Johan Louwers Personal Blog "my view on the IT world".

Moving from VMware to Oracle VM

2012-01-27T23:32:00.000+01:00

I have been working the past year a lot with technology around Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager 11 and 12C as well as that I have been playing a lot with public and private cloud concepts. Some people have asked me the past months on why I have not been blogging more on Oracle VM and the other parts I have been using and working with. It will be my intention to write more about it simply

Filemaker database and iPad development platform

2012-01-25T21:10:00.000+01:00

Robert Scoble who blogs and video-blogs for his website building43.com is also producing a show for the rackspace.com website called "small teams big impact" which is in my opinion (just as) building43.com a great show to watch. In this episode they talk to one of the companies from Apple which is not named apple however is named filemaker and who do provide small database solutions and a

The next level of board control

2012-01-23T15:51:00.000+01:00

Chaotic Moon already has a reputation for building great and cool things for mobile platforms and they do have some impressive names in their portfolio like NVIDIA, Discovery Channel, Sony Music, FlightAware and CBS sports. They describe themselves as: As the world’s most proven mobile application studio, we provide everything from initial brainstorming and strategy, to custom development and

Michio Kaku on CERN news

2012-01-20T18:28:00.000+01:00

Some scientific experiments get more media coverage then others. When, some time ago, CERN was reporting that during one of their experiments it turned out that neutrinos could travel faster than light, all hell brook loose. For some people it was really strange that some scientists where upset that things could move faster than light, and then another group of people was disappointed. For all

why OpenGraph from Facebook matters

2012-01-20T17:36:00.001+01:00

In 2011 Facebook announced during the F8 developer conference that they would launch a new version of its interaction mechanism for developers with the Facebook platform. What they announced and and launched is the new version of the OpenGraph protocol which can be used by developers to code applications that work with Facebook and interact with Facebook. In previous versions of OpenGraph the

Stop SOPA/PIPA

2012-01-18T16:25:00.002+01:00

For all people who have been living under a rock and have been completly oblivious to the SOPA and PIPA issues that are threatening us (I just have been meeting some of them so they do exist), please do take some time to have a look at this video which quickly explains what the laws will do and why we US and none US citizens should not let this happen. PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from

DNS BIND load-balance setup

2012-01-16T15:59:00.000+01:00

I one of my previous blogposts I stated that a method to loadbalance a cluster of (for example) webserver nodes would be using bind DNS and round robin. By using such a method your DNS server would provide you a different IP address evert time you request the IP address of the server based upon the name. As an example I have created a domain to play with in my own home setup. I have created the

Oracle failed to access the USB subsystem

2012-01-11T16:46:00.001+01:00

rwhen you are running Oracle virtualbox at a Linux host you can have some issues when you are trying to start a virtual machine for the first time. It can give you a warning that something is wrong with the connection from the guest to the hosts USB subsystem. Failed to access the USB subsystem.VirtualBox is not currently allowed to access USB devices. You can change this by adding your user to

big data vision from Oracle

2012-01-05T18:01:00.000+01:00

Big data is one of the key areas companies are currently trying to get a market share. In the field of big data it is key to be able to handle large sets of data. Companies working on big data solutions and working with large sets of data commonly are looking at NoSQL and Hadoop like solutions as well as super computing solutions. My personal favor is for the NoSQL and hadoop like solutions and

smart grid solution

2012-01-04T21:41:00.000+01:00

The way we use energy, the way we distribute it and the way we produce it will have to change in the upcoming years. we have already seen how smart metering and billing is coming into play and you see smart grids coming up. The company I am currently working for is also heavily investing in this area and it is a very exiting field to work in and to think about. Specially the smart grid options we

Oracle DNS-Based Load-Balancing e-Business Suite

2012-01-04T21:08:00.000+01:00

Recently Elke Phelps and Sriram Veeraraghavan presented a talk named advanced E-business Suite Architectures" which handled quite some interesting topics. You van check a re-run of the presentation via the weblog of Steven Chan and you can download the presentation also from the oracle.com website in a PDF format. One of the interesting subjects covered during the talk was the subject of

The unhosted project

2012-01-03T16:30:00.001+01:00

A 5 minute speed talk on the unhosted project. I am not a big fan of the unhosted project in its current form however I can see some good coming from the project so I would keep an eye on it. The below speech is given by the guys form the unhosted project and is offering an insight in the project within the 5 minute time boundary set for the speed talks at the CCC 28C3 conference. One

