In September 2011 I wrote about the data only mobile phone plan I had been on since January 2011. This came about by simply changing 3 recurring monthly expenses I had which resulted in a yearly saving of $1364.

28 months later, I’m still on a data only plan and in fact have reduced it from $10 a month to $5 a month which has resulted in $1200 of savings.

For $5 a month, I receive 500MB of data of which I only use about 400MB. I have a traditional mobile number that can’t make outgoing calls or SMS though can receive incoming calls and SMS. All outbound communication on my phone is done over the Internet.

Skype, WhatsApp, Acrobits Softphone, iMessage, Viber and email are applications that get used the most. Real time notifications from systems I manage is done with Prowl.

Some important points about the setup I have

1. My monthly bill is $5 a month plus every 6 months, I pay $30 to keep my mobile number which also gives me $30 of credit.
2. I have a Skype In number which costs $16 AUD every quarter which is used for work purposes. I also purchase $16 worth of Skype credit which typically lasts 6 months to make outbound overseas calls.
3. Attending meetings and appointments means that I can’t be late and also I have to know exactly where I’m going as I typically don’t have the luxury of calling others attending the meeting letting them know I’m running late or to ask for directions.
4. I always ask if someone has an account on a service like WhatsApp, Viber, Skype if I need to communicate with them on my phone. At the very least I will grab their email address.
5. At the office, I have purchased a Linksys SPA3102 which I can plug into the PSTN. I’ve setup Asterisk, Blink and Acrobits Softphone to route outbound landline and mobile calls through the SPA3102. The phone line which I need for the ADSL line in the office comes with $15 worth of monthly calls which is what the SPA3102 uses for outbound calls. I also VPN into the office with my phone and am able to use this line with Acrobits Softphone too.

I don’t see myself ever returning to a monthly phone plan which includes outgoing calls and SMS unless my work circumstances change dramatically. I have also previously written on why these types of plans are broken.

itnews.com.au is reporting that Amazon are preparing to go live with an AWS data center in Sydney.

Amazon Web Services will begin serving customers from its first Australian data centre on Tuesday, ending more than a year of speculation. The cloud computing giant has data centres in the US, Brazil, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo and edge nodes in seven other European countries, China and Sydney. Several sources told iTnews that it was moving hardware into Australian facilities late last year.

On November the 6th, a posting appeared on the Linux Australia Jobs mailing list, for a Cloud Support Engineer for Amazon based in Sydney.

ninefold was the premier choice for many organisations who had requirements to keep their servers and data within Australia for legal or latency reasons, though with this inevitable move into Australia for AWS, the competition in the Cloud space for Australian businesses is now seriously hotting up.

Update 13/11/2012

Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, has blogged on the launch of the new AWS region in Sydney.

In July 2011 DigiNotar, a Dutch Certificate Authority, was a victim of a major compromise of their infrastructure and certificate signing servers. 2 months after the attack, DigiNotar declared bankruptcy.

A year on, Fox-IT, an independent security company which asked by DigiNotar to investigate the intrusion, has released a fascinating 101 page report providing a deep insight into the breach.

Ted Nyman writes how social media is desecrating and cheapening our real world experiences transforming them into database entries sitting on server disks some where in suburban Virginia.

The end-game is this. Slowly, gradually, without realizing: we stop participating in our own lives. We become spectators, checking off life achievements for reasons we do not know. At some point, everything we do is done soley to broadcast these things to casual friends, stalkers, and sycophants.

Read The Horrible Future of Social.

In November, 2011, my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) and I came back from 5 weeks of traveling in Europe. We decided that we’d experiment with staying in apartments which we would find on AirBnB. On previous trips, we chose to stay in hotels so I was slightly apprehensive that a bad experience in staying in someone’s apartment would sour our trip. Boy, was I wrong.

The ‘AirBnB experience’ forced both of us to immerse ourselves in the culture within each city we lived in. No longer were we waiting in hotel elevators with other tourists. No longer were we greeted by hotel employees who forgot our name once we checked out. No longer were we ‘staying’ in 1 bedroom hotel rooms where a wet room, a widescreen TV with a splattering of American news TV channels and a turnover service which was considered ’boutique & luxury’.

We found ourselves trekking up flights of stairs with groceries we bought from local grocery stores, eager to cook in our very own kitchens. We’d then eat the food we cooked on our own private balconies watching the world go by. We’d regularly bump into ‘neighbours’ and foolishly attempt to start a conversation in their native tongue. Hola! Guten Tag! Dobrý den!

In Barcelona, our water system broke and I took pleasure in fixing it. We stumbled around beautiful Barcelona in awe of its glory and eventually found a plumber who didn’t speak a word of english but was patient enough for me to explain the part of the water system that broke and was gracious enough to provide that part to me for ‘gratis’. Another experience I’ll never forget.

I’ve thought about the experience and will always go the AirBnB route everytime I travel. Below are several reasons why I value the AirBnB experience so much.

Your Own Washing Machine.

Ever stay in a hotel and wanted to wash your jeans and shirt?

“Sure Sir, we can get that done for you for 10 Euros for your shirt and another 10 Euros for your jeans.”

With staying in an apartment fully decked out with a washing machine and sometimes a balcony, washing our clothes was always a pleasant experience. The cost to us was only a few Euros for washing detergent which sometimes came with the price of our apartment.

Your Own Cooking Facilities.

Traveling for long periods can make you appreciate a home cooked meal. Try staying 3 weeks in Italy and not being sick of pasta, pizza and cheese.

At each apartment we had a stove with at least 2 hot plates, a sink, enough cutlery and plates for four people and sometimes a dish washing machine.

Every morning I would cook a hot breakfast, usually bacon, eggs, mushrooms and tomatoes.

A fridge also helped store fruit and drinks. Not all hotel suites provide you with a fridge, and the suites that I have stayed in had small fridges that wouldn’t fit much in them.

Cheaper than a hotel.

Prague cost us $98 a night, Vienna was $75 a night and Budapest cost us $68 a night. Compare this to the average hotel price for a standard double room which is reported by the Trivago Hotel Price Index chart and you’ll discover that the average price of a hotel in Prague is $114 a night. Vienna is $144 a night and Budapest comes in at $86 a night.

You have your own tour guide.

Our hosts would provide us with enough information in the form of books, guides and maps on places to visit, restaurants to eat at and sites to see. They were also available over the phone if we found ourselves in any trouble or had any questions.

Live like a Local.

We felt like locals, living in apartment buildings with locals. At the very least, we would greet every person with a smile and a greeting in their language.

For the entire holiday, we lived and ate like a local. This is how I will travel from now on.

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