Dieter on the web

What better way to launch the new year then starting to work as a System Engineer/Developer for a consulting firm where everyone breathes Linux and Open Source?
Next week I'll start at Kangaroot. Woohoo.

When you're stuck on a problem, or not even stuck but you just want to boost your creative/out-of-the-box thinking...
Take a shower. When I'm thinking about a problem and I take a shower, the ideas and thoughts just start popping up, one after each other, or sometimes even two at the same time. It's amazing. And it works every time.

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I'm particulary interested in:

• The out-of-the-box concepts of Exherbo. I hope to see more things like this.
• Various talks at OpenSuse about distribution development, their build service, etc.
• tools such as func and puppet.
• syslinux, upstart, ext4 etc.
• Some mysql stuff and the filesystem i/o from a db perspective talk.

In november last year, I was contacted by Facebook HR.
They found my background interesting and thought I might be a good
fit for an "application operations engineer" position in Palo Alto, California. (it is
basically the link between their infrastructure engineering and operations/support
teams).

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I had to fix a problem at my dad's company...
"The network was broken."

It was a NetBEUI network connecting some windows stations - it has been running for years - and now suddenly the nodes couldn't find eachother.
One of the boxes (windows 2000 iirc) had 2 network cards, one for the network, the other not used for anything (not even connected). Disabling the latter - not even touching the former - fixed half of the network.

There was another box that couldn't find any other node in the network. This happened to be a box of which the ps/2 mouse broke. It had a usb mouse connected but since it was windows 95 it was not supported. I removed the usb mouse and attached another ps/2 mouse. This fixed not only the mouse but also the box could suddenly find the other boxes again....

Windows really does suck.

And the worst part is: even though all is fine now, I have no clue for how long it will work, and what will be the cause the next time it will be broken?

I've been meaning to write about a lot of stuff in separate posts, but they kept getting delayed, so I'll just briefly share everything in one post.

Thailand

In July I did a 3-week group journey through Thailand arranged by Explorado, but organized by ("outsourced to") the 2 guides of roots of Asia, who did an amazing job. The whole concept was exploring "the real Thailand" by means of Eco-tourism. We've been in Bangkok (twice), Chiang Mai city, a mountain village in the province of Chiang Mai, through the jungle, at a fisherman village in Phuket and at the tropical island of Koh Pha ngan. The latter was at the end of the trip and was timed perfectly to get some deserved rest in a more touristy (although not too busy) area, but the majority of the trip was spent far away from the typical touristy areas so we could be submerged in honest, authentic Thai culture and visit authentic locations, often we were at locations where seeing a group of white folks is not common. We've been at unique authentic temples, stayed with various locals and hill tribes, shared meals with them, took the same transport they did (at one point an entire village collected their bikes so we could borrow them to do a bike trip through rice fields and some of the most beautiful lakes I've ever seen). We've had plenty of beautiful moments during those 3 weeks. Like visiting the home of one of the local Thai who built his entire house out of clay, by himself and some friends, or visiting the ancient temple where our guide got married, in a forest in the hills, it was the most beautiful temple of the entire trip, but no other tourists go there because it's not really known (and should probably be kept that way). Or going to a bar in Chiang Mai city (one evening on my own, the next I brought a fellow traveler) to have some good times with some locals. The Eco-conscious part of the travel means:

• green travel (minimize impact on the environment, "leave no trace"). Other than taking the plane over there and back we did a pretty good job, we've used public buses, night trains, biodegradable soap, etc
• local foods (no import, minimal packaging, wrap in banana leaves, etc)
• supporting Eco-conscious projects (like elephant nature park, which is an entire volunteer-based reserve to give mistreated elephants (which has been a big problem in Thailand) a better life, where we washed and fed elephants)

This has been a great experience, and although I found the culture in the South disgustingly based on profiting from tourists, and the cities are too polluted and dirty, I've seen cultures so respectful of nature and each other, living by values I've been trying to apply at home - but being frowned upon in our western society because we're so brainwashed by consumerism, which was beautiful and heartwarming.

Photo album

Berlin

I've been in Berlin for the first Velocity conference in the EU, which was quite good. The best part was probably the "Velocity Birds of feather" (whatever that means) unconference the day before at betahaus, which was great for meeting some folks such as the soundcloud.com guys (which BTW, is the site we host our music on), although lots more interesting folks attended the conference itself (and it was packed). Berlin itself was nice too. Lots of history (Berlin wall, world war(s)), lots of impressive architecture (old and new), very cheap (albeit mediocre in quality) food, lots of Italian food, a bit cold though.

