Eschew Obfuscation

Cloud Server Load Testing

Posted by Max Dunn Sat, 07 Jan 2012 20:44:59 GMT | no comments

I have been working on the RealMealz site and am now looking for a suitable host server. Currently, RealMealz is in beta and has just light use, but we expect that once released the use will go up dramatically, so we want to be able to easily scale. I looked at Amazon EC2, Heroku and RackSpace Cloud Servers and the table below summarizes my findings:

Test: Login, hit Discover page 5 times
Use a 5 second ramp up

Average Discover page load time (Apache + Passenger unless otherwise indicated)

1. Users are concurrent users

2. I selected the Discover page since this is our most CPU intensive page. This test is not that realistic in actual use, but serves as a worse case example.

3. The Rackspace server had only 512Mb of memory and for the 10 user case for Apache it started swapping out. If I was using their next size up with 1Gb of memory, the cost would have been $44 per month but wouldn’t have suffered this performance issues as drastically.

4. The Amazon Micro instances provide bursts up to 2 ECUs, but if used at a high level for more than a few seconds, get throttled back greatly for about 15 seconds. This is why the 10 user case was so high, even for the 3 instance, load balanced case.

4a. The Amazon servers are a little underpowered. Even the hi-cpu instance that provides 5 ECUs is not all that impressive. My BlueBox server which has 4 VPSes on the server performed better.

5. It wasn’t clear how the Rackspace Cloud Servers could be easily scaled since RackSpace doesn’t seem to provide a load balancer for them.

6. Amazon’s EC2 instances are a bit of a pain to scale. You can’t add an extra instance to an existing load balancer, so you need to delete the current one then create a new one. There is an autoscaling feature, but this only works from the command line and I didn’t test it.

7. Heroku offered pretty amazing performance and was super easy to scale by just typing “heroku scale web=3”. The prices include $15/month for the larger database, although under 5Mbs is free.

8. With 3 dynos, Heroku was able to handle 20 concurrent users where the other tests were only with 10.

9. A disadvantage of Heroku is that it doesn’t offer shell access and there is no way to access the database natively. We do have some table manipulation built into our program, but if there are major changes or corruptions, we will need to export the data, fix it, and then re-import.

In the end, we are going with Heroku because it has great performance, easy to scale and is low cost.

Posted in Random Thoughts

Vinod Khosla's Five-Second Slide Rule

Posted by Max Dunn Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:31:22 GMT | no comments

One of my goals while at Presidio Graduate School was to get really good at giving presentations. Since slide decks are required for most presentations, making good slides is vital for good presentations. But the slide deck is not the presentation – you are the presentation. So if your slides are complicated and people need to take time to study them to figure them out, that means that the focus is on the slide and not on you. So it is important to make slides that can be grasped quickly.

How quick? Well Vinod Khosla likes to aply a five-second rule. He puts a slide on the screen and then removes it after 5 seconds. He then asks the viewer to describe the slide. If they can’t, the slide is too complicated.

How about your presentations? Can all your slides be quickly grasped with 5 seconds? If not, then go back and simplify them until they can.

(From: Forbes, Vinod Khosla’s Five-Second Rule)

Posted in Entrepreneurship

EV Electricity Costs With PG&E

Posted by Max Dunn Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:54:13 GMT | 1 comment

Figuring out how much electricity your electric vehicle (EV) will use is pretty easy. From the wall, 1kWh of electricity will power the Leaf about 3.5 miles (and a similar amount for other EVs). So for a normal 1,000 mile a month usage, it would take about 300kWh of electricity each month (rounding up).

This should add about $35/month for electricity at the average price of $0.11 per kWh. However, for most users it will push them up into higher tiers and be at least twice that. For us, we went from a $70/mo electric bill to $170/mo!

But wait, it gets more complicated. EV owners are required to contact PG&E and go on a special E-9 time-of-use rate plan.

The great thing about this plan is that off-peak, you can charge your EV for $0.05 to $0.06! The bad thing about this plan is that the bottom tier only goes up by 30% and then all times have higher costs. For instance, after 130% of base usage is reached, off-peak charging goes to $0.16 and then at 200% goes to $0.20!

