StratoS Online

Year of the gnome desktop talk

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:01:00 +0100

I promised to put up my previous presentation as soon as I had some time. Well that took a bit longer then excepted but here it is.

the year of the gnome desktop.odp
the year of the gnome desktop.pdf

You are free to use and adopt this presentation as you see fit and I will try to explain the story that goes with it.

Slide 1: I start up explaining why the question "The year of the Linux Desktop" is very relevant to gnome, and can equally be stated as "The year of the gnome Desktop". I reference to various distributions and their preference of shipping gnome as the default.

Slide 1-9: These are basically a joke in which I show that the question is a very old one. When ending on number nine i take some time to recall some issues those articles have stated for linux not being ready yet for the desktop.

Slide 10: This slide shows some adoption numbers from the gnome marketing page. I make the point here that while the articles are saying one thing, there are governments and companies that are investing in linux as a desktop solution.

Slide 11-12: Here i pose the question, is linux ready for the desktop. I go over some issues that have been resolved and go over some issues that are still problems.

Slide 13: I talk about suppliers who are already delivering linux desktops to the public.

Slide 14: I talk about the software needs of people, what people are getting from windows/Mac and what they will expect to find.

Slide 15-16: I show the solutions for the previously shown needs. I also work in a little joke by changing firefox to Epiphany

Slide 17: I pose the same question as before, but directed not at Linux but at users. I also talk about about some usability work that has been done for gnome.

Slide 18: I end with a novell linux commercial.

The above talk is about 30 minutes based on how much you can tell at each slide. But it could easily be filled up a bit with more recent developments to get in more time.

Nu.nl blog post

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 01:01:00 +0100

Just made a blog post on my corperate blog about my work on nu.nl. NU.nl; the back-end

7 things

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 01:01:00 +0100

I've been tagged by Lorna Jane in the current internet meme of telling seven things about myself that nobody knew. If your reading this because your following planet gnome-nl, then you have probably missed the meme, but it's the current rage in the php community. But i'll be sure to facilitate some cross over.

So without further ado, let's begin.

I knew i wanted to become a programmer at a rather young age. I can clearly remember lending a "programming" book from the local library containing programmes for the C64 that my family had at that time. However, the book simply contained multiple pages of "code" you needed to copy by hand, and seeing as i was around 10 years old then, with the attention span of your average house cat, it didn't really work out. However, a few years later when we had a PC my mother taught me how to create simple quizzes in DBase, and later i started writing and adapting programs in Basic. After that i never really stopped.
Not much of a new thing, but i used to have long hair starting from 2000 til early 2008. I actually wanted to cut it before i started working at ibuildings, but as things went i forgot about it until i was already working there. There was no real reason to cut it beyond, there being no real reason to keep it, and i needed a change. Any photographic evidence to me having long hair will be categorically denied.
I speak a very small amount of japanese. I've always been fascinated by japanese culture and as such tried to learn the language. I'm still planning to learn it one day, but i'm not in a hurry.
The first "real" program i wrote, that could be called a program, was 'pong' in qbasic. It made use of the graphics mode and contained a algorithm to draw numerals and variable refresh for speed. You played against the computer, who had 3 difficulty settings. The difficulty basically determined how fast his paddle could move.
My first 'hack' was editing the save game of the shareware version of 'one must fall', a old robot centered beat-em up. I used a hex editor to change a certain position to 0xFF, to give me lots of money.
My first involvement with gnome was when gnome-nl announced that they wanted to expand into doing a bit more with marketing and such. Before gnome-nl had been primarily a translation effort. Since i had a lot of trouble contributing back by writing code, i figured this would be a nice way to do something. Before i knew it i was at the novell congress with reinout, vincent and ronald and had a absolute blast telling people about the wonderful world of gnome.
I didn't realise PHP had a professional community before coming to ibuildings and meeting all these people being really passionate about a PHP. Before that, i always figured PHP was a bit of a ragtag community without any real substance. Which was a pretty nice eye opener, and i will certainly try to become apart of this community.

And now you know.
Below in no particular order are the 7 new people i tag.

Harrie Verveer - I knew harrie for a long time from the cafe, but never knew he was a programmer until i joined ibuildings.
Reinout van Schouwen - A crossover to gnome. reinout is one of the mayor gnome-nl contributors.
Wouter Bolsterlee - A fallback crossover to gnome. Wouter is another mayor contributor, and also a php developer if i'm not mistaken.
Boy Baukema - Another of the ibuildings developers farm, passionate about JS and this should be a good excuse to write something new on that blog of his.
Dade - He liked Ruby on Rails, but i'm not going to hold it against him. (yet)
Willem Spruijt - Willem Spruijt is one of the people behind Qash, and since i think Qash is a absolutely brilliant application, i'm tagging him as well.
Paul van Veenendaal - A old-time co-worker of mine, his current job description is (i kid you not) Wizard Digital Lab. I have no idea what that means, but i'm hoping to find out.

software freedom day

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 01:01:00 +0200

A few weeks ago i was at software freedom day in baarn. I would link to the website, but apparently there are some problems, it used to be at www.softwarefreedomday.eu but it appears to be down now. Anyhow, as you might know, software freedom day is the celebration of freedom in software around the world. Bas de Lange organised one the dutch parties this year, where he manages to fill the day with all kinds of talks about all the wonderful free projects we have here in the netherlands and around the world.

