I asked for my coffee to be served in a cup and it came in a paper cup. So I insisted, which defeats the entire environmental purpose of ordering a cup. The server was a mechanically beautiful young woman, thin as an idealized comic figure and just as inaccessible, to me anyway.

Some customers at the counter just complained about being treated like crap and walked out. I don’t know if they were talking about the service or about the non-responsive studio audience behind the laptop.

This is the 2nd day of the new year. I am trying to get some work into the Telfair project about visualizing the dynamics of Congressional legislation. It will be presented at this year’s PULSE

Cups also help save the environment. They don’t take up landfill space and when they are thrown away they degrade to sand.

If we don’t do something now in Savannah, we are going to be just like Atlanta, that is, if we want to sustain any kind of growth. Savannians are understandably hesitant to fully embrace sprawl-style mass destruction of its aesthetic.  We love our city. We want to grow but we sure as hell don’t want to grow up to be just another nowhere sprawl town (not that we think less of people in those towns. You play the cards you get and if you’re in a sprawl town, I’d suggest you play your cards to find ways to make it better).

We are one of the greenest cities in the U.S. Civic architects come to downtown and to drive under our tree canopies to learn from our example and to contemplate potential for a better way to grow cities. Of course we are far from perfect but the great thing about Savannah is that we are like a history book of civic development — good and bad and everything in between going back almost 300 years.

At this time, we can’t justify something like an elevated monorail system or a mag-lev train (although what do you think a 200 MPH train from here to Atlanta to Jacksonville, Charleston and Charlotte would do for our growth?) and we sure can’t justify a subway system.

BUT WE CAN JUSTIFY PERSONAL RAPID TRANSPORT!!

The cost per mile of track is only about $6 million to $16 million + about $100K to $300k per station. Compare this to the PRESENT cost of building a highway — $19 million to $1 BILLION per mile!

Rather than spend the next 2 pages writing about it, here is a brief video about a PRT for London Heathrow.

A long-running proof of concept came from the West Virginia University, where PRT has been going since the 70’s. Sooo.. keep in mind that the ones in this video are old.

The cost for building a PRT line that runs the length of Abercorn is LESS than expanding it or building some kind of perimeter. Please let us know what you think by posting comments on this article. We will add more links and info to this page later.

Before we continue I need to say that this is being written on a laptop, which draws a meager 10 to 15 watts of power. That translates to about 0.012 kilowatts and I would be drawing 0.012 kilowatthours in 1 hour. If the price of 1 kilowatt hour is $0.09, then the cost of running the laptop for an hour is $0.09 * 0.012 = 0.108, or about .11 cents.

If I ran the laptop for about a 10 hour work day then it would pull roughly $0.01 per day. (it’s hard to make a precise calculation because the device’s power demands change based on what you happen to be doing).

What about your honking desktop machine? It pulls a whopping 300 watts of power to do the same thing that your laptop does AND we are more likely to leave it running. How much does it cost per day to run a desktop CPU? $0.09 * 0.3 = $0.0270 per hour, or 3 cents per hour. But typically your newer machines (unless you are running a bot net virus) won’t pull all 300 watts so let’s say about 2 cents per hour.

Over a ten hour day that adds up to 20 cents. If you leave it running 24/7, that is $0.48 per day, which adds up to $14.40 a month.

Which brings us to server power. A server typically pulls more than a desktop because a serious server will have redundant power supplies and more aggressive cooling requirements. But let’s say due to software power management that each server pulls about $15 a month. A room of 10 servers then would pull $150/month, or $1,800 per year. A room of 100 servers, $18,000 per year.

As a foot note, Google runs about 450,000 servers in its facility, which comes out to about $81,000,000 per year. This figure does not take into account the enormous air handling systems and other infrastructure power needs of their data center. In perspective, that’s not a huge price to pay for managing so much knowledge.

Where virtualization fits in

Think of the bees as virtual machines and this box as a blade server. Each blade is a physical server. Each bee is a virtual server.

