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sones at CeBIT 2010

March 9th, 2010 bietiekay No comments

Die CeBIT ist um und sones schliesst seinen Auftritt im Rahmen der Partnerschaft mit Microsoft mit einem durch und durch positiven Ergebnis ab.Ich selbst hatte ja aufgrund einer ungünstigen Terminsituation nur am Montag und am Freitag die Möglichkeit persönlich vor Ort zu sein.

Die CeBIT war dieses Jahr eine schöne Möglichkeit einmal im breiteren Rahmen als auf den sonst üblichen Konferenzen und Veranstaltungen zu netzwerken.

sones hatte die Gelegenheit zusammen mit anderen Partnerunternehmen am Microsoft Stand in Halle 4 auszustellen. Geniale Sache war das insofern dass wir sowohl am Stand als auch im Rahmen des MSDN Developer Kinos die Möglichkeit hatten unsere Technologie mit Demonstrationen und Worten vorzustellen.

IMG_0321

Ich hatte ja schon darüber geschrieben dass wir eine Demo für die CeBIT auf Basis des Microsoft Surface Multi-Touch Tisches entwickelt haben. Das Feedback zu dieser Demo war durchweg extrem positiv. Es ist eben ein Unterschied für viele nicht-Techniker wenn man Ihnen einen Graph grafisch vor Augen führt und in diesem Graphen navigieren kann.

Für die Techniker auf der anderen Hand hat sich Henning nocheinmal hingesetzt und ein wenig weiter ausgeführt was hinter der Surface Demo steckt. Das kann man hier nachlesen.

Hier ein paar Impressionen:

IMG_1843 

IMG_1836

 

Source: http://www.dreiundzwanzig.biz/?p=35

Categories: Microsoft, sones Tags:

CeBIT started and we have a demo!

March 3rd, 2010 bietiekay No comments

The effort of 10 days materializes in a Microsoft Surface demo. And you can see it at MSDN Developer Kino every day during CeBIT.

 

IMG_0733

Categories: Development, Employer, Microsoft, graphics, sones Tags:

Developing on a Microsoft Surface Table

February 20th, 2010 bietiekay 2 comments

At sones I am involved in a project that works with a piece of hardware I wanted to work with for about 3 years now: the Microsoft Surface Table.

I was able to play with some tables every now and then but I never had a “business case” which contained a Surface. Now that case just came to us: sones is at the CeBIT fair this year – we were invited by Microsoft Germany to join them and present our cool technology along with theirs.

Since we already had a graph visualisation tool the idea was to bring that tool to Surface and use the platform specific touch controls and gestures.

surface_visualgraph
the VisualGraph application that gave the initial idea

The good news was that it’s easier than thought to develop an application for Surface and all parties are highly committed to the project. The bad news is that we were short on time right from the start: less than 10 days from concept to live presentation isn’t the definition of “comfortable time schedule”. And since we’re currently in the process of development it’s a continueing race.

Thankfully Microsoft is committed to a degree they even made it possible to have two great Surface and WPF ninjas who enable is to get up to speed with the project (thanks to Frank Fischer, Andrea Kohlbauer-Hug, Rainer Nasch and Denis Bauer, you guys rock!).

surface_simulator
a Surface simulator

I was able to convice UID to jump in and contribute their designing and user interface knowledge to our little project (thanks to Franz Koller and Cristian Acevedo).

During the process of development I made some pictures which will be used here and there promoting the demonstration. To give you an idea of the progress we made here’s a before and after picture:

Surface_Finger2
We started with a simple port of VisualGraph to the surface table…

Surface_Finger
…and had something better working and looking at the end of that day.

I think everyone did a great job so far and will continue to do so – a lot work to be done till CeBIT! :-)

Source 1: http://www.sones.com
Source 2: http://www.microsoft.de
Source 3: http://www.uid.com/

sones GraphDB Visualization Tool

January 25th, 2010 bietiekay No comments

We want to show you something today: Not everybody has an idea what to think and do with a graph data structure. Not even talking about a whole graph database management system. In fact what everybody needs is something to get “in touch” with those kinds of data representations.

To make the graphs you are creating with the sones GraphDB that much more touchable we give you a sneak peak at our newest addition of the sone GraphDB toolset: the VisualGraph tool.

This tool connects to a running database and allows you to run queries on that database. The result of those queries is then presented to you in a much more natural and intuitive way, compared to the usual JSON and XML outputs. Even more: you can play with your queries and your data and see and feel what it’s like to work with a graph.

Expect this tool to be released in the next 1-2 months as open source. Everyone can use it, Everyone can benefit from it.

