June, 2008

My Gentoo on a Macbook article,
although more than 18 months old now, is still attracting quite some eyeballs
and emails with questions and remarks. I was helping out someone getting
Gentoo configured on his Macbook, when he told me he saw a funny red light
coming out of his headphone plug. All I knew was that you could control the
light playing with the IEC958 switch in alsamixer.

Being reminded of it, I decided to give it a better look this time. I found out
that it actually is an optical
port of the internal sound card. Hmmm… as I happen to own one of these 5.1 systems of
creative (which I absolutey love, by the way). I checked available input
connectors, and yap… it had an optical in. Took me a while to find it, but
eventually, I got an optical
fibre cable with a mini adaptor, so it fitted in my Macbook connector.

Five minutes of playing later, I had a fully working, remotely controlled, DTS
and Dolby Digital capable surround system, accepting AC3 pass through sound,
capable of doing movie and music up mixing and giving me the true 5.1 surround
experience.

Just the idea that I have been running around with this feature on my laptop
without even realising it!

Feels good to use the hardware you paid for just that little it more. :-)

Live from the Gardemoen airport in Oslo. I’m
getting better and better in getting free internet access at airports lately. :-)

The last two days, the small town of Skien held three conferences at once: Open Nordic, the eZ conference (including the amazing eZ
awards event) and the very first Mobile Open Nordic.

I learnt one interesting fact. Most of the current Web 2.0 revolution we see
now, happens on top of the LAMP stack.

Let’s have a look where these technologies come from:

Linux:

started in Finland (Linus Torvalds)

Apache:

mainly American, but apparently has many Nordic contributors

MySQL:

Swedish/Finnish company

PHP:

started in Denmark/Greenland (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Basically, the Nordic countries can be held responsible for 75% of the LAMP stack!
(ok, Norway isn’t in the picture here, but they have Opera, for what it’s worth ;-))

I was very happy to see that Nokia (+ Trolltech), Sun, IBM and other big
players were represented by technical people, not by marketing people. In fact,
the most interesting talks I attended, were presented by people of those larger
companies. They really are trying to keep up with current trends.

Most interesting was also the main keynote speaker and opener of the conference
on the first day: Bart Hanssens from the Belgian federal government (Fedict). He held a talk about the
recent ODF guideline
implementation at our federal government.

Personally, I had a wonderful time. Met many new people,
mostly of the eZ crew and realised
the sheer joy of such an internationally orientated SME (especially at the
midsommernatten BBQ the last day). It felt great speaking 4 languages through
each other once more, especially increasing the level of my Norwegian again.
:-)

Yes, Norway… I completely fell in love with the country just once more…

Today, I ran into a pretty annoying problem with my laptop.
I booted up, and got one of these once-in-every-24-mounts fsck’s of my root
partition. Nothing to worry about, unless it turns out that there is a
non-trivially fixable problem which shows the well-known "enter your root
password to fix or press ctrl-D to continue" line. Again, nothing to worry
about… until you realise that your keboard isn’t available yet at that point
of time in the boot-process! (I don’t have USB support compiled into my kernel,
and Mac connects it’s laptop keyboards through USB.)

Important to note: I was at the airport at that moment, with no other hardware
or cables or whatever with me to help me out. And knowing that you’ll be away
for 4 days (I’m at Open Nordic now), you
really want your laptop to work.

After thinking about it for a while, I got the solution. For some reason, my
keyboard does work while in the GRUB menu. I found out that I could pass about
any script or command to the init kernel parameter.

kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda3 init=/sbin/fsck -y /dev/sda3

did the trick. :-)

Note that there are no quotes around the parameter value.

init="/sbin/fsck -y /dev/sda3"

won’t work!

I’m compiling USB support into my kernel right now.

Hooray! We have another one!

Again, a website from our federal government is
down. Nice to see though that Drupal seems
omnipresent up there (looks like Accenture didn’t get all their business after
all :-p).

Again, it’s a database problem. I guess Dries is right when he says that the database is the hardest part
of a Drupal installation to get right.

Luckily, there will be a really good solution
for that! As soon as we have a PHP connector to MyOwnDB out there, installing Drupal won’t require any local database
administration any more. Let alone taking care of backups, scaling up your
installation or ensuring high availability of your data… Great times are
a-comin’!

Hmm, what’s going on?
Seems they are having a lot of trouble on our national webservers:

Isn’t it sad, by the way, that the HTML of the error message generated by Microsoft IIS contains 12 errors? Can’t they even get that under control? The Drupal error page on the other hand, which is even more complex, validates perfectly.

Yup, the Belgian Prime Minister using Drupal. And he really likes to show it too:

:-p