Congres Open ICT voor beleidsmakers
NN-Open is currently organizing a congress for policy makers in the (semi)public sector. The congress is at 27 november 2008 in the Martiniplaza in Groningen. The congress is organized in the light of the actionplan "Nederland Open in Verbinding" (The Netherlands Open in Connection) to support the policy makers in adapting open source and open standards. One of the sponsors in NOiV which is responsible for "making it happen".
Since the congress is next week, most things are already taken care of and it looks like it will be a big success.
If your interested sign up at: http://congres.nn-open.nl/
I will be there too, so if you go, say hi. 
Lighttpd performance
We use Lighttpd a lot these days to offload our Apache2 servers. More specific we use Lighttpd to serve all the static content (images, stylesheets, javascript files and such).
Since one of our customers wanted a clear view I did some performance testing. I used siege with 500 concurrent connections with a list of urls with all the available static files (little over 3000 files).
The results:
Lifting the server siege... done.
Transactions: 279582 hits
Availability: 100.00 %
Elapsed time: 300.51 secs
Data transferred: 2401.35 MB
Response time: 0.03 secs
Transaction rate: 930.36 trans/sec
Throughput: 7.99 MB/sec
Concurrency: 27.50
Successful transactions: 279499
Failed transactions: 0
Longest transaction: 3.20
Shortest transaction: 0.00
While sending out with a rate around 80Mbit and receiving around 7Mbit, the old Xeon server didn't get over a load of 0.20.
I knew lighttpd was good at its job, but this still surprised me positively. I didn't try to push it any futher but I would expect the server could have saturated a 1Gbit/s link if you look at these results. I bet Apache2 would not be able to come even close.
Started a Dutch side-blog @ deaandeelhouder.nl
One of the websites we develop at OSSO, deaandeelhouder.nl, a project by ABM Online Solutions, has blog functionality available since a week. So I decided to open a little side-blog there in Dutch. Since there is so much going on in the financial markets these days it should not be hard to find material for a few posts once in a while.
I intend to post ICT related posts there (since that is where my interest is). My first post is a short one about the "ICT barometer", published by Ernst & Young last month about the minimal effect the "credit crisis" has on the ICT sector.
Developments at work
I was quite busy lately, in December we (OSSO) moved office to the "Media centrale" in Groningen and at the same time I had enough developments in my personal life to keep me well occupied.
Besides the move of office we also expanded our services quite a bit. Software development became a bigger part of our daily work and now we do not only offer it as support to applications running on our infrastructure but also use our infrastructure to supplement our software development efforts. This means we are doing bigger and cooler projects.
I hear you think, software development,... is it open source? Yes it is, we supply our software efforts under an open source license to our customers. However since its very customer specific at the moment we do not release anything online. But our customers definitely have the open source software license advantages.
If we build a more generic code base and have enough time/resources to actively support it as an open source project its very likely we will release some code/projects online.
All this software development doesn't mean we stopped doing other stuff we like. We are continuously improving our own network infrastructure, doing VOIP related work, setting up high availibility setups, etc. Since we are a team of 5 now, we can handle all these different things together quite well if I may say so. 
whats going on lately
I've not been making too much noise lately. However I'm still alive. Most of my living time goes to (the increasingly popular) working. But there are some activities going on in the "this might be interesting for other people" category.
- Management framework
I started working on a management framework together with Kim Chee Leong. It is scheduled to be finished in april. Later more on what it exactly will be, how it will become and why it has to be. Yes, it will be open source. - OSCafe
The OS Cafe is an initiative started by several companies in the north of the Netherlands. OS Cafe has the goal to make acceptance of open source more rapid and to give shape to the professionalization and progress regarding open source software. Regular activities with interesting speakers and other talks. All while enjoying some drinks and snacks.Till now the activities were quite inregular and had a focus on exchanging ideas. Lately the need for something concrete popped up (after all that dr^H^Hthinking). So some things got rolling. Our first focus is getting the local colleges to pay attention to open source and free software (with a focus on the IT related studies).
In the "probably not so interesting for the rest of the world but its my blog, haha!" category: I will spend new year in Toronto. 30 december 2006 till 10 Januari. One and a half week of real winter I expect. Already get depressed if I think about shopping for some "real winter" proof clothes. Rather avoid the mass shopping spree of all those mad people in their holiday season frenzy.
I promise I will blog more about that management framework thingy within a week. It does rock and its in the design phase at the moment.
LinuxWorld Utrecht
Yesterday I went to LinuxWorld, Utrecht. Me, Nils, Peter and Kim drove to Utrecht from Groningen. It started really bad, and I think in general it was quite crappy, especially because of the overpowered sales army. Open source innovation, community and just cool stuff were hard to find. 
The seminar about Desktop Linux started really bad with a german guy who had to give a presentation about a desktop migration to Linux which was really succesful. They were so surprised that everybody was so happy with the new system (Suse with kde 3.3 or something). I wasn't, they switched from Solaris with CDE to Linux with KDE!!! That usability improves from that is hardly a surprise. It was an old migration (2004) as well. And they only switched the desktop side, server side was still running on solaris with NIS, NFS and stuff like that.
After that they had a decent improvement, presented by a dutch executive of a health care organisation. They had a really succesful migration to Linux especially regarding costs. The main reason they were able to do this was because of all the ASP software (core software was webbased and out sourced). They had some other nifty stuff but it was a really good migration. Migrations from Windows to Linux are interesting and a challenge!
After the seminar we talked to the people of covete (also used in the succesful migration) which is a groupware thingy with neat asterisk integration. We will give it a spin next week.
While we finished talking to covete and other people (SWAT and some stereotype unix people) in the open source area LinuxWorld already ended. We went out for pizza with Dennis (seveas) and Pascal (pmjdebruin).
It was a nice day but not because of LinuxWorld.
In the newspaper
Today I was in "de spits". A dutch newspaper mostly found in the public transportation areas (similar to Metro).
A small part of the article is about our company and its me on the picture. Sneaked in our company logo and the Ubuntu logo on the computer screen.
The digital version can be found here: [spitsnet.nl]
Opening office building
We already moved in last april but last week they finally finished up the building just in time for the official opening.
Because of the attention for the incubator who manages our office building I also had two interviews last week. One for the University (RUG) newspaper (UK) and another one for "de spits". The University newspaper already got published and they even selected a picture of us working in our messy office. If someone can scan it for me I'll put it online.
The opening itself was quite busy and I think a success. I just had a two day break and now back to the hard work.
Random update
Decided:
- Install a wordpress plugin make the comment spam less annoying (before I go on holiday).
Bought (21 euro):
- The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (the tv serie).
- Harold and Kumar go to Whitecastle
- Dogma
- The Big Lebowski
Work & School:
- Busy
- Internship almost finished
Opinion:
- I think that the dapper-commercial repository is quite cool. Ofcourse I prefer opensource happiness, but its a good thing that non-free stuff Just Works on Ubuntu as well.
2006: Week 15
- Got the keys to our new office space. Yay!
- "Beginning Ubuntu Linux - from novice to professional" from Apress arrived today.
- dived in the world of transit providers, peering and data traffic costs this week.
- Realised there is a huge difference between providers even if they are in the same datacenter.
- Made a comparison between different providers.
- Great dinner tonight.
- Write a report which I will postpone to tomorrow.
- Updated Edubuntu Cookbook page, I guess I'll start writing next week.
Twitter: hpbos
- Gisteren the men who stare at goats gezien. :-) jeff bridges++
- @Ronald_R: Anders heb je nog Zombie Strippers! als optie.
- @Ronald_R Lesbian Vampire Killers... http://www.pajiba.com/trailers/new-lesbian-vampire-killers-trailer.php
- @joostdrijver stink voetbal, mijn reistijd naar kantoor verdubbeld in de laatste 500m.
- wie wil er vanavond "the men who stare at goats" met mij kijken? :P
- Rabobank internetbankieren is buggy as hell.
- Net film the fountain gezien. Wel mooi gemaakt maar niet mijn ding.
- Groningen binnen. Niet bijzonder. Nu coma tijd.
- Wat een kak verhaal van rouvoet. Ook met 4 procent geteld, lame.
Categories
- Advocacy
- Development
- Entertainment
- Evil
- Humor
- In the news
- Orbit Ubuntu
- Personal life
- Security
- Tech
- Travel
- Work
