Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

Warning: Marketing Video ! :

Via Bart

I finally got time again to look at ZoneMinder . As my ElCheapo webcams are supported now in recent kernels it was time to give ZoneMinder another try.

I started of from a Fresh FC6 install , upgraded the kernel, then ran into this article telling me to get ffmpeg-devel and some other packages. I took them from atrpms. 5 minutes later I ran into a build failure that showed up 3 google hits but no result.
(Too bad I forgot to save the error somewhere)

Then I ran into Sebastien Wains Installing ZoneMinder 1.22.3 under CentOS 4.4
Not that much different from the other howto, apart from where you have to get ffmpeg etc.
I got the ffmpeg packages from the Dries /RPMForge repository. And then off course ZoneMinder builds like a charm.

I hadn't noticed that SELinux was enabled on the box (I usually disable it ) which kept me from having an instant working setup. But one reboot and SELinux disable later we're up and running.

As of now I`ll know which Cat to punish for bringing in (dead) mice and birds !

As you can see I`m lagging on blog postings , there is still lost of stuff I want to talk about but I fail to find enough time to write down my ideas. Almost 2 weeks ago the NLUUG Spring conference was held in Ede, this years topic was Virtualisation. As mentionned earlier I was invited to talk about Using openQRM to manage Virtual Machines, with Xen in particular.

The day started with Joanna Rutkowska talking about Blue Pill the conecpt of moving a running operating system un the fly into a virtual machine, and the impact on security for these machines. She started off with a fairly technical talk which I`m sure that not everybody in the audience understood, so gi
ven the early hour lots of them dozed off.. Too bad the occasional security joke was only noticed by few :(

The next talk was the one from Vitaly Wool who got swapped with the one from Frank Weyns, As a former MontaVista employee Vitaly dicussed the reasons for userland drivers in an embedded environment. If you think about the fact that different mobile phones today still are running different operating systems on different cpu's , think what virtualisation in this area could do.

After my own talk and the Lunch break Anil Madhavapeddy was up to give us an update on the current state of Xen
Anil at that time he told us that 3.0.5 could happen any time now.. which in the meanwhile has happened in the form of 3.1 The weird thing is that every time I see Anil giving a talk he has a new release ready :)
Maybe I should meet with him more often :)
He also gave us an overview of the interresting stuff that had just happened at the XenSummit and information on the Xen Roadmap

Obviously I staid in the maintrack to see Avi Kivity present his work on KVM, I'd probably have come to this confere
nce as a visitor just to see this talk if I hadn't been a speaker.

I Skipped Franks and the BSD talk, then tried to sneak into the Using Xen talk but it was so crowded and from the hallpath I could see there wasn't going to be much to be learned for me.

Asia Slowinska closed the day with a talk on Prospector, or how she used Qemu based virtual machines to analyse Sta
ck Overflows, fairly interresting stuff .

Tim and I wondered "Do you have to be female in order to be interrested in both Virtualisation and Security ?"
I haven't seen that many women giving such technical talks at conferences, this was something totally different fro
m Creating new tracks in TuxRacer. (which also was a great talk btw)

The Drink after the conference had a nice surprise for me. There was a contest which Tim Hemel and I seemed to had won where Tim got an MP3 player and I got a Linksys WRT54GL. More about that new toy in a later post.

As I didn't want to get stuck in traffic hungry I had gladly accepted to join the rest of the speakers for the conference dinner. I`m not used to quality food in the Netherland so I wasn't expecting much but I was quite surprised with the quality of "Het Oude Politiebureau" in Ede.

Anyway the Virtualisation conference was some time well spent !

I've placed the paper, openQRM as Virtual Machine manager,
I presented last week at the NLUUG conference on Virtualisation online for your reading pleasure.

So yesterday I was driving on the E34 from Antwerpen to Turnhout, just before the service station in Ranst there was a banner hanging from a bridge suggesting me to visit gilbert.com There'es nothing on there besides the MacOSX placeholder. Yet another funky dns problem ??

