There's alot of talk recently about Enlightenment 0.17, which after three years of development, has now reached the point of usability. Enlightenment is a nifty desktop environment, not quite like KDE or Gnome, but build to impress. The resulting desktop may contains as much, or even more eye-candy than a Mac OSX desktop, so it's logic that a lot of people were waiting for the new version.


Now there's Elive, a live cd based on E17 with Debian, for you to test things out. What's even better is that the Ubuntu folks have put a page online which discusses howto install the latest cvs version compiled into deb packages on your PC, which is basically as easy as adding a line to your sources.list. I just installed the CVS beta of E17 on my PC, and must say that E17, just like E16, smokes other desktop environments in terms of eye-candy, though this doesn't mean that Enlightenment feels bloated in any way.


Unluckily, the provided debs are only for i386, which means that sparc is not supported. I'm seriously thinking about using my E3000 Sun server to build the sparc debs, though I will need to look for some webspace to host the +50 megabytes on deb packages...

Some info about the upcoming Sun Niagara chips has been leaked; The Register got some output of an OpenSolaris box running on a 8-way Niagara chip, showing 32 threads at a time, which makes Niagara very interesting for webbased stuff. I definitely would like to see some Apache2 benchmarks on this stuff, and can't wait to have one of these in our computer room. The first server based on the Niagara chip is believed to be called the Sun Fire T200.


Ben Rockwood has some more info about the different Sun chipsets and their codenames. Interesting to see is that a Niagara chip is in fact a scaled down UltraSparc II.

After 14 months of climbing, the Mars rover Spirit has reached the summit of Husband Hill, 269 feet above the edge of the Martian plain. The panoramic view from the top is spectacular. This breathtaking view from the summit reveals previously hidden southern terrain called "Inner Basin"(center), where team members hope to direct Spirit in the future. The rover left tracks to the left point toward the west, the direction Spirit arrived from. The peaks of "McCool Hill" and "Ramon Hill," both in the "Columbia Hills," can be seen just to the left and behind Inner Basin.

NASA is preparing to send the New Horizons probe to Pluto. It will be the first earth device to get intimate with the icy planet. And you can be there too - or, at least, your name. NASA is asking everyone to send them their names, which will be attached in the space device. The New Horizons probe will be launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto and the mysterious Kuiper belt, in the outskirts of the Solar System. It is expected that the probe will return to earth in approximately 50 thousand (!) years.

I've created a Flickr page to store some of my photographs. What a wonderfull service Flickr is ! A great place too to find sublime - and free - wallpapers.
Eat your heart out, Webshots !
And of course, someone already created FlickrLicio.us too.

Operation Crossroads was an atmospheric nuclear weapon test series conducted in the summer of 1946 at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The series consisted of two detonations, a low altitude test and a shallow water test. In contrast to all later atmospheric nuclear tests, a large media contingent was present for the two Crossroads detonations. They were allowed to cover the test atomic bomb explosions "with sufficient thoroughness to satisfy the public as to the fairness and general results of the experiment." In addition, three artists also recorded the project, to give the public an idea of the project. History.navil.mil offers a look at the aquarels being made then, only shame about the small images...

Biella Coleman recently finished her dissertation in Anthropology after studying Free Software communities for most of a decade. It's quite a read and offers a unique insight from a Debian outsider how Open Source communities work and thrive. A very interesting conclusion that has been made is the idea that crises such as the one around the Vancouver prospectus are necessary if painful, but are for the merit of the community. It's a hefty read, difficult and full of antropological jargon, but a very interesting work.

I have upgraded Drupal's spam module from version 2.0.3 to version 2.0.10. The sum of the upgrades allows me now to expire spam comments automatically, which finally ends the almost daily task of emptying the spam queue.


The work of Jeremy Andrews on this piece of software is impressive : new versions are delivired almost weekly, and sane feature requests get implemented at a very high rate.

To whom it may concern : from Wednesday on, my phone number at home will be cancelled. If you want to contact me by other means than email, use my mobile phone number.

I encountered this funny error message while resetting some values on xscreensaver :

$ xscreensaver-demo

attraction: domain error: forces on balls too great

Well yeah, I guess I would give up too ... :)