Just as with the New Horizons mission to Pluto, NASA is giving you again the opportunity to add the submission of your name & country which will be put onto a microchip & put on the Mars Science Laboratory rover. This mission is scheduled for 2011, so you still have some time to fill in your name. Might there be intelligent life on Mars after all, and if they find the rover, you'll be among the first ones to welcome our Martian overlords (and their probing chambers).
Please note that Robert'); DROP TABLE 'names'; (aka little Bobby Tables) has been added already...

2009 is indeed without a doubt the year of the smartphone. From that viewpoint, I'm really an early adopter since I have a smartphone since 2007. In retrospect, my current Nokia N80 has been the most fun mobile device ever. It has consolidated my MP3 player, my GPS, my internet communications device, my PDA and of course my mobile. But technology moves forward. Initially, smartphones were designed with the business user in mind. But then came the iPhone; and changed all that. Big touchscreens for everyone (thank you Apple). My initial idea was to acquire a second-hand N96 device, and wait a year for Android to mature. But an idiot changed my plans, and I decided to wait for the next Nokia device, the N97.

The N97 is important : Nokia produces mobile phones for everyone, and controls 40% of the market. The N97 is their top line model, and therefore a direct competitor for the iPhone. Nokia has released the 5800 Expressmusic as their first touchscreen mobile, and it has been a smashing success. The N97 is Nokia's aim at a new N95 success story and their new flagship device. Nokia decided to continue with Symbian as the operating system for their smartphone line, with some additions for touchscreen support. They probably did this to provide a solid base and a broad range of applications for the N97. However, the result is S60v5, and has some strange and sometimes confusing behavior, like single/double tap in lists. I applaud the stability of the operating system, but I'm quite sure that the N97 will be my last Symbian powered mobile.
If you take a look at the competition, the Nokia N97 has some serious opponents. The iPhone off course, with its glorious eye candy, and many available applications. Whether you like it or not, the iPhone has become the mass standard for smartphones. Unfortunately, as with many Apple products, the hardware is pretty impressive, but the resulting functionalities are pretty limited. My new mobile must support a GPS (and I'm talking about voice guided satnav, Apple, not about a map software which pulls data from the internet), and that pretty much ruled out the iPhone.
Android is the new kid on the block, and a very interesting one. Crafted in the dungeons of Google, this open and attractive operating system is the new standard for HTC mobiles. Unfortunately, Android software still is limited (but growing with a fast pace), and it fell out the list of candidates for the same reason as Apple, because of the absence of GPS software.
The Palm Pre came late to my attention : it looks like Palm really took the good things from the iPhone and even went a step beyond that. This resulted in a gorgeous looking interface, which got quickly copied by HTC in their Sense UI interface for the Android.

In a next blog post, I'll explain my experiences of one week of playtime with the N97.

Deze grote buizerd hing al een tijdje boven ons huis te cirkelen. Prachtige foto van de buizerd in de vlucht, herkenbaar aan zijn bruine vogelkleed, en zijn korte ronde staart. De buizerd is één van de meest voorkomende roofvogels in de Benelux. Het liefst zitten ze in een gevarieerde omgeving, meestal aan bosranden. Ze broeden en overnachten in bosrijke gebieden en jagen in open gebieden, zoals weilanden en akkers. Als je over de snelweg rijdt, zie je vaak buizerds zitten op een paaltje of een hek. Dit zijn goede uitkijkposten voor ze om voorbijwandelende muizen, kikkers of konijntjes te kunnen zien. Maar het is ook mogelijk dat ze wachten op een door een auto aangereden hapje. De buizerd is beschermd in België, waar er nog zo'n 700 broedparen bestaan.

The Dalwhinnie distillery lies on an altitude of 600 meter in the heart of the Scottisch Highlands. The location in a stunning and 'dram'atic environment made journalist Andrew Jefford exclaim that the only pollution risc at Dalwhinnie was the one by heath pollen. The name itself also implies a history of whisky trading as Dailchuinnidh (roughly pronounced 'Dalwhinnie') means 'the plain of meetings'; the area was the junction of three cattle droving roads.


The smell : Aromatic, spicy and sweet
The taste : oily, going with your fingers in a jar of honey, and licking them off. Sweet vanilla, sucking a caramel bar. Fruity and honey again all over the place. Some pepper in the aftertaste.


