Migrating Windows 10 from a spinning disk to a SSD

A few weeks ago I helped a friend with his computer, an older HP based desktop machine. What I noticed when checking his installation was that his HDD has some issues and as part of upgrading the machine to make it more usable we also agreed to move from an old spinning disk / HDD to a modern SSD. What we saw on the machine was in the Windows task manager that the system was hanging and waiting for IO. The HDD clearly had a problem and he started to at least make backups of his drive regularly (I hope).

To make a long story short, I ordered a nice Crucial 1TB SSD and started to work on the machine, using Linux and simply cloning the disk via dd – which simply did not and the machine would not boot, not even the repaid partition…. So what to do as the systen was fully secured and used a Uefi enabled boot process. This technology had been introduced some time back to protect systems from rootkits, malicious software that changes the boot process and gets very deeply embedded within a given system.

After multiple tries and failures (and some research I got it working, here is the process I used), based from an Ubuntu 22.04 live CD.

1. clone the partition table
   In this case it was pretty easy to do so as both disks had the same size. sfdisk is your friend here. You basically copy the old partition table into a file and then rewrite the partition table to the new disk. Step one done.
2. cloning the NTFS partitions
   now we need to start looking at the partitions. When using Linux you can either use a commandline tool like “lsblk”, fdisk or if you prefer a UI (assuming you don’t use command line), gparted is your friend. In my case I had 5 partitions on the disk, 3 of them were NTFS (Windows partition, some hidden windows partition and the recovery partition) – to of them were fat and unknown.
   To clone the NTFS partition ntfsclone helps and does the job quickly. In my case I did a disk to disk copy without writing to an image, so I used the “–overwrite” option. One problem I ran into was that indeed the HDD had issues and quite a lot of faulty sectors. the “–rescue” option tries to fix them or skips the sectore, so I cloud in the end clone the Windows partitions.
3. clone the efi and boot partition
   for the other 2 partitions, dd did the job quickly, unsing the “bs=1M” option. Business as usual there.
4. cloning the MBR
   For the system to boot, I finally cloned the MasterBootRecord (MBR) from the old disk to the new disk.
   For me the following command worked well
   sudo dd if=/dev/old_disk of=/dev/new_disk bs=512 count=1
5. rebooting the system
   After this I could simply reboot the system. Of course, Windows complained, collected data and rebooted into a working system.

As I said, this solved the issue for me, no problem rebooting from the SSD afterwards multiple times. The trick I think is that sfdisk copies the whole partition table plus the IDs, so Windows does not see a big enough change there. To be sure I also triggered a “chkdsk /f” from an elevate rights shell (Shift-Ctrl pressed when opening the terminal). On the next reboot Windows will check the disk before booting the system.

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Some thoughts on Android and iOS

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I have been mentioning it in the past to people in direct discussions, but I stumbled across an interesting article today:

https://www.mactechnews.de/news/article/Android-Selbst-ohne-Nutzung-uebermittelt-Google-340-Datensaetze-pro-Tag-mit-Nutzerdaten-170299.html

Even if this text is in German – it links to a study done in 2018 on data transmission in Android. Here’s the full whitepaper (in English). The net of the study is (and the German article) that Android seems to send about 350MB of your data back to google per month. 1/3 is your location data.

I keep having conversations with people that wonder why they get adds on something they recently spoke about, searched for or stopped in a shop – this is simply why.

There is one huge difference between iOS devices and android. When you buy an Apple phone, you basically pay for the hardware AND the software. When you buy an Android phone (or get one), you pay money for the hardware, the Software is perceived to be free. But in fact, you are paying: with your data! And you should be aware of
that.

My wife recently jumped into one of these conversations, that she had a discussion to look into some product and she then saw ads for it. As she is using the google apps on iOS (that is also stated at least in the article), google collects data that way as well. I pretty much stopped using native google apps on my devices now, but of course I do use google search and maps here and there. But I find to use it less and less as there are alternatives for search. VoWe had mentioned a few last week, with DuckDuckGo being pretty much the most known one.

Now, having said all of this, I keep hearing: “what do I care about my data privacy, I have nothing to hide”. What you forget on this statement is (as much as it is true), there is the concept of “Big Data” out there that is now able to connect in a short time various data bits into a bigger picture. One example from my own experience:

I was caught speeding (just a bit, but got a ticket). As I was pretty sure I had not been there at the given time, I was thinking how to be able to proof it. I remembered Google
location and checked my location profile for that day – just to find that I had been there at the given time and the ticket was valid. So, what I am trying to say: Any bit of data you are giving away can be a piece in a bigger puzzle that helps companies to understand your behavior patterns better and better.

I think everyone has noticed that when you go back to a website to book travel, very often the offers you wanted to get are gone the next time you log back in. Or are more
expensive. Companies are really good at this as you leave data every time you visit the website. With the data from google now they know pretty well if you are planning a trip (because you were searching on various sides) or if you are just window-shopping. In the first case they can for sure raise the price and make you pay more as you really want to buy…. Think about it.

 

Bye Bye Opel

Seit ich denken kann bin ich Opel gefahren. Gar nicht, weil ich irgendwie die Marke besonders toll fand, sondern weil unsere Familie immer Opel gefahren ist und ich auch über sehr lange Jahre Autos bei einem guten Freund kaufen konnte, der immer wieder bewiesen hat, daß er sich um meine Autos kümmert. Das alles war mir immer sehr viel mehr Wert, als eine andere Marke zu fahren.

Warum habe ich jetzt gewechselt? Das ganze hing mit meinem letzten Fahrzeug zusammen, da ich es jetzt verkauft habe, kann ich auch offen über die Story reden.

