So, I’ve written about Compellent a few times from a price perspective, mostly on the disk side. I was recently contacted by our vendor with quotes for two new Compellent controllers. “What’s this all about?” I asked. “Why don’t we have a call with Compellent to discuss?” he replied. I rolled my eyes a little but figured it was worth hearing them out, since our Compellent SAN is at the heart of our infrastructure.

We currently have two controllers setup in failover mode. The first was bought in 2008 and the other in 2010 to add redundancy. Earlier this year we upgraded to the latest software version in preparation for moving our production DB onto the SAN, to allow us a nice window before we had to perform another upgrade (which would now risk DB downtime… I like failover but I don’t trust it enough to have a DB up during a failover), so I was kind of skeptical about any sort of upgrade to begin with.

On the call, the Compellent reps explained that they’ve dropped Fibre Channel connectivity between the controller and the disk enclosure, and the purpose of the upgrade is to give us SAS. In addition, they no longer sell SATA (!). I asked why we couldn’t simply add SAS cards to our existing controllers and was told that our current controllers are PCI-X, so can only support up to 3Gb/s SAS, while the new controllers have PCI-e and support 6Gb/s. And they want to ensure that we have the best possible performance. Pretty sure someone said the new controllers “have the future built in” to them.

One of the features we really liked about Compellent from the beginning was the fact that it was basically a software solution on top of commodity hardware. They stressed this point repeatedly. “When new technology comes out, we can just add a new card into your existing controller.” I think the example at the time was 10-gig Ethernet, but it seems like the same logic would apply to SAS. I understand that PCI-X doesn’t support 6Gb/s SAS, but it’s a tough pill to swallow that if we want to expand our SAN at all now, on top of whatever the actual expansion costs, we’re going to need to plunk down some serious money to upgrade the controllers, which really seems like a net-zero for us. We’re not going to ditch our existing FC enclosures so we’re going to be limited to 4Gb/s anyway. If they’re only selling SAS, well, that sucks for us, but ok. But why can’t we just throw a $500 PCI-X 3Gb/s card in to expand? So we’re not running at peak performance. I doubt that would be our performance bottleneck anyway. Plus, swapping out controllers is a huge operation for us.

I know at some point we’re going to have to bite the bullet and do this upgrade, but it just irks me. On the bright side, I guess, we don’t have to do a “forklift upgrade,” and the disks/enclosures will all still work. But we have a long way to grow before we need to expand, so fortunately I can put this off for a while.

The FCC recently conducted a study of some of the top broadband ISPs in the country and measured customers’ actual bandwidth as compared to what the ISPs advertised. FiOS really came out on top.

The report is available on the FCC site. The bottom line, though, is that Verizon FiOS averaged nearly 120% of advertised speed (i.e., more than was advertised) and Cablevision was between 50% and 75% of advertised speeds. Latency (ping) was also heavily in FiOS’s favor.

FCC - Fios vs Cablevision

More than 78,000 consumers volunteered to participate in this study and a total of approximately 9,000 consumers were selected as potential participants and were supplied with specially configured routers. The data in this Report is based on a statistically selected subset of those consumers—approximately 6,800 individuals—and the measurements taken in their homes during March 2011. The participants in the volunteer consumer panel were recruited with the goal of covering ISPs within the U.S. across all broadband technologies, although only results from three major technologies—DSL, cable, and fiber-to-the-home—are reflected in
this Report. To account for network variances across the United States, volunteers were recruited from the four Census Regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. Within each Census Region, consumers were selected to represent broadband performance in three typical speed ranges: less than 3 Mbps, between 3 and 10 Mbps, greater than 10 Mbps.

The testing methodology itself required innovation on both the consumer, or “client,” side and on the ISP, or “server,” side. The server-side infrastructure, which comprised reference measurement points that were distributed geographically across nine different U.S. locations, was made available to SamKnows for the project by M-Lab, a non-profit organization that supports Internet research activities. Each consumer participant’s broadband performance was measured from a hardware gateway in his or her household to the off-net test node that had the lowest latency to the consumer’s address.

On the “client” side of the test, consumers self-installed a measurement gateway that was provided by SamKnows. These gateways, or “Whiteboxes,” were installed between the consumer’s computer and Internet gateway and came pre-loaded with custom testing software. The “Whitebox” software was programmed to automatically perform a periodic suite of broadband measurements while excluding the effects of consumer equipment and household broadband activity. This approach permitted a direct measure of the broadband service an ISP delivered to a consumer’s household.

Anyone who’s experienced both Cablevision and Verizon can probably corroborate these results. Unless Cablevision significantly improves their services (DVR/TV as well as Internet), at the same price there’s no way I’d go back to Cablevision; I’d even stick with Verizon if it meant spending $10-$20 more per month, the service is that much better.

In a recent “debate” with a friend, I looked for historical data about the US public debt. I found Google Public Data, which has info about the annual budget deficit/surplus, but apparently (oddly) doesn’t have the debt. Odd because this info is available on the Treasury website.

I copied & pasted the data into Google Docs and made a chart of my own and some basic comparisons over time. Here are some of them rendered as images, though the scale makes the horizontal access kind of useless. I tried embedding the interactive Flash-based graph but it didn’t work. Oh well.

After reading up on the new VMware licensing&pricing model I understand the uproar. Limiting vRAM is a reasonable constraint, but 32GB per socket for Enterprise? 48 GB for “Enterprise Plus”? If you have a dual CPU server with 144 GB (easily configurable last year), with 4.1 you’d only need 2 enterprise licenses to use all 144 GB, since in 4.1 an “Enterprise” license covered 1 CPU (up to 6 cores) and up to 256 GB memory on the host.

