Ken's World

Why is Gmail so Sloooooooow?

kdraks — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:22:19 +0000

Gmail has become unresponsive for my needs. It takes 10 seconds or more to load and when it does it is very sluggish. Before, when I clicked on an email it came up in less than 1 second – very snappy. Now, it sees that with the addition of Google Buzz, gmail has become very, very slow. When I click on an email it takes maybe 5 to 10 seconds to load – an infinite amount of time. I was about to give up on Gmail when I turned off Buzz and Gmail reverted to its former, snappy self.

How to turn off Buzz:
Scroll to the bottom of the email page
Click on the small text link “turn off buzz”
This will take you to a new page where you need to click on the Red Text on an Orange background (who picks these colors?) and verify.

Then back to gmail and it works great.

Landscape Webinar – Managing Clouds – Thursday March 18

kdraks — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:02:33 +0000

Join us on Thursday March 18th for a webinar focussing on how to manage your cloud with Landscape. This will be a detailed step by step demo of how to setup, manage and monitor Ubuntu on a private and public Amazon Cloud. Ken Drachnik, the Landscape product manager will provide a brief overview then Andreas Hasenack will perform a technical demo showing how to configure, setup and manage an Ubuntu cloud. The webinar is being offered twice on Thursday, at 1400 UTC and 1900 UTC, (10 am ET and 3 pm ET) so that people across the many time zones we serve can attend. To participate, please register

Comcast vs. Att Uverse

kdraks — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:50:37 +0000

I’ve been a loyal Comcast subscriber for years. In fact I was fortunate enough to be a beta tester of the @home service when broadband was first announced years ago. Since then its moved from @home to Comcast and I’ve kept Comcast and even invested in the “triple play” of voice, Internet and TV. However, over time, Comcast seems to have gotten bored with the relationship and quit paying attention to me and became indifferent to my needs. First it was voice – the voip phone would quit working randomly for an hour at a time during the middle of the day and always while I was talking with an analyst. So after a number of rounds with support and the ultimate response from sales of “our phone service is only for recreational use” I switched back to ATT POTS and had, once again reliable phone service. Then recently, Comcast Internet service would stop for an hour at a time, randomly and after having outages every 10 days I decided it was time to find a new provider.

About that time Consumer Reports did an article on Internet / TV services and listed ATT Uverse, Verizon FIOS as number 2 and 1 respectively and placed Comcast at # 24 in nearly every category. That, along with all the marketing ATT is doing in my area caused me to make the break and move to Uverse. They installed it yesterday and today its working just fine. My impressions are as follows:

Internet

Comcast is still connected and while it is working it provides great bursts of speed: 14 Mb up and 4 Mb down. But I can’t tell if this lasts or is just fast for the 30 s test then drops off later. AT&T Max gives me 12 Mb down and 1.4 Mb up which is about a 15% decrease but at least they are supposed to be more reliable and since I am not sharing bandwidth w/ my neighbors I, hopefully, won’t have an evening slow down.

Voice

Well it works, its clear and I have caller ID on my TV so when someone calls I don’t have to fumble to find a phone, if the TV is on, we can see which political organization it is that wants money this time.

Well this is the surprising part. The all digital TV service is really a step up from Comcast. Channel changing is very fast and crisp, picture quality is great and the DVR gives a near Tivo experience with some extra features like multi view. One key thing is that we can watch any recorded show on any TV in the house, which means I”ll never see my kids again as they can now hide out in other rooms to watch.

All in all, after 24 hours, I’ve been very satisfied with AT&T. I’ll do a followup in a few months after some time has passed.

Matt Asay Joins Canonical

kdraks — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:40:53 +0000

Today we announced that Matt Asay will join Canonical as COO. Matt’s been at Alfresco for 4 years and decided it was time for a change and possibly bigger challenges so he has started at COO. Here is why he’s moving from his blog. Welcome Matt.

HelpPortrait

kdraks — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:32:01 +0000

Help Portrait is a group of photographers that are taking portraits of needy people, just in time for Christmas holiday - its a way of helping those in your local community. Corey invited me to help him take portraits of individuals and families at a local homeless shelter (for families) last Th evening. We setup our rag-tag mobile studio in a multipurpose room and while he focused on families, I focused on individuals. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, his wife helped the kids decorate Christmas cookies. I took about 140 shots of some to 20 folks and Corey is now processing the images, adding backgrounds, making prints and putting them in frames (all of which he managed to get donated). The event was really fun and heartwarming – the kids were all so happy that it was 1) near Christmas and 2) they were getting their pictures taken. This went so well, we are going to take portraits at another Family facility here in Fremont on Th evening. I must admit this really opened my eyes to homeless difficulties here locally – there are just a lot of families that just can’t afford a place to live here whether its due to losing a job, illness or other reasons.

