Else Mobile Phone: Usability First!

I’ve spoken about usability in the past – and will continue to point out that our phones should not require “getting used to” as many people try to maintain.

I recently exchanged my LG Glimmer for a Samsung Caliber and have been startled at the positive difference in usability. The LG required a lot of memorizing where items were kept and a lot of trial and error to figure out. Taps on the touch screen were also not accurate and icons were commonly mystifying.

Using the Samsung Caliber was a different experience: I understood it after five minutes usage, and the touch pad was accurate from the start. Items worked as expected, and there weren’t any misspelled words either.

Now along comes the First Else from Else Mobile, an Israeli company. This phone has a form factor and style similar to the Caliber but was designed from scratch with a singular focus on the “user experience” – which is usability. The primary interface is basically half of a pie menu, combining this with immediate response. This means that one can select an action with a single thumb stroke.

The First Else is supposed to be out in second quarter of 2010, but we will see. According to Engadget’s article, the phone will only support EDGE and HSDPA. It is also running a Linux platform known as Access Linux Platform (or ALP).

An Experimental Underground Data Center: Iron Mountain’s Room 48

Iron Mountain has converted an old mine in Pennsylvania to a computing facility, part of which includes an experimental energy-efficient data center that uses geothermal conditions to improve cooling.

ComputerWorld wrote an article about their tour of the facility, including Room 48 where the experimental data center is housed. The power distribution transformers and the air conditioning units are outside the data center, rather than inside it. It also relies on the extreme pressure differential between the hot and cold aisle to move the air, making the data center very quiet (in contrast to the usual data center).

The data center in Room 48 operates at between 70 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit, and operates 200 watts per square foot (more than 50% above the usual 125 watts per square foot).

This data center is truly remarkable.

A Data Center in a Silo

The CLUMEQ project is designing a supercomputer, and has several sites already built. One of these, a site in Quebec, was built in an old silo that used to contain a van de Graaf generator.

An article in the McGill Reporter from several years ago described the supercomputer installation at Montreal.

The new CLUMEQ Collossus (as the Quebec installation is called) was described in an article in Data Center Knowledge. The design has all of the computers (Sun blades) are in a circle with the core being a “hot core” and the cool air being drawn from the rim.

Employees Rank Employers

Over at Glassdoor.com, employees ranked their employers about a week ago. CNet had a nice article on it.

Glassdoor.com permits employees (and ex-employees, and ex-interviewees) to post their experiences with the company anonymously, and to rate the employer and the CEO of the company. This provides a much better window into what employers are like and help you during a job search to find out whether you want to be working for this employer or not. Working for the wrong employer can be detrimental to your career or even your mental health.

There is nothing quite like Glassdoor.com; I recommend you sign up and rate your employer today.

Upgrading PostgreSQL

This is an old procedure, which is commonly understood by PostgreSQL administrators. However, if you’ve not done it before, over at the FreeBSD Diary there is a nice article describing how to upgrade the client and the server when moving from one version to the next (such as from 8.3.x to 8.4.x).

The basic thing to remember is that a complete dump of the databases is necessary, with the appropriate reload process. The article describes this process well.

Anybody who is interested in FreeBSD should follow the FreeBSD Diary; this “blog” has been around longer than blogs have been.

Firefox 3.5 Market Share and Statistics

Recently, a lot of folks have reported that Firefox 3.5 is the most widely used browser. This is true; however, the statistics do not show that Firefox is most widely used (which most responsible blogs have also reported).

Geeksmack had an excellent article on this topic. Looking at the graph shown there, there are many things that can be seen if you examine the graph critically:

• The loss of market share by IE 7 seems to correspond to the growth of IE 8.
• Firefox 3.0, at its height, had a larger percentage of users than Firefox 3.5 does right now.
• Firefox 3.5 seems to be affecting Firefox 3.0 the most: after Firefox 3.5 was introduced, Firefox 3.0 dropped in user count precipitously.
• In the middle of 2009, Firefox 3.0 lost users to IE 7 for a period of time.

The last thing is that these are all conjectures based on statistical evidence; true correlation may not exist. Truly, statistics must be analyzed with care.

There is a good article over at Blog of Metrics at mozilla.org describing all the places where one can find the current statistics on Firefox market share.

Workplace Privacy in the News

Workplace privacy is in the news again. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case of City of Ontario v. Quon in which personal text messages were sent on an employer-provided pager. Are these text messages private? Does the user have an expectation of privacy?

The blogs SCOTUSblog and the Volokh Conspiracy both reported on this, as did the mainstream press, including National Public Radio, the Christian Science Monitor, Reuters, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, and many more. The New York Times hosted a written debate about the issue.

Workplace privacy doesn’t involve constitutional rights, as there is no right to privacy in general and the constitution has been held to be specific to the government, not private employers. However, the issue is such that many organizations have focused on this topic: for example, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Publishing Law Center, and the ACLU. The ACLU states that “…the ACLU receives more complaints about workplace rights violations than about any other issue.”

As administrators, these issues affect us directly: it is often administrators who implement and oversee much of the technological surveillance, including digital cameras, email surveillance, web filtering, and more. It also becomes important in terms of protecting privacy as well, preventing data from leaking out from corporate servers. There is also e-discovery in which documents must be turned over during the case of a trial.

Before implementing a new method of monitoring, one should be aware of the laws involved and also implement a written policy that all employees will be made aware of. If this is not done, an admin can find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

This lawsuit has the potential to rewrite the laws on workplace privacy; the SCOTUS Wiki has a nice write-up on all of the details.

Direct NFS in Solaris with Oracle 11g: Benchmarks

Over at Glenn Fawcett’s Oracle Blog, there is a write-up about the speed of Oracle’s Direct NFS (now a few years old) as compared to the traditional NFS client. Glenn wrote about how to set this up initially, then followed up with a report on how to monitor the environment, as well as the results of testing the environment.

Glenn worked with Kevin Closson, who is one of the minds behind Oracle’s DirectNFS. Kevin wrote about the colloboration and about some of the misunderstandings surrounding dNFS with Solaris and Sun storage.

Oracle has a nice whitepaper on this topic, going into detail as well.

There is also an old posting by the Oracle Storage Guy describing DirectNFS in detail, particularly in regards to using dNFS with EMC storage.

Winter Storm Blew Through

2009 Winter Storm, Wisconsin, USA

2009 Winter Storm, Wisconsin, USA

2009 Winter Storm, Wisconsin, USA

Winter Storm!

The first winter storm of the year is coming to town: time to hunker down.

In the Snowbelt, one better be sure that your power is good and your generators are working well: power outages happen often during winter storms. If you’ve not tested it? You will soon.

Drive carefully – be safe. Maybe I’ll post some pictures – why not?