While I was catching up on the latest news from Norway the other day one story caught my attention. Over the next 3 years Norway will convert to digital broadcasts and stop the old analogue signals sometime during 2010. The national broadcast company has just recently released the list of channels included in the basic package causing a fire-storm amongst the public.

Apparently which channels that should or should not be included is far more important than almost anything else. I do understand the need for some entertainment (as the weather is constantly disappointing) but PLEASE get a life already!

Marc Gicquel was totally knocked out after receiving a serve moving 208 km/h just where it hurts the most.

Grabbing it by the balls… Marc Gicquel receives medical attention after the “impact”. Photo: AFP

It was a genuine killer-serve by German Benjamin Becker in the second round of the ATP-tournament in Halle (Germany) Thursday. Opponent Gicquel didn’t manage to react at all before the ball travelling at 208 km/h joined his own.

The Frenchman went straight down on the grass but a medic immediately rushed to help. The first-aid consisted of immediate rest in the most comfortable position possible (if any).

Ice ice baby… Marc Gicquel recovered eventually. Photo: AFP

After a while the poor Frenchman moved to sitting position and received a bag or two of cooling ice from the manly helper. The player himself helped by placing the “treatment” to its final destination (for the record). The medic also kindly encouraged the crowd to stop laughing even though the situation was rather funny (even Gicquel seams to be smiling).

At the end of the game Gicquel could look back at a great win (6-2, 7-6) and probably down at two (temporarily) tennis-sized body parts. In the third round he’s facing Jarkko Nieminen from Finland.

I wish him the best of luck! “Break a ball…” 

STANFORDS HOPE: The robot car named Junior passed the first of many city test yesterday and qualified for Urban Challenge this autumn. Google is one of many companies sponsoring “Junior”. The newly released Street View, which allows Google Earth-users to look around in the streets, is partly based on the technology developed at Standford, that were used in their previous robot car “Stanley”.

A few days ago the Google online security blog posted an article on web server software distribution across the Internet and the corresponding number of web server software across servers distributing malware. The numbers report a slightly larger fraction of Apache servers compared to the Netcraft web server survey.

The analysis is based on crawl information and only root URLs were examined, therefore hosts that did not present a root URL (e.g. /index.htm) were not included in the statistics. This may have contributed to the disparity with the Netcraft numbers.

Monday this week Adobe posted the beta builds of Adobe® Integrated Runtime (AIR) on Adobe Labs. Over the last few months, you might have heard about an Adobe project code-named Apollo — Adobe® AIR™ is the official name for that project.

What is Adobe AIR and why would you want it?