Michael Gracie

I’ve got to pass thanks on to michaelk, Senior Member at Linux Questions.org for figuring out why my PHP scripts would not work on FC3, despite my crude attempt at explaining the problem.

Repeat after me…..PHP scripts must have Unix permission 644 in order to run on Apache. Again, PHP scripts must have Unix permission 644 in order to run on Apache.

Dumb mistake figured out by a quick thinker. Thanks again.

A colleague and I have been jostling around start-up ideas for the last six months. We have worked well together in the past, and would likely make a very productive team going forward. It was desire, looking for an idea to quench itself.

A few days ago, upon letting me know he was putting the last iteration of the idea on the back burner (I had actually been forced to bow out a few weeks prior, as a new client absorbed my waking hours), he said something that will stick in my mind for a long time to come:

“I reserve the right to vacillate on the idea a little longer.”

At first, one might think this guy had gotten cold feet, and was trying to bow out gracefully. My impression was something quite different. Not only do I respect this person’s highly refined business saavy, but I didn’t think the idea was a full-blown go either. This statement reflects not a lack of gusto, but a concept stuck up on a shelf, in plain view, for a little more pondering.

The lesson here - don’t give up, just know when to take a break.

Too many ideas hit the ground running, and never see the light at the end of the tunnel. Rarely is it a lack of enthusiasm that makes the concept slip fluidly into the gutter. More so, it is selectively ignoring basic risk reward relationships - economics and personal, that are so critical to turning an executive summary into a “living, breathing” entity with a better than outside shot at being called a going concern.

What made the approach we were taking so arduous was not so much that we couldn’t come up with good ideas, or that we found too many others doing something similar. Our search spanned the “flavors-of-the-day”, as well as some esoteric meanderings that raised more than a few eyebrows. No, our trouble stemmed from actually looking at ideas in a practical light, dissecting how System A competed with Product B, and how Software X enhanced Service Y and Z.

Rather than continue to expound upon this idea indefinitely, I decided to get scientific about what is going on in the tech marketplace. I have constructed a mathematical model which accurately reflects my most recent discoveries. I believe this model solves for actual value creation, using easily obtainable data from the present day software/internet realm:

$ to be made this moment in technology = (∆ (email ↔ webmail)ⁿ / (1*√(DATE)bloggingsitecount))ⁿ - (allsocialnetworkingsites * initialinvestmentoffirstsocialnetworkingsite)ⁿ + (savingsfromopensourcesoftwareuse)ⁿ – (savingsfromopensourcesoftwareuse)ⁿ + (advancementsinpersonaldatabasedevelopment / ∑ timeforindividualstolearnanewscriptinglanguage)ⁿ, where n = ((∞∩∂Ω™ + (every₤earnedfromRSSfeeds * thenumberoffeedssentbackandforthbetweenthesametwosites)) - all existing $ going to Google)

Make sense? No wonder we couldn’t figure out a concept/profitable business model combination up until now!
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Ok. Yesterday a client of mine calls and says she wants to send a fax. A what? I did not know fax machines even worked on our souped up digital phone networks. I haven’t sent a fax in years (a quick scan to PDF attachment is my process of choice). Off to the races.

Let me begin by saying that I am as mobile as they come. I swear by my latest porto-box, even if it is a ten pound Dell C840. It has a mini-PCI b/g card, which is as close as I get to the network. I have a broadband connection in the house, that ends in two places - a wireless router for one, and another to a box that supposedly controls a machine called a television. Second device besides fax machines that I need to research someday. My cell is my only phone.

I started checking all the providers out there, and narrowing it down to two that seem to actually provide a service. (I don’t mention names when I have something negative to say - you can figure it out - I will call them ABC and XYZ). Both leave some things to be desired, and I am sure there are a few more that just didn’t make the cut (please let me know, too) but here is my take:

I first signed up for an ABC test account (free inbound, no outbound - just what I needed at the moment). I dialed the ABC number, and hear a fax on the other side. Good. Then I call the client, and give them the number. Five attempts by her later, no fax has gone through. Maybe it was the “handshake” or some other tech glitch, but nonetheless, it didn’t work. I log into my account, looking for some help. I find a lot of links to upgrade my account, but none that actually show any activity. The support section of the site turns up nothing either (except a lot more links to upgrade).

