Life, the Universe, and Everything

Yesterday at 17:50 I decided to go to the 4^th Manic Monday, organised by Creative Class, which started at 18:00. Boy, am I glad I made that decision.

For those who don’t know, Manic Monday is a simple concept of inviting a number of people for round table discussions with up to four different moderators or speakers, one at each table. Every 25 minutes, the participants move to the next table and take their discussion with them towards the following speaker/moderator.

The moderators yesterday were all very interesting people. First, there was Lorin Parys, co-founder of FlandersDC with a special interest in creative entrepreneurship. This lead our discussion topic almost immediately towards our Flemish education system where entrepreneurship is systematically under-valued.

Our group then moved towards Bart De Waele, co-founder of the webdesign company netlash and an all-round entrepreneur. This moved the topic from the general low sense of entrepreneurship in Flanders towards the differences we find in various cities, with Bart, obviously, promoting Gent here. :-)

After that, our group got a nice presentation from Luc Buntinx about his last 20 years in ICT entrepreneurship. Very inspiring! His latest venture, Story Nations seems pretty interesting.

Finally, we moved on to Giovani Oosters from the great Vous Lé Vous restaurant and found out we kept the best for last. His passionate story about cooking and his quest towards a Michelin star was truly inspiring and was really interesting listening to.

Overall, Manic Monday was a very successful evening, very well spent among inspiring people with great entrepreneurial spirit. What was very nice is that there were so many new faces. I was very happy to meet all of them.

Last week we had another Profoss-event in Brussels. As always, it was a high-quality event, with very interesting speakers and a nice group discussion at the end. It’s really a pity there’s never more than 20 people showing up. A topic such as the legal matters concerning Open Source software definitely should interest more people. Profoss has a lot more potential!

The first speaker, Ywein Van den Brande showed his expertise again by explaining the most important elements of GPLv3 compliancy. Isn’t it great there are lawyers out there knowing the difference between static and dynamic linking? :-)

I also very much enjoyed the talk of Philippe Laurent about the EUPL. The most important thing to remember here is the political value of this license: Europe is really going for Open Source here! Never forget the GPL was crafted for the American jurisdiction. It’s translations are always unofficial, which forms an additional problem for countries as France, where companies have to, by law, have all their legal documents interrelating them with other French companies in the French language. Also, terms as “distribution” have different meanings in the US and Europe, not to mention the various interpretations of the individual European member states.

I’m very happy I finally could attend a talk by Bruno Lowagie. I found him a very gifted speaker; he knew how to entertain and greatly inform the audience at the same time. Since he once called me “probably the youngest one on my list of favourite Flemish entrepreneurs”, I’m a big fan of his. ;-) In the context of this Profoss-event, the sharing of his experiences with the iText IP review were invaluable!

The other speakers, unfortunately, weren’t all that interesting to me. I was especially bothered by their lack of fluency in English (I blogged about this before). I really appreciate speakers coming over from as far as France and Luxembourg, but everyone should feel free to present in their native tongue. I’m sure they had a very nice message for the audience, and feel sorry that so much got lost in translation.

Anyway, it was a great afternoon spent in Brussels again. Congratulations to Raphaël Bauduin for the organisation. I’m looking forward to the next edition again, and feel proud Zeropoint.IT is an official partner of the Profoss-event!

Will I be attending Zoocamp?

Hell yeah!

Thanks to @filipb for organising!

If I got three words to describe the kind of environments I find myself in most, I’d go for “geeks”, “bloggers” and “entrepreneurs”. The list of events I frequent can be grouped in these three categories:

• Geeks
  • FOSDEM
  • Geekdinner
  • Cloudcamp
  • …
• Bloggers
  • #mwbbq
  • BGGD
  • @twunch
  • Blogmeet
  • #jongtuig
  • …
• Entrepreneurs
  • Limburg Web Entrepreneurs
  • Open Coffee
  • Barcamp
  • Plugg
  • Pitch Arena
  • …

I can imagine not everyone agrees with my grouping here. Of course there’s overlap:

I must agree with Philip however, that the separation of these groups of people is becoming less and less clear. None of the women at Girl “Geek” Dinner, know more than average about computers, let alone technology. Barcamp is not about sharing ideas anymore, but a reason for bloggers and tweople to hang out together. At geekdinners, we find ourselves talking more about the economy of the Internet as the technology of the Internet.

