Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Done

Some of my lower traffic sites were still on an old Drupal 5, others were at 6.4 and lots of modules were outdated. So I set out to migrate all the sites to a multisite setup. I now have a set of shared modules , shared themes and some specific ones .. just as it is meant to be. And I only have 1 central Drupal instance to upgrade. Next step is figuring out how to trigger the database upgrades from 1 central place.

Well 2 , ny personal stuff and our corporate sites, that's the idea. Personal site is on plain old Drupal 6.6 and for the corporate one we are thinking to go with Acquia Drupal, but we're not sure yet

I've added a new theme, however I can imagine most of you never saw the old one as most of you read this feed in an RSS readers, yet some people nagged me about my lack of style, and as over a decade ago I even won web design contests , something had to be done :)

I moved some blocks left and right and the performance of the site has improved drastically now, mainly slow technorati loading widgets in the left column often blocked loading, that's all gone now.

Also , as some of the commenters on earlier posts complained the main page has no CSS as it isn't in the CMS. So my next step is trying to find out a way that I can replace the now manually maintained files build from different includes into a more dynamical setup where I can also have feeds for my Publications and Presentations.

I`m wondering if there is any microformat or so out there for Presentations and Publications that I could use so other people could use that information in other sites.

After that there's just one site left to migrate.. but that migration won't be for next month as there is some custom modules involved that need to be ported.

Well.. off to some more content then :)

Bort is in to graphs and stats these days, so he was interested in my little Technorati hack.

Lots of us bloggers are using Technorati to track who's joining the discussion on articles we posts. Technorati gives you details on how many blogs link to you, and how much they link to you and translate that into an Authority rank. Now what they don't give you is an idea on how that rank evolves.

Technorati also as an API which allows you to get that same information.
As I was explaining the concept of RRDTool to someone a couple of months ago I thought it was a good idea to track a Technorati rank and grab that with RRDTool.

So I wrote a small script that gets the bloginfo data for my blog from Technorati,
parses out the number of inboundblogs , writes that info to an RRD file and creates a graph from it

wget -O $NOW.html  "http://api.technorati.com/bloginfo?key=getyourown&url=www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/"
VALUE=`cat $NOW.html   | grep inboundblogs  | head -n 1  | sed -e "s/<//g"  | sed -e "s/inboundblogs//g"  | sed -e "s/\///g" | sed -e "s/>//g" | sed -e "s/ //g" `
rrdtool update technorati.rrd $UNIXNOW:$VALUE
rrdtool  graph ../public_html/images/technorati.png --start 1218548820  --vertical-label TechnoratiRank DEF
:myrank=technorati.rrd:rank:AVERAGE   LINE2:myrank#FF0000 -m 2

The result looks like

As you can see somewhere in week 37 Technorati was pretty much not working. And 180 days before week 42 my blog got a lot of fresh , but non recurring inbound links.

Now I have a couple of more ideas to build on this.. just no time.. but if you are interested lemme know ..

Anyhow it's all lies, damn lies and statistics ;)

Seen over at Failblog, you could call it OS fail also actually .. maybe one day people will realize that AVG correctly identified the Trojan

Meme from codeblog

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open it to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My result:

"We'll cover more on where to place your name servers in Chapter 8, Growing Your Domains." - DNS and BIND , 2nd Edition , Paul Albitz & Cricket Liu

No really it really was the closest one .. someone just brought it back to my desk

I`m in John's Cloud Cafe !

Tom dropped me a mail today letting me know that all the links to my RSS feed were broken.
I tested, and tested again and failed to reproduce the problem.

The only things I had changed recently where the administrator menu module and Pathauto module, apart from that I had not made any changes. So I tried uninstalling the modules to see if that helped, it didn't. There was no difference between the 2 setups.

When I replied to Tom that I couldn't reproduce the problemm he told me he only had the problem on http://krisbuytaert.be/ and not on http://www.krisbuytaert.be/

So I verified the apache vhost config and it turned out that the problem, as usual, was a frigging DNS problem.
Both Apache vhost config files had a different setup, so depending on how you arrived at this site you got a different config.

