From time to time, having the ability to test your projects on a home lab system is a very good thing. In my home lab, I'm doing everything from testing small web-based projects to simulations of large-scale deployments.

There are two major, open source solutions for Linux that I care enough to think about when it comes to virtualization, Xen and KVM. Xen is in my opinion best suited for a datacenter environment, when the sole purpose of the box is to host virtualized guests, but it needs a patched kernel, and using X on a xenified kernel (for example when the same box is used as your livingroom multimedia center) is a pain, especially if you're on NVIDIA.

The kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) is provided with the stock Linux kernel, and provides full virtualization on machines with Intel VT or AMD-V CPUs. It also works fine in tandem with X and other applications. I have been using KVM (and kqemu) for a long time, but I've been basing my usage on manually doing the provisioning on the command line. That grew to be a series of long, mundane tasks, especially when I needed to provision several guests at the same time.

I made a couple of scripts to make it easier to provision a series of Ubuntu guests based on a LVM logical volume with a base image. The provisioning script creates a snapshot of this base image, mounts and modifies essential files directly on the guest filesystem, and creates an init-script in /etc/init.d.

In less than five days, I'm going to South-East Asia to spend a month relaxing, trekking, inhaling pollution and fighting cockroaches the size of my fist in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. It's going to be wonderful.

My problem is that it is very expensive to call to and from most of the countries in the area. The tariff for a call between a Telenor fixed-line in Norway and my prepaid mobile in Thailand is an outrageous €1.41 (NOK 11.38) per minute. The worldwide telecom tariffs are not based on distance, but destination bandwidth, de-facto monopolies, local regulations, corruption and several other complicated factors. In this case, Telenor really helps out with their typically inflated tariffs. For comparison, the Dutch telecom KPN charges "only" €1.08 (NOK 8.69) for the same call. Nevertheless, the tariffs are unacceptable, and Skype is really not an option, as it's not as flexible and portable as a mobile phone.

This is where broadband telephony like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) comes to the rescue. Thanks to VoIP, there is a market for call termination over internet trunks where prices are slashed to the bone due to the globalized marketplace that internet provides. Now everyone can take international calls at wholesale prices and perhaps become their own little telecom company. By shopping around, I have found VoIP providers that will terminate a call between Norway and Thailand for only €0.0066 (NOK 0.053) per minute, or 0.46% of the Telenor tariff, and even 50% less than the Telenor domestic tariff. I'm laughing all the way to the bank.

If you spend a lot of time reading on the internet, (by that, I don't necessarily mean spending the time browsing people's Facebook oneliners and paying your bills, but actually using it as the information source it is) then you are probably very busy right now, and I'll get right to the point.

Use an aggregator for RSS feeds. It provides you with a clean view of a great deal of sources, from your favourite 100% online newspapers (and their brilliant political comics, like Doonesbury), to these pseudo-attempts of "established" media desperately trying to justify their dual physical/online existance. (Some do this better than others, but I'll save that for a later rant.)

Today I've ordered a new gadget for my Asia trip in February. It's the Globalsat DG-100, a simple GPS data logger utilizing the SiRF StarIII chipset, which has been getting very good reviews out there. It can be set to record waypoints (locations) for a configurable interval based on time (like every 10 seconds) or distance (like every 100m) with storage for up to 64,000 records of time, location and altitude. The output can be exported to a myriad of formats, and can be represented as a Google Maps interface or used to geotag images taken during the trip. I can put this in my daypack during the day, and in the evening I'll have a complete record of my movements. (Why? I don't know. It's fun to play with that kind of data.) Best thing is that it is made for exactly the purpose of logging data, with no fancy and power hungry utilities like bluetooth, giving it up to 35 hours of usage without recharge. It also runs on normal batteries, if needed.

I enjoy quality journalism from international news channels like BBC World, Al-Jazeera and France24, but as I don't own a TV (and probably never will) my only option is to use video streams from broadcasters or commercial third parties, and as unicast streams consume a lot of bandwidth for each concurrent user, they are not an affordable service for broadcasters to provide en masse.