Lee Devlin’s Website

The Sun Also Sets

Sun Microsystems has always intrigued me. For a number of years, it seemed as if the company could do no wrong. During the early 1990’s, Sun occupied the top position in high performance computer workstations, a category of computing that has since virtually disappeared thanks to advances in PC hardware. Despite desperate attempts to unseat it from its leadership position by worthy competitors like HP, DEC, and IBM, Sun was able to prevail.

If you had purchased Sun stock in May of 1994, you’d have seen it skyrocket to nearly 100 times its value by August of 2000, just 6 years later. Had you kept it at the historical high price of $253/share, you’d have seen your investment lose more than 98% of its value when it came back down to just $3.17 a share by October 2008.

SUNW/JAVA stock price meteoric 100x rise and fall

Java had an incredible amount of hype surrounding it. Something that would relegate the Microsoft Windows operating system into a well-deserved irrelevance had finally arrived. No longer would all the popular desktop programs be forced to use Microsoft’s proprietary OS. Instead, applications could be written in Java and run equally well on a Mac, a PC, or any number of Unix-derived operating systems. It was a simple matter of providing a run time environment for each computing platform. That run time environment became known as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). If you have an orange coffee cup in your systray that always seems to be begging for an update, then that is an indication that you have a Java Virtual Machine on your PC.

The JVM looking for an update

For a while, many websites required the JVM to work properly, but lately I’ve noticed it has become much less necessary. And very few commercial desktop programs require a JVM. Whenever I install a new Windows OS, I can sometimes go for months before realizing I haven’t downloaded Sun’s JVM.

The Java programming language should not to be confused with JavaScript which is a completely different language used primarily in web browsers which was developed independently of the Java programming language. JavaScript was developed by Netscape and was originally called LiveScript. When the folks at Netscape saw the positive response Java was enjoying back in 1996, they made a cross-marketing agreement with Sun to rename LiveScript to JavaScript to tap into Java’s significant cachet. Netscape agreed to promote the Java language in exchange.

Despite all the hopes and dreams of Sun and enthusiastic Java developers, this ‘write once, run anywhere’ promise never achieved its potential. Today it looks even less likely that Java will unseat Windows from its hegemony on the PC. Apple has only recently managed to make some progress on the Windows desktop monopoly by finally breaking through single digit market share of installed base. Apple is now at 10% market share vs. Windows at 88.7% share according to a ComputerWorld report. But when it comes to desktop apps, Apple still relies on Microsoft to deliver the goods in the form of Office applications even for its Mac OS. I guess we’ll see if Google will have better luck than Apple in unseating Microsoft on the desktop with Google’s upcoming desktop OS and cloud computing approach to applications.

After Sun developed Java, it appeared to change directions. Sun seemed to be intoxicated with Java’s assured future success. This infatuation with a language that had failed to achieve its mission in any significant way 12 years after being introduced reached its zenith when Sun changed its stock symbol from SUNW to JAVA in 2007. I think it was Sun’s way of turning its back on its hardware roots in exchange for the promised fortunes of free software. For Sun’s market cap, the downhill slide continued despite the new stock symbol.

I had worked with Sun back in the late 1990’s and found that if you emailed Sun a Microsoft Word document it would be rejected along with a request that you to re-submit it in HTML format. I thought this was rather odd, since Microsoft’s Word was emerging as a defacto standard and surely someone at Sun should have been able to convert it to HTML. But then I found out that Sun employees didn’t have Windows computers and weren’t allowed to buy them. This was around the time that laptops running Windows were becoming indispensable business tools. Sun had acquired an insane hatred for all that emanated from Microsoft to the point where the use of its products was prohibited. In essence, Sun’s management had constructed a reality distortion field for itself and the rest of the company.

Sun acquired StarOffice in 1999. It later offered the software as a free open source “almost-compatible” alternative to Windows Office applications and called it OpenOffice. I’ve used OpenOffice which is the free version of StarOffice, but have found the applications lacking true compatibility. It feels like a product that was built without any apparent business model in mind, unless you consider a quixotic attempt to marginalize your archenemy’s revenue source to be a business model.

Sun had always been vertically integrated, supplying not only its own operating system, but also its own computing hardware all the way down to its Sparc CPU. Sun made some early tentative steps to get its Solaris OS to run on x86 CPUs, but the early efforts never really gained much traction, likely an indication that they were conflicted about making it work. Instead of figuring it out, Sun abandoned those efforts and continued to promote its Sparc architecture, and continues to offer Sparc-based hardware to this day. I believe it was this decision to try to do battle with not just Microsoft, but also with Intel, that furthered Sun’s problems. Sun entered into an alliance with AMD in 2004, but AMD has problems of its own, namely that it has to compete with Intel too. Finally, in 2007, Sun began working with Intel by adopting Xeon CPUs for its high-end servers. But I think it was too late at that point.

