Bodyboarding

My wife bought me a bodyboard for my birthday last month. It is a black Morey Mach 7-7. I also received a pair of Pod fins, a QuickSilver second skin as well as flipper and board leashes.

I tested the equipment the weekend that I got it, but there were basically no good waves. Since then we were either too busy, the weather was bad or there were no waves on the Strand beach. This Sunday, we finally went to the beach again for another try. After a quick thunder storm, the weather cleared up a bit. By midday, the sun was out and the wind was resting (for a change). The swell was about 3-4 feet, so it was a nice size for a beginner to try his luck.

I bravely tackled the cold water head on. I must have looked quite funny walking in the shallow waters with my new fins! Once in the not too shallow waters I dropped down on the board and almost froze solid, but one can't worry about the temperature too much. Got to have some fun!

Paddling out to the deeper waters where one can actually catch some waves, as they break, is quite exhausting. I still need a lot of practice. Getting past the white water is another aspect I need to work on, but until I perfected the art I need to develop a taste for salt water and burning eyes.

After a number of failed attempts to take a wave, I finally succeeded. I stayed mostly on the crest of the wave, in the white water. Non the less, the ride was exhilarating! At first it felt as if I missed the wave, it felt as if I was slowing down and then suddenly I was push forward while acceleration, followed by sustained speed for a while and then slowing down. Surfing on the white water provides for a very bumpy ride, the board vibrates like mad. It was quite a challenge not to loose balance and tip over.

After the ride was over, I just couldn't wait to do it again. The rest of the day I just enjoyed myself, while trying to learn the way of the waves. I must admit that I was jealous when I saw how easy the surfers paddle around to get in a good position to catch a wave. With their long thin board they have less water resistance than a bodyboarder have. On the other hand, I have fins, so maybe I just need to practice.

Rotary Group Study Exchange

I've been selected for Rotary International's Group Study Exchange (GSE) program next year. The GSE is a cultural and vocational exchange program between Rotary districts. I'm falling into District 9350, which includes the western part of South Africa, Namibia and Angola. The team I'm part of will visit District 9220, which includes Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion, Mayotte, Comores and Djibouti.

The exchange is 4 weeks long and we will depart around the middle of April 2007. Until then there is still a lot of team and personal preparation involved. I'm furthermore busy learning more about Rotary and is visiting the Helderberg Club on a regular basis. The club has been very helpful and friendly towards me and the GSE effort!

I'm in the process of creating a website for our team. It is still under construction, but you can visit it here.

AAD Airshow

We attended the Africa Aerospace & Defence (AAD) airshow at the Ysterplaat AFB over the weekend. The show started on a low note after one of the Sasol Tiger pilots died after his plane crashed in the ocean during a practice run a day before the show. I've seen them perform last year at the Ysterplaat airshow, they are very good and its quite a show.

We attended the Sunday show. Here is some pictures we took at the show:

Cape Town SPIN

I'm now on the committee for the Cape Town chapter of the Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN). This is one of many SPINs around the world and the first in South Africa.

From our website:

"The South African SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) is a non-profit leadership forum for the free and open exchange of software expertise, experiences and ideas, by creating a knowledge society based on all disciplines of software engineering."

We meet every third Wednesday of the month after work. If you are a software professional in the Cape Town area, you are invited to attend one of our meetings.

Back to work

My holiday is over and its back to work (9 Jan). The last couple of weeks before my holiday started was hectic and packed with late nights. We were trying to complete a project before going on leave, because I wanted to start the year with new projects. Unfortunately, there was still some outstanding issues left that we had to finish this year. The project was finally completed yesterday.

Anyway, the holiday was great. I got a lot of rest and very infrequently thought of work (I struggle to get this right sometimes)! Sadly, the weather was unpleasant most of the time. The Strand (and Cape Town as a whole) is one windy hell hole this time of the year. It is kind of sad, since it is the prime holiday season.

