While doing some quick Google searching, I found a very nice site containing tons of information on Battlestar Galactica, the great science-fiction that I keep raving about. This site is a wiki completely dedicated to storing information about the show. For those who don’t know what a wiki is, it is a database site where anyone can contribute information to try to get the most accurate data possible. This particular wiki uses the same software that the great wikipedia uses as its back-end.

If you watch Battlestar Galactica, you know what this title refers to. Frakking Toasters is an online comic strip set in the Battlestar Galactica universe. They try to have a new strip out every week and what they have so far is pretty funny.

If you’re like me, you like to keep up-to-date with many different topics on many different web site and you find that it takes a long time to go from site to site to read all the news as they get posted. As well, you might always be on different computers so you don’t always have access to bookmarks to remember all of the sites that you like to read.

A great solution to this problem has emerged in the past few years in the form of RSS or Atom feeds. These are small text files that many web sites make available for people to download. They contain a list of the most recent news, usually accompanied with the first few lines of the news item. Many news and information sites publish data in RSS form including CNN, the BBC, Slashdot and tons of others around the net. To find them, look for the words RSS, News Feed or XML on the front page.

RSS feeds can be read in a multitide of ways, including browsers like Firefox. However, a really nice way that I have found recently is using a web site called Bloglines.com. On this site, you can register all of the RSS feeds that you are interested in. The site will then regularly get the latest news from your sites of choice. When you go and read your page on bloglines, you get all the new pieces of information from all of the sites that you read on a single page. No need to run around, no need to remember addresses, no need to remember which news you read and which ones you did not. Here is a small preview of the interface:

If you give it a shot, let me know what you think.

Another year, more travels. I am currently on the road once again, this time giving a course at a US Navy research base in the state of Rhode Island. The course is going very well so far with two days already done and three more to go.

I flew into Providence on Sunday night and could not believe how quickly I managed to get off the plane and into my rented car. Within 5 minutes, we already had our luggage. 5 minutes later, I was walking out to get my car and was driving off the parking lot soon after. I managed to get to my hotel fairly quickly. However, there were a few times on the road where I was a bit puzzled by the lack of road signs in this area. I ended up just taking good guesses.

I am currently playing catch-up to the great science-fiction series Battlestar Galactica. Andrée watches it and I have been lagging behind for a while but by the end of the week, I should have caught up to all of the episodes. The story on this show is amazing and well worth watching if you enjoy sci-fi. On another note, we saw the movie Serenity last week-end on DVD and quite enjoyed it. The story was well written and the effects and acting were top notch. The only annoyance was the way that the lead actor kept chewing his words, making it very difficult for us to understand some passages. I still recommend it though.

A final note on this post to let you know that our friends Isabelle and Jean have given birth to a healthy little boy named Kevin Hamel. He was born on wednesday last week weighing more than nine pounds. The whole family is in good health and is now back home. Congratulations!

I have just upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.0, the latest version of a great content management system that I have been using to run this site for over a year. The upgrade went pretty smoothly, except for some minor imcompatibility with the plugin that I am using to provided versions of my posts in multiple languages. This is why you currently see two languages in the titles. Let me know if you hit any other problem.