The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

More evidence of creeping oligarchy

I fretted earlier this week about the pattern that has emerged in the U.S., driven primarily by the the Republican Party (though my party isn't guilt-free), to return to the golden age of fiefs and barons. Paul Krugman provided another clear example:

Over the past few days, The New York Times has published several terrifying reports about New Jersey’s system of halfway houses — privately run adjuncts to the regular system of prisons. The series is a model of investigative reporting, which everyone should read. But it should also be seen in context. The horrors described are part of a broader pattern in which essential functions of government are being both privatized and degraded.

[T]he main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?

Do we not remember the phrase "divide and conquer?" As more money and power becomes more concentrated, the competing interests of those without the money and power makes it more and more difficult to form an organized resistance. And by the way, the republican form of government is supposed to be exactly that: organized resistance to power. Krugman's column Friday outlined one way that the right and business interests are attacking republicanism. (Yes, there's irony that the Republican party has done the most to injure republicanism in America.)

Just keep this thought filed away: if your city ever privatizes its police force, move. Immediately.

Out of the apartment, into the cloud (Part 2)

Last weekend I described moving my email hosting from my living room home office out to Microsoft Exchange Online. And Thursday I spent all day at a Microsoft workshop about Windows Azure, the cloud computing platform on which my employer, 10th Magnitude, has developed software for the past two years.

In this post, I'm going to describe the actual process of migrating from an on-site Exchange 2007 server to Exchange Online. If you'd prefer more photos of Parker or discussions about politics, go ahead and skip this one. It's pretty technical and Parker only makes a brief cameo.

About 18 months ago, 10th Magnitude's CTO tried to move us to the predecessor offering now replaced by Exchange Online and Office 365's, Business Productivity Online Suite, AKA "BPOS." He was quite adamant that BPOS was a CPOS, and made just setting up the service a complete PITA. I'd like to assure him and everyone else thinking about cloud-based email that the situation today has improved.

The new migration tools start you with a step-by-step checklist, liked to all the documentation you need, that takes you through the entire process:

Step 1 took fifteen seconds. I called my dad and told him I was moving his email account to a different server, and that he probably wouldn't even notice the change except his password would change. He said fine. That was easy.

Step 2 was to add my domains to Exchange Online. My existing Exchange organization hosted eight domains, which it had acquired over the 12 years or so I'd run development servers in my office. Each domain required going into my DNS registration account at DNS Made Easy and adding a TXT records proving I owned it. Fortunately, my DNS provider and Microsoft communicated in real time about the updates, so I got through 7 of 8 domains in about 10 minutes. The 8th domain, which unfortunately was the Active Directory root domain, had its nameservers pointed at the DNS registrar that I used before switching to DNS Made Easy. Switching nameservers took an entire day, for reasons that pass understanding.

Step 3, mailbox migration, had a few hiccups, and required about more effort than I anticipated. First, using the Remote Connectivity Analyzer, I discovered that the specific combination of DNS records, firewall rules, and mailbox configuration on my Exchange server wouldn't allow migration. It took about two hours of playing whack-a-mole to get just one of the tests in the suite to work. Microsoft provided (generally) comprehensive instructions on how to fix the problems I encountered, however. The test suite itself gave me a good idea of what I was doing wrong on its own, even without the TechNet articles.

The remaining steps in the plan—redirecting mail to the new server, completing the mailbox migration, activating users, and starting to use Exchange Online—took about fifteen minutes. Seriously.

The whole effort took six hours total. Part of this includes the post-move configuration changes I had to make to several services and Web sites, as my Exchange server was also my internal SMTP server. This blog, all of my hosted websites, and the collection of services that support those websites (like Weather Now, for example) all had to have a new SMTP server to send emails out. That was a little tricky, and required using IIS6 tools on a Windows 2008 server. But that's another story.

Also, my RSS feeds didn't fare well in the switch. With Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2010, your RSS feeds are stored on the server, not the client. So I had to add all of them back by hand after the migration.

It's important to note a few things that would make this more difficult for a larger business than mine. I had two active mailboxes for people and a couple for support services, I controlled both the Exchange server and the network, and I had no critical business issues during the switch. Larger organizations will have to handle a migration much more carefully than I did.

In the end, my email experience is exactly the same. And my apartment home office is noticeably quieter with two fewer servers gobbling electricity.

Cloud email working fine; Azure symposium today

The email migration I did over the weekend so far has made my email experience better, in part because the server rack temperatures have dipped a full degree C (despite really hot weather outside). More details about the migration will follow this weekend.

Since 10th Magnitude has become a 100% Azure shop, Microsoft has invited us to participate in an all-day summit here in Chicago about the Azure cloud-computing platform. I'm leaving for it anon; I'll report this, too, weekend.

