d o l l m o n t . n e t

Next up: the kitchen sink!

For all you Unix geeks:

Yes, Android can do that!

On the road…

Posting from the road. I’m actually in a small cafe near my house posting this from my phone.

For some reason, a lot of cafes here like to blare Vietnamese pop music at all hours–even early morning. This cafe is nice because they humour me and allow me to jack my iPod into their sound system. Carlos Santana, anyone?

Android gets no love!

It seems like all the smartphone love is dedicated to the iPhone. Even here in Viet Nam where there is no “official” iPhone presence, all the cool kids have an iPhone. My poor G1 gets no love, and I think I know why:

Apple is a master of marketing. The original iPhone was a huge success in spite of several shortcomings. Each successive iteration of the iPhone has made it a stronger device. Each update of the iPhone’s OS has added key features that make the iPhone a stronger contender in this market. But it’s really Apple’s marketing might that took a weak, also-ran phone and turned it into the sensation that it is.

Even th e Palm Pre is garnering a lot of attention, though I think much of it is morbid curiosity. Tech fans everywhere are waiting to see if the Pre is enough to pull Palm out of the tech industry dead pool.

Which brings us to Android. The Android OS is incredible, yet Android doesn’t seem to get a lot of love. I think this is because Google relies on the phone makers and vendors to market it and, so far, T-Mobile is the only big vendor in the US. For reasons unknown to me, HTC, the makers of the G1, don’t really market their individual handsets. We hear a lot of hype from other companies like Samsung and Asus about upcoming offerings, and I can hardly wait to see what they have. But what they don’t have is Apple’s marketing might.

I love my Android phone. I have the G1, which I got from T-Mobile before leaving the US. It’s an invaluable tool and condenses all of the “wants” that I had when playing with things like Internet tablets, yet provides me with a phone. I’ll be writing up some of the tools that I use to help me in my freelance work. For now, though, I just want to give it a little more love…

Life at 50kph

I get into these discussions with Jane about going places and seeing things:

“We’re going to Cha Ben Tanh. It’s about 40 minutes from here. It’s a nice, weird and wonderful market.”

“How far is it in kilometers?”[1]

“Let me look—8.”[2]

“40 minutes?!?”

The other day, I finally realized the issue. When we were living in San Diego, getting in the car and traveling for 40 minutes in pretty much any direction would take us a pretty long way. This is because it was a short jump from the house to the freeway where we were then free to travel at 120kph. Now, though, we are living life at 50kph. And it’s only 50kph on a good day.

Scooter traffic can be pretty horrendous. Add construction or rain to the mix and you can find yourself going barely faster than a good walking pace. As a result, we really don’t consider distance when we decide to travel somewhere. Rather, we consider time.

Even outside urban areas, traffic and road conditions can combine to really slow you down. Can Tho is 180km from Ho Chi Minh City, yet it can easily take 6 hours to get there. That’s an average of 30kph.

Time is a great measure of tasks. When going somewhere, don’t focus so much on how far, rather, focus on how long.

[1] Thankfully, Jane is Canadian, so I don’t have to do distance conversion when having these conversations.

[2] A great tool for measuring distance between two points, even in a city as convoluted as Ho Chi Minh City, is Google Earth.

People don’t want free beer…

The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community defines two types of freedom:

1. free as in speech
2. free as in beer

When consulting, keep in mind that your customer doesn’t want free beer and probably doesn’t care about free speech. Your job is to downplay the free beer aspect and educate about the free speech aspect.

Why not free beer? Free beer is fine, but giving away anything else of value, like software, plays to our “you get what you pay for” mentality. That’s a dichotomy that’s not easily broken, especially in the business world.

When undertaking a new project, smart business people will set out a budget and work diligently to keep the project within that budget. If I come in and bid a FOSS-based solution, I don’t start by heralding the fact that the software is free. Software, even free-as-in-beer software, is never free. Even if the code itself is free, there’s still the need for building an infrastructure to run the code, installing and configuring the code, and ongoing maintenance of the code. It would be irresponsible to even hint that there’s no associated cost with the software. Breaking the software out from all the other pieces and attaching a $0 price tag to it is disingenuous.

So what to do?

For starters, calculate the cost of the software. Separate the parts of building out the infrastructure, installation and configuration, etc. as the software cost. Add the ongoing maintenance costs as just that—ongoing maintenance. Make your consulting fees about consulting: requirements analysis, recommendations, project management, usability and acceptance testing.

