Themed Christmas Presents

This year, my family chose theme packages as my Christmas presents:

My father invests into my startup business by feeding my thoughts.

And my brother seems to have noticed a certain trait of my personality…

I love my family. Thanks, Dad! Thanks, Tom!

See the full gallery on Posterous

Why is everyone talking about chocolate?

Weeknote 35

Wow, it’s already been 35 weeks ago that I officially started my full-time business, Freistil-Consulting. Most of those weeks were so busy that I didn’t bother to write my weeknote. Let’s give it a fresh start!

DrupalCONCEPT is running smoothly, more and more clients trust us to host their Drupal websites and we’re doing our best to give them a heck of a hosting experience.

We launched Apache Solr as a search engine extension to our server clusters this week, and it was an important milestone. With its high performance and high availability features, now including search, DrupalCONCEPT really became serious competition to Drupal hosting companies worldwide. I’m so very happy about the success of this venture! And I’m also happy that I found a business partner to share that success with — as well as the work, of course. ;-) Markus Heurung joined Freistil-Consulting in November and will be in charge of Drupal Projects and IT Training.

Since the year’s almost over, the next big news will come in 2011. We’ll spend the days up to the holidays working behind the scenes, improving, tweaking and getting more clients aboard.

And of course, there’s got to be the big strategy meeting where we’ll decide on the directions Freistil-Consulting will take next year. A day I’m very much looking forward to.

Linux tip: Coloring terminal output

Coloring output by using escape sequences is a technique I've known before I started using Linux. That's about two decades now.

But, as I learned today, the tput command provides a much more versatile approach:

bold=$(tput bold)
normal=$(tput sgr0)
echo This is ${bold}bold${normal} and this is not.

tput uses information about the actual terminal to generate the right escape sequences, so it's much better to use tput than to hardcode those.

Well, I understand that it's a big deal...

The music industry finally lost their last stronghold. The iTunes
Store has become the music distribution channel of
the digital age.

But Steve, when this thing so important to you that you even give it
the apple.com homepage, then why let an intern do the
photoshopping?

Having a smooth day

This morning, I woke up. And I mean, for the first time since I went to bed! Which is unusual because over the last weeks, Amalia either woke me up by walking up to my bedside in her sleeping bag in the middle of the night or simply because she has a bit of a cold and occasionally coughs really heavily. At other times, I woke up by myself with thoughts running around my head, not being able to get back to sleep again.

So, this was a really good night for a change. We had to hurry to get her to daycare in time, but if that's the price of sleeping through, that's okay.

On the way to the S-office, as always I tapped the button on my headset. Instead of the podcast playlist I expected to hear, the iPhone started a Smooth Jazz channel in TuneIn Radio. What a relaxing way to get the brain running! That's what I call a smartphone.

I decided to make this whole day a smooth one. Relaxed, swinging, smiling.

What about you? Leave a comment!

I'm officially an expert on chaos

I just got an invitation to the 4th Chaotic Modeling and Simulation
International Conference in Greece.

Since I'm not an active member of the international physics community,
I can only assume Google Street View now also publishes workplace
photos.

DevOps – Zehn Tipps für Entwickler

http://evan.bottch.com/2010/09/16/devops-ten-tips-for-developers/

1. Verstehe die Beweggründe

2. Beziehe Ops frühzeitig ein

3. Ein Team

4. Ziehe die persönliche Kommunikation vor

5. Ops ist ein Endanwender (und ein Teammitglied)

6. Teile Verantwortung

7. Gib nicht nur Bestellungen auf

8. Halte Versprechen ein

9. Missbrauche die Freundschaft nicht

10. Bilde dich weiter

Und zuletzt noch ein Nachtrag in puncto Höflichkeit: Es schadet nicht, "bitte" und "danke" zu sagen -- und "sorry", falls du was verbockt hast.

Amazon bietet eigenes Linux-AMI für EC2

“Many of our customers have asked us for a simple starting point for launching their Linux applications inside of Amazon EC2 that is easy to use, regularly maintained, and optimized for the Amazon EC2 environment. Starting today, customers can use Amazon Linux AMI to meet these needs.  This just adds to the great selection of AMI options in Amazon EC2 that range from free to paid, giving you access to the operating systems and environments you need.”

The Candy Black Studio

via candyblackblog.com

A dream of an office! (via @jkleske)

Google Streetview: Die Stunde der Hypokriten

Illuminate your thoughts!

via funktionalley.com

"Snakkes", a speech bubble lamp that can be written on with whiteboard markers.

A clever idea to keep customers up to date

Wufoo greets customers who haven’t logged in for some time with a list of interesting new developments.

Weeknote #18

Organizing

Man, I wish I could buy time. While the company bank account is quite well equipped, I just can’t find the time for everything that gets put on my plate by me or by others. Time Management my ass, it’s Getting Shit Done™ what it’s all about and that means: Differentiate the urgent stuff from the important stuff. And then do the latter.

I have to admit that I struggle to keep that in mind all the time. There are always many unplanned things that threaten to become serious distractions, be it a call from a customer in need of some hand-holding, a disrupted IT service or a sudden stroke of genius that of course should be worked out immediately. I try to be a good GTD disciple, but instead of a “mind like water”, my mind every so often resembles more a flushing toilet.

