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

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

Gregg Pollack of RailsEnvy created an amazing Video of OSCON 2008 asking Speakers to sum up their point in 30s. Thats fast forward, guys, watch this Oscon in 37 minutes Freak show! The viddler.com video even has an index of speakers:

Keynoters Tim O’Reilly, Damien Conway, Tim Bray, Robert Lefkowitz, David Recordon, Nathan Torkington, and Danese Cooper….

Headliner Mark Shuttleworth on stage taken from Flickr

Some guys from the HdM Stuttgart did a nice TV documentation on “the” Web 2.0:

• barcamping
• Web 2.0 Expo Berlin
• Interviews (partially english) with
  • Alpha Geek Tim O’Reilly
  • Enterpreneur Peter Ambrozy
  • Blogger Oliver Gassner
  • and many many more web 2.0 “aware” people
• and you won’t believe it: economic background

The film was sponsored by dmc, Cisco & Otto, broadcasted in german TV on 3sat and ZDF. It will be “reloaded” tomorrow 31.07.2008 13.30h on ZDF-infokanal.

Have a lot of fun!

Links Background

• http://www.web2null-derfilm.de/
• http://www.hdm-stuttgart.de/view_news?ident=news20080729173439
• http://www.3sat.de/3sat.php?http://www.3sat.de/neues/sendungen/magazin/123704/index.html

Links Stream

• http://www.3sat.de/webtv/?080729_webzweinull_neues.rm
• http://de.sevenload.com/videos/nJE9sqq-Web-2-0-Der-Film

Enjoy these Subversion commit statisics served chilled…

http://www.vimeo.com/hackontest
Download Hires: http://www.hackontest.ch/media/

Found those at http://www.hackontest.ch, which is a Hack Contest sponsored by Google.
During the http://openexpo.org/ on September 24/25, 2008 in Zürich, Switzerland three Open Source Teams will code “hard” on bugs & features rated by users. You can vote until 01.08.2008. TYPO3 is one of the favourites.

Support your local coders!

Some Geeks, Googlers & people gathered near San Fransisco for an Unconference called Foo Camp organized by O’Reilly.

If you wonder why anyone is still waiting for just organizing some Bar Camps have a look at barcamp.org. If you want to get your hands dirty you might find these OpenSpace resources useful.

This is what they where up to last weekend:
http://www.techcrunch.com