Full Circle

Everything is coming around full circle.

But Liu is investing $10 million in the Palmetto State, building a printing-plate factory that will open this fall and hire 120 workers. His main aim is to tap the large American market, but when his finance staff penciled out the costs, he was stunned to learn how they compared with those in China.

Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg -- less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn't have to put up with frequent blackouts.

About the only major thing that's more expensive in Spartanburg is labor. Liu is looking to offer $12 to $13 an hour there, versus about $2 an hour in Dongguan, not including room and board. But Liu expects to offset some of the higher labor costs with a payroll tax credit of $1,500 per employee from South Carolina.

So the high labor cost is offset by tax incentives (liberals take note), lower land cost and cheaper power. The other unstated advantages are shipping costs (which may offset high labor cost) and import restrictions.

If this continues you'll be fielding calls from Dell customers in India complaining about how they cannot understand your accent.

Let Us Install It!

So I went to the Big Box 'puter store. I was buying an external hard drive. I knew what I wanted and basically walked in and directly to the item I wanted and went to the desk to pick it up (they had them in the back and you had to bring an empty box to them). Conversation with sales dork as follows:

Sales Dork: Will that be all for you today sir?
Duffy: Yes, thanks.
Sales Dork: Do you need this professionally installed?
Duffy: ...
Sales Dork: Sir?
Duffy: It's an external drive
Sales Dork: Right and we can dispatch a tech to make sure everything is installed properly so you don't have to worry
Duffy: (thinking: I'll play along) And just how much is that going to cost me?
Sales Dork: We're having a special so we can do it for $29.99
Duffy: So, $30 to "install" an external hard drive. Does anyone say yes to that?
Sales Dork: (somewhat deflated) Sometimes...(looks around to see manager has departed) sorry, we have to do that with almost everything.
Duffy: No problem. Can we get this over with?

I feel for the poor guy. He's required by his manager to insult his customers in an attempt to charge them unnecessary fees.

So....

We're moving the filestore today. That means it will be off line. I've decided to keep this information secret by emailing my users, their managers and contractors for the past two weeks. I've also hidden it on a scroll on the main page in 36 point font. Herewith is the message I sent:

Hi All,

This is to inform you that the file store (K-drive) will be unavailable Friday, April 11 2008 beginning at 2 PM. The outage is scheduled to last (36 hours) through Saturday, April 12.

During this outage, users will be able to refresh reports stored locally. However, [redacted] web reports (both [redacted] and [redacted]) will be unavailable.

The outage is scheduled to allow us to migrate to a better performing server with more storage than the current K-drive.
Should you have any questions related to this outage, please contact me at the numbers below or [redacted] (by Sametime). Thank you for your patience and understanding while we upgrade our hardware.

Bold in original.

We took it offline at 1:50 today. At 1:53 I get an IM from a user:

User: I can't get into the system. There's an error message that says it's offline and I should log out. Should I log out?
Duffy: Yes (thinking: Of course not, why would you say that?)
User: When will it be back up? (just an estimate)
Duffy: 36 hours
User: Really!?
Duffy: Yes. (thinking: no, its up and running. I'll give you the sooper secret URL but don't tell anyone)
User: OK. Thanks. She wants to talk to you.
Duffy: She?
User: My manger

You can see where this is going. Lather, rinse, repeat. I end up forwarding a weeks worth of warnings to said manager. Manager was on the original emails as well. I have no idea why this surprises me but it does.

Update(s)

So the dishwasher saga continues.

Repairman #2, who does not look like a Bears Superfan arrives. I give him the part and he sets to work in grim silence. Upon dismantling the door to the thing he pulls out the fried circuit board with a grim expression. He gives a harumphing noise that doesn't really sound like that but that's as close as I can get onomonpedically (I made a new word, take that Freeberg!)

Him: "That's melted pretty bad."

Me: "...."

Him: "The door handle is melted too."

Me: "um..what?"

