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I just installed Kolab on my desktop machine, just to play around with it, and I must say I'm impressed. This is the most integrated groupware-like suite I've ever worked with.
Based on existing open source solutions like

• Postfix
• Cyrus Sasl
• SpamAssassin
• Amavis
• Apache
• Cyrus IMAP
• Mysql
• OpenLdap
• Sieve
• PHP

and others, you get a completely integrated mailserver, userbase, calendars,... with a nice webinterface for administration purposes.

I installed Horde as user frontend, which took some time, but now it's working almost well. Using Horde the user gets a well-integrated web interface to his email, calendars, address books, Sieve mail filters, notes and tasks etc.

This is definately something we should look into at VTK. When using Horde as user interface, we could even allow our users to access their Eduserv email from the same interface etc, which would be really nice. The implementation could easily be done in a multiple steps: first get all email stuff working, then addressbooks, then calendars,...
I wonder whether it could be possible to extend the "standard" Kolab "User" LDAP object so it can also be used for Samba3 LDAP authentication? If that'd be possible, this is definately the application to use on our new server :-)

Screenshots might follow later ;-)

Today, I was in my bed when the (fixed) phone rang. After a few time, I took up, but the line was allready dropped. A few hours later, when I checked my mailbox, there was a paper from UPS telling me they tried to deliver a package from Dell, but I wasn't home. They'll come back monday. Damn! I'm sure, with my order, I asked to call me on my cellular before they should deliver. So I'll have to wait a few days more...

I also was a little bit bad guy for my girlfriend: I wasn't with her much time this week. Shame on me ;-) On monday I had some work at VTK. Tuesday there was the election of the vice-rector (vice-president) of our university. The speeches of them took most of the time, there was only 1 round and decision was made. The candidate of our faculty didn't make it. In the evening, I had to go to Brussels for a meeting with VVS, the Board of Flemish Students to discuss about the (stock taking of the) Bologna process.

Wednesday, in the morning I helped a little bit for the preparations of our triatlon at VTK. In the afternoon, I went to Brussels again for a visit of the Flemish Parliament. Very nice afternoon! The Parliament is a very modern and beautiful building, with lots of art in it. Also very nice people, but a very long, boring speech of Filip Dewinter (about BHV for people following the actual news) in the general meeting, always the same. The offices of Groen! (you can call them extremely left), N-VA and a part of Vlaams Belang (extremely right) are on the same floor, in the same gallery. Nice situation :-) I also heard a lot of funny inside information there. Yeah, it sure was a very nice afternoon. In the evening, there was the weekly badminton followed by fries :-)

Thursday I had lunchmeeting with GSR, the Board of Students at Ghent University about the meeting of that evening (in Brussels once more) with VVS. After a few drinks at a sponsor-event of a student organisation, we left for the long VVS-meeting.

So it was kind of a meeting week and also kind of a Brussels-week. And if thats not enough, I'm going to Brussels again tomorrow.

My lovely girlfriend in doing fine with her final year thesis. It should be finished very soon, so she can start studying for her exams. Wish her good luck please. Wednesday, we have a little party for her birthday, so it'll be a nice week again, and with the days of at thursday and friday, also a very calm one :-)

Oh, before I forget, I also missed two practica of Multimedia Networks this week. The shedule is in an excel-file online at our e-learning application Minerva, but because it's an external file, you cant see when it's changed. You have to re-download en review the file manually. Stupid system. The system for making a reservation for a time slot is also at Minerva, but you can't see when they created new reservation opportunities. Let's hope that two missed ones doesn't have much implications on the results for my exams...

(click on the image to enlarge it)
I got Evince working :-) I had some troubles with it (wrong library naming: shell/Makefile.am adds -lt1lib when compiled with t1lib support, where t1lib only installs libt1.so on my system (default Gentoo t1lib build), resulting in a linker error. A symlink could have solved this, but that's an ugly solution, so now I patch shell/Makefile.am in the ebuild. I could even use sed, actually, because it's a one-line patch) but now everything works fine, including the popplet, dvi en djvu backend.

PDF font anti-aliasing works fine, but I couldn't get previewing (i.e. the feature enabling you to put a PDF file on your desktop, displaying not the icon assigned to PDF files, but the content of the file, as if it were an image or a plain text file) working yet :-( Guess I'll have to dig around some more, or is this a -cvs only feature? I got evince-thumbnailer installed, and it seems to be working fine though...

