It's almost done for me. Euruko08 was fantastic! I took a plane on Friday and was kind of lucky. Since the plane was apparently overbooked, there was already someone in my seat, so I had to sit somewhere else. The nice stewardess told me to sit in the front of the plane, where normally the people sit who get the special treatment. Because of this, I also had some extra services like a newspaper and great food. The flight only took 90 minutes and was comfortable. After customs and luggage claim, I took the bus and metro to my hostel. The hostel was pretty basic, but ok.
After strolling around the city center a bit, I took a tram to the opening party. On the way, I crossed one of Pragues many bridges and because of the great view over the river and the light (sun was just going down, which gave spectacular lighting), I stopped after the bridge, walked back and took some great pictures (I'll upload them later on). Afterwards I went on to the party.
Here, there were some people already and very quickly I started some conversations. In the end there were around a hundred people. I talked to so many people from so many different countries; awesome. After the party, I took a taxi to the city center with Thomas and Niklas (from Germany) and Alex from Greece. We had some food (midnight snack) and then I went back to the hostel.
Next day, I went to the conference and spent all day listening to talks, talking to people and so on. I had lunch with Thomas and Niklas and after the conference, we had dinner together at a nice pizza place. After that, party again. There were more people than the day before and again I had lots of conversations. After the party, I took a taxi back to the hostel again.
The following morning, I got up and walked to the conference, alongside the river. Beautiful view! The conference again had nice talks and we had lunch together. The conference ended with 2.5 hours of lightning talks, where I was speaking last. The talk went alright. When the conference was really over, I met Marek, a dutch guy with whom I worked with a couple of years ago, but hadn't seen him since. Together with him, some colleagues, Niklas and Alex, we went to a Mexican bar/restaurant to drink and eat. Here we talked a lot and even tried out some cool code Alex came up with. When the bar was closing we left. I walked back to my hostel through the city center. Prague is such a beautiful city, especially by night!
This morning, I woke up at 8:30 am, had breakfast and checked out of my hostel. Then I roamed the streets, looking at shops and so on. Now I'm in a small restaurant and will leave in a couple of minutes. I'll be doing the tourist thing a bit more and will go to the airport around 3 pm to get my flight back home at 5 pm.
All in all, the weekend was absolutely fantastic! I feel great, met so many nice and interesting people. The only thing is that my voice is absolute crap now, because of all the talking and liters of beer I drank, but that will be fine.. Anyway, I'll be at Euruko 09 next year! Definitely!
Archive for the 'techno stuff' Category Page 2 of 5
As written before, I'm currently in Prague for the Euruko 2008 Ruby congress. Yesterday evening, the congress was officially opened with a party at a very nice club. There I spoke with a lot of people, from all over Europe. I had expected that most talks would be about Ruby or Rails, but actually, this didn't happen. What I found very interesting is that most conversations I had (and overheard) were about spoken languages. Apparently, geeks have a fascination for spoken languages. I, myself sucked very badly at French and German in high school (as I did in multiple subjects), but this was mainly because of a lack of interest in learning in general. Since I started programming, I really developed an interest in languages in general; comparing languages and structures within a language. Maybe because of this, I looked for a real challenge and started to learn Russian somewhere last year.
The nice thing to notice is that it's not just me who's really fond of languages in general. I really wouldn't have guessed to find so many people with the same thing at a programming language congress.
Friday, I'll be flying to Prague for the EURUKO 2008 Ruby conference and will be doing a 10 minute "lightning talk" about Capistrano and Webistrano (stuff for deploying (Rails) applications in bigger environments).
I just preregistered for "Hackers On Planet Earth 2008″!!! As usual, HOPE will be held at the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City (yes, NYC I'll be back!) July 18-20 2008.
Next thing is booking a flight..
Yesterday, I got a HSDPA/UMTS USB modem. It's a Huawei e220, shipped standard with a KPN (and probably also an xs4all) HSDPA subscription. I hooked it up, but didn't seem to work out of the box with Linux. I run Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy) on my laptop. After some research I found out that there were more people having problems with using the device in Linux. Some suggested that kernels > 2.6.20 shouldn't have a problem, but that's not what I experienced.
After trying many options, I got it working. First some background. The device holds both a GSM modem and a flash drive. The flash drive contains the installation bloatware for use on windows (and maybe even mac) systems. When you connect the device, the usb-mass-storage driver is loaded and you can mount the thing, but that's not what we want.
For some reason, when connecting the device, one serial port (managed by the usbserial driver) is found at /dev/ttyUSB0. However, for the device to work, you need to have 3 serial interfaces; ttyUSB0, ttyUSB1 and ttyUSB2. If it only gives you the first one (0), it won't work, not even a simple "ATZ" on the serial port. I'm not sure why you need three, because (we'll see that later) you just use ttyUSB0 to dial out.
Anyway, the following steps allowed me to use the device:
1. Download HuwaweiAktBbo tool from http://www.kanoistika.sk/bobovsky/archiv/umts/ and run (or fist compile and then run) it. This tool does some magic with the usb library and will enable the extra 2 ports on the device.
