This morning I wrote my first piece of PHP. I can now see why it has been awarded ‘Programming Language of 2004′. Truly deserved. For the curious, the code rotates banners in my front page depending on the time of the day. Below lies an example.

Picture at 10AM GMT

Scott Tobkes sent me an article from the Herald Sun and here are the interesting bits:

During a demonstration of digital photography with a soon-to-be-released Nikon camera, a Windows Media Centre PC froze and wouldn’t respond Mr Gates’s efforts to push the remote control.

Later in the 90-minute presentation, a product manager demonstrated the ostensible user-friendliness of a new video game, but the computer monitor displayed the dreaded “blue screen of death” and warned, “out of system memory”.

So, Windows is stable when put in the right hands. Correct?

Some excellent spam advice was passed on to me by a technology-savvy client at work. Because it has been exceptionally successful, I would like to share it:

Set up distinct E-mail accounts that are intended for (at most):

• Colleagues, family and friends
• Mailing lists
• Newsgroups
• Public enquiries, e.g. directories, Web pages

Additionally, if you can have a catch-all account, give out different E-mail addresses for different purposes and leave all messages in the same ‘pool’ (mail forwarding can be used to centralise all messages as well). If one account gets abused, it can be separated out by instantiation of its address (or by breakage of some forwarders).

Separating boxes is the key

I have recently been thinking about extending a project of mine, Othello Master, to form a new project. The new project will take a different title and occupy a different domain. Chess, Checkers and the like can be considered. If you would like to be a part of this, please send me an E-mail because without somebody’s collaboration, I don’t plan on doing it.

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…