Jul 02 2005

512Mb iMac Rocks!

I just upgraded my iMac from a slow 64Mb machine to a "bleeding fast" 512Mb workstation. No really 512Mb in an iMac makes it a perfect tool to surf , read email , play music and watch streams.
I`m running UbuntuPPC on it and I`m loving it.

Jun 30 2005

Gaim

After 10+ years of using ircii and more recenlty epic as my favourite chat client, since yesterday I have changed to Gaim as my default irc client, despite the fact that itsn't command line based it gives me all the irc channels and servers I need in 1 window and on top of it I even get a nice jabber client with it. !

Makes one wonder .. I first joined irc somewhere 93-94 ish because I wanted to chat with the people I knew from the demoscene, most of them were located abroad , mostly .fi and .se , and dialing to their BBS's was just to expensive. While at #coders , #daskmig I even cofouned #nlcoders but got more in contact with people from #vlaanderen and later on #linux.be. For the fun I just tried to have a look on the different channels I used to frequent, lots of them still exist , strange thing is .. I still know people on most of these channels :)

Irc evolved from a purely recreational thing to a tool I use daily to keep in touch with collegues, to remotely debug problems and help them the world has changed a lot ..
irc is still the same :)

Jun 28 2005

What I have against gui's for firewalls !

I just ran into Firestarter which seems to look like a nice gui for iptables.
But upon seeing the screenshots I was wondering , why would one want to see the firewall status and traffic passing by on the desktop, sure it looks good but who whants a
gui on a firewall , who even wants to install X on an firewall (I`m talking corporate firewalls here, not the ocassional desktop/laptop connected in a "hostile" network that you want to secure).

If you don't have the graphical environment on the physical firewall apart from tunneling it over ssh most solutions open up other ports for the for the application to work, opening more holes in order te create higher security, strange concept :)

Actually from my personal experience, lots of people that are asking for a gui shouldn't be given one because they don't understand what they are doing and screw up more
than they actually secure. These people are better of with a firewall managed by a 3rd party that will help them realise that they shouldn't be opening ftp/telnet/pop3/vnc ports to certain hosts because they already have a VPN infrastructure that gives people access to certain services in a secure way. Too bad that some of them have to learn the hard way that if they start fiddling with their rules things will go wrong and will cost them a lot more to actually fix the problem they created than have somebody else solve it correctly the first time.

Jun 26 2005

Linuxtag 2005

LinuxTag 2005 is over, we went there with the bigger part of the X-Tend team, 10 people in total.

My impressions tell me that I've been to better editions of LinuxTag, My first complaint is that it really shouldn't call itselve an international conference because it is too German centric
Being a former speaker at LinuxTag , I already told Nils a couple of times but this year I heard more similar feedback from other people. Even when asking speakers to do their talks in English beforehand they still gave the talks in German :( I have no problem with introductiion level talks in German to satisfy the local audience, but more advanced topics should be in English, or French :)

Every talk differs and there were quite a number of interresting talks (especially in the FudCon II track ), but some talks need to find another forum.
During one talk one of the collegues sitting next to me remarked "This is a talk where .org sold out to .com". A talk where the first 15 slides are irrelevant marketing material from some hardware vendor does not fit at a LinuxConference, it might fit at a vendor event about Open Source (hmm.. I even remember seeing similar slides from the MySQL conference from the same vendor ) but not at LinuxTag. (imvho)

Apart from those only small things annoyed me, no wifi access in the auditoria (unlike last years) and the fact that the doors to the zoo had signs posted that we shouldn't enter the zoo that way.
When checking later with the organisation it seemed that we still should be able to enter the zoo, somehow :)

Jun 26 2005

OpenOffice EasterEgg

In the Calc part of oo.org type =game("StarWars"), enjoy the game.

Jun 26 2005

Antwerp - Karlsruhe 477 Km , 9 hours 30

Thursday I travelled from Antwerp to Karlsruhe by car, I've been doing that for the past 3-4 years and mostly it taks us 4 to 4.5 hours including a couple of stops etc.

First problem was to conquer the Antwerp ring, with the work there we lost about an hour for the first 10 Km When restarting my engine on the ring after 10 minutes of full stop we tought "Ok, we had enough traffic jams on the way already so rather than 4.5 hours it will be 5.5 hours By 1500 we'll be in Karlsruhe". Then on the A4 direction Koln we got stuck in a 25-40 minute traffic jam because 2 trucks had an accident just before Kreuz Kerpen which was our exit to the A61. Finally reaching the A61 with a changed ETA to around 1600 we were happy that we could drive again .. for about 2 minutes.. then we had to stop, full stop, shut down the engine again and wait.

Everybody was walking around on the Autobahn chatting with the people in the other cars. Looking back and forth all we saw were cars and trucks, but no movement whatsoever. It seemed that 3Km before us there was an accident and the road was fully blocked. After about 1.5 hours we saw that cars behind us were returning in the opposite direction and were leaving the highway to the previous exit. We were told that the road would be blocked for the next 4 hours and we should do the same. So here I was driving on a piece of road where people do 160Km/h in normal circumstances , backwards.

Once of the highway the question was how do we get from here to Karlsruhe, I wanted to go back to the A4 in order to take the next big Autoway south A3, or so .. but the A4 was closed direction Koln, so I had to drive 1 exit further. From there we tried to find a way to join the A4 again, with the A61 closed and everybody trying to do the same that took us about an hour. Then from Koln via Bonn back south .. guess what .. just before Bonn, exactly .. accident & traffic jam another hallf hour. With 2 smaller trafficjams for the rest of the trip we eventually arrived in Karlsruhe around 19h30. About 9h30 after we left and 5 hours later than expected.

Luckily when we drove back on saturday the trip only took us 4h30 :)

Jun 19 2005

Last week's presentations

I've placed the presentation I gave last thursday about Infrastructure Requirements for Linux on the desktop at both the Linux on the Desktop event at Novell and the OpenSquare event online
you can download it from http://www.x-tend.be/~buytaert/presentations/Infrastructure_Requirements_Linux_Desktop.sxi

Jun 19 2005

World66

I updated my world66 maps last weekend

Next week we'll be leaving for Linuxtag Karlsruhe again ..

Jun 19 2005

openmosix 2.6 userland

Matteo posted the old userland tools on the openmosix-devel mailinglist. These are the ones written by some students but he wants to rewrite them,

My initial feedback to the original developers would be don't use variable names in your native language "TAILLE_STRUCT, TROP_VIEUX" etc , same goes for documentation and comments, only a limited number of people speak french and (don't blame me) most of the world prefers english as a their second language.

But at least now we have something to test and play with !

Jun 17 2005

No more restaurants this week :)

Last friday Facade

Wednesday , Little Budha Next time Stijn will have to pay :)

and yesterday .. Le Cameleon Citron with the OpenSquare people

Oops, I even forgot our tuesday lunch habit, we moved from Mucha in StNiklaas to Mucha serves great food but most of us were still hungry after lunch so were looking for an alternative