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German words

2007-06-26T20:49:00.000+02:00

Recently I visited Wohnwelt Pallen in Aachen, Germany. It's a furniture store that has lots of other stuff too and also contains a restaurant. On the menu outside of the restaurant I saw a course with one of the best combination of German words I have ever seen:

Würziger Spießbraten mit Zwiebeljus, Semmelknödel und Rahmwirzing.

True Hitchhiker (2007)

2007-05-25T23:56:00.000+02:00

Happy Towel Day!

"...any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

R.I.P. Douglas Adams

(Towel Day 2006)

Am I slow?

2007-05-15T21:23:00.000+02:00

Everybody "Googles" his or her name sometime, today I did this too.
Now I think Google is trying to tell me something, searching for Loe Spee returns the following suggestion "Did you mean: Low Speed".

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn CDs arrived

2007-05-10T22:36:00.000+02:00

Today my Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn CDs arrived.
They are nice they are lovely they are hot.

But not as hot as the biomass powerplant some 400 meters from our house.

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn released

2007-04-19T19:28:00.000+02:00

The new Ubuntu has been released, it's numbered 7.04 and it's name is (as many already know) Feisty Fawn.
Go get it here (www.ubuntu.com) or here (releases.ubuntu.com).

We all live in a ...

2007-04-12T20:08:00.000+02:00

As this Reuters.com article says, the royalty dispute between the Beatles' record company called "Apple Corps" and EMI has been settled. This probably means the Beatles music will be available in internet music stores soon.

CHMOD a-x on executable files in subdirs

2007-04-12T10:39:00.000+02:00

Today I copied a lot of files from a Samba share, the problem with this is that

chmod a-x * -R

won't work since all directories will also be non-executable and therefor not accessible.
The command I used is:

find -type f -exec chmod a-x {} \;

Thanks to Pascal de Bruijn, Stephan Kochen and Martijn van de Streek.

CPU frequency selector

2007-04-06T01:25:00.000+02:00

About a year ago I bought a IBM ThinkPad R50e, which is actually one of the most basic IBM laptops you will find. It came with 256 MB RAM (which I upgraded to 512 MB), it has no fancy things like TV-Out and did not come with a integrated WiFi card, and does not have an mini-PCI slot.
But well it came with all the things I really needed, and I bought a nice WiFi PC-Card (about which I will blog soon), and everything works like a charm.
The "luxury" of this laptop is the CPU, it contains an "Intel Pentium M 1.60 GHz processor", which is pretty nice for such a modest laptop. It's a stepping CPU which means in normal mode it will run at 600 MHz and on demand will step up a maximum of 5 steps, 200 MHz each.
Under Microsoft Windows I could use a tool that came from Intel to set the CPU stepping manually, for example if my battery was very low I could force it to run at 600 MHz, so I would get the most time out of it.
In Ubuntu however I could use the CPU frequency tool to read the current frequency but I couldn't adjust it, which can come in handy sometimes. Then Dennis Laumen (my hero in this case) said he read something about why this is not enabled by default. The CPU frequency is a system setting and should not be configurable by any user, only users with administrative permissions, and by default a gnome-panel applet doesn't have these rights. This can however be changed really easy.

Open a terminal window and type "sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets".
Execute that command and enter the root password to get administrative permissions.
The following dialog will appear, read it and press "OK".
Then you are presented with the question to give the cpufreq-selector tool permission to set the frequency stepping of the CPU, this question should be answered with "Yes".
Wait until control is returned to the terminal and close it.

If I (left)click the CPU frequency monitor gnome panel applet now it looks like.

After this it's time to Rock'n'Roll, thanks to Dennis Laumen for pointing this out to me, and Carlos Garcia Campos for creating this wonderful applet.

Notes:

It would be nice if the frequency selector could be activated using the preferences of the applet, it could then by using gksudo possibly give a graphical interface for users to enter their root password and activate the additional functionality.
It's also possible to use governors which will adjust the frequency of the CPU dynamically after certain parameters change, for example the demand of CPU power.

GNOME 2.18 and MP3?

2007-03-16T17:28:00.000+01:00

Yesterday
Yesterday I blogged about the new GNOME release.
One of the things I found a bit odd while reading the release notes was this sentence:

Encode your audio in more formats including OGG, MP3 or even AAC!

This made me think that MP3 and AAC support would be in the new GNOME. Well I just ignored it and thought it was some kind of marketing trick I didn't understand.

Today
Today I downloaded the Demo Live CD to try the new GNOME. When I was using it and browsing some network share I came across some MP3s. I just couldn't resist and double-clicked one of them. (Well actually right-clicked it and opened it in Totem since Banshee which is using Mono wouldn't start under the Live CD.)

