www.uglychristmaslights.com is a site to show those houses where the residents are likely celebrating a happy holiday, but have no sense of decency in how they choose to celebrate. We will show the garish, the ugly, the weird. For your own sake, and the sake of your neighbors, do not try this at home.

Last Friday, I saw for the first time Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain. I generally don't like French films, but Le destin is a juwel. I'm apparently not the only one with this opinion, because the movie, which is regarded as the master of feel-good movies, was for 52 weeks (!) on the programmation list of the famous Studio movie theathers in Leuven. If you watch the movie, pay attention to the photography. Nearly every frame is a watercolor painting come to life, even the most mundane scenes.


Take, for instance, the snippet where Amelie encounters the man playing the record player in the subway. Look at the colors, and how even the buttons on the man's coat echoes the peas in the painting behind him. Look, too, at the colors in the concierge's apartment and in the park -- everywhere! It is a feast for the eyes!



Very beautifull soundtrack too from Yann Tiersen.

Isn't Christmas shopping fun ? Most people resent the fake Christmas atmosphere with the Jingle Bells sound terrorism, but if the place isn't too crowded, I really like it. Today I was browsing The Fnac bookshop for a good book for mum, when I suddenly discovered that there's a new print of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen Donaldson. It's one of the most powerful and complex fantasy trilogies since Lord of the Rings : each character-driven book introduces unexpected plots, sub-plots, and a host of magical beings so believably rendered you'd believe you might bump into them on your way to the bookstore.


If you love The Lord of the Rings, but dislike the arcane language, you should really give The Chronicles a try. Anyway, I treated myself on yet another Christmas present :)

I am one of Japanese astronomical photo artists. Now, I present a lot of unique three-dimentional space arts to you. I hope you will heal your heart by 3D SPACE WORLD.



In typical Engrish, Akira Inaka presents his 3D Universe site. It contains many 3D pictures of constellations, and deep-sky objects. The site's navigation is something to get used to, but the content makes alot good. Be sure to check out some of the constellations (Lyra in the summer section), and most of the deep-sky stuff (in the 'Other' section).

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Sometimes you run into goodies you just *have* to buy for yourself. I bumped into the Alien Quadrology, a collector's item 9 DVD set, containing 2 versions of each of the Alien movies : the theatrical release, and the director's cut. Each movie is accompanied by an extra DVD with bonus material. There's not much to be found on the internet about this 9 disc edition, except this Dutch review on dvd.nl.rn

Anyway, there's an extra package for me now under the Christmas tree ;) It a nice warmup for the Aliens vs Predator movie.

Isn't the Perl advent calendar cool ? One of the entries pointed to an article on O'Reilly.net about hacking some RSS spiders, which is what DarkChannels exactly is. It mentions the Perl modules Template::Extract and XML::RSS::Parser::Lite, which you can use to create your own RSS agregator. I certainly recommend Template::Extract, which is very usefull if you have complex datafiles from which you have to get your information.

Yesterday evening, I rewrote DarkChannels completely in Perl, so I could finally ditch the crappy shellscript I used to fetch the RSS feeds. So for now, DarkChannels 0.2 is just the same car, but with a different - and better - engine. Version 0.3 is already being coded, and will contain more functional enhancements.

On December 17th, it will be exactly one hunderd year since the first flight of the Wright brothers. MSNBC has a nice overview of the most famous airoplanes.

As it is the habit these times, there's yet again a new Perl advent calendar with various usefull Perl tips & code snipplets.

I'm not really a guy who installs every new Linux kernel, but in general I like to follow in the slipstream of newer kernels. In practice, that means I'm maximum 3 or 4 kernel releases behind (I tend to follow the 2.2 kernel branch too). So now that Linux-2.4.23 has been released this weekend, and that my firewall was happily running 2.4.20, I decided to upgrade the box to 2.4.23. I wanted to increase significantly the security, by patching the kernel with the grsec patch, aka GReater SECurity. It's a modification in the line of big iron Unices, where the kernel is provided with ACLs, several randomizer like PIDs, auditing and security restrictions. I still have some tweaking to do, like tightening the kernel module loader, but in general, I'm quite satisfied with the result.