fidzu : Planet Grep

The City of Athens has launched a new Drupal site to serve as its official website, along with a Drupal-based site at http://www.breathtakingathens.com/ that provides visitor and tourism information.

Athens is a large city (3.5 million residents and 6 million tourists each year), with a large tourism base due in part to its role in the 2004 Olympic Games. To support the city's needs, the site includes a large calendar of city events, a comprehensive map-based index of city services and interactive tools that allow citizens to access city resources. The site builds on Drupal's multilingual capabilities to provide information in both Greek and English.

10 Mar 2010 11:20am GMT

This post is long overdue, as the idea struck me when dicussing with Lefred while preparing his Fosdem talk on Maintaining too big tables

I got triggered finishing this post by Mr BuidlDoctor

Fred has been struggling with a typical DevOps problem resulting in the most unmanageable database setup possible, there's little room for him to move but he managed is way out .. because he is good at his job

It set the mark for me that because in different organisations even the Opsteam is fragmented `in different groups that there also we need to get the Devops idea going.

Typical setups here are the Network guys vs the Platform guys , specially with the growth of virtualization where the network stack doesn't stop at the physcial switchport anymore but the vlan trunks go deep in to the VM's a lot of discussion happens. There where traditionally the story for the network engineer stopped at the switch they now want control much deeper in the infrastructure.

But an even bigger group that needs integration are the security folks, it's no secret that in some organisations the security guys job is to be the bad guy, their default reply to something is NO. Specially to people wanting to drill holes in their architecture .

Patrick wonders if its the specialist vs generalist dillemma, I think it's the Web vs Enterprise IT way of thinking ..
DevOps first gained ground in Web environments , the battle has only started ..

We still have a long way to go before in say a banking environment the Devs and SecOffs' and the DBA's and the Ops are on the same line ... they all need to break the walls of confusion, they all need to come out of their silos. And when you are a generalist in charge of a bunch of these things you have to make sure your tuesday afernoon security persona talks with his other persona's from time to time ... otherwise you are really gonna need those meds :)

Technorati Tags: DBAOps devops NetOps SecOPS

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09 Mar 2010 9:39pm GMT

A short followup on my previous post about iframes; as I happen to like simple drop-in solutions, I updated the javascript that handles the 'blank 2nd page in an iframe bug' to automagically work upon inclusion in the html.

So if you happen to have problems with the positioning of 2nd (or later) pages in iframes (due to the top part of the iframe not being visible in the 'viewport'), just upload frameMagic.js to your webserver and add the following to the head of your html to ease your iframe-blues;

<script type="text/javascript" src="path/to/frameMagic.js"></script>

Optionally you can specify which iframes are to be treated this way (excluding the other ones) by doing

<script type="text/javascript">
var fM_conf="iFrame1,iFrame3";
</script>

You can find more information and examples on http://futtta.be/frameMagic.

Possibly related twitterless twaddle:

• 5 tips to tackle the problem with iframes
• HTTP upload MIME type hell
• AddToAny: removing the "spy" from the share-ware

09 Mar 2010 3:20pm GMT

09 Mar 2010 2:56pm GMT

Vacation, and the mind is free. Then I scribble something, unleash it upon Earth where only a handful might read it:

Stop for a moment
And watch around
Hush for a second
And hear the sound

Think of your past step
And watch the road ahead
Pick up a fight
And try to flight

Break your habits
Stop living by one's wits
Take another curve
And make some surf

09 Mar 2010 10:31am GMT

As we are deluding ourselves here into thinking it's snowing in Barcelona, I thought it appropriate to post some videos from the past few snowboarding trips.

Coincidentally, this is my first foray into the HTML5 video world - more on that later.

Let's start with my favorite, the one where I show off how years of gymnastics in my youth help me keep my body in one piece:

(Also notice the cool new orange snowboard pants that I settled on. Snowboard fashion was really boring this year, mostly grey and black only, with some ugly flashy colours as exceptions. I leave it to you to judge whether orange is one of them).

We spent eight full days in Tignes, France, with only about three days of sunny weather, and the rest filled with clouds and snow.

My goal this year was to learn how to do a 180. With the help of an instructor, that's exactly what I did! Here's an admittedly simple one - all the good ones are not caught on video.

Here's a more aggressive one with a bad ending:

A few weeks before our snowboard trip, we also had a business planning weekend which included one day of skiing. Xavier risked life and limb following me around with his iPhone to record this. It's not the most exciting descent in the world, and he ended up missing my one fall in it, but I was surprised to see how short the whole descent really is if you don't take any time to stop!

