We recently moved most of our servers. In the move we also upgraded our subversion server to the latest version (1.5.x). All went very well, except that our Jira (Jira is this great Feature and Bug-Tracking tool from Atlassian) could not see the subversion repository anymore.

The error we got was “svn: malformed network …”.

I suspected that, with the move to the latest version of subversion, the connection to subversion within Jira must use .jar files which were only compatible with subversion 1.4. Indeed, that was the case.

So, if you run into this, just download the latest SVNKit from http://svnkit.com (it is the standalone version), extract it and copy the svnkit.jar file to the directory “{jira-root}/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib/”. Make sure that you remove the older svnkit-1.16.jar file or any other svnkit-xxx.jar file. Then restart Jira.

It seems to be hard times everywhere these days. I hope you can find some way to survive, make money, feed your children, heat your homes and have some time to enjoy life.

I think now is the time to look at the things that are free in life. I can think off; walking by the sea or in the woods, hanging out with friends, going to the local park to play with your kids, go for a run or a brisk walk, listen to music, go to the library and get some books to read. Its all good for the mind and the spirit and its all basically free.

When things get better which they probably will eventually there will be plenty of time to go back to buying things outside of the necessaries like food and clothes and so on. In the meantime, look for the free things in life and start thinking about exchanging stuff with friends like books, music, clothes you don’t want.

Have some courage! Open your mind, to new ways. You know, every crisis also opens new doors, new opportunities, new paths to walk on. See the signs and don’t shut yourself down.

Here is a list of things that you might want to consider;

• If you need some kind of software then consider looking into Open Source. Open Source not only has the aspect of being freely available, but also having some great minds behind it. The Open Source Community is mostly very generous and helpful. Sure, we all need to make money, so consider paying some developers for their work. This is still cheaper then paying a license fee and you get what you need.
• Save some money by turning off those lights in your house, when you really don’t need it. Same goes for heating and water usage. You won’t see a immediate saving, but will profit in the long run and your environment will be thankful as well.
• Go over your insurances and contracts. Do you really need each one of them? Do you really need to have the best health insurance around or would a mid-level one do as well? Have you had so many accidents in the last year or could that money be used otherwise?
• If you are short on paying bills then talk to issuer. Let them know that you are short on money (put away your ego for a second) and work out a payment plan with them. You will be surprised how many people will agree to a payment plan.
• Your car! I know, I know. Difficult topic. But just imagine how much money you would save in a month without having to pay for car insurance, gas and leasing. Some of us, need a car to go to work, some live in remote places where it is simply not possible to be without a car. I have nothing against it, all I am saying is that you might be able to save some money each month with a cheaper insurance, model or way of transportation.

Remember, these are difficult times and difficult times call for compromises. Nobody wants you to stop living or not being joyful. Just cut down on some things for a while. Better times will come again!

We run most of our servers on some sort of virtual environment. Be it XEN or VMWare ESX(i). This has proofed to be a very cost effective way to fully leverage each machine’s CPU and RAM.

In any case, the other day we had to adjust some RAM settings for one of the virtual servers. After setting the RAM and restarting the machine we got an error message saying;

“Could not power on vm: no space left on device”

You can imagine, that we were totally shocked as this was a customer server and time was running out. So, the only cause of this could be that VMWare must have some problems with the expanded RAM.

As it turns out, the solution to this was quite simple. VMWare adjusts the SWAP file and in our case, there was no more space left on the drive that this virtual machine was running on. So, if you are prompted with this message you should go into the general server configuration and adjust the SWAP location. Then adjust it as well in your individual virtual machine environment.

As every year the North Bridge Venture Partners conduct a survey titled “Future of Open Source”. The results were presented during this years Open Source Business Conference and made available.

Over at the Ostatic blog, there’s a post with a rundown of the things they thought were most interesting at the Open Source Business Conference that took place in San Francisco.

The post is a must read for those interested in Open Source. Especially, the Presentation by Drupal Founder entitled “The secrets of building and participating in open source communities“.

Here are some quotes that the 451 group caught during the event, which I liked the most;

“If we have a better product, and it happens to be open source, we’re going to win. But it has to be in that order”.

“The best business plans are disruptive at the market level, but not at the adoption level”.

“The further up the stack you go the less need there is for the source code”.

“Open source development communities are always a bit broken. Dysfunction is normal.”

“Our biggest competitor is not Microsoft, it’s not Novell, it’s people stopping paying us for support”.

I think, that there is no doubt anymore that Open Source Software has changed the world of licenses and proprietary software at all. I mean, there is no need convincing me, since we are already make our Enterprise Digital Asset Management Razuna available under a Open Source license

So, it gives me great joy to see that Open Source conferences are making inroads and more people attend it then ever. I just saw this welcome video from the OSBC2009. It’s a nice example how Open Source is and has changed the game of software licenses.

