Open Indiana NTP

         Computing

I really like OpenIndiana, but finding some documentation for even the most basic things sometimes is difficult. Take NTP for instance, should be easy right.. And it is if you know what you are doing. vim /etc/resolv.conf Setup the search domain above, then copy the ntp configuration file: cp /etc/inet/ntp.client /etc/inet/ntp.conf Edit the configuration file putting in the servers that are near to you. vim /etc/inet/ntp.conf Enable NTP: svcadm enable ntp

Cantemo update

         Computing      Cantemo · MediaBox · Object Matrix · Portal · Vidispine

Just a quick update to what is happening with Cantemo these days. Firstly we have two main products in the marketplace at the moment, MediaBox and Portal DAM. Portal is our enterprise product, a Digital Asset Management system that can be tailored to suit just about any need or requirement. For instance if you need to build Cloud hosted Digital Asset Management system  System that has multiple workflows for multiple user groups A system that integrates with many different parts ( think Business Process Management systems, Transcoder farms, Newsroom Systems, NLEs, Digital Rights Management, Playout servers) and can work as the controlling force for all of that.

Postgres and psql for beginners

         Computing

Actually I am not sure whether I can put myself in the beginners pot, having run Postgresql for many years and built several products and service upon it. However a round of using PSQL for common use cases is needed I think. So this basically is for that usual situation where you have logged in to the server that postgres is running on and have access to the user postgres or have the rights to use psql.

Going back to Java applets for upload

         Computing      applet · browser · java · uploading

This is something that I didn’t think that I would be writing in 2012 – we are switching to a Java based applet for our uploader. The problem has been that browsers and their operating systems handle uploads differently. Really differently. Evening using a project like plupload, you can’t polyfill over the cracks. There are new APIs coming out (if you want to call it HTML5, not strictly true though), but to handle backwards compatibility, including IE9, there needs to be a mechanism to make it generic and the only thing is Java.

The new web stack

         Computing · Internet

There is a really interesting article over on Ilya Grigorik’s blog titled []1. Be sure to read the comments if you are interested in how AOL built a similar system many moons ago. I have been thinking about next generation web stacks, with proper (M)VC in the browser, communication with server using SPDY / WebSockets / SSE or similar with SSL, and then the topology of the stack in the background being event driven and that article has some really nice points.

New year, new workflow improvements

         Computing      workflow

So another new year has started but I continue to improve and refine my workflow and tooling. Firstly git. The more I learn with git, the more I like it, and the more I get into it. I like the fact that I don’t need any other tool, if I was using Mercurial I would still have to use Git because of the amount of excellent code being published into GitHub.

My must have OS X software

         Computing · OSX

I recently had the opportunity to look at what I would install on a vanilla OS X system and its was quite interesting to look at what I depend on and if I didn’t have it, what would be on my Christmas software list. So here goes: Git: Probably not the first thing that I would install, but it wouldn’t be the last. Via the proper GIT installer Python 2.

Javascript

         Computing

Never thought that I would be saying this, but I am really liking Javascript at the moment.

Larger desktop

         Computing

It seems that no matter how many pixels I have to play with I could always use more. Consider this number of apps that I have open a day: Browser window with debugging pane (1200 x 1200) Skype (220×1000 high) with conversation window (400×600) Mail (1000×800) Text mate or vim (typically 1600×1200) Terminal windows – at least two. One for Git and one for python shell. (1600×1200) 2nd browser window for looking stuff up though I can use tabs for them.

What’s the coolness

         Computing      Computing

Looking back over the last posts I realize that I haven’t been talking much about the software and and code that I have been using every day and some of it is really quite interesting. Python. I use python a lot, it’s my preferred go to language to solve a lot of problems. It has great libraries, an awesome community and the language itself is compact and non verbose. We are using Django heavily in our solutions and its really enjoyable to work with, and I never feel that coding is a chore.