I noticed that the upgrade for Oneiric was available, so I decided to jump in & upgrade my Ubuntu machines. It has become the habit that I encounter all weird stuff & errors during such upgrades, but that's something specific to me, it seems ;)


On my desktop, I returned to the installation program 2 hours later after I started it, only to find a black screen with a mouse pointer. No possibility to restore the screen, so I had no other choice than to kill X, and resort to command-line mockery. I've learned by previous experience that rebooting the machine or restarting X at this point lead to major mayhem on my desktop, so I entered 'dpkg-reconfigure -a' to complete the setup, which it actually did, to my big surprise.


Since Natty, there has been much turmoil on the internetz about something Canonical enforced to the enduser, called Unity. I have skipped this enforced desktop in the past by reverting to the Gnome legacy mode, but it seemed that this was completely foobarred in the current Gnome3 in Oneiric. So what has a man to do in a completely changed environment ? Adapt. I decided actually to try out Unity, and lo and behold, it was actually quite usable. Unfortunately, Unity does not support gnome applets, but I resolved this by running Conky, which adds extra panache to the desktop experience.


There are off course still quirks in Unity. Mocking around with the Compizconfig settings can ruin your desktop experience, although not so disastrous as in Natty. On my netbook, Unity refused to start up, leaving me only with a empty wallpaper. I resolved this by setting the LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 envvar in my .bashrc.


We'll see how this Gnome3/Unity combination goes. If it really turns out to be an atrocity, there's always KDE or XFCE to revert too...

My Nokia N97 phone is now 2 years old, and although the device got slaughtered in most user reviews, I must say I was fairly content with it. The problem with the device is that the experience got ruined by its software, Symbian S60v5, and its successor Symbian^2. Both were too 'heavy' for the N97 CPU, resulting in a slow operating of the device. But what's really drove me to buying a new handset, was the fact that the GPS took ages to activate (unless you enabled A-GPS), and the fact that the automated backups 'just stopped working'.
And then there's OVI suite. Please don't remind me of OVI Suite with its Nokia Software updater.
Nokia clearly has no clue what to do on the smartphone market, as indicated by the fact that the Meego-powered N9 is only available in some countries. The only one who is not aware that Symbian is dead, seems to be Nokia. And then there's the Microsoft deal.

Reasons enough to switch over to the Android camp. I was first thinking of getting the Wildfire S, but then I noticed that the Desire was equally priced. I must say I miss the N97's hardware keyboard, but all in all the Desire is a great device. Sleek, performant, and equipped with a great touch screen.

The STS-135 flight was the last of any Space Shuttle flight, and this marks the end of the Space Shuttle era, which began some 30 years ago. The Space Shuttle, although quite flawed, was a pinnacle in space flight technology, but eventually was shut down due to too high costs. Here's an overview of this remarkable vehicle :

• Top 10 Space Shuttle moments


• Space Shuttle Era in 10 stories


• Space Shuttle fast facts


• Even ESA made a Space Shuttle site


• The 3 most active shuttles


• A guide to the Space Shuttle


• The Shuttle history in pictures


• A shuttle documentary movie called The 2nd assassination of JFK


• A 80 minute Shuttle movie spoken in by Captain Kirk

Some remarkable quotes :

• "Most people lament the end of the Space Shuttle. What's really sad, is that there is nothing to replace it."


• "1969 : The landing on the moon
  1981 : The start of the Space Shuttle era
  2011 : Nothing
  For anyone traveling backwards in time, the American Space program looks fabulous."

Redlettermedia has the most disturbing, yet most humorist -and very true- review of the Phantom Menace, you'll ever have seen.
Also : review of Attack of the clones and Revenge of the Sith

Yamaha keyboard owners are spoiled, it seems, with their keyboard sounds quality. This was demonstrated lately in music school when I had the change to play on a - rather old & battered, I must admit - Roland keyboard. The piano sounded like I was killing a kitten.


I've always been very content with my PSR-E413 keyboard, piano sounds on it are truly excellent. However, 32 note polyphony is quite a limitation. And as one progresses, and starts using arpeggios, this limit got hit quite frequently. And as my keyboard playing interest seemed something that wasn't a passing fling, I was looking around for more professional gear.


The Tyros 4 was just released, but its price tag was way beyond my reach, just as the Motif XF. I wanted a keyboard/synth with 70+ keys, both with keyboard accompaniment and virtual analog synth sounds. The Korg M3 and the Motif XS7 remained, from which I eventually chose the Motif.


Truly a great machine. It would take me over 2 days only to try out all presets on this machine. It has more than 6000 arpeggio's, which is amazing. Trying out all of these for half a minute would take me about 3 days.


Seems that I'm well-equipped now to take over the charts ;)

Het zomerconcert is altijd een hoogtepunt van de muziekschool : 3 dagen optredens van jong & oud, in een aardige mix van muziekstijlen en - instrumenten. Dit jaar werd voor mij persoonlijk gekenmerkt in het puur piano leren spelen (dus zonder keyboard begeleiding, waarbij linker- en rechterhand een verschillende melodie - en vaak een ander ritme ! - spelen).


Het gebrachte nummer was Conquest of Paradise van Vangelis, in een piano uitvoering op een voor mij onbekende Casio stage piano. Ik ben redelijk in mijn nopjes : 2 kleinere fouten die zo goed als onopgemerkt weggemoffeld konden worden.


Terug een pluim aan de organisatoren en de medewerkers voor een uiterst geslaagd concert !

I've upgraded my machines to Natty, the latest (I avoid greatest with a reason here) Ubuntu release. As usual, upgrading Ubuntu is putting 2 steps backwards, and 3 steps forwards, and this release is not different :


- on my desktop, I got the usual crap with the Nvidia driver, but it seems that I'm getting more and more experienced in getting this fixed. One issue remains, and that is that the screen is garbled when resuming the computer. Restarting GDM fixes this temporarily. Will get fixed by the next kernel update. Also Grub config got updated, resulting in a incompatible framebuffer setting for my NVidia card.


- For one or other reason, my (personal) sane scanner config got reset, resulting in lots of trouble when scanning in some documents. After resetting all to gray-and-white, everything worked again. Why is an Ubuntu upgrade messing around with user settings, is completely incomprehensible to me.


- On my netbook, the desktop got upgraded to Unity. Now, there's a bunch talked and written about Unity, resulting in avid haters & lovers for this desktop environment. I find Unity pretty okay wrt features (it reminds me a bit of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which I was quite fond of). However, the thing is slow as a dog on low-end machines (as netbooks - opening the so-called lenses is enough to hang my Sammy netbook) and sometimes it takes ages to start up.


Also, it is heavily integrated into CompizConfig, which means that

1. my whole Compiz configuration got changed,


2. Fiddling with Compiz settings is enough to render your whole desktop unusable

The upgrade to Unity marks a first stage in the major upcoming changes for the desktop for Gnome users. I'm not sure if I'm willing to follow either Canonical or the Gnome folks into their direction. I hope Unity gets mature during the Natty release. If not, XFCE might become a serious desktop environment alternative...

Vrijdag avond ll konden waarnemers in Brabant & Antwerpen één van de meest complexe zonne halo's zien van de laatste decennia. Wie 's avonds naar het westen keek, kon daar rond de zon 2 concentrische cirkels zien, met daartussenin een vreemde parabolische boog. Ook 2 bijzonnen links & rechts van de zon waren zichtbaar.


Halo's rond de zon zijn niet echt zeldzaam : ze worden gevormd door reflecties van zonlicht in kleine ijskristallen in de bovenste luchtlagen. Meestal zijn de bijzonnen zichtbaar. De complexiteit van het fenomeen van vrijdagavond was echter nooitgezien. De grote buitenste boog was de zeldzame 46° halo, al was het maar omdat de bijzonnen er netjes binnenin stonden (en natuurlijk omwille van hun afmetingen - de 22°-halo was trouwens ook wel te zien, maar véél minder opvallend.


Voor meer diepgaande info: zie Atopics.co.uk. Zo'n beetje dé referentie als het gaat over atmosferische fenomenen.


Nog zo'n verschil:
- regenbogen zijn zichtbaar TEGENOVER de Zon (rond het 'tegenpunt' van de Zon).
- halo-fenomenen zijn zichtbaar ROND de Zon (hoewel de meest complexe wel héél ver van de Zon kunnen staan, zelfs tegenover), doordat er in die ijskristallen niet enkel breking (zoals in waterdruppels) maar ook nog een extra reflectie ontstaat.

Vandaag was het clubmatch op de hondenschool, een jaarlijks evenement waar per (hogere) klas de rangschikking bepaald wordt van de honden. Onze Berner Sennen Hayke werd er tot onze grote verbazing club kampioen in de C-klas !
We hadden het helemaal niet verwacht, en hadden dan ook de prijsuitreiking niet afgewacht om naar huis te gaan. De beker moeten we dus nog afhalen op devolgende les. We zijn benieuwd !

Bash junkie ? You need to read this : power shell usage for power users.