linuxchick.se » General

Congratulations Cobol 50 years!

amelia — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:58:11 +0000

Cobol – COmmon Business Oriented Language – is one of my favorite languages and the one I’m absolutely most impressed with. It is one of the oldest programming languages that are still in active use. At this time it’s 50 years since Grace Hopper created Cobol and the first compilers was subsequently implemented during the year 1960. At December 6th and 7th 1960 essentially the same Cobol program was run on two different make of computers, an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer.

Here’s some facts that you most likely didn’t know about Cobol:

1. According to a survey done in Great Britain and USA people are in contact with Cobol around 10 to 13 time every day.

2. Of 310 billion line of software that are in use today over 200 billion lines are Cobol, that’s about 65% of the total software.

3. Every day 5 billion lines of new Cobol code are produced.

4. 80% of all daily business transactions are processed in Cobol.

5. 70% of all mission-critical applications are written in Cobol.

6. 2 trillion dollars is the total investment in Cobol systems.

And of couse the famous Hello World for everyone that doesn’t know what Cobol looks like:

      IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
      PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
      PROCEDURE DIVISION.
      MAIN.
          DISPLAY 'Hello, world.'.
          STOP RUN.

(Slightly) new design 2.0

amelia — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:39:56 +0000

As the spring came I felt that gray isn’t my prefered color of choice anymore. I decided to personalized my design a bit and make it more me, therefore I wanted a dark red design with black decorations and a bit of white and gray. Since two days ago the new design has been added to both http://www.linuxchick.se and http://amelia.linuxchick.se. My photo gallery is unfortunately still down after moving to a new appartment more than a month ago, but it will be up… when I’ve decided how I want to build my new webservers. (Read: how redundant I can get it without overdoing it.)

Lately I’ve not been very good at writing on my blog, but what’s better is that linuxchick.se will soon have another page with code, articles and other this I’ve written in other contexts than to put on my blog. It will be published as soon as the new webservers are configured.

Happy New Year!

amelia — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 14:21:57 +0000

2008 has come to an end and as usual in the end of a year you think back on what and where it brought you. For me 2008 begun at the top, I had a new job since a few months and during the first three months of the year I managed to get interviewed in Computer Sweden not only once, but twice. There was a lot more stress on my new job and in May when it was time for the anual meeting in Svenska Linuxföreningen (The Linux Society of Sweden) I decided that I had to resign as chairman in favor for someone that acctually had the time.

I was working all summer and this is when I got introduced to a CMS named Escenic that has become something I work with on almost a daily basis. In the early summer I attended Nordic Nagios Meet in Stockholm, Sweden where I got amazed by RRDtools and meet some interesting people at the dinner reception and drinks in the evening.

In the middle of the summer, all unexpected, I met Mr. Right and it didn’t take many months before he moved from Gothenburg to Stockholm to live with me. Despite the feeling of new love the autumn has been rough and utterly exhausting. After a stressful summer my body told me it had enough and I had to realize that even I had a limit for how much I could work and how much responsibility I could take upon my shoulders. It was a very unpleasant, but still a very enlightening experience and a valuable lesson for the future.

In September I attended Sec-T, the first security event for a technical audience in Sweden. It was a pure frightening experience and I really don’t want my computers hooked up to the Internet, but for what use would they be if they wasn’t? Most frightening was Sockstress which most likely is the security hole of the year. It’s pretty much like a DoS attack, but with only a small amount of traffic you can put down a remote target in a matter of minutes. Who’s vulnerable for this attack? Only everyone using TCP/IP…

In the end of the year I thought that maybe I need something else to do besides working and thinking about work so I decided it was time for me to work on fulfilling my next dream. Said and done I joined Data3, an organisation for AS/400 and iSeries professionals, to see what the community around these computers that caugh my interest could offer. I’ve had my own AS/400 since 2006, but it’s very old and different from the new iSeries. I begun my hunt for an iSeries once again to finaly being able to combine what impress me with the AS/400 with my experience in Linux. Maybe it really is time for me to fulfill this dream in 2009 because it finaly seems like a company is willing to lend me one. :)

I spent Christmas at home together with my boyfriend and both of us had on-call duty during the holidays. At least we got ourselves a nice christmas present, a PlayStation 3, so now we finaly have a decent processor architecture in the living room. ;)

Being on-call duty is also how I’m going to end 2008 and begin 2009. Hopefully I will have a calm evening and night so I’ll have time to celebrate the new year and everything it will bring with a glass of champagne.

Happy New Year and let 2009 be the year when you fulfill one of your dreams.

Merry Christmas!

amelia — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:51:07 +0000

From a cold Stockholm with about half a centimeter of snow I would like to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas!

Myself I spend Christmas at home in Stockholm together with my boyfriend this year as we both are on-call duty during Christmas. So far so good, but we never know where we end up celebrating this Christmas… For now we’re both still at home, but we might end up where it’s dry weather, ~25C with slight breezes and it’s not the Canarie Islands… ;)

Now the photo gallery is up and running

amelia — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:57:54 +0000

Now I finaly got my photo gallery up and running, it’s a nice simple and striped photo gallery that does what it’s supposed to. I don’t have to much photos just yet, but I’m working on it and I certainly will work harder now when I have somewhere to put all the photos. I hope you will enjoy watching photos of my servers, some other servers and some random things I find interesting to take a photo of.

