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.

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.

[root@fortran ~]# date +%s
1234567890

Last major celebration for Unix time was Sun Sep 9 03:46:40 CET 2001 when it turned 1000000000.

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.

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.

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… ;)

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. :)

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 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

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