It’s likely that most people make things like comfort, style, and price the main criteria when purchasing clothes. But there are other things that can be more important such as the ability to fit a phone in the pocket.

My last pair of jeans was from Rivers (one of the more affordable Australian clothing stores which also has online sales) [1]. They were the “long leg” version and have front pockets that are 28cm deep (measured from the bottom of the pocket to the lowest part of the lip) and 15cm wide (a 15cm ruler will barely fit sideways in the pocket).

I’ve just got some new jeans from Rivers which are the regular leg length, they have front pockets which are 21cm deep and slightly more than 16cm wide.

The old pair could fit a Nexus 7 tablet in the front pocket. The new pair should more easily fit such a tablet in the pocket but it might be less comfortable to walk with the tablet in the pocket. I don’t plan to try using my front pocket for a tablet (I’d be more likely to use a backpack or my Scott e vest [2]), but a Galaxy Note 2 (which is about the largest device that most people would want in their pocket) would fit nicely.

I find the Rivers jeans to be quite comfortable and I like the way they look. They also only cost $25 online or $30 in the store. When I bought my first pair before I even had a 4″ phone they were good value and they will be even better value early next year when I get a bigger phone. Even though Rivers jeans may wear out faster than more expensive brands, for $30 it’s easy to just buy a few pairs at a time.

During an email discussion of geeky clothing the issue of women’s clothes having fewer and smaller pockets was raised. Unfortunately I didn’t think to measure the pockets in women’s jeans when I was at the Rivers to discover whether they have big pockets too. I’ll do that next time I’m in the area.

• [1] http://rivers.com.au/
• [2] http://www.scottevest.com/

I previously wrote about the changes to bundling prices by Virgin (which are similar to changes by other telcos) which make it uneconomical to take a bundled phone [1]. This makes it a little easier to compare telcos as there is no need to be concerned about which telcos offer phones you like. Now it’s just a matter of call costs and this is easier to assess when the cost of a phone isn’t adding to the confusion.

Comparing Australian Telcos

I’m currently with Virgin and I’ve found them to be OK in every way. They use the Optus network which isn’t as good as the Telstra network but which supports more phones. Virgin charge $19 per month for a SIM without a phone, that gives you $450 worth of calls at a rate of $0.99 per minute + $0.40 connection and $0.28 SMS – as well as free calls to other Virgin customers [2]. If the people you call most are on Virgin it’s going to be almost impossible to use the $450 at those rates. The $19 plan only includes 250MB of data per month, for an extra $5 you can get another 500MB or for $10 you can get 2GB. For my use $29 is probably the right plan, for my wife $19 would do.

Vodafone doesn’t offer free calls to other Vodafone customers unless you are on a $30 per month plan, but that plan only gives 500MB of data measured in 12KB increments so that’s going to be expensive. Also Vodafone have had some quality problems recently so I’m not going to link to them.

Optus has some interesting options, they start with a $14 per month plan that includes 50MB of data and 500SMS – that could be good value if you do lots of SMS [3]. Also all their plans give free 5 minute calls to other phones on the same account – this would be good if your SO is on the same phone account as you. Their plans offer small amounts of data and no apparent option for adding more which is a real problem for anyone who wants to use the Internet seriously.

Telstra are really expensive, their web site is poorly designed, and they tell me to use Windows or a Mac. Everyone who spends most of their time in urban areas shouldn’t consider them, the only reason for using Telstra is their coverage of rural areas.

Internode have a new mobile phone service based on the Optus network which offers good value for money [4]. They start with a $10 per month plan that includes $165 of calls and SMS. The call cost is $0.90 per minute plus $0.35 flagfall and the SMS cost is $0.25. It also includes 100MB of data charged at 1KB increments. The $20 per month plan from Internode includes $450 of calls $1000 of free calls to other Internode mobile phones, and 1.5G of data transfer. Internode also has a $15 charge for sale and delivery of the SIM. Internode also offer 150GB of free “social networking” traffic, I wonder whether it would be viable to tunnel some other protocol over Twitter or Facebook…

TPG also has some good offers, $18 per month gives you 1.5GB of data measured in 10KB increments and $550 of phone calls at a cost of $0.90 per minute with $0.35 flagfall and $0.253 SMS cost and unlimited calls and SMS to other TPG mobile and land-line phones [5]. The $10 plan from TPG offers $2000 of free calls to other TPG phones, so if you only need 250MB of data in 10KB increments (which is a lot less than 250MB in 1KB increments) and want lots of free calls to your SO then TPG could be really good. I’d rather pay an extra $2 to Internode and get data measured in 1KB increments.

Conclusion

My usage pattern includes a reasonably large number of calls to my wife and more than 500MB of data use every month. For this pattern the Internode plan is the cheapest for me and for my wife. It seems that a large portion of the phone using population who use the Internet a lot would find this to be an ideal plan.

