pvaneynd

status update

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:03:00 GMT

A short summary:
- trip there: uneventful with stopovers in Houffalize and Altstad in .ch.
- caravan: Monday morning model with non-functional power system, unclosable door, panels that were falling off and a front wheel that keeps dropping down when driving rendering the whole system dangerously unstable.
- camping: (jesolo international) great!
- weather: okish, a bit of rain now and again but hot enough to enjoy the sea and pool
- health: nearly broken tow from playing too much in aqualandia, some insect bites
- plans: visit Venice again, make more pictures.

Future plans:
- don't rent from http://www.caravans-deblock.be/ again

Speedtest meme

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:33:52 GMT

ok I cheated and did this at work... sue me.

'sitting'

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:31:10 GMT

So yesterday I had to 'sit' at the elections. In the end I was the 'second guy' who double checks if you are on the voters lists, marks you and gives you the voting card.

In our district we vote electronically. We have a bunch of ancient PC's with light-pens and you insert the card, select the person you want to vote, confirm and then you get the card back. Then you leave the booth and insert the card into the urn.

Which then checks if you indeed voted (voting is compulsory, if you don't want to you have to select 'blanco') and that the card is readable.

Most of of other people were more or less willing to do the job so we had fun and interesting discussions. At one point the head mentioned that the paper trail (voting list, double entry of presence, stamping of cards etc) would be better done electronically. I obviously protested and was joined by a guy who does safety coordinator at the railroads. We both agreed that a copious amount of paper is the only good way forward unless you have serious equipment (multiple WORM installations, the whole HIPA/FDI dance).

The most popular votes was the owner of the local ice cream saloon who brought ice for everyone, thanks 'Glacé Joseph'!

All in all a nice time, and later on I was very happy to learn that most of the ~ 800 people I gave to cards did not vote for the censored VB anymore.

Common Lisp has no libraries: ha!

Tue, 26 May 2009 04:51:37 GMT

In the last few weeks I needed to write a short utility at $WORK. I decided to use my trusted Common Lisp. Turned out that my old utility still would be ok, but 'upstream' had changed from CSV files to 'json' files.

A short google query, downloading the two libraries that exists to parse these files and within a few minutes I could read and parse the new fileformat.

Don't tell me CL doesn't have libraries...

ObDebian: yes I still need to update cl-irc and package said jason library... it's somewhere in my long todo list.

weekend in Paris

Tue, 26 May 2009 04:48:19 GMT

Last (long) weekend we stayed in Paris. After searching for a while for hotels that fit our requirements and finding that it would become very expensive indeed I decided that for the price of a night in a hotel we could buy all our camping equipment.

So we went to the Camping International in Maisons-Laffitte with our new '2 seconds' decathlon tent.

All in all it went nicely, we had nice weather so we could create quite a mess to compensate for the small tent without it getting wet.

On Thursday we packed, drove there and explored the local area a little. Friday we woke up gave $CHILD a breakfast and hurried to the Eiffel tower to beat the queues. We failed. After queueing for 1 hour in the 'stairs only' queue we got a ticket and started climbing the stairs. A little while later we decided that we needed a breakfast on the first floor or we would faint.

Then we climbed to the second floor and enjoyed the view. $CHILD decided to not go upto the third floor, even when we said we would take the elevator.

After escaping that tourist trap we went and walked the Champs-Elysées until we needed to find a supermarket to shop. With some inspiration we found that at the La Défence metro station there was a large shopping center so we could find something to bbq.

Saturday was a little bit more relaxed as we visited the La Défence area, Notre Dame, did a boat tour and then visited the mega shops La Fayette and Le Printemps. We had a drink on the roof terrace there with a nice view over Paris.

On Sunday we wanted to visit Versailles, but $CHILD declared he was tired of walking even before leaving the car (!) so we decided we had overloaded him slightly and that we would just head home.

Todo: unpack and cleanup all the stuff still.

Star Trek rebooted (no spoilers)

Wed, 20 May 2009 03:32:48 GMT

Yesterday I went to see Star Trek and I must say I really enjoyed it. It was funny, exciting and very much in the spirit of TOS, minus the 60's atmosphere. One of the best movies I've seen so far.

a nice surpise

Fri, 15 May 2009 12:57:05 GMT

We were looking at Disney Land Paris for a day trip. However as our son has severe food allergies we were shocked to find that you cannot bring food into DLP.

