Ernest de Leon.com

One of the topics that I love to talk about is ‘freedom.’ Freedom can mean many different things, but most people equate freedom to the ability to do whatever you want (within reason of course.) I tend to link freedom with the free software movement, where one has access to the source code of the software and the ability to modify that source code. I also link freedom to the ability to travel or work from home without losing income as a result. I would love to work from home all of the time if possible. This would give me more time to spend with my dog and future children. For now, I am OK with making the ’sacrifice’ of going into work every day like the majority of America.

With that said, I recently came across a new ‘movement’ of people called Location Independent People or LIP for short. One of these people is Lea Woodard, author of the book X Marks The Spot – The Indispensable Guide To Living & Working From Anywhere You Choose. This book is a collection of tips and advice on becoming ‘Location Independent.’ Essentially, this means the ability to live and work from anywhere. This can be something as simple as working for a company in San Francisco while living in Washington State, or as complex as working for the same company while living in Lima, Peru. In the book, Lea speaks about starting and running a business which provides the source of income to live anywhere. Certain countries provide such a low cost of living that even a modest business can provide an excellent standard of living.

The book goes into detail about what types of businesses work best for Location Independent People and how proper planning and budgeting can make the difference between an excellent time and a poor time. Lea also speaks to the challenges that you will face before you even leave (from family and friends) and after you have arrived. She discusses different types of accommodations, life styles, food choices and other location specific things. She delves into the technical side with advice on computing platforms, internet connectivity, snail mail services and other internet services that aid your location independent business.

There is a wealth of information in this book for a nomadic lifestyle or a less dynamic yet still location independent lifestyle. I highly recommend this book for those seeking these types of lifestyles. I also recommend this book for those who want to stay in the same place, but want more freedom in terms of work hours, commuting and family balance. I am fortunate enough to absolutely love where I live and not wish to live anywhere else, despite the fact that I have traveled extensively over the years. I do, however, value the freedom that comes with becoming location independent. I think Lea has done an excellent job encapsulating the lifestyle, challenges and benefits in a concise and clear manner. Grab a copy of the book over at http://locationindependent.com/lifestyle/the-book/ and give it a read.

For those of you in the know about the meaning behind “Without Wax” in the English language, here is an excellent review of the newest version of Mac OSX, Snow Leopard. OS 10.6 offers much in the way of increased speed and efficiency, and not so much in the way of bloat or unnecessary features. Here is a brief snippet. Follow the link at the bottom to read it in detail.

OS X Snow Leopard seems to do nothing really new. And yet, it could be their most important OS since 10.0.0.

Snow Leopard, as a follow up to Leopard, is almost absurdly insubstantial at first glance. The new operating system takes the same old boring, every day tasks like opening files, for example, and makes them happen subtly faster. But that performance is not being utilized by any third-party programs right now. And there are practically no new first-party programs by Apple. Nope, mostly just rewritten old ones and dozens of little interface tweaks. Some fanboys will ask, incredulously, “This is a new operating system?!” Those people are missing the point.

Full article at: http://gizmodo.com/5346418/snow-leopard-review-lightened-and-enlightened

I was trying to decide on what the most basic reason should be for an SMB to adopt cloud computing. Cost savings is always good, but you can shave costs other ways as well, and sometimes it may actually come out slightly more expensive to go into the cloud. Being able to start small and scale as needed is always nice. Imagine if you could buy a house, then add on to it as you need it without major construction or permits. Using open source software and tools is always great as you are getting true innovation not just repackaged old technology which is re-sold at high prices, not to mention you almost always get better performance overall with open source technology. These are all nice, but I think one particular thing stand out above these benefits, and that is geographic dispersal.

When an organization becomes big enough that they realize having all of your infrastructure in one data center is a bad idea, the topic of Disaster Recovery (DR) or Business Continuity (BC) comes up. The best way to achieve this is by geographic dispersal of your infrastructure. This means having servers at two locations, located far apart geographically (Manhattan and Dallas Texas for instance). This can get very expensive as you are essentially mirroring your main data center somewhere else. All in all the cost can easily exceed the cost of your main data center.

Most SMBs do not have this problem to worry about, nor do they have the capital to approach the DR/BC issue in a traditional manner. Cloud computing, however, can make this issue very simple and cost effective. Since we are only a few days away from the 4 year anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, I would like to use the event as an educational opportunity. There were many businesses that were devastated after the event. Many lost everything. Assuming some of these were SMBs that did business outside of the affected area, business came to a halt and probably ceased to exist altogether. Cloud computing (had it been around in present form and availability) could have solved many of the IT issues related to DR/BC.