To come to the point, when Totem started all of a sudden sound was coming out of my speakers. And I was flabbergasted. Did I miss something somewhere or does GNOME have MP3 support by default these days?

Ubuntu new release new website

2007-03-16T17:21:00.000+01:00

On April 19th the new Ubuntu will be released. It will be dubbed Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. The first real beta is going to be released on March 22nd.

Just before Dapper was launched the Ubuntu website was updated, and today I noticed it has been updated again. And it's a real improvement.
What I like are the two button in the center, nothing else just two buttons "Desktop" and "Server". Also the small menu on the left side is simple, clear and easy. Thumbs up.

GNOME 2.18 released

2007-03-15T16:23:00.000+01:00

A new release of the GNOME desktop environment is out.
This time it's version 2.18, and as always it looks really great.

Have a look at the GNOME 2.18 page or jump directly to the GNOME 2.18 Release Notes (English).

Voor degene die de betekenis niet kent

2007-03-05T22:54:00.000+01:00

sa·men (bw.)

1 bij elkaar => bijeen, saampjes, tezamen

2 met elkaar

3 onderling

4 bij elkaar gerekend

sa·men·wer·ken (onov.ww.)

1 gemeenschappelijk aan eenzelfde taak werken => coöpereren, samendoen

Bron: Van Dale

Koop "vrienden" voor 99 cent

2007-02-27T13:09:00.000+01:00

Dat de social networking sites de laatste tijd nogal een hype zijn en behoorlijk uit de hand lopen wisten we al. Maar dat je tegenwoordig, mocht je geen aanzienlijk "vrienden" lijstje hebben, deze "vrienden" kunt kopen dat slaat echt alles.

Bluetooth on Ubuntu Linux

2007-02-25T13:05:00.000+01:00

Recently I borrowed a Bluetooth USB stick from a friend of mine, just to try if I could get it working on Ubuntu. My friend bought this stick at MediaMarkt for 13 euros, it has no brand on the package just the name Qtrek on the stick itself. And it's pretty small.

So I plugged in the stick and typed in "lsusb" on the console to see what kind of chipset it had. On the console it said:

ID 0a12:0001 Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)

turns out this chipset is well supported on Linux, immediately a red light in the stick started to blink.

How it works now:
The first thing I tried was sending a file with my phone, it found my computer as "zaphod-0", I didn't have to do anything for this, it just was there.
When I wanted to send the file it failed however.
On the blog of Pascal de Bruijn I read about his experience with Bluetooth and also read he installed the "gnome-bluetooth" package. I followed his example and a new application called "Bluetooth File Sharing" appeared in my "Applications -> Accessories" menu.
By starting this application a nice little icon appears in the notification area (system tray). So again I tried to send a picture from my mobile phone, and all of a sudden this dialog popped up:
Since "Arthur Dent" is the bluetooth identification of my phone, I knew it worked, so I pressed the "OK" button and waited. Now the progressbar on my phone started to work and also the icon in the notification area starts an animation, and after a while this dialog appeared:
Then I knew the file was transferred, and there it was on my desktop. Worked like a charm. Well actually there were some humps and bumps, but once I fixed those it works exactly like I told above.

What really happened:
At first when I started the "Bluetooth File Sharing" application and wanted to send a file from my phone it failed. So I grabbed my sister's phone an LG KG800 and from there I tried to send a picture, and immediately it worked.
If you experience problems with this file sharing you can start the "Bluetooth File Sharing" application from the console by using the following command:

/usr/bin/gnome-obex-server

whenever something happens on the bluetooth connection debug messages are printed to the console, a succesfull transfer should look like this:

conn_request: bdaddr 00:17:4B:1D:0B:E9
conn_complete: status 0x00
** Message: Incoming connection from 00:17:4B:1D:0B:E9
** Message: Device 00:17:4B:1D:0B:E9 is about to send an object.
** Message: File arrived from 00:17:4B:1D:0B:E9
** Message: Filename '200702171898.jpg' Length 308934
** Message: Saving to '/home/lgespee/Desktop/200702171898.jpg'

Between the "** Message: Device ..." and "** Message: File arrived ..." the file is actually being transferred, so it can take a while for the lather to show up.
When I tried to send from my phone I only got to "** Message: Device ..." and then my phone told me the transfer failed. Since I am used to problems with my phone I gave it a good old reboot, and that did the trick, now it works like it should.

Tip of the day: Never ever buy a Nokia N70, cause it sucks in everything, bigtime, thanks Nokia.

