I love catching websites with their proverbial pants down...

I love unhandled errors from websites. Today, while submitting my timesheet for the day I received the following:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e14'

Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'And'.

/EZM/traddfreets.asp, line 752

It tells me that I'll always have a job in the future. I waited a few minutes and then tried to re-submit my time and got:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e21'

Multiple-step OLE DB operation generated errors. Check each OLE DB status value, if available. No work was done.

/EZM/traddfreets.asp, line 563

These, in particular seems 'frog march' worthy. What this tells me is they have an error in production and are trying to fix it IN PRODUCTION! That's a No-No in my book. I understand the desire to return to service, but what if your 'fix' inserts bad data? What if it corrupts? What if it gives access to protected data?

And worse still, The only thing I get is the SQL error. I get no 'sorry' page, or link to go back to the time sheet, no 'handling' of the situation. It's easy to see how this happens. All to often the focus is on the postitive-outcome side of things. Given A then do B, C and D and then return E. There's usually error checking along the way, which is half of the negative-outcome side of things. I often see errors and stack tracing output, some of if boiler plate from the underlying components like the ones above, others written by the website folks in question. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry is trying to pick up his rental car and there's no car available (paraphrasing). "But I have a reservation for a car." "I know what a reservation is sir." "I don't think you do, because if you did, I'd have a car right now. Anyone can take a reservation. It's the holding of the reservation...that's really the most important part!" (this bit gets used a lot by a lot of people judging by the google hits). In this case, they know how to 'Throw' the exception. It's the catching, the catching is the most important part.

Oh well, the silver lining is job security.

Google Apps, custom domains and the G1

I have a few domains for my personal and professional use. When I first started my personal website/domain I took what ever came from the hosting company. In my case, www.powweb.com is the provider in question. I've been generally happy with Powweb, but I also have straight forward run-of-the-mill needs too. The only thing that was a problem for me was email. I needed to be able to read my mail from multiple machines. Your typical provider only offers POP3 access and webmail. Webmail just doesn't work for me and multiple mail clients with POP3 is problematic. My initial solution was to use gmail to retrieve the mail via POP3. Then via GMAIL I can use their advanced webmail client and desktop clients via IMAP. I probably would have gone with Yahoo Mail had they offered IMAP for free. Don't know why, but I like Yahoo's webmail better for some reason.   

Gmail isn't with out it's problems though. When you send email via Gmail from your @gmail.com account it has a funny header that some MTA's don't like to honor. So you'll email will have a header lines:

Sender: user@gmail.com

Return-Path: <user@gmail.com>

but a from line of:

From: Richard Whiffen <me@whiffen.org>

In the past it used to say

From: user@gmail.com on behalf of user@whiffen.org

which was even worse. Anyway, some older mail apps reply to the @gmail.com. This becomes a problem when the reply is to a large group of people. The threads get fragmented because some people are mailing to @gmail.com some are @whiffen.org. Doesn't happen often, but enough to be a bother.   

The fix is to sign up for google apps. If you have less than 50 mail boxes (not aliases, actual email boxes) the free edition is quite powerful. When you sign up you can either buy a domain via Google, or you can use a domain you already own. I think it'd likely be cheaper via someone other than google but your milage may vary. I already had my domain so I signed up and via some fairly simple steps was able to point my MX records from powweb.com to google.com. So now I can log and get a gmail interface to my @whiffen.org. Google's mail infrastructure and spam filtering is far more robust than my hosting provider so I have had a noticiable drop in spam since moving over. I also have an online calendar and google docs @whiffen.org as well. So now when I send email from @whiffen.org there's no funky headers or other issues like that. It does mean however now I have two mail boxes @gmail.com (which I only use to subscribe to listservs) and @whiffen.org (and @rwhiffen.com but that gets no traffic at all). In Mail.app and Outlook it's trivial to manage. It is a bit trickier from the web interface. I basically have to log in more than once.

Where it gets fun is my G1. I have a T-Mobile G1 the "google phone" if you will. When I bought it I signed in with my @gmail.com account and when I'd click the nice red gmail envelope I'd get my @gmail.com mail and my @whiffen.org mail. But sending mail as @whiffen.org wasn't possible on the phone with out extra work. The simplest path is to set up the Mail app within the phone (it's separate from the gmail app). It will allow you to connect to a pop3 or IMAP host. But with the google apps setup, I was able to factory reset my phone and instead of using @gmail.com I used @whiffen.org and it worked like a charm. Now I have a single interface to my @whiffen.org email via the phone, via the web and via my Macs. What's more, my calendar and calendar invites are now @whiffen.org.