Learning

Starting a business means starting a new way of learning. I’m amazed what amount of things I’ve learned since I started planning my business in late 2009. After relearning things I had forgotten already and acquiring new knowledge about topics I had only heard about from my directs at my previous job as an IT manager, my sysadmin knowledge today is at a new height. At the moment, I’m doing heavy in-depth reading about MySQL performance and MySQL high availability concepts.

Working with clients is another great learning arena. There’s the client that first consumes a lot of support effort (“How do I create an SSH key?”, “Please help me install git on Windows!”, “Can you explain to me what the Features module is and how I use it?”) and then cancels during the test month nevertheless. There’s the customer that enjoys explaining to me how we should do our job. And there’s the client that is pure pleasure to cooperate with and pays their bills a year in advance.

Marketing

I’m happy to have closed the deal of sponsoring the Drupal-Initiative, the german equivalent of the Drupal Association. All their websites are going to be ported to a DrupalCONCEPT Drupal cluster and we in return will be mentioned as their hosting sponsor.

My next action will be an email newsletter to all my Drupal contacts. I’m unsure how successful this will be, but I’m afraid there are a lot of people that haven’t yet heard of DrupalCONCEPT and I’m definitely going to change that.

And with that, I’ll return to doing important things!

Tips for the S-Office

Matt Shapiro suggests that Starbucks should change its name to “Startbucks”, because so many startup founders not only get their caffeine kick there but also stay for quite a while during the day to do work and have business meetings. Certainly, I’m a member of that group. Over the course of a week, I spend at least 15 hours in my favourite Starbucks outlet in Freiburg working through my todo lists and answering customer requests.

With power outlets at many tables and free WiFi, Starbucks actively attracts road warriors with their laptops or iPads. But since they still call themselves a “Coffee House” instead of “Coworking Space”, I’d like to emphasise GigaOm’s recommendations for making oneself comfortable working at Starbucks without making others uncomfortable:

• Almost always favor a single location. It makes it easier for your contacts to drop in for meetings.
• Learn the names of most of the baristas and also take time to have a conversation with them. It helps build a human connection.
• Make the baristas involved in your venture – share your news and make them feel part of your struggle.
• Make sure you buy coffee or something at least three times a day.
• Tip generously – up to $10 a day will ensure that folks at the store don’t view you as a freeloader and a pest.
• Don’t spread out your stuff and take up too much space at the store.
• Invest in great noise-cancelling headphones (to counter the loud background music).
• Keep your mobile phones on vibrate and leave the store for conversations.
• Make sure that the number of people attending a meeting is fewer than four so that you can all circle around a single table.

As much as I’ll second the headphone item, I’ll also add a quasi-opposite experience: You’ll soon find out that you’re not the only regular. Drop your introverted geek defences a bit and introduce yourself to your fellow S-Office workers. More often than not, a new acquaintance becomes a business opportunity.

DNS-Check bei Pingdom

Seit kurzem bietet Pingdom einen DNS-Check an. Einfach die zu prüfende Domain auf http://dnscheck.pingdom.com eingeben und man erhält einen ausführlichen Testbericht.

HPC in der Amazon-Cloud

Der Name erinnert mich stark an meinen Lieblings-Kaffee-Provider:  "Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large". Beim genauen Hinsehen stellt sich heraus, dass es sich um einen neuen Instanztyp handelt, den die Amazon Web Services seit Neuestem für High-Performance-Computing-Anwendungen anbietet.

Es handelt sich um die leistungsfähigsten Instanzen, die es in der EC2 gibt:

• RAM: 23 GB
• CPU-Leistung: 33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem” architecture)
• Storage: 1690 GB
• I/O-Leistung: 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Ich bin beeindruckt und gespannt, welche Rechenprozesse bald auf der Amazon-Cloud Einzug halten werden.

Awesome, happy, cool

Two of mankind's greatest inventions: iPad + Velcro

via apple.com

Magical meets versatile.

Einführung in Chef

Opscode Chef ist eine Open Source Software, die ähnlich wie Puppet dazu dient, die Einrichtung und Pflege von Servern zu automatisieren. Statt in 15 Shell-Fenstern steuert ein Systemadministrator seine Systeme von einer zentralen Chef-Instanz aus. Das folgende Video gibt einen ersten Einblick in Sinn und Zweck dieser Systemintegrations-Software:

[blip.tv [blip.tv/play/hMAg...](http://blip.tv/play/hMAggebAawI)]

Opscode erhält 11 Millionen Dollar Venture-Kapital

JavaZone Trailer: Java 4-ever

Opscode Chef jetzt als gehostete Lösung erhältlich

Weeknote #11

Last week, things had to go slower because Amalia got Pink Eye and we had to take care of her at home. Although being able to spontaneously carve out time for my family has been one of the core reasons to start my own business, accepting that I won't get as much work done as I had planned still is hard. So, from time to time, I have to remind myself of Gary Vaynerchuk's foremost rule of Crushing It: Family goes first.

The IT infrastructure of our Drupal hosting service is getting better every day, but we're still missing a user interface where customers can change settings for their websites. We can't use any of the existing open source hosting panels because they're built for single multi-purpose servers while our redundancy concept distributes services over separate server clusters. So, I met with a Drupal developer to do some brainstorming for the DrupalCONCEPT Dashboard. We worked out some great ideas how the dashboard can be integrated with our system integration software. Since I want to use an agile development approach, my next task will be writing user stories for the most important functions.

