Life, IT & the Rest

The FOSDEM Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting will take place this weekend 6.-7-2-2010 in Brussels, Belgium. Some topics from the schedule

• Flukso: web-based community metering application
• SIP Communicator: Skype-like conf calls with SIP Communicator
• Copyleft Hardware and the Ben Nanonote
• Kaizendo.org: Customizing schoolbooks the free software way

Archive: Past Talks Video

Enjoy another day with talks about big web infrastructures @hdm-stuttgart.de!

“Wer langsam ist wird verlassen”
StudiVZ, XING und Co - Architektur und Betrieb sozialer Netzwerke

Der StudiVZ-Gründer Dennis Bemmann, der Vice President Operations XING
Dr. Johannes Mainusch und Heiko Specht, Account Manager Gomez
Deutschland geben einen Blick hinter die Kulissen großer sozialer
Netzwerke. Ergänzt wird das Programm durch Kurzvorträge von Studenten
des Master-Studiengangs Computer Science and Media.

Wann?
22. Januar 2010, 12.30 Uhr, Raum 056 (Aquarium)
Weitere Informationen
PROGRAMM

12.30 Uhr
Begrüßung und Einführung ins Thema
Prof. Walter Kriha, Studiengang Medieninformatik der HdM

12.45 Uhr
Wikimedia - Ausmessen des LAMP Stacks mit Werkzeugen
Studierende des Master-Studiengangs Computer Science and Media der HdM

13.30 Uhr
Externes Monitoring
Heiko Specht, Account Manager Gomez Deutschland

14.45 Uhr
Wer langsam ist wird verlassen - Performance großer Websites, ein Blick
hinter die Kulissen von XING
Dr. Johannes Mainusch, Vice President Operations XING

16.00 Uhr
Client-side Optimizations
Jakob Schröter, Master-Studiengang Computer Science and Media der HdM

16.30 Uhr
Skalierbarkeit, Datenschutz und Geschichte von StudiVZ - Technik und
Diskussion
Dennis Bemmann, StudiVZ Gründer

17.45 Uhr
Ende der Veranstaltung

Nice talk “Infrastructure in the cloud area” from the O’Reilly Velocity Conference

Conclusion

• Hard things remain hard.
• Using an API for system administration: more scaleable, better to handle.
• Automation, configuration management, self healing is cool.
• New efficiencies opten lead to new hard problems.

It splits up the layers

1. Bootstrapping: get hardware, network, OS in place
2. Configuration: Get application and monitoring running
3. Command and control: daily business, run & deploy code, rerun configuration

1. Bootstrapping

Cloud computing does not save money, it saves time (to market) and gives flexibility. In traditional data centers it takes a long time and a complicated process (4-8 weeks) to get hardware in place. Hardware resources are wasted. Using a cloud it takes 5-10 min to boot another server instance and there are less humans involved (buerocratics and tech staff). The drawback is that the application has to fit to the cloud.

2. Configuration

The old way was to hack 1 week on a server to make it production ready: a graveyard of state. Manual server configuration is always the base for automation, but is error prone and unstructured. A new way is to create a “golden” base image and an deploy packages, services, files to it with a configuration management tool like puppet or chef (examples to deploy “sudo” functionality to a server).

By describung “infratructure with code” you get a repeatable, agile, self documenting server environment. But that takes time to learn and hard things remain hard. Using an API for system administration an dautomation makes it more scaleable and better to handle.

3. Command and control

How nice would it be to trigger the configuration management system to create/repair a server, integrate it into the monitoring system, maybe automatically? The old way “meatcould” (many humans operting the servers) will be replaced with frameworks like nanite (Ruby) or control tier (Java). A two way communication (query version a apache, do update if necessary, restart service) and a messaging bus that works across data centers is the base for these frameworks.

Come & enjoy another Linux Day at Hochschule der Medien on Monday 25.05.2009 in 0711.de!

• Starting with OpenWRT on consumer routers
• stepping into 2 session on Groupware
• another 2 full on Mozilla open web technology and community topics
• “local network” with the Linux User Group Stuttgart and Open Source Region Stuttgart
• Join us in Unithekle, (some) free beers, open end
• Bring your router to Unithekle for OpenWRT hacking, see hardware compatibility list
• Video Stream

The T-Mobile G1 phone aka HTC Dream running the Linux based Google Android stack will be available in Germany for 495 EUR (without plan) on 02.02.2009 as announced on Heise mobil. Features include WiFi, HSDPA, GPS, compass and accelerometer.

For Developers Google offers the G1 as “Dev-1” without SIM lock and the possibility to load custom operating system images for 560 USD (incl. tax & shipping to Germany).

Radical change of functions and the look & feel of Android devices is encouraged, all functions of the phone and a rich API can be accessed by Java code, which runs in a non Java ME compatible VM called Dalvik.

Getting started with a “Hello World” programm using the Eclipse plugin is easy & well documented. The Eclipse plugin provides an emulator, debugger and profiler, so there is no need to by a device at first.

The first chapter of the wrox book “Professional Android Application Development” is available as free PDF and gives an overiew of features, possibilities and technology.

The Book “Deploying Rails Applications” gives an good overview and tutorials on the infrastructure needed for a successfull web project. The central tool is the domain specific language for deployment capistrano which is inspired by rake, written in Ruby by Jamis Buck and integrated with the Ruby on Rails framework.

I really liked reading this clear and progressive book by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, and Clinton Begin published by Pragmatic Programmers. The chosen analogy “moving into a new house” helps to understand why it is a good idea to automate server handling and web deployment. The main parts are

1. “bootstrap subversion” chapter on version control
2. hosting environments on shared and dedicated hosts.
3. The chapter on capistrano is the only printed documentation on that tool by now.
   Capistrano offers default deployment “tasks” for Ruby on Rails, but can be adopted e.g. for PHP Projects or admin tasks like key deployment, installation/compilation of software. Commands get pushed to servers in bash syntax via SSH in parallel. The servers can be grouped in “roles” like “web”, “db”, “all” or “most fancy customer”.
4. mongrel servers
5. scaling, performance
6. deployment on windows

Enjoy running around on O’Reilly Radar as “the last guy” in this browser game…

Like in real life: Make the crowd follow you && avoid the monsters && Have a lot of fun!

The Song “Code Monkey” hit the geek charts in 2006, has a nice wikipedia entry and really rocks. The New York Time article Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog has all the details.

Even writer & performer Jonathan Coulton seems to like that one of the many fan videos. Enjoy this Music Video by Kagato@StudioHybrid.org giving pictures to the words & music which express the real reality of some members of our contemporary society :]

Code Monkey MP3 & Code Monkey Games

Andrew S. Tanenbaum (Minix OS) & Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) will do Keynotes at the Free and Open Source Software Conference 2008 http://www.froscon.de 23.- 24.08.2008 in Bonn, Germany.

Talks of the remarkable conference schedule will be streamed by linux-magazin.de.

phpVikinger Derick Rethans will talk on 7 (or more) PHP Myths defused.

Press Announcement

This Linux Netbook looks amazing!

• Models “Ideapads S9″ and “S10″ cost about 320-360 EUR in .de
• From Oktober in shops
• 1GB RAM memory
• 160 GByte-Harddisk or 4 GByte SSD (Solid State Drive)
• Display is 1024 wide
• Express Card Slot
• Linux (Distro to be announced) or WinXP

Full News text in Linux Magazine Germany

This is the product picture you can see in the News http://www.linux-magazin.de/content/view/full/24797