New York city

I'm still recovering from the awesome time I just had in NYC. I've been way more busy over there than I anticipated. I should have stayed 2 or 3 weeks instead of 1 :). I've met various locals (one of whom who'd love to become a city guide as 2nd job because she just loves showing people around, so that just turned out great!). I didn't go for the typical touristy things (I skipped things like the WTC memorial, empire state building, statue of liberty, to the extent you can skip them, as they are very visible from pretty much all over the place). Instead, I wanted to get a feel of the real city and the people inhabiting it. I've seen parts of Queens, central and North-West Brooklyn, lots of areas (but not enough) in Manhattan and even Staten Island, been to a rock concert, comedy, improv and cabaret shows, the movies, more bars than I can count and mostly ate out with company (just as real new yorkers do, of course, though for breakfast that feels a bit weird). I even went shopping (not mall-shopping, but groceries in the supermarket, the Williamsburg Foodtown - that's what it's called - clerk advised me to enjoy every last second in the US, phrased in a way as if any other place in the world sucks in comparison, which is ridiculous, but turns out I followed his advice anyway) because I stayed at an apartment in Williamsburg, I also had 2 roommates, with whom I ironically couldn't spend as much time as I wanted to as I was so busy meeting up with all those other people, I also visited the Etsy and Vimeo offices (both are awesome) and met up with Dave Reisner (who is one of our latest Arch Linux devs, and who lives in NJ, but don't tell anyone) and who forgot to show me around in the Google office ;-) And I realize some of the past sentences are a bit long and busy but that's one of the things I learned at New York I guess. For one week, I almost lived like a real New Yorker, and it was interesting (but exhausting).

Move to Ghent

Enough about the trips. Back to daily life. I moved to the city of Ghent. Riding by bike to work every day along the scenic Coupure is fun. I am quite proud to say nearly all of my stuff in this apartment is second hand and I've been lucky to receive some free stuff as well (thanks Bram!). Not (only) because I'm cheap money conscious but I like to give things a second life instead of buying something new, lowering the impact on the environment. Even if it doesn't look too well, as long as it's functional. And this is exactly one of those values I mentioned above which is often not understood in our Western society but I was pleased to find out this philosophy is the standard in large parts of Thai culture.

Death metal

We've done 3 gigs (which had great reception, luckily) and we've got planned a few already for 2012, one of which will be at the From Rock Till Core festival in Merelbeke. We also did a semi-professional photo-shoot, and I made a website (you can tell I'm not a designer).


That wraps up 2011 for me. Good times.. Happy new year everybody!

I have been looking for the "perfect mobile companion device" already for a while. Basically I want a "pocket PC that can do as much as possible over which i have as much control as possible so I can do things my way, but still fits in a pocket and which can do gsm and such"
So, something like a netbook, but really portable, and that can also do telephony stuff.
Nokia's recently announced n900 seems to be very close to what I'm looking for.
It could have been a tad bigger (to make typing easier) but other then that it looks perfect: powerful, high resolution display, Linux with a "usual" userspace (unlike Android) to give me all freedom I'm looking for, keyboard, plenty of space and many goodies such as wifi, a-gps, fm receiver/transmitter, IR, bluetooth, digital camera, tv-out and so on.

This device has ignited my interest in Maemo and all things related so I'll be in Amsterdam on October 9-10-11, at the Maemo summit 2009. I was lucky enough to score a place in the ibis hotel Amsterdam, as Nokia has reserved more rooms then they could fill with invited speakers and own personnel ;-)
I'm hoping it will be possible to buy a device at the conference. The timing would be perfect. Nokia seems to be a really cool company and so far, they haven't disappointed yet...

Somewhat related: a Mer (maemo alternative) developer told me he was very interested in making uzbl available on Mer, so he did just that. I'm curious myself how usable uzbl will be on the n900. Only one way to find out :)

The adventure at Netlog didn't work out entirely, so I'm looking for a new challenge!

My new ideal (slightly utopic) job would be:

• Conceptual engineering while still being close to the technical side as well, most notably system engineering and development.
• Innovative: go where no one has gone before.
• Integrated in the open-source world. (Bonus points for companies where open source is key in their business model)

To get a detailed overview of my interests and skills, I refer to:

• My Linkedin profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dieterplaetinck
• My Curriculum Vitae. EN / NL

I wish I could put this on my webpage :

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So I'm back from the 3-day maemo summit in Amsterdam. It was very nice. Very well organized, and Nokia definitely invested enough in catering, fancy-suited people and such to please all 400 of us. I met several interesting people, both from the community, as well as Nokia guys.
The talks were diverse, but interesting (duh?). I will especially remember the kickoff with its fancy visual effects and loud music that set the mood straight for the entire weekend.
The best moment was, of course, when it was announced that every summit participant would receive a n900. Uncontrolled hapiness all around.