After receiving an RSVP for the June meeting of the Hamburg Drupal User Group, I decided to actually take the 5½ hour train ride across Germany and do a presentation about our hosting products. Being an active member of the community and directly connecting with Drupal users has already proven to be a great way of marketing our services. An since one of our first customers is based in Hamburg and totally enthusiastic about what we do, I'd be stupid to let that chance slip. Of course, I'll write how it went in my next weeknote.

Weeknote #10

Customers is what happens while you're making plans. I've been doing a lot of planning over the past months but having our first customers proved that you can't foresee everything. Hopefully, you'll have set aside some time to revise your plans and do what suddenly became necessary. I didn't, so other tasks had to be put on the back burner -- more plans to change.

Although I've learned to do project management and organize my tasks, it's hard to fulfill my many roles. I'm company owner, manager, accountant, system administrator, business developer, marketing director and support representative, each of them trying to keep a healthy schedule and family life. That's a huge challenge.

On the positive side, working from home saves me time otherwise used for commuting that I can use to balance work and family.

Over the past few weeks, I've been working a lot, but I've also started to put in a free day every so often. That proved a particular good idea because it lets me free my mind from the urgent to focus again on the important.

One of those important things is friends. Taking a break from work to meet a friend over coffee or spending an evening together around a barbecue grill is a great way of winding down. It also gives me a chance at reflecting what and how I'm doing right now.

And, as it stands right now, I'm doing okay.

Velocity 09: 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr

Anatomy of a Stick Figure

Amazon Web Services jetzt mit günstigerem Cloud Storage

Wem die Vorteile des Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bisher zu teuer waren, bietet Amazon ab sofort die Alternative "Reduced Redundancy Storage" an:

We are pleased to introduce a new storage option for Amazon S3 called Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) that enables customers to reduce their costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than the standard storage of Amazon S3.

RRS wird ebenfalls nach Datenvolumen abgerechnet, aber zu geringeren GB-Preisen als S3. Dateien, die im Notfall wiederhergestellt werden können, können mit RRS also mit geringerer Redundanz, aber eben auch zu geringeren Kosten in die Cloud verlagert werden.

Weeknote #5+6

What a ride those two recent weeks were! I feel like the rollercoaster of my business had finally climbed the first peak and now is thundering downwards, gaining more and more speed.

Drupal hosting

Last weekend, the Drupal Dev Days took place in Munich. So far, it was the biggest German Drupal conference ever. Since work on the website took much longer than expected, I decided to delay its publication a bit more and use the Drupal Dev Days as the venue to launch our Drupal hosting products labeled DrupalCONCEPT.

So, on Friday evening, I sat in my Munich hotel room, getting more and more nervous. Not because I had gotten the first time slot on the schedule for my talk "Drupal in the Cloud", but because I was becoming anxious how people would react to our business offerings. Well, in retrospect, the feedback I got there was nothing less than awesome! People came to me to ask me about details. Many were excited that we closed that gap in the Drupal services spectrum. The website design got praise, and I also got suggestions how we could make it yet more clear and informational.

And besides all the talking, I could do my first business deals, too. Already during the weekend, KontextWork announced they were partnering with us to host their DrupalWiki SaaS products. During the week, other new customers started populating their Drupal webspace on our servers.

The basic server infrastructure is running, but there are many construction sites we'll still have to deal with. No boredom in sight. :-)

Podcasting

This week really was as productive as it was busy. Additional to all the business stuff, I recorded the first episode of my new podcast Drupal Talkshow with my co-host Markus Heurung. We talked about the Drupal Dev Days, of course, and about the international DrupalCons in San Francisco and Kopenhagen. We also took a look at the Devel contrib module. It was a lot of fun and we plan on continuing the podcast on a bi-weekly basis.

Family

It's not easy to keep a healthy family life when both parents are busy working on huge projects with deadlines to meet. I'm glad that working from the home office enables me to do my fair share of household chores and spend time with our sweet little daughter. Also, Carolin and I are lucky to have great relatives and friends that support us. We very much appreciate it that we're not alone in taking care of Amalia while the creche is closed like this Thursday and Friday.

Overall satisfaction rating

:-) :-) :-) :-) :-) (on a 5-smiley scale)

Weeknote #4

Website work

I really crushed it last week to finally get the web hosting website done. And apart from minor touches, it’s done and online. I decided to keep the site under wraps, though, to ceremonially reveal it at the Drupal Developer Days that take place in Munich next weekend.

IT infrastructure

Let me tell you: It takes a lot of effort to make IT management effortless. While I still stand by my decision to automate everything from the start, it’s not always easy to accept the price of a lot more preparation work. Just whipping up some servers wouldn’t have taken me that long, but if you want to build automated processes, you have to think them through before you spend even more time implementing them. I had planned to go live with our Drupal hosting products in April, but there was just too much tech to handle.

