Some say that people buy Ferrari’s to be seen in them. While that might be true in some case, my guess is that the majority buy would the 458 Italia for what’s inside as well as out. Beauty is only skin deep but this bella has it all. Amazing looks and amazing stats to match. The Ferrari 458 Italia is powered by a 4.5 Liter V8 that delivers 570HP and hurls the car from 0-60MPH in only 3.4 seconds. Top speed is 202MPH and it red lines at 9,000 RPM. Perfect exhaust tuning is the cherry on top. From the videos I’ve watched (I’ve only seen one is person but my neighbor has one on order so hopefully I can bum a ride when it comes in) the red line is high and the car gets happier the higher you go. Anyone used to driving a BMW M or other high HP car can surely relate. The happy zone doesn’t even start until 5,500 – 6,000 RPM’s and it gets even happier between 7,000 – 8,500 (or scary if you’re not paying enough attention).

Check it out..

My definition of cloud computing is quite simple… It’s groups of servers working in tandem to provide a redundant, scalable and elastic platform which you can use to offer services via a web browser. There are plenty of people who would disagree with my definition but I don’t care because I’m one of those 100 people that I mentioned earlier. Now let me break it down in a bit more detail.

We’ll start with “groups of servers working together in tandem”…

When I say groups I don’t mean two, but rather cabinets full of rackmount servers. Lets say for example we have 1 cabinet with say 36 dual proc, quad core Dell PowerEdge servers with 32Gb or ram each. Let’s also say that we have a SAN w/16 TB of disk space. You can build a really nice cloud with that setup BTW. Since the current cloud hosting standard (and I use the term standard loosely) is based on how many instances you can squeeze out of a single server, let’s assume that number is 16 (although it could be considerably higher or lower depending on client requirements I would). I’ve arrived at that number by taking the 2 processors that I have on a single server, multiplying that by the 4 cores per processor and then multiplying that times 2, which gives 16. BTW I’m using very rough numbers and I’m leaving a lot of things out because this is intended to give you an example of how it works. So, we are left with 16 instances that can run on a single server. Based on that math if we multiply 16 instances by the 36 servers that we have in the cabinet, you have the capacity to provide 576 instances and. Since all clients are different and some require greater resources than others, you can rest assured that you will not have 576 identical instances running on this cloud. It’s more likely that you will have say 100 clients using the equivalent of 2 instances. Maybe 50 clients using the equivalent of 4 instances. Probably even some single clients using all of the resources of a single server and then of course at the bottom of the revenue-generating totem pole you have the guys who only want the least expensive option and they will get the tiniest slivers of available. Anyway you’d never want to sell all 576 instances on the server because then you would leave no room for clients to burst for additional CPU or memory requirements. I’m not going into the software and operating system side of this but let’s make the assumption that your server instances can be either Linux or Windows based. Now that we have the technical details out of the way, let’s move on to the basic concepts of server instances and how they’re created and moved around backed up and restored.

On to the “redundant” part of my definition that I mentioned earlier…
The coolest thing for me about cloud computing is that everything is virtualized and therefore virtual. I know that sounds dumb but bear with me as it requires further explanation. The hardest thing for most people to get past when they try to grapple with the concept of cloud computing is the fact that your server instance doesn’t physically exist, yet it looks feels and acts exactly like a physical server. When you reboot it you can access the BIOS just like a physical server. You can slam off the power to it just like a physical server. It can get hacked into oblivion just like a physical server. It can be backed up and restored just like a physical server (but that process is way better in the cloud).

Another great thing about this is the ease and speed of deployment. If you need 50 servers in 5 minutes, you can have 50 servers in 5 minutes. If you want to configure 1 server perfectly and then launch another similarly configured server, you can convert your server into a template and then spin up another instance based on that template. If your cloud is built properly you will most likely not use local storage. When I say local storage I am referring to the physical hard drives that typically live within the physical server that your particular website happens to live on. The reason it’s best to not do that is that you lose redundancy across the cloud. If you have an attached storage device and all of your server instances live on that device, physical servers simply connect to that storage device, grab the instances that they need and then they spin those puppies up. What this means for the average user is that if your instances are running on a particular server and that server happens to fail, your data is still intact because it lives elsewhere. And if the cloud is configured properly, available servers that have adequate amount of free resources will be notified automatically that a physical server failed and it will redirect other physical servers to lend a hand and spin up any instances that were left hanging. This is the auto healing feature of cloud computing has so many people sitting at the edge of their seat. Also if you have all of your data stored in one location it’s much easier to back that up and again if the cloud was built properly, you would have redundant storage or at least a storage device with lots of redundancy built into the chassis.