We just switched over a few months ago and are still analyzing our bill, but it looks like it was reduced from $170 to about $120. We think with some reduction (turn off those lights kids!) and shifting our dishwasher to after midnight we can get it down to about $100, which means the EV will cost about $30 per month. Just where it should be!

Posted in Electric Vehicles

Startups in Stealth Mode - Just Stop

Posted by Max Dunn Sat, 24 Sep 2011 14:30:35 GMT | no comments

(Advice from Jason Freedman)

Startups in stealth mode need one piece of advice. Stop doing your start-up. You’re not ready.

Let me a share a few reasons why you don’t need to be in stealth mode:

1. Execution is more important than the idea.
   This is the easiest lesson. Your ability to create a product is far more important than your ability to think up a product. This is a hard lesson if you’re not the one that will do the building, because it means that your contribution is not as valuable as you thought.
2. Someone else has the exact same idea.
   The adage is that if you have a good idea, there are 5 other people already doing it. If you have a great idea, there are 15 other people already doing it. One of the reasons you’re foolishly in stealth mode is probably because you haven’t done enough market research to realize that people are already working on this.
3. Totally unique ideas generally don’t make it.
   If you have a 100% totally unique idea, you’re either too far ahead of the market or you’ve picked a market so small that no one cares. Either way, you’re in for trouble.
4. The most likely cause of failure is your incompetence, not losing to the competition
   Start-ups are really hard on so many levels. The likelihood that you execute beautifully but then lose out to someone that stole your idea is so incredibly low, you shouldn’t think about it. The likelihood that you build a product that missed the mark, is an almost certainty. Optimize around the problems most likely to shut you down. Paul Graham always told us to focus on the one enemy that matters: the back button.
5. You desperately need real feedback
   Perhaps the biggest reason not to be in stealth is that you’re robbing yourself of great feedback. Most companies miss the mark on the first product. The great companies learn quickly and iterate. Skipping the learning part by being secretive just reduces the time you’ll have to iterate before running out of money.
6. First mover advantage is just silliness
   The obit has been written on first mover advantage. It rarely helps. Facebook wasn’t the first to social networking, Google wasn’t the first to search, YouTube wasn’t the first to video, yada yada. First mover advantage was a flawed theory that helped pre-product internet companies raise billions of dollars in the 90s.

I could go on, but this is a fool’s errand. If you’re reading this and don’t agree, you’re probably just not ready to do a startup and all the rationalizing in the world won’t help.

(From Startups in stealth mode need one piece of advice.

Posted in Entrepreneurship

Per Capita GDP and Oil Consumption

Posted by Max Dunn Sun, 03 Apr 2011 17:05:22 GMT | 1 comment

In Peak Oil in 2012, I looked at the strong link between worldwide GPD and oil consumption. But what about per capita oil consumption? It turns out that there is a very interesting story there too.

As reported by Frank Holmes in Seeking Alpha, China currently consumes 2 barrels of oil per per per person. At the same PPP level of $5,000 per year, Japan consumed over 18 barrels, Taiwan 6 barrels and Korea 4 barrels!

Since China currently consumes about 10 million barrels a day, just doubling their per capita usage would require an extra 10 million barrels a day, which is 12% of the world total. Since oil production has been relatively flat since 2005, it is unlikely that additional oil production will ever be able to provide that amount.

This is just another indicator that our worldwide oil supplies will never again be able to meet our total oil demand.

Posted in Peak Oil

How Much Oil Do We Use ?

Posted by Max Dunn Sat, 12 Mar 2011 18:43:02 GMT | no comments

How much oil do we use in the United States and where does it come from? This is a question that hasn’t been exactly clear for me until I read this article on the Energy Information Administration (EIA) website. Here is the quick answer.

The US is the largest oil consumer using 19.1 million barrels per day (mbpd). We are the the third largest crude oil producer at 5.5 mbpd. In addition, we produce 3.9 mbpd of biofuels, natural gas liquids and processing expansion. This means we need to import about half our oil, or 9.3 mbpd.

Contrary to popular belief, two of our largest oil suppliers are Canada and Mexico. Overall, Western Hemisphere nations provide about half of our imported petroleum.

Now you have it. While the US uses about 19 mbpd, we produce 5.5 mbpd of crude oil and create another 4 mbpd of fuel products so the 9 mbpd we import is about half our usage.

