet access because they are already running lines and pipes for water, sewer, and power – so why not throw a bundle of fiber in the ground at the same time? If you elevate Internet access to the status of a utility, then common carrier status suddenly becomes a big deal. Now, if an ISP is monitoring your traffic and deciding what you can see and do, then they cross the threshold and can (should?) be held responsible for the actions of their customers. So I guess it all boils down to these two questions:

1. Is Internet access a utility such as electricity and telephone?
2. Do the telecommunications companies want to give up their common carrier status?

I think that last question should be enough to scare any telecom provider away from even considering tiered Internet access.