jan.krutisch.de

The Birth of a Radical

21 Feb 2015

Most people who would consider themselves “radical” in a specific sense usually didn’t become “radicals” overnight. It’s a slow process that can take years. And one day you find yourself wondering “how did this happen?”

I’ve been wondering about this for quite some time now. Somehow, between 2010, when I started cycling to work every day, and today, I’ve become a radical. Not in the sense you might imagine if you’re a die-hard motorist, though: I drive conciously, often very asserting, and certainly a bit cheekily, but I try very hard to do this within the boundaries of our “road code” which has the very poetic name “StVO” or “Straßenverkehrsordnung”. The problems actually start right here: In contrast to the many many motorists I run into conflict with every day, I know the relevant parts of the road code very well. It’s a very common phenomenon as a cyclist in Hamburg to be yelled at for basically doing exactly what the law wants you to do. Or to be yelled at for telling a motorist that she or he just violated the road code in a very dangerous and reckless manner.

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Service-Wüste Kabel Deutschland

08 Dec 2014

18:50 - Ich komme nach Hause. Das Internet hat offensichtlich gerade noch ausgereicht um meine Hues anzuknippsen, kaum sitze ich am Rechner, ist das Internet weg. Die Outbound-Connection-Lampe am Kabeldeutschland-Router blinkt.

18:55 - Nach durchbooten des O2-Routers (Ja, ich habe zwei Internet-Anschlüsse, und ich weiss auch warum) habe ich zumindest wieder 8 MBit von 116 bezahlten MBit zur Verfügung (16 über O2, 100 über Kabeldeutschland).

18:57 - Ich fange an, mich durch die Hilfe-Seiten von Kabeldeutschland zu klicken. Seit der Vodafone-Übernahme ist da viel kaputt gegangen, aber siehe da: Ich habe den richtigen Knopf gefunden:

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Super cheap VPS providers

19 Nov 2014

I am usually not a cheapskate. I love to pay decently for a service or a thing worth paying for. With servers, things are a little different. First of all, the price span between super cheap and super expensive is usually really huge, while it’s often times totally unclear what the difference in service might be. Services like Digital Ocean are able to charge a healthy surplus by providing a superior “experience”, while their machines are, for the most part, beefy, but not exactly outstandingly so. I am writing this being a (happy) Digital Ocean customer, by the way.

So, a few weeks back, I was doing some research (Read: I googled a lot) on VPS hosters with a little twist: I tried to find European or even German services, with the clear goal of finding the cheapest ones. This didn’t become some sort of shootout, because that would have meant that I needed to deploy compareable things to to it, so don’t expect something like that here. I’m going to name a few names, but not to especially endorse them but to make my report a little more concrete.

Via google, I stumbled upon some sort of comparing site, webhostlist.de (unfortunately in German only). They listed a lot of machines way below the 5 EUR mark, which actually caught me by surprise. I remember I rented my first, very small VPS back in 2009 or so and it was a tiny, tiny machine for nearly 10 EUR a month. So this made me curious. I further trimmed down the list to services with more or equal to 1 GB of memory, because I think this is currently a pretty good limit for hosting small things.

I instantly bought three services, all of them high on the webhostlist.de list and as soon as the accounts rolled in, I started to deploy things to it. So far, my list looks like this:

• An iRedMail Mailserver, which is my testbed for self hosting email again (most likely worth an own article)
• A server that runs graphite, as a central hub for metrics coming in from other servers
• An application server for an upcoming little thing

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Decentralize ALL THE THINGS!

25 Oct 2014

This text is a modified version of my manuscript for my talk “Decentralize ALL THE THINGS” I gave at Eurucamp 2014. I sometimes write manuscripts for mostly non technical talks. In this case, it made a lot of sense, because it was also a good way to reason about the talk with my great Mentor, Frank Webber. After Eurucamp I thought this was a good way to kick off my long overdue article series about Decentralization.

There’s also the accompanying slide deck you could take a look at.

So, how was your year?

Of course I didn’t mean personally. Professionally, if you’re not totally ignoring the rest of the world, 2013 and 2014 seem to be quite shitty years for working in IT. After all the Snowden Revelations, the shitty, inappropriate government reactions and then all the security holes in critical pieces of infrastructure (most of you will at least remember Heartbleed, of course) and the countless account breaches (Remember the Adobe breach?), I definitely considered leaving our field completely, with a strong urge to do something simple as gardening (And thus completely ignoring the devastating problems gardening is currently facing, with a fast and steady decline of bee populations, the general issues of pollution and the strong bias of regulators for multinational corporations).

