I sometimes get curious as to the background of some authoritative figures. Here are some interesting facts, which should not be treated as gossip, but strictly as objective facts. Bill Gates at his early days is described in an outdated mini biography, a snippet of which lies below:

His (Bill’s) great-grandfather had been a state legislator and mayor, his grandfather was the vice president of a national bank, and his father was a prominent lawyer.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, who now share a large Boeing 767 passenger plane, appear to have come from so-called “academic families”. Page’s father, Carl Victor, is a computer science professor at Michigan State University, where Larry also began his studies. Brin likewise, but it is the University of Maryland where his father Michael works on mathematics. His mother appears to have worked (possibly still does) in NASA.

The facts above make one wonder if a family of overachievers is a pre-requisite for success. I hope this is merely a coincidence that which not broadly reflect on reality. I can honestly confess that my parents were never educated at a high level. In fact, computers are known to them only at a fundamental level, e.g. Web surfing and Microsoft Word.

The display blends with the player’s body

AVE you had a peek at the new Sony Walkman, which aims to compete with Apple’s iPod? Since Apple have introduced the ultra-thin iPod nano and will soon incorporate a mobile phone, Sony appear to have fallen behind already. Their 20 GB player does not look elegant to me. Have a look, however, at how its display blends with the actual body. The white captions are part of the display, which is almost unbelievable and probably unprecedented.

HIS Wednesday I will deliver a talk to an audience of surgeons at the Royal Eye Hospital. The two short presentations gracefully run under Firefox and focus on computer security and data recovery, which are not my primary fields of expertise. Nonetheless, there is plenty of information to deliver on the subject as it is broad and open-ended. As usual, my presentations are publicised on-line (not finalised yet):

• PC Security in a Connected Environment (XHTML)
• Basics of Data Recovery (XHTML)

Please do remember that both presentation were composed with a non-technical audience in mind. They do not bog down to a low level of granularity and tend to refer to Windows more often than to other platforms, which I shall not neglect to advocate. It is by no means propaganda, but I hope to get across the message that Windows (and several applications including IE) is prone to failure and woe.

I have found a very amusing Flash clip involving Monkey Boy Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. He sure seems to love his iPod, but so does the Queen of England.

Context: Massachusetts says Goodbye to Office – including a reference to Ballmer’s ugly side.

We shall soon see yet another powerful laptop that runs Linux and Windows. Pay careful attention to the specs though:

Processor: 6.8GHZ CPU (AtomChip® Quantum® II processor or 4 x Intel® Pentium® M processors 1.7CHz) / System Compliance: Two Operating Systems with Voice Command (Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional and Linux®) / Memory: 1TB Quantum-Optical non-volatile RAM (NvIOpSRAM-SODIMM 200-pin) / Storage: 2TB non-volatile Quantum RAM (NvIOpRAM-ATA IDE)

UPDATE 08/09/2005 14:00 – there are speculations that the source may be over-enthusiastic or even a hoax.

Always store your mail in (at least) two isolated places

nfortunately for most of us, there is rarely an option in mail clients which caters for one-click backup and restoration of E-mail. We still lack an embedment in a GUI, which makes backup trivial to all, as well as quick to invoke.

An alternative to explicit backup is duplication of data files. Owing to the use of Open Source applications, my mail gets backed up on the SAN every night and on another computer twice a week (in an open and raw MBOX format). I advise everyone to install a reliable mail client and set up a repeating job that can handle backups without any user intervention (see links below).

Microsoft applications (speaking of computer crashes when backups are truly needed) rarely seem to mind portability and safety of data. Outlook and Outlook Express would lock your mail in proprietary formats, which is the reason why I ceased to be their user (having started with Netscape Mail). Anything that served Microsoft’s purpose, namely my immobility, appeared to be the grand goal. Thunderbird will save your mail in a form that is extremely painless to back up. Furtherfore, it can also easily import mail from Outlook or Outlook Express, in a way that preserves all the data and even mail settings.

Another backup option is by converting mail to HTML, which is open and standard-compliant. There exists a Ruby script called eml2mbox which bridges a gap and helps towards the generation of Web pages from individual mail messages.

Older notes about mail management:

• Local or Web-based E-mail
• Public Mail Accounts and Filtering
• Urgent Mail Account
• E-mail Address Disclosure
• Managing Large E-mail Quantities
• Autoresponder Trick
• Solution to Junk Mail
• Managing E-mail on a Personal Domain

Thunderbird-related items:

• Outlook Versus Thunderbird
• Thunderbird Aqua – an attractive theme for Thunderbird

As well as links that are related to mail, lots of resources and tips on backup reside on this Web log.

otLinking is a term describing the situation where one site uses another Web site’s traffic, usually to display images it does not own. It is considered an act of stealing or unfair and unauthorised use of content. A few days ago I read a story about an HotLiknking victim that has gone a long way to achieve that sweet old revenge. As a large hamburger chain HotLinked a Flash clip, the Webmaster could notice unusual levels of traffic pulled from afar, namely from the hamburger chain’s Web site. He quicikly reacted quite shrewdly. The Webmaster explains: “…I redirected everything coming from Fuddruckers.com (the HotLinking criminal)… Wrote a nice little message pointing out how incredibly stupid their web developer is. And then redirected the main page to a pleasant little website showing photographs of slaughterhouses. And also opened up some more popups, for those that don’t have popup blockers.”

Also see my previous write-ups on HotLinking:

• Bandwidth Thieves – My battle against HotLinking
• Stolen Graphics – An hilarious Hotlinking Story