(quote from Digg.com)

Astronomers have witnessed a never-seen-before event in observations by ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft – a collision between a pulsar and a ring of gas around a neighbouring star.

The rare passage, which took the pulsar plunging into and through this ring, illuminated the sky in gamma- and X-rays.

Not a lot I can add except to say this is very interesting – even if space stuff bores you!

read more | digg story

(quote from Digg.com)

Virtual Earth’s New feature allows you to take a rid on the seat of a car and drive around town….google watch it!

Well, hyperbole aside this is an interesting development, but I am not convinced it is going to be a major threat to Google Earth.

In a nutshell, you get the choice driving a car or walking around one of two street plans (I assume more are to follow soon) using the arrows on your keyboard to move. Now, it is interesting but it is a FAR CRY from virtual reality. I am on a fast-ish broadband connection and the lag between moves is shocking.

The other problem with this, and it is the same with Google Earth, is that the photos are immediately dated. It makes this like playing Grand Theft Auto (or similar) on a 286 with a mod to make it boring.

Google Earth and its clones were (and are) an interesting way to pass time idly looking at remote parts of the world. This is good for about 10 seconds.

When (if) the mapping and response times improve this could be brilliant. It would be great to have a driving sim as good as current flight sims – but we arent there yet.

read more | digg story

(from digg.com article)

Sun has master the art of meaningless marketing. That Solaris (whatever version) is NOT Linux, hence, the phrase Solaris is better than Linux at being Linux does not even rise to the level of an oxymoron. Want some facts? Then read on.

This is an interesting and somewhat thought provoking article that examines some of the “issues” that revolve around Sun’s marketting machine. While it does highlight some interesting points, I can’t say it is really as clear cut as made out.

Sadly, Sun appear to have targetted Linux as their opposition – which has caused a natural backswell of linux devotees now slashing and burning Solaris.

Sadly, both are excellent OS and should be capable of standing on their own. They serve different functions and meet different needs.

Why dont they all just attack MS Windows like sensible people 🙂

read more | digg story

Well – previously the Dell Linux Workstations were discussed here and the end thoughts were that while it was a great idea the price was far from “right.” To make matters worse, UK customers would be charged an arm and a leg shipping and import duty. All in all, not in our top ten purchase lists.

However, today, thanks to the wonders of email, we have found out about a similar offer for people in good old blighty. This time it is Ebuyer (a legitimate online shop – do not confuse this with eBay) is having a warehouse clearance sale. Part of this is an “eSys ePC” for £127. The machine is not a top of the range monster, however at that price it seems almost trivial to get enough to run a Beowolf cluster at home.

The specs are:

• Processor: Intel Celeron D 315 (2.26, 533, 256MB)
• Memory: 256MB DDR expandable to 2GB.
• Disk: 40GB 7200Rpm
• 52 X CD-Rom, additional slots available to add more optical drives.
• LAN 10/100
• ASROCK/ ECS Intel 845GV chipset with built-in 64 MB Intel Extreme graphics
• Audio on board incl. Front Pannel Audio

The on board video is a bit of a downer, but at the end of the day this is a fully functional home PC for next to nothing.

One word of caution, some of the reviews talk about this coming with a monitor – as far as I can see, this offer is for the PC, keyboard and mouse, nothing else.

Right, I have been trying to update a website from a mix of static html and shtml pages to the wonders of “ultra modern” php.

The new pages are working fine and everything seemed to be going well until I decided it was time to accomodate all the people who had links to the old pages. (Not to mention try to retain the very high page rank the site had on google… 😉 )

Now, as the site was hosted on Apache / Unix, common sense says .htaccess is the way to go. I edited the file as follows:

There was an already existing line:

Redirect 301 index.html http://www.example.com/index.php

Which was handy. This works. Every day. So all I did was add a load of extre redirects along the following lines:
Redirect 301 old_name.shtml http://www.example.com/new_name.php

(note that it is all one line)

Now logic would say this should work fine. Except it doesnt. Nothing I do makes it work. I have tried adding full and partial URIs to both sides. I have tried swapping the sequence. Nothing.

In the end I gave up and used mod_rewrite to solve the problem which works, but is no where near as elegant.

Any ideas what I did wrong?

For those of you who dont know, the  Etrusia History Site is dedicated to looking at various aspects of history – mainly the history of the British Isles but in places this broadens and the site looks at other countries as well.

A good example of this is the  Roman History section there – this covers the links between the Roman empire and the British isles as well as looking at what was going on back in Rome during this period. Recent updates to the site have seen it get a complete overhaul (including a large scale move from SSI to PHP on the backend) with its main articles being on the Romano – British Amphora Trade, and Roman Domestic Politics in the Late Republic. Future articles are planned to cover the Roman war machine, society and the Romanisation of Britain.

This is an excellent site, if you have anything you would like to submit to improve it then you would more than welcomed.