Oh. Almost forgot the video:

 

(Watch it in full screen if you can)

Categories: Development, Employer, Research, sones Tags:

expect podcasts from sones :-)

January 20th, 2010 bietiekay No comments

Since sones will be at some community events, conferences and trade shows this year we thought it might be a good idea to have some hardware to document these events.

Since we wanted to have video and we did not want to cope with the rather complex subject of DSLRs we bought a full-hd-camcorder.

IMG_4669 Panasonic HDC-SD300

IMG_4672Touchscreen… hard to find anything without a Touchscreen these days.

Categories: Hardware, sones Tags:

developing a command line interface for the sones GraphDB

January 14th, 2010 bietiekay No comments

As you may know, my team and I are developing a graph database. A graph database is a database which is able to handle such things as the following:

510px-Sna_largesocial graph

So instead of tables with rows and columns, a graph database concentrates on objects and the connections between them and is therefore forming a graph which can be queried, traversed, whatever-you-might-want-to-do.

Lately more and more companies start realizing that their demand for storing unstructured data is growing. Reflecting on unstructured data, I always think of data which cannot single-handedly be mapped in columns and rows (e.g. tables). Normally complex relations between data are represented in relation-tables only containing this relational information. The complexity to query these data structures is humongous as the table based database needs to ‘calculate’ (JOINs, …) the relations every time they are queried. Even though modern databases cache these calculations the costs in terms of memory and cpu time are huge.

Graph databases more or less try to represent this graph of objects and edges (as the relations are called there) as native as possible. The sones GraphDB we have been working on for the last 5 years does exactly that: It stores and queries a data structure which represents a graph of objects. Our approach is to give the user a simple and easy to learn query language and handle all the object storage and object management tasks in a fully blown object oriented graph database developed from the scratch.

Since not everybody seems to have heard of graph databases, we thought it might be a good idea to lower barriers by providing personalized test instances. Everyone can get one of these without the need to install anything – a working AJAX/Javascript compatible browser will suit all needs. (get your instance here.)

Of course the user can choose between different ways to access the database test instance (like SOAP and REST) but the one we just released only needs a browser.

standard_cli

The sones GraphDB WebShell – as we call it – resembles a command line interface. The user can type a query and it is instantly executed on the database server and the results are presented in either a xml, json or text format.

graphdb-webshell

Granted – the interested user needs to know about the query language and the possible usage scenarios. Everyone can access a long and a short documentation here.

Source 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_graph
Source 2: http://www.sones.com
Source 3: Long documentation
Source 4: Short documentation

Categories: Development, Employer, hack-the-planet, sones Tags:

sones GraphQueryLanguage and GraphDB Quick Reference

January 13th, 2010 bietiekay No comments

Since we all need documentation I thought it would be a great idea to create a one-pager which helps every user to remember important things like query language syntax.

You can download the cheatsheet here:

cheatsheet 

Download here.

Categories: Employer, Research, sones Tags:

small tool to filter iCal / iCalendar / ICS files

December 6th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

I am managing my appointments using Outlook on windows and iCal on OS X. Since I am not using any Exchange service right now I was happy to find out that Outlook offers a functionality to export a local calendar automatically to an iCalendar compatible ICS file. Great feature but it lacks some things I desperately need.

outlookg

Since I am managing my private and my business appointments in the same calendar, differentiating just by categories, I had a hard time configuring outlook to export a) an ics file containing all business appointments and b) an ics file containing all private appointments. It’s not possible to make the story short.

So I fired up Visual Studio as usual and wrote my own filter tool. I shall call it “iCalFilter”. It’s name is as simple as it’s functionality and code. I am releasing it under BSD license including the sources so everyone can use and modify it.

icalfilter_1

It’s a command line tool which should compile on Microsoft .NET and Mono. It takes several command line parameters like:

  1. Input-File
  2. Output-File
  3. “include” or “exclude” –> this determines if the following categories are included or excluded in the output file
  4. a list of categories separated by spaces
  5. an optional parameter “-remove-description” which, if entered, removes all descriptions from events and alarms

Easy, eh?!

Grab the Source and Binary here: http://dropbox.schrankmonster.de/dropped/iCalFilter01.zip

Categories: Development, Employer, Reallife, private, sones Tags:

Unser erster Presse-Artikel im heise Newsticker

November 23rd, 2009 bietiekay No comments

Was für ein Tag. Nachdem wir vor ein paar Tagen nach viel harter Arbeit die “Technical Preview” unseres Babys “graphDB” gestartet haben hat nun auch der heise Verlag – namentlich die iX die frohe Kunde aufgegriffen und einen entsprechenden Artikel im Newsticker veröffentlich.

