TechED Malaysia

Just arrived in Kuala Lumpur for TechED Malaysia. High speed internet in the hotel room, lots of RDs here and tons of technical sessions this week, what else could a geek want? Well maybe a shorter plane flight! :)

Off to dinner with Adam Cogan and then we have a day of fun tomorrow.

High speed internet just rocks, I am IMing with my lead developer and using remote desktop to push his changes up to stage, all in Asia and the dev and server are in New York.What did we do before IM, broadband, and Remote Desktop? Suffer I guess. :)

SARS?

Back when VSLive was in town and I was walking around with some speakers from around the world, they were suprised at the police and national guard presence in New York. I said that while the world has gotten back to normal after 9/11, New York has not.

Well getting off the plane in Hong Kong a while ago reminded me that SARS is still a problem. Had to take a body temp test and fill out medial forms, and I am just a transfer passanger.

Off to TechEd (and other Adventures)

I am off at 11pm tonight to TechED in Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia. I get into KL at 2pm on Saturday due to the international date line. Nothing like a 20+ hour flight to catch up on some sleep, watch some movies, and do some work. I am now doing 5 sessions in KL, was drafted to do a chalk talk:

CHK9 Chalk Talk: Developing Mobile Applications wit NET Compaq Framework & SQL Server CE 2.0

DATE/TIME: 8/28/2003 14:45

My other 4 sessions are:

DEV203 ASP .NET DataGrid Drill Down

DATE/TIME: 8/26/2003 12:00

EDM207 .NET CF Database Development with SQL Server CE 2.0 ROI

DATE/TIME: 8/27/2003 16:00

DEV206 Efficient and Secure Data Retrieval in Your Middle Tier Using Stored Procedures and ADO. NET.

DATE/TIME: 8/27/2003 17:30

DEV315 Using Regular Expressions in Windows Forms and ASP .NET

DATE/TIME: 8/28/2003 10:30

Looking forward to seeing my fellow RDs:

Adam Cogan (Australia)

Tim Huckaby (US-San Diego)

Clemens Vasters (Germany)

Scott Hanselman (US-Portland)

802.11b WEP Encryption Sucks

Today is moving day. Right now the movers are doing their thing and I am sitting in my new apartment and my roommate Linda has WiFi with a LinkSys router. A bunch of us were here partying last night after rock climbing and when Shay and Linda were busy with Friendster.com I was worrying about getting my laptop to work here today (not to do work, but to blog of course). Last night Jack and Justin told me that they enabled WAP security on the router since “WEP security is better than no security.” I was concerned since Jack did not remember the WEP KEY or the admin password (Jack set up the WiFi for Linda). I said I will just hack the router.  Teammate Tom Halligan did not toss me under the bus for the first time in history and said “Forte can hack that in like 30 seconds."

Well more like 68 seconds. Will someone call the IEEE or whoever and let them know that WEP Encryption just sucks. I am not telling you what I did, but I did not want to reset the router and update the firmware since I don’t want anything to go wrong when I leave for Asia for 5 weeks tomorrow.

Brotherly Love

Today I move from W57th Street to E51st Street. Moving is not cool.

Then later on, I get on a train to speak at the Philly.NET Users Group. Can't wait, user groups are so much fun.

I'll be doing a quick session about RegEx then the main session on Web Data Binding (samples are not all here, but this is a link to the DataGrid Tech*Ed Session). I leave for Tech*ED in KL tomorrow and do both of these sessions, so it should be lots of fun. See you all there.

Arrest this Man: NYS License Plate # ROBB (T & LC)

A copy of my email to the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commissioner:

Today something unthinkable happened during our training bike ride in Central Park. On the last leg of the 40km ride a crazy livery cab started harassing us. (This is not that uncommon.) The harassment turned ugly when the car drove across two lanes of traffic and intentionally drove straight into teammate Tom Halligan (and clipping my right elbow at the same time). Tom was not thrown off the bike, but immediately a chase was on (lead by teammate Andy Catlin) and the car was swerving in and out of traffic to escape the park. Several bikers and other cars came to our aid.

We chased the car outside of the park and he was stopped at a red light. I yelled for him to “get out of the fucking car now” as another biker who came to our aid rode to the left of the car and I was on the right, all on Central Park West and about 95^th street. Then the car turned over the double yellow line and hit the second biker and drove down to Columbus avenue! That is the second intentional hitting of a pedestrian and leaving the scene of the accident. A few more bikers were behind me chancing the car down Columbus, and even pumping the fastest I have ever went (about 40mph on flat) we lost him around 72^nd street as the car drove on the wrong side of the road and went up a one way street to escape down the West Side Highway. Even down at 72^nd cars were pulling over offering his license plate and any other assistance possible.