Linux Apple Airport Express Support

2007-01-26T00:04:00.000+01:00

Well it's a little bit late, but this post is a reaction to three posts Stephan Kochen about streaming audio from the GStreamer framework tomade by an Apple Airport Express. (Post 1, Post 2, Post 3).

More than a month ago I was looking for a GStreamer sink that would stream audio player by the GStreamer framework to an Apple Airport Express.
I couldn't find anything, the only thing I found was JustePort by Jon Lech Johansen. And a certain Bash script.

I got it working more or less. What I did was create an ALSA sink, so it would write all data it received to a file (actually a FiFo). The Bash script I found would then be started and in a infinite loop keep reading data from the FiFo and pipe it to JustePort.
It worked, well I got sound on my speakers (which are connected to an amp. which is connected to the Apple Airport Express). The problems and/or limitations I experienced were:

A crash of the music player the first play you want to start playing a song with this construction. Restarting the music player and trying again always worked.
An irritating buzz when the FiFo was empty (the player was paused, or the gap in between songs).
The horrid construction and actions that need to be taken to get it working each time.
And of course the fact that all sound in Linux that was player over ALSA would be outputted to my speakers.

The best thing would indeed be a GStreamer sink plugin for this. So Stephan just to let you know, there are other people (even in your province) that are interested in this.
Now I am not a really great programmer on these kind of systems (too hardware oriented I'm afraid) but maybe I can help you in some way.

I think the best thing to do is to get something small to work first like detect if a Jack is plugged into the Airport's socket. And then from thereon continue implementing more complicated things.

Let me know if I can help you in any way, cause I have two of these babies at home, so I have a testbed.

From Sysvinit to Upstart = -12 seconds

2007-01-07T15:03:00.000+01:00

A few days ago I reinstalled my Ubuntu Linux PC. I was still using Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake but decided to install Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft since I had no problems with it on my laptop.

I am always a bit reluctant about upgrades so I decided to completely reinstall the system. But before I did I clocked my boot time under Dapper Drake (which uses Sysvinit), from pressing the power button on my PC till the GDM login screen took 67 seconds.

Then I installed Edgy Eft and installed all the applications I previously used and got the settings back (had some troubles with Evolution) and then clocked again. This time from pressing the power button till the GDM login screen took 55 seconds. Upstart gave an improvement of 12 seconds, that's pretty much I think.

Is it a birdie? Is it an Eagle? Is it an Albatros?

2007-01-05T00:04:00.000+01:00

No! It's a hole in one!

Uh, well okay, let me explain that. Yesterday I went to Dennis together with Pascal and Ivo, cause Dennis and Pascal both had their birthdays somewhere in the Christmas-holiday and they decided to have a little party. Well actually they decided we all should come play with Dennis' new Nintendo Wii.
An absolutely fabulous idea if you ask me.

We played the games that come packed with the Wii, Bowling (in which I pretty sucked), Tennis, Boxing, Baseball and Golf. Dennis also downloaded (bought) Bomberman from the Wii online shop system, and we played it for some time, a lot of retro fun.

To get back to the title of this post, in the golf game I got a hole in one at Hole 4, the total par of the 9-hole was 36 and I got 36 ;).

And for the insiders something worth mentioning is that Dennis got beaten by Pascal.

Another post about the Nintendo Wii will follow soon.

Gnome-VFS is getting old

2006-09-25T23:47:00.000+02:00

Alexander Larrson (RedHat) has been a developer and maintainter of Gnome-VFS for a while now.
He said in this mail a few days back, that he thinks it's time to replace Gnome-VFS.

Gnome-VintageFileSystem

While the idea behind Gnome-VFS is bloody briliant, its architecture and other stuff are getting old. I sure hope the replacement will be good, but I don't really doubt about that.

Teardown

2006-09-02T13:18:00.000+02:00

In all the excitement of Upstart by Scott James Remnant, you might have forgotten this other project by the same guy, Teardown.
The target of Teardown is best described with the usecase on the Teardown wiki page:

Matt is a laptop user, when he shuts down his laptop he doesn't want to have to wait for almost a minute before the laptop has actually powered off.

What it actually does, is remove all redundant and unnecessary symlinks to init scripts in the rc directories. Most scripts only send a TERM signal to their corresponding processes while this is also done by sendsigs. So most of them are redundant. On the teardown wikipage you can find a list of init scripts the developers found where only sending a TERM signal or doing nothing at all!

To those who are thinking, "What the **** is TERM signal?", Teardown just makes your computer shutdown within a few seconds (read: very fast compared to the current shutdown process).

