SWAT's blog

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

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.

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.