In 2004 Sun arrived at a legal settlement with Microsoft, claiming the company was exercising its monopoly position to ruin Java, earning it $1.95 B for its years of legal wrangling. However, I think the damage done to the relationship between the two companies was beyond repair. By the time of the settlement, Sun was hemorrhaging. Giving an ailing company that much cash is like giving it to a crack addict. They’ll only use it to go on a binge and, based on the sort of acquisitions made after that point in time, that’s exactly what happened.

Sun spent $1 billion to acquire MySQL in 2008, an open source database project that was no doubt starting to give Oracle and its competitors cause for concern because it was encroaching on the highly profitable database business. This acquisition did little to boost Sun’s prospects because MySQL really didn’t seem to fit in anywhere at Sun, and it’s hard to imagine there was any potential for revenue since MySQL was already open source and freely downloadable. Only about 1% of MySQL customers were paying for it. That sort of genie cannot be stuffed back in a bottle. To make matters worse, Sun was determined to move it upstream by improving its performance, furthering its threat to database companies who were still charging for their software.

By early 2009, Sun, having lost nearly 98% of its market value and suffering from years of losses or break-even results, was looking to be put out of its misery by being acquired by a rival. IBM appeared to be the front runner but in a surprise bid, Oracle came in and made an offer that Sun accepted instead. The deal is still pending some regulatory approvals.

What Oracle expects to achieve with Sun is anyone’s guess, but I think Oracle made the deal to get its hands on MySQL and to make sure it never becomes a competitive threat to its primary source of revenue. Despite claims to the contrary, Oracle has no need for Sun’s hardware business because it is no longer sufficiently differentiated from the competition. Sun’s software businesses have never made any money when one considers the cost of developing, supporting, and defending them. It’s just mystifying to me what Oracle’s Larry Ellison thinks he’s getting for $7.5 billion. I suppose if the company can be parted out, Ellison will be able to derail further development of MySQL, keep Sun’s $3 billion in cash, and sell off the rest of the company in an effort to recoup the remaining $4.5 billion. Oracle probably won’t risk entering the hardware business and thus alienating key allies like HP, Dell, and IBM when it comes to offering its database server on their hardware. My guess is that once the deal is approved and things quiet down, a fire sale for what’s left of Sun’s assets will ensue.

Sun was a formidable company in its heyday, and I’m sure there are still a lot of smart people there despite Bill Joy’s proclamation to the contrary, now known as Joy’s Law, that ‘most of the smartest people work for someone else’. That statement comes across with such a demoralizing thud that it’s hard to wrap one’s mind around its true meaning. Scott McNealy, Sun’s former President and CEO, known primarily for his sarcastic sound bites about Sun’s competitors and his periodic resurrections, has somehow been silenced. I don’t think he’ll be making a reappearance because Ellison is not the type of person who likes to be upstaged, as can be seen from the YouTube video below where he amuses the audience with his take on Cloud Computing.

Despite the multitudes of really smart people at Sun, its decline, fall, and consumption shows that no amount of technical brilliance can overcome bad decisions on the part of management.

Business Relationships vs. Hostage Situations

I’ve been working with computers for a very long time, dating back to the time when you needed to use punched cards to program them. After graduating with several engineering degrees from Penn State, I went on to design computer peripherals for a major computer firm for many years. Because of my computer experience, my friends, most of whom are not computer experts, often use me as their first line of defense when they have a computer problem. And these days, “business is a boomin’.”

Part of the reason people have trouble with their PCs is because of the aggressive nature of companies trying to shove services down the throat of anyone who gets on the Internet. Not content to festoon what might otherwise be useful information with blinking banner ads, the new target of choice is the browser’s toolbar.

Last night I was helping my auto mechanic friend with his computer because it had lost his user profile, and Windows would let him log in but wouldn’t remember any of his desktop icons or save any of his browser’s bookmarks. He needs his computer to do his job as a mechanic since GM has moved all of its documentation on-line and without a computer, you just can’t function as an auto mechanic anymore. I know that sounds unbelievable but it’s true.