Wenn man sich auf jede Instanz die im Moment für Tester läuft ein Login geben lässt sieht das übrigends so aus:

hosting75instances

Wundervoll zu sehen dass die Arbeit von exzellenten Entwicklern entsprechende Würdigung durch Kunden erhält. Interesse ist gut und ich denke in Zukunft wird man noch viel von der sones graphDB hören!

Source: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Objektorientierte-Datenbank-als-Webservice-866041.html

Categories: Development, Employer, sones Tags:

If you ever needed Box-Shots of your product for a presentation…

October 12th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

If you – like us – need a picture of a shiny product box of a soon-to-be-released product for your presentation you may want to consider buying several tools to create such shots. But you can also just use a small tool and Windows Presentation Foundation.

There’s a great article on CodeProject where a almost everything is pre-set-up for our needs. And everything is written in C# – great stuff!

In action it looks like this:

sones-boxshot

Source: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/BoxShot.aspx?display=Print

How to sell a car

September 22nd, 2009 bietiekay No comments

Mission accomplished. I successfully talked a co-worker, who needed to buy a new car, into buying a gadget-packed BMW 1 series.

He calls it his “cluster on 4 wheels” – because obviously there is some processing “horse-power” in this machine :-)

img_7539s

May he always have a safe ride!

Source 1: http://blog.ahzf.de/index.php/2009/09/21/mein-cluster-hat-vier-rader/

Categories: Hardware, Motorsport, Reallife, sones Tags:

massive parallel computing with FPGAs

August 25th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

Today we had a great meeting with SciEngines. These guys offer a great platform for everything that needs massive parallelism and IO bandwidth scalability. They even brought a small copacobana cluster to our headquater.

IMG_0045

IMG_0044

Source: http://www.sciengines.com

Categories: Development, Hardware, hack-the-planet, sones Tags:

Many 0×00s in the test run results…

July 24th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

We have this network share where each build from all the build-servers is dropped, including it’s test run results. It seems that we’re producing a huge number of almost empty filesystem test images which lead to astounding compression ratios:

efficiency

Categories: Development, Employer, Riot, sones Tags:

Plain-Text Username Password Authentification with WCF

July 21st, 2009 bietiekay No comments

If you got it, it’s easy. If you’re starting from scratch it ain’t as easy. We were in need of such a Username+Password Authentification so I started googling around.

I found several articles but had to mash it all together in a trial-and-error session. Now that I am enlightened I want to share my knowledge:

Step 1: Implement an UserNamePasswordValidator class and override the Validate method.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IdentityModel.Tokens;
using System.IdentityModel.Selectors;

namespace sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting
{
    public class UserNamePasswordAuthentification: UserNamePasswordValidator
    {

        public override void Validate(string userName, string password)
        {
            if ((userName != "Username") || (password != "Password"))
            {
                throw new SecurityTokenException("Validation Failed!");
            }
        }
    }
}

Step 2: Edit the App.config file to enable the previously implemented UsernamePasswordValidator.

    <bindings>
      <basicHttpBinding>
        <binding name="CustomAuthentication">
          <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly">
            <transport clientCredentialType="Basic" proxyCredentialType="Basic"/>
          security>
        binding>
      basicHttpBinding>
    bindings>
    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="SecurityBehavior">
          <serviceCredentials>
            <userNameAuthentication
            userNamePasswordValidationMode="Custom"
            customUserNamePasswordValidatorType="sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting.UserNamePasswordAuthentification, PandoraDB_WebServiceHost_UsernamePasswordAuth"/>
          serviceCredentials>
        behavior>
      serviceBehaviors>
    behaviors>
    <services>
      <service behaviorConfiguration="SecurityBehavior" name="sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting.PandoraDatabaseHost">
        <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="CustomAuthentication"
          name="ep1" contract="sones.Pandora.Database.Hosting.IPandoraDatabaseHost" />
      service>
    services>

In this example the ServiceHost will use no server SSL certificate and therefor allow normal http access instead of just using https ssl. You can configure that behavior with the <security mode=”TransportCredentialOnly”> line. Just change there and define an apropriate certificate and you’re good to go with https / ssl.

Categories: Development, Internet, networking, sones Tags:

wieder aktuell: sones sucht weitere engagierte Softwareentwickler

July 16th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

Ich hatte Ende letzten Jahres ja schon einmal ein Stellenangebot hier online gestellt. Damals mit dem Ergebnis einige sehr interessante Bewerber und letzlich auch hochmotivierte und qualifizierte Mitarbeiter gefunden zu haben.