Bei dem Auto handelte es sich um einen Insignia BiTurbo, im Grunde ein nettes Auto und ausreichend.

Mal abgesehen davon, daß Opel offensichtlich immer wieder mal Probleme mit zumindest den Entertainmentsystemen hat (bei meinen letzten drei Fahrzeugen ist das Navi regelmäßig abgestürzt oder hat sich aufgehangen) war es am Ende der Service, er mich als Kunden absolut verärgert hat!!

Das ganze fing damit an, daß mich eine Werkstatt in Walldorf anrief, ob ich noch eine Inspektion vor dem Ende der Garantie machen möchte – an sich eine gute Idee, ich hatte das Auto dort zur Reparatur des Kondensator der Klimaanlage.

Die Inspektion an sich lief ohne Probleme, da ich aber auch in diesem Auto nach knapp 2 Jahren Probleme mit dem Navi hatte (abgesehen davon, daß es einfach nur langsam war), hatten wir ausgemacht, das Navi upzudaten und neue Firmware auf das Auto aufzuspielen.

Lassen wir die Diskussion für den Moment mal außer acht, warum ich als Kunde für sowas überhaupt zahlen soll, daß Fehler, die der Hersteller in der Software einbaut, behoben werden, der entsprechende Mitarbeiter war erst nach Ablauf der Garantiefrist verfügbar, mir wurde zugesichert, daß man das Update als Garantieleistung übernehmen würde.

Nachdem das Update erledigt war, bekam ich einen Anruf der Werkstatt, man habe eine Problem. Das Zulassungsdatum in den Papieren sei falsch. Diese Aussage an sich ist eigentlich schon eine Frechheit (denn dann gäbe es irgendwo wohl eine Urkundenfälschung) war die eigentliche Aussage, daß man das Update nicht auf Garantie machen könne.

Die Diskussion mit der Werkstatt ging einige WOchen hin und her, letztlich hat der Freund in das System von Opel geschaut und wir konnten herausfinden, warum der Händler die Aussage gemacht hat (denn mein Freund hat sich natürlich in seiner eigenen Ehre angegriffen gefühlt). Der Insignia ist im Nov 2014 ausgeliefert worden, wurde aber erst im Jan 2015 zugelassen. Ein typisches Quotenauto also.

Nun ist es allerdings so, daß Opel klar sagt, daß die Garantie anfängt ab dem Tag der Erstauslieferung, nicht ab dem Tag der Zulassung. Somit hat der Händler in Walldorf also versucht, seinen eigenen Fehler erst mal auf den Kunden abzuwälzen. NICHT GUT!

Vorschlag seitens das Händlers war, einen Claim direkt bei Opel aufzumachen (und hier kommt jetzt der Hersteller ins Spiel) – also ein weiterer Versuch, Probleme zu verschieben.

Opel hat den Claim dann angenommen und wollte das intern prüfen. Soweit, so gut, dachte ich.

Nichts da! Einige Wochen später riefen mich nacheinander Opel und der Händler aus Walldorf an, man würde den Vorgang nicht aus Kulanz übernehmen bei Opel – der Grund dafür:

Die Werkstatt habe die Rechnung von 300€ in drei Teile gesplittet und damit läge jeder einzelne Betrag unter dem Betrag, wo man Reparaturen auf Kulanz übernehmen würde. Kundenservice at it’s best!!!!

Ich habe dem Händler dann gesagt, er könne ja einen Vorschlag machen, wie er das Problem löst. Einige Tage später kam der Vorschlag, daß man die Hälfte der Kosten übernehmen würde (also ich quasi die Lohnkosten trage und der Händler nichts verdient), Da es ja aber so oder so nicht mein Fehler war, habe ich dann dem Händler zu verstehen gegeben, daß es sein Fehler war und ich keinerlei Kosten zahlen werde.

Nach Rücksprache mit einem Anwalt hat der mich auch nur darin bestätigt, daß ich im Recht sei. Zumal ich dem Händler auch noch seinen Fehler zweifelsfrei hätte nachweise können: Bei der ursprünglichen Inspektion wurde ordnungsgemäß das Serviceheft abgestempelt – und in diesem Heft war auch das Auslieferungsdatum korrekt vermerkt. Somit hätte der Händler den Garantieanspruch prüfen können, bevor er seine Arbeiten beginnt.

Letztlich wurde das dann auch so akzeptiert.

Dem Fass den Boden ausgeschlagen hat dann aber Opel – der Kundenservice rief mich noch mal an um zu fragen, ob ich denn zufrieden sei (denn auch Opel konnte das Problem ja abwälzen und mußte nicht zahlen).

Wozu hat das ganze jetzt für Opel und die Werkstatt geführt?

– ich bin kein Opel Kunde mehr, ich hätte mir ansonsten privat mit einer hohen Wahrscheinlichkeit wieder einen Insignia gekauft

– einige frühere Kollegen haben die Geschichte gehört und fahren inzwischen auch keinen Opel mehr

Und das ganze, weil niemand das tun wollte, was für den Kunden gut ist! Und wenn ich mir das Unternehmen Opel im Moment anschaue, kann ich mir vorstellen, daß einige Kunden mehr ähnliche Erfahrungen gemacht habe! So verprellt man Kunden! Und vor allem merkt es Marketing und Produktmanagement sehr oft nicht mal, denn die unzufriedenen Kunden sind es irgendwann einfach leid, sich zu beschweren und schlecht behandelt zu werden. Sie sprechen mit ihren Käufen!

