A timed disaster!

Here are some timings I collected over the net. Set your stopwatches... Go!

• 24 hours and 23 minutes after the Russian operators began "experimenting" on the Chernobyl reactor, it exploded in the worst nuclear accident in history (1986).
• 2 hours and 40 minutes passed between the time that the unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg and when it finally sunk.
• 56 and 103 minutes took the WTC towers to collapse over thousants of people(2001).
• 6 minutes took the horrific Hartford Circus Fire to kill over 150 people (mostly women and children) in 1944.
• 73 seconds after liftof the space shuttle Challenger explodes (1986).

The same with computers:

• The Witty worm took 45 minutes to infect every possible machine in its threat portfolio.
• A half an hour is all it took for Nimda to spread worldwide.
• The Slammer worm did most of its dirty work in under ten minutes.

And now for the horrible truth (are you still counting?):
20 minutes is how long your average unprotected PC running Windows XP will last once it's connected to the Internet before it's infected by some spyware or virus!

This statistic is provided from the SANS Institute who clearly declare that 20 minutes is not long enough to update your Windows PC before it is too late. Think that you have to immediately link to Windows Update and get the latest patches from Microsoft. Then reboot. And get more patches. And reboot... (repeat to infinity). Oh, and don't leave out the latest anti-virus updates and anti-spyware updates either. Gotta have those. Oh oh oh, and don't forget WinXP SP2 which can be as large as 260 MB. And users are supposed to download all this in less than 20 minutes?

The Institute provides this very usefull PDF titled: "Windows XP: Surviving the First Day". GOOD LUCK! (Suddenly I feel very happy that I still use WinME)

Asperger? No, thanks (and get away from me!)

I just finished studying Avenue for my paper. Avenue is a programming language used to write scripts on ArcView 3. ArcView is a GIS user-friendly GIS program developped by ESRI. GIS stands for Geografic Information Systems and is a technology that combines databases with digital maps, thus projecting spatial data. Why am I telling you all this? Think about the amount of specialisation involved in this project: I am learning Avenue which is used ONLY on ArcView and ONLY for the early versions of the program, which in turn is one of dozens of software used to represent GIS data. And what is GIS again?

Anyway, I'm not good at learning programming languages fast (I still remember the painful experience of learning C in 3 weeks this Winter...). As I was taking a break I run through this article on the NET about Asperger's disorder It's a mental disease whose symptoms include an inability to interpret peoples' emotions from their facial expressions, incredibly logical thought processes that make math easy but human relations darn near impossible, and fear of physical contact with other people. And it's quite irritating to find small pieces of that behaviour in myself. It must be the walls that close towards me. (No, I'm not insane, it's a figure of speech!)

There is a new book around that is supposed to be very good and describes the life of Christopher Boone, a fifteen year old boy who suffers from Asperger's. The title of the book is "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time". In the beggining Christopher finds a neighbor's dog dead with a pitchfork stuck in it:
I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.

I'm on my way to the bookstore already!

Introducing the Kalashnikov MP3 player

Now that's something new! The AK-MP3 is a Kalashnikov-shaped Mp3 player with 20GB of storage. (visit site)

Andrey Koltakov, the creator, says: "Hopefully, from now on many Militants and Terrorists will use their AK47s to listen to music and audio books. They need to chill out and take it easy." Right on, brother. I doubt that the AK-MP3 will do much to promote world peace, love and understanding... But it will sure deter would-be muggers from attacking you on the street!

And another thing. If you are visiting Athens for the Olympics make sure you don't forget your AK-MP3 player. I am sure the security officers will appreciate your innovative style!