The Daily Parker

I have a new post up on the 10th Magnitude developers' blog.

Microsoft's Scott Hanselman has published one:

IAAS

Infrastructure as a Service. This means, I want the computers in my closet to go away. All that infrastructure, boxes, network switches, even software licenses are a headache. I want to put them somewhere where I can't see them (we'll call it, The Cloud) and I'll pay pennies an hours. Worst case, it costs me about the same but it's less trouble. Best case, it can scale (get bigger) if some company gets popular and it will cost less than it does now.

IAAS is Virtual Machines, Networking and Storage in the cloud. Software you wrote that runs locally now will run the same up there. If you want to scale it, you'll usually scale up.

PAAS

Platform as a Service. This means Web Servers in the cloud, SQL Servers in the cloud, and more. If you like Ruby on Rails, for example, you might write software against Engine Yard's platform and run it on Azure. Or you might write iOS apps and have them talk to back end Mobile Services. Those services are your platform and will scale as you grow. Platform as a service usually hides the underlying OS from you. Lower level infrastructure and networking, load balancing and some aspects of security is abstracted away.

If you're interested in Cloud or Azure development, or you want to understand more about what I do for a living, take a look.

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.

I've started playing around with Orchard, an open-source content-management system, as a replacement for this blog's infrastructure (and as a replacement for other things, like inner-drive.com. It hasn't been all skittles and beer: Orchard has serious issues running on Microsoft Azure Cloud Services, though it runs fine on Azure Web sites.

It turns out, my employer is moving to Umbraco, a different open-source CMS. So it makes sense to try that out, too, as I'll have to support Umbraco at work anyway—meaning I can learn it during work hours instead of after.

Working in my few free hours after work, of course, makes this decision take longer than I'd like. That, and I don't want to do this again for many years.

So no major changes to report yet, but I'm getting closer.

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.

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.

In my profession, I get to sit at Peet's Coffee at 6:30am and watch action-packed videos like this:

I know what you're thinking: "slow down, tigerblood. Slow down."

I'm also pushing a new build of customer software up to production, and waiting for my coffee to kick in.

At least I'm not blowing three runs in the 10th with a damned balk, like other people I could name.

Back in November, Chicagoans voted to buy electricity in the aggregate from Integrys rather than the quasi-public utility Exelon. As predicted, the big savings only lasted a few months:

And Chicago, where residents saw their first electric-bill savings this month under a 5.42-cent-per-kilowatt-hour deal completed in December with Integrys, will see its energy savings shaved to just 2 percent.

ComEd's new price is not yet official. But utility representatives have filed their new energy price of 4.6 cents per kilowatt-hour with the ICC and have told the commission they expect forthcoming transmission charges to be about another 0.95 cents per kilowatt-hour. That will make the ComEd "price to compare" cited by competing suppliers when marketing their offerings about 5.55 cents.

That said, between the new Integrys rate that hit me on my last electricity bill, and moving to the cloud, my March bill was only 54% of my average bill from 2009 to 2012. So ComEd is lowering rates too? Good. It'll still be higher than Integrys.

Too much going on:

• Paul Murphy at Financial Times thinks Cyprus will do the right thing
• Microsoft released figures about national security letters the FBI has sent it
• .NET 4 introduced the System.Numerics.Complex type
• Microsoft's Channel 9 posted a video about migrating applications to Azure virtual machines
• Jeff Atwood makes a case for the Ruby language
• BuzzFeed imagines Twitter's 7th anniversary promo video with the Inception theme
• No one really cares about LinkedIn endorsements
• T-Mobile has put up an animated graphic showing cyber attacks in real time

Now, I will go back to drafting documentation while I wait for AT&T to reconfigure my DSL and kill my landline. I've had a POTS ("plain old telephone service") twisted-pair line longer than most people on earth have been alive. After today, no longer. I don't think I'll miss it, either. I only have it because I have a business-class DSL, which I don't need anymore, and the only people who call it want money from me.

I've fixed seven annoying bugs and added three minor features to Weather Now, including:

• Fixed searching from the search box so you can enter an airport code directly;
• Fixed the Last 24 hours page to show day and night icons properly;
• Added a status page so users can peek under the hood; and
• Tweaked a few things in the background worker process around logging and status update alerts.

A minor bug fix release like this used to take a couple of hours to deploy, because I had to update the code running on the web server file-by-file. I got the process down to about an hour—but I still had to bring the application offline to make the update.

Since I put it up in Microsoft Windows Azure, publishing an update takes about 15 minutes, is completely automated, and doesn't require taking the site down. The great Inner Drive migration continues to pay dividends.