We got some snow
There has been some amount of snow this winter, here in Sweden. Well, we usually do have snow during the winter, but this amount is plain ridiculous. Who was that guy talking about global warming, was it Al Gone or Al Wrong?
Back again
I have been, sort of, away from this blog for a while. Primarily this comes from me being occupied with lots of other stuff. The past couple of months I have been busy with teaching/training most of the time.
I have given several courses over a broad spectrum. It has been in
- Erlang programming
- Threads-programming in C++
- Java fundamentals
- Java advanced
- Cloud Computing
Over Christmas/NewYear I started to learn Android programming, which is really fun.
Posting from my Android phone
Just checking how easy it is to write a blog post using my HTC Hero Android phone with wpToGo. Although the typing on the soft keyboard is a pain.
Mail migration
As a response to my crashed firewall, I decided to retire my hobby mail server running Postfix/Dovecot on Ubuntu Server. Instead I have decided to join the masses and go for a hosted exchange service instead. For a die-hard Linux freak as yours truly, this sucks. However, on the flip side, I gain better reliability and set of services, such as beside of synching mail to my Android HTC Hero mobile, I also get calendar and contacts.
Before summer I was looking intensively for a open source version of calendaring and contacts that allowed me to synch to a mobile phone. I tried eGroupware with Funambole client. But there were allways some part that didn’t work, whever I got something to work.
Now, when I’m on the move frequently I need a working solution for mobile mail/calendar/contacts that also works with a desktop client. Google mail wasn’t an option becuase they doesn’t seem to have a professional solution for a small-business.
As long as it comes to pure mail management using the postfix/dovecot/spam-assasin/postgray combo, it works flawlessly. But finding a decent (open source) calendar and contacts server, accessing them over HTTPS from a hotel room or via a mobile phone, is not possible.
Running a SOHO server(s) has its moments, when the broadband connection goes down, when the home assembled firewall crashes or just the cat plays with a cable that happens to be cord to the ADSL modem. Last summer (2008), the firewall crashed due to iover-heating. It was an old PC baught for my son when we were living in London 2001. The problem was, me and my wife was at the Canary Islands for another two weeks. After that I got some new hardware from a local computer store and it lasted for a year. The firewall software I’m using is Smoothwall, which used to be a very decent OS-based firewall. However, they haven’t upgraded the bundled drivers for many years, which results in it’s not able to install on modern hardware.
When the firewall crashed recently I bought a brand-new (cheap) PC, just to discover for the second time that Smoothwall doesn’t install on contemporary hardware. I wasn’t particulary tempted to build my own distribution with the appropriate drivers, at the same time I was cut-off from the net. So, I found a spare machine from 2004, which allowed installation of Smoothwall. But, as I said in the beginning of this post, I will not wait for this junk to crash, so I have migrated the mail handling elsewhere.
The next step will be to migrate the webs {www, blog, lib}.ribomation.com. I will write another post, when it’s done. Probably it will take some time, because I will be on the move for several weeks during September and October. Next week I will run a series of seminars on Cloud Computing, Groovy & Grails and trends in Application Development. The following weeks I will teach Erlang, Real-time Systems Programming in C++, more seminars and then more Erlang and RT++. It goes on like this until November. It’s fun and intensive.
Crashed firewall
Last week I was away from home/office the whole week giving for the first time my Erlang course in Linköping (200 km south of Stockholm). A day after my departure, my firewall crashed due to some hardware failure. It has been very frustrating ‘watching’ from a distant position no access to either this blog, my company web and the mail. Finally, after a lot of work during Saturday I got a replacement maching up and running again. Sorry for being offline for such a long time.
I’m (re-)launching Ribomation
During the 90s I was running my own company Ribomation, devoted to training (and consulting) in advanced software development areas. In the beginning it was mostly C, C++, OOAD and threads programming in Linux. Towards the end of the 90s, it was Java only - all sorts of Java related topics. When the dot-com morphed into the dot-gone, I terminated the business and spend some years abroad.
Almost ten years later it is time to start the company engine again and steer Ribomation out at the ocean. As always I will focus on emerging and disruptive technologies. Cloud Computing (CC) is definitely of that kind. CC will change the way we design and develop applications.
There are three use cases for CC:
- Extra server(s)
- Elastic (scalable) applications
- Massive data computation
If you need some extra capacity, for example testing server, number 1 above apply. If you need to design applications that can scale to 100.000s of users, number 2 apply. And, if you need to process large amount of data, number 3 applies.
Blog created
Now is this blog created and just need some stuff to put there.
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Jens Riboe
