kennywest

So yesterday I was doing the dishes. Nothing fancy about that, despite the fact I was listening to this while doing it. There's a track on the second disc, called Xpander which is really awesome. Choosing between Xpander and the track mentioned in an earlier post would be ... eh ... very difficult. Sasha rules! A while ago, Sasha did a set on Essential Mix , remixing and re-editing music live, on Ableton live @ Maida Vale. Now this set, my dear friends, is by far the best set I've ever heard. It also features the song mentioned in some earlier post. I think I heard this set a zillion times, but I never get tired playing it. Again and again. I guess that makes me a boring person :) Anyway, I think I should recall the earlier post about the best song of all time. IMHO, there's no such thing. There can be several :) So, I guess I will have to assemble box of records-that-should-be-rescued-in-case-of-fire . Cheers ...

Yes. Coming home today and browsing through the mail I received mad me a very happy man, despite of the rough week at work. Today I found 2 surprises in my mail: Revolution OS, the DVD . This DVD is a documentary on Linux and the Open Source movement. Yes, I do realize you can see this movie on-line but I just had to have a hard copy for myself. And yes, I do realize this makes me a real nerd :) 2 CD's with Ubuntu 7.10. The nice people of ShipIt send me a free copy of Ubuntu's most recent distributable for free. Guess this makes me a double nerd. Oh well, I don't care. You're all being jealous :)

I am not that old. I have developed my taste for music when I was twelve years old or so. I think everyone developed some taste at that time. Maybe for something different, like women :) Anyway, when I was twelve, 17 years ago, some dudes in Belgium invented New Beat. At least, I think it was invented here. It was a cross breed of New Wave and some other electronic sounds from the late 80's. I know my parents didn't like it very much, but I did. New Beat didn't last very long and then House music, and all its off-springs, came along. My parent's didn't like it either, even some of my friends didn't like it, but I still did. House music is still here, the number of off-springs still growing. Right now I like stuff they play on frisky radio and BBC's kiss 100 and Essentialmix . Obviously, this is not the only genre I admire. I also like other stuff like Muse, Nine Inch Nails, Placebo, Radiohead, ... . Seriously, you can't play house when you're hav...

I'm still using Ubuntu Dapper. Why? Because I don't want to mess a lot with this install and let a dist-upgrade trash it completely every six months or so. Trust me, I've done 2 or more dist-upgrades in Ubuntu and none of them went well. Anyway, I am still running Dapper and I'm proud of it. The only problem with this is that firefox and thunderbird shipped with Dapper have become very outdated. I wanted to try the webmail plug-in, but it only works for thunderbird 2. Damn :( Fortunately there are some kind people who also have an older Ubuntu install and created a script to easily install the latest versions of both firefox and thunderbird on any Ubuntu version. Cool eh :) The script is called ubuntuzilla and you need to run it as root. Not as a regular user, not using sudo. Use it at your own risk and make a backup of your mails before using the script!

Introduction I own an old Compaq Armada e500. This portable used to have 512 MB of RAM, but the other month, half of it failed on me and died. So, this left the portable quite useless. Running Ubuntu with Gnome is quite painful, because you spent most of the time waiting. Even the so claimed lightweight Ubuntu, Xubuntu, doesn't run as smooth as it should. The other week I came across a post on the dutch Ubuntu forums, talking about fluxbuntu . This Ubuntu version claims being more lightweight than Xubuntu, so I decided to take it for a spin. Installation fluxbuntu boots in a non graphical installer. If you ever installed Debian, this installer will look very familiar. I think Ubuntu's alternate install CD also uses this "ncurses" based installer. Although the installer is text based, installing fluxbuntu is not more difficult than installing any other distro using a graphical installer. It also has the same basic questions; what's your keyboard layout?, where do y...

