Came across toonel.net project. It’s free for private, non-commercial use.
Citing the site:

toonel.net is an experiment in a technique for conserving network bandwidth. If you are paying a fee based on the amount of data you transfer (e.g. 3G/GPRS/DSL/CDMA) and have monthly download limit, or if you have narrowband connection (e.g. dialup modem) then you are most likely to appreciate the service toonel.net offers. There are number of toonel.net client application packages. All solutions are 100% Java based and therefore this service can be used on any platform with an installed Java Runtime Environment, including mobile phones.

toonel.net: what it is good for?

• expensive transports (e.g. GPRS, CDMA…)
• narrowband or slow connections (e.g. dial-up)
• stretching download limits

Why toonel.net is different?

• cross platform
• built from open source components
• allows to compress virtually any traffic

As soon as I switch to some java-enabled personal communication device, (and if toonel.net will still exist by that time ), I would definitely try it. Or if I switch to some speedy but traffic-limited internet-access provider.

Today in mail:

AdaCore is pleased to announce the launch of the new Ada Gems series. The Gems will cover a wide-range of Ada programming topics and will often include executable source code and other related resources to help understand and discover the Ada programming language. The first Gem, written by Bob Duff entitled “Limited Aggregates in Ada 2005”, is available at:

adacore.com/category/developers-center/gems

I’m planning to reconstruct (based on literature and some original research) a specific cellular regulatory network. For this I decided to use some specialized biological modelling software. The requirements I had were pretty simple:

• must have SBML support. SBML appears de-facto standard for biological model notation;
• must be fairly frequently updated;
• should be feature-packed and easy to use. However, this requirement can only be checked after some use, and I was pre-selecting, not reviewing.

Software put into the title of the post was found to be the most mature and interesting from the usage perspective. However, there are more than those mentioned software tools reviewed. Reviews are based primarily on the information from official websites and documentation; some tools (like VirtualCell) are reviewed somewhat more thoroughly.
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This is a rather old method, applicable to magnetic-stripe cards. This is also a good warning/reminder for any card holders – do not let the card out of your sight even for a second.

And do not forget, that simple photocopy of your card’s both sides is sufficient to buy anything on the internet (anything *your card* can handle, that is). It might not be funny do discover that your card was used to buy a motorbike in Africa, though you never traveled outside the US

Update: video (http://www.youtube.com/v/sexUus0igWs) was removed from Youtube due to copyright claims.

came across this photo at Flickr. Must-see for any StarWars-lovers!
(“read more” for the photo here…)
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I think Sequoia View is a must-have utility program.
“Why?” – you may ask.

Because it lets you actually see you hard disk hogs. With this program you will know exactly which files/folders occupy too much hard disk space to keep them any longer.

The program is free, latest version is 1.3 and it was released in November 2002. However, WinXP is supported (don’t know about Vista).

See this page for more information and the download link.

Alternatively, contact me and I’ll try to mail you the setup program (which is circa 500KB).

Update: SequoiaView appears to ignore files larger than or equal to 4 GiB. Please comment to prove or disprove.

Update 2: here’s a KDirStat-based alternative, WinDirStat.

Nonanticipatory (system or predictor) is a (system or predictor) where the output y(t) at some specific instant t₀ only depends on the input x(t) for values of t less than or equal to t₀. Therefore these kinds of (systems or predictors) have outputs and internal states that depend only on the current and previous input values.

In simpler words, nonanticipatory systems can “take into account” only past and present, and cannot base their behaviour/decisions on future expectations.

Nonanticipatory systems are also known as causal systems.