Him: "The closing mechanism for the handle is right behind the circuit board so you couldn't see it and I guess the first guy didn't take it out so he wouldn't have seen it either."

Me: "And how much is that going to cost me?"

Him: "The part is nine dollars and twenty seven fifty for labor"

Me: "So, because the first guy didn't diagnose the whole problem I'm going to get hit with two labor charges?"

Him: "Yes."

Me: "No. Why should I pay for labor twice when I'm not the one who made a mistake."

Him: "Well, you'll have to call the office."

Me: "You can count on that."

He gets back to work in weighty silence. I pace the kitchen.

Him: "Here's another problem."

Me: "Fantastic. Now what?"

Him: "This replacement board is damaged. This relay is loose."

Me: "@@#$%%^$&"

I ask him how long he's being doing this.

Him: "32 years."

Thirty two years. That's a very long time. Long enough that I'm going to pick his brain.

Me: "What do you think I should do."

Him: "I'm not supposed to advise customers like that."

Me: "OK, if you were me, what would you do?

Him: "Well...if it were me, I'd be thinking about a replacement unit. I can repair this and maybe it will last me another 10 years. But I'll only have a 90 day warranty and when it surges like this you don't know what else was damaged. No way to know. If I were to buy a new one, I'd have at least a 2 year warranty and could even buy the extended 5 year for a hundred bucks."

After much deliberation, I sent him on his way with a refusal of service and asked him to refund my money rather than order yet another circuit board. The cost of repair is now right up against the cost of replacement. I am loathe to spend several hundred dollars on a new machine but am reluctant to throw good money after bad. What to do? I honestly haven't a clue. I ran over to Lowe's at lunch and looked at the models and frankly, they're all pretty similar w/in each price point. I want something that gets dishes clean and if possible is quiet. Those absurdly pie in the sky requirements put me in the $500-$700 range. For a machine that washes dishes. I kid you not.

Now I've got the devil and the angel on my shoulders. The angel is saying "repair it, all will be well. Don't spend the money for a new machine." The Devil says, "buy a new one with an extended warranty. If you fix this one and it dies in a year you'll have spent even more than you would have to replace it." (Frankly, I'm not sure who's the devil and who's the angel in this scenario. Readers are invited to speculate.)

So I'm at an impasse and am stuck with paper plates until I sort this one out.

Daily Roundup

OK, actually weekly roundup because blogging has been light

First up, Peggy Noonan asks if New York's Junior Senator can lose gracefully. I think we're seeing the answer is going to be "no".

From the Department of Unforeseen Consequences, Biofuels cause global warming.

Mark Steyn speaks to CPAC as only he can. Humor and insight in one package. If any GOP candidate spoke half as well as he did, he's be unbeatable.

Everything I've ever needed to know I learned from LOST. I particularly agree with point #4.

I think I'm legally bound to mention Berkley's support for the Marines....

If this doesn't amuse you, you must be Vulcan or something.

This one is red meat for the Techies out there. Behold, when server cabling becomes art

Remarkably, I've had 5 of these and the first four in the list are really awesome. Lambic is, admittedly, like sausage. Delicious but you really don't want to see it made. The uber-hopped IPA's by Dogfishead are truly inspired. Dogfish is the most exciting, groundbreaking brewer in the states today. If you're not drinking their beer, you're doing yourself a disservice. When the wort runs through the whole leaf hops it grabs the hop oil and makes is really really strong. Brilliant!

Utopias is more like cognac than beer. It's very thick, very strong and completely devoid of carbonation. It's very expensive and more of an exercise in extreme brewing but if you're a beer nerd (like me) you might appreciate it.

The Scots Pine ale is really not as odd as you'd think. If you've had Sierra Nevada's Pale ale you're familiar with the taste. The pine gives it a particularly floral and sharp taste but not in a bad way. It's not easy to find but I found it packaged with some other Scottish beers including one brewed with heather which was really nice.