But with 5.0 you’ll either have to buy 5 Enterprise licenses (160 GB) or 3 Enterprise Plus licenses (144 GB) just to use the full 144 GB. I guess VMware has done away with memory overcommit as a selling point? They used to tell us it was recommended to go up to 2:1 so we could safely put ~140 GB of VMs on a 72 GB machine – with the new model that’s completely gone.

To put it in monetary terms, on the machine with 144 GB ram from above, the cost for 4.1 would be $2875 * 2 = $5750. To stick with Enterprise it would be $2875 * 5 = $14,375, or $3495 * 3 = $10,485. A gigantic price jump. I haven’t read up on any features of vSphere 5, but I don’t think any feature can make up for at minimum nearly doubling the cost, with loss of a major selling point (memory overcommit). I mean, you can still overcommit as long as you’re willing to pay for the overcommitted memory. Also, the above numbers are per-host, so if you’ve got a 5-host cluster you’re looking at a $25,000 price hike.

VMWare has long been one of my favorite products, but this is making me consider alternatives. Almost 100% of the feedback I’ve read about this change has been negative. Seems like a huge mistake on VMware’s part.

• VMware 5.0 pricing
• VMware 4.1 pricing (as of 7/17/2011)
• ThinkCloud: vRAM entitlement Explained

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

I started college around when Napster was getting big. Between Napster and the ability to browse other students’ shared files, I downloaded plenty of MP3s, mostly due to the novelty of being able to get one-off songs that I’d never otherwise pay for. Songs like AC/DC’s “Big Balls,” which I’d never heard before, but which I noticed hundreds of people had in their collections, so I downloaded it and laughed as Bon Scott dragged out a double entendre for about 3 minutes.

In the years since then I’ve purchased lots of CDs, many of them due to having downloaded the MP3 years earlier. I’m certainly not an audiophile, but I can hear MP3 compression artifacts in anything encoded in “joint stereo” or under 192 kbps, so I usually bought the CD so I could create a pristine rip with my own settings. I haven’t bought every album, only the ones I really liked – one of the things that made MP3 downloading so novel was the ability to get a single track rather than having to buy an entire CD of crap, which is what the music industry was trying to force everyone to do.

A few companies tried over the years to sell individual MP3s, but nobody really had much success until Apple rolled out the iTunes music store. Apple succeeded for a few reasons, but I think one of the most important was the simplicity of the pricing model: $0.99 for a single track, or $10 for a full album. No subscription fees or any of that annoying crap, just pay once and you own it. Yeah, there was annoying DRM, but 95% of people don’t care about that.

I happen to be one of the 5% that does care about that. There were ways to strip the DRM but that was already too annoying for me, plus I hated iTunes (still do) and didn’t own an iPod, so this wasn’t very appealing to me. But on a more basic level, I already owned almost all of the CDs I wanted. When new albums were released, I could usually grab them (in CD form) online for around $15 shipped. Compared to Apple’s $10 for a DRM-laden AAC, this was a no-brainer for me – a physical copy of the disc to serve as a permanent backup, and the ability to rip the entire album at any bitrate I wanted.

Fast-forward to 2011. I have an iPhone now and so I’m stuck with iTunes (which also sells DRM-free MP3s now), but I still don’t buy music from Apple. In the intervening years I’ve come to realize that I just find $0.99 per track overpriced. There’s a price I’ll pay for a song, greater than zero, but less significantly than $0.99. The last few albums I’ve bought have been $3.99 specials on Amazon, most recently Foo Fighters Wasting Light last week. 11 tracks for $4; about $0.36 per track. The CD version of this album normally sells for $9.99; the MP3 version normally sells for $7.99. For $9.99 you get a physical item shipped to you to do whatever you want – rip to MP3, lend to a friend, sell in a yard sale, donate to a library. If you get the MP3 version, you get it instantly and save $2, but lose all the other stuff. I don’t know if Amazon lets you redownload stuff you’ve purchased, so maybe you don’t need the physical medium in the event of a HD failure. But for $2 more I’d rather have the disc.

What got me thinking about this is the NY Times paywall. I love the NY Times and apparently by their measure qualify as a “heavy user,” someone who reads more than 20 articles a month. I probably read 5 to 10 stories a day. I’ve found it’s pretty easy to bypass their paywall – I’m sure they realize it’s trivial, but most people won’t bother – but I do feel kind of dirty doing it, and it’s kind of annoying. I was thinking I wouldn’t mind paying for it, but certainly not their ridiculous prices. For one thing they have ridiculous pricing distinctions depending on whether you’re just reading online, on an iPhone, or an iPad. Who cares? If you’re paying for the content you should be able to view it on any medium. You’re paying for the CONTENT! $3.75/week for “nytimes.com and Smartphone” or $8.75/week for “All access” are the options and both of them are horrendous.

How about this: fund your account with $20. Each article you read debits your account $0.01 to $0.05 depending on age (stories older than 30 days shouldn’t cost as much as today’s news – I mean, you couldn’t give yesterday’s paper away for free on the street). When your balance gets below $5 it auto-debits $20 again. You can keep all the rules you have about referrals from Twitter & Facebook being “free” but that seems kind of silly. Maybe people who pay get a more pleasant experience while freeloaders get bombarded with ads. Paid users should also be able to see a full report of every article they’ve “purchased” and the date.