The wind did however not stopped us from having fun. We played tourist, tourist and visited many spots in the Cape Town area. Among them were the Tygerberg Zoo, Two Oceans Acquarium, World of Birds and the Cape Town Planetarium. We also spend some time with family and friends, which was also fun.

I'm looking forward to this year. There is many exciting things that is going to happen.

Dilbert Blog

Scott Adams, my favourite cartoonist and one of my favourite authors, has started his own blog recently. It is called The Dilbert Blog.

He is quite diligent and post an entry daily and sometimes more than once a day. We DNRC members can now get even more addicted to his humour.

The blog is also therapeutic and very good for your health. Few things let you feel so good as when you can laugh at the stupid things people do!

More news is that the e-book of "God's Debris" is now freely available for download.

Back to work

I started working again this week. The one week holiday was fun and we enjoyed Hermanus a lot! Unfortunately we were not very happy with our planned accommodation, so we spend the first hours after arriving in Hermanus looking for an alternative. We decided to stay at Moby's Backpackers. The staff there are very friendly and helpful! We had to cut our stay short a bit because of bad weather.

This week we had part one of our Agile Software Development course (presented by Jaco van der Merwe). It was very informative and exciting. I'm quite looking forward to the second part and to try out one of the Agile processes.

The "On-line Viscometer Controller" project I've been working so hard on this year shipped out to Botswana this week. I'm looking forward to the feedback, hope it is all good :)

This week I also wrapped up my first Masters thesis examination. I was the external examiner for a student, Francois Cilliers, at the University of Stellenbosch. It is quite hard work, but it was fun. Francois did a good job and he received his degree with honours.

Vacation time!

Whoa! Its vacation time!

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, we will be going to Hermanus. If you are unfortunate enough to slave away while we lay on the beach, drinking beer, getting a tan and all that other nice things, then let me know. I'll have another beer for you as well.

On the 31st October it is my birthday and our wedding anniversary. We'll be married for three years then. So, as you can see, we will have even more reason to party!

If you are jealous because I'm having fun you can always go check out the The 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library. It is a collection of movie spoofs, enacted by bunnies. I like the Pulp Fiction one the most.

Holiday coming up

It is almost the end of October. On the 31'st it is my birthday and our wedding anniversary. So this is usually a good time to take a holiday. This time around I need it more than ever. It has been a hectic year!

The last two years we hanged around in the Cape Town area because accommodation is so friggen expensive. We rather used the money to do stuff around here. However, we have decided that we need to get out of town for a couple of days. After a lengthy search we settled for the Hermanus Esplanade. The website is lean on information and pictures, but it looks cool enough.

We will be staying in self-catering apartments. Each apartment has its own private braai area. So if the weather allows, we will do a lot of drinking and braaing that week!

Long time no blogging

Long time no blogging! I've been way too busy (again) and just went through two rough, stressful, hellish weeks here at work. Altogether, it has been an arduous year for me. I cannot wait for it to be over. I'm so glad it is weekend!

Anyway, I've got a few things to mention:

• Pauline, one of Adele's sisters, returned from a working trip to England and Italy last week. She took some nice photos of the volcanic islands around Panarea (off the tip of Italy), Frome (a town in England) and London. She also brought us some nice (and delicious) presents.
  
• Charl Botha received his PhD last month. He was so nice to send me a paper copy of his thesis ("Techniques and Software Architecture for Medical Visualisation and Image Processing"). As can be expected from him, it is very professional. It even has an ISBN number! I don't think you can order a copy from Amazon yet, but you can get an electronic version from his website.
  
• While we are on the subject of academia. I'm now officially an external examinator for a master's candidate of the Digital Signal Processing department, Electric & Electronic Engineering at the University of Stellenbosch. I feel quite clever. If only it was true, I'm actually just sneaky.
  
• I've go a link to NumberSpiral today. If you like math, you will love this page. It offers some cool relations between a specifically numbered spiral and some specially numbers (perfect squares, primes, pronic, etc.). It is quite fascinating how the universe comes together!
  