After a short meet and greet and introduction speech from bas, the day started off with a talk about the vision and future of KDE by Jos Poortvliet. Because of time constraints he couldn't go into much of the eye-candy that KDE 4 brings us, but his talk was smooth and showed a lot of shared ideals and visions that are present in the GNOME community.

Next up was myself. Last year i talked about '10 years of gnome', celebrating the fact that gnome has a long and interesting road behind itself. This year however i chose to speak about 'The year of the gnome desktop'. I tried to answer the question using some available adoption figures, and after that, questioned the question itself. Because the question simply can't be answered, at least not when reading articles that sport the question in their title. If you would look back at articles written in 2003, all the reasons why linux/gnome isn't ready for the desktop yet, are all taken care of. But they simply keep thinking up new reasons why linux hasn't been adopted yet. Which in my opinion, is a explanation of a different question. I then ended the presentation with a commerical from novell

To tell you the truth however, it didn't really go that well. The presentation and idea behind it where solid, however my preparation was sub-par. I hope the people didn't notice it that much, but i had a few bad moments and also lost track of time. I actually thought i had only been speaking for 5 minutes when one of the organisers alerted me that my half hour was almost done.

What i was very happy about was the presentation itself though. I tried to avoid putting too much information on the sheets and instead focused on the story. This actually avoided the whole "looking at the sheets to see what i should be talking about" effect. I will try to put up the presentation as soon as i have time. I could do it now, but because the sheets are empty without the story it would be a waste of both of our time.

After my talk, in the obligatory question round, we got a nice little discussion about increasing adoption/awareness rates for linux/gnome. I also spoke about this with Jos for a bit. grassroots telling your neighbour about it, and getting those IT companies that serve the small business to take a look at linux as a valid alternative.

Because of the discussions, i missed the talk about GNUradio, i talked to Martin afterwards, and was pretty much blown out of the water for the scope that the project had. Their software enabled everything that does radio, and when they say radio they mean waves and not just music radio. Apparently they can also tackle things like radar and wifi.

All in all, it was a fun day, i found out about some projects it didn't know of before and met some new people in the dutch open source world.

Dutch PHP Conference

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:01:00 +0200

Ibuildings, my employer, recently organised a dutch, php centric conference called Dutch PHP conference, (Hey at least points for obvious naming). Of course all employees could attend the conference for free. Now i've been to quite a few conferences and gatherings over the years but i've never really been to a programming language conference before. So i was actually kind of curious to what it would be like.

With around 300 people and a fairly concentrated location the atmosphere was nice and relaxed, perhaps also because it was a developers conference the overall feeling was casual, also because of the relative low amount of people it had a very personal feeling, but perhaps this was also because ~70 of those people where my colleagues.

The talks themselves where interesting and the speakers where all good at keeping the room concentrated on the speaker but i found that the talks lacked some technical depth that i would have expected from a programmers conference. On the other hand the first day i was absolutely a wreck because i had to wake up at 5 o'clock. It also might have been my choice in talks, because i just followed the main track which might have been the 'light' version of the conference talks.

Some notable thing i took away from DPC would be the crash coarse in Zend Framework by Matthew Weier O'Phinney. I especially like the fact that ZF can be used as much or as little as you want, making it ideal for those small projects you have where you just want the ease of use of a framework without the fuss of overcomplicating the project by actually using a full fledged framework.

PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 - A look ahead by Stefan Priebsch was nice, although it was a pity his talk was only half a hour+. He had a very nice relaxed style of presenting with just the right amount of facts and his own opinions on those. It was nice that he allowed for a discussion on the namespaces feature, but since i don't really care for that feature i would have rather had him cut that short a bit sooner.

The two closing keynotes by respectively Marco Tabini and Terry Chay where also real nice, not so much because of the body of their talks, but more because the energy with which they presented their talks.

Marco's talk was mainly about there being no real mayo in america, we should focus on the cost-per-page when considering the business model and that cloud computing can help control those costs.

I don't really remember what Terry's talk was about, except that he used a lot of shrek movie snippets and slagging ruby on rails. His talk was really chaotic and i think missed some focus. But it might also be because it was essentially the last talk of the day so i might have been a bit drowsy. Hearing PHP being compared to a ball with nails sticking out of it was pretty funny though. His reasoning was that PHP might be ugly from a language standpoint, but at least it sticks to things.

A thing i noticed was that there where very little vendor stands, the only three where Zend, PHPWoman and phpGG. I would have at least expected there to be some stand from red hat, mysql and/or oracle.

FOSDEM

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 01:01:00 +0100

Last week was FOSDEM weekend, and this year the GNOME project had a stand there. While initially I was a bit worried that we might be a bit understaffed it all worked out quite wonderful. Lots of great GNOME hackers, translators, artists and others pitched in and spend some time behind the stand.

We had some great merchandise at the stand. Consisting of buttons, flyers and even t-shirts for both male and female. And the t-shirts where hot! In the first few hours of FOSDEM we had already sold dozens of them, and while I'm not sure how many we had in total, the girlies where soon sold out.

We where also graced with a few OLPC laptops that belonged to 4 OLPC hackers who hung out at our stand. Informing the public and of course ourselves about the project and the machine. I can tell you, having OLPC's at your booth is a sure-fire way to attract lots of attention. Many people stopped at our stand to try them out and ask questions about them. Because we where of course manning the stand a lot of those questions got asked to us, which meant that I learned a lot about them in a short time :)

Also present was the GNOME wall of love, where people attending FOSDEM could write about what they loved and hated about GNOME. Lots of post-it's where written and eventually threaded discussion emerged, like a analogue mailing list as it where.