Da wir nun wieder auf der Suche nach Verstärkung sind nutze ich wieder dieses Medium:


Die sones GmbH ist ein junges IT-Unternehmen mit Standort in Erfurt. Wir forschen in den Bereichen neuartiger Datenbank- und Speichertechnologien und entwickeln auf dieser Basis neue und innovative Produkte und Lösungen.

Am Standort Erfurt suchen wir ab sofort eine(n)

Software-Entwickler JAVA / .NET (m/w)

Sie wollen in einem jungen Team innovative Software entwickeln die im Datenbank-Segment ganz neue Wege aufzeigt? Als Software-Entwickler bei der sones GmbH haben Sie hierzu die Gelegenheit!

In einem hoch motiviertem Entwicklerteam arbeiten Sie am Kern unseres Datenbanksystems mit. Sie entwickeln Features und verbessern die Qualität der Codebasis im Hinblick auf Stabilität, Performance und Skalierbarkeit. Dabei kommen modernste Entwicklungswerkzeuge zum Einsatz.

Wenn Sie unsere hohen Ansprüche an fachliches Wissen, Eigeninitiative und Kommunikation als Herausforderung sehen – dann sind Sie bei uns herzlich willkommen!

Ihre Aufgaben:

  • Projektplanung und Projektsteuerung in Koordination mit anderen Entwicklungsbereichen
  • Analyse, Design, Implementierung neuer Produktfeatures
  • Verbesserung der Qualität existierenden Codes im Hinblick auf Stabilität, Performance und Skalierbarkeit
  • Softwaretests und Dokumentationen
  • Evaluierung neuer Technologien und Prototyping

Voraussetzungen:

  • Studium im Bereich der Informatik oder vergleichbare Ausbildung mit überzeugenden Referenzen (Projekte, Beschäftigungen)
  • Mehrjährige Erfahrung in der Objektorientierten Softwareentwicklung
  • Von Vorteil:
    • Programmierkenntnisse JAVA und .NET
    • Erfahrungen mit Testdriven Development
    • Gute Englischkenntnisse
    • Erfahrungen mit Datenbankarchitekturen und Netzwerkprogrammierung

Ihre Soft Skills:

  • Kommunikationsstärke und Bereitschaft zum dynamischen Wissens- und Informationsaustausch
  • Zuverlässigkeit und eigenständige kreative Denk- und Arbeitsweise
  • Ziel- bzw. Lösungsorientiertes Vorgehen

Wir bieten:

  • Hoch motiviertes und qualifiziertes Team
  • Ausgesprochen interessante und innovative Arbeitsgebiete
  • Viel Platz für Eigeninitiative und Kreativität
  • Die ständige Möglichkeit sich weiterzubilden und weiterzuentwickeln
  • Herausforderndes Umfeld eines High-Tech Start-Ups

Sie sind interessiert? Dann freuen wir uns über ihre aussagekräftige Bewerbung mit Angabe ihrer Gehaltsvorstellung an jobs@sones.de


Der Vollständigkeit halber das Stellenangebot nochmal als PDF:

Stellenangebot sones GmbH

Categories: Development, Employer, sones Tags:

getting System.ServiceModel.AddressAccessDeniedException in automated WCF Tests

June 5th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

We’re currently running several build processes. So each time someone checks new code in one of the build machines gets the whole package and builds it, runs tests on it and stores the result of this whole process on the Team Foundation Server. Great stuff so far.

Until you start to do things like automated WCF Testing. We’re using the selfhosting capabilities of the WCF to start a ServiceHost and then run tests against it. This works great locally. It does not on the build machines. Even if you promote the Build-Service User to Administrator you won’t get the love.

The error you might get would look something like this:

Capture

The exception contains an URL which tells you to add the Service URL to the machines URL Access Control List. On Windows XP and 2003 you have to install the Windows Support Tools and use the httpcfg command. On Windows Vista and 2008 you should use the already installed netsh commandline tool.

Since we need to get this to work on all current and future build servers I decided to add the netsh call to the build script, which looks like this:

” border=”0″ alt=”” src=”http://www.schrankmonster.de/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/get.AddressAccessDeniedExceptioninautoma_9859/Capture2_thumb.png” width=”400″ height=”109″ />

Add this Target before any tests in the .proj file and you’re set.

Source 1: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70353

Categories: Development, Employer, Software, sones Tags:

sones portiert sein Speichersystem auf das Speichermedium der Zukunft!

April 15th, 2009 bietiekay 1 comment

Aufgrund neuester Entwicklungen im Speichermedien-Segment wird ab dem nächsten Release des sones Speichersystems auch das angesagteste Speichermedium der Stunde unterstützt: die Speichergurke.

