The penguin Loves musician / (aka "De pinguïn houdt van muzikanten")

Last weekend I was one of the presenters at the T-dose conference 2013 held in Eindhoven / The Netherlands. It was about my experiences using free/open source tools for my music hobby. It is entirely in Dutch but Google translate is most likely you friend, here are the slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/fritsvanderholst/de-pinguin-houdt-van-muzikanten-t-dose-2013

I had about 20 people watching so that was OK.
Possibly I will do the presentation again at some other venue. 

Ubuntu updates and Sitecom Cloud security woes

Recently I ran into trouble updating my Ubuntu systems at home. Suddenly certain packages could not be downloaded from Ubuntu official servers. So I switched to the national mirror.... no avail. The another European mirror... same problem.  So that was really weird, different mirrors showing the exact same problem.

Packages I could not download had DRM in their name or SSL or other cryptography related names.  Also a weird and strange coincidence.. So it started to feel like the problem is most likely at my side..

I did buy a new Sitecom switch recently... and that it hit me. I did turn on Sitecom Cloud Security trial to see whether I liked it! Maybe the Cloud Security filters those packages?
Turned it off.... and yes problem solved!

I have no idea why on earth official, signed debian packages are filtered by Sitecom  Cloud Security... but don't count me in for a subscription to this service.

Kicking off...

Well I have the idea of starting my own blog for quite some time, but somehow never got to it.

While there is enough happening to write about.. 

Let's start off with an introduction. My name is Frits van der Holst, living close to the Rotterdam Harbor (in the Netherlands). I am A Linux/OSS enthusiast for approx 14, 15 years now and have moved my professional career into that direction. As a hobby I am an amateur musician, started off playing pop/rock and recently moved to playing Jazz.

Professionally I am now Linux / Open Source specialist. Stuff I do:

• Linux training for various customers.  
• Linux / OSS consultancy / support / Trouble shooting
• (Software) configuration management consultancy / support.
• Various presentations on Linux/ OSS and do write articles.

I do visit conferences regularly like: Fosdem, T-dose, LAC, NLUUG, SFD etc... 

For my music hobby I use OSS software fully to support me in making sheet music, rehearsing, recording, etc. My 'music notebook' runs Ubuntu Studio (not the best audio distribution but it works for me).

I do all my computing/ hacking whatever on Linux (whether my employer likes it or not..). 

So there is a lot going on and I do want to write about that. Writing articles is hard work and not fit for everything I run into or want to write about. Twitter is nice for short messages but I can't fit everything in 144 chars so with this Blog I try to fill the gap between the two.

Finishing off this first entry.. these are my coordinates:

Linkedin: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/fritsvanderholst/

Twitter:   https://twitter.com/FritsvanderH

I'll be back soon with some tech blogs.

Frits