Wir kaufen Dein Auto – ein kurzer Erfahrungsbericht und eine Warnung

Ich habe vor einigen Monaten von meiner Firma das Angebot bekommen, einen Firmenwagen zu nehmen. Da ich bisher einen Opel Insignia gefahren bin (dazu in einem anderen Post mehr), der ein Euro 5 Diesel war, war das Angebot nicht nur aus der Sicht, eine Flatrate für ein Fahrzeug zu haben, interessant.

Da wir aber als Familie keine drei Autos benötigen (zumindest im Moment nicht) stand als der Verkauf des Opels an. Naheliegend war es dann, als Internet-affiner Mensch über “wirkaufendeinauto.de” zu gehen.

Die Webseite ist ordentlich gemacht und gab mir als initiale Bewertung auch den DAT Wert des Autos an, natürlich mit dem entsprechenden Disclaimer “bis zu” – der Wert lag bei ca. 11000 Euro. Also habe ich einen Termin ausgemacht zur Begutachtung.

Das ganze lief grundsätzlich auch mehr oder weniger professionell ab (ich war in Mannheim), wobei der Begutachtert eine Probefahrt machen wollte, dann aber nur 100m wirklich gefahren ist, danach war es ihm schon ziemlich egal.

Und dann ging es los – das Auto hatte Gebrauchsspuren bei 5 Jahren. Diese wurden sehr penibel dokumentiert (ja auch ok). Irgendwann kam das Gespräch auf den Preis bzw den Prozess. Natürlich wurde mir da erklärt, daß die Autos ja überhaupt nicht gehen, der Zeitraum schlecht wäre, usw.

Ich hatte mich im Vorfeld auf Autoportalen informiert – der Verkauftswert des Autos lag bei ca. 12.000€, daher hatte ich mich dann mental auch schon drauf eingestellt, daß ich keine 11.000€ bekomme (trotz Anhängerkupplung und einem zweiten Satz Reifen).

Der Prüfer kam bei dem Termin ziemlich arrogant rüber, meinte, daß alles absolut unrealistisch wäre, bla bla bla. Ich habe dann relativ direkt zurückgegeben, daß ich es ja nicht an sein Unternehmen verkaufen müsse, aber er hat mehrfach versucht, einzuflechten, ich müsse dann ja nur das Angebot annehmen und alles wäre gut… Im Endeffekt bin ich mit keine guten Gefühl von dem Termin heimgefahren, vorwiegend mit dem Gefühl, Zeit verschwendet zu haben.

Der Prozess bei WirKaufenDeinAuto sieht vor, daß die Bewertung nicht vor Ort gemacht wird – der Kollege ist eine bessere Schreibkraft und macht eine Menge Bilder. Das alles geht an die Zentrale, von da kommt dann innerhalb einiger Stunden ein Angebot.

Die eMail kam dann tatsächlich am selben Abend – und ich habe mich einfach nur aufgeregt. Das Angebot lag bei 8500€.

Ich denke, hier schlägt das Geschäftsmodell zu, denn letztlich tritt “WirKaufenDeinAuto” als Vermittler auf und erzeugt einiges an Kosten, die irgendwo erwirtschaftet werden wollen – am einfachsten darüber, den Kunden keinen fairen Preis zu bieten, denn am Ende wollen und müssen hier 2 Händler verdienen – Wkda und der Händler, der das Auto verkaufen will. Und auch die ganze Fernsehwerbung will bezahlt werden. Darüber sollte man sich im klaren sein! Ich denke, selbst wenn es ein faires Angebot gegeben hätte, würde man bei anderen Ankäufern und Händlern immer noch mehr bekommen, da es einen Zwischenhändler weniger gibt, der verdienen will. Also VORSICHT!

Ich habe dann etwas recherchiert und gesehen, daß Mobile.de auch ein Netzwerk von Ankäufern unterhält. Der Prozess war sehr ähnlich wie bei mobile.de, gute Kommunikation und Terminvereinbarung.

Der Händler war sehr professionell und schnell, das Gespräch war menschlich sehr viel besser und angenehmer – und wir haben uns letztlich bei gut 10000€ geeinigt für das Auto in einem sehr offenen Gespräch.

Letztlich ist es doch das, was bei solchen Deals zählt: Beide Seiten können damit leben. Und ich habe am Ende 1500€ mehr bekommen – und ich gehe nicht davon aus, daß der Händler nicht wußte, was er tut. Den Eindruck hat er nicht gemacht.

In diesem Sinn – wenn ihr über WirKaufenDeinAuto geht würde ich empfehlen, ein Gegenangebot einzuholen.

Meiner Frau ist übrigens das gleiche passiert – auch hier hat ein regulärer Händler einen viel besseren Preis geboten, in etwa der gleiche Rahmen.

More than 6 month with SUSE now

For those of you based in Germany , you know that the first 6 month in a new company are somewhat special, as there are special rules for both sides on an easy and early termination of the contract.

So I am now with SUSE, my new company for more than 6 month. And I have to say it has been a good ride so far!

Besides the technical things, I will write about a little later, I have to say that I feel like I am back 15 years or so in the good Lotus times. Don’t get me wrong, there were also plenty of things in Lotus that did suck at that time (including Executives that called everybody out of their pressing projects to announce management changes – yikes), but there were less processes, people were valued and people tried to do the right thing instead of trying to follow the process.

When I joined SUSE, the first few weeks felt like a relief and there were quite a few things that were hard to believe for me. Real trust by management, a really open culture and mind of people. Support from people. I can say, I felt very welcomed and people tried to help me wherever they could. What an experience! Also processes that make sense and are not established for the sake to have a process in place and put guidance in. For example, I was pushed to travel and attend events. In IBM at same point I gave up on that. So huge change just there.