Landscape Dedicated Server Podcast

kdraks — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:31:35 +0000

I recorded a podcast on Landscape Dedicated server that’s now up on WorkswU. In this 5 min podcast I talk about what the strategy for the Dedicated server and who should use it.

Setup Landscape to Manage Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)

kdraks — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:03:50 +0000

Here’s a nice post about how to setup Landscape to manage your UEC. As we continue to develop Landscape we’ll be adding more capabilities to make setting up and managing a cloud easy – simplifing the process by allowing you to do most tasks from within Landscape.

iPhone 3.1.2 Software… Works

kdraks — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:36:31 +0000

After avoiding the iPhone 3.1 sw upgrades based on all the poor reviews I read, I finally took the plunge and upgraded to the 3.1.1 fix better known as 3.1.2. First I asked an iPhone expert at my local ATT store who told me she had upgraded and everything worked well. So, I went home, syncd my phone and checked the box to upgrade. It took some time to download the 200 MB+ file but the upgrade went perfectly. Then it upgraded some ATT software (from what I’ve read, this helps extend battery life by limiting the amount of time the phone hunts for 3G coverage). The ATT patch is very small and took just a few seconds. After restarting the phone everything worked well – all my photos, contacts, emails were still there AND I had MMS capability. After using this for a week I find the phone and all apps work great. I have not noticed any increase in battery life, but I haven’t seen it decrease either. All in all this seems to be a good upgrade that adds some useful capability to the phone. Next – its time to sell my iPod Touch on ebay!

Landscape 1.4 – with UEC Support

kdraks — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:04:03 +0000

We have released Landscape 1.4 — the next major feature update of Canonical’s management
and monitoring software that lets you manage multiple Ubuntu systems as easily as one.
Cloud management dominates the theme for this release with new features that allow you
to manage your private Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud or UEC as easily as you manage your
instances on Amazon EC2. Also released are new features that help system administrators be
more efficient including time based package updates and role based access. These new features
will be available this week on both the Hosted and Dedicated Server Editions of Landscape.

Cloud Computing: UEC Support

Building upon our support for Amazon’s EC2 Cloud, users can now
start, stop and manage their private Ubuntu instances on their UEC
from within Landscape. Users just enter their credentials directly
through Landscape to start, stop and manage an instance. We’ve
designed Landscape to work directly with both Amazon and
Eucalyptus console pages so you can manage your instances without
having to use any other tools. Landscape securely stores your security
credentials making is easy to spin up new instances on UEC or AWS
at anytime. Once the instances are initiated, they all display on the same
page allowing you manage all your physical, virtualised and Cloud
instances on one page.

New Timed Package Updates

Users can now schedule package updates, system reboots and
shutdowns in the future with minute increments. This gives System
Administrators the flexibility to schedule activities for systems to
occur during planned maintenance windows or low use periods to
minimize the impact on the network. Now that we have developed the
time / scheduling function, look for us to add this to other areas of
Landscape where it it makes sense, like scheduling scripts.

Administrator Roles

As Landscape is deployed in larger enterprises the need to delegate
and limit access to systems has become a key need. Now, in addition
to having a master admin who can manage all systems within a
Landscape account, you can delegate access to systems to other
administrators. This builds on our tags function (which allows you to
tag computers performing the same function and update them with a
single command) to allocate full access to systems by admin. Typically
this means sys admins in different areas can be given full access to their
local systems, but not to those in another area or country. Like tags,
assigning systems to other administrators is completely flexible so you
can use what every criteria you need.

The Landscape 1.4 client is available today and is included with
Ubuntu 9.10 server edition. Details are at canonical.com/landscape

Oracle Vows to Save MySQL

kdraks — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:05:24 +0000

In yesterday’s BBC article, Oracle was quoted as saying that they would NOT sell MySQL to close the Sun deal. Why is this so important? After all MySQL is open source and anyone can fork the code and provide support for it. In the abstract this is true, but in reality an open source project needs a commercial sponsor to both drive and support the project to be successful. This enterprise imprint means that the code will be supported for some time because a company has decided to invest in the sw and that means they plan to get something out of their investment. Ubuntu has Canonial, JBoss has Red Hat, Open Solaris and MySQL have Sun etc – each of these successful open source projects has a name brand sponsor which provides support and services. The 2nd important concept is who owns the copyright to the sw. The copyright holder may, at any time, relicense the sw under any license. This is not important for the existing code, but it means the copyright holder has immense control over future features and how they are licensed. Here is where the battle over MySQL really lies. Most do not believe that Oracle will support the innovation that has made MySQL such a success. Oracle as the copyright holder can limit resources / development and they can relicense it and future code under something more restrictive which would effectively kill MySQL – who would want to contribute code to a project that would limit its utility and distribution? Thus the EU is correct in questioning this deal.