Online storage

I am always looking out for online storage I can use to backup all my files. So I came along adrive.com which looked quite neat at first sight. It had all the buzz words I was looking for like ftp or ssh, quite big storage, etc ... Don't get me wrong I am happy to pay for a service so I am not just looking at the free options. But still this one got me. Look at the picture and then look again.Would you think that the free version has FTP? I though so. So I created an account and tried to run a few benchmarks on how fast the service is etc.. But I couldn't find the FTP description. Another thing that you can really notice by the design is that this page has been designed by people sitting in a dark room with green terminals. But then I had a look again and noticed that the first green tick in the free version was missing. Which I just assumed as normally all of the first items have a tick an then they are reduced going down based on the plan you choose. I felt like the people from Adrive had tried to trick me and not assuming that they have any bad intentions this is really bad UI design. Now if you look at the dropbox page, it looks really nice and they don't seam and try to trick you. So which service will I as a consumer choose where the pricing of all these services seams to be the same?

Trip to FOSDEM

I know my last post was about how I am not going to go to conferences this year. But FOSDEM is an event I just can't miss. So we are going. Here the mail I sent around

Hello

We are organizing a trip to Brussels for Fosdem in February.

FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Development European Meeting) is a
European event centered around Free and Open Source software
development. It is aimed at developers and all interested in the Free
and Open Source news in the world. Its goals are to enable developers
to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open source
software. It is said to be the biggest gathering of Open Source
interested people in Europe and the speaker list is quite impressive.

We will be leaving London on Friday (5. Feb) evening and returning on
Sunday (7. Feb). One of our goals is it to keep the total cost for the
weekend under 200 Pounds, which is quite cheep for a weekend in
Brussels.

People who are interested can look at the wiki [1] or drop me a mail.
Everyone is welcome.

Cheers Didi

[1] http://www.bunix.org.uk/wiki/doku.php/events:fosdem2010

I hope a lot of you can come :)

Google != Goog$e

From now on I will be calling Google Goog$e. This is to indicate that in my opinion Goog$e is just another corporate big shot, that tries to get as much money for their stock holders by any way possible. The cool hackish culutre that they are trying to promote is not different from the one Microsoft had about 20 Years ago. Funny enough every time I am talking to someone from Mirosoft I get the feeling they are coming back to it. They have this really cool research labs where you can pretty much do on what every you please. Maybe Goog$e is the new Micorsoft and vice versa :)

P.S. I am still thinking about if I should still wrinte Micro$oft. I think this will depend on how I am feeling.

Stuff I want in GMail

I have been using GMail for quite a time now and it is getting quite annoying, to be honest. The speed has just become to slow to work. Loading my mail is not a matter of minutes and searching has become pretty much impossible. Then the service is unavailable pretty much once a month which is really annoying if you really need that one address in that one email. And sometimes it just freezes and I need to close the tab and reload it. This is becoming a real pain. Where is the slick nice fast interface, that did everything I needed. I am noticing that I have been using alpine more and more lately just because it is pissing me off so hard. It seams like with the recent comments coming out of Goog$e, the increasing application error count and the impression that time has become uninteresting in favour for features Goog$e seams to be loosing it. (I know of two really good people that have already left because they are getting soo pissed of about the culture that is growing there) Another thing that I am finding quite hard to do is extend GMail. There are two features I want to implement but because Goog$e is more fascist about their source code and the Java Script they publish then Microsoft I am finding this really hard.
The first feature is a little icon next to the Compose Mail button that opens a new window with the email writing window. I have spent about 2 hours reading horrible Java script garbage to figure out how to create the correct AJAX call to trigger this but haven't really progressed so far. The second feature I really want is a TOP button at the bottom of every page that will bring me to the top of the page. It is a real hassle that every time you read a long email thread you have to scroll to the top of the page to see the list of labels again. Both these features seam impossible to integrate into the existing GMail framework. I talked to a friend who does some Windows dev work and apparently you could even script that in Outlook.

Conferences this Year

This is something I have decided a while ago but I though I might blog about it now. I will not hand in any talks to conferences this year (except T-Dose :). This has mainly one reason, TIME. While being at Bournemouth I always complained that stuff was not hard enough and that a well trained hamster could do my assignments*. So I made up a lot of stuff and made my work hard. A lot of times I decided to go the hard way ("F*** Java lets do it in C") just to learn something new. Another thing I am now noticing is that through not having to spend 24/7 doing university work I had time to do invent new stuff, which consequently got me speaking at conferences. Now at my new uni I am spending quite a lot of time doing stuff I don't know. I remember thinking "This seams like a lot of management and requirements, cool I really know nothing about that". But because I am now really learning about new topics which are totally out of my usual scope I don't get the time to invent new or funky things, hence that I cant really talk about a lot at conferences any more. I am still doing a little on objic, mostly reading, but I really need more time to properly get to the next step. I will still attend a few though, Fosdem being the obvious.