Please arrest this man and never let him drive again in the State of New York.

They call this FUD

Stephen Forte’s Testimony to the New York City Council, April 29, 2003

Thank you all today for taking time to hear my testimony. My name is Stephen Forte, I was born and raised in New York City and am 31 years old. At the age of 23 I founded a high-tech consulting firm called The Aurora Development Group, which was sold 5 years later. I also served as the Chief Technology Officer of Zagat Survey here in New York from late 1999 until January 2002. Last April I co-founded Corzen, based up at Union Square where I currently serve as Chief Technology Officer.

I have had to do the economic and technical analysis of whether to use Open Source in my operations twice, once at Zagat where we had a 5 million dollar technology budget but not enough time and money to meet our deadlines for an IPO and second when I founded Corzen last year with only $300,000 of initial investment. Time to market and saving money was very important at Corzen epically since I did not get a paycheck until December 2002.

As a small business owner and resident of the City of New York for over 31 years, I appreciate the magnitude of the current budget shortfall. It may be tempting to make a blanket policy stating that the City must only use Open Source software to save money. On the surface Microsoft Windows, for a typical server machine configuration costs approximately $6,000. Linux costs nothing. Surely Linux is cheaper. Isn't it?

On the surface it appears that way. But once you dive into the details you will see that Open Source is not free and that while it may have a place in your organization as well as mine when the technology deems fit, there should be no blanket “Open Source” only policy. This is a policy I would strongly urge the council not to spend any taxpayer time considering. Here is why.

A benchmark recently performed by the non-profit TMC (www.tmc.org) compared a Linux machine running IBM’s middle tier software WebLogic/ WebSphere compared to a Windows Server machine running Microsoft middle tier software .NET. At this moment in time there is no viable open source “middle tier” component to compete with the IBM or Microsoft offerings. Just a technical note, the middle tier is what makes your custom applications work: the web server, the application server, the runtime environments and the programming languages.

The TMC broke down the cost of the server machine into three components: the hardware, the operating system (Windows or Linux), and the infrastructure (.NET, WebLogic, or WebSphere). Since the hardware was the same in all benchmarks, the differentiating costs were due to the operating system and the infrastructure.

It turns out that the cost of the operating system is relatively insignificant in the overall server costs. Of the total WebLogic server cost of $76,990, only $5,990  was attributable to Windows. Of the total WebSphere server cost of $84,990, again, only $5,990 was for Windows. In neither case was the cost of Windows more than 8% of the total server cost.

However the use of Linux does have one dramatic cost consequence. It eliminates the possibility of using .NET as the application server infrastructure. Since Linux does not have a comparable infrastructure, the use of Linux thus dictates the use of either WebSphere or WebLogic. While you are paying for Windows Server, the middle tier is built right into it so the costs of the middle tier are quite low when factored in as part of the cost of the Operating System.

While the cost of the operating system is relatively insignificant in the overall server cost equation, the cost of the infrastructure is not at all insignificant. WebLogic costs $40,000. WebSphere costs $48,000. This is as much as the server hardware! .NET, in contrast, cost nothing. It is part of the Windows operating system. The bottom line is that in order to save $5,990 of operating system costs, one must lock oneself into a "free" operating system that will require an additional $40-48,000 for server infrastructure!

TMC did not include the cost of the database in their benchmark cost analysis. This was a rather odd decision, given that the database is just as critical to this benchmark as is the operating system or the infrastructure. Had TMC included the cost of the database, the cost analysis would have further favored .NET, given that Microsoft SQLServer is much less expensive than either Oracle or DB2.

I am not advocating the use of Microsoft .NET over IBM or Windows over Linux, what I am saying is that the cost of open source software is not free, and for enterprise wide applications not even less expensive then a comparable non-open source platform.

When I was the CTO of Zagat Survey I had to do similar analysis. Preparing for an IPO, we were not scalable in our web site costs. Meaning that as the total amount of users went up, the cost per user was not going down. I was being pressured by the Board of Directors, one of which was the founder of Sun Microsystems to use the Linix/Java/J2EE approach on our Web Site. When I came in as CTO I inherited a site running on the open source platform using the Java platform. The site had cost us $650,000. The problem with the site was that for what we paid for we got only the “bare bones”, the vendor told us to increase traffic a factor of 10X, we would have to spend an additional 5 million dollars. My own analysis supported this view as did the Venture Capitalists who invested 34 million dollars in the company. In addition the total cost per user would go UP, not down!

