Business | Ady's Blog

To Be Or Not To Be

I wish I had found the site “Joel on Software” by Joel Spolsky earlier in my life. It contains a lot of precious insights and good points in the area of software development.

Being a partial developer myself, I would have never thought of doing programming as a full day job anymore in this lifetime. However, reading on how Fog Creek values their programmers made me realize that there just might be a light at the end of the tunnel.

I’ve also been reading Joel’s book: Smart and Gets Things Done. Although his style might not be suited for many people especially the typical management, I see it as a very good way to get good technical staff and to retain them in an organization.

Programmers are human too, and for everyone there’s a price. Just keep them happy and they’ll do a good job.

The book is an interesting read for those who can keep an open mind; programmers and management alike. Just don’t bother to get it if you already have a firm way of managing people and not willing to change. Trust me, this is no conventional way of managing technical people. Conventional managers will only scoop some of the points that are advantageous to them, not for everyone.

As for me I don’t think I’ll have any chance to work in the States, perhaps one day I can create such company myself. Who knows…

World of Microprocessors

I have been terribly busy lately and my energy seems to be drained out completely once I reach home. It’s time to write something.

For no apparent reason I was browsing the Internet when my eyes caught on the words Intel and Penryn. I was curious. Really curious so I Googled the words.

The results of my search was a bit surprising. Not long after Intel® introduced Core™2 processors (a year plus ago), based on 65 nanometer process, Intel is planning to release Penryn in the second half of 2007. Penryn is the next generation Intel® Core™2 family processors which is built using 45 nanometer transistors.

After Penryn, in 2008 Intel is planning to release Nehalem which will have a brand new micro architecture and after that, they will go for 30 nanometer transistors.

Penryn basically introduces SSE4 (with 47 new SSE instructions) and should run faster than the current processors clocked at the same speed. It is much smaller so that a silicon wafer can produce more chips which in turn translates to lower cost and better profit for Intel. I wish I have some share in that company. Penryn also supports 6MB of L2 cache per two core, meaning that the quad-core version can have up to 12MB L2 cache. Everything is built with 410 million transistors. Amazing.

The race for smaller transistors have long begun, and Intel has been succeeding as a leader compared to the rival – AMD®. While Intel introduced the 65 nanometer processor in late 2005, AMD was only able to release the same technology roughly a year after. To outrun Intel, AMD has vowed to try to release its 45 nanometer processors within 18 months after the release of its 65 nanometer processor, and that roughly translates to mid 2008. It looks like Intel is not allowing that to happen.

As a long time Intel user, I am of course biased towards Intel. But I still remember my 80386DX was made by AMD 😉

What is happening is indeed a proof of Moore’s_law being valid. It states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months. Mr Moore is still alive and kicking and he was the co-founder of Intel.

If you’re a college student, avoid doing a project to research about all processors that were ever made unless you are really into it. When I was in college I was so into microprocessors and that is what I did. However back then it was still possible as the latest processor available were Pentium II. Nowadays, I am all confused with so many code names and numerical conventions. The latest processor that I have in my household is a Celeron D, while my torrent box is running on a 9 year old Pentium III 600MHz.

45nm Hi-k Next Generation Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture
A review at AnandTech

How current is your PC?

4.0Mbps Streamyx?

I was browsing through some blogs when I found myself on this particular post in doBot’s blog. Here’s the official announcement.

Familiar Malaysian forums have been discussing this for a while, and as usual I’m left behind again. Some of them mentioned that the 4Mbps is nothing if TMNet still decides to limit/throttle traffic especially for P2P users. I’m actually neutral in this P2P throttling issue, even though I am a heavy bittorrent user. Why? Well actually the number of broadband users in Malaysia is not that high, and most concentrated only among savvy Internet users. If most of these users are using P2P daily and TMNet does no policing act on it, the whole Streamyx infrastructure will most probably overload. This, is not deniable due to the incompetency of TMNet but IMHO every company deserves a chance to improve themselves, provided that they are trying to improve.

