I read Paul's post and I see some recurring things that I do not agree with.

Independence of the regions will cause even more fragmentation. Paul seems to suggest that if Flanders and Wallonia would actually divorce, that it opens the door for provinces to do the same on the same grounds. But the same grounds do not exist today.

The language barrier does not exist in Flanders. Sure some dialects sound different, but at least we can communicate with the majority of the people within Flanders on equal grounds. If you watch RTBF or read Le Soir (which almost nobody does in Flanders) you will see that everything is colored differently. You don't see that in the regional newspapers or media.

In a recent conversation someone told me he believed there was a Skype for Symbian devices and I could not believe I missed it while looking for it.

So I did the obvious and typed in Google "Skype for Symbian" and the first sponsored link invites to download it directly from skype.com.

Great ! Not really. It does not exist. Or at least Skype is making it very hard to find :-)

What remains of Belgium if even a decision of the highest court in Belgium is being dissed as one-sided ?

• De standaard
• Le soir

If not before, Belgium stopped existing today. Let's get this over with, anything is better than the current situation.

Last week I bought a Nokia E71, a few days before the iPhone 3G was available in stores. You may think I must be crazy for not giving into Apple, but I have my reasons.

I had the following list of requirements:

• Full keyboard (and not an on-screen keyboard)
• OS that I could develop for (Symbian ?)
• Not based on Windows
• Needed Wifi, GPRS, UMTS
• Wanted an SSH client (preferably putty)
• USB connection and bluetooth
• Small enough to fit well in my pocket

A study from the University of Arizona (recently posted on slashdot) looked at weaknesses in package managers (and mirror setup). By becoming an official mirror and delaying or stalling a mirror's updates they tried to lower the security of servers using that mirror and increasing the window of opportunity for a successful attack.

In itself it is very useful to make people aware of weaknesses in technology or abuse of trust, but in this case (and certainly for CentOS) I think they overstated the impact or at least ignored mechanisms used to prevent possible security risks.

And in case you were wondering, I am not dagw on osnews.com.

Any resemblance is purely coincidental.

Definitely if you end up on one of these.

However, I do not understand how any of the Arabic comment spammers expect me to moderate Arabic script. They probably don't know the site is moderated, oh well... Sigh...

Not sure when this wears off though :-/

At the 2008 Red Hat summit in Boston, Red Hat outlined to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux for new hardware and installation media one year longer than it did in the past.

This is a major event. In the past Red Hat offered new hardware support, bugfixes and feature enhancements (dubbed full support) for 3 years after the initial release. But now that will be for 4 years after initial release. New installation media will be release up to 5 years after initial release !

Everytime I am surprised that people don't know that apt-get works on RPM-based distributions and works much better than the alternatives. Especially in a CentOS/RHEL environment where you have various distribution releases running, apt-rpm allows you to use the same apt version and the same apt features across CentOS/RHEL 2.1, 3, 4 and 5.

In an attempt to persuade you to try out apt, let me denounce some myths about the current apt-rpm:

Another strange problem today while trying to install Firefox 3 RC3 on a Windows XP SP2 on a corporate laptop. Almost immediately after I run the installer:

"Sorry, Firefox can’t be installed. This version of Firefox requires Microsoft Windows 2000 or newer.”

WTF? This is a Windows XP SP2, you moron !

I remember having the exact error with one of the Beta releases. A reboot does not make a difference, I have administrator privileges, so it must be the braindead anti-virus, right ?