Developers Orbit

We moved!

Wow what a big step up from a tiny office to a 60 square meter office with new furniture.

Our new address is:
Rebenring 33
38106 Braunschweig
Germany

Will post a follow up with pictures and a bit more information probably will have moved the blog to our new server by then

Technology baby!

Today WolframAlpha was released and I have to say that all of us at Komola are stunned how well it can interpret queries and what cool and some times what random informations it gives you which you weren’t expecting but is super useful! Let me give you some examples of just what it can do. Say I want to tell all my team members who are partly sitting outside of germany that the release date is May 29th at 1pm german time. So I send my team this link: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=13:00+may+29th+in+german+time and everyone will not only see what time that would be in their local time but also how many days, hours and minutes are left until that date. But thats just one of the ways to use it. Say we want to do some calculation with pi and our calculators 9 digits after the comma will just not be enough so we can use their webinterface to do some calculation: 2 pi 5 m² http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+pi+5+square+meters+to+100+digits which not only gives me my result but also some other information like some conversions and a comparison in this case the area of a typical parking space. Those are just some of the things wolframalpha can do I really hope that this project comes to great use. If you want to take a look at some other examples just click through their collection of examples

Ausarbeitung unseres Businessplans

Wir haben am Dienstag ein Treffen mit Mitarbeitern des Technologie Parks Braunschweig. Grund dafür ist: Wir brauchen ein Büro!
Der Technologie Park bietet jungen Unternehmen aus Braunschweig und Umgebung die Möglichkeit, bei geringen Kosten in einem tollen Umfeld unter der Betreuung von erfahrenen Geschäftsleuten seine Firma aufzuziehen.

Mehr Informationen zum Technologie Park gibt es hier: Webseite des Technologiepark Braunschweig

Um in dem Technologie Park Büroräume mieten zu können ist es notwendig, einen Businessplan zu erstellen. Nun ja, wir sind gerade an der Ausarbeitung unseres Planes und hoffen, am Dienstag ein interessantes Treffen zu haben.

Screens are changing…

… and the Internet has to do the same! Today the common display at home is a 19 inch monitor (1280×1024) and has a 4:3 ratio but this is changing rapidly. A lot of you guys are upgrading to 22 inch wide-screen displays (1680×1050) and many people think screen real estate is growing - BUT actually it’s getting smaller. Many of you may now think I have gone nuts but it’s true due to multitasking and changes in Microsoft’s new operating system Windows 7, Google’s browser Chrome and most importantly how people use their computer a new and different design era has begun.

Here you can see what I was talking about the whole time because I only use half the screen for each browser the site has less width available. As you can see twitter works great on about 820 pixels of width but digg.com doesn’t do so great anymore it’s already showing a scrollbar but you can still use it. But some websites are not designed for small screens at all anymore here is the best example I could find: As you can see Wordpress is basically unusable since the right sidebar covers more than half of the editing area. Also the screenshot shows how I use the other half of the screen.

But to get to the point I really want people to develop for small screens again. I am not talking about really small but keep in mind that the main content of the page should fit inside of 820 pixels of width specially because Windows 7 brings features with it where you can dock your apps to the side and more and more people will use it.

Office server and Xen virtualization

On Friday we finally got our new server which like all our servers is getting a name from Transformers Bumblebee is a really powerful machine with an Intel Xeon X3360 (4×2,86Ghz) and 8Gb of Ram (4×2Gb) with 500Gb of storage backed up by a hardware RAID1. But this post is actually going to be about virtualization more specifically about Xen.

I started by installing Citrix XenServer5 which is now free but I didn’t like its front-end and the fact that the software couldn’t understand the servers 4 on-board NICs. Searching for something else I found that I could install Debian Lenny on the server, format the whole drive and could install XenSource on it. With the help of HowToForges Tutorial about how to install Xen on an AMD64 machine I got it to run fairly quickly. Installing a guest Debian Lenny worked right away mainly thanks to xen-tools which  unlike XenServer5 enables you to install Debian x64. My next step was to install a Windows Server 2008 x64 as another guest using a tutorial which someone wrote who had an X running on their server. After having a lot of trouble with it I finally got it going… the solution to why I couldn’t connect to the vm via vnc was that I simply had to use “vif = [ 'type=ioemu, bridge=eth0' ]“ instead of some weird bridg0. The installation was smooth but the mouse in the vnc didn’t stay in sync with my mouse (you have to add “usbdevice=’tablet’” so it stays in sync). After poking around in the VMs for a while I noticed that I was running out of space on my 4Gb virtual drive so I looked around and found this nifty tutorial to expand my virtual drive.

Side notes:

• modprobe sky2 would have made the on-board NICS work in XenServer5.. well the XenSource solution seems color
• /usr/lib/xen/ stuff is called /usr/lib/xen-default/ in Debian Lenny

Neuer Blog online

Wir haben soeben das Komola-Blog-Design für unseren Blog “Developers Orbit” fertig gestellt. Nachdem der Blog hier ziemlich lange eine leere Baustelle war, die nicht der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich war, haben wir es aber doch endlich geschafft! Wir werden den Blog benutzen, um über Informationen, Gedanken, Ideen und generell Neuigkeiten um und über Komola zu berichten. Dazu zählen unsere Projekte die wir haben (in der Vergangenheit haben wir an coolen Sachen wie Wireless-Wolfsburg gearbeitet) sowie unserem Produkt VS.Php, welches wir auf Deutsch übersetzt haben und an dem wir mit entwickeln.

Unseren Kunden, Partnern und allen weiteren Fans wollen wir zusätzlich die Möglichkeit bieten, einen tieferen Einblick in unsere Firma und über unsere Arbeit zu erhalten.

Also, auf ein gutes Gelingen!