*The* astronomical event of 2003 is the Mars opposition of August. That month, Mars has never been so close to Earth in the last 20 years. One good reason to send a load of Mars robots to the red planet, but also to observe Mars from a telescope. If you really want to know what you're going to see through your telescope, Mars Previewer II may be of interest : it's a Windows program which was distributed with a copy of Sky and Telescope, and shows you the current visible details of the red planet. I didn't managed to get it running under Wine, so for the Linux and Mac OSX folks, the next link may be of interest : this site simulates the rotation of Mars, so you''ll have a good impression of the possible visible details.

In 2001, NASA launched the Mars Odyssey, to map the Mars surface. The result is depicted on the Themis site, with high detailled pictures of our neighbour planet; 1 pixel equals 20 meters. The climax on the site though is this magnificent inzoomable Mars chart.

I'm leaving Seti@Home for what it is. No more searching for little green men. Instead, I''m devoting my CPU time now to more down-to-earth science : Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases.

Since proteins play such fundamental roles in biology, scientists have sequenced the human genome. The genome is in a sense a "blueprint" for these proteins -- the genome contains the DNA code which specifies the sequence of the amino acids beads along the protein "necklace." However, only knowing this sequence tells us little about what the protein does and how it does it. In order to carryout their function (eg as enzymes or antibodies), they must take on a particular shape, also known as a "fold." Thus, proteins are truly amazing machines: before they do their work, they assemble themselves! This self-assembly is called "folding." Understanding protein folding may lead to a cure for protein related diseases.

Most IT people know about VMWare, an environment that lets you run another operating system on your PC. VMWare will allow you to run eg Win 98 and associated software on your Unix/X11 workstation, displaying a window on your workstation, simulating a monitor on a PC. It's kinda strange seeing bootmessages appear in a window. But VMWare is pricy; you can use a VMWare copy for about a month with a temporary license, but after that, you are considered to pay for it.


Bochs is an open source implementation of VMWare. I was surprised about the maturity of the project. It's still not that advanced as VMWare, or as userfriendly, but if you have a minimum of geek capabilities, you can run an OS in it. I had to fiddle a bit with the virtual disk parameters, but finally got it working, and at this very moment, I'm installing FreeBSD in a Bochs cage.

What do you get when you combine the greatest story of all with the totally shifted British humor of the Pythons ? That's right : The Nazgul who say Ni.

The past month stirred up the astronomy feeling again, even up to the point that I'm considering the purchase of a bigger telescope (a 8 or 10 inch Dobson seems nice). The etching databases of Regulus and Dog Star are nice impressions of what is possible with those big scopes.

Ever wished you could read a downloaded Sherlock Holmes story in bed instead of in front of your computer? Now you can : Project Gutenberg offers electronic versions of texts whose copyright has expired; almost all major classics (and more) are covered. Unfortunately, these texts come as plain ASCII, which is very platform-independent, but also a pain to read. With a little LaTeX formatting, maybe these things can be reformatted to someting more readable. I noticed also that Debian includes a Gutenbook program, which allows you to browse the Gutenberg library online.

I was discussing a Perl project with a collegue, when one made the remark that actually there's no real Perl IDE (apart from Emacs or Vim, of course). I said that Eclipse maybe could be a solution, and lo and behold : two minutes later, my collegue found the website of EPIC, which is a very impressive Eclipse plugin. The number of Eclipse plugins is really impressive, even Clearcase plugins can be found. They now can all be found on the Eclipse plugin website.

Some days ago, I pointed out that Eclipse entered Debian. Unfortunately, there are still some problems to be solved for the Debian package. Luckily, the default Eclipse zipfile turned out the be a breeze to install.

Last week, I have been toying with Hercules, a "mainframe" emulator for Windows and Linux. Within Hercules, one can install different mainframe OSses, such as MVS, VM/370 or Linux/S390. Different older IBM mainframe OSses can be downloaded from cbttape.org. It looked promising to run VM on my laptop, but alas, the VM/370 version there is arcane. You won't find utilities like FILELIST or XEDIT, which makes it almost useless. A bit of a shame : it's hard to believe that IBM won't provide a modern VM OS to tinker with. It could attract lots of new administrators and developpers.

No matter what you are throwing away, somebody will find it endlessly fascinating. Witness Bill Keaggy, who loves other people's grocery lists. Which reminds me, I still have some errands to do.

NASA has an impressive solar system simulator, where you can see any planet from any point in space. Though it looks a lot like some Celestia screenshots...