Until zoutke by good fortune found food allergy information for Disney Land Paris (Dutch only I fear).

In short they do cater for allergic people, so instead of going a day we'll probably go for 2 days and stay in a hotel. The opportunity to actually eat in a restaurant with $CHILD is too attractive...

Physics Joke

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 03:46:43 GMT

From a friend who is now a professor:

A student has to give a talk about the general relativity theory. (In English)

He starts the talk with "I'm going to discuss Genital Relativity", instant reaction from the smart girlfriend in the audience: "yeah honey, blame it on Lorentz contraction".

Strangely enough none of my non-physics friends seem to get the joke, from nwhyte I expect he also gets it :-)

another first

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:39:17 GMT

Yesterday I was reading The rise & fall of the prefrontal lobotom when I started to feel a bit nauseous. So I turned to watch a little of the TV that was on to distract me.

The next thing I remember was feeling very nauseous and zoutke asking what happened. In short I fainted. You can see when you SO studied first aid when she starts asking questions like "is blood coming out of your ears" or "were you sitting on the chair or standing on it".

Oh well, the bad influence of the internet again...

[edited to fix markup]

@ fosdem but also not really

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:16:15 GMT

This year I managed to go to fosdem every day, even at the beer event. Not that I attended many talks: I was quite busy getting the network to work. We got wireless in almost all locations in the end. Setting up and fixing the problems took most of Saturday. On Sunday we added the final 'experimental' room via a wireless bridge link across the square, with the beam over the heads of the people in the queue for Belgian fries.

In the end it all worked and we had only a few configuration and many cable problems. I must say it was more for to 'work' at fosdem then to just be there. May thanks to Jerome Paquay who actually arranged to lend the equipment from our employer (Cisco) and to configure it. Thanks for AY for ... well being AY.

Next year n-mode? serious uplinks?

KDE 4.2 Xserver 7.4~5 and I'm feeling good

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:15:32 GMT

I installed the 4.2 KDE from experimental and ... wow. Nicer. Faster. Less display corruption. All in all good.

shame about the crash when I unplug my external display

I can't wait for the 'testing' release :-)

Congratualtions to the KDE and debian-KDE people!

Weekend redux

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 07:45:07 GMT

Last weekend was mainly shopping on Saturday and on Sunday 'Fietsen op rollen', cycling on rollers which wikipedia tells me is called goldsprint in English. The event was fun but chaotic.

Then we went to an indoor playing area which was also chaotic and fun.

Little or no hacking recently :-(.

23042

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:06:32 GMT

for the non technies, that's my CCIE number. 3 weeks of working and now it's over!. let the partying begin!

a truely remarcable thing

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:05:16 GMT

this happened a few days ago in Belgium. At a certain moment I was thinking that I'm in the USA, but that would be too offensive to my American friends, because not even their media are that stupid.

A well known pharmaceutical company (Omega Pharma) released a "GSM radiation protection chip" that is classical snake-oil: it works as by magic with QM, you just need to stick it on the GSM and ,amazingly for a pharma company, there are no serious studies to prove that it actually works. There is as with all pseudo science products a lot of nice looking pictures, a lot of complex words and a VIP (for small values of V and of I) that is promoting it.

The difference between this and the other voodoo stuff is that it is sold by the pharmacists!

What should we take away from this? Three things: don't trust medicines made by omega pharma and if you have stock in that company then sell, sell, sell! Now!. Oh and that even 'serious' journalists will just repeat whatever junk is being said to them.

More info in English here and on several facebook 'that stuff is snake-oil' groups...

deleting a contact

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 07:15:05 GMT

Today I had to delete a contact from my addressbook and the program asks "Are you certain that you want to delete this contact?".

Now I am pretty certain: I've seen the urn, the grief stricken husband, the mourning friends and family and the small children she leaves behind. However I most certainly do not want to do this.

an essential extension for firefox for 'real men'

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:58:44 GMT

http://kuix.de/sslhazard/sslhazard.php

Yes, I browse to billions of self-signed https sites every day so I needed this...

