Categories
Personal Computing

New Windows, SOS

Retired life is a zero sum game for now. For the first five years, I’ve chosen to live completely out of pocket by delaying the start of Social Security payments until age 70. To keep my retirement finances on track, I use ESPlanner to estimate my annual discretionary spending, See Finance to track expenses, and TurboTax to do my income taxes.

ESPlanner is a Windows program and I keep a Windows Free Household. Well, something had to give and I let the Windows camel into the tent but keep it in a corral using Parallels Desktop. This article describes my initial experiences with Parallels Desktop and Windows 8. Windows 8 is not your father’s Windows but it is awfully familiar in all the bad old ways.

Parallels Desktop

Parallels Desktop is a low administration version of the Parallels virtualization product designed for use by mere end users like me. Although I’ve been in the industry for over 30 years, I consider myself an end user when it comes to virtual machines and products so Parallels Desktop is my kind of product.

Terminology

Guest      An operating system running in a Parallels Desktop virtual machine

Host        The operating system running directly on the hardware, in this case, OS X.

Hypervisor            The part of Parallels Desktop that mediates between the guest operating system and the underlying hardware.

Virtual Machine     A simulated computer provided by Parallels Desktop using the Intel virtual machine facilities.

Installation

Parallels Desktop installs from a down loaded disk image. The retail box gets you a license key that you enter once installation is complete. The installation process is the one Mac OS X users know well. Just run the installer, let it verify that the host environment satisfies the preconditions, and then do the install. The product installs as a normal application bundle into /Applications. No surprises here.

Gest Installation

Parallel’s guest installation is straight forward. Parallels Desktop walks you through creating a virtual disk, starting the virtual machine, and loading and starting the Windows 8.1 installer. From there, it is the Windows installation experience  you know and love. Walk through the installation wizard answering its questions, let her rip, let the VM restart, and let Windows get itself caught up to date. As you remember, Windows will do an update download and a mandatory restart. That mandatory restart can be put off a couple of times but sooner or later, Windows 8 will insist on restarting. Might as well save yourself pain and get it over with.

Windows 8.1

When you are shopping for Windows, do pay extra for the standard Home Edition new system version. This version is somewhat more permissive in that it will allow you to make installations on a small number of virgin disks on the local subnet without requiring an earlier product to be present.

The System Builder edition lets you make one installation. Subsequent installations require contacting Microsoft to have them deauthorize the earlier versions. System Builder considers an installation to be subsequent if any part of the hardware has changed including the disk. Based on my reading, if you mess up a virtual machine, it’s likely you will need to call Microsoft and ask mother, may I to create a new instance of Windows. 

So, if you are an infrequent Microsoft customer, go to Best Buy or some such and confirm that you’re buying the correct version. And for their help, give them some love. You’ll probably not find the home/family version at Amazon or NewEgg. (I couldn’t but then again, Microsoft product jargon is mind numbing).

Remember the classic Steve Jobs jab, “Home Edition, 29.95. Business Edition, 29.95, Galactic Edition, 29.95”

Windows first impressions

Windows 8 is better than its predecessors in many ways.

  • The stack is execute disabled — this closes many buffer overflow attacks.
  • The heap is execute disabled — this closes many buffer overflow attacks.
  • Things work correctly for users that are not the administrator.

But Windows 8 hides many things. The UI has been reorganized around touch screens and touch gestures. Some touch gestures have mouse equivalents but they are not thought out in the same way as in OS X. And Windows is unclear about which gestures are mouse and touch screen and which are touch screen only. And it fails to explain the mousing technique for most mouse gestures. You just have to futz around until something useful happens.

Summoning the charms

One particularly frustrating thing in Parallels Desktop is summoning the Charrs. The charms are UI dingbats that let you search, see the list of programs like Launch Pad, and do some other common actions. Moving the mouse to the upper right corner is supposed to make them appear. Unfortunately, OS X gets first dibs on mouse events and the charms don’t appear.

The administrator user

The installer gives administrator rights to the first user created. As with earlier versions of Windows, the user holds these rights continually but unlike XP, the various system administration operations will ask for confirmation. On first launch of a downloaded image, Windows will ask if you really want to run this random thing from childporn.xxx. So it is a bit harder for things to be installed behind your back. But I don’t trust Redmond to get it right.

Just a user user

So the first thing I did after all the initial updating and restarting was over was to create a second user dave with regular user rights for every day use. This gives me another layer of insulation from acts of malware. Before performing administrative actions, Windows will tell me that I’ve initiated an administrative action and will ask for the administrator password. Not as elegant as sudo but an improvement over XP. So you give the admin password and you will be asked for additional confirmations for each admin action. So it is harder to be had than in the past.

Should something sneak by, running as dave prevents a process from touching the system files. Important system files are writable only by the administrative user so a process holding user id dave can’t alter them or install executables in Program Files, etc. Just a bit safer.

Active X

I guess Active X is still around and but less able to commit mayhem. Any Active X widget will be running as user dave with dave’s object access rights. Any Active X thing asking for administrator rights will be outed and I can kill it with extreme prejudice.

As a rule, I do everything I can in OS X where Apple and BSD sandboxing are in effect. The BSD Jails are pretty effective at keeping things out of mischief and I have OS X set up only to run signed executables built by developers who have purchased signing keys from Apple. This stops a lot of malware but $100 is chump change for a pro black hat. But, get caught and Apple kills your keys.

I don’t know if Microsoft is doing the same with signing of images, but the new versions are much more robust than the prior Microsoft art. The attack surface is still pretty large so Parallels Desktop provides another layer of containment. But Parallels can be exploited. Again, keep the attack surface small. I’m pretty much keeping this Windows instance stock.

Parallels Tools

Parallels Tools allow the guest to create native windows and to see a chroot subset of the file system. Once a guest process is launched, you can pretty much ignore the guest and interact with the user process in a regular Aqua window. And keep the data in the shared file system branch where the files are visible to Time Machine for backup.

Unfortunately, there is no Parallels Tool to summon the charms.

Categories
Personal Computing

Mavericks, Drobo, and More

For the past several months, I’d had a full volume on my Gen 2 Drobo. What’s a Drobo? It is a Firewire/USB external disk drive designed for use by small offices and professionals. Drobo is popular with photographers, musicians, video editors and such as an external storage device because it has some interesting properties.