P.S. This does not mean that Bournemouth is a shit uni, even if I don't agree with everything they are doing. It just means that if you already know how to program (especially Java) some courses might become quite easy.

*Maybe that is what we need in computing. n hamsters can solve x problems. Just make n big enough and you can solve any x. Who needs monkeys

Windows 7

We got my mum a Acer ONE for Christmas and I spent one whole day trying to set it up so that it would sort of work, as it came with Windows 7. After removing all the shit that Acer seam to think you need I spent another few hours going to different web-sites and downloading flash, acrobat, etc ... and mostly waiting. As a last task I wanted to replace the background image with a picture of my family. How would you go about of doing this? I spend 30 min looking in different menu items and trying to find this one thing. After doubting my intelligence I asked Google and guess what. It is not possible, in Windows starter it is not possible to replace the background image. Hahah how about that? You spend 400 Euros on a PC and you can't even change the background image. Money well spend I would say. Now my mum will enjoy Ubuntu. What a stupid decision, I was really thinking Mic$osft was on the right way but this just blows it. Only retards would use something like that.

Do backups

I took my laptop to a very remote location to actually get some work done. As I am noticing that when I work at home the internet is to big a distraction. So while I was happily working away I wanted to save my done work. At home I normally save all files see if everything builds and then '{svn,cvs,git} commit'. As my server is in Holland and my backup server in the US I need the internet to access them. But what do I do somewhere without internet (Yes these places exist). Every normal person would just continue with his work and commit when he comes home. But let's consider this scenario for a moment. While on the car my laptop wakes up out of suspend because something has pressed the button or I didn't close the lid properly. Now the hard drive is turning but exactly now I driver over a bump => headcrash. One week of work gone. Hard drives are something so liable you should never rely on them. My friend Edd breaks about one every week. So what to do. Risk it, no way. I remembered that while at a conference last week I was given a USB drive (Thank you Microsoft Research) so I pooped it in and now save all my data on this.

$ cp -ruv uni/ /media/disk/

does the trick. Now 2 things would have to break for me to lose my work. And if everything works out OK I format the Dongle and everyone is happy. But if my laptop decides to be funny I still have all my work.
I can not stress enough how important it is to think about backups. If you want your data to be reasonably secure you should always have a backup in a different physical location and secured with a different password. Loads of my friends and lecturers (that call them selves IT specialists) do no such thing. I can only hope they don't have to learn the hard way. I think this is a really understated problem. I know loads of people that say "Ah I do regular backups. I have a external hard drive next to my pc". And how much security does that give you? A robber taking your pc will also take the drive and your data is gone. At least use a service like dropbox for your important data. Taking away all the crap (mp3, videos etc..) you can download again normally you don't have that much "really vital" data. I have about 1 GB of files I really really don't want to lose.

Professor Michael Worton thinks UCL students are stupid

As some of you may know I am a student at UCL and as you can see from my previous posts I get a lot of mail. So I get really annoyed when people think I am to stupid to see something the first time they send it to me. Especially if people just resend the same mail over and over gain. It looks like Professor Michael Worton and Claire Underwood seam to think that all students at UCL (all-postgraduates|at|ucl.ac.uk, all-undergraduates|al|ucl.ac.uk) are morons and to stupid to read their email the first time they get it. And apparently we are not able to read and respond properly (to our own judgment) the second time. Ahhh because we really haven't figured out what a email is, just send it again the third time. The same mail.

Message from Professor Michael Worton Vice Provost (Academic & International)

I agree that some student survey is really vital for my success at UCL and important but still I emailed the sender and informed here that I was already getting enough mail and that I don't want this spam. And guess what, to further insult the students at UCL they are sending out a fourth reminder. Now that makes me wonder. If we get FOUR reminders about another student survey how many do we get about something that is really going to influence my student life (Exams, etc ..). I will be expecting someone to call me personally from UCL as some people seem to think that we are to stupid to read and think.

REST vs SOAP

For the Advanced Analysis and Design course at my university I have to compare REST with SOAP. My first reaction as I heard this was WTF. How is it possible to compare a strictly defined protocol with an approach idea like REST. I don't know if my professor doesn't understand the concepts of both or if this is the realization he wants us to get. For the people that don't know the difference here a little rundown. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol and was initially designed to call functions/methods on remote machines (basically RPC shredded through the XML buzzword machine) whereas REST stands for Representational State Transfer and describes how the resources in the internet can be arranged and talk to each other. Mainly described by the example of http. Of course you can use both methods to get data from some source (Amazon for example) but the general ideas are so fundamentally different that a real thorough comparison is not possible. Sometimes I do wonder. If you would only read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOAP and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer you would understand my point. That simple.

