The Daily Parker

Yes, I know the weather's beautiful in Chicago this weekend, but sometimes you just have to run with things. So that's what I did the last day and a half.

A few things collided in my head yesterday morning, and this afternoon my computing landscape looks completely different.

First, for a couple of weeks I've led my company's efforts to consolidate and upgrade our tools. That means I've seen a few head-to-head comparisons between FogBugz, Atlassian tools, and a couple other products.

Second, in the process of moving this blog to Orchard, I've had some, ah, challenges getting Mercurial and Git to play nicely together. Orchard just switched to Git, and promptly broke Hg-Git, forcing contributors to enlist in Git directly.

Third, my remote Mercurial repositories are sitting out on an Azure VM with no automation around them. Every time I want to add a remote repository I have to remote into the VM and add it to the file system. Or just use my last remaining server, which, still, requires cloning and copying.

Fourth, even though it was doing a lot more when I created it a year ago, right now it's got just a few things running on it: The Daily Parker, Hired Wrist, my FogBugz instance, and two extinct sites that I keep up because I'm a good Internet citizen: the Inner Drive blog and a party site I did ten years ago.

Fifth, that damn VM costs me about $65 a month, because I built a small instance so I'd have adequate space and power. Well, serving 10,000 page views per day takes about as much computational power as the average phone has these days, so its CPU never ticks over 5%. Microsoft has an "extra small" size that costs 83% less than "small" and is only 50% less powerful.

Finally, on Friday my company's MSDN benefits renewed for another year, one benefit being $200 of Azure credits every month.

I put all this together and thought to myself, "Self, why am I spending $65 a month on a virtual machine that has nothing on it but a few personal websites and makes me maintain my own source repository and issue tracker?"

Then yesterday morning came along, and these things happened:

1. I signed up for Atlassian's tools, Bitbucket (which supports both Git and Mercurial) and JIRA. The first month is free; after, the combination costs $20 a month for up to 10 users.
2. I learned how to use JIRA. I don't mean I added a couple of cases and poked around with the default workflow; I mean I figured out how to set up projects, permissions, notifications, email routing, and on and on, almost to the extent I know FogBugz, which I've used for six years.
3. I wrote a utility in C# to export my FogBugz data to JIRA, and then exported all of my active projects with their archives (about 2,000 cases).
4. I moved the VM to my MSDN subscription. This means I copied the virtual hard disk (VHD) underpinning my VM to the other subscription and set up a new VM using the same disk over there. This also isn't trivial; it took over two hours.
5. I changed all the DNS entries pointing to the old VM so they'd point to the new VM.
6. Somewhere during all that time, I took Parker on a couple of long walks for about 2½ hours.

At each point in the process, I only planned to do a small proof-of-concept that somehow became a completed task. Really that wasn't my intention. In fact, yesterday I'd intended to pick up my drycleaning, but somehow I went from 10am to 5pm without knowing how much time had gone by. I haven't experienced flow in a while so I didn't recognize it at the time. Parker, good dog he is, let me go until about 5:30 before insisting he had to go outside.

I guess the last day and a half was an apotheosis of sorts. Fourteen months ago, I had a data center in my living room; today I've not only got everything in the Cloud, but I'm no longer wasting valuable hours messing around configuring things.

Oh, and I also just bought a 2 TB portable drive for $130, making my 512 GB NAS completely redundant. One fewer thing using electricity in my house...

Update: I forgot to include the code I whipped up to create .csv export files from FogBugz.

WTF?

The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations.

Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses.

Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days. The Post Co. will change to a new, still-undecided name and continue as a publicly traded company without The Post thereafter.

WaPo's story about itself is lengthy and a must-read.

Update: James Fallows wieghs in: "Newsweek's demise, a long time coming, was a minor temblor by comparison; this is a genuine earthquake."

Observer columnist John Naughton explains how the practices Edward Snowden revealed have hurt us:

[H]ere are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.

The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.

His conclusion: "The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system." And no European country wants to deal with that.

So, great. United States paranoia and brute-force problem-solving may have destroyed the Cloud.

Our company needs a specific Microsoft account, not attached to a specific employee, to be the "Account Holder" for our Azure subscriptions.

Azure only allows one and only one account holder, you see, and more than one person needs access to the billing information for these accounts. Setting up a specific account for that purpose solves that problem.

So, I went ahead and set up an email account for our putative Azure administrator, and then went to the Live ID signup process. It asked me for my "birthdate." Figuring, what the hell?, I entered the birthdate of the company.

That got me here:

Annoying, but fine, I get why they do this.

So I got all the way through the process, including giving them a credit card to prove I'm real, and then I got this:

By the way, those screen-shots are from the third attempt, including one giving them a different credit card.

I have sent a message to Microsoft customer support, but haven't gotten an acknowledgement yet. I think I'm just going to cancel the account and start over.

