After a couple of days with the Pavoni, I was able to pull some nice shots on it. A capuccino:

And an espresso: The milk frothing is also much easier on the Professional, than on the standard one. I’ve always struggled with the machine my ex has, to get nice microfoam, but with this baby it’s easy peasy: I know it’s not perfect, but I’m still learning!

I started to drink coffee at a later age than most people do, mostly because I couldn’t stand the taste of it. I tasted my parents coffee, my classmate’s when we were on school excursions and many other variants, and at last I swore that I never would be able to drink that black fluid. But while I was in Italy with my ex-girlfriend, we found a very good coffee place where I tasted my first, good cup of coffee.

Ever since that time in italy, I’ve dreamt about getting my own espresso machine. But my ex owned an espresso machine so getting a machine of my own was a bit dumb. But when we went apart, I wanted to buy one, but didn’t have the money for a good quality machine.

In my searches for a machine that was within my budget, I stumbled across the Handpresso, and I was so thrilled with the good reviews and especially the price, that I got one about two and a half year ago. And I was really impressed by the quality of the shots that I pulled with it. Not in the same class as the ones pulled on a professional machine, but several classes better than a standard filterbrewed cup. I still have it and use it often, as it is very fast to pull a good quality shot. But I’m still in the search of the perfect espresso so time and again I’ve looked around for a machine in my price class.

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a La Pavoni professional – a so called lever machine – in just the right price range. That particular model has been around since the 70’s, and hasn’t changed much in the design since it’s introduction. And it’s a machine that has been praised for it’s good quality shots, as long as you’ve got the feeling for the machine and know how to use it correctly. My ex had the same machine, although not the professional one (but they’re not that different – only the size and a missing gauge on the non-pro one).

The machine was 11-12 years old, but looked brand new. I took it home and tried to descale it. Although I got a lot of dirty things out of the boiler, a look with a flashlight told me that I hadn’t been able to descale it properly – far from it. My guess is that the machine hasn’t been descaled at all since the previous owner bought it. So I went on with one more descaling with citric acid, but it didn’t clean the machine completely either. So I had to soak the boiler in citric acid for a whole day, and then I had a clean boiler.

When I tried it the first time, it leaked heavily from the group. Apparently the previous owner hadn’t changed the gaskets during the time he had it. So I bought a new gasket set and changed it. When I took the group apart, I found that it needed a serious cleaning too. But when it was reassembled, I had a machine that was almost like a new one:

I’s a very simple machine, as you can see from this view of the electrical parts: The old gaskets were hard and shrunk in size – no wonder the group was leaking heavily: All in all, I’m a happy Pavoni owner!

Just a short summer vacation update, sitting in the shade here by the poolside at the greek island Agistri. The temperature is well over 34 degrees Celsius and the most pleasant place to be is in the pool. Agistri is a very small island and there's not many tourists here. The food is good although it's much harder to get the traditional Greek dishes that I love. We've been here a week and this is the first day I've been on the net since I left home. Maybe I'll do another update later this week.

Despite the economic recession here in greece, we haven't noticed any significant changes since last year. The prices has gone up a bit, but that's also due to the fact that it's a small island with no real competition between fx the supermarkets - there's only two small ones in this town.

I think it's time to hit the pool. ;-)

The last couple of years, cloud computing has gained more and more ground. And the concept is wide and covers several different approaches to computing, but I only want to talk about two types of cloud computing here, namely IaaS and PaaS.

As an example of an IaaS cloud we have Amazons EC2 where you, as a user, work with the datacenter level of computing, in a virtualized manner; you can start a server (instance), and once it’s running attach IP addresses to it, firewall rules or even a block device (disk) that you then format and mount inside the instance. Pretty much the same things you did with a physical server and some networking gear, before IaaS saw the light of day. The biggest difference from the good old physical server days, is that with IaaS you can have your server running minutes after you “ordered” it, instead of several days with the physical servers, as long as your IaaS provider has excess capacity.

An example of PaaS is Heroku. As a user of PaaS you only have to deal with the decision of “how many workers do I need” and “which domain should I use” and then the Platform takes care of anything else. PaaS are often specialized for a particular programming language and environment – in the case of Heroku, it’s the Ruby programming language.

Which type of cloud to use is a matter of personal taste and needs. IaaS is more flexible, but needs more work to be usable for the user/developer, PaaS is easier to use and preferrable if you can find a PaaS provider that support your language and needs.

Now, as a server and hosting provider I’m very interested in those two types of cloud computing. Right now I deliver virtualized computing power to my customers, but only as a virtualized version of a dedicated (physical server) – we have no self-service features that enables our customers to order a new server, like they can if they used an IaaS cloud provider. So my goal is to build and deliver a cloud platform to my customers.

The last two years I’ve followed some of the activity in the world of cloudbuilding software – software that enables you to build your own cloud. Two years ago the solutions were few, and lacked on features, but during the last year several solutions has bubbled to the surface. I’ve tested a lot of them, and I would like to name two Open Source solutions, that seems to be very interesting for my company:

1. OpenNebula is a project that started as a research project back in 2005, but the first public release was in 2008, three years ago. I first encountered the project in 2009, where I put up a demo system and played with it for a while. But it never felt quite ready for production in our environment. I haven’t had time to play with the last version, but it seems to be really good, and the planned next release looks even more promising.