Chances are, you use your desktop or laptop often just to read email or look at a few web pages. But these machines, about which we frequently complain of their chronic slowness, become slow typically because they are waiting for outside things (like stuff on the net to come down). You are likely using less than 10% of your processor 90% of the time. Right now I have 2 text editors and 4 web browsers running and my CPU utilization barely spikes above 4%.

The wasted CPU cycles and power is scant with a laptop. But where this makes a difference is in a datacenter where there can be thousands of computers along a single wall.

Imagine a 20-story office building with only 20 people working, one on each floor. You still have to run the air handlers and send electricity through each floor of the building to keep those tenants happy. At this point, the building is under-utilized, or below its capacity. Yet the infrastructure still has to run as if the building were full.

What if (and this may never happen with real people) the workers in the building were told  to make the most efficient use of the office spaces? They would all be required to work on one floor when there are only 20 of them there.

However, during the day time when there are 1,000 people working in the building, they will all scatter throughout the floors and pumping power and air through the entire building makes sense. The building is fully utilized, or at its capacity.

As people leave later in the day, people who stay move closer to others who are staying.

The vacant offices and floors can have their power and air handling shut down or at least minimized.

This is how virtualization works to save power. It makes better use of unused space. Simply put: 1 server running at 75% capacity accomplishes the same tasks as 3 servers running t 25% capacity. Yet, all 4 servers (whether running at 25% or 75%) will pull about the same amount of power and require as much cooling to handle generated heat.

Virtualization allows the 3 physical servers working at 25% to move into ONE physical server working at 75%. Yet to the outside world, there is no difference — all 3 servers are still accessible in the same way as they were when they lived in their own physical machines.

That is a 3 to 1 reduction, or consolidation. The power savings are considerable, especially if this scheme is multiplied out over, say 10,000 servers.

Consolidating servers at night and shutting down unused physical machines can save millions in power bills.  That is the immediate effect.

But what if the demands don’t really increase a lot and the server room simply has more physical servers than it needs? Before virtualization for server class PC’s became mainstream, analysts had no choice but to account for future growth by adding more machines in anticipation of the growth. If they are wrong about their expectations, the company just bought a bunch of machines that will not be used, will waste power and will be likely obsolete in a matter of months.

With virtualization, if you had 20 machines in the room and you need to configure 100 separate servers, it can be done without purchasing more physical machines. Often the demand on servers that are built to pre-empt growth will not be used at full capacity from the beginning. Put your beefy existing servers to work at full capacity instead of buying new machines that are just going to run idle and then be obsolete by the time the anticipated growth shows up.

The indirect power savings are enormous. Fewer circuit boards need to be fabricated, fewer cases need to be cast, fewer cables and wires, fewer truck and cargo ship trips to handle  fewer physical servers.

This barely scratches the surface on what virtualization can do for you. See VMWare’s TCO/ROI calculator at Alinean to play with some numbers and contact us if you want to know more.

The BEST List

Best place to meet for lunch November 2009:

SOHO South Cafe

Best place to work November 2009:

Starbucks on Montgomery

REVIEWS
Metro Coffee House and bubble tea
MLK BLVD — CLOSED summer 2009

Soho South Cafe
12 West Liberty St.

Nice, open space with full menu, art on display and other stuff. Space is a renovated garage. Excellent place for lunch meetings.

Cafe Mucha
202 Broughton St.

Good pastries and decent coffee. Relaxed atmosphere downtown. Good place for downtown meetings.

Sentient Bean
13 E. Park Ave.

The Bean is one of the jewels of downtown, with great pastries and vegetarian fare in a warm, eclectic atmosphere. This is a good place to plan a revolution or to tweak your divs. Often, the Bean will have film showings and performances at its stage so keep an eye on the calendar to attend or avoid — you will be charged or evicted from the main space if the event has a fee. The Bean was founded by ladies who valued the public space as a brewing pot for community and green living. Their coffee is fair trade and organic. The Bean sits at the edge of Forsyth Park, which is good to have if you need to pace or if you brought your dog along. The Bean closes at 10 PM and opens at 7:30 am (yeah right, like you’ll ever get up that early).

