Cosmos on DVD

"To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
-- Carl Sagan

22 years ago, 13 hours of television changed my life. I was just 10 years old when I saw Cosmos for the first time. Carl Sagan's explanation of the "Billions and Billions" of stars in our universe was often heckled, but I always related to the wonder of the magnitude that he was trying to relate. Vangelis was responsible for the soundtrack (the same guy behind the music from Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner), and thinking back at it today, I feel the stirrings of emotion that brought me running to Science at an early age.

If you're looking for a gift for a child in your life this holiday season, I suggest the DVD Compilation. Make sure to buy it from the carlsagan.com site, as 10% of the proceeds go to the Carl Sagan Foundation.
I recently bought the DVD compilation from carlsagan.com, and I must say that I'm not dissapointed : great show, great music.

Dexia NetBanking for Mac OS X

For some days I'm busy porting Dexia's NetBanking to Mac OSX, the all-singing-all-dancing Unix-with-a-GUI. Today I finally managed to get the core of NetBanking working. It took only some days of twiddling with the code, just hindered by the fact that there's no VisualAge for Java available for Mac OSX. But this thing just shows how rock solid the whole NetBanking architecture is built.

And gosh, do I like this Java2 stuff in Apple. No more MRJ crap, just plain Sun Java. Internet Explorer and Mozilla working in one strike, God, this is the way how Java was meant to be.

For all you Macheads, Dexia's NetBanking will be available in December 2002 on your Mac OSX. No fscking module anymore, just a simple applet in your browser !

Barcodes

After reading a post about making your own Albert Heyn bonus cards, I search a bit around, and quickly discovered barcode (duh), a Unix command line program, which makes barcodes of an excellent quality (in PostScript).

Most barcodes on items here in Europe, are in EAN-13 code, which you find explained here. The first 2 or 3 characters are used for country codes. For example, Belgian manufactured goods are labelled with a barcode beginning with 54.

Back yard safari

The dog brought a bug inside the house, which I now can identify as a Green Shield Bug, thanks to Hania's and Hans' pages on the garden animals (also available in Dutch). The nicely illustrated site gives an amazing overview of what little monsters are living in the Western European back yards.