openfuture

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).

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 :-)

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.

October brought me a new job in the Open Source world when I started working for Open-Future, a newly created (Belgian) company dedicated to Open Source consultancy.

We will be organizing an official launch party on December 07 in the Oude Abdij, Kortenberg.   I hope that we can push Open Source adoption in Belgium, which is rather slow compared to other countries!

I had to install Windows for someone who needed Office (for a specific thing).  So I installed VirtualBox on his Karmic PC and created a VM.

When the Hard Disk dialog came up, I choose 3 GB thinking it's only Windows + Office without data...  Boy was I wrong.

After installing Windows XP and Office 2003, a dialog popped up saying that I had less than 60 MB left!  I was shocked that I needed so much space for nearly no software (let alone data)...

A new job, a new PGP Key :-)

I created a dark Zarafa theme (webaccess), to make it look as little as Exchange as possible :-)

Download it here

Today is my first day on my new job.  I'm now a senior consultant for OpenFuture (www.open-future.be) and I'm looking forward to this new challenge!I'm quite happy that I can do something to help spread Free/Open Source software in Belgium as a day job :-)