Dieter_be's spot on the web

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)

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.

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.

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).

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:

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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'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:

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.

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 ...

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.

I wish I could put this on my webpage :

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

I recorded a little drumvideo while practicing.
It's just some improvisation... Find the mistakes! ;-)

Recorded with 2 shure SM57's, an M-audio mobilepre USB and the iSight cam in my macbook pro.

The mic setup had to be close enough to sound direct and focused without too much reverb, and still far enough to allow all instruments too come through. After some experimenting I decided to place the mics behind the kit, next to me ( one each side), just below the height of the hips. I think I have found a pretty good compromise.

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 :-)

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.

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

Op deze pagina verschijnen enkele gegevens, documenten en toevoegingen in het algemeen in het kader van mijn masterproef. (ook wel bekend als eindwerk of thesis).

• Titel (nl): Geautomatiseerde webwinkel en orderverwerking
• Title (en): Automated webstore and order processing
• School: Katholieke Hogeschool Sint - Lieven
• Abstract (nl + en)

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.

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).