As I read everywhere in the media, TMNet is heading a committee for the second submarine link (I don’t remember the project name). That is indeed very good if it can provide us a secondary pipe and a fail-over mechanism. I have no idea but I am really hoping that this will widen our International link in a massive scale.

On the introduction of the 4Mbps link, I think it is to soon if no International link upgrade has been done. If anyone from TMNet can enlighten me that would be great, as I have no idea of what is going on in there that they actually decided to offer the 4Mbps package.

The price of RM268 is indeed quite high, but it is very reasonable IF AND ONLY IF there would be a huge improvement to speed and reliability. I know users in some other countries pay a lot more for broadband, and of course some pay less. It’s really just business and you can’t really do much about it. I’d pay RM268 if the service is good and reliable, with superb customer support. I guess I’ll just wait and see before running to the nearest TM Point.

If you want to be the first to test this service, go quick as they are offering RM198 before 17 June 2007. I need your feedback on the service before deciding. Oh yes, check the availability/coverage in your area first before even thinking about it. And of course, you have to be with 3km or less from the exchange 😉

I wonder how they would consider/calculate a package upgrade?

What do you think… would you go for this package?

Hosting: Responsibility of Customer or Provider?

This post is specially dedicated to Exabyte’s latest customer newsletter, which provide very useful information on how customers could prevent servers from overloading and causing service downtime.

I do agree with what Exabytes have to say, and it is true that I noticed that when the services were down, it was indeed caused by processes using too many CPU and memory resources. However it must also be noted that not all users are efficient programmers, and sometimes the codes simply made to achieve a certain goal without considering the impact to the server resources. This is the user’s fault.

I guess you know that there is a big BUT coming: when I experience service downtime I can see that many many cron (task scheduler) jobs are running out of control on the server. Some of them were even a few weeks old. The processes are obviously user cron jobs. In this case there is a lack of policing activity from Exabytes. When a service is down, the engineers simply restart the service and not do any investigation on what caused the overload.

After receiving an email confirming that the service is already up, I usually go in and check the zombie processes and they are still there, hogging MySQL and CPU resources.

We need to keep in mind that not all users are technical and have shell access like me, and they might not even know that their application / cron job is causing any resource problems. So IMHO it’s the provider’s responsibility to alert users if such case happens.

Now I only serve images on the server, and the server in US actually checks if the user is from Asia and if the Exabytes server is up. If it’s up then the images will be served from there. If not then users will have to wait for images to load a little longer.

Click on continue reading to read the rest of this post.

Continue reading Hosting: Responsibility of Customer or Provider?

McDonald’s Taman Equine

Last night (Sunday morning) at 2.50am my stomach started to rumble as I was staying up late to finish up some work. So I went to McDonald’s to get some food at the 24-hour drive thru. I arrived there exactly at 3.00am, and there were 3 cars ahead of me in the queue.

I didn’t expect anything weird until the first car in front still have not moved after 10 minutes. And 2 more cars arrived behind me. Not that I can reverse the car and get away or anything (although the thought did enter my mind). I turns out that I had to wait until 3.25am in the queue before it was my turn. Yes, 25 minutes in queue at McDonald’s drive thru.

After ordering (with very limited choice) I saw the supervisor was manning the drive thru counter while all of the other staff was playing around, taking drinks from the dispenser and do nothing. And the manager had to record orders on a paper. At first I thought they were on break or something until I decided to ask the supervisor why the hell did he write records on paper and does he have to do it every night? He said, “yes, we have to wait until the system turns back on in the morning to key in everything”.

Hmm… can’t the staff go around and pickup the food while the manager takes orders and record them? Beats me. I don’t know fast food business that well. I just eat them.

That’s a new lesson for me. If you’re starving in the middle of the night don’t go to McDonald’s. And I thought they had a perfect “system”. Quoting my entrepreneurship teacher in college:

Why McDonald’s can succeed in their business? They have a perfect system.

Yeah right 😉

Bye, Exabytes

It has become worst since these last few days. Mails are missing, and site is not accessible many times. I’ve set up server monitoring at host-tracker.com and I receive on average 6 downtime alerts per day, with monitoring triggered every 30 minutes.