I bought the vinyl of Shameboy's first release, "Re-choque". The track has been hyped on Studio Brussel, a Flemish radio station, for a long time now. Shameboy is a project around Jimmy Dewit aka "DJ Bobby Ewing" (of Dicobar Galaxy fame), Luuk Cox (Budcemi's drummer) and a mysterious guy called "Mr. Morceau". Some phat beats blended with 80's electro synths and some great producers provide all ingredients for a great dance track. Guess that's the reason why this track is #1 on the Belgian dance charts for several weeks already :-)

If you want to hear some part of the track, check this.

I'm thinking of replacing my current b2evolution install with some other engine. b2evolution's development seems to have stalled completely, and some other products look very appealing. Some of the features I certainly need:

• Multiple blogs hosted by one engine
• Multi-user capabilities, with access controls (who can write to which blog?)
• Themes (and preferably lots of themes available on the net ;-))

The main issue I'm facing is converting all current posts we got here to the new system...
If someone got a good suggestion, let me know :-)

Last but not least: we're making progress with the FedoraStateless@University project :-D Finally... :oops:

Peter: The stateless-snapshooter snapshot creation went fine normally. We left the machine alone while it was creating the snapshot, but it was at 5% when we left, so I guess everything was going fine.

It looks like the stateless RPM's have some missing dependency on some obscure Python package that's installed when you yum install gnome, but not when you install some basic headless server.

Let's hope everything works out fine now :-)

Tuesday, Ward en I took a look at our ftwlinux server. When we wanted to login, we didn't recieve anything on the screen, so we gave the system a hard reboot.

After rebooting, we installed the necessary tools for a graphical work environment wich is necessary for stateless-tools to work. This went fine, running stateless-snapshooter --list gave no problems, in contradiction to our previous attempts. However, when I tried to create the snapshot of our prototype system, it went wrong. Maybe it was the wrong location I was working in, or maybe there's some information lost with rebooting (mounted filesystems or so). I didn't had time to find out, but we'll sure do. Yesterday, I recieved an sms from Ikke telling me there s great progress in the project, so maybe he found out. You'll sure hear about it soon.

Now VMWare Workstation 5 for Linux is being packaged (and will be released soon, if I'm not mistaken) Christian "ChipX86" Hammond (who's working for the VMWare Corporation, must be an interesting job) released some screenshots.
As I blogged before this release is based on GTK+2, so it integrates nicely into your Gnome desktop (although the software seems not to be 100% HIG compliant?).

On the "free" side of FOSS desktop applications, Evince seems to make great progress. Now the "all-in-one-viewer" proposition has been shot on desktop-devel-list@gnome, all work seems to get into document viewing (duh, nothing else to do ;-)).

This is what's possible in evince-cvs for now:

I guess I should get Evince on my system, maybe not -cvs but at least some released version. This should need 2 ebuilds: one for Poppler, and one for Evince. Maybe they're in b.g.o already, who knows?

Oh, and I forgot: Hi to Planet Gnome-NL! I'll create a hackergotchi ASAP, but taking a decent picture of me is a hell of a job ;-)

So, finally I added a "screenshots" album to my gallery. Currently only some desktop screenshots have been imported, more to follow soon (I hope).

This is my current one:

People in #gnome-nl@GimpNet seem to be very nice, jay :)

Final Year Thesis and Internship

I've made my decision about my final year thesis. Next year, I hope to do something about wireless network access on trains. There'll be a WLAN on the train, with a base station on the train, and the train itself will communicate with antennas next to the railway. Because of the high speed of the train, there will be a handover to the next antenna every two seconds. In my thesis, I'll have to study and test those handovers. This is my first choice, I also had to give a second one. That one is about using the eID (elektronic identity card) for authentication in MHP (Multimedia Home Platform), the digitaly television platform that will be used soon in Flanders. You can find more information about both subjects on the INTEC website. The first one is at the research group IBCN (INTEC Broadband Communication Networks) while the second one is at WICA wich stands for Wireless and Cable. Both topics are part of the research in the newly constructed IBBT, Interdisciplinary institute for BroadBand Technology, founded by the Flemish Government.

I also had a meeting with a few people of the IBCN group for an internship related to that thesis. He'll try to arrange one at Siemens or at Televic. If he can't get an internship there, I'll accept the proposal of Barco to study the development of a L2/L3 multicast gigabit switch.