I've not had the coconut beer and of the Michelob, we will not speak.


Joke of the day:

A man falls overboard.

A Liberal throws a rope 6 feet past him and then lets go of the
rope.

A Conservative throws the rope 6 feet too short and demands that he
swim part of the way.

Jesus walks across the ocean, pulls the man up, and says "Try not to
make a habit of this."

I don't talk about it much but I grew up going to school with kids from this town. They're #1 in Forbes for most expensive community in the US. Needless to say, I'm from the other side of the tracks. Not poor mind you but in relative terms I was a pauper. Having them as friends in high school was often bizarre. I came from a world they didn't understand and vice versa.

Moving on....

Can you live your life in anonymity today? An interesting experiment.

What's the best wine ever made? Many say it's the 1947 Cheval Blanc. This writer tracks it down an manages a taste. At $12,000 per bottle I doubt I'll be buying any soon. I will however, recommend 2Up Shiraz from Kangarilla Road Vinyard. At $9.99 per bottle and that's a very very good buy.

I have an idea! Let's cover wild boars in pitch, set them on fire and set them loose on the enemy! Elephant or not I'd flee in terror if a flaming wild boar was headed my way.

More poking fun at the Patriots
http://www.break.com/index/patriots-parody-you-cheated.html

Technical Analysis of Jihadi encryption tools

Perhaps the title of the post is a misnomer. Intrepid infosec blogger Dancho gives a great analysis of the Global Islamic Media Front's boasting about their security toolset. See here and here for more. I confess to having missed this one entirely. I've not even heard of GIMF. However, as someone with a passing familiarity with encryption tools and network security, I can say that the key phrase in the article is this:

"If you perceive the Technical Mujahid magazine as a threat to the national security of any country, old issues of Phrack magazine must be giving you the nightmares."

I snarfed my Red Bull when I read that one. I used to be an avid reader of Phrack, 2600 and cDc's various white papers. In full nerd fashion, I went to HOPE twice and once even bamboozled my company into paying for it. At H2K one group emphatically decided I was an FBI agent and despite my protestations gave me a wide berth and breathlessly warned anyone I spoke to that I was a Fed. Rather amusing. (Oddly enough, a contact I made at that conference ended up working for a different three letter agency and in a truly bizarre turn of events I ended up working for him as a contractor but that's another story).

While I don't know enough about the tool(s) in question to comment on them it is no small thing that the Jihadis are expanding their battlespace to include cyberwarfare to the media warfare portfolio to round out their information warfare capabilities. Based on reading the posts above and their source material, I can tell you they are significantly behind the US Airforce in terms of preparedness and maturity. The specs noted seem impressive as they are current but more important (and unknown) is deployment and how good their opsec practices are. I disagree that a brute force attack would be ineffective against even 256 bit encryption as the algorithms are likely not employing strong passphrases which would cut the brute time required significantly. Additionally, the Jihadis tend to use a narrow set of key words and phrases as they are very evocative and easy to remember. I think I'm getting too far out on a limb here so I'll cut it short.

This is getting out of control

So...I've told you before about work related strife. We're passed stressful and into laughable. Part of my job is global support. Not a big deal, I've done it before but in the past it's been for largely English speaking people and usually, expats. Now I'm getting emails like this:

"Proszę wysłać (jak najszybciej) do Rabena 5 palet przekładek 1046260 z PL0112 do PL0306.
Jak zwykle będę wdzięczna za potwierdzenie dokumentu, którym przekładki będą wydane z fabryki."

I am not making this up.

I'm pretty sure that's Polish (but it could be Czech). Neither is available for translation in Babelfish so now I have to find somebody who can translate this or find a website capable of doing so.

In addition, I had a conversation with my manager about training my new counterpart. He asked how I "feel about travel". I asked him where and how long and with an evil grin he said, "two weeks at least, probably three." Now if any of you are familiar with business travel that means I'd be gone at least a month. It did not pass unnoticed that he didn't say where.

