kennywest

Before I start telling about my new pet project, I must congratulate my 3 colleagues that joined me at the Ubuntu booth on this weekends Dipro fair. We managed to gather around €80 of donations from people collecting an Ubuntu (or Kubuntu) installation medium. Compared to an earlier fair I did, with roughly the same people, this amount of money is enormous. If everything goes well, this money will be transfered to the Belgium Ubuntu loco team for supporting their actions. Anyway, like any other Dipor fair, there were a lot of people trying to sell old computers and laptops for unreasonable prices, the most hideous cases, do-it-yourself-ink-cartridge-refill kits and mini keyboards only my kids can type on :) While strolling through the fair, however, a colleague showed me an interesting Wyse Thin Client. These terminals are normally used as a very lightweigt computer, accessing terminal services provided by some server running Windows or Unix. This particular device (a 9455XL ) was run...

A few years ago I bought an orange fluorescent rod, which, mounted behind my television cabinet, gives an orange ambient light. The other weekend, it broke down :( Unfortunately, the original manufacturer ( WOFI ) stopped selling these a while ago. Makro where I originally bought the rod doesn't sell them anymore either. So I had a problem. Velleman however has these rods in its products list, so I rushed to a local dealer, finding that he only had these in green and white (WTF?). So I still had a problem. There's no way to open these rods, since the black ends are glued to the orange rod at both sides. So normally, there's no way to open these rods without breaking something. Fortunately the black end with the power cord on the rod I own came loose a while ago. So I decided to take it apart to see if there was a way to fix it. Inside, there is a normal fluorescent tube of 56W (about 1.5 meters in length) powered by an electronic ballast. Normally, fluorescent lamps you f...

Voor de mensen van mijn leeftijd (of ietsje ouder) die de rotzooi die ze de kinderen vandaag voeren op televisie maar niets vinden, deze link . Hier kan je alles lezen over series gaande van "Merlina" tot "Tik Tak". De site heb ik toevallig via google gevonden en wou ik jullie niet onthouden. Eigenlijk was ik op zoek naar (en gevonden :) ) Blake's 7 .

I realize it has been a long time since I last blogged on this site. I am very sorry for this, but I have been very busy. First I started a project on MuleForge ( ServingXML Transformer ) that should help people using Mule to easily wrap all the power of ServingXML into one single transformer. There is already some code in the svn repository, but it doesn't build yet with maven. The problem is that ServingXML does not have any jars available in the main ibiblio repositories, so I will need to host these jars somewhere else. For the brave out there, just checkout the code, download ServingXML , put the jars in your local maven repository and issue a mvn clean install . This should get you up and running, if not, just wait for me to fix the build. The reason why I created this project is that people where asking me off-list for new code and documentation. Unfortunately I didn't have those, so the project should solve this, I hope :) I also got involved with uface . This small pro...

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 :)

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...

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 ;)

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).