Some stupid idiot put $100.000.000 in SCO to revive the sons of bitches. SNCP (Stephen Norris Capital Partners) injected the money and will take a controlling interest doing so. According to a statement from the company, SNCP already has a business plan for SCO that includes pursuing its legal claims. Maybe SCO can start by paying up to Novell. Novell claims that the licensing fees could amount to more than $37 million plus interest.

The Unix community should be prepared for another round of FUD and lawsuits…

Update: Groklaw.net has a very interesting thread on this. Of course there’s already a connection to Bill Gates.

Hours, even days when precision required it, my computer was calculating fractals while I was sleeping or went to school. I used fractint to generate beautiful fractal images using DOS, windows & X11. For Mac OS X there is Fractal Domains (both PowerPC & Intel). But time moves on and so does technology. Fractals are turned into art. Now take a look at the winners of the 2007 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest. In fact all contest entries are worthwhile to inspect. Here’s one example of the winners to wet your appetite.

Oh no. My favorite linux distro, Gentoo, seems to be in turmoil. The server that hosts this blog runs Gentoo. In a blog entry written by Daniel Robbins (the creator of Gentoo Linux) he writes about the unfortunate news that the Gentoo Foundation’s charter has been revoked for several weeks, which basically means that as of this moment the Gentoo Foundation no longer exists. You will not find a trace of this on the official Gentoo website.

Daniel left the Gentoo project but can’t watch from the sideline how things get worse. He ends the blog entry with some positive news that he is going to offer to clean up the mess under certain conditions. The offer is now also online and you can find it here. Daniel states that a lot will have to change. Daniel is willing to clean up the mess under certain conditions. He wants all trustees to accept his leadership and the trustees he appoints. So he needs some kind of totalitarian regime to clean up the mess in an acceptable time. I normally do not support or sympathize with totalitarian regimes as absolute power corrupts, but in this case: Go Daniel! Go! Get in and save one of the best Linux (meta-) distributions out there.

Now I like a good screensaver and phosphor (written by Jamie Zawinski) is one of them. Phosphor emulates an old green monochrome terminal screen with a very long afterglow (due to the phosphor). Phosphor can be used in many ways. You can configure it to get its output from a file, URL or from a program. It can even emulate a VT100 so you can use terminal control characters. You could recreate some visicalc screens and old stuff like that, whatever keeps you ticking.

Now Jason Kress thought that it might be cool to display random Linux kernel source files using the phosphor screensaver and I like that. Jason created a small C-program to select a random file from all .c files found using the find command. I don’t like the fact that find has run to completion before a file is selected. Please keep in mind that the linux kernel has well over 9000 .c files. When I start my screensaver I’m taking a break. Possibly because my computer is compiling. I don’t want the screensaver hamper my compilation with a heavy find command on the disk.

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