Now that we’ve learned how instances spin up and how they can be moved around, now let’s talk for a moment about how they are backed up and restored…
Unlike traditional backup systems that connect to your server, analyze the data that has to be moved and then they download the data either on a file by file basis or a block by block basis, cloud computing typically uses what is referred to as snapshots. Snapshots are essentially the equivalent of a photograph of your instance and its state at the moment that snapshot was taken. Snapshots are instantaneous, easy to archive and are fully functioning replicas of your server instances. The key thing to remember about that is the “fully functioning” part. What that means is that they don’t have to be restored, they just have to be booted up. There are people out there who would say “yeah that might be true but they have to be moved from the storage array back to the.. wait a minute, you said everything lives on the storage server, nevermind”. In a nutshell this essentially eliminates the need for time-consuming and often problematic server restores from backup devices. If your cloud is configured properly, you should be able to set snapshots to occur on a recurring monthly, weekly, daily and even hourly basis if needed. You can then select the number of instances that you want to retain and you just created a vast library of backups that you can access if needed. Another great thing about snapshots is that they are 1 ginormous file which makes them easy to move around and securely upload to an off-site location or even to your corporate headquarters for extra safe keeping. Of course, they should be encrypted because they could contain sensitive data.

Now let’s talk about the “scalable” & “elastic” part of my definition…
Scalability is quite easy with cloud computing because it’s typically something that you can do on-the-fly and from a web-based control panel. Unlike expanding the disk space on a dedicated server which requires taking the server down, transferring the data, swapping the drive, etc. Cloud Computing allows you to resize the drive from within the control panel in real-time. Depending on how the cloud is configured it might require a reboot but I would take that any day to double my disk space. Same thing with memory (RAM) because that is something that can be adjusted at the user level through a control panel and you can typically expand up to the available resources on the particular server node where your instances happen to live. But let’s take it a step further and make an assumption that for some reason you feel you need 24GB of RAM for your environment. It’s very unlikely that the physical server your instances would be living on would have 24 GB of available memory for you to utilize. However with a few clicks of a mouse on the control panel your instances could be transferred to a server node that has no other clients on it and just happens to have 32 GB of RAM. So yes it is very possible for a single server instance to have 24 or more GB of RAM. The only limitation that I’m aware of is the amount of physical RAM installed on the server node that your instance happens to live on in that particular moment. But again since all of your data lives on a separate storage device, it’s easy enough for the controllers to instruct a server node that has 32 gigs of RAM to spin up your instances thus providing you with this ridiculous amount of memory that you might need. CPU scaling works the same way so there’s no need for me to go into the gory details again. Bandwidth is a non-issue because most respectable providers have an over abundance of available bandwidth to provide to you.

I could literally go on all day about cloud computing because I am completely fascinated by the possibilities. Clients love it for the ease-of-use and power that it gives them over their environments. Providers love it because of the economies of scale and centralized management. As the clouds of the world mature, I believe that power users will begin to let their guard down and start dropping dedicated servers in droves to hop on the cloud. As long as you don’t take a significant performance hit by moving your application to cloud, the benefits of being on a properly configured cloud are astronomically lopsided when compared to a typical dedicated server environment.

Cloud computing has evolved past bleeding edge and some would say even passed cutting edge but like any emerging technology, there will be pain aplenty. You can mitigate your exposure by easing into it and testing the waters rather than taking your website to turns $1 million per month and yanking it from your perfectly stable dedicated servers and tossing it on the cloud. Rather I would recommend that you incrementally migrate your environment or better yet, build out a virtual development environment that mimics your current production environment. Since cloud instances can be purchased by the hour or by the month, the cost to do this is relatively low. Point is you can build a full-blown development environment that would cost you thousands and take potentially weeks to deploy, probably within a couple of hours while you sip on a latte in your home office. You could stress test this environment until you develop a level of confidence that would allow you to migrate into the cloud without sacrificing your peace of mind.

