Planet FOSDEM

Philip Paeps: Temples, Zen gardening and manga

2010-03-18T10:15:00+00:00

19:15 JST

Last weekend was AsiaBSDCon. Great stuff as usual. It's always good to see friends from the BSD community again. Again, I focussed more on the hallway track than on the actual conference, but I did catch some good talks. Ana's talk about secure neighbour discovery in particular caught my attention, as did Peter's talk about DNSSEC. Unfortunately, I fear my brain may be too small to understand DNSSEC.

During the conference, Max helped me set up SIP so I can theoretically experience less expensive phone calls when I'm somewhere in the world with wifi. I don't want to think about roaming costs.

Over the weekend, "Neville-Neil Travel Translation Services" helped Brooks, Kristof and me get contiguous seat reservations on a Shinkansen to Kyoto (and beyond). Tasty food in a box on the train, but I snoozed most of the way. Conferences are exhausting.

Sadly, the weather in Kyoto is not cooperating this time round. Rain, rain, rain. Good for culinary tourism, rather less so for sight-seeing. Zen dry gardens are best experienced--well, dry.

Dinner last night followed my usual "get lost first, then hop into the nearest place that smells nice" and was immensely tasty. A combination of teppanyaki and okonomiyaki. I think we confused the staff by getting their "special" as a starter and then continuing with smaller dishes until full. Also sampled a very tasty "unfiltered" sake (bit like sparkling water, lemony) and an entirely (to me) new kind of meat: "hoso". From the sign-language discussion with the waitress, I learned that it's some internal structure of a mammal, but not much more than that. Quite tasty, if somewhat fatty and tendonny.

Sadly, part of the meal was spoiled a bit by a group of annoying tourists complaining about not liking one of the things they ordered and refusing to pay for it. I wanted to switch off my comprehension of English at that point. Or quite possibly hit them with a cluebat. If there's something you don't like, and it's not obviously rotten or "bad", just deal with it and be careful not to order it again next time. I have a (very) short list of things I steer clear from too and I'm practically omnivorous.

This afternoon, we fled back to the city when it started pouring down on our way to a temple. On a whim, we decided that the international manga museum would be an interesting thing to do (it would be dry). Unfortunately, as a museum, the place seems mostly to focus on the building it's in rather than the subject it treats. Also, most of the contents are encrypted in Japanese, which makes me wonder a bit about the "international" part in the name.

There were some interesting English (translations) manga in one room though, and I read Gyo by Junji Ito. If you think H.P. Lovecraft is weird, you haven't seen anything yet. "Weird" doesn't begin to describe it.

If only it would stop raining.

Out for tasty tempura dinner now, I think.

Philip Paeps: Why I gladly suffer jetlag

2010-03-09T14:56:00+00:00

23:56 JST

The weather today was disgusting. Rain, rain rain. Horizontal sheets of water. Really unpleasant.

This morning, we went to see the giant panda at Ueno Zoo, but it turned out that Ling Ling died of a heart attack a couple of years ago. Perhaps I need to rethink my fondness of Japanese cuisine a bit. Happily though, there were many other animals to cover for the disappointment. Particularly interesting was the aye-aye forest. Most of them asleep, but the one or two who were awake were highly entertaining. There was also a hyperactive Galapagos Tortoise, but of course it can't compete with an astro-chelonian.

Pity about the Panda. There's one in the Berlin Zoo I've consistently failed to visit for the past couple of years though. Maybe next year we should visit Berlin a couple of days early and see about the Panda.

Dinner this evening reminded me of why I don't mind sitting in a small metal tube pointed at this island for all too many hours. We spotted the restaurant by the (very!) cute waitress letting out the previous party. It was a tiny place. Three tables only. The kind of place I gravitate to.

Our starter was sashimi, including a bowl of small living fish. I'm actually not sure which fish they were. It was not ikizukuri, which I've had in Kyoto two years ago, but a bowl of small eelish creatures. I understand other people's sensitivities towards things like that, but really - carrots weren't uprooted by choice either, get over it. Just bite once and the vital problem isn't so vital anymore. Also on the plate were uni and some other tasty things. It was realy, really tasty

This was followed by a fried fish and udon and then cold soba. Yum yum!

All this was of course accompanied by some tasty sake.

The cute waitress disappeared at some point, but the food made up for her absence. We have the address of the place, we'll be sure to visit it again.

I asked Sato-san to ask Them to turn off the rain. It seems They have misunderstood though, and it now started snowing. This is suboptimal. I'll have to spend more time in restaurants. I'll end like the Panda, mark my words!

Philip Paeps: Back in Japan

2010-03-08T07:49:00+00:00

16:49 JST

Hard to believe another year went by. I got back to Tokyo last Friday via Copenhagen. I tried to burn some expiring miles to upgrade Kristof who is travelling with me to business class too, but it turns out they gave him the upgrade without deducting my miles. Very nice. Conversation made the flight over much less boring than usual.

So far, the food is working out very well. Last night, Sato-san recommended us a yakiniku-style establishment in the vicinity of Shinjuku station. The one with 200 exits and millions of people using them all at once. Despite the daunting location, we found it very easily. And the food was scrumptious, as expected.

Earlier today, we met up with the Italian invasion and went to check if Meiji Shrine was still where it was last year. While taking my annual picture of the enormous wooden structure leading to the shrine, a Dutch voice over my shoulder wanted to know if we were sure we could take pictures. Turned out to be Paul and Cor. Bumping into familiar people by accident in a city the size of Tokyo is a bit unexpected. On the other hand ... can't avoid the Dutch, right? ;-)

Food tonight promises to be interesting again. Watch this space!