Durch die sensationelle Speicherdichte und unerreichte Zuverlässigkeit ist die Speichergurke das perfekte Speichermedium für den Datenhunger von gestern, heute und morgen.

Source 1: http://www.sones.de
Source 2: http://www.speichergurke.de

sones is sponsoring partner of NEXT Conference 2009

April 9th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

Turns out that we’re actually doing business there – great news that is!

next09hamburg

sponsors09

Source: http://www.next-conference.com/next09/

Categories: Development, Meetings, sones Tags:

TechED EMEA 2009 – in Germany – will we be there? :-)

April 9th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

image

The dates are:

TechEd Berlin 2009 Developer
2-6 November – Messe Berlin, Deutschland – Germany

TechEd Berlin 2009 IT-Professionals
9-13 November – Messe Berlin, Deutschland – Germany

Comment if you’re going too!

Categories: Development, Employer, sones Tags:

Bugs Bunny

April 6th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

Welcome our newest office Member!

From the sales department with love:

006

Bugs Bunny

Categories: Development, Employer, Software, sones Tags:

T-Online Venture Fund investiert in die sones GmbH

April 2nd, 2009 bietiekay 2 comments

Bonn, 2. April 2009

Der T-Online Venture Fund gab heute ein Investment in die sones GmbH bekannt. sones sicherte sich in einer zweiten Finanzierungsrunde eine Beteiligung im einstelligen Millionenbereich. Mit den zusätzlichen Mitteln soll das Produkt bis zur endgültigen Marktreife weiterentwickelt werden.

Das 2007 gegründete Software-Unternehmen aus Erfurt hat eine völlig neue, innovative Datenbanktechnologie entwickelt. Die objektorientierte Datenbank kann die relevanten Informationen aus komplexen, unstrukturierten Datenmengen direkt miteinander verbinden und setzt somit neue Maßstäbe hinsichtlich Skalierbarkeit und Performance. Mit dieser Technologie werden komplexitätsbedingt bisher unlösbare Probleme in der Datenspeicherung und -analyse beherrschbar.

soneslogo 

“Bei sones hat uns vor allem die innovative Technologie überzeugt und der Ansatz, Bestehendes in Frage zu stellen. Somit können völlig neue Möglichkeiten des Datenmanagements geschaffen werden“, so Christoph Schmidt, Senior Vice President bei der Deutschen Telekom AG für den Bereich Personal Social Networks.

sones arbeitet derzeit am Ausbau seiner Datenbanktechnologie sowie am dazugehörigen Dateisystem. Gegen Ende dieses Jahres wird die erste Vollversion des objektorientierten Datenbankmanagementsystems (DBMS) zur Verfügung stehen. Softwareentwicklern und Partnern wird es via SDK (Software Development Kit) ermöglicht, weitreichenden Einfluss auf die Entwicklung zu nehmen und Veränderungen am System vorzunehmen. sones lädt interessierte Softwareentwickler und potentielle Partner ein, sich über die Webseite www.sones.de für das Preview- und Partner-Programm anzumelden, um die kostenlose Entwicklerversion zu erhalten und Feedback für die zukünftige Weiterentwicklung zu geben. Derzeit steht ein auf Webservices basierendes Tagging- und Recommendation-System zur Verfügung, das bereits kommerziell eingesetzt wird. „Das System kann an die jeweiligen Anforderungen in den Bereichen eCommerce, Social Networks und Portal/Content-Lösungen angepasst werden“ sagt Alexander Oelling, Leiter New Business Development bei sones. Auch hier setzt sones auf die Zusammenarbeit mit Software-Partnern, um das Produkt in die jeweiligen Webseiten zu integrieren.

Mauricio Matthesius, Geschäftsführer von sones: „Der T-Online Venture Fund hat erkannt, dass unsere revolutionäre Technologie die Zukunft der Datenbanken mitbestimmen kann, und uns in die Lage versetzt, diese Vision konsequent umzusetzen.“

Mit dem Einstieg des T-Online Venture Fund sucht das Unternehmen weitere Mitarbeiter vor allen in den Bereichen Softwareentwicklung und Vertrieb.”

Source 1: http://www.t-venture.de/de/topnews/090402_PM_TOVF_sones_dt
Source 2: http://www.sones.de

Categories: Employer, makes-my-day, sones Tags:

two times unfortunate stuff

March 1st, 2009 bietiekay No comments

First my Vista x64 machine at home seems to get slower by any minute it is powered on – most likely because one service is eating up all the installed memory:

5gb
(screenshot from Process Explorer)

I wasn’t able to figure out what’s the problem with it – restarting the associated services did nothing at all – killing it and restarting the services resulted in 5 gb of free memory…

And then there’s the other thing that happened this morning. We ordered a pile of 20 hard disks before christmas – and now 4 of them died.

business

Farewell you little 1 Tbyte hard disk – we never had the chance to get to know each other better.