(Warning: Sysadmin talk ahead) Last week, I decided to upgrade Chef to 0.8 because 0.7 has seemed really outdated for some time now and I experienced some confusing behaviour with our installation, too. The upgrade took almost a whole work day because one new component called RabbitMQ didn’t want to start but neither didn’t give useful error messages. I had to do some test installations on fresh servers and eventually found the cause in a discrepancy between DNS and the /etc/hosts file. Additionally, a software packaging bug in the chef-server package (a wrong symlink, as I later found out) broke the Javascript that’s essential for the Chef web interface. That wasn’t a big deal, though, because Chef 0.8 introduces a new utility called Knife that lets you manipulate configuration data from the command line. And no GUI is as good as no GUI.

Working with tools like Chef is an investment that’ll pay off eventually: With those automated processes, we’ll have to invest minimal effort into maintaining and growing our infrastructure later.

Business Development

Getting the Drupal hosting website ready was my main goal for last week, and I’m happy to have reached it. Now I’m preparing my talks for the Drupal Dev Days which will draw some traffic to the website – hopefully by many new Drupal hosting customers.

After the conference, I’ll concentrate on creating website content in the form of blog posts, knowledge base articles and podcasts.

Family life

I have to admit, starting a business while my girlfriend is writing her thesis isn’t the best timing. When both parents are busy-busy-busy with deadlines looming, even the question who does the grocery shopping can become a conflict – let alone the one who’ll spend the next hours out on the playground with our 2-year-old.

That’s where I’m grateful for Gary Vaynerchuck’s calming first rule in “Crush It!”: Family first. Always.

Why I moved from LaTeX to HTML

As I wrote in my last weeknote, I decided to switch from LaTeX to HTML for the training manuals and papers my company Freistil Consulting will publish in the future. In this post, I'm going to explain why.

As a computer scientist, system administrator and IT trainer, I've written a lot of documents ranging from single-page articles and a diploma thesis to my book "Perl-Meisterkurs" with nearly 200 pages. And all the time, I've been looking for the format that best supported publishing those documents.

In the early nineties, I learned to like LaTeX. The process of writing documents in LaTeX (write, process, verify, repeat) is so similar to writing software in a compiler language that I found it very easy to learn. And its output quality was just stunning compared to all the text processing software like Word. Also, like for example with Perl, there is a huge choice of useful extensions, called "styles", freely available on the Internet. With those, you can use LaTeX for writing articles and books as well as letters and even presentation slides (or cooking recipes for that matter).

But while you can generate PDF files easily with LaTeX, converting a document into HTML for the Web is tedious, even with the converter software available. And because I needed printouts as well as web pages to display on a projector, I chose DocBook XML as my source format. It's been used for publishing technical documents for a long time and can be converted into PDF as easily as into HTML. Unfortunately, at least using open source tools, the PDF output is not nearly as neat as the one from LaTeX.

So, when I started writing my Perl book, I reverted back to LaTeX and I've been happy for some years. That is, until I decided to focus on online training. Now great print quality didn't matter that much any more and I needed HTML files to publish on our online training platform.

The format had to be based on plain text so I could still use Textmate, my favourite text editor, and Perl scripts to process my source files. There weren't much alternatives left to choose from. One of the most interesting candidates was Markdown. I already use Markdown on most of my blogs because it's easy to write and also easy on the eyes. Furthermore, Scrivener, the writing tool I like most, also supports working with Markdown.

And then there was HTML, simple, plain HTML. I got the idea from Mark Pilgrim's interview on the setup where he mentioned that he's writing his new book in HTML. I liked this idea because doing semantic markup in HTML is easy and by using CSS, you can style a great looking online presentation.

Writing HTML is almost as easy as writing Markdown, especially when you have support from your editor software. Additionally, there was the strategic aspect that if I wanted to involve other writers, I would be much easier to find some who knew HTML than ones with LaTeX, DocBook or Markdown knowledge.

Because I still wanted to be able to generate PDF files, I looked for decent HTML-to-PDF converters. XSL:FO was the main reason I abandoned DocBook, so I researched the alternatives and found PrinceXML. Prince uses the normal CSS styling information and extends its syntax a bit to cover printing aspects like page sizes and footnotes. I found out that CSS3 actually even can do page or figure numbering and cross references. It has to be mentioned that PrinceXML is a bit on the pricy side, so I had to do some tests first.

I quickly converted one of the book's chapters from LaTeX to HTML, created a CSS style sheet for screen and one for print media, and checked the results in HTML and PDF. As was to be expected, the web presentation was fine, and also the PDF output from PrinceXML was quite acceptable. These results finally convinced me to go Full Monty on converting the book from LaTeX to HTML.

I haven't finished the conversion yet, but thanks to a Perl script with a growing list of regular expressions, I can minimize my manual work. I'll also need to write some scripts for generating the table of contents and the keyword index, because PrinceXML doesn't do that.

I expect to have a complete new version of the Perl Meisterkurs book in May and will let you know of my experiences in another post.

Secret play room

via boingboing.net

Some parents really are awesome. Until this, I didn't see the use of owning a family home.

Weeknote #3

Last week showed that defining priorities is essential when you're starting a new business.

Traveling

When I voiced my hope to get our hosting website online this week in my previous weeknote, I didn't think of the Perl seminar that would have me out of office for four of five days this week. So I only had Monday and the travel time on Tuesday and Friday to get the most important tasks done. By the way, I still enjoy taking the train to work, especially if getting there takes me a few hours. I kept the Bahncard 100 which lets me travel by train as much as I need for a flat monthly fee. So, for last week's seminar, I just had to reserve a seat in a train that goes all the way from Freiburg to Wolfsburg to secure myself 5 hours of solid work time in each direction.