VTK

It was kind of an active week for VTK. At wednesday, we had ParkingPoP, a rock contest for local groups, wich was a big success. At wednesday and thursday, there were elections for the new board of VTK. Our followers are Bram and Pierre and I'm sure they'll do a great job. We had a meeting where we explained what we did this year and our vision about the next year. It seems they want to do great things, let's hope they've enough time for it. Before that meeting, I also had a lunch-meeting in a nice restaurant with the head of The Computer Store, the shop with the most ugly site in Ghent where we had a deal to sell computers. He claims our deal with Dell also has some disadvantages where he can be better, building on the very good results of the previous years. I've discussed it at the meeting with our followers and it seems they see more disadvantages than andvantages with them as partner, next to Dell.

Ah, before I forget, Lennert (who had a blog here before) is elected for treasurer with 16 votes more (on a total of 564) than his opponents. Congratulations and lots of succes!

Student representation

I didn't sign in for the VTK elections, because I've some other things in mind. I decided to run for the election of vice-president of the Ghent Student Council. The election is in oktober, but it isn't possible to combine this with another year in the VTK praesidium. If I don't make it, no problem, I'll be busy enough with my other work for the student representation, my final year thesis and of course my girlfriend who feels a little bit neglected sometimes ;-)

Also in student representation it was quite busy this week. Monday there was the facultairy computer commission with a very interesting point on the shedule: division of some money for new infrastructure. We also talked about the use of our pc-rooms and the troubles with the shortage of capacity. About that last one, we'll prepare a text from the student representation with a call for more available computers. I'll start to prepare that one after this post is finished ;-)

At the meeting with the student representation of our faculty of engineering, we decided to use a new name for our organisation. Now, it was "didactische cel", a term where nobody exactly knows the meaning of, especialy new students don't know who we are. We've chosen the name "FRiS", which stands for "faculty council of engineering students" or "Facultaire Raad voor IngenieursStudenten" in Dutch. It's a new name, invented by our responsible Peter Huyghebaert, to be better known by new students. This week, we also had the monthly faculty council and the deliberation before with the head of our faculty, who was very interested in the situation of the new students of the first year.

Peter Huygebaert

Friday I also went to the general meeting of vzw StudentENmobiliteit (student mobility) for the first time. From now on, I represent the students of our university there, together with two other students. It was a very interesting meeting. I also asked for more posibilities to pump up the tires of our bicycles in Ghent, especially at the campus in Zwijnaarde. The responsibles of our university agreed, so soon it'll be OK there in Zwijnaarde.

Next week, we'll have the election of the vice-rector of our university. There are two candidates: Luc Moens, from the faculty of sciences, and Paul Kiekens, from our faculty. Again, it'll be a very interesting time :-)

Politics

This week, I recieved an invitation to visit the Flemish Parliament and the new headquarter of the Flemish political party N-VA. Seems also very interesting, so wednesday I'll do the trip to Brussels.

The Flemish Parliament

My lovely girlfriend...

is so curious now :-D Because her cellular is malfunctioning, I bought her a new one. At the 6th of May, it's her birthday. So now, I've put the box in a cabinet and she doesn't may look inside of it. It's so tempting, it's so close, but I trust her not to look in it :-D She doesn't know wich one allready.

Before I forget

Don't create a banana republic here please ;-)

Let me introduce you: Ward.

Ward Poelmans
Ward has just joined the Fedora Stateless @ UGent team. Because of we are all to busy, Ward'll try to reinstall our whole server with graphical support to test the stateless tools. Normally it should work then. I'm sure Ward will also join this blog and post his results here :-D

I was unable to read all other blogs I read normally for several days, and read most of them by now.

These are some things you must check out:

• A movie demonstrating Soft Bodies in Blender. It's quite long, but it's worth your time.
• We got Windows binary DLL codec support for GStreamer, which means every movie you're able to watch in WMP9 will be viewable in Totem or another GStreamer based application too, even if no free codecs are available.
• Spyderous got great insight in some of the shortcomings in Computer Science subjects in education

Did I mention our concert yesterday was quite ok?

I forgot this one:

• Never trust lawyers. Mind the name of the person writing this. If you don't know Greg KH: he's the author of udev, the Linux USB subsystem maintainer (one of Linux' trustees) and coder of lots of other kernel parts.

