The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is a remarkable book : it begins with earthling Arthur Dent facing the destruction of his house to make room for a new highway. To add insult to injury, Arthur's friend of many years, Ford Prefect, informs Arthur that Earth itself is about to end, as an alien race wishes to make an intergalactic highway and Earth is in its way. The novel then follows what becomes of Arthur and Ford as they hitch their way onto the Heart Of Gold, the most advanced ship in the galaxy, which itself was hijacked by Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed, way trippy ex-hippie president of the galaxy. Also on board, they meet the unforgettable Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend, whom Arthur once tried to mack on, and Marvin, a paranoid, chronically depressed robot. Thus, Arthur and Ford cruise the galaxy, searching for the question to the Ultimate Answer Of Life, the Universe, and Everything.


The book has been rewritten numerous times, been adapted to other media formats, including stage shows, and radio broadcasts. As a result, many versions of the Guide were develloped, all slightly different. And now, a new version has been added in the form of a movie, being released this week in theathers in Belgium. Most of the reviews I've read were going from 'this sucks' to 'could have been better', so I'm not settings my hopes too high for this.

M. bought some curtains last month, and wanted them installed asap. But when I tried to drill some holes into the wall with my old B&D, the drillhead came out red glowing, with almost no drill hole being made. So I knew I needed some more powerfull stuff. The person in the DIY store almost laughed at me when he heard which drilling machine I used.
So meet monster Makita, a drilling machine the size of half a bazooka. Comes with a 'wall demolition' option, and drills holes into concrete walls as if they were packets of soft butter. And it even comes with a little LED illuminating the spot were to drill.

Our neighbours are on holiday, and left us with the important task of taking care of their animals. That is : including three sheeps, a dog and 4 chickens. Not all that difficult, except that some of the chickens prefer to take a trip around the neighbourhood. I really don't know how those hens manage to break out from their fenced home, but they sure like to take a holiday themselves.


An advantage of this all is that we may keep the hens eggs, which means that we have some 11 eggs lying around in the fridge. Time to make a giant cake, I guess...

My new firewall is in place at last : as I did not have much time last week, I used half an hour here and there to install and harden the server. I must say that I like the new Debian installer : it took some time to get used to, but the result is nice. I'm quite impressed by the partitioner in the installer : it's quite powerfull, but I'm afraid it will be a bitch for newbies, as it's not really the most user-friendly part of the installation.


The configuration of Shorewall took most time : for some reason, the box refused to masquerade large tcp packets. Browsing went fine, but initiating a ftp request or some nntp traffic would only let some packets drip in. But then I recalled a problem I encountered at work with a new Solaris8 machine and pppoe customers. Pppoe uses a MSS which is quite lower than the default 1500 MTU used on most networks, which can give problems with big packages. Luckily, the Shorewall CLAMPMSS configuration parameter takes care of that.


I noticed that Debian installs some more experimental modules with its default installed 2.4.27 kernel. For pppoe, it uses the pppoe kernel module, which moves pppoe back to kernel space. The performance is quite impressive : whereas my previous firewall CPU would hit the ceiling while downloading large files, the new box doesn't even sweat.

It looks like the music industry has won another battle : ISPA members (which contain all Belgian internet providers) have closed all mp3 newsgroups on their newsservers. One might consider this move quite strange, as some of the mp3 newsgroups were used to post own mp3 samples, like people posting music they made themselves. On the other hand, won't this encourage people to spoil other (non-binary) groups with mp3 stuff ? Anyway, a sad decision; I have downloaded music in the past too via newsgroups, and even bought some CD's from the music I downloaded, so it wouldn't surprise me if this decision might even further lessen the CD sales.


But it seems that the music industry is even winning the war : the majority of downloaded music is coming from 'legal' sources like iTunes and stuff : thousands of people downloading crapp-ass-quality mp3's or wma's (128 kbit encoding really sucks) for a price that is as expensive as a normal CD.
How ironical.

Hoera : ons Martine heeft haar trouwkleed al gekozen. Ik heb een heel ruw idee van hoe het eruit gaat zien, maar voor de grote finale wordt het natuurlijk wachten tot de vierde februari.

For the last months, I noticed that my maximum download speed could not be reached. Rather by coincidence, I found out that while downloading something, the CPU on my firewall was in the red. I use pppoe to connect to my ISP, and pppoe takes *alot* of CPU time. Now, my current firewall was a Pentium I-166, and already in use since 2000, so I guessed it was time for a new machine. After browsing Ebay, I found a second hand Pentium III-650 which would do nicely. The machine runs Debian stable, and is called Argonath, after the double guardian statue which was placed on the borders of the Gondor empire. I opted for a XFS filesystem for the Squid cache, as it has the name of being one of the most performant filesystems around. I couldn't find a second hard disk, so no RAID setup. Pity, but a rsync will suffice for backup.

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, Google has added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Happy lunar surfing. And make sure you zoom in all the way to see a silly surprise.

De zaal ligt bij deze ook vast : na een lange zoektocht hebben we besloten om het feest in zaal Berkenhof te houden. Toch een aantal zalen in het Leuvense aangedaan, en Berkenhof stak er met kop en schouders bovenuit. De andere goede zalen lagen echter wat meer de kanten van Aarschot uit, en dat wilden we wat vermijden, gezien de familie al van ver genoeg moet komen. Berkenhof ligt in Bierbeek, ten zuiden van Leuven, op 5 minuten rijden van de afrit Haasrode op de E40.


Dit weekend moeten we ook naar een trouwfeest; ideale tijd dus om onze ogen eens open te houden, en een vragenlijstje klaar te houden voor het bruidspaar ;)

From the inbox :


DORMITORY:
When you rearrange the letters:
DIRTY ROOM


DESPERATION:
When you rearrange the letters:
A ROPE ENDS IT


GEORGE BUSH:
When you rearrange the letters:
HE BUGS GORE


THE MORSE CODE:
When you rearrange the letters:
HERE COME DOTS


MOTHER-IN-LAW:
When you rearrange the letters:
WOMAN HITLER


SNOOZE ALARMS:
When you rearrange the letters:
ALAS! NO MORE Z 'S


A DECIMAL POINT:
When you rearrange the letters:
IM A DOT IN PLACE


ELEVEN PLUS TWO:
When you rearrange the letters:
TWELVE PLUS ONE


AND FOR THE GRAND FINALE:


PRESIDENT CLINTON OF THE USA:
When you rearrange the letters
TO COPULATE HE FINDS INTERNS