Thu, 15 Dec 2011
On beards and politics.
I'd almost forget...
Before:
During:
After:
They finally made it.
Fri, 02 Sep 2011
Mind reading
As a spectator to sporting events, there are times when the ability to read a sport(wo)man's mind would be... interesting.
For instance.
Yesterday's woman's 1500m final at the world athletics championships in Daegu was won by Jennifer Simpson. This was a surprise to many, including (apparently) Jennifer herself, as evidenced by the look on her face after the finish. See, for instance, this youtube clip (interesting bits around the 4 minute mark)
Alternatively, I'd love to know what went through Carlos Berlocq when he won his first game in the match against Novak Djokovic in the third set. I mean, obviously nobody expected the world number one to lose from a relatively unknown 74-ranked argentine player, but that doesn't make it less painful.
Sun, 28 Aug 2011
At Steve's, again
for the second time, I'm at Steve's for his yearly barbecue.
After I'd done my waffles back at Banja Luka, I off-hand suggested to do them again at the barbecue, which people replied to with an enthousiastic 'oh yes!' from multiple mouths. So that's what happened.
I did overdo it on the amounts, though since after I'd baked 750g flour worth of dough, everyone still awake had already had a waffle; and I still had 500g flour worth to go. Since the dough can't be conserved overnight, I had to finish all of them. Which meant that I was still making waffles at 2AM, and no-one was eating them anymore. Bummer. Oh well, some people (including myself) had waffles this morning instead.
Speaking of waffles, and by popular demand: A few years ago I blogged the recipe of my waffles (hidden in a blog post about a large number of other things).
The rest of the barbecue was fairly nice, too. I mean, obviously it is: good food, good beer, good people to talk to, what more would you want? Exactly.
Right now I'm waiting for food that is being prepared, after which I'll probably get in my car and start driving home again. But that's not for now just yet.
Sat, 30 Jul 2011
Food
if you're not at DebConf11 and don't get the joke, don't worry; that's expected
Thu, 21 Jul 2011
On the beard, again...
It looks like I might actually lose it sooner than I was thinking in my previous blog post, a few days ago.
On the 18th, Formateur Elio di Rupo had written a proposed document on which to start negotiations. Most parties agreed to that, except for N-VA and CD&V. Unfortunately, that was enough to make further negotiations useless, so di Rupo had offered his resignation as formateur to the King, who kept his response "under advisement". I thought I was going to end up like Andrew.
Since he wasn't formally ex-formateur yet, however, he continued working. And today, merely a few days later, with an extra proposal—and perhaps also partly due to the King's angry speech for today's national holiday—CD&V has now been persuaded to join the negotiations. It's been over fourhundred days, and far too many weirdos, but they're actually sitting down to talk. Like, right now.
I'll hold off on buying those razor blades for now, but we might yet get there.
Mon, 18 Jul 2011
About the beard...
I'm someone who sometimes has a beard, and sometimes doesn't. Today, I'm someone with a fairly long beard, although it's not (yet?) one of the likes of andrew or maddog. I don't think it looks very well on me, but you can blame the government (or lack thereof) in Belgium. How?! What?! Yes, the government.
A while back, a movie critic working for the RTL (a Francophone Belgian TV station) decided to keep his beard until the Belgian government took the oath of office. He was quickly joined by an actor, and then by a Flemish radio presenter (dutch, with pictures). And then by a whole bunch of people.
I didn't join them, initially. But after a while, when my beard was starting to get long again, people started asking me, 'is that for the government?' And initially I said no. But people kept asking. Since it seemed like a good excuse for not having shaven that long, after a while I just decided to say 'yes' for the heck of it. And now, after having said so for quite a while, I've kindof grown to the idea.
Which, I guess, means that if the impossible happens, and someone back home manages to form a government that will take the oath while I'm still in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I'll have to go out and buy some razor equipment.
But I don't expect that to happen. Today, exactly 400 days after the previous election (yes, it's really been that long), it still doesn't look as if there's going to be an agreement on anything.
I wish there was something positive or funny that I could report on in this whole thing, but it doesn't look like it.
Sigh.
Sun, 17 Jul 2011
Mechlin to Banja Luka in statistics
I decided to go to DebConf11 by car. Not willing to do this alone, I asked for volunteers to join me in my car trip. One such volunteer showed up, and the car trip happened. Now, since I remembered to push the correct buttons on my dashboard after I completely fueled up the car and checked the tire tension and other things, I am now proud to be able to present you with the following statistics on this trip:
- Total distance travelled: 1466.8 km
- Average driving speed: 95.9 km/h [0]
- Total number of kilometers wasted on 'oh, crap, we forgot something': 10 (approx) [1][2]
- Total amount of fuel used: 81.3l
- Average fuel consumption rate: 5.5l/100km [3]
- Total amount of kilometers spent behind the wheel by Jeremy: 50 (approx)
- Total amount of kilometers spent behind the wheel by Wouter: the rest.[4]
- Time of departure: 2011-07-16 21:00
- Time of departure after point three and making sure we had everything: 2011-07-16 22:00
- Time of arrival: 2011-07-17 15:15 (approx) [5]
- Outside temperature at departure: 12 ° celcius
- Outside temperature at arrival: 35 ° celcius
- Longest (voluntary) break: 1 hour (approx; breakfast, tanking, bathroom visit, watching the sun rise)
- Longest (involuntary) break: 45 minutes (approx; customs check) [6]
- Last fueling stop: 4 AM.
