Techblog has an article listing the best 15 geek movies to see before you die. Is your favorite pet movie included ?

I upgraded yesterday to Beryl 0.2, and besides some minor upgrade problems, this desktop manager is looking spiffy. Lunapark6.com has a nice roundup at the state of the current Linux desktop, which has way more eye candy than OSX and Vista together.
I really like trailfocus, which makes unfocused windows transparent. I don't like a cluttered desktop, so trailfocus really emphasizes the current active application.

Well, my PC has been repaired. Seems that a broken memory DIMM caused all the trouble. Damn, even I should have figured that out. Kudos to the repair service of Medion, they send a technician to my house to fix the problem.
At least I'm working on a fast PC again. Time to start some backups...

Matt Keveney has put up a page with some animations how different types of engines work.

Since yesterday, Belgian internet provider Skynet has removed access to the alt.binaries newsgroup on their news server. Skynet closed about 18 months ago the mp3 binary newsgroups under pressure of the ISPA, and now the complete alt.binaries tree has been removed. The binary news groups contained mostly porn and multimedia content. I guess an era ends for some people...
Rumour has it that the true reason behind this move is that the removal of multimedia content would be advantageous for their digital TV business.

I recently joined a HP demo about integrity virtual machines, where I noticed that all demo machines had stellar names. One system being named Sulaphat, and being an astronomer myself, I wondered which star this would be. Apparently it's Gamma Lyrae, a blue giant star, which I found in The Electronic Sky, an astronomers wikipedia. Another place of interest is the Fixed Stars, where you can find more historical and astrological (ergo pseudo-scientific) information about several stars. Why do stars have such weird names ? Because the Arabs where the first to give them names.


Are you interested in learning the names of constellations and stars ? Head over to the Space Place, which offers you some printouts of sky views during several times of the year.

Indexed Blog puts out a few graphs/charts on index cards almost every day. It comes highly recommended. One of the posts is a chuckle about the seven sins, for which the site has categorized the different combinations. Neilk commented with these 3-sin combinations :


* ABC = plus-size prostitution
* ABD = receiving oral sex while eating KFC
* ABE = throwing a pie at the one who rejected you
* ABF = seducing your neighbour to obtain her recipes
* ABG = bulimia so you can have more sex partners
* ACD = shirking your pimp duties
* ACE = the home hardware place
* ACF = all the boobies in the world shall be mine. MINE!
* ACG = discount trophy wife


(where A = lust, B = Gluttony, C = Greed, D = Slth, E = Wrath, F = Envy and G = Pride)

It is now two weeks my workstation has died; the long wait for a technician (the box is still under guarantee) is finally over next Monday. In the meantime, I dug out my old workstation, a P3-900 MHz, which I didn't touch for more than one year. The box runs Debian unstable, for which I dist-upgraded most parts without much hassle : X, Gnome, ssh, Firefox, Thunderbird, and basically any client program which connects to the internet. The only problem is memory : the machine only has 384 MB RAM and a swap space of 256MB, which is insanely low with current desktops like Gnome or KDE. Browsing with IceWeasel (Debianese for Firefox) feels like driving a 20 ton truck. One week countdown...


This incident made it clear that I must give some priority to backups : previously I made a seldom backup on CD-ROM or DVD, but that is work-intensive, and not much fun to do. So - with the current storage prices plummeting - I decided to shop for an external hard disk and I chose for a Packard Bell hard disk of 320GB. A quick rsync one-liner backed up most of my current files, but when I have some more time, I need to look around for some other backup methods. Maybe snapshotting (rsync or dervish), or keeping my homedir in CVS seem nice and fun projects to do.

The Belgian satellite images in Google Earth (or Google Maps) have been slightly improved in quality : new images from the French satellite Spot5 have been incorporated carrying a resolution of 2.5 meters per pixel (whereas previous resolutions were 15 meters per pixel).

I'm taking a course on AIX administration, and an excellent administrator tool is smitty. However, as an AIX newbie, it's easily to get lost in the menu's of this tool. Where, for instance, do I find the paging space administration menu ? The IBM site carries a good whitepaper listing all screens available in smitty. If you know the fast path, this paper directs you to the correct location.