As Diana is going back to college (at least when the KULeuven permits her ), she stops working at T-Systems. This means we have to give back the super cool Alfa Romeo leasing car we’re currently driving around in. 🙁

As we kind of need a car or at least got so accustomed to having one, we set off on a course to find the right car for us. Which isn’t that easy, considering the length of my legs which disqualify a lot of the cheaper and smaller cars available on the market… after a few weeks of search we found a nice Alfa Romeo (yes, we fell in love with those) 156 1.8i Twinspark. Hopefully it passes the Touring car-test (only then we’ll buy it) which is scheduled for friday. I’ll post some pics when we got it ! 😉 

Something that I neglected to post (while I didn’t really post anything else either) … 🙂

I got my temporary drivers license since 20-Jul-2006 … so in about a month I can try and do my exam to get the permanent one… finally!

I’ve had it for 2 months now and do indeed wonder why I didn’t get it a few years back 😉

Great example,the KULeuven site .

I’ve heard complaints before from friends about how the KUL admins tend to hide every useful bit of information behind 256 clicks on the site, and then spreading it out so you need about 4096 mouseclicks to get info you need. It gets worse however. When you surf to it the first time you get a choice between English and Dutch. Think long and hard about this, because little do you know, half of the information on the English site is not replicated on the Dutch one (haven’t checked the other way around) !

Say you’re foreign (like my girlfriend perhaps?) and want to take classes at KUL. You speak fluent Dutch, and assume the information will be more current on the Dutch site so you click on "Nederlands". You subscribe yourself to a course, go to the Universiteitshallen to complete the subscription… and hear that you need to fill out 5 more forms, need a few pictures, all your degrees with official stamps (+ a Dutch or English translation, as German is not a Belgian official language I guess?), and then a 6 week waiting period. They cannot tell you this over the phone, all they know is "you have to fill out the form on the website" – which was ofcourse done. Only the form is totally different on the English site… Way to go KUL. Too stupid to tell anyone in time, the international office is lazy, the faculty is slowwww… result: Diana is still not subscribed and doesn’t know if she is even approved to do so. I don’t see a problem, but classes start in a week and noone knows a damn thing. "We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything."

Today is talk like a pirate day !

A few weeks ago I discovered pandora.com, a site like last.fm which is probably somewhat more well-known.

You enter an artist or a song, and based upon that the site creates a radio station with similarly sounding music. They have some bizarre but at the same time cool licensing going on which doesn’t allow you to listen to the exact song you want, can’t skip back in the list, and only skip ahead x times per hour, but I’ve created a few stations (Tiga, 2 Many DJ’s, Tiesto and Vitalic), they have a pretty varying bunch of tunes… Songs you don’t like you can vote down and they probably won’t be played again. Songs you like can be voted up and will return. Been using it at work for background music for quite a while now.

Oh, by the way.. you have to live in US to be allowed to use it. Hey Beverly Hills (*cough* 90210), here I come 😉

I’ve got a bunch of rackmount servers in my rack at home right now. All cool, but the rack is full… so no more upgrades 😉 Unfortunately a 4U and 3 2U’s with a total of 7 CPU’s (+fans), and 16 hard drives produce a lot of heat and noise, while kicking up our electricity bill. I’ve also got a 12-port gigabit switch and a 24-port 10/100 switch running and a few cisco 2500’s for tests and play 🙂

So in order to downsize this a bit the plan is to keep the cisco’s (they don’t produce a lot of noise or heat nor do they use a lot of power), replace both switches by one 24-port gigabit switch, keep one 2U box as router, replace the rest of the machines by one big badass 4U box containing all the remaining hard drives, and add a UPS.

I’ll have some leftover hardware at that point, perhaps I’ll sell some of it… or I can reuse it later without having to buy new stuff.

I’ve just bought the UPS (New 2U APC 1400VA for 150 €, not too expensive I think?), have a switch ready for me when I get some cash together, and then when I’ve got some more cash I’ll get the 4U Supermicro case and a 5-in-3 SATA hotswap tray set… In total the box can contain 15 disks (if I put in 2 more SATA 5-in-3 mobile racks). Expensive hobby this is.. but hopefully it’ll reduce power bills, heat AND noise…

I’d also like 2 19" TFT monitors one day.. Samsung Syncmaster 920n for example 😉 

Someone win the lottery and donate me some cash… :/ 

Great show, saw it a few days ago.

Hell’s kitchen is UK’s Gordon Ramsay‘s restaurant, where a bunch of aspiring US cooks can try to impress the great chef. The way he is telling them (and even his customers) off is just great 😉 I only saw the first episode so far but am hungry for more! (pun intended ;))

Hell’s Kitchen is broadcasted here in Belgium on VijfTV on thursday, 20.15 (dubbed "Keukenrellen"). 

Yes, yet another picturepost, but I thought it was funny 😉

Yes yes… geek humor++ 😉 

I’ve been working on upgrading my mail gateway setup to something a little more decent, and as of tonight (in my new testsetup) I’ve implemented relay recipient maps in postfix. Should be way better the gateway mailqueue and also for the internet as a whole, since I won’t be generating any more blowback like I am doing now (when mailing to a nonexisting address, the gateway accepts the mail, tries to deliver, then creates a bounce message and tries to deliver that one, usually trying to email nonexisting users or innocent bystanders whose From: address was forged). Also implemented some SNMP polling for queue size, more to follow. Yay. 🙂

 PS: Thanks to DaViper for providing me with a virtual machine and a subnet to host my off-net DNS and Mailgateway on, much appreciated!