It seems like the winter in Canada is going for an early start, this morning while enjoying my mandatory cup of coffee ;-) I've was a witness to the 1st Canadian snow fall of the year (in the Toronto area). It lasted only for a few minutes and within a few moments all evidence of this event melted, but non the less it was yet another reminder that the days of good weather are numbered :-(.

While a RC, this non the less is a noteworthy release as it finally introduces the concept of conditional expressions via the IF ELSE END syntax inside the templating language. This means that designers gain greater control over the output logic rather then they did before. It also allowed me to remove many temporary variables that had to store intermediate values of various conditional expression inside the "code" component of the page. Further details of this release can be found [url=http://fudforum.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=20999]here[/url].

Yesterday I've upgraded the wireless card in my laptop from the basic Intel Centrino Wireless capable for B/G to an Atheros 5004 based card. While I had seen this card work on a friend's laptop I was non the less seriously impressed by it's performance. First of all Atheros implements something called [url=http://www.super-g.com/]Super A/G[/url], which allows the card to reach 108mbit speeds on A or G protocols. This allows the card to use more then one channel when communicating with the routers, effectively doubling the “pipe” capacity. Additionally the card also pumps more power then Centrino Wireless, for B/G it's maximum transmit power is 100mw (that's milli not mega ;-) ), which you can reduce via the driver when battery life needs to be preserved. The card also has something called eXtended Range (XR) technology that supposedly makes the card more sensitive. Normally I would skeptical towards techno-bable of this nature, but I can now pickup and use my neighbors open MSN wireless access point, which is...

After a long break from this blog due to an overwhelming number of projects and "real life stuff" I've been neglecting this little corner of the net :-). I my long absence spammers have discovered this site and on a daily basis have been spamming the comment system with ads. This is hopefully now a thing of the past thanks to the upgrade of Serendipity, which now uses Turing tests to prevent automated tools from posting messages. And the older spam has been manually removed. Now that my schedule is more or less back to normal, I expect to be able to rant more often, something I am sure those of you who read this blog can wait for hehehe.

It appears that exploitation of the public's paranoia is not unique to us, North Americans, it's something our Trans-Atlantic friends in the UK have adopted as well. According to a [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3881587.stm]recent article I've read on BBC[/url] Federation Against Copyright Theft (Fact) in UK is launching a new anti piracy campaign under the slogan that Movie piracy supports terrorists. They claim that illegal movie copies are being distributed by IRA and Afghans Sikhs to sponsor their insurgency activities. They even made a nice poster. [center][img]http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40369000/jpg/_40369411_dvds3_203.jpg[/img][/center] It would appear they hope that capitalizing on the public's somewhat irrational fear of bad man hiding behind every corner they will accomplish what all other methods have failed so far. Good luck to them...