TPG is another good option, particularly for people who use TPG ADSL as they get a discount on the call rates and free calls to their land-line.

It seems to me that anyone who uses a mobile phone enough that a pre-paid option isn’t cheaper and who doesn’t need the coverage that only Telstra can provide will be best served by Internode or TPG.

I plan to transition to Internode some time after my current Virgin contract ends. I will probably delay the transition until the contracts for some of my wife’s relatives expire. If we all migrate at the same time then we keep getting free calls to each other – my relatives don’t use mobile phones much so there’s no money to save on calling them for free.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/09/22/phone-prices-australia/
• [2] http://www.virginmobile.com.au/sim-card/
• [3] https://www.optus.com.au/shop/mobilephone/byomobile/simcardplans
• [4] http://www.internode.on.net/residential/phone_and_voip/nodemobile/
• [5] http://www.tpg.com.au/mobile/plans.php

SSDs have been dropping in price recently so I just bought four Intel 120G devices for $115 each. I installed the first one for my mother in law who had been complaining about system performance. Her system boot time went from 90 seconds to 20 seconds and a KDE login went from about 35 seconds to about 10 seconds. The real problem that she had reported was occasional excessive application delay, while it wasn’t possible to diagnose that properly I think it was a combination of her MUA doing synchronous writes while other programs such as Chromium were doing things. To avoid the possibility of a CPU performance problem I replaced her 1.8GHz E4300 system with a 2.66GHz E7300 that I got from a junk pile (it’s amazing what’s discarded nowadays).

I also installed a SSD in my own workstation (a 2.4GHz E4600). The boot time went down from 45s on Ext4 without an encrypted root to 27s with root on BTRFS including the time taken to enter the encryption password (maybe about 23s excluding my typing time). The improvement wasn’t as great, but that’s because my workstation does some things on bootup that aren’t dependent on disk IO such as enabling a bridge with STP (making every workstation a bridge is quieter than using switches). KDE login went from about 27s to about 12s and the time taken to start Chromium and have it be usable (rather than blocking on disk IO) went from 30 seconds to an almost instant response (maybe a few seconds)! Tests on another system indicates that Chromium startup could be improved a lot by purging history, but I don’t want to do that. It’s unfortunate that Chromium only supports deleting recent history (to remove incriminating entries) but doesn’t support deleting ancient history that just isn’t useful.

I didn’t try to seriously benchmark the SSD (changing from Ext4 to BTRFS on my system would significantly reduce the accuracy of the results), I have plans for doing that on more important workloads in the near future. For the moment the most casual tests have shown a significant performance benefit so it’s clear that an SSD is the correct storage option for any new workstation which doesn’t need more than 120G of storage space. $115 for SSD vs $35 for HDD is a fairly easy choice for a new system. For larger storage the price of hard drives increases more slowly than that of SSD.

In spite of the performance benefits I doubt that I will gain a real benefit from this in the next year. The time taken to install the SSD equates to dozens of boot cycles which given a typical workstation uptime in excess of a month is unlikely to happen soon. One minor benefit is that deleting messages in Kmail is an instant operation which saves a little annoyance and there will be other occasional benefits.

One significant extra benefit is that an SSD is quiet and dissipates less heat which might allow the system cooling fans to run more slowly. As noisy computers annoy me an SSD is a luxury feature. Also it’s good to test new technologies that my clients may need.

The next thing on my todo list is to do some tests of ZFS with SSD for L2ARC and ZIL.

When I previously wrote about the Retina display in the new Macbook Pro I was so excited that I forgot to even check whether the display reflects light [1]. A TFT display with a mirrored surface apparently permits more intense color which is generally a good thing. It also makes it easier to clean the surface which is really important for phones and tablets. The down-side of a mirrored surface on a display is that it can reflect whatever else is in the area.

This generally isn’t a problem in an office as you can usually adjust the angle of the monitor and the background lighting to avoid the worst problems. It’s also not a serious problem for a hand-held device as it’s usually easy to hold it at an angle such that you don’t have light from anything particularly bright reflecting.

But my experience of laptop use includes using them anywhere at any time. I’ve done a lot of coding on all forms of public transport in all weather conditions. Doing that with a Thinkpad which has a matte surface on it’s screen is often difficult but almost always possible. Doing that on a system with a mirrored display really isn’t possible. The above photo of a 15″ Macbook Pro model MD103X/A was taken at a Myer store which was specifically designed to make the computers look their best. The overall lighting wasn’t particularly bright so that the background didn’t reflect too much and the individual lights were diffuse to avoid dazzling point reflections. But even so the lights can be clearly seen. Note that the photo was taken with a Samsung Galaxy S, far from the best possible camera.