While I was adding a new user and copying his data over from his prior user’s settings, which seems to be the only way to fix a broken user profile on Windows, I noticed that his browser real estate had shrunk considerably since I first helped him to set up the computer. Why? It was because numerous toolbars had somehow managed to install themselves without my friend’s help. I suppose he may have helped a little but I can assure you it wasn’t intentional. I know this because his smile brightened more each time I managed to make one of them disappear. So in addition to fixing the main problem, namely the lost Windows profile, I also spent a lot of time cleaning up the computer.

Not only did I remove the offending toolbars, but I also removed all the miscellaneous links HP had included in his browser before he even set up the computer. He was too afraid to delete these items for fear he might break something. I call this stuff ‘crapware’, because it usually induces a customer to try crippled versions of programs or services which seek to get him to sign up for a perpetual subscription to an unnecessary service. And I should mention that the computer crawled along at a snail’s pace because of its heavy-handed virus protection software which his employer requires him to use, at his expense, of course.

I might have forgotten about this travesty and you’d not be reading it here, but then I got spammed by Sun today. I’ve been constructing an article in my head about Sun Microsystems which I will publish soon about how this once proud and capable company is now engaging in a desperate attempt to monetize the un-monetizable, namely Java, by using Java’s persistent need for updates as a trojan horse. I made sure to visit Sun’s CEO blog, written by the pony-tailed Jonathan Schwartz himself, just to make sure that was their plan. Sure enough, it was.

In my haste to quiet that little Java coffee cup by saying ‘yes’ to the update, it installed Carbonite’s crapware on my PC. Now, I’m no fan of on-line backup services and had previously written a critical review of what I think of them. Part of my view is colored by an image that I will now convey to you. Hang on, because I think you’ll like it. In any event, I can guarantee you won’t forget it.

A few years ago I witnessed a sales pitch for a service to provide on-line backup. I won’t mention the perpetrator, and you’ll never guess who it was because this idea was pitched by at least a million companies over the past few years and it’s one of those bad ideas that simply will not die. But during the presentation, the presenter took several opportunities to indoctrinate us, much like he was reciting a mantra, with this phrase:

“When you hold the customer’s data, you hold the customer.”

Along with this mantra, delivered with pregnant pauses both before and after, he used a hand gesture. Imagine holding an invisible tennis ball out in front of you at approximately waist level, palm pointed upward. The image is that of grasping and squeezing a person’s unmentionables. Wow! I think I knew where he was going with this. It wasn’t a business relationship he was proposing, it was a hostage situation.

Thanks, but no thanks. I’d prefer not to get involved in that kind of thing.

Yet it is precisely this kind of desperate business model that gets investors all worked up these days. No longer can you propose to provide a useful and valuable service for which people are willing to pay. Instead you must trick them into accepting something (often something offered for ‘free’) and then force them to become some sort of stooge, paying you perpetually for your right to continually abuse them.

I can only hope that this nonsense fades into oblivion, because I don’t want to live in a world where every business relationship requires duplicity and, eventually, larceny.

The next time someone is proposing to give you something that sounds like it’s for free, grab your wallet and anything else you’d like to hang on to and run in the opposite direction, because if you don’t, your valuables will soon be in the possession of someone who may not treat them with the same respect that you have for them.

Backing up a Wordpress Blog on GoDaddy

Blogging is a great way to prepare content for the Internet without spending a lot of time worrying about the details of website administration and content formatting. But it’s easier to put content in a blog than it is to get it out of the blog for backup purposes. Wordpress has a way to export the postings and comments into an XML file for local storage, but since you have to remember to do it periodically, you’re likely to lose a few postings if something goes awry on the server and you haven’t done a backup for a while. And the XML export doesn’t save the images you may have uploaded to your web host because those are not stored in the same database as the posts and comments.

I started looking around for a Wordpress backup solution and was unable to find anything that looked like a good fit. Wordpress posts and comments are not located on your GoDaddy web host. They are on a separate host/database that GoDaddy sets up when you install Wordpress as an application. I download my website’s changed files to my local PC using a scheduled WS-FTP session. I generally use FileZilla for FTP and would like to use it instead of WS-FTP, but it doesn’t have a way to automate periodic downloads so I’m forced to use WS-FTP for my backups. WS-FTP isn’t free, but until FileZilla supports recurring automated scheduling of uploads/downloads, it’s the only way I know to do this. The FTP backup takes care of downloading my blog images and other website files but not the actual blog postings or comments.

GoDaddy has a web interface to set up cron jobs and I was pretty sure I could back up my blog’s database to the same Wordpress directory that stores my blog’s theme and php files using a script to dump the database. A database dump could put a copy of the postings and comments in SQL format in a location where my WS-FTP job could find it and download it on a regular basis.

