/dev/random

many of us know it ...

2009-02-09T03:36:13Z

i guess many of us geeks went through the one or other phase in their life when they felt themselves trapped in the system with no way out. "the system" meaning any kind of mental state that prevented a clear view on the situation.

brenda just posted this URL and i can only encourage all to read it. keep it in mind and have a look at it when feeling unsure if that all out there that seems to lock you in is "real" or just you looking the wrong way.

trust me, most of the time it is you, the rest of the time it helps to step back and look at the bigger picture. lets face it, we are a strange breed but we can do things the programmatic way, just think of it from time to time.

@bluehackers.org ... brilliant job

erlang user group

2009-01-13T03:46:52Z

on a related mission to my new years resolution i got the erlang usergroup finally kicked off. after several informal meetings with brenda and me at curry and other occasions i formalized things a bit and kick it off on 3rd of february.

more info over here

see you there ...

my first CPAN module

2009-01-12T23:30:23Z

long time no posts here. it was a very busy time and the turn of the year was reserved for recreation. that meant no hacking, or at least near to no hacking. it is now well into january already and my new year resolutions include way more activities in the open source space. i use open source every day and contributed to some projects but never released stuff i wrote. that is partly due to the environments i worked in and partly pure laziness.
fighting the latter one i started to release my daemon framework that i use for event driven programming in perl for quite a while. this framework is a grown thing and it takes quite a bit to clean it up and make it a framework rather than a bunch of libraries that happen to be used together. the first step was to create a git repository on gitgub and import all the stuff initially. i cleaned it up a bit and packaged it as a CPAN package and viola, here is Net::Server::Framework.

this package is a complete event driven infrastructure that still needs heaps of documentation and misses quite some parts as i did not get around cleaning up all the parts i wanted to. it obviously includes some parts that just grew and should have been replaced ages ago. all in all you can, however, take the beast, unpack it and start writing daemons.

in a post that will come later on i'll explain the inner workings a bit more, the idea of it is, that you write a daemon per functionality and then let those daemons interact with each other. if you are familiar with erlang you will notice the parallels here and probably understand why i think that erlang is a perfect fit for my sick brain and the problems i try to solve. the stuff you find on the github repository contains two working daemons that you can use as templates.

go out and play with it, feel free to mail me with questions, have fun with event driven programming.

compiling couchDB trunk on FreeBSD

2008-10-27T06:10:14Z

it has been a pain for a long time but actually in the meantime it looks like it is really straight forward. i checked out the recent version of couchdb from the apache incubator svn repository, complied it and ... it works, right out of the box.

what do you need?
well, a recent version of erlang obviously, i run erlang-lite-r12b4,1 which is the latest as far as i know (R12b4 is the latest version of the OTP framework) the erlang-lite port is under 'lang'.
the mozilla spidermonkey libs (under lang as well) and the gnu build tools, but they hang around normally anyway. remember to use gmake not the standard BSD make.

then we can start:

$ svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/couchdb/trunk couchdb
$ ./bootstrap
$ ./configure
$ gmake
$ sudo gmake install

then you can simply run couchdb from the command line (i normally run it in a screen to have the log handy and to see crash dumps if the occur).

time to relax ...

politics of the wannabes

2008-07-15T01:27:26Z

dns is in trouble, at least caching dns. i guess everyone who is into that topic is busy patching his resolvers. the funny thing about that topic is the kids that start wining that this is all bad and that the new design does not work for them and so on. it looks like paul vixie now stepped up to calm the crowds. his post is nice, i love clarity :-)
problem with the post is that the kids don't know paul or don't value his input but hey, after 7th of august there is not too much to worry about kids anymore. the internet will be a mess and there will be heaps of crying kids, complaining that all this is not fair and that there was too less time for them to patch and all the usual bla bla ...
there is a moment in your live where you learn pretty radical that there are some guys you better listen to when they say that things go bad. if you think you know better the world will show you that you are wrong. this is one of those moments.

