There have been a number of reported objects that were once thought to exist by astronomers, but which later 'vanished'. For instance, two days before the March 29, 1974, Mariner 10 flyby of Mercury, one instument began registering bright, extreme ultraviolent emissions that had "no right to be there." The next day, the emissions were gone. Three days later, they reappeared, apparently emanating from an "object" that seemingly detached itself from Mercury. The astronomers first thought they had seen a star. But, they had seen the emissions in two quite different directions, and every astronomer knew that these extreme UV wavelengths couldn't penetrate very far through the interstellar medium. This suggested that the object must be relatively close. Did Mercury have a moon?

The last days have been expensive... First, Friday I noticed an ad for a new bike. I have been looking a long time for another bike : the current one dates from my student years, and frankly, besides the metallic frame, there's not much that is worth restoring. I first thought about upgrading the bike with new parts, but that turned out to be too costly. I then thought about buying myself a second-hand bike, but they are really hard to find and some are as much worn out like my current one. So buying the one I did yesterday seemed to be a good choice, certainly if I considered the price. Unfortunately, the current weather does not allow me to do a testdrive, unless I want to return soaking wet.


We have been looking for some new garden furniture too, and a bargain in the local toy and garden shop seemed the right thing; it even had the color we were looking for.


And last, I'm about to buy myself a new car. I've searched long and hard for a second-hand car, but young diesel cars are hard to find, and *very* expensive. So I bit the bullet and decided to spend 3000 euro more, and get myself a new car. I haven't signed any documents yet, but within a week, there will be more news. Watch this space.

Last week, Veroniek, my most avid reader of this weblog, noticed me that the font size on Internet Explorer really was way too big to be enjoyable. So I took a look, and had to admit that it was a bit over the top. Fonts are now expressed in pixel size instead of the 'em' metric, so hopefully this scales well in all browsers out there. (Getting things like this right really sucks)

Darth Vader has launched his very own blog: The Darth Side: Memoirs of A Monster, in which the Sith Lord holds forth in posts such as "Christmas on Hoth" and "I Am Surrounded By Idiots." The comments are a hoot as well. The homage appears to be the handiwork of Canadian Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming.

Aardvark is a great Firefox extension for web developers and designers which provides a MouseOver effect on each HTML element : a red rectangle framing each element under the cursor. You will also see a little yellow caption showing the HTML element type and its class or id if they exist.


You can then press certain keys on the keyboard to do various things, such as delete the selected element from the page, isolate the element, or move the selection rectangle outward to the containing element.

Solaris 10 has been out for a while, and I even noticed it comes already preinstalled on our new V440 Sun servers. Sure, everyone now know about zones, ZFS and DTrace, but since there are 600 new features added to Solaris 10, there's still lots to discover. OSNews.com finally brings a Solaris sysadmin which talks about the forgotten new stuff in Solaris 10, which isn't sexy enough to make the marketing flyers, but still delivers a great advantage compared to Solaris8 or 9.

Whenever I see the doughnut varieties at Krispy Kreme's, I feel so sad that there's no such thing here in Belgium. Like a Starbucks shop. Just imagine a Frappucino with a chocolate glazed doughnut with sprinkles. For breakfast. Hmmm...

Is it just me, or does the new pope really look like a Sith Lord ?
Others have thought of this too -- take a look at Wikipedia (fast, because I bet it changes soon).

Apple OSX Tiger developer trading cards ? I apologize for any times I might have implied that Apple wasn't run by total dorks.

I have enabled the taxonomy_image module, which places a topic image next to the story, just like my previous Postnuke based weblog and other sites a la Slashdot. The most difficult part was to find out where I had to make the changes to display the image. Jony.net has a patch for the $DRUPAL_HOME/themes/engines/xtemplate/xtemplate.engine file, which is the one to modify.


Only thing left to do : adding a link to the image to display all stories from that topic.