It is true that at most of these events you bump into the same people over and over again. Is everyone a geeky blogging entrepreneur these days? It’s not that I’m not enjoying myself at these gettogethers, conferences and dinners, but unfortunately I believe there’s a high risk of circle-jerking which is hurting the quality these events altogether. If all starts to look like

stuff tends to get less interesting. Or not?

Last weekend Antwerp saw it’s first Barcamp organised by Anne. I was there and had another great and very inspiring day. I was also happy that my “presentation” had all the success I could have wished for. Not less than 6 couples attended my 20 minutes Swing dancing course! I think I reached all the Barcamp-ladies. :-)

My other contribution that day was taking care of the WIFI, together with @amedee. I dare say it worked out pretty well. I learnt some interesting stuff however:

• When setting up a WDS with multiple hosts, iPhones, blackberries and similar clients can only successfully determine the route to the Internet when associated to the main access point, because of a faulty gateway setting when they have to determine one themselves. This was easily fixed by setting the DHCP server optiont 3 (router) to the IP address of the main access point.
• A mixed daisy-chain and star WDS setup actually works! We had as main access point, WDS connected to and . was WDS bound with and with . (By the way, only very few people seemed to recognise the hostnames of the access points as large Pakistani cities, less my relation to them. Maybe next Barcamp I should bring a short presentation about my ventures in Pakistan. :-))
• Only have one access point serve DNS to the network. Then, set all of them to push the DNS setting to the clients via DHCP, just like with the gateway.
• The X-wrt graphs show that from time to time we had no connection to the outside world. All seemed to work fine those moments, but for a failing Internet connection. The -network had the same problem at the same time. Don’t blame me for that! :-p
• Barcamp attendees cannot live without an Internet connection. They don’t care about network encryption however. :-)

I think next time I’ll push this further and enter a proxying and monitoring gateway into the system. Must result in some pretty interesting graphs, I’m sure! :-)

Of course, next to contributing, there’s a lot of consuming to do on a Barcamp as well. I really liked some of the presentations I attended. Coming to mind are Thomas Vande Casteele’s explanation about Google Analytics. He sure is an expert there! Second, I was dazzled by Wouter Kampmann and his presentation about Semantic Web Services. This is really interesting for one of my ventures The Data Tank! I also particularly enjoyed the movement therapy session by Aster Saerens.

This Barcamp ended in a session questioning the very concept of Barcamp and how it ought to be organised. I really appreciate the conclusion we reached: it’s up to the organiser to decide how he/she wants to arrange those matters. A Barcamp can be in a tent with 50 people, or hosted in a professional environment costing so much money, sponsor dependency can’t be ruled out. A camp where everyone grabs some food from a nearby friterie during lunch break, or smoothly organised catering. All are equally fun!

Talking about sponsors, we had quite a few this time. Thanks to

• Nucleus, for the venue;
• Devia, for the soup;
• Chocolateque, for the chocolate;
• 10to1, for the lunch;
• The Parking Lot, for the T-shirts;
• Nespresso, for the coffee.

Even though the whole day was pretty exciting and exhausting, I had to rush off and miss the after-barcamp-dinner for a improvisation theatre show I was performing in that same night. All went well however, and having spent half my weekend in such an awesome way, I went home for a great sleep.

Looking forward to the next Barcamp already!

A while ago, I accepted the challenge of providing a bunch of 150 geeks at a Barcamp with reliable WIFI connectivity. Today, I spent some time preparing the setup.

The hardware will consist out of 5 different wireless access points, all flashed with the Open Source OpenWRT firmware (2.4 kernel, X-WRT interface). The access points are different models form different vendors, but that shouldn’t matter. (Thanks to Amedee for helping me out here!)

What I’m conceiving is a Star WDS-network setup. Depending on which rooms we will have available, this might turn into a Daisy Chain setup next week.

I have some networking experience, but never had to prepare a WIFI setup for 150+ heavy users. This leaves me with some questions:

• Do I enable encryption of some sort? Will the low-end CPU’s of the el-cheapo routers be able to hand that amount of work?
• What about bandwidth control? Can I trust that no-one will clog the whole pipe with an out-of-control bittorrent session?
• I figure most of the traffic will be going to a handful of domains (twitter.com, wordpress.com, flickr.com, vimeo.com, …); Would a (transparent) caching proxy help us out? Or would it be counter-productive, as most barcamp attendants demand real-time data from the Internet?
• What data could I/am I allowed to gather? I’d love to post some (anonymous) statistics afterwards with domain, speed and other trends…

Anyway, lot’s to find out still. Maybe, as this is the first time, I’ll just concentrate on having the network up and running in time and keeping it stable throughout the day.

