Joined the hype, created a flickr account.

All of the lists.cocoondev.org email lists have been migrated to our new server since a week, and I'm having daily fun with educating people about their email server setup. I toggled a configuration switch in Postfix to not accept mail from malconfigured email hosts, and my logs are being drowned by folks attempting to connect to my mail server from a mail host which has no reverse PTR DNS record set up. Often, these are folks running their own server from home on a DSL line, but I already saw a technology firm and a bank as well. Having reverse lookups configured for an SMTP host is a requirement per RFC, and it helps me to block unwanted inbound traffic from virus-infected computers as well. Postfix does this during the SMTP handshake, so my virus software and spam filter don't even see the message nor is a bounce message sent. I'm not really willing to incur bandwidth charges by automatically bouncing back mail to malconfigured mail senders - so I'm manually sending out warning messages to legitimate attempts:

Hi,

upon reviewing my mail server logs, it has come to my attention that you apparently aren't
able to send mail to the lists.cocoondev.org domain.

Aug 24 02:39:52 strider postfix/smtpd[11721]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[x.x.x.x]:
450 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [x.x.x.x]; from=<xxx@xxx.xx>
to=<xxx@lists.cocoondev.org> proto=ESMTP helo=<xxxxx>

This is because of a faulty DNS setup on your end: there's no reverse PTR record pointing to
your mailserver (x.x.x.x), as required per RFC.

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ptr.ch?ip=x.x.x.x

I reckon you are not using a smart relay host (from your ISP), and would advise you to do so,
or ask them to set up reverse DNS for your IP address.

HTH,

</Steven>

dnsreport.com and dnsstuff.com have been invaluable in educating myself about sensible DNS practices, and I'm happy to have outsourced DNS hosting to a company who apparently knows his stuff as well.

I've started being a legal wannabee during my first job at Wolters-Kluwer, working with some very bright legal scholar workers on a SGML DTD for all Belgian legislation and jurisprudence. The result of our effort even got used by some other EU W-K companies, so I figure we did a nice job. I've left after three years of working there, but my curiousness w.r.t. legal matters remained. Lawrence Rosen namedropped his new book on the OSI discussion list, so I one-click-ordered it (patented!) through Amazon and I've been reading the book on and off during the past few days. Lawrence employs a clear, precise, and only slightly patronizing writing style which I happen to like. I've only read chapter 1 and 2 so far, but I can already recommend it. Unfortunately, as with many of these books (and licenses), it's a bit too Americo-centric for my taste, but since the US hosts many of the companies interested in the legal implications of open source licensing, that's fairly logical as well. I just saw O'Reilly is cooking up such a book as well, so I pre-ordered a copy already. Yeah, I buy books like other folks buy bread: yet another side-effect of once working for one of the largest publishing companies in the world.

This is my second week of work after one of the more blissful holidays of my life. Our kids are at the age where care isn't the main thing defining our parent-child relation, and for the first time after my love and me have started working 12 years ago, we arranged for a full concatenated month of holiday together. First we went on a two week trip to France, then we spent a week at home doing some longtime postponed home cleaning, and we finished our holidays with a week housesitting the house of friends who were on holidays abroad themselves. We enjoyed good to splendid weather nearly all the time, and spending four weeks together as a family, without the daily chores a two-working-parents/three kids family has during the year, made us remember what the meaning of life really is: feeling at home with the people you love. Let's try to preserve that feeling over the next 11 months. More pictures in my PBase albums.

I'm currently stuck with a backlog of nearly 3000 pictures, which I took over the past 5 months. I took the habit of shooting in Nikon's D70 RAW format (.NEF), after finding out that the auto white balance of digital cameras can easily be fooled when shooting in mixed light conditions. Especially with in-door pictures, white balance can be off pretty quickly, and the advantage of RAW is the ability to change WB settings afterwards. Nikon has its own RAW processing software (Nikon Capture) which produces nice and sharp pictures (you use such software to "develop" RAWs into a more common format such as JPEG or the likes). Unfortunately, NC is slow as molasses on my Powerbook, so I went shopping for an alternative. On Mac, there's two of them: PhaseOne C1 and Bibble. Since Bibble didn't support D70 RAWs, and C1 seemed rather nicely done, had D70 support, and was the proclaimed "pro" market leader, I bought a license of C1 from PictureFlow.
While C1 is a very nice piece of software, its file handling capabilities were below standard. It cannot traverse directory hierarchies (which I use to keep my RAW files sorted and named by shooting date), and it drops EXIF data from the resulting JPG - data which I can use in iView for quickly locating stuff.
I've however also been beta-testing Bibble4 since quite a while now, but wasn't impressed too much by the GTK cross-platform stuff underneath. Bibble4 is slowly getting release-ready ATM, so I ventured into a last beta test, after having skipped several releases. While the UI isn't as polished as C1's, the Bibble folks surely know how to provide people with productive tools. After having spent 5 minutes to figure out how to do what I wanted, Bibble went off mass-converting 700+ RAWs, recursing directories and storing processed results into a subdirectory: just the way I wanted.
Needless to say, if you have RAW conversion needs and your packaged conversion software doesn't cut it, I'm wholeheartedly recommending to watch the BibbleLabs website closely until they finally release Bibble4. Good stuff cooked up by a mom-and-pop shop!

