Category: Technobabble

In transit, again

We’re moving! Yep. Again. Although, it’s been a year or two since the last time. The reason(s) Ok, so I’ve using Wordpress for quite a long time now and it’s been good. Mostly. It’s a fairly solid platform and has a whole slew of feautures that work nicely. Before Wordpress I used Textpattern, a very slimmed, minimalistic authoring experience and my first contact with textile and similar markup/writing/notation languages. For those unaware, textile is not unlike markdown. Or should we say that markdown is not unlike textile? Considering that textile was invented by Dean Allen two years before markdown. Anyhow. Both work pretty much as good as the other, allowing the author to write in any text-editor, using easily readable and fairly logical formatting. Before that I used Movable Type, and prior to that either Dreamweaver or… well, notepad or vim. Problem with all of those platforms, however, is that they require dynamically generated webpages and technologies like PHP, Perl, .NET, Java and whatnot. That, in itself, has been a very minor issue until lately. Sure, it requires servers with logics, engines, add-ons, execution rights to the local filesystem etc, but still a minor nuisance. Mostly a financial nuisance really as active servers tend to cost money while finding static hosting for free is still pretty easy. Hell! I could put a webserver on a RaspberryPi and get good performance for a small-ish blog like mine if all I am using is static content. But, again. Not a major problem in itself. The main instigating factors to move away from Wordpress are the increasing size of the package, the lack of personal control, the lack of ease to extend my platform due to ever-expanding APIs and the fact that it is so popular that every “hacker” and it’s mother knows how to find exploits on it. My webhost, NFSN has been very good at detecting probing and brute-force attempts and automatically block public access to stuff like the login-pages and XML-RPC interfaces when that happens. I am just so sick and tired of having to constantly be on top of it with software updates, plugin updates, theme updates, security updates, spam-filtering, re-enabling the login page… Back to the basics Teknoglot.se will be served statically from now on, and it will be hosted for free on Github Pages. Using Hexo.io I can write my posts using markdown, then with a simple hexo generate --deploy generate and update the static files and publish them. No login pages to hack, no dynamic pages to exploit, no server security to worry about.

Menu Problems!

The menus are looking a bit off as you may have noticed. I guess it’s an issue with WordPress 3.4 and Superfish and are trying to figure out where it goes haywire. Sorry for the inconvenience. Update I switched the theme to at least get the navigation working while I try to figure out what the problem with the regular theme is.

Rant - The Concept of Booth-Babes

Background Having visited a few conferences in the last years I have spotted a trend I didn’t think I would see in the IT-Pro sphere. You could probably call me naïve for that but logically we should not encourage this trend. This is my appeal to all exhibitors of future conferences to re-evaluate the concept of booth-babes. I will not go into the genus-political part of this discussion as of now–others are more eloquent and fit to handle that–but rather some of the more pragmatic sides to ditch the BB (short for Booth-Babe) and how that would gain us visitors as well as the exhibitors. I will also keep a pretty frank, and perhaps impolite, tone in this rant of mine. So, here’s my top reasons, in no particular order, to give up the BBs. Reason #1 - BBs is disrupting the purpose of the exhibition When I go to a conference, I am there for the tech, to network and shake paws with the people I collaborate with on-line. It is also a good place to meet the actual corporations that I do business with and discuss their products between four eyes. I do not want to plow through a crowd of great white whales [Oops! I meant “males”] ogling the BBs to get to someone with actual knowledge about the products and solutions at hand. Reason #2 - BBs are alienating the visitors If you are a heterosexual male or a homosexual female, the BBs can actually make you embarrassed, shy and unwilling to approach the exhibitor for that sole reason. If you are not, you might find an exhibitor with BBs appalling and take another route for that sole reason. Reason #3 - BBs are intimidating the female visitors

Server problems fixed! (hopefully)

I think I got the server running ok now. I’ve been fiddling about quite alot and unfortunately don’t know which one action that fixed the problem. If I do figure it out, I will post it here. Site performance should be a bit better now.