1 Ubuntu user + 1 Ubuntu user = 2 Ubuntu users

2006-08-29T19:46:00.000+02:00

Help the Ubuntu counter, add yourself and your machines running Ubuntu, to the Ubuntu counter project.

I am Ubuntu user #7442:

Beagle a dog I like & Rhythmbox or Banshee

2006-08-24T23:47:00.000+02:00

Beagle a dog I like

As I told you, I reinstalled my Ubuntu PC a few days ago, and since I had some bad experience with Beagle destroying my filesystem in the past, I didn't use it on my old install. But today I gave it another shot, since a lot has happened for Beagle between the old and the new Ubuntu.To be honest, I don't like dogs so much, but this one, man do I like it. Now I can't imagine how I could have ever lived without it. Really great.

Rhythmbox or Banshee

A struggle continuing on my desktop is the choice between Banshee and Rhythmbox, I still can't decide which one is going to be my default player. In the near future I am going to write a comparison from my point of view with the advantages and disadvantages, in my opinion, of the two competitors.

Help Firefox win the battle

2006-08-23T11:06:00.000+02:00

Help Firefox win the battle against Internet Explorer. This time not by reporting bugs, helping developers, promote it amongst friends and family.

But with a plain old game of checkers, go play.

Vote for your Linux preferences

2006-08-23T01:10:00.000+02:00

DesktopLinux.com launched its 2006 Desktop Linux survey on August 21, asking users of Linux desktops to identify what distributions they use, as well as their choice of windowing environment (KDE, GNOME, etc.), web browsers, email clients, and Windows-on-Linux solutions.

Well I think it might be a good idea to tell DesktopLinux.com about your preferences, so go vote now!

Long time, no blog - Some time, long blog

2006-08-21T23:59:00.000+02:00

Well it has been over almost two months since my last blog post.
I've been busy with all kinds of things, working, helping charity, having vacation, partying. But I thought it was time to add another post to my blog.

Two days ago I reinstalled my Ubuntu PC. I was still using an install which originated from an early beta, which I updated to another beta. Then I installed XGL using one of the nastiest methods and updated to another beta and finnaly to the stable after that.
Well the system was all sluggish and instable because of my crappy XGL install. So I decided it was time for a reinstall. And woopidoo, does this baby run like a charm now. This time without XGL.
I changed the human window theme because I was bored of it and I still affiliated the caramel color with a sluggish system :).
While browsing through the themes that come standard with every Ubuntu install I found one called Silicon, and man do I like it. I especially like the colors (grayish brown) of the title bar and the nice buttons on it, and of course the "not rounded shape" of the window borders.

Of course I was also bored with the fancy shining orange folder icons. So I decided to go with the Tango icon theme on which the Human icon theme is based. The button icons are almost all the same, and it has some nice mat blue colored folder icons.

The next day a friend of mine called me, and we were talking about some things and at one moment he said: "Oh by the way I just installed Ubuntu on a PC I had spare.". Ofcourse I was totally flabbergasted, because I didn't expect him to, so the duration of the phonecall got extended a bit (1.5 hours). I explained a lot of things, from where Linux comes from, where the Canonical gets its funds, who Mark Shuttleworth is, what philosophy drives most opensourcers have, how the community takes part in all this, etc, etc.
He got more and more interested and maybe Ubuntu has another (parttime) user. At one point in the conversation he asked me what KDE was and to what he could compare it (of all the things I told him). Well saying he could compare it with Gnome here would be a plain lie :). So my answer was: "Rommel" (Garbage). I told him it's a desktop environment like Gnome is, and explained him some of the differences. After like two sentences he was completely cured from the KDE idea.
While I was argumenting why Gnome and especially GTK are so great (although he is not an IT person, but a technician nonetheless), I got excited about using GTK again myself. So I decided to install MonoDevelop.The last version of MonoDevelop I installed, on my old Ubuntu install, was I believe a 0.8 and it lacked a lot of things one needs. But the 0.10 shipped with Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake is pretty good, it lacks some things, but it is absolutely useful.

I'll wrap it up because this post is getting pretty long. Probably Ubuntu is getting another user, the father of one of my collegues is willing to give Ubuntu a shot. So I'm going to install Ubuntu on his PC coming thursday and friday and he will try it for a while and then decide to keep on using it, or maybe reverting back to Windows. One advantage is he is very open minded for inovation. He might just love Ubuntu ;).

To prevent these long posts in the future I will try to make some time to at least blog once every week.