At the end I think our stand was a great idea and I'm sure our presence there had a positive influence on the way people look at GNOME as a project. If only because there are now lots of people who are proudly walking around in a GNOME t-shirt.

Also since my phone makes really bad pictures I took all the pictures from flickr.
OLPC - jcorrius
stand decoration - ebassi
gnome love wall - joseppc
t-shirt - zugaldia
wall post-it's - isriya

On other news i've updated the look of my website. The old look is still available if your browser supports alternative style sheets. But i doubt anyone would care enough :)

-edit-
Just to correct something Dave Neary wrote. I didn't co-ordinate anything. As far as i know all praise should go to Vincent Untz and Philip van Hoof.

ibuildings & FOSDEM

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:01:00 +0100

Well since last time i blogged, (which was a while back) i've started working for my new employer, which is ibuildings. I feel pretty good about them and the new job is pretty good too. At some later date i'll probably blog more about it, but for now this will have to suffice.

Also i've finally made my bookings for FOSDEM, february kinda sneaked up on me and where already half way. Which means i now had the choice about sleeping in a expensive hotel or the street. All the other places where full. *sigh* Oh well, i can take it financially i guess.

This year whe are going to have a GNOME stand at FOSDEM, and like always at the moment where horribly understaffed. So any gnome-ies out there who could give a hand, even if its only for a hour or so, please visit the gnome fosdem pages and sign up.

Wacken & go

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 01:01:00 +0200

A tad over due but i'm back from Wacken: Open Air, which while being a great metal festival, was a tad too wet this year, and especially the first few days where a absolute disaster; However, over all it was a pretty good festival and i got to see some good bands.

I also decided that i wanted to learn go. Mostly because it has popped up a few times now in movies and series i watched and it all seemed as a interesting new game to learn. Yet again i'm confronted with the fact that i live in a backwards province and the only Go club around was in Bergen op Zoom, and when trying to contact them, i discovered that they don't exist anymore or something. So now i think i'm going to have to suffice with going to a chess club. I haven't played chess in years, and even then only played against friends, so there might still be ample opportunity to learn new things.

Also on another note, i decided that i was doing a bit too little GNOME stuff. On the local level besides translations, there is very little going on, and since i don't have the time at the moment to start organising things. I decided that i should do some gnome marketing/gnome web stuff. Which at the moment consists of helping out with the donate page. This incidentally led me to use scribus which is a qt/kde based app, for doing typesetting/quark type stuff. The workflow of it was something i was not accustomed to, but i soon enough got the hang of it, and will probably use it again if i ever need something designed for print. Between work, hobby, gnome and having a social life this leaves very little time to work on pet projects, but i guess since most of those projects have been on hold for at least half a year, they can wait a bit longer.

My new old job

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 01:01:00 +0200

Well i'm sad to say i won't be going to GUADEC this year; I was planning too, but because of work i can't really afford to go. It would screw up project planning and that can't really be changed.
On another note, i haven't switched jobs, my boss convinced me to at least stay another half year at sitesupport because of the previously mentioned project. It was a tough cookie because i really wanted to work for ibuildings, but in the end the project and certain other aspects where worth the half year.

On a totally "unrelated" note, i'll be getting a new computer this week *wheee* I'm really happy about it, since my current rig is a 6 year old frankenstein of replaced parts, and in recent months is beginning to give the ghost. Secondary ATA has died, and my harddisk is puking the occasional "[1967109.982456] hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }[1967109.982470] hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=275874352, high=16, low=7438896, sector=275874352 " error. (bad m'kay)

Although, next to the joy of getting a new rig, i don't like the prospect of making all those tiny adjustments and such again, like installing a sane cyrus21+postfix+fetchmail mail system, for my spam collection.

But for those whom care about such things, i've ordered the following system. I6.6 Intel Core 2 Duo Game systeem I'm really not a hardware person, so i don't have a clue what i actually ordered, but heck it was expensive so it must be good :)

Feisty update gone wrong, and some other stuff

Sun, 06 May 2007 01:01:00 +0200

This week i decided i could safely update to Feisty because i hadn't read any bad press about it, and what the heck i wanted to see what's new anyway. This however proved to be a bad idea, after the reboot the system just hangs, and when looking at what happens i find a single line in one of the tty's saying modprobe segfaulted (if i recall correctly).

So i booted back to the old kernel, which happily still worked. But for some reason the nvidia drivers don't like it anymore and refuse to work. So currently it's also back to the old nv drivers. I'm a bit pissed about this, because this isn't the first time ubuntu failed and i was expecting better. I also don't feel like fixing it right now and am hoping there will be a new kernel out in a few days that will fix everything.

On a totally different note, there's also a big chance i'll be switching jobs in a few months. Currently i'm working for Sitesupport but i'm hoping i will be able to go and work for ibuildings, the main reason for the switch is the travel involved. I live in vlissingen and sitesupport is located in breda, which means i have to drive more then two hours a day for work. Ibuildings however is located in vlissingen. That would be much closer which is nice. They also seem to be more into open source which for me is a big plus.

Also if your a php webdeveloper and are looking for a job, sitesupport is hiring.
And not just because i'm leaving.

