Debian 3.1, codenamed Sarge, has been released on Monday after nearly three years of constant development. Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of eleven processor architectures, ranging from palmtops and handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between, and the installation is available in about thirty languages, just to give you an idea about the size of Debian.


This release includes a number of up-to-date large software packages, such as the K Desktop Environment 3.3 (KDE), the GNOME desktop environment 2.8, the GNUstep desktop, XFree86 4.3.0, GIMP 2.2.6, Mozilla 1.7.8, Thunderbird 1.0.2, Firefox 1.0.4, Perl 5.8.4 and much more.


The upgrade of my firewall took over one hour and went reasonably well, though not as smooth as anticipated : the upgrade process wanted to remove some packages, but that was quickly sorted out. Shorewall and Squid had their minor problems as they were not trivially upgradable, but these issues are now solved too. There's only one problem left with pppd and a deprecated configuration setting, but that doesn't interfere with a normal operation.

My new car has arrived last week. Since seven days, I'm the proud owner of a new Seat Cordoba. The 1400 TDI engine performs at least as good as my old Ford 1800TD, and it has tons of goodies on board. My old Ford has been sold, unfortunately for an 'el cheapo' price, but with its large number of mileage, I guess that was to be expected. Anyway, the daily trip to work has become a real pleasure !

Steve Jobs announced at the WWDC keynote today that Apple is switching to Intel processors. MacNN has live coverage. The bottom line is that Mac OS X for the last five years has been running on Intel, the switch is expected to be complete in two years, and Rosetta will allow PPC apps to run on Intel-based Macs, transparently. So the rumours were still right then : for two years, the gossip runs that there was an internal version of OSX which was developped for Intel. Running Windows on a Mac should now be possible, but it won't be possible to run Mac OSX elsewhere than on Apple hardware.

I gave up carrying spectacles some 14 years ago. I never want to return to those times, since I'm quite comfortable wearing lenses. I have allways worn slightly colored lenses, especially blue ones. But since last week, I have chosen for the Freshlook pack, which contains three brightly colored lenses, which can be worn during one month. So for the first month, I have chosen the green color. It's a subtle change, but especially in bright white light, the effect is remarkable.

Since a few months, my logfiles get filled with referrer spam : when you click a hyperlink on one web site, your browser passes to the next site the address of the page where you clicked the link. This is logged by the server hosting the next web site.


The referer information can be faked very easily. Some unscrupulous web site owners will arrange to have several computers access a particular web site with a referer that lists their own web site address. There are a number of ways to accomplish this (see below), but the result is that the web server logs of the targeted site will contain hundreds or possibly thousands of entries with the fake referer information. This is known as "referer spamming". Most referer spam infects blog comments, but in my case, only my logfiles are filled.


There are several solutions to this problem, mostly involving the RewriteCond directive of the Apache webserver, but I choose the solution from Kuroshin, where a BadReferrer is being created based on the spam URL.


Underscorebleach.net however, states that the .htaccess based solutions are part of an unwinnable race, as it takes hundreds of rules to keep up with the randomly selected spam URLs. We'll see if my .htaccess file can keep up...

I usually don't blog too much about my personal life, but this I want to share with you : last week I proposed to M, and she happilly said "Yes". Which means that I'm officially engaged now.

I've finished reading the Silmarillion for the second time. The first time I've read it, was during my student years. Some years ago, I bought the book, but never could bring myself to finish it. It's really hard to begin reading the arcane language, but once you're immersed into the world of Beren, Luthien, Turin Turambar and Finrod, there's no way to stop reading.

Pharao's Gold, English Mist, Mystic Mauve : who invents these paint color names actually ? For the last two weeks, I've been busy painting M's house. We used about 40 liters of paint to decorate the whole first floor, and boy, we're *very* glad it's all finished.

Computer parts are not like they used to be manufactured before. That's all I can say after my new LCD screen died this morning. My previous monitor died on me some six months ago, after six years of faithfull service. My new Philips LCD screen couldn't keep it up for 6 months... Luckily the thing is still under guarantee, so Monday I have a new one. Untill then, it's back to the nineties, using an old CRT screen with a resolution of 800x600 !

For sale :


Ford Escort 1800TD 1997
blue metallic color, grey interior
209.000 km
RDS radio
good condition
price negotiable