TMN SilverBelt: take 2

After only a week of usage I’ve returned my SilverBelt and asked for a new unit. The only serious problem I had with it was the battery – it didn’t last for a day with the exact same usage as my old HTC 3300.

The new unit had the same problem, so I had to cut some waste. I started by opting out 3G over GSM. It saved me a bit, but not enough to get me through the day.

The workaround to get me through the day was quite drastic: I had to disable push mail, and opt for a 1h pooling. But now I can get through the day.

So my verdict is:

• Cool display size – though a little “deaf”;
• Windows Mobile 6.5 is heading in the right direction (and way), but it is still a no go; ZTE/TMN “shell “ is poor, to say the least;
• Quite acceptable value for your money – ok, doesn’t support MultiTouch, accelerometer and digital compass, but we can’t really ask that for this price, can we? Ok, Pulse doesn’t support digital compass…
• Unusable for a communicating kind of guy

So I’m again on ebay looking for a bargain on a:

• iPhone 3GS
• HTC Hero
• T-Mobile Pulse

Until them, SilverBelt will do just fine.

PS: ok, some of these units don’t support PushMail, so this option is not entirely rational, is it? Who cares, its a gadget, if chosen without the heart will defy its purpose :)

eSATA versus USB

I’ve finally bought an eSATA external drive, a 1GB LaCie. Has it supports eSATA + Firewire + USB, I’ve decided to do a little home benchmarking. Here are the results:

 

USB

 

eSATA

 

Uau!… Bye-bye USB, here’s my new VM disk :)

 

And here are my internal disk results:

 

 

Strangely enough, these are worse than eSATA.

 

Update: I’m copying my VMs to my new eSATA external drive at 57MB/s. Cool.

 

<update>

Here’s a benchmark for another drive and external case (with eSATA):

This is a 2.5 disk. And the benchmark results are not so bright…

</update>

 

<update>

And here’s yet another cool setting from another development server we have:

</update>

100Mbps to 1Gbps simple benchmark

For some strange reason we still have old 100Mbps switches on our development datacenter. Backing up 500GB of virtual machines can waste 12h.

We sometimes couple VM host machine backups so we can guarantee a fast emergency restore. On these machines we are now connecting directly the 2nd network adapters on crossover so we can get 1Gbps. And now we can do it in only 1 1/2 hour. That is 8 times faster. Cool.

Here’s the experience we are collecting:

	100 Mbps	39 GB/h
	1 Gbps	309 GB/h

<update>

the 300 GB/h is the RAID controller - it is consistent with the 90 MB/s read limit.

</update>

To desktop or to laptop, that is the question…

The desktop is dying and it’s a pity. We can get more juice for what we pay for desktops, we can upgrade them not having to pay it all over again, and for most of the people the mobility is not an issue.

Year after year when choosing our workstations I try to buy a couple of beefed-up desktops, only to stop against one argument I have to accept: “we are a consulting firm”. And that’s a hard fact, though most of the development team on my division works in-house, if someone has to move into the client premises, even for a couple of months, a laptop is our only solution. Though most of the time a desktop would boost up productivity, I have to admit laptops come in handy on mobility. And energy consumption.

If budget was not a problem I’d have both. A beefed-up desktop to get things done and a laptop to hang around in meetings, to work at home and to carry on weekends and holidays. And definitely a  “kitchen sink” one, with a 15.5’ display, a 7200RPM drive (no SSD yet, I’m afraid…) and heavy enough to build to last, though carrying it to everywhere on a backpack, weight is not an issue. By the way, cool article Michael Campbell, the “kitchen sink” is pretty much the only point we don’t agree upon :)

Look what we’ve found in the drawer…

IBM OS/2 disk 6/16 !!! Isn’t it cool? I still remember installing Chicago (Windows 95 codename) on a 24 disk distribution! Or running good old MS-DOS 3.3 on a couple of 5¼-inch floppy disk. And though I’m not that old, I still participated on a project where 8-inch floppies were involved – even if I didn’t get to work with them :S

The next time someone complains about their flash’s pen performance, just surf to this page and you’ll probably feel better.

Boy, am I nostalgic…

<update>

Now that we are talking about punch cards, here’s a cool trivia:

The 80-column width of most character terminals is a legacy of the IBM punched card; so is the size of the quick-reference cards distributed with many varieties of computers even today.