Chillin with my gnomies

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 01:01:00 +0200

A few days ago i found this T-shirt, and i'm actually pretty tempted to buy it for GUADEC :)

Fluendo opens shop

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 01:01:00 +0100

I just found out that Fluendo filled there shop with a lot of media codec plugins, i've been waiting for this for quite some time since i first heard Ronald speak about it. I think the idea of paying for closed codecs on a open source system is fine, if someone legally creates a open version, sure i will take it, but i rather pay for legal codecs to view my media then use the w32codec pack from mplayer to view my stuff.

The installation was dead simple, either throw the codecs in a hidden subdirectory of your home directory or in your server wide gstreamer installation directory. And as expected it worked without a fuss, now most of my anime collection is playable in totem without stuttering or anything :) And like Ronald demo'd a few times while he was still in the Netherlands the seeking works like a wonder.

Some of the more obscure codecs still don't work of course X-h264 and such, but all mainstream stuff just worked.
Hopefully the shop will expand in the coming months to include many more codecs, and i'll probably be buying them all :) the price is right anyway, for all the codecs in the shop the current price at the moment is only 28€

As for screenshots well there's not much too see, but here's some shots anyway.

Report of T-DOSE

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 01:01:00 +0100

Well as i blogged before, saturday we where at T-DOSE the Technical Dutch Open Source Event. The starting keynotes by Willem Jan Withagen where pretty interesting, although left me with a nagging urge to install freeBSD.

The first part of the day was pretty uneventful with mostly vendors and other stall people looking at each others presentation and having a bit of a talk. After the midday though the amount of people started to rise, with quite a big chunk of them visiting our stand, not in the least to be attributed to the wonderful posters whe got from the Gnome Event Box.

We had quite some hardware running at our stand, consisting of 3 laptops and the gnome event box pc (which unfortunately died after a few hours, but after that was utilised to run from a live-cd)

The only bad thing was the fact that besides all this great hardware for showing off gnome, we had very little in the terms of recording it :/ so you will have to make do with the pictures i made with my phone.

T-DOSE

Sat, 02 Dec 2006 01:01:00 +0100

Currently i'm at T-DOSE trying to promote GNOME it's a bit difficult though, since for the most part it's just the vendors and other stall people looking at each others presentation. And i haven't really seen any real visitors yet.

To make matters worse, the pc from the gnome event box died. While running at some point it just crashed, At the reboot i got a couple of read errors and after that grub wouldn't go to stage2 and it would randomly not even find the disk to boot from. I'm unsure how this is going to be resolved, but i'll mail murray about it tonight when i get home. For demoing material it isn't a problem though, since we still had 3 more laptops there running openSUSE, Mandriva and Debian. I'll put some pictures online tonight when i can hook up my phone to a windows machine.

-edit @ 1:32 pm-
It seems i was a bit premature in my assessment of the amount of public because now after morning it's certainly picking up in the number of visitors.

Stemadvies

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 01:01:00 +0100

My advice for dutch voters.

Help ons de leugens ontmaskeren!!!!

(yes i'm kidding)

gnome-NL business cards

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 01:01:00 +0100

In response to Wouter about the business cards. Our current design isn't following gnome guidelines, the old gnome logo we use has been banned. The gnome logo guidelines are now quite specific about the use.

I actually pretty much knew it was going to happen at the time our cards where getting printed, but because it had been such a wreck getting the cards (took around 3 months i recall to get a design everyone could agree on), at the time i couldn't have cared any less.

Also please note that the logo at that time wasn't officially banned yet, it was just discouraged to use. I think i might have mentioned it a few times, but i'm unsure when en to whom, the basic idea was to get new cards printed this summer, but since the whole 'going to conferences to promote gnome and stuff' idea kinda took a dip last year, and talks with hurryjane about getting new cards printed went 'so so' i decided to just do nothing about it for a while. I'm not saying we shouldn't get new cards, but without us actually using them, it's kinda pointless at this time.

And thirdly, i kinda like the gnome2 logo, and while gnome has a brand to protect, we aren't gnome we are gnome-nl. Which isn't to say there isn't a strong relation between the two, but where not the same thing. IMHO where more like official platinum gnome partners. (to speak in commercial software terms) Which in my delusion means we don't really have to change the logo. Of course we should and we will, but there is no direct reason to do it right now.

openSUSE

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 01:01:00 +0200

As reaction on Vincent's blog entry about Dell Latitude D620. I have a Dell inspiron 6000 also with a i915 video chipset and never could get the native resolution on ubuntu (dapper), i knew about the 915resolution thing, but didn't want to invest any time into it, since it was working pretty good and native resolution was 1920x1200 and ubuntu got it to 18sumthingxsumthing and it looked ok albeit a bit stretched.

However i recently installed OpenSUSE (10.sumthing) on it and it worked on native resolution out of the box. Perhaps eft will also do this, but i just wanted to play around with Xgl a bit, but also wanted something that would just work without me having to tinker with it. So while i never was a big fan of SuSe linux i just wanted to see what had happened with it, and i was pleasantly surprised. Although hibernate and suspend are still not working, so perhaps i'll be trying eft in a few months to see if ubuntu can do it.

I have learned something though, there is no such thing as too high a resolution and scalable icons and text is a must have when your working with high resolutions. :)
Oh and Xgl kicks ass, and works just fine on a i915 video chipset. Although the redrawing of windows is a bit slow.

Dutch GNOME Live CD

Tue, 16 May 2006 01:01:00 +0200

I noticed quite a few people try to download our dutch branch of the GNOME Live-cd, however this project has been pretty much put on hiatus until someone picks it up again. Also the torrent for that live-cd has long been dead. However since the official (or at least as official as can be) GNOME Live-cd also sports a dutch version, i've changed the link under that file to point to torrent.gnome.org.

