via youtube.com But... what about Perl?!

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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. via opscode.com Was ich noch nicht verstehe: Wieso sollte jemand, dessen Infrastruktur CM-Software wie Chef erfordert, ausgerechnet ihr Herzstück extern hosten lassen?

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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.

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Customers is what happens while you're making plans. I've been doing a lot of planning over the past months but having our first customers proved that you can't foresee everything. Hopefully, you'll have set aside some time to revise your plans and do what suddenly became necessary. I didn't, so other tasks had to be put on the back burner -- more plans to change. Although I've learned to do project management and organize my tasks, it's hard to fulfill my many roles. I'm company owner, manager, accountant, system administrator, business developer, marketing director and support representative, each of them trying to keep a healthy schedule and family life. That's a huge challenge. On the positive side, working from home saves me time otherwise used for commuting that I can use to balance work and family. Over the past few weeks, I've been working a lot, but I've also started to put in a free day every so often. That proved a particular good idea because it lets me free my mind from the urgent to focus again on the important. One of those important things is friends. Taking a break from work to meet a friend over coffee or spending an evening together around a barbecue grill is a great way of winding down. It also gives me a chance at reflecting what and how I'm doing right now. And, as it stands right now, I'm doing okay.

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http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=anatomyofastickfigure-100422123121-phpapp02&stripped_title=anatomy-ofa-stickfigure</p> via slideshare.net Nice tutorial for drawing stick figures.

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Wem die Vorteile des Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bisher zu teuer waren, bietet Amazon ab sofort die Alternative "Reduced Redundancy Storage" an: We are pleased to introduce a new storage option for Amazon S3 called Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) that enables customers to reduce their costs by storing non-critical, reproducible data at lower levels of redundancy than the standard storage of Amazon S3. RRS wird ebenfalls nach Datenvolumen abgerechnet, aber zu geringeren GB-Preisen als S3. Dateien, die im Notfall wiederhergestellt werden können, können mit RRS also mit geringerer Redundanz, aber eben auch zu geringeren Kosten in die Cloud verlagert werden.

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What a ride those two recent weeks were! I feel like the rollercoaster of my business had finally climbed the first peak and now is thundering downwards, gaining more and more speed. Drupal hosting Last weekend, the Drupal Dev Days took place in Munich. So far, it was the biggest German Drupal conference ever. Since work on the website took much longer than expected, I decided to delay its publication a bit more and use the Drupal Dev Days as the venue to launch our Drupal hosting products labeled DrupalCONCEPT. So, on Friday evening, I sat in my Munich hotel room, getting more and more nervous. Not because I had gotten the first time slot on the schedule for my talk "Drupal in the Cloud", but because I was becoming anxious how people would react to our business offerings. Well, in retrospect, the feedback I got there was nothing less than awesome! People came to me to ask me about details. Many were excited that we closed that gap in the Drupal services spectrum. The website design got praise, and I also got suggestions how we could make it yet more clear and informational. And besides all the talking, I could do my first business deals, too. Already during the weekend, KontextWork announced they were partnering with us to host their DrupalWiki SaaS products. During the week, other new customers started populating their Drupal webspace on our servers. The basic server infrastructure is running, but there are many construction sites we'll still have to deal with. No boredom in sight. :-) Podcasting This week really was as productive as it was busy. Additional to all the business stuff, I recorded the first episode of my new podcast Drupal Talkshow with my co-host Markus Heurung. We talked about the Drupal Dev Days, of course, and about the international DrupalCons in San Francisco and Kopenhagen. We also took a look at the Devel contrib module. It was a lot of fun and we plan on continuing the podcast on a bi-weekly basis. Family It's not easy to keep a healthy family life when both parents are busy working on huge projects with deadlines to meet. I'm glad that working from the home office enables me to do my fair share of household chores and spend time with our sweet little daughter. Also, Carolin and I are lucky to have great relatives and friends that support us. We very much appreciate it that we're not alone in taking care of Amalia while the creche is closed like this Thursday and Friday. Overall satisfaction rating :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) (on a 5-smiley scale)