</update>

Windows 7 SSD optimizations

Microsoft claims Windows 7 is tuned for SSDs - read it to get the facts, FAQs and generic info about SSDs vs HDDs :)

Overclocking my Windows Mobile

I’m still using my old HTC 3300 (201 MHz), so if something I need is speed. I’m trying out Pocket Hack Master, and here’s my experience:

• It can be safely overclocked to 260 MHz
• It doesn’t seem to run any hotter, and it doesn’t waist significantly more battery
• underclocking has an annoying effect: the display starts to flicker; only acceptable from 150 MHz up

Pocket master has a cool option: change the clock on the presence of specific apps, maybe I’ll give it a try underclocking to 65 MHz and overclocking on the presence of all the apps I use. Hopefully my battery will last longer, since I’ve activated push mail I’m arriving home with something like 10 to 20% battery left, without using GPS :(

<update>

Unfortunately the “Application speeds” strategy failed… Some apps insist on staying in memory after exit. This happens with the phone app, for starter…

</update>

<update II>

From Pocket Hack Mobile’s site:

The energy that a typical processor consumes is a square function of its clock rate. This means that a CPU running at 100MHz consumes eight times less energy than a processor running at 400MHz.

This is not the experience I’ve collected. Strange…

</update II>

We’ve finally found the D830 substitute!

After a disappointing benchmark of a Vostro 1510, I’ve asked for a Latitude E5500 for try out. It was considerably better than Vostro (I’ll post the experience one of this days), at an affordable price. But it still had some problems:

• no graphic card option other than the onboard
• no connectors on the back! Too crowded on the sideways
• 4GB memory limit
• No 64 bits official support
• No e-sata support

But we had a break and I’ve managed to get a hand on a Latitude E6500. And let’s say I’ve loved it! Compared to E5500:

• there’s a dedicated memory graphic card as an option
• Some connectors are on the back – where they belong
• 8GB limit
• 64 bits support
• e-sata

More important than the benchmarks, the usage experience was great. Working on VMWare Player and Virtual PC was fast enough for our needs. And I didn’t expect any difference here to E5500, the specs are pretty much the same…

We’ve successfully tried:

• Windows Vista Business 64 bits
• Ubuntu 9.04 beta
• Windows 7 build 7077 (here’s an explanation of the base code tree, thanks for the link, Pita)

All I have to complaint is:

• One less USB (only 2). Oh well, everyone should have a stand with an USB hub, anyway
• On the unit I’ve tried, the LCD cover was a bitter unstable – it went back and forward as we pushed it

Here’s one of the simplest benchmarks I value the most (on Windows 7 build 7077):

Cool results!

D830 is dead. Long live E6500 :)

Vostro 1510 again

Here’s a great benchmark on the laptops we are testing:

70 MB/s average read? 210 MB/s burst speed? Pretty impressive. Let’s compare it against my D830:

This is obviously not a serious benchmark, the OS are not even the same (Vista x86 vs Windows Server 2008 x64). But other than the CPU upgrade (T8300 vs T7500), it explains why is my experience so much better with this unit. Great disk!

Choosing a mobile graphics card

Here’s a great link for those who need to choose a card.

Trying out Dell Vostro 1510

We are testing the next generation of laptops for our company.

We have been using Dell Latitude D820 and D830 for some time, but this line has been refreshed and we are trying out other options.

I’ve just tried the cheaper Vostro line. Dell has the following lines:

• the Precision series: hi-end;
• the Latitude: mid-range business class, focused on reliability, durability and subtlety;
• Inspirons: consumer-oriented with more powerful media-centric features;
• Vostro: economy-class;

And here it is, my first impression of the Vostro 1510 after the first day. Let’s start with the configuration I received:

• 15.4’’ XGA
• T8300
• 2GB
• 160GB 7200 RPM (a must!)
• Intel GMA X3100 (oops…)
• 9-cell battery (uau…)

Build and design

What the D830 had in metal, the Vostro has in plastic. For better and for worse. For better on respect to weight (and using them over naked legs, cold metal can be hard :) , for worse on how long can your laptop survive.

The glossy lid if cool, but couldn’t resist 10 minutes until it was fingerprinted like there is no tomorrow. I can only imagine how it will be one year from now, probably full of scratches.

The good news comes when you open the lid: the experience you get over the keyboard is fine, and all the plastics work fine here.

Screen

The 15.4’’ XGA display is slightly better than the one I have on  my D830. But this was D830’s  Aquille’s heel.

Ports and devices

D830 was a pain in the back of the laptop, it only had 3 USB. Now we have 4, as expected. <update>Unfortunately they are not conveniently placed – they are too close to us… </update>

DVD is slot-loading – this is cool!