I guess my point is that I wouldn’t mind paying for this content, but it’s overpriced. I understand that people need to be paid, but when CDs were $20, I didn’t buy any. When they dropped to $10, I bought plenty. If the NY Times is $200/year, I’m not going to pay for it. If it’s $40/year, I might. If it’s $20/year I’d definitely pay just to assuage my conscience. I want the NY Times to continue to exist and I understand someone has to pay the reporters and everyone else involved, but I’m not paying $200/year for it. I have a price in my head, what I think it’s worth. If you’re not near that, I’m not paying. A year ago my DVD player died and I wanted to get a PS3 for use as a BluRay player, but there was no way I was paying $300 for it, even though it’s probably a fair price. If it were $150 I would have snatched it up, it just was not worth $300 to me. In the end I bought a $50 Sony upscaling DVD player.

The NYTimes has overpriced itself as well, so I’m going with the cheaper alternative – bypassing the paywall and viewing the content anyway. They could tighten up the paywall, and maybe I’d find a way around it, or maybe I’d just get my news elsewhere, in which case we both lose. If there was a “name your own price” way to make it work, everyone would win.

Well, that was quite an ordeal. But Verizon came today and finally installed FiOS. All’s well that ends well, I suppose. My phone number was finally ported over and the internet is insanely fast. This is 25/25 internet with my desktop Fedora box plugged into the TP-Link router which is then plugged into the FiOS ActionTec router. I didn’t want to have to reconnect all my computers to a new SSID so I’ll just continue using the TP-Link until I have a reason not to.

FiOS 25/25 Speed Test - May 20th, 2011

One thing I did right away was change my DNS servers. The default DNS servers with Verizon were 68.237.161.12 and 71.243.0.12. By default, Verizon uses “DNS assistance,” meaning that DNS queries against these servers will return IP addresses when they should return NXDOMAIN, so if you mistype the hostname in a URL it can direct you to a page full of ads. You can disable this by replacing the last octet of the default DNS IP with 14. So for the two IPs above, it would be 68.237.161.14 and 71.243.0.14. I figured I’d compare the response times of these servers with Google’s 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. I used dig to time DNS requests and also used ping to measure latency. 68.237.161.14 was the fastest for me, followed by 8.8.4.4 and then 71.243.0.14, so those are my primary, secondary, and tertiary DNS servers.

“Health care reform” has been in the news for a long time but none of the proposals that look like they have any chance of being enacted make any sense. It seems to be generally accepted in the US that health insurance should be provided by your employer. This idiosyncrasy of the American system stems from a loophole that allows employers to offer health insurance as a form of tax-free compensation. It proliferated during the 1940s when wages were frozen, so employers used health insurance as a way to sweeten the pot for employees.

This system may have made sense at the time, but many people in America seem to think this is just How It Should Be because That’s How It’s Always Been. There are countless problems with this system, and after thinking about them I find it hard to believe that even the Republican party can support it.

First of all, if your health insurance is tied to your employer then when you lose your job you lose your health insurance. There’s COBRA, but that just says that your employer has to offer you coverage at the price they were paying. If you had been contributing $200 per month to your insurance and your employer had been contributing $200, COBRA means they have to “let” you continue on their plan for 18 months, but you have to pay $400 (your share plus their share) plus a 2% administrative fee. How generous.

Now assume you’re comparing compensation offers from several prospective employers. In addition to the salary you also have to evaluate their health insurance – nearly an impossible task. Do you work for employer A, offering $40,000 but you have to pay $100/month toward the insurance (which your current doctor doesn’t accept), or employer B, offering $45,000, but you have to pay $250/month for insurance that your doctor does accept but which has a $40 copay? Assume you go with employer B, but two years later the employer changes insurance carriers and your doctor no longer accepts the insurance.

On the employer side, they have to employ personnel just to manage these insurance plans and constantly need to be evaluating the best deals, how to keep their costs as low as possible while keeping as many of their employees satisfied as possible, performing arcane calculations like trying to determine the intersection of doctors covered by carrier A and doctors covered by carrier B so they can announce to their employees that “95% of the doctors covered by A are also covered by B!” Well, health care just can’t be reduced to numbers like that.

The health insurance industry is a huge middle-man. It’s a wall between patients and doctors that adds no value in its current incarnation. The fundamental problem is it’s a for-profit industry wrapping itself like a snake around something that’s essentially a nonprofit industry, squeezing the life out of it in the process.

The whole point of any type of insurance is distributing risk. A large pool of people pay a monthly premium and a few people cash out. 1000 people paying $100 in a month pays for one guy to have a hip replacement for $100,000. That’s how it works. Insurance companies make money by making sure they take in more than they pay out. This means raising premiums, bargaining down costs with hospitals and doctors, and denying expensive care. This is what a for-profit company does. However, health care just cannot be considered for-profit. The purpose of a business is to make money. That’s why it exists.

The purpose of a government is to do things for its people that serve the common good that they cannot do individually: building roads, bridges, sewers, schools, maintaining a military. Why not a healthcare system? Why not take the money currently paid by every employer and employee and put it into a huge fund to run the healthcare system, working in a similar capacity to the current insurance companies but without the profit motive? If the premiums were paid as a tax and were uniform across employers and employees, then employees wouldn’t have to worry about losing coverage when they lose their job, or comparing coverages across employees, and employers wouldn’t have to worry about any of this stuff and could instead focus more on running their companies. The GOP touts itself as the friend to small business, so why isn’t it all over this? It would make small American businesses more competitive with their European counterparts who’ve had such a system for years.

I realize this is basically socialized medicine, and the word “socialism” is political suicide and thus we won’t see anything like this anytime soon in the USA. Even without the Red Scare, the insurance industry wouldn’t let it happen. The FUD would be pretty thick – I’d expect to see talk of death panels and rationed care.