• My Cybot robot is coming on well. I still have quite a bit of construction to do though. The latest additions allow one to upload sound files, such as your own voice, to the robot. You can then get it to play the sound back at the proper moment. When someone is in your way, you can get it to say something like: "Get out of my way vile human scum!". Furthermore, one can now add sub routines to your programs. So now you can write a proper avoidance (which is quite hard to get right with the current set of programming blocks!) and call it from your main program. As promised before, I would upload some pictures one day.
• I've also finished the second book (Confusion) of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. I've enjoyed it even more than the first book. The story and characters are really well thought out. I just love how the plots are intertwined and how everything seems to be connected in some way. The series has so far kindled my interests in history, chemistry, politics and human nature in general. However,some of my friends find the series quite difficult and not as enjoyable as Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash.

That is it for now.

Bandwidth Drain

In the past couple of months I noticed that my website is using increasing more bandwidth. That means that the amount of data served by my site to the world was increasing. While I was delighted that I seem to get more visitors every month, I couldn't really see why. This is just a personal website with very few visitors. The site's usage analysers showed that my main page, blog and master's thesis pages are the three most popular sites visited, but the hit and byte usage numbers didn't add up.

Last month my 7 GB bandwidth limitation was reached. When this happens the site simple cease to function. So, for a about 4 days my website was offline (bad, but not critical) and we (Adele and me) couldn't send or receive email through the pshymorphic.com domain. Since pshymorphic.com is our primary personal email server, it is quite annoying! All messages send to us, just bounced (probably pissed off all the spammers, hehe).

At the start of this month, when the domain was online again, I started monitoring the usage statistics more carefully. The site was transferring about 150-250 MB per day. That is a hell of a log of data, but both Urchin and Webalizer couldn't tell me what the cause was.

About two weeks ago I decided to get to the bottom of this problem. I went through the Webalizer and Urchin reports in great detail. I finally found a clue. Urchin reported that files with the "gif/jpeg" extension were contributing the most to bandwidth usage. I made a few calculations (bytes/hits) for this category and realised that the problems must be a duo to a single file that is at least 500 KB big. I soon found that the offending picture is my somewhat famous GothicBackground. I pretty much forgot that it was on my site, since I've posted a link to this file more than two years ago in my old blog (see 10 March 2003 entry). Amazing how cool the net is.

The disappointing thing is that both Urchin and Webalizer didn't show this file in their "Top Pages" or file list. I'm not sure why, maybe it is a configuration thing. In retrospect, I should have simply monitored the 'access_log' file directly. I would have seen immediately how often the picture was accessed and how big it actually is (560 KB).

I now knew what the cause of the problem was, but a new dilemma presented itself. Who the hell is using the picture? It was obviously not people downloading the picture about 400 times a day. Someone, with a fairly popular site, is referencing the picture directly! I could delete the picture to solve the problem, but I didn't want to do that. I wanted to know who's using the picture, but it is impossible (as far as I know) to get the reference information from the limited data to my disposal.

I tried searching for the file on Google, Yahoo and MSN, but no luck. I did found links to the file on a few sites, so a few people liked it enough to download it :)

All is not lost. I'm and engineer and engineers solve problems. I devised a sneaky plan (I can be very sneaky sometimes). I used Gimp to create a new image. This image contains a request to the viewer to email me with information about where the image was seen. I uploaded the picture to my site and anxiously waited for the emails to stream in. Nothing happened :(

Finally, after about a week, a friendly soul (thanks Nicole!) send me an email with the info I was looking for. The website belongs to a band called "Dimond in the Ruff". I'm surprised that the owner(s) didn't notice the new background.

