I wanted to play around with smf (System Management Facility) in Solaris 10 on my laptop, when I noticed it wasn't present. Apparently, the Solaris Express build on my laptop was b63, which is quite outdated. Time for an upgrade, then. Sun hasn't simplified things by making three versions of Solaris available for download :

• OpenSolaris : the bleeding edge developpers release


• Solaris 10 : the stable release


• Solaris Express : located somewhere in between the first two

OpenSolaris is, off course, the most interesting one to follow. There is quite a bit of new stuff in the latest build, called Nevada :

• The version number in 'uname' has been upgraded to 5.11 to make the difference with Solaris 10


• The x86 build uses grub now to boot


• This is cool: metasync operations can now be cancelled and resumed later, via the new -c option.

OpenSolaris now contains BFU, an utility to upgrade the system without the need to download a whole ISO image (yay!). Off course, you can use Flash Archives to backup your previous system.

Confused by names as SledgeHammer, Sempron and Prescott ? There are alot of codenamed CPU's out there, and if you're checking out the market for a new computer, it can sometimes be confusing. Intel have mangeled their CPU names quite a lot, even worse than AMD in my opinion -- a XEON can be anything from a dualcore EMT64 Hyper-threading enabled monster that comes with a free coffee maker, to a "plain" 32bit x86 clone with no fancy addons.


Anadtech has a nice overview over the current desktop offerings from AMD and Intel . I'm not aware of a good overview article on the whole range of server cpus available from both AMD and Intel (or one including Power cpus and sparcs, for that matter), but Anadtech (again) has done a lot of benchmarks and reviews for the server market that at least gives you a brief overview of what's new.

Gigposters has put together a staggering collection of nearly 45,000
concert posters, indexed by band and designer, for you to browse and discuss.

Eén datum ligt toch al vast : op 4 februari 2006 trouwen Martine & ik in de St-Jans de Doper kerk in de prachtige Middeleeuwse omgeving van het Leuvense begijnhof. De datum is nog steeds een optie, aangezien de feestzaal nog niet vastligt, maar da's voor volgende week. Voor wat de feestzaal betreft, twijfelen we nog tussen Salons Kesseldal in Kessel-Lo, en het Berkenhof in Bierbeek, al zal het hoogstwaarschijnlijk de laatste worden.


Het moeilijkste stuk aan zo'n trouw is zoals veel dingen, een weet hebben hoe je eraan begint. Gelukkig is m'n zus zo'n anderhalf jaar geleden getrouwd, dus dat hielp al veel. Veel informatie vind je op trouwplanner.nl. Als we de info op die planner bekijken, merken we dat we redelijk op schema zitten. Toch al een opluchting...

A new month, so new colored lenses. This month, I'm wearing the brown set, called 'Honey'. Much nicer than the green ones, as brown is more the natural color of my eyes. The lenses are more prominent, this time. I still wonder why colored lenses allways are traditionally colored, eg like the natural eye colors. Why no red, yellow, orange or even black lenses (would look great on new wave parties). Maybe because no person would buy them ? I certainly would.

Beleuvenissen 2005 has started; this well-known formula is organized every Friday evening in Leuven, featuring some lesser known artists in several categories per week (Folk, tropical, ...). Last Friday we visited the Folk rather by coincidence, I must admit. As usual with Beleuvenissen, the bands are mostly underground, though I recognised immediately the headliner of Folk : Lais. I was surprised to find them rather good, as they remind me somehow of the Mediaeval Baebes, though Lais sounds less er... mediaeval ?

Sage seems to be the ultimate RSS reader for Firefox, available as extension. This might change my plans with DarkChannels, the RSS reader I wrote in Perl. I was just pondering to write a new version of DarkChannels with some slight modifications, but Sage has many of these functionalities already built-in yet.

Astromech.net is an impressive site for people who want to build their own R2-D2 droid, complete with lights, sounds, and maybe motion. Check out the tutorials.

The Messier objects are a set of astronomical objects catalogued by Charles Messier in his catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters first published in 1774. The original motivation behind the catalogue was that Messier was a comet hunter, and was frustrated by objects which resembled but were not comets. He therefore compiled a list of these objects. The Messier objects are still the most well known - and bright - objects on the night sky. Silicon Owl has an overview of the appearance of these objects, both in a telescope, and as photographed with professional equipment.


A Messier Marathon is an all night (or as long as you can stay awake!) search to try to identify as many of the Messier objects as you can, up to 110! If you time it right, are properly prepared, and try to find the objects in the best possible order, you'll find many of them. Sounds like fun.

Alan Horkan made a great mockup of those motivational posters, with some stabs to the most popular Linux distributions. The page has a link to some other page worth a chuckle : Why Gentoo is for ricers.