So, this is why I’ve turned a rather large part of my attention to this idea called decentralization. Because I believe that we need to change our thinking on what we’re doing here. All of us. First of all me. So this is a work in progress. I’m new to this, so please, if you’ve been preaching decentralization since, like, ever, bear with me for a a few paragraphs. I’m hopeful that I can actually shed light on this from some interesting, non common angles.

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Redesign, Schmedesign

22 Oct 2014

After reading @adactio’s great post on indie web building blocks, I wanted to do something. I started by adding a few rel=”me”’s to the page and then I stumbled over some weird styling issues (a time tag that I declared as display:block globally for some reason) and one thing lead to another and suddenly I found myself in this weird downward spiral of yak shaving (or sharpening the yak shaving scissors. Well, actually I had to wetten the sharpening stone first but there was a hole in the bucket. Long story.)

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Visiting Belgrade

17 Apr 2014

I don’t remember the exact date and I can’t find the needed data quickly (even Wikipedia fails me), but somewhere around the 24th of March of 1999, I was standing in the lecture hall at my university and opened up our bi-annual students assembly (I was part of the students council at the time) with a few, probably very incoherent words about what just started to happen in the Kosovo region. For the first time since the end of the second world war, german military forces were allowed to shoot enemy combatants on foreign ground. The german air forces were part of what was called OAF (Operation Allied Forces), an operation against what at that time was called Federal Republic Of Yugoslavia, which consisted of Serbia and Montenegro.

I’m not interested in discussing the details of this conflict and to be honest, I had to read up on it on Wikipedia because I seem to have forgotten most of the details. But I do remember that for me as a german citizen, it felt like the end of an era: Post-WWII Germany crossed a line I personally hoped would never again be crossed. Under a left/green government no less.

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Going Full Encryption

06 Jan 2014

One of the main outcomes of the whole NSA thing for me is that we actually need to step up our game. And with we, I, above all, mean me. And what exactly means stepping up our game?

If you haven’t, read Private By Default by one of our wise men, Tim Bray. It makes a few good points, why it makes sense to even encrypt traffic that seems harmless.

So, setting this up on my personal web server (which is actually a cheap root server that by now mostly hosts static web pages) was relatively easy. There are some weird pitfalls though.

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A public service announcement

02 Jan 2014

I have three computers I use on and off. On all of them, I have a relatively long blog post draft lying around I haven’t gotten around to finish and publish.

That’s not a good sign.

Over the course of the last weeks and festivities, I gave that some thought. And I believe I have found an answer, although I am not very happy with it.

2013 was the year when, at least for me, the last pieces of that already pretty much ruined facade that covered our society and political order (our so-called democracy) finally crumbled to dust.

It’s actually less the revelations by Snowden (and, me visiting the Chaos Communication Congress for the first time, had my fair share of new revelations and other depressing news there) than the way our society, the politicians, the press, but also the general public reacting to them that finally cemented my belief that we’re indeed now in a post-democratic state (As in state machine, not as in state prison). It’s not that I think that all is lost, but I think that the way out of this crisis will either be extremely long and painful, or extremly violent.

Thing is: I have no idea what to do now. I have a few vague ideas on how we could fix society on a grand scale, but none of them is especially applicable in the current situation. I am just a software developer. A quite thoughtful software developer with strong political opinions, but one who now needs to take a step back and listen, read and make up his worried and confused mind on what would be a meaningful contribution to the future of our society.

And in the meantime, I will try to just be a software developer, at least here, in this blog. As much as I feel the pressure to comment on the current turmoil, I found out over the last months that I simply can’t, at least not in a coherent, useful way. I’m afraid “F**K ALL OF THIS S**T” is hardly a useful contribution to the discussion, as much as it properly reflects my current feelings.

I hope that re-enables me to write on this blog. It will be, for the time being, more technical, more shallow, perhaps, but hopefully it will be revived in 2014 this way.

Here’s to hoping that from here on, things can only get better (My pessimistic winter soul disagrees, but eff it).

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The Problem with end-to-end encryption

09 Jul 2013

A friend of mine, Hendrik Mans, wrote a pretty good article (in german) about the whole PRISM etc. dilemma. His gist: We should stop to act in this case as if we are actually able to tell whats going on there. For the most part, we simply don’t know. Because we’re are not tech savvy enough to understand the technologies involved (which may or may not be true for you) but also because, for the most part, this stuff is still happening largely in secret and although Edward Snowden gave us some ideas of what’s happening, we still don’t know much about how that’s happening.