  • It is disk failure tolerant
  • It is easy to expand
  • Failure recovery is easy
  • You don’t have to be a professional storage admin to manage it

I’ve had this device since the Fall of 2009 when I purchased my current Intel Mac Mini. For the past several months, the system had been giving me fits with slow performance and unfinished disk backups. Being newly retired, I had the time to look into these problems in depth.

Some History

I’ve been a Mac OS X (say ten) user since 2002 when I purchased my dualie G4 mirror door machine. I’ve been migrating stuff forward through 8 OS X updates and a hardware swap so things had gotten crufty with abandoned executables, senseless start up items, etc, passe widgets, etc. Time for a house cleaning.

Second, in 2012, living in the east coast hurricane alley, I decided off site disk backup was good and began using Carbonite for this. In 2013, I became curious about Pogoplug and began using it too. Thus, I had 2 off-site backup daemons churning the file system.

In June 2013, the Time Machine volume became full in a way that caused it to mount Read Only. The drive reported write protected status to Time Machine rather than end of medium status confusing Time Machine’s end of medium logic so it just sat there and told syslog it was in trouble. No really clear user messages

Summer of 2013 also saw the Snowden Disclosures about NSA agressively trying to spy on all Internet traffic, FISA, Patriot 2, etc called to our attention. I decided to discontinue off-site backup to minimize exposure to acts of my government.

Winter Cleaning

I went through the start up items using Clean My Mac and disabled those not being used. Once comfortable that these changes are safe, I’ll use Clean My Mac to delete the old items. Clean My Mac knows what can be bushwacked and what must be kept around. For example, it won’t propose deleting or disabling the OS X UI server (a really bad thing).

I cleaned up old stuff from my TIvO days, iSTAT menus days, etc. Anything not essential to normal operation that I was able to identify as a 3 rd party add-in became history. Carbonite gone, PogoPlug gone, Quicksilver gone, ISTAT menus gone, SMART monitor gone. Amazingly, with the the third party crud gone and the external disks having free space again, life was good.

How Time Machine works

Time Machine is a really cool Apple OS X system service that has been around for several years. Time Machine is designed to back up a UNIX file system to external USB/Firewire disk storage. It doesn’t do tape because appropriate tape drives are $5000 devices that require SCSI interfaces not found on personal computers. The way TIme Machine works is to maintain a current virtual image of the file system on the external drive by making  a baseline backup plus hourly changes. As the program runs, it consolidates the hourlys into daily snapshots, weekly snapshots, and monthly snapshots.

The way it does this magic is to make a copy of each unique version of a file to disk hourly. Files that don’t change are written just once. Files you are working on are written hourly. Say you are writing a letter and do the following.

  1. Save the template
  2. Edit the template to make something useful
  3. Save the draft
  4. Print the draft to preview for proof reading
  5. Edit the draft
  6. Save the draft
  7. Print for mailing

Depending on how this activity spreads out over time, Time Machine will capture one or more versions of the letter, the final draft which is persistent and perhaps one of the two working copies.

How does Time Machine keep things straight? Behind the scenes, Time Machine keeps a version history for each file listing the current version and each available previous version. This history is organized for easy query by directory and date. When you enter Time Machine, it opens the directory and shows you your home directory for the current day in a Finder style window. You can poke around the current time in Finder. To move back in time, you use a slider at the right side to pick the available date and time.

Time Machine uses hard links to construct these virtual views in the Time Machine universe. This allows normal UNIX file operations to show what is available and to restore a directory or file becomes a simple UNIX copy.

More about the full volume

Drobo originally held the following disks

  1. 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green
  2. 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green
  3. 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green

Drobo proposed creating a 2 TB volume but reports 16TB total size, the maximum for this model. Drobo takes some off the top to store metadata so 2 TB is actually 1.8TB or so. Thus, to have a true 2 TB HFS+ volume requires more than 2 TB of installed disk. With the drives I had, the best Drobo could do was 1.8 TB and if I added a disk, it would give me a true 2 TB volume. The bad bit was that it went write protected rather than staying read write and returning end of medium status.

Drobo is file system aware unlike RAID which is disk block aware. Drobo tires to be smart about how it splits up file blocks across the available disks and how it creates and organizes forward error correction data for the file data. When there are two identical disks as the volume started out, Drobo mirrors. When I added the 2 TB disk, it reorganized the files and forward error correction to be spread across all 3 disks in such a way that the volume could be supported by any 2 of the disks.

Because this volume was made from 1 TB, 1 TB, and 2 TB, the Drobo tax still prevented creation of a 2 TB OS volume. About 1.8 TB were available because Drobo needed 200 GB (about 10 percent) for its internal record keeping.

Adding the third disk

In December, I ordered a 3 TB Western Digital Caviar Green disk from MacSales.com. When it came, I allowed it to warm up to room temperature and installed it. Drobo recognized the disk, filled out the 2 TB HFS+ volume and proposed creating a second smaller volume from the available extra. I took up Drobo on this offer. After a couple of days, it had done the necessary data reorganization and life was good.

The disk failure

One of the 1 TB disks failed early in the new year. Drobo became write protected again and Time Machine became unhappy. After a couple of days, Drobo had reorganized the data and forward error correction and again became read write. Magic. I didn’t have to do a thing other than leave the beast alone, a hard feat for a former Navy Nuke trained to do something when things go wrong! The something I did

  • Stop Time Machine
  • Unmount the volume
  • Tell Drobo to go to standby
  • Let Drobo do its thing unmolested

Replacing the disk

When I came back to replace the failed disk with a new Western Digital Caviar Red 3 TB disk, I recabled the drive on Fire Wire. The drive woke up on its own in healthy status. I inserted the drive in the slot of the failed drive. After a minute or so, Drobo discovered the drive and proposed creating an additional volume. I opted out of this. So here’s what I did.

  • Cabled the drive to the Fire Wire bus.
  • Added the Audio Interface to the bus as last device
  • Removed the bad drive from Slot 2
  • Installed the new 3 TB drive in Slot 2
  • Waited some
  • Started Time Machine

Time Machine is still sorting things out but has begun doing backups again. It will be writing data for a good bit of today. Once it finishes, I’ll unmount both volumes on that Drobo, restart the Drobo, and add volumes covering the new space. I should be able to create a second volume that is a full 2 TB.