I asked again, "Where?"
"Moscow."
"and when would I be going?"
"Next month."
"Uh...next month is December. You're asking me to go for the entire month of December?"
"Not the entire month, you'd be back before Christmas"
"Right. That doesn't really work for me."
"January?"
"You want me to spend an entire month in Russia in January?"
"Yes."
"You know my contract is up at the end of December, right?"
"@#@#$@%#$"

He left to reconsider his options. He knows he has to resign me because Ivan (my Russian counterpart) is not ready for prime time. I decided to head him off at the pass and talked to Ivan about coming to the US and A. He was, shall we say, very excited about the idea and immediately started pestering his manager (and mine.)

See? Reading "The Way of the Weasel" has it's benefits. Thank you Scott Adams!

So the warehouse crashed....

Completely. I mean if it were a cartoon it would have it's tongue hanging out the side of it's mouth and X's over the eyes. The DBA's called in UNIX and Oracle support guys almost immediately. Each blamed the other. Either way, my users had no data which tends to make them grumpy. After much ado, everyone agreed to blame the hardware since they were outnumbered.

It took two days to move everything over to another box on another frame while the original frame hardware was swapped out. My job of late has been to reassure people that yes, we know about the problem and yes, someone is working on it. I've referred a great many users to my boss since that's what he gets paid for.

One key event: A callout email/page went out around 3:30 AM on Wednesday morning. Oddly, my phone didn't ring so I didn't find out about the complete failure of our critical system until 7:00 when I logged on. I asked my boss why I wasn't called (not angry mind you, just confused). His response: "Because I'm too cheap to pay you for callouts". Ha! Take that you non-consultants!

My favorite moments are the users who name drop in hopes of resolution. Example:

Me: "Blah Blah Blah intro, how can I help you?"
User: "my web page is not working and I can't run reports."
Me: "That's correct. We have a global outage. Won't be back online until tomorrow"
User: "That's no good. I need to run a report for [Name] now."
Me (thinking): "Oh, it's for [Name]? Well why didn't you say so, let me just get my magic wand here..."
Me (what I actually said): "There's nothing more that we can do to make things go faster"

Same user calls back later....

User: Our repositories are local machines, why can't I run reports
Me: Because the database they're trying to hit is down.
User: Unacceptable. I need a local copy of that database installed on site so this doesn't happen again.
Me: OK. Fine by me.
User: (surprised) Really?
Me: Sure. If you want to create a backup site for the datawarehouse I have no objections. In fact, it would be great for resiliency.
User: Would that be expensive?
Me: It's going to cost many many thousands of dollars?
User: Why? We have servers here we can use
Me: The warehouse is many many terrabytes of data
User: Well if it's going to cost any more than $10,000...
Me: Well, call my boss, he's the one that's going to help you with that.

Fruit-picking robots closer to reality

Fruit-picking robots closer to reality making an end run around the illegal labor market in California. Add to that improvements in the robot mowers and the trend continues.

In all seriousness, automation of cheap labor has been the norm for centuries and will only continue apace.

Update:

Reader Alan Coffey asks: "Did they imply that the fruit picking robots would actually have an impact on the illegal situation anytime soon? The other major areas of illegal employment are janatorial, agriculture (livestock), landscaping and construction. See any automation posibilities there?"

No there was no implication that the robots would have any sort of impact on illegal labor markets. Given that they won't be ready for deployment for another 10 years or so, we can similarly assume the cost will be (initially) high which narrows the market further. However, like everything else the cost will eventually come down and be available on a mass scale. Any effect on labor markets is a long way off if at all.