And here are Xavi and me relaxing over cheese fondue and raclette the day before the skiing:

Some notes about the HTML5 video part:

• there is an enormous difference in colour between playing Ogg in Firefox, MP4 in Safari, and MP4 in Quicktime, on the same MacBook. My pants range from a soft orange to a bright red. Something is obviously up!
• To learn about HTML5, I started with Dive into HTML5 Video, then learned about Video for Everybody, some web code that handles all of the stuff I don't know how to do for me and just makes sure the video can play on Firefox/Chrome/Safari/iPhone/…
• Then I looked for WordPress integration, and found a plugin with a long name that implemented most of Video for Everybody. I modified it a little to do something more sensible for the poster image in case it's external, and to accept .mp4 as an extension instead of .m4v (which is not suggested by Dive into HTML)
• I configured our transcoding platform to generate the three types of output file needed to support HTML5: the thumbnail, Ogg/Theora/Vorbis, and .mp4 with H264 and AAC.

The embedded video should work fine in Firefox/Safari/Chrome/iPhone/Opera (except in Aitor's "I plug mplayer into Opera" case), and work fine in Explorer too where it falls back to Flash.

I couldn't get this to work in Android. 2.0 is rumoured to support the video tag, but so far no dice, and I couldn't find a single HTML5 video page online that the Android phones over here can play. If you can see these videos embedded in Android, or know what I should to fix them, please do let me know!

09 Mar 2010 12:42am GMT

I'm worried about the EURO's M3 if a European version of the IMF (a EMF) is to be installed.

Nonetheless, I think the European community should do it just to strengthen Europe's economy. I'm not satisfied by Europe's economic strength: I want it to be undefeatable.

We must not let the IMF solve our problems. Europe might be a political dwarf, but we Europeans should show that we will solve our own problems. We're an adult composition of cultures with vast amounts of experience. We know how to solve any imaginable problem. And let's not, in our defeatism, pretend we don't.

A EMF is a commitment to future member states: Europe often asks them fundamental changes; economic strength is what Europe offers in return. This needs to come at a highest price: Greece will have to fix their deficit problem. Even if their entire population goes on strike. Greece will be an example for countries like my own: Belgium has to fix a serious deficit problem, too.

An EMF comes at an equally high price, and that frightens me a bit: I don't want the ECB to go as ballistic on money creation as the FED has been last two years. I want the EURO to be the strongest relevant currency mankind has ever created. No matter how insane the rest of the world thinks that ambition is: I believe that keeping the EURO's M3 in check is a key to creating a wealthy society in Europe.

Politically I want European nations to negotiate more and more often. The European Union is a political dwarf only because finding agreement is hard. But in the long run will our solution be the most negotiated, most tested on this planet.

Together we can deal with anything. That doesn't mean it'll be easy; it has never been easy: just seventy years ago we were still killing each other. We're all guilty of that one way or another. And before that it wasn't any better. Today, not that many people still care: "it wasn't me", right? So stop being a bitch about it, then.

It's time to let it be. It's time to start a new European century that will be better. With respect for all European cultures, languages, nations, nationalities, values, borders and interests.

But also a European century with economic responsibilities for each member. It's our strength: we figured out how to keep our population wealthy: let's continue doing so in the future.

08 Mar 2010 9:51pm GMT

MySQL, the open source database product that puts the "M" in LAMP, was created by MySQL AB, a company founded in 1995 in Sweden. In 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion.

The story of MySQL AB is pretty amazing, so I unleashed my "inner academic", did some research and compiled a timeline of MySQL AB's history. This timeline is assembled based on different resources online, such as MySQL press releases (example 1) and interviews with MySQL AB executives (example 2, example 3), etc.

Things to add? Let me know in the comments and I'll update the post.

1995

• MySQL AB founded by Michael Widenius (Monty), David Axmark and Allan Larsson in Sweden.

2000

• MySQL goes Open Source and releases software under the terms of the GPL. Revenues dropped 80% as a result, and it took a year to make up for it.

2001

• Mårten Mickos elected CEO at age 38. Mårten was the CEO of a number of Nordic companies before joining MySQL, and comes with a sales and marketing background.
• 2 million active installations.
• Raised series A with undisclosed amount from Scandinavian venture capitalists. Estimated to be around $1 to $2 million.

2002

• MySQL launched US headquarters in addition to Swedish headquarters.
• 3 million active users.
• Ended the year with $6.5 million in revenue with 1,000 paying customers.

2003

• Raised a $19.5 million series B from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.
• 4 million active installations and over 30,000 downloads per day.
• Ended the year with $12 million in revenue.

2004

• With the main revenue coming from the OEM dual-licensing model, MySQL decides to move more into the enterprise market and to focus more on recurring revenue from end users rather than one-time licensing fees from their OEM partners.
• Ended the year with $20 million in revenue.