Offline Training

The seminar went fine. I had twelve participants eager to learn Perl and three days to teach them the most important basics. Which is not a comfortable time frame, because actually only explaining all the topics takes more than two days, and then the trainees haven't written a single line of code themselves. But they got to a basic understanding of the language which was my expressed goal for the seminar. Together, we hope that there'll be a second seminar where we'll be able to look at practical problems and more advanced aspects of Perl.

Spending all day in a classroom and the evening in a hotel room still isn't my preferred way of teaching, so I'll put more effort into promoting our online trainings.

Training Material

In advance of the seminar, I had to spend some time on my training material. Despite it having matured over more than 8 years now, it's still not perfect in its explanations and examples and it still contains a few typos and glitches. Additionally, for a few weeks, I've been thinking about the format I could best maintain it in the future. The LaTeX format in which I had written the book started to show real limitations, especially because I had chosen it for its printing quality but now needed a format for online presentation.

After I spent some hours on looking -- and deciding -- for a future format, I got back to my original goal of working on the training manual itself. (BTW, I chose HTML and will explain the reasons in a separate blog post.) But departing time came quickly and the seminar took up the rest of the week.

Website

In the end, I didn't have the time to do the finishing touches on the webhosting website, so I'll have to postpone the site launch for another week. There maybe would have been enough time, though, if I hadn't embarked on my journey to a better book and paper writing format.

Those tool and format discussions are dangerous because they can quickly derail a project and bring productivity to a low. Instead of working on your content, you start researching and testing different "solutions" that could replace your working one. Sometimes, "research" is just an euphemism for procrastination. If you have people that pay for your living without asking for a quick ROI, you may be able to go on Holy Grail expeditions. But in a business, you need to focus on what directly benefits your customers. With a training manual, that's its content, not the format it's written in.

The second priority is business development, for example with a website. That's why I'll measure the success of the new week by how much new business I'll have generated in its end.

Weeknote #2

Revisionism

Starting with the week after Easter, I’m now working as a full-time self-employed. And to comply with weeknote custom, I renumbered my weeknotes so the one from last week now is #1. All previous weeknotes, written during the business launch preparation phase, got negative numbers. The advantage of this change is that if (rather when) I have to compute the current weeknote number, I can use the Weeknote Calculator.

Secure Living

My application for state founding subsidies has been accepted! Yay! I’ll be granted nine months of unemployment pay with 300 € on top, no strings attached. That means I can develop my business in a sane pace without worrying about my family starving.

Online Training

The new Freistil Campus website is working great. I’m very happy to have moved from Moodle to Drupal because I can do so much more with the site now. As I’ve told before, we’re already using it for the new Perl Meisterkurs that started this month, and it’s so much fun to experience motivated participants that fill the seminar group with postings and literally beg for new course material so they can continue learning.

I’ll start working on a bunch of new training projects this week, including some free webinars about development topics like version control. My main focus will be two big online workshops I’ll call “Water” and “Ice” for now.

High Performance Webhosting

Work on our hosting system is going fine, all the base infrastructure is in place. Especially the monitoring and security systems have already proven to work great. The former by waking me up in the early morning to tell me I had forgotten to configure the resource allocation of one web server which then gradually ate up all memory and went down in flames. The latter by alerting me of of a mysterious change of a system program that, as I found out an hour of anxiety later, had been caused by a software update I had done the previous day.

I’m not happy to report that I still haven’t finished work on the hosting product website. But since everything else is running in its tracks I’m optimistic that next week will be launch week. (He said, in his child-like naïveté…)

PIXELS

Weeknote #1 (week 14, 2010)

Whoa, only a few weeks in and already falling off the wagon? Those things are called "weeknotes" for a purpose, my dear friend!

Well okay, I've been pretty busy lately and the holidays with their parent-visiting didn't help. So, what's going in at the Freistil front?

Passion for starting a new business is one thing, being able to support your family is another. Since I don't expect our revenue to be huge from the start, I had to look for some type of funding that lets me keep paying for rent and food. Fortunately, the German state offers subsidies for people who leave or lose their job and want to build their own business. The downside: it's the state. Think beaurocracy. So, the week before Easter, I went to the Work Agency to submit my papers. Because I try to live the dream of a paperless office, I had all forms scanned in and later printed them out for my CPA or myself to fill them in. Now, at the Agency, the clerk politely explained to me that applications have to be submitted on the original form. And sent me back home. cricket So, instead of closing the deal, I had achieved nothing and that setback destroyed my motivation for the rest of the day. Productivity ground zero. Fortunately, I got another appointment two days later and delivered the papers right before the official went on her Easter holiday. Now it's waiting with my fingers crossed.

After building some clusters on Amazon Webservices, I tried Rackspace for comparison. Rackspace doesn't offer a service landscape as a big as AWS does, they're more of a VPS-by-the-hour shop. But at that, they seem to be quite good. Since our infrastructure is highly automated, we'll be able to use inexpensive Rackspace servers without much hassle where they fit in.

Getting all the necessary infrastructure in place takes a lot of my time. Frist, there are many parts in this puzzle of high performance and availability. And second, I often have to catch up with many software solutions I may have heard about during my management days but hadn't had the opportunity to put my own hands on. Because of that, I spend many days on the command line. Which is actually fun, but keeps me from doing other important tasks like website building.