My new sweethearts

amelia — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 17:06:29 +0000

Here are my new sweethearts that are going to run CentOS. I brought them home yesterday and today after some re-arrangements of the harddrives I’m ready to install them. They’re going to take care of everything my poor P3 700Mhz with 312MB ram has been doing for about 2 years, which is everything from MySQL databases to Nagios monitoring system.

A short specifications on these cuties are:

forth: HP DL 380 G2, 2x PIII 1,266 Ghz, 2GB RAM, 6x 18.2 GB hdd

perl: HP DL 380 G2, 2x PIII 1,266 Ghz, 2,5 GB RAM, 6x 9.1 GB hdd

draco: HP DL 360 G2, 2x PIII 1,4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 18,2 GB hdd

dibol: HP DL 360 G2, 2x PIII 1,4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 18.2 GB hdd

pascal: HP DL 360 G1, 2x PIII 1 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 9,1 GB hdd

prolog: HP DL 360 G1, 2x PIII 1 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 9,1 GB hdd

Swedish surveillance law – two weeks later

amelia — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 20:00:49 +0000

It’s been almost two weeks since the controversial surveillance law that would let FRA (Försvarets Radioanstalt/The Defence Radio Establishment) the right to mass-bug all cable transmitted communication was voted through by the Swedish parliament. The storm of protests disappeared as fast as it appeared only a few days before the election in the parliament. Two weeks ago this law proposal was on everyone’s mind and today it seems forgotten by most people. The newspapers don’t write about it anymore and in IT-related newspapers you see articles like how will it affect you and what can you do about it instead of how do we get rid of this law once and for all.

So, how will it afftect me? You may think that since you’re sending an e-mail to your friend in Sweden you’re traffic doesn’t leave Sweden, but it’s not like that. I for one is a customer to Bredbandsbolaget one of the more popular ISP’s in Sweden. Not very long ago Bredbandsbolaget was bought by Telenor and since then all traffic is routed though Norway.

A traceroute to SUNET’s (Swedish University Network) website www.sunet.se reviles that the traffic is passing the boarders at two times to get to it’s destination.

[root@lust ~]# traceroute www.sunet.se
traceroute to www.sunet.se (130.239.8.25), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 * * *
2 195.54.119.229 (195.54.119.229) 18.998 ms 18.929 ms 19.341 ms
3 ti3109a211-pc3.ti.telenor.net (146.172.74.201) 20.212 ms 20.388 ms 20.059 ms
4 ti3109a210-vlan2.ti.telenor.net (146.172.74.197) 20.175 ms 19.612 ms 19.711 ms
5 ti3097a210-pc4.ti.telenor.net (146.172.74.193) 20.430 ms 20.000 ms 20.206 ms
6 ti3097d320-ge2-0-0.ti.telenor.net (146.172.91.245) 19.638 ms 19.459 ms 20.439 ms
7 * * *
8 ti3002b300-ae0-0.ti.telenor.net (146.172.105.94) 19.573 ms 19.163 ms 19.397 ms
9 c2sth-ge-4-2-3.sunet.se (130.242.94.217) 19.678 ms 20.434 ms 20.148 ms
10 a1sth-ae5.sunet.se (130.242.82.210) 19.905 ms 19.264 ms 19.660 ms
11 umu-g.sunet.se (193.11.0.226) 29.557 ms 29.569 ms 29.250 ms
12 adm-te.gw.umu.se (130.239.0.209) 29.346 ms 29.409 ms 29.824 ms
13 mit-sr01-te.gw.umu.se (130.239.0.162) 29.210 ms 29.048 ms 29.487 ms
14 wsunet.umdc.umu.se (130.239.8.25) 30.004 ms 29.986 ms 29.559 ms

The network 146.172.x.x is based in Norway which means that between jump 2 and 3 my traffic is passing the boarder to Norway and between 8 and 9 it’s passing the boarder again on it’s was back to Sweden.

Same goes for one of my favorite websites Linuxportalen:

[root@lust ~]# traceroute www.linuxportalen.se
traceroute to www.linuxportalen.se (213.180.84.59), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 * * *
2 195.54.119.229 (195.54.119.229) 19.488 ms 19.045 ms 19.421 ms
3 ti3109a211-pc3.ti.telenor.net (146.172.74.201) 19.956 ms 20.362 ms 20.386 ms
4 ti3109a210-vlan2.ti.telenor.net (146.172.74.197) 20.192 ms 19.875 ms 20.164 ms
5 ti3097a210-pc4.ti.telenor.net (146.172.74.193) 20.482 ms 22.322 ms 25.670 ms
6 ti3097d320-ge2-0-0.ti.telenor.net (146.172.91.245) 19.819 ms 19.875 ms 19.223 ms
7 * * *
8 ti3001b300-ae1-0.ti.telenor.net (146.172.105.26) 19.846 ms 34.587 ms 20.670 ms
9 fre-peer1-link.se.telia.net (217.209.228.145) 20.170 ms 19.764 ms 20.224 ms
10 hy-c5-link.se.telia.net (81.228.75.146) 21.508 ms 20.470 ms 20.195 ms
11 vs-b-c5-link.se.telia.net (81.228.72.46) 22.092 ms 21.957 ms 34.464 ms
12 oer3-c1-link.se.telia.net (81.228.79.231) 28.085 ms 27.607 ms 27.532 ms
13 ks-d4-link.se.telia.net (81.228.72.183) 30.503 ms 30.215 ms 30.423 ms
14 incitus-tic-114561.k.se.telia.net (195.67.200.34) 30.585 ms 30.244 ms 30.273 ms
15 213.180.69.37 (213.180.69.37) 30.511 ms 30.898 ms 30.312 ms
16 vz-0012.s.ipeer.se (213.180.84.9) 32.688 ms 31.229 ms 31.296 ms
17 linuxportalen.se (213.180.84.59) 31.519 ms 31.273 ms 31.012 ms

These two examples of traffic passing the boarder twice even though it’s destination is within the country is no special cases, all traffic in this network is routed though Oslo, Norway. That’s why I’m taking a stand and switch ISP to one who cares about my personal integrity, Bahnhof.

“Bahnhof vägrar följa FRA-lagen” – Bahnhof 2008-06-16

Swedish parliament refused to listen to the people – voted Yes for the controversial law proposal about bugging internet and telephones

amelia — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:32:17 +0000

Today is a sad day in Swedish history, with 143 against 138 votes in the parliament the controversial law about bugging everyone in Sweden was forced through. Despite heavy protests and demonstrations from the people the parliament decided to vote through a law that are violating the constitution at several points and the European Convention of Human Rights.

You’ve already read my opinions on this matter so I leave it to that…

Mass-bugging of Internet and phone without any suspicion of crime seems to be reality in Sweden

amelia — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:28:12 +0000

Early this day when the controversial law that would enable FRA (Försvarets Radioanstalt/National Defence Radio Establishment) to bug every telephone call and Internet activity cross-border the newspapers are predicting the law proposal to go through in the election. Unfortunately the most enthusiastic person in the parliament against the law seems to have given up and in the evening he made a statement that he would accept the law if some changes were made.

These changes included that Datainspektionen (The Swedish Data Inspection Board) will review FRAs work until 2011 and a committee of people from the parliament to controll FRAs activities from outside. Both Datainspektionen and the committee will be working out of a personal integrity perspective. At this point it seems like these small changes will make bugging of everyone in Sweden a reality even though it’s still not sure that this law is supported by the constitution or the European Convension of Human Rights.

The people have spoken on this matter, there are hundreds of blogs out there bringing up the subject and I still haven’t found anyone that speaks for the law. It’s been awfully quite around this law proposal up until a few days ago when blogs discussing the subject begun to pop up everywhere and in a matter of a day this law proposal went from coldest cold to super hot and every newspaper wrote about it of the front page. Earlier today I heard that Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter both had 13 (thirteen!) articles about the law proposal and FRA.

What would have happend if all these people didn’t write about it on there blogs? Would the newspapers even write about it so everyone could know what was going on? This law was supposed to be quietly forced through without to much attention ’cause they knew the people wouldn’t approve. Take a stand for the people and protect the legal security and personal integrity by voting against this law proposal.

Swedish parliament votes for law proposal allowing bugging of everyone – guilty or not.

amelia — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:50:49 +0000

Tomorrow, on 18th June, the parliament is going to vote for a new law proposal that will give FRA (Försvarets Radioanstalt/National Defence Radio Establishment) the right to bug all wired cross-border transmissions without the knowledge of any other authority or suspicion of crime. The law is proposed in the name of the fight against terrorism, but what’s not said is that huge amounts of transmissions from countries like Russia are sent through cables in Sweden to get to it’s destination. Because of the way Internet is built up this law does not apply only to Sweden physically but to everyone that get their information sent through cables in Sweden on it’s way to the destination.

FRA is very persistent with their statement that it’s only cross-border transmissions that are supposed to be bugged. As a technician I wonder how they’re going to bug all cross-border transmissions without collecting every transmission to determine if it’s sent to/received from another country. Another technical aspect of this law is encryption since they most likely won’t be able to decrypt all encrypted transmissions in real-time it has to be stored, but the law proposal is very fuzzy about whether or not the information they collect will be stored and if so, for how long.

The public discussion about this law proposal was almost non-existing only a week ago when the pressure from all the blogs on Internet became to much for traditional mass mediums. During the last few days newspapers collected astonishing information surrounding this law proposal. FRA is not really a military authority that the name insinuate but a civil authority and they’re already bugging wired transmissions in some cases even though it’s illegal.

As a citizen of Sweden and (until now at least…) a supporter of the Moderate Party that urge this law proposal I’m ashamed that I did vote for the Moderate Party in the last general election and the threat against democracy they’re trying to force through with this law. This law was deferred until next year due to doubts whether it was supported in the constitution or not in June 2007 and is now up for election even though it’s still not determined that this law proposal is supported by the constitution or the European Convention of Human Rights.