I figured others would like to know how to do this, so I’ve written up a short ‘how to’ here.

I will assume you have are using GoDaddy’s Linux hosting and have an SSH login and know your way around a Linux system. If not, you’ll need some help from a Linux expert who can understand the instructions below.

First of all, you can use a single command to perform the Wordpress database backup manually, to make sure it’s working. Here is an example of mine which I store in a file called “wpbackup” located in the wordpress directory (please note, this command should all be on a single line):

mysqldump --add-drop-table -h mysqlhostname -u mysqlusername -pmysqlpassword mysqldatabasename | gzip -c > $HOME/html/wordpress/yourblogbackup.sql.gz

If you can’t remember the mysql hostname, username, password, and databasename because GoDaddy generates them for you automatically when you install Wordpress as an application, you can find them all in the /wordpress/wp-config.php file. Please note that there is no space between the -p and the password. All other spaces are required. The mysqldump command takes all the data from your wordpress blog database and puts it in a SQL format that allows you to re-import it should the need arise. The “| gzip -c” compresses the database since SQL is made of plain text and it compresses pretty well, probably 4:1 or better. If you don’t want to use it, you can leave it out.

You will need to confirm that this is working properly. Just make sure it’s executable and type in “./wpbackup” to run it. Then you can do a “gzip -d” on the yourblogbackup.sql.gz file to turn it back into sql statements so you can browse the contents of the output file. Once you’re sure it’s working, then you are ready to set up the cron job. It is possible set up a cron job manually by editing the crontab file in your home directory, but GoDaddy has a web interface that allows you to set up and manage cron jobs without having to know how to edit the crontab file directly. You can see the result in the crontab file by looking at it in your home directory after you set it up if you’re curious.

Just go to the Hosting Control Center -> Content -> Cron Manager

Set up the job to make the wpbackup script execute on a regular basis. It should be done frequently enough to insure that your FTP download is getting a recent backup of the database.

With the cron job executing on a regular basis, and a scheduled FTP download of your website, the most recent content from your blog will get backed up so that should misfortune strike, you’ll be able to restore it to its original condition. The two commands to do that are:

gzip -d yourblogbackup.sql.gz
mysql -h mysqlhostserver -u mysqlusername -pmysqlpassword mysqldatabasename < yourblogbackup.sql

(please note, the mysql command should be all on one line)

If you found a better or easier way to backup your Wordpress blog, please leave a comment with a link to your solution.

Cool Surge Scam Artists at it Again

Last year I wrote a blog article about a Miracle Amish Heater that generated a ton of traffic. I was even interviewed by the New York Times as a result of that article. Well, the company that brought us the Amish Heat Surge is at it again, and this time they are doing something even more despicable. They are misleading customers in their ads about a new cooler that uses ‘96% less energy than a window air conditioner’. There’s good reason it uses so much less energy than a window air conditioner, and that’s because it only has about 7% of the cooling capacity of a typical window air conditioner.

The $300 product is called the ‘Cool Surge‘ and it uses ‘glacier packs’ that you freeze and then load into the device so that a fan can blow air over the packs and presumably cool the room. Well, there’s only one problem with that approach and that is that device will actually make your house hotter, not cooler! Why? Because the energy it takes to freeze the ice packs comes from your refrigerator which exhausts the heat it removes from the water into your home. They conveniently forgot to mention this in their advertising. In fact, they say that the unit can’t be measured with a BTU rating. That is complete nonsense.

The BTU rating of this so-called cooler is absolutely minuscule compared with even a small window air conditioner. A small 5000 BTU/hr window air conditioner produces the equivalent cooling to melting about 35 lbs. of ice per hour. This cooler holds 12 lbs. of ice total. That’s about 1.5 gallons. Think about the volume of 1.5 gallons of water. You’ll be using a large portion of the space in your freezer to continually re-freeze these glacier packs. Assuming you swapped out these packs every 4 to 6 hours, which is how long they last according to the website, this device would have only about 7% of the capacity to cool a room as a window air conditioner. And, don’t forget, freezing the packs simultaneously puts all the heat removed from the water (and then some) into your home. There’s a good reason that air conditioners need to be vented to the outdoors. It’s because they need a place to dump the heat that they remove from inside your house. You cannot cool a house with a closed system like this.

I wish I could talk with the engineers who dream up these scam products just to see what they are thinking. I cannot fathom how they sleep at night because they are swindling their customers and the worst part is they must know it.

