Best of both worlds right?

Well it isn’t exactly fast. Here’s a few rough timings:

Windows boot cold to online: 170 seconds

Boot virtuel ubuntu maskine to login: 53 seconds

Start Aptana (in virtual machine): 54 seconds

Start rails (in virtual machine): 35 seconds

So I found my old desktop, which I though had died, but fortunetly it hadden’t, cleaned it up and installed ubuntu(a bit old and slower CPU (dual 1.8GHz, 3Gb Ram)).

Boot ubuntu maskine to login: 50 seconds (about 15 of those are bios)

Start Aptana: 20 seconds

Start rails: 15 seconds

Quite a bit faster – and best of all, it doesn’t seem to lock up all the time, like the Virtual machine did..

Setting up and getting it working was fairly simple. I’ve a local server that I usually do my back to (a fairly simple xcopy command) and I run mozy on that server to move everything online.

CrashPlan Adv. Backup

I installed the crashplan on both my laptop and my local server. The software registers the machines with crashplan, and as long as you login with the same user account, they know each other. It’s just a question of selecting your data and where you want it to go.

When you sign up you get a 30 days free unlimited trial account. So I set up my machine, to back up my documents folder and my photo archive to both my server and the CrashPlan server. This is a lot of data. My documents folder is 30Gb – my photos (raw files) are 400Gb. So I was prepared to leave my laptop on for a few days.

About the screenshot: I’ve set up two backup sets. Docs and Images – both are backing up to my local server (ASUSB202) and to the CrashPlan cloud. I also accept inbound backups of the documents on ASUSB202 – so my laptop works as a backup server to.. This is the Advanced view – there’s also a simpler view, for people who can do everything with one set.

Enter the slow-zone

After two days it was less then 10% done. I stopped it and moved the hard-drive from the server, to the laptop and did the backup directly to that. Took about 24hours. Moved the drive back in the server and mounted the archive in CrashPlan. Worked. Cool. Still slow – it took 24 hours to backup to a local drive.

Okay, restart everything and wait for the crashplan cloud to show it’s worth.

At first I was quite disappointed – my average speed to the CrashPlan cloud was 12KB/s (no, I’m not connected with a 28.8Kbps modem, I’ve 1.5Mbps up) – that’s going to take years to complete. Not a viable solution. I upped the network cache and changed the scheme to “Throughput” and got up to an average of 20KB/s (this also nearly tripled my local backup speed). Still not enough.

Opened an issue in CrashPlans issue tracker and.. nothing. Halfway through the 30 day trial, I complained on twitter.. and got a friendly response and request for my issue number. I provided it and something happened. My case was forwarded to somebody else and.. things got a bit faster. My current speed is around 80-100KB/s. I never got any more feedback in the issue tracker, but hey, if it works.

My theoretical top speed is around 200KB/s, so I think CrashPlan can do better – maybe some concurrent connections, would help them maximize the data throughput.

But I’m okay, with what I got – I’ll have everything seeded in a couple of months.

The good stuff.

My 30 day trial ended today. So I had to make a decision.

So, the stuff I like about crashplan:

• Very flexible solution with ability to back up to your own or other (friendly) crashPlan servers
• Ability to back up several (up to ten) machines, in the CrashPlan+ Famility plan
• Simplifies my back up schedule, as I no longer have to work around Mozys “one machine only” limit
• Full control over how many version of a file should be saved (history, including deleted files)
• Interface gives a good level of control, and nice advanced options (good for me, not for non-it-expert)
• I’ve a lot of data – Unlimited is a must.
• There is support – if you can provoke it to react

Don’t likes

• Could be faster
• Interface could be more intuitive
• Support could be better

Did I pay – oh, yeah. I got the full CrashPlan+ Family Deluxe All-You-Can-Eat four year plan.

CrashPlan has gotten a lot of attention lately - and they are swamped with new customers, so I’m willing to take a chance with them, even if things are less then perfect at the moment. They obviously try, and their technical platform and solution (even if a bit slow) is superior to the other solutions I’ve tried.

I’ve long had a feeling that, at the end of the week, the more visual aspects of the tasks at hand had had less “love” then they warrant. Lets say we add a new page – all the new fields will be there, the new needed functionality will be implemented, but the visual glue, that’s supposed to pull it all together is somehow missing. It gets pushed to next week, where the same thing happens.

Sometimes we working from photoshop generated mock-ups, and the designer will have spend most of his time making sure the alignments are just right, or the color gradients are just as they should be.

All of this usually gets low priority with the developers – “it’s not crucial” – and it isn’t. In the pressure to have somethings to show off on Friday, the visual elements, paradoxically, gets down prioritized.

The Problem

I understand why this is – the developers focus on the hard stuff first. They want to know that the core is okay, before they spend time on other things. It’s more important not to have errors, than to have “bling”.