Reverse Engineering USB Devices

2012-01-03T11:53:00.000+01:00

Drew Fisher gave a speech on the CCC convention where he was talking on the subject of reverse engineering USB and how you can tap into the protocol. If you are ever interested in playing with USB and understanding the inner workings of USB this is a very good place to start. You also might want to check his website zarvox.org which holds some great information that can get you started. The

The coming war on general computation

2012-01-02T14:07:00.001+01:00

Cory Doctorow who you might know from his writing and his weblog craphound.com has given a great speech a Q&A session on the CCC 28C3 convention with the title "The coming war on general computation" You can watch the recording of this via the below youtube video. Description: The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been

ubuntu launcher settings

2012-01-02T11:35:00.000+01:00

Microsoft windows is already using a task-bar since windows 95 where we all found it was a revolution. At least I was thinking that and I thought it was quite a smart move coming from pure command line and 3.11 systems. Now we are all so used to task-bars and start buttons and we see them changing in the windows versions. we also see that other operating systems have adopted the same way of

Oracle eBS change username

2011-12-29T13:48:00.001+01:00

Amar Padhi is running a showing a nice explanation on how to change the username of a user in Oracle eBS. I encountered this option due to the fact that I was looking into some requests from a customer which involves the mass change of a userbase in Oracle eBS. This particular customer is in need to change a large set of its usernames to be able to be compliant with internal rules and regulations

Oracle Linux and wine

2011-12-29T12:54:00.001+01:00

For all people who like to run windows applications on your Linux workstation. Most of you would do a simple apt-get or yum command however if you are running a Enterprise Linux version like the Oracle Linux you might need to do some more things to get things working. if you execute a "yum install wine" on your Oracle Linux distribution you will not end up with a successful install of wine. To

Telnetd encrypt_keyid exploit script

2011-12-28T14:50:00.000+01:00

On the 23th of this month the guys at FreeBSD released a security alert on a bug found in the FreeBSD telnet daemon. It turns out that with some very simple tricking you are able to execute commands remotely as the user who is running the daemon (which is is many cases the user root). This is a very serious security issue and it possibly reminds some of you to some very old exploits years ago on

Memcached explaind by James Phillips

2011-12-27T17:20:00.000+01:00

A very interesting video with James Phillips who is the Chief Strategy Officer and cofounder from NorthScale. Northscale provides elastic data infrastructure software and is closely tied with the guys from couchbase and are the developed on the memcached project. Membase was developed by several leaders of the memcached project, who had founded a company, NorthScale, expressly to meet the need

A doodle or visual thinking

2011-12-22T20:28:00.000+01:00

I do love whiteboards, I love scratchpads, I do love to doodle and I love to work with photoshop. even though I do love to do this I am not a very good artist as some people are and when I draw a tree everyone starts wondering what it is. However, using it to explain things is a very usefull tools. Standing in front of a whiteboard with a couple of people and blueprint a new enterprise IT

Oracle NoSQL port settings

2011-12-21T13:26:00.001+01:00

Installing and running an Oracle NoSQL server is in no comparison with installing and running a traditional Oracle Database. Download and execute one command and you are up and running with your first node in your NoSQL cluster. (the very simple approach) If you have not been looking at on what port is running what you might want to be able to find out where your management server is running

Google Zeitgeist 2011

2011-12-16T11:48:00.000+01:00

When you state Zeitgeist most people will think about Zeitgeist as in the Zeitgeist movie movement and the zeitgeist movie from zeitgeistmovie.com . A less know fact is that zeitgeist (spirit of the time) is also something which is used by Google to refer to what the world has been searching on the past year(s). "What mattered in 2011? Zeitgeist sorted billions of Google searches to capture the

Hadoop explained by Mike Olson

2011-12-15T21:39:00.002+01:00

Hadoop is a Apache project aimed to build a framework a framework for running applications on large cluster built of commodity hardware. The Hadoop framework transparently provides applications both reliability and data motion. Hadoop implements a computational paradigm named Map/Reduce, where the application is divided into many small fragments of work, each of which may be executed or

FlipBoard on the iPhone

2011-12-07T12:50:00.002+01:00

The moment I almost made my decision it is time for a new phone Mike McCue comes out with a new version of FlipBoard. For all of you who have not been working with FlipBoard already, Flipboard is a new and very quick way to read information like it was in a newspaper. For none iPad users the issue was that it was only available on the iPad. Now Mike McCue, CEO at FlipBoard announced the iPhone

social media hell

2011-12-06T18:55:00.003+01:00

Every now and then I do think I will no longer be able to keep up with all the social media channels I use. Issue is that we do not have a good and correct working single integration to broadcast your message. Some applications are able to maintain some of the social media networks however I have not encounterd yet a single application that will help me keep track of all of them. If anyone has a