Gesendet am 29. Jänner 2017 an ikt@bka.gv.at.

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

Ich lebe in Wien und bin seit über 15 Jahren in der IKT-Branche tätig und derzeit Geschäftsführer eines noch sehr kleinen IKT-Unternehmens mit Sitz in Wien und habe mir die Digital Roadmap Austria der Bundesregierung angesehen.

Ich finde es sehr positiv, dass die IKT als eine Zukunftsbranche für den Standort Österreich identifiziert wurde. …

It’s good to see that the Mac at IBM program is well and good. Fletcher Previn, VP of Workplace-as-a-Service, gave a presentation about the current state of the deployment at the JAMF Nation User Conference.

To date, IBM has already deployed 30,000 MacBooks to IBMers; when an employee’s laptop is due for replacement after 48 months, they get a choice of which new laptop to replace it with and every week 1,900 IBMers choose to replace their old laptops with new MacBooks.

Previn notes that only 5% of Mac users call the help desk compared to 40% of PC users. You got to wonder though, whether the 35% of Mac users who don’t call haven’t just figured out that calling the help desk at IBM is a waste of time anyways. Most people only call them for password resets or when a server is down, although you could as well wait until the server is restarted on its own to save your time. …

I have to say that at one point I really liked the GPL license and the idea behind it. I always thought that it is weird to call it viral.

A few years ago the Software Freedom Law Center published an opinion that the WordPress themes are also covered by the GPL and I recently stumbled over my old blog post again.

Consider their statement on WordPress themes:

The PHP elements, taken together, are clearly derivative of WordPress code. The template is loaded via the include() function. Its contents are combined with the WordPress code in memory to be processed by PHP along with (and completely indistinguishable from) the rest of WordPress. The PHP code consists largely of calls to WordPress functions and sparse, minimal logic to control which WordPress functions are accessed and how many times they will be called. They are derivative of WordPress because every part of them is determined by the content of the WordPress functions they call. …

Tokens, U2F, and the real world

The use of two-factor authentication for personal use, even for online banking, never really caught on.

The only device that was at least slightly promising was the YubiKey, but there wasn’t really much adoption for it as the various operation modes all had their fair share of issues.

• HOTP was supported and YubiCo even had a public authentication service, but no major internet service started to adopt it and encouraged its use.
• TOTP was partially supported as it also needed a little helper-tool on the user’s workstation to supply the current time to the token as there was no built-in clock, which is understandable given it would then also need a battery. …

James Surowiecki wrote in a very inspiring article titled “What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?”:

“There’s something comforting about this story: even Nobel-winning economists procrastinate! Many of us go through life with an array of undone tasks, large and small, nibbling at our conscience.”

Task lists never really worked out for me. They often quickly morphed into a dumping ground for stuff I was never going to complete, anyway. For several months I’ve tried to take control of my task lists, but back in 2010 I stumbled upon Rene Cunningham’s post about why task lists are broken.

He describes an approach in which each task is not written on a task list that will grow forever, but you record each task as a future appointment with a specific date, time, and duration on your calendar. This means that you immediately notice when you over commit or when you have a free slot to get some work done. …

In one of my recent projects we were using Business Monitor and the embedded Cognos BI. During the implementation of the automated installation and configuration scripts it became apparent that not everything was scriptable, as I would’ve expected from my past experience with IBM products.

Configuration of certain Cognos parameters, such as the query size JVM parameters, initial heap size, and maximum heap size, is currently only possible through the interactive GUI web interface, but not through a scripting or API interface.

You will find that the parameters are stored in the Cognos Content Store database:

SELECT [CMID]
    ,[QSADDJVMARG]
    ,[QSINITJVMHEAP]
    ,[QSMAXJVMHEAP]
FROM [COGNOSCS].[dbo].[CMOBJPROPS67] …

Asynchronous event-driven web applications

The cloud means different things to different people, but we all agree that it for sure isn’t like your own data center. You don’t control the hardware or virtualization layer, you mostly don’t control the operating system, the database, caching infrastructure, or even the language runtime that is going to be used. Many of the assumptions that you make when writing an application to run in your own data center, need to be discarded when running on the cloud. …