Another very interesting experience was the change in tools. IBM Collaboration is not present at all in SUSE, not even on the radar anywhere. People know Domino, but other tools are just not known. As an open source company we use a lot of open source tools, in combination with some Microsoft tools through our previous parent company.

But in general, the service is available and people decide how they want to use it. For eMail for example we can choose the client we want to use. And on the tooling there is now consolidation going on. I can get my work done. One thing I am somewhat missing is an easy way to share documents, but we are getting there. I am now using a webdav upload to our Wiki, that is good enough for the moment.

A few words on Domino: When I think back I was not using it heavily in my last few month at IBM on the desktop. The only real thing I was opening the notes client for almost every day were 2 things: my Journal and my timesheet app. For both I am now using open source tools.

It feels weird for me to look at ICS from the outside now. And the push for Domino again. There are for sure clear advantages on the domino runtime but I would question that we would see a huge movement to Domino as an app server, unless there is a different business model HCL comes up with at some point. There is a lot of Opensource out in the market, optionally supported through companies like SUSE that are broadly used by the new generation of developers. If I am a domino shop, it is a no brainer to see that you can use APIs that are standard in the market now to access Domino Applications and build lean apps in containers that use Domino as a Database – question is at what point does the back end become invisible and replaceable.

Also the whole notion of bringing a 20 yr old application to a mobile device seems interesting at the first run – but really, I want a mobile app available that behaves like one, not a desktop / web app that is getting adjusted to a mobile device. And if I have to spend work on this somehow (reusing API’s potentially), we are back in the same position as before.

When I made the decision to leave IBM mid last year, that was emotional thing after 17 yrs with one company. I remember sitting at home, evaluating my options and try to form a decision. I think there were in the end 4 things that made me do the step:

1) my wife suggesting a change and a less painful work environment

2) my SWAT analysis where I realized that the only real risk was to be fired in the first 6 month

3) a good friend of mine who immediately said: You are such a good fit to SUSE culture

4) The suse staff who was super friendly and helpful from the beginning and gave me the feeling that they really wanted me onboard

I am happy now that I made the step. I have been drinking from the firehose for the last 5 month, learning so much about Linux libraries, Kernels, CPUs and server. And honestly I am very grateful I can learn again, I find things that I need to work on to understand them. It is so very different from my previous job that was to a very large extend consisting of playing political games. I am now mostly back to facts and we can drive decisions. They are not always right, but at least we are getting a direction set quickly and then can adjust as necessary.

With SUSE being an independent company again since March 15, I am looking forward to an exciting 2019. It will be challenging in some ways and I expect bumps. But I know that the whole company wants to do the right thing and fix issues. And that clearly makes a difference in the day to day work.

Traveling with Deutsche Bahn ….

Diesen Post schreibe ich dann doch mal wieder in Deutsch, weil es das ganze einfacher macht und auch eher an deutsche Leser als an internationale gerichtet ist ….

Ich bin seit einigen Jahren wieder vermehrt mit der Bahn unterwegs und das auch bewußt. Ja, wir alle regen uns gerne über die Bahn auf und es gibt extrem viel “Room for improvement” im Moment, aber ich denke, nach meinem Erlebnis von Donnerstag, daß wir doch auf hohem Niveau klagen (wenn auch natürlich zu recht).

Aber bevor ich zu der Story komme, kurz der Grund, warum ich so oft die Bahn nehme. Das ganze hat eigentlich einige sehr einfache Gründe:

Zum einen mal die Tatsache, daß ich in der Bahn arbeiten kann oder mich einfach entspannen kann und einen Film schauen kann. Ich muß mich nicht auf das Fahren konzentrieren, das ist insbesondere nach einem intensiven Arbeitstag mehr als angenehm. Da ich dann doch meistens eher in Großstädte fahre, ist es auch bei guter Infrastruktur am Zielort sehr angenehm, dort mit den öffentlichen zu fahren und dem Stau und der Parkplatzsuche zu entkommen. Letztlich bin ich meistens ähnlich lange mit der Bahn unterwegs, wie mit dem Auto …. Von den Kosten betrachtet ist es sicherlich auch, sofern ich alleine fahre, nicht teurer mit der Bahn zu reisen (ich habe eine BahnCard 50, die sich auch locker lohnt!)

Also, zurück zu der Story von Donnerstag (ich hatte ja auch schon zum Teil drüber getwittert) …

Am Donnerstag stand mal wieder ein Officetag in Nürnberg an. Da wir mitten in der Stadt sind und nur beschränkt Parkplätze zur Verfügung haben, bietet es sich an mit der Bahn zu fahren. Da die Bahn den Winterfahrplan offensichtlich im Hinblick auf meinen üblichen IC angepasst hat, bin ich entspannt mit dem RE gefahren, der zwar 10 min früher fährt, aber kaum länger nach Frankfurt braucht. Dort konnte ich dann endlich auch mal die Lounge testen und in Ruhe einen Kaffee trinken.