The Google apps setup also comes with Google docs, which I'm using to co-write some documentation currently, very hand tool. It has fairly flexible version control and permissions structure. It can do fairly robust word processing and spreadsheets. I find the spreadsheet navigation a bit clumsy at times do the the web based nature of it. Data entry isn't as smooth as it is with a local application. I haven't tried the google gears feature for offline editing yet. But for the basics it's pretty good. I essentially use it to rough in the documents and the finish them up in NeoOffice or in MS office via parallels.

A hidden gem, I feel, is google sites. Google Sites is very similar to Microsoft's SharePoint. You have less widgets and flexibility perhaps but you do have a lot of base features. You can make a file cabinet page for simple file storage, retrieval and versioning. There's a dashboard template that lets you add google gadgets to the page, like weather, docs, excel sheets, movies, but is generally intended to give you a portal-like view into your other site pages. There's also a announcement template and list template. All together it's easy to see turning Google Sites into a small company portal for sharing information, which is what I believe it's intended use is. Although I do find it ironic that it's not tied into google docs. When you add things to your 'file cabinet' page, you have to find the URL's to your Google docs via the Google docs page and paste them in as a web link. You can't select them from a list. I suspect this will be improved over time, but I was a bit surprised by that lack of integration.

What will really make Google Apps interesting is when they get integrated into Android. Then your phone will be tied into this nexus as well giving you a lot of power from a phone. I'd love to be able to at least read my docs on my G1. That's one area that is sorely lacking in the current G1 and the forthcoming 1.5 version coming 'any day now'. It'll come some day, but probably not for a while. I think they want to get things like Adobe Flash working first.

If I ever decided to start a small business I'm definitely going to use Google Apps instead of running an email server and share point server. Especially when the first 50 email users are free. I do find it a bit odd that the 'premier' edition is $50/user/year, which for what you get, isn't too steep. That $50 gets you 25Gb of mail, a host of extra security options, a 99.9% uptime SLA, and more support. For a lot of small companies, especially the 10 or less people kind, it would be tough to justify the $50 vs free. The security options might make it work while, but other than that, why would you do it? I'd be curious to know how many freeloaders like myself are out there vs the less that 50 user paying customers there are.

I've looked at the 'live.com' offerings from Microsoft, and I was very disappointed. It's far to confusing initially. They're also trying to be everything web 2.0 all rolled into one. While the idea is reasonable, as with a lot of things Microsoft, the execution is poor. Once I figured out what they were trying to do it made a twisted kind of sense to me but it was still cluttered and confusing. They forgot one of simple things about the web 2.0 experience. Most things are separate by default and you have to choose to join them. Not with windows live, they linked and cross linked everything. I looked at it, acknowledged, and moved on.

Anyway, if you have your own domain I'd strongly suggest you give google Apps a try. It's great email hosting if nothing else. It's fast and free. It has extras that appeal to small businesses or groups. If you're one of the lucky ones who has a grand central account (now called google voice, apparently), you also have a central phone number for your business, again for free.

Thoughts on Oracle buying Sun...

So Sun finally found a buyer. The IBM and Sun deal fell apart for various reasons (depending on who you ask) and now Oracle has swooped in and temporarily entered the hardware market. I've been writing this post in bits and pieces since I heard the news. The piece kept getting longer and longer and more unwieldy every day. So I've decided to break it up into three separate posts.

• What I like about the purchase



• Oracle as a hardware vendor



• The dead pool (what software products are going to die).

 

Over all I think it's a great deal for Sun. It remains to be seen how this works for Oracle. One interesting aspect of the acquisition to me, on a superficial level, is the logos.

 

Oracle Red

vs

 

Sun Blue

For my money, Sun has the superior logo and color since switching from that fisher price purple. A Red Sun logo looks pretty sad, IMHO. Huh, Red Sun, has an interesting ring to it.

 

The Dead Pool, who dies in the Oracle purchase of Sun?

Since Sun's primarily a hardware company and Oracle's primarily software, you'd think there wouldn't be a lot of overlap between them, but you'd be wrong. There's going to be a few hard choices to make for Oracle. Some of them are easy. Sun's Java Systems Web and App (aka SunOne aka iPlanet, aka Netscape) products will be killed. They weren't that heavily used anyway so no one will really miss them. Oracle can offer them an easy transition. The area of Identity management is going to be a sticky one. The fusion stack has an integrated LDAP already, but my limited exposure to it has been unfavorable. Sun's LDAP and IDM products only slightly better in my view. Both have good and bad points. But in the end, you only need one. So it'll be interesting to see what happens there. I suspect that most of the Sun products will loose most of these fights. They just don't have the momentum or market presence to stay.