I concluded after months of research that I can increase traffic by 20x and decrease the total cost per user by 1000% by not using open source technology. In a meeting on June 13^th, 2000 with the board of directors I justified my approach based on my open source analysis:

“Everybody knows that we must have scalability if we are to build a web site that we can go public with. Surprisingly, very few people have any idea what scalability actually means. I consider a system to be "scalable" if we can add more workload to the system without increasing the cost of the system per unit of workload. The common unit of workload for a web site system is a transaction. If the commerce system is an on-line store, then the transaction equates to an actual sale. If the commerce system is a bank, then the transaction equates to a banking transaction. In the case of Zagat.com a transaction is a pure database read, which is almost each and every page.”

I went on to conclude that the June 2000 version of our web site which cost $650,000 broke down after 300 concurrent users (nobody denied this, this was the reason why I was before the BOD.) I proposed a “Microsoft” solution for 1.2 million dollars, not the 5 million. William Ford of General Atlantic Partners said to me, never have I offered a CTO 5 million dollars and he came back ask said he only wanted 1.2.

I got permission to build the site and as development took place from July to December 2000, Zagat’s needs grew, so we had to add capacity. We spent only $300,000 over our budget of 1.2 million (compared to 5 million) and achieved 20x user base and 1000% decrease in cost per customer. In December 2000 the site launched and has not been “down” since. That is 2.5 years of uptime for a real cheap price tag.

Exhibit 1. Total Cost Per User at Zagat.com

Total Cost Per Customer
	June 2000 (Java)	Proposed	December 2000	Future Plans
Hardware	$80,000.00	$210,000.00	$300,000.00	$420,000.00
Hosting	$90,000.00	$168,000.00	$264,000.00	$528,000.00
Human Resources	$480,000.00	$700,000.00	$800,000.00	$900,000.00
Software	$0.00	$150,000.00	$200,000.00	$250,000.00
Total System Cost (Annual)	$650,000.00	$1,228,000.00	$1,564,000.00	$2,098,000.00
Max Simultaneous Customers	300	6,000	10,000	20,000
Total Cost Per Customer	$2,167	$205	$156	$105

The Open Source community is dynamic and exciting. There are pieces of my architecture both at Zagat and at Corzen where I use Open Source products (SendMail for instance). I would like to conclude with a warning. Unix was plagued by different “flavors” and “distributions” that dramatically increased TCO. This fragmentation is now occurring in the Linux space. Take a look at this quote:

"’Enterprises now realize that they are writing to a distribution, not to Linux in general. What works on Red Hat Advanced Server will not work on SuSE Linux,’ Schwartz [Sun's executive vice president of software] said. ... There is little doubt that the notion of ‘Linux and free have gone away. Red Hat's pricing model now makes that clear,’ he said.”

-          Sun Drops Its Linux Distribution, in eWeek, March 28, 2003By Peter Galli http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,981455,00.asp

I would like to thank the council for taking the time to hear my testimony today.

The Big E

So many people have asked many different types of questions about my trek up Mt. Everest (starting after TechEd on August 30th) that I decided to do a brain dump here. Ken Getz's sister asked two important questions here:

I am sitting in my office at Corzen in Union Square, having just brought the servers back up. It has been a long 40 hours or so.

Thursday 4:11 pm. Corzen’s Office @ Union Square

I am oddly sitting in the server room working on a staging server when all the Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSes) start to chirp. I know that only badness will follow. About 30 seconds later, the power goes. Everyone is calm since we are in a very old and has a power outage every once in a while. So my business partner and Corzen’s CEO, Bruce Murray and I decide to go and get a few beers at the local bar to wait it out.

Thursday 5:00pm. Park Bar @ Union Square

As more people start to filter on in the bar, we realize that this is bigger than we thought. At first we thought it was just local to our building, then our general area, but then we heard about Canada and such. We immediately thought terrorism (we are New Yorkers) and ran back to the office and plugged a TV into a UPS and saw some CNN. We decide to all walk home, Bruce and Bob Plummer (our director of Indicator Services) both live in Brooklyn, so they left for a 5.5 mile walk over the Brooklyn Bridge.

