Ton Kersten - Thoughts of a geek

It was a long time ago that I created a Geek Code Block for myself. As I aged this block aged with we, so it was about time I updated it.

Take a look at the about to see the new code. I also added a decoded verion for those who do not like to decode stuff.

After a week of Prince2 and coming back to my old self again I started my laptop in OpenSolaris. There where some minor things that needed to be resolved. Trying to resolve these was not at all easy, because I needed some extra software not available in the OpenSolaris repository.

Searching the web (Google is certainly your friend) I found some extra repositories I could use. These can be easily installed using the package manager, so I'll give the URL's only.

• Sun Freeware
• Blastwave
• OpenSolaris Pending
• OpenSolaris Release

Now I can install over 50.000 packages (with a lot of doubles, of course).

Being a blood donor since 1982 I have been donating blood on a regular basis. Today I reached the milestone, that I'm very happy about. I donated blood 100 times. This equals 50 litres of blood in total.

I would like to urge you all: Please give. It doesn't cost you anything but a little time and you help a lot of people. So: Give

If you live in the Netherlands goto Sanquin

The last 3 days were very hectic. I attended the course "Prince2 Foundation" which prepared me for the Prince2 exam. Three days of good old, hardcore studying. I really felt like an old man, not a student. I can hardly believe I did this for years non-stop and partied all the time. I even get exhausted thinking about it. Those were really good times, with very fond memories.

But all the hard work payed off. I did pass the exam (unofficially for now) and I do now have a "Prince2 Foundation qualification".

I would like to take a minute to thank our trainer Peter van der Maas who made these three days a complete joy. I would also like to thank the rest of the group. You all made it worthwhile and congrats if you succeeded as well.

At this moment in time I don't know if I will try the "Prince2 Practitioner" as well, but only time can tell.

At the top of this site I used a photo I found on Flickr and that was made by Toverberg. It was a nice panorama.

However it was a very nice photo I thought it would be better to use one I made myself. So today I was out there with a friend of mine (Niels) taking pictures for his camping. When selecting these pictures I was triggered by the one now shown at the top of this page. It shows the "Dutch National Liberation Museum 1944-1945" in our beautiful village. The white part in the middle resembles a parachute and inside it is "The Dome of Honour", with the "Roll of Honour" and was built in 1987. This is in memory of the dropping of thousands of American paratroopers on the landing zones alongside the Wylerbaan and in Klein Amerika on 17 September 1944, as well as the great Rhineland Offensive.

At the right of the Dome of Honour is the main building. This is largely build with portacabins from the former Neeltje Jans flood barrier construction site in Zealand. These were moved here in 1987.

My private laptop came delivered with Windows (of course), but I wanted a UNIX/Linux like OS as well. Running a lot of computers with Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, Slackware, Debian and others) I decided I wanted something else.

I came up with the idea that it should be Solaris, to experiment with the fantastic ZFS. But the real Sun Solaris lacks support for my laptop, so I thought I could run OpenSolaris, which has better hardware support.

skge "pci11ab,4320"

When using the stream editor (sed) with the -i option, it does break links. Like this:

~$ mkdir test
~$ cd test
~/test$ echo Hello > f1
~/test$ ln -s f1 f2
~/test$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May  4 09:28 f1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 tonk tonk 2 May  4 09:28 f2 -> f1
~/test$ sed -i.bck 's/Hello/Bello/' f2
~/test$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May  4 09:28 f1
-rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May  4 09:29 f2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 tonk tonk 2 May  4 09:28 f2.bck -> f1
~/test$ rm f2 f2.bck
~/test$ ln f1 f2
~/test$ ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 2 tonk tonk 6 May  4 09:28 f1
-rw-r--r-- 2 tonk tonk 6 May  4 09:28 f2
~/test$ sed -i.bck 's/Hello/Bello/' f2
~/test$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 2 tonk tonk 6 May  4 09:28 f1
-rw-r--r-- 1 tonk tonk 6 May  4 09:29 f2
-rw-r--r-- 2 tonk tonk 6 May  4 09:28 f2.bck

According to the sed developers this is a feature and not a bug. Therefore they will add the --follow-symlinks option in version 4.2.
Yep. It's not a bug.

I have corrected the vigit program, because it uses the -i of sed. The new version can be found here