Latest news
Devops for Drupal, the survey
Devops is gaining momentum, the idea that developers and operations should work much closer together , the idea that one should automate as much as possible in both their infrastructure and their release process brings along a lot of questions, ideas and tools that need to be integrated in your daily way of working.
Drupal has one of the biggest development communities in the open source world, being part of both communities We are trying to bridge the gap,
At Inuits we are building tools and writing best practices to close the gap, but we are not alone in this world and we would like to gather some feedback on how other people are deploying, and managing their Drupal environments Working with Drupal, build with Drupal in mind .. how do you release your sites .. That's what we are trying to figure out ... for everybody else to learn from
Oh and you can win some items of our brand new fashion line !
The survey is here , please spend a bit of your time helping us to better understand the needs of the community
World IPv6 Day
On June 8th 2011, Inuits,lLike many other forward thinking organisations , will participate in "World IPv6 Day" . As part of a world wide test flight for IPv6, we will make our website ( www.inuits.eu ) reachable over IPv6.
Currently our site can already be reached over ipv6 on ipv6.inuits.eu
More information regarding World IPv6 day can be found on the http://www.worldipv6day.org/ site.
Winners Plug & Play announced
Ghent, 16 december 2010, In Silicon Valley top universities , business capital, multinationals and creative entrepreneurs are a stone's throw away, an ideal breeding ground for start-ups as proven in the past. However it isn't a sinecure to get a foot in the ground as a Belgian start-up. Therefore the IBBT and FIT aggreed to support Belgian start-ups in Silicon Valley with the Plug and Play Tech Center. This week 10 out of 24 candidates were selected to cross the ocean to conquer the American market. The Plug & Play jury was very impressed with the quality of the flemish start-ups..
Tuesday 21 december 2010, 15:10 by Cathy Niesz
Minister of innovation, Ingrid Lieten: 'In cooperation with Flanders Investment & Trade the IBBT concluded an aggreement with Plug & Play Tech Center, the goal of this aggreement is to select sixteen or so start-ups that can settle themselves in Silicon Valley, California for a minimal period of 3 months. During those 3 months they are introduced in the Silicon Valley eco-system and are accompanied to grow, accelerate and launch there business in Silicon Valley.' The goal of this initiatif is to help Flemish companies enter the international market as soon as possible. Following the first call 24 companies submitted their candidacy and these 10 start-ups were selected to pack there suitcases for Silicon Valley: XAOP, wondergraph, VCWarehouse, Inuits, FluidDA, Percussa, Engagor, Collibra, Cartagenia, Ikan Development.
Ingrid Lieten : 'Mid February I participated in an economical mission to California and was accompanied by a couple of Flemish ICT-entrepreneurs and participants of the IBBT. Silicon Valley is still the center of the global internet and computer industry. For startups in this domain it is crucial to expand a good network there. These kinds of initiatives fit my policy of supporting Flemish high-tech companies.'
The selected companies were introduced during iMinds, the yearly conference held by the IBBT, that fits into a week long conference this year. The Future Internet Conference Week offers a program of back-to-back conferences, meetings and workshops around the internet of the futur. We closely follow the startups and hope to report more news in the coming months concerning there successes. Around summer a second call will be launched and a new batch of startups gets a chance to travel to Silicon Valley.
Inuits is Cool - Opening new Igloo
INUITS welcomes our family, customers, prospects, believers and colleagues in our new igloo in Brasschaat, called "'t Hemeltje" (Heaven).
In our garden (Park of Brasschaat) there is a winter village with an "open" ice piste, glühwein, Jenever, etc. You can bring your family with you, we Inuits will also do so !
When : Thursday the 16th of December (between 17 - 22 h).
Location : Gemeentepark 2, 2930 Brasschaat. (see on map)
To make sure that we know how many people will come to our new Igloo and to make reservations for ice skating, we would kindly request that you sign up.
Note: Subscribing is no longer possible
Inuits goes South !
After three years and a successful story of Inuits in flanders,
I am very very proud to announce the start of our new Southern Division : ESQUIMAUX.
Esquimaux will be based (in a pyramid) in the Kheops Business Center (www.kheopsbusinesscenter.be) in Gosselies near by the airport of Charleroi.
Esquimaux will explore the open Walloon market and the north of France. Esquimaux will put an extra business focus on solutions like OpenERP, .... but also our in depth knowledge of how to Adopt Open Source, Drupal and Content Management, Monitoring your infrastructure, High Availability and Scalability and Virtualization and Cloud Computing .
For Esquimaux and Inuits, we are still looking for open source lovers and believers.
En avant !
Esquimaux sprl
Kheops Business Center
Avenue Georges Lemaître 54
6041 Gosselies
BE0889780406
Kris Kerremans
M : +32 473 441 636
Training Drupal at Jimma
The day after I arrived at Jimma it was time to start the training, a driver picked me up and dropped me at the University of Jimma where I met Girum, the ICT development Officer. It is his team I will give training to. We drink a coffee and discuss the program. It's a warm welcome and talk.
Day 1:
How to install Drupal.
The first part of the session was theoretically, I went over all the steps to create a Drupal site on a LAMP stack and went through the main anatomy of Drupal. Meaning, nodes, users, taxonomy, blocks and modules. It's a very long talk if you want to go over everything. So in the second session I made it more practical. Installing Drupal on their own portable was the task. Every trainee has a portable with Debian installed on it, so this was a good starting point. After creating a web folder and extracting Drupal on it, we could start with the apache and mysql configuration. Once that was done, the actual install of Drupal was possible. And by the end of the day everyone had a working copy. Not bad for a first day I think.