Twitter is making me a bad blogger

If it can’t be said in under 140 characters, it doesn’t need to be said. At least that’s my view of the world when I use Twitter.

Sometimes I blog out of courtesy just to let people know I’m still alive. It saves them from having to make the awkward phone call to my wife to ask about me if I’ve been quiet too long. Instead, they can just check my blog and see if there’s any recent activity, and if so, then there’s no reason to disturb me or my wife by inquiring about my status.

Let’s face it, I have a lot of dangerous hobbies, for example, motorcycling, flying experimental airplanes, eating meat, and so forth, and there’s always a chance that I may not be around tomorrow and no one would know what happened to me. With Twitter, I can keep people aware of my most recent thoughts and experiences and not have to write too much. In fact, with my iPhone, I can snap a picture and thereby add virtually 1000 words to any tweet. It lets the people who know me in real life that I’m still alive. Best of all, my Twitter feed ends up over in the right hand column of this blog and so if you come here and find a stale article you’ve already read, you can always find a crumb in the Twitter feed. And that feature is making me a lazy blogger, because I find that I’m not updating my blog nearly as much as I might otherwise.

And if I ever do have anything important to say, I can blog it here and then tweet the link, thereby letting people know that I actually had something that took longer than 140 characters to say. In fact, I think I’ll tweet the link to this entry after I finish it.

You know you’re a bad blogger when you want to start every entry with, ‘Sorry it’s been so long since my last update…’ One benefit of merging your Twitter feed into your blog is that it gives readers some Twitter crumbs on which to nibble during those dry spells.

Now, where’s a Twitter app that periodically tweets my heartbeat? Better yet, where’s the app that posts my last tweet when that rate has gone to 0 for a few minutes….and what might I post in that final tweet? A picture? a URL? Perhaps it will be my whole life’s story reduced to 140 characters.

Are you one of those people who check in here every now and again to see if I’m still alive? What about you? Where may I surreptitiously inquire about your status? I always imagine, probably incorrectly, that some long lost friend or relative is reading this blog, yet I have no way of knowing. If you’re in that category, please, send me an email or call me (my contact info is up there under that link that reads ‘Contact’) and let me know you’re a reader. I’d really love to hear from you… you know… just to make sure you’re still alive.

Tagged.com scam – one messed up company

I got an invitation to join tagged.com today informing me someone I knew had sent me some photos. I clicked on a link to see if I could download the pictures, but the service required me to ‘register’ with tagged.com first. Well, I thought this was an inconvenience, but I didn’t want to disappoint the person who sent me the photos so I started the lengthy procedure that started out asking me for the usual username/password. But that wasn’t the only information they wanted. As I got into it, I started getting screen after screen of ‘offers’ and some that made mention of charging my phone number a sizable monthly fee for some service or other. I found the tiny ’skip this’ button on each page and became exasperated in my quest to find said photos. I must have turned down 10 dubious offers.

The real deal breaker came when it asked for my gmail account password. Wait a minute! You want my email account PASSWORD, so you can ‘match me up with my other friends’? It was about that time that everything became painfully clear. This dirtbag company wasn’t going to show me any pictures that my friend had sent me, it simply duped her into giving her email password and they had harvested her ENTIRE ADDRESS BOOK and were sending out these invitations to everyone in it.

I completed the registration (without giving up my gmail password) and sure enough, there wasn’t even a single picture posted to my friend’s account. What a scumbag company!

Companies that pull stunts like this (Grouply is another one) should be sued out of existence and have their entire staff incarcerated. I hate when companies use a person’s goodwill to send messages out without the person’s explicit consent just to induce others who trust that person that they need to register to get some important information. Then they dupe THOSE victims into giving up their email passwords and propagate the duplicity ad infinitum.

I unregistered with this pathetic service and let them know my sentiments on the stunt they had just pulled.

Whenever you get a dubious offer via email even if it comes from a trustworthy source, you should do a search on the company’s name affiliated with the email and append the word ’scam’. And never give out your Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail password to anyone. I’d have saved some time and frustration had I done a web search first on tagged.com because there are plenty of people that have called out these scammers including snopes. Hopefully, you found this posting before you wasted any time with this fraudulent operation.

My Twitter Policy

Twitter continues to confound me. People who I respect are treating it in the same realm as the second coming so I’ve decided to suspend my skepticism, at least for now. I’ve written about Twitter before, albeit in a slightly satirical way. Now I’ll get a just a little bit more serious.

My friend Rob McNealy, (TwitterID @robmcnealy), has a Twitter policy on his website that inspired me to write my own.

