I don't know what I have with printers, or better : what printers have against me. All the deskjet printers I had, never kept up longer than two years. So the last printer I got, was a second-hand HP laser printer, which would last longer, I hoped than its predecessors. Vain hope, it seemed : after two years, this one also died.
So now I decided to buy a new laser printer, a Samsung ML-1610. I wonder how long I will be able to use this baby...


Installing a printer under Linux has become a breeze - relatively spoken - with CUPS : the printer wasn't available in the default CUPS list, but a search on linuxprinting.org revealed a ML-1710 driver, which I copied to /usr/share/cups/model/. Works great.

Nog eens meegedaan aan het groot dictee der Nederlandse taal; aartsmoeilijk deze keer, maar wel gelukkig met de oudere spelling. Dat had blijkbaar geen invloed op de algemene trend : Vlamingen scoren beduidend beter dan Nederlanders die een gemiddelde halen van 44 fouten. Petje af voor de winnares (Vlaming, natuurlijk) met een uitstekende score van slechts 4 fouten. Zelf deed ik het redelijk goed gezien de moeilijkheidgraad, met een 35tal fouten. Martine deed het iets slechter met 48 fouten, wat haar de onsterfelijke uitspraak ontlokte : "Ik ben verdorie nog stommer dan een Hollander !" :))

After Kai Hendry 'nuked' his Debian unstable system by a simple upgrade, he decided to put up a wiki page which lists the status of unstable. An interesting page you might consult before upgrading your system. I have had my share of unstable problems too, but after checking the Bug Tracking System I often quickly found a solution. Of course, you could install 'apt-listbugs' too, which will print a summary of all RC-bugs before each upgrade.
Oh yes, I've encountered 3l33t leenuks idiots on IRC too, on both camps (Fedora and Debian), but luckily there are still lots of people willing to help you out.

What should I read next ? is a database of favourite books, and will suggest which books you can read based on your perferences (in this case, a given author and/or title).

I never fancied JK Rowling's Harry Potter books : too dark, too much Roald Dahl alike. However, Potter has taken over the world by storm, and for all those mage-apprentices out there, here's the Harry Potter lexicon, with a collection of magical spells and maps. So now you know again what your children are talking about.

In my first post about Linux on the Medion 8800, I noticed that the Debian/unstable drivers for the NVidia card wouldn't load, bailing out with the error message Unknown symbol register_ioctl32_conversion. Using the experimental nvidia-7676 drivers, everything compiled nicely, and the module loaded without any problem. If X.org refuses to start, spewing out a message about not being able to find the module, that's because you need the nvidia-glx package.

Gisteren zijn we voor de wet getrouwd, en daarmee is de eerste (zij het kleine) kroon op het werk gezet dat we al hiervoor gedaan hadden. De plechtigheid op het gemeentehuis stelt inderdaad niet zoveel voor, al was dat al bij al nog plezant. Daarna in intieme kring de blijde gebeurtenis gevierd en verscheidene flessen champagne soldaat gemaakt. Hier een kleine selectie foto's van de gebeurtenis.


Veel meer knallende kurken op 4 februari eerstkomend, dan wordt het grote huwelijksfeest gehouden. Nog een zevental weken. Spannend !

Perl's extremely flexible syntax makes it easy to write code that is harder to read and maintain than it could be. This article describes some very basic practices for a clear and concise style of writing Perl. It has even a link to the Perl design patterns wiki.

Sinds verleden week ligt ook de DJ vast; op het trouwfeest gaan we d'er een goeie Leuvense fuif van maken met de draaiskillz van DJ Freaky Music (tja, ik verzin de naam echt niet zelf). We hadden de man al aan het werk gezien/gehoord, en het mocht er zijn : muziek uit het beste van de jaren 70/80/90 voor alle leeftijden en zonder vervaldatum. De gast heeft een redelijk goeie muzieksmaak die met de onze overeenkomt, dus moet je er niet op hopen dat 'em grijsgedraaide zever als 'Summer of 69' gaat draaien.


Even freaky is de limousine die we gaan nemen als ceremoniewagen. That motherfucker is *HUGE*, zoals inspecteur Dick Durkin in 'Split Second' zei. 't Was wel effe verschieten, want het is de grootste wagen die we tot nu toe gezien hadden, en dat zijn er ondertussen al wat. Maar het resultaat zal de moeite zijn, zeker met ons erin ;)

Since mid november, Sun released Nevada build 27, which contained the source code of the anticipated ZFS file system. ZFS is IMO a radically new and revolutionary filesystem which completely eliminates the concept of volumes and the associated problems of partitions, all operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck a ZFS filesystem ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations, which is kinda neat.


So I decided to test drive the new x86 build; unfortunately, the Solaris installer is not for the weak at heart : the installer hardly doesn't upgrade, doesn't contain ZFS support, which is really sad, so your filesystems are created as UFS . I believe it is still impossible to put your root partition on ZFS, too, so I guess we're still stuck with UFS.


I installed the build in a VMware container, which makes the installer friggin' slow (it took over 7 hours to install), and I had to scrape my 256 MB RAM based notebook for all available memory : if I gave the VMware guest too much memory, it got terminated by the Linux OOM killer. Giving it 200 Meg RAM went fine, but then you're stuck with the textual console based installer. In short : use a machine with a minimum of 512 Meg if you're planning to install this in VMware. I'll be downloading the sparc build in the near future, to see how this behaves when installing it onto my Enterprise 3000 server.


Luckily, you don't need a JBOD or a million dollar RAID5 storage system to play around with ZFS : ZFS has the ability to use files as virtual devices! Instead of using a real disk, you can instead create files of 128MB or larger and use them just like a disk. This allows for debugging, testing, and experimentation with complex pool setups without having to require immense resources. Obviously this is gonna be slow. You've got ZFS on top of UFS, so, don't expect it to be speedy. But the point here isn't performance, its about being able to experiment, play, and learn with ZFS configurations that otherwise be impracticle if not impossible. As an example :

root@harad ~$ mkdir /vdev

root@harad ~$ mkfile 128m /vdev/disk1

root@harad ~$ mkfile 128m /vdev/disk2

root@harad ~$ mkfile 128m /vdev/disk3



root@harad ~$ zpool status

no pools available

root@harad ~$ zpool create oasis raidz /vdev/disk1 

 /vdev/disk2 /vdev/disk3

root@harad ~$ zpool status

  pool: oasis

 state: ONLINE

 scrub: none requested

config:



        NAME             STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

        oasis            ONLINE       0     0     0

          raidz          ONLINE       0     0     0

            /vdev/disk1  ONLINE       0     0     0

            /vdev/disk2  ONLINE       0     0     0

            /vdev/disk3  ONLINE       0     0     0

That the builds are *test* builds I had to discover unfortunately : I bumped into this bug which refuses to boot the kernel :

Reading beyond end of ramdisk

start=0x2000 size=0x2000

failed to read superblock

panic : can't mount boot archive