Whoos Whoos

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:32:04 GMT

For the last few months I've been running the latest git versions of xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd on my $WORK laptop with a Mobility Radeon X1300.

And actually I like them more then fglrx: they crash less and I actually have xrandr support so giving presentations and using the second screen no longer involves reloads of X.

A remaining problem was that they would sig11 when I enable DRI. Yesterday I went investigating and found out that the ati driver was crashing in the line:

Bool RADEONDRIGetVersion(ScrnInfoPtr pScrn) { ... /* Low level DRM open */ fd = drmOpen(RADEON_DRIVER_NAME, busId);

After giving some message that it cannot open /dev/dri/card0. Some research showed that this was because I forgot to load the kernel module. /me hits table.

modprobe radeon and DRI works. Obviously it doesn't do 3D because the mesa library is too old. Installing mesa 7.2 from experimental and I see:

$ glxinfo | grep direct direct rendering: Yes

And all the whoos effects... well ... whoos.

Now off to Ana's blog to find out how I can get KDE 4.1 in unstable....

Vista assymmetical speed problems

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 03:45:11 GMT

My wife has a laptop running Vista because she wanted to try out the operating system before having to decide on using it at work.

I called her various names because of it, but that didn't help :-).

So we have this setup with an SMC wireless router/AP talking to a Cisco 837 router that does the internet part. Upstairs we have a 'server' that is connected via Powerline IP-over-power, downstairs we have the Dreambox that is connected via a normal Cat5 connection.

In the last few days my wife complained that it was very slow to download media from Frost. Working at TAC having a network problem at home is almost a personal offence :-) so I decide to take a look and I find using iperf the following speeds:

frost (debian) --cat5--> sharrow (debian): 35 Mbit/sec frost (debian) ---WL-cat5-> sharrow (debian): 18 Mbit/sec sharrow (debian) ---WL-cat5-> frost (debian): 18 Mbit/sec sharrow (debian) --cat5---> frost (debian): 35 Mbit/sec frost (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 0.2 Mbit/sec sharrow (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 12 Mbit/sec sharrow (debian) ---cat5-SMC-WL--> martha-jones (vista): 6 Mbit/sec martha-jones (vista) --WL-cat5-> frost (debian): 18 Mbit/sec martha-jones (vista) --WL--> sharrow (debian): 18 Mbit/sec martha-jones (vista) --WL-cat5-> sharrow (debian): 18 Mbit/sec

This made no sense at all. The speed halved going from a WL->WL to a WL->cat5 connection but only in one direction!

So having isolated the problem to the Vista machine I started looking round and I found a note saying that running netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled in an 'Administrator' cmd window will fix the problem.

Now I'm very weary of changing the TCP/IP options of the operating system. In most cases the 'tips' you see flying round the internet have no meaning at all and sometimes make the situation worse rather then better.

However I did find this on a Microsoft Technet site.... Hmm

So in the end I try it and modify the setting, disconnect and reconnect to the wireless and:

frost (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 18 Mbit/sec sharrow (debian) ---WL---> martha-jones (vista): 18 Mbit/sec sharrow (debian) ---cat5-SMC-WL--> martha-jones (vista): 18 Mbit/sec

Aah, finally I could tune Vista so that it has the same speed as an untuned Debian machine. I only took me 2 evenings worth of work...

almost too real

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:52:48 GMT

Yesterday I saw this ad and was ... confused for a second...

Let's see if objects work:

BBC will do 'state of the art'

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:32:36 GMT

According to the stage. Cool, scifi to put on my ipod!

Meanwhile on the western front

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:12:25 GMT

So I got send at fairly short notice to follow a training in the states.

The flight here was reasonably uneventful, the car drive however... Some notes:

being use to a manual gearbox I tend to slam down on the clutch when I need to slow down the car a bit. Of course I got an automatic, so what do I slam? The brakes of course :-(. I was lucky at Logan that there was nobody behind me...
you do need cash for the tunnels when leaving Logan airport with a rental car, paying with a card is not an option. Guess who didn't have dollars on him...
the waiters are still as active as before. I'm used to getting ignored by waiters, not being asked if everything if fine every 5 seconds...
I keep forgetting about 'tipping'
somehow all the locals are talking about some sports event, but I fail to see the importance. It is strange how people seem willing to discuss sports, but avoid politics as a deadly taboo.
while searching an ATM I drove round 'known' places in Cambridge.

