Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuwjaar!

For the most frequent visitors:

Flemish – Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuwjaar
English – Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
German – Fröhliche Weihnachten und ein glückliches Neues Jahr!
Finnish – Hyvää Joulua or Hauskaa Joulua – 0nnellista uutta vuotta
French – Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année!
Italian – Buon Natale e Felice Anno Nuovo
Japanese – Shinnen omedeto. Kurisumasu Omedeto
Spanish – Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo

Valgrind : profiling memory leaks under linux

I stumbled upon a tool with high potential when tracing/profiling under linux. I’ll immediately take you to an excerpt from the Valgrind Quickstart:

The Valgrind tool suite provides a number of debugging and profiling tools. The most popular is Memcheck, a memory checking tool which can detect many common memory errors such as:

• Touching memory you shouldn’t (eg. overrunning heap block boundaries, or reading/writing freed memory).
• Using values before they have been initialized.
• Incorrect freeing of memory, such as double-freeing heap blocks.
• Memory leaks.

Openoffice without icons in Ubuntu

Issue
If you’re using an icon theme other than the default for Ubuntu causes OpenOffice to have no icons in the menus or on the toolbars, causing the toolbars actually have the tooltip text as the button’s text (example: Export to PDF, Print File Directly, Spellcheck, etc).

Workaround
Install the “openoffice.org-style-default” package, which installs the “openoffice.org-style-andromeda” package.
OR: Use the default Human theme for Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-style-default

References
Ubuntu forums
Launchpad

Tips & Tricks : Finding your monitor settings for your xserver config

This post is meant to share a small trick that I often use when installing linux on unknown systems. In my opinion, one of the biggest downsides in linux is setting up your monitor. Imagine starting out with linux, cause you hear it was great, installed it… and got an ugly looking desktop because the Xorg.conf is has the default properties.

Then you have a lot of evangelists saying you can perfectly calculate these values, but the thing that pops into my mind at this point is “user friendliness”.

A lot of things said to come down to the trick:

• Download knoppix
• Burn/mount it, so you can boot from it
• Boot your desktop/laptop with the knoppix live-cd.
• Backup the Xorg.conf file
• Boot your main linux distro (cfr. Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora, RedHat, Debian, … whatever)
• Backup your original Xorg.conf file
• Restore the Xorg.conf file from the Knoppix generated one
• Tweak it to your preferences

A additional & simple step that might ease up things for you… 😉

The architecture behind microsoft.com

Jeff Alexander blogged about the setup behind microsoft.com. It got the slashdot effect, and his blog is apparently (temporarily?) suspended. You can find the blog post below, as I dug it from out of the google caches.

Microsoft.com: What’s the story?
If you’ve ever wondered how microsoft.com uses our technology then read on. I recently came across some good information from the folks over at the Operations team at Microsoft.com. The thread basically talks about how we use IIS, Firewalls and Windows Server 2008. I think as we come up to launch next year it’s a really good and quick insight into what they do and how they do it. So enjoy the reading and let me know what you think..Pretend I’ve asked about how they protect our sites…

At this point we still don’t use firewalls for MS.COM sites and don’t have any plans on the books to put them in place. Here is the short answer as to why:

Character

“Character is like a tree and reputation, like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.” Abraham Lincoln

Why should you introduce blogging within your company?

Storytime!
I started blogging about eight months ago. Time has flown by, and I’ve learned a few things about writing and publishing. But the reason I started the blog, was to keep track of the things I solved and to publish those findings so that other may benefit from this wisdom. The saying “no need to invent the wheel twice comes into place here.

As the end of the year is closing towards us, and so are the deadlines for the cases we were giving during my courses. One of those tasks is to do the project management of a (dummy) project. This involves -a lot- of email conversions to get the (internally) distributed tasks aligned. These email threads often contain tasks and questions which need to be reviewed and replied to. The combination of several of causes it to be easily overseen or become to complicated.

Apt-get fun

Need some cheering up, do the following commands on your ubuntu system:

• apt-get moo
• aptitude –help | grep Cow
• • aptitude moo
  • aptitude -v moo
  • aptitude -v -v moo
  • aptitude -v -v -v moo
  • aptitude -v -v -v -v moo
  • aptitude -v -v -v -v -v moo
  • aptitude -v -v -v -v -v -v moo

Source:
Linux moo

MS Riddles : Service Pack 0.1

This post is meant as a follow-up to an earlier article with the subject “Why are manhole covers round?“. It’ll feature some additional “Microsoft Hiring Questions”. Here are my personal “favorites” :

Riddles

• • You’ve got someone working for you for seven days and a gold bar to pay them. The gold bar is segmented into seven connected pieces. You must give them a piece of gold at the end of every day. If you are only allowed to make two breaks in the gold bar, how do you pay your worker?
  • Answer
• • Imagine a disk spinning like a record player turn table. Half of the disk is black and the other is white. Assume you have an unlimited number of color sensors. How many sensors would you have to place around the disk to determine the direction the disk is spinning? Where would they be placed?
  • Answer (Discussion)
• • You have two jars, 50 red marbles and 50 blue marbles. A jar will be picked at random, and then a marble will be picked from the jar. Placing all of the marbles in the jars, how can you maximize the chances of a red marble being picked? What are the exact odds of getting a red marble using your scheme?
  • Answer
• • There is a room with a door (closed) and three light bulbs. Outside the room there are three switches, connected to the bulbs. You may manipulate the switches as you wish, but once you open the door you can’t change them. Identify each switch with its bulb. (note: For the Belgian & Dutch readers, this one was on “De Mol” a few years back.)
  • Answer

Why are manhole covers round?

Intro
A while ago I read an article about hiring questions . A small excerpt of this article aroused my curiosity:

I avoid asking “Microsoft” type questions. I was once interviewed for a job, and I got the litany of them from the hiring manager. For example, “Why are manhole covers round” type questions.

So WHY are they round?