I’ve seen people writing about my plugin said “if you can’t access the site, try again later“. And my AdSense stats reveals that very little impression made meaning that many people are having problems to access this site, and 4 others I have set up in this server.

Accessing this site is slow, very slow. I have to do something about it now.

As I have SSH access to the server, I can see so many cron jobs that have been running for a few days, not finishing its job. One thing about Exabytes’ servers is that they have a lot of features and allow people to do things that many overseas hosting company does not allow you to do. That’s a good thing except that when a user do something stupid, there’s nobody to look over the problem.

Well, the Engineers are fast when you report something, and they are doing a good job in reactive work. But I don’t see any proactive work being done. Once I reported that the MySQL server is taking a lot of load and freezing and asked them to check which user is doing this (even if it is myself), so that it can be prevented in the future. All they can say is that the MySQL server is now running fine.

Even though it is not downtime, it is certainly close to one. The server load sometimes goes as high as 34 (this is not percentage, this is a 1 minute average load on a UNIX machine – number of process fighting over CPU resources).

And I don’t think they are going to do anything about it. I am not sure how many domains are hosted on this particluar server but I am guessing there are a lot. I checked PHP’s max_execution time using CLI and it is set to 30 seconds. So why does the ones running from cron did not die?

Continue reading Bye, Exabytes

WiMAX In Malaysia

Ok ok I know this is old news for most of you. I just can find this time to write a bit about it.

Technically speaking WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. It is a common misconception to consider WiMAX and Wi-Fi as similar technologies. The fact that they both start with same letter and governed by IEEE standard 802x. makes them easier to be confused.

Wi-Fi, which most of us are familiar with and use everyday is targeted for short range access (10m) and is suitable for Intranet or hotspot coverage for a small area. It was never meant for ISPs to distribute Internet access. Wi-Fi uses unlicensed radio spectrum, otherwise you’ll need to apply for a license from MCMC each time you buy a wireless access point 😉

In the other hand, WiMAX can go up to 70km and is suitable for last mile/km distribution of Internet access from ISPs. The issue with licensing that we saw in the news is because WiMAX utilizes a licensed radio spectrum so not just anyone can operate a WiMAX access point.

Do take note, however all of the maximum ranges are still effected by the line-of-sight limitation so even if you live very near to a WiMAX access point but you live behind a hill you might not get the maximum 70Mbps speed that WiMAX can handle. That’s a nice pair of numbers – 70km/70Mbps.

Continue reading WiMAX In Malaysia

Exabytes Replies

Following the case I wrote about Exabytes’ disappointing respond to my notification, I received an email from the Director of Business Development saying how sorry they are about the incident.

By responding to a customer without being asked is indeed a very beneficial action towards a business. Customers feel happy that there exists someone inside the company who actually cares (even if they don’t really). It’s a good business practice and kudos to Exabytes.

I suddenly remembered I watched a video once by Ron Kauffman, and he explained how good customer service can overcome product defects. I agree with him 100%, if not more.

RegisterFly Gets Ditched By eNom

One little, meaningful email from my mailbox:

This is a formal notice to owners of domains which have been registered through eNom via its reseller, RegisterFly.com.

YOU MUST TAKE ACTION NOW TO RETAIN FULL MANAGEMENT RIGHTS TO YOUR DOMAIN NAME.

Although you purchased your name at RegisterFly, eNom is the actual registrar of record for your domains. As we are severing our relationship with RegisterFly, we are aware that this may have an impact on you as the domain owner.
Therefore we would like to offer this opportunity to assist you in securing control of your domain name directly with eNom.

Over the last year, eNom has become aware of an increasing number of complaints from dissatisfied RegisterFly customers.

As an eNom reseller, RegisterFly is contractually bound to adhere to certain standards of customer service in a speedy and diligent manner. Therefore, effective immediately, we have terminated RegisterFly as a reseller of domain names through eNom.

eNom has come to its senses, as when people buy domains from RegisterFly, eNom’s name gets displayed as well. It used to be like that; now RegisterFly is a fully accredited registrar by its own. The question is, isn’t there any control or qualification rules needed by ICANN to allow a company to be an accredited ICANN registrar?

