Stickybit
Blog
The virtue of sharing
Wikipedia does makes the world a little more complex by pulling us all out of the comfort zones of our pet beliefs. I won't pretend that this isn't a bit annoying.
Tribute to the great one
Steven P Jobs. What to say? IMHO he won't be remembered for all that long due to the nature of his achievements. After all, who remembers the guy that made the steam engine feasible for wide use? Technology changes with time and so does our appreciation of the people behind it. Centuries from now, he is hardly likely to be known at all. But he would deserve to be. He belongs among the likes of Shakespeare and Michelangelo as one of the true greats of western civilization. It's been a privilege.
The future of Internet
We are very pleased to welcome Patrik Fältström to Stickybit for an evening on Monday the 21:th of Mars at 16.00. Mr Fältström a.k.a. paf works for Cisco where he reports to the CTO office. He's a member of an advisory board to the Swedish Government and advisor to the United Nations' Multistakeholder Advisory group. He chairs the ICANN:s Security and Stability Committee of which he's been a member since 2005. The conversation will revolve around Internet challenges in the light cast by recent events such as the shutdown in Egypt, that the world recently ran out of IPv4 addresses and how to meet those challenges with policies and - of course - technology. Please send an email to fredrick@stickybit.se if you want to come. While most of the conversation will be held in Swedish, everyone will be happy to accommodate to people fluent in other forms of human communication though without warranty.
War Game - A Linux hacking contest!
A Stickybit War Game is all about letting your creativity excersise your knowledge of security and your skills with Linux to the extreme. Participate as a team or play it the hard way on your own but remember only one can be the winner.
Load balancing PostgreSQL in the Amazon cloud
We've been working on an internal project for quite some time that among other things involves a ReSTful web service backed by a PostgreSQL database.
Our "production" installation is deployed in the Amazon EC2 cloud, with the idea that this gives us maximum flexibility to scale up resource investment dynamically with demand. However, in such a deployment PostgreSQL becomes both a potential bottleneck and SPOF (Single Point of Failure). While at its current phase in development we don't see any indication that we will be reaching a performance ceilings any time soon, this is still a concern for any large-scale roll out.
Even old dogs can still learn about TCP and UDP stacks...
Besides netstat, lsof and tcpdump I've not got a new tool in the collection. Christoffer showed me the ss command the other day while we were trying to understand the load on the DesignSync server.
patch-tracking.debian.net
way back in june there were some discussions on the debian-devel mailing lists about more effectively visualizing the changes made by debian developers to the packaged software distributed in debian.
Adventures in Copenhagen
a little more than a week ago, i was invited down by a friend of a friend to give a quick 15 minute talk in copenhagen about package management in debian. the talk was to be part of a larger "package management deathmatch" being hosted by the european BSD users' conference (euroBSDcon), where developers from different OS distributions would pitch why their system was the greatest thing since sliced bread and so much cooler than those other guys' system.