For those who can’t wait: the ESSID will be . :-)

Last year, I was present at the first edition Plugg as a start-up finalist speaker for MyOwnDB. It was a truly wonderful event then. But this year, it was even better. Congratulations to Robin Wauters and Veronique Pochet for bringing us such a high-quality event.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Plugg is a one-day conference with a clear focus on celebrating entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and raising global awareness for those European start-ups in the Web / Mobile 2.0 field that stand out in the crop.

Mike Butcher is a great host and knows how to retain the audience’s attention throughout a full-day event. I’m less enthusiastic about Sien Luyten as a presenter for the core of the event, the start-up rally. But that’s just me, I suppose, as I heard other people congratulating her for her efforts.

My personal highlights of the day, however, were not the presenting start-ups (even though I found their pitches of a much better quality as last year’s contestants), but the very inspiring talks of Dries Buytaert and Bart Decrem. First of all, I am personally quite a fan of both these guys. Big Belgian names in the world wide Open Source community (that’s reason enough) ánd able to work on what they love most in their own businesses (need more reasons?).

I was very inspired by them, explaining the European entrepreneur that being in the United States is not a bad idea for your business and that we should not be afraid to think BIG.

I’m not a big fan of the States myself, but I can see their point. Thinking BIG however, is something I have in me. Let’s see where it gets me. :-)

One last thing I want to share is that it really struck me how nearly every startup was highlighting the fact that their product was platform-independent. Nothing we saw was tied to the Microsoft platform at all. I think the big shift towards the mobile platform, where no monopoly has settled yet, makes businesses rethink their platform compatibility strategy. Moreover, most key-note speakers clearly mentioned Open Source as being a really important factor in today’s digital world (Inmaculada Martinez, Dries Buytaert, Bart Decrem, Paul De Decker, …). I can’t help but think that the current crisis the world is finding itself in only accelerates this trend of Open thinking. This is good news for all us Open Source oriented businesses!

Anyway, it was nice meeting new and great people yesterday. I’m already looking forward to the third edition in 2010!

It has been exactly two weeks now that my little “4 people 1 rope”-competition has been going on. Let’s see how google is picking up on this:

Hmm, mediocre success, I’d say. Isn’t the Belgian blogosphere more powerful than that? :-)

Two nice reactions come to mind though: bnox with her Swedish thing and Imke Dielen’s nasty Rick-Roll. The dinner is still to be won, however!

So what all this about having four people but only one rope?

Yesterday, I and many other people had a great time at #mwbbq. During the performance of one of the stand-up comedians that night, I was asked to share my most kinky, truly-happened story with the audience. So I started off: “There were four people, but only one bit of rope…”, but before I could say another word, the microphone got taken away!

Apparently, this spurred some interest:

Now, here’s a small competition: the one who can write the most “interesting” blog post starting with “There were four people, but only one bit of rope…” (any language is fine) within the month of February will be treated to a nice dinner by me personally. Moreover, I promise to finish the actual story during that dinner! ;-)

In true xkcd-style, I started the following graph. Let’s see how it evolves over the coming month. :-D

Happy new year!

I recently read Windows 7: Mojave My Ass, an article by Jason Perlow about his experiences with Windows 7 Build 7000 (Beta 1).

Here’s an extract:

To make matters even worse, the “Run” option is no longer directly accessible from the Start Menu as a default behavior, you have to get to it via a Search. Once you get to Run via Search, you can click on it to execute any commands you like, such as the CMD.EXE prompt, and you can drag it onto the Desktop, but you can’t drag it onto the new Taskbar, like you can do with any add-on program, such as Firefox.

Is this what computing has turned into? Will we really allow Microsoft to have our Operating System-reviews to be reduced to OMG-I-can’t-click-here-rants?

I mean, what must their kernel developers think of that? I bet I’d be extremely jealous of the Linux kernel developers, who at least seem to have a lot of fun after a new release. :-)

In my opinion, operating systems are more than just desktop environments, and should be judged as such.