So, I'm getting used to working long hours, or, like Gary Vaynerchuck puts it, to "crushing it".

And in the same Crushing Mode, I finished the Freistil Campus website on Friday night at 3am. Campus replaces the Moodle installation I've been using for online trainings. Based on Drupal, Campus will give us more flexibility to build the features we need for a great online training platform.

For the coming week, I hope to get the new hosting website ready to launch and for a positive verdict on my subsidies.

Warum ITIL oft nicht (komplett) umgesetzt wird

In einem kurzen Video zählt Malcolm Fry, Autor des Buchs “ITIL Lite”, einige gängige Hürden auf, an denen eine ITIL-Einführung scheitern kann:

• Kosten
• Fehlende Unterstützung durch die Kunden
• Beschränkungen (z.B. durch eine ISO-20000-Zertifizierung)
• Zeitknappheit
• Fehlender Einfluss
• Verlust des Antriebs
• Zu hohe Komplexität
• ITIL V2 bereits eingeführt
• Konflikt mit anderen Management-Initiativen

AWS Elastic Load Balancing bietet jetzt auch "sticky sessions"

Gute Incident-Kommunikation lindert den Schmerz

Am 1. April war den Ops-Kollegen der Amazon Web Services wohl nicht nach Scherzen zumute. Jedenfalls nicht mehr nach 3 Stunden Teilausfall im Amazon-Rechenzentrum an der amerikanischen Ostküste. Ich bin durch einen Bericht auf SearchCloudComputing auf diesen Fall aufmerksam geworden.

Bemerkenswert finde ich dabei zwei Dinge:

Erstens hatte Amazon die Krisenkommunikation, anders als bei vorhergehenden Störungen, offensichtlich sehr gut im Griff. Auf Blog und Statusseite gab Amazon ausführlich Einblick in den Ausfall und seine Hintergründe. Man gab dabei auch unumwunden zu, dass ein vorher nicht getesteter Rollout zu der Störung führte. Dem Artikel auf SearchCloudComputing ist zu entnehmen, dass diese Transparenz durchaus Lob auch bei den betroffenen Kunden fand.

Zweitens finde ich es interessant, wie spät der Auslöser korrekt diagnostiziert wurde. Zunächst vermutete das Ops-Team von Amazon nämlich einen Kapazitätsengpass und versuchte, durch zusätzliche IT-Ressourcen Abhilfe zu schaffen. Erst als schließlich klar wurde, dass auf jeden Fall genug Leistung zur Verfügung steht, verwarf man die Hypothese und suchte erneut nach der wahren Ursache. Diesen zeitraubenden Irrweg will Amazon durch genaue Analyse des Falls und eine geeignete Anpassung des Monitorings in Zukunft vermeiden.

Solaris nicht mehr kostenlos

IT-Automation mit Opscode Chef

Amazon vereinfacht Traffic-Abrechnung

Amazon Web Services hat die Traffic-Abrechnung ihrer Cloud vereinfacht. Heute morgen kam die Mitteilung per E-Mail, dass der Traffic aller Dienste (S3, EC2 usw.) jetzt nicht mehr einzeln, sondern in Summe abgerechnet wird.

I'm in awe

Weeknote #-3 (week 11, 2010)

Outsourcing work

One of the four essential activities of a manager is delegation. But how should a business starter delegate when they’ve got only a few employees, surely with enough tasks on their hands, or even no employee at all? Tim Ferris’ book “The 4 hour workweek” made me aware of another possibility: the Virtual Private Assistant, in short VPA. A VPA works for many clients who outsource ancillary tasks to them. They specialize in jobs that can be done via phone or Internet, like booking flights and hotels, answering emails and researching topics.

This week, I tried this kind of delegation myself. A friend of mine was looking for additional work, and I realized that, starting my own business, I could help her start hers. So I suggested to her to try and work as a VPA — I’d be her first test client.

I started with delegating the task of extending my social network by researching XING members with “Drupal” in their profiles. While I was busy working on my business concept, she started reaching out to new contacts, taking breaks when the system throttled her request queue. Early next morning, contact confirmations began pouring in. And with them, a lot of surprisingly positive and encouraging responses like: “Sounds interesting, we could cooperate on a win-win basis!”, “Please keep me informed because you meet exactly our clients’ hosting needs.” and “I’m happy to see you fill that obviously empty niche in the market.” Happily, I immediately assigned the next task to my VPA: entering the new business contacts into our CRM system.

In conclusion, by outsourcing tasks to a VPA, I not only saved time that I needed for other important things but also gained publicity and even more motivation to start doing serious business. Thanks, Tim!

REWORK

I finished “REWORK”, the new business book by 37Signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. In REWORK, they pick up where they left off with “Getting Real”, transforming their experience of running 37Signals for over 10 years into practical tips for business starters. What they describe is what I’d like to call the “4S” approach to business: “Stay Simple, Stay Sane”. In pithy language, Fried and Heinemeier Hansson make the point that you should always keep your focus on the business and especially on its outcome:

• Do without outside money, be frugal instead and keep complete control over your business.
• Work hard, but not like a madman; burnout doesn’t benefit neither your business nor your health.
• Go forward making tiny steps.
• Hire on talents and team fit, not on resumé and formal education.
• And if you’re not making profit after an appropriate time, it’s not business, it’s a hobby.

