April, 2008

Enough votes were cast to decide for the following about geekdinner Limburg:

• It will be held on Tuesday 27th May 2008.
• We should be at least 12 people (sorry Amedee, sorry Guy).
• This means it will be held at a restaurant, our office can’t cater comfortably for 12 people in one room to eat self-made dinner. Too bad!
• We might have a nice extra though: Wouter and I will try to provide a self-made dessert. I’m reserving our table at a place called “Paal 26”, which is only 500m from our office. After dinner, people who are interested can come along to join us for a great Belgian Nero-style waffle dessert at the office!
• That is if it won’t be too late, off course. I guess we can start a bit early. Let’s meet at 19:00 and start eating at 19:30. Is that okay for everyone?
• It’s literally at 5 metres from the exit “Beringen” on the E313, which is one exit next to Lummen where the E313 and E314 intersect.
• People taking public transportation: take the train to Diest and continue on bus 7 to Beringen which has a stop in front of our office and one in front of the restaurant.

Yesterday was a day well spent. I was at Mobile Web Camp Hasselt and did a presentation about My Mobile DB, a MyOwnDB presentation in which I focussed on our vision/roadmap for the mobile future (in short: through a very lightweight (in terms of bandwidth) REST API, MyOwnDB can become a *very* good choice to db-enable your mobile app).

I want to say special thanks to Dorien from citylive for putting such a great effort behind the event!

After a whole day of presentations, scripts and a Wii, a couple of late stayers had a drink/dinner together after which Loes and I went to Kinepolis Hasselt for a late-night film. Did you know that Kinepolis Hasselt inserts a 10-minute break in the middle of the film? This is so annoying, I’m really considering never to return there. It’s truly awful. A couple of weeks ago, I was there to watch Rambo 4. Exactly at the moment where Stallone says “It’s time to decide: live for nothing or die for something”, suddenly lights went on and music started to play immediately: “De meeste droooomen zijn bedrog…”. Argh! I didn’t get into the mood of the film again.

After one month of being forced to work with Mac OS X (Tiger), I feel very relieved being back in my familiar working environment (which mainly consists out of Gentoo Linux on a MacBook, urxvt, dwm, mutt, amarok, firefox, pidgin and vim everywhere!).

In the end, I didn’t manage to really fix my laptop. I tried installing a working grub stage 1, 1.5 and 2 in the dd-backup-image of my root-partition and putting it back on my laptop’s hard drive, but that didn’t work out. I didn’t want to spend too much time any more on figuring out why or what, so I decided to play it rough. I booted my Macbook into FireWire target disk mode, (which, by the way, is the most awesome feature for a laptop to have ever!), cleansed the hard disk completely, and performed a Gentoo stage 3 installation form scratch.

One problem. I only have one other Gentoo machine lying around, which is on a PPC iBook. Can’t compile x86 binaries, let alone an x86 kernel for my MacBook there (I don’t have any experience with cross-compiled Gentoo installations on remote FireWire disks). I performed the installation from an Ubuntu machine then, for which I first had to buy a FireWire PCI expansion card. Problem again, this was a 64-bit machine, and I didn’t realise it until I had a bogus kernel. So, rebooted the Ubuntu machine with an x86 Gentoo live CD (all of a sudden I was happy that these “fake” 64 bit processors^Wnuclear power plants from AMD and Intel have a 32 bit compatibility mode) to compile a kernel for my MacBook, and performed the rest of the installation from Ubuntu again, as the Gentoo live CD didn’t recognize the network interface in that machine.

What I found pretty cool was that, even though this is a fresh install, after restoring my $HOME backup, everything felt so familiar all at once. Emerging vim and having all your plugins and settings all setup is great. Emerging firefox and seeing your bookmarks, stored passwords and URL location toolbar autocompletion history all in place at once really made me feel like coming home again after having been away for a long time. :-)

Mac may look nice, and have wonderful hardware… but after one month of OS X, I just couldn’t manage to feel productive at all. Pity.

I volunteered for organising the next It Pro Geek Dinner (IPGD). At first, I was thinking of organising it in Hasselt. After all, we’ve had Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp before already. Being afraid that way too many people wouldn’t be able to make it to Hasselt, finding it too far away, I decided to move it a bit (20km) closer to the centre of the world: Paal.

