Charon's activity.log

It finally arrived! Designing interfaces from Jenifer Tidwell. Did have time just to very quickly look through, but looks definitely promising ... when, why and how to use diferent methods of displaying, organanizing and interacting with data. Stay tuned for a review later.

Guys at ESO created a monstrous 9000x8000 pixels image of same kind of huge object - Tarantula nebula. Tarantula is 160 000 light years far, but has 1 700 light years in diameter! Check out zoomable version rather then original 211Mb monstrous TIFF.

A few posts before I mentioned "green" computing and wished to appear more and more. There is a Guide to green electronics from Greenpeace. Unfortunately it shows very bad score for one of my favourite electronics makers - Apple, see following score chart ...

Fortunately Sony Ericsson and Dell whose products I also use are much better. Anyway there is already Green my Apple campaign to push Apple be more environment friendly. So take action and ...

• Write to Steve
• Sign up
• Spread the word
• Get creative

... to get your Apple green!

I was glad again to see excellent performance of DSPAM spam filter. Althought the documentaion says I should train the filter with 300 spams to have best performace and I was prepared to do so, 42 messages were quite enough as I don't receive almost any spam, because everything is stopped by dspam. And I got no false positive as well. See those impressive stats yourr self:

DSPAM rules!

Almost a year of my work for CZ.NIC finally produced a result: we lauchned ENUM to public trial in Czech Republic on wednesday.

VIA launched Clean computing initiative by releasing first component to "Carbone free system" - carbon free C7 CPU. Hope other will follow and we'll see these logos more and more.

At last! Apple introduced new 24" iMac with nVidia GeForce graphics cards. The wait for ultimate desktop machine (small but powerfull, good looking, capable to run Linux with OpenGL acceleration, with as least wires as possible) is over. Now least popular task to get the money begins ...

Do you know how web pages die ? The process is: a decay with no updates for a long time, new version maintained by somebody else, complete abandoning, deletion from server with having no backup, server shutdown and then .... then there is only virtual copy in the web archive with broken links missing images etc. Just like UFO - our old-school Quake 2 clan.

And then ... then the page dies ...

WTF! IBM and Georiga Tech have demonstrated a 500 GHz Silicon-germanium (SiGe) chip, operating at 4.5 Kelvins. The chip was fabricated by IBM on 200mm wafers, and, at room temperature, the circuits operated at approximately 350 GHz. More info here.

I couldn't watch the match from world championship yesterday as czech team played poorly. So I decided to play some computer game ... and the only one I have installed on my brand new Ubuntu powered system was Doom3. I played with some borrowed hardware a long time ago and stopped it because of terrrible performance. But yesterday I lowered the resolution to 640x480, turned off the details and keep on playing even if I had something like 10fps many times.

I went through Delta Complex and Central processing to Site 3 and Caves and it was in-fucking-credible to play those dark tunnels, industrial sites and ancient caves. I finished the game ... but I heard something about strange signals coming from Mars :)

Looks like I'm in sort of wierd group of portable audio players customers as there is no product from any vendor to satisfy my needs. And this situation has been lasted at least for couple of years. And there is no hope to change soon :(

I thought these requirements are not something really exotic, are they ?

• User friendly & easy to use
• Great design / aesthetic look
• Ability to use it with Linux
• Support for OggVorbis
• Adequate battery life

I tried Neuros, but it looks awfully and battery life turned somewhat to 2 hours which is not acceptable. But at least it has cool feature of transmitting the output on selected FM frequency, so I still use it in the car.

Nothing else meets that criteria ... Creative, Emgeton, iAudio ... nobody. For a long time the closest is Apple with iPod. No Ogg support makes me beg after sending mails & signing petions:
APPLE, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, INCLUDE OGG VORBIS IN NEXT FIRMWARE VERSION, PLEASE!

Noticed intereting news on upcoming Microsoft products while reading Slashdot. Vista delayed, Vista 60% of code set to be rewritten, Vista not ready, Office delayed ?! ...

Looks like they're doing serious progress :)

Received wierd spam message today ...

From: "Moreland Mervin" <absenting@codec.ro>
Date: March 17, 2006 5:33:45  GMT+01:00
To: "Moreno Micah" <pavel.tuma@moucha.cc>
Subject: Re[8]:

muttered in a sleepy voice but without malice : 'All right, then . . . but
you'll pay for it ... I warned you, but if you want to ... What interests me
most now is Pontius Pilate . . .  Pilate . .  .' And with that he closed his
eyes.

'Vanna, put him in No. 117 by himself and with someone to watch him.' The
doctor gave his instructions and replaced his spectacles. Then Ryukhin
shuddered again: a pair of white doors opened without a sound and beyond
them stretched a corridor lit by a row of blue night-bulbs. Out of the
corridor rolled a couch on rubber wheels. The sleeping Ivan was lifted on to
it, he was pushed off down the corridor and the doors closed after him.

'Doctor,' asked the shaken Ryukhin in a whisper, 'is he really ill?'
'Oh yes,' replied the doctor.
'Then what's the matter with him?' enquired Rvukhin timidly.
The exhausted doctor looked at Ryukhin and answered wearily: 'Overstimulation
of the motor nerves and speech centres..

No Viagra, no drugs, no penis enlargement, no stocks, no software ... no images, no links ... but what ?!

Just read Techreport's nVidia GF 7900 review with some information about quad-SLI systems. Quite interesting and also funny reading as they really have jokeful editors. Here are some quotes:

"And we have the juicy details on the King Kong of PC graphics, quad SLI, where not one, not two, but four GeForce 7900 GPUs can pull together to squash all competition and raid your Swiss bank account."
"There's nothing like playing some F.E.A.R. on a pair of GeForce 7900 GTXs after a long weekend of yachting, but most of us will probably be more personally interested in the G71's other assignment, the GeForce 7900 GT."
"Probably a whole truckload of cash, because quad SLI will initially be available only through PC system builders like Voodoo and Alienware, who like to charge about the price of a Mazda for a well-equipped PC."

Long time of waiting for more battery power is coming to the end ... Ultracell demonstrated methanol based fuel cells with these specs:

• two working days per single cartridge
• hot-swappable
• will work in sub-zero and desert environments as well
• half weight in comparison to Li-ion batteries

Is there anything else what it could do ? And they look cool ... I guess their designers have been inspired by energy cells (or were these the ammo boxes, don't remember well) from old, very old, but nonetheless the best computer game ever made System shock 2.