Dann ging es mit dem ICE weiter nach Nürnberg. Offensichtlich war der Zug ziemlich voll (Ich hatte erst am Mittwoch gebucht), daher war ich nicht im Ruhebereich (zumal ich auch einen ConfernceCall während der Fahrt hatte). Ich hatte mich kaum hingesetzt, da ging es los. In der Reihe vor mir waren Tische, besetzt mit 4 Pärchen aus dem Ruhrpott. Leider wurden alle Clichés erfüllt. Die Bierdosen standen auf dem Tisch bei den Männern, die Damen hatten Sekt offen. Das war ja alles kein Problem (auch wenn ich mich schon frage, warum man morgens um 8 schon so bechern muss, aber gut. Dummerweise war das ganz zunächst mit einer Lautstärke verbunden, dann wurde geknobelt (dabei wurden zuerst die Männer lauter, dann die Frauen, um mitzuhalten). Zuguterletzt kam dann der Bluetooth Lautsprecher raus und Schlager wurden gespielt. Alles doch etwas heavy, da halfen die besten Headsets auch nicht mehr viel. Telefonieren war auch irgendwie nicht möglich…. In Würzburg stieg dann noch ein Gruppe Twens ein, scheinbar auf dem Weg zum Ballermann und ich war final umzingelt. Letztlich finde es es nun nicht wirklich angenehm, von betrunkenen umgeben zu sein, aber ok. Aber der Lärm, der alle irgendwie geärgert hat, war dann doch etwas arg viel des guten. Die Kids waren tatsächlich auch noch betrunkener als die 50er …. Keine Ahnung, ob die Airline die noch in den Flieger gelassen hat…. Not my monkey, not my business.

Richtig grotesk wurde es, also die Ruhrpottler dann Kartoffelsalat und Frikadellen gefuttert haben (wurde auch fleissig im Zug angeboten). Keine Ahnung, warum man so wenig Rücksicht nimmt auf sein Umfeld – aber ich denke, ich bin auch damals selber das eine oder andere Mal etwas über die Stränge geschlafen. Wenigstens war der Schaffner hilfreich und hat versucht, die Gruppen daran zu erinnern, daß man nicht in einem Partyzug wäre …. Hat zumindest für 5 min geholfen 😉

Für diese Erlebnis kann die Bahn – NICHTS

Der Rückweg war dann der Klassiker. Beim Weg zum Bahnhof und checken des Zugstatus gab es die Meldung, daß der ICE nur mit einem Zugteil verkehrt, zum Glück der, in dem ich eine Reservierung hatte…. Es gab aber nach Frankfurt einen Ersatzzug. Der stand dann auch schon am Gleis und wartet. Ein Schaffner war nicht zu finden, um die beste Strategie für die Fahrt zu erfragen (Ersatzzug nehmen oder in den überfüllten Zug einsteigen und seinen Sitzplatz einfordern. Der Lockführer war dann hilfreich und meinte, Ersatzzug. Das habe ich dann auch gemacht in der Hoffnung, daß der typische Deutsche Bahnfahrer ganz sicher in den kurzen Zug einsteigt, weil der ja die richtige Zugnummer hat. War auch tatsächlich so, der Ersatzzug war angenehm leer und die Fahrt sehr entspannt.

Dummerweise ist dann mein Anschlusszug gestrichen worden – da die RE’s aber alle 30 min fahren, so what…. Der um 8 wäre auch nur 20 min früher zuhause angekommen als der um 20:30. Insgesamt ca 20 min später als der IC. Bei der Einfahrt in den Bahnhof kam uns der frühere RE schon entgegen, also wieder Lounge und dann entspannt den RE um 20:30 genommen. Das war dann pünktlich und entspannt bis zuhause.

Also . Kann ich mich darüber ärgern? Nein, sowas von gar nicht! Ich finde die Bahn hat mit dem Ersatzzug gut reagiert, wir waren mit 5 min Verspätung in FRA, ich hätte meinen IC locker erreicht, aber es gab gute Alternativen, weiter zu kommen. In Zeiten des Smartphones kann ich mich immer darüber informieren. Und letztlich kann immer irgendetwas passieren, von daher brauche ich doch irgendwie eine Möglichkeit, ein Problem zu umgehen.

Früher wäre ich in Panik verfallen, heute tue ich das nicht mehr …. Und wenn wir alle mal ehrlich sind: Auf der Autobahn kann ich im Stau stehen, ich kann einen Unfall haben, was auch immer. Wenn ich heute die Bahn nehme, plane ich so, daß ich Optionen habe und einen Puffer. Das würde ich mit dem Auto auch genau so tun. Von daher komme ich auch gut mit der Bahn klar.

Ja, es wäre besser, wenn ein um pünktlich wäre. Ich meine Anschlüsse immer bekomme, usw. Und wer mal in der Schweiz oder Holland Zug gefahren ist, sieht, daß es auch so geht! Von daher hoffe ich, daß die Bahn besser wird. Aber grundsätzlich bin ich, bis auf 1 Mal immer da angekommen, wo ich hin wollte. Und in dem Fall war ein Unwetter und die Strecke gesperrt…..

I have to make a confession …. ;-)

After this topic came up twice this week and people were majorly surprised by this, let me make this more public – I am a part time Vegetarian 🙂 And I enjoy it

So, let me put some more meat on the bone:

But why?

Well, there are basically two simple reasons for it – one of which is mostly health.

I grew up eating meat every single day (mostly pigs my grandfather raised. Nowadays you would call them pretty much organic meat). It was something totally normal that meat would be part of any meal (and I really mean ANY meal). My father would have demanded meat if it would not be served. When I started to separate from my parents, my diet looked pretty much the same. meat every day. But I bought that in supermarkets.

Here another thing that is not widely known: When I was younger and looked for a job during my school vacations I ended up working in an abattoir for 3 yrs. (and yes, I still eat meat). So for me basically thing came together at some point. I do very well know how meat is produced ( and that it takes an animal to loose it’s life). For me the harder part and the question I started to ask myself during the process was the question if anyone can produce a kg of Schnitzel seriously for 5€. Well, yes, you can, but you make the animals suffer for that.

