have the pleasure to have been ranked second in the world for my contributions to MATLAB last month. This equates to my position in July 2004, but exceeds the number of monthly downloads, which was just under 2,000 at the time. To celebrate this occasion, I treated myself to a cup of coffee with two three sugar.

Less than an hour ago, the BBC revealed the list of the UK’s richest people, which is an interesting read.

An overall increase in wealth means that the entry level for the Rich List has risen by 25% to £50m.

Am I the only one to conclude that more money is taken from the bottom to reach the Billionaires?

Nearly every aspect of life has evolved to revolve around computers. Take banking, communication and licensing, for example. With more information drifting on-line, the number of usernames and passwords one has to remember becomes unmanageable for the mind.

Following the concept of the master key, it is vital to retain one master password — a cryptic password that unveils all others. How to turn this idea into practice depends on your operating system and available tools. Consider locking of a file, hiding of records in your PDA or secure on-line memos.

Some major news have just been released:

Jerry Seinfeld announces that he and the cast of Seinfeld plan on making 23 new episodes starting this fall. NBC expects to premier the new episodes in 2006.

indows and Mac users face long procedures of installing and recovering software whenever a computer is bought. This time-consuming process shows the strengths of comprehensive Linux distributions such as SuSE or Fedora.

PC users sometimes assemble a list of programs, each of which needs to be installed in turn. Why not use an image with all the software pre-loaded? Since hard-drive capacity is enormous, redundant bits cannot harm (with the exception of the Windows Registry). Also, one can distribute everything on several machines, without any repeated effort. If this does not illustrate the power of free Open-Source software, what does?

y relative passed me a message concerning Internet policies. It discussed the loss of privacy among sites with the .us suffix. The message came from GoDaddy, who apparently sent all their clients a self-promoting E-mail — one example among many of mail that that is uncalled for. Other organisations exhibit similar, let us call it, “aggressive behaviour”.

Bob parson, the man in charge of GoDaddy ‘broadcasted’ in this mass-E-mail:

…On my personal Blog, www.BobParsons.com there are a number of articles where you can learn more about the NTIA’s unfortunate decision and what you can do to help get it reversed.

I also will be talking about our right to privacy on Radio Go Daddy, our weekly radio show that debuts today, March 30, at 7 PM PST. To find out how to listen in, please visit the Web site dedicated to the show, www.RadioGoDaddy.com…

The above is shameless self-promotion. GoDaddy, the very large and successful domain registrar, have demonstrated tactless behaviour.

n relation to the previous item, research in MIT has produced a small application which turns English into computer code.

This small milestone can have an effect on the entry bar for programmers. However, one would argue that this the strand of work is pointless. Ambiguous languages can now (supposedly) turn into (ambiguous) code, which cannot be trusted. Will one be able to rely on translated ‘code’ of this kind? It’s the equivalent of sending E-mail from speech-to-text recognition without prior proof-reading.

A little sarcasm of mine; click image to view