About

Personalia

My name is Sven Vermeulen, born in Bruges (Belgium) on the 5th of September in 1982. I am currently employed as a Systems Analyst for database and scheduling technology at the KBC Group and am living happily in Mechelen, a city near Brussels (also Belgium).

I’m a heavy proponent of the Free Software movement. I’m an active Gentoo Linux user (a Linux meta-distribution) and official developer (I used to be project lead of Documentation and PR as well as Council member and Foundation Trustee and am currently working as a documentation and SELinux developer for the distribution’s Gentoo Hardened subproject). You will also find me active on the forums and as one of the #gentoo operators. I am also the author of the Linux Sea book.

Most of my hobbies are computing-related: security (both mathematical approach and conceptual), system-level programming, processes and automation development. I like to be a know-it-all, checking out how stuff works and why it sometimes doesn’t ;-)

ir. Sven Vermeulen
sven.vermeulen@siphos.be

Curriculum Vitae

Work Experience

Year Activity
2010 – present Systems Analyst Database and Scheduling Technology at the KBC Group where I maintain the strategy on database & scheduling technologies, watch over the information system & infrastructure enterprise architectures and help in programs and projects that want to integrate one or more database technologies into their own architecture.
2005 – 2009 WebSphere System Engineer at the KBC Group where I develop and maintain a framework for automated deployment and maintenance of JEE applications on WebSphere systems and, of course, work in projects to represent the WebSphere group.
2001 – 2006
2007 – 2008
2011 – present
Active in the Gentoo project, first as a documentation translator (English – Dutch), later as author (English), project lead (documentation, public relations), council member and foundation trustee. Now active as a SELinux policy developer, SELinux userspace package maintainer and documentation developer.
2000 – 2005 Graduated from the University of Ghent as Master of Science in Engineering: Computer Science, major in Software Engineering (in Dutch ‘Burgerlijk Ingenieur in de Computerwetenschappen – major Softwareontwikkeling’). My thesis was about making software tamperproof by embedding control regions, checksum algorithms and more.
1992 – 2005 Board member of the ACCB, a computerclub located in Bruges
2004 Summerjob at Philips: Search and repair faults in television sets
2003 Summerjob at K.U. Leuven: Authoring ‘Programming for Realtime Systems’, redesign of Orocos website
2000 – 2003 Board member of the LugWV, the Linux User Group for West-Vlaanderen (one of Belgium’s 10 provinces)
2000 Summerjob at Tyco Electronics: Camera verification of electromechanical components
1994 – 2000 Graduated from the secundary high school K.A. Brugge where I attended the Science / Math (8h) courses.

Additional Courses

Year Description
2009 IVPV Courses on Software Engineering
2008 IVPV Courses on Networking and Security
05/2008 dynaTrace Advanced Training
2005 ‘WebSphere Administration’ at ABIS
1998 ‘Intel PC Technical Repairs’ at IVO Brugge
1996 – 1997 ‘Programming in Turbo Pascal’ at SNT De Bogaerde

Technical Knowledge

Operating Systems Linux (Administration & Engineering)
Unix (Sun Solaris 8-10, HP-UX, AIX) (Administration)
Windows 9x, NT, 2k, XP (Advanced Use)
Enterprise Applications IBM WebSphere AS v5.1, v6.*, v7.0 (Administration & Engineering)
Apache 2 (Administration)
OpenLDAP (Administration)
Programming Languages C (Advanced)
Java and J2EE (Advanced)

Certifications

dynaTrace Certified for dynaTrace Diagnostics 2.5.4

9 Responses to About

  1. Francesco L. says:

    Dear Sven,

    I’m reading your beautiful guide (http://swift.siphos.be/linux_sea/linux_sea.pdf).

    I’d translate it in Italian language, because I think that your guide is the best in this moment and at all.
    Your have my “private” e-mail, but I prefer that you write here, before you’ll use e-mail. ;)

    I hope that you want I translate the guide.
    I think that this guide would be an “official” guide.
    I saw that the official documentation is often not clear for who not knows Gentoo. :(

  2. swift says:

    Hi Francesco

    You’re free to start a translation of it, but I recommend to wait (see my posting of today) until the document is more stable. Once I’m happy with the final result, I’m also going to release the sources (and start versioning changes). Regarding the “official” state: that’s not going to happen soon. I’m currently keeping my copyright on the document and the license is a no-commercial one, which is incompatible with the license choice Gentoo makes.

  3. Francesco L. says:

    I understood, Sven, and I agree with you, especially as regards the possible translation of a stable version.
    I’ll wait you, without any matter.
    Moreover, it’s you you’re developing your guide. :-)

  4. Francesco L. says:

    Hi Sven. :-)
    I would like to ask if, after a year, I can translate your guide.
    For answering to question, I think that you can use my e-mail – perhaps it is more easy in this way. :-)

  5. swift says:

    You are free to translate the document as long as it is released under the
    same license and it is not used for commercial purposes. You can find the
    sourcecode of the book on GitHub (http://github.com/sjvermeu/Linux-Sea),
    which might make maintaining the translation easier.

  6. Francesco L. says:

    Very thanks, Sven.
    I’ll only translate Sea Linux, whiteout any commercial will, hope, purpose, and so on…
    You are the Autor, and all things of your book will be same.
    I’ll only join the label, in Italian, “Traduzione di…” (“Translation by…”, in English).
    ‘Cause the software, for the his itself nature, is in continuous upgrading, I’ll see the sourcecode along the time and I’ll try synchronize translation and your “original version”.

    Cheers. :-)

    A notice off topic: the Siphos.be server seems have some issues, in these days.

  7. Francesco L. says:

    Little by little, I’m translating Linux Sea in Italian.

    But, I have some questions:
    a) How often, on average, you modify the source code?
    b) Are synchronised source code and Web pages?
    c) How is possible get the source code modifications?

    I have to say that unless you create some pages devoted to the modifications themselves, in which every modification is expressly declared, it will be difficult a great deal to maintain syncronized my translation with the original text.

  8. swift says:

    Hi Francesco,

    I don’t change them often (a few minor changes a month), depends on the bugs or changes within Gentoo Linux. The web pages are manually synchronized (I update the site when I commit new changes), but you’ll also find that I keep track of the changes in a ChangeLog file (cfr. github). On github, you can also see the individual changes of files (select the history link).

  9. Hi Sven, I was reading the conversation between you and Francesco and I’m also interested in translating “Linux Sea” into (Brazilian) Portuguese, of course, as soon as the stable version is released as you said before.
    I think this is a rich manual for those who want to learn Gentoo, and want to learn linux at all. I’m enjoying it.

    Congratulations for the job. Well done.

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