Wired News reports on the growing number of free/open-access academic journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals, for instance, lists 1527 journals, all containing several academic/scientific articles. If you're anything like me, a technology-scientific savvy geek, you'll find this a true goldmine.

Here's one worth a good chuckle : 300 reasons why we like the Simpsons. Only 300 ?

FUSE, the userspace mount utility in Linux, is prepping itself for inclusion into the main Linux kernel. Hence the last upgrade to Fuse 2.2. This version was recently introduced into the Debian unstable branch, which made it onto my computer after the last apt-get dist-upgrade. However, I noticed that the combination with siefs, the Siemens filesystem driver, refused to work after the Fuse upgrade :
# fusermount /mnt/usb siefs /dev/ttyUSB0
fusermount: old style mounting not supported
which was very annoying, cause I couldn't download the pictures I took with my mobile camera any more. The solution was to upgrade to siefs 0.5, and to kernel 2.6.11. Mounting the device with fusermount still isn't possible, but the regular mount works like a charm :

# mount -t siefs /dev/ttyUSB0 /mnt/usb

In January of 1848, James Marshall had a work crew camped on the American River at Coloma near Sacramento. The crew was building a saw mill for John Sutter. On the cold, clear morning of January 24, Marshall found a few tiny gold nuggets. Thus began one of the largest human migrations in history as a half-million people from around the world descended upon California in search of instant wealth.

After the gold rush was over, many towns were deserted, and became ghost towns. Ghost Town Gallery offers a collection of 1300 pictures from 174 Ghost Towns and historic places.

The Linux users group of Davis collected articles about Free Software and compiled a list of reasons to avoid certain non-free systems.

In 1998, six months after I bought my house, it got flooded after 14 hours of uninterrupted heavy rainfall. The little river the Motte, running 100 meters next to my house, couldn't bear all the water and set the neighbourhood blank. Though the damage was minimal - only my cellar got submerged, I became very suspicious after some days of rain.


Luckily I found out about this site which measures the heigh of the nearby river, the Motte. Even a little graph, depicting the situation for the past days, is plotted !

This site calculates the impact of a nuclear device on its surroundings. Apparently, a standard nuclear bomb dropped on Lille, France, has the ability to kill everyone in my region within several days, due to fallout radiation.

Inspired by Top Ten Myths about Gurus :




10. Your sysadmin knows what's best for you.


Not that you ever listen. My god, you're using Outlook and Exchange
for email, and everything bad that he told you would happen has
happened, and you still keep using them.


9. Your sysadmin can read your mind.


It's like reading one of those filler pages in an IBM manual. "This
mind intentionally left blank."


8. Your sysadmin doesn't feel pain.


Well, actually, your sysadmin often feels like his brain is being
bathed in acid and his eyeballs are being eaten by fire ants, but the
result is that his pain threshold is much, much higher than yours.
Wanna do a comparison test?


7. Your sysadmin knows all your past lives.


You were a worm crushed by a rock, then another worm crushed by the
same rock, then yet another worm crushed by that same rock yet again,
and now you get reincarnated in a human body? What the hell is wrong
with karma?


6. Your sysadmin knows your future.


Notice the rock that your sysadmin is idly tossing from hand to hand.
It looks somehow familiar and arouses a feeling of anxiety.


5. Your sysadmin knows everything.


That's why his brain feels like it's being bathed in acid.


4. Your sysadmin has no desires.


He wouldn't mind having one of those quad-Opteron servers. And a
twinkie. And some scotch. But by now he's given up on getting any
of the things he ever wanted, especially a life.


3. Your sysadmin is the avatar.


You think of the Internet as some kind of vast powerful all-knowing
nonphysical entity, and here he is representing it to you as a
physical being. Especially the nastiness of it.


2. Your sysadmin is divine.


Who else can read your email and change your quota? Certainly not
your puny god.


1. Your sysadmin can enlighten with a touch.


You need some powerful enlightenment, and that requires the powerful
touch of a blunt, heavy object. Like this rock. Hold still.

Wired has a story which talks about a danger to possible future inhabitants of the Moon that is rarely brought up: the highly abrasive lunar dust. Unlike Earth, the Moon has no erosive capabilities to smooth the edges of rocks or dust. As a result the lunar dust has arms that stick out, like Velcro, and sticks to everything. As the astronauts who walked on the moon found out, the dust scratched lenses and corroded seals within hours. Some of the particles are only microns across which means once they get into your lungs, they stay there. This could cause a lung disease similar to silicosis.

It seemed that the installation of Drupal 'secretly' placed a .htaccess file in the root directory of this website, which created a misconfiguration for DarkChannels, the RSS aggregator I wrote in Perl. I first thought that my hosting provider might have changed the global Apache settings, but that turned out to be false. Anyway, I hope this was the last upgrade problem for this site.