So to close the loop again to where I started – I decided to more consciously consume meat initially. The trigger was one evening where my wife jumped into a shop, getting organic Schnitzel for dinner. That was the taste of my youth! Schnitze that tasted like pork and that I felt the pigs had a good life until they were butchered. That started to make me think.

Now over to the health aspect. If you do mass breading of animals (and it needs to be cheap), you have to use medication for a lot of cases. That is part of where I think it is affecting my own health. I don’t want to eat antibiotics if I don’t have to.

How did this start?

As I said before, the trigger was my wife buying those Schnitzel and remembering the slaughterhouse days. So we agreed at some point to have one veggie day a week. That became the norm for a while. And after a few month we both thought that one day is just not enough for all the vegetarian dishes we started to like. So we extended it to the point where now we trying to eat vegetarian Mo – Thu and have meat Fri – Sun. We are at all not religious about it. If we have leftovers from Sunday – we’ll eat them Monday. If we want to do something vegetarian on the weekend, we just do it.

So – what do you eat then?

As I indicate before, we have way more veggie things to eat than we thought when we started. We do a lot of Mediterranean food (Pasta, pan fried veggies), Indian (very good for vegetarian food) or vegetarian Tapas. Sometimes there are German inspired dishes we do. although I find it hard to find good German vegetarian food (except for anything potatoes related, of course). There is really a lot of great tasty food around. But what we are not doing at all is to try to substitute meat in dishes, meaning no veggie sausages or veggie schnitzel. We don’t want and like that. We try to get back to basic, no processed food and combine it like we enjoy it

Do you still enjoy your Steak?

Oh, yes, I absolutely do and enjoy it. Check Instagram. But we try to use high quality products and not the mass and cheap products. We are in a lucky position to be able to make those choices, also for our veggies.

Food does have a certain cost associated to it. And we as consumers should be willing to pay the real cost (not paying all in between that sometimes make things outrageously expensive by adding charges). As I said before, why should any animal, even if it is at some point being butchered not have a good life? Don’t they deserve it?

Why should I as a consumer feel good about the fact a pig has never seen daylight and never turned older than a few month? Why do I want to eat something that contains a lot of water to gain more weight and is pumped in certain cases with medication to get it to the date of butchering?

Why not choose – if I want to eat meat – to eat it from an animal that had a descent life, was treated well? You’ll notice the difference right when you have the first bite. It is more expensive but provides also a much better taste!

If people can notice this at all – I feel like a lot of people have lost the connection to good quality products. And it also took time for me to get there. How can you taste the nuances if you always eat cheap meat and then have a high priced steak in a steakhouse? You will only notice that it is better and accept that you can’t make this at home – but that is totally wrong! Once people start an interest for the topic of cooking and ingredients used, you’ll get there. Any product has various ways to be cooked, good ones and bad ones. But especially ones you like or don’t like. Try things. Get out of your comfort zone. Nobody expects huge steps, do minor ones. Get some higher quality food and just try things. Maybe it is just me having a pretty good feeling for food and cooking but I think most people are able to get there. With passion, patience and taste. It’s like with everything: You can get to a certain level by trying.

And by using tools. Sous Vide is a great way to get consistent results, meat thermometers help. That all helps you to not waste the money you are spending on food but get good results.

 

If some of you feel to get a better connection again to how meat is getting on your plate, here are a few videos you might want to take a look at:

 

I can also recommend this movie, in case you have AmazonPrime. This a great documentary of a french chef searching the best steak in the world:

https://www.amazon.com/STEAK-REVOLUTION-Yves-Marie-Bourdonne/dp/B01699B6LC/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1547143997&sr=1-1&keywords=steak+revolution

For most people, it likely has a very surprising end!

One other thing I found surprising and that I want to share two thoughts from Jürgen David, one of the best butchers in Germany. 

The first one is that he said, meat is to sold cheap and that there is no real way to produce good quality for the currently average price paid for it.

The second thing is that I heard him say in an interview that he took his daughter out of school lunch – because they were serving meat every day. He said in his family they don’t eat meat every day and that the follow a similar idea to what I am trying to explain as my own Point of view here. 

I just want to close this post with saying clearly, I only want to share my thoughts and point of view. I don’t want to tell anyone that one should eat more or less meat. But maybe it triggers a few thoughts for some people reading it and a more conscious consumption of something really amazing – a great piece of meat!

quick come back to IT security and privacy

While having dinner with friends yesterday we talked about IT security for moment. One of them basically said he was totally surprised, that websearches he had done on Android show up on his iPhone as well. He is not an IT guy, so maybe it is useful to explain this a bit further….

Starting with Android (and I don’t want to ditch it, I need to say this right in the beginning) is mainly driven by Google. As Google does not charge for it’s services (except for computing power in the Cloud) and it is a business, the question is, how to they make money – well, I know it is obvious to a lot of people, but let me restate this: Advertising.

By simply showing you something that might be interesting for you and that you are willing to buy. Now, if I think about advertising, I think about magazines and TV first of all. When there are ads on TV I assume I do what most others do as well – I turn down the volume, start zapping or walk away from the TV. What makes Google more effective for those that want you to see advertising is that Google knows who you are (well, not necessarely all your name aso, but you for sure have an ID with them). So whenever you provide data to them they get to know you better. How do you send them data?

Well by using Chrome, signing into google when you use it – and obviously by using android. It is designed to collect data and I would even claim, that Google has no interest at all to make Android more secure and isolate Apps better from each other as that means users get more control on what Apps get access to and what they can use to send it back home and profile you.

To be frank, yes, there is a convenience factor here, but you are paying for it with your data.