Taking the others, the levels of automation available vary. Mopping floors is much simpler to automate than cleaning a toilet bowl and emptying waste baskets. Animal husbandry is another matter. I'm unfamiliar with the work involved so I can't speculate on how it could be automated. Dairy farmers have always led the industry as far as automation goes. Milking machines have been in use for decades. Without them, we'd never be able to meet the level of demand. Construction generally relies on streamlining and technique improvement. Automation usually leads to a decrease in labor required but not an elimination. Earth moving equipment created huge offsets in labor requirements. The finishing work like drywall and spackle is less likely to be automated due to the precision required for the work and creating a robot to do that work isn't likely to yield returns on investment.

Ruminations on Technology

Things I know about software:

I used to work with a program called Paradox. Never was there a more apt name for any piece of software

I also used to work with Easytrieve the most inapt name for any piece of software.

I know that "hotfixes" and "patches" are things that fix a known problem and create all sorts of new and unknown ones.

I know that technical writers are liars and weasels.

I know that when a customer signs off on code review and testing, they have neither reviewed the code nor tested it.

I know that marketing and sales guys are delusional sociopaths.

I know that sales reps will offer to pay your mortgage before they make a sale and don't recognize you 9 seconds after one.

I know that software has bugs not "undocumented features"

Nobody reads the manual

Installation is never easy

Uninstallation is even worse

If you have a server available for use by certain software, it will be the wrong file system

Clients will install multiple versions of the same software on the same box and then wonder why it's buggy

No one ever has a test environment or test data.

Clients will install Dev, Test and Prod on one box and act surprised when something goes wrong.

Whenever you get a call that "all systems are down" and "no one can do any work" you can guarantee nobody will have any idea what you're talking about when you arrive.

Users who demand you sprint to their location because they are working on a project that, if not completed, will endanger all life in the universe, will not be at their desk when you get there.

Publicly owned firms are fanatical about audits, privately held ones have never heard of an audit

Frequently, a manager who is less technical is a better one. They tend to leave technical decisions to technical people

Nobody ever documents anything

Anything that is missing or goes horribly wrong will be blamed on the last person to leave the department

All companies have a microdevelopment gap. Efforts too small to get funded and too large for the helpdesk

The aforementioned gap leads to the inevitable and geometric growth of "spreadmarts"

Never let anyone host anything on a production box that is not production, if you do, it will become production supported

Statement of Work: a club used to beat consultants. All of them contain the tech equivalent of the "necessary and proper" clause in the Constitution. Something like "and any other requirements".

"Quick" questions from users are usually the longest

Where'd my viewers go?

I've often said that Hollywood hates it's customers. It's not hyperbole or exaggeration. They hate them but want their money. They're like the Carnies of old that referred to everyone as "marks" and "rubes". They placate us with tripe in hopes of wringing cash from us.

Now they're wondering where the audience went.

The broken monopoly of ABC, NBC and CBS haven't been able to keep up with the changing landscape. Viewers no longer see TV as a set time and place thing. Now it's viewed as a block of entertainment that ought not to be on anyone's schedule but our own. You can thank/blame Tivo and DVD's for that. Full disclosure, I'm a TiVo early adapter. I got it as a gift and have nearly wept with gratitude every day since. I may watch TV more frequently but I watch it for less time.

Changing schedules doesn't usually affect me. I hardly know when my shows are on anyway. (Noted exceptions: LOST, The Shield, BSG.) Having kids makes is even less likely I'm going to stick to a schedule.

I listen to the BSG podcast hosted by show creator/producer Ronald D. Moore. He rightly, points out that before the technology existed to track CD purchases, charts were determined by random sampling of record stores around the country. This was neither scientific or even close to reality. Once they implemented the mechanisms to track CD purchases they realized that everything they "knew" about music sales was wrong. Country music was huge. Much much larger than had ever been expected. He expects the same will happen with TV shows soon enough. All those shows you like that get booted because of "low ratings" won't be. They have an audience, it's just a matter of proving it exists. As DVR penetration increases, TiVo will be able aggregate that data and give far more accurate assessments of what people are watching and in what numbers. Given that individual cable and satellite boxes are addressable, it's wonder they haven't implemented some tracking software. The value of that data would be very very high to networks trying to sell ad time.