Flamewar commence:

How much money can I make with my domain

I just had a look at http://www.thenetinfo.com and that tells me that my domain is worth:

Ribalba.de Estimated Worth $88 USD

Wtf. Who would give me that money. Really. And all the other sites I tried it just doesn't give you any info at all. Ahh wait

Stallman.org Estimated Worth $5.8 Thousand USD

and

Microsoft.org Estimated Worth $292 USD

So really who would belive such a thing?

The problem with google analytic when you run your own server

On my website www.ribalba.de I run google analytic which lets me see how many people look at my website where they come from and what they are looking for. Not that it really matters but I am just interested in why people would want to read about me. Assuming I should only be interesting for about 50 (+/-) people in the World. But I also run some analyzers on my web server log files and it turns out that the main thing my server is doing is serving files I have outside of my wiki (which I use for my site) they are files that I just have in folders and that can be accessed through directory listing turned on. But these are never accounted for in analytics. So if I direct my browser to http://www.ribalba.de it will be saved in analytics but when I goto http://www.ribalba.de/geek it does not. So in some respect analytics is giving me a wrong picture. Further image downloads from my server are not displayed. So not really useful as you are forgetting a huge junk of data and so your analysis of your site is bound to be wrong.

wrong start data => wrong conclusion

Maybe Google should offer a method by which I can upload the log-files after logrotate has run and so the file is not used anymore. So always take with a grain of salt what google is trying to tell you.

libnice for CentOS

Some guy on the CentOS mailing list needed libnice so I built it. It can be downloaded from:

http://www.ribalba.de/geek/port/

The source package is in the src folder and the builds in the respective directories.

I hope this helped some poor sole :)

Just for your inforamtion:

GLib ICE implementation

libnice is an implementation of the IETF's draft Interactive Connectivity
Establishment standard (ICE). ICE is useful for applications that want to
establish peer-to-peer UDP data streams. It automates the process of traversing
NATs and provides security against some attacks. Existing standards that use
ICE include the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Jingle, XMPP extension
for audio/video calls.

Why being nice pays off

I have lived in London for little more than a month now. My daily routine includes getting the tube to Uni and on the way I pick up my morning reading normally a Financial Times, a Guardian and a bottle of water. I do this pretty much every morning. So I spend quite a lot of money for this if you take it time 365. At my tube station I can choose between two news-agents that sell papers. As I am coming from the right I naturally always went into that one. And I never though much about it. It is owned by a family (it seams) and the people that work there are not rude but they are not friendly and helpful. After going there for a month they still didn't know what I was getting. In the morning when I am quite grumpy the last thing I really want is someone to be grumpy back at me. But I just accepted it and continued buying my stuff there. Four days ago I came from the left so I thought why not try the other shop. And what a difference, I was greeted really friendly and I had a little chat with the guy behind the counter. The next day I went to the left one agin and the same guy was friendly again. Now after just four days he already knows what time I normally go to university and of course the papers I buy. It never occurred to me that in a world where prices are pretty much fixed friendliness is one of the last selling points. Location might be important too, but these two shops only differ in the staff. They have the same stock and same prices and pretty much the same location. So the reason I choose the left one is because I am treated in a friendly way and people remember me. This might sounds stupid but I bet you have all done it. If someone treated you in an unfriendly manner you would say to yourself "I am not coming back" and if someone knew your face after entering a shop three times you felt sympatric with that guy.

So what can we learn out of this for IT. In the IT ecosystem prices are quite fixed too and location is becoming even more irrelevant. So maybe friendliness is a major point. Maybe your costumer will chose you the next time because you remembered him, like I take the little hassle of walking one minute more every morning just to be treated nicely. If you are a freelancer this is really important, in my opinion, as at the end of the day you are not much more than the news agent competing at a train station. Just you are competing with 100000 other shops and not one.

CentOS Pulse #0906 - The CentOS Newsletter

Hi all,

With a little delay, issue #0906 of the CentOS Pulse newsletter has
been released. It covers topics like the CentOS 5.4 release, a very
funny featured article and a interesting event review and much much
more.

You can read the newsletter at:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter/0906

More information about the newsletter and how you can contribute is
available from:

http://wiki.centos.org/Newsletter

Enjoy Reading!

