he media has become fascinated with the discovery of a new planet that orbits our Sun. It is rare for main-stream media to be fascinated by astronomy, so this news is rather major.

That planet, which is the 10^th in the solar system, is larger then Pluto that was discovered decades ago. Put in the words of the article from my favourite (syndicted) source of astronomy news:

Astronomers have discovered a new planet orbiting our Sun, which is larger than Pluto. It’s located 97 times further than the Earth from the Sun. This new, 10th planet was actually first photographed in 2003 by the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory, but it took this long to study and confirm its size and orbit. A name has been proposed to the International Astronomical Union, which is making its decision.

intendo’s profits are down by nearly 80% so worries about Nintendo’s vocation begin to resurface. The giant game maker has high sentimental value to many, including myself. Above is a screenshot that I took weeks ago while playing the classis Mario series from Nintendo.

Returning to the dysphoric news:

Reuters Japan passes on word from Nintendo of a 78.5% reduction in operating profits for the quarter ending June 30. Speculation from the news service on the reason for the drop makes perfect sense – the GameCube doesn’t have enough exclusives, first-party and third-party, and sales of GBA SP and GameCube have been declining.

udovic Drolez has just reached out for nntp://comp.sys.palmtops.pilot and informed everyone that the Linux on Palm Tungsten E Project is now a success. Put in his own words:

Great news ! Some folks have managed to boot Linux on the Palm T|E.

A screenshot is available at http://palmtelinux.sourceforge.net/

This project might be confusing to some folks. Palm are committed to build upon the Linux kernel, whereas the project mentioned above is an exploitation of Palm hardware as to obtain a pure Linux device. It is rather encouraging to know that Palm handhelds are flexible enough to adapt to different environments.

Cited by: PalmAddict

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

From a thought-provoking article in USA TODAY:

Speaking to hundreds of university professors, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates says he’s baffled more students don’t go into computer science.

Also see:

• Gates: Lack of Computer Science Spending Is ‘Kind of a Crime’
• Criticism on exploitation of power

This news item comes from MOSNEWS.COM:

Kushnir, 35, headed the English learning centers the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, all known to have aggressive Internet advertising policies in which millions of e-mails were sent every day.

For harassment purposes, their telephone numbers were disclosed in Wikipedia.

Figures have recently come out, which break down search engine usage in the States. According to one report, Google has been losing some of its impact

Google’s market share of US searches for June 2005 was at 36.9% compared with 37.5% in May 2005.

Then again, according a different study which was cited on the very same site, Google’s usage has been rising lately.

Google’s share of U.S. searches hit 52% in June, up from 45% a year ago, according to Web analytics firm WebSideStory Inc.

A careful read would reveal the obvious. The total volume of queries declines throughout the summer and likewise Web traffic in general. Google is probably more prolific outside the United States and among IT-savvy users.

June 2005 referrals to this domain

Example image from the local Gallery installation

Gallery is one of the most popular photo management packages on the Web. As a matter of fact, this domain has a Gallery installation (feed: ) as well. Gallery was built in PHP and is absolutely free. The number of features it makes available to site visitors and the site administrator is endless.

A fourth beta version of Gallery 2 has just been released and a demonstration purposes site was set up to boast the features of this next generation of Gallery: interface language, tree structure navigation and nice flexible page layouts are only a few enhancement that catch the eye.

I am not too keen on the beta name though: “Flippin’ Sweet!“. Not something you can recommend to your boss…