In the end I guess it just comes down to what kind of a society you want to live in. Social Darwinism sounds cool, but does it really seem right to have people having to choose between food or vital medicine while bankers make $57,000 per day (by causing the financial crisis that caused millions to have to choose between food or medicine)?

I’ve long wondered why this sentiment seems so much stronger in the USA than in other countries and I have a feeling it goes back to Calvinist Puritans who basically saw success on earth as evidence that you were chosen by God. There’s a strange reverence for the rich and famous in the US, maybe because we don’t have official royalty. Whatever the case, if socialism is the term needed to describe a healthcare system in which everyone’s basic needs are met and it’s not up to an accountant at an insurance company whether or not people can receive medical care, then bring it on.

I should probably point out that many Americans are served by a system like this already. For instance, the VA hospital system for veterans. Why not expand this for all citizens? As Paul Krugman points out:

And what would terrify the right, of course, is the likelihood that genuine socialized medicine would actually win that competition.

Obamacare is I guess a step in a logical direction, given the current political climate. But if you’re legally requiring people to purchase health insurance, why not just go the extra step and make it into an actual tax? Then you eliminate the middle-man. Everybody loves eliminating the middle man! Anybody with any business sense knows that when you eliminate the middle man you get a better deal, right?

I haven’t even touched on quality of care. Americans like to say they have the best doctors in the world, but I don’t think most non-Americans agree. And even if it was true, great care that you can’t afford isn’t of much use. I think it’s well established by now that the US pays much more per patient but doesn’t get correspondingly better outcomes. To say nothing of benefits like maternity leave. Almost every other country on the planet has a fairy reasonable maternity/paternity leave policy, understanding that bringing a new human into the world is a major undertaking. Most offer 2-3 months for the mother with at least some percentage of base salary. The USA offers 12 weeks unpaid leave with the “guarantee” that you can get your job back when you return. Something is clearly wrong.

I don’t get it. I’ve ranted about this to everybody I know, now I’m ranting to the Internet. Oh well.

I’m not sure why these guys operate this way – they’re more than happy to lose me as a customer and then throw huge discounts at me to get me back. If they’d just give me a good price I’d love not to have to go through this rigmarole. But after being with Cablevision for 2 months I checked Verizon’s pricing and it beat my current deal with Cablevision.

FiOS digital voice with number ported for free; 25/25 Mbps internet; HMDVR free “forever” plus a second HD STB, Showtime, Movie Channel and Flix. Since I already had the battery thing installed last time I had FiOS they gave me a fair discount. Basically the whole package for $87/month + tax, price locked for 2 years, no contract. Not as great of a deal as I’d had with FiOS originally, but it’s pretty good, and FiOS’s service is definitely better than Cablevision’s. I’ve heard Cablevision was rolling out their “DVR plus” service with all programs recorded “in the cloud” rather than on the actual box, but it’s been two months and I haven’t heard of it coming to Long Island. So basically 2 years later Cablevision’s service is exactly the same while Verizon has iPhone apps to control the DVR and use the phone as a remote, plus DVR that’s much faster and just generally better service.

On a side note, I noticed tonight I was having problems trying to stream Netflix to my Wii. I tried loading netflix.com on my laptop and that also didn’t work, it said “couldn’t find server movies.netflix.com.” I tested this via dig on my linux box and sure enough, movies.netflix.com isn’t resolving against the default Cablevision nameserver (167.206.3.206) – getting a SERVFAIL:

[evan@lunix ~]$ dig movies.netflix.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> movies.netflix.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 17569
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;movies.netflix.com.            IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
movies.netflix.com.     232     IN      CNAME   merchweb-frontend-1502974957.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com.

;; Query time: 2129 msec
;; SERVER: 167.206.3.206#53(167.206.3.206)
;; WHEN: Sun Apr 24 01:23:58 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 103

I tried the same query against Google's nameserver (8.8.8.8) and it resolves correctly:

[evan@lunix ~]$ dig movies.netflix.com @8.8.8.8

; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> movies.netflix.com @8.8.8.8
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 43718
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;movies.netflix.com.            IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
movies.netflix.com.     300     IN      CNAME   merchweb-frontend-1502974957.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
merchweb-frontend-1502974957.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com. 39 IN A 174.129.220.6

;; Query time: 34 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Sun Apr 24 01:37:26 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 119

I set my router to resolve against 8.8.8.8 rather than whatever Cablevision provides and now it works. I'm not sure if this is related to the big EC2 disaster of the past few days but it looks more like Cablevision's fault than Amazon's or Netflix's.

In 2005 I bought a 1999 Subaru Forester. I had previously owned a 1997 Subaru Impreza Outback, and while it was a fun car, it had awful transmission problems – I think we ended up getting it replaced. After the Impreza I vowed never to get another Subaru. The AWD is great in the snow (at the time I had bought the Impreza I was living in Albany, which is snowy enough that AWD makes sense) but it was just too expensive to maintain. Despite my vow, I somehow ended up buying the ’99 Forester in 2005. This was a pretty versatile car – decent on gas, big enough (but not too big), and AWD for the snow – and I got a decent price for it. It was pretty good for a while, I think we got about 2 good years out of it before it really went downhill. The transmission went and I kicked myself for having bought another Subaru. I brought it to my mechanic and he basically said it would cost more to fix it than the car was worth, so I ended up driving it for 3 more years with a blown 1st gear and with it burning oil.