Note to myselve:

If you run into a familiar face at a conference , you can be about 75% sure that you met him at the 2005 Linux.Conf.Au :)

The presentation I just gave at the NLUUG Voorjaarsconferntie on Virtualisation is now online.

I tought I could outsmart murphy by inviting a Virtual guest speaker to give my "Live" Demo.

Off course Murphy was in the audience , so for those who saw mplayer aborting

you can still see Matt's performance here.

When you try surfing to Blogspot.com, you end up at the google homepage. Obviously a vhost misconfiguration issue.

The 3rd Barcamp Brussels is over, I was a bit dissapointed over the target audience of the first Barcamp, missed the second one, but the 3rd one was right where I expected it to be
A healthy mix of technology, startup projects and the social aspect of technology.

I took my Tuxdroid with me, planned on having him tell the audience what they were twittering about, the idea was to take the logfile of my twitter jabber session and feed that to the text to speech deamon into Tux. I failed due to the lack of network hence incoming twitter stream, however the Tuxdroid proudly whacked its wings at the end of each talk :)

So about those talks :)

After Peter gave the startshot for the fight for a slot to talk I went to see the talk about gegis by Dirk Frigne.
I totally didn't know there was an OpenSource project written for the Belgian governement which was into Gis .. cool stuff to see.

Frank then was next with his talk about OpenID, I really should spend time with openid, hmm.. I kind of think I`m repeating myselve :)
Then Bernard continued with his talk on Performance of webb applications which off course included a large part about Databases..
I need to delete lots of stuff from my presentation :)

John introduced us to NotSoso, now if only I could find some spare minutes to actually look into NotSoso, I guess that that will be for later this week, or even after the weekend.

Then we had a 2 hour break for lunch and a groupfoto by Steven

Maarten did a talk about the Blogoloog and how he started out with an old Laptop with Fedora Core and now evolved into something more suitable , and Peter explained us about Belgian Tax Law .

Then some people found me interresting enough to come and listen to my talk about MySQL Cluster, I actually had taken the talk I had been preparing for the MySQL Symposium that should have taken place in
Amsterdam earlier this year and got cancelled. That talk supposed to be over 2 hours. So I kind of cut over 70% of the slides I had tried fitting them into a 20 minute talk.
I kind of "managed" :)

Bart gave an interresting talk about your online reputation, how to screw it and how to protect it. An interresting topic came up, should you poison your blog to attract a different audience ? Because according to him your peers are probably not your customers and you should try to get new potential customers to know you . So with that in mind.. what should I start blogging about ?

Clo and Bart Becks held a "Powerpoint Karaoke" on how to create a Sect, Pietel managed to take pictures that suggested that everybody actually joined the sect, that certainly wasn't true !
After It's in the details by Jesse and an even more interresting talk about what we could do with Freebase by Will I headed home exhausted, but satisfied.

I`m sure I missed some other interresting talks like the one from Toon Vanagt about TransferItOnline but other events will come where I can meet and talk to those people again !

So this company which doesn't deserve to be mentionned by name here really pissed me off last week. I`m already fed up with the different email spams I get from them on, apart from that lots of people try to phish me into giving away my unexisting username and password for that company ,but last week they really went over the line. The send a big package to my office address with some papers in it and some rubbish.

Apart from the fact that I never asked for their spam they were so stupid to send it in the wrong language. Yes they send me their rubbish in French, now I have no problem with people sending me stuff in English, but if you want to localise please do it correct, Belgium has 3 official languages, and my native language is not French ! So most often you're better of sending stuff in English.

This reminds me of the Novell, "We speak your language" campaign, maybe the same spam database has been used , as with the Novell campaign about 3 years ago I also was addressed in the wrong language.

Now to top the annoyancy the sent a usefull headset with their package, it would have been the only part from the package that didn't live in the trashbin yet if it would have survived the 20 minute car trip in my laptop bag to a customer. It didn't.

So to all you stupid marketeers, here are some valuable lessons.

• Don't spam me,
• Address me in my own language or English ,
• If you send me gadgets, presents, make sure they don't break before I can actually use them.