An academic study suggests that long-standing habits are difficult to break for a reason. It attributes this chronic and dangerous entity to physiology. This might, at least in part, explain why so many of us struggle to change recurring activities or rid ourselves from addictions.

Old habits don’t die. They hibernate.

Habitual activity–smoking, eating fatty foods, gambling–changes neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain when habits are formed.

CLI anywhere, at any time

CCESS to particular computers can be crucial, especially while travelling. There are a variety of ways for achieving full remote access, though simple, text-based shell access is supported by even weaker devices and light-weight software.

I recently read about someone who thought of handling Web servers from a Palm Treo, using E-mail, which is supposedly a universal API. I consider E-mail to be the wrong tool for a simple task, even if one uses cron jobs and collects the output via E-mail (similar to a hack I once mentioned. Alternatively, shell access can be obtained in one of the following ways:

• Cellular telephones: using CUTs
• Web-based: MindTerm, e.g. from Duke University
• Windows: PuTTy
• Windows mobile: I have seen an SSH client in action and it looked quite clean
• UNIX variants and derivatives: Built-in functionality
• Palm O/S: pssh, free and apparently based on PuTTy, though it is hard to tell for sure
• Blackberry: For that, one might have to pay nearly $100. That’s the chance one takes when steering away from Open Source. Palm may not be Open Source-oriented, but its users’ ideaology differs.

POV-Ray – The Kitchen by Jaime Vives Piqueres

recently wrote about Microsoft’s attempt to gently push away any technology that is not theirs. Among my list laid OpenGL and DirectX, which is a Microsoft ‘tool’ for putting an end to interoperable 3-D rendering (frequently gaming) in favour of proprietary. The added value is zilch. It is merely required to re-inforce the shackles of a monopoly.

I kindly advise that you sign the petition to stop this from happening. At present, OpenGL support is discouraged in Windows Vista, which looks grim for a world where interoperability prevails.

In the current implementation (as of 2005-09-22) of the OpenGL graphics library in Windows Vista – a soon to be released new version of the Microsoft Windows operating system, OpenGL is not a stand alone library. Instead it functions as a wrapper around DirectX, and is frozen to the vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4.

This means that OpenGL applications in Windows Vista will, most likely, suffer from severe performance loss, that, when an OpenGL driver is loaded, the Windows operating system will have odd behaviours and that future versions of OpenGL will not affect the Windows Vista platform. This would result in less developers actively supporting OpenGL, and as a result, less applications written which are easy to port to another platform or easy to maintain.

NOWLINGLY or unknowingly, whether deliberately or not, Google is striving to become a Web monopoly. As the Web is bound to become the centre of all, such monopoly can affect each and every aspect of our lives.

Google’s primary target appears to be Web services and their constant expansion, often superseding and replacing desktop equivalents in the process. What has Google implemented thus far? Below is nothing more than a partial list:

• Statistics: notably Google analytics, which can now help study the roots of traffic, in-site PageRank distribution, crawling patterns and so forth. This requires Webmaster to sign up with yet another service: Google Sitemaps.
• Web reading – e.g. Google Reader (for feeds), Google News, and Google Blog Search.
• Image search – equivalent to a digital photography library, which neglects or discourages fair use
• Desktop search
• Google Wallet – potentially making on-line banking and highstreet banks obsolete
• Mapping services
• E-mail and broader communication (Google Mail, Google Talk)
• Google Directories (DMOZ)/Google Base
• Literature – Google Print (just been renamed for fairly valid reasons)

What have Google not implemented yet? Can we identify what Google set as potential revenue targets?

• Games
• Office suite
• Music management (video gets closer)
• Graphical toolkits
• Web design facilities and/or hosting (Geocities) – Blogger and Blogspot make the exception
• Photo album management
• Bookmarks like del.icio.us (with the exception of Google Personalised that is only a step away)

Google can never replace very few elements:

• Hardware
• Operating system
• Web browser, with the exception of Google’s Web Accelerator (proxy/cache)

[Note: The lists above are intentionally incomplete. They are intended to serve as support for an argument rather than be a comprehensive reference]

Google have already teamed up with Firefox (Mozilla), Sun Microsystems, and a variety of other cross-platform advocates. Google are also avid Linux users and supporters, so one wonders if Open Source or openness in general can take the place of Windows and give Google collateral control at the expense of Windows.

Bill Gates considers major losses to Google as an option. Google were portrayed as the main rival/threat and Gates urged his employees to focus on so-called ‘Live Software’ and on-line services. Mapping services, book scanning and the like have already been copied by Microsoft in what appears to be a catch-up game.

Google have seen enormous growth owing to constant innovation and superb recruiting. Meanwhile, Microsoft failed to evolve, refusing a move to the Net at the expense of their own shrink-wrapped software monopoly. Commercial software in general appears to be taking a slow dive, so the next 5 years will reveal a significant change. We are currently standing at the busy interchange.

Windows 98 screenshot from the 6-year-old Compaq Presario (click to enlarge)

HIS blog post is not concerned with giving away a laptop, but rather about my recent decision to give up laptops altogether. In this item I have collected some notes on my reasons for neglecting the world of mobile computers that are simply over-sized and are thus not contributory quite so often.

For increased productivity (e.g. dual-head, fast Ethernet), I find desktop machines to be an absolute necessity. I have learned this over time and I recently gave up the laptop which I had lugged for 6 years. It used to serve me fairly well while travelling, yet travel is the exception, which does correspond with daily requirements.

There are endless issues with laptops: hardware upgrades, components that become difficult to replace or even find (e.g. built-in speakers). These are just a few among the more prominent factors. One cannot ignore inflexibility with regards to hardware probing and peculiar vendor-specific drivers. I am not necessarily referring to Linux to Windows (or vice versa) migrations, but also to ‘intra-O/S’ migrations where drivers may be missing and so-called QuickRestore CD’s (factory defaults) can never resolve recurring incompatibilities.

I ultimately decided to stick to a PDA, preferably with folding keyboard. Along with desktop wordstation/s it works flawlessly unless one travels all the time. I have become accustomed to this over time. Synchronisation of memos with the desktop gives me the convenience I have probably sought all along.

The following report was published yesterday:

DALLAS, Nov. 16 — Decaffeinated — not caffeinated — coffee may cause an increase in harmful LDL cholesterol by increasing a specific type of blood fat linked to the metabolic syndrome, hints a new study presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2005.

Other items about coffee:

• Coffee Leads to Stress
• Coffee Beer

A week back I became familiar with the World Community Grid. Described in their own words,

World Community Grid’s mission is to create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.

Our work has developed the technical infrastructure that serves as the grid’s foundation for scientific research. Our success depends upon individuals collectively contributing their unused computer time to change the world for the better.

I am hoping for my medical imaging research to become part of a localised research grid. Fortunately, this may actually happen sooner than I had anticipated. Yesterday I handed over C/C++ code to become a Web service.

I also have particular intersting in the way grid computing can assist the Web. My recent initiative called Iuron, once resumed, might rely on available, idle computer resources.