Category Personal

Mark's Art

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

My good friend and painter Mark has some of his fabulous art online on his homepage.

We know each other since the first semesters at university and I always liked his art. Whatever he did, he did it his way, just like Sinatra sings.

He already did some “live-painting” twice, i.e. creating a painting while a classical orchestra plays. I remember when he showed the sketches to me which helped him to prepare for one of the live-paintings, where he was supposed to visualize what the orchestra played: The Creation of Haydn. He had started with small sketches, then making bigger ones. Of course, the actual painting he created during the concert, was much bigger then any of his sketches.

I won’t write more about his works here, because talking about art is like dancing about architecture 😉

Take a look here, you don’t need to understand German, to understand the pictures: www.markkrause.de

Celebrating 1 year @ eZ

Sandro Groganz 1 Comment

Exactly one year ago, at November 16th 2004, I entered the doors of the eZ systems office in Skien/Norway and saw the shoes of my colleagues. In Norway, you always take off your shoes when entering a house and put on your slippers, so does the eZ crew in the headquarters.

Meanwhile, the shoes got removed from the entrance and are being piled somewhere else, out-of-sight for visiting customers. I am still at eZ systems and admit, that this is the coolest company I ever got to know. Just happy to work there!

Chinese Ginger Beef á la Zak

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Poor Zak: people he visits always try to talk him into cooking, because he is such a good cook – so did I!

He prepared “Ginger Beef”, something that has been invented by the Chinese inhabitants of Canada. It only took 2 hours (of course mainly because I was asking Zak too many questions about what and how he’s doing it).

What I learned:

  • He prepared a Chinese sauce by cooking vinegar and sugar.
  • Garlic should be squeezed/mashed to get the most taste out of it.
  • Garlic + ginger + lemon peel = nice smell 🙂
  • … and so much more.

The whole thing tasted so damn good, thanks Zak!

"Sandro Zic" is now "Sandro Groganz"

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

My family name changed: I am not anymore called “Sandro Zic”, but “Sandro Groganz”. The reason is that I got married this year and took the name of my wife.

Well, my biggest concern was of course my Google ranking, but it’s getting better. The very nice thing about the name change is that groganz.com was available. After I grabbed the domain, I agreed with my wife on having her name 🙂

So, please update your bookmarks to sandro.groganz.com! Old links using sandrozic.de will continue to work for quite some time.

Fixed Links

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

External links on my Website were broken, they were all going to “/”. The problem was easy to fix, I simply forgot to run a new upgrade script that adjusts recently added changes to the development version of eZ publish.

Yes, I run the dev version of eZ publish, currently the code that is going to be 3.6alpha. Living on the edge is cool, but requires thorough upgrading, dear Sandro, otherwise you’ll end up with broken links 😉

New Weblog

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

My new Weblog is now up and running on a new domain: www.sandrozic.de/weblog. It is powered by eZ publish. I will gradually add new functionality to the site, first of all RSS, trackback and pingback.

In fact, I have set up a portal on www.sandrozic.de that should serve as my personal knowledge management system in the long run, of course based on eZ publish. There’s a white paper with some ideas available online, which I plan to implement over time.

BTW: The portrait of mine shown in the Website’s header has been shot by Baard Farstad.

Ah, it’s so good to be back in the world of blogging!

New Job at eZ

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

I will be working for eZ systems, the Norwegian company behind the eZ publish CMS and CMF written in PHP. eZ will open a German office in January, this is why they hired me. My tasks are mainly to augment the community of eZ publish users in Germany, furthermore to serve customers in Southern Germany. The job profile comprises developers relations management, consulting, training, support, programming.

To get trained on eZ publish, I will be in Norway at the eZ headquarters in Skien until March for the 3.6 development cycle. I am very much looking forward to working closely with the team and to gain an intimate knowledge about the software. After the trainee period, I will work from my home office in Southern Germany.

There are several reasons why I feel very happy and confident with this job opportunity:

  • eZ is a great company: I have already met some of the ez crew and they are all classy folks. They are not following any hype, they care about a good team spirit, a solid product. I have to admit, that eZ gained my full attention after they hired Derick. Hiring someone who is a highly skilled expert in a certain field, shows that the company is of good health, that there is no paranoia about individual insufficiency, that everyone’s able to learn from each other, and that useless politics play no role in technological discussions.
  • eZ publish is a great piece of software: The CMS has been developed over years, the code quality is reasonably well and with the forthcoming 3.6. release, the CMS will be optimised for developers. eZ publish is a mature software and you can tell from the code, that the developers are highly skilled and motivated.
  • eZ has a solid business model: Just like MySQL, eZ publish is dual licensed. This business model has proven to work out pretty well as the success of MySQL or Qt demonstrates, and the growth of eZ suggests. Of course, there are differences between MySQL’s and eZ’s products: A database server is a basic element of many Web applications, thus the market penetration is higher compared to a CMS which is a more specific product. On the other side, a CMS needs more customization, thus a CMS company like eZ gets more money from customers to extend their product. Another point is that the MySQL database has only one Open Source opponent (PostgreSQL), while there are many more Open Source CMS out there. Nevertheless, the high quality of eZ publish makes it one of the best Open Source CMS on the market.
  • eZ is Open Source: I am advocating and programming Open Source for about 4 years now, and this special way of living, working, and business has become an important part of my personality – I would never want to miss it.

BTW: eZ is looking for personnel at their German office in Dortmund – no home office!

The Secretary to the Cathedral's Friends Resigned

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

If the company MySQL is the cathedral in the bazaar, then Zak Greant was the secretary to the cathedral’s friends – he recently resigned.

His official title was “Community Advocate”. Once, he described his work to me like this: “Imagine MySQL AB as a person that acts in a social environment, then me and David Axmark take care that this person behaves properly in the Open Source community and is accepted within the group.” The last 2 years, Zak was mostly concerned with the licensing issues that arouse when the MySQL client library became GPLed.

Zak’s two main concerns were – not only concerning the licensing issues – to fully understand the Open Source community, not only that of the MySQL database, and to make the community understand the company MySQL, the reasoning behind their actions. I have attended several of Zak’s talks at conferences and it always amazed me, how well he tried to balance out the interests of the company and the community. I write “tried”, because not all interests could be satisfied, as some of them have a conflicting nature.

It was Zak’s respectful behaviour towards anyone contacting him that made him a person as well respected by the community. His respect for others is deeply rooted in his professional approach and work ethics as well as his believe in the principles of the Open Source community and good social behaviour in general.

I am very much looking forward to see what he will be doing in the future and who will hire him. For MySQL, it must be hard to find someone as committed to the job as Zak was, also someone as eloquently acting within the community. MySQL is loosing a skilled and experienced secretary for the cathedral’s friends – but I am pretty sure, that Zak will stay with the friends of the cathedral.