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.

Since it’s a new year and everything I find it natural that I do something noone would ever believe I would do, so I went off and installed VMware ESXi on one of my servers, created myself a virtual server and installed Microsoft Windows 2008 trail version. My goal is to setup a fully functional Active Directory Domain without any prior experience in Microsoft Active Directory. Active Directory is one of few thing I’m really curious about when it comes to Microsoft products, it’s so integrated in the system with single sign-on in difference to UNIX/Linux that I’m used to.

My first experience was that everything was very easy to install and all information I needed to configure the basics were provided in the configuration dialog. Everything went really smooth and easy until I had installed the Active Directory Service and Windows asked me to reboot. I did reboot and afterwards my Administrator password didn’t work, only solution: re-install…

After a nights sleep I’m back in the game with a new installation of Microsoft Windows Server 2008. I’m doing pretty much the same thing as yesterday with the difference that I’m not deadly tired this time. After the installation and configuration of Active Directory is done I restart my server and to my surprise everything works and after solving a minor DNS-issue my virtualized Microsoft Windows XP is now a part of the Active Directory Domain.

Microsoft Active Directory is easy to use and so simple to install that it could be done even for the smallest office that needs to centralize documents and/or programs. Why Linux/UNIX is so far behind when it comes to these kind of feature is a question and I believe it’s important that open source community do something about this in order to get Linux onto the desktops in offices world-wide.

It was barely a year since I said it last time: We still have a lot to learn from Microsoft and it’s not all about marketing.

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.

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… ;)

Yesterdays news article in Computer Sweden has been a hot topic for Swedish open source-related forums, mailing lists and chatrooms today. Myself I wrote about this news article yesterday, but during the day today I’ve been thinking more about it and read others, and their co-workers and friends, opinions on this topic.

One of the more interesting opinions I read about was that closed source has better quality but they should use open source to strenghten the code base. Since the most commonly used open source license requires that the code will continue to be open source using it in a closed source application will require it to be released as open source. Poor unenlightened people, isn’t that a catch 22?

Closed source applications are produced to gain money for a company and it needs to bring in more money than it costs to develop the application to gain any profit. When a release date is set there is a deadline to keep up to for the sake of the trademark and the profit. As everyone that works with computers know it’s always something that delays everything in a project when you’re almost there and for the sake of the trademark it’s quickfixed, which doesn’t really provide any quality to the code. What’s even more terrible than the quickfixes is that in most cases they’re never fixed since they get the work done.

You may ask yourselves why companies are still using closed source if there’s quickfixes that are never fixed and maybe potentional security risks due to lack of time and/or money to keep within the deadlines and budgets, but how would you know that it could have been done better and more secure if you don’t know how it’s done now? Ofcourse the developers know about it and are able to fix it, but frankly they usually don’t bother since noone complains since the application gets the work done and they don’t use their own application in a large scale environment so they’ll never be affected by it.

Open source on the other hand is mainly developed by people that needs the applications themselves, everyone can correct someone else’s code or rewrite a function completely to fit their need better or just improve performance. Everyone I know, including myself, that contributed to open source or even developed their own applications are feeling honoured that others want to use their code. In open source it’s not about money or profit, it’s all about fast, secure and optimized code, in short good quality code.

There is one simple thing that will give the open source community the strength to defeat closed source, patents and monopoly in the IT-industry, passion!

“Het debat om stängda program” – Computer Sweden 2008-11-13

This morning I was meet by a newspaper saying “Closed source is better”, but that’s not really what surprised me. What really surprised me was the fact that it wasn’t an expert in any way that made this statement, but a LAWYER. How would she know?!

This lawyer, Malin Forsman, believes that closed source has better quality than open source even though many researches point the other way. She also praises Microsoft’s security updates as an example of great and fast resolution plans when their trademark is at stake. Her argument is that with money in the picture everyone will be pressured to deliver quality code. To that we can add that most open source developers are paid for developing open source applications which means there’s money in the picture and from her argument that would mean they’re pressured to produce quality code.

Companies like Sun and IBM who’s been on the market for longer than most companies producing closed source only are setting their focus on open source. IBM pays their own personeal to develop applications like Eclipse and Sun bought MySQL together with the open source database they develop with the same name. On top of this Sun decided to release their former closed source operating system partly as open source, did that decision result in poor code quality over night?

Back to my main question, is it really a lawyers place to decide wheter open or closed source has the better quality? What does a lawyer know about code quality, functionality and advanced applications anyway? Another concern I have about this lawyer is the fact that she used to work for Microsoft, which ofcourse wasn’t mentioned at all in the news article, does she still run their errands or is it that she just doesn’t get paid from anyone using or developing open source code since it’s pretty hard to intrude on the intellectual property when it’s given away for free?

“Bäst kvalitet på stängd kod” – Computer Sweden 2008-11-12
Malin Forsman @ LinkedIn

Open Source Forum 2008 toke place in Stockholm on October 7th – 8th. During the first day one of my favorite speakers on this kind of event was having two presentations. First up in the morning Arnoud Engelfriet from ICTRecht in Holland talked about the legal aspects of using and develope open source software and how your company lawyers and engineers could work together with open source. In the afternoon he finished the subject with talking about everything from embedded open source software, distribution of open source software and how GPLv3 could affect your business.

This first day offered a few other interesting presentations such as Alexander Schanz from DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH who talked about their open source radar data processing system PHOENIX runing on SUSE Linux and Lennart Hagberg from TetraPak who showed us and talked about the open source software behind their communications plattform for videos and documentation, an internal “YouTube”-service together with a wiki for documentation built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and WordPress.

