The times that I feel like a dumb fucker a really seldom, but tonight was such a memorable moment. I upgraded PHP to version 4.3.2, and immediately all my PHPNuke sites went blind, screaming Warning : Passing locale category name as string is deprecated. Use the LC_* -constants instead. I sighed, and immediately upgraded my PHPNuke5.2 to 6.5, and of course, the upgraded failed. What do you expect from PHPNuke ?

So I had no other choice but dropping the database, and rebuilding this site from scratch. Of course, some hours later, I found the solution to my problem : just don't use quotes while setting locale (LC_) vars, like the cryptic error message said :

setlocale(LC_TIME,"fr_FR");

instead of :

setlocale("LC_TIME","fr_FR");

Last night I had a chance to see Raduga 33, my first Iridium flare : right on the predicted time and location, it lit up. Iridium flares are small communications satellites providing spectacular visible reflective flares/glints to observers on the ground. With only a normal brightness of +6 magnitude, occasionally some of the Iridium satellites provide reflective flares of magnitude -8. For comparison, Venus can be as bright as magnitude -4.9, thus reflections can be up to 30 times brighter than Venus. The flares can last anywhere from 5 to 20 seconds before the satellite once again becomes almost invisible to the naked eye.

Heavens Above is a true gold mine for satellite spotters. Its aim is to provide you with all the information you need to observe satellites such as the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle, spectacular events such as the dazzlingly bright flares from Iridium satellites by offering you detailled information and star charts.

There's a call for votes in the Dutch newsgroup nl.kunst.sf+fantasy for the SF and fantasy movie top 50. Here''s my top 10 :

1. LOTR : Fellowship Of The Ring
2. Aliens
3. Blade Runner
4. The Matrix
5. Terminator
6. The 5th Element
7. Merlin
8. Dune
9. Star Wars : The Empire Strikes Back
10. The Hidden

Predator and Akira just fell out the top10. Shame, but it was a difficult choice...

Burning Man is a yearly happening in Black Rock desert, Nevada. Once a year, for one week in the desert (Aug 25 till Sep 1 2003), a community of living, breathing, participants join together to create Black Rock City. The people who attend Burning Man are no mere "attendees," but rather participants in every sense of the word: they create the city, the interaction, the art, the performance and ultimately the "experience."

There are many ways to participate. You can create a theme camp or build an art installation. You might put on a performance or build a stage for others to perform on. Check out examples of Playa Events which participants created.

The earth is over 5 billion years old. Life first originated in the oceans 3.4 billion years ago. The dinosaurs died out 65 million years in the past. Human recorded history stretches back 10,000 years in time.

These numbers are too large to visualize, and difficult to compare. That's why a timeline is interesting : an image sometimes says more than one thousand words. Hotu.org (HistoryOfTheUniverse.org) offers a nice timeline of the last 15 billion years of Earth. More impact on the climate of the last aeons can be found Climate Timeline Tool. Some others exagerate a bit in the visualisation of this timeline : the history on a toilet roll.

Interested in the future ? Faction Earth gives a probable future of the next 150 years : accelarated population growth and the formation of city clusters aka city plexes. Corporate and biological warfare with the origin of mutant humans and extinct life on Mars. Luckily, this possible future is all part of a computer game.