After upgrading to blosxom 2.0, I made some changes in this weblog, by:

• Replacing my old crontab generated tree by blosxom's dynamic plugin.
• Adding the archive plugin (the calendar list in the right column). I had to patch this one to make it XHTML 1.1 compliant.
• Adding the paginate plugin, that gives links to next and previous pages, as well as to all available ones.
  This plugin is still buggy: The last entry in the last page is a ghost one, and it does not use the current category to compute the number of pages. This last problem is probably due to the structure of plugins itself.

I also switched my main page from Server Side Includes to a PHP one. In fact my SSI scripts were going really long, and difficult to maintain. With PHP I was able to rewrite the whole in a few lines, while still being able to fully control the page.
Eventually I added a lot of rewrite rules in my apache configuration, to be able to "hide" the most of the weblog structure (the php is hidden, old links are redirected, etc...).

This was eventually officially announced this friday in our company: Eddie and Eiko will marry!
Apparently the secret was well kept, as it was a surprise for many (we were really a few to know about it).

I wish them all the happyness!

I know, I am quite late, as I am living in Japan for some time now, but I just discovered Chitose Hajime this week-end. I usually do not write here about music, but I will make an exception ;-)

She is a singer, coming from a 50 people village in Amami Islands, not far from Okinawa.

So what?, will you ask.

The answer is: She has a once-a-century voice!

The kind of tremolo she can sing is simply unique. The music itself is generally soft-rock, with some reggae rythms.

If you don't live in Japan, you may order her music on www.cdjapan.co.jp web site. You will not regret it!

Bruno (Tokyo): Devinez qui est #1 sur google avec "prout poil"?
Bruno (Tokyo): Guess who is number #1 on google with "prout poil"?

You maybe don't know Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen, even if she was really famous in her country, India. Here are a few words about her life:

Born in 1963, in a poor low-caste family, she was married at 11 to a man who was 3 times her age. After being abandoned by him, she was raped on a number of occasions, and eventually was kidnapped by bandits.

At the age of 20, she became quickly a legend when she became the "Bandit Queen", and the leader of a group of dacoits (robbers) in north and central India. On Feb 14th, 1981, as she was 18 years old, she attacked the Behmai village, and killed 22 people with the help of her band; One of the victims previously raped her and killed her own lover.

She became the number one police target, but, helped by the population, she always avoided to be captured.

She eventually managed a deal with the government, and, before a crowd of 10,000, she surrendered in 1983 (left picture) to the authorities. She spent the next 11 years in prison without any trial, three more than she negociated.

After being released, she became Member of Parliament in 1994, and tried to fight for the oppressed people. She was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997!

She was shot dead by three men on Wednesday, 25th July 2001, outside her residence in New Delhi... She was 37.

Here are some links:

BBC News article and biography
goodbyemag.com biography
Philip's Phoolan page (good starting point)
Articles about events following her death
Biography and interview (1996). Read only this one if you are lazy!

I removed the weather page: As it was written in JSP and used a postgresql database, I will not be able to transfer it to a hosting company (they mainly offer mysql & php).
I also removed the weblog subsection, and moved it as the main page.

Bruno (Tokyo): Jeff, n'oublie pas ton pre-meeting la prochaine fois.
Kamo-san (Tokyo): C'est quoi, un pre-meeting?

Bruno (Tokyo): Jeff, don't forget to fill out your pre-meeting, next week.
Kamo-san (Tokyo): Pre-meeting? What is that?

According to netcraft , some corporates switch from Linux to Windows Server 2003. Colt.com is one of them, and made this clever move in May. I will make no comment about the uptimes shown on the above graph...

...

I changed my mind, I will make one: Haa-Haa-Hoo-Hii-Hiiii... One reboot a day... Huummphrrrrr....

LOL!

Do you remember the famous Munich decision to switch 14,000 desktops from Windows to Linux, on May 28?

USA Today reported two days ago in this article what Microsoft tried to prevent this switch to the Open-Source OS. This deal was so important for M$ that were really able to give a lot! Here are some examples:

• They authorized Munich to have a new upgrade only after 6 years, instead of the usual 3 years contracts.
• They offered to install only Microsoft Word on some PCs, instead of their usual forced bundling of all Office applications.
• They were going to offer the City millions of dollars for training and support.
• Steve Balmer himself went to meet the mayor end of February, in order to explain why Microsoft had the best solution, and to make some special offers.
• They made a final offer of $21.7 million (from the original $36.6 million proposal).
• And much more!

But the City, mostly for strategic reasons, eventually decided to go for the more expensive Linux solution ($35.7 million against Microsoft's $21.7).