Tradewinds on Wilmington
107 Charlotte Dr, #F

Tradewinds is the heavyweight on iced drinks with a fully armed and operational ice cream bar. Just think about it: sugar,coffee, coffee, sugar, ya ya yah! You’ll be like that perverse cartoon weasel in no time, zipping around like your wireless card hunting a wi-fi connection. There’s one! And you get the password for it if you buy more sweet and caffeinated stuff. Nice place to hide and rule the world from the coveted tiki corner if you’re lucky.

Clary’s on Habersham and Clary’s on Abercorn

4330 Habersham St.

and

404 Abercorn St (next to big tower)

Clary’s has a full breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner menu and is the only place in town where you can order a cherry phosphate from a traditional soda fountain. The service is friendly and they are trying to encourage more telecommuters to hang around with wi-fi. It’s kindof intimidating and hard to work during their busy lunch hour and breakfast. But after lunch you have the place to yourself until around 5 or so.

Firefly
321 Habersham St.

Ahh the firefly. The name conjures an innocent childhood chasing bioluminescent insects and confining them in a jar. The atmosphere here is enchanting. It sits before Troop Square in the lovely downtown of our fair city. The main dining area is slightly below ground and there are also tables outside. This is our best place to meet for lunch. The menu and the atmosphere are great. You see people with their laptops during the lunch hour but you don’t see a lot of them sticking around. There is no wi-fi and the place gets busy on and off with tourists.

Christy’s Espresso on Eisenhower
400 Abercorn EXT # 904

No wi-fi but a good place to work if you’ve got Verizon Broadband. It’s right next to the Verizon store. Delicious treats and decent coffee. Mostly caters to office people around the area.

Savannah Bagel Cafe on Wilmington Island
444 Johnny Mercer Blvd

No wi-fi. Decent coffee and drinks and choice of bagels, sandwiches and pastries. Bagels made fresh every morning so if you like variety get there early. Art on display and for sale. Somewhat awkward for telecommuting but not bad to grab lunch and work an hour or two. Closes at 2 pm.

Carpe Vas (Abercorn and Liberty)
313 Abercorn St. (near Lafayette Square)

Built in a restored home in historic downtown. Classy atmosphere, limited selections but wi-fi if you ask for the PW. Don’t go upstairs the owners live there. Cozy place to work if you’re ok with having to feed the meters during the week or you have good parking somewhere. Tourists will walk in and out, though so be prepared to be talked at, about or with.

Franchise — these don’t need any bump but when you need to vanish into a franchise it’s better than nothing

Starbucks charges for WiFi through AT&T . If you have an AT&T mobile account it’s free for the mobile phones but not your laptop, those cheap bahstards.  Still ya gotta hand it to them, the atmosphere is usually pleasant or tolerable and there is a good variety of coffee and other stuff. Lucky for me I have a cellular Broadband card.

Starbucks on Montgomery and Abercorn

This is a fairly large sized facility that stays busy with many students from Armstrong U and South University as well as your telecommuters and business types. Scramble for that plug or bring a multi-plug connector because there are only 2 socket panels in this place (4 plugs). As always internet access is via AT&T wi fi hot spot arrangement.

Starbucks in Publix shopping center on North Abercorn

Starbucks in Barnes and Noble, Oglethorpe Mall

Starbucks in Oglethorpe Mall (yes there are 2 in that mall)

Starbucks at Kroger, Wilmington Island

Actually not bad. It’s not too far from Tybee and is open til 9PM. Because it’s part of Kroger it’s probably possible to stay in this space past 9PM. Will give that a try some day*. Good place to be anonymous. Noise is not too bad and enough activity going on to keep you from sleeping or picking your nose. The vibe is good and neutral. And if you get really hungry behold the 24/7  Kroger that surrounds you.

*Yes you can stay past the closing time…if you don’t mind working with the lights off (they are on a timer).