If I was buying a laptop that would only ever be used in the more northern parts of Europe or if I was buying a laptop to use only at home and at the office then I might consider a mirror display. But as I mostly use my laptop in mainland Australia including trips to tropical parts of Australia and I use it in all manner of locations a mirror display isn’t going to work for me.

This isn’t necessarily a bad decision by Apple designers. My observation of Macbook use includes lots of people using them only in offices and homes. Of the serious geeks who describe their laptop as My Precious hardly anyone has a Macbook while Thinkpads seem quite popular in that market segment. I don’t think that it’s just the matte screen that attracts serious geeks to the Thinkpad, but it does seem like part of a series of design decisions (which include the past tradition of supporting hard drive removal without tools and the option of a second hard drive for RAID-1) that make Thinkpads more suitable for geeks than Macbooks. While the new tradition in Apple design of gluing things together so they can never be repaired, recycled, or even have their battery replaced seems part of a pattern that goes against geek use. Even when Apple products are technically superior in some ways their catering to the less technical buyers makes them unsuitable to people like me.

Maybe the ability to use a Macbook as a shaving mirror could be handy, but I’d rather grow a beard and use a Thinkpad.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/07/31/retina-display/

After seeing the Retina display I’ve been thinking about the computer products that I’ve immediately desired. Here is the list of the ones I can still remember:

1. My first computer which was the TEC-1 [1], in 1982 or 1983.
2. A computer with a full keyboard and a monitor (Microbee), in about 1984. A hex-only keypad is very limiting.
3. Unix, initially SunOS 4.0 in 1991. Primarily the benefits of this were TCP/IP networking, fast email (no multi-day delay for Fidonet mail), IRC, and file transfer from anywhere in the world. Not inherent benefits to Unix, but at the time only Unix systems did TCP/IP at all well.
4. OS/2 2.0 in 1992. At the time OS/2 had the best GUI of any system available (IMHO) and clearly the best multitasking of DOS and Windows programs.
5. Linux in 1992. I started with the TAMU and “MCC Interim” distributions and then moved to SLS when it was released. The first kernel I compiled was about 0.52. At the time the main use of Linux for almost everyone was to learn about Unix and compile kernels. In 1993 I started running a public access Linux server.
6. Trinitron monitors in 1996. I first saw an IBM Trinitron monitor when working on an IBM project and had to buy one for home use, at the time a 17″ Trinitron monitor beat the hell out of any other display device that one could reasonably afford. A bigger screen allowed me to display more code at once which allowed easier debugging.
7. Thinkpad laptops from 1998 until now. They just keep working well and seem to be better than other products every time I compare them. I also like the TrackPoint. 1998 was when a Thinkpad dropped to a mere $3,800 for a system that could run with 96M of RAM, enough compute power for the biggest compiles and it cost less than most cars!
8. The KDE desktop environment in 1998. In 1998 I switched my primary workstation from a PC running OS/2 to a Thinkpad running Linux because of KDE. Prior to KDE nothing on Linux was user-friendly enough.
9. The iPaQ hand-held PC. I got one in 2002 and ran the Familiar distribution of Linux on it. I had it running SE Linux and used it for writing an article for Linux Journal. Being able to get a computer out on public transport to do some work really saved some time. In some ways the iPaQ hardware and the Familiar OS beat modern Android systems.
10. The EeePC 701 which I bought in 2008 [2]. In the last 4 years someone has probably released a system that’s no larger or heavier and has the same amount of compute power (enough for web browsing, email, and ssh). But most Netbooks that I’ve seen don’t compete. The EeePC allowed me to take laptops to places where it previously wasn’t convenient.
11. Android, before using Android I never had a smart phone that I used for anything other than taking photos. The other smart phone OSs are either locked down or don’t have the app support that Android has. I listed lots of problems with my first phone the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, but I still really enjoyed using it a lot [3]. Since getting an Android phone I’ve read a lot of email while on the go, this means I can respond faster when necessary and use time that might otherwise be wasted. The ssh client means that I don’t need to carry a laptop with me when there’s a risk that emergency sysadmin work may be required.
12. Cheap rented servers, Amazon defined cloud computing with EC2, Linode offers great deals for small virtual servers, and Hetzner offers amazing deals on renting entire servers. Getting your own Internet connection or running your own physical server in someone’s data-center is a lot of effort and expense. Being able to just rent servers is so much easier and allows so many new projects. I can’t remember when I first started using such services, maybe 5 years ago.
13. The Apple Retina Display [4] a few days ago.

For the period between 1998 and 2008 I can’t think of anything that really excited me apart from the iPaQ. Computers became a lot smaller, faster, cheaper, etc. But it was never a big exciting change. The AMD64 architecture wasn’t particularly exciting as most systems didn’t need more than 4G of RAM and the ones that did could use PAE.

What are the most exciting computer products you have seen?

