joker.iki.fi

Received this mail today:

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 28-01-2010 16:30 GMT+1

Subject: Nav4All navigation shut down by Navteq

Letter to 27,625,631 Nav4All navigation customers

Dear Customers,

It is with the deepest regret that we hereby notify you that the
global navigation of Nav4All and the Tracking & Tracing will go
offline in 3 days. The reason for the same is that the data licence
agreement with Navteq (a 100% Nokia subsidiary) was not extended, in
a totally unexpected manner. It is not possible to implement data
from another supplier in our Nav4All systems within the short term.
The Nav4All navigation system was developed for Navteq data. Nav4All
has therefore been constrained to stop.

We greatly regret the fact that we have to suspend the operation of
our service. With your help, we have developed Nav4All into a global
product with 27.5 million users in 56 languages, in 5 years. This has
made Nav4All the largest navigation supplier. This large number of
users also has to do with the fact that Nav4All works on hundreds of
different mobile telephones of many makes such as Blackberry, Sony
Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Android, HTC, Nokia, LG, Iphone, Ipod
etc.

After 5 years of testing and market development, we witnessed rapid -
in fact, exponential - growth during the last two years. That growth
was reported in the licence reports to Navteq. In mid-December 2009,
the global coverage was extended to include the Philippines, Morocco
and Kenya.

Please contact the Nav4All support desk in case you have any
questions: www.nav4all.com/support. If there is any further
information from Nav4All concerning the subject of this letter, the
same will be published on our website: www.nav4all.com. For reasons
of privacy, Nav4All does not have the email addresses of all its
customers, and we therefore request you to forward this email to the
maximum extent possible, in order to ensure that everyone is
informed.

Kind Regards,

Hennie J.M. Groot Koerkamp (CEO)

Nav4All BV

Keizersgracht 62-64

1015 CS Amsterdam NL

The text of this e-mail will be available on our website as soon as
possible in the following languages: Dutch, French, German, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Indonesian.

Nav4all wasn’t perfect navigation solution but I used it sometimes and it mostly worked. Sucks that it ended this way. Now that Ovi Maps are free, I guess the free navigation space was getting crowded.

Joker.iki.fi and most of my home office network, which all depend on the highly fault tolerant (read: old box with redundant disks, RAID5 copied to USB disks) file server, suddenly started to show mysterious symptoms of unavailability today. The box runs Debian stable and has been running without problems for I-can’t-remember-for-how-long. When logged in as root, the problem was obvious, every command that wasn’t a bash builtin, crapped out with an I/O error.

Crashed root filesystem disk, you say? NO. I thought so first, but I have a habit of fscking disks which fail, because - well, I don’t know, I just do it. I rebooted the server into a single user mode and everything got back up again. I mean everything. Low level fsck of the disk reported zero problems and everything is back to normal.

I have never seen anything like this, typically I/O error is a clear sign that something is very much wrong with the disk or the controller but no matter what I do (did some hard core read/write tests), the disk just keeps on going… Since I have everything on backup and this is not a production system by any means (just my personal server), I’m going to keep the disk running, let’s see what happens. If it would have been a prod server at work, I would be reinstalling it right about now.

My guess is that it’s the SCSI elves. Nasty little buggers.

I wonder how many hours per public presentation the people who speak for a living spend preparing? I’m speaking soon in here and couple of smaller seminars and I think I’m spending a godless amount of hours to prepare for the presentation. Mentally it’s ok, I consider myself quite a good speaker and I’m not afraid of big audiences, but the time spend on powerpoints and graphics is just mindboggling.

I guess most of the time people just reuse everything they present. I’m a bit of a perfectionist in here since I always try to gather all the input from previous presentations on the same topic and try to optimize, always giving the latest insight.

Now, back to powerpoint.

If I need to describe myself with one word, one which would characterize my whole being, that word would be “worried”. I constantly keep worrying about everything. It’s not that I’m every day depressed about state of the world or biting fingernails over safety of my family or possessions. It’s more like this constant little feeling that “eventually, everything may get all fucked up”. It’s tedious.

It’s been like this all my life. There’s a positive side to this and it is the fact that being constantly worried of something tends to drive one towards “going the extra mile” to make sure things will work and everything goes well. There has always been a little devil on my shoulder which tells me “look, you need to ace this exam / project / relationship / task, because otherwise you will suffer in the end”. That sounds positive, but there is a dangerous tint of perfectionism there on the side, which can create a lot of stress if there’s suddenly many things that need to be done well in parallel.

In Gibson’s Neuromancer, they had the technology to electrochemically modify the operation of neurons in the human brain to turn on and off addictions and to control the perception of everyday emotions. I hope technology like this would be developed during my lifetime. I would like to know what it would be like, maybe just for one hour, not to worry about stuff.

