Yesterday there was this documentary on the state of the internet, privacy and security (in Belgium).
The idea was based on David Bond‘s movie/experiment “Erasing David“.
Dirk Leestmans (journalist) hired a private security audit and asked him to hack Freek Braeckman‘s computer and bank account within the next three days.
Dirk also goes deeper on the different used technologies applied by the Belgian Police force to track people.
Yesterday was my first visit to a GentM event.
The topic of the evening: “Open Data”. (Someone even mentioned Smart Cities)
Someone (didn’t catch the name) talked about the digitalized University Library Ghent.
They pointed out that they’ve already gathered a lot of data and made it publicly available.
On the top of their homepage, there’s a link to available downloads and API’s for the people wanting to be creative with their data.
Next up was Pieter Colpaert, the father of the famous iRail going for word domination.
Pieter explained how iRails started, how they do it, and their goal (which is world domination).
His presentation:
After the awesome talk of Pieter, the microphone was passed on to Bart Rosseau.
Bart works as the Strategic Communication Advisor for the city.
He shared the view of the city on Open Data and what they want and will do for the public.
He noted that it’s obviously not as simple as just opening everything up to everyone, as there are privacy concerns etc…
He promised that there will be data available starting somewhere in the middle of May on http://gent.be/open
Probably on the 14th of May (source: appsforghent.be)
His presentation:
It’s not clear on which data will be placed in the public domain and/or under which license the data will be put.
So let’s keep our eyes open for changes on the http://www.gent.be/open page.
After his talk I’m glad I can conclude that there’s awareness on Open Data and Open Source within the city council.
Today I felt the urge to send this to some people…
The cartoon is from Dilbert by Scott Adams.
If you don’t know him, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Dressing for success
In the end, I didn’t send it… and pussy’d out.
But if this is meant for you, you’ll know it
So, quite some time ago I made the mistake of buying the ATI Radeon HD 6870 without first checking if it would play nice with my Ubuntu 10.10 desktop.
Turned out it didn’t
But now, there are proprietary Linux drivers released by ATI/AMD
First, you should update your system (just to be sure).
The Linux 2.6.38 kernel carries the ATI Radeon HD 6000 open source support. (just fyi!)
If you encounter problems or found this post helpful, it would be nice to leave a comment below.
This way, I can adjust it to the needs of my readers.
So I’ve been using my Targa NT9231 as a home sever (Running Ubuntu 10.10 server edition) for a while now.
It’s been serving several purposes such as internal webserver, irssi, monitoring and tunneling/proxy server.
As all wise people should do, I’ve been using OpenSSH to connect to it.
Solely connected to it from my netbook, as my desktop Ubuntu computer died after the purchase of a new ATI (curse you) Graphics card.
But now, I managed to revive my desktop (yay!) and wanted to log in on my server.
Setted up the key and wanted to transfer it to my authorized hosts file… but that gave me a bloody error:
Permission denied (publickey).
So I started to digg around and checked filepermissions, ssh_config file etc… But all seemed ok.
But then I found this little nasty openSSH Bug on launchpad.
Simply running “ssh-add” on the client fixed the problem!
Ssh-add adds identities to the authentication agent, ssh-agent. When run without arguments, it adds the file %HOME%/.ssh/identity. Alternative file names can be given on the command line. If any file requires a passphrase, ssh-add asks for the passphrase from the user.
I’m not sure how this could’ve helped, but hey, its a workaround that actually works
I’m not sure how to blog about this without giving the wrong impression.
Last year, when I was in Spain, I had a talk with people from all around the world about Belgian politics.
What I found was some bizarre mix from people not knowing what/where Belgium was to people that were worried about our upcoming civil war.
To make this clear, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN UPCOMING CIVIL WAR IN BELGIUM! That’s just some reporter or news agency trying to make themselves more interesting than they are.
Like half of the country speaks French and the other part speaks Dutch. That’s all there is.
That’s no big deal. In India, they have 7 different languages, in Spain they have 2, etc… (put them in the comment below if you know some more examples)
The only downside of this, is that politicians use this to make a name for themselves.
The language issue is being milked out by unprofessional politicians that don’t want to do their job!
To clarify this, it’s already been 212 days that we’re without a Government.
Somehow, most of the people in Belgium don’t seem to care anymore. Which is a bad thing
This video (dutch) explains exactly how I feel about the matter:
This guy is asking for the people to go out and demonstrate to let the politicians know, we’re not paying them for sitting around pointing fingers.
And I think, he’s damn right!
Some pictures/images (preferably of the same size)
A (very basic) knowledge of what a .gif is A .gif is actually a little slideshow of images.
5 minutes time or 10, depending on how fast you can switch between open windows.
Get started:
Open up The Gimp
I suppose I don’t have to explain how to do this?
Open up the folder where the images are that you want to be inside the animated image
Drag’n'drop the first image into the big empty Gimp window (the image you want to be displayed first in your ‘presentation’) If the order of the images don’t matter, just select all the images and drag’n'drop em all at once.
Press, and hold down, the button on the mouse or other pointing device, to “grab” the object,
Drag’n'drop the second image into the big empty Gimp window (the image you want to be displayed as second in your ‘presentation’)
Drag’n'drop the third image into the big empty Gimp window (the image you want to be displayed as third in your ‘presentation’)
Drag’n'drop the fourth image …. ok, you’ll get it now!
Continue doing this till you’ve dragged all your images in to that window.
You can check how many and which images are already in there in the Layer window. Open it by clicking ctrl+l or going to file\dialogs\layers.
Click “File” in the top menu
Click “Save As”
Choose a location where to save the final .gif file
choose a filename that ends with “.gif ” (eg. “ChoopDaWhoop.gif”, without the quotes ofc.)
Select “Save as Animation”
Fill in the comment, or just un-check it. (probably no-one will ever read it)
Select “Loop Forever”
Choose a delay value (this will set the time before switching to another image) Check out the image at point 13