I registered two BOFs for JavaPolis (13-17/Dec, Antwerp), one as a meetup for Belgian and international Java open source folks, and one about Apache Cocoon. Furthermore, the Cocoon GetTogether (11-12/Oct, Ghent) call for presentations was sent out by Andrew - come and have a look. And I'll be presenting Cocoon as well during XMLOpen, a new XML & open source conference in Cambridge (21-23/Sep).

Luc published an "interview" with Thomas Delrue, a Flemish guy who is doing an internship at Microsoft in Redmond. It's actually quite funny to see what happens when people get a stage about a topic they obviously haven't grasped yet. The interview is in Dutch, so I'll try and translate some of the funnier quotes:
"My experience with Linux and Open Source is rather limited. I've been playing with Mono and some Linux distros, but I don't quite share the Open Source philosophy. I don't think Open Source would be as big if you have to pay what you get. OSS being free is some candy to lure you into it. I don't like the mentality that everything should be free."
So what we have here is someone who downloaded Mono and installed Linux, and decides OSS is all about being free. While this might be true for most of its users, OSS is primarily a developer's thing, and I've come to realize that many OSS projects are very much economy-aware. Thomas also extrapolates the FSF vision into the overall OSS idea, which is a fundamental flaw with much of the less developed OSS critics. Big companies, on the scale of MS, are using OSS as a way to commoditize their products, and to offer their users the relative freedom to choose best of breed in a non-monolythic architecture. They differentiate themselves with services and add-ons, and feel customers are more likely to finetune their IT infrastructure because of open interfaces and open standards. This process of finetuning makes competition tough, but actually offers vendor independency while giving software companies the possibility to compete with what they can do best: track users' wishes, support them and think about ways to solve actual business problems, rather than just trying to keep the upgrade mania happening. GPL is just the tip of the proverbial OSS iceberg, and is being outclassed by a lot of business-reality-based license models such as the BSD/Apache-like licenses.
Furthermore, Thomas argues that OSS isn't innovative, with examples like Mono, KDE/Gnome, OpenOffice and Linux itself: how funny is that? While the software concepts behind these projects aren't exactly new, the fact that openly developed and reviewable instances of an application development framework, a windowing system, a word processor and an operating system are available today, learns us that the market actually wants these things untied from the economical goals of a single software monopoly. I'm pretty sure Thomas and his new love Microsoft like being in control of the software market, but they should not forget that software only has a reason of existence when it is being used. If users decide that they should not tie themselves into a monolythic (and insecure) system, software vendors should follow and break up their system into interchangeable parts. OSS on its own isn't going to do this, but it offers some best of breed components that learn software vendors what standards they should embed and support.
There's some more laughable claims about "what the user wants" in Thomas' discourse, but I'll leave that to others to dissect. It's a bit sad to see however how young minds can easily be fooled into false believes, if they are placed in the highly competitive, but definitely inwards-looking innards of a software giant. Go and have a look at what Microsoft and some others inflicted onto the world: a programming environment (Visual Basic) which still powers a lot of mom-and-pop-cooked speciality applications for book- and stock-keeping, video rentals management, or the medical records of my local health practitioner, and about which all of their users complain that their data is stuck into an application and a format which makes them dependent from their software vendor for longevity of their most precious data. By making software development a GUI thing, a lot of software has been written by non-developers, and whether this visual programming happens in Basic or .Net, their users' data is at risk of being hijacked ad eternum.
That's what Open Source is all about: freedom of data and vendor independence.