Monday, November 14, 2005

Hand-Job-Dating

I came across a beautiful one today. Check out what was on news.google.fr..



Obviously one journalist at l'Express doesn't know what a handjob is in English.

Just so you know, this article is about jobs for handicapped people... geez.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

of CNN, France and Hobos

Well well, hasn't it been an eventful couple of weeks!

I saw this on CNN the other day, and just had to post it. I mean, I would love to meet the kid who did this little graphic for CNN... Where were you on that one, dipshit?!


I have some advice for you:
1. go back to elementary school and start from there
2. once you're done with step one, and assuming you can read and write, open a browser, go to www.google.com, and type "map of france" in the blank. Don't forget to press enter on your keyboard (it's the big inverted L button on your right).
3. When using Google Earth, at least take into account the CITY LOCATIONS!!!!!

Fucking idiot...

Friday, November 04, 2005

New beast

Last weekend we got a new addition to our little family..
Meet Merlin:



He's a Maine-Coon, and a cool little beast - now the challenge is to get him accepted by our current cat..

Riots in Paris suburbs

Damn hoodlums.. Burning cars, destroying other people's stuff..

I fail to see why we do not declare a state of emergency in those areas, and send in the military (the foreign legion comes to mind) to clean up this mess.

I'm imagining that those idiots would calm the fuck down at the sight of a ready-for-combat-fuck-with-us-and-we'll-open-a-can-of-whoop-ass foreign legion unit..

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

amaroK-1.3.5 available

I've just updated amaroK to 1.3.5 in the FreeBSD portstree. This fixes the bugs, I mentioned earlier on this blog.

I've also written a patch for the "auto scan music collection" issue, when using postgres as your db backend.

All your base are belong to us.

Friday, October 21, 2005

All dressed up, but nobody to play with..

So Friday night, the big night - the b-i-g night..
My better half has arranged a soiree between friends, in which I'd hate to impose on - and my own plans kinda fell dead due to various reasons, to I'm left with two options:

1. Go back to the office, and catch up on some of my work.
2. Get some super-funky drinks with some cool people..

As I'm having a cold, neither seems to attractive - but I guess I'll have to opt for door number 2. Now if only it could stop raining...

Too bad, there's not any all-night-open driving-ranges, I could *so* deal with hitting the living crap out of some balls now.. oh well, I will definitely go play some golf one of these days, it's gonna feel good !!

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

On the subject of spam

A couple of months ago, I setup David Schweikert mailgraph scripts for all our incoming/outgoing mailservers. Since end of August, we've received 534278 mails, in addition we tagged 135893 as spam. That's like 1/5 of our incoming mails, are spam !!
Imagine the resources we waste on fighting spam.. Bandwidth, a dedicated server to scan, tag and store messages.

Over the same period of time, we've caught 1046 messages containing vira of some sort, and I've (through postfix header checks) REJECTED roughly 33000 messages.

It's a sad state of affairs.

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

amaroK 1.3.3

I committed the amaroK 1.3.3 update to the FreeBSD portstree a couple of days ago, go get it !

The amaroK dev team really worked a lot on the stability, and it should be (according to them) the most stable release..ever..

I've already managed to find a couple of bugs.. The amarok port installs two main binaries (amarok and amarokapp), the first one being a wrapper for the latter. If you've compiled the port with libvisual support, you'll have to run amarokapp in order to visualize any plugin, the wrapper will not work.

Another thing is user-defined "smart playlists", they do not work with PostgreSQL support enabled.

I've created bug reports for both issues.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Google Reader Vs Bloglines

Thomas wrote a post about the Google Reader, so I thought I'd give it a try. As usual with Google services I was positively surprised, and have more or less switched to it now.

On the down side (as Thomas mentioned), I cannot easily see how many posts are unread, and to which category they belong - I have a couple of different categories, such as "Read now", "Read later" and "Read whenever".. I hope they'll add this RSN.

The big plus, is that it actually keeps the posts marked as unread until I click on it. In Bloglines I'd usually click on one of my categories, and all unread posts in that category would be displayed - it could be up to 40-50 posts all displayed at the same time - if I'd accidently close this page, or if firefox would crash (yes, it does happen once in a while) - all the posts would be marked as read, and it'd be a pain to read them.

Also, the Reader interface is sexy ;)

Monday, October 10, 2005

Rugby Extravaganza

Hello amigos!

Last week (Saturday morning), I had a little mishap at rugby - head-on collision with some dipshit - and my left eyebrow exploded.. Of course I took pictures, and mich has been begging me to put them up, so here we are.

This is just after the collision, at the 'Urgences' (read ER) of the Ambroise Paré hospital. I like the little drop of blood on my cheek, I think it really 'makes' the picture:


This is after the stitches. Still doesn't look too good:



Needless to say, everyone left me alone for a week, people in the subway would take different subway lines to avoid me.

The stitches are coming out tomorrow, so I don't look like Tyson anymore (well that's my opinion):


Full details: 5 internal stitches, to stitch up the torn muscles. 15 external stitches, to close up the 10 cm gap in my head.

Ciao!

dimbo

Thursday, October 06, 2005

EuroBSDCon 2005

Just registered for EuroBSDCon 2005. Yay !
I'm looking forward to seeing a bunch of old (and new) faces, especially as I did not go to the BSDCan (Canada) earlier this year.
This time is takes place in Basel, Switzerland - and there are a lot of interesting talks.

