Leisurely Sunday at the beach
This Sunday we decided to cogerlo suave (take it easy) and went over the Las Americas bridge to Playa Veracruz. The whole trip took about 30 minutes and the difference could not have been bigger. So we exchanged the view in the left picture with a more exotic looking one as seen on the right.
If you happen to use a Mac you can subscribe to the Photocast Short trips around Panama City in iPhoto. For all others here is the regular RSS feed.
Welcome Antonio
Please welcome Antonio Touriño to our Panama office. His current duties are mainly maintenance and administration of Unix servers (currently that is Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X), but he has also a background in database centric PHP and Java software development. A little bit of C++ adds to the mix. Antonio is bilingual (English, Spanish) and holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Evansville, USA.
In the picture you see Antonio in front of his workstation, which is a Dual Core Mac mini with a large 21" TFT display. The mini is truly a powerful tool despite the size of its enclosure. And it just works, so we don't have to worry about the maintenance of our most important tools. Instead we can concentrate on the work we perform for our clients.
Before coming to Caimito Antonio worked for GII Corp in Panama as a programmer.
Walks around Panama City
The last few weeks have been quite busy. Taking care of all the little things after you relocate consumes a lot of time and you end up doing it on the weekends, because you have to work during the week. So there was virtually no time for a leisurely stroll around town or anything similar.
But this Sunday we finally could enjoy our new surroundings and I thought it would be a nice idea to let everybody interested come along as well. So I've created a new Photocast called Walks around Panama City. If you happen to own a Mac, it's available for iPhoto. For all others there is a version as regular RSS feed. You should be able to see it with any of the new browsers with RSS support or any RSS news reader.
For more information about Photocasts please visit the Travel Albums page.
Quite fast
Since Friday the new 2 mbps dedicated Internet access is working now and the first experience is quite a pleasant one. It's fast, ping times from Panama to the US or to Europe are much shorter than over cable modem as before.
Here a traceroute to Tampa, Florida in the US:
traceroute to www.caimito.net (207.150.163.124), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 192.168.10.1 (192.168.10.1) 1.768 ms 1.130 ms 1.019 ms 2 host-200-115-165-209.optynex.com (200.115.165.209) 2.052 ms 2.037 ms 2.649 ms 3 ge-2-1-0-501.ar1.pty1.gblx.net (208.51.117.169) 2.342 ms 2.996 ms 2.600 ms 4 so1-0-0-2488m.ar2.tpa1.gblx.net (67.17.66.169) 74.603 ms 75.025 ms 74.205 ms 5 lightspeed-ip-inc-triple-8.ge-3-0-0.ar2.tpa1.gblx.net (64.214.175.194) 74.942 ms 74.424 ms 74.435 ms 6 gige3.ds03a.tpa.sagonet.net (65.110.32.70) 75.489 ms 75.522 ms 74.846 ms 7 unknown.sagonet.net (207.150.163.124) 75.027 ms 75.679 ms 75.431 ms
And to Germany:
traceroute to www.heise.de (193.99.144.85), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 192.168.10.1 (192.168.10.1) 1.706 ms 1.038 ms 1.340 ms 2 host-200-115-165-209.optynex.com (200.115.165.209) 2.248 ms 2.388 ms 2.286 ms 3 ge-2-1-0-501.ar1.pty1.gblx.net (208.51.117.169) 2.352 ms 2.930 ms 2.640 ms 4 so4-0-0-2488m.ar2.fra2.gblx.net (67.17.65.78) 152.354 ms 139.273 ms 140.302 ms 5 plusline-ag-ip-services.ge-1-2-0.408.ar2.fra2.gblx.net (208.49.181.90) 159.152 ms 158.475 ms 158.795 ms 6 heise2.f.de.plusline.net (213.83.46.196) 161.429 ms 162.020 ms 161.908 ms
An interesting detail is this:
Optynex has deployed a fiber optics network based on Ethernet throughout Panama City, Panama, and connects customers with a simple TX-FX converter and a managed switch on the customer premises. If you look closely at the picture, you will see that the 100 mbps LED on the switch is illuminated. So we actually have a 100 mbps connection to the other side and only get shaped down to 2 mbps. There is some room to grow ;-)
Fiber Optics for Internet Access
Currently we use a 1 mbps connection that runs over TV cable. It was installed some time ago as a means to get any kind of IP access into the office - just to get started. In general it works nice, but at times it's flaky and ssh sessions drop or a file transfer stalls.
Three weeks ago I placed the order for a 2 mbps fiber optics circuit. It's a dedicated line with 2 mbps in both directions and of course we will have a set of static IP addresses that will allow us to run a few servers here. Not that I would like to have a datacenter in the middle of the office. That would be far too noisy. It's more about the flexibility to a few test systems here that will allow us to show customers things we are working on. Better security for our mail server and its contents is another reason for the upgrade.
The picture shows the breakout box where the fiber optics cable is terminated.
Why so many open source projects end up at Apache
Matt Raible reports that the Wicket web framework might become an Apache project and wonders why so many open source projects try to work under the Apache umbrella.
Apache has become a well-known brand that is know outside the developer's world as well. Journalists, financial analysts, clients in vertical markets and the average person all have heard somehow about Apache due to the popularity of the Apache httpd project.
The open source community does not only consist of spare-time-developers who code for fun and really don't have any commercial interest in their projects. There are a lot of professional developers who see better quality through collaboration, inspiration, and sharing of ideas for core concepts as important benefits of open source. The source code might be a major asset, but not as much as the brains behind a project. And basic technologies like programming frameworks are not so well suited to be released as a commercial project. They grow better in an open source ecosystem. Although one gives away a lot at the beginning, the contributions by the community are far more worth than that initial gift. But it needs a community for that to work. And the place where a community has the highest changes to form itself is at the Apache Foundation. For everything else there is always SourceForge. Codehaus seems to be good, but has not the visibility of Apache. So in the end everybody with higher ambitions will try to get into Apache.
Another motivation for some developers is to draw attention by potential consulting clients. The Apache brand certainly helps in this regard as well. So to go with Apache makes a lot of sense.