Fabio Massimo Di Nitto reported that he was able to install Debian on a Sun Enterprise 10000 server via NFS-Root at Ericsson Telebit A/S. Such a Starfire machine contains up to 64 CPUs and can run several operating systems at the same time.




At work, I sysadmin a domain on such a StarFire, or E10K as we call it. Speaking of which, we bought a new toy : a Fujitsu PrimePower 450 server, the size of half a refrigerator. Contains only a rack with a 4U machine in it, though.

Modern church has translated the bible into IRC lingo speak, which makes the book so much more understandable for them youngsters.

DarkChannels 0.4.2 has been released; it contains a bugfix where the script continues to operate even if one of the sites is down. The previous version bailed out when one of the listed sites was unavailable, a phenomenon that occurred too frequently, now that the list of sites continues to grow.




I'm starting to code on DarkChannels 0.5.0, which should support every version of RSS, and for which I will make the source available for download under the GPL.

Whoo-hoo ! 'Lord of the Rings' Director Peter Jackson is planning to film 'The Hobbit,' according to this Associated Press article. Jackson is waiting for New Line and MGM, the two studios with rights to the film, to battle it out for rights to make the prequel. Jackson also mentions wanting the movie to feel just like the LOTR trilogy, including having Ian McKellen return as Gandalf.

On several occasions, I noticed that the Mozilla download manager's background image distractingly looks like a raised middle finger. Glad to see that I''m not the only one. The bug, however, has been marked WONTFIX...

A young Ukrainian woman has posted a photo journal of her motorcycle rides through Chernobyl and the area surrounding it. Included are pictures of the now-emptied city, maps of current radiation levels, and a discussion of how the area has changed. While the english is quite broken, it's often a rather surreal story.

Another snapshot of the moon, and one that clearly shows how difficult photography of moon and planets is : the most interesting parts are fairly faint, as the craters on top of the image. However, the brighter middle part of the moon allways gets too illuminated, so the details get lost in a sea of light. The result is often a picture without any details : underilluminated faint parts, and overilluminated bright parts.




The image has been digitally remastered : first, I decreased the overall contrast, which equalized the brighter and fainter parts, and then I used a sharpening filter, which restored the details lost by the contrast filter.

I spent some hours upgrading Isengard, my laptop, to the latest 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. I never had any luck with the 2.6 kernels, as hardly anything worked, so I didn't expect much of the new 2.6.3 kernel. But lo and behold : I got a decent framebuffer screen at boot. I noticed some progress with the 2.6.2 kernel, where I barely saw some text scrolling by, but 2.6.3 has everything running smoothly. Except for my Xircom PCMCIA card, which freezes the laptop, but that seems to be a bug in the driver. Tomorrow, I'll give a patch a run, and see if that will solve the problem.

Don't bother to send me any emails for the next couple of days : my internet connection has been shut down and will remain so for the next two weeks. The reason for this is a mob gang called Scarlet. One month ago, someone claiming to be a Belgacom salesman, visited my house to sell cheaper internet and phone prices. Stupid as I was, I signed the documents, but later that evening I noticed that this wasn't a Belgacom affiliation, and that I had been deceived. I immediately called Scarlet to annulate the contract, but apparently in vain.

According to the Belgacom customer department I called this morning, I was the third customer calling this day for the same trickery, and that there were even people whose signature had been forged. Belgacom will restore the ADSL connection, but the paperwork could take up to 2 weeks....

Anyway, if you encounter a salesperson at your door, claiming to be from Belgacom, but his papers mention Scarlet, kick the guy out of your house. And kick him once again in the groin, with my regards.



Update : And we're back online. Pffeew...

Two days of FOSDEM, the Woodstock for free software geeks, as Sir Tim states so eloquently, have passed. First of all : FOSDEM 2004 was *crowded*, especially on the first day. If the event keeps growing on such a pace, the current location on the Holbosch campus might get too small the next years...

So what talks did we frequented ?

• Saturday was the least interesting day : Robert Love gave an interesting speech about the impact of the desktop on the Linux kernel. The talk about the Linux 2.6 internals by Jonathan Corbet didn't impress me much. And oh yeah, mental note to myself : do not ever sit next to the only entrance and exit door during the two most popular talks of the whole FOSDEM event...


• I spent some more time in the Debian and Mozilla developpers rooms, allways good talks for a less crowded public.


• Sunday was way more interesting : I spent the first two hours in the Debian developpers room, listening to talks by Martin Michlmayr and Wouter Verhelst on the build process used by the Debian project.


• Headed over to the Mozilla developpers room, where I attended a workshop on Mozilla debugging. Nice to see that tech evangelism still works :)


• Headed to the bar for a snack, bought some geekwear and then returned for a LVM2 status update by Alisdair Kergon.


• Back to the Debian developpers room, to listen to some of the (mainly legal) problems for packaging Java stuff in Debian.


• The next two talks were the most interesting of the FOSDEM event : Dave Cross gave a really interesting speech on the current status of Perl6


• and Richard Kilmer presented a nice introduction on Ruby. Very interesting and clean programming language. Should definitively try this out (but first Python ;) I really like the idea of treating everything as an object, and at least Ruby has some funky basic operators on arrays, unlike Perl. Or does someone know some CPAN module for array operators like intersection, union, difference ? I *really* need this stuff for porting apt to Solaris.

Most funny moment of the day : the sign at the toilets, referring to them as the SCO developers room :)