Yesterday, I bought the Special Extended DVD version of The Two Towers, the second part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A much enhanced version of the theater version, and one that's sticking much closer to the original storyplay of the book. Therefore, I find the quality of the Special Extended movie much higher than the original movie. 42 extra minutes, including a glimpse on some new characters like Denethor, steward of Gondor, who will appear in Return of the King. And what a wonderfull collector's item ! I wished already that I've bought the Special Extended version of the Fellowship of the Ring !

Linux 2.6 is almost here; there are still some issues with VMware and Nvidia drivers, but these wil be fixed soon (I'll guess VMware will release their part after the official 2.6 announce). In the meantime, follow this procedure for VMware :



VMWare works fine in 2.6, given that you install the updates at http://knihovny.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/. Just get vmware-any-any-update45.tar.gz and run the install script. Then re-run vmware-config.pl. Make sure that your 2.6 kernel doesn't have preempting enabled (this can cause some crashes) and you're all set.

The Opte project has some new colored graphs of the internet. If only they would release some code so we could generate our own maps of our own IP neighbourhood !

Via Karma :





[kristof@angband] $ whois belgique.be


Domain: belgique

Status: Registered

Registered: Tue Dec 12 2000

Last update: Mon Oct 27 2003 10:30

...

NameServers:

Name: kim.fgov.be

Name: justine.fgov.be

Polar Image is a site with marvelous pictures of atmospheric phenomena, by Pekka Parviainen.

Ace's hardware has an article about the new stuff in Solaris 10. Some interesting stuff, but at first sight, not much exciting features. Or maybe it's because the details are too sketchy yet. Dtrace, though, looks like truss on steroids.

I'm quite excited by this : there is a project called CSS ZenGarden. It's a collection of different stylesheets which modify the same content according to contributor's tastes and design abilities. There are few dozens of examples, and amongst them there is a Slashdot interface, albeit not a perfect copy as shows in the article.

You can view all the available CSS designs here [mezzoblue.com]. Same content, different stylesheet. Just shows off all the wonderful things that's possible with CSS standards-based page creation.


Just in time now I'm in the process of hacking some PHP scripts of a collegue which are responsible for the creation and maintenance of a collaborative website, something in the middle of a Wiki and a small CMS. I wanted to give the new website a different look than the original one, and was wondering how I would attack this problem. I was already thinkering with style sheets, but now I have a clearer view how to divide content from layout.

I guess we're living in a time where it's more expensive to repair stuff than to buy new stuff instead. I mean, recently I bought a DVD player for 60 Euro ! You can't even repair such a device for that price. My 8 year old 200$ TV broke some 3 weeks ago, and as it's a rather unknown mark, not many TV repair stores are willing to fix these TV's. So I had no other choice than letting the 'honorable' firm Telespeed repair my TV. They charged me 175 Euro for it (almost the new price), and now, 2 weeks after repair, the TV is broken again ! So while the TV is still under guarantee, they still charge me 20 Euro for pickup & delivery of the TV. That's fucking theft ! I already regret that I did not buy a new TV instead...

More than two years ago, in September 2001, I choose for Mozilla 0.9.3 as my default browser. It was a significant change from the commercial Netscape Communicator Suite with its horrible Motif look and feel, and its crash prone behaviour. I never regretted that decision. It was an exciting time, seeing Mozilla develop from a simple browser to the modern, secure and feature rich program it is today.




This weekend, I made a similar move by selecting Mozilla Firebird and ThunderBird as my default browser and email programs. It took a while, but I'm quickly getting comfortable using these spiffy looking programs. I discovered the Thunderbird tips 'n tricks site, and can recommend the different Quote Level Colors modification : it adds different colors of both the text and background of different quote levels in messages. This makes it much easier to follow a long discussion in newsgroups for example, where the level of reply quotes can go very deep.

Joey Hess, Debian developer, keeps his homedir files in CVS. An idea that seems strange at first sight, but it has some inexpected advantages. The first thing I usually do after logging in on a new box, is scp'ing my dotfiles so I get my comfortable environment again. However, keeping everything in CVS seems a great distributed backup medium that gets synced quite quickly.





At work, I use SCCS - an old Solaris CVS clone - to keep track of my servers configuration files. Every modified bit gets reported instantaneously.