I hate blog comment spammers. Guys, get a live.

This German article (bad BableFish translation) gives a great overview of what's currently possible using X11, on the field of eye candy. Some of the presented technologies are just technology previews, still nice to see though.

It's some sort of bundle about thingsI blogged about before:
- Xrender and Xdamage (alpha blending)
- Xgl (X server based on OpenGL)
- Luminocity (the wobbling windows, you know...)
- E17

Make sure you check the provided screenshots and demo movies.

You know my P4 is broken. So now, I'm using the AMD64 notebook from my parents. I allready had Ubuntu running on that, but without WLAN support. I installed vpnc for AMD64 (downloaded the .deb and used dpkg) and attached my computer to the router with a cable connection. Everything was fine, I could use it the way I wanted, no problems, seemed nice. But some things are missing: first of all, I want to use the wireless connection. ndiswrapper isn't an option, because there aren't any 64bit drivers for my WLAN device. It seems that the vendor is waiting for WinXP64bit to release them. Any other bad things: some other software isn't ported to the 64bit platform allready. I don't want to compile all stuff manually, I want to use my computer as soon as possible. So I decided to re-install Ubuntu with the fresh release of Ubuntu Hoary (i386) and give it a try.

The results are pretty good! The installer is very simple, quite fast and after that, you have a complete running system. I needed to install vpnc to access the internet at our student home, but that was no problem. Everything went just fine. The ubuntu website and wiki also provide lots of good information about restricted formats and so on. I really love it. I even love it so much, that I'm thinking about using it on my new laptop instead of Gentoo. The great advantage is that I have a running system with all features in about one hour, vpnc and restricted formats and so on included. With Gentoo, this can take a lot longer. If I need new software: apt-get or synaptic, wait ten seconds, OK. With Gentoo, again, this can take some time. I don't already know what it'll be. Off course, ikke is lobbying for Gentoo ;-)

Even my girlfriend likes Ubuntu! Till now on, she was using SuSE, but she had a few problems with it. She couldn't play DVD's, but now it seems that her hardware (the DVD drive) is broken. There were also some other problems making her think about using another distro. Now, with her final year thesis, she needs to use Corel Draw, and so Windows. So she had to repartition her harddisk and re-install linux (and windows). Because her DVD-drive didn't read the SuSE DVD, she tried Kubuntu. Yeah, she's a real KDE-lover. She loves fisherprice-looking buttons ;-) Kubuntu set up quite quickly, some problems with the wlan (using ndiswrapper instead of the native prism54 driver wich should be working normally), but now everything's fine. She loves it. Now her laptop is making a sound like a cow when starting up. Yes, she's a little bit crazy and I love it! ;-)

With WVS, we gave a LiveCD lesson last week. Not so much people, but others told me they didn't now it on time. The ten persons who were there were quite enthousiast. They loved ubuntu and most of them should try to install it on their computer. I'm sure Ubuntu has a great momentum now and has a great chance to become one of the most popular distro's in the world!

I really like this (don't just look at the screenshot, make sure you read the whole article, it's not too long).

Thumbnail is link to original image

Imagine...

Yesterday I did some DSP-related code again after several years (those AtomixMP3 days...). Read Stephan M. Bernsee's "The DFT a Pied" to "get" the DFT/FFT again, and then started to concentrate on beat detection of acoustic signals. Read Eric D. Scheirer's paper on acoustical beat detection, which is kinda heavy and theoretical (although very interesting at the same time :-)), and then found this article originating from this fantastic website. The article builds up things very well, it's very easy to understand everything as long as you got some very basic math knowledge. The author starts with some very simple energy based algorithm, then builds it up to more complex analyse methods.
I implemented algorithm #2 from that article together with some simple wave file reader/player in C yesterday, it needs some more tweaking, but the basics do work. Once I get it working fine I'll implement it as a GStreamer plugin. Lots of thanks to the people at #gstreamer@freenode.net for helping me out at coding the thing, I really need to learn some more about primitive data types and their size ;-)

Next task: use my current code to implement #3, enhance the visual beat tap, and make the code better (it's not optimized at all right now). Then I can put it into a GST plugin (after I read the GStreamer Plugins Writers Guide).