Je kunt zeggen van Belgen wat je wil

2006-06-26T00:18:00.000+02:00

Maar wij kunnen nog wel iets van ze leren.
Zie alhier een artikel op ZDNet.

ODF for the win!

Nu Nederland nog.

True Hitchhiker

2006-05-25T21:04:00.000+02:00

Happy Towel Day!
"...any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Check out Dennis' Towel Day entry!

R.I.P. Douglas Adams

Tomorrow is the day

2006-05-24T17:02:00.000+02:00

As I informed all of you almost a month ago, the big day is tomorrow.

Because most (if not all) of the shops in The Netherlands will be closed tomorrow, I hereby inform you to go get a towel today if you don't have one ;)

80s Videoclips

2006-05-09T00:05:00.000+02:00

The fact that the 80s probably produced the most awkward music videos of all time isn't anything new.

But today I found one from Finnish origin on Google Video that just beats the rest in every aspect. I had to laugh out loud, especially about the background dancers.

The 80s, what a wonderfull era.

One way or another

2006-05-05T14:52:00.000+02:00

If Microsoft Office doesn't come to ODF, then ODF will come to Microsoft Office.

[commercial]
If you don't like plug-ins, use a better Office suite, like OpenOffice.org.
[/commercial]

Package Mayhem

2006-04-28T01:13:00.000+02:00

Today I found a little bug in gnome-about-me, the application used to set all personal data of a user (Name, Address, etc). I didn't find a package on launchpad that said gnome-about-me, so I posted it under gnome-desktop.
And as you can read in the comments on the bugreport I got a wonderful tip I found valuable enough to blog about ;)

Sebastien Bacher:

Thanks for your bug. About the right package:
$ dpkg -S gnome-about-me
...
gnome-control-center: /usr/bin/gnome-about-me
...

Type "dpgk -S " followed by a binary name, and you will get the name of the package containing it.

Simply Great.

Update: Read the comments for some really useful tips by "Anonymous".

Edgy ...

2006-04-19T23:40:00.000+02:00

Today the name for the Ubuntu Dapper +1 release has been published.
It will be "Edgy Eft".

And know what, I dislike it, I don't want a reptile I want a fish.

Anyone interested in a petition for "Edgy Eel"?
I just like the sound of that.

Microsoft Internet Explorer being more correct than Firefox

2006-04-19T02:29:00.000+02:00

To give some credit to the Microsoft Internet Explorer developers, after bashing them in my last post, I thought it was fair to post the following discovery.

I was making a form in HTML, but it showed up in MSIE with some space above and beneath it. Ofcourse my reaction was, "oh no, not again" (just like the bowl of petunias).
Looking into the subject deeper I made a shocking discovery. The MSIE developers are actually more correct here than the Firefox (Gecko engine) developers. Not that the lather are wrong, the MSIE ones are just more correct.

As can be read in this W3 encouragement, developers should give the <form> element the following CSS option by default: "margin: 1.33em 0". Which tells us the form should have a default margin to its top and botton of 1.33em.

I can tell you one thing, I was flabbergasted ;)

Why exactly do people use Microsoft Internet Explorer?

2006-04-17T12:35:00.000+02:00

The last few days I have been working on a website I am making for someone. The website must be readable and look good in Microsoft Internet Explorer (the application some refer to as a browser).
I lost about 5 hours trying to work around some bugs in MSIE way of rendering CSS2. Later I will make a post about these specific bugs and their fixes, although I am thinking of making a seperate blog to post about all MSIE quirks I stumble upon.

Earlier this day I received a video showing the weakness of MSIE in another way, it will always be the weaker child. The video is quite funny actually:

Eurocontrol: "Is this flight 6, over?"

2006-04-02T19:21:00.000+02:00

Uh well, I seemed to have missed something somewhere.
I just posted a bug and got a comment, telling me to test Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 6 for this.

And I was like, is there a Flight 6 already?

For everyone who has missed it too, here is the release information, and the download page for cd images.

Moodle

2006-03-31T15:48:00.000+02:00

Moodle is a free, OpenSource course management system for online learning.
Yesterday at the Löss seminar at my school I heard about the project for the first time.
(For some reason I always mentally picture a noodle eating cow when hearing the name "Moodle", probably just me.)

At my school (Hogeschool Zuyd) we have a semilar system called Blackboard which is propriatary software. The seminar yesterday got me interested and so I went on a journey today to see what this OpenSource alternative had to offer. Mainly because teachers as well as students at my school are often complaining about Blackboard.

And WOW, does this "noodle eating cow" look great. I have only played with the online demo for an hour now. After that the demo was resetted. Lucky for me I made a backup of the created course and could easily restore it after the reset. I loved what I saw, great functionality. A clean and clear interface, which however could be improved on some minor points I discovered during this one hour session.