What to do with the new space

Time Machine is aware of disks and slices. Time Machine is smart enough not to back up the backup volume. OS X is also aware of disks and slices and knows which volumes are on which disks and slices. Although there are new volumes out there, they should not be used for data because they are on the same disk as the Time Machine volume. That means they can’t be backed up. Death of the Time Machine disk is also death of these volumes.

Time Machine will let you add volumes to the backup pool. I believe these may be on the current Time Machine disk. So once I have Time Machine happy and the available 5.4 TB formatted, I’ll add the new storage to Time Machine’s volume pool.

Choosing Disks

Best Buy and the other local retailers have consumer grade disks on the shelf. Both WD and Seagate package disks with cables, screws, etc for retail sale as internal disks. The catches

  • Unknown handling by customers. Was one dropped? ++ungood
  • Designed for light use

I’ve always had poor luck with disks bought at retail. They seem to last a year or two before going tango uniform (toes up). So I prefer to buy from Mac Sales or Amazon who package disks properly (like Sun packaged its repair part disks). I’ve had good service with these, 4 years for the WD 1 TB that failed.

WD makes its OEM disks in several grades identified by color. The 5400 RPM disks are Caviar Red and Caviar Green branded. The Red are rated for small storage array use. The Green are rated for PC use. The difference is that the Red are designed for a bit more activity as the storage array may not spin the disks down as often as a PC will. Several things are at work here.

  • Multiple hosts can read and write to the array
  • The array can do read and heal passes over the data
  • The array is less aggressive about saving power by spinning disks down
Categories
Eating

The Science Behind My Diet Change

This is a link to an NPR story that explains why I’ve changed my diet to be largely vegetarian. This article describes all of the biology that shows that humans are not designed to be every day carnivores. It is safe to have a meat meal every now and again but our daily diet should be plant based and may include fish and shellfish.

References

  1. Dr Oz Blog
  2. NPR Story

It’s all about critters

As you know, our digestive track is on the outside, topology speaking. The exterior surfaces secrete acids and enzymes that digest our food. The intestines absorbs nutrients from the food we eat. We live in symbiosis with a diverse colony of bacteria that help us to digest our food and, occasionally, some that are less than helpful. Most obviously, eating spoiled food introduces the bacterial that cause garbage gut, a technical term well known to those of us having dogs in the household.

It turns out that what we eat establishes conditions that allow different types of bacteria to be our guest helpers. Researchers have found that the gut bacteria colony changes in composition pretty quickly with a change in diet. This change completes in about four days. Unfortunately, some of the colony produce toxins as a byproduct of metabolizing the food we eat. It is this process that causes garbage gut when we eat spoiled food.

The catch is that eating unspoiled food can produce toxins that have less immediately obvious effects. Bacteria present in regular meat eaters metabolizes a specific amino acid into a specific toxic metabolite that the gut can absorb. That metabolite is responsible for establishing the conditions that spawn arteriosclerosis plaques. The involvement of the metabolite in plaque formation is partially understood.

TMAO

TMAO is the acronym for trimethylamine-N-oxide. Bacteria present in regular meat eaters produce this compound by metabolizing lecithin (a popular mold release agent in baking) and L-carnitine, an amino acid commonly found in meat. L-carnitine takes its name from the Latin root for meat, carnitas in Spanish and is present in animal meat and eggs.

The liver metabolizes TMAO into several harmful substances that are believed to have a role in plaque formation. Without TMAO, these substances are not found.

The interesting bit is that high TMAO levels are present only in frequent meat eaters. Those who seldom eat meat (both vegetarian and vegan) are able to consume lecithin and L-carnitine without producing TMAO. Those who eat meat invariably have TMAO in their bloodstream.

Some get the double whammy

Most body builders eat a high meat diet (yes, chicken counts but fish doesn’t). Many also take supplemental L-carnitine. Individuals eating a diet high in meat and supplementing L-carnitine, are in double jeopardy by throwing fuel on the fire with their L-carnitine supplementation. As we will see, high meat consumption and L-carnitine supplementation explains the high mortality rate to stroke and heart disease among strength athletes.

Several high profile boutique cardiologists were, before this was known, recommending L-carnitine supplementation as was a leading ubiquitous supplement seller. They are no longer making these recommendations.

The Detective Work

One quarter of all fatal first heart attacks occur in patients with none of the traditional risk factors for coronary artery disease. Researchers have long suspected diet but were looking at the obvious cholesterol rather than in the shadows. Recently, researchers realized that it couldn’t be LDL, HDL, and triglycerides because these were similar in the two populations. So, they began looking for something that was common in the heart disease population but uncommon in the healthy population. They compared the blood of patients with similar lipid profiles but with and without the disease. The difference turned out to be TMAO. Patients with heart disease had high levels of TMAO. Healthy patients had low levels of TMAO.

From where did the TMAO come?

The researchers fed a diet of red meat and eggs to subjects. They found TMAO. They placed the subjects on one of the antibiotics commonly used to treat garbage gut and the TMAO level dropped sharply. So red meat, eggs, gut bacteria and TMAO are now strongly linked and bacteria are known to produce TMAO from these foods. We don’t know which bacteria or exactly how TMAO initiates plaque formation but we don’t need to know. Those that seldom eat meat and eggs had low TMAO levels and low rates of coronary artery disease and stroke.

We Know Why Boutique Low Fat Vegan Diets Reverse Heart Disease

Dr Dean Ornish and Dr Neal Barnard, among others, advocate a strict vegan no added fat diet. This diet has dramatically lowered blood lipids in patients that adhere to it and most undergo remission of their blockages. We now know that these diets worked by lowering TMAO and we now know that these benefits can be achieved while eating a more normal vegetarian or vegan diet. No red meat, low TMAO. Regular meat, high TMAO. It’s that simple.

Personal Conclusions

You can eat nuts. You can put oil on your salad. You can have steak or chicken for Sunday dinner. But fish would be better and oysters, clams, scallops, etc are OK. Even when fried as long as you don’t eat beef, pork, or chicken, regularly. Once a week is probably OK because consumption for several days is required to change the gut bacteria to a harmful population.

Categories
Recipes

Hopped Up Hoppin’ John

Dreading the thought of another New Year’s Day meal of bland black eyed peas and boiled beyond recognition collards. Fear not, there is hope with Whole Foods Luke’s Hopped Up Hoppin’ John and Dave’s Yankee Greens from last winter.