Update: Yes, killing the account and starting over (by denying the email verification step) worked. So why couldn't the average pre-teen figure this out too? This has to be one of the dumber things companies do.

At 10th Magnitude, we have used Beanstalk as our central code repository. We transitioned to Mercurial about a year ago, which Beanstalk supported.

Today they sent around an email saying they're ceasing Mercurial support—including existing repositories—on September 30th, and would we care to switch to Git?

No. No, no, no. No Git. I'm not asking people to learn another damn version control system. (Plus Git doesn't quite suit us.)

But fortuitously, this forced re-evaluation of Beanstalk coincides with a general self-reflective re-evaluation we have underway. That doesn't mean we're going to Git, or (angels and ministers of grace, defend us!) back to Subversion, but as long as we have to move off Beanstalk, why not take a look at our issue tracking, external bug reporting, project management, and document sharing?

I'll have more about this as we get closer to the September 30th date, along with some awesome stuff about how we have developed an Azure application that does single sign-on with...just about any identity provider.

As I promised four weeks ago, I have the final data on moving all my stuff to Windows Azure. I delayed posting this data because Azure pricing recently changed, as a number of services went from Preview to Production and stopped offering 25% discounts.

The concrete results are mixed at the moment, though increasing within the next couple of months. The intangible results are much, much improved.

First, electricity use. Looking at comparable quarters (March through May), my electricity consumption is down two thirds—even before air-conditioning season:

Consumption from March-May 2013 was 1028 kW/h, compared with 3098 kW/h over 2012. But this explains why the concrete benefits will improve: during June-August 2011, when all of the servers were running and so was the air conditioner, use was 4115 kW/h. I'm expecting to use less than 1800 kW/h this summer, just a little more than the one-month consumption in June 2011.

Costs, alas, have not fallen as much as hoped, unless you add the replacement costs of the servers. I'm currently running 3 SQL Database servers (consuming 2 GB), 3 extra-small cloud service instances, 1 small virtual machine, and 55 GB of storage. Total cost: $150.

Electricity in June 2013 was $55, compared with $165 in June 2012.

Don't forget the Office 365 subscription to replace my Exchange server at $26.

Finally, DSL and phone service went down from $115 to $60, because I dropped the phone service. Temporarily I'm supplementing the DSL with a FiOS service for $30. In a few months, when AT&T bumps the FiOS from 1.5 Mbps to 30 Mbps (they promise!), FiOS will go up to $50 and the DSL will go away.

So, cash flow for June 2012 was $279, and for June 2013 was $289. Factoring in the variability of electricity costs means Azure costs exactly the same as running my own rack.

What about the intangible costs? Well, let's see...I no longer have 8U of rack-mounted servers spinning their cooling fans 24/7 in my Chicago apartment. When I shut them off, the place got so much quieter I could hardly believe it. And I no longer worry about the power going out and losing email while I'm out of town.

In other words, I'm literally sleeping better.

Also, moving to Azure forced me to refactor my demo site Weather Now so extensively that I can now add a ton of really cool features that the old design couldn't support. (Once I have free time again. Someday.)

When you consider as well the cost of replacing the three end-of-life servers ($6000 worth of hardware), the dollars change considerably. Using 60-month depreciation, that's $100 per month savings on the Azure side of the ledger. I'm not counting that, though, because I may have limped along for a couple more years without replacing them, so it's hard to tell.

So: dollars, same; sleeping, better. A clear win for Azure.

On this day in 1977, the Apple ][ went on sale.

The base model had 4 kB of RAM, a 1 MHz 6502 processor, and could display 24 lines of 40 columns in 8-bit color. You could buy one for $1,298 ($5,029 today), or if you wanted to upgrade to 48 kB of RAM you would pay $2,638 ($10,222 today). It came with a cassette interface at first, then later with a 5¼-inch, 160 kB floppy disk drive.

I learned how to program in assembly language on one. Ah, memories.

I have 21 hours of budget to finish a substantial project at work, and then another project to finish by the end of May. Posting may be iffy the next couple of days.

Coming up, the final figures on how much moving to Azure saved me.

Snicker:

Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.

The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.

But since when have the masses listened to critics?

On March 10th, I completed moving Weather Now to Windows Azure, and shut down the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center. I had already received my lowest electric bill ever for this location, thanks to a 25% rate reduction negotiated by the City.

Earlier this week I got my March electric bill, for my electricity use between March 8th and April 7th. Take a look:

My electricity use in March 2013 was just 26% of my March 2012 use (243 kw/h in 2013 against 933 kw/h in 2012). The bill was 80% lower, too.

My telecommunications bill also went down considerably. After I have complete data of these cost differences mid-May, I'll post a full rundown of how much moving to Azure saves me every month.