In a cloud computing infrastructure, you are utilizing pre-made applications from a provider such as Google Apps (Docs, Spreadsheet, Presentation), Gmail (Email) or you deploy your own applications to the cloud (such as an asset management application.) These applications reside in a data center somewhere other than the physical location of your business, and are dependent upon the existence of a reliable internet connection for availability. Google has already dispersed their applications across an internal cloud that spans several global data centers. A natural disaster or other emergency at one data center will not permanently cripple a service or application. In much the same way you can disperse your internal applications across multiple data centers. This way, if your data center in Manhattan gets flooded and shuts down, your data center in Dallas picks up the full load of your application until the Manhattan data center is back online. Since you are working with cloud instances, you are only paying for a single instance at each location (assuming your application can run on a single server.) In some cases with providers such as Linode, this can be as cheap as $20.00 USD per instance per month. That is down right cheap for a redundant solution that is geographically dispersed. Cloud Computing and Virtualization consultants, such as myself, can easily get you into the cloud and ensure that you have a valid DR/BC implementation.

If you have any questions or need help with your own Cloud Computing and/or Virtualization solutions, feel free to contact me via the contact page, or leave a comment for this article.

Apple must have decided on an early Christmas for all of us. While originally slated to release around the end of September, Apple has just announced (yes its official and on the main Apple website) that the much anticipated Snow Leopard will be available this Friday, August 28. I have been waiting for this for months now, and I can barely contain myself. The only downside is that I will be out of town during this time period. I might have to get up extra early and get to the Apple store before my plane leaves. Now that’s commitment!

For more information, visit the official Apple website at http://www.apple.com/macosx/

So I happened upon some interesting information from a company called Chitika, who tracks search engine stats. Their headline “Chitika Study: Open Source Users Love Google, Hate Microsoft” is telling. Now I do not find that surprising at all considering Google is a MAJOR backer of open source projects or initiatives, but it was cool to see some statistics that back it up. Apparently, among Linux users, nearly 95% choose Google for searches over Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing. Also of interest (since I also own a few Macs) is that over 90% of OSX users choose Google. Windows users are a little behind, hovering just over 78%. Needless to say these percentages are far larger than Yahoo, Bing or AOL have. I know that I have contributed to this as I use Google 100% of the time on both Linux and Mac. Do these statistics match your search patterns? The graph below illustrates Chitika’s findings.

Comment on what you think…

So in the midst of reading the Southern Vampire Series by Charlaine Harris, I picked up this book from Borders and decided to give it a shot. I mainly grabbed it because it looked short and I had some non-stop flights coming up that I figured it would be perfect for. Sitting in first class with some wine and finely aged cheese (ok nix the cheese), I read through this book and found it to be different yet intriguing.

I’ll disagree with one of the reviewers mentioned either inside the book or on the back cover. This book did not grab me from page one. As a matter of fact, the prose was repulsive and dull in the first half of the first chapter. Still, I drudged through hoping to see some light by the end of the first chapter. If I hadn’t seen some glimmer of promise, the book would have gone straight to the trash, or perhaps the fireplace in winter. At any rate, the end of the first chapter showed a little promise and I decided to read one more chapter. The prose finally evened out and the story began to unfold.

Writing stories about coping with former demons and dysfunctional families seems to be the rage today. With the gradual atrophy of the American family and moral values, the plot has become all to common and easy to write about. Placing this dysfunctional teen or pre-teen in an affluent setting is even easier. After all, these families have so much money their kids must be depressed and slightly bi-polar. You can’t have riches without penalty right? The story rolls on trying to create mental twists and turns, but I found myself already guessing half of the ending, and the other half was not surprising at all. The reason that I found this book intriguing is that it centered around a legitimate psychological disease that is very interesting in and of itself. I assure you the prose and plot did nothing to aid that intrigue. At times, I was even distracted from the plot. Aside from that, the book is very readable. I would highly recommend this book to those affluent couples that have what they think is the perfect child and to those who suspect something is amiss. It may be a real eye-opener for those who have become so detached from reality that they fail at parenting altogether. I would also recommend this book to those who despise or envy the above mentioned affluent class. It will provide comic relief to see how they deal with everyday life.

Fans of the HBO hit show “True Blood” may be familiar with the book series behind it. The Southern Vampire Series, also known as the Sookie Stackhouse series is the brain child of fiction writer Charlaine Harris. I have been a fan of vampire novels for a very long time. I think I first became truly interested back when Anne Rice was writing the vampire chronicles. More recently, I read the Twilight Series by Stefenie Meyer. It was an awesome series, and I began to look for more current vampire novels and series. I forget where I read it (so I can’t say for sure), but I believe Stephenie recommended the Southern Vampire series by Charlaine Harris. I have not seen a single episode of True Blood, nor do I intend to until I have finished the series I am reading, so I was surprised to learn that the Southern Vampire series was the basis for True Blood. I ran into the local Borders and purchased the entire series in one fell swoop and began to read.