Ingredients

I’ve listed the ingredients in the order of addition. The evening before preparation, measure out the black eyed peas, check them for foreign matter, and put them on to soak.

Serrano pepper’s are hotter than Charlotte in August so handle them with gloves and wash up the cutting board and tools in hot soapy water.

  1. bacon, diced , 6-8 slices
  2. chorizo sausage, 1
  3. yellow onion, 1 cup diced small
  4. celery, 1 cup diced small
  5. red bell pepper, 1 cup diced small
  6. Serrano pepper deseeded and minced, 1/2
  7. garlic, 3 cloves minced
  8. cayenne pepper, 1/4 tsp
  9. bay leaf, 1
  10. fresh thyme, 4 spring pulled 
  11. chili power, 1 tsp
  12. black eyed peas, 1 1/2 cups
  13. rice, 1 cup
  14. beef stock, 6 cups

Method

I like to do my bacon in a 350 oven so I’ll dice it up and get it going while I dice the vegetables.

Luke’s method follows.

  1. Dice the veggies up, Serrano pepper last and queue up at the stove
  2. Peel the chorizo sausage and mash it flat with a potato masher or similar tool (board knife, big cleaver, etc).
  3. Dice up the bacon
  4. Fry bacon in dutch oven
  5. Remove bacon and set aside
  6. Gently brown the chorizo in the bacon fat.
  7. Add vegetables and spices and cook through — onions translucent. Additional oil is not indicated. If roasting bacon and sausage, move to the stove top at this point.
  8. Drain soaking black eyed peas
  9. Add stock, black eyed peas, bacon and simmer for 20 minutes
  10. Add rice and simmer 25 minutes until rice and beans are tender
Categories
Holiday Letter

2013, Year of Changes

winter_wonderland_by_porbital-d5qx9lp

Winter Wonderland — http://porbital.deviantart.com

About the image

This photograph is an Internet image by the artist Pete at the link. Unfortunately, Pete didn’t give contact information or license information. I’ve used this image without permission on a non-commercial share with attribution basis.

cc-license

I’m 65 and I Like It

With apologies to Alice Cooper! But this October I celebrated my 65th name day. (Well 66th if you are a C programmer) One of the good things about becoming 65 is that you are Medicare eligible and Congress encourages you to sign up in a timely manner. Well, I did. And I also signed up for an AARP Medicare Supplement policy that picks up much of what Medicare does not, like the 20 percent copay. Medicare sets you free from the swamp of the individual policy market and from employer group insurance. This latter item was the last check in the box for retirement for me. I have a pre-existing condition and the CABG scars to show for it. Entering the personal market as it was before the ACA (Obamacare) would have been ugly. I’ve yet to make a Medicare claim but that will change in January as my 6 month well baby checks become due again.

Continue reading “2013, Year of Changes”
Categories
Home Remodeling

When not to call the Bath Fitter

This is a picture of the head wall of the hall bath tub surround. When I bought the house, the 50’s blue tile was cracked with what appeared to be grout or caulk in the cracks. The original owner (I’m the second) tried to make a voyage repair. Given that everything was 50’s ugly and tired, the plan was to renovate in 2007. My employer had other ideas and shipped me off to Newport Rhode Island. While up there, the house was on the rental market and the mold kept eating.
Image

I returned in June 2010 and started planning for retirement including a resumption of the restoration of 3444 Fletcher. Last fall (October 2012) I attended the home show to see what had happened and hoping to meet a contractor interested in my project. Bath Fitter was there for show and tell and would happily put new acrylic surfaces over my tired tub and tile. But doing a little reading and knowing there was trouble with the original 1950’s work, a traditional renovation was indicated.

The original construction used drywall for most of the bath surfaces but the wet areas were  a scratch coat of plaster on wire lath with tile on top. The scratch coat is porous and a bit crumbly. The working of the walls with time apparently had caused some failures in the plaster which wedged between the tile and plaster causing linear cracks just above the spout and around the corner. Water’s surface tension dragged it into the cracks and the wood became just a little wet. Just wet enough for those black pets to grow. Bath Fitter was willing to cover all of that up with faux tile.

The proper repair is to remove the original interior finish materials, remove the eaten wood, sister up new studs along side the originals and flush with the originals (they are 2×4 for real, not 1.5 by 3.5 or so). They are also dense hard old growth, not farmed stuff. Once studs are repaired, new Durarock or Wonder Board (cement wall board) goes up, acrylic sealer is applied, and tile over the Durarock. That’s the right way to do it. While we’re at it, we’ll also replace the galvanized waste piping with PVC, upgrade the electrical, and insulate the exterior wall.

At the home show, I met Ron Blount, owner of Blount Custom Homes. He’s a Tidewater Home Builder’s guild member and occasional participant in the home show build. He does larger custom homes and a lot of kitchen and bath work. I happened by while the market was still slumbering so he came out for a consultation, worked up a design, and made a proposal which I accepted. The project has gone very well with the first results in use as seen below.

When we finish the hall bath, the look will be similar to the master bath below. This is about a $13 K project including the custom vanity and mirror made by a local cabinet shop. The fittings are Kohler Tubi. The cabinet depth is matched to the wall set back. These photos were taken with available light hand held. The shower recessed light is on. The lamp is a CREE LED warm white recessed trim rated for wet areas. EcoSmart (Home Depot house brand) assembled the lamp from CREE LEDS and powered electronics made in the Triangle. Home Depot also has Edison base CREE lamps in warm and daylight. These are nice!

Blount Custom Homes has a crew of good subs but does most of their own carpentry, similar to Tommy Silva’s model but perhaps not quite as much high end. A Mexican American crew did the dry wall. Norfolk country boys did the plumbing and wiring. and Troy of Straight Line Tile did the tile work. Troy is an unflappable perfectionist. His work in the shower amazes me every day. He did a super job working in the alcove and the change from 12×12 tile to 6×6 tile at the top. Evan and Ron helped me pick appropriate materials and design elements appropriate to a ’50s mid-Century rambler. The nice cabinets, mirror, and shower door just appeared after some discussion of my preferences. This project took a good bit of faith on my part but it has gone well so far.

