Bedrijven hebben open source in eigen handen

My opinion article (in Dutch) on how companies could profit more from open source projects by thinking outside of the box to solve their issues.

Bedrijven hebben open source in eigen handen

Check out the comments. It remains hard for some people to accept that there are developers in the open source world that can and will provide good quality work. ;-)

Quick start setup of postgresql on Fedora

Today I needed to have postgresql running on a new Fedora installation so I could setup a demo for JBoss Operation Network.

This is what I did:

# First install server as root.
#
$ yum install posgresql-server

# init the database (note SELinux might complain
# if not in permissive mode) which is found in
# /var/lib/pgsql/data/*.
#
$ service postgresql initdb

# start the database service.
#
$ service postgresql start

# to setup users and databases we need to use
# the default 'postgres' user account, so login
# to this session.
#
$ su -l postgres

# create a new user for the jboss demo user 
# and database in my case.
#
$ createuser --no-superuser --no-createdb --no-createrole jbossdemo

$ createdb --owner jbossdemo jbossdemo

# leave postgres account back to root.
#
$ exit

# allow local connections to this account by adding the
# following lines to the pg_hba.conf:
#
#  TYPE  DATABASE  USER      CIDR-ADDRESS   METHOD
#  local jbossdemo jbossdemo                trust
#  host  jbossdemo jbossdemo 127.0.0.1/32   trust
#  host  postgres  jbossdemo 127.0.0.1/32   trust
#
$ vim /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf

# reload service to acquire changes.
#
$ service postgresql reload

# now install admin console for normal db 
# administration. Search internet for repos
# should your install not have this package.
#
$ yum install pgadmin3

Now I can install JBoss ON and use the jbossdemo account and database for my installation demo.

# some handy administration tips for your installation.
#
$ yum install postgresql-contrib

# install server instrumentation functions as 'postgres' user.
#
$ su -l postgres

$ psql --file /usr/share/pgsql/contrib/adminpack.sql

# schedule maintenance in daily cron job at
# /etc/cron.daily/pgsqlmaint. Put this in the 
# file:
#
#  #!/bin/sh
#  su -c 'vacuumdb --all --full --analyze' postgres
#  su -c 'reindexdb --all' postgres
#
$ vim /etc/cron.daily/pgsqlmaint

# back to root.
#
$ exit

# make it executable.
#
$ chmod a+x /etc/cron.daily/pgsqlmaint

# often going to need more transactions than the default
# allows so adjusts this as follows.
$ su -l postgres

# change this line to look as folows:
#
#  max_prepared_transactions = 100
#
$ vim /var/lib/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf

# back to root.
#
$ exit

# reload service.
#
$ service postgresql reload

Help push the open sourcing of a jBPM Migration Tool

Just back from vacation and saw this go by on the mailinglists of the jBPM project. A possible solution that many of us have encountered for migration of existing process definitions (running processes) over to a new version of the process definition. Check out the overview at Caleb Powell's blog.

It appears that this might be getting pushed into the jBPM project as an apart tool for the 3.x versions, so drop over to the blog and post your support for them to contribute this tooling. Really great stuff!

===================== UPDATE ======================
This looks like it will happen, see the jBPM forum thread.

Open Source Conference 2009

An early plug for the Open Source Conference 2009 to be held on 17 November 2009 in the Amsterdam Arena with the following topics central:

• Enterprise Content Management
• Customer Relations Management
• Business Intelligence
• Operating Systems
• Cloud Computing
• Virtualization
• Middleware
• Service Oriented Architecture

The website is in Dutch, but the talks will most likely also be provided in English. It should be a good day, let me know if you have a good enough excuse to rate my help in getting you in the side door... ;-)

CAiSE / PRET 2009 - looking back in review

Last week I spent the day at CAiSE / PRET as my chapter was included in the proceedings. It was a rather interesting day spent listening and discussing topics related to research being pushed over the line into practice. My favorite topic!