Philip Paeps: Pairing Bluetooth headset

2010-02-25T11:52:00+00:00

I am the proud owner of a Bluetooth headset. My laptop also speaks Bluetooth. Getting the two of them to talk to each other is less than obvious though. There seems to be plenty of documentation for ancient BlueZ versions, but none for more recent ones.

For future reference.

First put the device in pairing mode
Now use a cleverly hidden Python script (which depends on dbus and gobject, of all things) to do the pairing. I have no idea how I stumbled into this, and the only way to figure out what it does was reading it through. Highly intuitive!

# python /usr/share/doc/bluez/examples/simple-agent hci0 XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
The good news is, once the thing has been paired, it Just Works[tm]:

# mplayer -ao alsa:device=bluetooth foo.ogg

I have Opinions on dbus.

Christophe Vandeplas: BruCON Call For Papers

2010-02-20T11:00:34+00:00

2009 was the first edition of BruCON, a non-profit conference meant to unite all the people in and around Belgium interested in discussing computer security, privacy and computer technology related topics. It was a great first edition thanks to the help of the sponsors and many volunteers.

I'm happy that I'll be able to play a (more significant) role in the organization of the second edition.

Do you have an interesting topic to present or a cool workshop? Have a look at the Call of Papers here.

Relevant Content:

Hacking for Beer - BruCON 12 days left for early bird tickets

BruCON call for papers

One week before HAR

Watchguard Fireware SSL-VPN Vulnerability

ModSecurity Console signed ssl certificate

Pascal Bleser: Generate a moderately secure random password

2010-02-17T21:38:16+00:00

Just to remind myself... ;)cat /dev/urandom \| base64 \| tr -d '[^:alnum:]' \| cut -c1-10 \| head -1The command chain above does the following:dd if=/dev/urandom: read random data from /dev/urandom and write it to STDOUTbase64: encode that binary data into Base64 to make it human-readabletr -d '[^:alnum:]': remove all characters that are not alphanumeric (i.e. remove whitespaces, +, ...)cut -c1-

FOSDEM news: Video recordings online

2010-02-14T13:55:18+00:00

You might have noticed the videos of the Main Tracks and Lightning Talks are already online on our different mirrors. Round robin loadbalancing is performed using the following link: http://video.fosdem.org.

From now on we also publish the videos on YouTube. Google upgraded our account so we can now upload videos without time-limitation. This means you can watch any video streamed and in one single part.

Our official channel page is: http://youtube.com/fosdemtalks.

We are trying to collect recordings of the many developer rooms.

Pascal Bleser: FOSS event calendar site

2010-02-13T19:42:10+00:00

Visit fossevents.org for a calendar of upcoming Free and Opensource events all over the planet. Thanks to the fine folks at freenode for that resource.Read the following post for further information.

FOSDEM news: Thanks, volunteers!

2010-02-10T22:05:38+00:00

Another FOSDEM is behind us, and this edition was the best ever! This was in no small manner aided by our enthousiastic army of volunteers who helped with the setup, moderation, infodesk and various crucial tasks. I would like to take a moment to thank them for all their effort. Without you guys this would not have been possible.

Thanks, volunteers! I'm looking forward to working with you again next year...

Pascal Bleser: Call for testing openSUSE 11.2 with newer aria2

2010-02-09T08:18:06+00:00

As you might now, Zypp (the package management stack of openSUSE) uses the very powerful aria2 application to perform its downloads, both for repository metadata and RPM files. Before that, it used curl.Since openSUSE 11.2, the Zypp stack defaults to using aria2 (unless the environment variable ZYPP_ARIA2C is set to 0, in which case it falls back to curl). But currently, we have two issues with

Philip Paeps: Survived yet another FOSDEM!

2010-02-09T07:50:00+00:00

This year, FOSDEM didn't completely kill me like last year. Cleanup still turned me into a living corpse (despite the availability of Club Mate -- thanks to the Hackerspace Brussels crowd) but at least I'm back among the living a day after the event instead of a week.

I was very impressed with the network this year. Thanks to AY, Jerome and Peter from Cisco, and of course the FOSDEM networking team. We had to tell people to use more bandwidth. People even came to the infodesk asking us when the network would break because it didn't feel like FOSDEM to them. Yeah...

Taking it a little bit easier over the weekend, I was able to keep an eye on the noise on IRC. This little graph is highly amusing:

Back to work today. Very few days remain in my current contract, but that doesn't mean the work doesn't need finishing. :-)

Pascal Bleser: Packman for Factory

2010-02-08T21:16:13+00:00

We've started building and publishing a core set of multimedia/codec related packages at Packman for openSUSE Factory again, now that 11.3 M1 has been published.Currently available packages include: MPlayer, ffmpeg, fluidsynth, lame, xine, twolame, vlc and xmms, as well as the gstreamer stack and a pile of additional libraries. We don't build all the stuff that's in our 11.2/11.1/11.0

FOSDEM news: Video recordings online in approx 1 week

2010-02-08T16:31:23+00:00

The video recordings should be online in approximately one week. They will be released in an adequate Creative Commons license.

