wrong tool

You are finite. Zathras is finite. This is wrong tool.

Toddler Meets Cloud, world ends

by Leave a Comment

My son and I visited my friend Jason’s house and while he was there Jason’s wife offered to let the kids watch a children’s movie. Jason, an early cord cutter, fired up Netflix and quickly had them watching a Curious George movie.

Half-way into the movie, as I had forewarned Nicholas, we headed out. Nicholas was appalled. He was convinced that he would never see how this movie ended. I had to promise him, repeatedly, that he would get to see the movie. Nicholas was dubious.

We arrived home, and mommy told Nicholas that the movie was in The Cloud and we would watch it later. Nicholas turned to mommy and asked:

Are we going to see the movie through the window or outside on the clouds?

We both started to laugh hard. And cursed the fact that we had not recorded this for posterity.

Daddy who works on cloud infrastructures, with  Mommy’s help – oh okay Mommy is much better at explaining and she did most of the explaining … , explained what cloud was.

Here’s what Nicholas understood:

Inside Onedrive

by Leave a Comment

Ever since Microsoft gave away storage for a product I would buy anyways, I have been working to move ~1TB of storage to the cloud and have encountered many of the limitations of the service and learned a little bit of the technical underpinnings.

I suspect when the folks who created OneDrive imagined the service they thought pictures. And pictures have a reasonable size (1-2MB) and a small number of them. They did not imagine using one-drive to backup entire multi-100GB file systems.

And that impedance mismatch has been tough.

OneDrive uploads a small number of files at at time (2-4). OneDrive scans the entire FileSystem to find new files.

All of this will get fixed over time, I am sure although things are now kind of rough.

One of the more interesting things is that I have gotten some insight into how OneDrive is built.

OneDrive has four core elements

  1. Skydrive.exe that is the sync engine that actually copies the data to the cloud
  2. WSearch the search engine for windows doubles as a way for onedrive to keep track of the files on the file system.
  3. The use-of-stubs to manage offline files and provide the illusion of a single file system. Possibly the only good use of hierarchical storage management in the history of the snake oil known as HSM.
  4. A pretty UI

All of these technologies have been around for many many years and OneDrive is really a repackaging of all of them.

OneDrive, as a product, has the property of something that was cobbled together over time without any of the architectural integrity of competing products like DropBox or Google drive. This probably reflects the ambivalence Microsoft had towards cloud services. I am encouraged to read for Windows 10 Microsoft is working to improve Onedrive significantly.

One of the challenges for a company like Microsoft is that building a product that has the feature set of DropBox is easy, but building a competing product is a completely different can of worms. A competing product requires a deeper level of engineering than the cobbling of re-purposed technologies that the current Onedrive product is.

Microsoft’s decision to embrace DropBox may reflect that reality.

 

 

 

 

 

The unusable Twitter client

by Leave a Comment

Been using Twitter for more than 5 years.

Have two sets of friends:
hockey and tech

Hockey folks don’t give a damn about tech
Tech folks don’t give a damn about hockey

Hockey folks don’t want to read about storage
Tech folks don’t want to read about the Habs

So I have two Twitter accounts

Really hated how there was no *easy* way to switch between them. I tweet less because of this. I read fewer tweets because of this.

Except there is … Can you tell me where?

IMG_0267-0.PNG

Not there, stop looking.

What about here:

IMG_0268.PNG

Can’t find it? Let me help:

IMG_0269.JPG

I only discovered this when my finger accidentally hit that icon. Apparently mystery meat UI is in vogue …

This time it is going to be different, NOT!

by Leave a Comment

Signs of the upcoming apocalypse are everywhere… and today my wife had the latest sign.

While getting gas, my wife happened to bump into the gasoline attendant who was looking at the market on his cell phone.

And he turns to her and says: Why is the market going down these days?

Wife: How long have you been here in the valley?

Him: 30 years

Wife: Well you remember 2000? and 2008? I mean this happens bubbles grow and then they collapse

Him: No, this time it’s going to be different because of Apple and Oil and – At this point my wife stopped listening.

 

Public service announcement, it’s not going to be different. The same thing that always happens in the bay area will happen again, we are going to see an implosion of companies and employment. Like the Parable from the Gospel says: The exact time of the arrival of the bridegroom is unknown but He is coming.

All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again

by 7 Comments

One of my favorite shows on television was battle star galactica, and it’s theme that the past and future were tied forever in a cycle. As someone who has lived through three busts, the feeling of being a cylon trapped in a cycle of life and death is … familiar. And in each case, the bubble was caused by a drop in interest rates and in each case the end of the bubble came with an increase in interest rates.

Right now traffic is as bad as it was in 1999, in spite of the tremendous infrastructure improvements that were put into place since then. And there is this feeling that this guy wouldn’t be out of place here:

pets_com
Without any shadow of any doubt the total amount of investment in the bay area has gone crazy. The question is when will it end and was it correlated with an interest rate drop…

And then this shows up (my own annotations):

2015-01-12_1419

What the chart shows is how between the start of QE in 2008 and the end of QE the total aggregate investment in Seed rounds grew from under 50ish billion to over 500 billion.