Here it is:

I do not use autofollow. I generally wait for a day or two before I reciprocate a follow because if you’re a crook or identity thief, it takes about that long for Twitter to notice and boot you off. By then, you’ll have disappeared from my list of followers and I won’t have to waste any time. Otherwise, I will generally reciprocate, but not always. I actually visit the profiles of people who follow me before I decide to follow them.

I may not follow you if your Avatar looks like this -> unless I know you personally or if you’re just starting out on Twitter.

I may not follow you if you identify yourself as a quick buck artist who promises to help people make guaranteed millions on-line with no effort while they sleep.

I may not follow you if the website linked to your profile doesn’t appear to have a real person or real company behind it.

If I detect the slightest hint of MLM or network marketing or other pyramid ripoff schemes on your profile, I will most certainly not follow you. Here’s why.

I don’t use Qwitter to see who’s unfollowing me, mostly because that would be vain and it would keep me up at night worrying, but if I ever catch someone following me and then unfollowing me immediately after I’ve reciprocated, look out, because that really pushes my hot button. What kind of egotistical phony would pretend to follow someone just to get another follower and then immediately disconnect from that person? You’re welcome to ignore me, but a least give me the illusion that you care about my inane tweets.

I may unfollow you if you are hellbent on pushing a political agenda. A tweet or two to identify yourself as a card-carrying commie or slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun won’t bother me, but if you expect me to be converted over to your point of view with a continual barrage of venom directed at your political opponents, well that won’t fly with me.

If every single post you make contains a link to your business and how I should visit your website or buy something from you, then I may unfollow you. A continual barrage of commercials is something I can get on TV or the radio if I really wanted it.

If your posts look like you queued them up and fired them from a machine gun, I may unfollow you. Spread it out, I don’t want your mug, as attractive as it may be, stretching from the top to the bottom of my Tweetdeck.

If you decide to make up a longform blog post, and then chop it up into 140 character segments and send it out sequentially, don’t be surprised if I unfollow you half way through the ordeal. Just put it in your blog and tweet the link.

Telling the world good morning or good night on Twitter is OK, just once. If you make it a daily habit out of it, I may not unfollow you, but I will find a way to ignore you.

I reserve the right to change (or periodically violate) these policies at any time.

Still hungry for some more, better, Twitter advice? Here a few articles on Twitter etiquette:

Twitter’s 10 commandments
Twitter’s top 10 18 do’s and don’ts

Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade and flash boot

I upgraded 3 dual-boot PCs to Ubuntu 9.04, (aka Jaunty Jackalope) over the weekend. One of the motivations for the upgrade was that I heard that it booted in less than a minute, and I can happily report that it really does. I found that it was easier to just download the CD image via bittorrent than to let each computer try to pull down a complete update individually. I had one computer that was still running Ubuntu 7.10, and needed the 8.10 CD to upgrade it first. One of the benefits of Ubuntu is that the updates are easy, but you do have to boot and run the computer periodically because you generally can’t upgrade to the latest release until you have all the updates for the previous release. On a dual boot computer that is only booted to Ubuntu infrequently, it’s easy to get behind a full release, which is what happened in the case of my computer with version 7.10. Having a physical CD has another benefit which I’ll get into later.

I’ve noticed that my Windows computer becomes like a ship at sea, collecting software much the same way that a ship collects barnacles. It also appears to have the same effect: it slows everything down. My friend Chris gets around this problem by completely reinstalling Windows every day. OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but he rarely goes for a month without doing a fresh Windows install. This keeps his Windows boot times down to less than a minute, which is what my boot times were when I had a fresh XP install. How I long for those days. But the OS is just a small part of what I use on my Windows computer. The applications I have would take a day to re-install so re-imaging the OS every month is not practical. And all my customizations would similarly take time to reconfigure. For example, what ever motivated Microsoft to hide file extensions by default? I think that ranks up there as the dumbest idea ever brought to us by our friends from Redmond.

My Windows XP boot times and shutdown times on my main desktop are getting so long that I tend to leave it on all the time. In case you think I’m a Luddite for using XP, I have tried Vista and found that it provided no advantages over XP and hid everything I knew how to find previously. I watched my productivity plummet as I struggled to find all the useful things you need on a Windows computer (like a DOS prompt . I will wait for Windows 7 and see if they fix that egregious error, i.e., a gratuitous rearranging of menus and locations of utilities. Now that Linux is booting in less than a minute, I may use it instead of Windows for many of my computing needs. I may even turn it off at night. The majority of what I do on the computer is related to editing, email, and Internet access, which Linux does just fine. I switched over to Thunderbird and Firefox more than a year ago and don’t miss Outlook or IE at all. I’ve also been relying more on Gmail to consolidate most of my email addresses and it works great on Thunderbird, or the web browser, or even on the iPhone.

