Some months ago I had the chance to play a bit around with the Fink project. I first thought it would be an attempt to port Xfree86 and KDE to the Darwin environment, but it's more than that. I inmediately noticed that some of the Debian utilities, such as apt, where ported too.


In short, Fink lets you download either precompiled Darwin-PPC binaries for your iMac, or you can automagically download the source -with all required extra libraries- and compile it yourself. All this with one command : fink install Program. If you own a Mac OSX, you really should give it a try.

And now, the Fink, Gentoo,and DarwinPorts projects announced the formation of a cooperative development alliance forged to facilitate delivery of freely available software to Mac OS X. Under this new alliance, the projects will share information and coordinate efforts for porting software to Apple's Mac OS X and Darwin operating systems. Members of the alliance will share information using the www.metapkg.org Web site, which will provide a home for this cooperative effort. This will be a great boost for Free Software on your Mac.

If you took a picture of the Sun at the same time each day, would it remain in the same position? The answer is no, and the shape traced out by the Sun over the course of a year is called an analemma. The Sun's apparent shift is caused by the Earth's motion around the Sun when combined with the tilt of the Earth's rotation axis. The Sun will appear at its highest point of the analemma during summer and at its lowest during winter.

Last week has been in the focus of playing with Linux. I installed a proxy masquerading firewall for a collegue, based on the Alcatel USB SpeedTouch modem, using the Open Source drivers of Benoit Papillault. It took some time to properly tuning the stability of the modem driver, but in the end, I managed to get a very stable box. It was based on Debian, of course. Unfortunately the stable Debian release, which new version is imminent... for several months now. As a result, stable has become archaic with its 2.2 kernel. I upgraded to a 2.4 kernel for USB support and used these pages to install and configure the modem. If you want to do the same, I advise you to use the 20011007 drivers (with pppoa3) and this HOWTO for the ppp setup.




After that, it was my machine's turn. First off all, I decided to fix the side effects of my unstable NVidia drivers, and upgraded my filesystems to ext3. Then I upgraded my NVidia drivers, only to found out that they were as unstable as the earlier release. Well, at least, ext3 was doing its job ;) I Googled a bit around, to found out that the following setting may be the solution : just add


Option "NoRenderAccel" "on"


to your XF86Config-4 file, and the crashes should be history. Looks like that fixes everything...




It is unbelievable how performant the Low Latency patch is for Linux desktop systems. Whereas a vanilla Linux 2.4.18 kernel is horribly sluggish on my 128 Meg based system, the LL patch really boosts things up. I first tried with the PreEmptable kernel patch, as it is now default in the 2.5 kernel series, but after giving unsatisfying results, I added the LL patch too. At least, my MPlayer is now again playing without glitches, while my Seti@Home is crunching in the background.

After a search of nearly 2 years, I finally found a rare and limited edition (250 copies throughout Europe) of Muslimgauze's Box of Silk and Dogs. Staggering and gorgeous (also heavy), this set of previously unreleased material from the (sadly missed) late Bryn Jones has been housed in a quad-fold package which contains a total of nine CDs. Yes, kids, you're reading it right : a box containing 9 (!) CDs.


The outside is heavy black pressboard with simply the title and "by Muslimgauze" in black/white print. Unfold the 4 flaps and you have a 24 inch wide display of 9 CDs and backing photo of 2 shrouded people with rifles (the artwork on the CDs help make up the picture). 3 of the 4 panels have foam knobs for 3 CDs apiece and the 2nd panel from the right is where a short biography, limited edition discography and subscription/future releases info resides. Underneath each CD is the CD title, track listing and various pictures of Middle Eastern females. As usual per Staalplaat release, the artwork/packaging is superb.


It's hard to decribe what kind of music Muslimgauze really is : kinda like western electronic music, with eastern samples layered on top of it. But why don't you check it out yourself : this site has a taste of (legally !) downloadable Muslimgauze music.

I am thinking for some time now about building my own chess set, with some D&D figurines. The GamesWorkshop has many different interesting figurines, ranging from science fiction (check out the Tyranids) to fantasy (orks, goblins,...). I see that the Tolkien set has finally arrived.

Anyway, I was talking about building my own chess set; pity that GamesWorkshop figurines are so damned expensive, and I don't even talk about the painting hassle. I bumped into this site, which gives enough inspiration for themed chess sets, ranging from classical Greek to Egyptian styles.

If you're not a frequent flyer like I am, you might be interested in airline meals. Are they as tasteless as frequent described ? Airlinemeals.net gives you an answer to this question, even with a picture of one of the meals served in commercial airlines.

I was browsing the web for some Muslimgauze MP3's (no, they're almost impossible to find on Kazaa), when I stumbled on the website of NoiseIndex, a DJ in New York. There's a download section with lots of noise material. If you're a fan of Muslimgauze, Merzbow or dark ambient/industrial in general, you might download some of the extensive sound samples.

On the site is a link to the website of Maligant Records, which I know from some excellent noise samplers. I hope that the Miss TumorList 2001 election was a weird joke, though...


Also on the site are some links to goth and bondage/dominance clubs in NYC where NoiseIndex tends to play. Bondage is not really my cup of tea, though most of the clubs seem to offer a very interesting activity list.

Most people know about the solar system : 4 smaller rock-like planets orbiting the sun at small distance, and 4 outer gas giants. An asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is dividing those 2 categories of planets. Pluto, a small planet, circling the outer region of our solar system, was allways considered to be a special case.

Gerard Kuiper, had suggested in the 1940s and 1950s that perhaps Pluto was not a world without context but the brightest of a vast ensemble of objects orbiting in thernsame region. This concept, which came to be known as the Kuiper Belt. Extrapolating from the small fraction of the sky that has been surveyed so far, investigators estimate that the Kuiper Belt contains approximately 100,000 objects larger than 100 kilometers across. As a result, the Kuiper Belt has turned out to be the big brother to the asteroid belt, with far more mass and far more objects (especially of large sizes).

It is now clear that Pluto is not an anomaly. Instead it lies within a vast swarm of smaller bodies orbiting between about five billion and at least eight billion kilometers from the sun.

Some time ago, I noticed that there has been released a new line of Leathermans (Leathermen ?), called Leatherman Juice (warning : Flash enabled). Most obvious detail is that the Juice line is brightly colored, whereas the traditional Leathermans are only available in metal and black. I own a Leatherman Flair myself, and I must say I especially fancy the CS4 'Glacier'.

rnFor those who would like to see more info on the Leatherman, check out this site. A Leatherman has allways been some sort of a system administrator status symbol, though many sysadmins prefer some other tool like the Gerber. Anyway, part of the mythical status of Leatherman is that it has a 25 year warranty. Not bad for something that most see as an improved Swiss army knife...

I was browsing Proxis, just to discover they had nearly nothing available in Dutch of my two favourite writers, Jack Vance and Stephen Donaldson. I ended up ordering Rhialto, the Marvellous. Nice to see that Proxis decided again not to charge anything for shipping.


Anyway, Rhialto is a part of the Tales of the Dying Earth rogue series, a very amusing set of books which tell the tale of Cugel, who tries to survive by his wit and luck - with varying results. I especially recommend The Eyes of the Overworld; pick it up if you find it in your local library.


DyingEarth.com is a site about a RPG based upon these novels. On the site, you'll find different amusing PDF files explaining the scenery in which the game takes place, and provide an excellent introduction to get you in the mood. Part one and three of these PDF files, called The Excellent Prismatic Spray, are free for download, and nicely illustrated.