If someone would ask me to compile a list of 10 personal favorites, Lo-Fiction would definitely be ranked very high. I don't think anyone would disagree with this statement. P.S. If someone is able to find the lyrics for this song, please be so kind to post a link. Even though it's English I don't always understand what he's singing about :(

Yesterday our twins were born around 9u50 CET. Underneath you can see a picture of the proud mother and our 2 lovely sons. Mother and sons are doing well. And yes, the name Nils was inspired by Linus Torvald's father :)

Even though the recent changes in Sun's licensing, for distributing the jdk as a package, allows Ubuntu to provide prepackaged jdk's, I couldn't find a package for my Dapper install. On the dutch Ubuntu forums there was someone asking for a package for jdk 6u2, so I decided to give him a hand. This is the procedure that will work on Dapper, Edgy and Feisty: sudo apt-get install java-package now edit: gksudo gedit /usr/share/java-package/sun-j2sdk.sh search this section: "jdk-1_5_0_" [ 0-9 ][ 0-9 ] "-linux-i586.bin" ) # SUPPORTED j2se_version= 1 . 5 . 0+update ${archive_name : 10 : 2 } j2se_expected_min_size= 130 found= true ;; esac ;; make it look like this: "jdk-1_5_0_" [ 0-9 ][ 0-9 ] "-linux-i586.bin" ) # SUPPORTED j2se_version= 1 . 5 . 0+update ${archive_name : 10 : 2 } j2se_expected_min_size= 130 found= true ;; "jdk-6u" [ 0-9 ] "-linux-i586.bin" ) # SUPP...

In one of my last posts the other year I was complaining about my struggle fixing Debian after performing an upgrade while following the "testing" branch. Seems all the hassle I've been through, finally paid of. My upgrade to "etch" has been a very smooth transition. Since I was feeling adventurous, I decided to upgrade my vanilla kernel as well. The machine was running a vanilla 2.6.15.4 kernel which was becoming a little outdated. So I decided to take my chance compiling the most recent 2.6.22.3 kernel. Configuring and compiling was easy, but after a necessary reboot, iptables NAT and masquerading seemed b0rken. After googling a little bit, I discovered that the Netfilter people did a bit of refactoring in the modules and options necessary for NAT and masquerading. After enabling -> Networking -> Networking support (NET [=y]) -> Networking options -> Network packet filtering framework (Netfilter) (NETFILTER ...

OMFG, I just visited the site again and seems the date moved to September 8th. If you're following this blog, you can read that my girlfriend is expecting delivery of our twins the same date. Guess I won't be visiting the parade this year ... or lets pray for an early delivery somewhere in the middle of august ;)

This document is largely inspired by this link. The configuration contains a few flaws however and is not working for Ubuntu Edgy. First we need to install nss-updatedb: sudo apt-get install nss-updatedb Make sure to update /etc/nsswitch.conf : passwd: compat ldap [NOTFOUND=return] db group: compat ldap [NOTFOUND=return] db shadow: compat ldap Populate the cache by issuing: sudo nss_updatedb ldap Make sure nss-ldap doesn't search for the LDAP forever. Update /etc/libnss-ldap.conf : bind_policy hard nss_reconnect_tries 1 nss_reconnect_sleeptime 1 nss_reconnect_maxsleeptime 8 nss_reconnect_maxconntries 2 Check if this worked by unplugging the network and typing the following command: getent passwd Be warned, this might take some time. Now, install libnss-db and libpam-ccreds: sudo apt-get install libnss-db libpam-ccreds Update /etc/pam.d/common-auth : auth sufficient pam_unix.so auth [authinfo_unavail=ignore success=1 default=die] pam_ldap.so use_first_pas...

Prison Break has become a quite popular series here in Belgium. It shows how some dude is helping his brother to escape by tattooing the prison's blueprints on his body, along with some secret messages. Now, here in Belgium, we think that way of escaping is very oldskool and way too complicated. We just hijack a helicopter and airlift the guy from the prison's court. You don't believe it, read this link .

After a long time of uncertainty whether the Cityparade was going to be held this year or not, I found the releaving answer on the site today. It remains uncertain, however, which city will be hosting the parade this year. The other year it has been hosted by Charleroi. The year before that, the parade was hosted by Luik. Both cities are located in the French speaking part of Belgium. So, as tradition prescribes, it should be hosted by a city in Flanders. I don't care really. For the past six years it has always been fun, fun, fun. Be there!

