The Sofitel was perhaps one of my least favourite locations offering slightly less comfortable facilities than the Chaophya Park Hotel that I stayed in immediately after it for half the price. Being the hotel it is, it offers everything at a price, and this is what is missing in the rating of the hotel. Being a four (or was it five) star hotel, it offers all of the things that those sorts of people seem to want (over expensive facilities, people to wait on you far too much, rather token services) but it doesn’t offer some of the more reasonable style features like decent affordable internet. To be honest the internet wasn’t that flash and costed far too much money. Comparably less than what I’ve paid in Australia, but compared to the price in Thailand its a bit much. The place is also getting on a bit age wise, and it shows in places. The hotel needs a full refurbishment in some places to make it look neater and more modern. Perhaps I have my own idea of standards but the Hotel Sofitel Centara Grand in Bangkok just doesn’t offer me enough to go back there. It is nice enough to stay in but for that price, there are better places.

About a month ago I went on a trip overseas, I progressed from Toowoomba to Taiwan for a few days and then to Thailand. Each have their own features.

Toowoomba
Toowoomba, Australia’s largest inland regional city has about about 150,000 people (the size of the new Toowoomba Regional Council, Toowoomba City has ~100,000). Remember this number, its two orders of magnitude less than the next two cities. Toowoomba’s main street is almost empty most of the time, and there is only one shopping centre that has a regular population of people who are there to socialise (the other shopping centre’s have people but for the most part they walk in and walk out). Toowoomba is small by the standards of where I’m going but conversely it is also big enough to have most features that you would need. The city has a reasonable living cost for Australia, is small enough that getting around the place is easy and it has a University, lots of good quality schools, a great theatre (which draws international acts as well as major national acts; additionally it provides a valuable resource for the local community) and movie theatre/cinema. All in all its a nice place to live but the place isn’t going anywhere, especially in a tech perspective: the jobs just aren’t there.

Taiwan (Taipei)
After a short trip through Brisbane (~1 million people) to Brisbane International Airport I’m on my way to Taipei via Bangkok. Taiwan, the “Republic of China”, is an interesting albeit ‘neon’ affair. There are lots of people, and they are everywhere. Taipei has about 10 million people, a few orders of magnitude larger than larger than Toowoomba, and the traffic shows it. I saw one round-a-bout with what must have been at least 10 (if not more) lights located in and around it. The traffic is a maze of things being constructed and changed all around, the place scares me in some respects (there is something about driving into traffic that really scares me). I spent some time wandering around the main station of Taipei (technically lost, my guide was Joomla!’s shortest development working group member Aini) which is larger than it seems with multiple shopping centres attached. The place is big and busy with a big tower like all good large cities with a restaurant at the top (and more than likely an expensive one at that).

Thailand (Bangkok)
So after a short trip to Taipei (surprisingly its got as much duty free shopping as Brisbane domestic airport) I flew to Thailand and Bangkok. Bangkok’s new Suvarnabhumi airport (a few years old now, its still shiny) is massive, and as you drive away I felt like I was in the US in a small way: massive amounts of highways going up and down and generally all over the place, up to 12 lanes or more in places. Bangkok is about the same population as Taipei and has massive traffic jams as well. I think my favourite was being on the wrong side of the hotel I was staying at for half an hour. If I could have been able to walk it I would have done it in about 10 minutes. Bangkok is a place where you can really get bang for your buck with a lot of things priced very cheaply if you get away from the large shopping centres. The side of the road markets or the larger night markets offer a great price if you have a bit of time to bargain (or even if you don’t but you can usually get it cheaper if you do!). I don’t mind Thailand as a place but my memory is driving back on one of the elevated highways and seeing the red sky due all of the smog. Another is going to the Honda R&D in Thailand…next to rice fields. So there are some interesting juxtapositions in this country that make it interesting to look at and see.

The Nasa Vegas Hotel in Bangkok is a budget hotel that I stayed in a few years back. To be honest I found the rooms to be quite good. It certainly shows its age, but the hotel is a pleasant place to stay. Whilst it wasn’t built when I was there (late 2005) and its still not done yet (late 2007) the new train that will go all the way out to the airport will have a station near this hotel which will make it even easier to utilise. At the time the one down side was the lack of internet facilities though this might have changed.

I’m back in Thailand or more accurately back departing Thailand. This is my last flight. In a few hours I will wake up (or stay up all night, not sure yet) and leave Thailand again. Thailand is a great place with great people and I always enjoy myself when I’m in the country. Its a shame to leave in some respects though in others I will be happy to be home.