Thursday 6:30pm. West 57^th Street

I finally get home. Being the CTO, I was the last to leave the office and it only took about 45 minutes to walk home. Since it was mobbed with people and about 94 and humid, I was drenched. (I also had tix for a bway show that night, so I was dressed not in my typical shorts and tee shirt.) I peeled off my clothes and showered with all the windows open in my apartment for light. After my shower I was making some phone calls to my teammate Tom Halligan (who was in Long Island WITH power) and his wife stuck home on 11^th Avenue without power and my buddy Richard Campbell in Canada for information. I get hungry around 8pm and go out to look for some food.

Thursday 9:45pm. East 89^th Street

So my quest for food brings me to the east side where I actually hook up with my running partner and walk her home (she was walking home alone and I had a flashlight.) After I drop her off I walk down 5^th avenue, all along Museum Mile and to my disbelief, I see stars! Yes total constellations, like I was in the woods. I can hear the crickets in Central Park. It was so strange just walking home in such darkness. When I mean pitch black, I mean pitch black. When I get home to my building there was a little party going on, cheese and wine set up, and chairs. Talked about my Everest trip with my building owners (who are Everest junkies and climbers themselves) and I helped a bunch of people up the stairs with my flashlight (good Everest training.) When I was done, I climbed the 14 flights to my apartment and went to bed.

Friday 4:14am. West 57^th Street

I was awaken by the sounds of the power turning on! I turned on my AC and thought that the worst was over.

Friday 6:00am. Engineers Gate, Central Park

My running partner arrives and she is still without power. The whole east side of Manhattan is still without power. We run and it is nice and cool. When I get home I realize that just about 75% of the city is still without power. My phone goes out and the cell phone is spotty, very spotty. Bruce calls me and said that power is still not back in Union Square, don’t even think of coming in until it is. So I do laundry, clean my apartment and pack my bags for my Everest trip in the comfort of my air conditioning (I feel very guilty, but it was HOT).

Friday 4:00pm. Central Park South

I just completed a 30km circuit in 57:04 on my OLD bike. This was by far the best time I have ever had. Some friends come on over (who STILL don’t have power) and a good time is had by all. Total power is restored to the city by late evening. The subways still don’t work.

Saturday 12:00pm Corzen’s Office @ Union Square

The subways are open and I get down to the office and brought the servers back up. Life is back to normal.

You can go home again…

Tonight was a major homecoming, for many reasons. I was born in Flushing, Queens and spent the first 18 years of my life four miles from Shea Stadium, home of the New York Mets. My late Grandfather took me to my first Mets game in May of 1977 (a loss against the San Diego Padres, I still have the ticket.) I also worked for the Mets as a stadium vendor from 1987 to 1994. So I have been to at least one Mets game every year since 1977, and from ’87 to ’94 I must have worked over 500. Tonight was my first and only game of this season. So as my pal Kyle and I traveled on the 7 train to Shea tonight to watch the Mets take on Barry Bonds and the San Francisco Giants it was a bit of a homecoming for me.

But despite what my teammate Tom Halligan says, this blog is not all about me. Tonight was a very special Mets game for Mets fans. Superstar Mike Piazza officially came off the disabled list after missing the last three months of the season. So tonight was Mike’s homecoming and first game as a Met since early May.

Let’s just say that this game was one of the best games ever. I have never seen Mike Piazza hit a home run and most of the games I go to the Mets lose. Not tonight. Mike hit a 2 run home run and two singles for 5 RBIs in his first game back. The place went wild.

In addition to killing the first place SF Giants 9-2 tonight, there was insult added to injury. Pitcher Steve Trachsel hit an RBI double! That never happens non-baseball fans. Steve also pitched 7 2/3 solid innings.

But wait there’s more. Smart ass Barry Bonds (how dare he compare himself to Babe Ruth) had a horrible night. He actually got a hit but was tossed out trying to stretch it to a double. Then in the 8^th inning, they pinch hit for him! I think that the last time someone pinch hit for Barry was in 1986.

The only bad point of the game was at the 7^th inning stretch when RD Mom Eileen Crain called to tell me that Scott Hanselman and myself are in trouble due to some emails we sent on a private alias. I told her that she should chill out (which made her more mad) and had to call Scott to tell him the deal and then he called her and then I called her when I got home. We all love each other again, but I think it is kind of funny that news can travel so fast, from Redmond, to Flushing to Portland in a matter of 2 minutes without the aid of a computer.

Homecoming was fun and congratz again Mike.