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As mentioned earlier, I'll be at Archcon in Toronto in a few weeks.
It's a very small conference, and the first of its kind. At the last FrOSCon we have been playing with the idea to hold an informal Arch conference in Europe, but those were just ideas. Dusty and Ricardo beat us with an actual implementation.
This is great, and one of the milestones in Arch Linux history. Which is why I want to be there and help making it better.

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I'll be at fosdem - 10th edition - again this year.

I'll be presenting a lightning talk about uzbl.
Also, Arch Linux guys Roman, JGC, Thomas and me will hang out at the distro miniconf. We might join the infrastructure round-table panel, but there is no concrete information yet.

More stuff I'm looking forward to:

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The key to mastering a musical instrument is learning an other.

On February 4, I'll be in Amsterdam at DIR 2011, the 11th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop. After that, I'm going to the devopsdinner and Fosdem beer event in Brussels. On february 5/6 of course, Fosdem itself. Looking forward to the systemd talk. On sunday I'll do a talk about simple shell based Gnu/Linux installers, like mentioned earlier I hope devs from other "lightweight"/kiss-style distro's will be present (Gentoo and other *too's, Crux, *ppix, ... You know who you are) It would be interesting to share some common codebase for distribution independent topics (like filesystems), or at least discuss how feasible it would be.

So, the Arch Linux 2009.08 release is now behind us, nicely on schedule.
I hope people will like AIF because it was a lot of work and we didn't receive much feedback. I personally like it to apply my fancy backup restoration approach.
But I'm sure if more people would look at the code we would find quite some design and implementation things that could be improved. (With uzbl I was amazed how much difference it can make if many people all have ideas and opinions about every little detail)

Later this week I'm off to the Counting Cows festival in France, and the week after that (august 22-23) I'm going to FrOSCon in Germany where I will meet some of my Arch Linux colleagues in real life, which I'm really looking forward to.

If anyone wants a ride to froscon let me know. But note I'll try to maximize my time there (leave saturday early and come back late on sunday. I even took a day off on monday so I might stay a day longer if I find more interested people to hang out there)

I'm back from Canada/Archcon, and it was great. I've been in Toronto for 11 days, and visited Montreal for 3 days.

Archcon

Archcon was small (20-ish people). (That's what you get for doing it in Canada ;), but very nice.
Interesting talks, informal, good vibe, decent logistics and catering.
This year it happened because Dusty and Ricardo actually just wanted to have a conference without worrying too much about the attendance,
next year we should do it again because Arch (conferences) rock(s), and because we need more visitors. More central locations such as Seattle and Europe have been suggested.
Either way, next year both Judd (founder) and Aaron (current overlord) should be there. (this year they both had lame excuses like family reunions and "almost getting married". Congrats btw, Aaron!)

It was an absolute pleasure to meet some more of my fellow devs, and users.
Here is a pic from the group (unfortunately, a few are missing)

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For the last few months, I've started to actively use hitchhiking as a means to travel between home and work. What started as a "I'm not sure about this, it seems a bit awkward, but I do want to know how it goes and feels, so I'll try it out once" ended up being "this is great, I'm doing it every day and loving it". Here's why you should try it and why it may make your life more awesome.

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On 31-3-2008 LCL, one of the most used datacenters in Belgium - and the only one with a 0% downtime record in Belgium - had major power issues with their datacenter in Diegem, bringing lots of Belgian parties offline. (more specifics on the net).

If you're one of the sysadmins of a website with 35M members and 150M hits per day this means you're in for an exciting night ...

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UPDATE: this information is outdated. See http://github.com/Dieterbe/ddm/tree/master for latest information.

Introduction

If you have multiple sets of data (e.g.: music, images, documents, movies, ...) and you use these on more then one system ( e.g. a laptop and a file server) then you probably also have some 'rules' on how you use these on your systems. For example after capturing new images you maybe put them on your laptop first but you like to sync them to your file server frequently. On the other hand you also want all your high-res images (stored on the server) available for editing on the laptop, and to make it more complicated you might have the same images in a smaller format on your server (for gallery programs etc.) and want these (or a select few albums of them) available on the road.

The more different types of data you have and the more you have specific work flows the harder it becomes to keep your data as up to date as possible and consistent on your boxes. You could manually rsync/(s)cp your data but you end up in having a mess (at least that's how it turned out on my boxes). Putting everything under version control is great for text files and such, but it's not an option for bigger (binary) files.

I wanted to keep all my stuff neatly organised in my home directories and I want to create good work flows with as minimum hassle as possible, so I decided to write DDM: the Distributed Data Manager.

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I recently did two talks, for which the videos are now online.

