Threats rarely come from above, but most of the time from below. Small and flexible companies start with niches and keep improving their performance, until they become a threat to the established player. In this case we see the S-curve model playing out against Oracle. These migrations indicate that after years of development, many open source or low-cost databases have now attained performance that is either roughly equivalent to parts of Oracle, such as Postgres, or have developed capabilities that while irrelevant to much of the database market, are far in advance of any technology operated by the Red Borg, such as MongoDB or Riak or Cassandra.

Today I stumpled over a rather fascinating post on Sinosplice. It basically says that all maps in China are based on a different coordinate system than Western maps. As a result, ‘Western’ GPS-coordinates projected onto them will be off between 300 to 500m. I noticed this issue while playing Ingress in Shanghai. While walking along the Bund, I always ended up in the Pu-river. It seems that Google Maps has a correction-algorithm built in, while Ingress hasn’t. This still doesn’t help you while tagging photos or sharing your position with friends.

Update Aug 9, 2013:The biggest German email providers are currently running a big marketing campaign and promise secure email. They are using the same technique described on this page. After checking my logs, I can confirm that GMX-emails were delivered unencrypted on Aug 5, but arrived encrypted on Aug 6.Thanks to Mr. Snowden, we know two important facts about the world of security and email: First, most governments in the world will eavesdrop and store your communication, if they get the chance. They don’t have a specific reason and the benefits are highly disputed. Second, your users can’t/won’t use PGP or S/MIME to encrypt their email. The job is left to admins. We need to maximize usability and compatibility, while ensuring that user data stays confidential. If you are running Postfix, I’d like to draw your attention to some useful settings that will protect your user’s email in transit. If emails stay on the same server or the other server is secured as well, there is little chance to intercept messages on a big scale. If your users are sending emails to Gmail or Hotmail, then interception is still possible at the receiving end.Figure 1: Vulnerability of email-messages in transit.

Please note that email service will be unavailable next Saturday between 18h and 23h CET. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Since my webserver broke down, while I was caught on a ship to Japan, I have relied on the excellent monit to have an eye on all my important services. Currently their inventors, who give the client-version away for free are working on a remarkable evolution of their M/Monit-tool, a solution to keep track of multiple monit-instances. It only used to give you alarms and show events. Now it will record your system load and memory usage.

Many people are using cyberlockers, like Mediafire, Uploaded, Filepost, … to share files. There are many different providers and all of them keep nagging your with captachs to sell their premium accounts. There are some interesting tools to get around this, like JDownloader or PyLoad.

OC has been updated to version 5. Some of the shared files are not compatible between major versions. If you are missing any shares, just recreate them. Rest should be ok. If you have any issues, let me know.

Good luck in 2013 to everyone. I hope that it will be quieter than 2012 and we get some time to consolidate some of the big trends that started in 2012. My favourite ones are the Raspberry Pi and ownCloud. I also applied the latest 3.5 update to WordPress. This brought some changes in media management. So in case you miss some pictures, just check for the correct paths in your posts.

This morning version 4.5 of the excellent owncloud package was released. This is excellent competition to all those Apples and Googles who fight to take control of your personal data. Finally there is a decent solution to host all of this yourself. Calendar, as well as sharing it works flawless without problems. For addressbooks, there seems to be a flaw in Mac OSX, which prevents the addressbook app to see more than one of them.

We have an ancient Brother scan+print combination in our apartment. Cheap and reliable. Printing works well over CUPS, also from iPads with Airprint. My only issue was scanning. It works well with SANE, which also works via your network. Only problem is that the packages provided by Mattias Ellert on his website are a bit outdated and don’t always work with the latest Mac OSX. So here is a quick trick to scan on a remote machine without the trouble of moving the file later: