As an IT professional I have to deal with many different systems and platforms. I run some servers myself and I use different mail addresses. In addition I sign software packages as well as e-mail. There's also a lot of encryption going on. Without a keystore I'd be lost. There is a plethora of passwords, not only to access something but also to unlock encryption- or signing keys. More…
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I've tried many Linux distributions, from early Mandrake to free SuSE and ran Gentoo for many years since its early days. Then I shifted my priorities from building packages to having a life. Recently I returned to Gentoo with a strategy and clear motivation: no clutter, no Canonical and no systemd. After half a year I'm up and running again. A big desktop machine works from time to time through the large tasks requiring processing power. For everyday work I use a laptop, Lenovo G505s and a mini-ITX platform hosts all the important services like a backup RAID, web server, file/ media server and databases (SQLite, PostGreSQL), Gentoo binary package host. The following paragraphs outline the foundation of my motivation, to invest a little more time again, now more efficiently. More…
It started two years ago when nearly everybody in my near surrounding working as an IT expert was burning for Docker, containers, virtualization, clustering and all that fancy stuff with Netflix-, Amazon or Google-cloud foundation. It was back in 2015 when I had first contact with IBM Bluemix Garage and the new craze Ionic and/ or AngularJS. Until then I was a heavy weight champion of JEE development with an application server running 50-100 servlets at once. Now I sat with two guys in my office and tried to port the important parts of a few servlets to the new platform – check if it works out and estimate transition cost. More…
Companies sometimes need shared credentials. You need to access a customer's testing system, log in to a sample cloud instance or exchange work in progress from developer accounts. These systems are password protected and normally you have a shared document, a Wiki or a mailing list. It has never been a good idea to share passwords this way. Once you saved the credentials access is unlimited. More…
That's a pure hypothesis and includes Scientism (Asimov). Linux is not a clearly bounded object. First step of every scientific inquisition of Linux users is to ask, which distribution they use or more formal: who is your god? One could dive even deeper and is absolutely right when saying a distribution is not Linux but uses Linux. Some are real priests of open source software and were put together from patches of kernel code. More…
Illustrates the steps to create a clock face with Gimp. Not yet translated. More…
I started coding software in 1993. It was QBasic on a KC85/3, top computer platform of GDR and available at my school. Until then I moved through various level of expertise and have always been involved with high scalability projects of BKA (German Federal Investigation Bureau), Deutsche Bahn/ Schenker (Railway/ Transportation) and energy markets as well as automotive backends. Non-IT People always ask me, why I don't make it much simpler and they even suggest a solution. This two-part-series explains, what separates experts from average people. More…