OMG! Ponies

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:01:00 +0200

This years april fools on the internet was great.
ALL THE PONIES!

There's something smelly about old code

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 01:01:00 +0100

Well a bit late but happy new year!!!

So i finally updated the site to support multiple years. It's funny i wrote the code for this site almost a year ago, with a few minor tweaks here and there about 10 months ago
Yet when I look at the code base now it looks god awfull, some weird contraption that resembles a framework from hell. Oh well i'll probably do a rewrite of it one of these days (yes that means never),

But the real reason i updated my site and wrote this blog is to say that i still haven't sent uws his business cards. *sigh* but i'll hope to do it this week.

On the whole GNOME-NL front things seem to be going slow, or rather at a complete stand still. Not without reason though, paperwork was piling up, house keeping work kept lacking, my roof still leaking. So i decided to instead of doing lots of thing almost, to just start finishing stuff and getting things done. However when putting priorities to stuff that needs to be done, GNOME-NL did not really make it to the top, i'm hoping to start doing stuff again around the release of GNOME 2.14 but i can't really be sure since i still have lots of other stuff going on.

Last month of the year

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 01:01:00 +0100

Well the last month of the year is starting, and i've been entering backlogged money transfers into my accounting program grisbi Incidentally November was the first month i actually din't end up losing money at the end of the month. Living on yourself is pretty expensive. The leak in my house still hasn't been fixed, but that's partially my fault for not going after it enough.

I was at the LinuxWorlExpo even had a talk there about the current state of the GNOME desktop. Sadly though i was stuck in traffic and din't make it in time for my own speech. *sigh*
The rest of the day was a success though, lots of people where interested in the GNOME desktop, perhaps because of my no-show at the talk. Also a few projects whom where looking for some GNOME knowledge.

The HCC convention was something i was going to attend, however because of a little misfortune i couldn't get out of my province. Well thinking about my financial status, it might have been for the best.

At work where going into a faster gear, with multiple projects running side to side with quite important deadlines that need to be met, and a new TLD(Top Level Domain) that's going live Tuesday at 0:00.
This really adds to some general fatigue in weekdays i hardly even have the puff to do anything besides checking some mail to see if there is something that's uber important, otherwise i'll just reboot my PC and start playing some Civilization 4. To bad it doesn't run under Cedega yet or have a native linux client, since i'm sure that quite a few linux users have a secret civ addiction.

I also have to rewrite a few pieces of my site, since there is no real support for multiple years yet. Been playing around with mod_python to see if that's any fun to work with, but i'm too much of a noob at that language yet, although it will be a good way to learn it.

Long time no blog

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 01:01:00 +0200

Well it's been quite some time, but i have good excuses. My house is still leaking (after it being repaired like 3 times already) However i don't really have the money at the moment to hire a real company to do it, which is another problem. i seem to be spending more money then i'm making which isn't very health. i'm not broke just yet, but going from 5000 to 800 in only 4 moths is pretty bad i think. Even when this includes some expensive but needed purchases for my house.

The GNOME-NL live cd however now finally starts to come together, it just needs one small fix for it to be ready, running ubuntu breezy and thus gnome 2.12 with all the new apps.

On the side of my presentation however things are going slowly, i know what i want to say there, however putting it on paper in a understandable form is another matter all together, i'm not worried though i just have to spend some more time on it, Also i had this cool idea of using a video of GNOME as the "presentation" instead of powerpoint or impress, mainly because i find traditional presentations boring, and also because i think a video of gnome will have a secondary effect of showing people how GNOME actually looks and works.
I wanted to use Istanbul to record it, but when i do that the video shows my mouse having a yellow cube around it. for the rest it worked quite wonderfully.

Almost done now

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 01:01:00 +0200

Its all going fast now. My bed & sofa should both arrive this month and when there in my house i will be moving in. Also i finally found out where the leak was in my house. (everytime it rained i got leakage) I Also ordered a xs4all account for my internet.

Next to that i also made a little calculation for the production of live-cds (it can be found on the mailing list) basicly producing them ourselves is WAY cheaper. So we should probebly set something up to facilitate a massive burn fest close before the HCC.

Bunch of excuses

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 01:01:00 +0200

I haven`t been around lately, and this is actually for good reason, while a few weeks ago i was almost done with my new house, now with the heavy rain in the Netherlands i`ve found that my roof is leaking. And not only that, I discovered this because my entire kitchen was flooded and even worse the wood on the floor was ruined. So currently i busy with getting together a new floor for my kitchen. Also KPN (the dutch phone company) has still not correctly installed my phone line. (although i now have a 1,5 cm shielded extra thick phone line running straight to my apartment door (talk about bandwidth) :P) so i also don`t have any internet there. I`m also guessing i'l be busy for a few weeks longer, although i planning to keep next weekend free to do some gnome-nl stuff. (like putting a bit more pressure on the guy who should be making a gnome-nl live-cd but is now playing Guild Wars. (although i`m a bit guilty of that also))

Xfake and luminocity

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 01:01:00 +0200

I have a bit of a interest in SEO (Search engine optimization), so i tend to watch my statistics a lot, a thing i have been noticing is that a lot of people are finding my site on the keywords "Xfake and luminocity" while entertaining it isn't really all that useful since i have very little info about it on my site.