The book contains some things I consider common sense (but that’s hopefully from the lessons I’ve learned so far) and a few contradictions (what now, should I “pick a fight” or “ignore my competition”?). But all in all, the book’s a refreshing read and well worth the money.

Cloud-Plattform von IBM: "Smart Business Systems"

Special street maps

via niemann.blogs.nytimes.com

This is keyboard heaven, and Vince Clark is its god.

Weeknote #-4 (week 10, 2010)

Business planning

Much time this week went into the business plan for Freistil-Consulting. When I tweeted about it, @jkleske promptly teased me: “business plan? haven’t you read Rework yet? ;-)” What he meant was that, according to 37Signals’ latest business book, “planning is guessing”. And the numbers I use in the business plan actually are vague projections for the next three years. But first: I do have to present a business plan with a long term financial perspective to get state subsidies. And, more important: By replacing those guesses with the actual numbers, I’ll get my first financial controlling instrument for the company. And boy, do I wish I had such a thing while running my previous businesses!

BTW, Johannes, I started reading “Rework” this morning. And I look forward to reading your very own weeknotes!

IT Infrastructure

I’m having fun playing with all those open source solutions that enable us to run an IT infrastructure business. There’s Chef for automation, GlusterFS for data replication, JailKit for securing customer access, and so much more. I really enjoy learning to use (utilize, even!) those tools for the lean operation of our IT.

Already after some hours of Chef hacking, I’m able to have a Drupal server running in under 5 minutes, from launching the EC2 instance over installing the necessary packages and configuring user access to starting all the services. Thank you, Opscode!

It just looks like that

via aptgetupdate.de

You may know it as "Pantha Rei"

Advantages of a distributed company

This morning, I worked on the business plan for my new business, doing a SWOT analysis. One aspect in assessing strengths and weaknesses of a new business is its location. But if you're offering your products and services over the Internet, location doesn't matter much to your clients. It may still matter to your employees in terms of moving house or commuting. That is, if you're not building the company in a distributed manner.

So just when I was pondering this aspect, I got a link via @jkleske that fitted perfectly. In his blog, Toni Schneider from Automattic (of WordPress fame) lists "5 reasons why your company should be distributed":

1. Your employees will love it
2. You can hire great people wherever you find them
3. You will use better communication tools
4. You can still be social
5. Your offices will be more fun

Go read the article for his explanations, and read the comments as well.

I'm convinced that building myself a distributed company is the way to go. On the technical level, the Internet and especially Cloud Computing prove that virtual, distributed systems are superior to monolithic ones. It doesn't matter any more where a server is located if it's well connected, so you can choose simply by price and performance.

Since my company will take advantage of those principles, it's only consequent to apply them to the company itself, isn't it?

Weeknote #-5 (week 9, 2010)

Perl online training, open source development

At the beginning of the week, I decided to offer our “Perl Meisterkurs” online seminar from now on in regular intervals. I planned three courses for April, July and October, created their registration pages, and sent informational posts to several blogs and social networks. Training is the most intensive and time-consuming work I do currently, but it helps getting in some cash that will be needed when we have to expand our IT infrastructure.

Side note: Maybe it was organizing a Perl online training that triggered some
sleeping Perl development enzymes in me. On Tuesday, I picked up my old
project
CGI::Session::Auth,
a Perl Module I published as free software many years ago. I fixed a few bugs
and finally implemented suggestions I got back in 2008 for improving
the documentation. Because I now use Bazaar as my version control
software, I moved the project from BerliOS to
Launchpad where I’ll hopefully maintain it a
bit better now.

Website building

On Saturday, we got the finished design for our new Drupal hosting website. We’re now working on the site content to get it online ASAP.

Communication infrastructure

Now that first business contacts are forming, telephone communication becomes very important. I tested and chose Sipgate Team as our virtual PBX system. We got a set of phone numbers that we’re able to distribute among our VOIP accounts by single user or by team. Voicemail is integrated and delivers incoming messages via email; new message notifications are sent as SMS. The system is easy to configure and has a good cost structure.

Family

Carolin and Amalia will return home next Wednesday, so the days of my all-day quiet home office are coming to an end. It’s a real challenge to balance work and family life if both happen at the same place, but to me it’s a challenge worth taking on.

The Elder Ones Recommend Drupal

via drupal.org.uk

HT Markus Heurung (http://byzero.de)

Weeknote #-6 (week 8, 2010)

Monday last week, I attended a founders seminar sponsored by the Work Agency. I already knew most of the seminar content, but the exchange among the participants had been interesting. I even could talk a bit about my experiences from my former shots at self-employment.

When my new tax consultant told me on Tuesday what amount of tax return I can expect for 2008 (cough), I could not help but wonder why I didn't get help with my taxes earlier.

Many hours this week went into my talk titled "Drupal in the Cloud". I held it at DrupalCamp which took place in Essen over the weekend. Judging from the questions I got from the audience, I hit an interesting topic. After the talk, I had conversations with several Drupal service providers that I had start thinking about moving their hosting to us. This and the praise I got for my presentation made the journey worthwhile. If only the storm on Sunday wouldn't have disrupted train traffic so thoroughly that I ended up at my brother's place at midnight because I just couldn't make it all the way home.