2005

• MySQL launched the MySQL Network modeled after the RedHat Network. The MySQL Network is a subscription service targeted at end users that provides updates, alerts, notifications, and product-level support designed to make it easier for companies to manage hundreds of MySQL servers.
• MySQL 5 ships and includes many new features to go after enterprise users (e.g. stored procedures, triggers, views, cursors, distributed transactions, federated storage engines, etc.)
• Oracle buys Innobase, the 4-person Finnish company behind MySQL's InnoDB storage backend.
• Ended the year with $34 million in revenue based on 3400 customers.

2006

• Mårten Mickos confirms that Oracle tried to buy MySQL. Oracle' CEO Larry Ellison commented: "We've spoken to them, in fact we've spoken to almost everyone. Are we interested? It's a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between $30 million and $40 million. Oracle's revenue next year is $15 billion."
• Oracle buys Sleepycat, the company that provides MySQL with the Berkeley DB transactional storage engine.
• Mårten Mickos announces that they are making MySQL ready for an IPO in 2008 on an projected $100 million in revenues.
• 8 million active installations.
• MySQL has 320 employees in 25 countries, 70 percent of whom work from home.
• Raised a $18 million Series C based on a rumored valuation north of $300 million.
• MySQL is estimated to have a 33% market share measured in install base and 0.2% market share measured in revenue (the database market was a $15 billion market in 2006).
• Ended the year with $50 million in revenue.

2007

• Ended the year with $75 million in revenue.

2008

• Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB for approximately $1 billion.
• Michael Widenius (Monty) and David Axmark, two of MySQL AB's co-founders, begin to criticize Sun publicly and leave Sun shortly after.

2009

• Mårten Mickos leaves Sun and becomes entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital. Sun has now lost the business and spiritual leaders that turned MySQL into a success.
• Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion.

08 Mar 2010 12:00pm GMT

I created rpms for CentOS and Fedora of openERP 5.0.7

I didn't test them yet but you can try them and send me your feedback to improve them.

08 Mar 2010 10:24am GMT

Since a few decades, humanity got more and more cursed and/or blessed with a little device now fitting perfectly in a trousers' pocket or womon's purse. But how do you call it these days? Here are some possibilities which crossed my mind:

• Mobile
• GSM
• Handy (German)
• iPhone
• MP3 player
• Walkman
• PDA
• Alarm
• some kind of berry
• Book
• .. or.. Phone?

I just read my first book using Amazon Kindle on my iPhone. Although odd at first, it was surprisingly pleasant. Old books mind you, like 'Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'. I still prefer the normal, papered books, but reading using one's phone is sometimes handy (pun intended). Suddenly, my phone turned into a .. a book.

08 Mar 2010 9:56am GMT

Day 2 at the conference was much more interesting then day 1, cause it the talks way more technical.

Only on the lego talk I had some comments: java on embedded devices --> WTF.

Sejo had some issues with his server while doing his presentation on djagios, but nevertheless it was like the best talk I saw.

For both lunch and dinner we ended up in Haiku sushi which was VERY good. For dinner we took a bunch of people with us, cause the lunch was so good. So if you're in Copenhagen and like sushi, that's the place to be!

08 Mar 2010 8:09am GMT

08 Mar 2010 7:49am GMT

Is het alweer een maand geleden dat ik nog een blogpost gedaan heb? Hmmm, rap mezelf eens een schop onder m'n kont geven.

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx komt er aan, en ik heb het risico genomen om nu al een upgrade te doen van 9.10 naar 10.04. Hey baby, take a walk on the wild side!

Eventjes dit intokkelen:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

en een dik half uur later was de upgrade afgelopen.

In de known issues staat wel het volgende:
The fglrx binary driver for ATI video chipsets does not yet support the X server in Lucid. As a workaround, users should use the open source -ati driver instead. (506656)

Inderdaad, na reboot kreeg ik een waarschuwing van Xorg en werd mij een failsafe scherm voorgeschoteld. Nu heb ik 2 schermen, met verschillende afmetingen, en met een failsafe configuratie tonen ze alletwee hetzelfde beeld. Dat is dus niet de bedoeling.

Mijn oorspronkelijke xorg.conf was aangemaakt met de Catalyst Control Center voor ATI Radeon, fglrx-amdcccle, met vrij veel details (zie bijlage). Ik heb die radicaal verwijderd zodat Xorg automatisch zijn configuratie vaststelt. Beide schermen heb ik met behulp van lxrandr op hun maximale resolutie gezet: 1920x1080 en 1280x1024.
Het was mijn bedoeling om daarna de onderlinge positie van de verschillende schermen in te stellen met grandr, maar daar kreeg ik deze vriendelijke foutmelding:

User set screen size larger than max screen size

Oeps. De wijziging kan niet opgeslagen worden.

