SWAT's blog

Well, last weekend FOSDEM 2007 took place at the ULB in Brussels (Belgium) and I was able to attend. FOSDEM is a two-day event, if you don’t count the time it takes to prepare and break-down such and event. Luckily Dennis was able and willing to pick me up on Friday and together we drove to Brussels. It all started by helping out a bit with the preparations on Friday and bringing our stuff (cables, switches etc.) into the building. We also met some of the people who organized FOSDEM this year and they were very open minded. Afterwards Mark, Dennis and I went to a bar called “Roi d’Espagne” where we had a few drinks.

Day 1. We got up at about 7.30 and the day started calmly. When we arrived at ULB we got our stuff and started to set up the Ubuntu booth, which was done quite quickly (probably because almost nobody was there yet). At the Debian booth we got a glimpse of Paul Slater who was also there very early. At the right side of our booth we had KDE and Google and at left side we had OpenGroupware, GnuStep and PostgreSQL. Since the connection to the LAN (and the internet) was next to the Google booth, we set up our switches and power cables and we were ready to go (and therefore also providing networking and power to KDE and Google).

The people at FOSDEM (visitors, speakers or the people at a booth) were in one word great. I have probably never seen so many open minded people at the same place at once. During the Saturday we had a lot to do, because it was very crowded. There also was a door which would not close on its own and most of the time we had cold wind passing by our booth (yes, something that simple can be very annoying). As the hours went by, I got a chance to get away from the booth to go hunting. I found some schwag from Google (a jojo and a small blinking logo), Mozilla (a Firefox t-shirt, some buttons and stickers) and from Gnome (I bought a t-shirt). On my short journey I also saw a nice e-paper handheld device, which was monochrome but almost looked like normal paper (I definitely want one of those). While I was around I checked out the bar which had a great tuna sandwich for just 2 euro’s, which is really cheap.

At the end of the day we put our stuff for booth away and went to the center of Brussels. When we finally found a cash machine which worked, our eyes caught a glimpse of a Pizza hut. How fortunate we now had money to buy food, which was quite tasteful. Afterwards we went to sleep, since it was a very long day.

Day 2. We got up at about 6.30, because FOSDEM was starting an hour earlier today. I came across a developer who had a Nokia N800 which is a real nifty device (just check it out, but beware it’s not cheap). During the day it was not crowded at all, which we took advantage of (read: we relaxed a bit). A lot of people got the “WOW” effect when they saw Beryl in action and were wondering if it was live or if it was a movie. Somewhere at about 12.00 and 13.00 I went to the CACert signing party and GPG signing party, which was actually pretty overdue for me. Then I returned to the booth to show off some Beryl and Frozen-bubble. At the end of the day we cleaned up our booth and returned home. Thanks to Lucy, the name I gave to the female voice of the TomTom (because I forgot the actual name), we were once more guided quickly and safely through Brussels and back home. What a great weekend!

Yesterday I read an article about the fact that a couple of Dutch ISP’s now block ‘spam’ port 25. Port 25 is nothing more than your SMTP port, which probably is exploited by botnet-admins to send loads and loads of spam.
So now all of their customers have to suffer, which is overkill, for the few customers that have insecure, infected systems. Luckily my ISP is ‘smart’, which the others are clearly not, because they monitor the traffic on port 25 and block specific customers which send spam. At the end of the day I’m glad I pay a buck a month more, but I’m also getting a better service for it!

After looking at a certain episode of N3rd TV, I just had to read the article they shortly discussed. It is written by Andrea W. Cordingly, who wanted to write a funny/realistic article. Well, she did!

Apparently people (in this case: men) who use the Linux Operating System have special characteristics that could appeal to most women. The so called “Penguin lovers” are passionate about their Operating System and that passion extends beyond the computer. The Linux users seem to be more passionate about their relationships, then the “Windows users” and furthermore they seem to be great at solving problems. They also stand by their convictions, without regard to criticism, but they can be pursued by argumentation. 1 – 0 for the Linux team

On one of my many strolls through the internet, I came by a newspost on the irssi website. irssi is a small, terminal based IRC client. It’s quite popular and has enough options to satisfy your customization needs. Apparently there is a irssi “c0ders” theme that looks just like Eclipse, so you can use it at work without your boss or co-workers knowing that you are chatting in stead of working. Offcourse this was not the intention of the creator of this theme

Last weekend I was at the Ubuntu-NL WinterMeeting in Den Haag. The day started with rolling out of my bed at about 08.00 in the morning, I’m not used to this, not on a saturday. After being under the shower I was finally awake and had my breakfast. Now my day really started. I packed up my laptop and drove to the backery, where I had ordered a lot of apple turnovers and buns with sausages (they tasted great, by the way). Then I drove in about 1.5 hours to Den Haag and picked up ablomen. When we arrived at the building where the meeting would take place, our work really started.

We had to hurry, since it was about 11.15 and the meeting was supposed to start at 12.00. I got a quick tour of the premesis from ablomen, after which we unloaded the car. We put all the drinks and all the food on tables in the room across the hallway. Then we wanted to prepare the conference room, but the first Ubuntites had already arrived. So I turned the coffee machine on and the nice aroma started to fill the kitchen. Then we had to move quite a lot of chairs and set them up, where we got some help from the people who were a bit early. Then we set up my internet connection and the screen where we pointed the beamer to.

The meeting started with a having some drinks and talking to each new arrival. At about 13.00 I presented the schedule for the meeting with a little speech. After that everybody started socializing again, which was great. Then we had a discussion round, more socializing, another discussion round, pizza and even more socializing. It was great seeing the community in action! There were quite a lot of discussions and I think we made some real progress. After the pizza, most of the Ubuntites had some conversations with eachother and went home. Who can blame them, it was about 20.00.

After the meeting, the Ubuntu-NL forum and the Ubuntu-NL IRC channel suddenly were a lot more active. What was even better, is that the people who were at the meeting, knew eachother. This gives the forum and the channel an even better ambiance, since you now know who you are talking to.

The meeting was a great success and I can’t wait for the next meeting, I just hope I will have more time to talk to everybody