Older blog entries for idcmp (starting at number 60)

Xen vs KVM

I wanted to chime in on the Xen vs. KVM discussions, and give you some food for thought.I've been using Xen now for years, having replaced UserModeLinux on my personal server, and it's seen a lot of production use at my current job. That said, KVM is ultimately the right way to go. Constant maintenance of Xen's hypervisor kernel is what causes Linux distributions grief with Xen. Those that keep

Syndicated 2009-04-03 05:35:00 (Updated 2009-04-03 05:42:45) from Idcmp

Migrating to Zimbra: A Field Report with Hints and Tips

Last week our company switched from a dovecot/postfix/mysql server hosted 150-210ms away to a locally run Zimbra instance. If you need to do this, I hope my notes will help. I've got a lot to write, so I'll get started: A while before the migration, I gave demos to employees who had unique communication needs (legal department, recruitment, office admin, executive assistants, development, etc).

Syndicated 2009-01-27 03:53:00 (Updated 2009-01-27 04:56:43) from Idcmp

Provisioning Servers: An Afternoon with Cobbler

I spent some time evaluating Fedora's Cobbler installation service. If you play with many machines - real or virtual - you should definitely take a look. Some handy features: * Kickstart Setup: For Red Hat breed systems, existing Kickstart configurations (found on installation media) are exposed as profiles in Cobbler. You can add your own Kickstart configurations too (imagine a "rhel5-

Syndicated 2009-01-05 00:46:00 (Updated 2009-01-05 01:55:16) from Idcmp

Ye Olde Job: Technology That Wasn't

Our system could accept transactions over the phone (via a clerk) or through our website. The clerk on the phone used a semi-web based application to interact with the system. The headache with this was that the code base for the "semi-web" and "actual web" only became a common code path much, much deeper in the code. So the plan was simple, redo the website code such that it could eventually

Syndicated 2008-12-29 17:03:00 (Updated 2008-12-29 22:51:26) from Idcmp

Ye Olde Job: First Post - So You're the Boss

It's been seven months since I left my old job, and I feel it's alright to talk about some things. If you're in a situation where you're finding yourself leading a team of developers without any mentoring from anyone on how the heck to do that, I offer you some food for thought. As a developer, you measure your own progress by the code you write, the bugs you fix, stored procedures you debug,

Syndicated 2008-12-26 17:58:00 (Updated 2008-12-29 23:00:03) from Idcmp

Seven Reasons I Didn't Pick Your Open Source Project

After a really relaxing summer, I've picked up a job as a Systems Architect at local company suffering from growing pains. After almost a decade, I've put down my debugger and picked up a budget..for now. I've found myself looking at many different options of products some open source some not. I want to apologize to those open source projects I've rejected and wanted to let you know why: 1.

Syndicated 2008-11-09 18:36:00 (Updated 2008-11-09 23:26:32) from Idcmp

Wave Tracing: Ray Tracing for Sound

Here's the pitch: With regular ray tracing, rays of light are traced backward from a pixel of the camera, to an object and eventually to a light source (or lack thereof). If you can do that with light, why can't it be done with sound? Over ten years ago I was having breakfast with a friend and I sketched out the idea on a napkin. This kind of math is definitely not my strong point. But instead

Syndicated 2008-10-11 19:35:00 (Updated 2008-10-11 19:40:52) from Idcmp

GWT: Generators HowTo (BuildStamp)

If you're curious what generators are, or have never used them with GWT, this simple generator will give you a quick introduction to get your hamster wheels turning. I do a lot of prototyping in GWT before I build the backend and I've recently had the need to generate a "build version" for my GWT interface. While there are about fiftybazillionmillion different ways to do this, I've chosen a GWT

Syndicated 2008-09-26 21:08:00 (Updated 2008-09-26 21:08:15) from Idcmp

Spore on Linux

If you're a Linux user wondering if Spore works, the answer is: Sorta. I bought the download version from the EA Store. Nothing mentioned until after my purchase was complete that I needed a Windows-only downloader. I didn't test this under Wine. Aside: The EA Store website allows + in email addresses, but the Spore online login does not. I'm using Ubuntu 8.04 with a custom build of Wine

Syndicated 2008-09-15 07:16:00 (Updated 2008-09-15 07:40:19) from Idcmp

Chromium and Bees

Watching what Google does feels like watching X-Files. I want to believe there's some grand master plan, but I'm pretty sure they're just making things up as they go. Hank Williams over at Why Does Everything Suck pretty much covers my thoughts on Google's new web browser in his Huh? and Huh! posts.

Syndicated 2008-09-03 19:28:00 (Updated 2008-09-03 20:06:53) from Idcmp