Very sweet, and quite straightforward for a Highlander. Gentle and easy to drink. Too much like candy though for my taste.

Sure, we all know ZFS, but little chance is that you know RBAC, FSS or SMF. If you do know these, you probably won't know SamFS or JET. These are more obfuscated features of Solaris that are quite handy though.
LKFS aka the Lesser Know Solaris Features is a ebook by Joerg Moellenkamp about generally unknown commands and functionalities in (Open)Solaris.

The Russian volcano that erupted directly beneath the International Space Station on June 12th is now causing beautiful lavender sunsets across parts of the northern USA and Europe. A plume of ash and sulfur dioxide from the Sarychev Peak eruption is circulating through the stratosphere, and when parts of the plume pass over an area at sunset, the sky can be seen filled with delicate white ripples, sometimes-colorful streamers, and a telltale hue of purple.

Now that the milky way is getting high into the zenith with the accompanying constellations, an existing comet is getting back into sight. C/2006 W3 Christensen is visible as a hazy comet with a brighter core, and should reach magnitude 8 in the summer.

Het was ondertussen al 3 jaar geleden dat we ons nog eens lieten zien op TWClassic : in 2007 trok de affiche op geen bal, en verleden jaar hadden we teveel miserie aan onze kop. Maar dit jaar was de line-up toch wel sensationeel : Keane, Moby, Peche Démodé en Basement Jaxx zijn stuk voor stuk topgroepen die uiterst aangenaam festivalvoer zijn. Voor de rest : ruim 60 euri aan junkfood en booze, een marcelleke van StuBru (spot u ons Martine ?), een Proximus klak (Mobistar klanten moesten het met een belachelijke lanyard doen), en een jammerlijk gefaalde poging op een Randstad Duckie t-shirt.


Qua muziek niet te klagen, behalve dan Basement Jaxx. Tjonge, tjonge, wat een ontgoocheling; waar was de groep van 'Where's your head at?' ? In de plaats kregen we een wall of noise van drum-n-beat, gospel and r&b, die de weide in een mum van tijd decimeerde, en waardoor we hopeloos in de file terechtkwamen door het grote aantal vroeg vertrekkende festivalgangers.

We have a giant SL8500 tape library at work, which regularly needs to be fed. I once had the dull task of feeding the beast 600 tape media though the front-end CAP, at 14 media per time, which took me quickly about 4 hours to perform. Yesterday, we had a new batch of 300 tapes, which had to be entered. Luckily, the StorageTek technicians were present, doing a firmware upgrade of the library. As they opened the library for easy access of some vital parts, I took the chance of entering the machine, and putting the tapes in their slots from the inside.


A SL8500 is a U-shaped library, which can be entered from top of the 'U'. On the long sides, tapes reside on both sides, and on the curved side of the U, the tape drives are mounted. So I accessed the library in a narrow corridor of 2 meter tall walls, completely filled with tapes containing the precious electronic data of my enterprise. These corridors sure are narrow, so I guess one of the requirements of being a StorageTek admin is not having a Burger King subscription. I only hoped that the technicians didn't forget to deacivate the handbots, cause an encounter with a iron gripper, moving at 5 meters/second would definitively send me on a one-trip down to the cemetery.


The picture doesn't do the library right : in this dark corridor, only being lit by some faint LEDs, and with my crappy phone camera, only the lowest 50 centimeters are visible (I placed the camera on the floor). Imagine this being 2 meters high, and 15 meters long, and you have an idea what we're talking about.


I finished in an hour, and once the STK engineers had finished their labor, I let the library rescan its new inventory, which it finished within 3 minutes (I love StorageTek hardware). 450 new Terabytes ready to use. Happy munching, Optapemus Prime !

The planet Mercury is the smallest of the inner planets, and the closest to the Sun. It was visited by the Mariner 10 spacecraft twice in the 1970s, and about 45% of the surface was mapped. On August 3rd, 2004, NASA launched a new mission to Mercury, with the Messenger probe. It is now in the last stages of multiple gravity-assist flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury, en route to an insertion into orbit around Mercury in March of 2011. In just two flyby encounters, Messenger took some very detailled pictures of Mercury, and has already greatly increased our knowledge about Mercury's surface features.