Call me a sick bastard, but I find this *very* sexy.

We all know that Han shot first.

The Huygens probe has succesfully landed on the surface of Titan, the biggest moon of Saturn, and the only moon in our solar system which has its own atmosphere. The Huygens landing on Titan is probably the biggest scientific event of 2005, just like the scientific proof in 2004 by the Mars Rovers of water once being present on Mars. ESA has a collection of recent images on their Cassini homepage, and so has NASA.



More images :

• larger image of the one here above
• Celestia's rendering of Cassini's flyby
• The Planetary Society's has a Huygens weblog with images and discussion too
• Update : Anthony Liekens has put up a page with various mosaic panorama's, compiled of available images.

Tomorrow, the much anticipated Huygens Probe will rendezvous with the Saturn moon Titan. It has been making a 22 day journey to the moon, and end up entering the atmosphere sometime on January 14th somewhere at 11h15 CET.
Titan is one of the remaining puzzles of the solar system - while Cassini's imaging cameras and radar instrument have begun to reveal the details of its surface, the Huygens probe will be the first spacecraft to venture beneath Titan's thick clouds.

Comet Macholz is one of the most bright comets in the past years : right now, the comet is visible with the naked eye on the evening sky for observers in the northern hemisphere. As it's now making its closest approach to planet Earth, the comet passed near the lovely Pleiades star cluster on January 7th and will pass the double star cluster in Perseus on January 27th as Machholz moves relatively quickly through the evening sky. Currently just visible to the unaided eye from dark locations, the comet should be an easy target in binoculars or a small telescope. Here's a finder chart for the comet, in case you have trouble spotting it.

From purplemoon.be :

The Invitation 2005 has been cancelled!

Several ongoing arguements with other organisations in Belgium have made it more and more unpleasant for us to continue doing this sort of work. Recent collisions with people from some of these organisations forced us to make this decision. We're no longer interested in organising an event like The Invitation 2005 in such circumstances. Also, the past has shown us that we don't have to expect much co-operation from Belgian magazines and media and that the audience simply doesn't care. These recent collisions were the last straw. In short, we have had enough.

Google offers an interesting timeline of the Usenet archives, going way back into the past, and thereby offering a nice overview of some historical IT events. I once used the Deja archives to dig out my first post on the Usenet, but came no further than this post about my radio program at Radio Scorpio, dating from Jan 1st 1998.

Update : found my first post about Ultima7, dating from November 23rd, 1993 !

There are plenty of Linux live CDs out there, but few carry the utilities a Unix sysadmin wants for his daily job. Like minicom, for example, to connect a laptop with a Unix machine. Enter Debian from scratch, a live distribution, but which now also has entered in the Debian distribution, as it contains the dfsbuild package, which allows you to create your own Debian from Scratch custom live CD easily.


Oh, and by the way, I really like software which prints out messages like :


...

P: Configuring package shellutils

P: Doing something important

It has become a trend nowadays here in Belgium to decorate the houses with Christmas lights outside on the house. Many people go very far in decorating, and in many cases the frontier between good and bad taste is being shattered. Some decorations even seem to say 'Blowjob for 5$' instead of 'Happy Xmas'. That America has gone way over the bad taste frontier can be proven with some images of overly decorated houses. Some even manage to use over 100,000 lights this year and 150 channels of computer synchronized animation, even featuring music on weekends.

It has been almost a full year for the Mars rovers. NASA has created a flashback of rover images and information. You can use either HTML or Flash. There is even a movie taken from the hazard avoidance camera showing the full year of travel.