So for all the people whom stumble on my site looking for it, please go to seths place because he bloged on it quite a bit, and the live.gnome.org page about it. There's all the info that you need.

And yes i know this will even rank me higher on those keywords but now at least there are some useful links about it.

Contributing to GNOME and the marketing team.

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 01:01:00 +0200

For a few years now i've been planning to start contributing to the code base of GNOME, but because of lack of knowledge, time and patience this mostly stayed in the planning/starting and failing department. Then gnome-nl came along and i had a new way of contributing, locally in the Netherlands or better said the dutch speaking parts of western Europe plus "friesland".

Recently because of the GUADEC i got some good tips on how to set up shop to actually try and fix bugs and the likes in the code base via GARNOME, although because of my new house this is mostly just getting everything ready and worked out for when i have some time to spare. A few months back i also joined the GNOME marketing team, simply because i thought i should get some info on how to properly market it and what the global GNOME thought about marketing.

Now since a few weeks i've actually noticed that i like the marketing bit more then the bug fixing bit. Since i keep putting that on a back burner while i've already written a few half documents with plans and ideas on how to stream line the marketing effort locally as well globally (not yet released though). So i think my point of contribution to GNOME will probably take a turn for the strange, especially for me since i always disliked marketing types. We had a little phrase for those types of peoples, roughly translated to "A dick in a suit with a Alpha" (please note that in dutch the words dick and suit rhyme. also a Alpha is a type of car, and for dutch people the phrase is "Een pik in een pak met een Alpha") No i never wanted to be that guy in a suit with a big car and a smooth talk. I wanted to be the long haired hippie with the coffee stain on his sweater. It seems however that i'm becoming the dick in a suit pretty fast, and i don't know if that's all that bad really. I've also seem to be added as a marketing team member, now all i need is some knowledge of marketing, since i lack any real education in that field, so if anyone knows some good books about marketing please mail them to me

gnome launch box

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 01:01:00 +0200

I found this really cool app on the gnome live power user tools page. the app is like a super fast search thingy to start applications or documents or find someone in your address book whom you want to mail. It's called launch-box.

I use ubuntu so installing it was done in only a few seconds. But for such a application to be useful you really need to bind it to a shortcut key. However i don't think GNOME lets you do that yet in a easy gnome way, but it is possible.

You just open gconf-editor and search for Metacity (/apps/metacity/) there you have a few subs, the ones you need are "keybinding_commands" and "global_keybindings". In "keybinding_commands" choose a "command_X" to put the command in.
Then in "global_keybindings" find the "run_command_X" (where X is the chosen number) and input your keybinding as value. I use Super_L since that key din't have any previous use anyway.

GUADEC And my new house

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 01:01:00 +0200

Lots to talk about, lots of exciting stuff is happening and has happened.

I went to GUADEC this weekend with Vicent, Reinout and Olav. It totally rocked and really got me motivated to finally start to actually contribute to gnome in terms of fixing bugs and such. Also got some good info about how to avoid the whole gnome-common/autogen/stuff-around-actually-working-with-the-code by using garnome or jhbuild also saw some great stuff about eclipse will certainly be installing that soon and start working on something as soon as i got my house a bit ready.

The weather was a bit too hot for most people (including me) but the whole place was stacked with those water vending machines so it was pretty easy to get some fresh cool water.

I also finally bought the house i have been talking about, here some images to get a picture of the place

This place will become my bedroom, it's actually a bit too big but since i can't really move walls around it can't be helped.

This is the attic, and it comes with a cool PLC like device that controls all the lights in my apartment. It also has a RS232 interface so i can hook it up to a computer.

This will be my living room at some time or another, because the apartment was actually build as a multiple bedroom setup there is a sink in every room, which isn't very practical but can be removed.
You can find bigger versions in my ART section

NLUUG spring conference

Thu, 26 May 2005 01:01:00 +0200

I was at the NLUUG conference yesterday promoting and informing about gnome together with Ronald. The location and set up was quite similar as with the novell conference a few months ago. I think it went really well, the 20 to 25 ubuntu warty cd's i brought all where gone at the end of the day, and also the flyers with information about gnome where gone too. the ppc version of ubuntu was harder to get rid of, although they also where mostly gone at the end of the day, although i suspect some people din't really notice that it was ppc and also dint ask us about it.

A few problems that we got questions about where as following;

We got quite a few questions about accessibility in gnome, but apart from the themes for the visually disabled, the assistive technology support menu and the fact that Ronald knew that gtk in a way forces developers to think about accessibility because it is required by the interface with gtk objects. (at least thats what i picked up about it with half a ear) A bit bummer however was when the accessibility project page was showed. The first thing one will notice is that the "latest" news is from 26 of june 2004. Which especially in computer terms is off course old news.
We also got a few questions about gnome in solaris, and how to update that version. which to be frank i don't know a damn thing about. But we exchanged cards with the company that asked about it, and will have a little look around to see who or what company knows a bit more about that.

A very big plus at the conference was that Ronald had a "Alpha" version of gstreamer/totem running that had some cool new features we could demo. Which turned out to generate quite a crowed when he gave a demo of it. So for the next conference/event where going to be, we certainly should bring some cool tech demo. I was thinking luminocity perhaps, since it is quite easy to build and because of the xfake trick that makes sure that when it all chrashes you only have to start up a the Xfake again and luminocity and your off again. And whe can simply tell people what Seth bloged.