FOSDEM news: Donations draw result

2010-02-07T20:09:48+00:00

O'Reilly Books

Olivier Nicolas
Etienne Saliez

The above persons can email aburet@fosdem.org to know the details on how to get the books.

Nokia N900

Alex Dulaunoy
Michael Sawicz
Luca Capello

Luca was present this Sunday, so he has already received his new phone ... Alex and Michael will be contacted by email.

Linux Magazine

FOSDEM news: Keysigning: master hashes of list of participants

2010-02-07T11:34:02+00:00

The FOSDEM 2010 keysigning party is now taking place outside. If you were
in room Ferrer on time, you would have been able to read the master hashes from the projector. If not, find them on https://fosdem.org/2010/keysigning.

FOSDEM news: Live streaming

2010-02-07T09:19:18+00:00

If you can't be there, it is always possible to feel the FOSDEM ambiance by having a look at our live sessions in Jansson. Using VLC, you can connect to http://streaming.onsite.fosdem.net:10000
During lunch time, the Minix3 session is played back.

FOSDEM news: Acceptable use policy of BELNET / FOSDEM Internet services

2010-02-07T08:42:21+00:00

By using the Internet connection at FOSDEM you agree to the following:

The customer commits to act conform to the norms and protocols of Internet.
The customer may only use the BELNET network under strict legal regulation. Any use which is in violation of Belgian or international laws is forbidden. As an active member of ISPA Belgium (Internet Service Providers Association of Belgium), BELNET totally complies to the "Collaboration protocol in order to fight against illegitimate acts on Internet". In case of suspicion of illegal acts from the customer, BELNET will collaborate, within the strict scope defined by the law, with the judicial power to help them with their investigation duties.
It is forbidden to use BELNET for any activity having as consequence:
- Unauthorized access to third party data;
- Harming operational activities of BELNET or of Internet in general;
- Harming the use or performance of Internet services for other users;
- Wasting (human, network, computer) resources;
- Completely or partially destroying the integrity of computer data;
- Compromising the privacy of users;
- Using the network in order to send messages which are classified in the categories "harassment" or "spam".
The use of the BELNET network is reserved to public services, education and research. Commercial use as well as intensive personal use is forbidden.

FOSDEM news: Feedback form

2010-02-07T08:23:11+00:00

FOSDEM lives thanks to its visitors. Please tell us what you think about it and help us make it better.

(Marks: 5 means excellent, 0 means it was awful)

FOSDEM news: Follow live info on twitter

2010-02-06T12:58:12+00:00

If you want to have live updates of FOSDEM, make sure you follow us on twitter.

FOSDEM news: Network up and running

2010-02-06T08:24:18+00:00

The network is up and running. Enjoy the internet over IPv4 and IPv6

FOSDEM news: FOSDEM Beer Event

2010-02-04T09:01:07+00:00

As every year, there will be a FOSDEM beer event on Friday night before FOSDEM (February 5th 2010).
As in 2009, this year's event will take place at the Delirium Café, in a beautiful alley near the Grand'Place in Brussels. In addition to the enormous variety in beers, the location also has enough room to accommodate the vast crowd of geeks we tend to be.

Delirium Security will help us keep this area FOSDEM-only. If you meet a guard at the entrance to the bar, make it clear to him that you are there for the FOSDEM party. This is done by giving the code FOSDEM3 to the security, also printing this page can come in handy.

Jochen Maes: FOSDEM Beer Event Boycot

2010-02-04T08:16:03+00:00

There are people preparing to boycott the beer event just because Google sponsors the free beers.
The boycott would be by refusing free beer. If people do not want free beer that is their own choice.

However (and I'm very clear about this) I will not tolerate flyers to be handed out or any lobbying at the event. If I see people doing this I will remove them and refuse entry.
Google is our sponsor and we are happy they are! If you really want to boycott stay away from FOSDEM as Google also sponsors the event itself!

The event is a private event and supposed to be free, as stated before FOSDEM has no political nor religious goals and will always refuse to be a part of that.

So In case you are still wondering: People actively pursuing a boycott will be removed!

update: I got contacted by Jan saying he will not continue and I'm happy we can resolve this!

FOSDEM news: Last speaker interviews

2010-02-03T17:29:26+00:00

To finish our collection of informative interviews with the FOSDEM 2010 main track speakers, we proudly present:

See you at FOSDEM this weekend!

FOSDEM news: Keysigning: list of participants now available

2010-02-03T10:12:33+00:00

The list of participants for this weekend's keysigning party is now available. If you have submitted your keys to the keyserver and are participating in the keysigning party, you should now download the list and follow instructions at http://fosdem.org/2010/keysigning.

FOSDEM news: Printable Schedule

2010-01-31T18:22:30+00:00

A printable schedule (PDF) is now available. We will also print it out and make it available on boards around the venue, and it will also be available (in more verbose form) in the booklet you can get for free at the Infodesk. But if you prefer to have your own copy around, feel free to download and print. It is also quite handy to have an overview of the 300+ talks scheduled for FOSDEM 2010 !

Jochen Maes: Open source days March 2010

2010-01-30T17:42:57+00:00

I'll be going and on Saturday I'm going to do a talk about Djagios!

I'm pretty happy about it and can hardly wait....

afk now, just wanted to let you guys know!

FOSDEM news: New: BoF room for informal meetings

2010-01-30T12:29:39+00:00

At FOSDEM, we've been trying to accommodate open-source projects of all sizes and maturity to the best of our possibilities. As our devroom capacity is both limited and very well-used, we've introduced new ways for projects to participate: the many stands, the lightning talks and the crossdistro room.

