If Wikipedia is too dry or too objective for you, then the Urban Dictionary will give you some cool slang definitions to quote around. Some examples to give you a chuckle :


* Sun : Sun Microsystems. As in Damn that stock is going down like Sun Microsystems.


* Marriage : Suicide in it's worst form.
Jerry: Dude, Ben committed marriage yesterday.
Joe: Holy shit dude. Well, so much for hanging out with ben.


* Frodo : that last bit of poo that wont drop into the toilet : an annoying little shit that wont let go of the ring. As in :
-Are you okay in there?
-Yeah, but I gotta frodo. Come back in like 10 minutes

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.


--The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams


If you ever wondered how the Earth measures up to other planets or the Sun, this site might be something for you.

InstaLinux is a new website developed by open source enthusiasts based on code released by Hewlett Packard allows users to point and click through a few simple screens to generate a small (less than 30 MB) installation image. When booted, it will install an operating system via the network according to the user's specifications. Debian, Ubuntu and KUbuntu are all supported on x86 and x86_64 platforms, as well as several other distributions.

Jon Smirl has put up a nice overview of the current (pre-X11R7) state of Linux graphics. If you wanna read more about XGL, XAA and DRI, check it out.


Speaking of which, I got a problem on my SparcDebian where the upgrade to X11R7 refuses to start, and causes a machine hang. Seems that on Sparc I'm not the only one...

Nobody ever reads the EULA (End User License Agreement) that comes with most software. It's long, written in incomprehensible law jargon, and you're too eager to try the software out, so begone with this boring stuff !
But what does a regular EULA actually contains ? The folks at Linuxadvocacy.org have translated the MS Windows XP EULA into plain English.

NASA has build a video of the Huygens probe's descent into Titan's murky atmosphere. The movie was built with data collected during the 147-minute plunge through Titan's thick orange-brown atmosphere to a soft sandy riverbed on Jan. 14, 2005. In 4 minutes and 40 seconds, the movie shows what the probe saw within the few hours of the descent and the landing.

I just installed the latest Xephem-3.7.1 onto my debian amd64. The problem with the default deb package in the Debian repository is that the version is quite old, at 3.4.5. Unfortunately, building Xephem-3.7.1 isn't quite straightforward; here's a small howto to craft the binaries (no package, unfortunately) :


* download the source from the Xephem site
* unpack the tgz tarball
* create and run this script in the ./xephem-3.7.1 directory :

#!/bin/bash

# Fix gcc flags

for i in libastro/Makefile libip/Makefile  

 libjpegd/Makefile liblilxml/Makefile GUI/xephem/Makefile ; 

do

  echo "Fixing CFLAGS in ${i}"

  sed -e "s~^CFLAGS[ ]*=(.*)-O2(.*)~CFLAGS= 1 2  

  ${CFLAGS}~" -i ${i} 
done

sed -e 's~^CFLAGS[ ]*=(.*)$(CLDFLAGS)(.*)~CFLAGS=1 2~'  

  -i GUI/xephem/Makefile

* Remove the ./xephem-3.7.1/libXm/linux86 directory, as it contains 32bit libraries
* Create a symlink ./xephem-3.7.1/libXm/linux86 towards /usr/lib
* Install the lesstif2 and lesstif2-dev packages
* Build as described in the INSTALL file


That's it ! Copy your binary to /usr/bin, and you're ready to rumble.

There's lot of rumours about Apple incorporating ZFS in Mac OSX. Yet there are many people that say ZFS is great for servers but people don't need it at home. Unix Admin Corner tries to explain why ZFS is possibly more needed at home.

Solaris Express 4/06 has been released, based on the Nevada build 36. The OpenSolaris community is already counting at Nevada build 39, but the real interesting part of build 36 is that it allows you to hand-assemble a system which boots from ZFS. The procedure is not for the faint at heart, but it clearly indicates that a ZFS root filesystem is getting real close.


OTOH, people are porting ZFS to Mac OSX.

Dropped out of university too early ? Allways wanted a published scientific report with your name on it ? 'Controlling Digital-to-Analog Converters Using Amphibious Theory', 'Studying Forward-Error Correction and Model Checking with BUN' or 'A Case for Wider-Area Networks' are only some of the sounding titles of scientific reports the SCIgen robot can generate for you.


You're a science teacher, and hate the internet for it's ready to pick scientific papers ? You want to know in advance which students are going to deliver impressive reports, generated in a few seconds ? Fear no longer : here's the Inauthentic Paper Detector.


Note : I submitted one of my blog posts to this baby, and it rated my text as being classified as INAUTHENTIC with a 20.5% chance of being authentic text. I've allways known I was a lousy scientist :)