By comparing pictures from the 1930ties to now, photographer David Levere tries to give an idea of the changement big cities like New York undergo.

It's december again, which means there's a new Perl advent calendar.

Geosense is a very addictive online game, which even has an educational surplus. Do *you* know where Lima, Peru is located ?

I finally switched to kernel 2.6.7 on my Ultra-10 Sparcstation at work; the only thing that stopped me from doing this was because I couldn't get the mouse working in X under 2.6.7. I tried (and failed) so many settings under X, so I knew that something in the kernel wasn't right. Modules allways go for maximum flexibility, so I compiled the serial and PS/2 mouse drivers as modules, and activated the legacy psaux device.


After that, all was easy : modprobing the sermouse driver immediately told me that it discovered its hardware. In X, I configured the mouse as the /dev/psaux device with a PS/2 protocol.
That being solved, all my workstations are running 2.6 now.

There's a new version of the Netscape browser, based on a 0.9.3 branch of Mozilla/Firefox. It seems that they have taken the lean and mean Firefox and created a browser that's just not as good. They've added far too much clutter and features are less streamlined and more confusing than their standard Firefox equivalents. The decision to offer Internet Explorer's Trident as an alternative rendering engine, while pragmatic, is an insult to the heritage of Netscape and may set the cause of standards evangelism back years. In short : better use Firefox.


The latest Netscape browser development has been outsourced to a Canadian firm called Mercurical Communications, whose domain is mcomi.com; anyone remember that Netscape used to be Mosaic Communications, or mcom.com for short?

Frozentech.com has a nice overview of a complete list of Linux live CD's

The radio news yesterday reported that over 50% of all Belgian personal computer are infected with some form of spyware. I wonder if they mean 50% of all PCs running Windows, or 50% of the total amount of PC's, in which case the amount of infected Windows machines is even higher. Anyway, the figures are frightening.


Steve Gibson posted this link to a superb test of about two dozen top Anti-Spyware programs : Eric L. Howes conducted the test over a two-week period in October. The results surprised me: only 3 ASW programs had a 'batting average' of better than .500 when it came to eradicating the broad range of spyware in the test. Freeware star Spybot Search & Destroy came in a distant 7th with an average of only .376. The top three? Giant Anti-Spyware, Spy Sweeper, and Ad-Aware.

A glass of spirits made of ethereal salt, hermetically sealed up
Kept continually in quicksilver, of so volatile a nature
That it will scarcely endure the light
And therefore only shown in winter
Or by the light of a carbuncle, or a firefly

-- Batwings, by Coil (from the album 'Musick to play in the Dark II')




Johnn Balance passed away on Saturday. Balance was composer and co-founder of Coil, as well as a one-time member of such hugely influential acts as Current 93 and Psychic TV . The official memorial site can be found here.

[root@caradhras] # metadb -a -f -c2 c0t0d0s7 c0t1d0s7



Assertion failed: partno < dnp->vtoc.nparts, file ../common/meta_nameinfo.c, line 628

metadb: Abort

Abort (core dumped)

There seems to be some issues with Disksuite in Solaris 10 Express, which are solved in testbuild s10_70, but not yet incorporate into the latest download version (s10_69). What's worse, is that ZFS isn't included yet (or will never be) in the Solaris 10 Express downloads.

Owen Taylor threw down the gauntlet :
Currently, the time to boot the Linux desktop from the point where the power switch is turned on, to the point where the user can start doing work is roughly two minutes.



Ideally, system boot would involve a 3-4 second sequential read of around 100 megabytes of data from the hard disk, CPU utilization would be parallelized with that, and all queries on external systems would be asynchronous ... startup continues and once the external system responds, the system state is updated. Plausibly the user could start work under 10 seconds on this ideal system.




The challenge is to create a single poster showing graphically what is going on during the boot, what is the utilization of resources, how the current boot differs from the ideal world of 100% disk and CPU utilization, and thus, where are the opportunities for optimization.



Two days later Ziga Mahkovec posted some cool-looking results.