Someone interested in a second-hand Ford Escort ? Breaks only once a month. I had it up to here with my car. The last three weeks it went down on me twice : once with a faulty transmission, and yesterday the damned thing refused to start in the parking lot, because of a dead battery. Luckily, my sister was so kind to give me a ride to the garage, where I picked up a replacement car and a portable battery to fix my own car. And M. was so sweet to drive me back to work in the middle of the night to fetch my car. Time to start looking for a new vehicle...

Falko Timme has written a tutorial describing how to create Debian packages with checkinstall. Checkinstall is a nice tool to create simple .deb-packages that you can use in your local network (e.g. if you have to install the same piece of software on multiple computers running Debian). It lets you compile and install software from the sources like before, but with the difference that you end up with a Debian package which also means that you can easily uninstall the software you just compiled by running dpkg -r!

Science is beautifull.

I had it up to here with those 'el-cheapo' CDs from E.com. They are absolutely rubbish : from all the CDs I wrote, I guess I had to dispose some 60% because they were not readable after the burning process. I even feared my CD writer was broken ! But a test with some new Sony CDs proved the opposite : a CD successfully burned from the first time. So I dumped the rest of the spindle pack from E.com in the dust bin. Good riddance !

I thought long and hard about getting me the new iPod Shuffle : the Apple MP3 player had its style, iPod joggle and attractive price, but the fact that the thing didn't have any LCD screen nor a builtin radio, did me grab one of the competitor's products. The Shuffle is the poor mans iPod, says Nico Dijkshoorn in one of his columns.

I chose for the Creative Nomad/Muvo, a neat little gizmo, now permanently attached to my wrist, and boy, am I happy that I chose for the 512 MB model, and not for the 256 MB model : the flash device is already jam packed with some MP3 songs. And if I get bored of these MP3 songs, I just switch to the radio. Or play with the built-in dictaphone. Or just use it as a flash storage device.

Debian has three available versions : a stable one, which is released about every two years, a testing one, which serves as a playground for testing new stable releases, and a development version, which changes every day.
People who run the "unstable" version receive every day (or every time they choose for it) new software versions. A good place to track new versions is the Debian 'new' queue, which shows packages in the pipe before entering unstable.

William Sowerbutts reported that he has Debian running on his new Mac Mini, a PowerPC system in a small, quiet and attractive chassis. He has written up some notes on the installation process and explained partitioning. Basically, only a recent CD-R of the new installer and a weak lemon drink are all one needs.

Ever wondered why a week contains 7 days ? Seven is actually a weid odd number. Ten or six days would have been much easier : a year is 365 days, so nearly 60 'weeks' of six days, and a month would have been exactly 5 weeks. It seems that the 7 day week is a remnant of the Babylonians, who were vivid astronomers : their calendar was based on the moon, from which the month originates. But they needed something smaller than a month, and larger than a day. Four weeks of seven days were closest to the 29.5 day moon cycle, so they stick with it.

Names of weekdays is also a fun subject : they were named after the planets, which in their turn were named after the gods. In Roman languages, weekday names contain the Roman gods (lundi, mardi, ...), whereas in German based languages, the days contain the names of the Scandinavian gods (Wodan, Freya, ...)

It's official : Solaris 10 has been released. You can download Solaris10 for free, given that you only need an evaluation license. Time to install this on my Enterprise 3000 server at home, and this time I will be using my Linux laptop as a Jumpstart server, so other partitions will survive the upgrade.


Do you want some other Open Source programs installed on your Solaris ? Well you could install packages from Blastwave.org, but you could also use NetBSD's pkgsrc, which already provides 5,300 packages ready to build on Solaris. Install pkgsrc, 'make install' your desired package, and enjoy !

Talking about cult comics : Oh Wicked Wanda first appeared in Penthouse's September, 1969 issue, as a continued story in prose form, by British writer Frederic Mullally. Each short chapter had a single large illustration by Brian Forbes, but the actual story was pure text. The initial episode introduced her as the 19-year-old daughter of depraved plutocrat Walter von Kreesus. The serial ran its course in about a year, then Wanda disappeared. She didn't return until the September, 1973 issue, where she made her debut in comics form. Mullally continued to script her adventures, which were drawn by veteran comics artist Ron Embleton, already well known in England for the 1950s historic adventure series "Wulf the Briton", the 1960s science fiction epic "The Trigan Empire", and more. Wanda's appalling escapades continued in eight-page, fully-painted monthly installments, poking sometimes-vicious fun at politics, sexual mores, etc. for years.
Wanda was the predecessor of Sweet Chastity, which appeared also in Penthouse. Both these comics were drawn - it seems almost 'painted' - in the same style of Don Lawrence's Storm comic. If you happen to like Thorgal, check out the Storm comics for a mindblowing experience.