This weekends European GP race at Nürburgring is shaping up to be more of the same (well—probably not as spectacular crashes as Monaco). Kimmi Raikkonen set the time to beat in practice. It's also easy to miss just how well Jenson Button is driving—we're becomming so used to it!

Bring it on :)

* 128Kb ram is required, but 256Kb is strongly recommended
* The distribution fits on three 143Kb-sized floppy disks
* A hard disk is not needed but makes the system much more responsive

I have no idea if it's real or not - I might just have to dust off the //c and try it out!!

And you'd reckon having several dsl companies as your clients would help...

So, the blogs should come thicker and faster than tomato sauce from a dried up squeeze bottle at an under 9's footy training bbq.

Now that I can finally download at reasonable speeds I set about upgrading various bits of my home dev box. At last the mozilla firefox project is providing contributed compiles. At long last I don't have to compile my own darn firefox just to get good xft support. Plus I get well integrated gtk2 (no more annoying XUL gui issues) and SVG support to boot. The world's best browser just got better:

for linux x86 (warning: 8.9Mb)

This could just be a money wasting piece of silliness, but the new environmentally friendly rocket fuel has a shorter range - so in the interests of clean air, America is nominally a less-safe place.

What happened to all's fair in love and war? Mad Max would be in trouble if after the nuclear missiles land the EPA is still around. Perhaps their should just be one ICBM pointed to the EPA head offices to protect against future litigation ;)

Also, the big dollars that are still required are more frequently coming from commercial entities who are waking up to the gains to be had from funding academic research.

This, however, is raising new issues of tainted research, with many journals finding they can no longer apply as rigerous independance standards as they used to. (There was a good discussion of this with experts recently on NPR's All things considered radio show. Looking through the story archives it must have been one of the recent stories on the American FTA's decision regarding the morning after pill—but I can't figure out which one since airing times here in Australia are a bit behind).

Some costly research, however, is still the domain of the US and big Europeans. like slowing a neutron to 15mph!! That's crazy talk! But apparently it has been done in Los Alamos, as reported by The Register article: Boffins slow neutrons to 15mph.

The first is an interesting article suggesting that learning to program in assembly helps you be a better high-level programmer. I think it has some valid premises. I would actually add that you should be able to design logic systems, program in assembly and write a basic operating system in C. But that could just be me...

Why Learning Assembly Language is Still a Good Idea [onlamp.com]

The second is a somewhat interesting essay that walks through the writeers quest for performance in a particular program. In the useful parts, the writer talks about our often misguided attempts to find efficiency in the wrong places.

Programming as if Performance Mattered [dadgum.com]

I am well known for my love of elegant technology, old or new, and here are some great snippets of info I have come across in the last few days.

First, I have come into recent ownership of an old Apple Color Classic and an LC630. The Color Classic is so cute I want to set it up in my office to replace my broken fax machine. With (another piece of great tech) my old Global Village (cool old link) Teleport Platinum it will do just fine. Finding the GV software could be tricky though - try finding THAT on limewire...

So of course, I want to upgrade the Color Classic. The CC seems to have a sort of cult following due to it's cute form factor, and I am in luck with plenty of other people coming up with circuit and case changes so I can jam the LC630 mother board in, making a Takky CC:

• The Macintosh Colo(u)r Classic FAQ
• World of Power Color Classic

Next up, there is a new (and probably illegal) BeOS distribution called PhOS, based on a leaked copy of the BeOS source from just before development folded. Among other things it is multi-user!!

• A Peek at PhOS

And finally, I can never resist a good Apple Newton story. I still use my Newton MessagePad 2000 (to the amusement and ridicule of my un-enlightened friends), though not as much as I used too.

I certainly havn't used it for mobile blogging over bluetooth - but it's comforting to know that if I wanted to I could:

• Mo' Better Blogging With Newton