He also rants about the “solutionists” crying “you only need to use end-to-end encryption” and that’s a point I actually want to elaborate on a bit.

First of all, what do we mean with end-to-end encryption (e2ee) . For the sake of the argument, let’s assume it means something like PGP (or GPG for that matter) and everyone uses securely stored keys, the encryption is asymmetric and the keysize is big enough (which are a lot of assumtions already if you think about it) and so we can be relatively sure that this encryption is safe. Please note that I am not going to explain all of this to you. Fortunately, there are a lot of places on the web where you can get good information on this.

This is a great tool if your name is Alice and you want to send Bob a message which should stay secret between you two.

That is to say, if the secrecy of the message is what you actually care about.

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Hamburg Deine Radwege Teil 2

10 Jun 2013

Ich hatte neulich eine erst etwas unfreundliche, aber dann doch entspannte und lehrreiche Konversation mit einem Stadteil-Polizisten, der mich vollkommen zurecht darauf hinwies, dass ich auf dem Fahrradweg in der falschen Richtung, bzw. auf der falschen Seite unterwegs sei. Im gegensatz zu 100% aller Radfahrer, die der Beamte danach noch angehalten hat, wusste ich wenigstens, das ich im Unrecht war.

Aber darum soll es hier nicht gehen. Einer der Aha-Momente in unserer kurzen Unterhaltung war, dass in Hamburg momentan eine kleine Revolution stattfindet, von der niemand etwas mitbekommt.

Dazu muss ich etwas ausholen - Es gibt nämlich Radwege und Radwege. Genauer gesagt: Benutzunsgpflichte Radwege und Nicht benutzungspflichtige Radwege. Schon gewusst?

Der Unterschied ist eigentlich ganz einfach zu erkennen: Benutzungspflichtige Radwege sind mit einem Schild (Wer auf StVO-Beamten-Sprachverirrungen steht, dem sei der Wikipediaartikel ans Herz gelegt) mit dem typischen Fahrrad auf blauem Grund versehen.

Nicht benutzungspflichtige Radwege hingegen sehen nur nach Radweg aus, haben aber keine Beschilderung. Und wie der Name es sagt: Man muss diese Radwege nicht benutzen. Man darf es aber.

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Get the book while it is hot!

12 Mar 2013

So, finally, about at least two months after my original schedule, I started selling my book.



It’s been a tough decision. Not because I didn’t think the book was ready (I always planned to release it as soon as I thought it had enough material to be interesting to people), but because I, after Hendrik asked me if I knew Leanpub, basically threw 20-30 hours of work into the gutter and went for them instead of building the book on my own.

I did know Leanpub, of course. I even checked it out back in the days. But somehow I ended up trying to do all of this stuff on my own. Which was, as I see it now, a bad decision. From now on, every minute I invest into this project will be about the text and the example code and not about how to fix some weird code highlighter bug in Apple iBooks.

So, thanks Hendrik, for poking me in exactly the right moment (After I spent a full weekend on readying my own infrastructure and publishing chain).

It took me another day or so to convert the whole book to the slightly different markdown dialect Leanpub uses. Their publishing workflow is just insanely simple and brilliant - Thank you Peter and Scott for this great great platform.

And now I advise you to Buy The Book!

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JavaScript Styleguides

19 Jan 2013

As an author of a soon-to-be-published book on JavaScript applications, I had to come up with a coding style to use in the examples I have in the book. So I wrote this article to explain my way of thinking about JavaScript coding styles.

Having said that, the JavaScript community if there’s such a thing, has a few elements that leave me baffled every time. One of them is the battle over coding styles.

One particularly curious example, that also often gets cited, is the npm styleguide. So to explain why my JavaScript coding style looks as old fashioned and C-Like, let’s look at this extreme example and why I don’t follow it.

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Premature Abstractions Illustrated

06 Jan 2013

A lot of the discussion in the Ruby community are revolving around abstractions and when to use/do them and when not to. This is a struggle every developer faces every day, on various levels of, wait for it, abstractions.

It is also something the JavaScript community discusses very often, hotly, with very mixed results. If you look at, for example, the discussions around backbone.js and all of those add ons like Marionette, you can easily see that this is a topic that can lead to hot blood and unclear results.

