As you might have already noticed, I'm a great fan of low power machines. Running on just a few watts, these little machines can do amazing things: be a home theater PC or run your local file server. Or they can be used as the central syslog server on your home or small office network, running of course syslog-ng. There are many devices, which can send logs: not only computers, but routers, wifi access points, NAS devices, and even some home automation systems.I have some of these machines on my desk: a Raspberry PI, an EFIKA MX, a CuBox ... [Read More]

As you know I like syslog-ng but also my hobby is Android programming. Because I wanted to practice (and develop my Android skills), I've just written a little interesting Android application related to syslog-ng performance tuning. It can calculate the tuning related settings like log_iw_size(), log_fetch_limit(), log_fifo_size() and so on, based on the given source specific parameters. Furthermore it can generate an example configuration that can be saved or sent via email.So it was absolutely just my hobby project related to Android, but after I showed it to a few people interested in syslog, I received positive feedbacks. After I decided to share it with everybody taking into consideration that ... [Read More]

Our small community seems to be growing nicely: on our first meetup, hardly any drinks were consumed, and we nicely fit into the lecture room at BalaBit. On the second meetup, popcorn disappeared before I could blink. On our third meetup, we barely fit into the room. For the fourth, we'll have to move the meetup to a bigger room (the Auditorium). I'm very happy with the meetups so far, although the last one became a little bit more experimental than originally planned. I found it fun, nevertheless, and also learned quite a bit about ... [Read More]

The aim of this post is to demonstrate the fact that it is possible to combine the easy tom widget derivation in gtkmm with the good old C language-based GTK+. The Glade interface designer binds C and C++ together, since the custom widget created in gtkmm can be used in Glade and can be loaded in a GTK+-based application. Only the following steps have to be performed to reach that goal:implement the desired custom widget in gtkmm create a library from the widget for Glade design the user interface containing the custom widget with Glade declare the C interface for the application written ... [Read More]

We had our first and second meetup of the Budapest Clojure User Group, and I enjoyed them both, even though I spent an awful lot of time preparing for my talk for the second meetup. Quite a lot of people showed up, more than on the first, and that's a good sign! The feedback was better than I anticipated too, so the journey will continue!I don't usually get much feedback after a talk, but after the last meetup, there was a common theme in what I heard back: interactivity is good! That's the theme ... [Read More]

We here at BalaBit - being an innovative tech company - are always on the lookout for emerging technologies, and we believe that when an opportunity presents itself to help one of these gain foothold in our very own country, we do our best to support that. For these reasons, and more, we're glad to host the first Budapest Clojure User Group Meetup in our office, on the 29th of January!But what is Clojure? It is a modern dialect of the LISP family of programming languages, originally built on top of the Java Virtual Machine, ... [Read More]

Back in the old days, machines with less than 32 megabytes of RAM and 6 gigabytes of HDD were more than enough for software development. My first somewhat complex programs (small games, dynamic webpages, etc) have been written on a machine with even less resources than that. So once when I've taken a look at my resource usage while working on some PHP code in Eclipse and I've seen that the IDE used hundreds of megabytes of RAM and another half gigabyte was allocated by the browser, I began to wonder if it is possible to ... [Read More]

A few months from now, the 18th of February will be an important day in my life: sixteen years before that day, I wrote the first worthwhile poem of my life - there's been a few before that, but none that I'm proud of. Not until this one. On the 18th, I will have spent half my life writing poems (hundreds of them, by now) - and the other half, writing code. There is, of course, some overlap, and some of that, I will share today.In recent weeks, as a way to figure out how to help my ... [Read More]

A few weeks ago I was at the annual FSF conference in Budapest. I was helping at the BalaBit stand and also the organizer of the openSUSE stand. To attract more visitors to the openSUSE stand, I asked people to bring interesting machines running openSUSE. As Linux gaming lags a bit behind other platforms, we had a big machine running the freshly released native Linux port of Steam on openSUSE. The rest of the machines were miniature. As I'm still receiving questions about these mini machines, here is a short summary of my experiences with them.The smallest one was the ... [Read More]