Categories: Employer, Hardware, Software, sones Tags:

sones got a new website

February 20th, 2009 bietiekay 1 comment

Finally after more than two months of hard work of our marketing department the new sones.de website is online. Hurray! ;) It looks better and it’s way more informative than the old one was.

soneswebsite

Categories: Development, Employer, graphics, sones Tags:

finally faster internet

February 19th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

QSC just delivered a second DSL line to our office – now even faster – 16 Mbits downstream should be enough for now. Since the german telecom could not deliver more than 3 Mbit/s we had to ask QSC for their service… overall a very good customer experience so far.

If you order a DSL line in germany from a reseller like QSC it means that a technical guy from the german telecom is sent to your place and he is doing the last mile connect – in our case the guy thought it would be enough to drop the TAE socket inside the wall… means we have to get another company to do the cabling afterwards… well.

006

Categories: Employer, Internet, networking, sones Tags:

Pirates! and one more desk

February 18th, 2009 bietiekay 3 comments

Marketing got us a pirate flag – nice of ‘em, isn’t it? Since Henning has started is work he is currently sitting in our office – waiting for the other two guys to move in the office.

003

Pirates! HO!

 

003_stitch

Categories: Employer, sones Tags:

New Notebooks and the office for the 3 new developers :-)

February 11th, 2009 bietiekay 6 comments

I’ve got a new work horse :-) A brand new Dell Latitude E6400 just arrived on monday. It’s quite a lot faster than my old one and after the fresh install it’s also a whole lot better to work with.

017 

The other news is that all the new hardware for the 3 new developers arrived this week. That means that the guys can move in! :-)

020

3x Latitude E6400, 3x Keyboard+Mouse, 3x Sennheiser Headset, 3x 24” Widescreen

Categories: Employer, Hardware, sones Tags:

Sit down please.

February 5th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

Ha! I almost forgot to write about the cool sofa which was delivered last week (closing up to 99.99% Office completeness):

IMG_3974

 

It’s comfy and looks great – now the only thing left is the silver screen for the projector … the projector itself and the XBOX 360 is already here :-)

P.S.: Wanna work for us?

Categories: Employer, sones Tags:

Brawndo! THE THIRST MUTILATOR – It’s got what plants crave!

February 5th, 2009 bietiekay 2 comments

The final last pieces are falling into their place: We’re at 99.98% completion of the SONES Office Space.

Today we got the soda delivery. Since it’s unclear right now who likes what the most (pretty clear for myself: Dr.Pepper FTW!) the first order contained three different sorts.

Look that gorgeous fridge:

fridge

That means: Free Soda for every employee!

Source: http://brawndo.com/

Categories: Reallife, sones Tags:

Jabber Logging Windows Service Sourcecode

January 27th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

I promised you the sourcecode of the Jabber Logging Client Service I’ve written. You can read about it here.

It’s now a fully blown Windows Service which monitors the EvenLog Datasource you specify. You can specify filters now so that you won’t get overwhelmed by uninteresting messages from the Windows Event Log of the monitored machine. You don’t need to restart the service if you changed a filter – it’ll pick the new filter up automatically. The same stands for the target users. Just change the XML and the Service will pick that information up. If you change the EventLog Datasource or the Jabber-Settings you’’ll need to restart the service.

So here it is: JabberLoggingService Version 0.2

If you’re going to use it and you like it please drop me a line. Oh and don’t forget to read the readme.txt for full instructions.

Oh I almost forgot: You can grab the Sourcecode of the Linux version here: http://www.ahzf.de/itstuff/XMPPLogger/

Source 1: http://www.schrankmonster.de/2009/01/22/UsingJabberToMonitorWindowsEventLogs.aspx
Source 2: http://www.schrankmonster.de/content/binary/JabberLoggingService0_2.zip
Source 3: http://www.ahzf.de/itstuff/XMPPLogger/

Categories: Development, Software, sones Tags:

the feeling of success

January 26th, 2009 bietiekay No comments

When your brand new build server compiles and tests your code automatically and successfully for the first time… oh what a great way to end the work day:

buildtests

Categories: Development, Software, sones Tags:

Jabber Instant Messaging Eventlog Service with Presence Information

January 23rd, 2009 bietiekay 5 comments

I found out what to do to get the Jabber Eventlog Service to display status information in the Jabber Client…

serverZ

nice, eh? ;)

Categories: Development, Software, sones Tags:

Using Jabber to monitor Windows EventLogs

January 22nd, 2009 bietiekay 6 comments

Like every company we also got several machines working just for our infrastructural needs like Sharepoints, Activedirectory, Databases, Backup-Servers and so on.