Mirror and trim up

Categories
Personal Computing

Pogoplug Cloud and Disk Backup

Introduction

This article is about disk backup as much as it is about Pogoplug and Pogoplug Cloud. Disk backup is the computing system operations practices that protect a computer system’s file system from hardware, software, and user failures like dos> format c:. So disk backup is a combination of things

  • A saved image of the file system state
  • The media that stores that image
  • The device and programs that read and write that media
  • The user practices needed to create the backup save sets

Backups come in two varieties, local backups and off-site backups. Local backups are complete copies of the file system that permit complete restoration of the file system to the last saved state. These protect primarily against disk failures or other hardware failures that cause the disk to become corrupt. This can include a dropped, lost, or stolen laptop computer. Off-site backups permit recovery of essential records when one’s home is damaged by fire, flooding, windstorms, or theft of a machine or the local backups were destroyed, stolen, or unusable.

In days of yore, off-site backups were local backups that were carried to a safe off-site storage location such as your safety deposit box. Today, they are transmitted over the Internet to a cold storage provider such as Google Drive or Amazon Glacier. Some people use Google Drive or Amazon Glacier directly while most mere mortals use a service such as Carbonite, Pogoplug Cloud, etc to create and restore off-site backups. This article describes Pogoplug Cloud and the things used with it.

Some Definitions

I’ll try to use the terms defined below in this article. These may not exactly match Pogoplug’s usage of them but I can match them up to things on my Mac.

Cloud Engines: Makers of Pogoplug and providers of Pogoplug Cloud services

Local backup: A locally kept copy of a group of files made for the purpose of restoring lost or damaged files.

Off-site backup: A remotely kept copy of a group of files made for the purpose of restoring important files when recovering from loss or damage to the local site.

Pogoplug: A local server running the pogoplug service. This can be a PC running pogoplug pc or a purpose built Pogoplug device.

Pogoplug Cloud: A remote server running the pogoplug service.

Pogoplug Backup: The local pogoplug service client that conducts backups and restores backups.

Pogoplug Companion: The Android/IOS application that allows a phone or tablet to use files served by the user’s pogoplug service.

PogoplugPC: A Windows/Mac OS X application providing the pogoplug service from user space.

Time Machine: The Mac OS X system backup and system recovery application.

Web interface: http://my.pogoplug.com

Introducing Pogo plug

Pogoplug is the trademark of Cloud Engines, an international software company headquartered in Israel with offices in Silicon Valley. Cloud Engines got its start making a gadget called Pogoplug, a computer built into a wall wart (hence plug) that provided a small amount of Internet accessible shared storage using a user provided USB disk drive. Over the years, the product has changed form and new services have evolved around the original USB media server. This page tries to coherently describe the benefits of the Cloud Engines product and the associated services, something Cloud Engines has trouble doing, probably for want of a good technical writer.

Pogoplug branded products and services support a number of use cases so I’ll try to present the products in terms of these uses cases.

  • Local backup of one or more computers
  • Off-site backup of one or more computers
  • Local and Internet file sharing (a personal cloud service).
  • Remote file access

A bit about me

I’m a scientific software professional who has worked for 40 years on nuclear power plant application software, nuclear power plant simulator software, and wargaming software. My career spans the period from the introduction of disk drives to embedded systems to pocket sized “super computers”. Back in my simulator days, I’d stayed ’til one AM doing an integration build. I was tired and cranky so I blew off the backup. The head crash occurred as I was driving to work the next morning. This was back in the days of CDC storage module drives and dinner plated sized multi-platter removable media disk packs. A head crash was a big deal. The repairs were $10,000, a new pack was $1000 or so not to mention the lost data and the day that it would take to do the repair and a second day putting humpty dumpty back together.

My professional background is in several extinct minicomputer operating systems, SunOS 4, and Linux. My hobby background is a mix of early Windows ’95, OS-2, and Mac OS X, mostly the latter. I’m an amateur system administrator these days looking after RedHat workstation and plain old Mac OS X.

I’m not at all familiar with Windows backup and recovery procedures and my recollections of them are over a decade old. I’ve done one OS X system recovery using Time Machine and it is a joy. I’ve done several SunOS 4 system recoveries that were a pain courtesy of all of the media handling of 8 mm video tapes.

Windows Local Backup

To this day, Microsoft continues to leave disk backup to third parties. Microsoft does include a backup product but nobody uses it. Most 3rd party backup products are designed for use by corporate high priests in corporate settings where tape drives or tape library robots are available. Tape drives, tape handling, and automated tape libraries are too complex for most home users so something different is needed at home. Pogoplug attempts to fill the Windows user data backup gap. Pogoplug Windows local user data backup requires the following kit.

  • A USB disk large enough to hold the files to be protected
  • A Pogoplug server, either a Pogoplug kit machine or a local host running PogoplugPC software.
  • Pogoplug Backup installed on each machine to be protected

Pogoplug Backup is a free companion program available at http://my.pogoplug.com/downloads. This link provides both Mac OS X and MS Windows versions.

A Pogoplug server turns a USB disk drive into a local backup server. A companion software product, Pogoplug Backup backs up selected parts of its host file system to the Pogoplug connected disk. Typically, each user’s home directory is backed up plus any public directories such as those used by photo libraries, music libraries, and video libraries. Pogoplug Backup allows selection of the directories to be backed up. The directories and files to be backed up must be readable by the logged in user running Pogoplug Backup. Once the user has nominated files and directories for backup, Pogoplug Backup transfers the files to Pogoplug which maintains an image of the most recent version of the file. The machine must remain running and logged in until the transfer completes.

This process is sufficiently fast that it should be possible to save the entire file system. In my initial exploration of Pogoplug Backup, I did not attempt to set up a full disk save because I’m using Pogoplug Backup with Pogoplug Cloud for off-site backup.

Pogoplug Backup runs as a user program rather than as a service. This means that the user account must be logged in and active while the program is running. I’m not familiar with Windows but I suspect some care is needed to tell the machine to skip hibernation while the backup completes.

I’ve skipped over little issues like restoring applications and the Windows registry. These make Windows recovery a royal pain, about as bad as buying a new machine. Everything has to be reinstalled from media to recreate the registry which is difficult to back up while the machine is running. I’m not a Windows guy so I don’t know the details or of any tools that would make this easier.

Pogoplug Backup Limitations

Pogoplug backup runs as a logged in user process so it has the following limitations.

  • Files must be readable by the user
  • Pogoplug cannot back up complex data structures like a MySql database or an Aperture photo library. The UI will not let you choose things that Pogoplug backup does not recognize.
  • Pogoplug backup will not let you select directory Applications or Program Files content for backup.