But at the end of the week – when we demo the changes implemented, we also have a system that doesn’t look as good as it could. When the only comment we get is “Why is that button still green? I though we agree it should be red?”, after the demo of some nice new feature, you get the feeling that nobody saw anything, except for the missing red button.

And I understand this too. The business people can only see the surface (the UX). So you added a ton of code behind a field in a form and switched from one framework to another and upgraded jquery and fixed the broken dependencies… and all they can see is that it’s the wrong color.

What we have been doing until now, was to take out a week, once in a while, and only do the visually oriented stuff, that normally gets down prioritized and focus on them, without any functional issues getting in the way. This works, but it doesn’t solve the issue of the Friday demo.

A possible solution

I want to add a bit of priority to the “low priority” of the visual issues, and currently my idea is to do what I want to call Visual Impact Priority.

I don’t want to throw away the usual priorities, but I want to add an extra step in the process.

The idea is to simply look at the page/task as it is, and select the lowest hanging fruit/task that will have the biggest Visual Impact on the system.

The way you calculate this is very dependent on the system, but very concrete things like the number of pixels involved and how big the color change is, could be a place to start. Change a small area a little bit – Small Impact. Change a big area a lot – Big impact.

Changing a the background color of a page from black to red will have a huge impact on the page, and take all of five seconds to do. Changing the headline color from one shade of gray to another, is probably low impact. Changing it from green to red, is bigger impact as it will be noticed. Adding a new field to a form, will have a big visual impact. Even if it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles it’s supposed to have.

It’s a bit like having two priorities on all tasks. One if “Functional (Impact) Priority” (FIP) and one is “Visual Impact Priority”. And you alternate between them. Sort the task list on FIP. Take one from the top. Sort on VIP – take one from the top. Repeat.

And it doesn’t mean that you can’t slice the tasks. Maybe the specification is for a nicely graded green header. Making it green takes a minute. Making it graded takes an hour. So you spend a minute and make it green. Huge impact. And it allows the designer to see that green wasn’t that great a choice and he can change his mind, before you spend that hour doing a graded version.

I’ll let you know about our experience with this, when we’ve been doing it for while.

p.s.: I’m using word “Impact” in my priority-types to indicate that the balance between how important something is and the amount of works that goes into it is important. Your basic Return On Investment assessment thing.

It’s mostly a question of missing context and having the wrong audience. Allow me to explain.

But first a somewhat related video – not directly related, just the one that made me remember these thoughts.

So imagine you are a software developer (or something else, but not a “sales guy”), sitting in a room that’s 50% developers, %30 sales guys and the rest is management. One of the C-Level managers is giving a status report – it’s not going to well. Sales are down.

He is say stuff like “We need to sell more!” (without explaining how that’s going to happen) and “We need to focus on closing!” (like the sales guys didn’t know this). All the while the dev guys will be nodding, waiting, reciting Pi in their head and just try not to look bored. They have heard this before.

“Everybody needs to sell – you all need to sell.

You all have a responsibility for closing those deals!

You are all sales guys!”

<Bangs fist in table – points around the room>

Thank you everybody and goodbye.

What just happened?

Well, firstly notice how this card is never pulled, unless the company is in deep shit. It’s a desperate step, that is though to pull the company together – to put everybody in the same boat. We are all sales-guys. I’ve rarely seen this card pulled, without somebody or a bunch of somebodies being fired shortly after.

Secondly you just told the sales guys, that they suck so badly at their job, that a bunch of developers and administrators can probably save the day. Sell the stuff they didn’t manage to sell with their 10+ years of experience. Probably not that inspirational.

Quite a few developers are a liability in the sales process (not all). Yes, there should be lots of collaboration between sales (they are a customer of the product as much as anybody), and the development team, but taking a random developer to customer meeting is mostly a liability.

A developer will say things like “Yeah, that sounds easy, it will take a couple of days to develop” to the customer when the real answer is “The value to you will be  999 and I think you’ll be willing to pay 555, so we will need exactly 555 money to make it” (just packaged differently) - which is usually a lot more then what will be charged for two straight days of dev time. Also the first estimate of the dev will be low (he’s bragging – I know, because I’ve done this).

The developer will go back to his desk. Shake his head and forget it – if he’s lucky. He might feel a bit depressed, because he sees this, for the desperate move that it is. He sees the future. Okay, so lets say he thinks a bit more about this.

What does he know about sales? Well, the sales guys seems to be talking a lot with (potential) customers. They seem to call customers and “sell”. Sell might be stuff like explaining why the product kicks ass and why the customer needs it. More meetings and then it will sit in pipeline for a while and then disappear. Hm.

