Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

I don't even remember how I ended up on the Akademy site this morning .. but luckily I did.

Akademy takes place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver , ages a go my grandparents lived there to, that's Belgium if you didn't notice yet.

Now the weird thing is that there seems almost no fuzz about it in the Belgian Foss Community , nobody talks about it.
Also on Upcoming.org the event can't be found. :(

Honestly this worries me, why isn't there more talk about a rather big FOSS event in Belgium, don't we care anymore ? Or do we just not care about KDE. (apart from the people organizing the event ?)
There's lots of Drupal, MySQL and Gnome activity going on in our little country but somehow less KDE. Hopefully Akademy changes that.

Sadly I have already a fully booked schedule so I won't be able to actually make it to Mechelen for either days of the conference. Sad because unless we have a conference in Antwerpen some day soon it's probably going the to be the closest FOSS event to home.

Tim just explained that Easynet is suffering from a routing loop. Causing dns.be to be unreachable for some folks. So sometimes the cause is not a dns problem, only the result is :)

Beste Frank

Too bad you spend some unneeded money.. what you should have done is build yourselve a nice MythTV box.
Has all the features you list.. and doesn't need a subscription .

For your viewing pleasure
Tech Humor and Tech Talk

Last weekend was T-Dose I was looking forward to see Bert's drupal talk but I was way to late in Eindhoven , just in time to see his last 5 slides Too bad I couldn't find him anymore after his talk.

Just after his talk I ran into Matt and Tarry , Matt is always present at conferences , often giving good talks on stuff I care about such as openQRM this time.

It was great to finally meet Tarry in the physical world, and not just the virtual one, so the Irish Pub meetup in the late afternoon really should be repeated !

The Woman without a blog told me about her involvement in OpenDocsSociety and the 2 upcoming launche parties.

I arrived way to late at the social event because of the Eindhoven Marathon parking issues we about to have if we didn't move Matt's car , but that way I ended up a a table with the guy from
Gravity Zoo, great stuff those guys are working on .. Looking forward to see some of their demos.

The Irish pub threw us out at 0200 , which was kinda Early.. but the result was that I made it only 5 minutes late for the Open Embedded talk. Now I really really want to start looking closer at OpenEmbedded as I feel it would be a really good solution for lots of the stuff different people are doing wrong , but then I need to get some time slices from an altnerate Universe ..

As promised in Cambridge I went to Dag's talk on Dstat as I ran out of it in Cambridge coz of some urgent phonecalls.
As I already have a private presentation about mrepo , I can now safely skip his next presentations :)

I had to run out earlier and drop off Matt at his car in the middle of nowhere before heading home. But T-Dose is growing at good rate. It's not yet big and overcrowded as Fosdem so at least you can talk with lots of people !

Lots of new and interresting stuff on the web these days.

First of all the Centos community has a planet.centos.org now. Were I ran into the brand new feed of Field Commander Wieers Dag was long overdue setting up a blog but he finally made it and he already pointed me to interresting stuff :)

Then there is Peter Vandenabeele who also decided to start up a blog.

And last but not least I ran into Dev2Ops , upon sending that link to a collegue he asked me if I was behind that site .. I`m not :)

Dev2Ops clearly is tackling the stuff I`m involved with on a daily base. How do you deploy and upgrade software and it's configuration for different similar machines in the field.
The have a couple of nice polls on their site which interrest me:
How do you disribute software releases for in-house developed applications? and How do you maintain
system configuration files?. Just go a head and vote . I`m interrested in the results.
My votes were on using pacakges (rpm/deb) using apt or yum and off course Puppet ! ;)

BTW.. It makes me wonder .. who is NOT using Drupal these days :))

So I`m not the world largest KDE fan but I think the fact that Akademy 2008 will be held in Belgium is great news .

Finally some other Open Source event to visit our little country besides Fosdem. I should probably try to spend some time in Mechelen next year in August learn what those guys are doing...

So when Philip started asking for more integration and even joined conferences here is his chance .. no travel requirements just a 30 minute cartrip to Mechelen , at least for him :)

Seklos just posted a story on his Oracle blog on how he installed Oracle 10something in less than an hour.

I found the story hilarious. why . because about a decade ago .. when I was still into database & webdevelopment, Oracle first started shipping Oracle for Linus (somewhere in 99)
Back then some collegue had been struggling for a couple of days already to setup up Oracle on a Windows box and was thinking to just use SQL server.
So I went home found the famous CD with the typo (or did I really get the CD that should have been shipped to Finland ?) in my mailbox and as I had a new Siemens Server sitting in my basement, I installed a fresh RedHat and on a machine I never had seen before (that's the ninetees I`m talking about so no fancy just install it on most common hardware and it will work like we have these days) and then went on installing an Oracle version I had never seen before and guess what .. I completed that task in about just less than an hour.
So when I arrived at the office the next morning with an up and running Oracle on Linux server the crowd didn't believe me untll they fired up their SQLPlus clients and started creating their tablespaces and tables.

So now about 8 years later it still takes an experienced Linux and Oracle guy about an hour to install a basic Oracle ? What have they been doing ?

I bootstrap a fully operational MySQL server from blank disk to replying to queries in about 5 minutes.
Maybe I should move back to Oracle because as a consultant I get paid by the hour and if a similar job takes me about 10 times as long as I`m used to .. can you imagine ..

Now all joking aside .. the problem isn't with Oracle, the problem isn't with RedHat and not all the solutions are with MySQL, the problem is with people with little or no system experience trying to do a job they should grow in to over time, and failing to get proper help or guidance their first time.

Just one final thought.. with Unbreakable I really would have expected Oracle to go one step further not requiring the runInstaller thing anymore but just providing their customers with cleanly packaged software so a yum or apt-get install oracle would actually work.

Because as Luke learned us . If your computer can't install it .. the installation procedure is broken.

Dirk Hohndel told us that we should really become more polite on LKML and stop calling people pummel, twat, stupid clueless or braindead . Yes even Linus should.

Over lunch I figured out that we are not 10 .be folks but 12 .. yay !

Bdale is talking about GNU Radio after that it's GIT Time

There used to be a time where I was the only .be guy running around at Linuxconference or Linux Tag , or when it was just Peter and I running around at LinuxKongress . Today that's different .. so far I've counted no less han 10 people from our little country.

Yeah Belgium !

PS. If you are from .be , you are here in Cambridge and I didn't count you yet .. lemme know :)