It was exciting when a year ago at LinuxWorld Expo London we heard a rumor that Oracle was going to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was surprising to find out that this rumor was not entirely as well-intended and supportive as it sounded.

Instead of helping the community, Oracle was directly attacking Red Hat with its own product as if it was showing the world that Open Source has no value and that even Oracle could run away with Red Hat's crown jewels and customers. A hostile take-over attempt of Red Hat by Oracle.

Yes! After a few weeks of wanting this I finally took the time to write it. With the help from Jo De Baer I wrote YOU (Yast Online Update) support for mrepo.

mrepo works with helper-tools for the actual downloading of updates or creation of metadata and so the real meat is inside the tool called youget.

Monday evening, had a hard time finding the location because I trusted my GPS. It told me there was no such street-number. In the end I parked my car to search for the venue by foot and surprisingly I was parked 2 meters from the runway. Doh!

When I entered it was apparent that I was under-dressed for the occasion. For an exciting and young project like Drupal, the attendants were mostly dressed in suits. (mental note: do some research next time).

The aim of doing a set of Dstat presentations was not just to promote Dstat, but also to hear people's impressions and ideas. And lots of ideas were shared and ended up in the TODO list.

But one of the questions that I did not quite understand initially, turned out to be an interesting and useful idea. And after the presentation we sat together to show how simple it was to bring an idea into practice.

T-DOSE 2007 is over, and it was good. It could have been great if more people attended and I think the lesson for T-DOSE is that more advertising is needed. And maybe that will lead to more presentation tracks so that even more people are interested in coming.

But the organization was perfect, the location superb and the people the max. So next year you cannot miss out.

Thanks to everyone who made it happen.

This weekend T-DOSE takes place in Eindhoven, NL. This will be my first T-DOSE, but I expect it to be much like FOSDEM and FrOSCon, although maybe smaller and less developer-oriented than FOSDEM and probably more English-oriented than FrOSCon.

One of the reasons why I wanted to start a blog is because I often stumble upon new and exciting tools. and sometimes I want to share some information or an opinion on it. So a blog seems a good way to ventilate (and archive) that knowledge. Much like offsite storage...

This week 2 interesting tools caught my attention.

I noticed this post on Linux Weekly News where Dave Jones is twice as effective as Viagra. So like any curious individual, I wanted to see how I would score against Viagra, and the results clearly show I have failed :-/

But at least I do better than Natalie Portman ;-)

I stand corrected. For some reason Amazon does not show excerpts when looking just for CentOS. And the list of books that match CentOS is incorrect. Now if I redo my search query using CentOS Linux the real search-inside-the-book mechanism starts to work. Maybe it requires at least 2 keywords?

The result is a shining 15 books that contain CentOS in one way or the other.

One of the ways to promote CentOS is to have CentOS appear in shops and libraries. Currently our local bookshop has a few titles about Fedora and RHEL, but they do not mention CentOS at all.

These books are real bibles containing more than 1000 pages. They go into details about everything, but they fail to mention the RHEL rebuild distributions like CentOS or Scientific Linux.

Something is going on here ?

Being fallible (not being the pope) I learned some things from my Drupal installation. Dries asked me to keep a list of things, and this is a record of what I still remember.

Beware though that this list is focused on using Drupal for a personal blog.

You do not need the Blog module !
If you just want a personal blog, you really don't. I consider this vital advise, especially because not using Blog seems counter-intuitive and because it is described as:

Blog: Enables keeping easily and regularly updated user web pages or blogs.

Since I started this blog, people on the street ask me: "Tell me Dag, what makes you a Field Commander ?"

When I am good-tempered I usually answer that there are many qualities a good Field Commander needs, but the most important definitely is the silly hat.

(Being a Leonard Cohen fan often helps too.)

I am going to be very frank on my blog: I am a pine user. Yes, I admit it. In fact, I've never really lied about it, but I did obfuscate my email headers so people wouldn't harass me.

"So what ?" I hear you say. Well, for one it made me less pure. It was never free software and I was tainted... But I really did try to withdraw from using pine. In the last 13 years I had 3 attempts to move to mutt and even with the help of close friends, it was all in vain.

A year ago as a CentOS team member I had taken the task upon myself to promote CentOS at events. Since LinuxWorld 2006 in London, we have organised presence at at least 8 different events, and we intend to do even better.

One of my personal favorites was FOSDEM 2007 which was the biggest gathering of CentOS volunteers to date. And I am positive that with everybody's help we can do even better the next edition.

I was impressed of my progress in using Drupal. Even though I bought 2 books about Drupal on Amazon, I did not want prior knowledge to spoil my first impression.

The greatest strength of Drupal in my opinion, is the structure it provides to accommodate themes and modules. It becomes obvious that great effort is put into thinking everything through. Not sure if it is true, but it feels as if Drupal has been prototyped several times to become what it is now.