Thanks for reading this and I really do hope this was helpful.

My car is a 2008 M3 E93 (hard top convertible) and it has about 420+HP but weights close to 4,000lbs. While this car is clearly not track ready out of the box, it only takes a few thousand dollars to get you to the promise land, as I’ve learned. My ongoing dilemma has been that all I did was use racing brake fluid (Motul 600 or 660) and pop on racing pads before each event. The stock tires are Michelin Pilot Sport PS2 265/35/19 rear and 245/35/19 front, which are great tires but at 6,000 mi I’ve shredded the fronts and the rears have less traction than the reunion tour of New Kids on the Block. My goal is to be safe, go fast, finish track days without mechanical issues and save money without tearing up my street tires or my wallet. This all led me to the purchase and now I’ll outline a few reasons why I decided to do this.

Speed
Slicks provide better grip which allows me to go faster. Also I dropped close to 20lb of unsprung weight going from stock 19″ wheels to these super light 18′s which makes the car easier to stop, keeps the brakes cooler and lightens the load. 20lbs might not seems like much but it’s huge when it’s unsprung.

Brake Preservation
Dropping the weight on the wheels really does allow them to run cooler which will positively affect the entire braking system and will hopefully allow me to get through events without significant brake fade or other failure.

Tire Preservation
Since my stock tires are staggered (larger in rear, smaller in front) and the new ones are 275/35/18 square (same size all the way around) I can rotate the tires front to back, sided to side, corner to corner, flip them or whatever I need to do to extended the rubber life.

Money Preservation
While I had to drop $3,000 to buy everything, I can sell the wheels, spacers and lugs for pretty close to what I paid for them and I can even resell the tires if need be. So my actual cost when it’s all said and done will be far less than $3,000.

One issue is that since I am still relativity new to tracking my car, I’m learning in leaps and bounds as opposed to tiny increments. The events I frequent use different “run groups” which separate drivers by skill. Everyone starts in green, then blue, then yellow and after that you go red. After red you can probably be an instructor if you want to but I’m still trying to figure out why anyone would want to do that aside from the free track time in the instructor group. We are running at Texas World Speedway this weekend and I will be starting in the yellow group which is a step up for me but I have earned it by consistently driving faster than others in my run groups and by being safe, no spins and never had I gotten more than 90 degrees sideways. Which brings me to my next point that these tires are not very “audible”. In other words they are pretty quiet on the track so if you start to slide you don’t really get a warning, it just happens all of the sudden. The PS2′s scream like Richard Simmons at a George Michael concert. They let you know what’s going on and you can use that sound to make corrections. Slicks are not that friendly so when they let go (as I’ve heard) they just let go really quickly. So I’m a bit apprehensive as they also require a couple more laps for warm up. In fact I run (2) laps briskly and midway through the 3rd lap, lower the boom. At Eagles Canyon I got to run this new setup for a couple sessions and got sideways in a turn only to later lose all (4) wheels in another. Luckily I was able to reel it in quickly on both slides. Texas World Speedway is much faster so I will have less time to react but it also flows better so I’m not running 140mph to a hairpin turn and wailing on the brakes. On to the purchase and installation..

Tire Purchase:
BF Goodrich R1 275/35/18
Two words.. Tire Rack. They kick ass, heat cycled them for me, had them in stock and I got tire totes so I can transport them in the car without messing up the interior.

$1,048.00 – (4) tires
$      30.00 – Competition heat cycle all (4) tires
$      39.90 – (4) tire totes which are great BTW and highly recommended if you don’t have a trailer.
$      82.64 – Shipping to Dallas TX
$ 1,230.54 – Grand Total

~

Wheel Purchase:
D-Force LTW5 Lightweight Forged Alloy Race Wheel 18×9
Bought these at Turner MotorSports which is a great place but they did muff the shipping. They quoted me an extra $100 for 2nd day and when they realized they under quoted me, rather than calling me to ask what I would like to do, they shipped them regular ground. This could have caused me to miss my Sat track day because if they did not arrive on Friday, I was screwed. We were lucky and they arrived at 1PM on Friday so I had time to get them balanced, installed, spacers tested and then uninstalled and put in the tire totes. They sent me a sweat shirt as a “sorry about that” gesture and I appreciated that. Decided to go with flat black since they looked nasty and I like it like that.