Then you get into the sore spot for a lot of people. The open source products and projects that Sun supports or owns. Oracle already has Oracle Developer Suite. Sun has Sun Studio and the fairly popular NetBeans. And developers are the most cool-aid drinking crowd you'll ever find. You think Linux and WIndows folks don't like each other, just put a NetBeans user in the same room as an Eclipse user and ask them which is the better IDE. There's no good answer here. You can't keep them all, although because of the open source nature of NetBeans there isn't a lot of expense to keeping it around. Sun Studio is probably already dead, we just don't know it yet. Then there's MySQL... Seems like chicken little just did this dance about a year ago when Sun bought them. Some folks think it's not as bad as it sounds and I think they're right. Oracle could actually bring some real value to MySQL. The open source issue would still be sticky, and they don't want to erode their sales, but there could be a fairly sizable chunk of middle ground for MySQL and Oracle. Other open source projects probably won't be so lucky. Glassfish is probably going to get dumped. Not a lot of upside for Oracle with Glassfish. Then there's Oracle Linux and OpenSolaris. Although there's probably room for both, strategically they should pick one. My wishful-thinking bet is on OpenSolaris. The tie-in's with the hardware line are too strong to ignore. Oracle Linux hasn't exactly lit up the server market anyway. But any way you slice it I'm expecting forks of a lot of Sun sponsored open source projects at the first sign of Oracle playing rough with the Open Source community.

Other interesting areas are going to be in the grid space. Sun and Oracle have competing grid technologies. Not sure who wins out in the merging of those products. I suspect Sun Cluster will be put out to pasture in favor of ClusterWare (which also portends bad things for Symantec's VCS product). Sun's N1 management suite will probably be left with out a chair when the music stops as well. It will be interesting to see where Oracle simply drops a product vs where they merge a product. In some cases the products have different strengths, and merging them makes a lot of sense. But by the same token you don't want to create market confusion in your product portfolio, so they have to walk a fine line.

So my software deal-pool list (dead as in not a Sun product/project anymore., forks/spin-offs not counted):

• Sun Java Systems Web and Portal products



• Suns IDM/SSO suite



• Glassfish



• Sun Cluster



• Sun Studio



• NetBeans (*sniff*)

I'm sure I'll amend this list with a few that I've overlooked later.

Oracle as a hardware vendor

It will be interesting to see how long the 'Sun' badge stays on the equipment. Right now I think the Sun name will stay on for 2 or 3 years or until Oracle exits the hardware game. I'm betting that they will start cutting hardware sooner, rather than later. Oracle loves fat maintenance contracts, so I could be wrong about them leaving the hardware game at all. There's a lot of recurring revenue to be had on the support contracts. But the Red Sun won't be able to compete in as many hardware arenas as it did in the past. I suspect underperforming lines will be culled quickly. I don't know what lines those may be. If, for example the blade servers, aren't selling like hot cakes (relatively speaking of course), then I think it'll be taken out behind the shed, old yeller style. Eventually I suspect all the server hardware will go this way, but that's just a speculative guess on my part. I know Oracle would love to have an App to Disk solution on hardware that no one else sells. Unfortunately it's no guaranty of success. If owning the whole solution where all it took to be successful, we'd all be running IBM and Apple.

Product areas I see getting killed off first are the blade systems. I could be mistaken but I don't think the blade idea has much steam. The barrier to entry for most companies is too high. Plus there's the 'eggs in one basket' problem that make a lot of systems architects and engineers shy away from blades. I wouldn't be surprised if they kill off the intel and AMD based systems as well. Let HP and Dell have that. Although they could try and keep it going to have that bundled solution. Systems preloaded with unbreakable linux or Solaris and preloaded with Oracle goodies as a value add. The first spin off will likely be StorageTek, which will likely kill the brand. IT history is full of brands that diminished under a new owner and then died after subsequent resale (Who uses wordperfect anymore?). The reason STK makes a a good spin-off candidate is there are other tape/storage vendors who would love to get their ends on their install base. The same can not be said for the x86 business or SPARC.

My current feeling is we'll see product streamlining first and then reductions/spin-offs. Mostly scalpel type cuts, but few major changes in the first 18 months. A lot will depend on the state of the IT industry. If IT purchasing is ramping up, Oracle will likely keep things going for 3 years or so. But if IT spending is in the tank or they botch the merging of the two support/sales organizations they'll go at the Sun hardware lines with a battle ax.

What I like about the Oracle purchase of Sun

I'm not quite sure what the 'vibe' on the street is (and by street, I don't mean wall street, they're like headless chickens riding a herd of sheep). So far I think reaction is mostly neutral or 'wait and see'. The open source community is up in arms fearing a mySQL death blow. I think that fear is unwarranted at this time, and I'm not alone in that thought. I think there could be some real upside to Sun customers, especially Sun/Oracle customers. Oracle brings financial stability and customer base to the table. Sun brings a recently invigorated streak of innovation and solid hardware creation & manufacturing skills.

