In the middle of a cleaning session… a big appartment takes a lot of work to get cleaned up :s

Yesterday we went to Fnac, because of the “Buy 4 books, get the cheapest one for free” action. We didn’t actually find 4 books to buy, so we still saved. I bought Dan Brown (author of the Da Vinci Code)’s new book: The Delta Deception (in Dutch however), and Diana bought “Head first Java” published by O’Reilly (about the only publishing house I buy computer books from). She decided yesterday she wants to learn programming, and after some comparisons of programming languages, Java was the outcome.

We’re 2 chapters far now, just reaching into OO. The book is pretty well-written, not boring like most books are (e.g. the book we used to learn Java at Rega), so that’s especially good for her, as she doesn’t really like learning from books. I’m there with her and together we wrote her first little programs in Eclipse. I don’t know how much she remembers of it the day after, but I will try to help her until she can do what she really wants to do with her programs 🙂

Somewhere this week I changed my firewalling script so that on start it would clear out all the tables and start fresh with my rules. Some time afterwards I noticed I could not reach certain sites, such as Ebay, modules.apache.org, mininova, and others – I didn’t see the connection immediately though.

When clearing out the rules it also automatically cleared out the “clamp mtu to mss” option Debian’s pppd script enabled before… after putting that back into the tables, everything started to work fine again.

Took quite some debugging, as I first thought this was a pmtud issue, and that was supposed to solve it… Another thing learnt, another thing to remember when similar problems arise 🙂

Went to the “vakantiesalon” today, at Brussels Expo. Arrived there at 15:50, saw it all at 16:50, back home at 18:05 (!). Bad weather, snow, traffic jams, and lots of unnecessary-fog-light people on the road 😉

The vakantiesalon is quite small compared to the motorshow we went to last time, with one of the three parts totally dedicated to France (which we weren’t interested in at all); so that’s why it didn’t take very long to see everything else.

What struck me is that many people weren’t interested in selling anything at all, possibly cause they’d been there for too long already). For example, there were a few interested people waiting at a desk, but the woman behind it was simply sitting there reading some book, paying no attention to the visitors at all. Customer service, sure.

A band in the Irish pavillion playing Scotland Brave, that was very odd, too. I must be missing something 😉