Sirius Corporation plc

I came to a startling realisation yesterday.  Somehow, 2010 has been charging along at the pace of an express train without me even noticing.  Yesterday seemed to be Christmas, but now we’re at the start of March.  That means that it’s now nearly a month since FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developer’s European Meeting) was held at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

We have recently been expanding into additional office space upstairs which has been turned into our new Customer Service Centre, this possibly explains where some of the lost time has gone.  More on that, with pictures, in another blog post.

Mark Taylor and I recently travelled to Brussels to attend FOSDEM.  The journey was smooth, with even the M25 being kind to us.  The French and Belgian Autoroutes had hardly any traffic on them until we approached the outskirts of Brussels.  It’s the first time that I’ve been on the Eurotunnel for many years, having favoured the ferry more recently, but it’s wonderful to be able to drive to Brussels, from London, in about the same time that it takes to get to Liverpool or Manchester.  On the Autoroute in France I was interested to see a Lithuanian car transporter filled with N-reg (about 15 year old)  British-registered vehicles – heading away from Britain.

Having arrived in Brussels at about 7pm we spent some time trying to understand the street parking restrictions, before heading off for a quiet drink and Belgian waffle to prepare for the rest of the evening. The Beer (unfortunately not Free) Event was at the Delirium Café near the Grand’Place in Brussels. Festivities were in full swing by this time with a great atmosphere.  If you’ve ever wanted to be in a bar filled only with several thousand other geeks, the Beer event at FOSDEM is definitely the right place to be.  The Delirium Café is in an old and unspoilt part of Brussels which is exceedingly beautiful and very metropolitan with outside restaurants, despite it being in the depths of winter. Despite not being a particularly big beer fan, some of the Belgian beers are very good, particularly the fruit beers from the likes of Lindemans, which are very refreshing

The party went on until the early hours of the morning, and then continued into the not-so-early hours of the morning.  This might explain our slightly late arrival at the site of the Université Libre de Bruxelles on Saturday morningafternoon, where the main FOSDEM conference was held.

Parts of the Université also had some great architecture, but its size meant that keen navigation skills were useful.

Due to the huge number of tracks on such a large number of topics, it was hard to decide exactly which talks to go to, so we decided to go for the tried and tested and went to our good friend Paul Adams’ talk on KDE PIM.

It was great to see stands from so many organisations, from Firefox (bonus points for the cute fox logo)…

…to KDE and Amarok.

I like trying Continental foods, so I was keen to try a restaurant serving local styles of food.  I’ve eaten snails before many years ago in France, but decided that it would be good to try them again.  Which was  followed by something a lot more familiar – Moules (Mussels) for main course. The snails were moderately pleasant. Glad that I tried them but probably won’t do so again for a while.  I did give the frogs legs a miss though.

On the Sunday, for me, the highlight of the day was a talk by Andrew Tanenbaum on MINIX. Tanenbaum is famously known for his debate with Linux Torvalds in 1992 about kernel design. MINIX is a still teaching and research operating system, and the talk was entitled “MINIX 3: a Modular, Self-Healing POSIX-compatible Operating System”.

Despite the fact that it was about a highly technical subject, the talk was very accessible, and made even better by the fact that Tanenbaum is an excellent lecturer who did a great job of keeping the audience entertained and interested.

Overall, FOSDEM was a great opportunity for like-minded people from all over Europe (and perhaps further) to talk about their common interests, even though they were from different projects.

At Sirius we have recently started using and deploying Roundcube in favour of the tried and tested (but very old) Squirrelmail. Impressed by it’s beautiful front-end, ease of use and obvious extensibility, Tom Callway spoke to Till Klampaeckel and Thomas Bruederli, two of Roundcube’s core developers, to find out more about this exciting project.

1) What is Roundcube?

Roundcube is a free open source webmail client with an application-like user interface. Roundcube provides all the functionality one expects from an e-mail program and connects to any mail server backend that supports IMAP.

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Goals

The goals of this blog are to illustrate how to:

• authenticate Mac OSX Leopard workstations from an existing redundant OpenLDAP infrastructure
• configure Mac OSX Leopard workstations from an existing redundant OpenLDAP infrastructure
• store and manage configuration settings on an existing redundant OpenLDAP infrastructure using Workgroup Manager

Please note that this article applies only to Mac OSX Leopard. Previous and later versions are untested.