It would be interesting to see what kind of oracle appliance the combined team could come up with. I have visions of an appliance based on the T5240 that auto-configs via the enterprise manager grid control. It woud ship pre-installed with RAC and the Fusion stack. You plug it into the appropriate VLANs, it attaches to the grid and then you tell it what kind of work you want it to do. It'd have 128 threads, a good mix of disk and memory. If you're starting to run out of capacity, just add another pre-packaged building block to the grid. The devils always in the details, but I think it could work. It'd be a bear to patch/upgrade unless it was built into the process to automatically segment the grid into upgraded vs non-upgraded and once a threshold of nodes are in the upgraded status, switch traffic to those nodes en mass. Because no one else builds a T2 based server, you'd have to get all your kit from Oracle which could drive future revenue. If they make the entry point easy enough and the OS/Hardware simple enough, smaller businesses could run oracle products than before.

Oracle (which owns most of the products I encounter in my professional life these days) could optimize and integrate the Solaris kernel to provide added speed and flexibility on Sun hardware. Especially in regards to performance and scalability. If Sun can optimize it's kernel for the Oracle RDBMS or Java for the Fusion middleware stack or Weblogic with out customizing the respective products, it could be a big win for Oracle. I think the trick is going to be to not customize the products. If they do, they open themselves up to the same anti-trust talk that Microsoft faced. We're a long way away from that, but they wouldn't want to give their competition any ammunition. There was a time when the VOS (Veritas, Oracle Sun) stack was the way to go if you needed to scale big. They even created a joint center for a while to work on issues up and down the stack (not sure where that ever ended up). But there's only so much a joint operation can do, because patents and IP rights get in the way. The barrier between two of those three has just been removed (and the 3rd isn't as vital as it once was).

The other area I like is the cutting edge areas. For example Sun's doing a lot with Flash storage and mixed flash/disk storage. What if you could optimize the database to take advantage of that mixed storage pool? Oracle and a native ZFS pool? And perhaps most interesting (and the one that gets me giddy) would be native DTrace providers for Oracle products. Imaging the diagnosis option if you can natively probe an underperforming SQL query? Probe a 'lost' tuxedo session? And then the gui's that could be written to take advantage of the providers? You'd never buy Spotlight again.

Perhaps the most important reason I like the purchase is Sun survives. I selfishly want Sun to live on because I consider myself to be quite good at Sun. I'm fair at AIX and Linux, but Sun and Solaris is in my wheelhouse. I'm not adverse to AIX or Linux, it's just not what I've had the most exposure to. If Solaris goes away, I guess I'd have to go with Linux because I can run that on just about any hardware. AIX requires me to buy something from IBM.

At any rate, I'm glad Solaris lives another day.

I miss the rejection letter

A while back Louis CK was on Conan O'Brien. He had a great bit on "Everything's Amazing, Nobody's Happy." Basically how things are amazing right now and people still have room to complain. My cell phone has more abilities than the first five computers I ever owned combined. And yet I still find time to complain about what it can't do.


Similar thing with the job market. Searching for jobs has never been easier. In good job markets you can put a profile up on job boards and sit back and wait for people to find you. In tougher markets, you can search and apply from the comfort of your computer. No resumes to print, cover letters to write with awkward salutations, no envelopes or stamps. You apply, and 5 minutes later it can be in the hands of the HR department. It's amazing. You can sit in any internet connected location in the world and look for jobs in any major metropolitan city in the western world and then some. The 'web 1.0' way of doing it was a bit cold and non-personal, so sites like linkedin.com have stepped in to meet that need. (My profile's here) There are other avenues as well. EMC has a twitter account for jobs. It's never been easier for job seekers and employers to find each other.
As the Joe Walsh song says: "I can't complain, but some times I still do". I miss the rejection letter. I still get them every once and a while, but haven't gotten any on this latest round of job searching. And I think it's an artifact of living life at internet speeds. So I've sent resume's and inquiries to a handful of opportunities but haven't received any kind of response. Others I have recieved a canned response from the HR application they used to allow you to apply, or an auto-reply email from the HR@company.com email box. I guess I can forgive the lack of response. The flood of potential applicants and the number of dead ends therein would make it a fools errand to respond to them all personally. With the ease of applying for jobs, a person can apply to several dozen jobs in an afternoon. So the likely hood of someone in HR responding to someone who's already taken another job is pretty high. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that HR doesn't get back to me personally. But it doesn't mean I have to like it either. Some times it would be nice to know that a real person at least received my application. It would be nicer still to know that I didn't get it so I wouldn't be left to wonder.
Oh well, even though everything is great, I'm not completely happy...