Funnily, I recently fell into the “premature abstractions” trap pretty badly myself. I can’t share details in code, because it’s a yet to be released client project, but the story goes a little something like this (drop the bass):

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Your Design Principles

03 Jan 2013

A quick show of hands, how many of you have seen Dave Thomas’ closing keynote at the Scottish Ruby Conf?

For me, this keynote was one of the most liberating moments of 2012. Why? Because in essence, he was telling me that I wasn’t crazy. He was telling my that my gut feelings of what I thought was wrong with the rails community were at least shared by someone who I hold in high regard.

(By the way. If you have never read “The Pragmatic Programmer”, please do. Really.)

Here’s the contents of the slide where Dave made me jump with joy:

“Good” code is not the only code

Dave said:

I think there’s this increasing tendency in the ruby community to feel that somehow we’re the guardians of “good” programming taste. Right? Everything has to be done right. Everything has to be done using patterns. Everything has to be done using factories and injection and all this other kind of bullshit that I tried to escape when I left the Java world 1999. And what happens? You’re bringing it back to me. STOP!

Yes, you could say that this resonated with me.

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Der Sündenfall der Deutschen Presse

01 Dec 2012

Lasst uns bitte aufhören über das Leistungsschutzrecht zu reden. Also ich meine Inhaltlich. Das haben genug Menschen bereits getan und alle die sich auskennen und nicht befangen sind kommen zu dem Schluss dass das Quatsch ist. It’s understood.

Der große weiße Elefant im Raum ist, und darüber wurde zwar auch reichlich berichtet (wenn auch nicht in “der Presse”), aber vielen ist hier die Dimension glaube ich nicht wirklich klar: Das LSR stellt für die Deutsche Presse (und das gilt dieses Mal leider dann nicht mehr nur für Springer) einen echten Sündenfall dar.

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Endlich auf dem eBookCamp!

06 Nov 2012

Ich tendiere ja dazu, Berichte über Veranstaltungen inzwischen auf Englisch zu verfassen, aber beim eBookCamp, dass letztes Wochenende in Hamburg stattfand, mache ich mal eine Ausnahme: Zum einen war die Veranstaltung eine rein deutsche Veranstaltung und zum anderen sind die Leser, die diesen Artikel interessant finden könnten sicher auch in der überwiegenden Mehrzahl deutsprachig.

Mein Weg zum eBookCamp ist ein eher sonderbarer: Ich finde das Umfeld zwar schon seit Ewigkeiten spannend und war einer der ersten in meinem Umfeld die auch einen eBook-Reader hatten, aber mit der Verlagsbranche, an die sich das Camp vor allem richtet, habe ich bisher nicht so richtig viel zu tun gehabt, jedenfalls wenn man strikt von Buchverlagen ausgeht. Aber wie das Leben so spielt: Andrea Schlotfeldt veranstaltet nicht nur eBookCamps sondern ist auch noch mit dem Betahaus-Mitgründer Lars Brücher liiert, den ich nun wiederum seit besten Dot-Com-Zeiten durch unsere gemeinse Bürookkupation bei silver.screen kenne. Wir teilten uns damals lange ein Büro und ein paar Stereolautsprecher, über die wir damals sehr enthusiastisch Napster entdeckten. Those were the days. Und so saß ich eines schönen Tages im letzten Jahr mit Andrea in einem Reisebus im Cilento und wir sprachen über eBooks. Das letzte Jahr scheiterte meine Teilnahme noch an irgendwelchen Doppelbuchungen, dieses Jahr passte das Camp auf vollkommen magische Weise zwischen Reykjavík und Tel Aviv.

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Distributed synthesis - my MHD Reykjavik hack

30 Oct 2012

This is actually a pretty sad moment - I am sitting in an airport cafe at KEF and am about to leave Iceland after a brief, 6 day love affair with one of the most exciting places I’ve ever been to.

The reason I’m here is the Music Hack Day Reykjavik which, as Johan, one of the organizers, told us, started off more as some sort of joke and then turned into the most awesome Music Hack Days I’ve ever been to. The event itself was great: Awesome food, great crowd of people, small enough to be able to get to know each other, pretty much the most awesome food I ever had at a hack day (Lobster soup from the Sea Baron. Need I say more?) and some pretty awesome hacks. But on top of this awesomeness: Iceland. With Geysirs and Huge Waterfalls (Gullfoss), Edges of continental plates.

