Google Nexus S

So back in May I ordered a new mobile phone.  As much as I liked my old iPhone 3G, it was getting to be a little long in the tooth.  It worked, but was a bit on the goofy side when I tried to do certain things.  Plus, there was a bit of screw you AT&T for trying to buy T-Mobile in my choice.  I ended up with the Nexus S.  While I personally am new to the Android world, my other half has been in the Android world for almost 2 years.  She has the G1.  Now that I’ve had the phone for a couple of months, I wanted to document some of my experiences.

First and foremost, one of the best features of the phone is the built in Wi-Fi hotspot.  Now, to be fair, the newer iPhones do have it built in as well, but since I’m on T-Mobile, the additional feature costs me nothing extra.  And it’s legit.  No jail breaking, no side loading, nothing.  Just a built in feature of the phone.  In fact, I’m at a coffee shop here in DC right now watching over my child process (also known as Alex) and I didn’t even bother getting a code for the Wi-Fi here.  Instead, I’ve conducted some basic business over the portable hotspot on my Nexus S.

And while it’s handy, one thing I’ve found rather astonishing was the fact that during a recent trip to Philadelphia, my Nexus S was better for internet connectivity than the major name hotel I was staying at.  I was even able to watch Netflix streaming on my iPad over the personal hotspot while I couldn’t over the hotel provided Wi-Fi.  Now, there was also a wired connection and I wonder if that would have worked better, but since my iPad lacks an ethernet jack …

Other surprising things for me included:

• Speed: even though the Nexus S is only on 3G and not T-Mobile’s HSDPA+/4G, using the phone itself is quite snappy.  And compared to the EDGE connectivity I was getting on my old iPhone, this guy’s a downright speed demon
• Usability: if you listen to the Apple faithful, the Android phones are a pale comparison of the iPhone.  I guess in some ways they are correct.  The iOS devices are definitely slick and I do still enjoy my iPad (though it’s become a bit flaky lately).  Now, that being said, I do like my Nexus S.  It works and generally works well.  Once over the hump, I do think it works as well for me as the iPhone did.  There are more rough edges, but it’s not the night and day difference some think.
• Auto Updating: it may be a simple thing, but knowing that my phone will just be constantly up to date is a great thing.  There’s no hooking it up to the computer to run updates, it just does it.  And even better is if you allow it, all your applications will automatically update themselves too.  Maybe that’s less of an issue for me, but for others (like my other half), having it keep itself up to date is a great thing.
• Music: the music stack is not as nice as the iOS versions for sure.  However, I like the choices I have.  If I don’t like the Google-provided apps, I can always install something else.  In fact, one of the best things I have is access to both the Amazon MP3 music store and Cloud Music Service, but also the Google Music service.  They are a single source for storing my music and then syncing to my phone.  It saves me from having to decide exactly which music I want to download and have.
• Apps: now, any Android phone can share the same apps as my phone, however there are a few exceptions.  One big surprise for me was that any restricted applications, such as Netflix, always target the Google phones first.  That means that when Netflix shipped their streaming app for Android, it supported two phones: the Nexus One and the Nexus S.  I sort of assumed that since the phone wasn’t that popular, I would get those last.  I guess that targeting the pure Google phones is a better idea than I thought.

There are definitely some things I miss and some of the applications aren’t as good on the Android as on iOS, but overall, I’m quite happy with my choice.

Next Redbook is out

Last fall I spent 3 weeks in Costa Mesa helping write the updated IBM FileNet P8 Platform and Architecture Redbook.  It’s finally done and posted (or more specifically it was posted about 3 weeks ago and I missed it.  Here’s a link:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg247667.html?Open

Switching mobile phones

I finally broke down and switched mobile phones this week. I had been using an iPhone 3G (bought new and unlocked at duty free in the Rome airport) on T-Mobile. While not perfect it was a quite serviceable little phone, even though I could only use EDGE speeds for mobile broadband, not the 3G my wife's Android-based G1 used.

For two years, the iPhone was exactly what I had wanted and was a joy to use. Two things happened to make me choose to switch. (well three if geek wanderlust is factored in).

First off, iOS 4.0 came out and many apps started to require it. Because of this, I ended up having to upgrade. Now, for 3Gs and iPhone 4 users, that wasn't t a big issue, but for us 3G users, it wasn't the best upgrade. While it did work, there were a few limitations, most importantly, the speed dropped. iOS just needed a beefed CPU than what my older and aging 3G offered. Now, while annoying, Apple did say at the start, a 3Gs was the minimum for good performance.

While the speed thing was annoying, the second issue that started plaguing me was what appears to be an increasing reliance of mobile data. It seems that more and more applications I used frequently seemed to put a greater and greater strain in the data pipe. What this looked like is more and more apps just seemed to stall for no good reason. On wifi, the problem was less noticeable, so I'm inclined to think they were assuming there was a good 3G connection.

