google, google, google

Yes, right. I never said google when she was near me, nor am I browsing the web, when she is sitting on my lap for having a drink or some cuddling. So what?

She now keeps on saying

google, google, google

half the day and ignoring the past days favourite words like tree or chair.

Now what the hell did google offer my daughter that she keeps saying their name all over the day? It can not be money, so it must have been something else… chocolate? A bigger football? Hm… investigation continues.

It’s been one year and two months ago, since my daughter Leonie was born and it was a busy life for me. Not only my whole life did change, but my own views of what life should be like or what should be of importance.

Today marks another point of change. Hopefully it will be the last larger change for quite a few years, so I can finally enjoy the nicer parts of life and enjoy life with my daughter. Yes, you guessed right, I will become a single daddy, as my wife has decided to start a new life without her daughter and me, to explore the possibilities for her future.

Well, no bad feelings, I’m just feeling sad because my daughter will now have to learn how life is without having a mother.

On the good side, I finally found a wonderful new flat for Leonie and me. It’s pretty much double the size of my current flat and has enough space to create a nice living room for Leonie as well as a small home office for me and it’s a very friendly place, where one can finally again have people invited to enjoy the good sides of life. There’s room for friends and I have already started to get things changing by calling around to get in touch with my friends, which I have not been doing for much longer time than I should have done. My luck, because they’re really good friends and they all are happy to see me coming back to life.

These days, I do have many stuff to think about. I still wonder how I could forget or ignore my own needs and wishes for such a long time and just reduce myself to a working machine and a housework slave.

I guess it’s these things, that make you change and find out what is important in life.

Since we did not expect her arrival for today, I had to take some cheap shots with my mobile. Better ones will follow, done the classical way using analog media.

For now, I am totally overwhelmed and need sleep. Mother and child already sleep and since I am the one to take care for them I should get some sleep before they wake up. Good night.

I have edited all posts and updated them to make use of the Markdown syntax. Markdown syntax is pretty easy to understand, as most people will know its syntax from editing simple text documents. Anyone using WordPress, should have a look at it. You can enable Markdown in the Plugins menu of your WordPress installation.

If you find any posts which seem to look strange, this might be one I might have missed updating. In this case, please post a comment with the posts name or send mail to dsr@best-off.org.

As of today, I have finished implementing a draft implementation of our new company-wide style sheet for both off- and online media and now we’re moving on to testing. Pictures of the reloaded design will be posted soon. Hopefully this draft will pass all W3C tests and make our test users happy.

The file system needs some love and new applications need to be installed.

Midgard Core and Apache 2 module already made it through the compiler with small patches, PHP4 and PHP5 will be a task for the next days, since I plan to switch to using official source and binary packages from both Apache and PHP to build Midgard.

This will require a lot of changes to the Windows build system as for now the build is better suited for my open sa source tree - which also has not been touched for months sigh - and it should be possible to build against any source tree.

For now the rough plan is to use environment variables to link against the desired source tree and for Midgard core and Apache this worked out well.

Good news is that since the Gnome support for Windows has improved over the last months, at least this part of the build process is a lot easier. I do not know in which shape the PHP build system is - especially the module build system - but this seems to have improved, too.

I decided to use the Windows Installer Toolkit released to the Open Source community by Microsoft. It is .NET based and allows for the transformation of an XML definition nto a real Windows installer application, patch packages are possible, too.

Initial thoughts for the Windows port have been defined in mRFC0011 by Henri Bergius and after checking what Windows Installer can accomplish these days, I will add my two cents to it. Expect more over the next few days.

I hope to finish my Windows port before the baby arrives, so any input, idea, or whish is welcome.

So for today I’d like to introduce everyone to our daughter Leoni (losely based on Leo for Lion).

More news coming soon and hopefully new photos, too. Expected date of birth is March 24th, 2005. Plus or minus two weeks, depending on the growth in the next weeks.

There is a little addendum for those running Fedora Core 3 or RHEL4 beta (or e.g. CentOS 4 beta):
you are safe as these distributions already have a working zlib and pcre version available right from the start.

