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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.

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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.

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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?

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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!

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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.

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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.

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http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/09/introducing-amazon-linux-ami.html “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.”</p>

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via candyblackblog.com A dream of an office! (via @jkleske)

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Wenn ich als Bürger schon nicht verhindern kann… dass in meinem neuen Reisepass Fingerabdrücke und per Funk lesbare RFID-Chips installiert werden dass meine Kontobewegungen überwacht werden dass mein Kommunikationsverhalten registriert werden soll dass ich in vielen Städten auf Schritt und Tritt von unzähligen Überwachungskameras gefilmt werde dass ich auf Flughäfen in Zukunft durch einen Nacktscanner spazieren muss dass Mautbrücken automatisch alle Autokennzeichen erfassen …. dann will ich wenigstens einen riesen Aufriss machen, wenn jemand es wagt, meine Hausfassade zu fotografieren. Erfrischend klare Worte von dennis-knake.de</p>

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