While playing around with my Puppet configuration I discovered that the 'system facts' returned by the Facter helper tool were not consistent on my Debian boxes.

On some machines Facter properly reported all LSB related facts of the system, while on other machines it did not report any such information.
The problem occurred on about 50% of the hosts, so I excluded a bug introduced by manual over-tuning of the system configuration.

Further investigation showed that Facter uses the lsb_release command to collect the LSB information of the system.
On Debian this command is provided by the lsb-release package which was only installed on half of my systems...

Now my Puppet manifests include the following configuration directive which should prevent this problem in the future :-)

package { 'lsb-release':
	ensure => installed,
}

One advantage of being in Australia during the swiss winter is that you can go to music festivals in January! And so I did :-)

Last thursday I went to the Big Day Out festival in Sydney.
What is interesting compared to festivals in Europe is that in Australia the festival starts at 11 in the morning and ends at 11:45 in the evening, whereas in Switzerland festivals start around 5 in the afternoon and end around 5-6 in the morning.

I really liked the performances of Parkway Drive, Miss Kittin, Röyksopp, Bassnectar, Kasabian, Soundgarden and Regurgitator.
Also it was nice to catch a glimpse of The Jezabels, Hilltop Hoods, Kitty, Daisy & Lewis and the show of Kayne West.
A bit disapointing was the performance of Cavalera Conspiracy. They even had to fallback to popular Sepultura songs (Refuse/Resist, Roots Bloody Roots) in order to get the crowd moving. On the other hand it was lucky for me, so I got to see a live concert of Sepultura (performed by the founders of Sepultura!), something I didn't think I would ever see after Max Cavalera had left the band.
Unfortunately the last train back was before the end of the festival and so I did miss Nero.

Listening to Keren Ann is just perfect when you have to work on a rainy Sunday.
Thank you Metropop for showing me her music.

Keren Ann - My name is trouble

Yesterday after work we had some beers at The Local Taphouse (including some fine porter from BrewDog to increase my shareholder value) and then we went on to go out in some clubs, in shorts and flip-flops.
Astonishingly we had no problems getting inside, anywhere else in the world this would not be possible!

This morning then up again for some early surfing at Bondi before all the tourists arrive.
And now chilling in my Kammok under the trees in the frontyard :-)

This morning I started to prepare the bagagges for my trip to 28C3 and for the two months in Sydney.
While stowing away all my stuff in boxes so I can sublet my room I found old boxes with stuff, which I did stow away over a year ago when I went to Sydney the last time and I've never even thought about since!

As I did not have time to open them today I don't even know what is in those boxes. Probably I should just throw them away when I come back from Sydney, there can't be anything important in there :-)

Let's finish the badge advent calendar like it started - with a tech conference badge. Enjoy my Open Systems nametag:

One of the rare concert evenings at Satellite where even the technicians had to have an additional badge (but nevertheless this is another one of a kind memory): Soiree BAM 2005

There we go, the first year I participated as staff: Festival Balelec 2005

Luckily this one took place very year (for more than 30 years now!): Festival Balelec 2006

Yet another great event which no longer exists: ClosedAir 2006