Kris Buytaert's blog

Oct 15 2007

T-Dose 2007 is over

Last weekend was T-Dose I was looking forward to see Bert's drupal talk but I was way to late in Eindhoven , just in time to see his last 5 slides Too bad I couldn't find him anymore after his talk.

Just after his talk I ran into Matt and Tarry , Matt is always present at conferences , often giving good talks on stuff I care about such as openQRM this time.

It was great to finally meet Tarry in the physical world, and not just the virtual one, so the Irish Pub meetup in the late afternoon really should be repeated !

The Woman without a blog told me about her involvement in OpenDocsSociety and the 2 upcoming launche parties.

I arrived way to late at the social event because of the Eindhoven Marathon parking issues we about to have if we didn't move Matt's car , but that way I ended up a a table with the guy from
Gravity Zoo
, great stuff those guys are working on .. Looking forward to see some of their demos.

The Irish pub threw us out at 0200 , which was kinda Early.. but the result was that I made it only 5 minutes late for the Open Embedded talk. Now I really really want to start looking closer at OpenEmbedded as I feel it would be a really good solution for lots of the stuff different people are doing wrong , but then I need to get some time slices from an altnerate Universe ..

As promised in Cambridge I went to Dag's talk on Dstat as I ran out of it in Cambridge coz of some urgent phonecalls.
As I already have a private presentation about mrepo , I can now safely skip his next presentations :)

I had to run out earlier and drop off Matt at his car in the middle of nowhere before heading home. But T-Dose is growing at good rate. It's not yet big and overcrowded as Fosdem so at least you can talk with lots of people !

Oct 12 2007

Slashdot party invaded by Microsoft Spies

Philip , I wanted to take pictures of the guy in the Blue shirt with the weird logo .. but you guys didn't let me..

I really wonder what he was doing there.. the only answer I can come up with is that he was spying on us and that Microsoft is creating files of which Open Source people to sue .. so laughing with his shirt might not have been our best bet.

I`m starting to be scared, the guy obviously had some friends and he was into what he called Business Intelligence .. that's like Microsofts Central Intelligence Agency right ?

Were there any other Slashdot parties invaded by the borg ?

UPDATE. There used to be a typo in this article, but honestly it was NOT on purpose ..
I had a good laugh upon noticing however ..

Oct 12 2007

Xentos domU initrd with lvm support

Before I forget again

Initrd for domU

mkinitrd --preload xennet --preload xenblk /boot/initrd-2.6-xen.img 2.6.18-8.1.8
.el5xen

Now at least I can google for it again :)

Oct 11 2007

Whaa

Aaahrr.. I can't find my /. T-shirts anymore :((

Oct 10 2007

Zimbra Annoyance (Updated)

Zimbra has this nice feature to share calendars, you share a calendar with a group of people and they get a mail
The following share has been created:

Now when you read that mail in the Zimbra interface .. everything works fine.. there is another mime part with some XML info that Zimbra learns to create an Accept button from.

However lots of people use IMAP or POP3 rather than the webinterface to read their mail.
Non Zimbra clients don't parse that extra XML part, so they get a mail stating that a new share has been created but they never actually see that calendar in their webinterface.

The person who sent the invite also doesn't have an option to resend the invite it seems.
Luckily the receiver can resend the mail to his inbox and then the xml part gets parsed.

Ideally someone not using the webinterface could get a link to click on .

Anyway .. at least it works.. unlike some other groupware solutions.

UPDATE:
Ah the lovely ways of a community support.
Seems like my sender didn't look good enough .. there indeed is a resend function.
And it seems that in the upcoming 5 release the nodes provide you with an URL and a (cleartext) username and password combo

Oct 09 2007

Announcing GeekDinner 6, Antwerp Edition

So we doodled and now we have a Date , a Location , and a Page to Sign up for the evening.

The majority of votes said we should meet on monday October 22 the which is what we'll do. I figured out that Kasteel Steytelinck in Wilrijk would be a good location with parking space and easy to reach from different highways.

And we also have a Wiki where you can Sign up for the event so we at least have an idea a how how many people will show up

Oct 09 2007

My First Linux

Pete and Dave are starting a trend that comes back every 2 years.

How long have you been using Linux ?

It must be the We're getting old week. With /. turning 10 etc

I recon it's pretty difficult to remember exact when and how after all these years. I do remember my first Linux Workshop in Brussels somewhere 1993 I also remember that when I started out writing a new project my first version always was 0.98 because I think that was the first Linux kernel I ever used ..
And yes it was an SLS and yes I remember going over to some friend before a Datalink meeting with a stack of 1.44 floppies then having to wait for another week since one of the floppies went bad and I had to make a new copy of that disk. We've come a long way :)

So when did YOU start with this Linux and Open Source thingie ? :)

Oct 08 2007

Slashdot 10th Aniversery

So this thursday we'll be celebrating the 10th birthday of /. amongst other locations in Antwerp.

Might I suggest that at each party the partygoers buy drinks all night for the person with the lowest /. id !

So Koen, how does that Bus by SMS thingie work ? :)

Oct 07 2007

Newbie Drupal Experiences

Every once in a while you start with something new.. you're used to being rather expercienced on different topics in open source , having written an article and a book left or right but there comes a day when you will feel a total newbie again :)

About 10 years ago I was mostly into technical webdevelopment , perl, php, oracle plsql , java servlets , coldfusion stuff like that.. I stopped building corporate websites about 7-8 years ago when I realised I was spending more time helping people to build the infrastructure to host those sites than actually building the sites. (That and the fact that I really got bored with people wanting greener green)

So fast forward to about 5-6 months ago where I suddenly felth the need again to start writing code for a small pet project of mine.

I wanted a framework where I could jumpstart with different features I needed such as usermanagement and a blog feature.

As I mentionned earlier this week .. everybody seems to be using Drupal these days and has similar newbie feelings :)

Dag is posting about his experiences on how to use Drupal as a personal blog. So my current project is different.

For a personal blog I wouldn't be using the blog module either has he describes, but as I wanted different authors .. I understood I do need it.

I had the same problem with the Vocabularies and Terms .. Upon starting I really didn't understand what they meant for my blog. So I recreated the categories I had in dotclear in there. I deleted them from my database after a month, when I figured out how to use tagging in the blog :)

So what do you need when you want to go one step further, like getting content from a database. So here is where the I probably went totally wrong and where the documentation could use a hand.

I started out writing my own module where I use some drupal functions and custom php code. Turns out there is something like CCK but I`m still not sure if CCK is the thing I need (or how to use it)

I`m pretty sure the way I`m writing my modules totally wrong also.
I'm having 1 big file in which I do everything.. Pretty crappy if you ask me but I don't really find another way .. Or should I create multiple modules ?

Luckily this is just a hobby, won't be big and professional like... It's just a project to learn and I got a different dayjob ..
However my fear is that other people probably won't realize how wrong the
are using a certain technology and will offer their services to customers :(

So I`m nagging some people about a new Drupal User group meeting.
Guess Dag and I will learn some stuff there ;)

Oct 05 2007

The Toss Test

It seems like The 10th floor test which I described in my early blog years and which got refused at Wikipdia is also often referred to as the Toss Test

However I must say I prefer to do the test without the part where they throw the engineer out of the window :)