Weeknote #-7 (week 7, 2010)

Regarding my new business, the last week was quite short because I went to visit my girlfriend and my daughter at their health resort at the Baltic Sea on Wednesday.

I've decided to change our web meeting service provider. Up until now, I'd used GoToMeeting to do webinars and online trainings. It worked okay; only an audio problem that made people sound like the Chipmunks when I used an USB headset on the Mac had been annoying me for some weeks. Not until Acquia recently switched from GoToWebinar to WebEx, I realized that an important part of our customer base couldn't join our webinars in the first place: There's no Linux client for GoToMeeting. It didn't take me much more time to decide to switch to WebEx, too.

For starters, we won't incorporate. I discussed my plans with my tax consultant and she advised me not to incorporate early on but start lightweight as a sole proprietorship company.

Venomous Porridge: A conversation I have every month or so

Going Freistil

I've been very busy working over the last weeks and months. Busy working on a new (ad)venture: My own business. I decided to pull my old freelance business from the back burner and go full-time. Because I thought that the experiences I'm making along the way could be interesting to some people, this will be the first of (hopefully) many articles about my starting up.

What happened

How did it come that, amidst a recession of all things, I decided to leave my corporate shelter to start my own business?

One could  assume I got tired of commuting every day for more than two hours. But the opposite is true: My one-hour train ride to and from the office often was more productive than double the time in the office. I have noise-blocking earphones, so on the train I got interrupted at most once an hour. Try this sharing an office with two other people. Salary reasons then? Well, there certainly are people getting paid a lot more for doing less work and having less responsibility. But no, I got enough to get along fine, and money isn't my top motivation for sure.

The real reason is that I felt I wasn't growing any more, speaking in a professional sense. I realized that certain conditions to further develop my skills and talents had vanished over time. (Maybe I'll describe those conditions a bit more at another time.) I felt a growing incompatibility with my work environment and when I had the opportunity to sign a dissolution contract in October, I decided to take it.

Since then, I've been doing a bit of freelance work from home (or my "office desk" at Starbucks). More importantly, I caught up on the paternity leave I didn't take when Amalia was born. It feels so great to have quality time with my family and at the same time enjoy the freedom to work on the things I have a passion for!

I've thought hard about my next steps. Shouldn't I look for another job providing me and my family security? Oh shoot, it's 2010 and job security a thing of the past. Going into another employment has virtually the same risk as starting your own business nowadays.

But working hard in IT management would at least grant me a decent salary over the next few years, wouldn't it? Yes, it probably would. But why work hard for other people's wallet when I could do the same for my own -- and towards my own goals and to my own rules?

After reading an informative book on how to properly start a business in Germany, I read "Crush It!", "Escape from Cubicle Nation" and "Meconomy". And then I decided to go on a new journey of personal and professional growth by starting a full-time business.

Going freestyle

Now, what kind of business? I've been thinking hard about that question and also talked about it with some friends. I still haven't finished my business concept yet, but it'll certainly involve the things I'm passionate about: high performance information technology, open source software, consulting and training services.

It'll also be about finding new ways of doing things. That's why I chose "Freistil Consulting" as the company name.

What lies ahead

As I said, I'm working on the business concept. I've done a rough business model, but the detailed business plan sketching out all the strategic and financial points will still require some effort: exploring my strengths and weaknesses, checking on chances and threats, talking with my tax consultant, my financial advisor, and, most importantly, with potential clients.

The number one condition is already met, though: I have the official support of my family, for which I'm very grateful.

At the same time, I'm working on the technical side of things, writing concepts as well as building a basic IT infrastructure. I finally understand the general enthusiasm for Amazon EC2.

From now on, I'm going to write regular posts about my experiences growing (with) my business. Having just discovered Weeknotes, it'll probably be in a weekly format. Is there something you're especially interested in? And please tell me your thoughts in the comments, I'll highly appreciate it!

My thinking tools

Just like "good writing comes from writing and not from good writing tools", good thinking doesn't come from good thinking tools. But tools can help you concentrate on the task at hand instead of the environment you're doing it in.

The creative congregation of the Church of Mac seems especially interested in which tools help in getting things done. Summing up many conversations I had on blogs, IM, Twitter and in real life (gasp!), I put together this mind map of the tools I use to collect ideas, thoughts as well as important documents I need to refer to.

In another article, I'll describe my work and data flow when I use those tools.

Take a look and please tell me in the comments what tools we have in common and what your recommendations are!

Understanding Multi-tasking on the iPad: What is it really?

Found Footage: The Story of Macintosh

Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet

Guerilla marketing by IKEA

via marketallica.wordpress.com

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

I enjoy a good presentation that makes it easy for me to learn new things or that transfers a message in an entertaining way. And noone I know of does it better than Steve Jobs. His keynote at MacWorld 2008 where he introduced the MacBook Air is legen... (wait for it) ...dary!

Carmine Gallo even wrote a book about his presentation style named "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs". And in this SlideShare presentation, he summarizes the key points which push Steve's presentations from good to great.

Interesting, right? I recommend you take the time to watch his MacWorld 2008 keynote (again) and learn how he not only gets his message across, but how he really hammers it home.