Let me summarize this a bit:
Soeren Research claims that the migration to Linux as desktop platform is not cost-effective for small companies. This is a common claim. I can not remember how many of these statements I have seen in the past months and this one is really one too much.

We have switched several offices to Linux as desktop and server platform within the last year, moving from Windows 2000 to Linux with Gnome as desktop. The reasoning for these switches all have been the same. Windows 2000 is to expensive for small companies, as you can not leverage the volume licensing options, you need an even more expensive Windows administrator, plus there is the constant presence of system failures. For example, you do a fresh Windows 2000 server installation on a new system. First it works, but when you start using Active Directory it suddenly breaks on each boot complaining about a broken printer, and there was not a single printer installed or even attached to the system. Two years later the issue still remains although the client reported it to MS.

So over the last few years, I got the strong feeling that Windows is not the right thing in a small office. There are several reasons:

• small companies usually do not have much more than a amateur administrator
• small companies do not have servers running all day and all night.
  Each day a secretary or someone else switches it on and waits until it is booted.
• there is no need for fancy features.
  Things needed include file sharing on the network and sometimes a little email.
• no one has the time to run updates.
  There usually is enough other work left.
• you have mostly untrained users, even unaware of how Windows works.

This results in lots of issues which consume time and money, I will describe a few below.

• desktops and server(s) in a small business will be installed one time.
  Afterwards every user has the believe that things are done and never need to be touched. If anything does not work without reading the manual, the company will loose up to a whole day of work when all users wonder what happened.
• updates will be done in the users spare time when no work is left.
  This might happen once or twice a year. If the company has an office-wide web connection this may add another five to ten spam servers in this world.
• small companies do not think about Access Control Lists, LDAP or RSBAC.
  They trust in their systems to do the right thing. Windows does not do the right thing. It will not report a bug and then tell the user to look for fixes, it will simply report a bug and stop.
• in a small office your word processor needs to be reliable and it needs to work the same way on each desktop.
  Have you ever tried this with Windows without any management software? No chance, it even breaks if two system share identical hard- and software installations.
• installation of a Windows desktop or server and keeping it up to date is time consuming.
  As a small company does not have ZENWorks or any other working management solution, each installation or update might cost from half a day of work up to one week, depending on what you need to do.
• license fees are to high.
  Assume you have ten users and one server. Now go and buy the cheap volume licensing from MS. You will get Open Licensing, meaning you buy X numbers of licenses and have to pay for each support call.

Now if you know some economics or even have learned it, you can do a quick calculation. And yes, these are thousands of Euros of additional costs for each year. For a small company we’re talking about a sales volume near a million Euros. Now deduct the costs and see what’s left. Yes, then a few thousand Euros do count much more.

Try This With Linux

Now let us try the same with Linux. The picture is pretty different.

• desktops and servers will be installed once.
  Afterwards you can run automated updates using Cron on the whole network.
• users do not have to care about updates.
  They simply use their desktops. Some may start to wonder why they do not have to stop working for a new update to work.
• users do not care if it is MS Office or OpenOffice.org.
  If they can type text, apply formats, add tables, work with spreadsheets, use their templates, it is fine for them. Plus: even untrained users can use OpenOffice.org without training.
• a Linux server can switch on the desktop systems each morning.
  It will supply all users with the same desktop on whatever machine they login. Same look, their files, only different seat. Once installed, this works perfect.
• even if there should be any license fee coming up, the price can not be higher than for a Windows system.
  Support is available from the web, via browser or email plus your users will start to learn how a computer works when they enjoy Linux day to day.
• if you report bugs, you will get a response and some time later you get things fixed.

So where is the difference? It is in the marketing and in the look and feel. Yes, Linux does not look like people are used to, but it has the ability to let your users do their work. From a business point of view, what counts more? A beautiful Windows XP desktop with flowers or dogs and lots of blue and green or a user who can work without interruption for the whole year?

Summary

Run as many case studies as you like, we are enjoying Linux in the mean time.