100 things we didn't know last year

Each week, the Magazine chronicles interesting and sometimes downright unexpected facts from the news, through its strand 10 things we didn't know last week. Here, to round off the year, are some of the best from the past 12 months.

Yum, trivia. :)

Lion Country Safari

We're playing snowbirds for the holidays this year, and one of our first activities was to bring the kids to the Lion Country Safari, (map) in West Palm Beach, Florida.

I'm usually not much of a zoo-goer. I even once got my entire class kicked out of one for sneaking behind my teacher's back and opening cages to release the animals when I was about 8, in France. On the other hand, those open air, free-roaming and conservation oriented ones are more to my liking. I'd still much rather see those animals free, in their natural habitats, but given so many of those species are now endangered, I have to take the lesser of two evils approach.

You can find a few photos below or go to the equivalent Flickr set or slideshow.

It was quite nice, but if you are in the area during the summer, I have to say that the Parc Safari, in Hemmingford, Quebec, is much larger and a lot more fun and interactive.

Happy Holidays

I'll be on a plane early tomorrow, so I will wish you all some very happy holidays.

And if I somehow stay offline that long, may 2007 bring [more] peace on Earth.

Best regards to you and yours.

Stephane Daury

Screenshots of Fedora Core 6 in VMWare Fusion Beta

Please note: this is an early report, and more details will be posted as I have more time to dig deeper into Fusion. Loads of screenshots in the meantime.

As I mentioned earlier, VMWare Fusion for Mac has had its first beta version released publicly today. My first thought was to try the existing Fedora Core 6 x86 virtual machine I put up for download a few weeks ago, to see if it would run as is on my 2006 Core Duo Macbook.

Having experience with both VMWare on other platforms and Parallels Desktop on the Mac, I was eager to see how the two compared. Having moved VMs between OS platforms with VMWare, I really wanted to know if the Mac would indeed be treated equally.

So since I'm busy packing for a holiday trip, and only have little time for it, I thought I'd post screenshots of how it all went. Hint: it's all good. :) You can go ahead and download my VM image, and give it a shot for yourself.

I'm only going to embed a few screenshots below, so the page stays light, but here is a complete archive: FC6_in_VMWare_Fusion_Beta-SCREENSHOTS-20061222.zip (71 screenshots. SHA1SUM: 0e468e48e8727ff842258e720b323960f19b92ad)