An interesting signal has been discovered by SETI. No real evidence of Someone Out There, but not fully explainable either. Maybe aliens should send spacemail, not signals: Rutgers electrical engineering professor, Christopher Rose, has an article on Nature magazine's cover today describing the most efficient way for our civilization to be discovered by aliens. On this question of better to 'write or radiate', his conclusions: better not to send radio transmission, when physical media like DNA on an asteroid can declare a terrestrial presence.


Similar to what motivated Voyager scientists to attach a plaque for the outbound trip.

Linux Today reports the first release candidate for Gnome 2.8 has been released. A look at the new stuff can be found here. Notably, the possible inclusion of Evolution, and some networking goodies.

I used to believe that if you put pussy willows catkins (yes, that is what they're called!) in your closet, they'd turn into kittens overnight. Hense, we stripped the neighbor's bushes (a subject of great concern at the next coffee klatsch), made little nests on the floors of our closest out of tissues, and waited. And waited. And waited...
I used to believe is a collection of ideas that adults thought were true when they were children. it will remind you what it was like to be a child, fascinated and horrified by the world in equal parts. This site will reassure you that the things you used to believe weren't so strange after all...

We visited Maanrock, a festival in Mechelen, last weekend, featuring bands like Dog Eat Dog, Buscemi and Krezip. The most remarkable thing I remember, though, were the giant waffles they sold (30 or 40 cm long), and the regret I still feel I didn't ordered one ;) Very nice city also, Mechelen, and as clean as Leuven too.

Cool ! Grsecurity is finally available for Linux 2.6.7, and grsecurity.net has a brand new spiffy design.

I was designing a website for a NPO, when I discovered that its layout sucked big time when seen in Internet Explorer. Turned out to be a bug in the CSS rendering of IE, but I surely lost quite some hours squashing the bug. Next time better take a look on this site about all IE bugs concerning CSS rendering.

'Hewlett-Packard finally offers 24x7 support for Debian GNU/Linux with HP Extensions. In an article Chris DiBona highlighted the services offered by GNU/Linux vendors and pointed out that their repositories are miles ahead of competing proprietary commercial offerings.

Make love chess, not war chess.

Dammit ! I passed by the waste recycle park and noticed that some of the dumped computers still carried some coax network cards, like the ones I use at home (yes, I know it's 2004). As almost everyone uses UTP, coax cards are rare, and (more) expensive, so when I see a spare coax, I grab it. Unluckily, I wasn't allowed to disassemble the computers, as I need a special permit. What country is this, Russia ?
I got a few phone numbers of official instances that I'll try next week, so with a bit of luck, I'll have my coax cards in the next weeks.


Update : crap. No luck in obtaining some kind of permit. Apparently they still get money for those old machines...

We visited the Beach party in Glabbeek last Friday, which featured a gig by the Levellers. Great feel-good music, and a nice environment for a concert - for once not crowded and jam packed with people. Gorki played before The Levellers, but dissapointed on a major scale : I allways have found their music to be all alike, and their last album tends to harder rock music, whereas their best and most famous songs are slower ones.