When I bought my PDA/GPS combination, it was installed with the Medion 'Navigon' Navigator. I've used it for about a half year, but never found the interface pleasing, nor the menu user-interface anything near comfortable using. So I recently made the switch to Tomtom 5. The menu surely is worth the upgrade versus Navigon. The GPS view itself is an improvement, too : Tomtom shows me the names of the streets on the map itself, without too much cluttering the screen.


And another goodie is the extra POI's : I imported the speed camera locations of the Benelux, and configured Tomtom so that it gives me a warning when I get anywhere near those damned robot cops.

Ever heard of octonions ? They're not a new kind of vegetable, but are part of a high dimensional algebra, which is disturbingly fascinating. While reading the introduction, I got the disturbing sense that the author was just making stuff up and seeing if he could get away with it.


But I guess that's the technical definition of "research in mathematics". Truly, it is: the researcher sits or paces, possibly muttering, and then writes. The basic idea is that you come up with an idea and see just how far you can stretch it before it breaks or passes the Hooke's Law limit.
It is important also to stay away from the Hooke's law limit on one's own mind. More coffee and other mind-altering substances have been consumed in the pursuit of mathematics than in all of sysadminnery, it seems...

White shores - palm trees on the beach - pancakes with chocolate and French toast for breakfast - free cocktails - unknown stars and constellations (I spotted Andromeda and Pegasus high in the east) - pimps waking us up in the middle of the night, showing us their 'merchandise' - Wolfsheim music in the lobby - sun strokes and inner ear damage :


Back in Belgium after a two week vacation in the Dominican Republic. Very hot out there, and very cold in here. Luckily, we still get a warm feeling by looking at our pictures.


Lessons learned :
1. transatlantic flights suck
2. I have way too many black t-shirts.

Which would upset you more, your brother dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees?


Which would be bigger news to your neighbors, those dozen mutilated bus children across town or 15,000 dead in an earthquake in Iran?


Inside the Monkeysphere is a very interesting - and humorous - article from David Wong, which describes perfectly the negative impact that a large group of people has on our behaviour : why we care about some people while not giving a rat's ass about most every one else.

This page has 5 IQ tests with a very good content. Be prepared, this is not for the weak of mind or the short of time.


Now I am trying the "Test for exceptional intelligence". The crack that authors of this stuff were smoking is so strong that it qualifies under weapons of mass destruction.

How do you stay organized? PDA? Paper? Maybe, you're not and need to start? However you may organize yourself, you might what to have a look at this tool even, if just for the sheer beauty of the concept and implementation. PocketMod is a browser-based tool and the only requirement is that you have the Flash player plugin installed. Once there, you'll be able to build a portable paper organizer that gets printed on one page of paper. You then fold it in a special way to create a little book.


And if you think PocketMod is cool, you should take a look at Douglas Johnston's D*I*Y Planner, a series of lots of templates distributed under a Creative Commons license, including a 'widget kit' in OpenOffice.org Draw format to assist in creating your own! The D*I*Y Planner is available in several sizes, and new templates are included in every release.

My last set of colored lenses were the blue ones. I must admit it's the color I least fancy, though the blue was one of the most prominent colors, as finally there were some people who asked if my eyes had changed somehow.


So now, back to regular lenses. It was a funny experiment to see my eyes change color every month. I can advise it to anyone, though don't expect many people to notice the changes, as they are quite subtle.

It's about cats. In sinks.

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.