All Blogs

It was a very busy week, this one. Even that busy for not having enough time to post something on this blog. My girlfriend also found this blog (she was standing next to me when I was reading/posting). Firstly, I didn't tell her because I thought she wouldn't be interested. Now, she finds it very "nerdy" :-p Let's see if she reads this too B-)

I also created a new category "Politics" (and moved the software patents cat) where I'll post something about Flemish (and Belgian or regional) politics. I'm very interested in that and sometimes I'm also active. I don't know if all posts will be in English there, maybe sometimes I'll use Dutch. As first message, I can say I created two proposals for the city council of Ghent. One about safety in the student-partystreet and another about student mobility. I'll keep you on touch.

Monday, we had student council where my two proposals (see this post) were accepted (with a few extra lines). You can find them here and here. Both are pdf-files in Dutch. After the meeting, we had a drink, nice people, interesting talks, lots of alcohol so I stayed there too long ;-)

As ikke already mentoined, we sold our first two Dell notebooks at VTK. The third one is in progress and ikke has a friend who wants to buy another one. The website isn't ready, but ikke and Bram are developing it. The database structure is ready, now there creating the aplication to start coding soon. When that's ready, I hope the Dell-selling will be a great succes. If you're interested, don't hesitate ;-)

Just had a telephone call from VTK. Seems that there are problems: they can't log in on the clients anymore (domain VTK not available is the message) and e-mail isn't working anymore. I'm trying to solve it for two hours now, but it doens't work. For the mailtroubles, I see that every email for our domain is accepted, but sent back to our "smart relay", creating a loop. I checked configuration files, but they seem OK. sendmail.cw and local-host-names are OK, just like the other files. For the smb-problem, I also don't know how to solve it. This is the message I recieve when trying to mount a samba-share on a windows computer:
# mount /mnt/clients/osama/d/
3424: session setup failed: ERRDOS - ERRnoaccess (Access denied.)
SMB connection failed
I've sent an email to ikke, Lennert and Femi. Let's hope they know what to try.

Wednesday, we had a company visit at Sidmar. First a presentation of the company, the job possibilities and conditions,... After that a visit at the factories, very nice. At the evening, a walking diner at the yacht "Jacob Van Artevelde" in the port of Ghent. Very nice B-)

Sunday, I'm going to FOSDEM, Brussels. Ikke will be there too, and normally also Real Nitro and Lennert. See you there?

Oh, BTW, please sign this petition against taxes on pc's. Some politicians want to create those taxes as compensation for music industries. It's like a punishment before you did anything wrong. Now we already pay for all blanc media (CD's and DVD's), so every linux-CD includes a fee for the music industry. Stupid IMHO.

I just created my first CV. I'm going to need it for some company visits this and next year. You can find the dutch version here and the english version here. B-)

Yesterday and a few days ago, I also created some proposals for the student representation. One of them is a about using Minerva/Dokeos for sending information to the students and asking for feedback of the people we represent on a more formal way. The other one is about readable slides. Some teachers are using PowerPoint slides with lots of animation: balloons popping up above eachother. When those slides are the only studymaterial that you have and when you need to print it for an open book exam, you can't read a damn thing of it anymore. So I prepared a document with some directions for good slides: no (dark) backgrounds, carefull with animations, printable,... Monday we're having a meeting with a discussion about this documents. Normally both of them will be accepted, let's hope so. If they're accepted, maybe I'll post the final versions here if you're interested. B-)

Davy and frocksii agreed on creating a website for the selling of Dell-computers at VTK. Let's hope they can fix this quickly so we can start the project. Tommorow, I'm going to help with a guided tour for prospective students to let them know more about our university, faculty and courses. Ikke will be there too :-D

Next thing for me: learning object oriented programming with PHP. Object oriented programming is no problem, I allready know a bit about php, so it can't be that difficult. After that, advanced CSS is next. Lot's of interesting stuff to do so ;-)

After a very short vacation, the 2nd semester has started. I've had two new courses today, an interesting one (multimedianetworks) and a very boring one (informationtheoretics). I think I'm not going to follow that second one very intensive ;-)

Before my vacation, I arranged a deal with Dell and VTK. The principes of selling Dell computers at VTK were already OK, but now we recieved some very good prices from them, without having to pay for windows if we don't want it. A lot cheaper than on their website. Normally they should create an e-commerce site for our students, but I didn't hear anything from them. I'll give them a call tomorrow. Let's hope they arrange it soon, so we can start selling those machines.

At the same time, my girlfriend has also finished her exams, very good normally, so we could have a (very short) vacation. We went to Molenheide. Bad weather, but we spent a great time together.

First day of the 2nd semester, great problems at VTK. Printing at the new Nashuatec all-in-one and the old laserjet didn't work anymore. All people frustrated, me target of all kind of projectiles. Thanks to ikke, printing at laserjet works again. We also had problems with a full (or corrupted) hard disk, so we couldn't send or recieve e-mail anymore. Fixed by moving the maildir on another harddisk and creating a symlink. It's a temporary solution, but the whole system needs to be redesigned. I also executed the deathrowscript (for backing up and cleaning the temp dir) for the first time, seems OK. From now on, it's executed every saturday at 1 AM.