Technorati Tags: internet

iPhone launch Wellington - update

2008-07-10T22:48:39Z

the poor guys of vodafone had their shop open till about 6:00 this morning and reopened at 9:00. i was in the shop at around 9 and found some pretty tired faces :-)
it looks like the credit check thing is the part that takes the most time. mine failed obviously the first time as i am no kiwi and they wanted to have my passport and visa faxed to the vodafone credit check team. even today in the morning there are queues at all three voda stores in welli and guys are running around shops asking for stock figures. the 16gig version is pretty much sold out now as it looks like.
well ... i finally managed to get my hand on one as well :-) lets see how it compares to the first generation iPhone.

iPhone launch Wellington - New Zealand

2008-07-10T13:03:06Z

some pictures from the iPhone launch down here in Wellington. The queue was about 150 guys long and was well treated by Vodafone staff. It was only around 10 degrees down here and Vodafone served coffee and provided caps for the freezing queue.

At midnight the store opened and the first in line - and only the first - entered the store to get his iPhone. It took about 20min till he came out again. I am curious how long it took the last guys to get their phones :-)

comments on the NZ iPhone plans

2008-07-08T22:30:59Z

the plans for the iPhone in NZ are plain ridicules. NZ is light years behind the global standard and vodafone is trying to sell it to us as a premium service for the high price segment. mobile data usage is standard elsewhere but it looks like vodafone NZ did not even bother to look abroad. 250 meg for 80$ a month is a joke when you compare it to europe or the states.

this video shows the reaction down here quite good :-)

http://www.youtube.com/v/291gK1ikf1w&hl

Technorati Tags: iPhone

iPhone plans in NZ

2008-07-07T22:24:17Z

the iPhone plans for NZ are online ... well, were, for about a minute or so till the vodafone servers crashed. here is a screenshot:

Technorati Tags: iPhone

why i hate PHP

2008-06-23T04:06:22Z

PHP itself has not too much to with it actually, well, it has, but the biggest problem with that language is the entry barrier. it is too low. every 10 year old can learn how to write basic php code and then starts to mess around with it, writes broken stuff and wonders why on earth software design is told to be complicated.
i got one of those php projects on the desk in the moment. a customer needs to get that project online and "just needs some bugs fixed". end of the story is that they refuse to have it rewritten because they sank too much money in it already and now got only the budget to fix the remaining bugs. turns out there is no "remaining bugs" there is just broken code around broken design around missing experience around no f**ing clue what software design is in the first place.
i saw lots of broken code in my live and i am well aware that i wrote broken code as well when i was a teen, probably even later. i wrote php as well as other stuff but i learned programming with real languages. programming is more than knowing the syntax, it is software design. it is the concept of how to optimize not only how to bump lines of code into an editor. this code rejects every idea of design. it has nothing to do with programming it is only inconsistent lines of code that happen do display things (at least from time to time).
why blame php? i think php is a language that can be used by guys knowing their business (even then it is a pain). it does not try to force you to a clean design. it does not provide you with a consistent API (positional parameters are interchanged every now and then) and it does not force you to actually design your code. this leads to the problem that every teen thinks to be able to write an application 10 times too big for him and the result even does nearly what was required. the problem is that the code is not maintainable because it was not planned, the code will never scale because the concept of scaling has never been considered. the code is cluttered and not readable because a codebase normally reflects the state of mind of the programmer this is a bad picture for the poor guy who cranked out those lines.

if all that sounds a bit frustrated then you are probably right. i never saw such bad code before not even in perl. most probably because perl has a higher entry level (replace perl with the language of your desire, i just used perl as it is often referred to as write only code).
it is embarrassing to know that someone paid good money for such a mess!

