MIT Media Labs has come up with a design for a sub 100$ notebook computer. It is intended for developing countries. It’s a pretty novel idea. As the computer will eventually include Wi-Fi, I wouldn’t mind buying one myself. You can read about it in this BBC News report.
Domino Pressure
I’ve been playing Domino Pressure every now and then for the past two months. It’s pretty challenging. The goal is to tip the right domino (by clicking it), so that it will cause all the other dominos to fall and eventually squash the tomato. My record is around level 105. Enjoy.
How I started listening to The Prodigy
Around 1992 there was a radio station in Israel called “Zahal 2”. It broadcasted, among other things, alternative music and at that time some electronic music. Trance music was not even defined as Trance music back then. Anyway, all electronic music was either categorized as “Techno” or “Rave”. Under both categories, The Prodigy’s Out Of Space and Charly were broadcasted. I used to really like those tracks, but in Israel you couldn’t (and in fact still can’t) buy any singles, so your options were either buying the album of the band, or a compilation of songs with the song you’re looking for in it.
Lacking any direction in music, I was a serial buyer of compilations. It doesn’t mean that I bought a lot of them – CDs were pretty expensive, and as a teenager I couldn’t afford as many as I wanted. One day my older brother, who really liked pop music and generally introduced me to the idea of listening to the radio, told me that I should buy an album of a band instead of a compilation and get some direction.
I pondered it a lot, went to the CD store a couple of times returning empty-handed. But one day I did it – I bought my first ever album of a band. It was The Prodigy Experience. I’m a big fan since. I doubt it that that was my brother’s intension.
Lobster Vending Machine
Engadget brings us this weird lobster vending machine. I’ll have to see it with my own eyes to believe.
The Prodigy
The Prodigy is my all time favorite band. They are simply the best band in the world. The Prodigy are a trio: Liam Howlett, Keith Flint and Maxim. Liam, who makes all of The Prodigy’s music, is a genius and a true master.
The Prodigy’s latest album is called “Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned” (AONO). It came after a long 7 year silence, which happened because of Liam’s writer’s block. But the album is brilliant and was worth the wait. Also, by all reports, The Prodigy’s live act is back rocking as hard as ever.
During October a “best of” album will be released, and will be named (after a great track) “Their Law”. Therefore, I declare October as Prodigy month for this blog. I’ll theme this blog a little accordingly, and mention some stuff about The Prodigy. I might even start earlier than October, being excited and all.
Some links to Prodigy stuff:
Official website
nekosite, the website for Prodigy’s number one fan. Look inside the forums. A lot of stuff there.
Brainkiller, where you can download some tracks and videos
TheProdigy.nl, another place for downloads
Palm will switch to Windows Mobile on next Treo version
It’s the end of an era. One of the most successful smartphones ever, the Palm Treo, will switch, on its next version, to the Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system instead of the Palm OS.
I really like Palm. I used to own a Palm Pilot III and today I own a Palm Tungsten T. It is well known that the Palm company has gone through a lot of changes and restructuring over the past few years and made quite a lot of mistakes along the way. But this is a real shame. Palm OS is a good, solid, user-friendly, oriented towards simplicity while saving battery life operating system.
Microsoft is, of course, celebrating the event. On Microsoft’s homepage you can see this image. All that they have left to do is a victory dance, then buy Palm and fire all of the employees.
I wonder what the Treo with Windows Mobile will have to offer that other Windows-based smartphones don’t already have. It better be good.
About not giving up
There is a fine line between being determined or persistent and being stupidly stubborn. It’s the same fine line that separates the brave and the dumb.
Today I think I was just stubborn, but to tell you the truth, right now I’m happy about it. Yesterday I was at a wedding, and slept only 3 hours or so at night. That’s because I got up for my morning workout. I thought about easing it up a bit by switching today’s aerobic with tomorrow’s weight lifting, but decided against it. I did the entire aerobic exercise according to my routine, and then I did Yoga.
The strange thing is that my heart rate reached 179 bpm, 4 bpm less than my all time high. I never know in advance whether it’s going to be a rough day or a relatively easy day, heart rate-wise. I mean, today I expected it to reach at least 181. Anyway, it felt like 181 :)
An idea on how to fight adware/spyware
This is a short idea… adware and spyware authors rely on connecting to some of Windows’ (or Internet Explorer’s) services through the Windows Registry. Generally speaking, there’s a DLL somewhere, which is pointed to by a GUID in the registry.
It’s possible to know, from the DLL, which interfaces the classes inside implement and implement their interfaces yourself. Then, by changing the pointing GUID in the registry to a new DLL, which implements the same interfaces, Windows will load your stub DLL (which does nothing, for example) and this will disable the malicious software.
I admit that I didn’t look into it in enough detail to make sure it works, and right now I don’t feel like infesting my computer with crapware (nor am I going to buy virtual PC software) so I’m just wondering if it’s a good idea.
Gizmo Blogs
Pluggable Compiler
While reading this post about C# 3.0 on MSDN Blogs I thought about an idea to make pluggable compilers. Let me explain:
In every programming language the language designers have to decide which features go into the language and which features stay out. These decisions are crucial to the development of a language and the rate of adoption of it. Once a decision to include a language feature is made, it cannot be undone.
So the idea is to make the compiler pluggable, in the sense that you could include lingual features you’re interested in and exclude others. This could be used to streamline the development style in a team of programmers, for example. In the companies that I have worked for so far, using advanced programming techniques, which were great to use but you had to go through a learning curve to understand, was frowned upon. In production code there’s not always room for creativity at the price of code readability.
A pluggable compiler won’t be easy to make. It will have include a parser, which will know to which compiler plugin it should address when it finds a certain syntax, and different feature syntaxes may interfere with one another. Now I’m wondering if it is even possible to make a plugin-based compiler. Maybe just having the possibility of turning off some language features could be nice. But it’s just an idea.