Only a touch pad for mouse input. Oh, well, most people hate the other one on the keyboard, so why complain?…

Battery

I received a 9-cell battery. Battery life was a strong-hold of the D830 with a 6-cell battery, but the autonomy is great! I’m getting closer to 7H of autonomy, just incredible!

This comes with a price: a small hatchback on the back of the Vostro, which tends to unbalance the laptop when placed on most stands. Vosto is actually not very stand-friendly, has it holds the memory card reader, audio and mic sockets on the front panel…

Software support

No 64 bit support announced yet. This and the 4GB memory limit is something that makes me very unconfortable…

Performance

Performance was something of a surprise. Not that I had any doubt about the mid-range T8300, particularly when  helped by a 7200 RPM disk. What I was surprised to observe was the responsiveness of the Intel GMA X3100, even with Aero on and packed with heavy effects. The only thing I’ve reaaly missed was more graphics memory – when I plugged an external display I couldn’t get more that 1240x800, I am assuming this was memory related, though I didn’t yet tried to allocate more shared memory.

Conclusion

Though not very impressed with the Vostro specs, this configuration ended up better then the lower expectations I had. With some minor changes, it can be a fair desktop replacement for a not very demanding software developer. Though the D830 will be missed, and a Latitude E5500 is more what we’re used to.

Mac buyers pay Apple tax

Nothing new here except for the confirmation of what we already new: the return of the Microsoft / Apple wars!

Here a great chart (original chart here):

Yes, it's a tax. It's called a luxury tax, and only those who can afford it will pay it. It's not fair, it's not rational, but's that's how it is.

Yes, from the hardware value, the price we pay for Macs is too high. The value has been centered on the exclusivity, and that is changing as we can see by Apple's crescent market share, price dropping and Microsoft's discomfort.

Daily I use XP, Vista, Windows Server 2008, Mac OS X and Ubuntu. If I had to choose, I didn't have to think twice: I had to choose Windows. For it's maturity, for it's completeness, for it's application support, for it's hardware support, for it's backward compatibility, for it's great development experience.

But I believe in diversity, so I'm happy with Mac OS X raise on the market. And this is the turning point to Apple, has they seem to already have saturated the market of geeks and people that buy luxury products. Though comfortable with the consumer market, let's see how they cope with the price dropping. And finally, let's see if Apple continues to feel uncomfortable on Microsoft's stronghold: the enterprise market.

A Cray for $25k

I was reading InfoQ's article on MPI.NET and the trend keeps on going: hardware is getting cheaper! Yes, this post is not about MPI, is about getting a Cray CX1 for $25k!

On the early 90's I remember a lecture at college where about a distributed system of Unix servers taking over the responsibility of a Cray supercomputer - apparently the only reason the Cray wasn't disconnected was for the tape library it controlled.

So then I believed Cray were a dying breed of dinosaurs. I was wrong, they are alive and kicking, and you can get one for the price of a regular server 10 to 15 years ago.

I never had so much need for computational power has I did on project SADPOF, an operational decision system for the forest. I'm talking about Simulated Annealing with multi-objective evaluation, huge parallel processing needs of huge chucks of data, with inner LP solving problems. When I'm talking about huge data, I'm talking about simulation variables of matrixes of floats of 6000 x 36 x 32 x 15. And calculating about 30 complex restrictions and a huge objective function.

Our test box was a 2x Quad core and it costed about $5K. A Cray would be welcomed, though MPI doesn't seem to much appealing to work with. What seems appealing is PLINQ, which will no doubt updated to work on HPCs using MPI.

iMac day 3

I've been spending most of my time preparing a Silverlight presentation, so I can only talk about the beautiful display, VMWare fusion, Remote Desktop, and, did I mention, the brilliant display?

After the initial in love phase, I'm starting to get the first problems:

• I couldn't get networking services from my XP guest to be served from the host; and yes, the firewall is disabled, I'll have to google about it;
• VPN from within the guest OS is just too slow - guess I'm having some networking problems with VMWare fusion...
• (Disclaimer: ok, I know, I've only bought my iMac a couple of days ago...) In my (humble) opinion, Finder is by far the weakest piece of software from Mac OS X - from those of the most visible ones... Even taking into consideration my inexperience on Mac. For me Finder is clumsy and outdated. So I've said it. Sorry.

