There's nothing more startling than rising from your lazy couch at evening dusk, and seeing a hot air balloon landing in the field behind your garden. This baby, marked with advertisement from a technology education center in Mechelen (100m from my work !), dumped itself in a corn meadow. 5 minutes later, the companion car arrived and the great folding could begin.
Mark the dark spot above the ballon in the picture. Even at higher resolution, I have no idea if this is a bird (maybe a bit large, no ?), a blow of hot air, or a piece of venting sail from the balloon.

Hot women and magic swords
Because you'll never have either.


Inspirational posters for gamers.

Phobosweb has put together the top 100 SF books one should read. Did you know BTW that George Lucas allways aknowledged that he used Dune as a major inspiration for Star Wars ? Jitterbug.com has a lengthy explanation about the similarities in both epics.

I purchased recently some solar foil; it's the best way to observe the sun safely : ocular solar filter are just unsafe, because of the high temperatures it receives by all the concentrated sunlight in your telescope. Solar projection is rather awkward to take pictures.


Solar foil reduces the sunlight to 0.000 01 percent of its strength, which gives nice pictures like the inset here. Unfortunately the sun surface is quite boring the last days : not a single tiny sunspot in sight.

At the top of a particularly convoluted and otherwise completely uncommented code:


// Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.



The c2.com wiki has a page with all the funny and weird stuff that can be found in source code.

The time that I read Slashdots comments is long gone. There's just too much noise, even with a +5 filter. In the case you really want to read the best ./ comments, head over to Seen on Slash, which accumulates the most relevant comments.

The Moscow underground is renowned for its majestic splender, take a look for yourself. Check out Unrealised Moscow too, for a look on some of Stalinists' taste in architecture from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Although, ultimately, neither of these projects was realised, the plans submitted by the participants had a noticeable influence on the development of Moscow. Considered today, it is clear that the best examples of this architecture, most of which never got beyond the drawing board, are more profound and interesting than the ideological norms within the constraints of which they were devised.

TW Classic is over, and judging by the number of visitors (over 50 000), this years edition was a great success. With bands like Simple Minds, Arsenal and Sting, the line-up surely was way better than last year.


Only two things were annoying :
- the food was way less varied than the previous years (eg no chinese stuff this time)
- the stench that surrounded the festival area was immense. Whether this was due to the large number of visitors, or to the last week's 80 000 people visiting Rock Werchter is unknown.

If the Earth were a sandwhich is a Google Maps appliction showing you were you would emerge if you dig a hole through the Earth. In my case, somewhere around New Zealand.

Nexenta alfa release 0.5 has arrived. It is the first Nexenta release which supports Solaris zones. It uses debootstrap technology in conjunction with remote APT repository which simplifies *a lot* of Zone software management routines.


It is possible to pre-install fresh zone with custom software out of the APT repository. In this article you will see how apache gets pre-installed and pre-configured to operate in a newly created Nexenta Zone.