Finally in March 2010 I decided enough was enough. I had finally paid off my last student loan and also gotten a raise at work, so by my calculations I could afford a car payment with virtually no financial pain, as long as I kept it under $300/month. I looked at a bunch of cars but the main contenders were Toyota Corolla & Camry, Honda Civic & Accord, Ford Fusion, Focus & Escape, Kia Soul, Optima & Forte, and Hyundai Elantra & Sonata. I did lots of research and I was really torn between buying a new car and buying a used or certified preowned car. Based on my previous problems with used cars I really wanted one with a good warranty. In the CPO category I was leaning heavily towards a 2007-2009 Civic. They had 2006 Civic EXes on the lot for $15k, but with financing these came out pretty close to $300/month already, and I just felt like it should be possible to get more car for the money. $300 * 60 months = $18,000, and I figured I could get about $2000 trade-in for my car, so I reasoned I should be able to get a car in the $20k ballpark for about $300/month. Of course, this math assumes zero interest, but I saw a few 0% interest offers.

I checked out Toyota, but this was right in the middle of the safety recalls they had going on. I figured Toyota was probably really ok, and this was just a great time to buy a Toyota, but their deals weren’t really that great, and the salesmen I encountered at the Toyota dealer were dicks.

I checked out the Kia Soul, which I hadn’t even heard of until I started shopping for cars. It had almost all of the features I wanted and I think they offered 0% financing on it. It was pretty compelling, but I was wary of buying the first model year of a new car, and I found the engine pretty weak. When you drive on Long Island’s parkways, the ability to merge into 60 mph traffic is a necessity. The Soul did have some great features and an interesting look, but I’m not really that interesting.

Finally I looked at the Hyundai Sonata. In April 2010, the 2011 Sonatas were already on the lot and the dealers (and Hyundai) were doing everything they could to clear out the 2010s. I was drawn in to the dealer by the 0% financing (60 months) plus $1500 cash back Hyundai was offering on the 2010 Sonata. For a few years I was impressed by the Sonata’s styling, and personally preferred it to the other larger sedans – Camry & Accord. I got an internet price quote of $20,000 for a 2010 Sonata 4cyl with the sunroof package, with 0% financing for 60 months. I couldn’t believe this price to be accurate, since sticker price was something like $25,000 without the sunroof, but it turned out to be $21,000 with the sunroof, which was still a pretty great price. (The sunroof is the one real impracticality I insisted on. I figured I’d have this car for a long time, and I’ve always wanted a sunroof.)

I went in to the dealer and met with their internet salesperson, who basically shook my hand and passed me off to another salesperson on the floor. He told me they didn’t have any 4cyl Sonatas in stock and asked me if I wanted to drive a V6 Sonata. I said sure, but I didn’t see what the point was since it would drive completely differently from a 4cyl. Well, I was probably right that the 4 and the 6 were pretty different, but I sure did love that V6. After driving a 2.5L Forester for 5 years, a 3.3L V6 was pretty exciting. I mean, it wasn’t a Corvette, but it was definitely peppier than the Subaru.

I sat down to discuss price for the 4cyl Sonata and started the paperwork to buy it when they told me what my monthly payment was. I don’t remember the number but I think it was well over $350. When I asked why it was so much it became clear they hadn’t calculated it with 0% financing. They said they couldn’t give me 0% at the $21,000 price. I walked out and went home.

Two days later the salesman called me, telling me he could now give me 0% financing on the price we had agreed on. This was tempting, but after driving the V6 I decided I wanted that instead. He called a few more times but in the end he ended up offering me the exact car I drove – the V6 – for the price I had asked for, with 0% financing. It was still over the $300/month limit I had set, though. He said he could give me 0% interest for 72 months, and give me $2000 trade-in for my Forester, but would have to raise the price to $21,900 (with sunroof installed). $21,900 * 1.08625 sales tax = $23,788.88; subtract $2000 trade-in = $21,788.88. Divided by 72 months, this comes to $302.63. Pretty close to $300. I put another $2000 down, lowering the monthly payment to about $275. Well into the comfort zone. I got the car I wanted at a price I was pretty happy with.

That was about a year ago now. So far I’ve driven mostly to work, but also took a trip to Pennsylvania. At my current rate I’ll be under 8,000 miles on the car by the time I hit the 1-year anniversary. I got the oil changed at 3,000 miles (5 months) and again at 5,200 (8 months). So far the car has been pretty great. The gas mileage around town isn’t great – usually average around 18mpg but it goes as low as 16 in bad traffic – but on the highway I frequently hit 30-32 mpg, pretty good for a V6.

Aside from the sunroof, the car doesn’t really have many fancy features. But I’m not really a fancy person. One thing it has that I totally love is a built-in MP3 player with a USB port. Inside the center console, under the armrest, there’s a USB port and a headphone line-in jack. You can plug anything into the line-in – MP3 player, iPhone, etc. If you buy the Hyundai iPod cable, you can plug in your iPod and control it via the car’s integrated system. This sounded cool, but they wouldn’t throw the cable in for free for me (wanted to charge me $65 for it), and when I tested it on a showroom floor model it didn’t work properly with an iPhone (gave that stupid “this accessory is not designed for iPhone” error and the phone put itself in Airplane Mode). I ended up buying a Transcend 16GB USB flash drive for under $25, formatting it with fat32 and dumping MP3s onto it (WinAmp is great managing the folder structure). I stuck the USB stick in the USB port in the car and have >1500 songs in there at all times. This is pretty awesome – much better than having to plug in the iPhone each time I get in.