Hotel 81 is perhaps almost my perfect style of accommodation. Its simple, I’m not sure if it rates any stars and it definitely doesn’t have features and limited services (the check in area is the size of the bathroom I have in my Sunworld Dynasty room at the moment) however its ISO9001:2000 accredited, which I’m sure means something but I doubt it has any impact. I’ve used it once and it was nice and cheap, I needed somewhere to stay in Singapore overnight to grab some stuff and all I was using my room for was sleeping and showering so that was it. Of course for this price there are downsides, such as the fact the room I was in didn’t actually have a window (its like a basement room) and nor does it have internet. That said its location meant that acquiring internet wasn’t that bad (wireless access point at the Starbucks up the road did the job at a comparable rate to most 4/5 star hotels) and for what I’m doing, I don’t need any of those features. So if you’re really only after somewhere to sleep and clean the place is fine, albeit small. Technology wise its walking distance from Sim Lim Square and has a nice enough general shopping location as well as being close enough to transportation.

I’m presently over in Taiwan presenting at ICOS, and one of the things I’m looking at is one of Joomla!’s 2007 Summer of Code student’s final project. Its an email interface for publishing into Joomla!, and it raises what I find is the interesting concept: building a simple interface into a more complicated thing and allowing that simple interface to provide the basis of a more advanced system.

When I consider this more and more I look at the ability for systems to build up more advanced using simpler tools. It is actually the basis of the UNIX philosophy, lots of small tools doing their own thing really well and then tying them all together to build a more advanced product, perhaps a GUI interface or something that automates things.

When you step back and think about it, the internet is based on a similar concept. If you look at a really common protocol like HTTP or SMTP you can easily write and send valid protocol responses without too much effort by hand. And then you look at what is built on top of that, we have products like Mozilla Firefox which provide a nice GUI interface into the system and allow the user to graphically browse the web and saves them from having to see the raw HTTP that is being transmitted with each and every request.

So how does this relate to my part of the world? Well at present I’m writing a metadata file system (the sort of thing you do in your spare time…no really!) and part of its interface is utilising the file system to provide the system interface instead of writing a full API to manipulate the metadata part of the filesystem. What I’m using is a combination of the POSIX listxattr, getxattr, setxattr and other related functions. The benefit of this will mean that the system will work in locations where this is supported and will appear as a ‘natural’ part of the filesystem. This means that applications can start to take advantage of the extended attributes within the file system without having to worry about compatibility from one file system to the next (you can enable extended attributes on ext3 though they’re not structured like they are with the MDFS project). 

So starting off simple and making a flexible interface allows for the system to deploy more advanced systems at a later point without compromising on short term functionality. The development and debugging of a GUI application is harder than testing concrete scriptable interfaces such as checking that completing certain operations behaves the same way in two different circumstances, however it is easy to move from the simple interface into building the more advanced one.

More and more I see articles about how the internet is becoming more and more disjunct: firewalled and limited by sovereign nation states to prevent the flow of information. Today I saw an article on Slashdot commenting about Russia’s interest in creating their own internet similar to that of China’s (perhaps complete with firewall as well) and other parts of the world have had similar stories where the government is attempting to limit or reduce the availability of information made available from the internet.

The fact is that it reminds of something that scares me more than I realise: the Internet in is segmentation is similar to the ‘Internex’ of the Seaquest DSV world, a sci-fi tv show from 1993-1996. The Internex had some cross over into different countries (e.g. sovereign nations were still connected) however each nation was heavily gaurded from the next one, I assume to protect from cyberterrorism. The cyberterrorism threat in itself reminds me of the claimed issues of Chinese attacks with in the USA government departments. It is always interesting to see where fiction leads us to reality (or reality becomes like fiction) with so many parts of sci-fi becoming more and more a reality. But the question is, does the rest of the world predicted in these visions of the future also come with it? Or is the restriction of this information again the start of more borders as governments realise what the Internet is really capable of delivering to its users?

It makes me wonder. Where is the world headed?

So today I gave a business student a hard drive, a business IT student. He looked at me, he looked at the hard drive and then said “What is this?”

Some days I wonder about Business IT students, I wonder what they’re actually learning.

Obviously not what a hard drive looks like.

Last Friday I spent half an hour inside one of our smaller server rooms to fix our development VMWare ESX box. Its called development because its a Dell box and it takes a good five minutes for it to get past the BIOS and SCSI controller load screens. That was the first and last Dell server I think we bought. However what had happened is that the powered had failed the day before and even though we managed to take the machine down, I think the UPS serving that server room had failed after the backup generator also failed which meant that the machine didn’t go down cleanly. However when it came back up it ended up failing and unable to find a root partition. I’ve broken enough Linux boxes to recognize the error and realize the solution is really simple, just fix up the fstab which is all I did and magically the box started working properly. But this lead me to an interesting thought.

