port7 – co – uk

So having a number of chats with various people about what we would like to see in a corporate twit platform.

Following from a blog post by friend and colleague Mr K, I have been thinking, could we build something?

That naturally progresses to, what do we want to build, how would we build it, and with what would we build it?

Addressing the first question, could we build it? The answer is of course yes, it’s just software and assuming we have a sensible set of requirements and some clever bod’s anything is possible.

The second question is what do we want to build, is possibly the tricky one. Why not just use Twiter? Well essentially my problem with that is that it is a hosted service, and for any corporate having potentially private and sensitive company info hosted on a server outside it’s control is just simply a no-go. Also on the privacy aspect, your company tweets could appear in the public tweet list.

So what do we want?:

• Ability to ‘follow people’
• Ability to create groups, and also to follow groups
• Ability to search posts, both all and people you are following
• Options for backend auth (LDAP, AD, OpenID)
• Logging, so all posts can be logged
• Ability to post and read by various means, IM, Web, SMS, etc
• Scalability, this should be able to scale to corporations of 100,000+ users

So with with what should we build it, given the requirements above, could this be done with the LAMP stack? Or do we need a proper daemon written in C? Not being a developer, I don’t know these things. My guess is that LAMP could do all the above, though the scalability requirement might be tricky (or not!)

Anyway I am throwing these thoughts out to the ether, feel free to comment, volunteer to do it, or just shoot me down

So there is a requirement with my current client to print barcodes from an application on HPUX. The current way this application prints is to simply output an ASCII text file and send that to the printer with a couple of control codes to set landscape / portrait mode etc.

So I had a look round the web and found a few solutions, that allow you to print barcodes from UNIX systems. They essentially involve a program that sits in the lpd print filter system and looks for various codes in the print stream, and then interprets them as barcodes. Reading the implementation guides for these systems, it seemed that they were assuming you were printing Postscript print jobs, but we wern’t, they were simple ASCII print jobs. When I was trying to find out about the print jobs, I did ask the team if they printed in Postscript or PCL, I just got a lot of blank states, and comments like ‘I don’t know anything about that techie sh*$e‘

So I had come to the conclusion that the application team are going to have to learn Postscript and start outputting reports in that. Which is not a bad thing as it will give them a lot more flexibility in their report formatting, and produce nicer looking stuff.

I then came across this project, which simply uses Postscript to draw barcodes based on variables that you stick in the Postscript print job.

You just have a Postscript report template that includes a bunch of stuff that will allow it to correctly interpret the codes you give it into working barcodes. After a hour or two of furtleing about, which included a long drawn out hunt for someone who knew what type of barcodes we use, I managed to create a print that duplicated a working current barcode.

So it seems like we have a winner, an Open Source project that will give us barcode capability from a key application, and will also move us towards using Postscript, which is not a bad thing.

Top Stuff!!

Last night I had the opportunity to see Richard Stallman speak, he was in Manchester speaking at an event arranged by the Manchester Free Software Group.

I had seen Richard speak previously at FOSDEM a few years ago, but as the opportunity to see him doesn’t come up very often, especially on my doorstep I thought I had better go.

Richard spoke on Free software in general, first talking about the 4 Freedoms and why they are important, then onto the history of the GNU Operating System and also a little on Digital Restrictions Management. After that he took questions from the audience in his own distinctive style . He also an introduction to the Church of EMACS, which drew lots of laughter from the audience.

It was a really enjoyable night, so thanks to all the people who worked hard behind the scenes to organize the event. I came away with renewed respect for Richard and his views, I hope he continues as he is for many years to come.

Dear Lazyweb,

Can someone please tell me what the difference between NLPOS9 and IRES2 is? And what do I get over NLPOS9 by going with IRES2?

Is it drivers, is it admin tools, is it support agreements? What is it!!??

Prompted by a mail emergency yesterday, I needed ssh access to the outside world from my current assignment. I am on a network that only allows outgoing http and https connections.

After some digging, I stumbled across gotossh.com a useful service that allows you to essentially ssh from a webpage. I guess they use some sort of ajaxy java magic to encapsulate a ssh client. I know there are questions to be asked of the security of such a service, but it was an emergency and got me out of a hole.

One of the things it did allow me to do, was to ssh to my colo box, and join #manlug via irssi, and I got talking to rjek who said I should try ssh’ing to port 443, through the work proxy. Now I am sure I had tried this before without success, but still I thought I would give it a go. I set my colo sshd to listen on 443, configured putty to use the on-site proxy, and connect to my colo on port 443, and lo-and-behold it worked!

So I am now a happy bunny, with a few options for getting out to the world. I have since discovered corkscrew and also putty with file based config storage (rather than in the registry). Which is nice.

If anyone is getting mail bounced, they might want to check that the mail server is not configured to use ordb.org as I found out today.

I seems if your mail server is set to check ordb.org for spam purposes, it will blacklist everything, as of 26 March 2008.

See this article for info.

Interesting post here on the Capgemini CTO blog, contemplating a future (if I read the post correctly) where licenced software products are a thing of the past.

It’s interesting in the fact that this has come from Capgemini, one of the big consultancies beloved of big business, are they ‘getting it’? This is where Open Source comes into it’s own, in value added services and support costs.

I am reminded by a statement from Mark Shuttleworth a few years back where he claimed that he saw the day some years in the future where the Open Source model would be the dominant model of software development and also delivery.

I see Microsoft are making a bid for Yahoo, they are obviously looking to respond to the growing power that is Google, and so Yahoo seems like a good buy.

What is just as interesting and not good news, is that Yahoo recently bought Zimbra, the most promising of the Exchange alternatives out there. So by acquiring Yahoo, Microsoft will also get Zimbra and promptly bury it, in favour of the 500-Pound Gorilla that is Exchange.

My request to the board of Yahoo, don’t do it, but if you do, ensure that Zimbra stay’s open!

Just setting off for a meeting at Microsoft HQ, should be interesting. As I am there on a professional basis I am going to avoid pointed questions about closed standards, document formats and anti-competetive practices.

Then again, maybe not…

So after unsubscribing from Linux Journal about a year ago and getting a subscription to Linux User and Developer I am thinking about going back.

It seems that LU&D have a bit of a distribution problem, I have not had a magazine for a few months now, and I also have not been paid for a couple of articles I wrote. With Linux Journal, the magazine always arrived on time and although there was a slight American bias to the magazine it was a good read with great articles.