Jan-Piet Mens

This might take a few minutes…

Oloid-shaped gold bar. A limited edition 1.000 kg solid gold bar from German designer Martin Saemmer.

[via.]

[Thanks, Nic!]

A little too heavy: a CPU and a bit.

Volker recently asked native English speakers what the first thing is that comes to their mind when they hear the words "public viewing". He got quite a few answers. Most of those were along the lines of "funeral". I consider myself a native speaker and replied along similar lines (if a bit more brutal).

I checked the dictionaries on my bookshelf, and the term isn't mentioned. Neither does it appear in the usual places:

So I also asked for help, and got my parents to ask their friends. These are people who are probably a bit older than those reached by Volker's tweet One interesting reply came from Roger:

Public viewing is old english usage in the sense of a pre-funeral "lying
in state" normally only for senior dignitaries.

In current trans-world english language public viewing means any "open
house" event from a real estate showing to an art show to an antiques show etc and it has become very sloppily used.

I asked for hard proof regarding the funeral part, but unfortunately Roger doesn't have any. His reply led to a broader search which turned up interesting results. There is no doubt that the English term "public viewing" is associated with a funeral.

Nice to see the image is from a secure source. The click (href) a bit further down isn't.

John Collins reviewed my book Alternative DNS Servers in the latest UKUUG newsletter.

The book is in three sections. In the first section DNS is fully described, including some of its history. In the second and largest section the various servers are presented in microscopic detail apart from the Microsoft proprietary DNS servers which are an overview — the author steers the reader onto open-source alternatives. In the third section, “Operational Issues” some practical issues are discussed, together with some performance tests.

The book concludes with some comprehensive appendices on various topics notably LDAP and also some Perl DNS Servers — in case after all that you want to write your own.

The bit I like best:

The detail this book goes into is incredible. It documents features of BIND which are only sketchily covered in manuals I had read and previously had to guess at their usage (wrongly in a few cases).

The review is short but sweet. Thanks, John.