Jeff Han has been showing multi touch screens for many years. Very impressive and fascinating to control your own computer like that. We already see, that people love the way how the iPhone can be navigated, just imagine how it would be if the below can become mainstream.

I am a huge fan of making my life “simple” and not complicated. After all, life around us is already complicated with all that is going on, so why bother taking it home, right?

That is also one of the reasons, why I use Apple Hardware and, to some extend, Apple Software. Not that I don’t know how to work with Linux or Windows, but Apple has one thing going for them, that is “It simply works”. That is true when it comes down to their Hardware, Operating System and Phone. You could argue, that this and that feature is not there and Apple is mediocre in their feature set (thought, this is mainly true), but I think because their not overloaded with features they have less to worry about and again it boils down that “it simply works”.

In that regard, I set out the other day to get my sound and TV setup right in my house. Something which I thought will take a long time, took merely minutes to get everything up and running. I took a new Mac Mini as the center of my “Hub”, meaning I have iTunes running on it, got it connected to my Apple Airport Extreme (with 2 Airport Express devices on other levels in the house) and have my Stereo connected to another Airport Express device. Then I also hooked up the Mac Mini to my TV Set.

Now, the best part of this setup is that I can control iTunes and the Mac Mini from everywhere in my house with my MacBook Pro, or from my wife’s MacBook or from my iPhone. Yes, iPhone!

Did you know that Apple has a great little iPhone app that allows you to control iTunes directly from your iPhone? I didn’t and so I as totally blown away when I found this little gem of software, called “Remote“. Once installed, again it took a minute to install and setup, you can control iTunes and Apple TV right there from your iPhone.

I remember when I was invited by Apple to come over to a MacWorld keynote and I saw Steve Jobs talking on the Apple Hub idea. His vision was that Apple devices become the Hub, the center of your life. Well, I have to say that they achieved it. Well done and thank you.

Over at the TED conference this year, Evan Williams gave a 8 minutes talk on Twitter and a short history of it.

He said one thing that should be of great interest for Entrepreneurs, that is that he started Twitter as a side business to their startup and that he learned to give ideas a room event thought they are not part of the core business.

My primary Linux distribution of choice is CentOS. CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by RedHat. Thus CentOS is merely speaking a copy of RedHat and provides the same stability and security.

The trade off with stability and security is, that you mostly run packages which are not cutting edge and thus you run into issues where you need the cutting edge. This is the case with FFMpeg.

There is a DAG repository that give you FFMpeg in the yum installation, but that version is not working with libx264 or libfaac and still uses the older way of and might break some applications.

Thus I set out to find the best way to install FFMpeg. Since FFMpeg depends on a lot of external libraries we first have to install this external libraries.

Please follow the below steps one by one to install FFMpeg on CentOS/RedHat 5.x. successfully. Some of these libraries might be older (some even from 2008), thought I used what worked best for me and were stable in production environment.

Lets create a directory first
mkdir -p /opt/ffmpeg-packages
cd /opt/ffmpeg-packages

Installing FAAD2
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/faac/faad2-2.6.1.tar.gz
tar zxf faad2-2.6.1.tar.gz
cd faad2
autoreconf -vif
./configure –disable-drm –disable-mpeg4ip
make && make install

Installing FAAC
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/faac/faac-1.26.tar.gz
tar zxfv faac-1.26.tar.gz
cd faac
./bootstrap
./configure –disable-mp4v2
make && make install

Installing LAME
wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.98b8.tar.gz
tar zxfv lame-3.98b8.tar.gz
cd lame-3.98b8
./configure
make && make install

Installing yasm
wget http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/releases/yasm-0.7.0.tar.gz
tar zfvx yasm-0.7.0.tar.gz
cd yasm-0.7.0
./configure
make && make install

Installing x264

FFMpeg requires that you get the latest x264 codec. Thus we use the latest from their GIT repository.

git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git
cd x264
./configure –enable-shared –prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install

Installing Xvid
wget http://downloads.xvid.org/downloads/xvidcore-1.2.1.tar.gz
tar zxfv xvidcore-1.2.1.tar.gz
cd xvidcore/build/generic
./configure
make && make install

Installing FFmpeg

For FFMPEG, you will need to get the latest out of SVN.

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-nonfree –enable-postproc \
–enable-libfaad –enable-avfilter –enable-pthreads –enable-libxvid \
–enable-libx264 –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libfaac –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay
make
make install

The “make” of FFmpeg can take up to 5 minutes, so please be patience. I also disable “FFServer” and “FFplay” on my servers. Please adjust to your environment.

Hope this helps.