Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

The next edition of Profoss scheduled late january will tackle one of my favourite topics. Virtualization ..

Raph just posted a Call for Papers he says :
If you have deployed a Free or Open Source virtualisation technology in a demanding professional environment, if you're a services company with extended expertise with virtualisation, or if you have developed a virtualisation software under an open source license, or built a product based on open source technology, and want to share your experience with your peers, please don't hesitate to submit your proposals.

Henning Sprang seems to have a different view on the concept of a Vendor LockIn than I do

On his blog The daily laziness: OpenQRM vs. vendor lock in??? , he describes how openQRM Locks into using .. openQRM.

Well, not really .. at least not in my opinion, although openQRM still has a long way to go and the proposals for a meaner and leaner Henning gives are certainly valid,

openQRM however does not force you to do anything you don't like. The source is available and free, you can modify its behaviour , you yourselve can spend time on in, learn and modify the platform no one .
(given the complexity I agree you won't dive into it in just 5 minutes but you nothing (b)locks you)

Certainly in the virtualization field openQRM gives you the freedom to migrate your machines from one virtualization technology to another, Today VMWare, tomorrow KVM, the week after Xen
or all 3 or them from one management console (can come handy after a merger) all with the same interface. None of the commercial products out there will even think about giving you a GUI to manage their competition.

On top of that when you go out and buy VMWare , you can only manage VMWare instances and you get a framework that will also force you to work in a way you can't change. You have only one company to talk to, VMWare, (maybe via its integrators but they can't fix issues , they don't have the source) with openQRM you can hire other people besides Qlusters , you can change to another organisation to support you.

Try that with VMWare , I fear you are Locked In

For your viewing pleasure
Tech Humor and Tech Talk

So just when last weekend I started asking for a LinkedIn API , then ran into the Facebook API I ignored Google's OpenSocial announement.

And guess what .. the start for the OpenSocial Drupal is already there.. now when will the code show up ? :)

I wonder if I shouldn't totally switch careers and become an industry analyzer. Traveling to all the nice places , getting invited to all interesting parties just by predicting
what will happen in the future. And all that offcourse for a big fat paycheck

It's not like this is my first prediction coming true

I just got an invite to connect to an old collegue on Plaxo Pulse

I`ve been ignoring Plaxo for a while now as the only thing it did for me was keeping an online addressbook.
I already have an online addressbook it's called LinkedIn.

Upon accepting the invite Plaxo proposed me to import my contacts from both Facebook (which I don't even actively use) and LinkedIn . Now this is the first time an app proposed me to import my contacts from LinkedIn.. an API was announced but I haven't found it yet.

I browsed around on the new Plaxo Beta but honestly I can't say I found anything interresting on it so it'ss yet another passive social network account for me.

However it made me wonder if there are already drupal frameworks out there that let you use FaceBook or LinkedIn data. And I promptly ran into the Facebook one still pretty young. I couln't find a LinkedIn one yet however .. altough that one would interrest me more

Any takers ? :)

Lots of people are commenting on VMWare's vision on Open Source
With statements like
What we want to do is fund ourselves to be able to build new stuff. If you're purely open source, there is no way you can do new stuff.
you'll lose credibility pretty fast.
It's clear that proprietary software companies can't keep up with the speed of open source development so they need to spread more FUD on a daily base.

Half a decade ago Open Source indeed was catching up on proprietary software and trying to implement features that the other side already had. We have long passed that moment .. Xen and KVM are the technology leaders of the pack. The rest is trying to keep up. (And it's not only in the Virtualisation area that we see this evolution)

Yes VMWare does similar things under the hood with a more fancy GUI as Tarry notes but in a way indeed they are heading the way Microsoft showed them they way. Or aren't they..? Apple did nothing really new with the iPod, apart from its slick interface. But today Apple is feeling the heath from people not wanting their DRM, wanting to play OGG , and people wanting to use their device from non Apple platforms.
So people clearly want something more open, not one tool that locks them in with a vendor. If you really are looking for a GUI to manage your platforms you'd better choose for one that can manage them all

Being a Drupal newbie with some web experience today I`m struggling with creating a form and using the input from that form to display items on the next page.

Unless I`m mistaken (which given my newbie status is perfectly possible) in a _form_submit you parse your data then return a link to the next page you are displaying.

When inserting and updating a page this works perfeclty because you point back to the page that displays the data you edited . But so far the only thing I found out that takes input from a form and displays it in the next page is by using a multipage form.

This article on Lullabot explains how to create such a page .. but I call that far from simple.
Anyone got a better way to do this .. Al I want to do is have a form where I can select some values, then based on those values get some data from my database and display that. There has to be an easier way than multipage forms. But this Drupal newbie can't find it :(

Next step is to get the above example working ..

about a decade ago:

Only the actual quote was.. I want the Green to be Greener

The folks from Krimson.be are organizing a couple of Drupal workshops in Gent
and even a full development tutorial day.

I already met half of the Krimson crew so I`m looking forward meeting the other half and learning from them ...