Update: It turns out that when the domains are transferred to eNom we get an extended renewal for free! A domain I had which expired on the 17th Jan 2007 was renewed even though I was ready to let it go. Maybe this is a sign, and I should do something with that domain?

Update: It turns out that the domains are indeed expired. They keep it for themselves, the expired date shown on a whois query is one year later but the system says it’s expired. 🙂

Frustration With Exabytes

Between 00:20 to 02:10 Malaysian time (16:20 to 18:10 GMT) the Apache service on the server hosting this site was down. I know that only Apache was down due to the fact that I can’t access the webites using the web browser but I can access FTP, SSH, SMTP, and POP. Here’s what I put inside the form for Exabytes technical support:

Hi

We can’t access the site using HTTP. Apache may be down. I can access FTP, SMTP, SSH, and POP. I realized that there was a problem with the network at the data center as described in https://support.exabytes.com/index.php?_m=news&_a=viewnews&newsid=209 but this problem will cause outages on all services, not only HTTP.

Just letting you know as you may not realize Apache is down.

Thank you.

And the reply I received surprised me:

Dear Ady,
At the moment, our network had high latency.
Our network engineers are currently working on this issue.
You may refer to:
https://support.exabytes.com/index.php?_m=news&_a=viewnews&newsid=209

If you have any enquiries, please do not hesitate to contact. Thank You.
Best Regards,
KM Chow
………………………………..
System Engineer,
Exa Bytes Network Sdn Bhd

With an excellent customer support record so far (at least for myself), I was surprised that this Engineer (?) can’t read well. He shouldn’t have repeated the URL I already mentioned. This somehow implies that the customer can’t read and the reply really looks like a template.

I am hosting at Exabytes Malaysia due to the fact that the customer support is fast, and my access to the server is very fast. But right now I am thinking of moving my blog elsewhere. Too bad some of other sites I host here must stay due to the fact that they are targeted to Malaysian customers and the access is fast.

Thanks, Daddy

Well, this post is not about my dad but about GoDaddy. Tonight, after my continuous disappointment with RegisterFly I decided to buy some domains from GoDaddy. I am still very impressed with their system. Top level automation. For my story I will need the following image to assist me.

As their promotion mentioned: Private Registration just $4.99 or FREE when you register three or more domains!

Even though I didn’t really need private whois information, it was quite a good offer especially with .com domains priced at USD6.95. So I went and add 3 domains to my cart, clicking the “private” button. That went well – all of the private registrations (rows 4-6) were inserted with cost of 0. At this moment all three domains were at their full prices, so my total cart amount was USD23.64.

Next I simply added a .info domain which costs me USD1.99. Nothing special about it, just the low price but I still get the free private registration. My cart now holds USD25.88.

Next, I needed a simple hosting preferably with unlimited domains so I signed up for a year of budget Linux hosting. That costs USD43.05 (3.59 x 12). The most exciting part here is that the first domain I registered (row 1) became USD1.99 as they promised with the hosting package: Your Domain is Just $1.99 With This Purchase. My total then was USD63.97.

Going further, I was ready to checkout and pay with my PayPal but I remembered a discount code provided by BLAUGH. So I entered it and further obtained 10% discount (even though 10% should be USD6.397 I was given USD5.20 – must be some other calculations). It brought my total to USD58.77.

If I consider my hosting to be paid in full (USD43.05) I only paid 58.77 – 43.05 = 15.72 for my two .com, a .net and a .info domain 😉

I was (am) happy. I would really recommend this service to everyone. And immediately after paying, I can already check my whois, and manage my brand new domains.

By the way, RegisterFly responded to my ticket about domains not registered (see related link), and they say it was a problem with traffic load being too high. That’s a bad excuse.

Connect To Me Via LinkedIn

There’s a new service in town: LinkedIn

It’s a connection building site, more or less the purpose is like those of Ringo or Friendster but targeted to the professional community. It have a paid option where you can see more business information about other people in the community. The site looks professional and the system works really well.

