Marc, himself, his blogs, and you reading them.

McGuyver

2006-12-16T21:06:12+01:00

Finally. The bags are packed. We're ready to go. Off with the family for little less then 3 weeks to Egypt! Departure tonight.

Noteworthy special dialog:

mom: Why don't you help me out packing, son.
son (aged 6): Ok.
Hey mom, what are these?
mom (whishing she remebered those before asking him to help): Condoms, son.
...snipped...: Intertaining dialogue balancing between honesty, truthfull leveled information transfer and slight evasiveness.
son (showing he understood): Well, they sure didn't stop me from coming to be.
mom: (speachless)

Apparently totaly unrelated, this dude is filing for a vasectomy upon return... :-)

Anyways. That's all for this year. Probably one of the early ones around: but here are my best wishes for the coming year. Have fun during the season holidays. And see you around in 2007

Open source licensing - final version.

2006-10-05T08:52:12+01:00

Finally an open source license model I completely grasp: The NpBoL. I think it's both the original and the final version since I can't see how one could make it more complete by removing anything from it.

This completely appeals to one of my most natural social tactics. I'ld like to call it the "since you invented your existence into my life, I'll gladly opt to ignore you did so"-approach. Sometimes though public pressure requires you to disguise it with a flair of naivety and continued pleasant surprise...

Taming maven-2, part 1.

2006-08-04T14:35:29+01:00

Or as Howard was putting it; 'appeasing the petty God'. Matter of fact, the maven team selected his quote to be this week's guiding 'topic' of the #maven irc channel.

Entering maven-2 land is like coming home after the long and winding travel maven-1 was about. Yeah sure, there is some laundry you badly need to do. But your custom build cutlery is getting a dedicated spot on the cupboard as opposed to getting wrapped up and displaced all the time. If you're the kind that will never leave ant, that's just fine, but if you ever waged into maven-1, you really should schedule switching to maven-2.

(Although just like maven-1, this release has some rough-edges feeling, I just have my hopes up this is a good sign of release early-and-often that will eventually go away)

Doing injustice to the smooth 80% I'm only adding these simple lists: (anyway, the actual recommendation here is just go and see for yourself)

There is plenty docs already out there (always room for more). Some maven sources that inspired me:

Java posse interview with Brett Porter. (#070)
Better Builds with maven. (Mergere's book)
Almost all of Maven's mini-guides (from this list)
helpful hands at the #maven channel
loads of lucky searches at Google

Trick's I've learned already:

check the effective-pom
```
mvn help:effective-pom | less
```

let plug-ins describe themselves

mvn help:describe -DgroupId=org.apache.maven.plugin -DartifactId=maven-compiler-plugin -Dfull -Dmojo=testCompile

use the -X to get a grasp of the life-cycle steps, and how it all works (pipe through less to read at your own pace)
write those MOJO's, no really, write them!
use the maven2 extension for eclipse, and don't think so fast you should file a bug
don't try to be smarter then the tool (specially: stop thinking pre-goal/post-goal)

Which brings me to the 20% of 'Making Sacrifices on the Maven-2 Altar'.

[random sequencing of goals]
The immediate advice I got on the channel when opening with "I'm looking for the maven-2 equivalent of the maven-1 'pre-goal'" was this clear "don't hold your breath".

Here is what seems to BE: The order of goals tied to one and the same life-cycle phase are executed

AFTER the one that is tied to the life-cycle for that particular packaging type
and then in no particular order,
(although it looks like it follows the order they are declared in the effective-pom)

Note that the order in which you declare plug-ins in the pom is irrelevant! (Which makes sense if you grasp that changing the plugin-order in the parent pom, could affect the effective order of any child pom.)

So, you are not to expect any ordering between multiple goals tied to the same phase. Which basically boils down to: we're left over to the goodwill of maven-2 to define enough phases to tie your goals to.

Note: above is unless you are willing to define your own artifact and life-cycle, which might very well the place I end up for other reasons after all. (There afaiu you can define your own phases as you please.)

[integration tests]

After quite some attempts I'm just giving up on trying to combine regular junit tests and integration tests in one and the same module.