Didi

And another email address

I am collecting email addresses. I have 8 different locations emails goto and then 25 different forwards to one of the 8. But one of the coolest address I have so far is:

which of course is just a forward but still quite funky

The problem in how I read mail

So I get quite a lot of mail every day, like a lot of us do. But there is no way that I can read all of them at once or even start answering them. I normally filter out the really vital stuff every morning and evening and then when I get time I read the rest. When I need to answer something and I don't have the time to do this I flag the mail with a little star. Now when I get time I start answering the mails that I have put a little star on. I further use my mail as a TODO list. So I send myself a mail with what I have to do and add a star. So I end up with a list of stuff I have to answer or do. Now there is a flaw with doing it this way. Think about it. .....

Ok the problem is that GMail orders the newest message first. So you see the latest message on the top. Now when you start working of your TODO list you start with the newest item. As you never manage to answer all messages you are always left with some at the bottom. You are answering mails like a stack. Which results in that you will have mails at the bottom that are really old. And as long as you don't work of the stack to the bottom they will age continuously. So there is really important stuff in my TODO list I just forgot about and never did. I should have really just checked the dates once :)

Howto send mail through Gmail using your UCL address

Following my previous post on how to receive UCL mail with Gmail now here is how to send mail using Gmail but with your UCL address. You have to go to settings (top right) and Accounts and Imports and then click on the button with "Send mail from another address" So here is the data you need.

Email address: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk

Then you have to click on send trough SMTP server and enter the details

SMTP Server: pod51002.outlook.com
Port: 25
Username: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
Password: you should know this

And you don't click on enable SSL. I am sure you can do this with SSL somehow but I don't have time to figure it out :)

Then Google will send you a confirmation code which you have to enter. Please check in your spam folder as this is where my confirmation went. But after that you can just send mail like you are using outlook.com

Getting your UCL email into Gmail

I really don't like outlook.com or this web interface to live.ucl.ac.uk So I though why don't I collect all the mail in my Gmail account so I can read it in alpine. It is quite easy to set up.

• You first sign into Gmail and then click on "settings" (top right) then you select "Accounts and Import"
• Then you need to click on the "Add pop account"
• Enter your UCL address and click next step
• This will fail and you will be asked to add your data manually

Following data is important:

• Email address: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
• Username: yourlogin@live.ucl.ac.uk
• Password:
• POP Server: outlook.com
• Port: 995
• And use SSL

This is pretty much all you need to receive mail. I further add a tag so I can search for uni mail quicker and leave the messages on the server in the case Gmail goes down.
But that's it. Quite simple actually.

To see how to send mail trough Gmail using your UCL address see my other post: Howto send mail through Gmail using your UCL address

Need money

I have been accepted to the

2nd IEEE International Conference on
Adaptive Science & Technology

in Ghana to present my paper on Objects in the Cloud. Now I have been looking at flights and etc and on the bottom line I can't afford it. I find this quite sad that in the conference atmosphere you always need someone behind you that can sponsor you (University, Company, etc). I mean I do get expenses for many conferences when I talk but a few don't even think about setting up a grant for poor students like me. I think they are missing out and creating a rich elite which is never good. Sorry for this rant but I am quite sad that I can not go :)

Trac with lighttpd on CentOS

I spent a few hours today trying to figure out how to get trac working with lighttpd on CentOS with the standard packages from rpmforge. Like always this seams to be quite easy but then you spend ages on the little things.

First of all you need to install trac via yum which is quite easy: yum install trac
This is assuming you have lighttpd already installed

So here is the section you have to put in your /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf you will also have to enable a few modules at the start most notably mod_fastcgi but please always check that you have all the modules enabled.

$HTTP["host"] == "trac.mypage.org" {

url.rewrite = ( "^/$" => "/root")

server.document-root = "/var/www/trac"
alias.url = (
"/trac_prefix/chrome/common/" => "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/htdocs/",
)

# rewrite for multiple svn project
url.rewrite-final = (
"^/trac_prefix/[^/]+/chrome/common/(.*)" => "/chrome/common/$1",
)

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/trac_prefix/chrome/" {
}
else $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/root" {
fastcgi.server = (
"/root" => ( # if trac_prefix is empty, use "/"
(
# options needed to have lighty spawn trac
"bin-path" => "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/fcgi_frontend.py",
"min-procs" => 1,
"max-procs" => 1,
"bin-environment" => (
"TRAC_ENV_PARENT_DIR" => "/var/trac/",
),

# options needed in all cases
"socket" => "/tmp/trac.sock",
"check-local" => "disable",

# optional
"disable-time" => 1,

# needed if trac_prefix is empty; and you need >= 1.4.23
"fix-root-scriptname" => "enable",
),
),
)
}
}


There is nothing special with the paths and the rest if quite standard. The one thing to note is that I couldn't get trac to live properly in the root directory. As soon as you select a project it will error => So we rewrite the url to add "root" to the end. The rest should be pretty straight forward. There is no authentication in this example but this will follow in a further post.