After a while I discovered it is translated in Dutch (and many other languages for that matter) too. This is surely a great topic to make and hold a presentation about at our school one day on behalf of the HSZLUUG.

I will keep you updated on the subject.

(Thanks go out to the Löss for letting me know about this project and for letting me participate in the seminar for free.)

Driver's Seat

2006-03-25T12:23:00.000+01:00

Yesterday (2006-03-24) I succeeded for my drivers licence, or in Dutch 'rijbewijs'.

So be carefull on the roads ;)

Big day countdown.

2006-03-25T12:20:00.000+01:00

Exactly two months to go.

Details will follow shortly.

Pomme & Kelly

2006-03-20T19:21:00.000+01:00

I was just working at school with Dennis Laumen and we took a 10 minute break.

It was a good idea to surf to Google Videos, we found the videos of Pomme & Kelly. They are like the Chinese Backstreet Boys:

only difference, they're girls and apparently Dutch.

This is the video we found, it's a lipsync of Aretha Franklin - Respect:

It even seems there is a complete online Idols version, where you can link your own made musicvideo and compete with others.

Don't you just love the internet.

Sunglasses at night

2006-03-17T01:09:00.000+01:00

After using my old hackergotchi for half a year now I finally decided to change it to a new more fashionable one.

I am not sure yet if it is more Corey Hart style or more Benjamin Mako Hill style, oh well what does it matter anyway, behold...

The old one:

The new one:

What a difference.

Wallpaper payback

2006-03-15T15:08:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine (Collin van Banning) downloaded the Breezy Live CD about half a year ago and was really enthousiastic. First thing I did the coming weekend was install Ubuntu on his laptop. Needed some additional memory which I got from another Ubuntu-NL member (thanks again Hein-Pieter). Since that weekend, he started to love Ubuntu more and more, and is now even handing out Live CDs to other people.

That same friend made a picture on his vacation to Switserland in December 2005, which I liked so much I have had it as a desktop wallpaper ever since. So I decided to ask him for releasing this picture under the Creative Commons, he agreed on the idea, I edited the picture where needed and uploaded it to art.gnome.org.
It got accepted last night and is now an official art.gnome.org wallpaper.

An easy and good way for people to contribute without posting bugreports or coding.

PHP Object Generator

2006-03-14T20:16:00.000+01:00

Just found this nice generator.

Generator

One who, or that which, generates, begets, causes, or produces.

By Wiktionary

Well it produces things, automatically, which is always a good thing for us lazy Software Engineers. The following is said on their website:

By generating PHP objects with integrated CRUD methods, POG gives you a head start in any project. The time you save can be spent on more interesting areas of your project.

I just tested it, and it looks really cool and timesaving.

Bravo Tango

2006-03-14T19:43:00.000+01:00

When I saw the new iconset in Ubuntu the orange Tango one as seen at Jeff Waugh's Blogpost, I was in doubt. It looks really good, but than again, it isn't really that Gnome HIG compliant.

So I posted this issue as a bug, not to really report it as a bug but more to get some clarification on the subject.
And well I got it, from the Dictator himself.

The bugreport can be found at launchpad.

Reactie op DRM lied van Dennis Kaarsemaker

2006-03-09T21:54:00.000+01:00

Wil ik bij deze even reageren op de blogpost van Dennis Kaarsemaker daar hij geen reactie mogelijkheid heeft op zijn eigen blog.

Pure genialiteit!
Leuk vooral als je even het nummer opzet om de melodie te pakken te krijgen.
Vervolgens hardop met je hoofdtelefoon op begint te zingen met de lyrics voor je
op planet.ubuntu-nl.org.
Even stopt om te horen dat je zusje zegt: "Wat je nu zingt klopt helemaal niet."

Ik denk dat we nog maar eens een Ubuntu-NL meeting moeten houden, en dan maar meteen de nieuwe versie van je grote DRM lied opnemen.

Schitterend.

Congratulations Wikipedia

2006-03-02T00:23:00.000+01:00

1 Million articles on Wikipedia, congratulations.

Vliegenmeppers en metrosexuele eenden

2006-02-21T00:36:00.000+01:00

I just ran the new Ubuntu 6.04 Dapper Drake (Flight 4) Live CD.
It looks really promising, all kinds of cool new things, and although I can't test this really because I am using a Live CD, it does feel a lot faster.

Using an alpha assures you will run upon a few bugs, I found 7 this evening, mostly small ones, and reported them all using Launchpad - Malone.