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Website work I really crushed it last week to finally get the web hosting website done. And apart from minor touches, it's done and online. I decided to keep the site under wraps, though, to ceremonially reveal it at the Drupal Developer Days that take place in Munich next weekend. IT infrastructure Let me tell you: It takes a lot of effort to make IT management effortless. While I still stand by my decision to automate everything from the start, it's not always easy to accept the price of a lot more preparation work. Just whipping up some servers wouldn't have taken me that long, but if you want to build automated processes, you have to think them through before you spend even more time implementing them. I had planned to go live with our Drupal hosting products in April, but there was just too much tech to handle. (Warning: Sysadmin talk ahead) Last week, I decided to upgrade Chef to 0.8 because 0.7 has seemed really outdated for some time now and I experienced some confusing behaviour with our installation, too. The upgrade took almost a whole work day because one new component called RabbitMQ didn't want to start but neither didn't give useful error messages. I had to do some test installations on fresh servers and eventually found the cause in a discrepancy between DNS and the /etc/hosts file. Additionally, a software packaging bug in the chef-server package (a wrong symlink, as I later found out) broke the Javascript that's essential for the Chef web interface. That wasn't a big deal, though, because Chef 0.8 introduces a new utility called Knife that lets you manipulate configuration data from the command line. And no GUI is as good as no GUI. Working with tools like Chef is an investment that'll pay off eventually: With those automated processes, we'll have to invest minimal effort into maintaining and growing our infrastructure later. Business Development Getting the Drupal hosting website ready was my main goal for last week, and I'm happy to have reached it. Now I'm preparing my talks for the Drupal Dev Days which will draw some traffic to the website -- hopefully by many new Drupal hosting customers. After the conference, I'll concentrate on creating website content in the form of blog posts, knowledge base articles and podcasts. Family life I have to admit, starting a business while my girlfriend is writing her thesis isn't the best timing. When both parents are busy-busy-busy with deadlines looming, even the question who does the grocery shopping can become a conflict -- let alone the one who'll spend the next hours out on the playground with our 2-year-old. That's where I'm grateful for Gary Vaynerchuck's calming first rule in "Crush It!": Family first. Always.

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As I wrote in my last weeknote, I decided to switch from LaTeX to HTML for the training manuals and papers my company Freistil Consulting will publish in the future. In this post, I'm going to explain why. As a computer scientist, system administrator and IT trainer, I've written a lot of documents ranging from single-page articles and a diploma thesis to my book "Perl-Meisterkurs" with nearly 200 pages. And all the time, I've been looking for the format that best supported publishing those documents. In the early nineties, I learned to like LaTeX. The process of writing documents in LaTeX (write, process, verify, repeat) is so similar to writing software in a compiler language that I found it very easy to learn. And its output quality was just stunning compared to all the text processing software like Word. Also, like for example with Perl, there is a huge choice of useful extensions, called "styles", freely available on the Internet. With those, you can use LaTeX for writing articles and books as well as letters and even presentation slides (or cooking recipes for that matter). But while you can generate PDF files easily with LaTeX, converting a document into HTML for the Web is tedious, even with the converter software available. And because I needed printouts as well as web pages to display on a projector, I chose DocBook XML as my source format. It's been used for publishing technical documents for a long time and can be converted into PDF as easily as into HTML. Unfortunately, at least using open source tools, the PDF output is not nearly as neat as the one from LaTeX. So, when I started writing my Perl book, I reverted back to LaTeX and I've been happy for some years. That is, until I decided to focus on online training. Now great print quality didn't matter that much any more and I needed HTML files to publish on our online training platform. The format had to be based on plain text so I could still use Textmate, my favourite text editor, and Perl scripts to process my source files. There weren't much alternatives left to choose from. One of the most interesting candidates was Markdown. I already use Markdown on most of my blogs because it's easy to write and also easy on the eyes. Furthermore, Scrivener, the writing tool I like most, also supports working with Markdown. And then there was HTML, simple, plain HTML. I got the idea from Mark Pilgrim's interview on the setup where he mentioned that he's writing his new book in HTML. I liked this idea because doing semantic markup in HTML is easy and by using CSS, you can style a great looking online presentation. Writing HTML is almost as easy as writing Markdown, especially when you have support from your editor software. Additionally, there was the strategic aspect that if I wanted to involve other writers, I would be much easier to find some who knew HTML than ones with LaTeX, DocBook or Markdown knowledge. Because I still wanted to be able to generate PDF files, I looked for decent HTML-to-PDF converters. XSL:FO was the main reason I abandoned DocBook, so I researched the alternatives and found PrinceXML. Prince uses the normal CSS styling information and extends its syntax a bit to cover printing aspects like page sizes and footnotes. I found out that CSS3 actually even can do page or figure numbering and cross references. It has to be mentioned that PrinceXML is a bit on the pricy side, so I had to do some tests first. I quickly converted one of the book's chapters from LaTeX to HTML, created a CSS style sheet for screen and one for print media, and checked the results in HTML and PDF. As was to be expected, the web presentation was fine, and also the PDF output from PrinceXML was quite acceptable. These results finally convinced me to go Full Monty on converting the book from LaTeX to HTML. I haven't finished the conversion yet, but thanks to a Perl script with a growing list of regular expressions, I can minimize my manual work. I'll also need to write some scripts for generating the table of contents and the keyword index, because PrinceXML doesn't do that. I expect to have a complete new version of the Perl Meisterkurs book in May and will let you know of my experiences in another post.

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via boingboing.net Some parents really are awesome. Until this, I didn't see the use of owning a family home.

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