$1,159.80 – (4) wheels
$     89.95 – pair of 12.5mm spacers (front)
$     96.95 – pair of 18mm spacers (rear)
$    69.60 – (10) 75mm studs (12 x 1.5)
$    69.60 – (10) 90mm studs (12 x 1.5)
$    45.00 – (20) 17mm (12 x 1.5) open lugs
$      0.00 – (2) loctite 262 thread lockers
$  204.32 – Shipping
$1,735.22 – Grand Total

Here are the tires delivered to my office and the wheels delivered to Autoscope with the spacers and lugs..

These things obviously look great and the weight savings combined with added grip means they should absolutely kick ass at the track.

~

Fast forward a couple weeks after I did Texas World Speedway, Nov 2009

~

Got to run the entire weekend (4 sessions per day) on these new tires and wheels and as expected they made a huge difference. Had one spin coming off the front straight which caused me to slide at least (50) yards off the track into the grass backwards. Don’t really blame that on the tires because I has just passed a good friend and was going way too fast into that corner. The spin was going to happen one way or the other simply because I was way carrying too much speed into the turn and I’m apparently not good enough to convert a rotten corner entry into a blazing exit. On the bright side, my lap times were cut by about (13) seconds which for me is HUGE. I also ran more consistently and on (3) complete sessions, all of my laps were within a few seconds of one another. Best time for me around Texas World Speedway clockwise was 2:04 and my goal there next time is to get under 2:00 by a few seconds.

Here is the spin and BTW, this is after I passed a bunch of cars:

In closing, for anyone trying to figure out which tires, wheels and spacers to buy for an E92 or E93 M3, I can honestly say that I feel as though I made the right choice. It was cost effective, everything is very high quality, the tires are awesome, the wheels are light like you would not believe and the results are in the (13) seconds I shaved off my lap times.

Side note:
I switched to Castrol SRF brake fluid for this last track day at Texas World Speedway and completed the entire weekend without any brake issues. Highly recommended over motul (which is still great stuff).

Till next time ~ John

~

Am I the only person having issue with horrible reception on AT&T in the Dallas area? I think not, since pretty much everyone I know who uses an iPhone is having issues.

Let me preface this by saying that despite it’s obvious shortcomings, I still love my iPhone. However I dislike the reception & rates. Data is fast, stable and works well almost all of the time. Voice is bad to the extent that I can’t (this is not an exaggeration) get through a call without some garbled crud on the other end. I’ve obediently followed the upgrade path as mandated by Apple. Bought the iPhone 1st gen, thought it sucked as a communications device but great for everything else. Held out on the 3G since I suspected something else would be coming soon so I jumped on the 3GS 32GB version.  3G was a huge upgrade in data but the voice started having issues right away. Went to the Apple store and they gave me a new one (kudos to Apple) which quickly started having the same issue. Went back a week later and they told me to reset the network settings and even suggested I turn off 3G and use the “older more stable Edge network”. That didn’t go over too well so they suggested I wait for AT&T to upgrade the system since that would “resolve any issues”. Reluctantly I agree but should have taken that nerd to the mat and made him give up a new iPhone on the spot.

Fast forward (2) weeks.

Tuesday – September 29th, 2009
I’ve struggled with the reception non stop for the past 2 weeks and someone told me today that they had reception issues, get a new iPhone from the Apple store last week and it works perfectly. So my guess is that Apple is instructing their staff to keep the masses at bay with the “AT&T upgrade” spiel in hopes that AT&T will actually do an upgrade one day. My other guess is that the hardware has an issue on certain lots of iPhones (like mine) and getting a new one that was manufactured in a different Chinese factory by a different child, just might do the trick. So I plan to bum rush a mac guy tomorrow morning and not leave his side until I get a new iPhone.

I’ll update this post in a couple days after I’ve had a chance to use the new iPhone for a while.

