Tim Smalley’s weblog

I received an email this morning from Michal Brichacek, a student at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan who is cycling from Alaska to Panama - over 12,000km - in order to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

I wouldn’t call myself an avid charitable donor, but this is something that is extremely close to my heart, as earlier this year my fiancée was diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer. I can’t begin to describe what a horrible disease cancer is - it has been a truly devastating experience for everyone that is close to me and Kai, but one thing that it has done is bought both of our families much closer together in order to collectively fight the disease.

On my recent trip to Taiwan for this year’s Computex trade show, I decided to read Lance Armstrong’s book, It’s Not About The Bike, instead of watching the in-flight entertainment. It’s a quite simply legendary story where Armstrong tells all in his fight against cancer. It’s a must-read for anyone that is looking for some inspiration.

Having seen both the effects of cancer (and the treatment) first hand, and read Lance Armstrong’s story, this was an ideal opportunity for me to donate.

Michal is currently in San Francisco and has already covered almost 5,300km in his first 45 days on the road. You can follow his progress on his website, Cycling For A Cause and, no matter how big or small, please support his amazing journey - he’s attempting to raise $1 USD for every kilometre he covers!

MySpace has said that it is launching a news aggregation service under called MySpace News in the second quarter of this year. It will rely on both algorithms and user rating (basically a combination of Google News and Digg).

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It’s surprising that the venerable JPEG image compression standard, which dates back to 1986, is still the best we can do for photographic image compression. There’s a sequel of sorts to JPEG known as JPEG 2000 and it’s the logical heir to the JPEG throne. JPEG 2000 promises higher image quality in conjunction with much smaller file sizes.

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Here’s an interesting article that talks about the costs of leaving your PC on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You’ll be surprised how much it uses, even when its sitting idle. To some extent, I disagree with the author’s comments about not using high-end kit. Providing you’re responsible when it comes to turning your PC off when it isn’t being used, I don’t see a problem with enjoying the marvels of high-end CPUs and graphics cards. Leaving a PC sitting idle isn’t good for the environment, no matter how energy efficient you think it is.

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After years of slow moving, it seems the whole industry went into a tizzy in July. Has this world lost its mind? The author of this article doesn’t think so, and he thinks he’s found the key that makes it all come together. Could Raytracing be the future, and will it be with us sooner than we think? Really insightful read.

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There’s an interesting story on The Register discussing AMD’s upcoming quad-core processors. The article suggests that the K8L quad-core processor will become a dual-core processor if it decides that the user isn’t giving it enough work to do, using a new technology known as Dynamic Independent Core Management.

The chip will also beef up the on-board cache with an extra level of memory shared between the four cores.

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’nuff said.

First rule of driving off-road: Don’t floor it when you get stuck…

It’s taken me a while to get around to it, but I’ve finally got my picture gallery up and running again. There are plenty of pictures for me to add from the various trips I’ve done since then. I guess I’ll be spending the rest of the day uploading some of those.

Ed Bott from ZDNet believes that Microsoft may release a Windows ‘kill’ switch in September if Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage update has not been installed on computers running Microsoft operating systems. He goes into great detail about a situation that could potentially cause complete chaos.

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Since moving to my new domain name, I have not had the chance to get my gallery working. I need to change some configuration options before everything will work again - hopefully I will get the time to do that later today.