Now that I've got all the info I need, I must decide what to do. I don't have a problem that someone uses the picture, but they can at least download the picture to their own site. For a minimal fee I might even serve a smaller version of the picture to the site :) My evil side contemplated to replace the image with the infamous Goatse "art work". For the uninitiated, read the story about Goatse at Wikipedia (no picture there, I promise). This plan got a few good laughs from Rob, he think I should do it. For now, I'm going to wuss out on that plan. I'll decide what to do over the weekend.

Ode to the Froth Master!

For me, making hot chocolate and Nesquik is a very important and delicate operation. I hate straight milk! So, in order to make my bones and teeth happy, I cut my milk it with these heavenly chocolate treats.

The problem is that I can never manage to completely dissolve the particles in the milk using a 'plain old spoon'. Over time I developed a special process to prepare my milky treat. I first pour half a glass/cup of milk, then heat the milk if required. Next, I add N teaspoons of powder, followed by stirring vigorously to mix the drink properly. I then fill up the glass/cup, followed by more stirring. This is followed by more heating if required. The final step is enjoyment, but only partially, because there is always some undissolved particles left in the milk that spoils my fun :(

I swear by my non-patented two-step process (it makes the drink better, really!), but Adele always thinks I'm weird for preparing the drink that way.

In recent months, I started fantasising about an electro-mechanical device that can fully mix my treat. We have a handheld blender/mixer at home, but it is just too big and powerful to use for stirring a glass of milk. So, I started to passively look for such a device. I've seen a few models, but they were all expensive and much too fancy (gazillion different stirring heads) for my need. Since I'm suppose be an electronic engineer I thought that I should just make my own device using a cheap old DC motor (the kind frequently used in toys). Then, suddenly my world changed. We were shopping over the weekend and there it was. My dream machine, a simple milk frother! The best part was that it only costs R 26, bargain.

So, we bought it and immediately went home for a chocolate milk treat. I can report back that this device is excellent and totally the man, I mean machine, for the job. In just a few seconds, all the particles are dissolved. In a few more seconds you can work up a nice head of froth. I can now enjoy the ultimate milk chocolate drink, with minimum effort and maximum enjoyment!

Here is a picture of my new favourite tool. I can recommend it highly!

Birds Paradise Robertson

Adele and I visited Birds Paradise in Robertson again this week. They have a bunch of birds and monkeys there, but we usually go there for the ponies. Adele loves ponies!

I took some pictures of some of the animals with my cellphone. There is a few nice pictures of the ponies, crocodiles, llamas and wallabies. If you are in the Robertson area you should go check it out. Next time we are there we want to visit the monkeys and exotic birds as well.

Happy car

A good battery makes for a happy car. I mentioned in an earlier post that I had a lot of trouble with my car's electrical system. It seemed that every time it rains and I drive long distance and then get into heavy traffic where one needs to stop/go at a slow pace, the car started to "loose" power. The radio would shut off for a while and sometimes the car would completely switch off, causing some non-entertaining (especially when you are doing 120 km/h on the highway) back fires.

After six trips to three different shops (two of which is accredited VW service centers) the problem was still not fixed. So, after the car couldn't start due to a dead battery, I took the battery for acid test and it turned out that all six cells were dead. We replaced the battery and now the car is working perfectly again. The only concern I have now is that there is some root problem that caused the battery to die in the first place. I guess time will time.

The symptoms now makes sense. When it is raining, I use a lot of power (lights, heater, wipers, etc.) then as soon as I started to hit the heavy traffic I must stop. When you stop, the car's radiator fan sometimes switches on to cool the radiator. This extra load proved too be too much for the battery. I guess it shorted, actually an open circuit makes more sense for me here, but I do not know enough about the chemistry inside the battery. In the end this had nothing to do with wetness, but power consumption. It took me a while to see the correlation though :)

What bothers me about this story is that I would think that the battery is one of the items that an auto electrician will check when you ask them too look for electrical problems. Sad that none of the three did that.

On the positive side, I learned a bit about the electrical system in my Golf. I also learned that there is nothing arcane about the electrics in cars and that I can apply my electrical knowledge to cars as well.

