New jobs

Last saturday, I took an exam. Today, I noticed that I passed it (dutch): I am now a tennis official. Spooky.

The exam itself wasn't all that difficult. There was a course two weeks ago in which the relevant rules were explained, and there was some preparation material on the vtv website that we were told to go through.

In other news, I'm also running for DPL again. While that isn't a new job yet, it may become one. After having gone through the whole thing three times now, I must say that getting my platform written was never this difficult; I've been working at the text for quite some time now.

Here's for hoping third time's a charm...

Bjorn Monnens on Debian

If this were twitter (and if I had a twitter account, which I don't), this post would start with "RT". As it is, you'll have to make do with this link: Bjorn Monnens on why he chose Debian testing over Fedora.

This weekend I switched again to Debian 6 testing as this is also Gnome 3. I had to do the same stuff as for Fedora but I noticed already that it’s much more stable and it is also much faster than Fedora. Boot is really a difference of +30 seconds.

Go team!

(with apologies to those who read this blog through Planet Grep, as Bjorn is there too)

Apple hates quality

I own a DAS Ultimate S keyboard, and am very happy with it. Yes, the price tag is pretty high, especially when compared to those cheap keyboards you'll find in every bakery shop these days; but the difference in quality isn't something to be ignored.

A while back, I got three PowerMac G4 machines from someone, so I could work on them for Debian. They'd been gathering dust for a while, since I'd been busy with other things, but this week I had a look at them.

One of the three was incomplete; it lacked a video card. The other two, however, were quite usable. They came with MacOS 10.4.something, and one of them had a 40GB hard disk, while the other had an 80GB one. The disks were quite noisy, but I've already replaced them with a CF-IDE adapter, so now they're running off some solid-state storage, which should be at least somewhat faster, if not entirely efficient.

However, installing a quality operating system on them proved to be somewhat harder than expected.

When I connect the DAS keyboard to the PowerMac, put the Debian CD in the drive, and reboot the machine, it will eject the CD rather than trying to boot off of it.

When I disconnect the keyboard, it will boot off the CD fine, but since OpenFirmware apparently doesn't support USB hotplugging, that means yaboot will sit there forever waiting for me to enter "install" and hit enter.

When I replace the high-quality, 130-euro DAS keyboard with a cheap crappy "I don't know what a proper ISO layout looks like" 5-euro Logitech "keyboard", suddenly everything works as it should.

Except that my hands hurt from trying to type on that thing, of course.

I swear, Apple hates quality.