Alphatek – Steven's Tech Blog

As a good Swiss guy, I like watches (clichés, clichés), but after a while you get a bit tired of always wearing the same one. So you begin to look around for a second watch, and a third, and so on…It’s really hard to tell WHY you always want new watches just to see the time. Isn’t a 10$ plastic watch enough some may think? Well, no

(more…)

Hello,

Allez, un post en français pour une fois J’ai quelques livres à donner contre le paiement des fais de port, si ça vous intéresse il suffit de répondre dans les commentaires, ou par mail à steven.moix à axianet.ch. Les bouquins que je donnes:

• Pratique des réseaux d’entreprise aux éditions Eyrolles (technique)
• Le langage C++ aux éditions CampusPress (livre de poche)
• Assembleur, aux éditions Micro Application (gros pavé)
• Conception Objet en Java avec BlueJ 2ème édition aux éditions Pearson (débutant)

I have been quite silent on my blog during the last weeks for a good reason, my life got really busy. Besides my studies, I have to finish some Linux server installations for a couple of customers before I start to work on my bachelor of science in IT diploma work, but that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

For the last 3 years I lived with a roommate in another city for my studies, but in around 3 months I will be back to my parent’s house until a find a job, work for a couple of months to save some money to take a flat for myself. This “merging” has some consequences on the IT front: too many computers. I find myself in a home with:

• 2 laptops
• 2 desktops
• 1 hobby computer, an Alpha

This wouldn’t have any consequence if I wasn’t suffering from some compulsive need to update them constantly, which has a negative impact on my free time :p

For those who didn’t notice, Adobe released an updated version of the 64 bit Flash plugin on 24.02.2009. It’s the version 10.0.22.87 now. The installation procedure is the same than with the old plugin, just delete it before.

Get it on http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

I don’t know about you, but when I’m a bit depressed there is some music I simply have to listen to and voilà, I’m in a good mood again with a big smile on my face. I can’t say why I like a particular piece of music, it’s probably a mix of past memories, good rhythm and lyrics.

2 very different songs really stand out for me, “Hey Ya!” by Outkast and “Mr. Blue Sky” from Electric Light Orchestra. It’s simply awesome

And you? Do you have such songs?

Yesterday there was an OpenSolaris install party/workshop/presentation at my school, the HEIG-VD. The presentation was made by the Swiss OpenSolaris User Group which were very nice and open about other operating systems

Honestly, I didn’t know much about OpenSolaris, so I went there to open my horizon a little bit and it turned out to be very interesting! We mostly discussed about technologies implemented in OpenSolaris 2008.11 and made parallels with Fedora and Linux in general. There were talks about:

• OpenSolaris history
• The ZFS Filesystem, perhaps the most interesting part, it was a  live demo of the ZFS filesystem made by Javier Conde, a Sun engineer.
• The OpenSolaris application packaging and repositories configuration
• Virtualization containers, and how to run native Linux apps in them
• The DTrace tool to analyze software

All the people using Microsoft’s Live (MSN) Messenger protocol with Pidgin (any OS) or Adium on OS X may have noticed that it wasn’t possible to connect to their prefered IM network since this morning. The reason is that Microsoft changed something in the protocol…as far as I know, they have retired protocol version 15 or 16 that Pidgin/Adium are using.

There are 3 solutions to this problem at the moment:

• Install Empathy + Butterfly plugin (yum install empathy telepathy-butterfly)
• Install the MSN-Pecan plugin for Pidgin, from http://code.google.com/p/msn-pecan/
• Wait for an update

I hope this quick post helps…

During the last couple of days, I began to seriously code a little Java application using Swing for the GUI. The only obvious thing I can say, is that I learned more about Java in the last 3 days than during the whole last year at school. There is a cool picture about that on xkcd:

On a sidenote, OpenJDK really freed Fedora and Linux in general for me. It works perfectly beautifully associated with NetBeans 6.5

Last summer, we had to do do some web programming and database design at my engineer school. Our group chose to create something more useful: an online DNS checker.

To get an idea of the project, without reading the rest of my post, head to http://www.dnsknife.com/about.php. There is a good description of the project on this page.

So, here we are, 6 months later and the website is running well. Actually it’s running on an Ubuntu 6 box hosted at school, but I’m going to transfer it to one of my CentOS boxes when I have a bit of spare time. The current server has severe memory issues and the database (PostgreSQL) goes down on a regular basis.

The website may look simple, but the code behind it is rather complicated. It’s a full MVC model coded in object oriented PHP5 and the database designs looks like that:

It’s full of dependencies everywhere as you can see, now let’s have a look at the application structure:

As you can see, it’s rather complicated (but not complex) for a PHP program. The watchdog is there to prevent any service from accessing controllers and managers it doesn’t have the right to access. This means that even if you are logged on the website, there is a full security check for each button or function you are trying to call. The “Technical” part is a module which queries DNS servers.

The whole design is very open to extensions, it was designed this way from the ground up. If you want to add a new DNS test, you can, very quickly.

Every function in the whole design has been documented with sequence diagrams. This was the most “boring” part, but in the end it is REALLY useful when you actually begin to code.

I’d like to thank my friends Simon Oulevay, Jonathan Rey and Sven Wagner for the good job, it was really a great and pleasant experience to work with you

Oh, and it’s free, we hope that it will be useful to some of you!