Mobile people as we are, we find ourselves pushing more and more functionality to our mobile phone. Take a look at my own Nokia N80 : it is my mobile, PDA, MP3 player, PIM and GPS (and probably some stuff I forget right now). As versatile my phone is, there is still one functionality I miss in it, and that is not the little device its fault : enterprise calendar. It's very handy when you decide to go to work later, that you know what meetings are planned that day. That way, you can give the people involved a notice you won't make it, or at least will show up later.


There are plenty applications around that do this trick for you, at least if you have the chance (?) of working with Outlook at work. At our place, we're the victim of the GUI nightmare called Lotus Notes. And there seems no application that does the syncing with Symbian, and if there is one, little chance I can get it installed on my desktop at work. So I needed an extra man in the middle, and that is Google Calendar.


CalSyncS60 is a Symbian application that syncs your Google calendar automagically with your Symbian one, either by 3G or by entering the hotspot of your choice. That leaves me only with the task of getting my Lotus calendar into Google. No chance with Domino 6.5 (the export function gives very weird results), but in later releases, this should be possible. There is ATM no option left but manually entering my enterprise calendar into Google calendar (I'm not a meeting animal, so this isn't such a daunting task anyway).

It's been a long time since I reviewed some whisky. You might wonder if I had gone up the wrong path : converted by the H2O brigade, having replaced my daily dram by a hot coco at the evening fireplace ? No my friends, the truth is that I have been low indeed on booze, and reached back to my usual medicines : I received a special edition of the Tullamore Dew, bottled into a ceramic crock, and I spent some care on Scapa & Highland Park, the usual stuff.


But recently I decided to give some of my attention to The Black Grouse, a product from the Famous Grouse - the number #1 selling blend in Scotland... and in Sweden (which has a pretty sophisticated whisky market, apparently). The Black Grouse is a Scotch blend derived from the Famous Grouse, with some of the finest Islay malt whiskies.


Color : dark gold
The nose : malty, some bonfire smoke and a little peat.
The taste : malty again, quite some peat, medicinal, surprisingly sour, with lots of hints of fruitiness. In the aftertaste again some smoke.


The verdict : I allways say "Better a brilliant blend than a mediocre malt". And the Black Grouse is brilliant. I must admit I don't like the sour taste, but blended in water or coke, this makes a magic drink.

Yesterday, IBM gave a technical overview of the upcoming 6.1 release of Tivoli Storage Manager (or TSM for short), which should be available for download starting from March 27th. This long awaited release will contain some interesting features like :

• Database being a separate DB2 instance


• Data deduplication as a separate, out-of-band housekeeping process, and off-course only for FILE devclasses. Good news is that Active Data Pools are also supported.


• Real-time monitoring and reporting built-in, based on ITM and TCR


• NetApp Snap support


• VMWare VCB support


• Active Directory support

There is also less good news : the installer seems to be replaced with the same ISC installation procedure (which makes it probably impossible to install on non-supported platforms)

Het moest er toch eens van komen : verleden zondag met onze pup meegedaan aan een hondenshow. De Kempische Kynologen Klub (een naam die voor een nogal ongelukkige afkorting en ditto website zorgt) organiseerde verleden weekend de 35ste Kempische schaal in de veilinghallen van Hoogstraten. In deze ruime hallen werden enkele honderden rashonden met hun baasjes verwacht samen met minstens evenveel bezoekers.


Onze Berner viel met zijn vijf en halve maand in de baby klasse, waar zij tot ons beider schrik moest uitkomen tegen 3 andere en veel jongere pups. Nu moet je weten dat een Berner op zo'n 4 à 5 maanden ouderdom van vacht wisselt, en zijn uiteindelijke licht krullende haardos krijgt. Daarvoor zijn Berner pups kleine teddybeertjes met wollig pluishaar. En zo'n pup met stijve krulharen die alle kanten opstaan, heeft natuurlijk minder kans tegenover kleine lieve teddybeertjes die blijkbaar net uit de droogkast gestapt kwamen.


Bon, met een derde plaats en een Belovend label, was de schade beperkt, maar volgende keer zorgen we dat we in een meer representabele strijdklasse uitkomen.