The fact that both have different life-cycles assigned to them kept leading me to believe that I should be able to combine them in one project easily, but it turned out there was no easy way for me to get the correct ones executed in the different phases.

Well, so far for my first weeks of maven-2. As they say: "it ain't over till the fat lady sings", and I sure have some more maven-laundry to be done. If anybody has some advise on the above just drop me a note.

Insomnia cure

2006-07-27T08:50:05+01:00

People not tired enough by counting sheep can now switch to counting ubuntu users.

Information Biology

2006-06-09T11:09:07+01:00

The commodity (in our world) of "being able to read" is hiding a tremendous natural wonder. For me personally it's at least the wonder bringing me one of my biggest joys. Give me letters and I'll enjoy reading, sucking up the memes contrived in them. By the way: It's fun to see how it's taking a similar place in the lives of our kids (even when the youngest is yet to learn how to make meaning of those funny marks, it's obvious he's already drawn to them)

My current read is Steven Pinker's - "How the mind works" (In Dutch translation and borrowed from a colleague who is now delving through my copy of Oliver Sacks' - "Uncle Tungsten"). I'm somewhere half-way enjoying the ride through smart insights, remarkable test results, funny anecdotes and clever mind-tricks. The mainstream of the shared ideas, although those require careful attention to grasp, are easily accepted into my postmodern view of the world. Since there is no eternal truth, this comes pretty darn close to it IMHO :-).

Pinker's view on "how mankind's step into the 'information niche' has been instrumental to its biological success on this planet" pins down the unbeatable advantage in our world of being natural information processors. Looking at the rest of the biomass out there it is by far our most distinguishing talent. It's great how we extended this into non living material that cooperates in the effort, and even more to see how we use our reflections on those machines to gain better insights in how the biological versions are working.

Apparently unrelated I'm receiving this week the invitation to join in on the presentation of Lennart Martens' PhD thesis. It's safe to state he's one of Belgium's most talented (Java) software engineers. More importantly to me however he has turned out to be one of those instant-click people I've had the pleasure to meet. Mostly due to a similar sense of humor and some joint interests in (reading!) life I guess.

Anyways, the man kinda left professional software engineering and went back to his biotech roots some years ago. His goal was to leverage his acquired professional software development knowledge into this extraordinary field of fundamental biotech research (which was predominantly inhabited by dedicated Perl-hackers at the time). To say he's been successful at that too would be an understatement. (Naah, there ain't that many people I know that had a publication in Nature, but YMMV). So yeah, I'll be happily joining in on the presentation next week, not in the least because I'll be treating myself: On top of things, he's quite an entertainer as well.

Anyways. This got me into skim-reading Lennart's work lately. Lennart is making quite an open source statement in his work as well and has been releasing the fruits of his labor under open source licenses. Quite a natural thing to do for government research if you ask me, but apparently important enough in his field of expertise to find some argumenting inspiration in some well chosen quotes:

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

-- (attributed to) Sir Isaac Newton

"Information, no matter how expensive to create, can be replicated and shared at little or no cost."

-- Thomas Jefferson

In my current state of mind (being half filled up with Pinker's ideas) this last one reads like Darwin's mission to humanity :-). If ever you were looking for some reason of being, then why not actively work to exploit nature's selected gift to humans: "Process information" and maximize the effect by sharing it to others so they could do the same?

Well, having a new ubuntu release in the same week accompanied with the example Mandela Movie to explain what the word means is probably just coincidence? Or is there some growing spread of this new meme?

One final note in light of all this. Receiving a compliment for 'sharing your insights' is probably the nicest gift one can get. Thx mate, and happy to.

Dapper Update Story

2006-06-08T21:45:11+01:00

Updating to the new Dapper distro was slightly less boring then expected. Getting everything up to where I was before was as easy as:

use upgrade-manager -d
fix up the xorg.conf for fglrx
reconfigure vmware
done

Uh, leaving breezy was a breeze :-)

J-Dapper

2006-06-01T08:46:50+01:00

It's announced to happen today, but it hasn't happened yet so it seems... So we're still waiting for the big world-wide mayor download feast to start.