Who wants to wait for 5 minutes to look up something on the Internet? Not me, and I know I’m not alone. More and more people are leaving their computers on all day (and sometimes all night) to avoid having to endure a long boot time. Leaving a computer on 24×7 wastes energy, of course, but it saves time. The wasted electricity will be less than the cost of lost productivity if you’re continually waiting for the computer to reboot because you shut it off whenever you don’t need it. A typical desktop uses about 1 cent in electricity per hour (assuming a 100 watt average draw) or about a fifth of that for a laptop. Even at the U.S. minimum wage of $6.55/hour, a person’s time is worth more than a 10 cents every minute. But if you leave several desktop computers on all month long, each one would add about $7.30 to your monthly electric bill, so even though a penny an hour doesn’t sound like much, it does add up over time, especially if you’ve got some fire-breathing gaming PC with 10 fans trying to keep it cooled, like some people I know.

The culprits that seem to really slow down the computer in my case are those annoying yet necessary programs that have services that run all the time in the background. The instant messenger clients have become particularly bad over time, with Yahoo and MSN loading up many unrelated items to try to get you to visit their sponsor’s websites. I have found pidgin on Linux helps consolidate multiple chat clients into one that isn’t a constant source of spam or other distractions.

I like to use Linux because it doesn’t seem to be much affected by the performance-robbing effect of adding programs like Windows does. Perhaps Linux programs just work better together and go to sleep when not in use. And they don’t seem to affect the shutdown time as much either. In Windows, it invariably has to wait for programs that are no longer responding during a shutdown (and then kill them) and it takes a while to get through the list. It’s no wonder people dread a reboot when installing software on Windows. The Ubuntu systems shut down completely in about 15 seconds or less. I often wait for several minutes for my Windows systems to shut down. It seems like the shutdown time increases in proportional to the time the computer’s been running.

I can go for many hours sometimes without having to use Windows. But I don’t think I can use Linux exclusively. Invariably, there’s a program that I’ll need to use that only runs on Windows. Also, I don’t want to be one of those annoying Linux bigots who haughtily dismisses anyone who uses Windows (or Macs).

One of the other issues associated with having multiple computers is that no two will be alike. For example, your bookmarks, applications, plugins, files, email, etc., all tend to require local data and settings that don’t propagate through to the other computers. The proposed solution to that, of course, is to move all your data and applications to the ‘cloud’. I have done that with my bookmarks, using Google’s bookmark app and toolbar, but it’s hard to get everything into the cloud. Also it is not without its own set of issues, and one of them is that you need to have a persistent Internet connection without which you can’t get anything done. You also place a lot of trust in the vendor who runs the cloud, perhaps too much trust, in keeping your data safe and private. So far, many cloud services are ‘free’, but in the future, you may have to pay some fee to keep using them, but they’ll only implement that policy after you’ve become completely dependent on them.

I’ve experimented with using a combination of portable computing approaches over the years including a flash drive (both U3 and PortableApps) but I’ve been thinking that a flash drive with the OS and everything else like your programs and data on it would be even more useful. Well, there is a feature on Ubuntu that allows you to take a live CD and make a complete bootable operating system with a USB thumb drive. Now that flash drives are getting big enough to store not just data, but all the applications as well as an entire operating system, it just may be time for the flash-based virtual computer. I made up a Ubuntu boot flash drive yesterday and found that I was able to boot perfectly on 4 separate computers. It usually takes a bit of fiddling with the BIOS to get it to work, but it comes very close to having a total computing enviroment that fits in your pocket and remembers its state and all the other things that a truly ‘personal’ computer will remember.

USB flash memory isn’t as fast as a hard drive, taking several minutes to boot to the OS, but it’s actually quite usable. But putting all your data on one device is like having all your eggs in a single basket. If you lose the flash drive, it’s almost as bad has having your computer stolen, and so it needs to have a workable backup solution too, but that shouldn’t be too difficult if you could copy your data to a networked backup drive whenever you were working. You don’t really need to copy the applications or OS, since those can easily be downloaded again.