This year, we're adding yet another opportunity: a Birds of a Feather room.
The concept is simple: any project can reserve a timeslot (15, 30 or max. 45 minutes), during which they have the room just for them.

The idea is to hold ad-hoc discussions, meet-ups or brainstorms. It is not meant for talks, so there will deliberately not be a projector.

The BoF room is available on Saturday from 12:00 till 19:00, and is located in the AW building, room 117. It is a cosy and small room with 31 seats.
We will hang an empty schedule on the door on Saturday morning. Reservation is done by writing your details in the timeslot(s) you want to occupy. Maximum 3*15 minutes per project.

One more reason to get up early on Saturday : )

FOSDEM news: The fourth quartet of speaker interviews

2010-01-27T16:01:20+00:00

This is the fourth batch of interviews with our main track speakers:

Next week we'll publish the last interviews. Only 9 days until FOSDEM kicks off!

Jochen Maes: Today is a sad day

2010-01-27T13:50:25+00:00

Yesterday night our veterinarian operated Muffin. She had malformed teeth and when we started noticing something was wrong, we went straight to Stefan Haustraete.
He called us this morning at 00:30 to tell us the operation went fine and that I could pick her up this morning.
As operating on chinchilla's is not without risks we were now hoping she would start eating again.
This morning I tried to feed her every hour but she wouldn't swallow.

At 12:15 Muffin stopped fighting and choose to go to Mulan. Her friend that left us a few years ago.
I buried Muffin around 13:00, tears in my eyes and while writing this I have difficulties holding back.

Muffin, I hope you'll find all the raisins you want now. Don't worry we'll miss you and will never forget you. Thanks for letting me be a part of your life!

FOSDEM news: Keysigning: six days to submit your key!

2010-01-26T10:53:00+00:00

With six days to go before the key submission deadline, 128 keys have been received by the keyserver. While this is a nice round number, surely we can do better than that. There is still time to submit your key to take part in the keysigning. Why wait? Do it now.

Please remember that the submission deadline is Monday 1 February 2010.

For more information, see http://fosdem.org/2010/keysigning.

Philip Paeps: BSD Certification schedule

2010-01-25T08:39:00+00:00

Looking through my calendar (yes, I have one) for 2010 this morning, I discovered that I will be proctoring quite a number of BSD Certification sessions this year. Plenty of opportunity for people (you?) to sign up!

Chances are there will be other opportunities throughout the year too.

Floris Lambrechts: Tradition

2010-01-24T16:35:07+00:00

Yes there are still traditions…

Jochen Maes: For people in doubt…

2010-01-24T15:13:41+00:00

FOSDEM news: New to FOSDEM ?

2010-01-23T09:31:11+00:00

The way FOSDEM works is a little different from other conferences:

Entrance is free, but donations are welcome
There is no registration, just come to the campus and enjoy the conference
It's a technical conference, don't expect marketing/sponsored-talks
It's not a bad idea to make a list of must-see lectures beforehand. Check out the Main Tracks, Developer Rooms, Lightning Talks and Stands
If you arrive on friday, check out our Beer Event
When you arrive on the campus check out our infodesk. You'll get a free bag with some goodies and our information/schedule brochure with maps and other info

There are a lot more things to see during the conference like keysigning, LPI exams, food, drinks, free transportation,... check out the links in the left menu.

FOSDEM news: Job Corner

2010-01-23T09:26:44+00:00

Like previous edition we are proud to announce companies will be able to inform you (our visitors) about job opportunities in Free or open source software. The job corner will be located at the end of the main hallway (H building).

There are some rules on what is or isn't allowed, but the most important is to use your common sense.

Philip Paeps: Whisky tasting

2010-01-22T20:27:00+00:00

Keeping up the appearance that planet grep is a collection of drunks, I accepted Elise's invitation to join a whisky tasting with a group of people able to compress their thoughts into 140 bytes or less.

First of all, I was impressed at the decompressed presence of all participants. They failed to depict even a single stereotype! Except maybe taking pictures of bottles, but I think that can be forgiven. ;-)

I was particularly impressed by the Caol Ila and perhaps even more by the Black Bush. The Sazerac Rye was also highly tasty, but I felt it was no match for the Templeton Rye Brooks introduced me to a while back.

In addition to whisky, the tasting session also included an amazing stilton and cheddar (not of the radioactive orange variety). I found these went very well with whisky.

In the end, I bought a bottle of Laphroaig 19 year old tastiness. Yum!

I don't think this will be my last whisky tasting session.

FOSDEM news: Are you going to ...?

2010-01-22T17:46:11+00:00

If you are coming to FOSDEM, spead the word with the usual image on your blog...
<a href="http://www.fosdem.org"><img src="http://www.fosdem.org/promo/going-to" alt="I'm going to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting" /></a>

Christophe Vandeplas: I'm going to FOSDEM

2010-01-22T17:44:02+00:00

Relevant Content:

Going to FOSDEM

Traffic Stats for TunnelDroid

Extremely simple file loadbalancing with statistics

FOSDEM Speaker interviews

FOSDEM 2009 approaching

Floris Lambrechts: Gratis HD televisie over de kabel

2010-01-21T19:26:41+00:00

Onze nieuwe TV ondersteunt rechtstreekse digitale ontvangst via DVB-T en DVB-C. Waardoor je dus met een gewoon analoog kabel-abonnement veel zenders kunt ontvangen (kabel) én de VRT-zenders digitaal kunt bekijken (DVB-T via de antenne).

