I am highly suspicious about MATLAB Central‘s management of their ranking mechanism. For several months I have noticed that the Instrument Control Team (employed by MathWorks, makers of MATLAB) gets just few isolated downloads (indicating the number of times people download one’s code), and then, within hours, it gains hundreds. I wondered if someone out there modifies their numbers slowly enough for no-one to suspect. Be alert. ‘Inside trading’ might always be around the corner.

A gadget fair has opened in Las Vegas and the following picture from the BBC caught my eyes:

The chair also lets people experience surround sound while watching videos, with wireless control for six surround sound speakers. And a drinks holder.

Drinks holder?!?! Has humanity not gone spoiled enough yet? What’s next? A built-in toilet?

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

Slashdot (News for Nerds; Stuff that matters) have shown some rare figures of the way employees in the IT industry use the World Wide Web:

…Microsoft employees use Google for their searches 66% of the time, but MSN Search only 20% of the time, and Firefox is their second most popular browser behind Internet Explorer 6′s whopping 98.76% share. Google employees use Google as their search engine 100% of the time and 21% use a Mozilla or Firefox browser. Apple employees like Google best and 68% use Safari…

Last night I voiced a problem which I have experienced for over a year. Every once in a while, when using the shortcut stroke, text gets erased for no apparent reason. It turned out that other people suffer from the same problem and here is its cause, explained by James Anderson from alt.comp.sys.palmtops.pilot on January 3rd:

It’s a bug in the keyboard driver: every 16th shortcut it deletes the last 16 characters. The only solution is to disable the driver when you aren’t using the keyboard. When you enable the driver again its shortcut count will start over from zero.

As a strong Palm advocate, it disappoints me that fundametal mistakes can be made. Nonetheless, Palm devices remain notably stable.

When Palm refuses to go right

Cited by: PalmAddict

A retrospective item from 76-year-old Harvey Tobkes led me to making some predictions for the future. In 20 years from now our children will raise an eyebrow at:

• how people used to walk around in supermarkets, which have now become warehouses controlled by robotics.
• how we used to type in data using an odd device called a ‘keyboard’.
• the fact people used to go to work.
• the way information was recorded on paper and later binned.

A second top headline from the BBC is dedicated to blogs and their effects on cyberspace. It has been only hours since the last dominant blog-related headline from the BBC. A closer look revealed a ‘pagefull’ of headlines of this nature and I began to ponder Jacken’s opinion:

I can really see that big companies could feel threatened by the blogging phenomena. If I am thinking of buying a new expensive product, I always do a google search to check out what people have to say.

Thunderbird, Firefox and… RSSOwl!?!?!? Yes, an RSS aggregator that I recently started using. Personally, I do not think it has matured sufficiently; I still use a beta version in fact.

At present it is slow, a little difficult to work with, but on the positive side, it is trivial to install (there is an RPM package too). Only its name and logo, which attempt to associate it with the Mozilla family, had me inclined to give it a go. I would rate it ’7 out of 10′.