Wear sunscreen.


If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.
The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists,
whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my
own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

In late May 1997, Chicago Tribune metro columnist (and "Brenda Starr" writer) Mary Schmich was walking to work along Lake Shore Drive, wondering what she was going to write about that day. It occurred to her that it was near graduation time and she thought she would write a column that read like a commencement address. As she wondered what advice she might offer, she saw a woman sunbathing on the shore of Lake Michigan.


"I hope she's wearing sunscreen," thought Schmich, 45, "because I didn't at that age."


And that's how newspaper columns are born.


A couple of months later, the column became an Internet hoax when a prankster never identified except as "Culprit Zero" copied it, labeled it as "Kurt Vonnegut's commencement address at MIT," and began e-mailing it to his or her friends. The pyramid began. Schmich's quirky, smart style seemed believable as Vonnegut's. It carried the implied authenticity of the printed word. And, on the Internet, the concept of "validity" is often less important than "bandwidth" and "really cool graphics." The spread of the thing was amazing. It eventually reached Buz Luhrmann, who bought the rights of the text, and so the Sunscreen song was born.


What circulates on the Net faster than anything else, it's clear, is jokes.

I had to disable comments yesterday to work around a security bug of Drupal 4.6.1. I just installed the upgrade to 4.6.2, and restored the previous settings, so everything should work normally again.

To celebrate their 125th anniversary Science is running a series of articles on the 125 Questions of Science. The top 25 each link to an article exploring the subject of the question in depth. Included are such questions as: Are we alone in the Universe? What are the limits of conventional computing? How did cooperative behavior evolve?

It's hot out here, and this since two weeks. Temperatures rise daily above 30 degrees Celsius, and that's exceptionally hot. Geoff Milburn decided to put his thermodynamics classes to work however, and produced this ~24$ homebrew air conditioner. It'll cool a room to a comfortable level in 15-20 mins, and will run for a few hours on a garbage pail full of water. It's cheap, environmentally friendly (just fire the waste water off to your garden), and makes a good one hour project for a quiet evening.

TW Classic 2005 is over, and I can't say it was very good. Duran Duran was headliner, together with the Belgian rock god Arno and Lenny Kravitz. But Duran Duran just, eh, sucked. Sure, they have one or two good songs on their new album, but the rest isn't "Wild Boys" either. Even when they started on their old repertoire, they could sparc the public. Weird. Luckily Lenny Kravitz knew how to entertain the public, and that made our evening good.


There was heavy rainfall predicted, so I didn't bring my mobile phone with me. That means no pictures of the concert. Pity again.

Since the release of Debian 3.1, support for AMD64 has -unofficially- been included. CD and DVD images will be made available on cdimage.debian.org. If you visit packages.debian.org and search for a package you will notice (since a few weeks ago) that it also lists the amd64 versions, including links to download the packages from one of the mirrors. This will continue to work for sarge, but may break for short times while amd64 gets integrated into the main Debian archive. More information can be found on the Debian AMD64 homepage.

Tired of using Powerpoint or OpenOffice Impress just to make a presentation ? Sometimes I just want to create a slideshow which 'just looks good', without having to find out all hidden options in a presentation software. If you have the same opinion, you might want to try out S5, a webbased slideshow format, consisting of one html file, and some CSS markups. Very interesting if you have to give presentations on computers other than your own.

I just upgraded the Drupal engine to version 4.6.1. The upgrade process was cumbersome, awkward, non-trivial and difficult to say at least. It seems that Drupal suffers from the same upgrade disease as PostNuke does : the first time, the upgrade died on the database upgrade. Luckily, I did had a backup of the database and the website, so reverting the upgrade was no problem. I performed the upgrade then on a local copy, which learned me how to upgrade properly. There are some problems left, especially with the taxonomy_image module, but that's for later.


OpenSolaris provides support for x86/x86-64 processors as well as Sparc. The Blastware guys are working on Polaris, which is an OpenSolaris port to PowerPC. Sun has been working on opening Solaris for over a year now. The OpenSolaris project started with a pilot group of Sun and non-Sun users. During the pilot program a lot of info including screenshots could be found on various OpenSolaris member blogs. (My favorite is Ben Rockwood's blog).


Teamware is the source code management system Sun uses for Solaris and OpenSolaris. Which was designed by Larry McVoy (now of BitKeeper) while he was at sun. No word yet on if Teamware will be available for OpenSolaris developers or not. Sun also uses CollabNet for it's Open Source project websites so that might be a possibility as well.

It seems that my previous spam measurements were quite good, but also that the spammers have stepped up to the next level : comment spam. I already had to delete 7 spam comments last week, so I've decided to install Drupal's spam module. It contains a trainable Bayesian filter, manually entered custom filters, counting the number of URLs, and detection of content posted from open email relays.


The Bayesian filter does statistical analysis on spam content, learning from spam and non-spam that it sees to determine the liklihood that new content is or is not spam. Seems a bit like the spam filters included in Thunderbird.

In November 2004, Microsoft's second-in-command Steve Ballmer made some headlines by mentioning that Chairman Bill Gates was getting four million spams per day. At the time, Jef Poskanzer was dealing with a little spam problem of his own - he was getting around a million spams per day. He found it a little comforting that his problem wasn't quite as bad as Bill's. However, a couple of weeks later Ballmer corrected himself, saying he mis-remembered the stat and Gates actually gets four million per year. This means he was getting one hundred times as much spam as Bill Gates. He has written a tutorial explaining why he gets so much crapmail and how he dealt with it.