Jun 19

After a work-week without Denise, she will return home today. From what I can say she cannot read this message yet so we have a few surprises for her amongst them: I did the entire house, cleaned it from the top to the bottom. I vaccuum cleaned, did all laundry, washed the windows, ironed the washed items, did the grocery’s, played with Luca. Really; from monday till today I did not have had more then 15 minutes for myself. I made sure that we could eat on time very day, which Luca enjoyed very much because he was able to play afterwards; I am trying to think of a schedule that enables us to eat as soon as possible after arriving at home (that might mean that we’ll be cooking one day in advance for the next day), and trying to think of something that enables us to continue till 1900 hours (for example) and then have the rest of the evening off; and most of the weekend as well.

And there are a few more surprises, which I will write about later today; we do not want to spoil them before she’s at home right? ;-)

Jun 17

Let op, dit belooft een erg grumpy post te worden. Als je daar geen zin in hebt, kun je beter deze post niet lezen :-)

Vandaag las ik dat een aantal pensioenfondsen overweegt om de deelnemers te korten op de uitkering. De uitkering waar de mensen zelf voor gespaard hebben, jarenlang. Zo hebben de meesten voor VUT/Prepensioen en gewoon pensioen gespaard. Een grote groep 50+’ers die net niet overal in mee kon doen (de pech generatie) heeft al meerdere keren naast de pot gepist, en nu blijkt dat de actieve deelnemers ook gekort gaan worden. Ik begrijp dit niet. Mensen geven hun zuur verdiende geld in handen van een pensioenfonds, en in de beleving van bijna iedereen gaat dan dat geld in een fonds, waaruit “VEILIG” belegd wordt om rendement te maken zodat je later met pensioen kunt en tig jaar van je leven kunt dekken.

Niet alleen wordt je dalijk gedwongen door onze regering (Die overigens hier zelf maling aan heeft zal uiteindelijk blijken, zulke smeerlappen zijn het wel) om langer door te werken (tenzij je natuurlijk meer dan genoeg verdiend, als minister bijvoorbeeld, want dan boeit het je niet en stop je gewoon op een gegeven moment), tot je 67e, en korten financiele instellingen de uitkeringen waar ze zelf in geblunderd hebben. De topsalarissen worden niet 123 aan banden gelegd, maar wanbeleid bij deze bedrijven wordt ook niet echt afgekeurd of onderzocht, men doet er maar wat soepeltjes om. Ook het wanbeleid van de regering houd stand in ons totalitair regime. De regering en de elite eromheen houd alles strak in de hand, en het klootjesvolk wordt onderdrukt. Mooie democratie wat eigenlijk gewoon niet zo is.

Het wordt tijd dat we ons eens gaan verzetten hiertegen, het kan en mag niet zo zijn dat een regering standpunten uitdraagt die niemand (de meerderheid, die telt in een democratie?) steunt, kilometerheffing, hogere pensioenleeftijd, wanbeleid steunen van bedrijven, zelf wanbeleid voeren, Europese Unie NEE (herinneren we ons dit nog? dit wordt door de strot gedrukt, het heet nu alleen anders), auteursrechten shit (iemand die denkt dat het voor de regering is, no way, het gelobby van grote labels zorgt ervoor dat dit speelt, de resultaten lopen terug, en terecht, de marktwerking geeft aan dat de prijs te hoog is, dus dat om de vraag te vergroten de prijs omlaag moet, men gaat andere toevluchten zoeken want het KAN goedkoper, in plaats van dat dat wordt bewerkstelligd, wordt iemand dalijk bestraft omdat hij muziek en dingen download, maak dan de prijs goedkoper!) etc etc.

Ben benieuwd of mijn druppel op de gloeiende plaat werkt, leave a message!

Jun 17

Last Sunday we returned from Belgium. I first opted to drive the same way as we did on the way in (via Eindhoven) but we got redirected through Antwerpen, which made the travel easy and comfortable. One thing: do not eat at the AC restaurant near Breda (just before the border); it’s expensive and we didn’t like the food. The sate(chicken) wasn’t quite ready yet (not cooked very well); my Schnitzel was “ok” and Luca’s spaghetti was just from the Microwave and not entirely interesting / nice to eat.

Anyway; on friday we arrived, having eaten already so we could pickup my new Macbook (which is just in front of me at the moment updating and things like that) and head for our little house. It was a very nice little house, it’s one of the best houses that we had while being away for a weekend. We showered Luca and took some resting, this was one of the first weekends that we had ‘time off’. Saturday we had breakfast in the house, we got a very large survival pack from Snow :-) and headed over to the Quad terrain where Luca was about to drive. We found out that it was right next to our house so very short walk :)

Luca was a bit over optimistic and flew the Quad (we have some pictures, see the gallery) and we drove together as well, which was much more fun for both of us :) .. The rest of the time we went to the swimming pool and the childrensplayground. We had dinner with the Snow people later that day, (Good food, we liked it :) ), and again retired for the evening making a slow stop, great to get back to strength a bit because of these weekends :)

Sunday we again went to the playgrounds and the swimming pool ; after which we headed home. Denise unpacked and packed, she’s away with her group 8 :-) , so the house is entirely mine :-) :-) (or at least for the moment).