The other reason I chose now to upgrade was the AT&T buyout of T-Mobile. I've been a customer of T-Mobile since 2000, or when they were VoiceStream. I've loved their service and their pricing. And since I live in a big city, coverage was never an issue for me. Well, there was no coverage in my parent's hometown in southern Illinois, but I'm nit there too often, so it wasn't a real issue. Now, with AT&T buying them, I can only assume that means my bill will go up, and up, and up. (hooray for no competition). Upgrading phones now means I signed up for a two year contract extension which means that when our clueless government approves the deal (which it will, even though it's bad for everyone but AT&T), I will still be under contract and they have said they will honor all existing contracts.

Oh, and my current plan is unlimited everything (phone, data and SMS) for both Felicia and myself, for about the same price as everyone else's non unlimited plan. Take that death star...um...AT&T.

I've really only started playing with my new phone, a Samsung Nexus S. So far I really like it. Switching is a strange experience, one I will document more as time goes on.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

New michaelandfelicia.com

For those of you who missed my last post, I decided to take the old michaelandfelicia.com and convert it from a long disused home for our pictures and make it more of a life stream or aggregation of all our other social networking sites and blogs. What made this an interesting project was that I was able to pull out of mothballs my old FileNet WCM / eGrail virtual machine. It ended up being a decent vehicle for doing this kind of project. After a few weeks of messing around, the new site is now officially launched. It's still a work in progress in that it only tracks Twitter (and anything we cross post there) and our blogs. I hope to add more sites as I have a chance to get my RSS parser built for other sites. But in the meantime, this should track us relatively well. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

An old friend

In an ongoing effort to keep both friends and people who don't really care up to date with what I and the family have been up to lately, I decided to take my wife and my website, michaelandfelicia.com, and turn it from a place were four year old content went to die and make it a one stop shop for following us and our life. Frankly, I would have liked to have used FriendFeed with a custom URL for this, but since it's been bought by Facebook and seems to have been left out to pasture, I decided that a roll your own solution may be just the ticket. Though to be fair, roll your own is a bit of an overstatement.

So, to that end, I dug out and brushed off an old friend, FileNET WCM 5.1, or more specifically eGrail. It may have needed a bit of dusting and removal of a small amount of bit rot, but once it got it back up and running, it felt and still feels like home. I do have to admit, that it has taken me a bit of time to remember all the old tricks, but even after almost 10 years, the software seems as good as ever.

I often wonder what would have happened if FileNET would have kept working on it ....

Anyway, I decided to take the old syndication module out for a spin and so far it seems to be working just great. I already have it pulling in feeds from Twitter and Blogger. Not sure the other feeds I'll pull in, but if it has RSS, then it's fair game as far as I'm concerned.

So far the only real issue I've seen is that WCM seems to expect a single article per XML file. That meant I have to preprocess the feeds using Java, but I had to do something to download the data anyway, so it does seem l be working out. As soon as it's ready, I'll post a link.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Infrastructure

I hate it. I really hate it, but after seven years with Speakeasy as my primary Internet provided, I ended up having to switch to Comcast. There was just something increasingly wrong with my old POTS-based DSL line. When I first moved into the new house, I was getting a solid and very reliable 5.1 or 5.2 Mbps. While not the best, it was sufficient for my home office and enough to reliably do Netflix streaming in HD.

But it was definitely expensive. I was spending about $105 per month for the service, which was a bit high. However, it was business class and was running on a dedicated loop, meaning it wasn't sharing the line with my current telephone service.

However, after. Year and a half of service, something went wrong and the speed and reliability began to drop. Toward the end, about the best I could reliably achieve was about 4.0-4.2. I'd lost about 20% of my performance. And that drop was just enough that I could no longer stream Netflix at HD. In addition, with Felicia quitting her job to take care of Alex, we had additional demands on the service.

So, in the recommendation of my brother in law, I looked into Comcast Business service. I ended up with the cheapest package for both Internet (10x2) and basic cable television as well as a telephone line. The true triple play as it were. Now, I did end up opting for the static IP address at $14/month, I think.

All of this together, even with the static IP, ended up being $50 per month less than what I was paying for my DSL line and telephone before. And just as important, it's been reliable so far. I've been with them for going on three weeks now and I can't really complain so far.

As time goes on, I'll try to report back if I see any throttling or bad traffic shaping.

Mindy 3.0 – Open the Windows!

So, in what appears to be an annual event, I’ve had to rebuild Mindy yet again.  This time it wasn’t a complete hardware failure that caused the refresh, though there was a minor hardware problem involved.  Turns out when I rebuilt her last year, I had picked up three Western Digital WD1001FAYS 1Tb hard drives to uses as part of the RAID configuration.  Unfortunately, those are desktop drives and appear to be basically incompatible with any kind of RAID for redundancy (RAID-1, RAID-5, etc).  I kept seeing disk timeout errors from my RAID controller which were causing system stalls (up to 60 seconds) and repeated verification runs on the array.  Besides being annoying (nothing like having the music you’re listening to just stop mid stream followed by a very annoying repeating click – love the SoundBridge, but it doesn’t handle that gracefully), I also would see file corruption on my primary file server.  Fortunately it was confined to the logs, but it was no good none the less.