Trying to find a hotel for a reasonable price, got some good offers through the venue and the Swiss tourist office - as the conference itself will take place at a university campus, they've been able to really keep fees to a minimum.

Probably going to drive over there.. it's only 550km or so. Last year, I drove to EuroBSDCon in Karlsruhe, Germany - I believe the distance is about the same.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

New FreeBSD.org website imminent

The cool and slick re-design of the www.FreeBSD.org website, should come online sometime within the next 12 hours.

It has been created by Emily Boyd as her Google Summer of Code project.

Update: ... and it's been launched. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback on it.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Tennis

Managed to play a little bit of tennis this weekend.. it's been a while, so as suspected a was pretty trashed afterwards.. It felt good though.

Also, we went to visit some family in the north of France (near Amiens) - I enjoy coming a bit away from Paris, enjoying the peace and quiet (I'm becoming an old fart... ). We had some good food up there, they certainly know how to feed a Dane ;)

Came in to the office this morning, with the ever growing backlog awaiting.. it's getting increasingly tiresome trying to keep up with everything. Have a bunch of FreeBSD stuff I need to do as well, apparently there's still problems getting amaroK and libtunepimp-0.4 to get along. I hope I'll have a few moments tomorrow to play around with it.
Got a mail from Andreas Klemm with a bug-report on sysutils/hackbot. Basically, the path to the datafiles required by hackbot was wrong, so hackbot would bail out with an error... Last time I made a commit to the hackbot port was in March 2004.. Amazingly nobody else pointed out the error..

In other news, I can report that Dimitri looks more or less like a roadkill. He had a rugby playing "accident" and ended up with about 15 stitches in the eyebrow.. It's a sorry sight.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

amaroK 1.3.2

Just committed the amaroK 1.3.2 update to the portstree.
New features include:
- A new sexy volume slider
- Improved podcasting support
- Additional context menu for playlist window
- Scrolling through tabs

I built it on 4.x / 5.x / 6.x and -CURRENT.

I have yet to test it with the much anticipated libtunepimp 0.4.x version.

Friday, September 23, 2005

FreeBSD work

Supporting FreeBSD 4.x is becoming more and more of pain, I wish we'd drop that branch soon - so we can focus on 5.x / 6.x. - many ports needs heavy patching and quirks to be able to compile on 4.x..

Anyways, I managed to commit the long awaited amaroK update (1.3.1) the other day. I haven't received any bug reports yet, so I guess all is good. The amaroK dev team, just released 1.3.2, so my tinderbox is happily building away testing the build on different branches.
Akode engine support has been dropped (unfortunately), and Helix (realplayer) been added. PostgreSQL support has also been added, and it seems to work really great.

The aterm-1.00 update created a bit of noise, since most of it has been completely rewritten. Managed to solve most of the problems, there still a few loose ends though - Pav's been reporting some weird flickering behavior, that I've been unable to reproduce...

I also ported two new KDE apps; databases/ksqlanalyser and databases/ksqlshell. I'm particularly happy with the first on, as I'm now able to work on our ERP, MS-SQL powered server without vnc'ing to it. The latter is similar to the first, but created a nice GUI front-end for PostgreSQL and MySQL.

Long time no see.

Yup, we haven't really been around for a while.. For my part, I was on vacation for 3 weeks in the south of France, and the south of Italy, so frankly I could't be fucked posting anything on no god-damned blog.

I'm back now though, and in an attempt to kill time between now and 5pm, blogging comes in handy.

I've finally made it over to the enlightened side! I now have FreeBSD installed on my HP DV1100 laptop, and so far it's been pretty damn cool. It's nice to have a system that is free, boots in 15 seconds, is stable as hell, and had a bunch of really cool apps (which are once again, totally free). OK I have to admit, not everything worked off the bat after we installed FreeBSD. Getting 1280x768 resolution to work on my widescreen was fun, as was trying to figure out why some my mouse buttons weren't responding. There still are a couple things i need to figure out, like how to get my cd/dvd burner burning and my Compact Flash Bluetooth gizmo communicating, but I guess dealing with that shit is the price you have to pay!


I'm also running the coolest media player ever, maintained by that jackass of a buddy of mine. I must say Amarok was part of the reason I switched over - It was like a toy mich had which I could never, ever have. Well now it's mine. And it rocks.

Well that's all for now... ciao!




Long time no blog

Not getting too much blogging done these days, I guess I haven't got that much too report on..

Been reading a couple of good books lately:

- Blink: The power of thinking without thinking, by Macolm Gladwell

- A dogs life, by Peter Mayle (This is an excellent read)

and most recently Naked by David Sedaris. It's outright hilarious, and an easy read. Next in my queue is "The art of war" by Sun Tzu. I've been wanting to read it for a while, so I'm looking forward to it.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Hitchhiker

On my way home last night, I discovered this hitchhiker on my car:





He's pretty hard to make out, as my phone cam resolution is sooooooooo crappy.. but rest assure, he's there ;)

Monday, July 18, 2005

Tinderbox

Spend some time last week setting up Joe Marcus' tinderbox scripts. Works really well, and enables me to test ports builds on different FreeBSD branches. In addition, it makes installation packages that I can deploy over my servers, hence saving build times.

I've setup build environments for: RELENG_4, RELENG_5 and the newly branched RELENG_6.

Spent some time HTMLizing the README file, here it is.

Read more and get it here.

Pimp up da Firefox

Just came across a splendid article, on how to do fine-grained tuning of Firefox.

Give it a try.