Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

This February I`ll be heading to my 8th Fosdem in row.

I went to every single Fosdem so far, some years only one day because of other obligations but I was a round most of the time
During the first couple of years I was pretty active in the FIT team, helping out people to find the right rooms , keeping the fosdem contributions safe with Sven, funding different social events and devroom dinners ,
Later I was in charge of the HPC and Cluster devroom in which we also held the openMosix summits.
And back in 2004 I replaced Moshe at the openMosix Summit standing in front of a great audience at the Janson room.

As Wim just pointed out the Drupal Devroom schedule is out
and it seems like 2008 will be the year that I have to rush my talk in order for the Drupal Devroom to close its doors on Sunday evening. I'll be sharing my knowledge on MySQL cluster with the Drupal crowd for them to learn and benefit from.

Lots of rumours about Yahoo wanting to dump a significant part of it's personnel have been overwhelmed by the new news that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo.

Let's stand still for 5 seconds to think about that impact :

First of all.. they are buying a lot of advertising and content , a field where they were currently losing market share. But they are buying more.

They are buying into the mindset of startups, Flickr, Upcoming, and others.. something they have long lost ..

Bort just made an interesting point in realising that in with Microsoft buying Yahoo, that would also include buying Zimbra, and lots of other open source technology. What about openID, will they make their own MS-OpenID ?

Will they make the same mistake they made when buying Hotmail ?

Will yahoo still need to let people go or will they leave themselves because of this ?
Lots of questions .. time will tell.

Christophe just proved it. I've been saying it for a while, I had a good idea about it .. but now we have mathematical proof.

I`m about 2 years ahead of the crowd.

And I wasn't even early on Last.FM I was using Pandora before that..

Slashdot pointed us to this guy who slightly modified his EEE :)
Now that's what we call hardware hacking.

Anyway .. the EEE is now the Nr1 item on my WishList !

Last century I was sometimes noticed to be using VMWare to run a weird platform on my Linux Desktop , or to run some test installations. With the introduction of Qemu and later Xen there was no need for me to use the proprietary closed alternative.

So I got the question earlier this week to build a virtual instance of our bootstrapping environment so that field engineers could take that virtual machine on their laptop and do installations from there.

One of the collegues told me that booting a fresh VMWare instance of the network would be no problem so I took up on the challenge.

First of all a registration procedure so the nice folks over at VMWare can spam me with their marketing stuff during the next couple of months. I needed to register as I seemed to need a Serial Number.. whow .. that was ages ago since I last needed such a beast.
A full 101Mb download later I had an RPM ready to be installed.

"Cool an RPM" I tought, that means that I will be able to clean up all the mess they leave behind with a simple rpm -e.
Wrong guess. it seems like VMWare starts copying around files in different places on your filesystem and actually even wants to compile stuff against your running kernel. All fine and well, but the result is a bunch of unidentified files that are cluttering my filesystem.

The next step required me to start the gui to create a virtual machine, suddenly the load of my machine skyrocketed. Load 11 whew.. yep the VMware process was the guilty one.. luckily it went back to normal after a while .. but I`m still not sure what happened there.

Click, click, click and before I knew it VMware was allocating 4Gb on myfilesystem for an empty VM. Noo.. don't allocate it yet.. retry.. ok .. take it when you need it .. that's better. And why do you think I only want 256Mb for this machine ? Hmm.. where's that config file.. aah.. clickerdy click again .

Start VM, F12 to boot of the network, wait, reboot done.

And thus we joined the era of transferring an unmanagable image that everyone will copy around wile slightly modifying things and never placing them in version control . hence ending up one day with something nobody knows how we got there..

What did we learn, that the way I bootstrap a Virtual machine or a physical machine really doesn't matter, and is still just a matter of mapping a MAC address to a HOSTNAME.

When working on the system, to check if the install was done correctly it felt like I was on a remotely bad connected machine, not really slow, but really slow but still (could have been because I logged on via the gui). Certainly not like the paravirtualized Xen machines I`m used to work with, more like the VirtualBox experience.

The big problem with giving someone an image to play with however is that you loose all control over what is being deployed , configured or changed and it just becomes a change management nightmare. At least reinstalling won't take much time.

But I`ll go back to KVM and Xen for my daily work.. I've seen enough GUI's for this month :)

Elise why ask if you can see already ?

So while Siteseeing I figured out that indeed NotchUp is a Drupal site.

Not only is it a Drupal site.. and not only can you import your LinkedIn contacts, but they also seem to be able to parse your profile (hResume) ? Do they have access to the LinkedIn API already ?
I was just hoping the could open up that part of their code :)

And yes.. they have a scaling issue :), so I`m guessing they will be the first to pay me real money to interview with them themselves.

Lefred pointed us to O'Reilly Maker

This one really is my preferred one

It's sad, but so true.

This Nokia rant makes me wonder where the Mac version is.

Didn't Scott Adams already write this one ?

That's Wally right ? :)

And even the IT Crowd also has it's own manual already.

Cute :)

When Tarry mentionned Kevin Lawton , I remembered I had seen hem speak once about Plex.

I however couldn't remember where, I was sure about Germany , tought it was LinuxKongress. I tried to remember over dinner where .. couldn't remember ..

Eventually google figured , it was in Stuttgart at LinuxTag back in 2001.

If only I had known back then what I know now :)