The devastating megathrust earthquake of December 26th, 2004 occurred on the interface of the India and Burma plates and was caused by the release of stresses that develop as the India plate subducts beneath the overriding Burma plate. At least 27,000 people were killed by the earthquake in Indonesia. Tsunamis killed at least 18,000 people in Sri Lanka, 4,300 in India and 1,400 in Thailand. The tsunami crossed into the Pacific Ocean and was recorded along the west coast of South and North America.


This is the fourth largest earthquake in the world since 1900 and is the largest since the 1964 Alaska earthquake. Here's an animation of the tsunami following the earthquake, a photo gallery, and a realplayer video of the tidal wave. Of course, no blog post about this disaster should be complete without the information of how to give help.

Something terrible has happened : the local Quick restaurant has disappeared from our village ! Where do I now get my favourite hamburger ?

Here's some linkfest Christmas joy :

• the most delicious laptop ever


• same stuff, but a regular computer


• a nicely decorated Xmas tree

I noticed that Stephen Donaldson has delivered The Runes of the Earth, the first book in what seems to be the 3rd trilogy in the 'Thomas Covenant' series. I've read the books some 10 years ago, and was very pleased to see that the books were reprinted last year. I managed to buy the first trilogy last year, but couldn't yet find the second serie in the shop. Can't wait to read the next serie, though Thomas Covenant won't appear in the last trilogy : he was killed in the sixth book, so now Linden Avery takes over.

Yesterday we visited the Live gig at the Brabanthal in Leuven. Good concert, with a nice intro gig by Jasper Sterverlinck, but shame about the horrible PA system.

Some weeks ago, Sun released testbuild 72 of their Sun Solaris Express program, basically a testversion of Solaris 10. I hoped to be able to upgrade my previous build (b69), but the upgrade program bailed out with an error saying that it needed 6 GB diskspace to upgrade the machine, more than was available on the disk. So I had no other choice than reinstalling Solaris 10, and as the installation program is really braindead, I had to repartition my disk again. The installation program simply isn't able to keep the existing disklayout.


C'mon Sun, I know that 99% of Solaris installs happen by Jumpstart, but this could really better, no ? I tried to install my Linux laptop as a Solaris Jumpstart server, but encountered too many problems with the setup_install_server script.


Well, they are *test*builds after all, aren't they ?

The Firemonger project is dedicated to providing an easy to use CD which contains the latest versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, the web browser and email client created by the Mozilla Foundation. In addition to these amazing products, they have added a selection of plugins, extensions and themes. In other words, this CD contains everything you need to get started with Firefox and Thunderbird.

"You are nothing without your robot car. NOTHING!"


So build your own replica of KITT and rest assured that you are somebody special.

"Silence," commanded Goodgulf in a loud voice. "Speak not of the Great Ring here or anywhere. If Sorhed's spies discovered that you, Frito Bugger, hailing from the Sty, had the One Ring, all would be lost. And his spies are everywhere. The Nine Black Riders are abroad again, and there are those who claim to have seen the Seven Santinis, the Six Danger Signs, and the entire Trapp family, including the dog. Even the walls have ears," he said, pointing to two huge lobes which were protruding from behind the mantelpiece.



Bored of the Rings is the hilarious parody of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy, The Lord of the Rings. This side-splitting book follows the travels of Frito Bugger through Lower Middle-Earth on his quest to destroy the One Ring.
The story begins the same way The Lord of the Rings does, with Frito's uncle throwing a party for all the boggies in the Sty to attend. What are boggies, you ask. They are caricatures of Tolkien''s hobbits: "Boggies are an unattractive but annoying people whose numbers have decreased rather precipitously since the bottom fell out of the fairy-tale market."



'Bored of the Rings' has attracted many fans, though not so many as the original, with even a fansite which contains large snipplets from the book.

Taosecurity.com has a great article how to keep your FreeBSD installation up-to-date, probably the first thing many people want to do after an initial installation. It's nicely explained for all you BSD novices out there.