If you ask me, this is a very good opportunity for you to get linked to others and find out if anyone is interested in your expertise. I does not matter if you’re still a student – the system supports it too. Maybe you’ll be able to secure a job after graduation, or even find a place to do your industrial training. As for me, well if there are opportunities to work abroad or remotely I would certainly be interested 😉

Connect to me now: http://www.linkedin.com/in/romantika. Drop me an invitation using my email ady [at] romantika [dot] name

This is not a paid post, and I will not gain anything from this except for valuable networking and contacts.

RegisterFly Woes V2.0

Urgh… RegisterFly did it again. Although I have officially become a GoDaddy customer, I still have like USD30+ in my RegisterFly account so I decided to spend the money on some domains I have in mind. Guess what? I registered and paid for the domains on the 5th of January 2007 but until today there’s no sign of the domain in any whois and they remain free for registration.

So, if someone were to buy those domains from other registrars they still can. It’s so stupid and disappointing especially since they took my money when I registered, and now that I want to use it they don’t exist!

I sent them a ticket two days ago, and until now there’s still no reply. That’s normal even though they boast of 24/7 support on the top of their page. Maybe I should try calling their support number.

Things ain’t that bad as I registered some not so very critical domains… and I can always buy them somewhere else as they have not been registered. 😉

1TB Hitachi Hard Drive

After 51 year from the introduction of the first hard drive by IBM in 1956 (5MB in capacity), Hitachi has released a 1TB hard drive. For the technical readers, 1TB = 1024GB = 1048576MB. That’s a huge amount of data, and if the hard disk crashes and you don’t have any backups or a RAID setup, you’ll end up kneeling down and crying over your lost data. And just imagine what’s the cost for data recovery service…

In the future if I even consider buying disks this big, I’ll surely buy by pair and setup RAID.

The consumer version of the Hitachi drive is named Deskstar 7K1000 while the two other versions (which will be released later – 2nd quarter) are called CinemaStar for DVR boxes, and unknown name for enterprise with certified MTBF.

The disk contains 5 platters, in which each carries 200GB. The 7200 rpm Serial-ATA drive will have 32MB data buffer. It will be available in SATA 3.0Gb/s and Parallel-ATA 133 interfaces.

Of course, this big capacity drive was achieved by Perpendicular Recording.

For further reading this technology go to http://www.pcworld.com/article/….

Whatever it is, I am sure that late Reynold Johnson will be very happy with what has evolved from his invention and how it has helped mankind.

Thanks for Azidin for the heads up.

RegisterFly Woes

Do yourself a favor. Do not use RegisterFly for domains.

When you submit a ticket, they don’t care. When you submit multiple tickets, they’ll reply by saying “Please do not submit multiple tickets with the same issue”. But at least I got their attention.

I am pissed off at them since I can’t even renew my domains. Their so-called automated domain renewal emails kept flooding my mailbox, but when I try to renew everything seems to fall apart. Submitting a ticket didn’t seem to help, so I did what this commenter in Vincent Rich’s blog suggested – use Firefox’s ReloadEvery extension to submit hundreds of tickets. I got their attention. One of my .com domain got transferred but for this particular domain romantika.name their buggy system seems to be ignoring my renewal requests and gave me a blank order ID.

Now I have decided to transfer my domains elsewhere. The new registrar is powerful, their automated system is really automated, helping me register a new domain and the transfer requests within 5 minutes. However, I got stuck again with the authorization code. Previously in RegisterFly’s system you can clearly see an authorization code (a.k.a. EPP code) for every one of the domains, but recently it has disappeared. Vincent also had the same problem. Currently I see that he already succeeded in transferring his domain to NameCheap. Well done, Vincent. I wonder how long it took him for the transfer to complete.

What I have done so far about the transfer process initiated today is send another ticket, and an email to their support for the authorization codes. That’s where the transaction is stuck now. And I also see another ticket I created about my problem renewing romantika.name domain. That’s not the first. The first also went unanswered.

I warn you once more, don’t do business with them. You’ll lose precious time, and money to buy aspirin because of the headache they cause.

What registrar do you use?