Steady as a rock

At work there was a spare desktop-size-but-server-hardware machine which no one was using. *was* using indeed, since it’s now in my kitchen, replacing an old an noisy macine that was my home server until now. It’s damn quiet,even the fridge makes more noise! And the specs are good as wel: p4 2.8 GHz HT, 1 GB ram, 2×80GB SATA.

It’s already running ssh, bind, apache, openvpn, postfix, mpd, apt-cacher and some fresh pbuilder and falcon instances. Now to build a load of feisty packages

Exciting news in the mail today:

Dear Dennis Kaarsemaker
LPI ID: LPI000121021

Congratulations on completing your Ubuntu Certified Professional
certification.  You have now joined the worldwide community of
Ubuntu graduates.

Yay!

Urgently wanted for a full time job in the center of Amsterdam: linux sysadmin with experience as linux sysadmin (doh) and preferably a bit of perl knowledge as well.
Shouldn’t be afraid of touching machines with that os from redmond installed once in a while. Having a good appetite for beer is a plus, as is being slightly weird :)
If you are looking such a job and fit the profile (and wouldn’t mind being a colleague of mine), please contact me (dennis-at-kaarsemaker-dot-net).

With public transportiation going down the drain fast here and a cheap car available, I joined the greenhouse masses and bought my first car. It’s an almost 9 year old dark blue suzuki alto and it’s quite fuel efficient, so my contribution to the climate crisis will not be large.

In other news: I started poking at usplash again and will have some nice patches ready before feature freeze, if mjg59 accepts them. Still looking for a Qt person to port the already famous usplash-switcher to Qt. Anyone?

Yesterday was the first meeting of the Ubuntu community council in 2007. This was the first meeting where I wore my new CC secretary hat and it felt good. I love the Ubuntu community and this is one of the ways I try to help making it grow. The CC meetings are a good place to get to know what is going on in various parts of the community and you don’t see so many cool contributions per second anywhere else

The next meeting isn’t scheduled yet, and since it’s now part of my duty to poke the council members about a date people can now blame me if it is delayed.

If you didn’t know it yet: django rocks. Very, very much

Right now, almost all of ubuntu-nl.org is django-powered, even the forum (punbb) and planet templates (and planet config!) are generated by django for maximum style consistency. It took a while to perfect^Wfix all the bugs, and an SQL view (Yay, MySQL 5!) for integration of forum data and django data, but the dutch Ubuntu website is now better than ever.

For more python goodness:

• Planet is also python
• It’s all managed in bzr , which is written in python
• The code will be published on launchpad, which is also written in python
• Python also rocked for the migration scripts

At LinuxWorld Utrecht I took the LPI level one exams and to nobodys surprise I passed them with ease. Last week I got a mail from LPI saying that my score was one of the best (that honestly didn’t surprise me either, given how easy LPI level one is) and that a company here in the Netherlands sends small surprises to the best candidates. Today the ’small surprise’ arrived and well, small isn’t the right word as I now have 5 new tuxes, ranging in size from 1cm to90cm

Tomorrow I’ll be starting at booking.com as system operator. This unfortunatly means that I’ll have less time for Ubuntu, but I’ll still make it to UDS Mountain View. Me and ubuntu_demon will be flying to San Francisco on november 4th with the following schedule, anyone who wants to fly along or meet up is welcome!

09:30 Amsterdam (Continental flight 59)  - 13:30 George Bush International (Houston)

14:40 Houston (Continental flight 1566) - 16:59 San Francisco International

This landed in my mailbox an hour ago:

Congratulations on completing your LPI Level 1 certification. You have now joined the worldwide community of LPI graduates, and you have the necessary pre-requisite to take the Level 2 exams.

Maybe I’ll take the Ubuntu Certified Professional exams in december

Quite a few times already, people asked me where I found the time to do so much for Ubuntu. Well, that wasbecause I currently don’t have a job. But that may change soon, I had a job interview today and it went well. Fingers crossed!

Today, DHL delivered a very nice early birthday present: the nokia 770 I won last week! It’s a really nice linux based PDA. This message is, of course, written on the 770 - in a rather tiny, yet well readable font. The 770’s screen is amazing!

ps: my birthday is september 30

It can actually be summarized in 2 words: f*ing awesome!

A slightly longer (and in no way chronological summary):

Travel

To get to EuroOscon, I had to get up at 3:30 in the morning, which you may guess is not my prefered time to wake up. The trip to Brussels was fairly uneventful, I slept through a substantial part of it. Going back home on thursday however, was a real pain in the ass. The international train was canceled, so I had to take a local train to Antwerp, which was of course a very busy train becuase the international train was canceled. After a short sprint in Antwerp, I reached an also crowded international train and sat down next to a girl from Holland, with whom I had a nice talk until she had to leave at Rotterdam. Some sleeping and reading Make magazine later I arrived at Lelystad. Home sweet home

The venue & organization

Apart from the sometimes flaky wifi, no complaints here. Very well organized and a nice hotel. The lunches were great .
The sessions

Apart from on or two talks which I wish I never had gone too, the talks were very interesting. Great keynote speakers and a nice diverse set of talks (although the web 2.0 crowd was very visible). A few highlights (for me) were

• Microformats: embedding semantic information in your HTML so html2anything convertors can be useful
• Kamaelia a framwork for orchestrating workflows, mainly targeted at multimedia but unlike gstreamer, also usable for other things
• Freedom to call sip, telepathy and more with openwengo
• Jabber beyond instant messaging
• The Conway channel evil perl guru Damian Conway showing off his nice tricks. He makes perl usable!

The people

There were lots of interesting people at the conference, it’s been a great pleasure to meet all of them. It’s too hard to remember all the names, so I won’t name anyone in particular, but the people playing werewolves and the lightning talks people were especially interesting to meet. Thanks all of you for the great times!

Django

I also briefly met Adrian Holovaty of Django fame, who is a happy Ubuntu user and offered personal support for my endeavours in transforming the Ubuntu NL site into a django powered beast. I hope he knows what h got himself into

Ubuntu & meeting Mark Shuttleworth

There were three slots featuring Ubuntu in the original program. However, Jeff Waugh canceled, reducing this number to two. When the Ubuntu BOF on wednesday started, Mark however was nowhere to be found. A short chat with mdz and elmo (thanks again guys!) revealed that Mark was not even supposed to show up. So I gave the attendees 2 simple choices: leave, because Mark is not coming, or stay and I’ll answer questions. To my surprise almost everyone chose to stay, the BOF actually was rather succesful

On thursday, Mark gave the final keynote and afterwards we had a short talk. This was undoubtedly the best part of the conference, not everyone in the Ubuntu community gets the opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation with the (in)famous sabdfl

So all in all: it was an unbelievable experience and I’m so thankful for O’Reilly allowing me to attend the conference basically for free.

Thank you for all the interesting conversations, all the support for the Ubuntu project and the insightful comments. Thanks for all your work on Freenode, you’ve made our stay much more pleasant.

Have a good time in the hereafter buddy, you’ll be missed here.

Rob ‘lilo’ Levin passed away on Sept. 16 my condolences go out to his family, friends and his colleagues from the PDPC.

So today I threw out my old own php blog-like code and installed wordpress-mu on a new vhost. I’m also switching to english so I can be aggregated on Planet Ubuntu. Since this is a multiuser blog system, I am hereby offering blog hosting to Ubuntu NL members

Now for the next steps in the death of my own php code: finish the new django based Ubuntu NL site, fix the forum database and integrate it. And fix up planet.

Wel wel, google earth heeft nu een linux versie. En uiteraard houden de hi-res fotos letterlijk 20 meter van m’n huis op