Day 2:
For day two, the main university site was used as starting point for explaining and adding new Drupal features. This was a good repetition of the first day, installing a Drupal, but this time we deployed an existing installation. At first the administration part of the site was revamped. Adding the administration menu and the Rubik theme made the admin already lots more user friendly. Also adding a WYSIWYG and IMCE for images, made the site more usable. For the second part of the day, we focues on SEO. Meaning installing and configuring Path, Pathauto, Nodewords, XMLSitemap and Google Analitycs.
Day 3:
On this day I had a first throw on custom modules. They wanted to know how to make a custom block showing the latest news items. After a rather chaotic explanation about hooks and module anatomy, a block with the latest news appeared in the screen. While we were on that topic, I was very aware that we were building something you could do with much less effort and a lot quicker. So I decided for the second part ot the day to switch to the Views module and explain it in detail. After seeing the power of this module, the direct need to create own modules was tempered. But could continue on that later, when the basics were known better.
As you can read, the training is a search between doing the needed and providing answers for needs on the main site. After 3 days, the knowledge and appreciation for Drupal was starting to grow and we could start with building a blog site as a project. But more on that on another post!
greetings from Jimma!
Some images from Jimma - Ethiopia
I wanted to share some pictures from the trip with you, there are some images showing Adis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia and Jimma, the city where the university the drupal training is taking place.
You can find more pictures here
Arriving at Jimma
It was a long and tiring flight To Jimma. I left Saterday in Antwerp at 4 PM ( CET +1 ) to arrive Sunday in Jimma at 12PM local time ( CET +3 )
I had to take two flights, from Brussels to Addis Ababa and from Addis to Jimma. The first flight made a stop in Paris, so that meant 9 hours of sitting at the plane seat. Once arrived in Addis, I had 5 hours to kill before I could board the plane to Jimma. At least, that's what I tought... When I checked in almost 4 hours later, I had to board immediately! Ow, I forgot about the hour difference :S I almost missed my plane! But I still got it and arrived in Jimma as planned.
I was picked up at the airport by a staff member of the Jimma University. The greeting was very warm, and so was the weather ;) I was dropped of at the Jimma Central Hotel, where I could check in and get some rest and prepare for my first day of training. I was exhausted, I slept 2 hours at most at the plane.
So I enjoyed the rest of my Sunday at the hotel, on the terrace, in the sun, next to the swimming pool! For those who wonder, it is indeed the complete opposite with the rest of the town, which is rather poor and misses lots of things we take for granted in Europe.
More to come soon!
Preparing for Jimma
A few months ago Jean-Marc asked me if I would be interested to give Drupal training in Ethiopia. Without asking further information, I agreed immediately! And now Saturday, it's finally coming. Of course, in the past few months I did gather the extra info. At the University of Jimma I'm gonna give training to the the ICT Development Office and ICT members from colleges. The initiative for the training comes from UGent, who has several training tracks in co-operation with VLIR-UOS. We will be splitting the training in two phases. A technical track and a usage track. And this spread over two weeks
A non-exhausting list of topics in the training:
- Installation
- Server configuration
- Development and production environment
- Security
- Drupal install
- Drush
- multisite
- multi language
- contributed modules
- Views
- CCK
- Community
- SEO
- Profiles
- Build your own module
- How to start
- Hooks
- Form API
- Services
- Security
- Drupal theming
- Templates
- Regions
- CSS
- JS
- Drupal 7
- Site management with Drupal
- Create content
- Taxonomie
- webforms
- Media
- User management
- users
- roles
- rights
- Blocks
As you can notice, it will be a rather busy agenda. Well, I'm fully preparing for my departure now. My flights leaves Saturday at 17h40 CET from Brussels Airport. And I'll arrive at Addis Ababa (Ethiopian capital) 6:20 AM. This still puts me about 330km from Jimma, and the quickest way is an national flight. I'll arrive Sunday in Jimma at 11:55 AM. And what happens next? We'll see. But I'm excited to find out!
More info at:
Inuits on Stage
As an Open Source company we are proud to have different of our consultants to be active in the Open Source community, contributing to different projects and presenting about their experiences at different conferences around the globe.
Next week, 6 and 7 february the 10th edition of Fosdem will take place in Brussels, for some of our consultants it will indeed be the 10th time they will be at that conference.
Inuits will be presenting differen talks at Fosdem, and other upcoming conferences.
Stijn Beauprez will kick off the Embedded Devroom on Saturday with a talk titled Rich Mobile UI Designs: do's and don't
On Sunday you can attend a talk by Frederic Descamps about Daily Maintenance of big databases/tables in the MySQL development room, followed later that day by Kris Buytaert talking about MySQL High Availability in that same MySQL Devroom.
A bit further from our corporate Igloo Jochen Maes will be presenting about Djagios at Open Source Days 2010 In Copenhagen which will take place on the 5th and 6th of March at the IT-University of Copenhagen
Later that month, from 23 to 25 march, Kris Buytaert will give a session on MySQL High Availability with Pacemaker at the UKUUG Spring Conference , in Manchester.
At the NLUUG Voorjaarsconferentie 2010 which will trake place on may 6th 2010 in Ede, the Netherlands , Tom De Cooman will be presenting the Open Source Monitoring Tools session and Kris Buytaert will be evangelizing Devops, Devministration, Agile Administration, or How to Survive the 10th floor test.
So there's plenty of opportunity to meet us in person the next couple of months, don't be shy.
