On Tuesday evening, the Ottawa Dotnet Users Group organized presentation of Adam Machanic from Boston with title "Designing Highly Concurrent SQL Server Database Applications". I was not sure whether I will make it, because because I did not feel really well, but I am very happy I went. It was probably one of the best presentations I have seen in Microsoft Glacier Room on 100 Queen Street. I am not sure whether because it was indeed so great or because it touches closely what we are doing.

I found out by accident that the famous Get a Mac ads exists in many versions: Some nations have their own actors http://www.apple.com/uk/getamac/ads/ http://www.apple.com/jp/getamac/ads/ Other have only just language version of Long && Hodgman act http://www.apple.com/de/getamac/ads/ http://www.apple.com/fr/getamac/ads/ http://www.apple.com/it/getamac/ads/ http://www.apple.com/es/getamac/ The Austria and German speaking part of Switzerland are using German version of the ads (no surprise there) - http://www.apple.com/chde/getamac/ - and the francophone part of Switzerland uses the French version. As it looks like, Italian and Romansch speaking Swiss do not count :-(

After lots of attempts (see here, here and here), I have finally resolved my disk space problems and the RAID-5 NAS server is up and running since about two weeks now. I have stayed with Fedora 6, successfully installed Samba, configured the shares and copied all family JPEG's, videos, MP3's etc onto the huge 907 GB large RAID5 share. The old NSLU2 is still dead - I did not have any time to try to re-flash it, but all content of it's disk was without any issues readable by the new server (the NSLU2 was using ext3 filesystem) so I did not even have to try to use backups.

Depending on how you define success, you may get different answer to the question above. If you choose for the success criteria: - amount of money made by programming AND - number of people using the product AND - impact on the community at large the answer is probably Charles (Karoly) Simonyi, Hungarian born ex-Microsoft employee, billionaire, astronaut and original author of Microsoft Word. True, there certainly are people that made more money than him and their fortune is closely related to software - but unlike Simonyi none of them was actively programming for major part of their career.

I've stumbled upon this page, full of math jokes. Many of them are IMHO really good and extremly funny (your mileage may vary, though). My favorite few: Two male mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees, and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of math. The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress.