I recently discovered the website of the US National Park service, which is a true gold mine for the tourist looking for various information of the National Parks in the USA. You'll find activities, maps, and road information among others, as well as more educational stuff like the history and geology of the various parks. Even comes with a handy click-through map of the different states in the US !

Want to know which technology scares me the most ? AI combined with nanotechnology. Here's an interview with professor Vernor Vinge, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, who's claiming we'll be getting near the Technological Singularity near 2020, which indicates the point where man-made machines will be more intelligent than man.
Bill Joy, the former Sun executive, warned in 2000 with his Why the future doesn't need us, an essay with some somber thoughts about how our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

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Question: i = ?


PHP: 13
C: 14

Verkiezingen binnenkort ? Tania Derveaux belooft 40000 jobs op affiches in het Antwerpse. Een engelse versie van haar NEE website vermeldt I will give you 40 000 blowjobs; those who are married or shy can also choose to receive their blowjob in Second Life. 't Is maar dat men in de politiek ook virtual reality heeft ontdekt.
Echt of Photoshop verkiezingsstunt ? In elk geval een reactie op de 200000 jobs die OpenVLD en SP.A ons beloven, en enkel mogelijk in een land waar de huidige minister van financiën ons niet kon vertellen wat de vierkantswortel van 25 was. Ik heb me niet ingeschreven (ik kom op dat vlak niks tekort, dank u), maar misschien is hier een taak voor u weggelegd ?

Here's a page with some of the most funny geek T-shirts. I own one. Woot !

I purchased a new Acer Aspire laptop. I test-drived Windows Vista for 4 days, during which it bluescreened on me twice. Today, I installed Ubuntu Feisty on it. Surprisingly, almost everything worked out of the box; only the maximum screen resolution obliged me to install 915resolution first, after which the 1280x800 resolution in Gnome came available. Even the built-in webcam worked without a problem ! Only shame that the default installation of Ubuntu doesn't support LVM.
I just have to resolve some problems with the wireless link, but that's probably due to some weird encryption algorithm I configure at my access point. Ubuntu has an excellent Linux on laptop wiki, where the Acer Aspire 5610 is described here.
The laptop is called Esgaroth to the city in the Long Lake, south of the Lonely Mountain and east of Mirkwood, as described in The Hobbit and in Lord of the Rings.

I just returned from a week in Denver, Colorado where I joined the LTUG 2007 conference. LTUG is the Large Tape User Group, a consortium of StorageTek customers. The 2007 conference sessions displayed roadmaps of future software and hardware and was this year first congress which featured Open System sessions. Take a guess how the road to the StorageTek headquarters is called ? Here are some more pictures.

I'm writing this on my newly upgraded Feisty, but boy, did this upgrade took some problems ! First of all, the update-manager crashed after some time during the install of the packages. So I switched to good old 'apt-get dist-upgrade'-'apt-get -f install' combinations which finally got things less or more straight.


After reboot, I got the usplash screen; when my disk kept on rambling, I knew there was big trouble. Getting rid of the usplash logo was easy, and it seemed that udev was causing lots of trouble. The combination with evms and lvm seemed fatal, causing the system only to boot partially into single user. I got even kernel crashes when I disabled evms. Eventually switching to Edgy's kernel version, and getting rid of lvm and evms alltogether finally let me into the realm of runlevel 3. After that, all was easy : switching to linux-2.6.20, re-enabling AIGLX and beryl, and lo and behold, Ubuntu Feisty in all its glory.


Most troublesome dist-upgrade *ever*

De ringmus, hier gezeten op een pas ontluikende haagbeuk, is een vogel van het platteland. Je vindt hem dus vooral in landelijke streken, boomgaarden, en gebieden met hagen en bosjes. Het grote verschil met de huismus, is dat het mannetje van de huismus herkenbaar is aan zijn grijsblauwe petje. Ringmussen daarentegen hebben een zwarte stip op de wangen.
Deze vogel is niet beschermd in België, omdat hij als schadelijk wordt aanzien voor onze gewassen (hij is verlekkerd op granen).

Since years, bees in the US are mysteriously disappearing. The same effect is now showing clearly in Europe too, especially in Britain. Some scientists have discovered that mobile phone communication might be responsible for this decline in insect life.