Just yesterday I realized that life is so much better when you have time. Then you can plan ahead and prepare yourself for the things to come, which I wasn’t able to for quite some time now. Yesterday I noticed that I had some ‘spare’ time, which was really rare, but I had to make use of it. Since I have a LAN-party next week, I had to prepare my computer again since I’m not using Windows. So I started installing Dawn of War, Winter Assault and Dark Crusade on a Windows computer, zipped it all up and copied it over to my Ubuntu computer. Now I only need to find the time to get the game working on my computer, but luckily I have read reports of other Cedega users which have the games in question working. Even with something this small, you immediately notice that having time is a great thing.
Browsing Posts published in January, 2007
This weekend I was at a birthday party of a friend of mine. Sometime in the middle of the night Snake (a friend) got behind the computer. Ow dear, I shivered of the possible things that could come. Luckily it were only a few very funny movies he found on LiveVideo.com. Why tequile makes you feel better, How to… (tequila) and finally a secret fridge with Bud beer
A few weeks ago I was finally pushed to the edge and wanted to make my website IE compatible, don’t ask me why. Well, since the site looked great in Firefox and Opera, which can run on my Ubuntu box, I didn’t care much at first.
The CSS layout was screwed up, because Internet Explorer doesn’t like it when you use a absolute div without a height and with “overflow: auto”. What happened, was that IE stretches the div to it’s full length, what pretty much sucks. So I had to find a solution for this stupid problem. The solution is as simple as it is scary. As it happens to be, IE uses CSS values which start with an underscore (IE just ignores it). So I was able to give all my div’s a “_height” in percentages and it was fixed. OK, the layout isn’t exactly the same as in Firefox or Opera, but hey, at least you don’t get a website which is a few kilometres long 
OK, when I read that there was an Ubuntu installer for Windows I didn’t know what I should think of it. Today I downloaded the installer and tried it out. The installation went fine, although it’s still very beta. From the looks of things a very small BitTorrent client is included which downloads the actual Ubuntu installation CD and then bunzips it. Then several files are created in your C:/ubuntu/ like a ubuntu image file, swap file etc. After that the installer gave me errors, since it seems it requires GRUB to be installed. Well it’s a great project, but I don’t think a lot of people have GRUB on their system or want it there (or at least not Windows users).
At about the same time Flash 9 for linux was officially released by Adobe which is a great thing for the entire community. I’m not a Flash fan, but since a lot of websites use it, you have to make sacrifices. “If you can’t beat them, join them.” It shouldn’t take too long before the first official Flash 9 Ubuntu .deb packages should arrive. Finally no more nagging about ‘nasty’ Flash sites and applications that don’t work, because they should. Now let’s hope Flash 10 for Windows arrives at the same time as it would arrive for Linux…
A good friend of mine, ellessar, asked me to come by his new place and hook up his internet connection. He tried himself (and called the helpdesk, which didn’t support Linksys…), but that didn’t work, so he called in the cavalry. When I arrived I started with checking the default settings, which were OK. After that I checked the cable connection which was also fine. Since this kind of ‘error’ usually is ‘user error’ I tried checking the DNS etc. (since I couldn’t use the internet, but had an IP). Nothing worked. It was saturday, after work hours, so we couldn’t call the helpdesk. I jotted down some notes, and told him to call the helpdesk the next week.
After a few days I talked to him on MSN, what… he had internet! I asked him what happened. He told me, he called the helpdesk and they tried to ship him off (for about the 3rd time) with the standard line “It’s your router, check your configuration”. He replied with the notes I jotted down and then the guy on the other got really quiet. “I’m going to ask a colleague, please hold” was the reply and he had to wait. When he returned he was told that he got a “bad IP” and that it would be fixed soon. A few days later ellessar finally got his internet back.
A few days ago a friend of mine came by my place. Finally I got a wireless access point so I can work everywhere in the house. Since I’m a bit paranoid I configured the AP to have MAC filtering and use WPA2. Offcourse it worked on my laptop but not on the laptop of my friend. Then the shit really hit the fan.
It started off by him using Windows XP SP2, well it’s his choice. Then we noticed that the WLAN PCMCIA card *should* support WPA2, so we tried connecting to my home network, which offcourse failed. We noticed that his Windows had no WPA2 support, but he had a fully updated Windows XP system. Finally we found, downloaded and installed the Windows XP WPA2 support patch which was released on 05-09-2004! Since nobody uses WPA2 (feel the sarcasm) it’s not important to include it in the default Windows updates…
At the end we couldn’t connect to my home network, since apparently the network card was not WPA2 compatible. But it showed me once more why I like Linux so much.
A few weeks ago I was at Sogeti at a presentation about crowdsourcing. I started off by finding the building where it took place. When we finally arrived, we were greeted and we left our coats at the entrance. Then we proceeded to the cellar, in which the event took place. We got our nametags and started the evening with a healthy glass of fresh orange juice. It didn’t take long before we started conversations with lots of different people. When it started to get interesting, we got interrupted. Dinner was served! Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to compliment the chef, since the food tasted delicious.
After dinner we went to the presentation hall, in which two interesting presentations took place. I’ll summarize, mostly because it’s a bit blurry for me. A few of the more interesting questions that arrose where: “Is crowdsourcing viable for enterprises?” and “How do you crowdsource your products?”. It’s all about creating a win-win situation for both parties and working with the community (it’s not a dictatorship). Look at what Wikipedia did all those year ago, now that’s a great business case. But most businesses will need to make ‘sacrifices’, since they need to let go of their treasured “it’s mine and you can’t have (read) it” mindset.
Currently I’m totally swamped with work, as usual. Somehow I can’t find time to rest, and I mean really rest. Luckily the “Christmas-vacation” came along, which gave me some time to recharge my empty batteries. It’s becoming usual to work hard and fill up all of your free time and just work towards your vacation. When it’s vacation, it’s finally time to relax (and still work a little bit) and recharge your batteries, which are probably very low.
Somehow I have dozends of projects on hold or on ice and as soon as I have a little spare time left, those projects pop up again. You keep yourself occupied and hopefully make a nice buck out of it too.