So, if you want to join, please don’t hesitate to sign up!

And now, for the grand announcement: if not too many people subscribe (I’m not announcing the limit of course), I will invite you all to our office and cook myself. No need to worry. I know how to cook. A bit at least. ;-)

See you soon!

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On my laptop (a macbook), I dual boot between Mac OS X and Gentoo. Up to last week I only booted into Mac OS X once a month to see if there were any firmware updates (which only come in .dmg archives), so in fact I was single booting Gentoo.

Last week, of course in front of a customer, grub failed for no apparent reason. I just shut down my laptop cleanly in the morning and in the afternoon it didn’t want to work any more. Luckily, I could still boot into Mac OS X, so not all was lost.

When I realised that I couldn’t access my Linux partitions from within Mac OS X (due to imcompatible partitioning scheme types (GPT <vs> MBR)), I knew this problem wouldn’t be that easy to fix, especially because of this extra handicap: no CD-drive to boot a Linux rescue CD from. I had the same DVD stuck into my macbooks internal superdrive for over 4 months (yes, Thomas, this was your qeimc DVD :-p). After having it surgically removed by S&S they told me I would never be able to use my internal superdrive again, because the drive itself got displaced so it doesn’t fit with the opening in the casing any more.

Another thing I suddenly realised was that I did have good backups of all my data… but not of my working environment (/etc, dotfiles, $HOME/bin, …). That made me really want to get my Gentoo working again.

First try: boot into a rescue system. I tried with two bootable USB disks, which work nicely on another PC at the office. My macbook choked on both with a nice “boot error”.

Second try was at Barcamp. Thomas (another one) was so kind to bring along an external firewire cd drive, so I could boot into a resuce system and fix my grub. No candy. I sure got the live CDs (tried multiple ones) in my rEFIt boot manager, but actually booting from one was too hard a task for mr. macbook.

Third try: to the rescue! Here’s what I did.

Disk: /dev/rdisk0       geometry: 9729/255/63 [156301488 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
 #: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−
 1: EE    0   0   2 -   25 127  14 [         1 -     409639] <Unknown ID>
 2: AF   25 127  15 - 1023 254  63 [    409640 -   60817408] HFS+        
 3: 83 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [  61227048 -   54685260] Linux files*
*4: 83 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [ 115912308 -   40384077] Linux files*

I knew the start and size columns were expressed in sectors.

Then there’s . I knew I needed something like

The manual explains that works with 512-byte blocks. So I only needed to figure out what the relation was between 512-byte blocks and sectors. told me just that!

Filesystem              512-blocks     Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2              60817408 54925160 5380248    91%    /

Seems like partition disk0s2 has 60817408 512-byte blocks and 60817408 sectors. Therefore 1 sector = 1 512-byte block.

The manual also told me that the start-column is 0-based and the size-column 1-based. Bringing all this together brought me to

and yup… these dd images on elisa (another PC on our network) are loop-mountable.

Okay, my laptop isn’t fixed yet, but now at least I can try out some things without having to fear losing all my precious stuff! :-)

Last weekend, I spent my entire Saturday in geek-land: a Barcamp followed by a Geekdinner. Lovely!

I met some really interesting people again this time, and got to see live-blogging from nearby for the first time. Raphaël and I gave a presentation about MyOwnDB, and even before it was finished, you could read about it already. Apparently, it’s still not that easy to explain what MyOwnDB is all about. De Standaarddidn’t really get it completely either. We’ll have to work on that!

Anyway, I really love hanging around with Barcamp people, even though I couldn’t find anyone to help me fix my laptop. :-)

Later that day, we all shifted to the net|lash offices for a mixed GirlGeekDinner and ITPro Geek Dinner. I had a great time again meeting very interesting, almost famous people and hurting myself (and other people) playing tennis on a Wii.

I hereby officially announce that I will be organising the next ITPro GeekDinner. It will be the first one in the province of Limburg. Let me present you with a little fact: starting from Antwerp or Brussels, Hasselt is as nearby as Ghent is!