What a nightmare. I just upgraded my Opera browser from version 10.10 to 10.11, a minor upgrade one would think given the small change in version numbers.

Three hours later, I've just finished. The people at Opera have lost the plot with too much fancy stuff in the form of widgets and turbo, not enough basics. It's a classic case of design driving down usability.

To start with, the download tries to be too clever. I use Slackware and the Opera download site provides a Slackware package. No problems, thinks I, good to go. Except that the package is in tar.gz format, a format that Slackware hasn't used since Slackware 12.2, about 18 months ago. It was quickly solved though, I just unpacked it and repackaged it into the current tgz format suitable for the package manager. Still, if Opera is going to provide a Slackware package, it should use a package system that Slackware understands.

Darn, Opera still won't run, it can't find shared library libqt-mt. A quick search shows I don't have it installed. I try installing the Qt3
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I get a daily email from Universe Today that summarises their stories of the day. Every so often, one comes along that is jaw-droppingly amazing.

Take a look at the photo below. Every one of the dots is a galaxy. A galaxy, not a star. Each galaxy contains billions of stars.

Simply amazing. We're very used to hearing (in Carl Sagan's sonorous voice) "billions and billions of stars", but an image like this really brings it home.

I pulled the image from the Universe Today website; click it to go to their full story.