Pretbederver hier is echter de TV zelf; met slechts 1 coax aansluiting ben je verplicht te kiezen kiezen tussen ofwel kabel ofwel antenne.

Digitaal ‘combinatiekijken’ lukt dus niet zonder extra abonnementskosten en een digibox/digicorder toestel (en bijhorende zapper) van Telenet. Zou je denken…

Het lijkt een goed bewaard geheim, maar Telenet verstuurt de digitale VRT zenders (één+, canvas+, één HD en Canvas HD) over de kabel in onversleuteld DVB-C formaat. Dus geen digibox of digicorder voor nodig op TV’s met een DVB-C decoder.

Bovendien zijn ook de onlangs ‘verdwenen’ analoge zenders beschikbaar als digitale ‘open kanalen’ (CNN, BBC World, CNBC, Arte, Actua, France 3, TV5, TVE).

Ik moest op ons Philips toestel wel een trucje uithalen om één en ander aan de praat te krijgen; eenmaal het toestel overtuigd is dat het geen Belgische maar Zweedse signalen ontvangt, ging het quasi vlekkeloos.

Meer info:

Forum topic bij Tik over hoe de kanalen te vinden: http://www.tik.be/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=10086
Lijst met kabelfrequenties te downloaden bij Open Televisie Blog: http://boulder2.wordpress.com/

FOSDEM news: Speaker interviews installment 3

2010-01-20T17:45:26+00:00

Today we publish the third batch of interviews with our main track speakers. Here is some interesting reading material to make you curious about the main track talks

Jochen Maes: compiz and fedora12

2010-01-19T08:41:07+00:00

On my fedora install I enabled compiz, which works correctly. The only problem were the keybindings that weren't responding, no matter to what I set it.

On the compiz irc channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/#compiz) soreau told me to edit the /usr/bin/compiz-gtk file.

You will see in the line where it launches compiz "glib gconf" ond must replace that with ccp. Then it will recognize your settings which need to be configured again!

Now Super+# does switch the desktop! w00t

FOSDEM news: Certification Exams

2010-01-17T19:32:43+00:00

Certification exam sessions will again be offered at FOSDEM 2010.

The Linux Professional Institute, the BSD Certification Group and TYPO3 will organize exam sessions during FOSDEM 2010. Interested candidates can now register for exams with the respective certification groups.

The schedule for the exam sessions is also available now.

FOSDEM news: FOSDEM Smartphone applications

2010-01-16T21:06:28+00:00

In an effort to make FOSDEM even more paperless, there are now Smartphone applications with the FOSDEM schedule. The features of the application depend on the platform, but they have a few features that make it nicer to use than the paper booklet, such as being able to download the latest schedule, read the descriptions of all the talks or view a map for each event. And best of all, it's not paper!

Floris Lambrechts: Beste Bank Card Company,

2010-01-16T13:29:59+00:00

Banc Card Company / Card Stop schrijft:

Betreft: uw kaartnummer [VISA-kredietkaartnummer]

Beste klant, Onze diensten werden ervan verwittigd dat uw klantgegevens gecomprommitteerd werden door een database hacking in het buitenland.

Teneinde fraude te vermijden vragen wij u (…) om u kaart te blokkeren (…).

(…)

Ondertussen doen de gerechtelijke instanties al het nodige om het onderzoek verder te zetten en de daders te identificeren. In het belang van het onderzoek kunnen wij echter geen verdere details melden.

OK, leuk dat jullie preventief optreden. Maar welke gegevens zijn er precies gelekt? Kennen de ‘hackers’ nu ook mijn aankopen en mijn privé-adres?

Ik neem aan dat “verdere details” zullen meegedeeld worden zodra het onderzoek afgelopen is? Ik had namelijk graag geweten welk bedrijf (al dan niet uit onzorgvuldigheid) mijn gegevens heeft laten stelen.

Alvast bedankt

Philip Paeps: New gadget: ThinkPad x200s

2010-01-14T20:58:00+00:00

My trusty x60s is "written off" this year, so it was time to get a new machine. Blatant consumerism and all that.

Unless you drink the Apple kool-aid and are able to put up with their programmer-unfriendly keyboards (though that's gotten better of late), ThinkPads are still the only reasonable choice for a laptop. The logical successor to x60s was the x200s.

While I'm generally very happy with the machine (it's even lighter than the previous one and the nine-cell battery lasts even longer - about 10 hours, PXE just works, suspend/resume just works, it still has a proper nipple instead of a silly touchpad -- basically, it's still a ThinkPad) Lenovo made some really strange design decisions this time round.

Why does it have to be so wide? As far as I can tell, the extra width is mainly caused by a wide bezel on each side of the screen. It's still very compact (about the size of a sheet of A4 paper), but it makes you wonder.
The increase in width has subtly changed the keyboard dimensions in a way I can't quite put my finger on. I seem to be making the strangest typos on this keyboard. I'm sure muscle memory will catch up eventually.
Why would you put a camera on a business laptop? Does anyone else feel uncomfortable staring at a camera all day long? I know it's not doing anything (because I don't put drivers for that useful thing in my kernel), but it's just "there". All the time. I'm looking for a sticker to put over it.
The nine-cell battery sticks out the back a bit, like the extended batteries on X-series ThinkPads have always done. It no longer sticks out over the entire width of the laptop though. Which again makes me wonder why the laptop is wider. Surely they could have made a 12-cell battery that sticks out over the entire width, or just preserved the previous width?

