Nearly three years after landing on Mars, the rover "Opportunity" has reached a region of the planet that may provide the best clues yet about the history of the red planet.

The golf cart-sized robot is now overlooking Victoria Crater, showing us rugged walls with layers of exposed rock and a floor blanketed with dunes. Take a look at this magnificent panorama, taken from 800 meters distance.

Both Mars robots got recently a software update comparable to a Y2K fix : both rovers are nearing 1000 days of operational status, and the original software only had 3 digits for the current day. Opportunity will the next weeks be exploring the Victoria crater, searching the crater rim to see if there's any way it can get down into the crater. For geologists, deeper usually means farther back in time. By going down deeper, in a place five times bigger than the last craters, we hope to see the history of Mars.

There's much ado about the Google.be case : two newspapers won a lawsuit against Google for archiving their news stories, which conflicted with their business model, which wants subscription for older archived articles. The court favoured the Belgian newspapers and ordered Google.be to put up a legal note about this on their frontpage, and to remove the articles from their archives.

A lot has been said about this case: that it could have been avoided with robots.txt, that it was all about the money, etc. Francois Planque has a nice roundup. The case is IMO quite stupid, will cost the two Belgian newspapers quite some visitors (the number of people visiting sites through Google is unneglectable) and indicates a problem with court rulings and understanding of the internet. If I download a site page, this page is copied in at least three places : my browser cache, my local Squid proxy cache, and probably on the cache of my ISP's transparent proxy. Must all these versions be deleted after the page has been archived on the original site ?

However, I personally don't think this could so easily be resolved by the use of the robots.txt file : this file is only a 'recommendation' for internet spiders what to index or not. Many bots don't even scan the robots.txt file. I think that lots of website builders aren't aware how to properly display guidelines how to cache site contents : simply by use of the 'HTTP header: Expires' as stated in RFC2616 (read part 14.9 about Cache-Control). The Belgian newspapers easily could have implemented this by using an expiration period of let's say 24 hours, and still have a working business model.

There has been a lot of debate recently about the demotion of Pluto as a planet. Pluto is a weird planet : it is the farthest one, has an eccentric orbit (where it becomes closer to the sun than Neptune at one point) and has a moon that is almost as large as itself. It's also discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, an American, a subtle and important fact, cause this whole discussion is mostly a political one.

The first proposition was to include Ceres (an asteroide between Mars and Jupiter) and Xena, recently discovered as the tenth planet, in the list as officially acknowledged planets. The problem with that resolution was that there are more objects in the solar system which would be classified as planets.

The second proposition was to remove Pluto as a planet, and call objects of its size as 'Plutons', or dwarf planets. However, the discussion is still open, and lots of scientist would like to see Pluto to reappear as planet.

Xena, the tenth planet, just got renamed as Eris, which is more according to the standard of giving planets the name of Roman and Greek gods. In Greek mythology, Eris is the goddess of warfare and strife. She stirs up jealousy and envy to cause fighting and anger among men. At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of the Greek hero Achilles, all the gods with the exception of Eris were invited, and, enraged at her exclusion, she spitefully caused a quarrel among the goddesses that led to the Trojan war. In the astronomical world, Eris stirred up a great deal of trouble among the international astronomical community when the question of its proper designation led to a raucous meeting of the IAU in Prague. At the end of the conference, IAU members voted to demote Pluto and Eris to dwarf-planet status, leaving the solar system with only eight planets.

The satellite of Eris has received the offical name Dysnomia, who in Greek mythology is Eris' daughter and the demon spirit of lawlessness. As promised for the past year, the name Xena (and satellite Gabrielle) were simply placeholders while awaiting the IAU's decision on how an official name was to be proposed. As that process dragged on, however, many people got to know Xena and Gabrielle as the real names of these objects and are sad to see them change.

Red Hat's Virtual Machine Manager is a GUI for Xen. Not as fancy as the VirtualCenter of VMWare, but it's a start.

Stoyan Angelov has build up an impressive Solaris documentation site with links to Opensolaris, ZFS, SMF, name it, all the Solaris goodies are included.