The spacecraft was a long way from home.

I thought it would be a good idea, just after Saturn, to have them take one last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel hardly distinguishable from the other points of light Voyager would see: nearby planets, far off suns. But precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having.

It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos—but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last for decades to come.

So, here they are: a mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets in a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight off the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world; but it's just an accident of geometry and optics. There is no sign of humans in this picture: not our reworking of the Earth's surface; not our machines; not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalisms is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. On the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential: a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings; how eager they are to kill one another; how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we've ever known.

The pale blue dot.

Many thanks to Gizmodo for posting this reminder. The film was made by David Fu, which contains the voiced writings of Carl Sagan, accompanied by the music from Mogwai, “Stop Coming To My House”.

Been a year and ten months since the last blog post about the site itself. You may have noticed it already, but Avencius is in a maintenance mode. I still try to keep you posted about the latest releases and technologies, but it also means that no theme or feature work is being done.

First of all I would like to welcome all the spam sites that have been hammering on the servers, filling up the comments and increasing the user account database with numerous accounts (85 pages with 20 accounts per page in the last weeks). The Drupal spam module has been replaced by Mollom. Hopefully this free (and paid) service can help reduce this, while also helping Mollom to keep up their database on hostiles. Anonymous comments have been re-enabled now that the module is active, but I'll keep an eye out in case things turn nasty.

So what will the future bring for Avencius? Obviously the site has been slowing down for the last year(s) now, and several other sites have emerged who offer better and more intense coverage. Possible directions are: a generic technology web site (think Engadget, Gizmodo) with a taste of gaming (like Joystiq and Kotaku), and the occasional nerdy accent (much like Lifehacker and Slashdot).

Whether it will be based on Drupal, Wordpress, or custom made remains to be seen. But I just want to let you know I'm not letting this location become a post-apocalyptic era of the browser war =)

It's a bit late as probably most of you already seen stuff change as you visit this site, but hereby I'll formally let you know all the goods and bads that has changed in the last month or so for Avencius as a site.

First of all there is a new visual refresh, which is actually based upon the original theme of my personal blog, but altered to fit here. The theme simply called Avencius 2008.2 indicated that sporadically I may change some bits and pieces. The changes overall mean that the menu options at the top are gone, and only the name plus slogan appear. The blocks on the right moved to the left, while the labels changed from top to bottom. The background of the top of the site is slightly smaller, giving a more lighter appearance. And last but not least, all posts are now surrounded by a huge border. For those who don't like the changes, and/or are using an account, you can alter the theme back to the previous version if you wish. I hope you all like this slight new theme.

But looks aren't everything and to help a tiny bit in being more user and search engine friendly some internal workings have changed. If I'm not mistaken all nodes, blogs, and other internal links are now humanly readable. The numbered article links still work, but each node now has an alias that is actually a link made out of the node's title. In addition the front page and each article or blog post has meta keywords and descriptions added to them. Most of these are automatically generated, but new articles may get customized content.

As far as directions going, considering the last poll... for now Avencius will continue covering both web browsers, meaning Firefox and Opera, with some spicy sauce like Safari and Internet Explorer.

As time progresses the site matures further, so here's a status update on the development going on at Avencius. Some may know I have a different job now and daily made aware of different web browsers and web compatibility, thus some of the latest alterations to the site are a direct effect from that.

First of all you'll probably notice that all the links are red. From a usability perspective the black and blue was too close to each other color wise. So I do hope you know where to click now. Also in the sense of usability is the removal of several links, and mapping them directly to brand names. In addition all the artwork, except for the background, have been refreshed and are newly created images in the style of the previous ones with more Leopard (10.5) love.

Second of all, there are now Firefox and Opera links in the menu bar that will trigger filtering on a specific browser.

Hope you all like it, remember you can comment anonymously (as long as you don't trigger the automagic spam filter).

Every website that allows interaction suffers from it these days. It's like being forced to lock your door, chain your bike, etc. Even if it shouldn't be necessary, you'll have to as in all social communities there are those who want to do evil...

Anyway, my apologies for those who have been commenting and didn't see their comments appear on the various posts. Due to massive abuse of the anonymous posting abilities Drupal was set to queue all comments. I've disabled this feature and now everyone should see their posts again.

However, while I search for better spam protection solutions (as the current one isn't sufficient and on upgrade actually breaks), it might happen that some spam posts appear. I'll try to remove them as soon as possible, please do not be offended by them.

