Nice game: kiki

I just finished playing kiki, a very nice game I recently found on Sourceforge. It's a 3D-puzzle with 23 levels where you should forget the distinction between up, down, left, right, before and after.

What is also great about the game is that it is open source (like all software on Sourceforge), which means it is really free. So you don't have a restricted version, no nagging to buy the complete version etc. And it is available for Windows, Linux and most other Unix-variants, and OS X.

There are more than 10000 free games on Sourceforge - well, some of the projects are actually libraries for developers to create games, but most of them are games.

Design screws up functionality

Last weekend I staid in a nice hotel in Reims, and I was again frustrated by the shower. It's not the first time that I see a shower with knobs that are almost circular, with just a little bulge. Didn't the designers realise that this is hard to turn, especially if your hands are covered with soap? At home I've got these old-fashioned knobs that are somewhat triangular, that you can easily turn if you're all soaped up, even if it's with your feet.

All male talk

Yesterday I went to a talk about the development of airwings. Interesting talk, but the remarkable thing is that there were about 30 men, and not a single woman! How the hell is that possible. OK, I expect the number of women at such a talk to be considerably lower than at a Robbie Williams concert, but not zero women. I know for a fact that there usually are women at hackers conventions. So why none at this talk? Very strange.

Anyway, the talk was very interesting. It turns out that it is practically impossible to fly faster than about 90% of the speed of sound, because at that point the air resistance increases very fast. Planes that go faster, use up a lot more fuel, like military planes and the Concorde (that's why it was so expensive).