Now heading out to fetch Luca from school and then eat and swimming (again :D )

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Jun 12

In an hour, I will drive to Vlaardingen together with Luca to pickup Denise. We are then heading towards the Molenheide in Belgium. Why? Because Snow organised their annual spring-weekend. The kids are invited so Luca and Denise will travel along. I fear that we will hit high traffic near Eindhoven, but lets see how things resolve :-) . When we pass Eindhoven we will lookout for other Snow cars; there should be a few of them around there. Luckily after Eindhoven we are nearly there.

On sunday we will return in the midday, after that I’ll write up a little story and put in some pictures :)

Jun 11

At the beginning of this year I was asked by the BSD Magazine people to write an article. I asked what the idea was and I was told that I could emphasize on security, or the installation of FreeBSD and things like that. But then in a way to that everyone can understand it. Also I knew that I was going to move out of the house within limited time, so I agreed writing it if I could have some help.

Jeremy Reed, Michael Lucas and Murray Stokely helped where possible and it resulted in a very nice article. The issue should be out soon, so you are invited to order the issue of http://www.bsdmag.org and read the article I wrote. It goes about installing FreeBSD 7.1 (yeah it applies to 7.2 as well for whats it worth :) ). So stay tuned!

20090612: In addition you can download/order it from here: http://www.freebsdmall.com/cgi-bin/fm/bsdmag.05?id=HtzwqhCU&mv_pc=105.

If you read it, I am ofcourse interested in seeing what you think about it, so do not hesitate to let me know!

Jun 06

Ed Schouten started working on a FreeBSD – clang project. He did this by importing clang into a project repository and making sure that a ‘make buildkernel’ succeeds. (If I followed correctly). I believe this is one of the steps that he will be taking to get the LLVM compiler suitable for FreeBSD, and perhaps eventually replacing the GNU licensed gcc compiler. That (like his TTY work) would be one hell of a job! Please poke ed@FreeBSD.org if you are interested in helping!

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Jun 06

The FreeBSD 8.0 code slush had been announced. This means that large projects are no longer allowed to do “drive by commits” to the head branch, but that there is an organisation behind it that checks everything and makes sure there are enough people to cover the project and make sure it’s in the best possible shape before the release. The release will take a little to get going, but the process had been started. From here on the team will have to manouver through a pipe that keeps getting smaller and smaller. If your favorite new feature is not in yet, don’t hold your breath because this might mean that it will take a little longer to get it in a first -RELEASE installation. Stay tuned!

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Jun 05

Make backups. That’s one of the lessons learned after reinstalling Nakur. I transfered back all files to the machine, and most functionality is completely restored. This could only be done because of backups that I had available with rsnapshot. rsnapshot under FreeBSD is maintained by Ralf v Dooren, a Snow collegue! and works best for this to get the backups back at home…

There is one pity though, the upload speed is capped at 1mbit. This makes restoring large backups a bit more problematic. Even if you have all data (OK I now have a full SQL backup script running everyday instead of periodically), you also depend on the speed with which it can be restored. If that speed is inadequate it makes restoring painful.

I toyed with the hetzner backup FTP server and I am using Duplicity with a given password, so that I have “local” backups available, which can be transfered at multiple megabits, a full backup took ~ 4 hours, which makes it double that amount max to restore (I like to take the times bigger then they really are). That’s better then 5 full days (5×24hours) :-) .

So, speed is also important :-)

May 31

Yesterday/today I reinstalled Nakur. Not because I wanted to do that, but because an upgrade messed up libc.so.7 which was needed by.. well at least most of the support binaries. Instead of using /rescue I managed to reboot the device and well you can imagine, mess up the entire machine :-) .

It took me a while to recover from it, first I needed to get the machine up and running again remotely. I first tried to get into my Zpools remotely, but I am too stupid to get that going. Also the rescue image didn’t support ZFS so that was messed up. After reinstalling a fresh system, I decided to leave zfs on nakur and go for gmirror instead.

My rsyncs are still running. I have backups for almost 95% of the materials on the machine, except for some SQL databases. So some blog entries are vanished sadly. If you miss something that was important to you, please let me know!

May 31

FreeBSD 8.0’s code freeze is upcoming. The last hands are getting layed on importing crucial things that we want to have in FreeBSD 8.0. This is not an announcement that we will start freezing soon, but you might consider this as a pre-headsup. One of the features that I am personally proud of is the new TTY layer which is MPSafe from this release on. My friend Ed Schouten rewrote the code to make this happen and I am very excited to see it being put to it’s widest potentials.

But not only that, if we were to cut a 8.0 release -now- it would have the following features:

- new TTY layer
- hierarchical jails
- updated zic/timezone code
- various 802.11 fixes by Sam Leffler
- MLDv2
- new USB stack
- Network running entirely GIANT free
- IGMPv3

and many many features/stability/code improvements as well!

Be prepared for the actual code freeze

(There were some comments that were lost due to server rebuild problems :-/).

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