Second, highlight the free-as-in-speech element of FOSS-based solutions:

1. no vendor lock in
2. support for open standards
3. community development
4. availability of source code

Each of these elements is important, but they can mean nothing to the client without your explanations. Educating your client is part of your job. Don’t teach them to expect something for nothing, or nothing is what they’ll offer you.

By highlighting free-as-in-beer, you run the risk of having the client think: “Hmmm… I could have my bosses nephew install that. The software’s free. What could go wrong?” Down that road lies madness for the client, but they often don’t know that. They only see the chance to save the money they had budgeted for the project.

When performing the job, you have to differentiate yourself. Illustrate why simply having the nephew do it doesn’t make sense. Show that you will complete all localizations, including branding. Don’t show screen shots of the raw software—show screenshots after the localization and branding is complete. Even if you have to mock these screenshots up, there impact will be much greater. Demonstrate the ways in which you’ll document the setup and use of the software. Have a stock acceptance test plan that you can show the client. Keep your toolbox full of little things like this. These are the things that separate the highreasonably priced consultant from the bosses nephew.

Well. These things and years of experience…

Could we get a little perspective, please?

Last week, we enjoyed a very nice dinner at one of the nicer hotels in Ho Chi Minh City. One of the people in the dinner party had previously worked at this hotel and told us that when he was there, he made 750,000VND/month. That’s 6 days a week, 10 hours a day. He quit because the money simply wasn’t enough. He has a young baby and, as is often the case, momma can’t produce enough milk. Supplemental milk costs 350,000VND/month—almost half his take home pay.

Keep in mind that this is a “fancy” hotel and at the higher end of the pay scale for service workers. Nowadays, a waiter typically makes 1,200,000VND/month. Speak English and your salary can go as high as 2,000,000VND/month.

As I write this, XE.com tells me that 1,000,000VND is USD $56.23. So, at the high end of the pay scale, people working 6×10 could be taking home as much as $112 a month.

Perspective? A new scooter, the ultimate status symbol, is $1,800. As a western family in HCMC, we pay $350/month in rent. A meal out for a family of four at a “typical” restaurant may only cost $12, but if you’re only making $112, that’s more than 10% of your monthly gross.

Is it any wonder that Vietnamese people are so industrious, often working as many as 3 jobs? They have to be to make ends meet. And with an inflation rate in the double digits, it’s going to get worse. This may be one of the fastest growing economies in the world, but the benefits of that haven’t really trickled down yet.

We went by a shopping center near the heart of Ho Chi Minh City. It looked as if it had been transplanted from any city in the US. High end shops, KFC, Pizza Hut. Big, expensive hotel on one end, anchoring the mall. Prices were ridiculous, relatively speaking. Many prices were equivalent to their US counterparts or higher. Estee Lauder makeup, for example, was more expensive than in San Diego. How do you justify spending 800,000VND on face powder when you make 1,200,000VND? You can’t. Clearly, this mall was for tourists, ex-pats and the very wealthy.

Back to our dinner at the nice hotel. The bill? 750,000VND, with tip.

This screwdriver is crap!

The Mac world is abuzz with an article about how crappy the Dell Mini 9 is as a “hackbook”. Basically, the article reads like this:

I bought me a nifty new screwdriver. It doesn’t drive in nails very well. I’ve not really tried it on screws, but because of it’s shortcomings as a hammer, I declare it’s crap.

Please. If you’re going to write an article about how crappy the Dell Mini 9 is, write about how crappy the Dell Mini 9 is. You took a modestly priced netbook, shoehorned Mac OS X onto it, and now you’re complaining about how poor the experience is.

I have a Lenovo IdeaPad S10. I bought it for a specific reason. I knew when I purchased it exactly what I wanted to do with it: write emails, surf the net, chat. Does it work for that? Exceedingly well. Did it meet my expectations? Very much so, especially here in Viet Nam where I spent over a week having to rely on wifi in coffee shops to get any work done.

I have two computer bags. One is a laptop backpack that houses my ThinkPad T61, it’s brick and a few “necessessities” for computing on the go. It weighs 25 lbs and looks like I’m carrying a data centre on my back. The other is a small leather pouch, looking like a typical purse. It has my S10, it’s brick and a few “necessessities” for computing on the go. It weighs 10 lbs. Which do you think gets hauled around to more coffee shops?

Can I do all of my job on the S10? No. But I can keep in touch with clients and friends on those days when DSL to the house doesn’t quite make it the last mile. That’s what I bought the S10 for, and that’s what it excels at: driving screws. Not hammering nails. Had I wanted to hammer nails, I’d have bought a hammer.

The argument that the Mini 9 was turned into a hackbook because Apple doesn’t make such a beast is specious. If Apple doesn’t make a netbook and you must have Apple, you can’t have a netbook. Figure out where your priorities lie.

