The latest branches of Firefox have some really interesting goodies. The most interesting stuff are livemarks: bookmarks linked to an RSS feed. The 1.0 release of Firefox (aka Phoenix) is scheduled for september 2004.

Jinx.com has an impressive amount of cool geekwear.

I don't have the time to apt-get regularly, so I get usually a few hundred packages that have to be upgraded. In some cases, apt wants to remove something you rather like to keep on your system. In that case, you can check out the reason why with the following command line option :



apt-get -o Debug::pkgProblemResolver=1 ...

Boy, do I hate date calculations. Gregorian dates are so cumbersome to calculate, I mostly switch to Julian dates to work with. Even with the Perl Date::Calc module I really hate those calculations...

I noticed that someone implemented a Perl module to convert Gregorian dates to Tolkien's Shire date system. The Date::Tolkien::Shire module converts dates into the Shire Calender as presented in the Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. It includes converting epoch time to the Shire Calendar (you can also get epoch time back), comparison operators, and a method to print a formatted string containing that does something to the effect of on this date in history -- pulling events from the Lord of the Rings.

A nice overview of all goodies in KDE 3.3. Most noticable is the new KDM makeover. Hmm, maybe time to check out KDE again : I''m using Gnome since the last year and a half.

Karel Biddeloo died two weeks ago on cancer, from which he suffered since end 2003. Biddeloo was famous as the author of the well known 'Rode Ridder' (Red Knight) comic. I'll always remember the Red Knight specials on Radio Scorpio, almost true mediaeval festivities, which were contributed to Biddeloo, and which he frequented too. The last 4 Rode Ridder comics still have to be released.

TWClassic is not really my cup of music, but with a few friends and someone very special, it turned out to be quite enjoyable. Alicia Keys and the Corrs were quite good, and Phill Collins was good for some youth sentiment. We had only one rain shower for some 15 minutes, but in comparison with the previous days, the weather was really great.

I finally received the documents to cancel my Scarlet telephone and internet subscription. Since they tricked me to become a customer end january, it has been quite a suffering to let them know I wasn't interested in staying their customer. Their internet services are based on NetNet, which is the former PlanetInternet, and which has a really bad name when it comes to availability. And I refuse to support a company which screws its customers right from the beginning.

I guess the official countdown has started : still 4 days to go before the end of my 2 and a half month sick leave. I'll be glad to go to work again, but boy, I now already know that the first few days are going to hurt. My back is fully recovered; the last two weeks have been filled with playing sports, and my back is keeping up nicely. All this excercise has one disadvantage though : I'm so tanned that it looks as if I have spent the last month on a Mediterrean holiday instead of sick leave...

Beautiful weather to watch the Venus transit, the astronomical highlight event of this year. I spent the morning at the C200 campus in Heverlee in the company of Wega, the astronomy association in Leuven. Some astronomy amateurs have the most amazing telescopes ! I saw lots of gear which made me jealous, though my 20cm Dobson would have been a worthy contestant. I should have brought one of my telescopes with me, it would have been great fun.
Solar filters made out of millar or astrofoil are such a great tool. I usually use ocular projection, which is quite awkward, and solar ocular filters are just plain dangerous. The image trough an astrofoil filter is quite sharp too : on the right a snapshot of the sun through such a filter.