Most IT departments have the best intentions of providing the best quality, coherent solutions, yet market conditions, projects running in parallel and various constraints on budgets, resources or time, often causes what might be defined as Accidental Architecture.

The easiest way to identify cases where you’ve been hit by accidental architecture is when describing your it architecture and look for the works “except” or “but not”. Typical examples include - we have a single-sign system utilized everywhere except…”, “We update all systems to current versions, but not this old system…”.

It seems to be quite popular to move away from custom build IT solutions to so called COTS - commercial of the shelf solutions. The idea being, that to software solution fulfil a functionality which long has been commoditized and standardized to such an extent that it offers no “competitive edge” nor core value to the business.

For most companies and organizations the office suite would be a pretty safe bet for a piece of software which is magnificently suited for a COTS solution. Finding someone who develops an internal word processor in-house seems crazy as so many fully capable solutions exists in the market.

Google has come up with a nice new image format called webp. Currently support for this format is fairly limited, so if you need to use webp images else where it might be nice to convert them to a more widely supported format. To do the conversion, Google has made a small tool available called dwebp. The tool however does only seem to support conversion of a single image, not a batch of images.

So I’ve installed a Raspberry Pi and it’s been running smoothly day in, day out. I’d like it to stay that way, but as the server is running it’s gathers lint in log files, databases grows and knowing how the load on CPU and memory is utilized through out time, I was looking for a tool which could help me to solve this problem.

As fun as it might be to build your own solution, I’ve learned to appreciate ready to use solutions, and it seems a nice little tool is available called RPi-Monitor. Assuming you run the Raspbian, the RPi-Monitor is available as a package ready to install through the standard package manager (once you’ve added the package repository).

Here’s a little trick, which is has proven itself just as useful as it is easy. To most companies handling domains is critical task, as losing your domain name may have catastrophic consequences. Handling domains isn’t particularly hard, but there are some tasks, that may be time-critical to handle in due time - luckily Google Calendar provides an easy way to help make sure these tasks are handled.

(In this little tip, I’m using Google Calendar as the reference, but Outlook.com, Office365 or any other online calendaring system can probably do the same.)