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…

From my previous item, it is implied that I live at night. Very few people wake up shortly past midnight, but let me explain why this induces a huge gain. Here are my top 3 motivations:

• Network load is sometimes only 10% of that at daytime. I can download a full backup of my ¼ gig Web space in under a minute.
• Traffic and pollution of daytime are avoided.
• Psychlogical uplift from work completed before the day began.

On the downside, a person’s nightlife (in the conventional sense) is shattered.

Dvorak uncensored is a well-known Web log run by the famous John C. Dvorak. Judging by the times of his posts, he goes to bed after 1AM and wakes up before 5AM (although timestamps can be altered in WordPress). I personally sleep from 7PM to 1AM, but this still gives me more than Dvorak’s 4-minus-hour sleep. Another such ‘super-human’ is my Ph.D. supervisor, Prof. Chris Taylor OBE; I suspect he gets no more sleep than Dvorak. More people to list: Winston Churchill with about 3 hours a night and Margaret Thatcher with 4. (so I’ve heard)

PalmAddict refer to MyPalmLife, who refer to Crimson Fire, who have released a Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance emulator for Palm.

With a large SD card, hundreds of Nintendo games can be carried in one’s pocket. Can this lead off a massive switch to Palm? Refer to PalmAddict for more information.

Picture from Crimson Fire