Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Tarus is happy not to have VC's on his back. He doesn't want to be responsible for turning a 15 Milj investment into a 150 Milj cashout. Others chose to go that way.

Back when he wrote the article the chances were small that he already knew that Qlusters was going to be shut down with still sooo much money in the bank, but the VC's wanted it back.

So how do open source companies plan on making those tenfold roi reality.
Apart from selling out to a bigger company I think thats a very difficult task.
Especially when you keep in mind how to manage both the Open Source community and your customers. The figures he mentions that VC's require surely start pushing vendors into violating Fabrizio Capobianco rules.

Now the story changes when indeed you cn go to a model where you are selling a large scalable service to your customers, even with microsized payments it becomes a possibility, but that's a totally different business model from what e.g. the Open source systems management shops are doing .

So will the Zenoss, Hyperics or the Groundworks of this world survive the demands of their VC

Luckily these projects are Open Source, so when the company dissapears, the project can continue, and grow even better. Like openQRM did

The past couple of weeks my blog is being annoyed by different comment spams, the content of the comment seems perfectly relevant, often even correctly tackling the topic, or sometimes even almost insightful follow up questions.

However the link to the author site is totally bogus.

If talking about drupal and high availability , a question on GFS or OCFS2 is obviously on topic. However I don't want my blog to link to lot of irrelevant sites.

On the other hand I can't tell Mollom the content of the article is crap. I do want to tell Mollom the "author" of the comment is crap. I even might want to have the comment visible but not link back to the author.

Anyone got good ideas on that ?

I kind of poisoned my laptop earlier today , I fell for the Google Trap , their new browser somehow seemed interresting enoug to look at. With CodeWeaver's
Chromium build I got tempted into installing the thingie.

Mistake :)

Yes it all looks nice and fancy , but at first sight it isn't really faster than
my firefox. Now the real disappointment comes when you start browing the web
with it. The first time you end up a a site that uses flash however you realise
you won't be using the codeweavers build that much.
Yep there it goes wrong ...

So I don't really see the advantage of running Chrome in Wine while my Firefox beats the crap out of it on all levels.

rm -rf /opt/chromium/

The bad wine is gone .. back to regular business again..

Harish Kumaresh from Packt wrote me last week to ask if I wanted to review their Zenoss Core book

The package arrived today ..

So I`ll try to free up some time asap to actually read it :)

PS. Yeah I know, the pictures are is so "Dries", but I like the concept :)

I`m absolutely astonished when I see some of the ideas / concepts people are trying to build a busness around , call it a cool startup and expect VC capital.

But I`m even more suprised that a big part of the world and even the VC world is falling for these ideas, or thinks that the general public will pay for such a product or service.

Let's have a look at some TechCrunch 50 startups.

Michael blogs about OtherInbox, when looking at their site my first reaction was: Hasn't google been doing that for ages ?
The ivo.rentoren+spamfromblog@gmail.com or ivo.rentoren+cocacola@gmail.com or ivo.rentoren+chanel@gmail.com type of addresses ?

On which you can base filters etc ? So what's new ? From reading their website I fail to see where they are differentiating.

2 articles down the road I learn from Brady that a company called Yammer which provides a hosted version of Twitter is also launching at TechCrunch... Now the idea of an enterprise Twitter version isn't stupid, but with a tool like Laconi.ca already available in open source it is something everybody with a functional brain can implement in his own company. Question arises obviously if Twitter itselve shouldn't host this :)

Yammer seems to be a spinoff of a much more interresting tool that I'm actually using Geni now that was/is a groundbreaking and interresting tool to use for which I haven't found an equally strong alternative.

Having had a couple of ideas before where I usually killed the potential project after thinking about the business model I wonder if I just should have pursued the projects even though I myselve would never become a customer at such a company.

We belgian people tend to be to critical for ourselves it seems, we think a project can't succeed to fast, so maybe we should start more stupid ideas and see how the rest of the world react. Afterall.. Reinventing the wheel seems to be a popular hobby of a lot of people these days

While playing around with the great MySQL Activity Reporter , I ran into the following error.

[client 192.168.254.72] PHP Fatal error: strftime() [function.strftime]: Timezone database is corrupt - this should *never* happen! in /var/lib/mysqlard/mysqlar.php on line 62

Now the error is clear .. the Timezone database is corrupt and I`m the one to blame for .. this was on a pretty stripped down Centos that lives in UTC. So there wasn't a real Timezone database.

Obviously a quick apt-get install tzdata solved the problem, but once again the lesson is.. don't strip too much .. you'll eventually endup needing those 3 Kb of free space you gained anyhow.

Dear LinkedIn,

Obviously it's tags we want, we want to be able to place freeflow tags on a person so we can identify where we met them, common interests, or other relevant information we want to keep about connections.

A part from that If I add details to a person, I would love to see them show up when I export the my connections..

The whole idea of having to edit these details for another person and not being able to export them.. weird.. It should be the person himself editing these details then decide if I can see them or not. That way I don't have to keep track of different new phone numbers when people change them.

Having my own metadata is interesting , but the main feature should be to keep track of people, new jobs, new contact details , and tags so we can sort and search for persons, and export our own data.

Afteral it is my data isn't it. And I want to use it as my way

Lenz just posted pointers to a great presentation of his about MySQL HA and Drupal,

Seems like a small part of me did go to Szeged afterall :)

Stephen , good thing you think about touring to Europe again for the Xen Summit.

Colocating with LinuxTag or LinuxKongress would really be a good idea, but make
sure to organize it the day before or after , not during the congress :)
On the other hand .. you wrote LinuxKongress, but you probably meant Linuxconf.eu didn't you ?

But then again Cambridge is also a lovely place for a summit ;)

I failed to get both Autodiscovery or even adding a host to the Zabbix monitor working on 1.5.6 so I decided to roll back to 1.4.6 afteral.

At least autodiscovery seems to work there.

The weird thing is that people upgrading from older versions seem to get it working like a charm, but a fresh install on a Centos 4.X seems to be troublesome, Just no time to debug it now.