Pogoplug’s limitations make it suitable for backup of user data. It is not designed to support system recovery. In this way, Pogoplug and Carbonite are similar. They will save user directories that reside on the system disk. Pogoplug appears to give more user control of what is to be saved.

Mac OS X Local Backup

Pogo Backup and Pogoplug can support Mac OS X backup and the procedures and prerequisites are the same as for the Windows use case. But, most OS X users continue to use OS X Time Machine for disk backup. Time Machine maintains the current state of the file system on an external drive, either directly connected or network storage provided by an Airport Time Capsule, Airport Extreme, or a network storage array such as a Droboshare. Time Machine differs from Pogoplug Backup by maintaining back versions of a file in the archive and permitting recovery of any back version that remains available.

Time Machine also differs in that it was designed to save the entire file system including directly connected external disks. This is easily configured and you can tell Time Machine to skip directories whose contents are transient.

I use a USB Drobostore with Time Machine that currently has 4TB of raw disk storage configured as a 2 TB virtual disk. I have a second 1 TB Drobostore that holds music and photos and the system’s internal 320 mB disk. Time Machine maintains the current state of the complete file system except the part dedicated to Time Machine itself. Time Machine allows user configuration to specify the storage device to be used and those parts of the file system to be included or excluded from protection. The 2 TB storage array is adequate to backup both if I have Time Machine skip the EyeTV spool directory and the iTunes spool directory. There’s no need to back up transient TV shows and movies. Eventually, I’ll have to put a 4th disk in the Time Machine Drobostore.

Time Machine uses hard links to maintain a current virtual image of the protected file system tree while retaining back versions of files. The hard links point to the current versions with the back versions on disk. The Time Machine user interface allows you to retrieve the current version of a file or any earlier version still in the archive. When Time Machine needs space, it starts shedding oldest versions of files.

I’ve needed Time Machine once when a system disk failed. The recovery procedure was dead simple, install OS X from external media, open Time Machine, and restore the volume. The next morning, Oswald was ready for use. I’ve used Time Machine a second time when my Aperture photo library fell victim to a disk malfunction. A Drobostore, then connected by FireWire became befuddled and my Aperture Library went missing. Time Machine came to the rescue. I had to rummage back a week or two but I found one that was usable.

Pogoplug Off Site Backup

The offsite backup process is identical for Windows and OS X. The material tha follows applies to both.

I’ve tried two solutions for offsite backup, Carbonite and now Pogoplug Cloud. Pogoplug Cloud is a $60/year service that uses Amazon Glacier to store the portion of the file system that you wish to protect. To use Pogoplug Cloud, you need the following

  • A robust Internet connection such as Cox Preferred
  • A Pogoplug Cloud subscription
  • Pogoplug Backup installed on the machine to be protected

Once these conditions are satisfied, you use Pogoplug Backup to nominate directories and files for backup. Pogoplug Backup transfers these to Pogoplug Cloud in much the same way that it transfers files to a local Pogoplug server but the process is limited by Internet speed rather than local Ethernet speed and disk drive write performance. My initial Carbonite backup took a good week and I had to pause it while watching Netflix or iTunes content. I expect that Pogoplug Cloud will be the same.

Pogoplug Local and Off-site Backup

If you have both a Pogoplug Server and a Pogoplug Cloud service subscription, your Pogoplug server will transfer backed up files to both its local disk and the Pogoplug Cloud subscription. Once properly setup, the off-site backup process is an extension of the local process and no additional user actions are needed.

Local and Off Site File Access

This is how Carbonite and Pogoplug differ. Carbonite permits backup and recovery only. Pogoplug permits on the go file access by web service at http://my.pogoplug.com. From here, you can retrieve any media saved in a home Pogoplug server or in the Pogoplug Cloud.

The Recovery Process

The recovery process is similar using OS X Time Machine or Pogoplug. For this purpose, we’ll assume a failed disk drive replacement. The work flow is

  • Repair the hardware by replacing the bad system disk
  • Reinstall the operating system and applications
  • Install Pogoplug Backup
  • Restore the user data system

With OS X Time Machine, recovery is relatively easy. Newer Macs include an Internet boot loader that will start OS X from the Internet for the purpose of recovering the system If you have an old machine like mine, initial startup requires an OS X installation disk for older versions of OS X or an installation thumb drive for Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks.

  • Start the machine from a recovery disk or thumb drive image
  • Format the new disk using Disk Utility
  • Install OS X from the boot media
  • Connect the external Time Machine volume and allow it to mount
  • Restore the complete file system from Time Machine

With Pogoplug Backup and Pogoplug, the work flow is

  • Start the machine from a recovery disk or thumb drive
  • Format the new disk using Disk Utility
  • Install OS X from the boot media
  • Reinstall applications
  • Install Pogoplug Backup from the Pogoplug.com website.
  • Sign in using to your Pogoplug your Pogoplug credentials, usually your primary E-mail address and password
  • Restore the user directories and files saved

I can’t really comment on Windows recovery because I’ve not needed to do it. In OS X land, things are not so bad. There is no registry. Applications are saved as application packages (basically a directory) in /Applications which may be backed up. A Time Machine restoration brings everything back. I’ve been there, done that, and have a working system to prove it. Time Machine rocks.

I’ve not needed to do a network recovery and hopefully I never will. But I live in hurricane country and a Cat 2 will damage my home and a Cat 3 will blow it down and probably wash it away. So I’m careful. I rely on my Mac for all of my tax and financial record keeping. And my photos and home movies reside there. So I back up off site and it is money well spent because little of this can be replaced even if I knew what it all was. The choice of a Mac Mini was deliberate. I can throw the mini and Drobostores in a bugout bag should we need to evacuate.

Categories
Web hacking

Ooma Gumma, One Number to Rule them All

With apologies to Pink Floyd!

What is Ooma?

Ooma is yet another VOiP telephone service but one with a twist, Astersik running on the subscriber equipment and Google Voice integration. It was Google Voice integration that hooked me.

Ordering

I purchased my subscriber equipment directly from Ooma.com. The web store was a bit colicky when I purchased, probably as a result of unfortunate use of the back button on my part during the order entry. The site told me that the credit transaction failed so I tried again. Same symptoms. I placed an order with Amazon.