Entertainment and media are changing. "Siliwood" grows year on year. Eventually, they'll figure out that microbilling is the wave of the future. First you'll subscribe to channels a la carte. That spells doom for channels that are propped up by artificially high subscriber rates (E!, Oxygen, etc.). Thereafter, you'll likely be subscribing to individual shows (as you do now with podcasts). They'll probably offer free pilot episodes or even the first few to hook you so you'll buy in. The audience will get to vote with their wallets. Imagine that it takes $300,000 per episode to produce a show, that means you need between 150-300K viewers/subscribers. That's easily done for most shows that are even remotely popular. Shows like CSI, LOST and 24 garner many times that number weekly. Granted a number of those would depart if they had to pay for the privlidge. Even if you lose 2/3 of that audience you'd still be looking at 4MM viewers and $4MM per episode (assuming $.99 per episode). That's no small beer.

Wind power idea

I've been skeptical of wind power in the past. Largely my concerns rest with scalability and consistency of supply. There are ways of mitigating the latter somewhat but the former is a barrier created by physics not will. This idea, however, might have some merit. If that's going to be used to power lights along the highway and possibly suppliment some service stations it would be a start.

Even if this only does a small amount, that's a good thing. It won't drive the price of oil down but we need to move to renewable energy wherever possible.

A Bleg

Reader(s):

I currently have a Dell 3K series w/ a 70 Gig drive which is almost full. I'm going to add a second hard drive exclusively for data. Then I'd like to create a logical partition on C: to allow for an XP and Ubuntu dual boot.

Question: Can I partition C: and install the second OS without having to reformat?

My Users are not very bright.

Hapless User: hi
Duffy: Hi
Hapless User: this outage that's planned for tomorrow - will it affect the processing servers/CMS?
Duffy: tomorrow? That's today mate
Duffy: and, yes, everything is down from 5:00 pm tonight until Sunday morning
Duffy: (or whatever 5:00 is in your crazy metric time you guys use)
Hapless User: whaaaaaaaaaaaaat
Hapless User: total panic
Duffy: I cleverly disguised the outage time in bold type in yesterday's email
Hapless User: yeah I read the mail this morning - so "tomorrow" was Saturday ;)
Duffy: Here in the US, Friday follows Thursday
Duffy: Irrespective of when one reads their email
Hapless User: so it's starting 5 pm this evening EST (that's 11 pm for us) and ending 7 am EST - that's 1 pm for us)
Duffy: right

8-Megajoule railgun

Navy develops 8-Megajoule railgun, Nukem bows down

The mere mention of the word brings back visions of the original first-person-shooters to grace our now-antiquated machines, and now the US Navy is getting real personal with a realized version of the pixelated railgun we all love and adore. Presumably ripped straight from the (admittedly lacking) storyline of Quake, an 8-Megajoule railgun has been officially created, fired, and deemed worthy of flanking our naval ships, which should strike fear in the hearts of anyone wishing us harm. The gun was showcased this week at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren, Virginia, and utilizes massive quantities of electricity rather than gunpowder to propel "nonexplosive projectiles at incredible speeds." The weapon is powerful enough to equal the damage inflicted by a Tomahawk cruise missile, and the device's project director compared the impact to hitting a solid object "going 380 miles-per-hour in a Ford Taurus." Moreover, the railgun touts a 200 to 250 nautical-mile range, compared to the 15 nautical-mile range that current five-inch guns sport now. Interestingly, the weapon should "only" cost around $1,000 per shot once loaded onboard, which is chump change compared to the cool million that vanishes each time a cruise missile is deployed, and if everything goes as planned, we'll be seeing a 32-Megajoule prototype in June, with a 64-Megajoule rendition adorning our ships by 2020."

Seriously, 8 megajoules is an enormous amount of energy.