OK so John is forcing me (at gunpoint, where he got it I don't know. Probably a seven-eleven) to do a diary entry. Not sure what to write right now thought, I'm just praying he won't shoot me and Gianni won't use his supersarcasm on me.

I lost some money at gambling. Not much, about an hours work for a unix consultant and about a months work for a Mexican handing out flyers on the Strip. Even so, we have moved into a cheapass hotel/casino now, and Gianni is prepared to eat the slimy toy I bought, so maybe we aren't doing THAT well.

The food in Las Vegas (and I suspect in most of the US) is just horrid or overpriced, makes you ill and makes you want to eat more at the same time.

Gianni has changed into this gamble-and-win-super-competitive-mode. "I bet I can eat this entire burger in 1.2 minutes". I'm going to tell the coppers that he's under-age and sell his ticket to go gambling.

John has put the gun down now, I'm going to make a run for it.

I feel SO bad for not wrting anything in here in the last few.. well .. since forever. I'm sat here at defcon, listening to a presentation about AIRIDS.. a nice intrusion detection system, using a wireless card, shared with 5000 hackers, so in the next few minutes, geek-ware could be hacked.

Apologies to all you geekguys and geekgrrls (sorry lydiabushgrrl, still love me ?) or not reading your diaries and articles, but I have been very very busy at work.

It's something like 40 degrees celcius here at defcon, and even the industrial-grade airconditioning in this hotel doesn't seem to cut it. Having a heavy laptop heating my legs probably doesn't help either so I better shut it off and pay attention to the guy in front.

I will try to make some more entries [honest!] here from the Con if the wireless network holds out.

Ok, so it's been a while _again_. I'm not sure if it's just me being lazy, or my life being boring. I don't think my life is boring... maybe I just don't have TIME to write stuff, but I'll stop rambling just in case I am boring.

Gathering big events from other people then... from what I hear John has played with Elf, or something, Linus released kernel 2.4.0 (arbitrary development version in case anyone was wondering), linuxSH is merging dreamcast support in their CVS, my girlfriend Linda has to study alot and I hate Martin for some reason.
What this all means to my life or yours ? I'm not sure, but it filled some blank space in my diary.

It's been ages since I wrote anything here. I hqve been very busy I guess.. was on training courses for 2 weeks straight and of course that's when servers start to crash. I don't let it bother me though, cross-compiling kernels is much more fun. I have become addicted to the scrolling of a kernel cross-compile. There's something magical about it. You start with 100mb of source and compile a nice 2mb kernel (compressed to 600 kb) and it works on this alien piece of hardware, and it works well.

As a result I now have projects going to compile a kernel (and userspace apps) for: ia32 (duh), parisc32, parisc64, hp300/400(apollo), Mac (m68k), SuperH (hitachi chip), uClinux (mc68000 branch, no MMU) and PS-7110 (ARM variant found in Psion S5). I have started to look at ELKS too... those 286s would make a nice terminal afterall. (they also merged with SIBO (Psion S3 stuff))

Nothing much happening besides that.. oh, trying to set up a userspace HPUX11 compiler and a WinCE developer environment(SH and ARM) (I know I know, but you gotta write a bootloader for em some time). EPOC32 (since they were so nice to give me membership to Symbian developer group) and PalmOS (just wondering what it's like) are on the list. God forbid I ever become a decent coder, or I won't get any sleep.

I'm behind on diary entries again, and the other authors seem to be slacking aswell: short diary entries, Backline not writing any details about his nights with Little Elf, pah

Since he won't tell us, I'll just assume that his wank-o-meter is back to zero and that he's generally having too much fun to write about it. Good for him. Lil Elfy is a nice girl and so far she hasn't told him about the hot relation I had with her a few months ago, so all is well.

Slow days, slow diary entries. Let's see.. well I got my second paycheck a week ago, one for a whole months work this time, so I'll go buy all those things I've been dreaming about (actually I've been dreaming about chicks.. no, I won't buy any of those)

I had just pressed 'submit' when I noticed lots of typos, mainly q's instead of a's. This bring me to the following point : qwerty keyboards (US-English in this case) suck. I'm used to typing on an azerty keyboard (Belgian-latin1) layout. It isn't too hard to get used to a qwerty keyboard, but the problem is that when I get home, I start making typos there. The worst part is that I am in a current split-personality kinda thing, and I can't go back. I could just replace the keyboard here with an azerty one, but I'm used to it now (well, half) and the same goes for home. I fear my self-taught typing skills are gone forever. Thank God I never learned how to type properly.

Ok, I've been slapped on the wrist by some actual techies that read the diary (hi there !). They have been informed that the last logentry wasn't technical at all. So, to elaborate, the D-class servers will be running HP/UX 11.00 and MC/Serviceguard, to provide protection beyond single node failures within the cluster, using dynamic quorum capability and will most likely run in an active-standby configuration.

HP MirrorDisk/UX, HP OnlineJFS (Journaled File System) will also be installed. I am not sure what the primary function will be but it is likely to be a Orqcle database server, in which case the OPS edition will be used. Hardware-wise the servers will be equipped with dual 64bit HPPA cpus, 1GB ECC ram, fibrechannel disk controllers and all the goodies. Price is expected to be no more than $100,000 (2 servers, mind you) which is a bargain.

Hmmmm, we could use one of these setups for geek-ware ;-)

I'm a bit bored so I'll just write something in here. Have I mentioned before hoz much Joe Cartoon rocks ? Well not nearly as much as Alan Cox does. I found out one of the engineers here stayed in the same dorm as one of the main linux kernel developers, and maintainer of the motorola (m68k) port. My ego is being bruised here on a daily basis. Extremely capable people, and I am the sysadmin... what a strange world we live in.

Speaking of work and sysadmin, I lowered myself to a level low enough to use HTML codes for reasons other than this diary. Very un-techy of me. Before you know it I will be exhibiting some form of creativity and even start playing music again

Coporate life has it's little oddities. besides the manager-related troubles that employees experience and overall paper-work, requests, confirmations, validations and so forth, which I will tell you all about later, the moral/propaganda machine is remarkable. We have this bulletinboard at the coffee-corner and now that I have looked at it for some weeks, it always has newspaper/magazine articles about blunders the competitiom makes, such as the Sun Server Flaw (tm). How smug.

Wooops, I just went to the coffee-machine and passed by the webdesigner guy. I'm forced to reconsider the un-techy-ness of web design, although I wouldn't call SQL database management and server-side scripting webdesigner-stuff, more webdeveloper-stuff.

Ouch I'm hurting. I had the brilliant idea to go to a student party yesterday, which is cool because of free beer, but not so cool to wake up early for work, despite the full three hours of sleep. Some genious (probably drunk) decided it would be cool to hold it at a karting circuit and organise races inbetween free rounds of beer. Also some famous actors were supposed to be there, but I didn't know any of them since they star in soap operas, which I hate. Felt like going up to one of them and say "I've got chairs that can act better than you", but it felt like a ripoff.

Being the professional racedriver that I am, I managed to lap everybody once, except for some short little midget-like woman that turned out to be one of those actresses. (something tells me the famous people were given better karts) who said women can't drive ?
Our team finished fourth out of twelve, which wasn't too bad since we were ranked 12th until the last driver (me) started his session. Surprisingly all the drivers were relatively sober, so no real physical damage was done, but then again we belgians can drink proper beer in large quantities without looking like an englishman. I am a bit sore now though, and tired.

It's supposed to be someones birthday soon, but I forgot who. I wouldn't know what to get him or her anyway, so that works out nicely.