My favourite python easter-egg

Posted on 2011/11/21 by Gregor Dorfbauer

Try it!

import this

If you are curious and don’t have a python shell near to you: Python PEP-20/

Posted in Python | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Usersnap launch!

Posted on 2011/11/07 by Gregor Dorfbauer

Today our new product, Usersnap has been launched into private beta!
Usersnap is a visual feedback tool. Just add some lines of JavaScript to your webpage and your visitors can send you annotated screenshots of your webpage. It’s perfect for testing / going live of a new webpage. Immediately after a user notices an issue, he/she can send a screenshot without using external tools.

There is no need to install any plugins (no Flash, no 3rd party Javascript needed) and it’s completely asynchronous (it does not slow down your page in any condition).

Please test it (either on usersnap.com or directly here in the lower right corner) and feel free to request a free private beta account!

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Handling SNMP Counter32 overflows on HP1810-G correctly

Posted on 2011/10/10 by Gregor Dorfbauer

Most network devices can be queried using SNMP nowadays. Luckily, even for a small HP 1810G-24 Switch, about 2000 SNMP OIDs exist – hooray for graphing.
One of the most interesting graphs on a switch is bits in/out on each port.

The HP 1810G-24 switch does not support Counter64-types for octet counters. This post introduces a middleware to fetch the Counter32-types fast enough to build a software Counter64 object to display the correct bandwidth in a munin graph.
Continue reading →

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Benchmarking inside virtual environments (Time is relative)

Posted on 2011/08/17 by Gregor Dorfbauer

A reliable time base is needed for successful benchmarking. But what if the system’s time is correct in an absolute way, but not in a relative way? During my evaluation of different virtualization techniques I found some strange results – nearly four times the performance inside a VM on VirtualBox vs. the native performance of the host!

Continue reading →

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How to send text messages using Python and a modem

Posted on 2011/08/12 by Florian Dorfbauer

At La Gentz we love to monitor our servers and services. We also love all the fancy warning e-mails if something is going bad at our server room.

Recently we realized, there’s a single issue we can’t get warned by e-mail: The breaking of the interwebs in our office (i.e. our main router crashes or someone accidentally unplugs the red cable)

This is fixing the internet

Continue reading →

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Using the Kinect for public User-Interfaces on Ubuntu Linux

Posted on 2011/07/19 by Gregor Dorfbauer

The Microsoft Kinect is a affordable (around 100 EUR) device for natural interaction. I present a way to use the Kinect under Ubuntu Linux 10.10 (x64) as an input device for a browser remote control using OpenNI, Sensor Kinect and the NITE toolkit.
Kudos goes to Mathias Frey (Vienna University of Economics) for being cool enough to commission us with this cutting edge evaluation!

Continue reading →

Posted in Python, User-Interface | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

La Gentz at last years SenchaCon

Posted on 2011/06/22 by Gregor Dorfbauer

Have a close look at the promotional image of next years Sencha con, Florian Dorfbauer of La Gentz is presenting our ExtJS-Solutions to the experts!

http://secure.lenos.com/lenos/sencha/SenchaCon2011/agenda.htm

Posted in General | 1 Comment

NodeJS – parsing and transforming large XML documents

Posted on 2011/04/18 by Josef

If you are working with legacy data you often get in troubles with the problem that you have large amout of data. A few weeks ago, I had to parse large XML files, extract some data, convert it, add manually generated data and after that save the output to a JSON file. (We need this because later this file was used as input for our own ExtJS/Sencha component).

Continue reading →

Posted in nodejs | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

New Power Source for La Gentz Data Centers

Posted on 2011/04/01 by Gregor Dorfbauer

In times of a nearing energy crisis, La Gentz tries to operate their data center as independent as possible. Because of the decrease in demand of our family’s cider products, we thought about a biogas plant, which powers our own data centers.

Green-IT

Continue reading →

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How to compile and build a QtWebkit application with MS Visual Studio 2008

Posted on 2011/03/28 by Michael Mayrhofer

Sometimes you want to use a modern browser (read: not Internet Explorer 6.0 for instance) inside your client application, in order to display external web pages or dynamic web applications.
If you want to build your own browser application QtWebkit provides an easy to use API.

This Blog post provides an easy, step by step guide to integrate the Qt WebKit browser component into your client application. Continue reading →

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