The other issue I was seeing was an almost complete failure of the VMware web UI (MUI).  When I first rebuilt her, I installed Ubuntu Linux server 8.04.2 LTS.  My hope was to avoid doing a rebuild for a while and plus I’d worked with Ubuntu for a while and really liked it.  Unfortunately, it appears that Ubuntu + VMware Server 2.x (at least for me) are not really a good combination.  For the first couple of months, all was well, but then the MUI started failing to connect to the back end server.  At this point, I can’t tell if it was a simple degradation of the system or if it was a result of an update (I think the latter).  Regardless, by about 2 months ago, I would restart the UI, connect once or twice and that was it.  I could never reconnect, so no starting VMs, stopping VMs, etc.  It became basically unmanageable.

At that point, I decided it was time to fix the drive problems by replacing the desktop drives with three Western Digital WD2002FYPS RE4 2 tb drives.  These are the RAID Enabled drives, which basically means they have TLER (time limited error recovery) enabled.

Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) - instructs the drive that in the event of write failure that it should limit the amount of time it takes to attempt to correct the issue.  Typically this is 7 seconds.  That way the RAID controller can catch the issue and help fix it rather than assuming the drive has timed out.

No only do they have the TLER, they also have a 5 year warranty and 64mb cache, so they are blazingly fast.  More on that in a moment.

So, about $800US later and I have three new hard disks and the battery backup (BBU) for my LSI / 3ware 9650SE RAID card.  (I’m thinking this is worse than a child, but I digress).  I proceed to backup all the data (no small feat with 3tb online and only 1.5 tb of space around), and start the rebuild.  First thing I do is take out the six hard disks I had in the system before (3x1Tb and 3x500Gb), attach the BBU and install the three new RE4 drives.  Then I had to determine which OS to use for the new system.

My original plan was to move to VMware ESXi 4.1.0 so I could continue to leverage my investment in VMware (both as a desktop system and from the server).  So that was my first move.  I build the array and then tried installing ESXi.  No dice.  It would load the bootstrap and then just before starting the configuration UI, it would freeze (at the “Booting: MBI=0x01100db, entry=0x00100212” step).  I couldn’t seem to figure out what was happening.  Nothing online seemed to explain the error and I had a hard time determining if my motherboard (ASUS P6T Deluxe V2) was supported or not.  VMware does have a small number of supported motherboards and the ASUS was definitely not on there.  I had found a site that said the P6T (no additional markings) has been made to work, so I didn’t assume it was a complete hardware incompatibility.

I was stumped, so I turned to Windows Server 2008 R2.  I have an MSDN account, so I pulled down the server installer, just to see if it worked.  Funny enough, it failed too.  The installer would start and then almost immediately give me a black screen and an error code (—insert code here—when I find it).  I dug around and was finally able to determine that Windows (and ESXi for that matter) both failed to start because I had disabled ACPI in the BIOS (remnants of me trying to solve the drive timeout problem mentioned earlier).  Enabling that allowed both to boot.

Now I had a decision to make.  Do I go with ESXi or Hyper-V.  My preference was definitely VMware’s solution as I’ve used Server and Workstation for quite some time and generally have good luck with it.  In fact, I use Workstation on my work laptop on a regular basis.  So it was back to trying to get VMware to boot.  First thing I discovered is that VMware ESXi (not ESX) cannot be installed to a RAID card like mine.  It needs some sort of storage (non-RAID).  So I ordered a compact flash card to SATA adapter.  Once that came in, I tried it again.  Still no dice.  Now I got an error saying the vmfs3 module wouldn’t load.  Back to Google.

After a bit of searching, I think I’ve determined that it isn’t compatible with my network card, and apparently this is a requirement for it to install.  I thought about ordering a new network card, but at this point, I was tired of spending money.  And while the CF to SATA card was being delivered, I tried Windows 2008 and seemed to finally get it to a point where it looked usable.  So, I ended up installing Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V.  (Though, I probably should have gone with the Hyper-V stand alone, free product in retrospect … and if I had known about it, I would have).

All wasn’t completely rosy, but I’d made my decision.  There were, however, a couple of key tweaks I had to perform before the system worked as it should.  I ended up having to disable the IPv4 large packet offload on all the systems before I managed to get proper network performance.  Actually, on my Server 2008 client OS install, I just disabled all offload.  Now, I can get around 40-60Mb/sec transfer rates to and from the VM.  That’s what I like to see and wasn’t ever quite seeing with the older VMware/Linux setup (though, I didn’t have the BBU for my card and I think the new drives have twice the cache, so that’s not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison)

No matter, I now have Mindy 3.0 up and running and she’s doing quite well.  I’ve even used the Vmdk2Vhd converter to move from VMware to Hyper-V.  Though, one piece of advice for the transition: before moving any Windows VMs to Hyper-V, install an IDE hard disk, boot the VM and uninstall the VMware tools.  That’ll make sure you can (a) boot the Windows VM on Hyper-V (as it only offers IDE disks for conversions like this) and (b) you actually get the VMware tools uninstalled.  They don’t like being uninstalled off a non-VMware hosed system.