Where does the customer come from? Random dialing? Look in the yellowpages? Some sells guys seems, to sell the new product to all their old customers/friends, and then run out of steam. Does the dev know anybody interested in the product? What would his (dev-) friends think of him if he calls them and tries to sell them something? Would they ever talk to him again? Probably not. Probably better to call and ask them about any job openings, than alienate them…

The dev has only been in one real sales meeting before, which he though went pretty well, he even managed to respond with a quick estimate to a question from the customer, but he’s recollection of what really happened there are hazy. Did we “close” that deal? Was it good? Probably, didn’t a few weeks of development work came out of it?

So the developer spends the rest of the day twirling his office chair, staring in the air, waits for somebody to tell him what to do. The next day, he’ll be back to normal, with just a small nagging doubt that something bad looms in his near future.

Does it ever make sense?

Well, yes. If you make it clear what you mean by it.

But mostly it’s common sense – because it’s something, that you should be doing every day.

Whatever it is you are developing, it is going to be sold. Somehow, somewhere, somebody is going to give you money because of that product. That’s “sold”.

Developers are sales guys only in the sense, that they make products that has to be sold. If they are really good (and the market is right) they make a product, that sells it self. You are in sales, because every time you spend resources on a feature or function, you remember that the time you spend on it, needs to be financed by a customer. Maybe not today, but one day.

Now you are selling.

Still doesn’t make you a sales guy.

(that takes brass balls – being a developer takes balls as well, but they don’t have to be brass)

p.s.: If you don’t know if a function has “sell” value, go ask for a “business case” (I’m really hoping you already have a “use case”). Ask you product manager, ask a sales guy, make one. Maybe collaborating with a sales guy, maybe having him add a real (potential) customer to the team. Go!

A Deepness in the Sky

The Qeng Ho (human traders) and the Emergents (also humans, but more top controlled) are both racing towards the OnOff star and it’s single planet. A planet inhabited by the first hi-tech alien civilisation that humanity has meet. Immense riches wait for the group what gets to trade with the aliens. The Qeng Ho and the Emergents has a small clash when they arrive at nearly the same time, won by the Emergents, but damaging both groups so much that they are forced to co-operate. A lot of the book is about the fight between the two different ways of life, as represented by the Emergents and the Qeng Ho. Most of this can be read as a long tribute to the old Heinlein and Poul Anderson stories (like Trader to the Stars). I enjoyed this part of the book a lot. Lot’s of interesting surprises and plot twists.

The other part of the book is about the aliens, which I’m sorry to say, kind of bored me. They where simply put not alien enough. Most of their story, but for a few references to extra arms and such, could be read as a quite normal story about the industrial revolution, and even if Vinge gives a good reason for this (the way of the translation) this doesn’t change the fact that it bored me and the references to the earth of today was kind of clumsy if not downright silly. A couple of hundred pages of boredom about the industrial revolution entwined in five hundred fantastic pages of intergalactic culture clash, doesn’t kill the book or even make it a bad book. It’s still one of the best books released the last ten years

Amazon.co.uk – Amazon.com

Frameshift

The title Frameshift is referring to an error that can happen during DNA replication (one DNA pair disappears or an extra is inserted, if I’ve understood it right). But Frameshift is not really about frameshift, it’s about Pierre Tardivels fight against a deadly disease, Pierres fight against a Nazi war criminal, an insurance company and a genetic experiment done against Pierre and his wife. And that’s probably one of my biggest problems with this book, it’s basically trying to tell two stories at the same time and even tries to create an illusion of these stories being even more stories. That might have worked, but the stories are so thin. The ideas are not bad, but Sawyer seems so intent on mixing political satire and critique in to the story, that the stories get shifted to the background. Maybe I would have found the political satire and critique relevant and fun if I had agreed some more with Sawyer. I got no ideas as to Sawyers political standpoints, but this book was just a bit to “tree hugging” to me.

Like I said, I don’t really know what to think about this book. Maybe I’m just not a good enough reviewer to tackle this book or maybe it’s just a good thing that I didn’t sign a contract saying that I would have a rock solid opinion on everything when I started reviewing…

Amazon.co.uk – Amazon.com

The Terminal Experiment

TTE starts of when the main character, Peter Hobson, detects that humans have something that could easily be described as a soul and that this soulwave (as he calls it) survives after our death. Peter decides to create three computer simulations of himself, to test how the disembodied soul changes (in other words: what’s the afterlife like).

And this is where the story falls apart. The first simulation is created without memory of physical experiences. This should simulate life after death. The second is created without knowledge of aging or death. This should simulate the life of an immortal. The third is left unmodified and left as an control. The life after death simulation, is invalid simply for the reason that, even with all these memories removed it would soon get new ones just from the interviews done with it (if interacting with the physical world isn’t a physical experience I don’t know what should be). The immortal one would soon gain knowledge of the fact that the computer it’s running on could easily be turned off, proving the mortality of the simulation in a rather fatal way. The control looses all similarity to Hobson the moment it gets disembodied by being run on the computer. Here’s lots more wrong with this scenario but, frankly, I don’t want to waste anymore time on this book than I have to.

