Distant Parts

Now the move is pretty much complete, I’ve got a few more details of the move for anyone who’s interested.

Carsurvey.org has been hosted with the same company for about 4 years. They were originally known as Ev1Servers, but were acquired by The Planet, and in my experience, service proceeded to go downhill from that point.

Support used to be good, but a RAID problem and a recent server stability issue were both handled badly, and I decided it was time to move Carsurvey.org to pastures new.

After lots of research, I settled on SoftLayer, who seem to be picking up a lot of disgruntled The Planet customers.

Initial reasons for choosing SoftLayer:

• Pretty good feedback on forums such as WebHostingTalk
• Large choice of operating systems, including RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.0 (the old server was running version 4.0, and I wanted to move to the newer version, complete with PHP5 and MySQL 5
• Huge flexibility in hardware configuration
• Quad core Xenon processors - these are hugely powerful for the money. The new server has a single quad core Xeon at 2.4Ghz (Kentsfield, Core 2), compared to the old server, which had two single core 2.4Ghz Xeons (the old NetBurst type)
• Almost any RAID configuration you could reasonably want
• Very competitive pricing. For the new server, which has a quad core processor, 2Gb of RAM, and 3x 150Gb Raptor SATA disks in a hot-swappable RAID 5 array, it’s costing $279 a month (including various other sundry options). That compares very well to the $348 a month I was paying for the old server at The Planet, which only had two disks (in a mirror; not hot-swappable), and two single core processors
• Support forums available. I’m always suspicious of companies that don’t dare have support forums

Observations following the move:

• The Planet have been getting more and more aggressive with their marketing emails (they should do something about their support instead). Thankfully SoftLayer don’t seem to be bothering me in the same way
• I had need of SoftLayer’s support when I first got the new server. It was OK. Quick response times (unlike The Planet), and reasonable responses, although they took a few attempts to fix an admittedly obscure hardware issue. There’s room for improvement, but SoftLayer were much better than my recent experiences with The Planet
• The new SoftLayer server has far more sophisticated management facilities than my old The Planet server, including backend VPN access, and full control over an IPMI card, which allows for easy monitoring of the hardware, and KVM console access (useful if you make a mistake while securing your network connections). These new facilities took some time to learn, but the extra security and control were worth the effort
• I do miss the live text chat with support that The Planet offered. The Planet’s solution was badly implemented, but it’s often easier to use text chat support, than explain things over the telephone. It would be good if SoftLayer could offer this facility

In conclusion, so far I’m pretty happy with SoftLayer. Carsurvey.org is running on a more powerful and configurable server, with reasonable support, for less money than I was paying at The Planet.

Quick thoughts on the UK iPhone launch:

Positives:

• The contract is 18 months, not 24 as some had suggested
• Including the Cloud connectivity is very clever. It partially compensates for the lack of 3G
• The included data plan fair usage limits of roughly 1400 web pages a day translates to about 0.5-2Gb a month (depended on the web page size they’re assuming). That’s competitive with T-Mobile and 3’s data tariffs

Negatives:

• The tariffs (£35 to £55) are too expensive, given the phone costs £269 and it’s an 18 month contract. They should have offered £25 to £45, or at worst £29.99 to £49.99
• No 3G. Despite the WiFi bundle, this is a big deal. Steve Jobs is wrong about the tradeoff they’re making of battery life vs data speed
• The killer quote was from O2 regarding EDGE coverage: “By launch we’ll be north of 30% and build from there”. EDGE is slow enough. If that coverage is going to be patchy, it means relying on GPRS. Oh dear…

So a bit of a mixed bag, but not enough to tempt me away from my N95. I wait the iPhone 2 with interest

Carsurvey.org and related sites are currently in the process of being moved to a new and better web server.

While this move is in progress, some of the features of the site may not be available, such as adding new reviews and comments, and the members area. Once I’ve switched everything across, it may take up to 24 hours for your browser to start using the new server instead of the old one.

Apologies to everyone for the inconvenience. More details on move to come in a future post (once I’m happy  the move has been completed successfully).

For me, Apple’s new iPod touch is like selling a Ferrari for $20,000, but only installing a fuel tank with a 2 mile range.

It’s such a great device, but the lack of Bluetooth kills it dead for me. I wouldn’t mind, but it’s such a silly omission.

Living in England (rather than San Francisco), the world outside my house isn’t blanketed by free WiFi. If the iPod touch had Bluetooth, I could connect it to the web via HSDPA through my N95. Without that feature, Safari on the iPod is only useful within my home.

