Moore’s Law and Compounding Interest

In deploying the small Ruby on Rails application on an old Dell 8200 running Debian-sarge, I decided to see how the application would perform under load.

Apache comes with a great little application meekly called ab. ab is a small command-line tool that slashdots your web application, and gives you a nice measure (in pages per second, amongst other things).

Measuring the performance of the Dell 8200 using the Mongrel web server vs. my Mac Book Pro running the same versions of all the stack of software (except, obviously the OS) – the speed difference is 16x. Now as these machines are about 4 years apart from each other in the Intel-world, 16 is exactly what you would expect: the performance doubles every year. Very wise prediction from 1970 that continues to drive this whole crazy industry.

What has this to do with Compounding interest? Exactly 22 years ago one of my kind, late great-uncles started a bank account for be with the grand deposit of AU$200. Which I’ve subsequently forgotten about.

Mum found the Deposit booklet somewhere, and sent it to me. Today that account is worth about $640. This is a compounded interest rate of 5.4%. In another 22 years it will be worth AU$2,023 at the same rate.

Now, if it had compounded at Moore’s Law over the last 22 years: the amount in the bank would be a grand $6,276,211,921,800.

Now I know why I work in IT, not finance!

Climb every Mountain

Spent the last week and this week on a personal Ruby on Rails project. This involves subversion (as a version management system), mongrel, capistrano, ftp, postgresql, some smarts with DNS, exim and a two-day complete re-install of Debian. That re-install was not expected.

Unix has this wonderful and powerful concept: the root user knows what they are doing at all times. 99.9% of the time this is a safe assumption. 0.1% of the time you type “yes” instead of “no” – removing the kernel in this fashion is highly not recommended.

How do you fix a broken Linux install?

Stage one involved making what is known as a LiveCD, or bootable Linux. I decided to download and boot from a Knoppix LiveCD. A quick restart from the CD, and I could see that the data was intact.

Stage two was installing a new 350GB HD for the data to bring the server up to 0.5TB of storage. The old faithful Unix standbys of dd, fsck from the old 200GB to the new 350GB and start the difficult work.

Stage three is a full Debian reinstall onto the old 200GB with 0.5Gb download of the most current packages, and re-apt on a 686 rather than 386 kernel. This didn’t take too long. Re-configuring all the servers and services: dns, dhcp, CUPS, Samba, Apache, subversion, rails+gems, python took most of the weekend.

Stage four: backup scripts. 0.5TB is too much of a mountain of data to lose.

Enron, the Emails

Watched “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” last night.

The documentary was not as in-depth as the book: detailing the “mark to market” and “off-balance sheet entities” created by the management of Enron. The impact of the resulting US Law named Sarbanes-Oxley made financial auditors more responsible and powerful within organisations; and personally changed my last 3-4 years at Adobe. Paperwork and legal city.Thanks to technology, you are able to do some filtering through 500,000 of Enron’s emails from 1999 to 2002. (link thanks to Andrew Smith). Just like looking through someone’s trash, there are few diamonds amongst the organisational announcements and spam.

Adobe Mars and Print-ready PDFs

Random question popped into my head whilst having a shower: does Adobe Mars, the new project to represent PDF as a packaged XML format, support PDF’s strong print/prepress heritage.

Things like CMYK, colorspaces, high-dpi images, Postscript fonts, trapping settings (overprint/knockout) and the Crop/Bleed boxes. All those high-tech printing things.

The short answer is yes.

(testing process: InDesign document, export as PDF 1.3, open in Acrobat 8 Professional, Save as “PDF in XML Format” using Mars plugins, re-open, check with Acrobat 8 Advanced>Print Production tools. Open SVG as text)

XML Goo-i-ness Inside

Microsoft pre-released their XAML-in-the-browser technology, WPF/e earlier this week. XAML inside.

XAML “smells” like the W3C’s Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). DOM-inside-a-DOM, Declarative animation, 2D graphics. XAML maybe not SVG, but it certainly tips its hat to SVG.

Adobe today pre-released their XML-in-a-PDF technology, Mars, for Acrobat 8. Essentially, Mars as a technology is presently delivered as plugins for Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 Professional. You can save an existing ‘binary’ PDF out as a .mars file. These .mars files are like .jar or .war files: manifested, structured ZIP files. Looking inside a description of a page, you have an SVG Tiny 1.2+ (as Adobe state, SVG/FSS0 representation. The specification clearly documents that .mars takes the current concept of PDF, a document format, and extends this as XML.These technologies do not directly intersect: an XML representation of SWF rather than PDF would be closer to XAML. Having cross-platform viewer support for Microsoft’s XPS would be closer to PDF.

I was premature in saying SVG was deprecated.

The Protestant Work Ethic Does’t Work.

In a culture where work can be a religion, burnout is its crisis of faith.

About the technology-centric world in which we live: One has to wonder whether the developments of a high-speed world haven’t made burnout worse.
Another good read is “The Latham Diaries“. Whilst Mark Latham has damaged the Australian Labor Party more than their political opponents, he does detail a personal crisis. The institution that built him in his work life ultimately destroyed him. Yeah, Mark was a bit of a bloke’s bloke in a poisonous profession – but the personal toll led him to leave.

Another quote: happiness equals reality divided by expectations.

I know it is a bit rich coming from someone who is working part-time, at best: but I feel it must be said.

Time does not go backwards. Remember that.

Internetworking with Internode. 97%

Quiet week in the ‘cottage.

Phase 1 of the de-installation of Bigpond as our ISP: Internode, all the way! Added ADSL via Internode: the highest quality Aussie-owned ISP in Australia, to the home network. Once Telstra Wholesale get their act together, the next step is 8Mbit/s. It seems that Telstra has not correctly provisioned their IT for ADSL resellers.

Based on the low quality of cable modem internet in our part of Sydney, 8Mbit/s will match our so-called “up to 17MBit/s” on Bigpond Extreme. This is due to the shared bandwidth nature of cable.

Internode’s backhaul, or throughput to their servers and to the internet the US, is amazing. That’s why they have a 97% referral rate according to CRN.

Also signed on to Nodephone, Internode’s Voice-over-IP service. Plugged in the landline to the Billion Router, and we have low Australian calls. Installed X-Lite on my Mac, and now I have a softphone.

Also took the opportunity to increase the security on our local wireless to WPA. Leaving WEP and MAC layer filters in the past as they are easily cracked. We don’t wish to become the local ISP for the neighborhood.

Yes, my superfund is an investor in T3. But Bigpond’s recent comments as to network control is a major concern: and I am voting with my liquid dollars. Business-wise, I trust that Telstra management grok the new IP/digital world ahead.

So, on the Xmas list: ADSL2+ and Nodephone Direct-in-Dial.