we made it. http://www.zoomer.de is finally online.

A large part of the Lovely Team was working hard during the last 6 month to get the thing going.

The Technology behind it? Lovely!

lovely.news = cutting edge Python/Zope3 software, PostgreSQL Databases, ZEO Clusters, WSGI pipelines, Varnish Caches, Nginx Reverse Proxies, F5 Load Balancers.

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The content on zoomer.de? Lovely as well! A young, dynamic team. Backed by long-term news experts. Just watch their video and use zoomer.de :)

Thanks a lot, lovely team. especially quodt, jukart, schwendinger, dobee, jayeff, wolfabua, stmartin, iham, pjee, haudum. you rock!

Lovely Systems is using Amazons Elastic Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Simple Queue Service (SQS) for business critical applications. yesterday we experienced a outage of the services.

while it’s really bad that our services were down as well. i need to say that it was the first outage within 2 years! that’s awesome.

On the other hand - where is the support hotline? who can we call? who can we mail in case of troubles? My mail to the “Business Development Inquiries” was answered 11hours later…

But nevertheless: Amazon, keep on the good work - we’ll use your services more and more in future.

here’s the official statement from AWS:

Here’s some additional detail about the problem we experienced earlier today.

Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of our locations. While we carefully monitor our overall request volumes and these remained within normal ranges, we had not been monitoring the proportion of authenticated requests. Importantly, these cryptographic requests consume more resources per call than other request types.

Shortly before 4:00am PST, we began to see several other users significantly increase their volume of authenticated calls. The last of these pushed the authentication service over its maximum capacity before we could complete putting new capacity in place. In addition to processing authenticated requests, the authentication service also performs account validation on every request Amazon S3 handles. This caused Amazon S3 to be unable to process any requests in that location, beginning at 4:31am PST. By 6:48am PST, we had moved enough capacity online to resolve the issue.

As we said earlier today, though we’re proud of our uptime track record over the past two years with this service, any amount of downtime is unacceptable. As part of the post mortem for this event, we have identified a set of short-term actions as well as longer term improvements. We are taking immediate action on the following: (a) improving our monitoring of the proportion of authenticated requests; (b) further increasing our authentication service capacity; and (c) adding additional defensive measures around the authenticated calls. Additionally, we’ve begun work on a service health dashboard, and expect to release that shortly.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

thanks mrtopf for photographing and blogging :) http://technorati.com/tag/snowsprint2008

Nothing more to say! see you next year!

– jodok

Countdown for snow-sprint is running!

(more…)

My friend Tim did a new Xmas scene for RJ. Its one of the first he ever did. It is called tic and makes everything double. So here is the Lovely Xmas present for all Mac owners. Download RJ.zip and have fun ;-)

Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

p.s. this patch should also solve some of the issues with the old one… let us know if you experience any problems.

after a wonderful redesign, some hours of work (hell yeah, work), some sweat and less party, we finally done it. http://www.meinberlin.de is online. great, lovely, powerful and not seen before.The mixture: some google maps, a great team of enthusastic coders, innovative projectmanagers and a quintessence of design. So the fusion of knowlegde between Urban Media and Lovely Systems created the magazine and map news community portal meinberlin.de - erforsche deine Nachbarschaft. we proudly present it to the crowd.

For the technique guys a overview: python code within zope/zodb, jquery and native JS, mysql databases, and a huge package of ajax bases services.

Lovelysystems joined the job fair in the local university of applied sience. (Fachhochschule Vorarlberg, Dornbirn, Austria). We’ve got really good feedback from the other exhibitors about our extreme lovely, simple and outstanding job fair stand. ;)

Lovely Systems is proud to announce the 5th Snow-Sprint in a row. Between Friday 18th of January 2008 and 25th we’ll code, talk, eat, drink, sleep, ski, snowboard in the Austrian Alps.

This time we chose Hotel Piz Buin in the Area of Silvretta, below the highest Peak of our State - Piz Buin

(image from Wikipedia)

Sprint organisation is done on http://www.openplans.org/projects/snow-sprint-2008
We’ll definitely focus on Zope3 and High Traffic related topics - Plone People welcome!

Highlight the week in your calendar, add your name to the Openplans Wiki and book your flight.

See you in the mountains!

Jodok and the lovely team

A little bit more than 1,5 years ago we founded Lovely Systems. Michael, Manfred, Sasha and me… Meanwhile we’ve grown a little bit and it turned out that the two Companies Lovely Systems in Sweden and Austria were growing in different directions: Austria headed towards Zope3 based Web2.0 Portals (our sister company - Webmeisterei got our Austrian Plone business), Sweden sticked with Plone and is now Valentine Web Systems. So girls and boys, write down the 14th of February, it’s Mr. Valentines birthday. Sasha and Tim, we wish you the best for your future and looking forward to a fruitful cooperation!

♥ Manfred, Michael, Jodok and Armin, Bernd, Bernd, Clemens, Jeroen, Johannes, Julian, Jürgen, Manuela, Maria-Anna, Markus, Michael, Stefan and the Webmeisters Gerd, Harald, Markus and Oliver.