Anyone plays rise of nations against computer players ?
I figured out some interesting 'feature' yesterday. When playing against computer players only, try staying in the Medieval Age (or some other age). The computer players will never pass you in age reaserch. Even better, they seem to only do a certain amount of other library researches per age. So you can research all of your library researches, but only advance 1 age, and they'll be stuck at that 1 age + 1 library research per category.
It's weird. And it doesn't work in world domination campaigns. But solo, it can give you a huge advantage ... Which in fact isn't cool once you know it.

It are busy times for the servers of Sherpa. Last week, the windows and database installations were cleaned up by Cronos, today the servers received some extra diskspace.
6 drives of 36GB in raid5 to be precise. I guess that will help us back on track, because there was only like 40 GB in it in total.
Next week, they should also get a memory upgrade. all those upgrades should make up for 3 years of operation time without any adjustments.

You could call it the 'freeze off your hands' training, but it's still popular at this time of the year.
Last sunday 11 persons showed up to do some canoepolo, throw some balls and make some goals. The youth is well presented in Lokeren, which is a good sign for the future.

After 66 years, the asteroid hermes has been rediscovered.
Well, one could argue that it ahs actually been discovered for the first time. Instead of the one big object Hermes was thought to be, it are actually 2 rotating object of about the same size.
Hermes is one of the asteroids that pass earth in a close trajectory.
Because the objects are close to each other, they raise appreciable tides in each other and each has slowed down the other's spin significantly.
Hermes comes really close to earth, but the chances it crashes with earth is very unlikely in our lifetime. It would probably crash into venus first.

I read an article on this subject before, now I read another one, stating a little more details.
Two British companies, Hampshire-based Roke Manor Research and the aerospace giant BAe Systems, have developed a system to give an exact location of each cellphone. And with the use of the Doppler effect (distortion of a wave because of the speed of the object that's producing the wave) they can estimate the moving speed of an object.

The system could be used to track traffic jams or to track speeders as they go. The new development has also drawn alot of attention from privacy organizations who are concerned that the privacy of the persons using a cellphone would be intruded when the new system would actually be used.

Gator, the software budled with other programs like Kazzaa, wants to get rid of the Spyware reputation.
Gator started to file legal suits against companies mentioning there software as spyware. The company claims spyware is when information is sent about a users surfing habits to target the advertising such programs delivers. Adware on the contrary, the term they wish people to use, do so with the user knowing about it.

At least we can say they aren't as bad as the software bundled with iMesh, where you can't even get rid of it by installing iMesh. I still think software shouldn't be used to monitor other software (aka Gator monitoring your habits with internet explorer) and serve unwanted ads (yes, unwanted, because you choose to allow them to serve ads with your Kazzaa, but not pop-ups whenever you visit sites).

Office 2003 is the new version from the well known microsoft office suit.

The suite, officially Office System 2003, brings alot of changes under the hood. But there are also new features visible to the user.

However, as always when microsoft is concerned, there are already reports of small but annoying bugs, or features how microsoft like to call them.

A new feature is the sellf destructing e-mail. An a-mail sent by a person get's automatically destroyed after being read. This allows senders of the e-mail to control how long an e-mail exists. Sceptics already proved that the e-mail is not really deleted. parts of the text are still available on different places.
Also compatibility issues arise with new features. For example the information rights management, where certain information can be released to only certain persons. Beta tests show that mac users are completely shut out when using this feature.

Nuna II, a solar powered vehicle built by a team of 12 students of the universities of Delft and Rotterdam in Holland, won the World Solar Challenge.
The challange is a 3010 KM race accross the Australian continent. The challenge is to build a car to make it through that distance powered by nothing but the sun.
The winning car, Nuna II, achieved the goal in just under 31 hours, beating all previous records. Built on EAS space technology, Nuna II has a theoretical top speed of 170 kmh, which is quite fast for solar powered vehicles.
I can't wait to drive a normal consumer car with that kind of propulsion.

An article on ScienceDaily caught my eye today.
It's not hard to figure out why. The title was somewhat eye-catching.

Are Walruses Right-handed?

Well, how would I know ? But the article reports a scientific study claiming walruses actually are. When they remove sediment from food buried food, they prefer to use there right flipper.
Another prove were the longer bones in the right flipper. Due to frequent use of the right hand, humans also have longer bones in there right arm.

HCC, the Dutch computer club, sued DELL over there terms and conditions. HCC claims they ciolate Dutch law.
I don't know anything about Dutch law, nor there terms, but at work, we happen to all have DELL PCs. So my interest was drawn to the article in PCWorld today.
Still, I think there terms are not that bad, what I hate about DELL computers, is there custom made hardware. When something is screwed up, you can't replace it with something you buy somewhere, you actually have to order everything @ DELL. And adding harddisks to our desktop PCs neither is possible, there's simply no room for them.

Microsoft released it's first super patch. The super patch, or Update Rollup 1 for Microsoft Windows XP officially, bundles 22 critical updates previously released.
With the recent security risks from unpatched Windows machines, Microsoft had to change the patching strategy.
At the same time, Microsoft promised alot more things. Firstly, there will only be monthly patches instead of weekly, making the life of system administrators alot easier. Secondly, the patches will be smaller and very easy to rollback in case of a problem.

"Excuse me, could I get some whater from you ? My cellphones's battery is flat ..."
You think that is a weird question ? Well, I don't, ... anymore.
Canadian scientists have developed a method of generating electricity from water for use in small devices like cellphones, calculators and many more.
The technology is based on the interaction between liquids and solids on a very small scale. The surface of the solid receives a small charge that attracts opposite-charged ions in the liquid and repels like-charged ions. I'm quite sure the details of the process are very interesting, but unfortunatly I don't understand it a bit.
Some work needed to be done to increase the scale of the electricity produced. A 30cm column of water will produce one to two microamps, which is why to little to power anything, but still. They are now developing parallel tubes to increase the current.

I have finished the site for Canoe & kayak services, a store that sells kayak equipment. The content is still rather empty, but he's filling in his products as I write this, so that should improve.

I picked up some interesting news a few days ago.
Nokia produced a game console, called the N-Gage and hopes to achieve a large market share in the gaming industry. No prices have been announced yet, but they hope to sell several millions in 2004 worldwide.