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Had a great time. No time to give an overview at the moment, but I will report on it as soon as possible.

@RealNitro: the only way to learn things is by coding a lot :-)

It has been a while since I have posted here, for two reasons: I didn't have much to say, and last week was very busy. I did a rewrite of the gotcha php-code that is used for the Home I live in. It took me a while to decypher the old code (amazingly complex), and eventually it took me 4 evenings to finish the job. However, the gotcha that's going on atm still uses the old code. :-( There was no time to test the new version thorougly, and just before the start of the gotcha (22h. last sunday), I discovered a little bug too. But I'm looking at it from the bright side: now I have the opportunity to fine tune my code, check it for weaknesses in its security, add new features, maybe add a fully featured admin-page, give it some new html code... If anyone (that is: anyone I know and trust ;-) ) wants to see my code running, just let me know. Btw, does anyone know of a way to check if an e-mail that should have been sent with the php code has really been sent? I'm asking this because last sunday the old php code did not start at first (I had to try 3 times!), and apparently some people didn't receive their passwords (which sould have been sent with the php mail function). :-/

Two days ago (sunday) I went to FOSDEM. The overall 'experience' was better than had I expected it to be. None of the presentations I attended were too technical (except the one about nautilus ;-) ). The one I enjoyed the most was the one about FAI, followed closely by XFCE. I think I liked the one about FAI the most because we might use it in stead of Fedora Stateless. (the speaker was very good too)

There ya go. Not much more to say. I have a big, unpublished post here at this blog about 'mabber.py'. But I will not publish it before I tested the installation instructions, and I still need to choose a license (or invent one).

It was quite hard to solve the problem I pointed at here. After a while we finally discovered the filesystem was quite corrupt, so configuration files were damaged. smb.conf was quite fast fixed, but the sendmail configuration was terrible. Thanks to Femi, it's solved. Let's hope we can soon migrate to our new server configuration, without sendmail.

Yesterday, I placed the prices of our Dell-computers online. Now all people can buy them by e-mail, but ikke and Bram are working at an e-shop to automate the whole thing. ikke told me the database structure (and implementation) is ready now, so I can insert the data. Already three computers (all Dell Latitude D800's, the notebook topmodel) are sold. Seems good B-)

This week we have Filmweek (movieweek) and Lentefuif (spring party) at VTK. Let's watch some movies and have a great party this week!

Also some bad news in politics. The European Council and Commission told they'll ignore the desicion of the Parliament to restart the whole software patents direction. It seems there will be a big conflict between those two European institutes. They'll try to vote the direction as an A-item (without discussion) on the next meeting. Some national parliaments already decided they can not accept such things, so let's see what happens. Let's hope they can counter such a boycot of democracy. More information about the desicion here.

Another bad thing coming towards us, is the pc-taxes for copyright. As I mentoined here, some political parties are trying to push a proposal that creates a tax of 40 euro on each computer sold. The money should go to music companies as compensation for the (illegal) copying of their music with computers. Normally, there wouldn't be a majority for that. One of the governing parties, SP.a announced in the media that they were a great opponent of those taxes. Now, they're breaking because of the pressure of another party, VLD to approve the proposal. Stupido's.

Hehe, my girlfried has red the previous post and the piece about her. Than she looks at me in a way she makes me completely crazy. Oh, I love her so much :-D

Sunday, I went to FOSDEM. It was good, some good talks. I visited the desktop tracks about KDE and XFCE, some developer rooms: Gentoo ("Gentoo Documentation Project", missed "Enterprise Java on Gentoo"), Mozilla and Debian ("Fully automatic Linux installations"). Because of some delay, they really messed up the lightning talks, so I missed VideoLAN, wich was very impressive at the booth. FAI was one of the most interesting talks. I think we'll use it for the Linux@UGent project because there's not so much swing in Fedora Stateless. They even don't talk about it for FC4.

And now: let's build a firewall!