Having said it, I still believe to have bought an incredible piece of hard/soft-ware! And I keep recommending: buy a Mac, install XP, Vista, Ubuntu and whatever you feel like on VMs. Play with them all. Fail. Analise. Try. Learn. Feel the differences - and the similarities. Get new concepts from them all, mix them wisely and you'll surely get better solutions for your problems - at least I guarantee you'll have fun trying. Hell, mix them crazy :) Because a techno-diverse world is a better world :P

Today's personal achievement:

• Finally I'm not constantly lost on Spaces, Dock, Finder and running applications. Still pissed when Finder reuses de window folder I needed, and annoyed with the way we get to choose folders and files from within apps, but I'm getting the hang of it.
• Finally understood when installations just install, and when I have to copy the bloody files to the Application folder;
• Today I didn't have to fire up a terminal, sudo bash, route add, chown and chmod to get things done. A milestone!

PS: did I mention how good the display is?...

iMac day 2

I've been writing project proposals like there is no tomorrow, so I haven't got a lot of time to play around with my new toy. Here's a fast report:

Forget about the cool OS, forget about the innovative community, forget about the Unix breeding, forget about the great display monitor (ok, that we cannot forget)... Forget about all of those, what I like the most about my new iMac is... the way it runs Windows!

It is just incredible how they interact. VMWare Fusion is just awesome, my XP developing lab just flies! And what about Unity? Just incredible! Working seamlessly on Visual Studio 2008 and IE8, side by side with Safari and LightRoom is just unbelievably cool. Even the remote desktop experience is just great - I'm presently blogging from a remote desktop connection from home to the office, and my old Vista seems to have gained a new live with this great display. And what about photos? It seems like the same old photos have been retouched by a professional photographer.

I hope to get some time over this weekend to blog about my Mac experience. Until then, I only have the following cons:

• cannot get two concurrent user sessions;
• cannot write over my NFTS formatted external disk - arghh, the last Ububtu I've used did it!...

PS: now that I've reconfigured the Spaces swapping shortcut from CTRL-Arrow, I can even edit through a file without changing spaces :) Hurray!

Finally bought a Mac

I've been trying to get a cheap Mac for years, but finally gave up and bought a new one. It's a simple 20' iMac, I've just bought an extra memory to get to 4GB.

Those of you who know me since the late 80's should be wondering if I have Alzheimer - yes, I used to develop on System 6 and 7 on Macintosh 128K, Plus, SE 30 and Quadra and hated everyone of these dreadful beasts. Those of you who know me from the mid 90's as a Microsoft evangelist (not to say fanatic) should be wondering if this is a sign for the end of the world. Those who know me from the last years know I'm just in love with Mac OS X.

Why Mac? Because:

• it is different
• it is challenging
• it is beautiful
• it brings a new UX
• it has a user community that isn't afraid to dump the past and reach for new concepts
• it is innovative
• it has Unix roots (yes, I've worked on Unix for ages...)
• it isn't too intrusive a gadget to put on a bedroom
• it runs all I can run on a PC (including XP and Vista) plus Mac OS X

And no, I'm not planning on stop using Microsoft OSs. They are the best, but I want more. There's room for much more, believe me!

I'm now trying to get into this new concept (the last time I used a Mac was over 3 years ago for only a couple of months). The next step is to choose a virtualization product to get my good old XP developing machine up and running - can't wait to get Silverlight into Safari on Mac :)

After that my next step will be to to install Ubuntu on my old Celleron.

PS: isn't it strange, the first things I've installed was a Remote Desktop Client! Looking for new challenges is fun, but feeling firm on known ground is very cozy...

Murphy's law - and why it pays off to be paranoid

If there is one thing that geeks and sailors know, is that if something can go wrong, it will. On a sailing boat the engine will only refuse to start when entering an harbor on a heavy storm. When demonstrating software, it will only fail live on the demo, no matter how many times you have prepared it.

Yesterday we had a demo that proved this law once again. It all started with a lot of USB pens being hooked into the desktop to get the presentations, some of them crashing explorer. Then we run out of space on the system drive and just didn't notice it. Then CPU went ballistic to 100% just doing nothing. Finally the machine started to slow down until it nearly stopped - we could see the GUI elements being drawn, it was very educational...

Luckily I had prepared another laptop where I kept the demo up and running - yes, some times being paranoid does pay off! I really never intended to use it, I've been mirroring resources for demos for years and this is the first time I've used an alternate laptop on a demo.

I have been examining the event log, looking for hard drive errors that I didn't found. What I did found was a series of unfortunate events, from the USB installations to the lack of space on system drive, but also:

The speed of processor 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 16 seconds since the last report.

The speed of processor 1 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 16 seconds since the last report.

Oops, the laptop was overheating and the BIOS throttled the CPU to avoid damage. Could this be the reason? As we are always demonstrating our products on these laptops, I've never risked a BIOS update, should I had done it this probably would never happened.

