Yesterday I finished the very last piece of a big project, repainting the doors, wooden posts and the upperfloor. The colours used where a bit yellow-ish, but now they are opal-white (or how that is written). It looks much better and brighter. Ofcourse I can do more things around the house like repainting the walls on the first floor and the upper floor, and more of those kind of things, but this is a major breakthrough 
On August 31, 2009, In Weblog, by Remko
Last night the FreeBSD team had unfrozen the development branch for -HEAD (What will eventually lead up to 9.0-RELEASE). Although people need to be conservative about commits they make, they can continue development again. RELENG_8 is still frozen but people are allowed to merge after consulting the Release Engineering Team. Good Progress is being made now to get 8.0 out of the door.
After doing the house (painting, cleaning up) I have now arrived at cleaning up and improving the Evilcoder.org pages, and reintroduce the Elvandar.org section. The ‘posts’ surrounding that will be moved to subpages underneath the Elvandar.org button on top. Also my Resume and things like that have been placed under ‘about’, where it belongs. The systems pages are gone, I saw no continued use for them and I needed to update them too frequently . If you have suggestions on replacements, Let me know!
After being in the field of a systems admin I have met a large group of various spamfilters. Even at home I played with some of them and found that they were quite effective. Though lately a decrease is being seen on my hosts that make me wonder. Spamassassin’s spamd (which I use) does not get any new updates for some time already. That might mean that all spam is the same as it always had been, or something else is fishy.
My spamfilters were quite effective till around two weeks ago. Effectiveness of around 90% suddenly decreased to 66% (as per spamstats.pl which reports the spamd output). I also setup some relays just a few days ago that filter a lot of known blacklists already and prevent them from even entering the system. Some of the domains that I manage had been altered to use them instead (not JR-Hosting domains that is).. I also see a large amount of blocks there (As I expected). But still for every 1000 emails that are being send every day at the moment (ok the volumes aren’t impressive ) 330 (at least) are spam in the last two weeks.
I could retry to train my filters again ofcourse (and train around 200 emails or so instead of too much). If there are suggestions, please let me know!
Today RELENG_8 had been opened up again. Reason for stalled commits and such is that the SVN to CVS exporter was unable to cope with the new branch and didn’t export anymore. To prevent massive surgeries needed to get the system backup again, we stopped the exporter and fixed it. Simon Nielsen and Peter Wemm did a lot of work to get this in the proper position again.
Unfortunatly this stalled development and working towards RELENG_8 a bit. But headsup, things are now getting back to normal and the queue by re@ is being flushed.
Stay tuned!
On August 4, 2009, In FreeBSD, by Remko
Yesterday Ken Smith created the RLENG_8, which is required before being able to release any 8.x version at all. This is the first step that will finally lead up to BETA3, after which RC1 is planned. Beta3 also marks the end of the “liberal” ‘ok we still allow some new features if they had previously been discussed’. No more new features will be inserted when BETA3 becomes live. I will try to make a nice list of what’s new for 8.0 the moment BETA3 is tagged. The release is one step closer again!
On August 2, 2009, In Photography, by Remko
I bought a new lens yesterday from Sigma:
Sigma Lens
It’s a macro lens which I can use to closely photograph flowers and insects amongst other things. I played around with it yesterday a bit and made very nice pictures from Luca’s eyes (which are nice and blue).
In the meantime I am also looking around for the Sony Alpha 380 body, which looks very OK after testing it, but it’s still a bit expensive for the moment 
A little ago I wrote a furious blog about organisations that should be violated from this world, or change it’s method of thinking. The RIAA and BREIN are just a few of those organisations. Just very recently nu.nl: http://www.nu.nl/internet/2051635/rechter-verbiedt-downloadsite-the-pirate-bay.html reported that a dutch judge allowed an order from PRIVATE company BREIN which asked to shutdown access from The Netherlands towards Sweden (The Pirate Bay).
Whilst I do not want to judge whether the content provided by TPB should be illegal or legal (depends on country, law, etc), I do want to judge about what I wrote in the previous paragraph. How is a Dutch judge allowed to “order” a foreign entity (or group of people whatever) to shut down access from an entire country just because someone isn’t agreeing with the site? The power of the interwebs(yeah internet) is that there is a freedom of speech,press, and things. If something is forbidden in the country of hosting, then there is a case.. in that specific country. We tell everyone we are the western and civilized world, but instead we are far worse then China in our filtering methodology.
The judge must have been having a really bad day to allow this, give “jurisprudentie” about this and allow other funky things like “We have requested the persons to be in the court via email, facebook, twitter and more of those technology related things”. This goes beyond control. 1984 here we come, BigBrother is Brein and associated judges!.
Do note that I believe these sites have such a large success in the first place is because of the prices being too high for digital media (CD/DVD and so on). If the prices lower, you will see a dramatic decrease in downloading, if the prices are kept high, there will remain an increase in interest in these things. I wonder when people will start realising that.
For now, The Dutch Government, Judges and “organisations” had failed again, I do not understand how they can keep surviving. Stand up people!.
On July 24, 2009, In Weblog, by Remko
After almost 14 days of around 40degrees we feel hot. Its incredibly hot especially because its 14degrees and rainy in the netherlands! Tommorrow we will be flying home again. Egyptians are interesting people but can be very problematic for tourists, the income differences are too big, they earn 40€ per month while we do not wake up for that.
Though people are grateful if you tip them a bit, litterly one second ago i tipped our poolboy, i gave him a quarter of his standard wages and he blessed me. Its a mere few euros for us but very important for them. Its good to be able to do good every now and then.
On July 20, 2009, In Weblog, by Remko
After seeing them we got the opportunity to swim with the dolphins. Sadly they were not seen by me but they swum under me people told. We also saw nice coral reefs with nice fishes. just a few more hours to return to the harbor
English 
Dutch 