Last but not least, Sawyer has in Hobson managed to create a character that is so incredibly civilized, nice and politically correct that it’s sickening. He doesn’t drink or smoke (nothing wrong with that, but then added to the rest…). And no matter what happens he reacts in a civilized fashion. And for sickeningly politically correct, just listen to this (from page twenty – Hobson enters a bar): “On his right was a poster for Molson’s Canadian depicting a curvy woman in a red bikini with maple leaves crowning each of her upturned breasts. Sexism in beer advertising, thought Peter: past, present, probably forever.” Really? I don’t think so – I’ve never heard of a (heterosexual) male who’s first thought upon seeing a pair of breasts is “Sexism!”. It may be the first thing that he says if he’s trying to score a few cheap point with a nearby female, but that’s another story.

Probably the last Sawyer I’ll ever read unless I get stuck with one of his books on a deserted island.

Amazon.co.uk – Amazon.com

• Something physical. 10-20 minutes before I start, I do twenty push-ups or similar. Something to get my blood pumping. Allow enough time for your breathing to become normal again.
• Clear my nose. Make sure breathing is as unhindered as possible. Sometimes I use saltwater spray to help.
• Close down software. Close down Skype, Outlook, etc, anything else that will popup and especially the ones making notifications sounds.
• Mute phone, and put it away, so that it wont make speakers go woop-woop, when there’s an incoming call. Turn of your speakers if you can.
• Prepare story. Make sure every step is planned. Make sure every stop works.
• Drink a bit of water. Yeah, coffee is King, but water removes clears the mouth better.

That’s it. The last one is of cause a bit more involved, but that’s a topic for another post.

A Fire Upon the Deep

But the book quickly takes off in other directions with a couple of other subplots. Actually the story starts of with the story of why the family ends up crash-landing on a backward planet; using a receipt, masked as a plan for achieving transcendence, that they found in an old library, they have created a monster. Vinge has created a very interesting universe consisting of the Transcendence, the Beyond and the Slow-zone; the Slow-zone is space with the properties as the space that you and I live in at the moment (why? Oh. Why?). The Beyond is space where faster then light travel and higher machine intelligence is possible and the Transcendence is, well, an even higher plane.

As the story took off, I even started to enjoy the subplot about the kids – the aliens that they live among are so interesting and take over so much of the subplot that they could actually be the basis for a quite interesting story in and of themselves. Maybe not exactly a must-read, but if you like grand scale space adventures this is not one to miss.

Amazon.co.uk – Amazon.com

This is Vinge’s first full length novel. For some strange reason, I’ve never gotten around to it before now. I’m not sure why, but maybe it has been a combination of fear that it couldn’t live up to the expectations that A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky had built and the fact that Vinge has written so little and I didn’t want to bleed that well dry just yet. An endless list of excuses doesn’t make a good review, so let’s get on with it.

Across Realtime

Across Realtime is really two books, The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime. There is very little connection between the two books and they could easily have been (and originally were) published in separate volumes. So at a total of 530 pages, what you get is actually two books for the price of one (okay, my copy was about 30% more expensive then a normal paperback, but it’s still an okay deal).

The Peace War takes place around 2049 – fifty years after the War of Plagues, which was won by the Peace Authority, when they invented Bobbles. Now Bobbles are so important to both these stories that I have to try to make a short explanation of them, even if it’s kind of impossible without spoiling them. So, a Bobble is an energy sphere that once created will reflect everything (except gravity), so if you bobble a nuclear missile just as it explodes – well, problem solved. And as Bobbles last forever, well, they do last forever, right? Well, maybe not. Old man Paul and his young apprentice Wili are fighting against the Peace Authority, who has been keeping the peace for the last 50 years, through its monopoly on technology and especially bobble technology.

Marooned in Realtime takes place fifty thousand years in the future. After the Peace War humanity went back to unchecked technological progress. About two hundred years later the human race disappeared from the face of the earth. The only people left are people who (through bobble technology) have traveled to the future. Brierson was a cop in the 22th century until a “customer” bobbled him to the future to escape capture. Now Brierson has to solve the murder of the only person who might have stood a chance at uniting the few remaining humans and create a fresh start. And if he can figure out what happened to the rest of humanity along the way – so much the better.

Both of these stories are amazingly imaginative. The idea of the Bobbles carries a lot of The Peace War, but there is so much more, and the way they move on to Marooned in Realtime, becoming just another bit in the machinery of the future (okay, quite a large bit), makes me tingle with joy. Both of these stories received a Hugo Awards and seldom has a Hugo been so well deserved. Now, if Vinge would only learn to type a little faster and keep up the quality.

Amazon.co.uk – Amazon.com