Also Ronald, me the kde-nl people and probably a lot more got asked to go work for Yacht. So if your into IT and have knowledge of UNIX/LINUX and are in need of a job, you might want to look there.

I also will rewrite this blog post when i get home from work to include some proper grammer and spelling :)

Buying a house is bad for your mental well being

Sat, 21 May 2005 01:01:00 +0200

It all sounded so wonderful and so easy. About a half year ago, "i just needed to put my little scribble on a contract and in a few months the house would be mine". I just needed to get a mortgage and that would be that, no worries and no problems.

And it was all done, at least for a few months it was. Then the mortgagor decided that they din't like the contract and all hell broke loose. Notaries telling me on the left that there's nothing wrong with the contract and my mortgagor on the right telling me that they don't care if it's legal or not they just wont accept it. Evidently this stressed out our assigned notary because he decided to take a unannounced vacation.
Well happily 2 months later and 2.5 weeks before the transfer of the house, (where i need to have a mortgage or pay a 10% total cost penalty) it all got straightened out. A new contract was made and everyone was happy.

And what a joyous week that was, because then the life insurance company decided they needed me to take a medical test and a small blood test, which is perfectly normal, yet not perfectly normal 12 days before the transfer especially not when they have had my request for at least 3 MONTHS. (image this having to go from a doctor, to a doctor at a company whom decides if i can get a insurance, who notifies the mortgagor that it's all right, who then can give me the mortgage. I suspect normally this would take at least a month, perhaps two. Yet now this has to be accomplished in less then 12 days, including weekends and a bit of GUEDAC.

So therefore i can conclude, that if you haven't bought a house, you don't know the meaning of the word stress.

Business cards

Mon, 02 May 2005 01:01:00 +0200

After much talking, designing, sweating and frustration where almost done with the business cards for gnome-nl. A few final modifications have been made, the results is a very `GNOME` card. The front-side is designed by uws, it is very clear, holds all the needed information and looks very professional.

The backside of the card will hold a full visual that will be different for every batch of cards per person. This will give the cards a very personal touch and a playful style that is certainly present within the gnome community. Some final decisions around what kind of images will be used and some legal stuff is still being done, but this won't pose a significant problem i think. It's simply just wrapping it all up. So here i present a sneak preview of the current final design of the gnome-nl business card.

Don't worry about any missing info on the card, that will all be dynamically generated on demand with the hurryjane.com system. Whom also are sponsoring us these cards at no cost. (YaY)

The planet is safe.

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 01:01:00 +0200

After terrorizing planet.nl.gnome.org for a day with my old posts, i finally figured out why planetplanet did not understand my rss feed. Simple but stupid, they apparently take the link attribute of a rss feed as a unique key for items. But don't check if the key actually IS unique. And since my home brew blog software does not really support links at the moment. (basically it just dumps all the items on my blog page, and dividing it up was on a todo list :) )

So now after finishing that todo list for my page, the planet is safe once again.

(yes, this entire post was actually just written to get to say that)

planet.nl.gnome.org

Sat, 23 Apr 2005 01:01:00 +0200

Argh. I've been wrestling the rss for two days now, and every rss feed validator says it valid. Yet planet.nl.gnome.org still doesn't include me.

On a other note, i've pre-booked my hotel for GUADEC yesterday. I'm not sure if i will be going by car or by train to Stuttgart but i'm already sure that i will be sleeping comfortably.

Python

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 01:01:00 +0200

Well since i tried Perl i thought i might as well try python too. I haven't written much in python yet (apart from the odd x-chat python plug-in/module/whatchamacallit) but i was rather pleased about it, to accomplish the same effect as in my little dabbling with Perl i firstly had to write less lines of code, and it also came a bit more natural. Although i'm still freaked out about the "no-brackets just use tab" way of making statement blocks.

POOP

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 01:01:00 +0200

Not much to note besides that i'm dabbling a bit with POOP. I've written some Perl before but mostly just basic scripts for backup purposes or to simply do some file renaming on lots of files. But Perl Object Oriented Programming seems at first to be a bit awkward, but i'm sure that if i play with it a bit more it will all start making sense.

The thing that bothers me most about it right now is that i'm left too do lots of stuff that other languages mostly do themselves. At least that's what i think right now, i'm a bit too tired too really read the technical stuff, so i'm basically just dabbling with it trying to make it find files and /grep/ them. More finger practice and amusement then anything else.

this site, gnome-nl and stress

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 01:01:00 +0200

I've been trying to update my code for this site and especially this blog, but the more i try to push myself to do it, the more i start to dislike php programming, after 8 hours+ of php programming enough is enough for one human being or something. So i'm actually looking if perhaps i just need to pick another language to program in like Perl or python or something, because i think it's basically just the fact that i'm so busy with php all day that i'm really starting to grow a disliking for all it's quirks.

On a unrelated note, i'm witnessing a quite interesting phenomenon on the gnome-nl front. I think i'll call it `the indecisiveness of a specific mass of people`
When you have a relate small group of people, say 3 or 5 or something, decisions can quickly be made. With a large group of people say 50 or so, decisions are also made, although a bit slower simply because automatically trough group mechanics someone will be cornered to make a decision. But now in gnome-nl with about 15 people being active, we apparently are on the border of those two. Too many people to decide anything quick, but too little to get anyone cornered enough to make a final decision. Either that or it has something to do with the recent blog post of john fleck about a bicycle shed.

