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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

Exams are finished! Yeah, finally! Last one, Advanced Computer Architecture, will be good enough, I think. I just made one big mistake in some assembler code: misread a register and so made the complete exercise (6/20 points) bad. I noticed it just 10 minutes before deadline, so no time enough to restart. The other questions will be OK, I think.

Now the exams are finished, I've some time to install Linux on the notebook at home. It's an Acer Aspire 1522WLMi. Some points I (don't) like:

• Easy partition management
• Excellent localization management: after choosing language, I just had to press OK a few times for country and keyboard selection
• Allmost all hardware good detected, including the 1280x800 screen resolution
• No support for the WLAN device, I'll ask frocksii about his experiences, I thought he did it with the 64-bit beta of ndiswrapper
• After installation, the X-server didn't work. I had to mess up a bit with XF86Conf. Indeed, still XFree, no xorg.
• It was my first experience with gnome since a long time and it seems nicely evolved, I like it
• A few missing icons (as the "show desktop" button, the items in the "computer" menu,...
• I'm automatically logged in with my username.

Let's hope I can get the WLAN working, because now I have to go upstairs for a cabled LAN connection and it's cold there... I'll write more about the progress here.

Lot's of good luck to all people still having exams! Just a few more days and it'll be also time to party for you!

Yeah! Done my exam Design of Multimedia Applications this morning. I think it'll be good enough. I didn't like it, just two questions: he gave the title of the chapter and we give the content, but it'll be OK. That means there's just one more left! Tuesday, I have Advanced Computer Architecture. Nice course. My lovely girlfriend also has just one more left on thursday, and after that we'll spend some nice time together :-D

With that horrible exam wednesday, I wasn't in the mood for studying this one. I started yesterday evening, wich is very late, so I just slept three hours this night. XX( Even then, badminton was very hard and very nice today. Now, I'm just going to check a few things at my gentoo box and some forums, and then I'll take a long sleep ;-)

My gentoo does some strange things today. Much emerge errors, I'll take a look closer to it. I used PHP5 till now, but I want to go back to PHP4, but that one doesn't compile. Tetex (a dependency of it) also doesn't compile.

I finally gave Ubuntu Linux a try. The LiveCD won't run on my computer, so I tried it at the portable AMD64 at home. Starts quite quickly, seems nice designed (gnome 2.8.1), it just looks good. The WLAN doesn't work, but I'll install Ubuntu x86_64 on this machine later and try it with ndiswrapper. Anything else seems really nice.

Yeah! Democracy realy rules! The European Parliament has voted in the JURI Committee for restart with massive majority! This is a real victory for democracy, because the Parliament made lots of amendments that were ignored by the European Commission, where the big multinationals, like Microsoft and Philips, lobbied for a fast adoption of those horrible patents. That's why the commission wanted to put this as an A-item, an item that's voted without discussion, on meeting of the European agriculture and fishery ministers. Former french prime minister Michel Rocard MEP, PES (FR/PS), gave a very strong speech at the meeting with Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, who had in the morning assured the JURI Committee that the Council would finally adopt its beleaguered Common Position text. Rocard's speech was a very good one, pointing about several "inelegancies" by the Commission, also with some hard words for McCreevy, and that's a big reason why the Parliament members voted for the restart. See here for more information.

One of those trivial patents: the 3D use of a computer desktop aka dialog boxes with tabpages.

Exam yesterday (statistics) was horrible. I'll be realy bad. Let's hope it's enough to pass if Analysis of Systems and Signals was good (I think it was good). Tomorrow, I have an exam Design of Multimedia Applications. We had one lesson about MHP, wich is very interesting, one lesson about content management, but most of the time it handles about MPEG standards. Quite interesting, but the projects we had to do this year, weren't that. Let's hope the exam goes well. After that one, there's just one left for next week. After that one: party time! :lalala:

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 ;-)).