Anyway, it got me thinking about way back how this debian peep talked about this other guy that was running this new linux distro. For some reason, that was enough to get me into it. Which means I've been going through the warty-hoary-breezy sequence up to now: patiently awaiting dapper.

The big pre-release-news posted on the ubuntu-fridge this morning is about ubuntu running on Sun's hardware. Unsure what Steven is yet to think about this in terms of practical administration of this new box, but this surely means it could be running an apt-aware OS. {/me thinking 'hoho, now I have a machine-gun (Die Hard)}

For the mere mortals amongst us there is a far more important outcome of this canocial-ubuntu-sun-sparc courtship: A page like this reads as apt-get install sun-java5-jdk. Sweet.

Incredibles!

2006-05-24T16:36:42+01:00

"Of course every super-hero has an alter-ego! Do you think I go shopping in this outfit?"

In an attempt to prove that teachers are in fact super-hero's, there is at least two of which I've discovered their alter-ego:

Mark Van den Borre, is a music teacher who also started this great initiative of listing up ubuntu-support-spots in Belgium.
and "Meester Jan", my (worhsipping) daughter's much adored (by mothers as well) teacher, is in fact nobody less then PIV HUVLUV the stand-up comedian. (Fien's latest evaluation listed a proud 9/10 for "Speaking up: Telling a joke in class.")

The local (and new) event-palace is hosting in exclusive (sold out) pre-avant-premiere his single-man show this evening. I'll be safely hidden in the audience checking out his teaching methods... Hm, haven't seen him shopping in this outfit!

mpo the bofh

2006-04-21T22:01:42+01:00

Confession time.

I suck at system administration stuff. No, it's worse: I just hate every moment spent at doing (euh, failing at) it. I even have my own theory to justify why. It's a personality thing, and I'm sure every psy-HR-manager out there will have tons of scientific argumensts to back my claim.

The corner-stone of my theory runs around the huge amounts of utterly illogical detail-facts one need to pile up to cope with the "Arbitrary Complexity" introduced by tons of well-thinking developers that all needed this arbitrary string-value-format saved under this arbitrary property-key-name in this configfile with that arbitrary name over there in that arbitrary location. Sigh. Better not forget about the case-sensitivity on all those....

Sure GUI config tools are a big hellp ! To me however they just introduce arbitrary placed menu options triggering arbitrarily layed out dialogs...Naah best help comes from Google unless you couldn't guess that very well choosen best searchword...

Somehow there seem to be people out there that feel like a fish in this water of randomly choosen rules to comply to. The more I think about them, the less I can be surprised about any mild social disfunctions they might carry along.

Anyways, I feel often saved by piling up the 'sensible defaults' from preconfigured packages I just apt-get install and assume working from there. Not so this week however where for some reason or another I've found myself strugling with some of the above in full depth. Some of my results below, as a future reference to myself and somewhat as patch to the Internet as a whole who didn't had this indexed with the google-search-words I had in mind.

apache2 vhosts and mod-proxy

When faced with the symtoms of

browser showing "Forbidden. You don't have permission to access / on this server."
logs showing "client denied by server configuration: proxy:http://localhost"

there is a fair chance you are just missing out on this small section to allow the proxy-ing to happen:


        
          Order deny,allow
          Allow from all

Setting up automatic mysqldumps with logrotate


# use:
# 1/ copy this to /etc/logrotate.d/mysqldumps

# 2/ in the postrotate section
#   modify password for root
#   check that uname -n doesn't produce an _ in the name for this host. --> change script with other delimitors if needed

# 3/ bootstrap with for each database you want:
#   $ export DBNAME='hetsysteem_db';
#   $ sudo touch -t `date --date="1 day ago" +"%m%d%H%M" ` /var/backups/mysqldumps/MYSQLDUMP_`uname -n`_${DBNAME}.sql

# test with
#   $ sudo logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/mysqldumps


/var/backups/mysqldumps/*.sql {
    daily
    rotate 5
    missingok
    compress

    postrotate
      file=$1;
      if [[ $file =~ '.*\/MYSQLDUMP_([^_]*)_(.*)\.sql' ]]; then
        DBNAME=${BASH_REMATCH[2]};
        /usr/bin/mysqldump -hlocalhost -uroot ${DBNAME} > /var/backups/mysqldumps/MYSQLDUMP_`uname -n`_${DBNAME}.sql
      fi
    endscript
}

Quiz time

2006-03-31T07:28:36+01:00

Found myself at an incredible difficult fund-raising-quiz last weekend. Which translates to "Paying your share to feel stupid all night." Go figure!

