A sad record : Belgium (together with parts of France, Germany and Holland) is one of the three most polluted areas of the world. The two other smog areas are the most eastern parts of Nothern America and China.

We spent the last two weeks in Turkey, the first week touring through West and Central Turkey, and the last week at the beach in Bodrum. The tour week included a day in Istanbul, and I found it almost like coming home after my first visit, now some three years ago. I even discovered a Starbucks at Taxim street, which made my day really great.

Gentlemen, start your drooling. This is my new toy : a Sun Enterprise 3000 server. Very hefty, very noisy, but very beautiful (and powerful). Unfortunately, the box doesn't contain any disks yet, so it's powered now by a SparcGentoo live CD. It's purpose will be a testbed for Solaris10, so I can play with zones and DTrace. And, yes there will be a partition too dedicated to Sparc Debian ;)

'Java 1.5 has been released, and in a weird twist of fate, Sun decides to call it J2SE 5.0.

Cute or very, very wrong, Mozilla Firefox themed furry anime girls.

Blastwave has a nice introduction about Solaris zones. I would very like to see a comparison between zones, good old chroots and something like Linux Virtual Server, or User-Mode-Linux, each compared with their benefits and disavantages.

With the release of the new Star Wars DVD box, it's a good thing to reveal the truth about the saga : from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good. In his column, Jonathan Last explains in his case for the Empire, what's wrong with our view on a galaxy far, far away.

Kazuo Yoshia has an impressive collection of little whiskey bottles. Drinking that up must have cost him a fortune (and his liver).

It's official, 25% more unbelievable greatness in the Special Extended Edition of Return of the King, the 3rd movie in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.


" The linked description (on the official LotR site) starts "DISCS 1-2: The Feature FEATURE (approx. 250 minutes) - A new version of the final installment in the epic trilogy! The Academy-Award winning film now has 50 minutes of never-before-seen footage incorporated into the film for this highly-anticipated video release."


The extended version can be ordered starting on Oct 1st. Whoo-hoo !

A guy from Microsoft has made a cool drawing: Since 1997, he kept all spam/virus received and was able to draw some kind of history. Some interesting things show up on the charts : spam went ballistic starting in 2002. You could see it growing in 2001, but 2002 was when it really took off.