The Alaska Volcano Observatory is monitoring the state of the Augustine Volcano since it
erupted on January 11th 2006 175 miles from Anchorage.

Their website has received more than 200 million hits from visitors who want to view the information streamed live from over 30 cameras and recording devices set up in its vicinity.

While preparing for my traffic school test, I came
across the following section in the online traffic school
test manual.

Under a section titled
Safe Driving While in an Earthquake

"Drivers in California travel in the car approximately 63 million times a day"



I am curious to know how they came up with that number ?

Under the section titled
Emergencies - Dealing with Brake Failures while driving

Sideswipe Objects (attempting to reduce speed)
Sideswiping involves slowing the vehicle by deflecting the car off other objects on the road. No object should ever be hit head-on, nor should objects like curbs be hit, as they could cause the car to over-turn. Guard rails and parked cars would be good objects to sideswipe, as they might gradually slow the vehicle.



err...ok

Modern medicine is redefining old age and may soon allow
people to live regularly beyond the current upper limit of 120 years,
experts said on Wednesday.

Richard Miller of the Michigan University Medical School said tests on mice
and rats -- genetically very similar to humans -- showed lifespan could be
extended by 40 percent, simply by limiting calorie consumption.

Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist from Cambridge University believes
the first person to live to 1,000 has already
been born and told the meeting that periodic repairs to the body using stem
cells, gene therapy and other techniques could eventually stop the aging
process entirely.

De Grey argues that if each repair lasts 30 or 40 years, science will
advance enough by the next "service" date that death can be put off
indefinitely -- a process he calls strategies for engineered negligible
senescence.

Frederick P Brook state the following regarding the practice of
Flow Charting your design in software engineering in his popular book
The Mythical Man-Month

"The flow-chart is the most thoroughly oversold piece of program documentation. Many programs don't need
flow chart at all; few programs need more than one-page flow chart....."

"The detailed blow-by-blow flow chart is an obsolete nuisance, suitable only for initiating beginners into algorithmic thinking. When introduced by Goldstine and von Neumann the little boxes and their contents served as
a high-level language grouping the inscrutable machine-language statements into clusters of significance. As Iversion early recognized, in a systematic high-level language the clustering is already done, and each box contains a statement. Then the boxes themselves become no more than a tedious and space-hogging exercise in drafting; they might as well be eliminated. Then nothing is left but the arrows. The arrows joining a statement to its successor are redundant; erase them. That leaves only GO TO's. And if one follows good practice and use block structure to minimize GO TO's, there aren't many arrows, but they aid comprehension immensely. One might as well draw them on the listing and eliminate the flow chart altogether..."

- Chapter 15 - "The Other Face", Page 167-168

Beta News reports that IBM announced on Thursday that it had scored a breakthrough in file system technology that increases the speed of data access by seven times. Called the General Parallel File System (GPFS), the technology allows for high-speed access to files across multiple nodes of a Linux or AIX cluster. Researchers were able to attain a 102-gigabyte per second transfer rate on the ASC Purple supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a recent test. The file system was an astonishing 1.6 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1024 terabytes, 1 terabyte = 1024 Gigabytes, 1 Gigabyte = ...you get it ?) in size, the largest ever in the world.

My laptop has 80 Gigabytes. Imagine transferring the content of the entire drive in less than a second!

Alaska officials said on Friday that up to 267,000 gallons (6,357 barrels) of crude oil poured out of a pipeline at the Prudhoe Bay field, making it the largest oil spill ever recorded on the state's North Slope.

This is what environmentalists have been dreading for years. Since the Bush government's proposed opening up
of the "last frontier" to oil and gas companies the activist have been arguing about the environment impact.
Though spills are accidental and can happen anywhere, this could be the harbinger of things to come.

Its quite ironic that both the Sierra Club and GreenPeace failed to pick up this breaking news as of this moment. Hurry up folks!

Wal-Mart's plan to open its own industrial bank in Utah to handle its electronic payment
processing is attracting attention from congreesman, lawyers and financiers.

Their concern is that losses to the FDIC, which insures deposits at
banks and thrift institutions, could be staggering if Wal-Mart begins to
have financial troubles that bleed into its bank's business.

"Consider the consequences if Enron or WorldCom had owned a bank," the
group said.

The world of Web based Office software application is growing fast. I have already used Num Sum and Jotspot Tracker to manage
simple expenses. There is Writely for word processing and upcoming for organizing your schedule. Yahoo has already thrown their hat in
by purchasing upcoming and now Google follows by purchasing Writely.Looks like the consolidation will continue. I guess that way you need to go only to a few sites to manage everything!

Subversion has been steadily gaining popularity over the last couple of years. It was introduced in
mid 2001 as the ("better") alternative to CVS.I began using it today and am fairly impressed with its feature.

• Directory versioning - Versioning directory trees as opposed to just files (as in CVS)


• True version history - includes tracking file rename, copying


• Atomic Commits - appears to be the most popular. Roll backs entire commit if any section in the logical chunk fails the commit.


• Versioned metadata - You can create your own property key value pair. e.g. list of authors of sub section in the file. ChapterfooAuthor=foo, ChapterBarAuthor=bar...etc


• Choice of network layers - Offers a wider option of network access layer. Pluggable into Apache HTTP Server and accessible over SSH Tunnel. This is interesting because users can now create Web Application to update the repository as opposed to just view available with web cvs

The documentation bundled with the install is an excellent guide.

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday unveiled its 'Origami' project, a paperback-book sized portable computer, which is a hybrid between a laptop PC and a host of mobile devices that the world's biggest software maker hopes will create an entirely new market.

So everyone is familiar with the popular Amazon feature of recommendation. You search for a book and the result
include recommendation for purchasing other books based on what previous buyers of the same book did during their purchase. EasyUtil is a service engine that generates recommendations based on the data a client site provides to the engine.You can hook up your application to their web service interface
using their access key provided during sign up.

And now similicio.us is integrating the EasyUtil capability with del.icio.us to search for similar bookmarks within the site.

If you are using Open Office and would like to incorporate their charting
tools, there is a neat guide for you by Solveig Haugland.

Finding hidden treasures in OpenOffice 2.0's Charting Wizard

I have never used Charts in MS Word. Does it have this feature ?

Nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan's work has been controversial since he
published a study in 2002 claiming to have achieved the Holy Grail of
energy production -- nuclear fusion at room temperature.

Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the sun.

If scientists can duplicate the results and harness the technology,
tabletop fusion has the potential to provide an almost limitless source of
cheap energy.

Energy groups Statoil and Shell plan the world's biggest scheme to bury industrial gases beneath the seabed in a $1.2-$1.5 billion project off Norway to raise oil output and curb global warming, the firms said on Wednesday.

Verizon Wireless on Tuesday announced an agreement that will allow TiVo subscribers to remotely schedule television recording using a Verizon mobile phone.The service, called TiVo Mobile, will debut later this year, and pricing will be announced at that time.