One day, we have the need to create a fast cluster of linux machine, specialized and easy to segragate in different networks (for better security). We need web servers, integration servers (running java hudson), huge developer machines (running for instance eclispe) and so on.

It was not easy to find a good environment. This research lead us also to consider a very huge set of different and complex management software. In this series of article, we will show what we discovered.

Or final goal is to have a way to define a set of linux virutal machines, connect them and manage all using open source software. We also want tools easy to understand. We do not want super-optimized stuff, we have the “just it works well” approach.

We thinked about these types of virtual machine: super light LAMP servers, medim sized java tomcat servers (or udson servers), big database machines and super big development machines.

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After working with unix for years, we noticed it is difficult to get a very uniform approach to unix management.

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If you're trying to use MySQL with phpMyAdmin, you've set up the phpMyAdmin's config.inc.php, and you're getting an error saying "Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client", you need to set the password on the mysql command line using the OLD_PASSWORD('password') routine.

For example:

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Every Year, Giovanni consider some "trends"  based on his consultant experience. This trends have been gathered in the last six months, and are printed  at regular basis. This thoughts  are note merely "preference", but are strong opinions based on IT firms products, cleared by buzz-words and soap-opera-like scoop (like "Wired"  bad ideas are :).

CMS Market is still facing PHP simplicity versus huge software house products.

Druapl & Wordpress are good. Drupal is an ace if you are very dynamic needs. For instance, multi-language sites, forums, polls and so on are a snap to install. But if usability is a concern, choose wordpress. joomla/Mambo are not so good in my own opinion, but I’d like to her a comment from you.

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The http://www.pocketsoap.com/tcpTrace/ is a small windows utility to track down connections.

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Da Acquadro.it, leggiamo questo suggerimento su come trasferire le email da Outlook al vostro Mac:

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Testing is important.

Testing web interfaces is difficult, and often your consultant company prefer to suggest you a manual-based testing. But is it so difficult to do automatic web testing using open source software?

Let’s give a look to two nice web testing software

Warning: this article is still in progress: it has been published for getting comments all around.

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Book review by Stefano Fago: This book introduce one of most interesting  language of new wave of functional programming. You will find a complete overview of clojure language focusing in functional paradigm that can be the real obstacle for a standard developer. The author try to follow you on learning different subject with a lot of examples but sometimes it need more reflection and time to master some arguments and a syntax that may seems obscure. The book is a good starting point to introduce you to a new way of programming but also to learn some particulars aspect of Java. To consider a complete but not easy reading. However a book to have!

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One of the best thing of scripting languages like Python is the ability to fast prototype complex things. In the past ten years, if you like to build distributed application you was forced to use huge and heavily languages like Java.

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Django Project, a powerful and clean Python Web Framework, is going to relase 1.2 as  the next milestone at the beginning of March. For the meanwhile, you can grab the Beta2:

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