And on the "YaY i'm buying a house"-front things are looking even grimmer, for some reason the people whom i want to give me a mortgage((hypotheek(dutch)) don't agree with the notary(notaris(dutch)) about what is possible in my buying contract(koop contract). The effect being that it does not really mater who is right and who is wrong, but i'm not getting the money. So now i have to have the contract rewritten and the seller basicly has two choices. Either get 10% of the buying sum because i can't get my mortgage or sign another contract and sell the house to me. *sigh* Normally i'm quite unaffected by stress, but now i'm quite literally about to snap. Just too much money at stake that i don't own.

Gnome-nl progress

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 01:01:00 +0200

Yesterday we had the first official gnome-nl meeting about what should actually happen. A few good idea's came from that, like making a dutch version of the current gnome live CD other things that where discussed where collaborations with kde-nl and doing some networking, with dutch based companies as well as on the upcoming GUADEC.

However while the part of the meeting that i actually witnessed was great, the part where i was still trying to get there was a living nightmare. I drove around Utrecht for at least 2 and a half hours trying to reach Ronald's place, i saw some very interesting parts of Utrecht and i actually had a flat tire somewhere along the way also. *sigh* Getting there was definitely not the fun part.

This also showed me that i really need one of those navigation computers for in the car.

Handheld support

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 01:01:00 +0100

I'm the proud owner of a Sharp Zaurus c860, installed with the cacko rom. So of course my site should support handheld devices.

Since my site only needs a few changes to support smaller screen sizes. i only needed to modify 3 properties. (some width's) and with a little bit of nudging and pushing my site now supports all kinda of smaller screen devices :) You just gotta love CSS.

although i'm not sure if very narrow screens will display it correctly. But at least my ~~PDA~~ PMA does.

mmmm seeing the thumb of my zaurus i think i should modify my script for auto-generating thumbernails thought. It kinda stretches it a bit.

Seeing double

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 01:01:00 +0100

Woohoo, finally got dual screen :) one CRT and one LCD. Still figuring out some things, but i'm already sure i'm going to love this. Worked dual screen before with one CRT and a laptop LCD. (using some program that works over a network connection connecting X servers, but it was too slow too be useful)

Too bad i have a ATI card though, doesn't work nice at all, no xinerama support as far as i've seen. (but i haven't really looked yet, just hooked up the second monitor and started editing the xorg.conf file until the damn thing worked :P

Being connected

Sat, 12 Mar 2005 01:01:00 +0100

Well this day started out nice. My computer crashed and apparently took out my NIC with it, the strange thing however, is what's wrong with it. It will send packages no problem, but it received nothing. Tested it in windows and linux and both showed the same symptoms, tried the network cable in my laptop and it worked perfectly. Tried pinging my loopback and also worked. So basically, it's not the software, it's not the network, and since loopback worked it's also not about 90% of the card. *sigh* but broken none the less.

Well it was a old card so i'm not really shedding any tears over it, the trouble was however that the only spare one i had was a old realtek i got with a cable modem subscription. (so it's cheap and thus crappy and very very old) first booted into linux with it, currently running Ubuntu linux hoary. But to no avail, it din't even register as a ethernet device for as far as i could tell. After that i booted into windowsXP, that promptly told me it found some new hardware, and that the hardware was a ethernet device. YaY
The only problem however was that it hadn't the foggiest idea to what kind of ethernet device it was, and to find out it wanted to connect to the internet. *sigh*

So now i'm currently working on my laptop also running Ubuntu hoary. And i'm actually quite pleased with how fast it works, since it's quite a old laptop. Also the fact that it produces little sound is quite a plus. The only problem with it however is that it's more like a very light weight and flat workstation. Since the battery is kinda deceased and it needs the power cable inserted into it at all times.

StratoS Online, online

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 01:01:00 +0100

Well it was about time for this thing to go online, not everything is done yet, more files and images will follow and i'll be working on the site from time to time. (pretty busy with work, buying a house, having a personal life, gnome-nl) Oh well can't have everything.

Basically i'm still editing the XML files by hand, and in some browsers this site will look like crap. But with a average of 80 visitors per month (of which 50% is probably myself) i'm not in a big hurry to fix things.

On another subjects. I'm buying a HOUSE!!, will be moving in in a few months, and i'm pretty excited about it.

I'll also start doing some more stuff for gnome-nl then just hang around on the gnome-nl channel on irc.gnome.nl probably going to manage a bit of promotion. But everything is still in the air thought.

On the work part i'm still having fun happily, although i had a rather rough week behind me, *sigh* currently working on a site where you can order cards and send them out to people or simply get them yourself. Big project and way too little time to finish it.
I'll post a like when it's done, because while at this moment i hate the website, it is actually a rather cool site.

StratoS Online, Almost ready to go up

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 01:01:00 +0100

Have just finished writing the code for the files and art section of this site. Used the standard gnome icons for the files section, first wanted to do just a list of files, but this looks a bit better.

StratoS Online, back to basic

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 01:01:00 +0100

Well here whe are, a totaly new design and code base for my site. This time i'm actually planning on keeping my site regularly up to date.

Instead of news i've chosen to use a Blog, basicly the only reason for this is that i will be posting a bit more. Another reason is that i've implemented a Blog interface into my site backend that enables me to blog via gnome-blog. Which is a standard desktop application for gnome.

Well Actualy that would be lying a bit I haven't actually build the thing yet, basicly now i'm simply editing by hand some XML file ;)

I Also have to do some thinking about how i'm going to implement the Files and Art sections.