Kent Beck lecture

On Wednesday almost all the developers at Stone Three attended a public lecture by Kent Beck at the University of Cape Town. Kent is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP). I was quite please to see how many people attended the lecture.

His style of presenting is quite different from the norm, but I enjoyed the talk a lot. He did not cover much on the XP practices or tried to sell XP at all. He focused on a set of core values, such as communication, respect, courage, integrity, simplicity and feedback, and how these values influence the way he develops software. Using these values and principles he develops the current set of XP practices.

He made it quite clear that everyone should evaluate their own values and principles, then use them to develop practices, customised for themselves, to make software engineering more enjoyable and doing a better job of it. One should not be surprised if you end up with similar practices than advocated by XP.

Overall, he is like a psychiatrist, probing and guiding one to get to the bottom of problems. He then relates processes that worked for him in the past. This way he enthuses people to think a certain way, instead of slamming down a bunch of rules as law and forcing one to adhere to it.
He is very much like Dr. Phil, but for software engineering :)

The lecture was organised by the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) . Apparently they would like to get more "celebs" to come to South Africa for lectures, etc. This would be quite cool and a good thing for the industry.

Germs suck!

Germs suck! My short holiday was screwed over by the flu. I spend the whole week in bed. The pros are that I got a lot of sleep and that a made a fair dent in my reading stash.

One of the books I read was Andy Kessler's "How We Got Here: A Silicon Valley and Wall Street Primer" e-book. It is a nice tour of technology and markets, starting from the industrial revolution till now. It is quite cool how the technology and the markets worked together. Makes one think about the implications of national policies and what it means for innovation. As well as what impact innovation can have on the wealth of a country. You can get a free version from the previous link.

Dr Ashit Talukder visited Stone Three yesterday to tell us about his research in distributed sensors for health monitoring. His group are doing some cool stuff with motes. He also showed us his Sony Vaio U notebook. It looks like a big PDA, but packs the power of a small notebook. This is the computer to get if a tablet PC is too big for you. I wouldn't mind owning one.

Short holiday

Whoa! I'm off to have myself a short holiday!

I hope to get the car fixed and to get my robot up to date.

A time to breathe

I'm just starting to wrap up a project I've been working on way to hard! I've been neglecting my personal life, health and no doubt my sanity as well. I tell you, working almost day and night for weeks on end is no fun. However, the project in general was quite cool. I learned a lot about LabView, Compact FieldPoint, signal processing and made some new contacts, but I'm ready to take a breather.

I've got a lot of things to say and do. Chief among them is submitting my tax return. This year is the latest I've submitted my return so far. Hope it is not a trend.

Things to say

• Eddie Baumgardt, my brother-in-law, joined the blogsphere as well. If you know him, go visit. His blog is more interesting than mine :)
• Marguerite is still enjoying her visit in Canada. She posted some very beautiful pictures on her site. I'm just a sucker for nature photos.
  
• Kent Beck from Extreme Programming fame (or is that infamy?) will be visiting South Africa next month. A couple of us at work will go listen to his talk in Cape Town. Maybe I will post some comments afterwards.
• The other day I came across Lucy. From the website: "Lucy is our long-term, pure research project to develop some novel theories about the fundamental operating principles of the brain.". Lucy is a robot, but the main action is happening in the AI software. Lucy's inventor (Steve Grand) was also the brain behind the Creatures series of games. Check out his current research on his website.
  
• Car trouble again. Our VW Golf Chico has a mysterious electrical problem that only surfaces when its raining (and this time of the year it is almost always). During wet spells, the car's electrical system will just switch (may sort?) out for very short while. It has happened three times now that the electrical system shut down completely (even the radio resets). So far the car always starts again, but it is not fun when your car dies on you while you are doing 120 km/h on the highway. We've took the poor car to two shops now (including the VW dealer in Somerset West) and they couldn't find the problem. What to do?
• Project Aardvark is coming on nicely it seems. I'm quite curious about what the product is. It seems I won't have to wait for too long the get the answers.
  