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The requirement for a new brochure last week got me tackling one of those periodic (and in my case instantly forgettable) gotchas – how to do I import EPS images into Inkscape?

I’ve been using Ubuntu Linux for years but there is one application that I just can’t give up – Adobe’s InDesign. I use it on a Mac. Yes, it’s expensive and proprietary but when it comes to desktop publishing there really is no substitute. Currently it’s hard to find a commercial printer that doesn’t balk at the idea of non Adobe-generated Postscript. That’s a shame because tools like Scribus are excellent.

At Sirius we make extensive use of image libraries like istockphoto.com. Very few designers who operate from such royalty-free libraries produce their vector scalable graphics in anything other than EPS. That’s okay if the graphic doesn’t need manual editing, you just import it straight into Adobe InDesign. But if you want to do a little tweaking you need a drawing program. On Linux, that means Inkscape.

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In the build up to the release of a series of benchmarking tests for network monitoring / management applications based on Open Source technologies, Tom Callway speaks to Tarus Balog, the CEO of the OpenNMS Group and current maintainer of the OpenNMS open source network management project.

1. What is OpenNMS?

“OpenNMS is the world’s first enterprise-grade network management application platform developed under the open source model.”

What the heck does that mean?

It was registered on Sourceforge in March of 2000, although it was started in 1999, so it has been around for awhile – long enough to qualify as “world’s first” when you add that …

It was designed from the beginning to be “enterprise-grade” which means it can manage tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of network elements. We have commercial support clients who are using one instance of OpenNMS to collect on over 50,000 discreet devices, another collecting data from over 120,000 interfaces (this results in 1.2 million data points every five minutes) and still another with 200 devices, each with 32,000 interfaces per device.

OpenNMS was also built to be a network management application platform. Users can use OpenNMS as a framework on which to build a unique management solution. While OpenNMS does a lot out of the box, it really shines when it is customised for a given network.

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An enterprise thrives or fails according to how well it does what it does. That much is, or should be, obvious. Inevitably, as they grow processes are put in place which seek to improve efficiency. In recent years with essentially all employees having access to computers, software has been built to recreate those processes electronically.

Enterprise Resource and Planning (ERP) software comes as a suite of utilities to do just that and divides business processes broadly into the following conceptual areas in order to make the structure of very complex software manageable:

• manufacturing
• supply chain
• financial
• project management
• human resource management
• customer/supplier management

In other words there’s something for everyone who is involved with the management of companies. ERP software can be extremely complex, as it must be to meet the needs of some of the largest and most sophisticated companies in the world.

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At Sirius we’ve just completed the migration of our corporate website from Joomla! to Drupal. There are many discussions of the relative merits of Drupal and Joomla!, but we thought it would be interesting to discuss what we’ve learned.

Joomla! and Drupal superficially claim to do the same sort of job. Both allow you to get a well structured website supporting multiple contributors up and running quickly and easily. If anything, Joomla! is probably the more straightforward of the two to set-up. It’s very easy to get near-instant gratification from a Joomla! deployment while you’re still knee-deep in Drupal’s ‘blocks’, ‘views’ and ‘taxonomies’.

Our Joomla! based site served us well for three years but as our need for new features grew, so did the arguments for switching to Drupal. While both Drupal and Joomla! offer a thriving market for third-party extensions, we felt that Drupal’s architecture was better suited to us.

In any system there is a trade-off between simplicity and flexibility. As noted above, Joomla! is probably the quicker of the two systems to set-up, but the flip-side is that it makes more assumptions about the nature of your site whereas Drupal encourages you to make those decisions for yourself.

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At Sirius we’re fans of Request Tracker, which is excellent free software for running a help desk. One reasonably common question on the Request Tracker user’s mailing list is “how do I make setting a subject mandatory when creating a ticket?”. Another useful modification that we use at Sirius is to force setting a non-zero priority on tickets.

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In the build up to PGDay.EU 2009, an event which we’re sponsoring, Tom Callway caught up with friend and colleague Dave Page to talk about the PostgreSQL project and how this somewhat unsung Open Source project is taking on the enterprise database market.

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One of the projects I’ve been working on recently is a large web application designed using MDA (Model-Driven Architecture). Now I confess that my Java experience lags at least a decade behind my C experience, but I feel that I’ve worked with the language long enough to have a reasonably meaningful opinion on things Java related. So I thought I’d write a few notes about my experience in case other people were considering following this path.

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