Starbucks at Victory and Skidaway

Housed in a restaurant building that had been turning over every 6 months since I’ve lived here, this Starbucks has stuck around and is a favorite for telecommuters, students and conspirators. Its easy location with close access to the Truman Parkway, the Daffin Park area, Home Depot, Target and Staples makes it an ideal meeting spot for pound the pavement business and organizer types. The service is decent and the scenery is great. Many of the tables have plugs directly beneath and this is a good place to work. Just make sure you’re paying your rent with constant refills and pastry purchases.

Huddle House on Hwy 80 near the bypass

Booths with places to plug in available. No WiFi. Coffee cheaper than starbucks and your usual fare of killer omelettes and other gut busting diner cuisine.

If you need to work longer hours into the night, though, this is not the place. They will rush you out the door once you finish a meal, even if the place is empty. Maybe this is company policy.

Eh.. the natives mean well. But it can be a drag to try to work here.

Public Spaces:
Forsyth Park
Savannah’s famous central park is a great place to work if you’ve got the battery charged up and you’ve got a broadband card. Perhaps we can convince the city to bless the space with a wi-fi cloud.

Tybee Pier
In the summer, NOT a great place to work because of the blaring music and temptation (for some of us) to visit the bar too early in the day or to be visited by visitors who have visited the bar too early in the day. Hint, on Tybee, it’s never too early in the day. But there are peaceful times on the pier in the spring and fall. Plugs near the railings. When you’re lucky you have a nice office overlooking the waterfront.

In fact it makes it much more difficult to use them. Type loose languages like PHP can be a nightmare in the evaluation of complex expressions because one not only has to look at what is apparent on the code at face value, one must also consider the complicated parsing rules when different types are banged up against each other. In type strict languages, we usually get a compile error when incompatible types are compared or misused, thus, allowing us to avoid embarrassing end-product behavior. In the type loose, interpreted PHP world, we get a runtime error (or somebody — not necessarily  the coder during debugging — gets a runtime error) — maybe or maybe not, when operations are made on incompatible types. Mature programming languages, do not allow such problems to happen in runtime — or at least do everything they can to minimize such runtime problems.

It’s the difference between building a house of straw and a skyscraper of concrete and steel. Sure, you could build a huge building with bales of straw and it would be functional living or work space until the moisture problems and other problems set in.  Then what happens if someone runs a truck into it? Or sets it on fire?

Have a gander at the PHP comparison operator page. Back in the old days we thought it was hard enough remembering the difference between = and == in C. Now there is a === and the way things are evaluated are TYPE BASED although there are loose restrictions on which types can go on which side.  NOW not only do you have to understand what the type of the variable is, you have to understand when PHP is going to decide to convert your string into an integer or when it will convert it into some other type like a boolean.

Another problem with languages like Javascript and PHP is that they keep running even if serious runtime problems occur, often without even so much as a warning or any other kind of message to anyone anywhere. This is not a big deal with a high school or undergrad programming project where maybe you are trying to get the n-factorial or do your first shopping cart — but is it a good idea to build ANY business on top of that? Yet there are thousands…(maybe millions).

They say always use ‘===’ when comparing strings in PHP. I would say the best practice would be like the practice in C — use strcmp()  and remember that 0  means TRUE if your question is “are these 2 strings the same?” (otherwise we get the mathematical difference of the ASCII characters between them.. For C this is a descendant of the assembler comparator, where the differences between the character values are subtracted from each other. 0 means they subtracted each other out exactly, meaning they are the same string of characters. I dunno where PHP thinks it’s going with that.

Or all hail the String.equals(string) comparison function in Java — where “true” means the strings are the same. With the “easier” type loose languages, you can be guessing and permuting code for hours, chasing down a bug.

In short, only coders who truly understand the consequences of type looseness should program in type loose languages. But type loose languages are ostensibly made to help people who don’t understand programming too well. It helps them alright — it helps them make mistakes that they can’t find.

Why? Frames are great. We’ve been writing web apps since 1994 and frames were the answer to prayers of simplifying interface code and server load.