One interesting part is this quote from Christine Strobl (Munich council member): "And the more Microsoft discounted, the more it underscored the notion that as a sole supplier, Microsoft could - and has been - naming its own price".
I know very well some Corporates which did not get that point at all, and prefer to go the opposite way, wrongly thinking that an unique supplier means cheaper prices ;-)

This web site (except the statistics page which I won't change) is now XHTML 1.1 Strict compliant.

At the same moment I removed the javascript section (which was pre-downloading the top menu images, and changed their color when the mouse was over). The home page, for instance, is now 30% smaller (only html code), and less than half of the original size if we consider the images download.

Linus Torvalds announced today in an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List that the test1 version of the 2.6.0 kernel is ready for testing!

He also asked people, especially the Linux vendors, to start testing it, to make the release of 2.6.0 quicker than the last one - "2.4.0 took about seven months from the pre1 to the final release" - and to have everybody ready when the 2.6.0 comes out.
You can download the test1 version on the kernel.org site. You will also find a small readme file there ;-)

When I was around 12, and scouting, I went to a summer camp somewhere in France, and we had, the last day, a cooking contest. My patrol won the dessert prize with the (soon famous, as I publish it today) Canouga ©. I strongly recommend you to try this recipe as soon as you can. Why not tonight?

You will only need a pan, a wood spoon, one liter of milk, and one kilogram of sugar.

Now, the difficult part: Pour the milk and sugar (yes, everything!) in the pan, then put on fire. I don't know if the fire should be strong or not, as we used a fire camp at the moment, but it was probably very hot.
As soon as it is on fire, never stop stirring it with the spoon... Ensure that the sugar mixes well with the milk, and that nothing is burning, that's the challenge...
Stop the fire when the whole becomes hard...

That's it! It is time to serve the canouga © to your guests, and to think about buying a new pan, as you will never be able to properly clean the one you used.
Maybe you will need to find new friends too ;-)

What puzzles me is that the canouga © won the contest! I don't want to imagine what the other patrols made ;-)

Bruno (Tokyo): Jeff, arrête de m'embrouiller la tête...
Bruno (Tokyo): Jeff, stop bullshitting me...

Japan Government is going to switch its 800,000 employees payroll system to a Linux system, designed by Fujitsu Ltd, IBM Japan Ltd, and Oki Electric Industry Co.
The design contract is worth 188 million yens, and the development itself could cost between 2 and 3 billion yens. The new system is supposed to halve the operating costs of the network.

This weblog section will be reserved to the Linux switchs around the world.
As I started it only today, let's start with a June 6th The Register article, which explains the recent Linux moves in Europe.

According to news.com, the announced website defacement contest is currently taking place, but there are chances that "web site attacks was mainly a flop".

The zone-h.org website is not accessible anymore, after it received 500 defacements links. As h-zone is the "official" repository of the contest, it is unclear how many sites have really been defaced ;-)

Due to h-zone.org trouble, the person running the challenge extended the contest for another day.

Jean-Paul (Tokyo): D'un point de vue technique ça marche, mais, dans les faits, pas du tout.
Jean-Paul (Tokyo): From a technical point of view it works, but, in reality, it does not.

news.com reports that a website defacement contest will take place this Sunday. The winner will be the crackers group to get the more points with a maximum of 6,000 defaced sites. The points are given as following:

• Windows system defaced: 1 point
• Unix, Linux or BSD system: 2 points
• IBM's AIX: 3 points
• HP-UX or Apple's OS-X: 5 points

zone-h.org expects 20,000 to 30,000 defacements during this contest. They also noticed that the number of defacements decreased the recent days, while the scanning of web servers increased. They think that the crakers are currently looking for targets, and are waiting the contest time to launch the real attacks. This is not really surprising, for such a serious matter: It is really important to know who is the best :-)

If you want to have fun, just have a look on Zone-H defacements archives, and on their Hall of Shame!

It is interesting to compare the latest Netcraft web servers survey to the January ones.

In terms of active sites , Apache has now 67.54% market share (66.42% in January), and IIS has 23.98% (vs 24.79%).
Open source is going well in some areas!

Another interesting point of this survey is that Network Solutions is moving back a quarter of a million sites to Solaris after they moved them to IIS one year ago. Hum... I wonder why they come back ;-)

I just made public the statistics page for this web server. These statistics are collected since 2000, using the excellent awstats software.

One of the most interesting data is the queries on search engines which links to my site. For instance, this link show these queries for 2003.

Mozilla 1.4 and Netscape 7.1 (which is based on Mozilla 1.4 too) have been released yesterday. Mozilla is available first for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Other versions (Solaris, OpenVMS, etc...) should follow soon, as usually.