Things to do

• As I said earlier, I need to make SARS (South African Revenue Service) happy and submit my tax return. Each year, SARS is making the process less painful. I quite like the positive attitude that SARS tries to portray. Instead of the traditional warnings of criminal punishment, they rather inform the public what the taxes do for them and the country in general. SARS further tries to help people complete their tax return as well. Every Saturday they have a group of people stationed at the more popular malls that can help you with those darn forms. They will of course never be able to make it completely painless. There is always a good amount of pain involved if you hand over a fair chunk of your income to the government. I'm developing a back pain just thinking about it!
• I've got a lot of Cybot construction to do. Cybot is a mail order robot targeted at kids (like me) . Every two week you get a magazine and some parts that you have to assemble. The robot is quite advance already. At this stage it can run around autonomously, one can program it to run around according to your design, control it via a handheld device and control it via voice commands. Pretty sweet toy. Future improvements include a soccer playing module, camera module and tracking orbital module (a separate robot). Anyway, I took a lot of pictures with my old cellphone (small resolution though) and will take more with my new cellphone (1.3MPixel, much better). I want to organise them all and post it on my website at some stage.
• Finish reading "G0del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" so that I can get to read the 20+ other books I've bought, but haven't read yet. I'm about one third through and its really excellent. The book has been published 20 years ago and is still a must read. It can be quite "heavy" on the mathematical side (all the formal system goodies), but the lessons learned is remarkable.
• I would like to write a bit more about LabView and my experience with the development environment up till now. Watch this space.
  
• I would like to spend some more time on my AI research. Maybe, write some basic programs to test some of my evolutionary programming ideas, etc. There are two things that I would like to do in the short to medium term. One is to write a Corewars warrior evolver (a program that generates and evolves warriors). The other is to write a reasonably good AI for the Diplomacy board game. The first one seems the easiest and I will probably start there. More about this at a later time.
• The final item on my TODO list is to have some fun. Anyone got some?
  

Anyway, I've meet my babbling quota for today.

New Dining Table

We bought a new dining set last weekend. It comes as an disassembled kit. So, me and Adele spend a good few hours on Saturday and Sunday shopping and assembling the table and chairs.

I was a bit disappointed with the kit. Firstly, quite a few components were missing (in the case of the table it about half of the components!) and secondly, I had to redrill some of the holes in the chairs to get the bolts completely in.

However, the end product looks very nice! Have a look at some pictures.

Margi's Blog

Marguerite, my sister-in-law, is working in Canada for a few months. She just started her own blog to talk about her experience. If you know her, you should go read it.

Project Aardvark

Like most companies FrogCreek offer employment for inters. However, unlike most companies, they will let the interns build a complete product from scratch. The project is called Aardvark.

What makes it even more interesting is that they will make a documentary about the project. Maybe it will become a reality TV show about software development. On the project page you will also find a blog from the interns.

I think it would be interesting to follow.

H.P. Lovecraft and killing Zombies

Killing zombies is lots of fun and can be very therapeutic. The activity is ideal for relieving stress or to just get you mind of things for a while. However, conjuring up zombies can be hard work. You will need a (fresh) graveyard, magick 'ingredients', ammo, darkness and a few free hours.

While you can never beat the real thing, you can now enjoy this activity without leaving your desk by playing this flash game. It is based on a short story (Herbert West - Reanimator [pdf]) by H.P. Lovecraft.

Let the heads roll!

Atlas of the Human Journey

The Atlas of the Human Journey is an interactive map that shows how humans migrated from Africa to populate the rest of the planet. It is part of the Genographic project. Researchers use genetic markers to track the migration patterns of our own specie.

I found the atlas very interesting and it worth studying. There is lots and lots of information.

Gecko's like coffee too.