The car doesn’t have Bluetooth or nav – those features were only available in the “Limited” model, which was like $3000 more (also included leather seats), but I got a Motorola T325 Bluetooth car speaker as a gift recently and it works amazingly well, and I got a Garmin nuvi 265WT GPS with lifetime traffic (which also happens to function as a Bluetooth handsfree speaker), which together came to under $150. So I have cloth seats (“leather-appointed”) and instead of digital thermostats for driver & passenger seats I have a knob that controls both sides at once. I’m ok with this since it saved me $3000. Like I said, I’m not fancy. I’m not under any illusion that this is a Lexus or a Mercedes, though the overall quality is pretty good. The interior has lots of plastic, sure, but most cars in this price range seem to these days.

All in all, I’ve been impressed with Hyundai lately. They have the best warranty around, and no matter what anyone says about it, few manufacturers have been willing to back up their vehicles with a 10 year warranty. I’m aware they will try to weasel their way out of that warranty, but all manufacturers do that. But when you look at a comparison on paper, a 10-year/100k mile warranty is a lot more compelling than a 3-year/36k mile warranty.

Bottom line: one year later, if I had to do it over again I’d still pick the 2010 Sonata. The 2011 Elantra looks pretty awesome too, as do the Genesis and Equus. If I could afford a car in their range I would definitely consider the Genesis (especially the coupe) or the Equus.

(I hope I haven’t jinxed myself by writing this…)

Optimum Boost advertises 30 Mbps down, 5 Mbps up. Here’s a speed test I just ran at Ookla’s SpeedTest.net:

(My desktop is plugged into the router, the router is plugged into the Arris cablemodem.)

Here’s one of the last speed tests I did with Verizon, on 2/15. I had the 25/15 internet package:

(Desktop was plugged into 8-port Linksys 100 Mbit switch, the switch was plugged into the FiOS/ActionTec router.)

Verizon’s upload is much better than Cablevision’s, as you can see. Most people probably won’t notice it, but I do. Another thing to consider is that the FiOS router has pretty good WiFi built in. I got pretty good speeds using 802.11g on my laptop upstairs connected to the FiOS router downstairs. With Cablevision I went back to my old Netgear WGR614v7 router that I’d bought in 2009 after my trust Linksys WAP54G AP had died (at that point I was using my Linux box as router/NAT). The WGR614v7 is pretty crappy. The UI is fine and I guess for basic usage it’s acceptable, but the antenna is pretty small and the signal was very weak. When I connected 6-7 devices to it (Wii, 2 laptops, Mac Mini, 2 iPhones, Kindle) it would randomly not work on one of them. Rebooting the router fixed it, for a while. Somewhere in the logging facility of the router I saw an out-of-memory error. The kicker was that we’d get errors in the browser randomly when loading pages, and wifi speeds were pretty lousy – 10 Mbps down on the 30 Mbps Optimum connection.

I decided to right this wrong and spring for a new WiFi router. After some quick checking of Newegg I found the TP-LINK TL-WR841ND 802.11n router for $25 with free shipping and a free 802.11n USB adapter (TL-WN727N). Seemed like a no-brainer. I got it, set it up in under 10 minutes, plugged the N adapter into my wife’s laptop and can easily max the 30 Mbps cable connection from upstairs now. My laptop is still using G and the speeds & signal are pretty good. The TP-Link has 2 antennae and both are much larger than the Netgear’s single antenna; I can get a strong signal outside on my deck on the opposite side of the house from the router in the basement.

So the credits are finally wearing off my FiOS bill. I was paying $49/month for about 8 straight months for all 3 services plus HBO & Cinemax (a ridiculous price) with great phone & internet, plus HMDVR and 2 boxes. My most recent bill was $127 which includes a $40 credit that ends this month, so next month’s bill will be $170 or so.

Cablevision’s been beating down my door for weeks to come back, but they couldn’t come close to the deal Verizon had given me so it was easy to fend them off. But after this recent bill I gave them a call and signed up for the Optimum Triple Play. They have a special deal for people coming back from FiOS: $69/month for all 3 services plus Boost (30/5 Mbps) and a DVR. I added another box and HBO and it came to $100.30. So as of Friday I’ll be on Cablevision and this website will probably be down until I find a new home for it – maybe WordPress.com.

Why do I care? Maybe I don’t. But this is fun anyway.

Go to the IRS.gov website to the SOI Tax Stats page.

Download one of the Excel spreadsheets under Basic Tables: Returns Filed and Sources of Income. I used All Returns: Adjusted Gross Income, Exemptions, Deductions, and Tax Items for 2008.

Look at spreadsheet columns I through N. I & J show the amount of taxable income in each bracket and the number of returns in that bracket. M & N show the number of returns that had tax and the total amount of tax in each bracket.

At the top of column J, the number is 5,652,925,474. Dollar values are in thousands, so this is about $5.6 trillion of taxable income earned by US taxpayers in 2008. At the top of column N it shows that to total tax paid by all these people is 1,031,580,923, or about $1 trillion. So of all the taxable income earned in 2008, 18.2% was paid in federal income tax.

I added a new column, to the right of N, and in cell O10 entered the formula =N10/N$9. Then I formatted the column to show results as a percent. Column O now shows the percentage of tax paid by each income bracket:

I then added another column to the right of I, and in cell J10 entered the formula =I10/I$9 and formatted it for a percent. Column J now shows the percentage of the population (of taxpayers) in each tax bracket:

With these extra columns it’s pretty easy to see where the tax revenue comes from. Cells P23 through P28 sum to 33.24% of revenue. J23 through J28 sum to 0.8% – meaning that the top 0.8% of taxpayers (those with over $500k taxable income) really do account pay 33% of the tax in the USA. The next 62.2% of tax revenue is paid by 54.5% of the population – those between $40,000 and $500,000. The bottom 44.7% of the population pays 4.5% of the tax revenue.

The different population segments are color coded below:

It’s interesting (and strange) that the 13,400 people who made over $10m in 2008 contributed more revenue than the bottom 54.7% – 59,000,000 people.

