geneva::information
photography and rant from the middle of europe
Well, that’s what some stock photography agencies say, and they are sooooo right. Damn right. I mean. I would hate to try to sell photos and get resource to sell which is unusable. Like – pictures from the aircraft seat.
The good thing is that I could not care less. I do not sell any pictures *) and that I just take the pictures I like to take because I think they are nice/cool/interesting.
Whic is why I feel totally at ease to post this one.
It’s in IAD on the flight to MSP. That flight meant a lot to me, so it’s totally ok to post a boring wing.
And this one. C’mon, the reflections are great. I love it :-b
That is part of the University of Minnesota where we had Dev-Jam this year. Reminded me of FFB, a lot.
And that’s Jen. Jen took this picture:
:-)
Other images from MSP?
Tree torture. Well, the tree was dead. Looks still serious.
And that’s the Mississippi! First time for me to say hello to it.
Part of the University of Minnesota..
Clear rules for bike traffic..
And yet another boring highway – I hope nobody has hard feelings about highways being called boring. They are rarely..
“s”. I went onto a “range” as well, the first time. My thumb is still not responding to sensory stipulation.
ok, that’s it. I did not get to take many pictures this week :-)
*) I sold pictures I uploaded to a stock photography site of a total value of EUR 1 or so, please be so kind to ignore that.
I spent a week with an incredibly bright group of people in Minneapolis this week on the OpenNMS Developers Conference. I did not touch OpenNMS a lot, but focused on support organization and the configuration of .. RT ;-)
Sehr lesenswerte Zusammenfassung auf dem BeckBlog zu dem, was man heute über das Geschehen auf der Loveparade weiß.
Love Parade – wie wurde die Katastrophe verursacht? Ein Zwischenfazit | beck-community.
20 people died on the german love parade in Duisburg. The article is a summary written by a law professor. He is discussing the different possibilities for responsibility and points out where things did not go right (as we know today).
Danke nochmal an Euch für Euer Feedback zum Photowettbewerb! Dieses Bild hier hat beim Wettbewerb gewonnen :-)
Thanks to everybody for their feedback, I won the competition with this picture:
1 comment
XING (which should be pronounced Crossing..) proposes now a Recruiter Membership. That Membership provides better search criteria and probably some bells and whistles.
The search criteria are however interesting:
“Gezielt Suchen, schneller Finden: Filtern Sie Ihre Suche per Mausklick nach Kriterien wie „Aktivität auf XING“, „Karrierelevel“ und „Branche“ und erhalten Sie in 10 Sekunden Ihre perfekte Ergebnisliste.”
Filter by “Acitivity on Xing”, “Career Level”, “Business sector” and get perfect results.
Now, dear recruiters. Do you value someone with a lot of activity on Xing higher? Or would you rather think that he’s not focusing his energies the right way?
I’m not sure I like that idea, not sure at all.
Website temporarily unavailable
The France.fr teams regretfully announce that the new French portal is currently inaccessible. We are dealing with a problem linked to the configuration of our servers. All the systems are being audited to allow us to get the site up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience and see you very soon on the site!
via France.fr.
I will now press Apple + I to see what is behind. Nothing special, but they use a tracker to track the failed attempts.
And now Applie + U for the source.
Not a lot, but we get to
//-- Copyright 2010 AT Internet, All Rights Reserved. //-- AT Internet Tag 3.4.007
after following a jscript. That’s the tracker.
But well. C’est la vie :-)
Vor vielen vielen Jahren (es war 1999) begann ich als Produktmanager elektronische Dienste bei der Deutschen Post zu arbeiten. Ich hatte die Gelegenheit an vielen interessanten Produkten mitzuarbeiten: Zum Beispiel an der elektronischen Signatur. Und wir haben uns auch viele Gedanken darüber gemacht, wie man die unterschiedlichen Fähigkeiten, Produkte, der Post zusammen bringen könnte.
Da kam das Projekt “epost” auf den Plan. Vor dem Börsengang der Post ging es darum, die Kompetenz der Post in neuen Medien zu demonstrieren. Wir haben also einen großen, sehr großen E-Mail-Service gebaut – und ich hatte das Glück, die technische Projektleitung übernehmen zu dürfen :-)
ePost, auch “Lifetime Email” genannt, war kostenlos, offen und soweit ich mich erinnere auch ziemlich schnell. Die Technologie dahinter war faszinierend. Das spannende am Dienst war aber die Offenheit – wir hatten die Architektur so ausgelegt, daß man ohne große Probleme andere Dienstleistungen einbetten konnte. Entweder direkt, oder aber über die Nutzung der Authentifizierung. Ach, das waren Zeiten.
ePost ging dann aber den Weg eines Produktes, dass sich alleine finanzieren musste aber nicht konnte – es kam ein Verkauf an einen anderen Dienstleister und schließlich die Einstellung des Dienstes. Bis jetzt.
