Star Wars

All over again. The chinese have managed to shoot down one of their olsd weather satellites.

Frankly, I'm happy they did it. This way, they will have some more pull on bush's administration in getting them round a table to signa treaty to ban such weapons which, apparently, the US have been developing too, albeit enshrouded in secret.

I'm all for a civil conquest of space.

Free Shareware Software

I know, it seems like an oxymore, since you usually have to pay for shareware. Still, people at http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/ do actually give away one different (and useful) software every day. Until now, I did get a nice backup utility, an advanced text editor, and a software to compare similarity between images.

Can't say much about the backup utility, other than it seems to work OK at home, but not on the work computer. In this second case, the scheduler doesn't start the backup, although manual backup is still possible. It compresses to ZIP, which is a pain if I want to recover only one file, although may be there's the option of only extracting the file I want to recover (through winzip I imagine).

The ImageComparer works very nicely, although it is trigger happy and flags as likely identical pictures shot in the same location: e.g., a picture of mine in front of brussel's Atomium, and one of Marie taken two minutes later in the very same spot.

Haven't tried much of the gridinsoft editor, although I have seen that his regular expression engine does not recognise \t as a tab (!) - hopefully, though, his sorting abilities maty mean that I'll miss a bit less the wonderful unix utilities such as sort, awk, grep. never mind, it can only sort alphabetically the lines, not based for example on single columns - bash scripting still rules...

In the meanwhile, I've started looking for a Linux-based PDA with (possibly) full qwerty keyboard (real or simulated) and GPS capabilities too. may be one day i'll have the time to write something on it. Otherwise, it'll be cool nonetheless. And hopefully useful. :-)

My first Wikibution

that is, my first contribution to Wikipedia. In my city's entry, I've added a tidibit of info regarding one of the main sights. It doesn't show my name as I didn't register (yet), but now I have so I'll start adding my little knowledge to the lot already accumulated there...

Quantum Interrogation

Here, is one of the best 50 posts I blogged about last week. An exercise in quantum measurement, substituting the Schrodinger's cat with sleeping puppies, and knowing whether they're in the box without waking them up. cute, indeed