In addition the website has been upgraded to the latest release of the back-end.

Update: Spam filters are in place, registered users can help reporting possible spam posts, thanks in advance!

Update 2: It seems the spam has become worse than before and actually passes through the filter as it uses completely nonesense words and links. For now I'm tweaking more settings thus making it far more strict than before.

Time is a two sided thing, especially with web sites. It can make you more popular and mature, but it can also make your looks age. So here it is, the first iteration of the visual refresh!

If you haven't noticed anything and you're still seeing the old theme, go to your profile and change your default theme accordingly. The visual refresh is not complete yet, just as the previous theme it will be polished over time. At the moment you're seeing the initial stage which is ready for the public. The first priority right now is to clean up the php and css code.

Besides a visual refresh there have been other changes. Most importantly first: content. As I said before this web site stopped blogging on Opera, more specifically Opera news. Recent experiments have shown that blogs about Opera, and competitive browsers such as Firefox and Safari, have gained increasingly more hits as well as comments. That's a good thing!

The visual refresh also comes with some added value. Remember those draggable text fields that Safari supports? Well everyone who uses Opera or Firefox can now drag the text fields on Avencius as well, though only vertically. As this theme uses open source material, it can be acquired by request.

Although you may have been hoping for something totally new right now, that's not going to happen soon. Life changes, and so do ideas. For the time being the idea is to use my personal web site for the experimental topics, while this domain will be used for (biased?) blogs about web browsers, offering an independent view on every one of them. The idea of going for articles with depth instead of news articles is thanks to the free Dutch news paper called De Pers, which showed me another way of bringing people up to date and in for debate.

I hope you all like it, the visual refresh, as well as the hopefully richer content. As always, thanks for visiting my site!

Previously this site received lots of spam attempts, which were blocked at first by the spam filter. Currently even the spam filter needs to be adjusted in such a way that it can even block non-spam related posts. To give users the least amount of trouble, no anonymous comments are allowed anymore, only registered users may post comments.

However this blocking of spam isn't the only problem. Lots of automated spam bots try to post replies on posts where no access is granted. This leads to filled up access logs, as well as throttling by the sheer amount of bots that try to access the site at the same time. In order to reduce this issue for real users some actions were taken: the website is now cached (leading to less SQL queries), comments are enabled (they were gone due to throttling), search is disabled when the amount of users concurrently visiting is too high (due to throttling and reduced SQL queries).

I'm sorry for the inconvenience this may cause, please give feedback if you have any issues on this website. Thanks in advance!

The website has been updated to the latest Drupal 4.7. This release comes with big changes, and hopefully improvements, both for administrating this website as well as for the users in commenting etc. The upgdate required some modifications to the theme, as well as to the database. So please give any feedback if you see something, small or big, that looks like a flaw.

Please note that during the bumpy update, the website lost some database information, my apologies for the inconveniences this may have caust. Also, the website now uses AJAX technologies more heavily, which pushes the required minimum browser. But any Firefox, Opera or Internet Explorer user should not see any difference. Lastly, more than a week ago I disabled the anonymous comments again, although the spam filter took most of them out, it was really annoying to see my logs filled with denied access, spam posts etc.

Anyway, let's keep up the Opera blogging, and with Opera 9's expected release in June I hope to write some stories on the new features.

Update: Following the road Opera 9 is going; Avencius been slightly improved in the areas of clean design (less blocks, minor improvements to theme) and a simple layout (advanced settings available through AJAX components).

Update 2: First bugs have been fixed; the search option that pointed to a 404 not found page; uneven widths for left/right sidebars, which are also now better suited for 1024 resolutions; and updated php for valid XHTML 1.0 Strict code according to W3C's validator.

This website is currently running Drupal 4.6.5, but in a few weeks Drupal 4.7 will be out, which has some changes that affect this website. The current theme engine, XHTML template will be replaced by PHP template, a more powerful and customizable engine that already is available as an add-on. In preparation of this release the Avencius 2 theme has been completly rewritten to use the PHP template as its base. There might still be some CSS issues to sort out, but it's already XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.0 compliant.

Registered users can switch between the classic Avencius, Avencius 2 and the new Avencius 2 PHP theme. The two older XHTML template themes will disappear with the upgrade to 4.7.

I still need to find a way to put some wolf somewhere...