On day two of Open Source Forum 2008 there were two tracks, one track with presentations like the day before and one track with live demonstrations of products and services. I begun day two at the live demonstrations track listening to Urban Anjar from Ubuntu Sverige talk about Ubuntu Linux and show KVM virtualization on Ubuntu. After the coffee break I ended up talking about Nagios and Op5′s Nagios-based network monitoring system with Jonas Björk and a representative from Op5.

Next up before lunch was Erik Lönroth from Scania Infomate who talked about how the use Linux in their cluster for calculations and simulations. With open standards and open source software they reduced many performance problems, but when they got here they found a new problem, no one had solved the problems they encountered before. To my surprise it would be until this point of this conferense when someone finaly said that you can get far with open source, but when you’re there it’s time to solve the problems never solved before and share them with others. At this moment I found myself thinking that with people like Erik Lönroth out there on the IT departments of the companies there’s hope for open source to survive the step into the world of business.

A presentation that surprised me during this conference was Anders Wallenquist from Vertel/Dataföreningen who talked about the CMS Drupal. I was surprised because I’ve never understood how competent Drupal acctually is and on top of this Dagens Industri, a financial newspaper, will move their webpage to Drupal instead of Escenic and Polopoly like most other newspapers in Sweden uses. To read more about di.se and Drupal IDG wrote about it at http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.182311.

Back to Open Source Forum 2008, during day two there were two tracks which means a lot of presentations that you don’t have to time to see. I’ve been writing about those presentations that impressed or surprised me during these two days. For the full agenda of this conferense see http://www.opensourceforum.se/Program.htm.

So, what’s my summary of this conferense? Well, it was terribly expencive, only ~50 visitors and I had some very interesting conversations about various subjects with other visitors which would mean that since I’m not paying for it, it was totaly worth it. :)

Thursday and Friday this week I spent at Sec-T, the first security conference for a technical audience in Sweden. It was two days of  great impression, laughter and the terrifying feeling of realizing that no matter what you do you’re fucked, there’s always someone out there that’s one step ahead of you. The event presented a couple of interesting speakers and myself I was mostly impressed by Robert E. Lee and Jack C. Louis from Outpost24 who talked about DoS-attacks and especially their framework sockstress that could send any computer to a certain death within a few minutes with no bandwidth at all. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, they left out the technical information on this attack in their speech.

Another interesting speech was made by Bosse Norgren from the IT Crime Section at the National Criminal Police who talked about the challenges with modern forensics and how to prepare for going to court with a computer related crime. I found it very interesting to hear about his experiences with forensics work together with the information on how to present your evidence in court. Together with his presentation about how the IT Crime Section at  the National Criminal Police is organized and how IT crime sections developed within the county police this speech was very interesting for everyone working with IT on a daily basis and sometimes meets the challenge of a computer that’s been compromised.

As it should be there was of course a mystery speaker that wasn’t reviled until the last hour of the event when he went up on stage. This mystery speaker didn’t need much presentation at this event and as most people guessed it was Felix “FX” Lindner who was talking about forensics on Cisco IOS. He begun his speech with the question most of us were asking “why forensics on network equipment?”, but after his presentation of security flaws in Cisco routers we could all agree on the fact that this was something we will do in the future.

This event was the first security conference for a technical audience in Sweden for as long as I can remember and I’m pretty sure there’s never been any conference like this before. On the good side is that the people behind Sec-T seemed eagered to make this an annual event and I will defiantly show up next year.

More information about Sec-T can be found at www.sec-t.org and presentations from all speakers except Felix “FX” Lindner can be found at http://sec-t.org/2008/files/SEC-T2008.zip. This zip-file also contains the challenge from Sec-T so you who weren’t there could check it out. The winner of the challenge contest solved all levels in 2,5 hour which is impressive, even though he didn’t do it all by himself and the fact that another person later told me he solved all levels by himself in about an hour, and I believe him. :)

An annual survey made by the management software maker BMC shows that 65% of their customers will increase workloads on mainframes and maintain the plattform for the long-term. As I’ve believed for many years the future for the mainframe is bright and in this survey a majority of IT managers report that they will not only continue to use the systems for legacy applications but start moving new workloads that could benefit from the mainframe’s availability and scalability onto the plattform.

In the same survey nearly 75% reported that the availability advantages the mainframe offers makes a difference to their environment and 65% said that the mainframe offered a superior central data serving environment. The ability to integrate legacy applications in newer system through Web services and Service-oriented Architecture makes 44% of the respondents keep their mainframe systems.

Today is International Women’s Day all over the world to celebrate the economic, political and social achievements of women. In honor of International Women’s Day IDG (International Data Groups) published interviews with fourteen women working with IT on interesting positions in their newspaper Computer Sweden and this morning they published the same interviews on their web page. I’m one of the interviewed women in this article and I find this a great way to encourage young women thinking about an IT education to take the step and actually do it.

My main question about women in IT industry is: Where did they all go?! In the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s when mainframe computers where the only computers that existed almost ONLY women worked with computers. This was back in the time where a mainframe computer covered a whole room and the personnel worked in white robes. All of these skilled women must be out there somewhere in the IT industry, but where are they? Well, of course this was a while back and some of them is old enough to get their pension today, but at least some of them must be working for the IT industry still in these days. Why do we never see any interviews with these ladies that were a part of building the IT infrastructure we have today?

To all women in IT industry i want to say one thing: Never forget that in the old days we were a majority in the IT industry and that we today are a row model for young women to encourage them to seek the knowledge and enjoyments of working with IT.

Interviews with all women: “Gå din egen väg i it-branchen” (swedish)
Only my interview: “Självlärd Linuxevangelist” (swedish)

Old interview with me referred to in the new interview: “Vi kan lära oss av Microsoft” (swedish)