Feeling lost ? Here's a map of the known universe as in the Star Trek series. A pretty cool map, but it doesn't explain the "Quadrant" thing very well. I guess they defined the transition from Alpha to Beta quadrants as the line straight out from the galactic core that intersects with Sol. (In basically the same manner as defining the Prime Merdian to be the line running from North Pole to South Pole passing through Greenwich, England.) Thus, the Alpha and Beta quadrants are the area where most of the series takes place, because Sol is right on the border between them.


The borders for the Gamma and Delta quadrants are, as a result, the 90 degree perpendicular lines from that line, also starting at the galactic core. Since Sol and its neighbors are out in the arms, this makes the Gamma and Delta quadrants literally on the opposite side of the galaxy.

The game of petals around the rose took Bill Gates 30 minutes to solve. All I can say is that I solved it way faster, in about three minutes. The game is part of a special kind of guessing games, called Look-and-say sequence. Can you solve the following sequence :


1 11 21 1211 111221 312211 13112221 ...

As Christmas and New Year approach, many geeks expect shiny new toys. Imaging-resource.com has many detailed helpful reviews of digital cameras.
Dpreview.com allows one to review several currently available cameras side-by-side.

A colleague and I got a bit surprised when on a stripped Solaris, a program refused to work cause it couldn't find a shared library. But even after setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, the program behaved in the same way. In cases like that, one should try to modify the global ld path, which is /etc/ld.so.conf on Linux, but that file is not present on Solaris. Even greater frustration arose when it turned out that setud binaries cannot be trussed, so no list of syscalls to find out where the program is looking for its libraries.


Turns out that the use of LD_LIBRARY_PATH is restricted for setuid and setgid programs, as part of the Trusted Solaris environment. However, the list of shared library directories can be extended to the list of trusted directories in /var/ld/ld.config by use of the crle command.

Westegg.com has a nice overview of many Simpsons quotes with humor derived from subtleties of language, esoteric allusions, or just plain wit. Even Wikipedia has a page devoted to some neologisms in everyones beloved animation TV show.

A long living Xorg bug has finally been fixed : on my Ultra-10, Xorg crashes the system when starting up. The code in Xorg was trying to mimmick VGA routing by disabling I/O responses behind the Simba PCI controller. Unfortunately, doing this also happens to disable access to the IDE controller I/O registers, thus crashing the system. No console messages because the console has been put into framebuffer mode by the X server already.


This took a painfully long time to track down and debug. Luckily, once fixed, the code got blindingly fast implemented in the Debian packages, and the fix is now available in xserver-xorg-core-1.1.1-10. No luck however in SparcUbuntu, cause the package isn't yet available, and the Debian xserver-xorg-core package cannot be installed on Ubuntu, because of conflict issues. However, by unpacking the deb file, one can simply copy the Xorg binary to /usr/bin, which fixes also the problem.

I recently got subscribed to Google Reader, and I love it. A nice Web2.0 application for browsing RSS subscriptions. And one that puts my own home-brewed Darkchannels into the shadow. I started it to get my own XULChannels, and it did what it had to do, but the last two years, I even didn't had time to change one bit.
The same for the GDM Bluecurve theme, which is basically caught up by time. So from today I won't link them on this page, and by time they won't be available any more on this site.

So, Debian has finally decided to rename Firefox and Thinderbird to IceWeasel and IceDove. Why all the fuss was all about, I still don't know, but I do find the Iceweasel rename job stupid. Why Debian simply didn't shove Firefox and Thunderbird in non-free beats me.

Ubuntu 6.10, aka Edgy Eft, has been released this week. Time to upgrade, and indeed, as the most comments say, Edgy starts up quite quickly, thanks to the new upstart init replacement. Edgy also contains - to my surprise - the recently released Firefox 2, which contains spell checking as I see while I'm typing this blog post. No excuse for typos any more :)


I'm a bit surprised that I had to manually change the Ubuntu release to edgy in /etc/apt/sources.list; with the upgrade to Dapper, I remembered the update-manager detected this automatically.


Other goodies : Ubuntu 6.10 server edition is now also available for Sparc.

Everyone knows APOD (Astronomy Picture Of the Day). APOD calendar list all pictures since 1995, in an easy calendar view.