I’m heartbroken that Apple have come so close to a must have device, but have blown it for the sake of a cheap Bluetooth chipset. And it’s not as if there’s a partner like AT&T to blame.

p.s. If you just want a media player, or you live in San Francisco, get your order in now and join the inevitable waiting list

For almost 2.5 years, my main desktop computer has been a 20 inch iMac G5 (1.5Gb of RAM), running Mac OS X Tiger. It’s been a great machine, but for quite some time I’ve been struggling with its relatively slow CPU and the 20 inch screen.

I’ve been dreaming of a new Mac Pro with OS X Leopard, dual Harpertown processors (8 cores in total), and a 30 inch screen. No such beast has yet materialised, but I was starting to get desperate. Then I came up with a plan:

• Remove my Mac mini from its home in the living room (to be temporarily replaced by a laptop)
• Upgrade my Mac mini from a 1.5Ghz Core Solo, with 1Gb of RAM and a 60Gb disk, to a 1.83 Ghz Core 2 Duo, with 2Gb of RAM, and a 160Gb disk
• Use the upgraded Mac mini as my new desktop (with my Dell 2405FPW monitor), and sell my old G5 iMac
• Upgrade the Mac mini to Leopard on release
• When Apple release a new machine that I want, return the Mac mini to my living room, with the benefit of its upgraded specification

So far the plan has worked out very well, and some interesting points emerged from the experience:

• I opted to install the Intel T5600 processor. I wanted a Core 2 Duo as they are 64bit (unlike the Core Duos), and seem to perform significantly better than the old Core Duos. The T5600 supports Intel VT, unlike the slower T5500, and the only thing it misses is the slightly larger caches on the faster Core 2 Duo chips. Apparently this has a negligible effect on performance. Also, at 1.83GHz, I was comfortable that heat wouldn’t be an issue
• Mac minis are not designed to be opened. It’s the most fiddly PC building job I’ve ever done; I managed to break a thin plastic cable clip, and didn’t manage to get things working again (with the aid of insulating tape) for several hours. I’m never opening the Mac mini again
• The upgraded mini feels much quicker than my old G5 (it’s supposed to be twice as quick, but it feels like more than that). Even the GMA950 graphics card isn’t a problem for me. Expose runs beautifully, and that’s my main graphics heavy application. I no longer feel in a hurry to upgrade to a Mac Pro
• The mini is super silent as a desktop. It can be heard, but only just
• My Dell 24 inch screen is much nicer than the 20 inch screen on my old G5. Maybe I don’t need a 30 inch screen after all?
• Two days before I rebuilt the mini (but after I’d ordered the parts), Apple upgraded the Mac mini to Core 2 Duos, with the lower specced machine using the same T5600 processor as I chose for my upgrade. So my machine is almost an official specification. And the entire cost of the upgrade (including £75 on eBay for the processor), was about the same as Apple would have charged to upgrade their new base Mac mini to 2Gb of RAM and a 160Gb hard disk (I went for a Hitachi disk, in case anyone is interested)
• Being an Intel machine, I now had the option of running Windows in Boot Camp or virtualised. More on this in another post, but in brief, this is a killer feature for me
• Moving your files and preferences to a new Mac is a much nicer experience than migrating between Windows PCs. Just copy across your home directory, and that’s pretty much it

I’ve just been playing around with sar (part of the Red Hat sysstat package), and kSar, which displays the sar data in pretty graphs. Very handy for monitoring historical server performance.

Here’s a nice article describing how to use kSar.

I’ve just made the decision to increase the maximum queue lengths in the Carsurvey.org Members Area. The reviews queue can now hold 75 reviews (up from 50), and the comments queue can now hold 250 comments (up from 150).

Carsurvey.org is really busy at the moment, which is fantastic news, but it’s making enormous demands on my time. Normally the Members Area can cope with approving most of the reviews and comments, but the Members Area activity is low at the moment (probably because it’s Summer), and I’m having to personally cover the gap between what the Members can do, and the large number of comments and reviews currently being submitted.

In order to stop things blocking up, and to allow me to sleep, and fulfill a few personal obligations (basically a Perfect Storm of social events), I’ve increased the queue lengths, so the site can manage about 2 days with only minimal attention, without having to block the addition of new reviews and comments.

I still aim to get most reviews and comments approved within 24 hours, but occasionally (this coming weekend for example), it may have to slip to 48 hours, as there’s only so much I can do in snatched moments with my N800.

Apologies for this, and hopefully it will be a very infrequent occurrence.

I’ve just made a small change to motorcyclesurvey.com, to see if applying a CSS max-width to large block of text content improves the visitor experience, by keeping the line lengths from becoming too long.