So I just finished the first book in the series, Dead Until Dark, and I must say that I liked it. It wasn’t oozing with the supernatural elements like some of Anne Rice’s works, nor was it overtly coy like Stephenie Meyer’s series. I think it struck a good balance between fiction and reality. I really like the way that vampires were now ‘accepted’ into society as ’sick’ from a virus that caused vampirism. They were no longer to be feared and hunted and were protected by laws now. The Japanese had also created synthetic blood that vampires were able to drink for sustenance in lieu of killing humans. Similar to the twilight series, the main character Sookie Stackhouse, has the ability to read minds and is courted by a vampire who is ‘mainstreaming’ – living among humans. She can’t date men because she can hear their thoughts and it troubles her, but her vampire boyfriend’s mind is silent to her. This gives her the ‘peace of mind’ to date him without knowing what he is thinking. It can’t get any better than that right? It is like Edward and Bella from Twilight, but reversed.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that the book was entertaining and worth the read. I just started the second book in the series and I will post a review when I get done with that book. After I finished the first book, I did happen to quickly read the book Sharp Objects while traveling, so I will post a small review about that book as well. If you have any comments about Dead Until Dark, please leave them!

I was reading an interesting article that dealt with the future of computing. In it, one sentence modified and old agage and said “recession is the mother of invention.” That inspired me to write a post that expanded on that thought and put a little perspective on it. Don’t cast stones when I say this, but I believe that this recession is one of the greatest things that has ever happened to this country. I know that a lot of people are not happy with the current state of affairs, some more than others, but it has forced most of America to sit down and reflect on what got us in this mess. Most of the blame lies square on the shoulders of the average American citizen.

Years of unparalleled growth and a culture of plenty caused Americans to lose sight of something our depression era relatives held in firm grasp – value. I still remember my grandfather’s aversion to the banking system and large institutions in general. It is amazing what a man with a third grade education taught me in the short but valuable twelve years I shared with him in my youth. Our modern culture of ‘throw-it-away’ goods, replete with toxic chemicals, has over shadowed the culture of quality and value that preceeded it. What happened to electronics, furniture and clothing that were of such qood quality and expense that repair was the first option that came to mind when failure struck? Why is it that the only two things that people seem to repair today are homes and automobiles? My first guess is the expense. The average American can not just ‘throw away’ a car or house and get a new one. What changed in our society and when did it change?

In my youth, I worked in IT for Sears. This company was a very strong company on several fronts, two of which were service and warranties. Service is a human aspect that is tough to capture and quantify, but a warranty is a written guarantee that your product will perform as intended, or the company will repair or replace it. Today, Sears has experienced severe retail atrophy in many market segments, and the warranty has lost most of it’s value over time. I am not saying that a warranty has no value or that no one purchases them any more. I am simply stating that the perceived value by the consumer has dwindled a lot over the years. Why is this?

We should probably blame our constant effort to drive down prices as consumers. Depending on the product, a reduction in price often means a reduction in quality. This reduction in quality means that the product will most likely fail faster. Couple this with the fact that product revisions and entirely new products release all the time, and you have a recipe for disposable products. If I know that an MP3 player costs $79 but the build quality is not so good, I may not want to get it. But if I also know that the next version of that MP3 player with more storage and more features will also be $79 and will release in six to nine months, my perception changes. I am now asking myself if that first MP3 player will last until the next revision. If so, then I may get it and use it until the next version releases. It has now become a disposable item to me, or at the very least a ‘lease’ that I can then pawn off on a sibling or sell online.

Now lets circle back and see how this logic applies during a recession. Three years ago, I may not have cared about that $79 for the MP3 player. Today, spending $158 on ‘MP3 player usage’ that spans 1.5 to 2 years is a big deal. What else can I buy for $158? The economy is now adding yet another variable to my equation. What I want is an MP3 player that will last for three years and not cost me $300. Can I find that? If I can’t, will someone meet that demand? Of course someone will. Recession via necessity has spawned innovation and invention. Take this scenario and scale it to an enterprise level and we have quite a nice picture evolving.

I am a CIO who is looking at my PC refresh cycle. I used to refresh 1/3 of my PCs every year, making a 3 year refresh cycle. When times got a little tough, I extended that out to 5 years and 1/5 of my PCs. Now we are in a recession, and the numbers are looking bleak. It is not feasible to extend my refresh cycle out any longer than 5 years, and the PCs are starting to fail. I then hear of an awesome new technology called Virtual Desktop Infrastructure that allows me to consolidate all of my desktops onto more powerful and efficient servers. I can then put thin clients out on my employees desks which have a 10 year + shelf life. I decide to implement this new technology (CAMS Solution from SecureTek Group) and reach a consolidation ration of 40 to 1 : desktop to server. My employees are happy with the performance and user experience and I am saving tons of money. It’s a win win right?

What just happened here was a recession causing innovation. This will be the new paradigm that saves America from falling off the capital market precipice. In the past, we leveraged debt or cash to innovate and push forward. Today we are strapped for cash and it is harder to get loans for growth. We need to innovate our way out of this hole. Now you see why I say that this recession is the best thing that could have happened to this country. We are slowly shedding our ‘throw-it-away’ consumerist attitude and innovating our way out of the hole. The corollary benefits for our pocketbooks and the environment are just icing on the cake. I’m glad to see America evolving and learning. It should result in a much better society in the years to come.

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