I have basically come to terms with the idea of "wide screen", even though it's unnatural and crazy. I find myself using :vsplit more than split, but I still think it's nuts.

This particular model comes with an Ericsson F3507g Mobile Broadband Minicard, which is a very fancy gadget. I haven't tried it yet, because I don't have a spare SIM, but it brings an amazing collection of radios with it. It also adds a privacy concern: "theft deterrents" in the BIOS. I don't particularly want my laptop reporting my location (there's a GPS radio in it) to anyone who listens at all times.

Presumably, these things need operating system support and I can turn them off in the BIOS, but how do I know they're really off? Time to spend some more quality time with the bootloader to make really sure.

Overall, I'm very happy with the new gadget. It does what I need it to do and will presumably do it until it's written off.

I'm still trying to decide what to do with the x60s now. Other than the keyboard, which is predictably beaten up, it's in fairly good shape. Probably donate it to a school or a geek in the larval stages.

FOSDEM news: FOSDEM multiplies things by 10

2010-01-14T18:08:28+00:00

For our 10th edition we multiply by 10.

The Spouses / Partners Tour will have two groups a day, doubling the capacity.
Last year we introduced the FOSDEM bus driving every 50 minutes on Sunday afternoon. And extra bus will lower the waiting time to max 25 minutes.
For the catering: expect a second fries van. So let's halve the queue.
We ask our visitors to apply seat defragmentation to double the capacity of the rooms.

Ralph Meijer: Apple Notification Server = Idavoll

2010-01-14T15:23:11+00:00

Last week, Blaine Cook congratulated me on Idavoll being in Apple Max OS 10.6 Server, as its Notification Server. I did have contact with Apple's server team ages ago, about them using Idavoll and having added some customizatons, but never knew where it ended up. The list of Open Source projects used in Apple's products confirms the use of Idavoll, and Wokkel, too, as a dependency of Idavoll. Cool!

Idavoll, and thus Notification Server, is a generic XMPP publish-subscribe service, in Python with Twisted. Upon inspection of the code and the differences against the mentioned versions, most of the customizations match those I was already aware of: an SQLite backend, the whitelist node access model and associated member affiliations. The link to Notification Server at the open source list goes nowhere (yet), so I am unsure about the actual license of their additions. I contacted the server team, and will write again if I have more news on this.

At the nice post by Jack Moffitt on Apple's use of XMPP, Kael mentions the presence of more Publish-Subscribe goodness in Calendar Server. This is actually the stuff that uses Notification Server for push notification in iCal. As Jack says, it is truly great to see large corporations like Apple to embrace XMPP like this. I really wish Google Calendar had a similar feature. Now I only get meeting invites through e-mail. Apple's particular use of Publish-Subscribe reminds me of Joe Hildebrand's effort on WebDAV notifications, and I think that there are a lot of applications that could benefit from such push features.

As I touched upon earlier, at Mediamatic Lab, we use XMPP Publish-Subscribe for exchanging things for federation. But we've also built a bunch of interactive installations, most of them dealing with RFID tags we call ikTags. To name two examples, the ikCam takes a (group) picture, uploads it and friends the depicted persons by reading their tags. The ikPoll is a polling station where people can 'vote' on questions with the tag. Typically, there are also publish-subscribe notifications coming out of those interactions, so you can create a live stream of things happening at an event like PICNIC. Combined with the Twitter Streaming API and our own status messages, this creates an entertaining back channel, coincidently powered by Idavoll.

FOSDEM news: Call for volunteers

2010-01-11T20:04:53+00:00

FOSDEM 2010: nearly there... And you can help us make it a success again. Visitors of previous editions will probably have noticed our enthusiastic team of weekend volunteers who help us bend the chaos into order. Feel like helping out this year? Here's your chance: don't be shy and just sign up!

FOSDEM news: Second batch of FOSDEM 2010 speaker interviews

2010-01-11T09:38:19+00:00

Here is the second batch of interviews with our main track speakers.

We hope this will make you hungry for more...

FOSDEM news: Participating stands

2010-01-09T16:41:13+00:00

The stands have been decided since a long time, but we had not yet published the list on our website.

In total 31 projects were selected, you can find a list of them in schedule.
Update: we forgot to list RepRap!

The keynote talks are already in the schedule too, as well as most of the main track talks. We are still making final arrangements, so the timing is missing for some of them. In the coming days and weeks, the schedule will grow to include the devroom and lightning talks.

Christophe Vandeplas: Change files on the read-only filesystem of your Android phone

2010-01-09T08:37:05+00:00

I am currently working on an small application that needs to load kernel modules at the startup of the Android phone. I could eventually start up an Activity or Service using a trigger on the BOOT_COMPLETED_ACTION, (howto), but this creates some complexity as I need to load compcache kernel modules requiring lots of free memory.
Using a boot script is much better.

(Un)fortunately an application cannot change things in the /system partition as it is mounted in read only.

