Sometimes Systems work is a lot like plumbing. You have that task that must get done no matter what, and you know you’ll be getting grimy in the proccess. Unpleasant as they are, this kind of jobs give quite a sense of accomplishment once done; people without dirty hands are wrong, aren’t they?
Ldap authentication and apache as ssl proxy and client verifier, stuff for another campfire tale …
I’m glad not everything in Systems and Operations feels like plumbing; puppet smells good.
A pythonista seeks new job and I think of gift economies on 12seconds.tv
Via planet python I read of a pythonista and craftsman feed-up with software establishment, and turning away from professional software development; he wants Art and energy back in his code. A brave guy, not afraid of the GIL-Dragons.
I know many people are slowing down and searching for fulfillment where the little things don’t get in the way. Patrick’s choice in this is bar-tending for a living, and coding as part of his life. To me that choice implies lots of beer-tending and not that much/good coding; but working for non-profits, local communities, or just embracing simplicity are also approaches that probably wouldn’t suit me.
I’m trying the Natural Enterprise way, coding and technology for life and profit (mutual and responsible). I stand in the shoulders of those that contribute to Free Software project. My question is how integrate those Free Software coders in a working gift economy. Current donation and micro-payment schemes don’t work; they are good for the middle man but not cost effective for nano-lending (tips, <10$). Maybe an open field for non-currencies,the P2P micro-credits, and fund-raising entities.
I heartily recommend comments to Patrick’s post as well as his archived posts on coding, energy, and Art.
I find weird the way most traditional (non-web) business deal with web developers. Imagine yourself buying a piano with no idea on how to play it, just expecting the piano to do its magic without your intervention or knowledge; pianos don’t work that way, neither web sites.
I’m in the planning phase of a joint venture in which most of my revenue will consist on a sales percentage once the shop is up and running; why this kind of agreement aren’t more prevalent? I suppose they are perceived as risky. Better a web we cannot manage than share a fraction of its non-profits.
To the old-timer paying a commissions to salesmen should be more than familiar; to the developer a percentage serves as motivation to keep things updated and justifies maintenance chores that sometimes are hard to bill.
So maybe some business should be looking for web developers willing to act as they sales representatives on the web and earn a mutual profit.
Last January a new company was born promising new tools for us working at IT infraestructure automation. The name of the tool is Chef; good luck looking for it on google, chef is a keyword as common as puppet.
When i firs heard of chef i got a litle worried about the possible damages to puppet as a community and as a project. It seemed weird to me to hear from chef on the #puppet irc channel and also weird were some of the opinions on the blogs of Chef’s evangelist (in particular one impliying bad behavior from Lak when he asked for money/contract to fix a particular issue).
In my opinion puppet is a well-behaved FLOSS project that is fostering community, writing code, and earning money. I’m glad to see those same worries of community hijacking being discussed in puppet-users. And even happier seeing the changes in licensing and focus that are underway at reductivelabs.
So, cheers for reductivelabs for keeping the good work and trying new roads to grow and prosperity. Let’s not repeat the Tla Tale.
You can read the (now old) news about Chef at The Madstop.
Recently I read about the Wealth&Giving trick by Foster Hibbard, follower of the post Great Depression self-help guru Napoleon Hill; a little magic to get into an abundance mindset. The trick is dead simple: for every euro that gets into your hands you shall hoard and give away fixed percentages; v.g. for every 100€ you get, no matter how you get them, put 5€ in your wealth chest and give away another 5€.
The giving part is really nice. For some one like me using mostly Free/Libre/Open Source for most of my bussiness, this trick is a clear tip to contribute back some of my earnings. Thanks to this I’m getting into the habit of sending a donation to the project I feel most contributed to my work on the last month (thank Aquamacs!).
To help on the accounting I’m using a Dashboard widget. With the multipliers configured I use the Income box to calculate my Wealth & Giving contributions.
Un problema muchas veces repetido cuando no trabajas en ingles y ASCII. No siempre se controla la codificacion que se usa en distintos entornos de trabajo y produccion; al final acaban apareciendo caracteres extraños y problemas de codificacion.
Working with many development and production some people forgets to check their default charsets; in the end encoding mismatchs crawl. I’ve seen a few programmers falling in this trap.
Last time our php was Latin-1 encoded and the production Apache server used Utf-8 by default. In a shared hosting environments the default encoding can be set from the .htaccess file:
AddCharset ISO-8859-1 .php
AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1
Same thing from php:
PHP. Use the header() function before generating any content, e.g.:
header(’Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8′);
Links and discussion:
There’s an ongoing conversation about filesystem layouts on planet debian.
As Wouter, I find the biggest drawback to multi-filesystem layouts is lack of flexibility when resources are scarce; scarcity means laptops in the Wouter’s post. I’m thinking of long-lived servers in need of upgrades, in particular those with a life of unplanned and ad-hoc growth.
When scarcity strikes: drama. The cleanup dance isn’t a solution, everything clogging /var and other undersized partitions is of value; forget about deleting it. On the first storage famines I go resizing the affected filesystems with unused/un-partioned space(yay, I planned for un-planned growth). After the resizing is done you realize that some other partition also need extra storage.
Here comes the cleanup-moving dance. First put data out of /var and system partitions, then update configuration for the affected services or start symlinking to the new directories.
My two worst cases were bacula related. In both bacula’s database needed more space than its current partition could afford:
This is the first in a series of tales and anecdotes giving body to the “IT Facilitation” buzzword. It’s the main idea in my new effort as entrepreneur in Ageda.
The web page for Hotel Mayari is simple, the content almost static. Most of the job was mediation, bypassing the limitations frequently found in spanish hosting companies, cooperation, and coercion of past service providers. Some of the troubleshooting included:
Client had ideas on the looks of the final page, but for every intermediate step they needed constant reassurement. The facilitation done by Visualtis was 10% of technical nature, 30% of hand-holding and coaching, 30% of client and providers negotiation, and 30% of education.
Visualtis is now becoming an established local IT consultancy; we still pursue new ventures (taking more fun than ever) but for the most, gone are the days of the early-stage startup-wannabe. Our first years are full of valuable experiences, as Jim Hirshfield says at The Grateful Life: be a student of entrepreneurship at an existing venture. After my experience at Visualtis I endorse that advise.
These are some of the things I learned in the first years:
Last: try hard to make fun. I’m sure our last project benefits from the experience gathered; but the energy people are putting into it and the fun we are getting is something we needed in our past venues. I feel that makes a lot of difference, we really like our Porra!
Some one else sharing experiences at a startup-wannabe?
From Twitter