A pattern emerges

What do you call a system in which:

In short, what do you call a system that concentrates wealth—mainly derived from investments, not from production—in a few hands, keeps it there, and makes it difficult if not impossible for everyone else to better his own condition?

Feudalism.

The United States isn't a feudal country, obviously, but a good chunk of the political and economic elite clearly want it to become one. It's still in our power to prevent this. But I'm less and less confident.

Obamacare's success

The Affordable Care Act has helped 3.1 million people get health insurance:

As a result of the law, the proportion of insured adults ages 19 through 25 has increased to nearly 75 percent.

The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to allow young adults to remain on their parents' family plans until their 26th birthday, even if they move away from home or graduate from school. This policy took effect on September 23, 2010.

"Today, because of the health care law, more than 3 million more young adults have health insurance," said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. "This policy doesn’t just give young adults and their families peace of mind, it also gives them freedom. It means that as they begin their careers, they will be free to make choices based on what they want to do, not on where they can get health insurance."

And the Republicans want to kill it:

The central pillars of the health care reform law — guaranteed coverage regardless of health status, an individual mandate to buy insurance and subsidies delivered via exchanges — were originally crafted by moderate conservatives and have long enjoyed support in the GOP. But after Obama embraced the template, Republicans ran to the right and abandoned it in an effort to undermine him politically. Now, as they try to sneak back closer to the center, the hard-right base that they’ve empowered is giving them hell.

First came the warning shots from activist groups like FreedomWorks and Club For Growth, which most recently purged the longest serving Republican senator for taking moderate positions in the past. Then came the cries of opposition from conservative legislators in the party. The anger is reflected among high-profile conservative activists who are actively confronting party leaders for straying — and apparently making them nervous.

This is going to be a long 139 days...and I can't wait until the Supreme Court fires off the ACA decision due any day now.

Sometimes I hate being right

A few months ago, when Chicago finished its 10th warmest winter (followed by its warmest spring ever), I predicted a warm summer. Actually, the state climatologist predicted a warm summer, and I repeated this prediction.

Regardless, the mechanics are simple. Warm winters and springs keep Lake Michigan warm, which means come summer the lake can't absorb as much heat on hot days. This means, all things equal, a warm spring leads to a warm summer. (Oddly, though, warm summers have no effect on winter temperatures.)

How accurate was the prediction? Well, so far, this summer is worse than 1988:

The brutally hot and often bone-dry summer of 1988, serves as a benchmark for hot summers in the Chicago area. That year produced more 32°C and 38°C temperatures than any other on the record books here—47 and 7 respectively.

By June 19, the 1988 season had logged 10 days of 32°C temperatures. The long-term average of 90s [Fahrenheit] by June 19 has been just three. That means this year has been producing 90-degree days faster than one of the most prolific heat-generating summers in the Chicago area's history.

Someday I'll have a summer house in northern Saskatchewan. For the next three months, though, I expect to be uncomfortable.

Out of the apartment, into the cloud (part 1)

Before coming to 10th Magnitude, I was an independent consultant, mostly writing software but occasionally configuring networks. I hate configuring networks. And yet, since 2008, I've had a 48U server rack in my apartment.*

A “U” is 25mm, so this means I have a 1.2 m steel rack behind an antique dressing screen in my living room home office, which sits between my dining room and my bedroom in a compact apartment in Chicago:

It looks modest enough, yes?

On the server rack are three 2U and one 1U rack servers. Behind the server rack is an old desktop box that got drafted for server duties. All of these machines have cooling fans that whirr constantly. Under the servers are the routers, uninterruptible power sources, and wires that connect the servers with the rest of the world:

I spent about $10,000 on the servers and the rack in the last decade. All of the servers are nearing the ends of their lives—the newest is from 2008—and need replacing soon. Plus, every month since then they've used about $90 per month in electricity. They need air conditioning, too, which costs another $30 or so in the summer beyond what I'd spend on my own comfort, because the bastards create a lot of heat.

Imagine my glee when, about two weeks ago, Microsoft began offering a new configuration for its cloud-based Azure platform that dropped the price of moving (most) websites into the cloud under $15 per month. That, combined with the onset of summer in Chicago, pushed me over the edge. I am now committed to getting the server rack out of my house by the end of September. This will accomplish three things:

  • It will cost less;
  • It will be quieter; and
  • Someone else can deal with the hardware and network maintenance.

I’ve already started. Over the weekend I moved my email to Microsoft Exchange Online, which costs $4 per month per mailbox, and so far works better than my old Exchange server. As just one example, if the power goes out in my apartment while I’m traveling, I won’t lose email connectivity.

Tomorrow I’ll describe the process in detail. Spoiler: the only thing that made me swear was getting my mobile phone connected.

* Before 2008, the rack was in my office in Evanston. I didn’t want to keep the office when I moved to Lincoln Park, so the servers moved in with me "just to save money." Never a good idea.