References:

EIA. (November 29, 2010). How Dependent Are We On Foreign Oil? U.S. Energy Information Administration. Retrieved March 12, 2011 from http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_brief/foreign_oil_dependence.cfm

EIA. (March 8, 2011). Short-Term Energy Outlook. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Retrieved March 11, 2011 from http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/steo/pub/contents.html

U.S. Census Bureau. (March 10, 2011). U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services. January 2011 U.S. Census Bureau. U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. CB11-41, BEA11-09, FT-900 (11-01). Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_press_release/ft900.pdf

Note: All numbers for 2010 except oil additions for 2009.

Posted in Peak Oil

Li-Ion Battery Cost Breakdown

Posted by Max Dunn Sat, 05 Feb 2011 04:17:08 GMT | no comments

It would seem obvious that lithium is the most expensive part of a li-ion battery. However, it turns out that lithium contributes only 10% to 14% of the battery cost, while the separator is responsible for 40% to 60%! Here is the breakdown of how each material in a li-ion battery contributes to its overall cost:

• Anode: Made from carbon, 5% to 15%
• Cathode: A metal oxide, 5% to 11%
• Electrolyte: A lithium salt in an organic solvent, 10% to 14%
• Separator: Made from polyolefin, 40% to 60%

It is very surprising that the plastic polyolefin is the most expensive part of a li-ion battery!

(From the Pike Research blog post Lithium-Ion Battery Materials: Japan Dominates in the EV Era

Posted in Electric Vehicles

Fiji "Greenwashed" Water

Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 31 Dec 2010 04:26:07 GMT | no comments

Hah – I see that Fiji Water is being sued for greenwashing!

In the Sustainable Design class I took in October 2008 through Stanford Continuing Education, we studied greenwashing, which is to promote a company’s products as environmentally friendly when they are not.

TerraChoice provides a good greenwash metric with their Six Sins of Greenwashing:

• The Sin of Hidden Tradeoff – Promoting a single green factor of a product without any attention to other important issues.
• The Sin of No Proof – Unsubstantiated claims. For example, claiming a product was not tested on animals, but with no third party certification.
• Sin of Vagueness – Poorly defined or overly broad claims, such as “chemical free.”
• Sin of Irrelevance – A claim that may be true, but is either unimportant or otherwise irrelevant.
• Sin of Fibbing – Claims of certification that are false.
• Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils – A claim that may be true, but distracts from greater environmental impacts.

For my greenwashing analysis, I chose to write about Fiji Water. While Fiji Water does have a lot of sustainability programs in place, their business model of shipping water from Fiji in itself is not environmentally friendly at all!

So I was gratified today to see that others share my concern about Fiji Water and that they are actually being sued for greenwashing. The lawsuit claims that Fiji Water’s claim of being carbon negative is not true because they are using a discredited carbon accounting method known as “forward crediting.”

While I didn’t know about this when I wrote my paper, I feel justified to have identified Fiji Water as a greenwasher over 2 years ago!

Posted in All About Me

Public EV Charging Station Ratio?

Posted by Max Dunn Tue, 14 Dec 2010 20:02:36 GMT | 1 comment

In previous analysis, I relied on the Better Place estimates that initially there should be 4 public charging stations per electric vehicle (EV) and that this number could drop to 2 to 1 as the EV population grew.

However, new numbers from Pike Research suggest that we only need 1.15 to 1.3 charging stations per EV.

While these numbers are all guesses, it is important for anyone trying to determine how much revenue they could expect from installing EV charging stations since at 4:1 there will be a lot more unused charging time at each station than at 1.15:1.

(Source: Pike Research – Charge Spotting: Determining the Right Mix for Public EV Access)

Posted in Electric Vehicles

Making Money From Public EV Charging Stations

Posted by Max Dunn Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:23:28 GMT | 1 comment

Electric vehicles (EVs) will soon be available in large numbers and will need to be charged daily. This is no problem for half of the US population that can charge at home, but the other half that park on the street or in apartment complexes will need public charging stations. Is it possible to make money from EV public charging stations?

There are several ways to do this. One is to add a percentage surcharge over the price of electricity used (although this maybe prohibited by some PUCs), another is to charge a fixed fee every time a charging station is used and a third is to charge a monthly fee.

Read more...

Posted in Electric Vehicles