Cristian Livadaru's Blog

Buissnes Talk ... Weihnachten fuer geschaeftsleute

Message from the CEO (Christmas Event Organizer):

Dr. J. Christus v. Bethlehem:

Also Kinder, ich bin jetzt in Urlaub. Aller Vorausicht nach bin ich bis Weihnachten wieder da, aber die Vorbereitungen darauf sollten natürlich jetzt schon loslaufen:

Status: Wie Weihnachten 2005 im Internet gezeigt hat, heißt Weihnachten nicht mehr Weihnachten, sondern X-mas, also muss der Weihnachtsmann entsprechend ab jetzt X-man heißen!

Da X-mas 2006 quasi schon vor der Tür steht, ist es spätestens seit Oktober höchste Zeit, mit der Weihnachtsvorbereitung zu beginnen – Verzeihung – seit Oktober ist es höchste Zeit, mit dem Weihnachts- roll-out zu starten und die Christmas-Mailing-Action just in time vorzubereiten.

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Thursday, December 21, 2006

Cleaning up Gallery2 Cache

I wondered why my Gallery2 database backup was so HUGE ! (3gigs of text!) That couldn’t be right. After I search a bit on menalto.com on the forum I found out that the cache was the problem. After deleting the cache, the same database had only 16MB ! That is quite a difference. Anyway, the cache has it’s useful part, else you could turn it of so I wrote a little script to clean up everything that is older then a week. The DB then still has about 200MB but that is not comparable to 3GB ! So here is my little script.

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Kolab, a opensource Groupware solution

Want a Mailsever for a office that does all out of the box with virusscanner, spamfilter? Well Kolab could be one thing you should look at. Due to the fact that it uses Postfix and Cyrus, there is no way you could compare the performance to an exchange server (also called by someone as the best harddisk Benchmark ). Well since I love debian as server distribution it was also the OS I chose for this installation. But unfortunately there are no Debian packages for Kolab but you can still use the sources. I found an excellent HowTo (in german). This explains step by step all you need. The biggest problem was that I had to compile all kolab packages from source. On the P3 500Mhz I had here to install it took 6 hours! so make sure you have a loooot of coffee and time to get this done. Apropos coffee, it’s time for a new one. The next problem one might encounter is, like in my case, when you use the same machine to install the new server. How do you get the old mails for the old installation on the new one? Well if you have XEN installed somewhere it’s a matter of minutes to setup a new Virtual server, install cyrus on it and follow my Howto to import the old mails on the Xen Vserver. This might sound like a bit of to much work, but it really is simple. Why didn’t I import the mails directly on the new Kolab server if the old one was also cyrus? Well, the old setup was a bit different and also a different cyrus version so I didn’t want to mess up to much with Kolab so I thought this would be the easiest way and all went out perfect. But wait, now I still don’t have any of the old mails on the new Kolab installation. Well for this task you could use imapsync. I used it like this: imapsync –host1 192.168.0.101 –user1 foo –host2 localhost –user2 –authmech1 LOGIN –password1 foobar –password2 foobar –noauthmd5 –subscribe Caution! if other users are logged in the machine where you start imapsync you should not user –password1 and –password2 since one could see the password in the process list. Refer to the imapsync manual and use the version where it reads the passwords from file! Don’t forget the –subscribe option else any folder from the old server will not be shown on the new one, they will be imported and one could manually subscribe with thunderbird or a webmail, but for some users this task could be to complicated so make their (and finally you life) easier because I bet you will not be very pleased to hear “Oh my good, where are all my mail folders” from all users you have! One final thing … if anybody is interested in installing it on a debian 3.1 on x86 platform, check the download locations carefully! There ARE binaries for debian! And you won’t have to wait 6 hours for compilation, like me, just because you where to fucking blind to see the ix86-debian-3.1 folder! arggg… I could punch myself for this. If you still didn’t find it, try here.

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Sunday, December 17, 2006

several thoughts

don’t really have a topic to blog about, or to many things but not in the mood for collecting my thoughts and put them in a blog. Just sitting in front of my monitor, with a cold beer, and in a (2b || !2b) mood. let’s see how many will figure out what on earth I mean by this anyway … sitting here, listening to some cuban music over pandora.com and trying to switch of. This is one of the days where a lot of things go trough my head like memories from the past. Oh yeah … the so called “good old times” I bet everyone has heard of them. I’m not complaining about the actual situation, and I don’t think I would change something, but still, there is this “good old time” thing coming up from time to time … maybe this comes from my inner voice, trying to remind me of some mistakes I did in the past, or rather, just a single one that I regret! All mistakes have it’s learning effect somehow, but there is just this one thing that will no leave me alone, this one think I think I will never forget and never forgive (no, it has got nothing to do with love or things like this). A different plausible explication why we have this “good old times” feeling as we get older, is because we get “wiser” as we get older. As we where “younger” we where more “stupid” and “naive” and as we get older we see how sick everything around as is. How money can change people and that the world we think we live in, is just something that exists in books and movies. If you look around, corruption, crime, lies, brothers fighting each other, hate, war … all because of money. Most of the people don’t give a fuck about what will happen in the future or how the decision, a politician takes, will effect the feature. Here I would like to post a little excerpt of “The Poverty of philosophy” by Immortal Technique:

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Sunday, December 10, 2006

I am becoming a ISTQB Certified Tester

I usually don’t post blogs regarding my work but I think this one is worthy for being blogged. Last month I attempted the first part in Budapest.

“ISTQB – Certified Tester, foundation level”

I was rather optimistic about this Certification, or rather about the seminary and learning some new things, but I was quite disappointed. Things like skipping pages from the material but then get questions about that skipped material at the exam. The material was also extended, my colleagues that did that seminary one year ago, had 25 pages in the “syllabus” we (the 4 of us that didn’t have time one year ago) had the same 3 days, but our syllabus had now 73 pages. Things like the moderator not knowing answers to example questions without looking at the result page didn’t really increase my mood and the trust in this seminary.

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Wednesday, December 6, 2006

Addicted to The Simpsons?

Well what do you say to this? Today after watching over 10 episodes of Simpsons (in which I forgot to turn on my mobile, didn’t check my server and it really did crash … well what would homer say? Doh), I just received a mail (no clue to which list I subscribed, but thanks god I did it ) about the Movie, well I do know about the movie since quite a while and have seen the teaser, but now the Trailer has been released! Go and see it on http://www.thesimpsons.com/ Well I sure du hope they will sell doughnuts instead of Popcorn at the movie. So and instead of reading my apache security book to prevent further crashes on the server … I am going to watch more simpsons episodes

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Sunday, November 19, 2006

fixing problems

An elderly lady phoned Verizon to report that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called – and that on the few occasions when it did ring, her pet dog always barked right before the phone rang.

The telephone repairman proceeded to the scene, curious to see this psychic dog or senile elderly lady. He climbed a nearby telephone pole, hooked in his test set, and dialed the subscriber’s house.

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Friday, November 10, 2006

How to wake up by 6:30 every morning ... for the serious procrastinator

Just read this in Karanet. I think I will have to try this next Monday when I have to wake up REAL early to catch a train to Budapest at 6 in the morning

The plan

Make sure your PC is in your bedroom with the monitor pointed at such an angle that you can see the screen perfectly. Go to the bios of your pc. Set your PC to startup automatically by 6:30a.m. Set your alarm clock to startup by 6:20a.m. Set your alarm clock to Radio, preferably, talk radio, not music radio. Put it at the far end of your room. Download a whole bunch of stand-up comedy routines that you have not watched. Make a link to one of them in your autostart menu. Set VLC so that it startsup in fullscreen mode. Strategically place bread and the juice beside your bed. By 9pm on the first day, swallow one of the sleeping tablets. As an optional step, put on some Jenna and squeeze out some tadpoles.

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Thursday, November 9, 2006

Testing gallery 2.2

Gallery2.2 still isn’t released, but since I can’t wait to see it I started to install the nightly snapshot of gallery2.2, don’t worry! only on a testsystem I’m not upgrading the main gallery installation, yet. So what’s so great about gallery2.2, well actually there is no specific feature that I’m waiting for but I do bet there are a lot of things that I will like. The first thing that I noticed was that 2.2 now also knows Romanian The installation was easy as always, but the hard part will be the upgrade, this I will test the next days to get an idea of what awaits me when upgrading the existing gallery. Didn’t do that now since I only have 300mb left on my test VPS. New modules: There is a new printing service, a Flash video player, mp3 player, replicate items (like a link only that this one really replicates (copies) the item. So and here I am now at step 9 of 11 and my installation kind of stopped activating the user modules, but that isn’t something that will stop me. Looking at the admin interface it does look a bit newer and shinier, but the first thing I saw that sounds great is the Dynamic album feature. Well, enough for now. Looks quite interesting, and as soon as I have created an testinstallation with some images in it I will post a link.

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Wednesday, November 8, 2006

Borat, go and see it :)

Well I have to say at some scenes I kind of expected more from Borat, nevertheless it was a great movie and worth being seen. As I have seen the trailer I was already sure that Borat his home village was NOT from Kazakhstan, it was filmed in Romania. Not only that the people, the village and everything else looks really Romanian, I have also found an interview which confirms this.

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Monday, November 6, 2006