must admit that I have fallen in love with the ‘Digg (sub)culture’. And primarily owing to Digg (and its saturation of dynamically-generated pages), the number of hits for my surname is growing at a wild pace across search engines. It is approaching one million in Google (Interesting fact: if I received a penny for every hit that is added to Google, for example, I would be able to make ends meet). This wasn’t intended; rather it’s a side effect that I have just become aware of. I tend to have a consistent username, which is always available due to the small size of my family.

I suspect that, at the moment, Digg boasts over 10 million subscribed members who are largely interested in information technology. Many will be exposed to the virtues of GNU/Linux and Open Source, which seems encouraging to me. At the time of writing, 4 of my submissions appear in the front page, among 15 submissions in total. That’s almost a third of a front page, whose domains’ Alexa traffic rank is among the top 100 sites on the Web. What an overwhelming experience.

have just reached page one of Digg’s top users! This puts me at an excellent position in two separate Web sites: MATLAB Central and Digg, with 20^th and 30^th position, respectively.

With MATLAB I have been for 2 years, but with Digg this was achieved within just 2 months, which seems rather amazing to me. Two months to get there translates to more than one story at the front page, per day, on average. The pace on weekdays stands at approximately 3-4 front page (promoted) items per day, which makes my first rave seem almost insignificant and utterly irrelevant.

VER wondered what a Windows XP clone that is based on Linux would look like? Just follow the link to find out. Apart from various Linux distributions that achieve Windows ‘lookalikiness’ out of the box, there are many extensions too. Regular and long-time Linux users , however, are rarely happy to discover some a new “Start” button for Ubuntu, for instance. And I speak from recent experiences and observations here.

On a related note, KDE is frequently said to imitate Microsoft Windows a little bit too much (design mistakes included). Nevertheless, definitely not in spite my opposition to this claim, I always say that KDE is user-friendly, intuitive, innovative, and comprehensive. It offers me plenty of function that is not available elsewhere. I have just spotted the following ‘fresh-out-of-the-oven’ blog post, which seems to concur with my opinion:

10 Things I Love About KDE

Oh, man, a top ten list. Am I already scraping the bottom of the barrel? Don’t worry, friends. I have several articles on the back burner, but various endeavors are preventing me from completing them. So let’s just run through my favorite desktop environment ever. In no particular order, here are ten things I love about KDE.

(The list in brevity):

1. KIOSlaves

2. Krusader

3. YaKuake

4. Respect

5. KMyMoney

6. KDevelop

7. The Simple Things

8. It’s About Choice Too

9. You Don’t Get Functionality Like This Just Anywhere, You Know

10. Outlook Killer? Okay!

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.