Internet Explorer 5 & 6 users won’t see the change (max-width isn’t supported in those browsers), and nor will most users of small monitors, but hopefully restricting the text content to a width of 33ems (ems being used so the max-width scales with font size), with auto left and right margins, will make the reading experience more pleasant for visitors.

As usual, if this change seems to be positive, I’ll roll out the change to the car and mobile phone sites.

As an aside, for tracking the effect of small changes like these, I’m finding the Google Analytics Pages/Visit figures very useful.

On Friday night I had the chance to play with a Nokia 6120 classic for 10 minutes or so, and here are my quick impressions.

The 6120 classic is a very small HSDPA Series 60 phone. Basically a very stripped down N95, which is no bad thing. Because of this, I’m going to compare the 6120 classic to my experience of owning an N95.

N95 features missing from the 6120 classic:

• GPS - GPS is getting better on the N95 with the new Assisted GPS feature. However, it’s still more of a nice to have than an essential feature in my view
• WiFi - This is a significant loss, but is mitigated by the presence of HSDPA
• Infra-red port - Not a big issue in 2007
• TV Output - How many people actually use this in the real world?
• Micro SDHC card support - 2Gb plain MicroSD in the 6120 classic vs 4Gb SDHC (and maybe higher) in the N95 - See the comments

Important features shared by both phones:

• HSDPA - Super fast data. You’ll never want to use GPRS ever again. Note that you’re going to need an “unlimited” data package to make proper use of this feature
• Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 - lovely mobile optimised WebKit browser
• Bluetooth 2.0 - Fast data transfers, and A2DP for audio
• Audible hiss on the headphone socket - I’ve heard this on all four N95s I’ve played with, and the 6120 classic was no different. Not a phone for audiophiles
• A navigation pad - A tiny joystick, as used by many phones, is a deal breaker for me

Other differences

• Physical size - The 6120 classic is a super small phone. Photos don’t do it justice. It’s very very thin for a candy bar phone. The N95 is like a brick compared to the 6120 classic
• Button size - The numeric keypad and the nav pad on the 6120 classic are good, but the buttons surrounding the nav pad are a little too small for comfort
• Build quality - The 6120 classic is very solid, and feels much better made than the N95. Annoying, given the N95 is a lot more expensive. I worry about my N95 being damaged by keys in my pocket, whereas the 6120 classic felt like it would have no such problems
• Screen size - The 2.0 inch screen on the 6120 classic is noticeably smaller than the N95’s 2.6 inch screen. The small font size in the N95 web browser (which I use) is about the same size as the normal font size on a 6120 classic
• Camera - The 6120 classic is passable with a 2 megapixel fixed focus camera, and 320×240 video at 15fps. Not a patch on the quality of the N95 though. I took the same photo with both cameras, and the N95 shot was clearly much better
• Speakers - Both the N95 and 6120 classic have very loud speakers. The only difference is that the N95 is stereo, and the 6120 classic is mono. Given how close the N95 speakers are, this is a very minor point
• Stealth - No one would ever guess the 6120 classic is a powerful smartphone; it looks just like a standard Series 40 Nokia phone
• Price - My friend who owns the 6120 classic got it for £29.99 on a £15 a month Three contract (18 months). By way of comparison, an N95 on a £20 T-Mobile contract is £249. That fits with Nokia’s suggested sim free price for a 6120 classic of 260 Euros (£176). I’m not sure if that includes tax, but as a comparison, the N95 sim free is still going for around £450. That’s a huge difference

In summary, the 6120 classic is a seriously impressive phone. I’m not going to swap my N95 for one, but if I was looking to buy an N95 now, I’d struggle to justify it over the 6120 classic. WiFi, GPS, the bigger screen, and the better camera are definitely worth having, but I’m not sure they’re worth £250 extra.

See the All About Symbian 6120 classic Review if you want more detail and photos of the 6120 classic.

Ordered by date acquired, with :

1. PalmPilot Professional - faulty, so I only had it for a few days
2. Psion Series 5 - never found a real use for it. Plus it was expensive, and the rubber skin started peeling
3. Palm V - slim, and beautifully made
4. Casio EM-500 - starved of RAM, but such a gorgeous screen for its time
5. Palm IIIxe - Cheap, rugged, lots of RAM
6. HP Jornada 568 - liked the flip down screen protector
7. Sony Ericsson P800 - weird but promising. Felt like an alpha product
8. Handspring Treo 600 - lovely build and software integration. Pity about the voice quality
9. i-mate JAM - great form factor, but unstable, and poor telephony
10. Dell Axim X50v - great screen, super fast, dual memory cards. It’s just a little too large
11. Nokia N95 - see my review

Eleven PDAs in 10 years, and still the search continues for my perfect device