Somewhere in June 2009, I became self-employed. Since it involves sending invoices, I decided to create a template with OpenOffice. After creating a new invoice, I export it as PDF and email it to the customer. Saves me paper, ink, envelopes, stamps, trips to the post office, fuel, ... You get the picture.

Unfortunately I still have to hand them in to my bookkeeping office on paper, so I still have to print them once. Which is what I've been doing since June 2009. Until I tried printing invoices from Q4 2009, somewhere in December. The printer refused to print anything.

In case you're annoyed by the fact that backspace doesn't work by default in vim on SLES, add this to /etc/vimrc or ~/.vimrc:

Recently I came across this link in #xbmc-linux on Freenode: http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kernel-patch.html

Recently some of the larger ISPs in Belgium decided to finally open their eyes and increase their ridiculously low traffic limits. They even announced to entirely drop these limits for the more expensive ones. About damn time they did that.

Unfortunately, if you read the small letters, they still mention "$ISP maintains the right to lower the bandwidth for customers who have a higher traffic usage than the average for that particular product". Sounds pretty vague to me. I'd rather have a connection with a 250GB traffic limit, then signing up for something like this, which is totally unclear... Typical ... They really couldn't come up with anything better, after the big publicity stunts they organized? Belgacom, Telenet, you both fail once again.

As you could read in one of my previous posts, I have been investigating my Sagem F@st 3464 modem a little, to see if it ran Linux (which it does). With the help of this topic, I was able to login into the modem with telnet. After entering the password and typing the "shell" command, I was presented an ash shell with BusyBox.

Have you ever noticed that if you put cron jobs in /etc/cron.daily on a SLES machine, they seem to run at random times? I noticed it a few times, and I find it to be really annoying. Say, I rebooted a machine yesterday around 14:00, and today at 14:15, the machine starts rebuilding the man db, backing up the rpm db, cleaning /tmp, rotating logs, etc. Huh?! Looks like a bad idea to do such things when the system is currently in use by multiple people. Imagine that you put a database backup in there, and that backup locks your database...