Jan Brinkmann - Weblog of Jan 'luckyduck' Brinkmann

Yay, finally some very good news after a period of silence. Me an my friend vulture are now employees of the wonderful firm VegaSystems! Looking backwards, we can really say that our internship was a success. We had a really great time working there, and if that would be a great thing on it's own, we're now able to sign a contract asap. The only thing that has stopped us from doing this already, is the fact that we're not yet able to tell when the boring b.i.b. will let us go. However, we're already working there, and now are able to earn some money with working on linux and networks, which is already a very great thing. :)

The german provider Serverschleuder wants to sue Thomas Hoelscher, because he told the people about his negative experiences with the help of his blog. There is not much so say about this, only the question: What is going on with some german people?

After a long time I finally managed it to update my page again. Much things happened since I wrote the last entry. I really needed a break from computers in my free time, since I havn't had a reallife for about two or nearly three years. During the summer, I spended a lot of time together with friends, enjoyed having a good time with them and also went to a lot of parties in the weekends. All this was necessary for me to get my life back.
But having fun wasn't the only thing I had to do. I also learned a lot for school, with success as I can say now, to be prepared for the final exams in may this year. Because of all this different things, I also retired as a Gentoo Developer, since I simply wasnt interested much in spending my free time online. Now, where I'm back with a very good feeling about everything, I'm doing an internship in a very great firm called Vegasystems. I'm really happy about my current situation, since everybody in this firm is friendly and I enjoy working with Linux and network stuff generally. Hopefully, I'll be employed when my boring training finally ends. For everybody out there: You shouldnt make the same mistake as I did, never sign a contract which makes it possible for you to do a train at the b.i.b.. You have to pay for doing and learning quite a lot of unnecessary and boring stuff. I would never do it again. :-)

Back from Brussels I'm really inclined to say the day was a success. I went there by car with a friend of mine and we had quite a lot of fun. Approximately 150 geeks, politicans and even Richard Stallman himself showed up at the Metro Station Schuman in Brussels, Belgium. There was also a member of the European Parliament who joined the demonstration, Eva Lichtenberger from the The greens (a politcal party). Somebody sponsored yellow T-Shirts with a writing on the front "NO Software Patents" and a writing on the back "Power to the Parliament". Everybody was able to wear such a T-Shirt in the end. We walked to the European Commision and then moved on to a place near the European Parliament in Brussels where the demonstration ended. Me and the guy who went with me to Brussels had the chance to talk to somebody from the "Frauenhofer Institut". He has a supporting role in the Parlament and was quite happy to talk to somebody who is involved into opensource software development. We told him what our concern are, why software patents are dangerous and what are the problems with the current proposal. From his point of view the actions and demonstrations which were performed by the opensource community were a success and the current proposal will not pass without further discussion and without modifications. After 9 hours of driving with my car I'm really tired, here are 2 pictures which I've taken. I'll upload more tomorrow. :-)

There are demonstrations against software patents in Europe in several European cities tomorrow. One of these cities is Brussels in Belgium. I'm going to join the demonstration which will start at 13o'clock local time. Every European who hasnt done so should consider to contact his representative in the European Parlament. Tell these person with your own words why you are concerned about software patents and why you think that they're not only dangerous for you but also for the European community. Another possiblity to participate is to support the Web Demo and to tell everybody why software patents are dangerous. For further information see:

• FFII
• No software patents!

I'm going to take some photos, depending on wether I'll get internet access or not I'm going to blog directly from Brussels. :-)

Finally, after some setbacks, Gentoo Linux 2005.0 was finally released. I'm proud to be part of such a great developer community and proud to have contributed something to Gentoo to give something back. I would like to thank my mentor, Karltk, who made this possible for me. Now we can say we've made our users a big easter gift, the release of 2005.0. Everybody can download a copy from his favourite mirror or via bit-torrent:

http://torrents.gentoo.org
http://tracker.netdomination.org

Now where Planet Gentoo is finally online, I would like to thank the Infra team, especially Daniel Drake, for the great work. Things for Gentoo Java are generally fine, we still have a lot of work to do but we already have a good base to work with. In the near future, as soon as all dependencies are in the maintree, I'll commit the Tomcat 5.5.x ebuild and the related patches. Also good news from the media-video and sound front. We've spotted a new media-video and sound developer who has already contributed a lot of great work to Gentoo. His name is Diego Pettenà and I'm going to mentor him. His mentoring period starts next week when he has repaired his Linux box which is currently broken (hdd failure). I'm he sure that he'll be a great addition to the media related herds and also a great addition to the Gentoo team generally.

Hi everybody, back from FOSDEM which was a very great event I think. I finally got the chance to meet all the people I knew from the IRC in the reallife. Most of the saturday I was spending time on the Gentoo booth before we had the developer dinner somewhere in Belgium (I think the name of the "city" was Mechten). It was very nice and I really enjoyed the hole weekend. There was a lot of positive feedback from users and now I'm even more motivated while working on bugs. One of the highlight for me was it to meet my mentor, karltk, and Sejo because they're the Gentoo dev's I know for the longest time now. It was also a great oppertunity to talk to people I never talked to before. Hope to see you all on FOSDEM 2006. :-)

The Gentoo booth:

from right to the left: beejay, pylon, tantive

Now, after some time has gone by, I decided to step forward and maintain Tomcat by myself. There were several people who wanted to restructure the package but it seems that they either disappeared or hasn't continued their work on it. I'll need some time to build it from source and make it fit into the Gentoo structure but I'll do as much as possible to come up with a solution for it in the near future. My plans are to first finish the already existing and hardmasked 5.0.28 version of Tomcat and when that is done I'm going to integrate the new 5.5.x release into the portage. My work on things like mod_jk for example will start as soon as that is done. I'm not sure what will happen to the old releases like the 3.x version, but we'll see.

Starting from today, irc.freenode.net has a new Gentoo Linux related channel, #gentoo-media. Currently, there are a lot of open bugs assigned to media related herds and the main purpose of the channel is it to get media devs and users closer together. #gentoo is crowded and related to everything about gentoo. This channel is all about media software, like those you can find in media-video, media-libs or media-sound for example. Another important purpose for the channel is it to improve the communication between the media dev's themself to reduce the amount of open bugs related to this kind of software since it's an important part of the desktop software. So, everybody is invited to join. :)