2. A real newcomer is OpenStack, a project announced last year as a joint venture between Rackspace and NASA. Since it’s announcement, several big companys has joined the venture, some contributing more than others, as well as independent developers from all over the world. And the project has gained ground and looks very promising.

As a provider it should now be easy to choose one of those fine projects, and use them as a building block for a cloud offering. But it’s not as easy as it looks. OpenNebula is clearly the project that has the most complete featureset (and some of the code is written in Ruby), but OpenStack is bursting ahead and is getting massive support from the big companies, latest with the announcement of Project Olympus from Citrix, and it’s hard to make a choice.

On the PaaS side a new Open Source project was announced by VMWare in april, named CloudFoundry. Now that is really interesting, as it is a platform that currently supports three programming languages (Java, Ruby and Javascript/Node.js), but aims to support a wide range of languages later on. I haven’t had the time to test it yet, but it seems really promising and could be a foundation for a PaaS offering at my company. You can see an example of a Ruby application that get deployed to CloudFoundry here.

So all in all, from a provider point of view: Even though it gets more and more “cloudy,” the “sun got a strong hold now,” in the business of cloud computing.

A while ago I sprained my right wrist, while trying to learn to ride backwards on my unicycle. Last year while I was starting out on the uni, I smashed my shin with those, almost lethal, trials pedals that my bike came with. I got some deep holes in the flesh, and I catched some inflamation in them. So early this year, I bought some shin guards to protect me from that never happening again.

But I have never had a serious fall on the unicycle, and I apparently thought I was immortal or something like that, because I tried to ride backwards without protecting my wrists in any way. And I've felt the result for the last month now. I haven't been able to write that much, as the hand position for writing hurt too much, and I couldn't do it for long periods, without taking breaks very often.

But now my wrist is almost back to normal, so I can write some more again. And the next thing I'm going to buy for myself is wrist guards - that's for sure!

It’s now been almost 3 weeks of me flirting and dating with Vim, and Imust say that I’m impressed by her, and the way she moves. She’s still too fast for me sometimes, and she still do things that confuses me. My memory is also way too bad to remember all the ways to please her – but I’m learning!

The discovery of plugins like NERD_tree, and key remappings in .vimrc has made the transition from TextMate toMacVim bearable. Also watching the Smash Into Vim screencasts has taught me some tricks, and the work ofCarl Lerche and Yehuda Katz, integrating a bunch of plugins to make it easier for newcomers to get started with Vim, really is worth mentioning – you can fetch the complete collection here (with an easy to use installer too!).

I still have to practice a lot to get where Gary Bernhardt is, regarding Vim experience. I have to go through his Play by Play screencast on PeepCode again, to extract some of the goodies that he shows.

This post is written in MacVim, just for the exercise – although I didn’t get to try some of all the shortcuts and commands that I’ve learned. I have to produce some code to do that…

Maybe she’s not that fancy dressed, maybe she doesn’t have that modern look, but underneath that dull, 70’s look, lies a power that hard to control. I have known her for a decade, and flirted with her from time to time, but she never caught my interest long enough for me to get hooked.

It was so much easier to fall for TextMates nice and slim look, and for the power that lies ind CMD+t and the project drawer, but when you have lived with her for some time, you find that’s she’s a slow starter, never really reinvents herself, and can’t keep too many balls in the air at once. You try to indulge her by turning on the Cutting-Edge flag in the software update settings, but that only makes her cover up her weak spots with more makeup.

So a couple of days ago, I left Textmate at home and set out to take MacVim for ride. It was akward at first, but then again, so was my first dates with another mistress of mine, Puppet. You got to hang in and be brave, ‘cause she tricks you. Be careful with the keystrokes when she is in command (mode) and learn the undo key (u) early on (and the fact that she actually has three moods (modes)). If you grasp her moodyness, she will slowly loosen up, and hand over the full control of her hidden power. And then you can molden her into the editor you really want.

I’m still struggling with her moodyness. I find myself fingering for the arrow keys everytime I have to move around in a file. I find myself reaching for the safety belt I have in my mouse. But I’m also patient, because I know that in the end it will pay off. Just as with Puppet. And Linux. And all the other mistresses I keep.

I've signed up for this years Startup Weekend Copenhagen. Some of you who knows me, would probably ask: Why? You have your own company. Are you changing horses in the middlie of the stream? To that question I must answer:
No. I'm not.

I just see a lot of potential, meeting up with a lot of smart people for an intense weekend of pitching product ideas, choosing the best ones, designing them and build them. I know that I can provide knowledge in the areas of how to build the infrastructure to support a new, webbased product. And I hope that I can learn a lot from the processes we have to go through that weekend, to get some results in that short, but intense period of time. Some experience that I can take home and use in my own team.

But then again - it could be interesting to be part of a new startup... :-)

In the week after, I'll post about the event and the outcome of it.

Last saturday the weather was finally good enough for me and my son to go outside and do some unicycling. We've both missed it a lot during the long period of cold weather with lots of snow, so it was fun to get the wheels going. We were both curious how bad we would be after such a long break, but we both did a fairly good ride without falling too much. And I realized how much fun it really is, and how much I've missed it.

As long as we're not in a club of unicyclists, we have to rely on the weather to be good enough to ride in. When we (hopefully soon) get a club started in our hometown, we can ride indoors and ignore the weather outside. But until then, we have to ride outside.