Denn jetzt..ist es wieder da! Natürlich viel besser :-)
I’ve blocked my facebook account by logging in from somewhere else – and the mobile to which fb wants to send an sms is not here. Hence – no facebook for some time (or if I get the vpn to work and facebook has an insight..well..)..
*this* appears through other ways on fb.
The ones who know me are aware of the fact that “law” is one of my hobbies. Especially my friends from the mighty states think that that’s rather sick (“there are some things even rats won’t do..”), but well, it’s fun. Changed my view on the world, definitely.
Now, while finishing the migration from server old to server new, I came to the point where I needed to cancel the service contract for server old. To find out that I need to send the guys a letter with return receipt. wtf? I can order everything online, by filling out web forms, but I can not cancel the service contract without sending a letter, a physical thing, with return receipt?
It’s even more funny when they claim that “they will only treat cancellations which are complete” and (presumably..) on their form. That. Sucks.
The only light on the horizon is laposte, which has the brilliant service of sending out letters..but you can do it all online. So I went to the website of my hoster, downloaded “their” form to cancel, printed, signed, scanned, went to laposte, uploaded, paid!, sent the mail with return receipt.
And still. I do this only because it’s a french company and my french is not good enough to complain decently – if it was a german company I’d have pulled out the verbal “Argumentarium” to get them to accept my cancellation by the same media by which the agreed to conclude the initial contract..
My hosting provider (www.online.net) has launched a new server which comes at 19€ per month. That’s 20 less than the old machine I had, so I decided to move. I can live with the relatively low performance of those machines – and even if I would have need for more bang, I would rather rent a second one and scale out mysql and postgres over there. Especially as the new ones have 2GB of Memory, as opposed to the old 1GB. Running OpenNMS and Confluence requires Memory ;)
I had ordered the new machine almost the day they launched it and started to set it up. My first question was whether I could take my old IP address (88.191.66.88 – ain’t she sexy..) with me – but no way, I can not.
That added a slight hurdle – the server is primary DNS for my domains as well and got whitelisted in a few other networks for certain reasons. It’s running a mail server as well, which was less of an issue for me. The other things I do there (OpenNMS, the blogs, my PPTP server) are not really fixed to the ip address.
The first thing I did was to migrate the blogs over to the new machine. My setup was already before the migration using nginx to talk to the apache – the only thing I had to do was to point the nginx not anymore to the apache on localhost, but on the remote machine. That worked surprisingly well – nginx never fails to amaze me :)
So now the users talked directly to nginx on the old server, which fetched the content from the new one.
I staid in this setup for some time. To clean up a bit and prepare for the next server move, I got a “redirect”-IP Address from my hoster (virtual). In the first step, I directed it to the old server and started to slowly change IP addresses of websites to use the virtual address.
Now the user would talk to “virt” which would talk to nginx on “old” which would fetch the content from “new”.
Moving the DNS was a bit more tedious, as I had to register a new nameserver. I will need to clean that up later on, as I’m currently again using the physical ip of the “new” server (instead of the “virt”).
So now the new is the master, old and my (own) secondary as well as the secondary of my hoster pull the data from it.
One thing I did correct in the beginning but missed to do this weekend was to set the virtual ip as well on the new server (as eth0:1..). I knew it, but forgot and wondered why it did not work in the beginning..and in that process I set as well a route, accidentially, which prevented new to talk to old.
To make my life easier I mounted new entirely on old, via nfs. That’s not sexy but works pretty well :-)
This weekend I did then the final moves, switching virt to talk to new, after setting up nginx completely on new.
The mail server migration went smooth (amazing) and the finally I added the backup-manager configuration to use Amazon’s S3 service again for backup (by far the cheapest and most comfortably solution I could find). The cherry on the cake is that the backups are now encrypted with gpg. We’ve gone a long way in the open source IT world, believe me :-)
It’s fun to work on the console, from time to time..and see how things get better and better.