All is well when ends well. The project was a huge success, I'll be posting about it soon. congratulations to the core team:

Alexandra Marques, Luis Gonçalves and Mário Romano. For those who don't know me, I'm really about the same height as Alexandra, if not shorter :)

PS: by the way, the project's name is SADPOF, an operational decision system for the forest - oh yes, Simulated Annealing, multi-objective evaluation, parallel processing of huge chucks of data, lots of cool and geeky fun! More about it soon.

Graphics memory requirements for our developing workstations

When choosing a graphics card for a developing workstation, I often forget how demanding Aero is. The way we used to calculate memory requirements, based on multiplying resolution and color depth, just doesn't work with Aero. Here are the requirements:

• Single Monitor and Mobile Systems
  • 128 MB up to and including 1920x1200
  • 256 MB over 1920x1200
  • 64 MB up to but not including 1280x1024
• Desktop dual monitors
  • 256 MB for larger dual monitor configurations
  • 128 MB up to but not including 1280x1024x2

Oops, way higher then I expected... Here are Dell recommendations for Levels of Aero Support on Desktops with Two Monitors:

These specifications indicate minimum configurations to support Windows Vista Aero based on current Dell testing*.

High resolution, dual monitor or many open application windows may require additional memory for optimal Aero experience.

 

256MB Discrete AERO for all dual monitor resolutions 128MB Discrete AERO for Dual 1024x768 with 0MB shared All dual monitor resolutions with 128MB shared 64MB Discrete AERO for dual 1024x768 with 64MB shared All dual monitor resolutions with 192MB shared Basic for any dual monitor resolution with 0MB shared Integrated Graphics AERO up to Dual 1024x768 with 128MB shared All dual monitor resolutions with 256MB shared Basic for Any dual monitor resolution with 64MB shared   Dell recommends systems to be configured with at least 1GB dual-channel memory and a premium graphics card. To further optimize the Aero user experience, Dell recommends 2GB dual channel memory.

 

Bottom line is: on a developer's rig, 256MB is a must for dual monitor with high resolutions. I'll try to hook some 128 and 256 MB graphics laptops on a couple of LCDs to check the limits, and post the result back here.

[Update]

On my first test with NVidia Quadro 135M I setup 1280x800 and 1280x1024 on a 17' LCD. Please note that as 135M has TurboCache, I may be incurring on some performance costs...

Benchmarking some servers

We have a bunch of Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers as virtual machines servers for our development environments. On our latest server someone made a mistake and ordered a 2 RAID1 topology, not our typical 4 to 6 RAID5 topology.

We ordered 2 extra disks and reinstalled the server. Here's how it benchmarked as 2 disks on RAID1:

Here's how it benchmarks now as 4 disks on RAID5:

As expected we got a great improvement with little investment, still having a fault tolerant scenario compatible with our development server deeds. A higher sustain rate sequential read speed. If we had 6 disks, I'd expect still a better performance.

NOTE: we didn't actually add 2 disks, we replace 2 x 300GB disks with 4 x 400GB ones.

Choosing a developing laptop

Once in a while we get to write a letter to Santa Claus asking for hardware. This letter is about laptops, and this one goes like this:

Dear Santa Claus (the manager who signs the checks, thankfully someone who understands the value of a fast machine),

Here's what we need for laptops to our .NET division (yeap, the guys that use dynamic environments don't need as much power):

• Dell Latitude D830
• Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7700 (2.4GHz/4MB/800MHz) with nVidia Quadro NVS 135M
• 2.0GB, DDR2, 667MHZ [1X2GB DIMMS]
• 160GB serial ATA HDD 7200RPM
• 8x DVD+/- RW Drive

NOTE1: A T7500 could also be an acceptable solution.
NOTE2: VT, x64, Santa Rosa and Vista compliance seem to be guaranteed; no 64bit drivers availability for now :(

This laptop should be upgraded to 4GB 1 to 1,5 years from now, extending the laptop's lifetime to 2.5 to 3 years. The thing is, we should probably be forced to install 64 bits then to see more then 3.5GB...

The laptop's lifetime can be shorter if:

• core needs raises / price per core prices drops
• SSDs prices drops / performance raises way over 7200 rpm's disks
• memory need raises above the 4GB limit
  

As for the development workstations needs, those will be covered on a latter letter (post).

Here it is. As most letters kids send to Santa Claus, we should always be prepared to get a not so cooler toy. And don't forget to state how much we loose waiting for long compilations on slow machines. And if this works out, the next level is the rest of The Developer Bill of Rights.