Sluggish performance on teknoglot

I, as well as others, have noticed some slow performance from my blog lately and I just wanted to let you know that the root cause have been identified as a bug in on of the crypto libs on the server. I haven’t found a working solution yet but are trying to keep an eye on the site regularly to be able to bounce the problematic services when they start to act up. Hopefully there will be a fix available soon. Sorry for any inconvenience in the meantime.

Move complete, welcome to teknoglot.se!

Oh my God, I actually moved my blog for real. I think I’ve been putting this upp for nearly half a year now and even though I actually went and bought a “real” domain-name for it. But now it’d done. The server is now self-hosted and self-maintained. Now, that obviously gives me a bit more to do, but on the other hand. I can fix any problems myself and not have to create tickets and hope someone responding to them knows what they’re talking about. The design is mostly borrowed, for now, but it works and I hope I did all the HTACCESS rules on the old server correct so that they forward all the old links to the same post on the new one. So, welcome!

I'm moving (finally)

If you’re seeing this, the move went OK. 😛 Anyway, I have tried to make sure that all the links, images and urls are still intact and that people are automatically redirected to the correct address on the new site too. I think I got it right, but who knows? Still fiddling with the themes thought. Sorry for the inconvenience! ps. Post from the old site is a jump ahead. Hi all, I’m finally getting my male donkey out of the wagon and has started moving this blog to a new self-hosted server. The current host is cheap and delivers quite the good service, but since I already have servers running 24/7 at home, with attached electric bills, and more than enough bandwidth for a couple of websites I find it silly paying for yet-another hosting solution. Also, it is a good time to do some spring-cleaning and actually start using that teknoglot.se domain i bought some time ago. 😛

Let's split!

Now would you look at that. Since my old site, Tranquillity.se, got messy and unfocused I have now started a new one. That’s right, you’re looking at it. Instead of blogging about mostly anything like I did before I have decided to split it into Three sites. This one for the Technical stuff, some other site I haven’t set up yet, and a personal blogg for the… personal blogging… stuff. When time gives, I will import the old tech-related posts from Tranquillity.se into this site but for now. Nothing yet so far. Have a nice day!

Quest Software acquires eXc and VizionCore

Yes, I am officially slow. But never mind. Quest Software is a rather nice software developer with some interesting products for a wide range of Microsoft systems – like Site Administrator and Recovery Manager for SharePoint – but also database and application servers like SAP and Oracle E-business. I have lately been working with some of their MOSS-related products that, neglecting the somewhat goofy and unspecific manuals, are stable and well worth taking a look at. Quite recently they have acquired two other companies also worth paying attention to as they, too, tend to deliver products that ease things up. eXc does it’s thing in the Microsoft SCOM/MOM arena while VizionCore dances with virtualization techniques. At least, that’s where I’ve come across them both. How will this affect me, then? Not very much it would seem. Here’s what VizionCore says about their part: “The completion of this acquisition signals another major step in Vizioncore’s evolution and growth in the virtualization market,” said David Bieneman, CEO of VizionCore. “While maintaining the autonomy that has made us successful, we will also be able to leverage technologies developed by and acquired by Quest, such as Invirtus and Provision Networks, to enhance and expand the feature sets of VizionCore products. This is very positive news for virtualization customers who will enjoy a richer and robust product set that will help them achieve greater levels of ROI from their investments in virtualization platforms.” In my head, this means that VizionCore will still be VizionCore but with, perhaps, tighter integration with Invirtus. Invirtus was, by the way, a “Strategic Partner” to VizionCore even before the acquisition. eXc then? Well. It is not clearly stated in the press-release as far as I can tell. We can only hope that they will make the decision to rebuild their not-even-web1.0 excuse for a website. And what the hell is up with that logo? Fortunately for us, their design skills – or lack thereof – does not reflect their programming skills. But still… no sane man or woman uses Comic Sans in a logo. Not even jokingly. Actually, using Comic Sans at all should be considered an act of felony. references: Quest Software Continues Its Value Add to Microsoft System Center Quest Software Completes Acquisition of VizionCore…