In January 2011 I downgraded my $30 mobile phone bill to $10 a month. Previous to paying $30 a month, I paid $50 a month. No longer was I able to make a “$270″ of phone calls on other networks over the GSM network. No longer was I going to pay $0.35 for each SMS. And no longer was I going to pay $0.89 to retrieve a voicemail message.

Thats right, I decided to stop paying the outrageous, overly exuberant prices Telecommunication companies in Australia wanted me to pay to use their network and services.

All I needed was a connection to a network that provided me with data. For $10 a month, I could get 500MB of data over a 3G or GPRS connection. Thats all I needed.

So for the last 9 months, my phone plan and habits are summarised as;

1. My monthly bill is now only $10 for 500MB of data.
2. Every 6 months I have to pay $30 to keep my mobile number to allow for incoming GSM calls. I also get $30 of credit for this.
3. I communicate with friends and family over IP. There are a plethora of applications on the iPhone that provide an infinitely better experience to communication than a SMS or even a phone call.
4. I use Acrobits Softphone as a VoIP client on my iPhone. It hooks into the contacts list on the iPhone, supports push notifications and I think is by far the best iOS SIP client. The app itself cost $7.49 and by forking out another $12 I was able to purchase the G.729 codec which provides better call quality over a 3G connection.
5. I pay a once off $20 fee to have an incoming DID. Included in this I also get $20 worth of VoIP calls.  By using asterisk, I have full control over time and destination based routing and reroute incoming calls to my DIDs to either voicemail or my SIP client depending on time of day.

The way I make outbound calls had to change. When I have any packet loss over a 3G connection or latency  due to a poor wifi connection, the quality of the call drops dramatically. This is usually followed by me asking the other person to call me back on my mobile number. If its a company I’m dealing with, the person I’m speaking to has no hesitation in doing this. If its a friend or family member, there is a bit of confusion and I quickly suggest I move this conversation over to IM or email.

From this how much have I saved?

For 2010, my monthly mobile phone plan cost $50. In 2011 its $10. So far I have saved $420 if I was to compare with this time last year. This brings a total yearly savings of $600 if I continue to stick with this for the next 3 months.

image by ryan_tir

Tim Ferris’ latest book, The 4 Hour Body, describes the ‘Slow Carb Diet’. I wont go over the details in depth but if you’re unaware of what they check are out the details here and here.

In summary, there are 5 general rules to the diet.

• AVOID ‘WHITE’ CARBS
• EAT THE SAME FEW MEALS OVER AND OVER AGAIN
• DON’T DRINK CALORIES
• DON’T EAT FRUIT
• TAKE ONE DAY OFF PER WEEK

3 months prior to starting the ‘Slow Carb Diet’ I quit the gym, ate alot of beans and legumes. I also started doing 5km runs 3 times a week. I weighed 105kgs back then. I now weigh 80kgs. I’m 30.

Here are some of the things I’ve learnt from being on the ‘Slow Carb Diet’ which has certainly changed the way I live and eat.

Cheat days can be expensive

Sunday is my cheat day. I can eat what ever I want and I do, eat, what ever, the fuck, I want. Shopping for my cheat day is like letting a 4 year child lose in lolly shop. A point made by Tim in the book is that you should only buy portions for your cheat day that will last just for your cheat day and no more. You dont want that half tub of French Vanilla Icecream sitting in the fridge during the week potentially triggering a mid week ‘cheat night’ which is against the diet.

I buy my food vices on special and on the cheap. Biscuits, Icecream, Chocolate are the usual suspects. I find that if If I don’t shop around and buy the treats on special, I could easily spend $25 just for a single days worth of junk food which is bit too much money I’d like to part with just to pig out and make myself feel sick.

Your partner will eat and cheat with you

I cook dinner every night and eat with my girlfriend. This means she too will also have to consume legumes, eggs and spinach.

After a couple of weeks this took its toll and she needed her nightly portion of carbs in the form of pasta, rice or a baked potato. I now cook these items for a single serving which she has, whilst I stick to foods that are inline with the diet.