# mount
rootfs on / type rootfs (ro)
tmpfs on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=600)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
tmpfs on /sqlite_stmt_journals type tmpfs (rw,size=4096k)
/dev/block/mtdblock3 on /system type yaffs2 (ro)
/dev/block/mtdblock5 on /data type yaffs2 (rw,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/block/mtdblock4 on /cache type yaffs2 (rw,nosuid,nodev)
/dev/block/mmcblk0p2 on /system/sd type ext2 (rw,noatime,nodiratime,errors=continue)
/dev/block//vold/179:1 on /sdcard type vfat (rw,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noexec,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0000,dmask=0000,allow_utime=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8)

Fortunately, as I have root support on my phone, I can simply remount the /system partition as rw, do my change and then remount it back to ro.
Here is how you do this in java code:

public static void saveCommandsToBootFile(String script, String filename) {
	// first remount filesystem in rw
	// save the file
	// remount the filesystem back to ro
	String command = 
		"mount -o remount,rw /system \n" +
		"echo '" + script.replace("'", "\\'") + "' > " + filename + " \n" +
		"mount -o remount,ro /system \n";
	executeCommand(command);
}

public static void executeCommand(String command) {
	Log.d(MainActivity.LOG_TAG, "Executing the following commands: \n" + command);
	Process process;
	try {
		process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("su -c sh");
		DataOutputStream os = new DataOutputStream(process.getOutputStream());
		//DataInputStream osRes = new DataInputStream(process.getInputStream());
		os.writeBytes(command); os.flush();
		// and finally close the shell
		os.writeBytes("exit\n"); os.flush();
		process.waitFor();
	} catch (IOException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	} catch (InterruptedException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}	
}

Some remarks you could have:

I didn't use java to write the file: Indeed, my java application runs in a limited environment and has no rights to write to /system/, even mounted rw. I would need to write the file temporary somewhere else, to then move it back to the final location. This looks a little to complex.
I escape the ' quote in the script to prevent my echo foo > bar failing.

Relevant Content:

Traffic Stats for TunnelDroid

TunnelDroid

First Android application for BruCON

Jochen Maes: redmine

2010-01-08T10:54:59+00:00

For Inuits I installed a redmine. At first it ran with fcgi and apache but Karl Vogel stated that it would run better on Phusion Passenger.
The Passenger install is pretty basic and explained (all the way at the bottom of the page) on the redmine Howto configure Apache to run Redmine, but they forgot to mention that you need to remove the .htaccess file!

Otherwise you get weird errors like this:
Processing ApplicationController#index (for 84.192.162.68 at 2010-01-08 11:19:21) [GET]

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches "/index.html" with {:method=>:get}):
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/rack/request_handler.rb:92:in `process_request'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_request_handler.rb:207:in `main_loop'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/railz/application_spawner.rb:385:in `start_request_handler'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/railz/application_spawner.rb:343:in `handle_spawn_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/utils.rb:184:in `safe_fork'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/railz/application_spawner.rb:341:in `handle_spawn_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:352:in `__send__'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:352:in `main_loop'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:196:in `start_synchronously'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:163:in `start'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/railz/application_spawner.rb:209:in `start'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/spawn_manager.rb:262:in `spawn_rails_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server_collection.rb:126:in `lookup_or_add'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/spawn_manager.rb:256:in `spawn_rails_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server_collection.rb:80:in `synchronize'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server_collection.rb:79:in `synchronize'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/spawn_manager.rb:255:in `spawn_rails_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/spawn_manager.rb:154:in `spawn_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/spawn_manager.rb:287:in `handle_spawn_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:352:in `__send__'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:352:in `main_loop'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:196:in `start_synchronously'
/usr/lib/phusion_passenger/passenger-spawn-server:61

Jochen Maes: openldap en 3 AD servers

2010-01-08T10:51:06+00:00

Recently I had to use 3 AD's for the login on one application. The only solution I could think of was to proxy the requests from a local openldap towards the correct AD. Problem lied in that those 3 AD's were on different networks and not linked to each other. Luckily there were no duplicate users on the 3 different AD's

As I had a bit more issues to get it setup here are the steps:

1) create a schema that defines sAmAccountName and add it to slapd.conf:
attributetype ( 1.2.840.113556.1.4.221 NAME 'sAMAccountName' EQUALITY caseExactMatch SYNTAX '1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.15' SINGLE-VALUE )

2) Add following config (change for your needs) to slapd.conf
# settings for AD3 database meta suffix "dc=ad3,dc=grouped,dc=all" subordinate uri "ldap://ip3/dc=ad3,dc=grouped,dc=all" suffixmassage "dc=ad3,dc=grouped,dc=all" "ou=users,ou=bleh,dc=blah,dc=be" rewriteEngine on RewriteRule "sAmAccountName=(.*),dc=ad3,dc=grouped,dc=all$" "%1ou=users,ou=bleh,dc=blah,dc=be" ":" idassert-bind bindmethod=simple binddn="dn3" credentials="pw3"
# settings for AD2 database meta suffix "dc=ad2,dc=grouped,dc=all" subordinate uri "ldap://ip2/dc=ad2,dc=grouped,dc=all" suffixmassage "dc=ad2,dc=grouped,dc=all" "ou=users,ou=foo,dc=bar,dc=be" rewriteEngine on RewriteRule "sAmAccountName=(.*)dc=ad2,dc=grouped,dc=all$" "%1ou=users,ou=foo,dc=bar,dc=be" ":" idassert-bind bindmethod=simple binddn="dn2" credentials="pw2"
#settings for AD1 database meta suffix "dc=grouped,dc=all" rootdn "cn=user,dc=grouped,dc=all" rootpw "userpw" uri "ldap://ip1/dc=grouped,dc=all" suffixmassage "dc=grouped,dc=all" "ou=users,ou=fuu,dc=bal" rewriteEngine on RewriteRule "sAmAccountName=(.*)dc=grouped,dc=all$" "%1ou=users,ou=fu,dc=bal" ":" idassert-bind bindmethod=simple binddn="dn1" credentials="pw1"

How does this work? Well the last entry (must be the last!!!) is the basedn that you will search with your application and it user the "user" as login.
This will be tho top level and underneath the 2 subordinates will reside (dc=ad2|3,dc=grouped,dc=all). If you do not use the subordinate it will not search users in the ad2|3.

