D - 8 : het begint hier serieus te stressen. Nog een achttal dagen voor de trouw, en het is nu bijna dagelijks dingen te regelen. Ik ga trouwens een lijst ophangen met zaken die we de laatste week zullen moeten afwerken, of we gaan dingen vergeten, ik voel het. De betalingen beginnen ook binnen te stromen, en da's het minst leuke deel :( Nu begrijp ik ten volle waarom mensen zeggen dat je maar éénmaal in je leven een trouwfeest geeft.

Maar dit terzijde. We hebben nogal wat vragen gekregen van familieleden waar het allemaal te doen is in Leuven, dus heb ik een pagina gemaakt met daarop enkele wegbeschrijvingen naar de kerk, feestzaal, ... enzo, samen met kaartjes hoe je moet rijden. Hopelijk maakt dit het wat duidelijker voor niet-GPS bezitters. Voor de gelukkigen met een Agnes de GPS zijn hieronder nog de feestadressen vermeld :

Kerk : Groot Begijnhof 14, 3000 Leuven
Parking vind je aan Tervuursevest 62, parking nummer P3.

Feestzaal : Ruisbroekstraat 24, 3360 Bierbeek

Spaceimages.com carries a page with the most stunning space images taken in 2005. Explore the view from Husband Hill, Mars, explore the surface of Titan or admire the remnants of the 1987A supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which optical hot-spots now encircle the ring like a necklace of incandescent diamonds. Each image is accompanied with an extended explanation.

Industrial music is still alive, it seems : Hitachi put up some .wav files with the sounds of hard drives gone bad. Gizmodo is offering a sweet Tokyoflash Equalizer watch to the person who uses those sounds to create a song that makes the whole world sing.

The first batch of entries is in. You can give them a listen over at Odeo, or use the RSS feed.

There are plenty of tracks that sound like Autechre, even Ryoji Ikeda.

One of the features of Solaris 10 which is no less important than DTrace, Zones, and SMF is the re-write and major speed-up of the network stack. Internally the project is called FireEngine, and BigAdmin carries an interesting round-up of this new stack.

OpenSolaris BrandZ is a framework that extends the Solaris Zones infrastructure to create Branded Zones, which are zones that contain non-native operating environments. Nils Nieuwejaar has a blog post where he installs a Debian zone with BrandZ.

I'm on my way to Pluto. or at least, my name is. The NASA space probe New Horizons, launched yesterday, carries a disc with the names of all subscribers of the NH ecard site which I mentioned some months ago. The $700m probe will gather information on Pluto and its moons before - it is hoped - pressing on to explore other objects in the outer Solar System. Pluto is the only remaining planet that has never been visited by a spacecraft.

At the same time, researchers are opening the Stardust probe, which collected dust particles on the Wild2 comet. A very important part of the study of cometary grains is the study of organics. We know comets contain abundant organics and abundant water. We're not sure what kinds of organics are in there. But we think that most of the Earth's water and organics - most of the molecules in our bodies - came from comets.

Members of the public are being asked to sift through millions of pictures of the gel to locate the precise positions of the tiny grains. The project, known as Stardust@home, has been set up by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Volunteers will be able to access the images via a web-based "virtual microscope".