Balance…

Posted on 2 August, 2009 by

H1N1 is causing a minor uproar here in Vietnam. Last week, I got laid up by the flu. Not just any flu, though—angry flu. The worst flu I’ve had in quite a while. So bad, I went to the doctor. I was. as is wise in this case, checked for H1N1 and found to be clean. It was just a normal, nasty flu bug. So that’s good.

The balance part? While sick, I was laid up, sleeping a lot. Client queries and missives continued to ping on my attention. I had to tell the ones with active projects that I was sick and put them on the back burner. I could have kept running to keep up, but that would only have laid me up longer, I think. I had to balance. It’s not always easy to do, especially as a freelancer. But even freelancers are human. So are your clients. Everybody understands, generally.

Keep the balance. Don’t get overwhelmed or everything suffers.

Not at any price…

Posted on 18 July, 2009 by

I love ebooks. I had an RCA REB1100 back in the day. Here in Viet Nam, I rely on ebooks to feed my reading addiction. I’ve watched the ebook scene evolve with great interest, awaiting the day when ebooks become like MP3’s: ubiquitous, cheap and readable on almost any device.

When Amazon got into the ebook business with the Kindle, I thought that the dam was about to burst. I thought that Amazon would be like Apple: a little late to the game, but ready to completely change the game. I was wrong.

Unlike Apple, Amazon allowed itself to be bullied by the publishing industry. Restrictions on the Kindle hobble the device. Instead of creating an environment that could turn ebooks into the same kind of commodity as MP3’s, Amazon has created a closed environment filled with loopholes and exceptions and restrictive DRM. Sure, Apple had DRM on the first iPods, but they didn’t hamper your ability to get regular MP3’s onto the device.

I fantasized that somebody would give me a Kindle as a gift. I have no idea how it’d work here since there’s no Whispernet. But I was willing to give it a try. I’ve seen the Kindle and played with it. It’s a great ebook device (and I’ve tried many, many ebook devices). It’s got so much potential, I weep when I think about how Amazon has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

David Pogue of the New York Times has an excellent take on the decision made by Amazon to reach out and remotely delete content that users had purchased. For me, their actions are a deal breaker. I’ll now never own a Kindle, and I know a lot of people who feel the same way. Amazon made a serious blunder and then compounded it with a wishy-washy statement that said, essentially, that they would try hard to avoid doing that again. Not that they won’t do it again. Just that they’ll avoid it. Not enough, Amazon. Not by a long shot.

Further, the fact that they were able to reach out to Kindles and remove content implies powers beyond what I want them to have. What happens when the publishing industry leans on Amazon enough to get them to remove any content that doesn’t have Kindle’s DRM? Can Amazon do that? Technically, they can. Morally, they’ve demonstrated that they’re willing to consider it.

That’s a risk I’m not going to take. I’ll never own a Kindle, Amazon. Not at any price.

The pause that refreshes…

Posted on 8 July, 2009 by

Android gets no love!

Posted on 17 June, 2009 by

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

Posted on 16 June, 2009 by

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.

Could we get a little perspective, please?

Posted on 6 May, 2009 by

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!

Posted on 27 April, 2009 by

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.

Posting from in country…

Posted on 9 April, 2009 by

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…

Who watches the Watchmen?

Posted on 7 March, 2009 by

I did. And you should, too.

Although Watchmen is over 2 1/2 hours long, it really doesn’t seem like it. The pacing is very well done and the movie just flows. Action sequence are very well done, if a little graphic in places. Characterization is outstanding.

Watchmen is a based on a graphic novel and translates well to the big screen. I personally don’t understand why reviews appear to be so polarized. I have to wonder if there’s a correlation between good reviews and reviewers who read the graphic novel and vice versa.

Based on some early feedback, I was prepared to be let down. I’m happy to say that I was not. If you’ve read and enjoyed the graphic novel, you should enjoy the film. A couple of the folks that went in our group had not read the novel. All of us enjoyed the film.

Go watch Watchmen.

Gentlemen, start your engines…

Posted on 8 February, 2009 by

We’ve grown up, from a one man shop to a real live consulting firm. Up to now, all of our business has come about by word of mouth. Now we feel it’s time to:

1) Start showing off some of the work we’ve done.

2) Start giving back to the community that has helped us by documenting many of the things we do in a much more public forum so that others may take advantage of the things we’ve learned.

It’s my hope that you enjoy what we have to offer. The focus here will be Open Source tools. For the most part, we run these tools on Linux, but we’ve also helped clients out with OpenSolaris infrastructures.

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

Open Source Excellence

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