Maybe I will test my XS4All VOIP tomorrow with Ekiga, (Treenaks get ready for some questions ;)).

What details are for

2006-02-17T16:39:00.000+01:00

Todat I received a new kernel image through the Ubuntu updater.
I expanded the Details to read a bit more about it, and this is
what I saw:

Version 2.6.12-10.28:

"MOMMY MOMMY! Soyuz eated my previous upload!! MOMMYYYYY!!!!!"

aka: "The let reupload 10.27 and hope.."

You just got to love it.

Tux Tax

2006-01-20T01:36:00.000+01:00

We can't make it more fun, but we can make it easier.

As the slogan of the Dutch tax collectors office goes.
They really gave that slogan some strength.

Behold: http://www.belastingdienst.nl/download/1122.html

Maybe a little too late, but hey, they made a Linux app.

Belastingdienst we love you.

NTFS write support

2006-01-04T01:26:00.000+01:00

Well I just came home from the Irish Pub where I went for a drink with two friends. And like every geek I always check my comp before going to sleep and check the familiar newspages.
And I read about the release of the new 2.6.15 kernel. Skipping through the list of major changes I read the following.

NTFS write support: NTFS finally implements write support so "vim /ntfs/foo.txt" works. You can write(2) to a file even beyond the end of the existing file. Resident non-resident files and are supported. Sparse files can also be written and holes will be filed appropriately. truncate(2), ftruncate(2) and open(2) with O_TRUNC flag also works. There're some limitations with heavily fragmented files which you won't be allowed to change. Also, notice that creation/deletion of files and directories is still not supported and mmap(2) based writes is still not complete (commit)

"Well hooray that looks promising." was what I thought.

I'm pickin' up good intentions

2006-01-02T18:57:00.000+01:00

Happy new year everybody.
I just wanted to wish you all the best for 2006 and let you know I am still alive.

Normally I don't have any good intentions for the upcoming year, but well I must admit I couldn't elude from the one I made for 2006.
Which is of course to Blog a little bit more.
And I'll promise you the last week of December has enough things to blog about. So stay tuned :)

Cheers...

Get Internet Explorer

2005-11-03T00:35:00.000+01:00

As you might all know the website GetFirefox there is another "browser" ;) called Internet Explorer. It too has a website GetInternetExplorer. Go and read all about it.

Funny.....

(Update: the "browser" even has a community, I thought MS didn't do these.)

The bird has landed

2005-10-20T16:47:00.000+02:00

Finally OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been released.
Go and download at http://www.openoffice.org/

Open the fridge and feel the Breezy

2005-10-13T10:55:00.001+02:00

Finally, it is October the 13th, which means that today the new release of Ubuntu Linux is there.
Version 5.10 codenamed Breezy Badger has finally arrived.

Yesterday some people of Ubuntu opened the Fridge, "Got something to report?" "Stick it on the fridge."

I am sorry for this short post, but my Ubuntu Linux CD has just finished burning, so I am heading for an install, I'll keep you informed.

(A picture of my fridge will follow when my sister returns from Rome and brings the digital camera back.)

OpenOffice.org into the water

2005-10-02T22:57:00.000+02:00

I just read an announcement on OSNews.com linking to an article telling us that the OpenOffice.org team has decided to develope a port of their great office suite for Apple Mac OS X.
This is great news, now Macintosh users finally have a good alternative to Microsoft Office for the Mac and AppleWorks.
NeoOffice .org already took a shot at this goal with NeoOffice/J based on the old OpenOffice.org 1.x series, but seeing the OpenOffice.org developers giving a shot at it, is a bright perspective. If I understood it correctly it will look like the average ordinary Aqua application, which is a real improvement compared to NeoOffice/J which was only partially Aqua style.

Keep up the good work OOo.

CPUs designed for Operating Systems

2005-09-27T22:30:00.000+02:00

That Linux and MS Windows are two opposites most of you will already know. When downloading a Linux distro one can choose between multiple CPU compiles, one for x86 CPUs, one for 64bit CPUs, one for PowerPC CPUs and probably a few others.
This is because different CPUs have different instruction sets and the Operating System needs to be compiled the right way to use these instruction sets.

Now what if we could turn this concept around and design the CPUs so they have the instruction sets the Operating Systems want? Sounds strange doesn't it.
Well let me tell you it does exist apparently. I received an old Compaq PC from a neighboor, he didn't need anymore and he knew I could probably use some parts, so he donated it to me. I was getting all the still useful parts out of it, floppy disk drive, cd-rom drive, sd-ram, cables, etc.
The CPU was passively cooled and had a nice heatsink, which a friend of mine was looking for for some time, so I decided to pull it of the CPU. And there it was a nice AMD-K6 looking me right in the eyes.

