Well, in the mean time, Slackware 13.37, the “Elite” edition, was released on April 25th. I tried to help as much as possible as one of the SlackBuilds.org staff, doing what I like most: investigating things that did not work and write patches for programs. The result is that – with a huge effort from all the SlackBuilds.org admins, we had a working repository of > 2.600 scripts when 13.37 came out!

When 13.37 was officially released, I was still installing the network in my new / old house. But I set up a few wireless access points I had to get my laptop and netbook on-line with my new 15Mb internet connection. I’m still installing the 1Gb cabling, as it took some time to find the drill to get through these very solid brick walls As you might imagine, I’m sort of a “geek”, so my network has about 10 systems running simultaneously here at home…
But I had the task of building all the packages of the script I maintain on Slackuilds.org on a clean 13.37 system to put them on my site. This took a couple of nights, but they are all ready now and have been uploaded. Well, at least for Slackware and Slackware64. The packages for ARMedslack will have to wait until I can find my external USB drive I put in a box before moving…
But, almost all packages have been built and uploaded for i486 and x86_64 architectures. Only one did not survive: inadyn. It seems that project is dead. But there is a good alternative: ddclient. I recently took over maintenance of that script and it works quite well.

To check out all the packages I built, go to my site.

This was not a question of perfect timing, just of being lucky

Slack Linux Fans is an interesting site to follow the latest happenings of our favorite Linux distribution. You can also follow Slack Linux Fans on Twitter.

So since it was clear this game was going to happen, I have heard that same question over and over again. I can’t deny that I am Dutch, and that I spent most of my life in the Netherlands. So, although Brazil has embraced me, I had to defend the Dutch team and answered each and every time that I was convinced that they would defeat the Brazilian team. After all, you can only win if you believe in your own capacity.

My faith was answered with laughter and disbelief. But faith is exactly just that: faith – believe or don’t believe.

Today the game finally happened and the result is there. Probably this picture shows what it was all about: The Brazilian players loosing their control of emotions, while the Dutch team remained strong, believing that they could achieve what they came to do:

It's all about controlling your emotions...

I imported all posts from the previous blog, but some links might fail. If you find any inconsistencies, please write a comment or send me a mail, so that I can correct it.

The old blog will stay online as long as Google allows it, since there are several sites with deep links to the posts, but it is closed for new posts or comments.

Lots of sad news here in Rio, after all the rain that has fallen here over the last few days, but life goes on

In just a few days I will officially be on vacation, so I might not have too much time to write here, but I still have some raw material I want to publish, like some experiences with nagios (working very fine here), ntop, cacti, zabbix, etc.

And I’m working on some lay-out changes for my blog, so be prepared to see some novelties here

Happy New Year!

I’ve been using virtualization and emulation for several years, both professionally and for fun.
Searching for even older versions of Slackware and Linux, I found several articles about the history of Slackware, Linux, GNU, Minix, Unix and so forth and started to collect links and making notes to read more.

This collection of notes just continued growing and growing, as part of this history has parallels with my own history in computing. So I decided to write a series of posts about all this, trying to organize my notes in a chronological way. I have no idea how many chapters / parts / posts there will be, as I am still organizing things. Nor do I know how long it will take to finish. It is all really ad-hoc writing.

Talking about all this with my wife she said it might even become a book. Well, she’s the one with a talent for writing, but hey, who knows.
After all, I always used this old saying from José Martí (*), that every man ought to do three things before he dies:

• Plant a tree
• Write a book
• Have a son

I already planted a tree and have a son (a daughter as well). But all I wrote until now are software manuals, and I am afraid that doesn’t count.

I have no idea if José Martí really ever wrote or said this. I also heard people quoting Ernest Hemingway saying this, but he lived in Cuba for a while, so he might have picked it up there.

(*) José Martí (José Julián Martí Pérez) was a Cuban journalist / diplomat who fought for the independence of Cuba and is considered a national hero there. When I visited Cuba in 1986 I noticed how people still like him.

The national airport of Havana is named after him and he wrote the verses for the famous song “Guantanamera”, that in a way might have something to do with me writing these lines:

Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece la palma
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma.

which roughly translates to:

I am an an honest man
From where the palm tree grows,
    (well, I do live in Brazil now…)
And I want, before I die,
to cast these verses from my soul
    (now I just hope someone will read all this

My next post will / should be about the origins of it all: UNIX (but I’ll start even before that… UNICS)

To be continued!

Today I was ‘Googling’ and by coincidence found a page talking about some software I wrote several years ago. It’s a simple Hex-editor for Windows written in C, based on much older versions, dating back from the days of CP/M. If you have no idea what CP/M is, you’re probably a bit younger than I am

This version I found today on the internet dates from 2003 / 2004. I published it at the time for free download (I always believed in free software) on my website. I never promoted it too much, but some people managed to find it and at the time I received quite some feedback.

After finding that page, I did a Google search on this Hex Editor and found pages from all over the world mentioning my software Never had any idea my little program has been used in places like Poland, China, etc…

That’s the internet: no more distances and complete anonymity.