NASA is preparing to send the New Horizons probe to Pluto. It will be the first earth device to get intimate with the icy planet. And you can be there too - or, at least, your name. NASA is asking everyone to send them their names, which will be attached in the space device. The New Horizons probe will be launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto and the mysterious Kuiper belt, in the outskirts of the Solar System. It is expected that the probe will return to earth in approximately 50 thousand (!) years.

I've created a Flickr page to store some of my photographs. What a wonderfull service Flickr is ! A great place too to find sublime - and free - wallpapers.
Eat your heart out, Webshots !
And of course, someone already created FlickrLicio.us too.

Operation Crossroads was an atmospheric nuclear weapon test series conducted in the summer of 1946 at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The series consisted of two detonations, a low altitude test and a shallow water test. In contrast to all later atmospheric nuclear tests, a large media contingent was present for the two Crossroads detonations. They were allowed to cover the test atomic bomb explosions "with sufficient thoroughness to satisfy the public as to the fairness and general results of the experiment." In addition, three artists also recorded the project, to give the public an idea of the project. History.navil.mil offers a look at the aquarels being made then, only shame about the small images...

Biella Coleman recently finished her dissertation in Anthropology after studying Free Software communities for most of a decade. It's quite a read and offers a unique insight from a Debian outsider how Open Source communities work and thrive. A very interesting conclusion that has been made is the idea that crises such as the one around the Vancouver prospectus are necessary if painful, but are for the merit of the community. It's a hefty read, difficult and full of antropological jargon, but a very interesting work.

I have upgraded Drupal's spam module from version 2.0.3 to version 2.0.10. The sum of the upgrades allows me now to expire spam comments automatically, which finally ends the almost daily task of emptying the spam queue.

The work of Jeremy Andrews on this piece of software is impressive : new versions are delivired almost weekly, and sane feature requests get implemented at a very high rate.