Remember to sit down and have a discussion with myself. Do I really want to have this blog online or do I not?

I have lots to say but I am suffering writer’s block. And there’s no time. Joker.iki.fi is a very useful server for me for various reasons, but I am not sure whether the port 80 should be used like this. Blogs which receive no updates are sad and boring waste of internet pipe.

We use both Windows and Linux at work and don’t have any official corporate policies on how to set up the work laptops. Of course you need to make sure that backups are done regularly and all customer information should not be carried around or should be encrypted with secure methods, but other than that, it’s pretty free. Most technical people use Windows and Linux and also other Unix systems. For me, the most important ones are Linux and Windows, with the option to switch between each with a single reboot.

In general, the options are:

• Partition the laptop HD and install a typical dualboot setup
• Use Live / persistent Linux together with windows (Live from CD or Persistent from USB)
• Use Linux and run Virtual Windows guest OS
• Use Windows and run Linux as virtual guest OS
• … and many others

Although virtual machines are nowadays very flexible and easy to setup and configure (I’ve mainly used VMWare and XEN, and looked at KVM), I only prefer to use them in scenarios where I need to test multiple servers on same laptop when doing some work with distributed systems which need to be relatively well isolated of each other, but can’t dedicate hardware to each separate box.

When I don’t need multiple OSes running parallelly, but rather want to just run Linux on top of hardware, I don’t really like the classic dual boot setup with both windows and Linux using the same physical disk. I don’t go into details why I don’t like this setup, but the most important is that it’s really annoying to guess how much space you’re going to need in the long run, and having more than two OS’s (like three or four), is going to make even the largest laptop hard drive look crowded.

So much for the background. I decided to try setup a dual boot system in such a way, that Windows would live on the laptops internal SATA drive and Linux would occupy the Transcend 1.8″ Portable Solid State Drive, which connects to the laptop using the eSATA port. This installation is not going to bother the windows side of things and is going to run directly on top of the hardware. The laptor is Dell Latitude E6400, which is really good laptop with technical specs I am happy with.

Very Good Thing (TM) is that the BIOS on the laptop allows me to boot from various devices so I didn’t even need to mess with the master boot record on the first disk which hosts windows. Because of this, the installations was really painless, as easy as if you would install Linux on the secondary hard drive of your PC. Just say during the installation which disk you want to use (/dev/sdb in my case).

Now to the really important thing: how does it perform?

The specs on the Transcend eSATA SSD promise me this: Max Transfer speeds (eSATA) Read: 90MB/s Write 50MB/s. Below are some comparison values:

#> hdparm -t /dev/sdb reports me that the read speed is 88,5MB/s. This is really impressive as hdparm reports 72,6 MB/s for the internal SATA drive. So the eSATA interface is at least as fast as the internal SATA hard disk, when it comes to reading. This is still quite far away from read speed of my software RAID5 array which I use at home for storage (about 180 MB/s). But it’s still a lot better than using persistent linux from USB stick or something like this.

I need to perform some write speed tests when I have more time. But at least for now, it seems like the dual boot setup with external SSD drive, as long as it connects with eSATA, is very good choise. Of course there’s the price - the SSD drive, of size 64GB that I used, costs about 150 euros. After installing linux (KUbuntu 9.04 Desktop) I still have 52 GB free (swap uses 4 GB and user files 3 GB and then there’s some FS structures). This makes the price per free GB close to three euros, which is of course much more expensive than for example using a 0,5 TB internal SATA disk.

However, keeping in mind that:

• There’s no more room for internal disks in the laptop
• (I have understood that) external drives consume almost the same amount of power
• I don’t need to spend time tweaking all sorts of installation options that typically come with persistent USB installations
• It’s faster than anything else (as far as read speed is considered)
• It’s not really that expensive for business use

This type of dual boot installation makes a lot of sense to me. And then if I need to install for example, RHEL or SLES, I just get another drive and install on top of that - I can be certain that the installation will not break any existing installation, this really makes a lot of sense. (And if I find out that it does not make sense in the long run, rest assured that I’ll be ranting about it in the future).

I’ll update some images of the installation here when I find the time.

It’s again been a while since my last update and the reason, once again, NO TIME. At work I’m no longer at probational period, and work has started to pour in. Currently the workload is rather good, not overwhelmingly much but enough to keep me busy. Surprisingly lots of travel. I have travelled more during this four months than in last year. It’s still ok and I am still confident that this was a right choice for me. Workwise, I get to do more concrete things now than before - less powerpoint and more technology.