To monitor many machines we came across the idea to use Jabber Instant Messaging to monitor the machines. For example the VPN should drop a line to specified jabber adresses if someone connects or disconnects. Every single machine is maintaining it’s own log – which means you would have to consolidate them in some ways. And since consolidation is not the masterplan – since you would need an event alarm system which sends out alarm calls if something weird is happening, you would need that alarm system too.

So we wrote (while waiting for the machines to install) several small tools which provide a gateway between syslog-ng, windows event logs and Jabber.

Since we are using this productively my Jabber Client Window looks something like this:

psi 

As you can see there are 3 machines online right now – and since these are Linux machines they also provide some status information like load averages and free memory. The Linux version was written by ahzf in perl – and obviously his library can handle the presence and status information much better than the one I used for the Windows version :-) – So there are no presence and status informations for the Windows machines right now.

The Windows version is written in C# and relies on the Jabber.NET library. It comes with a small setup and runs as a windows service.

jabbereventlog_windows

In the setup you have to enter the username+password of a user that can access the local Windows Event Log. After the successful setup you need to edit the config file:

editconfig

It’s XML and quite easy to understand (I think) – so you define the jabber server, the user, the password, the Users that you want to receive the messages and the EventLog you want to monitor.

After starting the service you get the startup message via the jabber server and from now on everything that is written into the Windows Event Log is sent to the accounts you specified. Easy eh?

P.S.: sourcecode release will be after we packaged everything.

Source: http://code.google.com/p/jabber-net/

Categories: Development, Employer, Software, networking, sones Tags:

Power Install Party

December 15th, 2008 bietiekay No comments

Hmm… setting up the new gear for the office infrastructure can be somewhat time consuming…

powerinstallparty2

Having relatively huge VMWare Server Host machines we’re power-installing all the virtual machines that are needed for your inhouse infrastructure…

Categories: Employer, Software, sones Tags:

SONES Office 80% complete

December 8th, 2008 bietiekay No comments

Das Entwickler-Büro #1 ist bereits 99% fertiggestellt… auch sonst sind die Räumlichkeiten nun fast komplett :-)

Also deshalb auch ein paar Update Panoramen:

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(Achim am Gerät)

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Categories: Employer, Panorama, sones Tags:

Stellenangebot Softwareentwickler .NET / C#

December 3rd, 2008 bietiekay 2 comments

Wir stellen ein!

Die Sones GmbH ist ein junges IT-Unternehmen mit Standort in Erfurt. Wir forschen in den Bereichen neuartiger Datenbank- und Speichertechnologien und entwickeln auf dieser Basis neue und innovative Produkte und Lösungen.

Am Standort Erfurt suchen wir ab sofort eine(n)

Software-Entwickler .NET / C# (m/w)

Sie wollen in einem jungen Team innovative Software entwickeln die im Datenbank-Segment ganz neue Wege aufzeigt? Als Software-Entwickler bei der Sones GmbH haben Sie hierzu die Gelegenheit!

In einem hoch motiviertem Entwicklerteam arbeiten Sie am Kern unseres Datenbanksystems mit. Sie entwickeln Features und verbessern die Qualität der Codebasis im Hinblick auf Stabilität, Performance und Skalierbarkeit. Dabei kommen modernste Entwicklungswerkzeuge zum Einsatz.

Wenn Sie unsere hohen Ansprüche an fachliches Wissen, Eigeninitiative und Kommunikation als Herausforderung sehen – dann sind Sie bei uns herzlich willkommen!

Ihre Aufgaben:

  • Projektplanung und Projektsteuerung in Koordination mit anderen Entwicklungsbereichen
  • Analyse, Design, Implementierung neuer Produktfeatures
  • Verbesserung der Qualität existierenden Codes im Hinblick auf Stabilität, Performance und Skalierbarkeit
  • Softwaretests und Dokumentationen
  • Evaluierung neuer Technologien und Prototyping

Voraussetzungen:

  • Studium im Bereich der Informatik oder vergleichbare Ausbildung mit überzeugenden Referenzen (Projekte, Beschäftigungen)
  • Mehrjährige Erfahrung in der Objektorientierten Softwareentwicklung
  • Von Vorteil:
    • Programmierkenntnisse .NET und C#
    • Erfahrungen mit Testdriven Development
    • Gute Englischkenntnisse
    • Erfahrungen mit Datenbankarchitekturen und Netzwerkprogrammierung

