Looks like XULchannels is definitely dead... A real shame. If I find some time, I would like to enhance DarkChannels a bit, so the functionality would attain the one of XULchannels...

I upgraded my redhat-artwork-0.73 package to the redhat-artwork-0.88 version, found in Fedora Core 1. I was curious to see which enhancements they applied to the beautifull Redhat login screen, but boy, what a dissapointment ! The Fedora login screen is butt-ugly. Just a plain boring darkblue background, what a difference with the soft blueish tints of the Redhat GDM theme. I guess there won't be an upgrade to redhat-artwork-0.88 of my GDM Bluecurve package...

Matrix Revolutions has hit the theathres, and from the comments and reviews, I learn it's the worst movie of the trilogy. MattW has written down some answers on the open questions from the 'Matrix Reloaded' (spoiler warning).

In the night of Saterday on Sunday, there will be a lunar eclipse visible for the inhabitants of America and Europe. The eclipse is a total one, though the moon won't pass through the center of the Earth's shadow. As a result, the southern part of the moon disc will be brighter (more reddish) than the rest of the moon. I guess there will be some sites who will emit the event on their webcams. Don't forget space.com''s 10 cool facts on lunar eclipses :




If you were on the moon, on the side facing Earth, the home planet would block out the Sun. The Sun's light would not completely disappear, however. Earth would be ringed by light scattered through its atmosphere. The Sun would be hidden behind a dark Earth outlined by a brilliant red ring consisting of all the world's sunrises and sunsets.

Tonight, I have seen the first aurora in my life : at 22h20 local time, a faint green light in the north-east suddenly turned into a bright red curtain with orange borders, stretching out into the zenith. Immensly beautifull and very rare here in Belgium; I tried to capture it on my digicam, but the cam isn't sensitive enough. What a great way to end my birthday :)


Update : an hour later, at 23h10, again a green-white glow in the north, not as spectacular as the previous one, but still impressive.

It is storming on the sun : since a week, there are gigantic solar spots visible on the sun, accompanied by several coronal mass ejections. Today, one of the largest eruptions ever measured, has taken place. The solar flare creates intense radiation levels from high-energetic particles, bombarding the atmosphere of Earth. This phenomenon is called a proton storm, and this one hasn't even yet reached its maximum.


Satellite communication will be disrupted because of the Rontgen- and EUV-radiation, damaging the solar panels, and the satellite computers will be jammed because of the energetic particles. Astronauts on the ISS will be subjected to large X-ray levels, and even passengers on planes will get X-ray doses comparable to the ones of doctor visits.

The increased solar activity will create a very large auroral activity, most noticable in the night of Wednesday on Thursday. So if you've never seen the polar light, keep an eye on the sky during the next nights.

I hardly can't believe I didn't add this earlier on my blog : the Encyclopedia of Arda is a great piece of work containing timelines, maps and detailled descriptions about everything - and I do mean *everything* - in Tolkien's Middle Earth. And it's even available on CD for your offline browsing pleasure.

I still wonder why Mozilla FireBird has no option to turn off animated gifs. I mean, it's not like they are Netscape or AOL, or what :) But because FireBird still has no GUI for this, it doesn't mean there's no support for stopping animated gifs.

To change this in firebird:

- type about:config in the location bar

- scroll down to image.animation_mode

- set to "none" for no animation, or "once" for a single loop

- restart your browser

Last weekend, I managed to connect my laptop to the TV screen. It was much easier than expected, mainly because I discovered a SCART input on my old TV, so it was just a matter of plugging the TV-out to a SCART adapter. The image was only b&w, i guess because of the default NTSC output, and no way of getting the card into PAL output, not even with toshset. And God, what a lousy card the CyberBladeXP is !




No, then NVidia is much better supported under Linux. I used my desktop and nvtv to get an el-cheapo DVD player for my TV. Next step : buying a ''real'' DVD player.

I got a mail from someone claiming to be from the legal department of IBM.co.uk, asking if I had legal permission to use their logo on my site. A quite surprising question, if you ask me, since I have a legal disclaimer at the bottom of this page. But since I had not that kind of legal permission, and it is IBM's logo after all (my motto in those matters is : never meddle with companies whose legal department is at least as large as their IT division), so I removed the logo in question, and replaced it with a homemade one.