• Uzbl lightningtalk @ fosdem 2010
• Open Source Monitoring tools lightning talk @ Kangaroot showcase 2009. This one is password protected. If you were a participant, you should have received the pass

If all goes well, I'll be at ArchCon this summer, where I'll be doing these talks:

• AIF: The Arch Installation Framework
• Uzbl – web interface tools which adhere to the unix philosophy. Whereas in the fosdem talk I had to focus a lot of information into a short timeslot, here I'll elaborate a bit more

We're not sure yet if those talks will get videotaped.


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Foreign visitors: yeay I graduated today \o/

Dutchies: joepie, afgestudeerd...
Vandaag proclamatie gehad, ben geslaagd met voldoening, zelfs geen enkele buis \o/
En een 12/20 voor de Masterproef :-)

Today at Fosdem 2011 I did my talk Can we build a simple, cross-distribution installation framework? Basically, using the Arch Installation Framework as a starting point, along with the notion that most of the code is actually not Arch-specific I adressed other distros to check if there was any interest in sharing workload on the distribution-agnostic aspects of the framework. If other distros with a similar philosophy of little-abstractions/KISS would join, we would all reap the benefits of a simple, yet quite featureful installer. There was some interest, so we'll see what happens.

• slides
• video

I'm starting to keep track of some things I want. I've picked Amazon because they have many items in their database.
wishlist

Yesterday, after a night of searching and fixing spelling errors, things that could be better explained and other small details,
I got my thesis printed and delivered the six books to my school.


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I've been reading GTD lately and it's absolutely a great and inspiring book.
Having made my home office space into a real Zen I want to start implementing GTD in my digital life but it seems very hard to find a good GTD tool that fully implements GTD. (even though there are a lot of tools out there)

The most interesting ones (each for different reasons) I've looked at so far are Thinkingrock, tracks and yagtd (the latter requiring most work before it does everything I need, but it's also the most easy to dive into the code base). I'm keeping my eyes open because there are certainly more things to discover.

Even though there are probably no applications out there that can do everything I want, I just wanted to share my feature-wishlist. These are the requirements I find that a really good tool should comply with:


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I just signed my contract at Incrowd, the company behind sites such as redbox and facebox.

I will be working there in a team of all young, enthusiastic people. Among those, some people are already familiar to me: my old friend Lieven (we've played in a band together but kept in touch afterwards) and my ex-classmate Jurriaan. Both of them love their jobs btw :-).

My official title is "System & Network architect".
Things I will be doing there is

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Every year, during a special weekend in February, the University Libre of Brussels suddenly becomes a little more geeky.
It's that time of the year when many European (and some inter-continental) colleagues join us at
Fosdem: the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (more info here).

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Dit weekend (17-18 maart) ben ik naar Kwartee 4 geweest.
Kwartee weekends worden georganiseerd door Formaat (vroeger bekend als VFJ) en ging door in vormingscentrum destelheide te Dworp (dichtbij Halle, ten zuiden van Brussel).
Twee man sterk (Steven en ik) vertegenwoordigden we jeugdhuis SjaTOo.

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Froscon was great.

• It was smaller then I thought, I especially assumed more activity in the devrooms (I'm too used to fosdem which is much bigger), but hey nice conference anyway.
• It was great to meet (some of) my Arch Linux colleagues. Mostly the guys from Germany showed up, and Roman who is from Ukraine.
• We all got an Arch t-shirt/polo of which we could pick the color ourselves. Woohoo. Thanks donators.
• A few people also told me they had tried / were using uzbl (my browser project) so that was really cool.
• I had an interesting chat with Thomas Lange, the author of FAI (a tool to automatically mass-install systems, mostly Debian). I've used it in the past, liked it and was somewhat inspired by it when building AIF. (but some design goals are different).

Here is a picture of my "Arch releng partner" Gerhard (right) and I (left). We've done a lot of work together and it was great to talk face to face for once. Here we're showing (proudly) an Arch Linux Froscon disc (which is a slightly modified version of the 2009.08 core images):

Team photo:

Image gallery

I started working at IBCN, the research group of the university of Ghent. I was looking to get back to the challenging world of high-performance and large-scale (web) applications, but I also wanted something more conceptual and researchy, rather then the highly hands-on dev- and ops work I've been doing for a few years now.
The Bom-vl project is pretty broad: it aims to make the Flemish cultural heritage media more useable by properly digitizing, archiving and making public the (currently mostly analog) archives from providers such as TV stations.

Currently, I believe there's some >100TB of media in our cluster (mostly from VRT, afaik), along with associated textual descriptions/metadata, with more to follow. The application is currently for a selected audience but the goal is to make it public in the near future. I'm part of the search engine team, we aim to provide users with the most relevant hits for their queries, by using existing technology (think Lucene, hadoop, etc) or devising our own where needed. As I'm charged with a similarity search problem ("other videos which might also interest you"), I'm studying information retrieval topics such as index and algorithm design and various vector models. Starting next week, I'll probably start implementing and testing some approaches.