Many aeons ago, I made a music program on radio Scorpio, called Fallout. It was a fun time, where Jan Goesaert and me experimented with the medium radio. I think I can humbly say we were many years ahead of our time : we were the first on radio Scorpio (in 1996 !) to offer internet editions of our previous shows, podcasting even before the word was invented. It may have sounded amateurish, but I hope our enthusiasm kept things enjoyable for the poor listener. And the poor listener was a test subject for industrial noise and illbient, as that was the underground music type we were broadcasting.


The program featured a website, but this one got lost in the many hosting provider takeovers the web knew at that time. So I sobbed many years about the loss of this site, untill now : thanks to the Internet Archive, I found a partial copy of the site, which I used to create a reconstruction. The webdesign was -ehm- 1990ties, but was true to the show by having dark backgrounds and icons (and skulls ! and pentragrams !).


Without further ado : here's the late Fallout website. Enjoy this marvelous piece of nostalgia.


Whereas "light" ambient embraces the importance of human social formations (think of tribal), and reaches from the inside to the outside, Isolationist music takes the confrontation with the inner side of man : fear, perversion and paranoia. Are you ready for this confrontation ?

Now that I have new shiny monitor, and running in 1600x900, I'm finding myself with an awfull lot of screen real estate. Now, I'm a person who likes a desktop that is clean & functional and doesn't distract me from doing productive work. That's why I prefer Gnome above KDE, as it offers a more sober desktop environment. It's not that I don't like desktop bling-bling, but bells & whistles should not distract me. That's why I'm using the trailfocus feature from Compiz, so that inactive windows get transparant, and the focussed window gets my full attention.


That's why I also like maximized windows. But on 1600x900, a maximized window is 30% too wide. Text in Thunderbird & Firefox gets smeared over a too wide distance, which makes it more difficult to read. So I was thinking of using the right part of the screen for displaying system information & other stuff. Many aeons ago, while my preferred window manager was WindowMaker, it offered an applet system which could be docked on a side of your screen, like you see in this picture. Gnome offers the same thing with its applets, but recently more bling has been added in the form of screenlets. The problem with this is that maximized windows cover the dock area, so that you need mouse or keyboard actions to make these visible, and that's not the idea.


With the latest versions of the Sidebar screenlet, however, this dock area can be fixed, so that maximizing a window still shows the Sidebar area. My experience however with screenlets is that most of them are still very attention demanding, especially due to the bright colors they use. It takes some time to find screenlets or screenlet themes which offer a sober screenlet experience, so we'll see.


The Sidebar has some other possibilities : I use 2 Gnome Panels, one keeping a window list, and another stacked on top of the first, containing many application launchers. As the Sidebar doesn't get covered by maximized windows, maybe I can now replace the launcher panel with a Mac OSX like panel.

This is why you're fat offers an intriguing view on the food habits of our American friends. A showcase on calorie bombs like a seven pound breakfast burrito stuffed with potatoes, eggs, onions, and ham bits, lots of cheese on top and smothered in red chile. Some food really does look yummy, but the most justs looks revolting.

Warning :
I have (finally !) a black-green-blue Mozilla T-shirt,
and I'm not afraid to use it.

FOSDEM 2009 was a remarkable edition : it featured one of the most interesting talk sets ever, almost up to the point where I regretted not attending the Saturday. It was, as I realised myself suddenly, the edition where cloud computing was prevailing in Open Source : high-availability, database shards and distributed filesystem replication.
Defining your agenda is probably the most difficult task when attending FOSDEM; here's my tracklist :

• What's new in Drupal 7 ?


• MySQL-HA


• Poor man's SAN with CentOS and gPXE


• OpenSuSE on netbooks


• SysLinux


• Ext4


• Database shards at Netlog

Also spotted : lots and lots of netbooks (me too !), and a first IRL view of an Android device. Neat !

Yesterday, my monitor made a crisping sound when I tried to switch it on. A flickering on the screen of gray and white, followed by the smell of burnt plastic and a wisp of white smoke (Habemus papam !), made me fear the worst. Indeed, RIP to my faithful 17" Philips LCD. At such times, a spare computer is a very handy thing.


Skip forward to today. I acquired a new 23" Acer X233H screen. Unfortunately, my NVidia 6600 Geforce only supports a maximum of 1440x900 (no 1920x1200 for you!), so I wouldn't call it the ultimate screen experience yet. But I like the transition from 17" to 23", although my Gnome desktop settings still might need a bit of tweaking.


Update : and it's b0rken already. Bah...
Update2 : got my money back, and switched to a Samsung Syncmaster 2033. Much better, and this one supports 1600x900 :)