What some code pups today may do in their innocence is re-route the functionality of frames through ajax by using divs that load themselves. This can actually increase server overhead (every new connection to the server causes it to instantiate a gazillion objects) and ajax content is not typically SEO friendly anyway.  Just because you can get a control to load its stuff asynchronoulsy doesn’t mean you’ve sped anything up or made any actual improvements.  But it does mean you’ve made your interface more optimizable and you have more control over what your interface can do.  In fact, before AJAX became a religion it was possible to do this in the earliest versions of Netscape and other browsers.

The guide? AVOID frames on NON-VALIDATED content — that is — for content you want the whole world to know about. But for applications development where things get serious and your users are logged in as  distinct individuals — use frames if you need them. There’s no law against them yet. They are there because they are useful.

Clearly it is a risk VS benefits issue. We believe that the benefits of cloud computing, when it comes to business applications far outweigh the risks that he mentions.  It is not true that we have always been able to do what cloud systems do today. We have never had the level of access and convenience we have today. We have never had the sheer power of massive pipes and servers hosted in secure facilities at the price we get today.  We have never had the versatility of scaling resources on command or on demand. The only way to have this kind of power in the past was to host your own secure, Tier 4 facility with millions of dollars of equipment and staff.

Much of cloud computing is accessible today in terms of pricing because of software that the FSF has brought into production.  Packages like Apache or Linux and PHP all have components that would not have reached their level of sophistication and reliability without the help of the FSF community and GNU licensing.

True — products like Google Docs and Gmail are not “free software” in the same sense that Open Office is free software. And products like Amazon’s EC2 and S3 could all of a sudden meet a spike in pricing at the whim of the company that runs it. But there are others who provide similar services who will keep the prices in check. Although many of these products are not free, the equivalent “Free Software” configuration on hardware with equivalent performance and reliability specifications would cost much, much more to own and maintain.

So Dr. Stallman, with all due respect, we disagree that the cloud is the wrong direction. You helped bring it to us and although it may cost some freedoms, the sacrifice is not without its rewards in considerable benefits for businesses and individuals.

Answer: that room can be found in your outside offices. Of course, there are times when you need all the equipment and conveniences of your home office. But many times, it pays to work outside. Outside in something like a cafe setting, there are distractions — but they are often the kind of distractions that can make an introvert turn inside instead of being bothered — things like people staring, standing in line or talking to each other. In today’s cafes, which are now typical work environments, one can feel right at home ignoring everybody, yet at the same time be able to make an occasional nod or conversation in a much more human way than in a chat room.

At home, your generous refrigerator and kitchen will keep giving until it is empty of all gifts. Then a magic troll in the form of yourself or your respective caregiver replenishes the gifts and all is good again.

At a cafe, you’re looking at $6 for a frappe and a piece of cake. You probably will not eat as much.

At home, you can go around in your underwear, have absolutely no structure to your day and even sleep for most of the time.

Then you realize that being your own boss means you can’t fire your own (often only) employee. You can curse your employee all you want, even put a pistol to his/her head and refuse to do anything else until some specific thing is done. But that won’t get your employee to work. Why? Because you chose this lifestyle to get away from that. And the employee side of you will shut down.

BEING YOUR OWN BOSS ALSO MEANS BEING YOUR OWN EMPLOYEE.  ”Hello there, I would like for you to pay me full time to work one hour per day for you”. Would you hire this employee? Probably not– unless the employee knows how to make a zillion dollars an hour for the company. But if you become this employee and you are your own boss, you will not be able to fire yourself for making nothing of each hour of the day.

Many of us are creatures of accountability. Utter embarrasment at indigency and bad hygiene might be the only thing that can get your employee to finally wise up and work for you. Once you’ve hit that bottom and you look your boss and your employee  in the face AND SEE THE SAME FACE, then you can start making progress.

Take your employee out. Your employee is not likely to sit around watching porn, sleeping or picking his/her nose while in public. He/she might waste time writing on a blog or other things like that. But eventually, you will justify the extra effort to get it together and get out. Why? Because the most important person in the world is counting on you.