- Amount of kilometers left to go before the car said bleep, you need to tank soon: less than one.
- Most tense moment: on crossing the slovenia->croatia border, confusing the border police officer ("no, I'm Wouter, that is Jeremy"—yes, we both had photo-ID), who then promptly holds on to our documents, asks the car's papers, and tells us to please park over there and wait a moment while he gets us to be handled by guy in a somewhat more military-looking uniform.[7]
- Biggest "uh-oh" moment: after crossing the croatia->bosnia and herzegovina border, watching the very, very, very, very, very[8] long line of trucks queueing to cross the border. In the other direction. And then realizing that you probably need to go through that very same queue on the way back
- Largest single toll fee: €15 [9]
- Last bit of time spent asleep before this trip: the minutes surrounding 2011-07-16 05:00:00 [10]
- Time wasted writing this blog post when I really should've gone to bed instead: 45 minutes
- Time now: 21:02:54
But it was fun. And that's all that matters.
Those who've shown up at debconf already, or who will arrive soon: see you tomorrow. Those who will arrive later: see you soon. And those who won't arrive: better luck next time, I hope.
[0] this includes times when the car isn't moving with the engine
running, but not times when the car is turned off, locked, alone and
forgotten, in the rain, while those idiots who were supposed to
be its drivers were inside having a drink.
[1] Which is surprisingly little. Usually I manage to need more.
[2] Jeremy forgot his^Wa Debian banner. I forgot something, I can't
recall what. I decided to bring some CD's to enjoy during the trip, and
a 3.5mm audio connection cable which we end up not using
[3] According to the dash. I'm too tired right now to check it. Also see
the next two points.
[4] This could incorrectly be interpreted as a criticism on Jeremy. It's
not his fault that I only told him a day before we left that I have a
manual transmission. And in fact, if anything, I'm unhappy with the fact
that I even had to hand him the wheel for those 50 km. I would've loved
to be able to say "I went all the way from Mechlin to Banja Luka, all by
myself".
[5] I forgot to check the clock, to be honest.
[6] What, you think I have a chronometer?
[7] The last four points could really have been written as two.
Figuring out which goes with which is left as an exercise to the
reader.
[8] very, very, very
[9] 7-day Slovenian road tax vignet
[10] Once I wake up, I hardly ever manage to fall asleep again.
Esecially if it's light outside.
Wed, 22 Jun 2011
Nothing Else Matters
The office is located not too far from a church (dutch) which contains a fully-functional carillon. For one thing, this means that during day hours, once every fifteen minutes the bells play a little bit of music; for another, it also means that once every so often, someone sits behind the carillon's keyboard, and plays some live music. This is often done in the afternoon between 14:00 and 15:00 on weekdays, when I'm at work. I've grown to like this.
Usually the music is classic carillon music; but quite often they add in something unexpected. Today, for example, I was surprised to hear a carillon version of Nothing Else Matters, which sounded surprisingly nice.
I've been thinking off and on to place a microphone on the roof of the office, so that I could stream the carillon concerts to the Interwebz. It hasn't happened yet, mainly because it would require me to get organized a bit more than I currently am, but perhaps I might actually go through with it at some undeterminate point in the future... oh well.
Mon, 09 May 2011
Moved house
I was amazed this morning that it's only been a month since I moved house. So much has happened since.
For reasons that I won't go into, I've had to move house. Since I like living in Mechelen, not too far from work, however, I decided to search for something close by. And I did find something close by; I moved to "just around the corner". Which is a bit silly, but then blame the bureaucrats.
At any rate, I'm starting to feel at home in the new spot. It's a bit smaller and a bit more expensive than the old place, but it looks a lot better, and that more than makes up for it. And it's not like I needed the extra space in the old place -- I kept having this big empty spot in the middle of my living room, anyway.
To make matters more interesting, I've been on stage three times and out of the country once in this past month: One wedding, two concerts, and a work trip to Cork. I guess that's why it seemed like so much more time.
But that's over now, and recently I finally managed to make some time working on other projects. Today it was incorporating some patches (which turned out not to work entirely) and doing a release for nbd. That release was overdue by quite a bit; there were a few fairly serious bugs outstanding that I had commits for in the git repository already, I just had to get them out there. Oh well.
A few weeks back I've also managed to work a bit on ipcfg some more. The reason it has been so long since the last time I worked on it was that I had started to realize there were several things wrong with it, and I wasn't sure how to best move forward. But then not so long ago I had an epiphany, and I've now started to reimplement the broken bits—which is, well, most of it. But hey.
Moving isn't fun. Glad it's over. Almost.
Mon, 18 Apr 2011
Slides online
I've just put the slides of my LOADays kerberos/ldap talk online. The talk wasn't recorded, and most of the interesting bits were in what I said rather than what's in the slides, but maybe someone finds them interesting. There's also slightly more information in the handouts, though even that doesn't contain everything I said during the talk.
I'll also point to these three articles in my blog, which I wrote a few years ago, and which explain how kerberos works and how you should set it up.
If all else fails, and you have a budget, I do have rates. Or catch me on IRC :-)
Some mail is welcome in /dev/null. Real mail, however, is welcome at my email address
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