Consider an all Microsoft shop who had never considered Linux before but wanted to virtualise their products. The best product to do this from what I can tell is the VMWare ESX platform which is really a small Linux hypervisor and then their own management tools underneath. The aim is that the end user never has to see the Linux back end they only see the graphical tools for Windows like Virtual Control Centre or the web based interfaces.  This leads me to the funny thought that a pure MS shop that had perhaps sworn off Linux might be deploying ESX because it is the best option out there (MS hasn’t brought out their solution yet, thats waiting on their Longhorn Server product), an entire Microsoft world virtualized under Linux.

It makes you wonder where the world is heading.

With Toowoomba in the middle of an amalgamation with 7 different local government authorities who share our boundaries (or in the case of some not even that!) life is looking mighty interesting on various fronts. One of these fronts involve the IT issue of merging multiple disparate systems into one single system.Like any medium sized organisation (Toowoomba City Council currently employs around 900 people) we have a few systems in place to handle things. We’re using Pathway for our LIS data (who lives where and if they have a dog or not style stuff), JD Edwards for financials and assets (e.g. controlling pay roll), ESRI’s suite of GIS products (e.g. ArcMap and ArcSDE; working out where things are in the City) and Hummingbird’s Document Management solution to maintain our corporate documents. The challenge is to take these products and try and merge the information stored in seven different organisations who in some places won’t share any applications and integrate it into one.To make matters worse the organisations are spread in some cases hours away from where we are. So the problem I’m looking at is how do we integrate email, contacts and documents for all of these people together. They’re not going to have any of our standard software beyond Office which is a problem as we use Notes and like to think that one day we’ll move to open source.So Google Apps becomes an option for this transitional period while we try to work out what we’re going to deploy and how we’re going to deploy it. It works within a web browser and an internet connection, its relatively lightweight compared to other distributed solutions (large file transfers weak network connections, Citrix deployments) and offers a far more responsive nature than either of these because technically they are native to the desktop application (e.g. the web browser).Setting it up is an interesting situation as part of it requires ‘verification’.  There are a few options to get verified:

1. Put a HTML file on some web space (this didn’t work for me)
2. Set up a new DNS pointer for Google to find (this also didn’t work)
3. Just set up the DNS the way it needs to be (e.g. pointing things to ghs.google.com)

 The last one ended up being the solution for me even though it isn’t obvious when you first start off that things will work this way. Thankfully you can get things up and running without having to verify that you own the domain, just end up setting up your DNS to point to the right place solves things anyway. So what does Google give you?

• Mail – Their Google Mail product available on your domain, the main reason a lot of people will be deploying this solution.
• Calendar – Their calendar solution is integrated into the mail address book. Interestingly enough they don’t have the address book feature as another application which for building corporate address books might be handy, or linking into a website.
• Pages – Google Pages is perhaps one of the lesser known products in Google’s application stable, is a product similar to the old Homesite and Geocities products of old (before they sold out and had lots of ads, then people realised that doing everything manually most of the time was too much effort and they just wanted a template and WordPress did all they needed, or Joomla! did what they wanted better). I’ve used it since the early beta and this, like its brothers is stand alone as well.
• Docs and Spreadsheets – Again, the boon here is the integration with Mail’s address book application which means that you have the ability to share documents (and document control) with different people within your organisation. As an administrator you can also restrict documents to within the domain or allow users to share it externally, so this doesn’t make it less secure than other solutions for document sharing (still doesn’t stop users exporting it to another format and emailing it manually anyway).
• Chat – The final major application is Google’s XMPP powered IM solution, which again integrates into Mail’s address book to provide contact list management integrated with your contact list. This is available via the web browser standalone interfaces, your start page, within the Mail application or using a dedicted IM client such as Adium on the Mac, Google’s Talk application on Windows or the Gajim Jabber client or Pidgin on Linux. These chats can also be logged and are available in the Mail application as well.
• Start – Like the customised Google home page (iGoogle), this is provided as an option for your domain as well. Again it integrates with the rest of the products like Mail, Calendar, Talk and Docs to allow for a very functional first page to go to (more functional than most options I’ve seen around the place). Its heavy integration in a small way puts it at the functionality level of something like Microsoft’s Sharepoint style solution, however the Google solution is not customisable (unlike Sharepoint) however out of the box it enables users to see more information about their data (such as the Docs integration)

This was just a review of the standard edition, the premier edition (at $50/user/year) offers a few more interesting features such as optional ads, policy and message recovery, resource scheduling, single sign on and other user services (including a 10 GB mail box). As an option to a Microsoft powered world, some of the tools are better integrated and easier to use (collaboration and versioning is awesome in Google’s Docs product) however the simple problem is that when the network link goes down, so does your entire office productivity.Something to dwell on.