Nothing special about that, but when I examined the CPU a bit better after disposing it of the coolpaste I noticed something very strange. This CPU was designed for a specific Operating System, apparently AMD designed these CPUs for a specific Operating System.

Retro musicvideo's

2005-09-25T21:23:00.000+02:00

Saturday a friend of mine visited and he had recorded some oldschool early 90s Eurodance musicvideo's at home. They are just great, he had one or two video's of 2 Brothers On The 4th Floor which were awsome.
But total nostalgia came when I saw the video from Twenty 4 Seven (Dutch Wikipedia only) called Slave To The Music with performers Nance (Dutch Wikipedia only) and Stay-C.

Oktoberfest

2005-09-22T21:05:00.000+02:00

I just wounded up on a site searching for a GIMP plugin, and it had a webcam of the Oktoberfest in Bavaria Germany.

This website has got some pictures, and I must say one day I hope to go there to taste the atmosphere and the beer (of course).

Minor before major

2005-09-21T19:33:00.000+02:00

I just read that Firefox 1.0.7 has been released and can be downloaded from the Mozilla homepage. It finally fixes the IDN bug, it is a good thing that the Firefox developers still have time to patch the 1.0.x series, and are not spending all their time on the upcoming 1.5.x series.

Because quick patches are important!

Erdinger

2005-09-19T14:40:00.000+02:00

Today I was strolling around the Internet for half an hour when I decided to look for a place to buy Erdinger beer glasses. It is one of my favourite beers and I am used to drink these in a nearby club, in the original 0.5 liter glass.

So I was looking for a place to buy them and wounded up in the official Erdinger webshop.
On the 0.5 liter glass page I mentioned two links to other sized glasses, a 0.3 liter one and a 3.0 liter glass. And for a moment there, I thought it was a typo. So I clicked the 3.0 liter link and guess what they sell massive 3.0 liter beer glasses.

To get an idea of the size I searched for a picture, and found one using Google. To get a good illustration of the size the glasses are depicted next to a Pringles can.

Officer: "Why are you driving so reckless sir?"
Driver: "I don't know officer."
Officer: "How many beers did you drink sir?"
Driver: "Just one glass officer."
Officer: "I bet it was an Erdinger, now was it?"

Thanks go out to http://www.white-russian.nl/ for letting me use this picture.

Mini action by XS4All

2005-09-18T20:13:00.000+02:00

Today I saw something really cool. The dutch internet provider XS4All always had nice actions to draw their attention.
The difference here is that most do this because their services are poor. But with XS this is not the case. I am already three years XS customer and very very very satisfied, never had a connection drop in these three years (well once when lightning struck our neighboors house). This is how a ISP should perform, and they also have real skilled technical helpdesk employees and all kinds of nice services.

The cool thing however is that they currently offer you a modem for free (nothing special), they do not charge any enrolment fees, and you get a technician at your door who installs everything. Or you choose not to get the technician and instead get a 130 euro discount on a Mac Mini, now how cool is that.

Most XS4All customers are either geeks or people who got told to go for XS4All by geeks, this because they are not the cheapest in The Netherlands, but one of the few that are actual ISP's. Well geeks don't need a technician, and geeks love MacMini's (mostly), what a coincidence.
I just love this ISP, and am still waiting for an analysis that tells us XS4All customers have a bigger life expectancy compared to customers of other ISP's.

Jack Bauer is well trained

2005-09-16T13:55:00.000+02:00

Some days ago I finally started watching 24. I must say I am enjoying it.

As you all know Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is one of CTU's best agents, and he quickly sees the difference between friend and foe. In the first episode from 1.00 am to 2.00 am Bauer is escaping a building together with his superior Richard Walsh (Michael O'Neill).

Bauer improvises a bandage for a shot wound Walsh has, he walks up to a door with Walsh following. Bauer opens the door and looks to the right, he doesn't shoot, he continues by looking to the left in one swift move.
Walsh follows him and he too looks to the right, doesn't shoot either, but we suddenly see two crew members standing in the corridor. Are they lucky Jack and Richard got the very best training available, otherwise they would have been shot.
As we can see the two are a little bit tilting away from Bauer and Walsh the moment they see Walsh approaching, they clearly trust Bauer more.

First post

2005-09-15T19:22:00.000+02:00

Well now, my very own blog. At least I have the first post ;)
I hope my following posts will be more entertaining.

Cheers.