Audra Ang, an Associated Press writer, reports about a Beijing clinic that treats online addicts.

All the children here have left school because they are playing games or in chat rooms everyday,” says the clinic’s director, Dr. Tao Ran. “They are suffering from depression, nervousness, fear and unwillingness to interact with others, panic and agitation. They also have sleep disorders, the shakes and numbness in their hands.

The descriptions sound a little freaky, but I have known people whose entire life was dependent on their computer.

Hmmm… 5 AM… time for lunch…

The iMac I sometimes use at work. It’s
rather obvious I’m right-handed.

have a few pet peeves when it comes to the placement of peripherals for the sake improved interaction. For instance, I would strongly encourage placing the mouse right next to the keyboard and adjacent to the keypad (not diagonally). The thumb is then close to the secondary ENTER button and only a mere distance from the arrow keys, which are frequently used for navigation, for example in file managers or text editors. Conversely, the mouse can be picked very quickly to assist editing.

At the same time, the left hand remains poised over the left section of the keyboard, close enough to SHIFT, ALT and CTRL (or equivalent) which are better off used as keyboard accelerators (shortcuts) at the speed of will.

magine yourself the following scenario:

You open a page filled with links and adjacent to each individual link is a little visual page preview generated on-the-fly — a pseudo-screenshot if you like.

Ever since the inclusion of tabs in major browsers, navigation of several destinations at once (forking) has been possible. Nonetheless, under normal curcumstances, only one page could be viewed at any given point in time. Several previews, much like thumbnails of imagery, can increase productivity significantly. Allow me to illustrate this graphically.

In this text-only page, on-line preview
of destination pages would help greatly

To make such extended hypertext protocol viable, bandwidth barriers must be breached. Every link in any given page (with a possible threshold on the number of previews) will result in site hits. This inconsistent and unfamiliar behaviour has implications on server load, statistics and even CPU load which is required page rendering. Perhaps one can argue that RSS feeds have had a similar impact.

Will you trust these for storing your mail?

uch information is migrating from our hard-drives to on-line servers: files (e.g. FTP), bookmarks (Deli.ci.us or portals), (Web-based) mail, feeds (analysis and statistics by Feedburner), photos (notably Flickr) and newsgroups (e.g. Google Groups) are merely a few more major examples.

Storage of personal data remotely has its powers:

• Data can be accessed from anywhere regardless of the computer used
• Backup is often handled by the service providers
• Liability shifts to service providers
• Inferences, e.g. spam filtering in GMail that adapts in accordance to users’ purging behaviour, social bookmarks, tagging…

Some people, myself included, have learned the hard way why the dependency upon third parties is risky. Hard-core users have their todo lists on-line, their mail on third-party servers and often files or address books stored remotely. The dangers:

• On-line servers may disappear due to bankruptcy, takeovers or corruption
• Import (and especially export) facilities are intentionally limited to suppress user mobility
• Servers fail or periodically go down; timescale for recovery is unknown
• Limited space and ‘premium’ packages that later emerge
• Pricing and policies which change, e.g. Yahoo stopped free POP3 support around 2001 (I too was a victim)

It is easier to blame somebody else but yourself as in the case of third-party dependencies. Yet, things are different when you control your own — shall we say — destiny. Ownership of your own domain is the first step towards an easier life in which the system administrator is yourself.

Video formats are among the most complicated formats to handle. Decoding and encoding of a frame sequence is an intricate process that different manufacturers take a different approach to solving. One solution is to settle down for no compression, the other being imposition of standards. There is one body, namely Microsoft among a few more, that embeds elements which are never agreed upon in the IT community. This corruption of inter-operable formats includes documents, spreadsheets, mail and even Web pages. Norway has had enough of that.

I would argue that there is no reason to get bitter. No open format, no view. I was never a huge TV/video anyway. When Microsoft change the encoding of text or textual formats, that descends to an entire new level though.

Click to enlarge the image

oogle Earth is a project which strongly impresses me. I got hold of a Windows machine where Google Earth had been installed and grabbed a few screenshots of streets around Manchester, UK.

Given the satellite data, this technology is not overly innovative. All that is required are mappings of existing satellite images onto a sphere, then relying on OpenGL acceleration. The real issues to be faced are bandwidth and Google’s progress on 3-D geographical data acquisition.

What screenshots cannot show is the excellent real-time interaction with the scene. Roads, street names and other details can be toggled on/off. There is also some highly continuous motion when hovering from one place to another. To get a better impression, you may wish to view this gallery with more sample images.

A cheaper method has been suggested for cooling down servers: warpping them in bubbles.

Is it just my imagination or is the wrapping going to warm up the server due to the ‘blanket effect’? If one of these temprature-controlling containers (like the ones astronauts use in space) gets used, does it really save energy?It turns out that air conditioners work on pumping the excess heat from the servers out so that they needn’t cool down the entire room. It makes no difference how warm the room gets outside of the bubbles, but how will the engineers feel about it? I am ‘privileged’ to have experienced the unpleasant feeling one gets in a room with hundreds of racks, namely in Manchester Computing where I work.