The table with my additions is available here:

08in12ms

A couple of weeks ago the hinge on one of the cabinets in our kitchen broke. I took the door off, unscrewed the hinge, and went to Home Depot to try and find a replacement. No luck. I went to a local hardware store, same deal. I was annoyed, and worried I’d never be able to find a replacement. I headed home.

I looked at the broken hinge and found imprinted on it, in tiny numerals, was “32.260-01″. It also had “blum” imprinted on it, which I assumed was the brand name. A long shot, but I entered “blum 32.260-01” in Google. I was thrilled to see that while there were no organic results, there was a paid link for CabinetParts.com. I clicked through and found the exact part I needed. They were a little more than I’d hoped to spend, but since I had no idea where else I could go to find them, I was happy to pay it. I got the part a few days later and it was exactly what I needed. Cabinet: repaired. So, hooray for them!

I’ve been hearing for years about paid bloggers. If people are getting paid to write their crap down in an ad-supported industry, it seemed like it might make sense to throw some ads up on this very site to see what happens. I’ve had Adsense running on this site for a few months now and the short answer is a whole lot of nothing. Here’s what the earnings look like since 1/1/2009 (my Adsense account is much older than this site; I put the banner ads up around Fall of 2009):

Basically, in a year I’ve “earned” under $20. That doesn’t even pay for domain registration & DNS for a year. And since Google doesn’t actually pay you until you have $100 in earnings, this is fake money anyway.

Now I didn’t have any illusions about making money from this site, I just put the ads up as an experiment to see if this is a realistic way to earn a dependable income. From what I can tell, it can be, but only in certain cases, basically coming down to how much traffic you can generate.

1. You’re already famous. If you’re already a “celebrity” in your field (whatever that field is) then people already probably want to hear what you say.
2. Your subject matter has mass appeal. If you write about discoveries in quantum physics, you may have a decent following, but it’s still only going to be the people who care about quantum physics. If you write about Jersey Shore you have a much larger pool of possible readers, because everybody loves watching a train wreck.
3. What you say actually matters. This is related to the first point. If Joe Shmoe (or Evan Hoffman) rants at the top of his lungs, it’s just some guy complaining. If Ben Bernanke makes an offhand comment about interest rates the stock market tanks.

I’m sure there are some other cases, but as far as I can tell a tech guy writing about things that annoy him doesn’t fit any of these criteria. I’m tempted to remove the ads altogether, but it’s too interesting seeing what ads Google puts up on some of these pages. The first few months, the ads were all for some rabbi’s circumcision service. Not sure what that was about.

I noticed a bunch of people landing on this site by searching for “compellent sucks.” I just want to avoid any confusion: Compellent doesn’t suck. Now that the pain of spending the money to expand our Compellent SAN is in the past, I am back to being in love with the product. The only gripe I’ve really ever had with Compellent is the price, and as Ben Franklin said:

The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.

When I started at my current company, spam was handled with a separate server running SpamAssassin and a few other services. This sort of got the job done but required babysitting. I wasn’t part of the Sysadmin team at that point but I know they had to restart SpamAssassin relatively frequently, manually clear out the email queue when people noticed they weren’t receiving email, etc.

After a few months, someone wised up and purchased a Barracuda Spam Firewall. I assumed this was basically a pretty GUI wrapper around the same tools we had already been using, but it was certainly worth the money. In addition to the basic filtering of spam it filtered for viruses, performed recipient verification against AD via LDAP, had nice graphing and reporting.

We bought the unit in October, 2005 and it’s mostly been great. There’ve been some hiccups over the years but all things considered it’s performed very well. However, when we recently updated the firmware from the 3.x series to the 4.x series we started experiencing problems: intermittent outages (connection refused for ports 25 and 443), CPU load pegging at 100%. We called support and, as I suspected, the problem is most likely due to the age of the hardware. It’s been nearly 5 years so I figured it was time to replace the unit. The original unit was a model 300, so I was considering a Model 400, which, in addition to the updated hardware, offered SNMP monitoring (of which I am a big fan).

It was at that point that I saw they now offer a VMware Virtual Appliance. I requested a demo license and downloaded the appliance, which was just a zipped .ovf. A demo key was emailed to me. I imported the OVF, gave it 6GB memory (we have plenty to spare in our ESX cluster – our original 300 unit only had 512 MB) and powered it on. It booted to a standard Linux console prompting me for a username and password. I didn’t know what the default was (and I needed this to configure the network info) but Google turned up PDF instructions that revealed the default username/password to be admin/admin (which I probably should have just guessed). After that I was able to configure networking and access the web UI. I exported the config from our 300 unit and imported it into the Vx appliance which restored most of the settings (including our massive whitelist).

I haven’t tried routing any actual mail through it yet but so far it seems great – the same UI as the 300 but much faster – it takes just 1-2 seconds to login versus 60-90 on our old box, and the menus are much more responsive.

I was somewhat apprehensive about moving our inbound MX from a physical server to a VM in case of some outage affecting VMware, but that’s only happened once in the two years we’ve been running VMware, and was due to a network misconfiguration. In the end I decided to risk it, though, because the virtual appliance costs $1,000 plus $180/year for each 100 users versus $3,999 for the Model 400 + $1,099 for the first year of updates (with no limit on the number of users). Plus, the appliance has all the software features of the highest-level model.

I don’t expect any problems, but this is my first virtual appliance purchase so I’m mildly apprehensive. Here’s hoping it works out.