google app engine

2008-04-14T21:28:25Z

i tried to play with the new toy in town ... did not work for me however as my gmail account origins from the time when google faced the law suite in germany and had to rename the gmail.com accounts to googlemail.com. this very mail address now does not play with app engine (support is on it and comes up with new "try this..." things every day, very ambitions actually).
well, in the mean time i have two things working in my local development environment and tried to read a bit around what the rest of the world tells us about the whole buzz. interestingly the answers are not as enthusiastic as expected. honestly everyone waited for google to announce a cloud computing stack since amazon launched S3 and later EC2. with the latest promotion of amazon for their stack it was even more obvious that google will come up with something soon. so why don't we worship google and praise the new cloud platform?

well, some of us do, but there are some more critical voices out there and they get my full support. on o'reilly radar they try to be not too negative about google but some of the local voices down here paint a more drastic picture.

i guess we have to face it. google is the giant that tries to show us the nice side and really tries to be supportive to the internet but in the end google is not different to the other giants out there. it is simply impossible to be really big, make tons of money and still be a geeky bunch of guys trying to neglect the fact that business is the thing paying their bills. i really think that google tries to support the internet community but i think it is obvious that they try to do it in a way that primarily supports their business model. having tons of applications running on a application stack of google gives them a huge variety of ideas and already working projects that can be acquired and integrated with near to no effort. this is web2.0, make a quick and dirty thing, publish it at google app engine and hope that you get bought. this looks like a perfect fit for all those social network "applications" that float around. if you want to do real business and want to own your data, go somewhere else.

a good friend is gone ...

2008-03-19T20:55:01Z

i read about it today and still have a sms from him from last week. bernd luevelsmeyer, a good friend of mine, is gone. he was probably one of the most important influences in my work live and guided me on my way to UNIX and the console. he was the best sysadmin i ever had and was always a good friend.

sad to see the real geeks leaving this planet.

climate change for web designer?

2008-03-09T19:36:57Z

i read a brilliant post on o'reilly radar today that cited steve sounders from yahoo on website performance and how it impacts the climate change. this moves the focus more towards us tech guys and highlights once more that climate change is not just a topic for energy companies. interesting side note is that after google yahoo is the second heavy weight internet player concerned about green house gas and CO2 emissions.

here is the link to the article

domain registration in USA

2008-03-06T21:41:17Z

as we all know there are some registrars in the US that offer domains for really good prices. these registrars are perfect for the time where your content is nothing more than ... well than what exactly?

The case of steve marshall(GB) is a really interesting one. he runs some travel pages for a mainly european audience to destinations in cuba. the pages are a bit 20th century but with a very clear message: "we sell touristic offers". as they sell offers in cuba they are conflicting with american interests and therefor they were put on a blacklist by the US treasury department. the registrar holding these domains, enom, was therefor forced (at least that was enoms interpretation) to disconnect these domains. they did that without further notice or any information to the customer.

welcome to the wild wild west ... move your domains to somewhere else, the bucks you'll spend more might be well spent.

the whole story at new york times

keeping track 2

2008-01-23T10:19:28Z

i described my way of keeping up with my daily stuff in this post earlier. my dad read this post and made me a fantastic present. a new notebook. more, a notebook kit. the basis is the famous and really very perfect atoma notebook system. i combined it with my already tested post-it sliders and extended it in some ways. but before i go into details, have a look at the exceptionally nice notebook.

the huge advantage of the atoma books is that you can take any page out of the notebook at any time at any position and either insert it at an other position or archive it. the kit itself looks like that

just a pack of pages and some alloy rings. it is really stunning when you assemble them to a real notebook and after the first some rings it gets easier to fiddle them together. the system is stunning and so easy and pretty that it makes simply a perfect tool.

i decided to never ever change notebooks again. i just archive out the old projects and always keep a current notebook with me. the current setup has three categories: the main project index ...

... a calendar (as you have single pages you can simply print on them) ...

... and a knowledge base. as i don't have to change notebooks anymore i can assemble a nice little knowledge base in the back of the notebook and never have to copy it again.

a nice thing to mention as well is the fact that my much loved Faber pencil fits in like a charm (at the bottom)

this notebook will remain the optimal setup for the coming time and will be improved over time by probably more categories and other handy things.

thanks again to my dad who had the right idea and the right place to search for this fantastic tool.