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/23/the-start-of-my-computer-career/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/21/review-of-the-eeepc-701/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/18/xperia-x10i-first-experience/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/07/31/retina-display/

A non-profit organisation I support has just bought a Dell PowerEdge T410 server to be mainly used as a file server. We need a reasonable amount of space and really good reliability features because the system may have periods without being actively monitored, it also has to be relatively cheap.

Dell servers are quite cheap, but disks are not cheap at all when Dell sells them. I get the impression that disks and RAM are major profit centers for Dell and that the profit margins on the basic servers are quite small. So naturally we decided to buy some SATA disks from a local store, one advantage of this is that Dell sells nothing bigger than 2TB while 3TB disks are available cheaply everywhere else.

So we bought 4 cheap 3TB (2.7TiB) SATA disks, connected them to the server, and found that only 2TiB was accessible. The Dell Tech Center says that some of the RAID controllers don’t support anything larger than 2TiB [1]. Obviously we have one of the older models. There’s lots of SATA sockets on the motherboard that could be used, however there is one problem.

The above picture is the side view of the T410, it was taken with a Samsung Galaxy S so the quality is a little poor (click for the original picture). The server is quite neat, not many cables for a system with 6 disks, not the 12 separate cables you would get in a typical white-box system.

The above picture shows the disk enclosure. You can see that each disk has a single connector for power and data, also the disks aren’t separate, multiple disks have the same power wires and the data cables are paired.

Above you can see the SAS controller, it has two large connectors that can each handle the data cables for 4 disks, nothing like the standard cables.

It’s easy to buy SATA data cables and connect them, but there are no spare power cables in the box. The connector that supplies power to all the disks appears to be something proprietary to Dell which goes straight to the double-connectors on each disk that supply power and data. This setup makes cabling very neat but also provides no good option for cabling regular disks. I’m sure I could make my own cables and if I hunted around the net enough I could probably buy some matching power cables, but it would be a hassle and the result wouldn’t be neat.

So the question was then whether to go to more effort, expense, and possibly risk the warranty to get the full 3TB or to just use the SAS controller and get 2TiB (2.2TB) per disk. One factor we considered is the fact that the higher sector numbers typically give much slower access times due to being on shorter tracks (see my ZCAV results page for test results from past disks [2]). We decided that 2.2TB (2TiB) out of 3TB (2.7TiB) was adequate capacity and that losing some of the slow parts of the disk wasn’t a big deal.

I’ve now setup a RAID-Z2 array on the disks, and ZFS reports 3.78TiB available capacity, which isn’t a lot considering that we have 4*3TB disks in the array. But the old server had only 200G of storage, so it’s a good improvement in capacity, performance, and RAID-Z2 should beat the hell out of RAID-6 for reliability.

• [1] http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/extras/w/wiki/2837.aspx
• [2] http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/zcav/results.html

Last night I played with an Apple Macbook Pro with the new Retina Display (Wikipedia link). Wikipedia cites some controversy about whether the display actually has higher resolution than the human eye can perceive. When wearing glasses my vision is considerably better than average (I have average vision without glasses) and while kneeling in front of the Macbook I couldn’t easily distinguish pixels. So Apple’s marketing claims seem technically correct to me.

When I tested the Macbook Pro I found that the quality of the text display was very high, even now the 1680*1050 display on my Thinkpad T61 looks completely crap when compared to the 2880*1800 display on the Macbook. The Macbook was really great for text and for a JPEG that was installed on the system for testing. But unfortunately pictures on web sites didn’t look particularly good. Pictures on my blog looked quite poor and pictures returned by a Google search for “art” didn’t look that great either. I wonder if Safari (the Apple web browser) isn’t properly optimised for the display or if there is something that we should do when preparing pictures for web sites to make them look better on Safari.

The retina display has a 71% greater DPI which means 2.93* the total number of pixels of my Thinkpad. The overall quality of the experience for me (apart from web pictures) seems more like a factor of 2.93 when compared with my Thinkpad than a factor of 1.71. This has to be one of the most desirable products I’ve seen from a company that’s opposed to freedom for it’s users. I’m not about to buy one though, $2,300 is a lot of money for a system that can’t be upgraded, repaired, or recycled, and doesn’t even have an Ethernet port. I’m sure that if I bought one I would discover that it some of the hardware features don’t work properly with Linux.

The new Apple design trend of making it impossible to repair anything works reasonably well for phones and tablets which are cheap enough that they are hardly worth repairing when they have been used for a while. Lots of people can afford to spend about $600 on something that may be discarded after a year or two, but very few people can afford to spend more than $2,000 on such a disposable product.

Why is Apple the only company producing systems with such displays? If someone produced regular PCs that have the expected features (including an Ethernet port) with such a display at a lower price then I’m sure that there would be a great demand.