My loot! ping from redhat & fedora, a tuit from perl, t-shirts from FOSDEM itself and Mozilla/Firefox, pocket guide for '*grep', a bunch of stickers, a DTrace quick guide (handy!) random flyers and stickers, a CD or DVD from about every big distro there is (Linux & BSD & OpenSolaris).

It's also cool to see all those promotional posters from the different teams.


One of the main tracks, here Andrew Tanenbaum is getting ready for his Minix3 talk.


What is an OSS convention without penguins?


Fosdem was great as ever, a lot of interesting talks and sessions. Packed rooms everywhere. A chance to see the rock-stars of the open source world. Also, these photos prove that the 5MP camera on the Samsung Galaxy android phone isn't realy that great.

I've got myself an Android phone, i went for the Samsung Galaxy i7500 (i'll probably have some more posts about it later). It works like a charm, when connecting with USB it maps as a drive, F-spot starts up to import photos, only thing not working was syncing music in rhythmbox (Android also plays .ogg). The phone was not recognized at all, even though the MTP plugins were enabled. The solution appeared to be really simple, insert the USB cable, mount the drive and add the following file in root '.is_audio_player', after restarting rhythmbox you can now sync music.

The command i used was:
$ touch /media/galaxy/.is_audio_player

One of my fav bands in 'Foo Fighters', the man behind this rocking beast is Dave Growl, previously famous as the drummer of Nirvana. There is now a 1 page interview available with Growl from Time Magazine. One of the questions deal with piracy, this is his answer;

I don't have a problem with people downloading music. To me the important thing is that people come to my shows and see the music live and have that personal experience with the band. I've made a decent living making music. I'd feel greedy if I asked for anything more.

Our Red Hat Account Manager came by one day, she brought some cups along. I adore the JBoss one, I'm calling this post - One girl two cups.

Is your clock running way to fast for a guest VirtualBox system? There is a long standing open bug regarding this problem reported. There is a solution available in the means of adding some kernel boot parameters. Edit your grub config file (normally '/boot/grub/menu.lst') and add the following;

divider=10 nolapic_timer clocksource=acpi_pm

after a reboot of your guest, your system time should now run at a normal pace.

Karmic Koala is one of the best Ubuntu releases so far. Some reports might say otherwise, but my personal expierience says otherwise. It's not perfect, and some things are not fixed yet, at least the development is open en every 6 months a new release comes along improving upon the previous installment.

There are some things that bothered me, luckily fixes are available. First, when using the latest Eclipse some button clicks are not registered. This can be fixed by defining the following environment before starting eclipse;

GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

Second, on 64bit the flash plugin also sometimes doesn't register mouse clicks, this is even more bothersome. In Eclipse at least you could still use the keyboard, not so in flash. To fix this you need to add the above line at the beginning of '/usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/noarch/npviewer'.

There are a lot of adds for mobile internet on Belgian TV the last month, but there is one that makes me almost mad. I'm very anti-belgacom, mostly because of the olden days when all we had were modems and used it to connect to BBS's - i even had my own 2 node demo scene oriented board.

Anyway, the add goes something like this. 'Pick mobile internet from Proximus (the mobile provider of Belgacom), it's great and we were the first to have a mobile phone network in Belgium'. They sure did, not because they are this innovative, but because the market wasn't open and Belgacom had a monopoly on anything phone related at that time (fixed & mobile). You wanted a phone? great, pay through your nose for outdated fixed phone technology and their mobile phone pricing was ridiculously high to put it mildly.

After a while, the market got open and competing companies were allowed to enter with their products. The first to do so was Mobistar, their price was half of Proximus. The very next! day Proximus slashed their prices in half as well.

The ad gets me mad, because they try to convince the people they were the first, while the truth is that there was no other choice and they were certainly overpriced at the time.