Now, a couple of thoughts. Why would I want to upgrade to a paid account when I cannot even get the free account to do what I need it to? I am certainly not against paying, but for what? The only thing the upgrade offered was outbound faxing I don’t need, and a local number which I also don’t need (all my clients are far and away anyhow). A quick shot at the ABC pricing schedule, and I see no inbound-only plan.

Ok, no worky, no planny, no customer…….goodbye.

Next stop, XYZ. Now XYZ asks you to pay for some service upfront, but they offer the first thirty days for free (yea, whatever…they just bill in advance for service). But, again, as I am not opposed to paying, I sign up. Next thing I know, I have a confirm message on my screen, with a number. Bang…a confirmation email hits my box. Quick dial of the number, and I find a fax alive on the other side. Call the client, and give her the number. Five minutes later, an email arrives in my box with a nice clear PDF attached…..just how I like it.

Now some caveats on XYZ:

1) Their “activation” Outlook COM plug-in file (downloaded from their site) did not work. No care here, as a quick email to tech support (very responsive, by the way) confirms that file only enables outbound faxing from Outlook 2003. Don’t need it, and two, inbound has already proven to work fine without.

2) XYZ offers no inbound-only pricing plan (what I really need).

Questions and conclusions:

Why do these fax services think outbound faxing from email is so important? They force its “need” in their pricing structures, as though it is a world beater. If I have to send a document, why not just email it, instead of using email to fax it?

And why not offer an inbound-only plan? It should actually be cheaper for them to receive faxes, than to send them. Senders bear the cost of the call from the fax machine to the server on the inbound, while the fax service provider bears the cost of the call from the server to the fax machine on the outbound. And even if a service has a POP in every area code in the world, they still have to pay for the last mile, which makes the whole thing a wash.

As far as usefullness, well I am part of a small band, so I favor the inbound. But in a large organization (which I have been a part of in the past) the following dynamic occurs:

People are happy to see their faxes show up at their desk, as they are always wary of who might be reading the fax over at the machine across the hall (or worse yet, scooping up their two page doc along with another twenty page one, and walking off with it). Inbound service certainly solves that problem. Now on the outbound side, if someone needs to send a doc, they would rather save the trip, but if the document is readily faxable from the desktop, then why not just email it? And if the doc required a signature, etc., the person has to make a trip to the fax machine anyway, unless of course, multinational corporations are now providing sheetfeed scanners to every employee…not!

Someone please let me know if a better service exists, or if the “premier” providers get a little farther along.
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I was recently involved in a somewhat petty, but nonetheless interesting and evolving debate. While out with a friend for an afternoon of lunch and gadget browsing, we decided to run into BestBuy. An hour later, after perusing big screen plasmas and stereo systems the size of lunch boxes, my companion decided to buy a new alarm clock. You know, one of those GE models with the big buttons on the top, and the huge red LED dsplay.

Well first I asked why they needed that? The reply was that the old one just didn’t work quite right after the last storm. It seems not so recent electrical activity had knocked out the power, and that the clock had not awakened the owner as it should. I soon uncovered that despite these instruments being battery powered (in backup), the owner sometimes failed to change said batteries, so the outage reset the clock time. I then asked why not use your cell phone alarm to wake - it is kept by the bed at night, as the land line is in another room? A Nokia phone is my alarm clock of choice, on the road, and at home. Well, I would just forget to set it. But you have to set the alarm every night anyway, heh? Well, yea, but alarm clock is so much easier. I see.

The user forgets to replace a battery, and blames the device. Another device sits in the quiver, perfectly capable of performing the task, but that is simply not convenient enough. So, we buy an item to replace one which likely works perfectly well. Nevermind the fact that we now leave the old item for the landfill.