Geen probleem, Google is mijn beste vriend en zo kwam ik terecht op http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2. Met behulp van xrandr kan je op de console hetzelfde doen als met de gui-tool grandr.
Eerst vraag ik de informatie van mijn beeldschermen op:

amedee@fangorn:~$ xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 3200 x 1080, maximum 3200 x 2048
VGA-0 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 375mm x 301mm
   1280x1024      60.0*+   75.0  
   1024x768       75.0     70.1     60.0  
   800x600        72.2     75.0     60.3  
   640x480        75.0     72.8     59.9  
   720x400        70.1  
HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-0 connected 1920x1080+1280+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 477mm x 268mm
   1920x1080      60.0*+   60.0  
   1440x900       59.9  
   1280x800       59.9  
   1152x864       75.0  
   1024x768       70.1     60.0  
   800x600        60.3     56.2  
   640x480        66.7     59.9  
   720x400        70.1

Daarna probeerde ik de schermen in te stellen:

amedee@fangorn:~$ xrandr --output VGA-0 --auto --left-of DVI-0
xrandr: screen cannot be larger than 2048x2048 (desired size 3200x1024)

Hetzelfde probleem dus als met grandr, maar deze keer met wat meer details.

De oplossing was het aanmaken van een eenvoudige /etc/X11/xorg.conf met uitsluitend dit:

   Section "Screen"
       Identifier       "Default Screen"
       DefaultDepth     24
 
       SubSection "Display"
           Depth                24
           # ADD A VIRTUAL LINE TO PROVIDE FOR THE LARGEST SCREENS YOU WILL HOTPLUG 
           Virtual              3200 2048 
       EndSubSection
   EndSection

Na herstarten van X hadden grandr en xrandr geen probleem meer met de nieuwe ultrabrede desktop. Zie ook de screenshot in bijlage.

Voor de rest werkt Lucy perfect!

08 Mar 2010 1:28am GMT

It was the dawn of the 1970s, at the height of worldwide student protests against the Vietnam War, and a librarian stationed at a U.S. Information Agency post abroad had received bad news: A student group was threatening to burn down her library.

But the librarian had friends among the group of student activists who made the threat. Her response on first glance might seem either naïve or foolhardy - or both: She invited the group to use the library facilities for some of their meetings.

But she also brought Americans living in the country there to listen to them - and so engineered a dialogue instead of a confrontation.

In doing so, she was capitalizing on her personal relationship with the handful of student leaders she knew well enough to trust - and for them to trust her. The tactic opened new channels of mutual understanding, and it strengthened her friendship with the student leaders. The library was never touched.

(More available at the flash preview widget's page 21)

- Daniel Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence, Competencies of the stars. 1998

In Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains several practical methods to improve the social skills of people. Before I bought this book a year or two ago, I read Daniel's first book Emotional Intelligence. This weekend I finally started reading Working With.

I recommend the section Some Misconceptions. Regretfully ain't this section available for display in the flash preview widget. Instead of violating copyright laws by typing it down here, I'm recommending to just buy the book.

You can find audiobooks online. The section about misconceptions is at track three. Track five talks about two computer programmers, which is very illustrative for many of my blog's readers (and possibly myself). I hope you wont illegally download using torrents. Instead, buy the material.

Also very interesting is this lecture by Daniel:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Here you can also find a Authors@Google talk by Daniel Goleman:

What distinguishes Daniel Goleman from old line proponents of positive thinking, however, is his grounding in psychology and neuroscience. Armed with a Ph.D in psychology from Harvard and a first-grade journalism background at the New York Times, Dr. Goleman has authored half a dozen books that explore the physical and chemical workings on the brain and their relationship with what we experience as everyday life.

- Peter Allen, director of Google university, introduction to Daniel Goleman. August 3, 2007

I hope readers of my blog will shun away from pseudo science when it comes to emotional and social intelligence, but instead read and learn from authors like Daniel Goleman. I also (still) recommend the books available at The Moral Brain by for example Dr. Jan Verplaetse.

07 Mar 2010 12:17pm GMT

I recently did two talks, for which the videos are now online.

• Uzbl lightningtalk @ fosdem 2010
• Open Source Monitoring tools lightning talk @ Kangaroot showcase 2009. This one is password protected. If you were a participant, you should have received the pass

If all goes well, I'll be at ArchCon this summer, where I'll be doing these talks:

• AIF: The Arch Installation Framework
• Uzbl - web interface tools which adhere to the unix philosophy. Whereas in the fosdem talk I had to focus a lot of information into a short timeslot, here I'll elaborate a bit more

We're not sure yet if those talks will get videotaped.

07 Mar 2010 11:06am GMT

Alliance VLSI development cycle has stalled and there are many software compatibility issues that need to be solved before getting a proper (one that can meet the industry's needs) digital backend flow with opensource software. Herb which was meant as a clone for Alliance VLSI will not be stable enough at the end of this [...]

06 Mar 2010 11:17pm GMT