After running errands, I was surprised to find 3 order acknowledgments in my E-mail so I canceled the Amazon order and called Ooma operations support. They couldn’t head off the orders but told me to decline the duplicate. The next day during lunch, I receive a phone call from Palo Alto, CA, unusual. I answer it and find myself speaking to an Ooma programmer who questioned me about what I did and what I intended and cleaned up the mess saving me the trouble of an RMA and trip to UPS to post the returned duplicate.

Ooma has a daily sanity check the orders job that looks for duplicates and other common errors before shipping the accumulated orders. The QA process caught my goof and several like it so development tracked every order down to verify it and do what the customer intended! Having had a nameless pet sales company send a package to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, Afghanistan, this was a welcome surprise that puts Ooma ahead of the web sales pack.

Unboxing and Installation

My subscriber equipment arrived properly packed for UPS in Apple pretty packaging. I ordered both an Ooma Telo subscriber interface and an HD-2 handset. The setup instructions for both were clear and initial setup went smoothly. The combination has several advantages.

  • The HD-2 handset uses DECT 6 wireless protocol in a band away from WIFI, baby monitors, microwave ovens, and other sources of trouble.
  • The traffic between base and handset is session encrypted.
  • The handset uses a codec designed for low data rates and high immunity to dropped packets. This encoding carries end to end when talking to an Ooma HD-2 or similar handset that supports this codec. Otherwise, the call is transcoded to coding that both parties can support.
  • The HD-2 handset can import your contacts in VCF format.
  • The product includes life of the product US calling. You pay the taxes and 911 service fee.
  • Home phone service with basic Ooma features costs $4 per month vs $35 for my Vonage bill.

The Ooma handset works well with a few minor quirks, possibly knowledge gaps on my part rather than product issues.

  • I’ve yet to learn how to change the handset and speaker volume during a call. The menu set to do this is preempted by the call menu set.
  • The navigation buttons are a bit small but serviceable.

Ooma Premier and Google Voice

Ooma Premier is an $10 per month option that unlocks a number of features, some of which are unique to Ooma. The one that attracted me was Google Voice. Without Premier, Ooma Telo can be one of your Google Voice forwarding phones. With Ooma Premier, two things important to me become available.

  • Outbound calls show my GV virtual phone number
  • Google voice and Ooma voice mail are merged.

Ooma Premier adds another much appreciated feature, community and personal blacklists. These work so well that one Florida subscriber received exactly two political telemarketing calls during the 2012 presidential campaign. Politicos are exempted from the do not call list. Should somebody leak through, it is a simple matter to go to my.ooma.com and add them to your personal blacklist, much as I do with unwanted callers to my Google Voice number.

When an inbound call occurs on my GV number, my mobile and the Telo HD-2 ring. Since the Telo telephone output is connected to the house wiring, the old cordless to be retired also rings. Telo does distinctive ringing so GV rings ring-ring and calls to my home number ring-ring-ring. I can tell them apart. By using my GV number, I can take inbound calls on my home phone as with any GV forwarding. When I make an outbound call via Ooma, my Google Voice number appears for my callers, something Vonage could not do.

Porting of my Vonage number to Ooma took about a week with no pestering from Vonage. I guess they have figured out that they have been one-upped. Consumer Reports ranks Ooma at the top of the heap for US domestic telephone service based on service quality, value, and unique features.

Before Ooma with Google Voice integration I had been making all of my home calls on my mobile. With the HD-2 handset and GV, it is as easy to do this calling by land and the call quality is much better for the recipient. They sound fine to me courtesy of that tall tower and beefy base station transmitter but my mobile is scratchy or worse at the other end courtesy of a small antenna and a few milliwatts of power. So my friends, family, and vet are much happier.

Voice Mail

Ooma Telo keeps voice mail locally. You can play it at the base station, with HD-2, or from my.ooma.com, or call your Telo number and play it remotely. Voice mail transcription is optional, an option I forgo using Google Voice transcription instead. Google does well enough that messages, though somewhat silly at times, are usable. I still have to check my mobile’s native voice mail separately but the message is to call my unstated GV number and leave a message there. If you don’t know it, we don’t have a relationship. Tough.

Outage Forwarding

Ooma will forward calls to an outage number. I have my outage forwarding set to my mobile’s native number. I expect this feature will see limited use but Thursday’s storm put the power out for 1.5 hours.

 

Categories
Personal finances

You know you are getting old when

  1. You start paying attention to mail from Social Security
  2. Medicare Supplement adverts begin to flood your mailbox

Both of those have happened. Will you still love me when I’m 64? And Medicare sets  you free from your employer’s health care plan! When that happens, my employer has nothing to offer that I want!

Some Modeling

That’s what I do so naturally, this winter I sat down and made some financial planning models. I’d done that exercise a year or so ago but was not satisfied with it. I began to look around for something more robust than my shaky advanced mathematics and found http://www.esplanner.com. Economic Security Planner is a sophisticated planning product developed by a Lawrence Kotlikoff, Boston University professor of economics, and his graduate students. It originally began as research with a spin-off company started to provide Windows software and web service. Professor Kotlikoff is a regular contributor to NPR’s Marketplace and to PBS News Hour.

Introducing ESPlanner

ESplanner is available as a web service and as a MS Windows program. The program version comes in 3 levels, basic, andvanced, and professional. The advanced and professional versions provide the same model but the professional version has client data management capabilities of interest to professional financial planners. The web service is layered with tiers similar to those of the program product. For most people, especially, those like me who keep a Microsoft Free Household (TM), the web service is the way to go. One program does not justify the hassle of Parallels and MS Windows administration when there is a viable alternative.

You can try the basic planner as a web service. The free test drive lets you enter model parameters, make runs, and retrieve reports but you cannot save your model for future updating. ESPlanner offers several levels of subscription that make saving model configuration, support, and advanced features available. The advanced versions of the model offer a couple of additional features.

  1. Monte Carlo evaluation for susceptibility to economic and market variability
  2. Pessimistic planning assuming that you loose all of your stock assets.

My first impressions of both of these features is that they are of limited use for assessing the basic adequacy of your retirement planning. What they do is offer some additional assurance that your standard of living is reasonably immune to market and economic events.

