gvansanden's blog

I'm the author of a Free Software web application, eLAS (http://elas.vsbnet.be).

Though the application is written and supported purely on a LAMP stack, many of it's end-users are using MS-Windows and unfortunately Internet Explorer.

Starting with eLAS 2.0, I already dropped any form of support for IE 6, but I do provide bugfixes for IE 7 and 8.  For that sole purpose, I need to run two instances of Windows XP in Virtualbox (one for each version).

Today marks the release of eLAS 2.0 with many new features and an AJAX based interface.
I was quite happy to be able to finish this new release during my working hours thanks to a grant from LETS Vlaanderen.
 

You really have to hand it to Microsoft, apart from bad software and a lousy OS, they also produce their fair share of comical material like the Get The Facts campaigns.

But the guys in Redmond are rarely satisfied with any great piece of work, so their humor department produced this very funny article in  Computer world.

I've been quiet on the Ubuntu-Yahoo deal so far, but in my comments people seem to take me as hostile to this decision.

Frankly, I don't see what the big deal is on this issue, Ubuntu is not replacing an open service like Identi.ca by something like twitter on new installs and upgrades.

It's trading one commercial search provider with another because of a straight forward business deal, one they have been completely open about too.

I visited FOSDEM this weekend.  It was very interesting.

Had a nice chat with the MariaDB people and off course Zarafa.  The talks where nice, though the one on Ubuntu and Debian was a bit controversial.

Next up is storage expo :-)

The Open Sourcerer is running a blog post titled "Is Canonical Becoming The New Microsoft?"

The author does make some valid points regarding issues like proprietary software in Ubuntu and concerns over the views that Matt Asay holds.

I've been messing with finding a decent desktop backup application this weekend to run on all the family laptops. I thought backintime would do the trick, but it turned out not to work over sshfs (due to the lack of hardlink support) and doing backups to the same disk that holds the data seems like a bad idea to me.

So, today I found an article on deja-dup in my RSS feed, installed it and it's wonderful. It has a built in scheduler and supports all filesystems that gvfs does, but adds nice things like encryption for your backups and it integrates very well with Nautilus.

On 25 february, I'm giving a workshop on Zarafa, the open source alternative to MS Exchange.

If anyone is interested in signing up (for free), they can still do so at http://www.open-future.be/zarafa-workshop

Saturday brought a very strange behaviour to my Linksys WAG200 router, it started crashing very often.
After some tests I discovered the cause to be bittorrent, whenever I start deluge (with torrents in the queue), the router goes down at random intervals of 10 minutes to an hour.  Without bittorrent, it just runs for 8 hours or more...
I don't understand this behaviour though as it wasn't upgraded recently and it has worked fine with bittorrent for nearly a year now...
I hope to get to the bottom of this very annoying behaviour.

My new rental car just told me to "Depress the break pedal"...
I tried talking to it about how hard the life of the average pedal was, but I had to kick it to get it really depressed.
(the car in question is a Volkswagen Passat in case anyone is wondering).