I should stay up later, it's only 20:00 local time, but my body still thinks it is 02:00 so I'm off to bed.

bitter sweet weekend

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:30:05 GMT

Last weekend we had a nice time at 'Het Vennebos', a bungalow park with a tropical swimming paradise in .nl. The houses were not as bad as feared from reading a few bboard entries, but still it should be better next year after they renewed the place.

I think we all had a fun time, even if the event was overshadowed by some bad news. I've uploaded the pictures to flickr and 'friends' and 'family' can see them there. Random people should only see a few pictures.

encrypted root filesystems on servers

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:09:44 GMT

The one problem I have with my server at home now seems to have a fix.

The server has a standard encrypted root, as configured by debian-installer. The issue with this is that after booting I need to go to the console and enter the LUKS password. As I do almost everything remotely this is a pain.

However C'T published a nice article a while ago on how to solve this. The short story is that you install a custom initrd plugin that starts dropbear and waits for the password on the console or via ssh.

Now to install and test this...

wireless in 2.6.26 considered bad for europeans

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:05:38 GMT

After upgrading to 2.6.26 I could not associate with my AP anymore. After searching I noticed that the amount of channels reported by iwlist wlan0 channel had changed. And the channel that my AP was using (13) just disappeared.

I openeded a bug with the iwl people and the end result is: in 2.6.25 the card selected the region for the wireless, in 2.6.26 the cfg80211 system is doing so and the default is 'US'.

So if you are in Europe you need to add a file /etc/modprobe.d/cfg80211-region with as contents:

options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU

Holiday recap

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:09:36 GMT

On the 4th we got the Caravan. We drove it back carefully and started loading it.

The 5th in the morning (not as early as we wanted) we left for Lausanne. Driving was uneventfull for us, but the first 300 km we say 3 caravan related accidents. Nothing makes you concentrate on driving as much as driving past a poor family on the side of the road standing next to the wrek of their stuff.

We had a few stops in France and got irritated by the low speed limit for caravans in Swizz (80 km/h instead of 130 km/h in France).

When we arrived we quickly contacted our friends and went to the cathedral of Lausanne for some open air party. The camping gave us free travel tickets on the public transport so it was very nice and easy to get round. I took an instant dislike to the old fashioned attitutes of the Swizz to smoking, aka "it is good for you".

The 6th it was raining a lot, so we visited the olympic museum in the city and then went for diner with the same friends again. All in all it was nice the camping was nice and the city also seems nice.

The 7th we left early for Venice. The GPS decided that the 'easy' way was not across the Mont Blanc Tunnel but the more difficult Saint Bernard Tunnel. In the fog. The picture does not do justice to the difficult driving conditions.

In the end we arrived in the camping which is on the end of a long road. At one point you see a sign saying: "left this and that camping, straight 25 more campings". We quickly (with some help) parked the caravan, setup the tent and had dinner. Then we went for a walk and were incredibly lucky: we just followed the stream of people and ended up on the beach just at the start of the fireworks display. Which was very nice and very very long.

The next few days were mostly taken up by going to the wonderful swimming pools, shopping and going for walks to the beach. In the evening the kids of the camping would all join in a 'baby dance' of dancing while being lead by the 'entertainers'.

The 11th we went to Venice. We took the 12 hour ticket public transport ticket and saw the Doge's palace and then had a long with a crossing of the Canale Grande by a gondola . At the end of a triering day we went home to our Caravan.

The 14th we left and drove to the camping of Milano. That one is a lot worse of course, especially it was a lot less clean. In any case we had a nice time walking round Milano and even went onto the top of the Cathedral. The evening of the 14th there was a great storm with lighting and a strong wind. The tent remained up, but was very wet...

The 15th we went via the Gottart across Switzerland and then to camping Lug ins Land near Bad Bellingen in Germany. There we relaxed for a day until the bad weather caught up with us. Just after we had folded up the tent (that only just got dried) it started raining again. So with rain we returned to Belgium where we cleaned up the caravan and returned it to the lender.