2. rmmod usbserial and then run "modprobe usbserial vendor=0x12d1 product=0×1003″. This will force the driver to get things going well. (Check with lsusb if the product is 0×1003, since I read it could also be 0×1001)
3. Run the tool you just downloaded. You should now find ttyUSB0-2 in you /dev directory.
To execute the tool (I renamed it to e220setup), I put the following in /etc/udev/rules.d/51-mobiledata.rules:
#/etc/udev/rules.d/51-mobiledata.rules
# Rules for HAUWEI e220
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="12d1", SYSFS{idProduct}=="1003",
RUN="/usr/local/bin/e220setup"
KERNEL=="ttyUSB0", SYMLINK="modem", GROUP="dialout", MODE="0660"
KERNEL=="ttyUSB1", GROUP="dialout" MODE="0660"
KERNEL=="ttyUSB2", GROUP="dialout" MODE="0660"
Now the device is setup and you can use /dev/ttyUSB0 to setup your connection. I use wvdial and my config looks like this:
[Modem1] Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0 Baud = 460800 SetVolume = 0 Dial Command = ATDT Init1 = ATZ Init3 = ATM0 FlowControl = crtscts [Dialer kpn] Username = KPN Password = KPN Phone = *99# Init2 = AT&F Init3 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0 Init4 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","fastinternet","",0,0 Stupid Mode = 1 Inherits = Modem1 New PPPD = yes Dial Command = ATDT ISDN = 0 Modem Type = Analog Modem
I was 4 when I first touched a PC. It was an 8088 Zenith. I still remember the machine and from that moment, I was hooked. I loved playing games and writing some GW basic programs. During my childhood, I played with computers a lot, at first only games, but later I got more interested in operating systems and such. These were the days of BBS'es and I strolled around on many of them, downloading things, but mainly talking to people that were also logged in. I loved it. Later (I guess it was in '93), I got on the internet. In the meantime, I got my own PC with a 2400 baud modem and used to dial in to a free account I got from a friend. I got myself an email account and spent many hours on web based chat boxes. As a real geek I started looking at the building blocks of the internet and taught myself HTML. Somewhere in 1996 I installed Linux for the first time and it made a big impression. Since I was unfamiliar with unix like systems, it took me a while to grasp some concepts, but I managed and early '97 I completely switched from Windows 3.11 (my pc was too slow for 95) to Linux. While learning Linux I was on IRC a lot and next to email, this was my main way of digital communication. After that, things went fast. I started a web design company and later on started working as a Linux Consulant. The rest is history.
Now 15 years later, some ways of communication have been added to my list. I still use IRC on a daily basis, Email is something I can't live without and I use the following digital technologies to communicate with the outside world (some more often than others): this blog, MSN, Skype, Twitter, Hyves (dutch social network) and Linked-In. And of course my mobile phone with voice and SMS. 10 ways of communicating! (and most of them are accessible 24/7, everywhere) Of course there are people who use much more than me (pound, facebook, myspace, youtube, etc), but I still think that 10 channels is something that I couldn't have foreseen 15 years ago. I'm old enough to remember the time when we only had one phone in the house and wrote people letters or post cards and that you just went to a persons house when you wanted to check if he or she was at home.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I had lived in the 50′s or 60′s at my current age. No generally available computers, no digital communication. Of course I wouldn't have known better, but I still wonder. My live revolves around digital stuff. Not only digital communication, but I make a living of it. A gardener or carpenter could have his job 60 or 50 years ago, but my profession and hobbies didn't exist then.
15 years ago I was excited about the Internet and I still am. I really think that I live in an awesome age where exciting stuff happens. The downside however is that I think that interpersonal relationships are more superficial than they would have been in the past. I have a couple of really good friends (yes, in real life) and a couple of 100 online, but most of them are merely acquaintances with whom I have conversations like "how are you? long time no see!". But for me, that's fine, as long as I have real friends to talk to, I'm happy.
What also comforts me is the fact that I'm not scared to grow old being lonely. I know that in 40 years (when I'm almost 70), I still can have the means to communicate with people all over the world. This is in contrast to my grandmother, who spent the last 10 years of here life in a home for the elderly. Apart form the weekly phone calls with some relatives, she could only communicate with the nurses and other people that were living there. Her world became very small. I hope (and think) that this will not happen to me. The other side of the globe is just 15 ms away and I would like to keep it that way.
Last weekend I went to Amsterdam. There I met some friends of a good friend of mine and noticed that those people know a lot of people I also know. Here in the Netherlands, the group of nerds and hackers isn't very big, I would guess a couple of hundred people and a lot of those people know each other. A lot of these people work at ISPs or know people that work at ISPs.
Some years ago I visited the hacker festival "What the Hack" and also saw a lot of people from the Dutch scene. At the festival, next to all the tech talk, there were a lot of lectures on social and political topics.
What wonders me sometimes is that there isn't some hacker union or something like that, that is able to put pressure in politics. Big corporations have big lobby groups and those are well used, but why isn't this done by hackers? Money equals power, but nowadays, in our online-centered society, bandwith, connectivity and uptime also equal power. I'm not in favor of abusing power to get things done, but its interesting to see that apparently cooperations use certain methods to get things done or to put pressure in the right places, but that these methods aren't used by hackers with power.
Somewhere in July, I wrote an article for the 2600 Hackers Quarterly magazine about my April Fools prank I did a couple of years ago. Last week, I got an email from the chief editor that my article will be published in the next issue!
My new company website is online!
I didn't do a good spell check yet, but hey, the beginning is there.. I also need some more icons and graphics, but I'll work on that next week.
Business is good 
Oh my..
Guess I failed on the Startrek question, the books I read and took a wild guess at the "Who shot first" one..
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