Levenoblogs : 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster, filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. Of those companies, 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately.


Dear Leveno, "the cloud" isn't a backup replacement. Thank you.

2008 has been the year where scientists have received confirmation that the universe is swarming with planet-filled solar systems. Before last year, it was generally assumed that most stars would have planets, but there was no evidence to back up this assumption.
I wouldn't start packing yet, though : most discovered exoplanets are Jupiter giant sized gas planets, due to the course method used to discover those celestial bodies. Wired features an article explaining the most extreme exoplanets currently discovered.

Perlgeek.de has some articles on the transition from Perl5 to Perl6, while clearly explaining the differences between those versions. Very interesting, not only for a Perl6 introduction, but the articles also learnt me some new Perl tricks I didn't master yet.
Speaking of Perl, it keeps amazing me what someone can do with this language. In our new TSM version, IBM changed the web frontend to a full blown Websphere application, called ISC, with of course its own user database, different from the one in TSM, and kept in an unaccessible format. That's a big problem in an organisation which has about 150 TSM operators. We almost feared that this would end up in a manual definition of those people. It was there that I grabbed the documentation from WWW::Mechanize, which I discovered during my Test::More enlightenment. Within two hours, I had hacked up a Perl script which pulled all info about the operators from TSM, and entered them automagically in ISC.
Love this stuff !

Looks like Google is serious about Android : it's not only meant for your mobile, cause Google plans Android-based netbooks by 2010.

Are there better times than winter to have clear skies ? Not here : there's so many fine dust in the air, which distributes the shining of street lights, that the winter sky sometimes reminds me of a summer night. Talks with colleagues amateur astronomers teach me the same thing : clear skies, but a horrible seeing. But yesterday, the quality seemed a lot better. So time to haul my 25cm Dobson out of the closet, and have a look to the winter sky, and maybe, to test my Intelliscope Locator fine tuning. Alas, it seems that with temperatures around minus 8 degrees Celsius, any electronics is worthless : the Object Locator froze after a few seconds (computer speak, not literally), so I had to resort to manual control and a good old star map.

• The winter sky is dominated by Orion, and M42 is without a doubt the most beautiful object on the northern sky. Lots of details, a nice view on the inner stars (the Trapezium), and nice long shootouts from the central nebula.


• M78 is a small reflection nebula in Orion, which I hunted for long and in vain with my 114cm telescope, but now I spotted it immediately in the finder scope. Unfortunately, rather a dull object, quite small with little or no details.


• Time to get a quick glance to the Andromeda nebula, M31, which started to disapear into the lower sky glow. Not too spectacular, almost no detail, indicating that the seeing was indeed of lower quality.


• I tried then to find M1, the Crab nebula in Taurus, also an object which I couldn't locate with my first scope. M1 has the reputation to be a dull object, though I couldn't understand why : true, it is rather small, but with my telescope, I spotted rather lots of details.


• Auriga is an interesting spot in the sky : many open clusters, from which M36, M37 and M38 (the Big Three) are the most interesting ones.


• For one or other reason, I kept returning to Orion to find some more deep-sky objects. The Horse nebula is a very difficult object for visual observation, and I had no luck in spotting it, even while using a UHC-III deepsky filter. I really wonder if this nebula is really observable in Belgium with its horrible light pollution.


• Some more open clusters, like M35 in Gemini, and the NGC869-NGC884 combo in Perseus are great objects, but after a while, open clusters tend to get rather boring.


• I then remembered M48, an open cluster in Hydra, which I found a beautiful object at my first astronomy days, and one that I really wanted to see again after such a long time. Unfortunately, not so spectacular as I envisioned it.

Isn't it sad that I can't offer any visuals from my observations ? In the old days, I made some sketches, but I lack the patience for it nowadays, and for photography, a Dobson is rather worthless. Maybe I really should get my sketchbook the next time, but then preferably in warmer temperatures.

Als je op kerstavond met een huis vol gasten net aan de warme hapjes wil beginnen, dan is het toch niet meer dan normaal dat net op dat moment de electriciteit uitvalt, zeker ? Twee en een halfuur zonder stroom, dan moet een mens naar noodoplossingen zoeken; die gigantische zak met theelichtjes komt dan eindelijk van pas, en de oude houtstoof is dan ideaal om buiten te plaatsen, en in afwachting van de terugkeer van de 20ste eeuw, de soep en het voorgerecht op te verwarmen.


Maar electriciteitsproblemen bleven ons achtervolgen : verleden zondag gaan eten in het Fonduehuisje in Leuven, en net op het moment dat de electrische gourmetvuurtjes aangestoken werden, viel daar ook al de stroom uit voor een gans uur. Zware tijden voor electriciteitsleveranciers, blijkbaar.

It's sad to see how the Debian project come to a complete halt every time a new release is imminent. I won't say much about the problems raging through the project, but I do want to remark this : I can't help to conclude that Debian


- regularly succeeds to drive away brilliant people, such as Manoj
- sometimes exhibits a behavior that mimics the worst bureaucratic institution.


So whether you're working in a community driven project, of in a large hierarchic enterprise, in the end, it all boils down to one point : everyone wants to be a manager.

Dear lazyweb,


Can you point me to some pointers where I can find documentation how I can convert media files between the following codecs/containers :


* dvr-ms
* mpeg2
* xvid
* Divx (msmpeg4 ?)


Only condition is that this must be accomplished by using one (or a combination) of the following command line programs :


* ffmpeg
* mencoder
* transcode


(bonus points for mentioning other GNU CLI programs, which do also the trick).


Thank you.

Testing ! Is there anything sexier than program testing ? Apart from 3D gaming development, cloud computing, automated Kickstart installation, high-performance clustering, Rails development, etc ? Okay, testing is even more boring than writing documentation, but fact is that we, humans, don't like testing, but computers love this type of bandwork. And testing is necessary : adding little changes to other people's programs, break them in the most horrible ways.


I've learnt this the hard way.


A serious bug in one of our backup clients forced me to upgrade the package. No problem, just dropping the new binary in the package, relabel everything, and build the thing. Not a good idea for a package that wasn't released for over 18 months, and passed through 4 different responsible teams. The postinstall was a 300 line spaghetti mess, which in the end I ended up rewriting half of it. And still more and more bugs kept popping up, which left me terribly ashamed.
I needed a way to test automatically all of the outputs of the postinstall, and at the same time to check if all configuration files were created correctly, and if the program was able to connect automagically to the backup server.


So I decided to have a look at Test::More, and delve into the documentation, and try to write some test scripts myself. Boy, was I pleasantly surprised (as allways with Perl, but this aside) ! Within one hour, I had a test written which checked all of this stuff automatically, and even discovered 4 more bugs in the output. Needless to say that since now, I'm addicted to testing my programs.

Disgrace ! Why wasn't this mentioned anywhere on the Ubuntu blogs ? As Intrepid Ibex is the current Ubuntu version, today, at 11:04:56 GMT, the Unix time_t value was "IBEX", that being the ASCII representation of the 32bit number of seconds since New Year 1970.


Other interesting upcoming dates :

IBEX  Fri Dec 12 11:04:56 2008 GMT 

ICON  Sat Dec 13 05:59:42 2008 GMT 

IDLE  Sat Dec 13 23:59:01 2008 GMT 

IDOL  Sun Dec 14 00:11:56 2008 GMT 

IEEE  Sun Dec 14 17:41:25 2008 GMT 

INCH  Sun Dec 21 13:23:20 2008 GMT 

INDY  Sun Dec 21 13:27:53 2008 GMT 

INFO  Sun Dec 21 13:36:15 2008 GMT 

IRAN  Wed Dec 24 14:03:58 2008 GMT 

IRAQ  Wed Dec 24 14:04:01 2008 GMT 

Fear not, dear Ubuntu supporters, the ubuntu teams get another chance, as the lowercase numbers still yet have to come :

Ibex  Mon Jan  5 19:54:32 2009 GMT

Ibis  Mon Jan  5 20:11:31 2009 GMT

Idea  Wed Jan  7 08:18:41 2009 GMT

Idle  Wed Jan  7 08:48:37 2009 GMT

Idol  Wed Jan  7 09:01:32 2009 GMT

Iran  Sat Jan 17 22:53:34 2009 GMT

Iraq  Sat Jan 17 22:53:37 2009 GMT