Simplicity is a form of art...

The three additional layers in the OSI model

At my workplace, I jokingly refer to the three extra layers on top of the OSI network model as a way to describe the difficulties of discussions or cases. These three additional layers are Financial Layer, Politics Layer and Religion Layer, and the idea is that the higher up you go, the more challenging discussions will be.

Switched to Lineage OS

I have been a long time user of Cyanogenmod, which discontinued its services end of 2016. Due to lack of (continuous) time, I was not able to switch over toward a different ROM. Also, I wasn't sure if LineageOS would remain the best choice for me or not. I wanted to review other ROMs for my Samsung Galaxy SIII (the i9300 model) phone.

Today, I made my choice and installed LineageOS.

I missed FOSDEM

I sadly had to miss out on the FOSDEM event. The entire weekend was filled with me being apathetic, feverish and overall zombie-like. Yes, sickness can be cruel. It wasn't until today that I had the energy back to fire up my laptop.

Sorry for the crew that I promised to meet at FOSDEM. I'll make it up, somehow.

Lots of new challenges ahead

I've been pretty busy lately, albeit behind the corners, which leads to a lower activity within the free software communities that I'm active in. Still, I'm not planning any exit, on the contrary. Lots of ideas are just waiting for some free time to engage. So what are the challenges …

Umounting IPv6 NFS(v4) mounts

I had issues umounting my NFSv4 shares on an IPv6-only network. When trying to umount the share, it said that it couldn't find the mount in /proc/mounts:

~# umount /mnt/nfs/portage
/mnt/nfs/portage was not found in /proc/mounts

The solution: copy /proc/mounts to /etc/mtab, and …

Today was a productive day

Fixed 14 bugs today, with a few more pending (those for packages only get marked as FIXED if it is moved to the stable state). One of the changes is the GRUB2 support in the Gentoo Handbook (yes, finally, sorry about that). That opens up the road for the stabilization …

Hacking java bytecode with dhex

I found myself in a weird situation: a long long time ago, I wrote a java application that I didn't touch nor ran for a few years. Today, I found it on a backup and wanted to run it again (its a graphical application for generating HTML pages). However, it …

Centers of Excellence

When dealing with software (I'll talk about software here, but the information is applicable to most technologies, such as appliances and operating systems) many organizations want to have "centers of excellence" with respect to the software. These teams are responsible for positioning the software within the organization, supporting the software …

About time...

I was just wondering why "UTC" stood for "Coordinated Universal Time". Apparently (okay, citing Wikipedia here, so be critical), it's of two main reasons: English and French speaking folks that were participating in that discussion wanted their language to be presented in the abbreviation (English wants "CUT - Coordinated Universal Time …

prezi presentations

While doing some research on current rich internet applications / web application platforms, I discovered an online presentation site/tool called Prezi. This online application allows you to make dynamic presentations differently from the standard presentation software like OpenOffice.org's Impress. A nice example can be found online as well of …