Jan 7, 2011
Dimdim:
Dimdim has been acquired by salesforce.com. Your free Dimdim account will remain active until March 15, 2011. After that date, you will no longer be able to access your free Dimdim account.
Please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for additional information.
We appreciate your understanding, and we thank you!
Pursuant to the Dimdim Terms of Use (the “Agreement”) governing the use of Dimdim Inc.’s (“Dimdim”) Site and Services (as defined under the Agreement) by you (“You”), Dimdim is hereby exercising its right to terminate Your Dimdim Account and the Agreement in its entirety. Dimdim will continue to provide Services to you until March 15, 2011. Following March 15, 2011, neither You nor Dimdim shall have any further rights or obligations of any kind under the Agreement, including the right to access the Site, or receive or use any Services. Dimdim thanks you for your business, and wishes you success in the future.
Socialite:
That notice above makes me glad I never used Dimdim for serious work. The other one makes me reconsider giving Socialite another try.
Dec 25, 2010
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!
Dec 3, 2010
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.
Nov 24, 2010
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.
Nov 17, 2010
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?
Nov 16, 2010
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!
Nov 14, 2010
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.
Sep 18, 2010
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.
Sep 15, 2010
“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.”
Aug 24, 2010
A dream of an office! (via @jkleske)
Aug 12, 2010
Wenn ich als Bürger schon nicht verhindern kann…
…. dann will ich wenigstens einen riesen Aufriss machen, wenn jemand es wagt, meine Hausfassade zu fotografieren.
Erfrischend klare Worte von
dennis-knake.de
Aug 11, 2010
"Snakkes", a speech bubble lamp that can be written on with whiteboard markers.
Aug 10, 2010
Wufoo greets customers who haven’t logged in for some time with a list of interesting new developments.
Aug 6, 2010
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!
Aug 1, 2010
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.
Jul 22, 2010
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.
Jul 13, 2010
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.
Jun 28, 2010
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)]
Jun 27, 2010
Opscode, Inc., a cloud infrastructure automation company, announced today that it has closed an $11 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by Battery Ventures and includes a follow-on investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who led Opscodeʼs Series A round of funding of $2.5 million, bringing the total amount raised for the company to $13.5 million. As part of this investment, Sunil Dhaliwal, a general partner at Battery Ventures will join Opscodeʼs Board of Directors. Proceeds from the new funds will be used to expand the companyʼs engineering staff, fuel research and development initiatives, and drive sales and marketing efforts.
Nach Puppet steht jetzt auch Chef auf finanziell gesicherten Beinen.
Jun 25, 2010
Opscode, Inc., a cloud infrastructure automation company, today announced the limited beta release of the Opscode Platform, the world’s first hosted configuration management service.
Was ich noch nicht verstehe: Wieso sollte jemand, dessen Infrastruktur CM-Software wie Chef erfordert, ausgerechnet ihr Herzstück extern hosten lassen?
Jun 23, 2010
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.
