The choice was hard; between a Canon EOS 350D (Rebel XT), a Nikon D70s and this 20D, I read intensively during a week about these camera. The latter won the match thanks to the 350D's image quality (especially in astrophotography) and the size of a D70s. After that, I had to choose a lens. I read articles for another week and watch at my pictures to know what I shoot usualy. At the end, the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM was the one.

Now, it's time to learn how to use properly this new toy and it should be interesting!

The following updates will be made in FreeBSD's CVS. There won't be standalone release any more.

The Orchestre Cinématographique de Paris, directed by Samuel Sene, interpreted several titles from the 5 released movies: Main Title, Theme of Yoda, Leia, Anakin, Jar Jar, Jabba, the Ewoks Parade, the Flag Parade, Across the Stars, Imperial March, Throne Room & End Title, and a few more. To end this concert, a choir joined the orchestra and they played Duel of the Fates!

This was a really great night. The director followed the sheet music to the letter, no title was arranged. Seeing a film score played by a symphonic orchestra was an old dream; it's now realized!

The only dark side of this concert was the public, a bit unruly. Between the neighbour who was singing, people who applaud during the music or before the end, those who quoted the films, we were far from a classical music concert rigour. By chance, I wasn't next to a Jedi with its disturbing light sabre.

• Star Wars Reunion schedule (including this concert) [FR]
• an article about the concert and the director Samuel Sene [FR]

As usual, it won't work on 4-STABLE and 5-STABLE branches.

• Download from the mirror server

There must be many bugs remaining, because tests were done on a small disc image. Mainly, the readdir(3) call was modified to add NFS specific parts. Thus it needs more testing with huge exported directories. But this is the purpose of this release: use it on a wider range of environments.

As usual, the files can be downloaded from this site or from the mirror (much stronger):

• Download from the mirror server

As for 0.1.3, only FreeBSD 6-CURRRENT users are concerned. For FreeBSD 5-STABLE, the release 0.1.1 must be used.

• Download from the mirror server

This is probably the last stand-alone release because the next objective is to commit it to the HEAD (6-CURRENT) of FreeBSD's CVS.

• Download from the mirror server

The purpose of this new flavour isn't to bring killer feaures but only to support FreeBSD 6-CURRENT. Therefore, it includes the last changes in the VFS. About mmap(2), the current implementation doesn't rely on read(2) anymore and return the appropriate block number to the VFS. Read-ahead support is also included. The visible part of this change is a performance improvement.

This release doesn't support FreeBSD 5-STABLE.

• Project homepage
• Download mirror

Hopefully, someone posted a comment in the entry #260188 of bugzilla.mozilla.org that solved this problem!

To explain quickly, one must edit the file ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and add these lines:

binding "gtk-unix-text-entry"
{
        bind "u" {
                "move-cursor" (paragraph-ends, -1, 0)
                "delete-from-cursor" (paragraph-ends, 1)
        }
        bind "w" {
                "delete-from-cursor" (word-ends, -1)
        }
}

class "GtkEntry" binding "gtk-unix-text-entry"
class "GtkTextView" binding "gtk-unix-text-entry"

This will bind the shortcut again in Mozilla, Firefox and every Gtk+ 2.0-based softwares. For Microsoft Windows and MacOS, mozillazine.org brings another solution.

Don't hesitate to read the bug's comment, it may have more informations

• Bug #260188
• Another similar bug
• The other solution on mozillazine.org

To folllow this special event, the Cité des Sciences (Parc de la Villette, Paris) organized a public conference, the same day, at 8.30pm. After watching to NASA TV all the day, I couldn't miss this occasion ! As ESA was releasing informations, prestigeous guest stars such as André Brahic and Francis Rocard, as well as people in Darmstadt, Germany (where ESOC HQ is located), talked about the events of the day and made several presentations on the mission itself (history, involved countries, experiences, results from Cassini, technical details, etc.) or on Saturn (discoveries, rings mechanism, satellites overview, etc.). Documents were illustrated with great images from Cassini, the Voyager spacecrafts or from the VLT.

One of the best moments was the first 3 images from Huygens ! Those raw images were making of this success a reality. Eventhough every scientists were excited, all remained very careful about comments.

The conference took place in a auditorium, but as expected, it was over crowded very early. A large display was installed in the hall, so I and about 200-300 persons could see the con anyway. As usual with astronomy public events, the youngest and oldest people were very interested. Unfortunately, RATP didn't let the subway opened all the night, so I had to come back home before the end of the speeches.

• Cassini-Huygens homepage on NASA's website
• Cassini-Huygens homepage on ESA's website
• Cassini-Huygens (Wikipedia)

I still work on the port and a few issues remain before the next release. I'm working with another developer to solve problem with mmap(2) and small files. Once everything is fixed, I'll post an update.

The next step will be to test it on the new UltraSPARC to check 64 bits and big endian compliance.

Thanks to the help of gt from SunWizard.NET, we finally found a solution. Now to share our experience with everybody, I published a small documentation for the procedure. This howto in french is available here:

• Serial connection between a PC and a Sun Ultra [FR]

• ReiserFS for FreeBSD 0.1.1

To avoid my own server and ADSL connection saturation, i must put the files on a more robust server. I'll post a news when it's done.