How ESPlanner Differs

Most free planners let you assume a yearly draw and determine the amount of assets needed to provision that draw at retirement. ESPlanner has a second mode of operation that answers the question “Given the assets I have, how much can I draw yearly?” Being in the position where wealth accumulation is drawing to a close, I used ESPlanner in this mode to determine what level of income my estimated assets at retirement would support. To my knowledge, this capability is unique and the results were reassuring. I was able to confirm that I held sufficient retirement assets to maintain my current standard of living.

What’s In the Model?

The ESPlanner model includes the following processes

  • Asset holdings
  • Investment performance
  • Proper treatment tax-favored (IRA and 401K) and regular brokerage accounts
  • Proper treatment of defined benefits pensions
  • Social Security and Medicare
  • US and State income taxes
  • Longevity assumptions (they recommend planning to 100)
  • Recurring obligated payments like mortgage, insurance contracts, etc
  • Planned expenses like cars, home renovation, college tuition, offspring’s weddings, etc
  • Periodic income from work or other continuing periodic sources
  • Lump sum income from estates, asset sales, etc.

The model calculates the yearly discretionary spending that your assets can support. In ESPlanner’s terminology, discretionary spending is any spending that is not obligated by law or by contract. For example, your taxes, mortgage payment, and loan payments are obligated. ESPlanner estimates your Federal and State income taxes from your total taxable income.

Monte Carlo Modeling

With the optional Monte Carlo feature enabled (at added cost) the model includes Monte Carlo analysis of sensitivity to historical stock market variability. This feature is useful for confirming that your holdings are adequate to survive stock market swoons and recoveries and inflation variability.

The Upside Investing Bit

The “Upside Investing” bit models the conversion of stocks to “safe” assets like bonds. Typically, you do this as you harvest growth assets to produce income. The process is a bit of a bucket brigade from stocks to intermediate bonds to short term bonds or cash. This is a rolling process because a good bit of the portfolio (50 to 65 percent) must remain growth invested to produce asset growth that keeps pace with inflation. The model does Monte Carlo analysis to confirm the adequacy of the asset migration plan in the presence of stock market swoons and recoveries. I found this feature less useful, possibly because I misused it.

Inflation and Investment Performance

Mean inflation rate and mean investment performance for each investment account are model input parameters. ESPlanner recommends 3% inflation and 5% investment growth. I used these values. The 5% value may seem conservative but this value is picked to reflect your mix of stocks and bonds. This is an assumption that I need to verify from time to time. During 2013, the S&P 500, NASDAC, and Dow are all up handsomely with soft bond performance. Bonds are returning coupon.

ESPlanner considers inflation and asset growth/shrinkage as part of the model but this does not appear explicitly in the reports. Rather, ESPlanner shows the reports in constant dollars. I find this easier to interpret than use of future dollars for future years. Future dollars make the inflation effects apparent but could mask declining real standard of living.

Social Security?

In the spending model, Social Security is an input obtained from the Social Secuirty web site or the yearly mailng. For a single person, that works well. If you have a spouse, you and your spouse have different ages and different earnings histories, and you have dependents, Social Security strategy becomes a complex problem with about one million permutations. The purpose of the Social Security optimizer is to evaluate you and your spouse as a unit to determine the optimum Social Security utilization strategy. Who should be the primary, who should be the survivors. Should one of you start and then suspend benefits? If you are single, the result is obvious as explained below. If not, then you need to use this model.

ESPlanner, Inc offers a Social Security optimizer. I gave it a try also and was surprised! The Social Security Optimizer told me I should delay collecting Social Security until age 70. Being a single male, this is a pretty simple decision. Delaying to age 70 to begin drawing Social Security increases your yearly draw by 1/3 from a defined benefits inflation protected source. By doing so and putting this result into the ESPlanner spending model, I was able to show that my yearly spending could increase relative to starting Social Security at age 66. The increase was significant.

This result seems counter intuitive so some explanation is in order. In the age 66 scenario, you must conserve assets early in retirement to maintain late in retirement standard of living. By delaying until age 70, those sequestered assets are freed to pay income during the shorter 100% out of pocket period. Basically, you are betting that you will live longer than the median life expectancy which Social Security uses to determine the payout rates. The Social Security early and late start adjustments are actuarially neutral. If your family history suggests, as mine does, that you will outlive median life expectancy for your cohort, it is a reasonable risk to take. My aunts and uncles not claimed by lung cancer or early colon cancer lived into their late 80’s and both paternal grandparents lived past 90. Given that I don’t have the risk factors (smoking, agricultural chemicals) of the early mortality uncles, It is a good gamble.

The other thing that surprise me was that Social Security would be a significant fraction of my after-seventy spending. For me, about half, maybe a bit more. A big surprise since I’m about a 92 to 93 percentile wealth unit. I’d assumed that Social Security would be providing Starbucks Money. Suddenly, I’m very much more interested in the shenanigans of the Republican House of Representatives now that I know Social Security will be doing more than buttering my bread.

Categories
Music

New Music

It’s been a busy winter music wise. After watching Arron Embry, Ryan Keen, and some others, You Tube pitched Shaun Kirk and Kim Churchill who popped up in My Playing for Change subscription. I found Arron Embry at work listening to the clip linked above. Ryan Keen is courtesy of the London iTunes festival app. Apple produces this gig each summer and offers each set for streaming. Often, the opening acts are rising stars getting their first big event exposure. iTunes Festival is the UK equivalent of the Newport Folk Festival but it is not restricted to folk. Every genre of small ensemble music, jazz, classical, pop, singer songwriter, is there is some measure.

And over on the Jazz side, another serendipitous You Tube find, young Beka Gochiashvili, a Georgian teenager who has attracted the attention of the likes of Chick Corea, Bryan Blade, Lenny White and others. Beka is a force of nature. At 16 he picks up a lick by ear and makes it his own, playing in paragraphs. He’s quick but, more important, he can think on his feet taking a musical idea and making it his own. He’s studying at Juliard to get his theory, composition, and business skills. If you poke around on the Tube, you can find his recital videos from his trio lab. He’s one of those rare people who have the technique, something to say, and the arranging and leader skills to pull it together an make music that is more than the sum of its parts.

One of the miracles of the digital age is that folk’s formative years are being recorded and published. All of these guys are great and they’re all self produced. Well Lenny White produced Beka’s record (iTunes). Wonderful things are happening, none of them at a major label.  Beka’s Trio Recital is something else. Here are these three teenagers playing their hearts out trying to keep a properly professional face for their professors. Don’t let ’em steal your groove face, Beka.