The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by investigators at a major U.S. research university. The element, tentatively named Administratium, has no protons or electrons and thus has an atomic number of 0. However, it does have 1 neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons, and 111 assistant vice neutrons. This gives it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called morons.


Since it has no electrons, Administratium is inert. However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with. According to the discoverers, a minute amount of Administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than one second. Administratium has a normal half-life of approximately three years, at which time it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons, and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. Some studies have shown that the atomic mass actually increases after each reorganization.
Research at other laboratories indicates that Administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to concentrate at certain points such as government agencies, large corporations, and universities. If can usually be found in the newest, best appointed, and best maintained buildings.


Scientists point out that Administratium is known to be toxic at any level of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reaction where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how Administratium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising.

The migration to Drupal is a fact, quite earlier than I expected. There's quite some support for migrations from Postnuke to Drupal, so the database migration went really fast. There are some things which give problems, mainly the search function, but I hope to fix that soon.

I've never been satisfied with the upgrade to PostNuke 0.75, and for a while I have been looking for alternatives. I guess I've just spotted a worthy competitor in the form of Drupal; just a matter of checking if the PN database can easily be migrated to Drupal, and if that succeeds, this website's engine will be powered by
Drupal. If all goes well, expect to see this site change significantly within the next month.

New Scientist is reporting on 13 things which do not make sense. It's an interesting article about 13 areas in which observations do not line up with current theory. From the placebo effect to dark matter, it's a list of areas in need of additional research. Explanations could lead to significant breakthroughs... or at least new and different errors in scientific observations.

Debian has been known to be the NetBSD of Linux : it runs on 11 different computer architectures ranging from embedded devices over personal computers to mainframes. But this complex range of archs to be supported makes realeasing a new version of Debian painstakingly slow. The upcoming next release, Debian 3.1 aka Sarge, has been delayed already a few times. But now, release manager Steve Langasek has announced that Debian support will be dropped for all but four computer architectures.
Among the reasons cited for doing this are improving testing
coordination, 'a more limber release process' and ultimately a shorter release cyle. Luckily, this is only a proposal, but it indicates about how some of the leading people in the Debian project feel about the current situation. Personally, I think the proposal is insane, and that one should better investigate about how the number of packages could be
reduced. Dropping Sparc would make me quite unhappy, and frankly, I don't see how this is compatible with the Debian Social Contract. It's all about the user, wasn't it ?


Update : from Steve's original post, I can make out that dropping archs would only be for stable and testing, so there still would be some kind of support. Still, having no stable (server) environment for Sparc could be painfull.

I'm convinced that business success in the future starts with the question, What should I do with my life? Yes, that's right. The most obvious and universal question on our plates as human beings is the most urgent and pragmatic approach to sustainable success in our organizations. People don't succeed by migrating to a "hot" industry ( one word: dotcom ) or by adopting a particular career-guiding mantra ( remember "horizontal careers"? ). They thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are -- and connecting that to work that they truly love.

Those who are lit by that passion are the object of envy among their peers and the subject of intense curiosity. They are the source of good ideas. They make the extra effort. They demonstrate the commitment. They are the ones who, day by day, will rescue this drifting ship.

Po Bronson is the author of this rather lengthy article about how to deal with your job. Read it, it should be your bible, certainly if you're dealing with HRM; Jeremy has an interesting round-up of the article too.

Upgrading Postnuke sucks. It sucked 4 years ago with PHPNuke, and it still sucks with Postnuke. The upgrade failed with an error on the upgrade on a database table, so here am I. Wondering whether to start freshly from a new install, or choosing some other CMS who knows how to get its shit together. Both options mean loosing 4 years of posts, or re-enter all of them. Reverting to the old version of Postnuke isn't an option, as there were some critical security errors discovered last week.

Update : I finally chose for upgrading to the latest PostNuke version, as importing the stories went smoother than expected. There may be things that break the next couple of days, but I hope the main engine holds. Now just find a new theme to replace this butt-ugly default one...

Due to my car troubles, I spent the shortest FOSDEM visit ever last weekend in Brussels. Just enough time to see these presentations :

• Alan Cox gave a speech about kernel development management. Nothing too much new here that we didn't knew already, but still interesting to hear.


• Thomas Lange explained Debians FAI system, its automated installation process for servers. I already played around with this before, but found it not really something you set up quickly, as also was clearly explained in the talk. Unluckily, FAI has no support for LVM, which is rather a shame, though it's in the development pipeline.


• Finally, I stayed in the Debian developer's room to listen to Jeroen Wolfellaar, who explained the Debian QA team procedures.

Short but good. Pity I couldn't be there on Saturday : I really wanted to hear the talks about Snort and Nagios. The many developers rooms were a great idea, and the new AW building used to accomodate them was a great idea. And God, some nerds really can be a pain in the ass, like the one in the FAI presentation, who really insisted on having a USB storage based FAI system.

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!