I've discovered a baby gecko in my coffee mug the other day. I think it is proof that gecko's like coffee too. Here is a picture of this highly cultured gecko.

How useful is an MBA for a small ISV?

Erik Sink offered some advice on how useful an MBA is to a small ISV startup.

One of the thing that came out is that small software companies should get some of their good developers into marketing. While you there also check out his 'Marketing for Geeks' article.

What to do with those stickers?

When you buy a computer system from one of the big vendors, you often find a bunch of stickers attached to your chassis. They do an especially good job at defacing a laptop.

Not to worry though, Paul Graham figured out what to do with them.

How to destroy the Earth

So, you are a regular evil genius. Constantly pondering what mischievous activity to commit next. I've got just the right hobby for you: destroying mother Earth.

The article is a humourous take on possible methods to destroy our home planet. As it turns out, it is quite difficult to completely and utterly obliterate this glorified rock.

If this is too an ambitious project for you, then you can always go for the lesser, but not less fun, activity of taking over the world. Here is some pointers to get you started:

• Captain Electro's guide to taking over the world.
  
• How evil are you?
  
• How to be a villain (feel free to buy me one).
• Take over the world.
  

Goodbye dear laptop

Crime sucks! Last night my work laptop was stolen from my car while it was parked in a 'secure' parking lot. It was only three weeks old, barely old enough to surf the net without overlord guidance.

The villain (boosfokker) cut the battery cables to disable the alarm and then broke in from the driver side by punching a small hole in the door, just underneath the keyhole. They then gained access to the boot via the back seat.

This attack seems to be a known vulnerability for my car. No patches has been released that I know off.

How to start a startup

One of my favourite technical authors, Paul Graham, wrote an article about How to Start a Startup. If you have read a number of these type of articles you will recognise many of the ingredients for success, this one is no different. Very good read.

Security vs Quality of Life

Here is a short piece by Hunter S. Thompson about security. Does a secure man have a better life or just a more mundane existence.

Hard Drive Wind Chimes

I dissected a number of hard drives to scavage the motors for possible use in robotics. Now I have something to do with the rest of the parts, making wind chimes!

What You'll Wish You'd Known in High School

Paul Graham's latest article, What You'll Wish You'd Known, is now available. It is mildly off-topic from his normal posts, but still worth a read.

In short, instead of trying to figure out what you want to become, kids should rather spend their time tackling projects that are fun, 'cool' and challenging in a field that interests them. That way you keep learning new things (keep that brain juices flowing), do something you like (have fun) and take responsibility (become an adult) .

I think his suggestion, of taking up a project outside of your normal, possibly boring and monotonous work, is just as suitable for adults. In fact, one should try to keep challenging yourself constantly, That is the path to continuous growth. I'm fortunate to have a 'day job' that provides these qualities: fun, cool and challenging! However, even with such a great job, I still try to do other things, such as playing with robots and AI.

There is so many people who are not as fortunate. For them it is best to do something about it, less they die of boredom and stupidity caused by stagnation and repetition.

Carl Zimmer

This week I 'discovered' the work of Carl Zimmer. He writes science related essays and books, especially on the subject of evolution. His latest article, Testing Darwin, appeared in Discover magazine this month.

The article primarily covers the Digital Evolution Laboratory's digital life simulator called Avida. The goal of Avida is to make it easier and faster to study evolutionary concepts, both digital and biological. Its quite fascinating how they are able to demonstrate or duplicate many biological concepts using the software.

Carl also has a popular blog that seems very interesting.

Expiration of online e-commerce account information

Bruce Schneier has a short but nice entry about the fact that the login information you often need to enter to buy products on-line, never expires. By supplying the information, you have effectively created an account at the vendor and are therefore liable for all activity on that account and are always a target for their on-line marketing efforts, etc.

He suggested that an option to terminate the commercial relationship between you and the vendor would be good. It would certainly let you manage your accounts yourself, as it should be!