Homewise it’s been ok. It’s not too dissimilar from the situation at work. The family keeps me again very busy but there’s a direction for the better now. Even my wife is not anymore constantly sleep deprived and she really has enjoyed her part as stay-home mummy.

Finnish summer is again what you would expect and I have managed to find some free time again, so I guess I should not complain. Let’s see where I am in a month or so…

It’s been an interesting 2009 so far. With my daughter learning to walk and the new job and lots of travelling, every day has been very busy. I would like to take it easy for a change. I fear that there’s no more time available to take it easy - but I will certainly try to organize my time better and concentrate to the things that deserve the most time.

One such thing is friends. It’s been so awfully difficult to find time to meet even the closest ones. It’s not entirely my fault since they are quite busy too, but having a small child and hectic work is not helping at all. It’s easier to meet those friends with children since they typically have similar schedules, but again, having the kids around makes it more difficult to really be together. There’s always interruptions and things to organize and take care of. I have started to feel quite lonely lately, so I will definitely need to do something about this soon. And the fact is still that it’s so damn difficult to make friends that keeping the existing ones should be a priority.

Another such things is peace of mind. I find myself constantly worrying about things that I really don’t have that much control over. I won’t give you examples since those are too personal to be shared in the internet. But nowadays I spend a good part of the day working and taking care of things that I must to do. Things such as shopping for food and clothes, cleaning the house, helping others with their things, maintaining myself in a good shape and generally just trying to manage. During the free time I have, I spend way too much time worrying over things. This needs to stop since it really really makes my life shitty to say at least. I just need to find a way to actively concentrate on things that I can solve and simply drop the rest.

And finally the third topic is work. I will not take it so seriously anymore. This meaning that I will keep demaning that work is done in a sane way and properly and not with the constant fear of failure. The explanation that I hear everywhere: “We’re constantly suboptimizing, doing things in a crazy way and generally acting like  a scared bunch of rabbits because OMG there’s a recession” has at times caught me too. This will change. The recession, when I look at it, seems just like a scam to keep people scared and push them to do even more unpaid overtime and give up benefits and job satisfaction. I have never been paid more or gotten more attractive headhunting attempts than during this so called recession. I don’t know anyone whose job would be in danger because of the so called recession (that being the real reason) or would be unemployed because of the recession. The prices are just the same as before, the people keep buying and selling just as before and everything else, when looking through my eyes, seems JUST AS BEFORE. So, from now on, I make a holy promise to do the work the best I can and actively keep improving the way the work is done because just grinding teeth and pushing overtime is not working out too nicely. For anyone.

Spring is a time of renewal. I’m not entirely sure what this means for a thirty-years-old working nerd father, but I’m extremely certain that I’m off balance. The kind of balance I’m talking about is that of body and mind. Currently they are closing to a divorce, yet both longing for each other but not finding the time to meet and talk things through.

I raise a toast to body and mind and hope you both successful spring!

I got a new phone and had to take a new SIM card for that, and I didn’t want to migrate my old number to the new card, as the new number is mostly for work. Now I have two phones but I want to carry just one, and have the calls and SMS:es forwarded to the new phone.

Easy? Not really. Diverting calls is easy, but for some reason, there just aren’t any SMS forwarding applications that would satisfy my requirements:

• Free, as in speech and as in beer
• Would only do one thing, that is, forward SMS:s to another cell phone number, as soon as they arrive
• Would be easily customizable
• Would work on S60 3rd edition without the certification pain

Well, now there is a solution that satisfies all these requirements. All this with < 30 lines of Python code.

Check out sms_forwarder.py.

It’s been a hectic beginning of 2009. Today we are celebrating my daughter’s first birthday. Also, I have signed a contract with new employer which looks like it’s going to be an excellent opportunity.

Although everything is well, everyone is healthy and the recession doesn’t seem to hit me at least yet, I have to say I’m bit sad. Sad and in need of vacation.

I’m sad because I’m leaving a really good company and people behind. I’m sad because I haven’t had that much contact with my good friends because of the hectic schedule. I’m also a bit sad that I don’t really have that much time to spend with my family.

All of my time goes into stuff that doesn’t really make me happy. Cleaning the house, repairing the house, constant ‘gotta do’ shopping for shit that I’m not sure we actually need.

I hope that with the new job, upcoming summer and my wife’s school ending I finally get into a situation where I can enjoy the fruits of all this labor. Life just can’t be this fucking hard constantly.

On a positive note, I have finally found a good RPG, in Ultima-style, for my Playstation 3. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion shows real promise. I’ve been somewhat disappointed to the RPG offerings for the PS3, but this is really nice.

I have also kept a small break from bicycling. I’m really waiting for better weathers and some additional motivation to start this year’s training.

That’s pretty much it. I love you all.