The diet is a winner for busy people

I have not done any real cardio exercise besides playing basketball 2 hours a week since being on the diet. The diet is excellent for people who don’t have time to exercise alot though have the discipline to stick to the right foods. Don’t get me wrong, I still exercise but I’ve reduced my exercise regime down to 3 to 4 nights doing free weights and ab exercises on the ground and on a decline bench at home.

Feeling hungry is now a different feeling

Sure I get hungry, but the feeling is alot different to when I wasnt eating so many legumes, greens and no white carbs. These days, when hunger strikes I chomp on a single carrot, stick of celery or a couple of almonds and the hunger disappears. Previously, I would hunt for dry biscuits, fruit, cereal or just anything that would provide my stomach and brain with a quick fix. My way of thinking when it comes to food and nutrition has certainly changed because of the Slow Carb Diet.

Grocery shopping becomes more systematic

The onset of the diet forced myself to think differently when it came to purchasing food. Because of the first 4 rules of the diet, I would think long and hard about what I’d eat. Grocery shopping trips would be more strategic and reading labels and nutritional information on the food products I bought would now be part of my shopping routine.

I know exactly what my meals will consist of for the next week. Legumes, greens, beans, eggs, mushrooms with pork, lamb, beef or chicken. The shopping trips for these meals becomes more systematic, less time consuming and cheaper.

Get used to beans and legumes

Borlotti beans, mushrooms, spinach and 2 eggs is breakfast. Beans, lentils, spinach and a carrot is lunch. For dinner I will have a mix of more borlotti beans and white beans with a handful of almonds for something to munch on during the night.

To get the most protein out of your meals, beans and legumes are the way to go.

My body composition certainly has changed over the last 9 months and people I havent seen for a couple of months do notice it but this is not the most important part of this diet. Changing the way I think, eat and value food has been the most rewarding part for me. I feel I can continue with the diet for another 6 months at least but will carry the life changing knowledge, experiences and habits I’ve gained till I die.

Apple have subtly neglected to link iTunes 10.5 beta 2 for Windows on the iOS 5 beta dev center page.

For the bleeding edge type who run iTunes on Windows, iTunes 10.5 beta 2 is found on the iCloud downloads page.

http://developer.apple.com/icloud/downloads/

Server hostnames are important and they should be carefully thought out before a startup builds out its infrastructure. At the very least they should be descriptive enough to allow a technical person to loosely identify the servers business purpose.

Let me describe how I setup puppet manifest with descriptive server hostnames.

Firstly, I’ll point out why its important you need to think about a server hostname standard. Later you’ll see how this pays off when it comes to Puppet, the automated system configuration tool developed by Puppetlabs.

Lets say a server with a hostname webserver.example.com hooks into example.com’s infrastructure.

The problem with using a simple and very much non-descriptive hostname such as webserver.example.com is that the hostname itself provides very little information on the server’s purpose. All we know is that its a webserver belonging to example.com.

• Is it a development or production webserver?
• Physically, where is this server located?
• Is this the only webserver that belongs to example.com?

To resolve these issues, its important to provide descriptive hostnames to servers based on a meaningful namespace. By changing webserver.example.com to web01.prod.lon.uk.example.com we can immediately determine the following characteristics of the server and example.com’s infrastructure .

• It is 1 of potentially many web servers.
• It is a production web server.
• The server is physically located in the United Kingdom.
• More specifically it is located in London.
• It can be assumed that this server has a corresponding DEV, UAT, SVP and DR server which shares a similiar name (example; web01.dev.lon.uk.example.com).

These points are important in the way we can now handle nodes within example.com’s infrastructure using puppet.

Puppet supports classes which can be included by nodes. A class contains puppet manifest which is used to describe how the server is to be configured. Nodes in puppet define which servers can connect to puppetmasterd and pull down the manifest.