Anyways, among the load of those silly "Why can't I remember stupid facts" questions there was also the more interesting logic and riddle section. Here is one from that set:

Two ferry boats (A and B) operate on a river. Both boats have different (but constant) speeds. At a given time they start off together at opposite sides of the river and meet 155m from the side where B started. When they reach the other side both need to wait the reglementary 12 minutes before (each at their own time now) can start crossing over again. During this second crossing they meet at 85m from the side where B took it's second start.

Obvious question: How wide is the river?

A horse of a different color...

2006-03-17T08:20:42+01:00

Well. You know this embarrassing scene where you've been singing allong with some pop-song for years (practically screaming your heart out in fact) only to suddenly see the lyrics in print and realize...

Blush

While Steven is busy at boldly bringing daisy where no daisy-man has gone before, the rest of us kept to the standard Outerthought way of live. Which for some reason allowed company lunch to deteriorate into one of those spit out your famous geek-quotes. (Off record, and you might be surprised, but Bruno ran a lousy score!)

Anyway, silly me always thought the expression 'a horse of a different color' only made sense to people knowledgeable to 'Emerald City'. Me being impressed and all by a movie not only influencing modern language, but even creating the mini-cultural context in which one could deduct the etymological traces for the semantic novelties.

But to my surprise, the web proudly produces evidence that no one less then Shakespeare himself knew about the beast.
Boy, this sure doesn't look like Kansas any more!

Oh, and a late runner up this morning almost got us started again: "The blow blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds". (from the exploding whale)

Beautiful tasting Belgium

2006-03-06T08:09:26+01:00

Got out to Brugge, die skone this saturday to mingle with international tourists. (Incredible how many languages I heard speaking out on the streets there). The trip is only 20km for us but we got in full tourist mode (taking pictures like crazy et al) mostly to enjoy one of the last weekends that the missus is *NOT* in full tourist mode. Working on the family-run-campsite the term takes a different meaning from mid march to mid oktober.

Anyways, we had a splendid time and can recommend these ready made attractions in the city:

Taking the Kabba (dutch only!) along: A booklet which provides 3 different search-walks for kids
Visiting the Chocolate museum which was amusingly chauvinistic and pro-chocolate (two mild deficiencies I recognise within myself)

So yeah, the relation between overweight and chocolate is scientitifcally not proven, but the aphrodisiacal benefits of the productmight very well be just true :-). And belgian chocolate is just better then the rest (well, the swiss do a not too bad job) because of:

Simply belgian law: All fat in chocolate over here needs to be chocolat-butter, any drop of different fat and you can't call it belgian chocolate.
Chocolate grinding in Belgium goes down to a particle size of 20 microns (the rest of the world typically stops at 30-35, which is the scientific measured 'resolution' for the taste-awareness of the tongue anyway. Any automation engineer knowing Nyquist-Shannon will explain you why we got it right though :-)

Mesdames

2006-02-27T22:48:33+01:00

Books.enjoy()

2006-02-24T12:12:48+01:00

Been a while since it happened, but I've been crying my eyes out in laughter with my current book. Yeah, I'm probably over-reacting there, but his books keep on doing that to me. I've been an absolute John Irving groupie ever since The World of Garp. Even if I'm probably only enjoying the play from the balcony ( after trying out some originals I know his kind of language subtleties passes by at my knowledge of the English language so I'm happily relying on the quality translation work of the local publisher)

Quite different (and only dutch) there is a new book from Pieter Gaudesaboos to add to your childrens' bookshelf. It's again a prize-winner: "Stad van Pieter Gaudesaboos winnaar van boekenpluim 2006" (jury-report in dutch)

14+

2006-02-20T08:02:43+01:00

Ok, so we (me and she) got through the seven fat and the seven lean years now. We know we're going out this evening, but does anyone know what's to follow next?