I really like the idea of the USB bootable flash drive. It had been a few years since I last experimented with it using DSL (damn small linux) which, at an image limit of 50MB, was just too ‘DS’ for me. But with an 8GB flash drive, I easily fit a complete Ubuntu 9.04 distribution on it, and I put Apache, MySQL and PHP on it as well. Imagine that, a server that fits in the palm of your hand! Well, almost, since you still need a motherboard to run it on. Next time, I’ll write about my new low-power computing platform built from an Atom Mini-ITX board and chassis.

Solar array is up and generating…

I flipped the switch on the solar array today and watched my electric meter begin to run backwards, erasing not just today’s electricity usage, but most of yesterday’s as well. Today was a very sunny day in Colorado. These words were written on a computer that was, at the time of the writing, operating on solar energy alone.

For as long as I can recall, I’ve always wanted to own a house that ran on solar energy. My dad worked on the very first government communications satellites back in the 60’s and 70’s and he’d sometimes bring home bits and pieces of that project for my amusement. One of those early artifacts was a solar cell which is one of the technologies that allowed satellites to be practical in the first place. I remember being fascinated as I watched the solar cell power a small motor from a lamp. This was long before solar cells started showing up in calculators (which didn’t even exist at the time). The solar cells I played with back then are very similar to the ones that are now powering our entire house.

A 5.6 kW Solar Array Generates all our electricity

This solar installation uses a method called ‘net metering’, which feeds any excess electricity to the grid for use by my neighbors when the sun is shining. During this time, my meter runs backwards. After the sun goes down, my meter runs forward again. Based on the size of the array and our annual electricity usage, our house should have net zero electricity consumption over the course of the year. A net metering system has a few advantages over batteries because I don’t have to worry if we get several days with no sun, since I’m still hooked up to the grid. Also, a bank of batteries to hold just a day’s worth of electricity would be enormous, weighing over 2000 lbs. and they would also be costly. The savings from generating your own electricity are real, since for every kWh I generate, it means less coal or natural gas that needs to be burned back at the power plant.

I’ve always looked at the large south facing roof of our house as a perfect location for a solar array and now it’s here.

For those interested in specifics, the system includes 32 Sharp 176W panels connecting in 2 strings feeding a Sunny Boy inverter. Total capacity is 5.6 kW.

Looking for a Twitter app…

In order to improve my productivity, I am looking for a Twitter application with the following automation features:

1. Tweet a quote from some famous person every 5 minutes. I have a book of over 2800 quotes and it would be ideal if it could be scanned into a database and direct the contents into my Twitter stream. It will take about 23 days to cycle through all the quotes at that rate. After it’s over, I want it to loop continuously for the benefit of my new followers and in case someone missed one of the quotes.

2. Check the local weather and send a message to all my peeps about what it looks like outside my window, at least 5 or 6 times a day. It should also tell people when it’s getting dark in my neighborhood.

3. Connect to a pillow sensor so that when I’m hitting the hay, everyone will know, as I’m sure they are curious. It should issue a random yet clever statement with the word ‘pillow’ somewhere in it.

4. Each morning when I arise, it must proclaim that momentous event and simply send the phrase, “Mornin’ Peeps!!!”

5. Whenever Guy Kawasaki tweets anything, which happens about 300-400 times a day, the app should be the first to Re-Tweet it, ideally within 30 milliseconds so I can get my mug to appear in the Tweet stream before his next posting, if possible. For an extra bonus, remove any gratuitous references to alltop.com.

6. It should monitor for any DMs sent to me and forward them to my spam bucket, because, frankly, I just don’t have the time to check my Twitter DMs.

7. It should search through Google’s newsfeed and tweet the top headlines as they change every 3 minutes. It should insert ambiguous and random catch phrases that go something like “This is cool!”, or “Can you believe this?!” in front of the tinyurl link.

8. Harvest the entire Twitter member database and follow everyone.

9. Auto-follow anyone who somehow manages to follow me before I can follow them. It must then send them a Tweet, an email, and a phone text telling them how much I appreciate their follow and how I intend to hang on their every word.

10. If anyone should ever stop following me, notify me about it immediately, so I can launch a marketing campaign to get them back, ASAP, unless it’s someone who doesn’t Tweet every hour, because I really could care less about those kinds of people.

11. Send out some blip.fm song link every 10 minutes that will make my followers think I have very sophisticated musical taste.

Have I left any out? Feel free to add your own ‘must have’ Twitter automation features in the comments…

UPDATE 2009-03-21: Just in case the satire didn’t shine through, I think that automation in social networking is a slippery slope that eventually ruins the experience. People who engage in the techniques above make me want to ‘unfollow’ them on Twitter.