Savings

Google is lately heavily advertising their Google Apps related savings.
I have tweaked the assumptions in order to match the following 5 nines setup:

• ZFS + dedup storage backends 
• clustered frontends (Solaris Cluster):
• Postfix + Dovecot + SpamAssasin + OpenLDAP
• RoundCube webmail
• Mercurial for versioning
• MediaWiki for content

The result was:

Do not get me wrong - Google Apps is a great SaaS. However In case of a large organization who happens to be cheap/money conscious, _EXTREMELY_ concerned about privacy and with it's own data centers - there are some alternative solutions. The costs go mainly in hardware as all software used is free and system admins are creative and payed well below the 70 USD/h that Google is assuming.
  

Headhunting callflow

A                        Daniel                   Continental              
|----INVITE (Interview)->|                        |                        
|                        |                        |                        
|<-200 OK----------------|                        |                        
|                        |                        |                        
|                        |<-INVITE----------------|                        
|                        |                        |                        
|                        * Discussion with A      |
|                        * A proposes work for    |
|                        * Continental            |            
|                        * Proposal sounds good   |
|                        * Better rates than Conti|                        
|                        * Decline Continental    |
|                        |                        |                        
|                        |-488 NotAcceptableHere->|                        
|                        |                        | ???                         
|<-183 In Progress--------------------------------|
|                        |                        |                        
|----INFO (In Progress)->|                        |                        
|                        * Puzzled...             |                        
|                        * In what progress?      |                        
|-------------------BYE->|                        |                        
|                        * Amused                 |                        
|<-200 OK----------------|                        |                        
|                        |                        |                        
A                        Daniel                   Continental  


Isn't this callflow flawed?
What the heck... I refused Continental with a brutal 488. Still they believe that they are in progress.
Their timers are completely screwed. However I understand them - It would have been cheaper for them to hire me directly  than via A.

Lately

I am spending time with my daughter. Not as much as I'd like.
We listen to all kind of music - she enjoys Mozart and "Dead can Dance".
We also dance sometimes, The Blue Danube waltz - is her favorite.

In the meanwhile VXML scripting and some cracking of a Java based license system. I was lucky with the cracking as the vendor made mostly no obfuscation and DID NOT sign the jar files... It would have been considerably harder to crack it if at leat one of those two have been applied.

I have set up a server(web, mail, etc) for an online community. I installed RoundCube webmail (I was considering Zimbra for that but hardware was terrible) and I found it extremely pleasant to use.

Auld Lang Syne

Happy New Year!

MMXI

I wish a better year to everybody!
Peace and prosperity to all of you!

Merry Christmas!

One psaltic Christmas Carol



And an excellent remaster of an old Romanian carol by Vlaicu Golcea:



(sorry for the audio quality, not the best)

ChillOut