If you're interested about Virtualization I suggest to read this report about my views, hope you like it ;-).

Never seen a weird place like Formentera, all people there speaks Italian, it doesn't feel like being in Spain at all. In Canada at least somebody speaks French ;-). It's a great place to have a vacation nevertheless, the sea is cool and there are nice parties and events by night often on the beach in very Italian style.

Yesterday I returned from the KVM Forum 2008. The conference was great.

My presentation about the MMU Notifier was admittedly a bit too complex for people not actively working on the mmu.c code. MMU Notifier is a fairly small patch but the complexity of understanding what it does and how it works is quite high. You should read the slides if you're interested about that. I didn't bullettize them much, that was a cons during the presentation, but it's a bonus to read them online.

The trip also reminded me how much I like San Francisco and California!

For quite a while I couldn't connect to the internet using bluetooth /dev/rfcomm0 with the Samsung Z720, despite the /dev/ttyACM0 worked with with the supplied usb cable. The trick is to change channel 1 to channel 4 in the /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf file (this is with Gentoo after unmasking the latest bluez-libs-3.28, bluez-utils-3.28-r1 packages and kernel is 2.6.24, but it should work the same for any recent distro). I didn't know the modem channel was different from 1... Now even both kmobiletools and gammu works using /dev/rfcomm0 like with ttyACM0.

The ping latency I get with bluetooth to reach my asterisk server at home (including the latency of the adsl, vpn etc..) is slightly above 100msec but usually below 150msec with HSDPA. With EDGE I usually get more than 300msec. Usb cable or bluetooth don't seem to make a lot of difference for the latency.

I didn't bother to measure the bandwidth with rfcomm but it should decrease it from 7mbit of HSDPA over ttyACM0 to 2.1mbit of EDR.

As for the AT commands needed to establish the ppp connection with HSDPA (or UMTS or EDGE or GPRS) this is my wvdial.conf:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
ISDN = 0

[Dialer z720-bt]
Init4 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","your.apn"
Modem Type = USB Modem
;Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Modem = /dev/rfcomm0
Baud = 921600
Phone = *99**1*1#
Stupid Mode = on
Username = yourusername
Password = yourpassword
;Auto DNS = on
Auto Reconnect = off
Dial Attempts = 1
Carrier Check = no

You likely want to turn Auto DNS on if you don't use a dns server behind the vpn. Hope this helps if you had my same rfcomm problem with the the Z720.

After 8 years and half yesterday was my last day of work for Novell/SUSE.

While on one hand I'm extremely excited about my new job and the huge potential of the products that I'll be working on starting today (that's why I changed job after all ;-), on the other hand I'm sad to leave Novell after so long. The environment of SUSE Labs is fun, friendly, clever and productive. I didn't leave because of things like the Microsoft deal (which for various reasons I consider irrelevant as far as open source development is concerned, and financially speaking it was probably a no brainer decision for Novell to take so I certainly couldn't complain much about it), or unhappiness about the job. It's just that a new opportunity presented itself with a startup I strongly believe in, working on a really cool technology that I like, need and use so much myself ;-).

Now that I left, I think I can definitely recommend Novell as a great company to work for, to be partner with and to be customer of.