few moment ago I realised that our beloved dog Jenny does not appear anywhere on this site. How can this be? As Jenny is nearing the age of 15, I decided to post a picture of hers, pulled from September 27^th, 1992. It was extracted from the digitised photo albums archive, which I had acquired on my most recent home visit.

Click image for full size

I can vividly recall the day that we got Jenny as a puppy. I must have been 9 or 10 years old at the time.

According to a recent article from the BBC, there was collaboration involving the British Government and Microsoft — collaboration over getting the back door to Windows Vista.

In jeopardy: people’s privacy, on thier own workstation.

The controversy: encrypted filesystems made futile due the ability of governments to penetrate them. Government were said to be liaising with Microsoft, which could theoretically provide a ‘master key’. In turn, Microsoft denies any such claims.

Windows Vista won’t have a backdoor that could be used by police forces to get into encrypted files, Microsoft has stressed.

N the last 8 days of February, I may have set a new personal record. I composed nearly 400 posts, which had been sent to various newsgroups, especially technical ones. I am admittedly somewhat addicted at this stage. I merely try to catch up and keep up appearances as a regular reader and participant.

Below is my personal take on newsgroups and in particular UseNet:

• Newsgroups are suitable for like-minded people to support each other and contribute on-topic ideas
• Newsgroups are a place for pressing, on-topic news to be raised and openly discussed. The newsgroup has a chance of having impact on the parties (e.g. companies) involved and/or being discussed.
• In UseNet, content is made eternally public owing to (or put negatively — due to) newsgroup mirrors
• Key advice: always watch newsgroup post headers. Especially when reading high-traffic newsgroups, keep all headers in sight. Headers in newsgroups can help a great deal in discerning and predicting the poster’s behaviour and his/her chance of returning to the discussion. Such habits are less important for E-mail where most typically the sender is known, assuming good spam filters operate.

Related item: Newsgroups Statistics

OOGLE has set itself some high goals, characterised by the aspiration to reach gigantic worth. After its initial public offering (IPO) a few years back, Google’s stocks (and thus perceived value) has gone through the roof, almost as though it was still a start-up company.

More recently, Google’s stock suffered two consecutive slams, but stocks recovered yesterday. The initial reactions were probably due to fear, energised by impbalance and slowed growth, as confirmed by Google themselves. Nonetheless, encouraging news continue to flow:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Web search leader Google Inc. aims to become a $100 billion company and said on Thursday that it plans to put systems in place to help reach that scale during 2006.

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

Foreword: I syndicated Robert Scoble’s blog for a few months in the past, mainly in order to keep an eye on Microsoft’s ‘software politics’ and developments. I thought I would see the nicer face of an aggressive corporation, but I soon dropped it like a hot plate.

consider very few things to be “shocking”. There are very few things as adverse-to-logic and even shocking as Robert Scoble using Firefox and running his blog on WordPress (LAMP technology). This has been the case ever since his so-called ‘Net dad’ had weblogs.com sold out to VeriSign — a rather evil company. Scoble is a Microsoft evangelist, but he decided to practically infiltrate a world of Open Source. At some stage, it ended up badly.

Before Scoble became Dave Winer’s ‘surrogate child’, he wasn’t doing anything too admirable, but he was among the first people to blog. Then, years later, he would rave about ‘RSS this and RSS that’. It was Winer’s technology. Scoble only understands computers as a user, rarely realising the underlying issues in depth. He is no developer and no great writer either, yet his reputation and momentum, as well as being outspoken and critical of Microsoft while being paid by them is what makes him somewhat exceptional. His reputation is overrated.

When it comes to technology, I found that Scoble cannot tell his ass from his face. Microsoft employed him only because of his Web statistics. It is a public relations trick — companies buying readership (through popular voices) and promote propaganda to improve the Windows brand name and image. Microsoft had plans of employing many freelance bloggers to promote evangelism, using money. Scoble now runs on Linux and when I mailed him about it, he could only come up with a lame excuse about this choice.

If you seek a popular blog to aggregate, skip Scoble. It is an utter waste of time. Grossly overrated.

That’s 1,000,000 articles in one encyclopedia

After the arrival of Wikipedia for the iPod, a compact disc, or a memory stick, comes yet another important milstone:

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 1,000,000th article in the English language edition of Wikipedia. The article is about the Jordanhill railway station in Scotland, and it was started by Wikipedia contributor Ewan Macdonald. Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, online encyclopedia with 3.3 million articles under development in more than 125 languages.

Related items: Wikipedia Statistics, Wikipedia Introduces New Restrictions

In line with my recent inclusion of personal philosophy:

I try quite hard never to eat outside my house.

The intent is to minimise exploitation of others through labour.

Perhaps I simply dislike the notion of “classes” in society.

Without restaurants, you see, people would do what they have passion for.

Many waiters, waitresses, cooks (not chefs), and cashiers seem unhappy.

People at a production-line fast food kitchen feel imprisoned.

I would know because I worked at Burger King for a year.

I still believe that many of us could cater for our own culinary needs.

Having let my opinion be heard, I feel quite relieved, so thanks for reading.

Sidal, timely note: I am beginning to feel that I would rather blog about personal opinions at the expense of news items and some daily ‘geekery’ of mine.