Ihre Soft Skills:

  • Kommunikationsstärke und Bereitschaft zum dynamischen Wissens- und Informationsaustausch
  • Zuverlässigkeit und eigenständige kreative Denk- und Arbeitsweise
  • Ziel- bzw. Lösungsorientiertes Vorgehen

Wir bieten:

  • Hoch motiviertes und qualifiziertes Team
  • Ausgesprochen interessante und innovative Arbeitsgebiete
  • Viel Platz für Eigeninitiative und Kreativität
  • Die ständige Möglichkeit sich weiterzubilden und weiterzuentwickeln
  • Herausforderndes Umfeld eines High-Tech Start-Ups

Sie sind interessiert? Dann freuen wir uns über ihre aussagekräftige Bewerbung mit Angabe ihrer Gehaltsvorstellung an jobs@sones.de

Der Vollständigkeit halber das Stellenangebot nochmal als PDF:

Categories: Employer, sones Tags:

Das neue SONES Office :-)

December 3rd, 2008 bietiekay No comments

Seit Anfang dieser Woche sind wir ja offiziell in die neuen Räume eingezogen und dementsprechend geht es hier die ganze Zeit rund. Ikea hat schon aufgebaut und gerade ziehen die Elektriker die notwendigen Netzwerk- und Stromkabel ein. Es geht zu wie im Taubenschlag :-)

Rein technisch ist zumindest mein Arbeitsplatz schon vollständig aufgebaut – alles in allem ist hier ein deutlich angenehmeres Arbeiten möglich als im alten Büro und es sieht alles viel schicker aus.

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jaja es sieht noch wild aus – aber es entsteht ja noch :-)

Habe ich erwähnt dass das Büro indem ich sitze das einzige mit Tür auf die Dachterrasse ist? Oh das wird toll im Sommer!

IMG_3838_stitch

der Himmel ist böse grau in letzter Zeit – ich schätze ich habe heute eine interessante Heimfahrt.

Categories: Employer, sones Tags:

Philips Living Colors

November 29th, 2008 bietiekay No comments

After painting the walls we took one of the new Philips Living Colors Lamp for a test run:


SONES Logo + Living Colors from Bietiekay on Vimeo.

Categories: Modding, sones Tags:

Painting the wall

November 29th, 2008 bietiekay No comments

SONES just moved into the new place – and after having all the ordering done we’re now waiting for the delivery of the various bits and pieces of the new office.

To make it a little bit more SONESisch my wife and I decided to paint a 1,5m huge logo of the company on the wall that can be seen first when you walk in. So we went to the nearest hardware store and bought all the needed tools aaaaaaaand we found somebody who could mix the right shade of green to fit our company color.

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Back at the office we started with placing the projector and the logo itself so we could draw the borders with a pencil on the wall.

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When the borders where on the wall we started the masking tape attack! It was the first time that I had used masking tape but it everything went surprisingly good.

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The last and final step is to paint it. So we got the paint, we got the rollers – and after half an hour:

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The shades you’re seeing in the picture above are just because of the wet and already dry paint which has a slightly different shade. So after a bit of drying and the removal of the masking tape:

IMG_3827

Et voilá!

Categories: Modding, Reallife, sones Tags:

elastic windows

October 24th, 2008 bietiekay No comments

Amazon has done it’s thing and you can now order Windows based machinery based on EC2. That’s great news for us since we’re definitly planning to make our software also available on EC2.

“Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 is a fast and dependable environment for deploying applications using the Microsoft Web Platform, including ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight™, and Internet Information Server (IIS). Amazon EC2 enables you to run any compatible Windows-based solution on AWS’ high-performance, reliable, cost-effective, cloud computing platform. Common Windows use cases include website and web-service hosting, high-performance computing (HPC) and data processing, media transcoding, distributed testing, ASP.NET application hosting, and any other application requiring Windows software. Amazon EC2 also now supports the SQL Server® Express and SQL Server Standard databases, and makes those offerings available to customers on an hourly basis.”

Source: http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

Categories: Development, Employer, Internet, networking, sones Tags:

Dye your life…

September 28th, 2008 bietiekay No comments

Some weeks ago I came across those cool color changing LED lamps made by Philips in a hardware store. It’s a mood light with a remote control – you can even control up to 6 lamps with one remote… Oh I really do think that several of these would be great in the new office or at home.

livingcolors

Source: http://www.lighting.philips.com/microsite/living_colors/