Didn't do anything special for valentine's day. I think it's to commercially pushed. This friday, we're two years together, so that will be a special day full of love for us :-D

Looks we know the origin of our problems with the VTK-server yesterday. We're not the only one having those troubles: when the sysadmin of the building connects a computer to an unused UTP-connection, the pc seems like under DoS attack. One of the network operators told about a known problem, some loop. The last message on our firewall (dmesg) indeed was "oversized ethernet frame". That could cause some delay and Metsie, the impatient one, thought our server was the problem and rebooted it with the known result. Normally it should be fixed now...

Haidie,
Just had my exam HFC Accessnetworks, more difficult than I expected, but I think it'll be OK. Next one is those damn bloody statistics. Yeah, like RealNitro. I'll do it for the 5th time, RealNitro for the 3th. If I don't pass this one (now and in August ;-)), I'll have to redo all exams of my second year while I'm doing the 4th year now (in the 3th year I passed all exams succesfully).

Had some troubles at VTK today. When I finnished my exam, I put on my cellphone and Sygmoral had sent a message pointing me on the fact that the VTK servers were down. Now, at VTK, we have a mail/file-server, a webserver and a firewall. The firewall is an old machine (but does its job well) with a hard disk with a corrupted segment. We didn't know about that corrupted segment and found a blank partition when we first looked at it. (we = the sysadmins of this year) Yeah, we thought to prepare a new gentoo-installation and new firewall on that partition, but it wouldn't work. No problem, we should take care of it after the exams, the machine still runs fine under the current slackware. But when testing the new gentoo, we installed grub and for some reason we couldn't make grub boot into the old slack-installation. Re-installing the old lilo didn't work also. The problem with grub is nog fixed and was quite strange: we had to create a symlink to grub.conf, called menu.lst. |-| Didn't know that, never done that and always working. But thanks to Femi, the firewall can now be rebooted back in the working slack-environment without having manually to edit the bootline in the grubconfig while rebooting.

So back to this afternoon: seems Metsie has also notified the website could not be viewed and he didn't get mails anymore. So, he thought to be smart and rebooted the firewall. Bad idea: as I mentoined above, the firewall tries to boot in that corrupted harddisk segment. So I arrive, see kernel panic. With the help of Ikke, I could reboot the machine in a working kernel, but firewalling wasn't working as it used to be: from within VTK we could view webpages of the outer world, but from any other place, we couldn't see VTK's. Pinging was no problem. Seems that there were lots of old kernels on that machine and one of them is the right one to boot :crazy: A hint for everyone: just make sure you always have just one working kernel and delete the non-working ones! So you can't make mistakes ;-)

I also introduced the DeathRow at VTK today :>> At our fileserver, we have a temp-directory but that's evolved to a personal extra storage of the preasidium members. If they have work for school, they put it there. That's not what it's initially created for. If we want to periodically delete the contents of that directory, there are always questions like "please, don't delete this one, we still need it and it's too big for our personal directory" and now there are several files called "filename-please_dont_delete". Now, no more mercy for them! I've created a directory "deathrow" somewhere else on the server, executable and readable for everyone, but the contents itself are root-owned and not readable by others. From now on, every week the contents of the temp will be moved to the deathrow. If there are some files (only VTK-files, no personal files) that must be kept for still a few weeks, we can manually copy them back to temp, but we won't do it much. The old contents of DeathRow are deleted before moving the temp to it.

Some real other stuff now!
Tomorrow Bill Gates comes to Brussels. Normally he'll talk about Software Patents. For the moment, Software Patents are not possible in Europe, but the European Patent Office illegaly accepted more than 30.000 of them. Now, those companies payed a lot for this patents and they now want to make those patents legal. Many protests from free software organisations, consumer organisations, academics, scientists, economists, SME's and the European Parliament made enough amendements to the directive preventing non-trivial patents. Now the European Commission wants also to allow these ones by placing them on the meetings shedule of the European Agriculture Ministers (who don't know anything of this by default) as an A-item: an item that's being voted (normally yes) without discussion. In the meantime the European Parliament tries to restart the whole proces to reopen the whole discussion since many people have changed their mind (against SP's) and the EU now consist of 10 more countries than when the whole story started. And now Gates comes lobbying for those damn software patents... Let's hope they never introduce them here. More info about why software patents are bad can be found in Dutch here, in French here and here in English and many other languages.

Now that Gates is coming to Brussels, the Flemish political party Spirit wants to discuss with Gates about Free and Open Source Software, FOSS. Spirit is known from this I pointed about yesterday, but last year they did also reach the news with an IMHO stupid action "Gates, open your bill" asking for more FOSS in schools and public. OK, I also want more FOSS in schools and so on, but they didn't promote FOSS that way. They only shitted on MS (OK, I also do that sometimes ;-)), their webpage was called "windowssucks.html" and they promoted open standards using a Flash-website :crazy: They even made MS send a letter to the Belgian Government asking for apologies. Crazy people...

Geert Lambert, the chairman of Spirit

Some good news about Jabber: BELNET, the Belgian national research network for education, research and public services, has installed a Jabber server. It's a nice bi-processor SunFire V65x with 2GB RAM, connected to the Belnet backbone through a 1Gb ethernet connection running the jabber deamon and a few transports to MSN, ICQ/AOL and Yahoo. They also provide a nice online client called Greenthumb and a very simple one. The goal is to create an open IM-infrastructure, primarly for schools, but usable by everyone. More information can be found here. Let's hope it haves some succes. I already think about moving my amessage.be JID to Belnet hoping for a better service (less downtime for example ;-)).