The PRET (industrial papers) section of the conference was opened by W. van der Aalst with a nicely integrated look at process mining. He tied it up in a story line based on TomTom, so with process mining they expect to provide navigation like functionality to your business by mining the various data sources. This is done with a tool called ProM.

Lots of pretty stuff can be done with this tooling. I really loved the live simulations of processes running through a generated process flow that the tool came up with after mining some data source. To be truthful, I was left with the feeling that even though the ideas and such are interesting it misses the connection to reality. My biggest problems were that you can only cut some costs in a project by generating the process flow (i.e. less hours spent on modeling by the IA/BI gals). What about the rest of the project players? It does nothing to speed up my work as a team lead developing these processess. The use cases are not generated... what about integration to the various business data sources, this was left blank in the presentation.

Finally we were put through a long story about nothing from a Cordys executive. Must have been a reason, but I only got the message that Cordys can solve all your problems, but no details included.

When the break came about it was time for viewing our posters, which is always fun to watch. I put these things together and am always curious to the reactions or even if anyone will stop to ponder my work. Luckily I did not waste my time creating this poster as it was well pondered!

After the break it was time for a new concept, a sort of mini overview of the papers grouped in my session, followed by an audience discussion with author participation coming from within the ranks of the audience. My paper was well received and I even had some nice reactions from the Session Chair (he liked my use of "Happy Flow" so much, it is a standard in his vocabulary now).

It was nice to have a chance to mix it up with people from not only the practical side of the business, but researchers and manager level minds as well. It was a rather lively discussion and I was rather impressed with this type of session. Often simple conference presentations can be incredibly bad, to downright awful if the presenter is having some English troubles.

The afternoon session was more in Enterprise Architecture and not really my area of interest. Soon after this we were all headed into the city of Amsterdam for some dinner and social talks over beer. I walked past some of my old hangouts from my university days and was devastated to find my regular bar twisted into some sort of hip lounge place now called 'Mini Bar'. I must be getting really old... ;-)

The Nokia Sportstracker

I thought it would be fun to give this a try on my Nokia E71, just installed, turned it on, and started to ride. This is the resulting output, which you could have followed live on-line even!

http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/workoutdetail/index.do?id=1098618

Note that this cycling part of my blog is pretty much moving over to my twitter account @ericschabell, which is much more convenient for cycling stuff.

Fedora 10 adding new java version 6 (1.6) to alternatives

I have posted in the past on how to switch from one version to another in the alternatives system.

This time I want to add a new version of Java to the list of alternatives you can choose from, this you do as follows:

# unpack you java version and place it in /usr/lib/jvm/
#
$ mv jre1.6.0_13 /usr/lib/jvm/

# this shows the list of possible java installation
# but you don't yet see the above one listed:
#
$ update-alternatives --config java

# so we add it.
#
$ update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/lib/jvm/jre1.6.0_13/bin/java 300

# select from the list now with:
#
$ update-alternatives --config java
There are 3 programs which provide 'java'.

  Selection    Command
-----------------------------------------------
 + 1           /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.6.0-openjdk.x86_64/bin/java
   2           /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.5.0-gcj/bin/java
   3           /usr/lib/jvm/jre1.6.0_13/bin/java

Enter to keep the current selection[+], or type selection number:  3

Fedora 10 x86_64 and Zimbra email client install howto

Today I buffed up my Fedora 10 Lenovo Thinkpad T500 installation to a full blown x86_64 version.

One of the missing requirements was the Zimbra off-line desktop (mail) client, which is not available in x86_64. This is what you need to install on cross libraries to get the standard install script to work for Zinbra:

$ sudo yum install libXext*.i386 glibc*.i686 libstdc++*.i386 xulrunner.i386

After these install, you can just run the install script as follows:

# This was the latest version for Linux at the time.
#
$ sh zdesktop_1_0_build_1593_linux_i686.sh