Below are node definitions for 3 servers. See how easy it is to identify the function of each server when we use a structured hostname standard?

node /web01.prod.lon.uk.example.com/ {
    include node_prod
    include node_lon
}

node /web01.prod.bej.cn.example.com/  {
    include node_prod
    include node_bej
}

node /web01.dev.cn.sha.example.com/ {
    include node_dev
    include node_sha
}

By using ‘include node_prod’ web01.prod.lon.uk.example.com will include a class with a name of ‘node_prod’. Likewise for web01.prod.bej.cn.example.com. web01.dev.cn.sha.example.com will include the ‘node_dev’ class. All 3 nodes will also include the class which is named after the city they are located in.

Moving onto the root, prod and dev classes, I then begin to define system configuration that should be applied to all servers that belong to example.com and then by building an environment class such as ‘node_prod’ I can be more specific about which configuration is applied to what server based on where it sits within example.com’s infrastructure.

Below I’m defining a hosts entry for ‘prod-smtp-server’ for all servers that include the ‘node_prod’ class which sit in the production environment. For development servers which include the ‘node_dev’ class a host entry of ‘dev-smtp-server’ is applied.

class node_example_com {
    host { “example.com”: ip => ‘10.1.1.1’ }
}

class node_prod {
    include node_example_com
    host { “prod-smtp-server”: ip => ‘10.0.0.254’ }
}

class node_dev {
    include node_example_com
    host { “dev-smtp-server”: ip => ‘10.1.0.254’ }
}

I will then drill down to location starting at the country level. Below are the UK and China classes.

class node_uk {
    host { “uk-gateway”: ip => ‘10.10.10.1’ }
}

class node_cn {
    host { “cn-gateway”: ip => ‘10.20.20.20’ }
}

Once I have country level classes, I define city based location classes.

class node_lon {
    include node_uk
    host { “london-proxy”: ip => ‘10.10.10.254’ }
}

class node_bej {
    include node_cn
    host { “beijing-proxy”: ip => ‘10.20.20.254’ }
}

class node_sha {
    include node_cn
    host { “shanghai-proxy”: ip => ‘10.20.30.254’ }
}

Using the power of puppet, its classes and inheritance with a well thought out server hostname standard from the first day you roll out your startups infrastructure will provide you with much more manageable infrastructure for the future. This should be obvious to any startup who wants to achieve scale.

Today at 3am Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT), all my Australian servers kicked over to the Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) timezone.

I had a 2am cron job running on one of these servers. The result of having a cron job that is triggered at 2am on a server which sits in a timezone that supports Daylight Saving is that the cron job is ran twice when the timezone comes out of Daylight Saving.

When the server comes back into the Daylight Saving timezone the cron job would not of ran at all.

Luckily for me, this cron job isnt business critical and the fact that it ran twice had no serious impact to the operations of the business.

Lesson I learnt today. Do not schedule cron jobs at 2am.

image by pedromourapinheiro

Like most others in my generation, I’ve grown up with a mobile phone and have accepted the fact that SMS and outbound GSM calls cost what they cost.

The way the Telco’s advertise their plans and rates, they are able to ‘brainwash’ the public into thinking whether the cost of an SMS or a GSM phone call is cheap or expensive.

Here are a couple of offerings from 3 Australian Telcos.

‘Bonus $100 on your first recharge each six months’

Woah, I get $100 just by recharging? Hang on, its not $100 in cash is it?

No. Its $100 worth of calls where the cost of each call is determined by an internal company committee whose main agenda is to deliver higher profits to the company and its shareholders.

What if your committee decides to bump the cost of a single call to $100? Do I get a grand total of 1 call if I recharge every 6 months?

‘I pay $149. I get $1,250 flexible credit + $1,250 telco to telco credit which equals $2,500 of total value. Plus I get 5GB and social networking.’

Holy smokes Batman. $2,500 of total value for $149. I’ll take 5 thanks. I’m sure I can sell these to 5 friends making a handsome profit of $11,755.

No. The $2,500 of value is made up of SMS, calls and data which can only be used on your network. The value of each piece of data, call and SMS is determined by your company.