The rest should be pretty obvious and basic...

llap!

Philip Paeps: FOSDEM 2010 keysigning

2010-01-05T23:36:00+00:00

Of course there will be a Friday Beer Event at FOSDEM this year. Only this year, it won't be me organizing it. I felt it was time to do something different and it looks like Jochen has a very firm grip on things. I'm looking forward to attending the beer event as a participant.

What to do with the so-called free time now though?

It seems I've inherited the keysigning bits.

Setting up a very basic key submission server required a mere couple of hours of remembering why Perl is a write-only language. The results of that exercise can be admired at http://ksp.fosdem.org/kspd.pl.txt. Announcing the existence of this service to the world was rather more involved.

The ordeal reminded me -- again -- of primitive cavemen.

Every time someone wanted to paint a woolly mammoth on a cave wall, they'd have to draw it from scratch, either with reference to a previous drawing, or from memory. It was impossible to reuse previous mammoths.

One glorious day, a bright caveman discovered that certain rocks can be rubbed against thin sheets of skin to leave an impression, and the impression can then be used to draw new woolly mammoths. Even more (haha) impressive was that the impression could be used to make a new, slightly modified (longer tusks, who knows?) mammoth-template. Previous impressions could be saved for future generations, to teach them what woolly mammoth looked like in grandpa Thag's youth.

And thus version control was born.

Fast-forward many centuries. People no longer live in caves. Mammoths are now stored in "the cloud". Someone comes up with the wonderful idea of "content management".

One day, someone creates a mammoth and pastes it on the proverbial cave wall. A couple of days later, the mammoth needs changing a bit. In these modern days of the cloud, where mammoths fit in 140 characters or less, this can now be accomplished without going through the pesky process of archiving previous mammoths. Of course, the cave wall could be "configured" to keep old mammoths around, but why bother? In ten minutes time, there will be a new mammoth, and no one could possibly care about the previous one.

And thus version control died.

And mammoths are drawn from scratch again.

As technology advances, humans regress to compensate.

The keysigning announcement is now online. Being the caveman I am, I've also put it in a version control system, far away from any clouds. Just on the off chance that it may come in handy. You know, in a year or so?

FOSDEM news: Keysigning

2010-01-05T22:16:57+00:00

Web of Trust

PGP public key and CAcert certificate identification are based on multiple (the more the better) people doing an identification check against official identity documents such as driving permits, passports, national identity cards, etc.: the Web of Trustworthy. The Web of Trust is a reciprocal process: people identify themselves to each other.

The "keysigning party" is essential to strengthen the Web of Trust and keep the security technique open and freely available.

Like previous years, there will be a PGP key signing and CAcert assurance party at FOSDEM 2010.

FOSDEM news: identi.ca user and group created!

2010-01-05T09:09:50+00:00

A long forgotten task was to create a FOSDEM account on identi.ca. We just did that and you are welcome to subscribe to our fosdem dents!

We also created a group that you can join! You can find the group information here

Philip Paeps: Newtonmas revisited

2010-01-04T10:41:00+00:00

Google is celebrating Newton's birthday today. Better late than never, but in the interest of historical accuracy, I feel it should be celebrated on 25 December and not on 4 January.

I am aware of the fact that the calendar was fiddled with around the time of Newton's birth, but I think the key defining element of a "birthday" is the day one is born (or birthed, depending on perspective). I'm sure Sir Isaac's mother thought it was 25 December.

If Newton was born in the 21st century, his mother would have had to fight her way through a forest of "christmas" trees to get to the delivery room.

FOSDEM news: Main Track Program released

2010-01-03T20:43:39+00:00

The list of Main Track speakers for FOSDEM 2010 is almost complete and officially announced today, even though the website does not contain all the speaker bios and abstracts yet.

The keynotes will be highly interesting and entertaining, as always:

Brooks Davis discussing the Promotion of Open Source Methods at a Large Company,
Richard Clayton talking about evil things, and
Greg Kroah-Hartman, teaching us how to write and submit your first Linux kernel patch.

Check out the almost full Main Tracks Program here.

FOSDEM news: First FOSDEM 2010 Speaker Interviews

2010-01-03T14:02:13+00:00

Just like previous editions we have collected a list of interesting interviews with our main track speakers.

To get up to speed with the various topics discussed in the main track talks, you can start with the following articles:

Stay tuned for more interviews in the next weeks...

FOSDEM news: Bring your partner

2009-12-30T11:39:51+00:00

Since 2009, FOSDEM hires professional guides to offer a free guided tours of Brussels for the spouses/partners.If he/she would like to accompany you, and is not interested in the FOSDEM conference, this will make the stay worthwhile. Brussels is a city with a rich historical past, and a cosmopolitan present.