Too often, we look at a purchase as solving a problem, a need. We justify that purchase in our heads, back and forth, to buy or not to buy. Most often, we buy. A new “this” to solve “that” problem. I am as guilty as anyone. My latest idea is an Apple notebook to solve a big problem I have….not being able to type this entry while lying in the comfort of my bed. How ridiculous.

Now, many say “Well buying stimulates the economy!” Sure it does. “You sit there denoucing spending, so you must be a socialist, or worse, a communist.” Not so. In fact, I am as capitalist as they come. I invest in private ventures that create new jobs. My retirement account is full of growth stocks. I speculate in the equity, debt and commodities markets, which provides liquidity, albeit small, to those markets. But no, I do not give in to the hype.

What hype, you ask? The hype is that consumer spending accounts for 2/3rds of our economy, and that participation benefits us all, so we must participate. “We must buy products, because that creates jobs! Who cares where the jobs are, your spending helps a lot of people out!” Sounds a little socialist to me. I’d rather buy some distressed corporate bonds, put my faith in management to turn the situation around, and reap the benefits. “But I am not a financial genius”, you say. “I don’t have time to invest.” What you aren’t then, is a thinker, and what you don’t have time for, is thinking.

No, saving and investing is not clipping coupons. It is entirely more difficult to invest, even if just on gut instinct, than to buy a new television and decide that is you contribution to our economy. You certainly will reconsider, when that newfangled electronic gizmo is obsolete or on sale at half price a week later. And that brings me to my final point.

The wealthy in the US invest in financial assets - they provide capital. That capital provides the means for production, and the contribution appreciates in value. The wealthy become wealthier. Meanwhile, the tiers below continue to purchase assets that are not only unncecessary, but often useless. Those assets depreciate in value. In the case of that new TV or laptop computer, obsolete in a few years. Worse yet, that new car, worth 70% of its purchase price the moment it pulls out of the dealer. The rich often (more often than you might think) live modestly, and get richer. The rest of us live frivolously, and get poorer.

Sounds like a zero sum game to me.
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So I am mulling this real time streaming data concept when I come across this article from Forbes: Data On The Fly. It talks about Michael Stonebraker of Ingres and Postgres fame, who started a new company called Streambase. This outfit has produced a derivative of SQL they call StreamSQL, and the claim is it can process data as it comes in the pipe, before it is written to disk. Great for big hedge funds and market makers.

Seems like this StreamSQL could prove a pretty interesting tool for a peer-to-peer database network. Finding out what data you really need to hold on to before you write would fit into the limited storage capacity scenario likely existing at each node in such a network.

Could BitTorrent be used to share information between disparate databases? For example, I have an SQL database full of information, and you have one too. Now I go searching for something in my database, it is not found, so instead of giving up, it would then look on your database. Any thoughts?

A colleague recently asked me what computer system I was favoring for the long haul. I immediately thought of Apple. He asked me why I thought Apple was a good choice, and I replied that OS X would be the main reason, and hardware “comfort” second. The open question for the evening was why didn’t Apple make cheaper products for the main stream? Their desktop units, in particular, were priced many hundreds of dollars above its PC competitors. Yes they are.

Why doesn’t Apple sell cheaper products?

I recollect a Harvard Business School case study from long ago that suggested competing on price was a losing proposition, in the long term. Sustainable value could not exist in an environment where competitors steered organizations based on price.

We see now in the PC business that the way to sustain markets is to build faster machines to maintain margins. The need for faster machines seems to be driven by the size, complexity and quantity of operating systems and other software. Unfortunately for PC manufacturers, people (with the exception of gamers, etc.) now realize they do not need all that software, hence all that speed. Both my colleague and I recently agreed we just have too much on our desktop, and it was time to cut back. Meanwhile, the mobile community is shifting value from Mhz to battery life, as wireless networking becomes ubiquitous. Down go laptop clock speeds. For the PC manufacturers and software developers, now what?

