Sunday, May 20, 2007

Something good out of Microsoft

It seems time to time Microsoft can produce interesting results. Grab while it is hot!

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Happy couple

It looks like there is another happy couple under this Sun. Congratulations to you both Dan and Daniela.

RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 - pushing forward

I took the chance and visited Red Hat 5 technology demonstration today. It was called Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - Dynamic Infrastructure spoke by mr. Stanislav Polášek fro linWorx.
Firstly new features were introduced and among those:
  • Virtualization is now default
  • New and simplified licensing model (no restrictions based on RAM,CPU,...)
  • Only 2 versions (bye bye AS,ES,WS,...) Advanced Server and Desktop
  • Kernel 2.6.18, better SELinux and many smaller updates to about 1200+ packages
Well most important feature is virtualization and I have to say I'm impressed the way they did it. Such a complicated task of virtualization (and I know what that means, we've spent month before we got it right) is now simplified into well defined processes and controlled by various tools that could have some functionality lift up but works very ok for the basic purpose.
In the end there was real demo of starting of installation of RHEL5 on one machine, then in the middle of the process, migrate the machine to another physical host and finish the installation. Machine didn't have a clue what is going on.
Downtime? 2seconds!

Unfortunately it seems there are no pre-build predefined profiles of various types of machines (i.e. Intranet Server, WWW server, FW appliance,...) yet, but recently announced RedHat Exchange seems to fill the gap here. One can find pre-build images from SugarCRM (CRM), OpenFire (IM) , Zimbra (Messaging and Collaboration) and more. Very exciting, now all you need to do is to install this core Linux in your enterprise and then install those binary, instant on systems to add new features for you company.

It seems that Enterprise Linux could be the MS Small Business Server killer! Well done.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

BIll Hicks - the Comedian

In 2001 while I was visiting my family in USA, I've greatly enjoyed all that band of folks around Saturday Night Life and stand-up comedians that appeared on the same channel. I could watch that for hours. And I still do that on Google Video today. Recently I discovered Bill Hicks, and his style suites me a lot, straightly addressing issues of all kind (religion, politics, sex, smokers,wars,...) , yet with interesting style of humor. What is nice, is that most of his talks still apply today, even he passed away in 1994.

See :
www.billhicks.com
Wikipedia entry
some videos on youtube

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

the Computer Language

I'm diving. Yes thats is right, in my free time I'm now diving into Python. Finally it seems I found THE language. I grew up on Pascal and C and even it takes an effort to code something useful in it I like it (most parts of GNOME is written in C). Java is now mature but I never had enough time and will to follow up with it. But I have to say with things like J2EEv5 and above frameworks like JBoss Seam, web development in Java has bright future. Then there is Perl which I love, it is like extended bash with OOP in it. But I'm not skilled in any perl web framework and I'm unsure how to do Webservices in Perl and I'm even not sure I would like to do it Perl. So this leaves Perl to my Unix related skills where it works great for managing machines and automating small tasks. I've missed the Ruby On Rails hype.

And now Python. Something I heard about many times already. Something that has OOP built in from start, Interactive and is highly mutable (easily shape able) into anything you need. For some small project I'm developing I needed something simple and easy I looked into django. Because of great documentation and good people on IRC I've decided to stay with Django for some time. With Django you need python (well it is so simple you do not need it for tasks like CRUD) so here I am. So now I'm in the middle of diving into python eagerly reading how to do polymorphisms, SOAP and more in just few lines if you get to code right ;)

Google Tech talks about Django and several more videos from Alex Martelli aboyt python is definitely great way to start.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

off topic

For last two weeks I managed to be mostly without computer and I'm still alive! Firstly, late skiing on iceberg with my colleagues at Hintertux in Austria was excellent. Surprisingly I could breath in 3000 meters above sea pretty well. I've managed to drink a lot of beer cans, sprained my ribs and completely exhausted all vitamins in my body (like there were any). Then small sickness and right after I got fit we spent whole extended weekend with Mira, Jita and Evicka in Kochel Am See in Germany visiting Eva's friends. Kochel Am See is interesting place, mainly for tourists, just before Alps. Two lakes right next to each other, one about 150 meters above the other one. Fantastic view of Bavaria area. It was mostly raining and we slept in caravan. Next day we had trip to Neushwanstein beautiful neo-romantic castle facing Austria.

Hint: get the Bratwurst !