Finally, addressing the keyboard, which seemed to be the largest part of the complaint: I don’t have direct experience with the Mini 9 keyboard, but the Lenovo keyboard works very well for me. It’s pretty close to full size and I can hit pretty close to my full speed on it. Keep in mind, though, I didn’t buy a tiny laptop with a tiny keyboard, shoehorn an OS it wasn’t meant to have on it, and then try to write a novel! Were I a novelist, I’d have a dedicated keyboard to attach to whatever computer I was working on–for a novelist, the keyboard is the ultimate interface and no corners can be cut there. I don’t write system documentation on my S10–I save that for when I’m on the ThinkPad. I’m saving up quite a bit of it for when my desktop arrives with my wonderful Logitech G15 keyboard.

For those who are curious, my S10 dual boots into Windows XP and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. 98% of the time, it’s in Windows. 98% of the time, I’m surfing the net (Chrome), reading email (Chrome) or chatting (Pidgin and Skype). Windows XP is a seamless experience for this. The right tool for the job, folks. The right tool for the job.

Jaunty Jackalope

The latest version of Ubuntu has hit, and lucky for me FTP Telecom in Viet Nam is mirroring. This means I was able to download and install in a pretty reasonable time.

How’s it look? So far, it’s rock solid. It recognized all of my hardware (Thinkpad T61 with nVIDIA card) out of the box. The install was painless–even resizing my Windows 7 partition worked. I’ve changed my Appearance settings to Dust as I prefer the darker widget look. It tends to focus my attention on the large fields I need to fill out… The look and feel are typical Ubuntu–very polished and smooth.

Of course, I did have to do a bunch of things like install the Adobe Flash plugin and decoders for MP3. Silly that, in this day, we still need to do this. I understand the reasoning but surely there’s some detente that can be reached.

Anyway, it’s great to be back in a pure Linux environment. When administering Linux systems, a Linux desktop really is the best tool for the job, at least for me. As good as tools like PuTTY are, they can’t compete with the efficiency I gain from just running at the command line.

Two big thumbs up to the Ubuntu crew for getting yet another release out the door.

Disk Space or DNS

Whenever I have a client call me up to tell me that a service that’s been working fine for ages has suddenly stopped, two prime culprits immediately spring to mind. One is very subtle, the other not so much.

When first logging in to the afflicted system, I do `df -h` to check available disk space on all volumes. It’s amazing how many of these incidents come down to a disk running out of space. Usually, a monitoring system warns when disk space hits 90%. Sometimes, though, that last 10% can be churned through very quickly, catching even the monitoring service off guard. In a number of cases, I’ve had monitoring systems miss full disk conditions because the full disk condition stopped the agent from accurately reporting the current state (a topic for another entry). Bottom line: check your disk space.

DNS issues are much more subtle and can manifest themselves in different ways. Often, you’ll see a sudden decrease in performance for some inexplicable reason. Things that used to work suddenly break. In many cases, this is because systems that refer to hosts by name can either no longer find those hosts or there’s a sudden delay in the process.

The `host` command is your friend here:

chris@utc-pdc1:~$ host www.dollmont.net
www.dollmont.net is an alias for dollmont.net.
dollmont.net has address 216.86.156.11

This tells me that www.dollmont.net points to dollmont.net, which in turn has an ip address of 216.86.156.11.

chris@utc-pdc1:~$ host 216.86.156.11
11.156.86.216.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer server1.fusednetwork.com.

Doing a `host` command on the IP address will tell me if reverse DNS is working. In this case, it’s pointing me at a Fused Network server, which is correct—Fused Networks does my site hosting. In a perfect world, I would have a DNS PTR record for the IP address that pointed back to dollmont.net, but this is more than good enough. Forward and reverse DNS both resolve.

If there’s an error in either one of these checks, it means that DNS is broken somewhere down the line. Trouble shooting that can be a nightmare, and is beyond the scope of this article.

Disk space and DNS are the first two things you should look at whenever things start behaving in a wildly different manner. Often the problem will be one or the other and usually involves a quick fix.

Posting from in country…

Every sysadmin, at some point in their career, thinks the same thing: given the proper net access and the proper automation tools, I can do this job from anywhere. We’ve all had that thought, including me. I wonder how many have acted on it?

I’ve taken my freelancing on the road. The reasons are many and varied. This is my first posting from Viet Nam, where I’m setting up an office to continue my consultancy.

From time to time, I expect to post a little about what it’s like freelancing in a country like Viet Nam. For now, though, I’m working on a couple more of those boring technical posts…