Now I hear the same argument being made again: I have nothing to hide. As much as that is probably true for my friends, you I think, are missing the point. Ask yourself if you would post all your personal data on your house so everbody can see it. If you say: Sure, then move on. If you say no, then I think you might have nothing to hide but you also don’t want everybody to know.

In the end the real problem starts with the technology available these days. Computers are now able to process and correlate huge amounts of data and with arteficial Intelligence make sense out of it easier than years before.

So, maybe a simple example: You share your geo location with google (because you, for example use Google Maps). So Google will get to know where you start your journey from (mostly home it a lot of cases) and where you often go to in the morning (work), or on the weekend for shopping. It is not very hard to connect these dots. I spoke about this on an earlier post and you can easily see the recorded geo data Google has from you!

Now, moving on. You communicate via WhatsApp, Facebook, whatever. Even if WhatsApp might not analize your data (Google is known to process your mail for patterns), you send them other data. When you use it, where, aso. Just again, data that is interesting to profile you and allows a company to show you better ads, that they can then charge the companies higher fees for.

All apps tend to ask for permissions, but you should really think what is needed. You should think if you want to sign in or if you want to use the private browsing mode of a brower. I am not saying that all is a secure way to not be profiled as there are new ways that internet companies are able to use data of your computer to assign you an ID and identify you. Your CPU, Resolution, whatever. All that data that Browsers can read from your machines.

All this data likely provides a pretty good picture of who you are. And if you still think, I don’t care, pls follow this thought: Assume you want to sign up for an isurance. Would you want your health insurance to track if you work out, what you eat, how much you drink and smoke? Do you want to live in a world when you have your next hangover your healt insurance raises because you poisoned your body? Even if we think we do live healthy, science can change and something we do now might be seen as bad – once that is treacked it will affect fees later on. So I don’t think it’s that easy and simple – unfortunately.

So – I think we should all be careful about what we share on the internet and use our brains. As much as we don’t invite any foreign people into our lives immediately, we shouldn’t do the same in the internet. And we should respect other peoples view’s and needs as well. For example. I am consciously not posting pictures of my kid. Or I am trying to stay vague on things that only if you met me and we interacted would make sense to you. I am not perfect with that and sure, there will be traces and a chance that you can correlate data and make sense out of it. But at least I am trying to make it harder than serving everything in an easy way.

If you would ask me for some advice: Try to make your social profiles private. If you don’t (which I am doing on a few services consciously), understand what that means and think what you want to post there. And remember, even if your Facebook profile, Google profile, Microsoft, Twitter, Instagram, whatever is potentially private, all these companies analyze your data. And they also sell it if they can. Why wouldn’t they?

Btw, the thing that triggered the discussion yesterday was Alexa and the recent incident: As we do have the European privacy law in effect now every European citizen has a set of important rights:

• they can request that data is being deleted (and there are fees if that does not happen)
• people can request to get the data that is being stored about them

Latter happened with Amazon – somebody had requested his or her data from Amazon. The result was quite astonishing as Amazon not only sent the requested data but also the recordings of other people. Now again, do you want Amazon to record you (without knowing) and then make those recordings available to random people?

I assume Amazon will get this problem fixed but you can clearly see there is a difference between things that can be done (recording and unlimited storing of data) and that should be done (why is the data not deleted? Why is it being kept? How can the computer programs not isolate the data properly? )

When you give data away, you don’t have any control over it anymore. You have to trust other people to do the right things and take care of your personal data. As that is something that we all can not always avoid, we should still ask why it is needed.

I didn’t purchase a 0€ recording the other day as I had to register. That is fine, but I am not willing to provide more data than needed to the supplier. Why do they need my address, date of birth, aso? Sure, they can ask for all of that, but WHY is it needed? It is not transparent to me. And I would still think not necessarely. They are not shipping anything to me, so why an address?

Anyway, I hope I made you think a bit. It really isn’t that easy. We all produce data with others, computers advance in their ability to process the data. So I think it is important to think about what we do before we just simply move ahead and click ok.

I had an interesting debate with my former boss a few weeks ago: The claim was that in the US a change in eMail provide is happening, more and more people are moving from “free” (we defined what free really means earlier) services to services that cost you a few dollars. Sure, nobody gives you the total guarantee that the data isn’t analyzed, but the need to do it is much lower when you actually make money on other ways. I would also assume that people will ask this question more and more and hopefully at some point think what they post and share publically and what they should keep for themselves. Or only post in environments they control.

Because this is likely only the beginning – when I look at China and the face recognition software that is being used, the score people get by behaving right or wrong: That is all not the right way. As a society we need to agree on what we find acceptable and what we don’t want to happen. And we need to think about it. It is way to easy to say: But we need to store all the data and the technology to protect you from xyz. As well as that might be true, it opens any gate to misuse at the same time.

I want to close this with a quote I heard in a podcast today: You can’t get freedom with total security. If you want to be free you have to accept at the same time that you have to take some risk by not everything being fully controlled.

IBM sells Collaboration Business fully to HCL – few thoughts

Those of you who know me for a longer time know that I have been part of IBM’s Collaboration business for a very long time and have recently left IBM.

With the announcement last week, I must admit I do have very mixed emotions about it. First of all I am thinking of my former teams (if they are even still existing and still part of IBM. I think some people had seen the writing on the wall (so had I) and have moved on.

