LexArrow - it’s in your mind…

Orange Romania launched a new marketing campaign: together we can do more. The end line of the commercial is (in Romanian) “Sunt cine sunt datorita tuturor“, which in English translation means “I am who I am because of everybody else“. The problem? The meaning of ubuntu is, and I quote from their website “Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘Humanity to others’, or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.”

The words may not be the same, but the meaning is identical. Coincidence or not?

I just posted the longest blog comment ever, on Denis’s blog. I rediscovered a part of me I thought gone: I managed to follow my line of thought, by letting it free, unbiased. Like I was someone else, hearing another voice reasoning. Haven’t felt that in a while

This is the title (translation: the time of the cathedrals) of the song that opens the Notre Dame de Paris show. I’ve seen it for the first time in high school at a French class. I’m not a fan of musicals, not by a long shot, but this one is really amazing. Great music, great voices, great choreography, great scenery!

This is the title of a book I’m reading, written by Daniel Goleman. It has too many anatomical details for my taste, but it’s interesting none the less. It sustains that IQ plays only a small part in professional success and in fact EQ makes the difference. EQ meaning capacity to form human relations, self awareness, self confidence, pro-activity and other feelings like these. Everything is based upon documented research. It emphasizes awareness and trusting your instinct. It explains the fact that people are not rational in a mathematic/computer kind of way. The human brain makes decisions based on perception and former experience.

This is not astonishing news, as I’ve heard these things one by one in different situations. The fact that much of the scattered information I’ve been acquiring are in one book is an important value added.

I see this book as a tool to successfully prove some points I couldn’t prove before. For example school teaches only hard skills/technical stuff, but never the soft skills needed in life, not just in business, but in everyday life. It also raises some questions. If people don’t make rational decisions, why try to explain human behavior through inflexible mathematical patterns. I’ve learned so many economical models that our teachers even said they will never happen in reality, but YOU HAVE TO KNOW THEM. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think practice is possible without theory (or the other way around), but I feel I learned a lot of useless things in college that I never applied in almost 2 years of working experience. Well, that’s just the result of going to college in Romania. I had a great time both in school and in high-school with very demanding, but awesome teachers. College was a biiiig disappointment. On the other hand, as a student, I had time for extracurricular activities (a.k.a working) that shaped me and taught me essential things that I will detail in further posts.

Back to the book, if you’re not interested how the amigdala and the limbic system make you react in certain ways, then read this book on the diagonal in some parts. You’ll essentially learn what EQ is, how it manifests, what is it useful for and a few tips on how to improve it.

I got stuck once again after I thought I have succeeded. Postfix doesn’t do directly mail through old SSL mail port, so I have to go for Exim or Sendmail. Already downloaded the first but I cannot configure it properly. Documentation is… how should I put it…”open source”. At the moment, it’s code seems like out of this world to me. I know I shouldn’t expect to make progress learning a new software in 3 hours (from 1 to 4 AM :D), but everyone has one or more dwarfs in their head and I make no exception.

I don’t know why, but this development thingy is really addictive. I can work for 10-14 hrs a day without food, water or sleep; I simply forget about them. And when I finally cannot keep my eyes open I get pissed because I have a new idea, but my body won’t let me execute it. It’s not the first time this happens. Actually it used to happen a lot when I was in college or at work…dunno’…like I was in a parallel world of my own, even if I had people talking, music or any kind of noise around me, I could hear….somewhere…far far away

P.S: I promise after I get the project into a near beta version I’ll start writing about things that I have a major in: knowledge management and business

I stretched the server thingy way beyond the common sense limits and I’m glad I’ve overcome all hurdles until now.

It’s time to stretch it a little more, as I found out my ISP is blocking port 25 (the one used to send mail).The possible workarounds are to use their hail server as a relay or build my own SSL/TLS mail transport….As I already planned SSL/TLS support for the software I’m building, I’ll go for it!

I’m in 7th Heaven after me and Chris pulled it off!

I’ve been working for a while now at a script that downloads, installs and configures server applications: OpenLDAP, Apache HTTP, PHP, MySQL, Postfix, Dovecot, Samba, Joomla, Bugzilla, KnowledgeTree, SugarCRM, PHPLDAPadmin, Pure-FTP and Webmin. I think such software would be very useful for system administrators and developers because you waste a lot of time installing and configuring something that is critical for an enterprise and can be automated.

The problem was I have a dynamic IP address, and the only solution to have a working domain/subdomain is through a dynamic DNS. So, on Chris’s advice I went on www.afraid.org, created an account for free, submitted my desired subdomain test.lexarrow.com. I also had to upgrade the firmware on my Linksys WRT300N router so it can update the IP (got the upgrade file from : www.dd-wrt.com ).

The new admin interface on my router is just awesome! Built-in VPN server, wake-on-lan and lots of others that it didn’t have before the upgrade.

This wasn’t all it took. Chris had to update the NS for the subdomain and voila : test.lexarrow.com works!

Now I can finally begin my real-life testing

P.S: If you are interested in the software I’m developing, please drop me a comment. If there will be enough “desire” for it, I could make it a public project.