Wacken & go

A tad over due but i'm back from Wacken: Open Air, which while being a great metal festival, was a tad too wet this year, and especially the first few days where a absolute disaster; However, over all it was a pretty good festival and i got to see some good bands.

I also decided that i wanted to learn go. Mostly because it has popped up a few times now in movies and series i watched and it all seemed as a interesting new game to learn. Yet again i'm confronted with the fact that i live in a backwards province and the only Go club around was in Bergen op Zoom, and when trying to contact them, i discovered that they don't exist anymore or something. So now i think i'm going to have to suffice with going to a chess club. I haven't played chess in years, and even then only played against friends, so there might still be ample opportunity to learn new things.

Also on another note, i decided that i was doing a bit too little GNOME stuff. On the local level besides translations, there is very little going on, and since i don't have the time at the moment to start organising things. I decided that i should do some gnome marketing/gnome web stuff. Which at the moment consists of helping out with the donate page. This incidentally led me to use scribus which is a qt/kde based app, for doing typesetting/quark type stuff. The workflow of it was something i was not accustomed to, but i soon enough got the hang of it, and will probably use it again if i ever need something designed for print. Between work, hobby, gnome and having a social life this leaves very little time to work on pet projects, but i guess since most of those projects have been on hold for at least half a year, they can wait a bit longer.

Wednesday, June 13 2007

My new old job

Well i'm sad to say i won't be going to GUADEC this year; I was planning too, but because of work i can't really afford to go. It would screw up project planning and that can't really be changed.
On another note, i haven't switched jobs, my boss convinced me to at least stay another half year at sitesupport because of the previously mentioned project. It was a tough cookie because i really wanted to work for ibuildings, but in the end the project and certain other aspects where worth the half year.

On a totally "unrelated" note, i'll be getting a new computer this week *wheee* I'm really happy about it, since my current rig is a 6 year old frankenstein of replaced parts, and in recent months is beginning to give the ghost. Secondary ATA has died, and my harddisk is puking the occasional "[1967109.982456] hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }[1967109.982470] hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=275874352, high=16, low=7438896, sector=275874352 " error. (bad m'kay)

Although, next to the joy of getting a new rig, i don't like the prospect of making all those tiny adjustments and such again, like installing a sane cyrus21+postfix+fetchmail mail system, for my spam collection.

But for those whom care about such things, i've ordered the following system. I6.6 Intel Core 2 Duo Game systeem I'm really not a hardware person, so i don't have a clue what i actually ordered, but heck it was expensive so it must be good :)

Sunday, May 06 2007

Feisty update gone wrong, and some other stuff

This week i decided i could safely update to Feisty because i hadn't read any bad press about it, and what the heck i wanted to see what's new anyway. This however proved to be a bad idea, after the reboot the system just hangs, and when looking at what happens i find a single line in one of the tty's saying modprobe segfaulted (if i recall correctly).

So i booted back to the old kernel, which happily still worked. But for some reason the nvidia drivers don't like it anymore and refuse to work. So currently it's also back to the old nv drivers. I'm a bit pissed about this, because this isn't the first time ubuntu failed and i was expecting better. I also don't feel like fixing it right now and am hoping there will be a new kernel out in a few days that will fix everything.

On a totally different note, there's also a big chance i'll be switching jobs in a few months. Currently i'm working for Sitesupport but i'm hoping i will be able to go and work for ibuildings, the main reason for the switch is the travel involved. I live in vlissingen and sitesupport is located in breda, which means i have to drive more then two hours a day for work. Ibuildings however is located in vlissingen. That would be much closer which is nice. They also seem to be more into open source which for me is a big plus.

Also if your a php webdeveloper and are looking for a job, sitesupport is hiring.
And not just because i'm leaving.

Friday, April 13 2007

Chillin with my gnomies

A few days ago i found this T-shirt, and i'm actually pretty tempted to buy it for GUADEC :)

Monday, January 15 2007

Fluendo opens shop

I just found out that Fluendo filled there shop with a lot of media codec plugins, i've been waiting for this for quite some time since i first heard Ronald speak about it. I think the idea of paying for closed codecs on a open source system is fine, if someone legally creates a open version, sure i will take it, but i rather pay for legal codecs to view my media then use the w32codec pack from mplayer to view my stuff.

The installation was dead simple, either throw the codecs in a hidden subdirectory of your home directory or in your server wide gstreamer installation directory. And as expected it worked without a fuss, now most of my anime collection is playable in totem without stuttering or anything :) And like Ronald demo'd a few times while he was still in the Netherlands the seeking works like a wonder.

Some of the more obscure codecs still don't work of course X-h264 and such, but all mainstream stuff just worked.
Hopefully the shop will expand in the coming months to include many more codecs, and i'll probably be buying them all :) the price is right anyway, for all the codecs in the shop the current price at the moment is only 28€

As for screenshots well there's not much too see, but here's some shots anyway.

StratoS Online

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Monday, August 20 2007