till Scot Adams jokes about it ....

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert201833620802...

Yes I removed the image link.. some weird policy invented by a PHB that should probably feature in one of Scots cratoons, prevents me from displaying the actual image here.. , Or was it the marketing department ..

thnx Christophe

The interweb thinks there isn't much future for Zimbra if Yahoo gets swallowed by Redmond. I`m not sure.

There are different alternatives apart from the being extinguished during the takeover.
I have no clue how the core developers and the management of Zimbra was reimbursed when they were taken over by Yahoo, however I hope they didn't waste all their money and still have some money left. As they went this far with the company already they must have some good contacts with financial people that can help them get a new company off the ground ArbmiZ or ɐɹqɯız would be good names ;)

They could either go with a fresh start, or Yahoo could be so smart to have the guys perform an MBO.
Or even sell the Zimbra assests again .. even at loss.

If getting the Zimbra organisation out of Yahoo doesn't work why not hire the key developers away from the company effectively rendering it worthless , big chance you don't have to hire them away from their current job but just be waiting at the front doors when the exodus starts, people either don't want to work for the new company or will be forced to leave as they are redundant.

RedHat has a big opportunity here .. they don't have a relevant mail offering yet, there have been rumors around RedHat going to partner with the OpenXchange folks but I haven't heard from that yet .., but other companies might have look at the codebase also.

Would we need a fork ? We don't know yet ..

But I don't think we have to worry that much .. I think there are bigger things to worry about ..

Back in the days when I was spending more time on security projects than I do nowadays , I started working on the concept of an Open Source Security policy within the Isecom

Over at the Open Management site that idea came back to live, It's not much but I at least could paste initial the drafts I had still lying around in my CVS repo into their page.

As always I`m sure I'll run out of time to focus on the project, but at least it has a fresh start now.

Please contribute :)

Bort pointed us to a new interesting feature in the linux kernel.

This is really good news, we'll be able to get input from the kernel on the fact that it is about to start doing things we don't like.

Looking at a random machine

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2017       1128        889          0         53        443

It's not only Java applications that should be polling this device frequently ..
firefox, clock-applet, liferea, gnome-terminal, VirtualBox and evolution also might want to look at it .

Thank you for cleaning up your mess ! :)

Real Heroes happen Here
All mashed up with People who understand

Twice in one day I was pointed to The Mantra .. the vision , the good practices on how to run an infrastructure. And because I fully agree with this way of runing an infrastructure I`ll highlight some of them again .

• Design For Change , the google way.. everything will be different the next time you look around
• Be reproducable , you have to be able to survive the 10th floor test .. yes even when building stuff
• Design Redundancy upfront , don't try to squeeze it in later .. it will be more expensive and you will be less flexible
• ...

Dormando has some more reading material.
And when you are done reading Go watch the video of Randy Shoups presentation on Amazon's infrastructure, because also at Amazon we can find 4 repeatedly discussed points in the Architectural strategy

• Partition Everything
• Automate Everything
• Async Everything
• Prepare for Failure

It's a repeating theme , with variations based on your specific problem domain.. but the central toughts stay the same.

Automate Everything




Expect Failure

Matt , we've arguing open standards , W3C compliance and , no flash , java or any other plugin requirements for basic functionality for over a decade now. Those people just don't listen .. they only know IE and their customers / bosses only know IE.

Telling them there is a whole other world out there that is not running on windows doesn't matter for them as they don't see revenue from them. (Chicken, Egg)

The argument that does work however is :

"Hey I just tried looking at your site while waiting for this meeting and it didn't work, does it work on your phone ?"

People will start to care about not being able to have basic functionality from their phone.

Paper makes me waste time .. actually signed papers make me waste even more time. Papers that have to be signed are always on a stack waiting to be signed posted ..

So whenever someone sends me a document that needs to be signed what happens is that it has to be printed, then signed, then I usually opt to scan the document and mail it back to the sender. Seems like not everybody thinks thats good enough so they want me to send the original docs also ..

Which means finding an envelope, figuring out how much stamps these things need, since usually it's not just a 1 page document but more pages than the average letter and off course most of these documents need to ge sent abroad.
Then I start realising I don't have any stamps at home...

Aahrr!

It seems like for the past 4 years February is the month that O'Reilly really loves me and decides to publish one of my articles.

This years version was cowritten together with my collegue Johan Huysmans and tackles the creation of Highly Available Gateways

Altough the every HA situation is different and this is a pretty easy setup it's a good start for other setups.

Enjoy the read

PS. Yes I know , in 2006 I also had a January article :)