In general I think Domino and Connections have been good ideas (I am not saying good products, hold on for a few more min). They changed the world, they both were an impulse in the industry to make people think about collaboration differently. Why I don’t call them good products? Because of the lack of investment. Both product families were profitable for IBM – at least that was my last understanding (ICEC was for sure, the product I was last responsible for in IBM). But I do believe that there were wrong decision made for a to long time. Sure, Cash Cows need to pay for new developments, but the business needs to maintain balance and actively manage development. What happened from my PoV is that Domino had to pay for a lot of things, but it didn’t have to pay for it’s own development. And this lead to fewer innovations and enhancements and made I think the fear of clients that was articulated a self – fullfilling prophecy. People looked to migrate away from Domino for eMail mostly. And because eMail was never the real focus, it was to late when things changed. But at that point in time, in my opinion, the focus was switched to mail, ignoring that the most important reason for Domino to be used by clients was the AppDev capabilities. So with the focus back to mail, the next important area lost the focus. So, to make a long story short, I think the decline of Domino was mostly driven through IBM.

I think Connections is a similar story. Because new products had to be launched, development was cut back on it, customers became unhappy and the new pink vision was the direction people wanted to go for. As much as this was the right direction, reality is as well that pink was a rewrite of the stack with little new value and innovation. Sure, it was the way to enable it, but that would have been some time before it would happen.

In general I think as well that the whole ICS brand was in a very difficult situation. It was pretty much (with Portal) the only end-user facing software IBM was selling and majority of people didn’t care about this business and were rather looking (especially the CIO office) to get SAAS offerings from the market. There was little to no appetite to use IBM itself to improve the software. It was rather sacrificed (as so many other profitable business) on the altar of shareholder value – sucked dry, then sold to pay for the next acquisition – in this case RedHat.

So it hurts me to – in a retrospective – see all this happen now. But as I said earlier, the writing was clearly on the wall for a while. I think who had ignored this was living in a bubble….

For the products the sell to HCL is a good thing, I think. HCL wants to invest, a lot of the former engineers are already over and make an impact. They can make decisions without the burden of IBM and politics, hopefully without teams being constantly cut.

There are 2 concerns I have on this:

1. it is the same people again. I do really hope the leaders have learned from the things that happened in IBM and the critics they got from clients to do things better now. I am pretty sure the pink vision will rise again, but this time I hope there is a ongoing focus on delivering customer value instead of only technology
2. this is the even bigger one – is this a to big task? With he lack of investment by IBM I have the feeling that both products are a few years behind competition. So can that gap be closed? Or is HCL willing to have a clear focus and communicate that to the market? And – is there a value prop compared to some many other tools that have been developed in the meantime and are established already?

Time will clearly tell what is going to happen. I wish all my former colleages well and I also hope everyone will have a choice what to do next and make the right decision.

At some point I want to write a little more about my own PoV, why I left and what I felt changed for me since. But that will be a few more days, maybe around Christmas at some point.

Nasty VMWare snapshot problem

This is a more technical post this time, but maybe it helps somebody who has a simliar problem. So….

I was called late last week by a friend. She runs a local family business and her question was if I knew something about VMWare.

When I looked at their server (the ERP system was basically affected, none of their registers was actually working anymore), it became pretty evident that they were running VMWare workstation to host the system in a virtual machine. And that basically their part-time admin had used Snapshots within the vm to do some sort of backups. The other thing that was also evident was that the system was not booting anymore – with the error message

“The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created”

After some research it became clear that the chain of snapshots was broken (explained for example here). But how to fix it? Basically there was a problem that the chain of snapshots was broken.

This article explains the problem and solution fairly well and also explains the tools needed.

So I extracted the discriptor files this way of all 18 snapshots that existed, some of them really small. And I found the following dependency of the snapshots:

1=> 2 => 6 => 4 => 5 =>8 => 3 => (7,9,10,11,12,14,1)

So snapshot 3 was pointing to a lot of snapshots, including 1. So besides the fact that this is a circle and therefore can not work, it also lead us to the root cause of the problem: The base image was overwritten!

Now, reading more about this issue, there are some hints that 7-zip was a way to look into a vmdk file. My friend found an ealier vmdk of the vm that I was able to list the content easily with 7-zip. So, full of hope I was thinking: If I can get access to the latest snapshot this way, I should be able to extract the latest version of the database and config to be then used to restore the system.

BUT – nope, 7-Zip does not allow you to access snapshots, just does not work….

So I started to look for other ways. And basically, being a linux guy somewhat, that came handy now. There is a tool in Linux (discribed here in detail) that allows you to mount Guest file systems in your native OS, called guestmount which is part of qemu. I was hoping that maybe this tool would allow me to now mount the snapshot – also was not working ….

Now, I found a solution – which is the combination of all these things:

back to the chain, the problem was the first snapshot or base file, that was missing. Being able to extract the CID from that file and update it reference in the 2nd file. I was then able to mount snapshot 2 – YEAH!!!

Whith this then I was able to also mount Snapshot 3, the last working one before things went crazy. Having it mounted finally (and as the server was Windows and it was a fairly safe bet to mound sda1 out of the image, I had access to the content – Voila.

Then it was just a matter of copying the data from the ERP DB and required config onto a USB stick (not even 2GB) and hand it back.

Now we need to keep our fingers crossed that the data is not corrupt (which I hope for as this is the directory that is constantly overwritten in the VM) and we should be able to restore the system. But that is a differnt story.

 

Anyway, hopefully this helps somebody who runs into the same problem. Maybe even a base VM with OS would allow this process … but I have not tested it…

 

Anyway, there is one thing the teaches us all: BACKUPS ARE NEEDED. NOT ON THE SAME COMPUTER OR EVEN THE SAME HARDDISK, BUT ON A SAFE STORAGE THAT IS INDEPENDANT.

If you do backups, they are unpleasant to do, but they help you a lot when you need them!