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.

Picture from the BBC

XCITING news (for me at least) came out yesterday afternoon. I won the rowing competition (first stage among 10) with the time of 10:43.5 for 3000 meters. The second among the 10 contestants was almost 1 minute behind me, which considering my neglected endurance, makes this a high achievement.

Related items on exercise:

• Rowing Ahead
• Decade of Exercise
• Mr. Fitness

T has been a good day at the gym today. A team of dozens of production staff took over the health club for the filming of models. Good-looking women ‘infested’ the place. [smile /]

Previous ‘special guests’ were
Jeff ‘Left hook’ Lacy, a boxing world champion (a fortnight ago), and Justin Timberlake a couple of years. It was just me and him at the gym, but I didn’t recognise him at first. He is unimpressive when faced in person.

My pause/resume demonstrative program

ARLIER this afternoon noticed that my MATLAB profile had gone past the 30,000 count milstone. That count corresponds to the number of downloads of my code and programs over at MATLAB Central. I keep track of these numbers three times a week using HTML syndication. After some hesitance, I thought it was worth raving about; just because I rarely get the chance! [smile /]

Related item: A short write-up on an honourable highest position: first world-wide. This was my greatest moment of excitement, for which my grandfather popped some champagne.

Y site has just returned to Google’s top 50 for “roy”, after I had dropped to oblivion last year. I was never truly trying to get there. I never aimed for the site to be affiliated with the keyword “roy”, but this was a side effect of anchor text (words adject to or within hyperlinks). More oddly, my domain name and front page title make no mentioning of Roy. This, anchor text must matter a great deal; More than many of us realise, that’s for sure.

As another example, take the main developers of WordPress. They are ‘Googlebombing’ themselves in ‘out of the box’ installations of the software Web-wide. Try searching Google for “matt”, “mike”, or “alex”. You will see what I mean.