Category Archives: Personal

Linux Exchange Integration

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Like many of us, most of the companies I work for have a Windows based environment. This implies that our mail is handled by Exchange. In many cases you can access the mail with IMAP, however some companies choose not to open up anything except the webmail (and OWA).

As you may know, Android has the possibility to do over the air sync of calendar,email and contacts using the Microsoft ActiveSync software. As Android is a Linux device with a Java layer on top. I already checked if I could extract the sources from the Android app. During my search I came across a small project called davmail . Davmail is a project written in Java that acts as a proxy for OWA. It connects to the OWA of your company and exposes the receiving of mails using an IMAP or POP interface. You can also send mails using standard SMTP. This will then be translated in a Active Sync call to send the actual mail. It also exposes your contacts and calendar. I’ve not yet managed to get the Calendar working but at least my mail is now working. Up until now I was always booting a Vmware. The only thing this VM would be doing was running Oultook.

Let’s hope these days are over and I can finally leave the Windows behind. (Not if it would be a Exchange 2010 at least the webinterface would be a RIA but as it’s still the 2007 edition not much rich GUI is available for Linux).

So everybody looking for an alternative give it a go and let me know, I’m pretty interested to hear what you think about it.

Veel sterkte Bruno!!

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Ik las net enkele posts van Bruno . Het deed me onmiddelijk terugdenken aan mijn vader en de tranen schoten me in mijn ogen. (Mijn vader is nu al een 4tal jaren geleden overleden, er werd een alvleeskanker geconstateerd. Laatst op een bbq kwam ik een specialist tegen en we geraakten aan de praat. Blijkbaar is alvleesklier kanker een van de zwaarste gevallen en ligt het sterftecijfer heel hoog veel hoger dan de % die ons waren meegedeeld) Mijn meter (geen rechtstreekse familie van mijn vader had borstkanker, zij is er wel goed uitgekomen. Kanker is dus zeker geen doodvonnis!!

Ik wens jullie veel sterkte in deze moeilijke tijden. Ik heb het ook meegemaakt en hoop dat het net als bij ons jullie familie veel hechter bij elkaar brengt, ik hoop ook dat het bij jullie zo afloopt als bij mijn meter en jullie je leventjes mooi verder kunnen zetten. Dat jullie nog veel kleinkindjes mogen krijgen. (-> in oktober wordt mijn moeder moeke!!)

Contact info

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Hey Peter,

I had the same problem some time ago, didn’t find an email adres on their blog so no way to contact him. Didn’t know I had made the same mistake. Anyway you can always contact me using bjorn at pczone.be. I’ll put it on my blog somewhere ;)

Sorry for the troubles :s

Silence is a good thing (this time)

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I haven’t posted in a long time, reason is actually very very simple. As a startup I’m getting really a lot of work, maybe even to much work. But you don’t hear me complaining, I’m really glad that I’ve got this much work.

One of the first investments I did was the purchase of a 24″ TFT screen. I have to say, It really improvese my coding speed. In a couple of months I’ll buy a second one for xinerama!! I’ll take a picture when I’ve build the setup, but it really is true that you work faster if you have a larger image to work with!

Next week I’ll be attending javapolis, one of the biggest (if not the biggest) java event in Europe. I’ll be going the thursday and friday as I don’t find the wednesday interesting enough, give me a shout if you’re also going! I’m always interested in talking with other ‘geeks’.

Hope I can get some free time during the christmas period to work some further on my mono topreader project as I really want that getting into a usable state.

Prime Potter

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Well we always accuse the prime minister of the Netherlands to look like Harry Potter. If I can remember some flemish pollitician even called him that.

Well with the events of yesterday I propose we should call our own prime minister Harry Potter. Our country was 900 million € short, they sat down a couple of days and when they came out of their offices they had managed to magically get more than 900 million €. Could you do the same to my bank account pease ?! :)

I’m really interested at how we will notice this in our dailly lives! Both as a consumer and as a self-employed person.

Spreading the word

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My girlfriend is still attending college, she is studying to become a teacher in sports and informatics. She was asked to do a presentation at here school today. As we at home mostly use opensource she is familiar with the linux phenomenon. She is actually quit pleased with the results, ie she fully agrees that firefox is a better browser than internet exploder.

Yesterday she was poking my brain about opensource so she could do the presentation. She took our camcorder and started with recording our mythtv box. She really loves this piece of softwer, I don’t think she wants a normal vcr ever again :) .
She also took my copy of an elephants dream the first opensource movie. She also recorded the fancy xgl stuff,just for letting her fellow students see that linux in some fields even surpassed windows already. (in my eyes they already did in almost every field :) )

So I wanted to give here a big kiss and hug for helping me spreading the word of opensource software. I hope the presentation goes well for here. Schools and computers mostly don’t go together that well, I hope the dvd and avi file work on the crappy material they have over there.

One more converted

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Yesterday I had a meeting with my boss. During our last workshop I did part of my demo on ubuntu and most of the other people were really amazed at how far the linux desktop had evolved. My boss mailed me a couple of times asking more information on my linux (ubuntu).
Yesterday he told me he had installed ubuntu and kubuntu. He was really amazed as all his hardware (including wireless) worked out of the box. With windows he had to search ages for his printer drivers, he had to seperately install his wireless,… in short he was dazzled with how far linux was.
I’m proud to say I converted one more it professional to ubuntu, let’s hope the count goes up rapidly!!

Podcast comment

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This morning I was listening to my cup of javaposse. They started a discussion about the difference between good and bad codemonkeys. The said that a good monkey would be 300% more productive than a bad one, but what’s more strange is that they would probably still be paid the same.

As I know what a lot of my collegeaus earn, I really have to agree with this. There are guys out there who really get paid way to little for what they know and do, and others who actually don’t do much get paid even more. This is really frustrating, I know that if I’m in charge of the money I’ll be giving my best programmers more than those who do little and know little.

In my former job, I now and then had to interview some sollicitants. I always asked the very simple question, tell me the difference between an abstract class and an interface. If they didn’t knew, well sorry your not a programmer in my eyes. It’s one of the basics of OO programming, what’s almost a defacto standard.

My current employer works with consultants (as I am one of them), I told him as tip. If you get a consultant, just type his name in google. If you don’t get any results, I for one wouldn’t hire them (unless he can explain). Why you might ask, well actually very simple. If you can’t find something, where do you look. Google,Support,… in most cases if you log a question or something you have to provider your credentials, so you leave your credentials behind. These things get picked up by search engines. It’s not always true off course, but in many cases it will give you an indication of the person who is sitting before you.

Now I was wondering if you could take it one step further. Afaik if you are programming you are using your keyboard, hence a person who knows who to type without looking at his keyboard should be faster than someone who needs to look at his keys. So should you say, if you can’t type, you won’t get the job, or is this taking it one step to far?