Well at least one person has an opinion. Bill Gates thinks hardware will someday be free. Bill is a guy who it is difficult not to listen to, but I still have to think about that one a little more. If you get the hardware for free, and don’t actually buy the software (you usually “license” it), it sounds as though the industry may starve on its own success. I doubt however, that you will ever be able to pick up Apple hardware for nothing.

Another industry has experienced a similar fate. The US auto industry failed to maintain consumer attention, due mainly to an inability to create a product of competitive quality while fighting each other for price superiority. Meanwhile, Toyota Motor refused to lower their prices to levels of their primary competition, and yet Toyota is now the number one car manufacturer on the planet in terms of volume. They still build vehicles for which quality is hard to beat anywhere, and at any price. Toyotas will likely never be free, but I suspect that at least one major US automaker will not make it another twenty years, at least not independently.

Apple may have had its trials and tribulations, but it still carries its own weight, and seems to be making great strides of late. Someone seems to have a clue that people are willing to spend a little more for a supposedly superior product. People keep doing this, so maybe there is just something to it.

PS: I drive a Toyota.
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The machine is a Dell Latitude C840 with the following general specs:

- Intel Pentium-M 2.2 GHz
- 1 Gb Ram
- 60 Gb 5400 rpm IBM/Hitachi hard drive - primary bay
- 80 Gb 5400 rpm Toshiba hard drive - modular bay
- Nvidia GeForce 440 Go 64mb graphics
- Dell Truemobile 1300 b/g wireless card

Now the primary bay is slated for Windows XP Pro SP2, and the modular bay is for the Fedora Core 3 install. Each has its own master boot record, and I can select the drive to boot from at BIOS.

The Linux is kernel 2.6.10 (and change). It is running the following very convenient module/services:

- NTFS - the primary bay drive mounts on boot in read-only mode

- Wireless - the Dell Truemobile is a Broadcom chip, so Linuxant’s Driverloader was required to get that puppy going. It is also running with WPA, using the wpa-supplicant add-on

- Database server is MySQL 4.1, including the Admin and Query Browser add-ons

- Printer is an HP Deskjet 5150

Note also that I have not messed with installing the aggregious Nvidia graphics drivers - the X does a damn good job on its own.

How It Was Done

Not too difficult, with some time. First, I pulled the primary drive from its bay, and inserted the “soon to be modular” drive in its place. Ran install, and ran user select so I could put my own database install on later. Everything was fine on first try. I then swapped the drives again, and inserted the drive bay module.

Booted to FC3, and ran the NTFS rpm. Edited fstab to mount on boot, and used the umask=0222 tag so users other than root could use the drive. Then did the driverloader installation. Added the wpa-supplicant, then dropped the supplicant config file into the driverloader directory, and renamed it to dldr_wpa_supplicant. This gets the WPA to load along with the driverloader, so you have WPA at the start.

What Works, What Doesn’t

Well, I haven’t found much that doesn’t work. Wireless fine. All drives operate as required. My external NTFS firewire drive even mounts automatically when I turn it on. IR, ok, although I don’t have much use for it. Again, video is fine without the Nvidia updates, although I don’t play games, so I don’t know if 3D works. I am having some issues with getting PHP to access MySQL, but I suspect that is user error. Other than those points, it is a great production machine that draws me away from Windows roughly 50% of the time.

The fstab and config files follow. If you would like to know anything else, just let me know.
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VMWare creates a virtual drive on a machine to run other operating systems. Set up the drive, install the operating system of choice, launch, and run….easy. But can VMWare be used to run an operating system wholly contained on another fixed drive (meaning hard drive) installed on the same system?

If someone knows the answer to this, including how to do it, let me know. You can read about my dual operating system laptop under Open Source Love if you can’t understand why anyone would want to do this.

Want to give a bit of kudos to the Linux community, for making so many peoples lives a little better. I performed a nice clean install of FC3 (taken from fedora.redhat.com) on my Dell C840, and although I did a few unorthodox things with it (which I will explain in a moment), I am extremely happy with the way it stuck, and how it runs to this day. And this is despite having very high expectations for the platform from the start.

Nitty gritty after the jump.