I've been testing several free groupware applications at VTK lately, none of them do everything I want untill now :-( egroupware comes close thanks to it's integration with LDAP, but it's buggy as hell (on our system at least): I can't even add a simple event to my calendar, and some of the "applications" just generate PHP errors and die. If anyone got experience with FOSS groupware applications (especially if they got support for LDAP as account and/or addressbook backend, or even Evolution and/or MS Outlook support) please let me know which apps I should try.

...since my last post on this blog. Lot's happened in meantime: a few parties, LANwars, we've choosen the new boss of our university, I'm selected for an internship developing an L3 multicast switch at Barco. I was quite busy, so I didn't have much time to write some stuff here.

Some bad (or maybe even good) news: my computer is broken. The IDE-connector (or controller) on the mobo doesn't work anymore. It's a quite old Pentium 4 system, one of the first types of Pentium 4, with an Intel D850GB motherboard and 512 MB RD-Ram (Rambus, Rimm,...). So a change would be a new mobo and new Ram. Maybe my parents'll do that to use my computer at home. It was a very good system, running still very good. I'll miss it, and the good configured Gentoo where I had put lots of time in.

But with that sad news, there's also very good news! My parents decided to give me a new system! As mobility is getting more and more important, they bought me a notebook. Now I can use it here in Ghent, at home, and at all other places I'll hang around. For the interested ones: it's a Dell Latitude D810 bought at VTK. Here are some specs:

• Latitude D810, 15.4" WSXGA LCD (1680 X 1050) Screen
• Pentium M 730 (1.6Ghz, 533Mhz, 2MB L2 Cache)
• 1GB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM Memory (2X512MB)
• 80GB IDE (5400rpm) Hard Drive
• 8X DVD+RW Drive
• ATI X600 videocard with 128MB dedicated ram
• Networkcard and 56k modem
• Intel PRO Wireless 2200 802.11b/g mini PCI card
• Belgisch AZERTY keyboard
• 9 Cell 80WHr LI-ION Primary Battery
• Delux Nylon Carry Case
• System Documentation, Resource CD, adapter
• 3 year "Next Business Day On-site" warranty + Completecare Accidental damage Cover
• home delivery

Just take a look at the price at VTK and compare with the official prices from Dell ;-) It's a huge difference! I like the VTK services!

The Dell Latitude D810
While waiting for my own notebook, I can use another one. It's the Acer AMD64 I allready talked about. Installing vpnc for use at the student home was very simple. But I've added some other, I think bad, repo's and now the whole system is broken. So now, I'm running windows (that other would-be OS in dual boot on this machine). I think I'll study somewhat the next days, so I won't have time to install Gentoo or another Linux distro. I want WLAN working on this machine to use it at home, but there aren't any AMD64 drivers for the IPN2220 card inside. I'll wait, maybe they release them with the release of windows 64bit. My new computer will be, just like my old one, running Gentoo Linux in single boot.

Sven just made me feel good. If Gentoo devs will stick to freedesktop.org standards and maybe even actively contribute to them, it'd be of great value for Gentoo Linux as a desktop distribution.

Hija,

I just received this email from Jono Bacon:

Hi all,

Right, my band Seraphidian (www.seraphidian.com) is
involved in a competition to play the Download
festival. We have been finalised as one of the top 10
bands, and I really need your help to push us forward.
This is a huge deal for us.

Please could you go to the following URL and click on
the red VOTE link to vote for the band:

http://www.snickersunsigned.co.uk/snickersunsigned/voting/votedetail.asp?bandid=952&startat=0

Also, if you run a website or weblog, could you
*please* write an entry encouraging you to vote. You
will know how important music is to me, and we really
want to push through to win this!

Also, could you please *not* write a script to bombard
the site with votes or they may accuse the band of
cheating, which we really don't want to do.

The vote closes on monday, so time is of the essence!!

Thanks a lot folks!

  Jono

Maybe some of you know him, read articles by him, whetever. I met him IRL at FOSDEM, he's a great guy (who doesn't know the hilarious LugRadio webcasts?), so if this can help him forward, I urge you to click the link and vote for his band (even if you don't like the music ;-))

CP: Fatboy Slim - Going out of my head

Methinks this is funny :-) Make sure you check the preceding message too, so you know what this is all about.

CP: Gotan Project - Joy

So, I'm back, but will leave again on friday ;-)

Napoli was quite nice, lots of Roman things of course ([url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pompei]Pompe