Annoying .. but I guess I owe Tom a beer for figuring this out and pointing me to my own DNS problem.

Bart wonders why my definition of Open Source is.

The Open Source Definition pretty much defines what Open Source is to me.

But it's mostly because of that definition that you get a lot of other things for free.

It gives you freedom to learn, to improve, it gives you an ecosystem in which you can solve problems rather than having to tell your customer that your hands are tied and you can't help them

It also gives you a platform on which you can continue to build rather than having to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

A couple of months ago there was a big discussion about Organic vs Non Organic Open Source, and I strongly believe that the better projects out there need to have a big user and contributing community.

And all of that means open source to me.

But when it comes down to defining Open Source, OSI did a pretty good job for us already.

Kaj wrote about using Dopplr to keep track of where colegues and friends are traveling and finding out about accidental meetups. (I even use it to track where one of the Inuits collegues work plans)
Now I have never met Giuseppe , but we shared slides before so I'd love to meet him one day .. connecting to him via Dopplr gives me that opportunity .. who knows one day Dopplr will tell me we have matching travel schedules.

Earlier this week LinkedIn announced Tripit as one of their first integrated applications, I was a bit dissapointed I use Tripit to let Dopplr learn about my trips , but I really prefer Dopplr over Tripit.

Now there are 2 things I would like to acoomplish with these kind of tools.
First of all I don't mind giving all of my LinkedIn contacts, so my whole addresbook, access to my upcoming travel plans so I can meet up with them again if our plans happen to match. On the other hand I use LinkedIn as my addressbook, so it only contains people I've met, or collaborated with (sometimes even over a decade ago) . And there are a bunch of people out there that I haven't met yet but that I'd love to meet one day and buy some beers or even dinner/lunch. I'd love to connect to them on Dopplr to make that happen but I don't want to have them connected on LinkedIn (yet).

So when Dopplr integrates with LinkedIn I hope they think about this kind of scenario ..

Oh and btw.. Xaprb rocks !

This was not a CloudCamp !

Don't get me wrong, it was a great event and I met lots of interesting people , but it was not a *camp.
The idea was there to have an unconference after the formal sessions, but the formal sessions ran out and there was no time because of food and bar duties.

The event was a mixture of regular Belgian Campers, Virtualization geeks, Open Source folks , obviously there were a couple of "lost" americans , and the crowd from up North :)

The location was weird to say the least, what if the boat hat floated off on the river :)

It's obvious the world doesn't have a fixed definition for "Cloud Computing" yet , Tarry really made a safe bet by cut and pasting the definition from WikiPedia but the thing that really worried me was that when Raph asked if the audience could define Open Source they couldn't either.

Given the audience it's really hard to understand why they couldn't explain what Open Source is .. they should be able to. As the biggest chunk of Cloud Infrastructure is based on Open Source , the audience of a CloudCamp should be able to define Open Source, but then again there was quite a number of suits around that weren't expected to understand what it is all about :)

The fact is that a the cloud today still is a bit of undefined, different marketeers are grabbing the opportunity to rebrand their longtime existing product as fresh and hot cloud.

The interesting part of the Cloud to me is the mix of Virtualization, Scalability, Automation , Large Scale Deployment , playing the puppetmaster, and High Availability ..

It's stuff I have been doing for ages , it's the stuff this blog has been covering since the beginning ... but I don't plan on renaming my blog .. as afterall the whole cloud issue is just a Freaking DNS Problem

Pictures of the event are here

I probably ranted a bit too much on the marketing push that Sun has been trying to make into the Open Source community.
The economical situation isn't really perfect so Sun does deserve some credit too.

Yesterday Techcrunch published an exclusive interview with Jonathan Schwartz on the future of Sun and how Sun will be rescued .

[YouTube Movie Embedded]

More details are here