~

Wednesday – September 30th, 2009
Quick update from the Apple store..

Currently waiting to speak with someone for almost an hour now at the Apple store and jumped on a demo MacBook Pro since they have Wifi here . Will update later to see what happens, but I’m sick of waiting.

~

Friday – October 2nd, 2009
Two days later I have been using my new iPhone with much lack of success. This tells me that that iPhone itself is probably OK but as I suspected, AT&T still sucks. So there you have it, AT&T sucks and my iPhone is jonesing for a new provider. Somewhere I read that Verizon is getting it soon so instead of hearing nothing on the other end you can hear, “can you hear me now” over and over.

My three suggestions
1. AT&T should stop spending money on crap like this and upgrade their network
2. Apple should offer the iPhone through multiple providers and create some much needed competition
3. If you have a real job, get a Blackberry. If you’re an unemployed person with money, get the iPhone

~

Update – Sunday October 4th, 2009
After having spent the weekend in College Station (about 200mi S/W of Dallas) I can confirm without a doubt that the problem is not the iPhone, it’s AT&T. While driving back to Dallas from College Station I had a 2.5 hour call with no drops, no static, no in and out audio and it was crystal clear the entire time. That is until I got within about 20 miles of downtown Dallas and then the reception was very poor and the calls dropped twice until I got home. Unlike North Dallas, South Dallas is very undeveloped and one of the first signs you see of urban sprawl is the downtown skyline. So you are in the country and suddenly you see downtown. Point is I would assume that as my call jumped from tower to tower in the country, they were likely not oversubscribed to death. However the towers that carried my call into Dallas were probably oversubscribed more than AOL in it’s heyday.

So it’s official, AT&T sucks and the iPhone does not.

Now back to the iPhone issue:
My wife has a 3G and I have a 3GS, she needed the 3.0 update so she could copy, paste and a few other cool new features. She uses a Sony Vaio and I use a MacBook Pro so everything works differently when you have an issue. So I connected her iPhone to her notebook, started up iTunes, clicked the update button and watched in awe as it took a digital dump. Not only did it render the phone useless, iTunes could not see the phone at all. I tried reinstalling iTunes, rebooting the PC, restarting the iPhone, reinstalling the USB drivers, tried two different USB cables, used msconfig to stop all services except for ituneshelper and qtask and nothing. Having tried everything I knew and after scouring Google for answers I quickly realized it was going to be a long day and that I was NOT the only person suffering from the dreaded 1604 error.

This left me with no alternative but to call AT&T because I assumed that Apple would be unreachable only (2) days after the release of a new iPhone and iPhone O/S.

611 is the number you call from your cel to get AT&T support so I called and started navigating the prompts until I heard “for Apple iPhone support press 1″. Then I took a deep breath, settled back into my chair, took a sip of water, closed my eyes and reluctantly pressed 1. To my amazement within a single ring I was greeted by a friendly voice who appeared to speak English as a first language. He was friendly, calm, helpful and determined to resolve my issue quickly. We ended up doing basic troubleshooting and he quickly understood that I had a clue and had done everything correctly up until this point. He eventually confessed that Apple had no resolution for this error but said there was a work around and all I had to do was restore the iPhone on a different computer  and my Mac happened to be in my lap at the time. He stayed on the line as I did a quick restore and then plugged the phone back into the PC so it could sync again. It worked flawlessly and I was grateful but sure wish that tip had been in the FAQ on apple.com. It does say “try a different computer” but it doesn’t say “restore to factory settings on another computer and then sync to your normal computer” which would have been clear enough for me to figure it out without calling in. Either way my blood was starting to boil as I navigated the voice mail prompts but it quickly cooled off when this Apple rep (yes he worked for Apple, not AT&T) took charge and led me to the promise land.

Way to go Apple for excellent customer service and thanks again for not forcing me to speak with four different people who all call me Mr. John.

I actually had to find a rock and etch the password into the sidewalk so I could see it as I entered it into the WordPress app. Still love the iPhone but am amazed and frustrated almost daily by this oversight. And yes I changed my password to something I could remember.

Waiting patiently on 3.0 iPhone OS.

Quick Update on 6/21/09:
Got 3.0, it kicks ass, way to go Apple!