I switched to FiOS in December, 2009, and I was pretty apprehensive, having been a Cablevision customer for many years. I really had no problem with Cablevision’s service, I just thought their pricing was much too high in the face of the new competition (and deals) Verizon was offering. I ended up going with Verizon due to their awesome deal, but now it’s almost a year later and I can’t imagine going back to Optimum. It’ll probably come down to price when the current promo pricing I have with Verizon ends, but if the price was equal then no contest – I’d stick with FiOS.

To cancel your Cablevision service, you need to call them.

• Nassau county: 516-364-8400.
• Suffolk county: 631-267-6900 and 631-727-6300.

Other phone numbers are listed here:

http://www.optimum.net/Support/PhoneList

Since I was bemoaning Compellent’s pricing recently I figured it would be unfair of me not to highlight the upside. Their tagline is (or was when we purchased it) “The only SAN so sophisticated it’s simple.” While I can’t say whether they’re the ONLY one, the idea is definitely true. This is the first SAN I’ve ever used, and aside from the learning curve for iSCSI itself (targets, spinup delay, etc.) it’s totally simple and intuitive. Create LUNs, map them to servers. Don’t worry about things like RAID levels or hot disks. We’re into our second year with Compellent and it’s definitely lived up to its promise of simplicity.

I don’t know how much management the average SAN requires but our sales rep recently asked me how much time per week we spend managing the SAN. I crinkled my brow, because I don’t really spend any time managing the SAN. I’ve logged in to the web interface a lot more over the past few weeks than I normally do because the SAN filled up quickly due to our experimentation with Hadoop, and I wanted to make sure we didn’t get to 100% before I was able to order more disks. But aside from that incident I think the only times I’ve logged in to the management console have been to add a LUN or map a datastore to a new ESX host.

I was reminded about this simplicity when we finally added the disks last week. We went to the datacenter Wednesday to move some servers around in the racks to ensure there would be enough power in the SAN rack for the new enclosure (16x 2TB disks). We also updated a firmware update for the SAN (required so it would recognize the new 2TB drives). We have redundant controllers, so we were told there shouldn’t be any downtime. I don’t tend to trust those types of statements – if someone says something will be down for an hour I budget for 4. If it’s 8 hours I budget for a day. If it’s zero I just think they’re lying and it’s going to explode and kill people.

So all things considered I was rather impressed. We have dual controllers, so the update was installed on one controller first, and that controller rebooted. When it rebooted, the iSCSI traffic did actually fail over properly to the secondary controller. This wasn’t completely flawless – the console on some of the machines showed some iSCSI errors, but the machines seemed to be working fine (I rebooted them just to be safe). A couple of the VMs (whose data/swap drives are all on the SAN) barfed and had to be rebooted – I think our Jabber server was the only casualty, but that was back up in under a minute. When the second controller updated itself, its traffic failed back over to the first one. When it was all done (took about 30 mins total) there was a warning about the ports being unbalanced, which was rectified by clicking the “rebalance ports” button. So all in all, I’d say there was “pretty much” no downtime. After the update, we racked the new enclosure and called it a day.

This week a tech from Compellent came onsite to do the actual install for the enclosure (hooking up the fibre loops and installing the new license). This was really zero downtime. I got some alerts that one of the loops was down, but it didn’t affect anything. Pop the disks in, wire it up, install license, and we’ve got another 32 TB usable space. It’s been over a day and the data is in the process of moving from our tier 1 (32x 15krpm FC disks) down to tier 3 (SATA). All in all it was a pretty painless procedure. Sure, it would have been easier had we not had to do the firmware update, but I guess when a new type of drive is introduced that’s to be expected.

So in conclusion, I guess this just reinforces my theory that the only bad thing about Compellent is the price. And if that’s the worst thing someone can say about your product, that’s probably a pretty good place to be.

Time to expand the SAN again.

I planned and budgeted for this this year but it still pisses me off. Look, I realize these guys have to make money, but the bottom line is they’re charging over $1.40/GB for SATA storage. There are 7200 RPM 2TB SATA drives on Amazon and Newegg ranging in price from $130 to $220. That’s as low as $0.065/GB. There was even a 2TB WD “Green” drive (sub-7200 RPM, I think 5900 RPM) on Slickdeals today for $99. That’s 5 cents per gig.

Like I said, I realize these guys are running a business and they want to make money, but this type of price gouging is just infuriating. Assuming a 2TB SATA disk retails for $200, and they tack on 100% markup, so $6400 for 16 disks. $5000 for the enclosure. $10,000 for their “special sauce.” That’s about $21,000 for 32TB, or $0.65/GB, which is still about a pretty healthy profit. This doesn’t take into account the insane annual support contracts you’re paying for in perpetuity.

I don’t know. I guess I’m just cheap. I’ve complained about this before, and I complained about it again this time to our reseller. The SAN vendor is Compellent, and while the product is very good, the pricing certainly doesn’t scale the way they made it sound during the sales pitch. They kept saying how they’re able to leverage commodity hardware in order to keep costs low. Well, maybe they meant their own costs. It’s certainly not getting passed on to us.

Though maybe I’m jaded because this is the first SAN I’ve worked with. I’ve heard lots of horror stories about SANs and carving luns and having to restripe arrays and worrying about hot disks, etc. With Compellent I don’t have to worry about any of that. It is a nice product. I just wish it was cheaper. My reseller’s response to my complaint was basically “It’s definitely expensive, but at least it’s good; all SAN vendors mark up their prices wildly but the product often sucks.”

Anyway, I guess when you have shareholders to please, if you can milk people, you’d better do it. I suppose my advice would be to buy what you need up front and don’t expect to be able to leverage falling costs of storage. The savings don’t get passed on to you.