Virge - high level goals

There has been a lot of changes to my life recently, however there is one thing still in my mind. And it has been there for a while, but I never got any time to sit down, write a summary and start doing that. I use the blog mainly to create my opinion on various topics so I've decided to brainstorm it here.

With my friend we like technology, free technology. I always get quite quickly excited about what is possible to achieve with it. Gentoo, Ubuntu, GNOME, Apache foundation just to name a few. And I like to play with that. For a year or two we've been playing with gentoo Linux and Xen and we had a great time. Now there is one physical box running dozen of virtual boxes separated into various network silos, backuped, each with different functionality, monitored and there are several scripts that makes deployment of new machines quite easy. I take it as a proof of concept.

Idea is to have a Linux box where one can deploy virtual appliances with ease in a secure environment with advanced features for network, file systems, software packages and easy to use admin console. We would like to use Gentoo as (despite its recent problems) it is one of most advanced distributions of Linux out there, EVMS (for reliable data storage with possibility to do cluster EVMS), XEN to power virtualization and possibly www console for managing the machines, machines should use binary packages for quick setup. Usage? Home appliances, ISP machines, Datacenter in just one box. I short: the ultimate linux machine ;).

I'm aware of others doing the same (rPath,Redhat,VMware), but as I said, I like the technology so this is our try. Virge is simply Virtualized Gentoo.

Steps:

• create LiveUSB with latest Gentoo2007.0 (updated), that would install Virge on the new box (including the Xen enabled kernel, EVMS setup, some appliances)
• create admin console using Django+Python+libvirt for managing boxes
• merge this application into portage

During the POF we've ran into some issues with portage, for example we are aware that it is not easy to do binary packages with different USE flags (gentoo feature). But I'll leave those to be solved during the FUN.

Any help is welcomed of course.

CSS teasing

Recently I realized that I need to jump back on web development wagon. I played bit with JBoss Seam and it seems like it is great Java framework to do things. However the learning curve is too high for me (it builds on JSF when it comes to html pages). Then I found Django, django is really one of the most exciting frameworks for building webapps I've met so far. Built on top of Python, great support and rapid development cycle suits me a lot. Check Django philosophy for more.

So I have written two simple apps for testing:

• a syslogviewer used in our company
• web presentation for one of our customers

Both works quite well and I did most of the work in a reasonable time. What is taking now most of the time is the desing of the pages them selfs (and make them look same in Safari, Firefox and damn you Internet Explorer with your weird understanding of CSS box model!!!). I've never pretended to be a great artist (or medium, or ..), although if the time spent on tweaking my desktop theme would count than I would be a star for sure. Anyway, these days CSS is what drives the look of the websites. In short: in HTML one describes the content and associated CSS describes the way the contents looks.

When dealing with CSS I ran into following issues:

• box model a.k.a. the basics
  
• floating of boxes a.k.a. how to position the boxes
  
• selectors a.k.a. how to apply styling to correct elements
  

There are many tutorials on the net for CSS, this one I found particularly interesting :

• http://css.maxdesign.com.au/
  

I've also learned some tricks:

1. To make submit buttons a bit nicer, give it a class and style the class:
   submit-button{
   border:1px solid #CECECE;
   }
   
   
2. To avoid positioning problems put any dimensions in outter element. For example to center one element inside another:
   #outter{ width: 80px; height: 50px; }
   #inner { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding-bottom: 20px;}
   
   
3. When two columns with different height need to look the same size, use the container with background set to image with "1px height repeat-y" atribute. With this technique one can create table looking layout. Nicely described at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/
   
   #container {
   background:transparent url('/images/background.gif') repeat-y;
   }

Although learning CSS right takes a long time (and even more to practice) it pays off. Result is highly skin able pages with one place to modify the look and reduced amount of data required to load each page. It also separates the code from presentation which both developer and page designer will appreciate.

going loud

Many times I wanted to contribute to community by any means. Recently I spent two days by installing Joomla! and VirtueMart as an multilingual eShop for a friend of mine. By exactly following manuals and guides posted on the internet I only got a mixed results that site had two languages, but switching to eShop component has crippled everything. Then I found this bug and things started to work as expected. So I took the opportunity and shouted loud into Czech Joomla! forum. Now I just hope I didn't make too many grammar typos/mistakes to ashame me.

I'm still playing with N800, it is cool device. Battery life is excellent, much more of what I would expect to get from such a device running full Linux system under hood. For a first day I was having very bad experience with my 2GB mini SD card, uploads to device were constantly failing. Next day I got another one just for 600Czk (30$) and since that everything is smooth. Installing new application is just a breeze, integrated web browser renders most of the web-pages correctly and the screen is brilliant, Canola is looking to be good companion, especially when mixed with UPNP somwhere on the LAN. I was unable to play my locally streamed mp3 and DivX avi files though, but I guess this is just a matter of time until this is fixed.

Eva likes it even more, when I see her quietly surfing the web from sofa, listening to mp3 songs stored on the internal card, listening to radio, I think I'm not going to be the owner anymore pretty soon.

Office documents? Just throw them onto your browser

For a while I know about google Docs service. One can upload/create/edit various types of office documents. It has very good compatibility with MS Office and is able to talk OpenOffice formats as well. Once you are done with your editing you can save into PDF file and send to friends.
On line collaboration is of course supported as well, documents can be read-only or shared among friends by sending them invitation email. Besides corporations this means you do not have to have Office tools installed on your PC as long as you have Internet access or you do prefer to have solid and robust OpenOffice installed (free of course). When it comes to corporations, this might not work as some obscure macros are usually deployed in this sphere.
Today when reading about GoogleToolbar 3.0 (still in beta yet) I found out new cool feature. When applied one can throw documents on your browser window and they are automatically opened in GoogleDocs and ready to be viewed/edited. When you have you google account ready, there is even no need to sign in anymore.

Microsoft? What a bright future.

Recently I talked to a good friend of mine and we discussed Microsoft. She met some good people from this company and asked me why I am so skeptic about this company. For some time I'm now sorting my mind on this topic and found two great sources where everything is expressed in a much better way than I can do.

First is Why Does Everyone hate Microsoft? posted on slashdot, where some serious facts and nice opinions are posted. Here I admitted to myself, I do not hate Microsoft. But I used to, I swear, every time when commanding probably the biggest battle in time and a game crashed back in 1996 it could drove me crazy, really. I still do remember those frustrating moments when something crashed, or not worked at all and I spend endless hours in effort to debug the problem. People say their desktop does not crash anymore, well done Microsoft, we have not crashing MS desktop after almost two decades of coding. Now we have it full of viruses, spy-ware, malware and more. Microsoft people says that this is because Windows is #1 operating system and if other OS's were used as much they would suffer from the same issues. I do not think so, I believe there is something rotten, hidden in the system.

Then today I've discovered 1990-1995: Microsoft yellow road to Cairo posted on roughlydrafted.com. This guy seems to have very good overall knowledge about the history of the company and points out many unknown facts about the company. It gives a perfect idea why the system is rotten inside and how the company works.

In short, monopoly tactics used everywhere, killing other companies that offer innovation, FUD, poor products, missing interoperability (yes sharing is good!), frustration, locked users/companies all covered in very shiny and juice wrap promising heaven on PC (just stay tuned). But try to explain this to uninterested user in two minutes and not bore him into death.

time to move over it