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.

I’ve been looking into a few different options when it comes to co-location, but of course the best thing would be if I could have my servers at my work. If that’s not possible I have a few other options that are up for discussion, until then let me know if you know where to get a sweet deal on co-location in Stockholm, Sweden.

Unfortunately I can’t keep the servers at home as I would like to do, happy servers means a happy Amelia. :)

Today I’ve been re-arranging my servers in the computer room, installed an AC to keep them cool and changed my small Cisco Catalyst 2940 to it’s bigger friend Cisco Catalyst 2950. As you always do when you’re going to move your servers and change switch I planned to get rid of that horrible cable mess that suddenly appeared from nowhere all around your servers.

All into my idea of a perfectly looking computer room without this cable hell behind the servers I did shutdown every computer in the room, including the one with over 500 days of uptime, even though it did hurt a little bit inside me.

After a few hours of moving servers around, pulling out and pluging in of cables I’m finaly done and my computer room does have a lower temperature, the servers that needs it is hooked up for the UPS and another cable mess, atleast it’s a slightly more stylish cable mess. :)

More and larger images of my servers can be found at http://gallery.linuxchick.se/album/3

I’ve found the love of my life on IRC. Thanks to our friend vacum I ended up in #data.se @ FreeNode where I found this cute geek. He’s the most wonderful geek and so far he seems to put up with all my strange ideas and projects. There’s only two not so good thing with him, one is that he lives 483,5 km (~300 miles) away from me in Gothenburg and the other is that he loves his Mac, but at least one of them is possible to change.

You’ll find Eric’s blog at www.emj.se.

I’ve got the time and the interest, but no matter how much money I save I’m not even close to my own IBM server and my search for someone that has one they don’t need continues. In the meantime I’m not just going to sit around and wait, I’m taking up an old projet of mine that’s been put aside for a while.

In February 2007 I published the first version of my book Fritis Datorkunskap A which is a textbook for course in basic computer knowledge at upper secondary school here in Sweden. The book has only been published in swedish and i doubt that it would be translated to any other language since it follows strict rules from Skolverket according to what subjects are brought up in this book. More specificaly the book brings up what a computer is together with a little history about computers and Internet, how to search and how to behave (netequitte) on the Internet and introductions to office applications such as the OpenOffice.org suit and the Mozilla products Firefox and Thunderbird.

In November 2007 I released a new version 1.1 which contained some clarifications and spelling correction. I’ve got some feedback during these one and a half year as the book has been online, but not as much as I was hoping for. Anyhow, since the OpenOffice.org project is working hard on release 3.0 I’ve decided to upgrade my book so it’s compatible with OpenOffice.org 3.0 when it’s released.The book surely needs a facelift with new frontpage, click-able table of content and new screenshots.

Aside from being compatible with OpenOffice.org 3.0 and look better than ever the version 2.0 will most likely be written in LaTeX instead of OpenOffice.org because of it’s ability to convert into a lot of handy formats. Another thing is that I’m giving up on GNU FDL and concider a BSD-like license instead. If you have any useful input on the license subject feel free to comment this article with your opinion or send me an e-mail at amelia {at} linuxchick {dot} se.