This week I attended Berlin Buzzwords Conference 2010, a two-day event aimed at software developers. The conference offered two tracks, one on search and the other one on NoSQL systems. Typical attendees seemed to be MacBook-wielding, twittering lifestyle geeks, often with SQL-induced childhood issues. The hype level was high - a …

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You can use RSS to easily follow a few high-profile websites and link sharing services like Slashdot or Digg to discover popular web content. But that's like reading a classic newspaper and some magazines: The information provided may have a higher chance of being relevant to you, but there's still …

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Last week I ran into a nasty little problem while implementing an application with soft real-time requirements. I was aiming at 1 ms or less for a TCP-based request-response roundtrip on a local network. Should be trivial, but why did my tests indicate that I wasn't even getting close?

The …

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Going through old CACM issues I discovered a paper (PDF) on stream processing. A common problem in this field is to find frequent items in a data stream when you only get one pass through the data and you need answers in real time. This is interesting in situations where …

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Half a year ago, I bought an Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook. The first thing I did was wiping Windows XP off the disk and installing Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix. When I bought the netbook, I knew support for the wireless chip (AR928X, according to lspci) was limited, but things …

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A few weeks ago I wanted to enable digest authentication on an Apache 2.2 web server. I got basic authentication working within minutes, but I didn't want to send plain text passwords over the web, so how difficult could it be?

I followed some tutorial on the net but …

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Usually, I download all my email via fetchmail, sort it into folders using procmail and read the mails with mutt. This works reasonably well and I've been using this mail setup without major changes for about 10 years. Since I recently bought a netbook, I also wanted to read mails …

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Once in a while, I install Python packages from source using distutils. The distutils-powered setup.py script found in many packages installs software in /usr/local/ - quite useful because it doesn't interfere with packages managed by your distribution. Since Ubuntu Jaunty and Python 2.6, this doesn't work anymore.

Previously …

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I've been reading up on distributed systems again. For quite a while, my monthly copy of CACM has been my only connection to computer science topics. This time, I followed a few references and came across interesting concepts (most of them familiar from back in university).

Amazon doesn't just sell …

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Upgrading from Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" to "Intrepid Ibex" wasn't the smooth ride I was used to. I'm a pretty happy Ubuntu user and my system (an old Acer Travelmate 291) has been running all Ubuntu releases since "Breezy Badger" without a single reinstall. This time, however, I experienced problems with …

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