Jay’s Not Here

Today is the last day of Energy Saving Week 2009. It’ll also be the last day I’ll be running my 108-watt-when-idle development server. I decided to replace it with the new Mac Mini Server and see if that really lives up to all the marketing hype. Here’s a quick summary:

Pros:

• Sips a measly 13 watts when idle. That’s a whopping 87% energy savings over my old server.
• Hourly back ups to a dedicated hard drive, out of the box. It’s configured as a twin 500 GB set up; one for the OS and the other for Time Machine.
• It’s great as a collaboration server: VPN, VNC, SSH, CalDAV, http/https, Open Directory, per-user/group wikis and blogs right out of the box—but if your DNS server isn’t configured properly (or you have no authority to make changes on it) you’re hosed. Good luck finding help.
• Open Directory + SVN = pure awesomeness; no more mucking around with htpasswd files—users can change their password themselves using a built in web interface.
• Makes a great media server—plays 1080p video full screen very smoothly; even across a (wired gigabit) network share (hosted by a dedicated hardware RAID5 unit).
• It was a hell of a lot faster to set up all those services compared to my old Linux server (I still have nightmares about IPsec and ypserv configuration); and I didn’t have to download/compile anything either. I only had to edit config files to get Apache/SVN working.

Cons:

• You need to administer your own DNS server for everything to work. DNS is painful and very tricky to get right if you haven’t set it up before. Luckily the Tomato router firmware, which includes dnsmasq, is good enough to get everything working. It doesn’t run on all routers, and the ones that it does support only transmit at 802.11g speeds (i.e. 54 Mbits max).
• Kerberos and iCal Server are a huge pain to set up unless you’ve got a fully functional DNS server with fully-qualified forward and reverse mappings for your machines.
• Prone to stealthy name collision problems: if you’ve got a nasty habit (like I do) of creating a local admin account with the same username as your Open Directory user account, you’re in for a whole lot of set-up pain.
• Server Admin keeps overwriting my Apache settings You can prevent that by putting your stuff in a separate .conf file and Include it from the main config.

The newly released Mac Mini Server caught my eye. It boasts 16 watts of power usage when idle—that’s just 2 watts more than the base Mac Mini. So I busted out my handy Kill-A-Watt meter to see how my existing boxen farm measures up:

Note to self—don’t forget to turn off the TV.

[1] Assuming a constant rate of $0.093 per kWh (which is currently the peak usage rate in Ontario) and 24/7 idle time. Costs will be higher when the devices are under heavier load.

I heard back from the ethics review board today about my study. They weren’t happy about how I used the word “remuneration” so I decided to look it up on Wikipedia.

Apparently, someone was able to sneak this in:

Renumeration can include:
…

• Eating boiled eggs to gain usage of supernatural powers

I had my first participant come into the lab for my first qualitative study. The session went fairly smooth except for a few wrinkles. I’m studying expert software developers—i.e. people who code to put food on the table. I learned quite a lot:

• An interruption-free environment lets a coder focus on their task so much they can lose track of time and let 3 hours pass. (Ahh, memories of undergrad assignments…)
• My idea of easy can be very, very different from someone else’s.
• Coders don’t like think-aloud experiments. They just want to do things their way.
• I need to make the task even shorter.
• Even though your screen recording software has a crash recovery feature, DO NOT TRUST IT!^[1]
• The last GO Bus going home leaves Union Station at 0040h. Not a good idea to miss that one, lest I want to spend the night downtown…

Now it’s time to go over all the data. Luckily I have all 3 hours worth of source code deltas, browser history, and IDE metadata, despite losing 2 hours worth of video. Some data is better than no data.

^[1]
I made the awful mistake of thinking my data was safe after recording the session. The program was in the middle of transcoding the capture data to a standard movie file and I stupidly decided to close the lid of my laptop to put it to sleep. Of course, when it woke up, the screen recorder crashed, but I knew it had a crash recovery feature that allows transcoding to resume. Well, it did continue, but the last 2h10 of the recording was all green screen. It only salvaged the first 50 minutes.