‘$99 Plan includes $1,000 of standard national calls & SMS/MMS to any network + 2GB of data’

OK, I’ve already been burnt by the first 2 plans.

I know that your company dictates the cost of a ‘standard national call’ so I’ll just use $1,000 of SMS.

At $0.25 for each SMS, I can get a total of 4,000 SMSs on this plan for $99. That’s way more SMSs than I need.

As long as I use the GSM 7 bit character set, the SMSs I send will have a maximum of 160 characters which compressed takes 140 bytes.

140 bytes multiplied by 4,000 = 546 kilobytes.

For $99 a month I get to send 546 kilobytes of data to any phone on any network.

Where do I sign up?

image by liam-manic

Everyone has seen it before. An email sent to you with tens, perhaps hundreds of others who are on the To: and Cc: fields. The sender most of the time is well intentioned. Someone then chooses to hit ‘Reply All’ instantly relaying a one liner email that has no value to anyone on the list.

Sometimes it stops there. Other times it snow balls with others knowingly abusing ‘Reply All’ relaying more dribble.

Outside of a traditional work environment the cost of such an annoyance isn’t much. Perhaps some time away from looking at photos on facebook.

Inside the office, the cost can be much higher.

In one ‘Reply All’ incident I was a part of 663 people were on the initial To: list. A person replied to the entire list with a message that was only intended to be read by the sender of the original email.

After doing some math, I’ve attempted to calculate a rough finanical cost on how much the final ‘Reply All’ email cost the company.

663 people where in the To: field.

Lets assume each person spent 1 minute of their work day, reading, cursing and then deleting the email which results in 11.05 hours of total work time.

To get a dollar cost, lets say the average salary of everyone who received the 2nd email was $80k. Using howmuchdoimake.com, that works out to be $41 per hour or chunking it down even further, $0.69 per minute.

At $0.69 multiplied by 663 we get a grand total of $457.47.

Perhaps a ‘Reply All’ abuse filter should be a mandatory feature on any enterprise mail server?

image by acidally

For the last 18 months I’ve been training to dunk a regulation height basketball ring. Like most Saturday mornings I was at a Melbourne basketball stadium running the courts, wearing ankle weights and “backboard slapping” in an attempt to improve my vertical jump.

A regular to the courts walked in and began warming up. After 10 minutes he was getting serious air, hitting reverse and 2 handed dunks. This guy had phenomenal dunking ability, at least a 50” vertical and stood at 5’7″. Everyone else in the stadium stopped what they were doing and watched in awe.

I respectfully walked up and was keen to learn how he trained.

“How do you train to increase your vertical?”

His response was simple. “I dunk. Thats all I do.”

“What do you do?” he asked.

Without hesitation I answered “I run for 30 minutes 3 times a week, spend 2 days a week doing plyometrics and play ball Monday nights and Saturday mornings. My diet mainly consists of beans, carrots and tuna.”

“Why?” he asked.

I responded. “Because I’m training to dunk.” <br/>

“The only thing that is going to HELP YOU dunk, is TO DUNK.”

<br/> I stood there in silence and thought about what he just said.

My training regime had been all wrong. By concentrating on training techniques and tips I read from books by so called experts I had just been getting better at running, doing fancy exercises and playing basketball whilst risking injury.

My only goal was to dunk. Why wasnt I just concentrating on that?

On this day I learnt that Mark Susters advice on what makes a great entrepreneur, “Just Fucking Do It” applies to more than just being an entrepreneur. It applies to everything that I’m trying to get better at.

image by rubbertoe

Well, Melbourne had its first DevOps meeting today. A talk on Kanban and how it is used at REA was first up. The second talk was how the culture change at Lonely Planet that came about from merging development teams with operation teams has changed the way they release code. I liked the fact that LP created a new DevOps role within their company to help resolve issues within their company between development and operation teams. This role was to have control of both teams.

All in all, I think this first meeting was a brilliant step in the right direction towards the change that needs to occur in merging roles and responsibilities between development and operation teams and for both teams to get a better understanding on the value they provide to their company.

More photos can be found here.