But enough of that. If you can find a chance, to go to iceland, it’s worth it. I will definitely go back for a longer visit.

My Hack was something I had in mind for a long time now, but in contrast to earlier hackdays I didn’t actually prepare myself: I wanted to build some form of distributed synthesizer. With the Web Audio API available on iOS devices since iOS6 came out, this project got even more interesting. My original plan was to create something together with our long time MHD travelmate Michael aka Rockitbaby, but he had to cancel the trip on short notice due to very unfortunate events, so I was on my own.

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Die Sache mit den Unternehmen

18 Oct 2012

Ich bin heute auf Twitter über Umwege auf ein paar Tweets von @christiansoeder gestolpert, der mit der These aufwartete, dass es Unsinn sei, von Unternehmen zu Fordern, Werte zu haben oder zu entwickeln - Unternehmen seien dazu da, Geld zu verdienen und Werte könne man Unternehmen nur durch geeignete Regulierung durch die Politik vorgeben.

Ich hab darauf hin eine sehr kurze Diskussion mit ihm gehabt, die er aber einseitig sehr schnell abgebrochen hat. Das will ich ihm nicht vorwerfen, ich war gefühlt einer von 200 Leuten, die ihn dafür verprügelt haben.

Ich beschäftige mich, wenn auch nur Hobby-mäßig und total unwissenschaftlich schon seit Ewigkeiten mit diesem Thema und mich ärgert diese Sichtweise. Aus mehreren Gründen.

Zum einen ist diese Sichtweise so typisch Sozialdemokratisch: Die Unternehmen, das sind die bösen, das wird man nie ändern können, und deswegen brauchen wir Gesetze!

Zum anderen passt es ironischerweise natürlich überhaupt nicht zu dem, was die Sozialdemokratie, wenn sie denn mal in Regierungsverantwortung war, an Politik betrieben hat.

Aber wichtiger ist eigentlich, dass mir diese Betrachtungsweise stinkt.

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I'll be writing another book

17 Oct 2012

Just a quick post from another night where the sleep doesn’t come so easily. I am really happy to finally having gotten my sh-t together enough so that I can spread the news: I’ll be writing another book. The first one was definitely an interesting experience - It’s definitely worth a lot to be able to mention that you are actually the co-author of one of the first books on a subject when you are applying for a job.

That being said, financially, writing a technical book with a traditional publisher is a complete desaster. I knew this beforehand and since I was writing the book while being employed, this was not a huge problem in terms of financial risk.

This time, things will be a bit different.

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On Jaywalking

05 Oct 2012

A few months back, I can’t exactly remember where and when, I came across the word “Jaywalking”. Since then, it has regularly popped up in discussions with people and so I took a good look at the wikipedia page. Forward to me mentioning it on the twitters, which triggered Jan Lehnardt to ask me if I could summarize my findings in a blog post. Which makes this the second post I wrote on his request.

Well, here you go. First of all: I am not a lawyer. This text may also be full of errors. So don’t consider this text to be a legal advice.

The term Jaywalking describes the act of crossing a street as a pedestrian at places and times where you probably should not. I say “probably”, because things already start to get blurry.

Take my home country, for example. It is not illegal to cross a street at a random point. Actually I’m pretty sure that this is not true for all roads, as I am pretty sure German law has something to say about crossing an autobahn, but let’s just assume classic standard inner city roadworks, no motorway, no highway.

So, as I said, you’re totally free to cross any street at any given point and it’s totally up to you to be clever enough to not be run over by cars. Now, if you do get hit by a car, things get utterly complicated in the process of finding out who might be responsible for that, so let’s leave that out as well. This is civil law by then anyway.

There is, of course (there always is) an exception in our beloved “Strassenverkehrs-Ordnung”, or short StVO (Isn’t that one of the most german sounding words of them all?). As soon as you are within sight of a pedestrian crossing, or crosswalk for my american readers (weird enough, the law does not define a clear, distance based boundary on what “within sight” means), you are obliged to use it. And, as many people around the world find out when visiting germany, you are then forced to adhere to the traffic light. The fine for crossing a street during the red light seems to be something around 5 EUR, but I personally don’t know anyone who knows someone who knows someone who ever had to pay that fine. But that’s also because in general people just adhere to the traffic light, even if it makes no sense, because it’s 3AM in a godforsaken suburb and the next car will most probably cross this place in about two hours.

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