There's alot of agitation around software patents lately, and with good reason. Software patents are a serious impediment for software development, and the problem goes further than development too : it would be an open door for more restrictive measurements like enforced DRM, where for example, CDs that you buy would only be playable on certified equipment (not on your PC or car radio). Alan Cox, famous Linux hacker, has issued an open letter in which he asks to vote for members of parliament which are against software patents. Softwarepatenten.be has a nice list of Belgian MP's with their attitude towards software patents.

For those of you that know me very well, it is no secret that my favourite drink is whiskey. Now, when it comes to whiskey, I'm quite conservative : I prefer mostly Irish whiskeys, and there's nothing that beats a shot of good ol'e Tullamore Dew. But I heard lots of good of the Bushmills brewery, so I decided to take a bottle of Black Bush. It doesn't really liked to be mixed with coke, so you better drink it pure, or on the rocks. But boy, is this some powerfull stuff ! Two drinks and my head is spinning !

Debian From Scratch (DFS) is a single CD that is a full rescue CD capable of working with all major filesystems, LVM, software RAID, and even compiling a new kernel.

And, it's a cdebootstrap-based install CD that can install i386 woody, i386 sarge, i386 sid, and amd64 sid directly from CD, and whatever else from the 'net. The installation can best be described as "Gentoo-like".


Definitively need to play with this, though the documentation still is sparse...

Ishkur has compiled a great 'family tree' of electronic music, containing many of my favourite bands. The overview has lots of sound samples, so check it out.



(via Kapinga)

Remember the Invitation, the new wave festival in Ghent some months ago ? Julie Haelemeersch wrote some nice reviews of the event, as pointed out in the comments of that article. Now she has created Ad Mortem Festinamus, a goth site about all new wave events and gigs, a bit like the Kagan Calendar in blog format. Quite a change from crappy sites like SlashGoth.be.



Oh, and Dave's back too !

"I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum and slipped Raggot, our gerbil, in," he explained. "As usual, Kiki shouted out 'Armageddon,' my cue that he'd had enough. I tried to retrieve Raggot but he wouldn't come out again, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, thinking the light might attract him. In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake.



Read all about Raggot, the Rectal Rodent, and be sure to listen to the hilarious sound file too. (It is an urban legend, though...) Oh man, I'll never be able to hear someone say 'Armageddon' without bursting into laughter again...

Since today, Novell has made its Evolution connector to Exchange available for download under the GPL. The connector will be included in the 2.0 version of Evolution. With the Connector for Microsoft Exchange installed, Evolution functions as an Exchange client, enabling users to become full participants in company-wide group scheduling and other collaborative tasks. A good step forward for enterprise Linux desktop users (as I am).

More mobile fun : the Java applications provided with my mobile phone are mostly stupid Java games. I really want some more productivity applications found on modern PDA's, like a Palm or Ipaq. So I took a look on my phone''s file system, and found out that most Java applications are MIDlets, Java applications suited for embedded devices like mobile phones. Midlet.org is a site where you can find some interesting applications, like grocery lists, scientific calculators, or telnet clients to run on your mobile, and transform it to a real PDA device. Next step is developping my own MIDlet applications, like explained in this developersWorks article.

I already told you about my new Siemens MC60 mobile. I quickly discovered how expensive it is to download ringtones and wallpapers by WAP or SMS. So I decided to buy a data-cable to connect the phone to my computer, for which I payed an outrageous 47 Euro, but I guess in the long run it'll be worth it. Now, the cable came with a Windows utility set and driver, but I soon hated the occasional reboot to download pictures from the phone's camera, so a Linux solution had to be found.


In Windows, the Siemens utility used a kind of serial over USB connection, so I knew I had to use the usbserial drivers of Linux. After some Googling, I found out that most Siemens mobile phones use the pl2303 driver. Two kernel compilations later (one for the driver, the other because I forgot to include ohci-hcd), my computer successfully created the /dev/ttyUSB0 device when I plugged in the datacable.


Apt-cache search siemens told me that scmxx was a nice command line utility to talk to the Siemens phone, and indeed, it worked, though it only seemed to like to exchange phonebooks and SMS messages. No chance in downloading some camera pictures. So I searched some more and discovered SieFS, a fusermount extension which enabled me to mount my mobile''s filesystem (apparently a 2 MB vfat compact flash card) on my computer. After that, all was plain easy.

Just upgraded Angband, my main workstation, from kernel 2.4 to 2.6.5. The upgrade went with no real problems, and everything runs really smooth. Feels quite fast too.