HAT a day over at Digg.com! 3 of my story submissions have reached the front page; and the day is not over, yet.

I have recently accumulated some friends in this social networking platform and, to be honest, this sometimes makes me feel like a groupie in a game which is not democratic. People who acquire friends are more likely to have their submissions rapidly popularised. We shall see if Digg version 3, which is due to be released this Monday, will somehow correct for this tendency by deterring excessive mutual ‘digging’.

All my stories, by the way, are posted in defence of GNU/Linux and/or Open Source software. I truthfully do this in the spirit of freedom and openness.

Related items:

• My first appearance in Digg
• My second Digg rave

Update (8:35 PM): It’s now 4 (stories in the front page), with the possibility of 5 by the end of the day!

The first mode of variation in a
poor appearance model of the brain

OME “dreadful deadline”, which I mentioned in my previous post, is thankfully behind us, after a short extension. To make matters much better, I have just received a notification of acceptance for another conference, which saturates my once-modest publications list. Tomorrow I may find out that another paper was accepted (of which I am not the first author though).

All in all, such decent progress will make it easier for me to complete the Ph.D. fairly early. I will be presenting my work in July and fingers remain crossed for TMI. When one gets showered by many achievements at once, it is hard not to make a vanity blog post. I hope others feel happy for me as I have already informed my entire family.

E are currently working on a paper which we believe can be included in the high-status journal. That journal is widely known as IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. This will, as a matter of fact, be a revised submission and it will hopefully make it into this publication with an impact factor of 4 (very high). This paper submission was mentioned several times before and, quite frankly, there is very little information to add.

So what is so dreadful about this particular submission deadline? Well, for a start, I have stayed awake for 24 hours straight yesterday. Then, I slept for just 4 hours and I expect the rest of the today to be rather similar to yesterday. I rarely let pressure and nervousness get to me, yet sometimes it inevitably happens, especially when peers are involved.

Two stories at the very top of Digg.com (click for full-sized image)

ROOVEY! Another two submissions of mine have just reached the front page of Digg. At the time of writing, both the first and second positions are occupied by Linux advocacy articles which I submitted.

I am now hoping to get a higher proportion of submissions accepted. I must admit that I am slowly becoming addicted to that whole Digg phenomenon.

A story on Open Source parasites — one which I submitted yesterday (click for full-sized image)

story/link I had submitted to Digg.com has just made it into the front page. Digg is, at present, among the top 100 sites on the Web, which makes this a high achievement. My site was also once referenced in the front page of Slashdot.org, which appears to be losing (some of) its community to Digg. The term ‘Slashdot effect’ was recently substituted by the ‘Digg effect’, at least to some folks.

My days of innocence

have never, in my entire life, not even after 10+ years of persistent training, attempted to find out how much weight I can benchpress. I am referring to a proper trial under good conditions and just one repetition, at maximum capacity. Perhaps I feared find this outing because of the possibility of injuries (particularly if the spine is permitted to bend). And yet, the curse has just been lifted, so to speak.

Today at the Health Club we undertook the second stage of the Mr. Fitness contest (I fortunately won the first stage). This time, for a change, the task was to benchpress the most weight just once, on a Scott Machine. Arms had to hover over the chest and the grip could be relatively wide if necessary. The back needed to stay tight on the bench. I started by securing a weight of 150KG (we get 3 attempts/goals in total), plus the bar which weighs about 5 KG. I then attempted 160KG successfully and finally I did 165KG, at which point it became hard. I could probably benchpress more, but I ran out of attempts (the third must be last). I later tried 170KG (175 including the bar, which bent under the heavy load), but I mistakenly allowed my arms go too low (below 90 degrees on the elbow), which botched it. I am still extremely pleased with this achievement.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

EVERAL years ago I foresaw the demise of Windows, especially when I was first introduced to Linux. Years later to find myself sought after by companies like Google, whereas giants like Microsoft only seem to offshore their job market as to cut margins and sustain stable figures.

As some recent large declines in the MSFT stock indicate, the trend looks unpromising, for Microsoft. If I was to predict the events of the next couple of years, I would argue strongly in defence of SOA and mobile computing, predominently run on Linux.

Concurrently, as an article in the CNN suggests, mobile devised will gnaw at usage of the personal computer. The evidence is there to be seen as Google liaise with Nokia on their Linux-based Internet tablet. Moreover, Motorola have just become friends of Open Source.