What the chart also shows is how with the end of QE in Q3 of 2014, the total amount of money in seed rounds has collapsed from over 500 billion to less than 200 billion. Twitter commentary from the VC community suggests that there is basis in fact.

Turns out we had a bubble begin with a drop in interest rates (QE Start) and and end with an increase in interest rates (QE End).

Speaking from my own narrow field of view, in early 2014 people were running around getting funded, in late 2014 I heard a lot fewer stories and recruiting pitches to go join the new new thing…

What does this mean? Assume the trend holds…

First of all it means that there is going to be, once again, much better traffic for those who survive the wave after wave of layoff. Many companies will fail and the never ending and increasing investment dollars that allowed for endless seed rounds will disappear creating a large overhang of employees who will, unfortunately, move on to other pastures. Secondly it means if you are in one of those seed companies, you better be figuring out how to get to sustainability faster … and finally it means that the quality of investments will pick up….

Oh and housing prices will drop again…

For folks who have not been here in a similar bust the experience will be traumatic as the go-go atmosphere evaporates. For those of us with more grey hairs, we are reminded of the saying: This time it will not be different….

 

 

 

The problem with image backup services like iCloud

by Leave a Comment

At NetApp in 2008 while we were struggling to define feature set of ONTAP 8, a product manager asked me if it was okay to ship backup in 8.0 and restore in 8.1. He quickly realized that this wasn’t going to work…

Unfortunately Apple has made a similar mistake with iCloud.

The problem with iCloud is that it is an image backup service. An image backup copies every disk block and restores every disk block. An alternative to an image backup is a file backup that restores every file. An image backup has the nice property that it is faster to restore than a file backup. The problem with an image backup is that it is a an all or nothing restore. If a part of the image has a corrupt file, then the backup is useless.

For example, if you have a firmware image in the iCloud backup that’s corrupt, then restoring the backup from iCloud restores the phone into a corrupted state.

And that is a problem. Turns out if you have let’s say 5 years of photos in those backups, there is no way to restore the pictures because the image contains the corrupt firmware.

This isn’t impossible to fix. Many backup apps that do image backup are also able to do file restores. Unfortunately Apple doesn’t offer that service.

Fortunately third party restore apps do!

The real lesson is that if you are using an iPhone, please use a service like dropbox or google drive or one drive. In this manner if the backup is corrupt you don’t lose your data or spend money on someone tool.

 

Because some 1’s are 0’s and some 0’s are 1’s

by 1 Comment

When I was an aspiring software engineer at my first job at SGI in 1996, I asked my friend and mentor why a specific kernel debugger wasn’t working.

He gave me an answer, but even then my unwillingness to be satisfied with a curt answer was – well – annoying. He looked at me as I tried to get a more interesting answer than just – well the configuration didn’t work and realized that he needed to get on with his life than answer one more annoying question from this freshly minted new grad.

His response to my: well okay but really what was going what was the fundamental issue?

His answer was legendary:

Because some of the 1’s that should have been 1’s were 0’s and some of the 0’s that should have been 0’s were 1’s

I love the answer. It was a brush off, but at the same time was deeply insightful. At the end of the day the reason software doesn’t work can be reduced to a string of 1’s and 0’s that aren’t correct.

And many years later my son repeated this to me when I asked his mom why the database wasn’t working:

Apparently some sayings endure.

Why we can’t have nice things

by Leave a Comment

KMM8q

 

This really captures how different disciplines see each other!

The way to really read this:

  1. Look across the discipline you belong to
  2. Look diagonally across to see how each discipline sees itself
  3. Look vertically down to see how we wall see sysadmins.

 

It wasn’t me, it was my neighbor

by 1 Comment

Keith Adams of Facebook pointed me to this paper:

Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them:
An Experimental Study of DRAM Disturbance Errors

The fun part is that we have a new and exciting way to induce memory corruption. Reading memory.

The interesting part is the proposal of a probabilistic algorithm to address the issue.

This continues my enduring belief that reliance on reliable hardware to make software work is increasingly a fools errand. As we patch more and more of the cracks, eventually we will have to stare at the chasms and rethink software design.

In the meantime, the next time I get a memory corruption I am pointing my boss to this paper.

 

Looking back on “Here Comes Another Bubble”

by 1 Comment

In 2007 the Richter Scales captured the zeitgeist of the Silicon Valley bubble atmosphere with this hysterical video:

The irony about this song was that the 2007 bubble was killed by Lehman’s. A lesson in mass hysteria.

And as I was re-watching it last night I wondered – so what happened with those scrolling startups? And was Peter Thiel right or wrong?

bubble-3

When it comes to Facebook, he was probably right. In fact, the valuation of Facebook is staggering and an amazing achievement for the folks at that company!

That got me wondering about the rest of the companies … The hype around MySpace wasn’t probably justified:

myspace

And then if you look at the scrolling startups, I tried to circle the ones I knew were still in business. Admittedly I didn’t look through every single one — there are a lot but was struck by how few of them are around:

bubble-2 bubble

Starting a company is hard. Creating investor value is hard.

And sometimes it’s worth remembering that for ever Facebook there is a scrolling morass of companies that go nowhere.

And like the song says, those folks are probably back at work looking to start another new thing…