The title says it all. Below is an ultrasound taken march 25th. As you can see, we're expecting twins ;) The babies are due near september 8th. I'll keep you posted ...

I'm sure many of you have encountered the same problem I was facing. I have a portable provided by my employer, but the employer does not provide any means of making backups of this portable. I know, he should, but hey, nobody's perfect. In the past 6 years I've been working for several clients, gathering a lot of data (code, documents, presentations, you name it). The past 2 years I've been doing some Biztalk work as well, working with virtual machines. Using virtual machines is ideal when doing Biztalk work. No need to pollute your perfectly running portable with Biztalk Server 2004 and visual studio. Working with virtual machines also enables me to work with different versions of Biztalk Server. An unpleasant side effect of using virtual machines is that they tend to take a lot of space on your hard drive and you'll need at least 1,5 GB of memory in your machine. As a result, I gathered 30 GB worth of data and virtual machines and I wanted to synchronize this wit...

Sometimes (I hope) you discover code you've written that was not as thread safe as you thought it was. Testing this can be quite a painful experience. I just found this article on Java World describing ways to create JUnit tests in a multithreaded environment. Looking at the date it was published, the article is quite old, so I was wondering if maybe there are better techniques than those described in the article.

This is probably illegal, so use it at your own risk. Some PDFs on the internet have a copy protection to make sure you cannot copy-paste any content from the PDF into a document you're writing. To circumvent this protection there are several tools available on the internet. I haven't tried any of them, because they're not free ;) There is however a procedure that will enable you to circumvent the copy protection using free tools. The trick is to convert the PDF to a PS (PostScript) document first and then convert it back into a PDF. So, download Ghostview en Ghostscript from: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ . Next, open your PDF in Ghostview. Next, from the "File" menu, select "Convert" (a dialog will pop up) Press "Ok" Fill in the name of the "converted" file. Press "Save" Tada, you can now copy content from your newly created PDF ;)

For those of you not familiar with ESB, where have you been the past years ;) For those of you not familiar with Mule, please point your browser to http://www.getmule.com . The following is taken verbatim from one of the Mule despots on the mule-user mailing list: Included are different ways that those not already in the Mule community can learn more -- including a flash movie with Ross Mason talking about basic Mule design principles, a RedMonk (IT analyst firm) survey on open source ESBs, and even a quick integration survey that they can take (in exchange for a Mule t-shirt).

For those of you interested in exploring the goodies of Sun OS, Sun is shipping DVDs for free . I came across this link _after_ downloading the whole CD set. Bummer :( I needed the CDs anyway because my Enterprise 450 does not have a DVD reader. Below are some images from Sun's site ... in case you're interested how this machine looks like.

Voor de Belgen onder ons die het jammer vinden dat Willy's en Marjetten vroegtijdig werd afgevoerd wegens te weinig kijkcijfers. Teken hier en dan bent u okidokipianissimoki ;)

I own 2 laserjet printers. One old LJ 1100 and another very old LJ 5L. The first one was priced over 400€ when I bought it 7 years ago. The 5L was "donated" since it was suffering the famous paper jam problem. After 7 years of usage, the 1100 was suffering the paper jam problem as well. You can find a lot of people on different forums describing the same problem. It seems that there was a time that HP was replacing the separation pad and pickup roller (which are the components causing this problem) of the LJ 1100 for free. Those times are gone :( So I surfed to http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/kits/hp and ordered: 1 HP LaserJet 5L/6L Multiple-Sheet/No Feed Paper Jam Repair Kit 1 HP LaserJet 1100 Multiple Sheet Feed Paper Jam Repair Kit The 2 kits arrived the other day and I was very keen fixing both printers (even though I only need one). The kit for the 5L comes with a new separation pad (whole assembly) and a new pickup roller. It also includes a video (on CD) showing how t...

So I decided to upgrade my blog to the latest version of Blogger. As you can see, the template changed. Nothing fancy though ;) Hope you like it (should there be anyone out ther reading this blog).