I was recently looking for the chart placement of a bunch of songs I liked back in the 1980s. This page has been invaluable for my research, although it looks a little bit dated and doesn't live up to the promise to have all the charts from 1970 to 2001. Anyway, if you are looking for your favorite songs of the 1980s, it's worth a look.

I have a bunch of PC systems round here but for the past two years or so I worked almost exclusively on my Dell notebook. I haven't upgraded any of my desktop systems since. In fact, the last time I upgraded any of them must have been four years or even longer ago. But now, with the dawn of new, power-demanding video games like COD5 and others, I had to make a decision: Buy a new, powerful notebook or upgrade a desktop PC. I decided to do the latter...

I picked the system that once was my main machine and started looking for a combination of suitable components. I needed to find a balance between power, costs, energy consumption and noise emission. Especially noise emission is critical. I really hate it when PCs sound like vacuum cleaners. All in all this task isn't as simple as it sounds.

Long story short, I ended up with the following components:

• ASUS P5Q Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU
• Arctic Cooling Freezer CPU Cooler
• Corsair XMS2-6400 DDR RAM 4GB
• be quiet! Dark Power Pro P7 power supply
• Gainward 512MB 9800GTX+ PCIe graphics card

So far I'm pretty satisfied with my choice. The system runs stable and is very quiet. It has enough power to run all current games at highest details with excellent frame rates. The costs were approximately 500 EUR, which I would say is quite reasonable. I should note that I used my existing FDD/HDD/DVD drives, so there was no need for new ones.

Now, time to play some COD5 :-)

I've catched a very bad cold that forced me to bed for over a week. It got a little better in recent days, but I still suffer badly from its effects :-(

Have you ever wondered who the people behind all those programming languages are? Wonder no longer. Here is an extensive gallery of the inventors of various programming languages. Nice page, compiled by Chris Rathman.

When it comes to internet connectivity, the area I live in is way behind today's standard. Although I have a reliable DSL connection, the connection speed is located at the lower end of the scale. Due to the weak infrastructure in my area this will, unfortunately, not get better in the near future. However, I'm not complaining since the line is sufficient for my current needs.

But how do you find out what your connection speed really is? For this purpose there are numerous speed tests available. A speed test is performed by a piece of software which measures the line performance between your end and a server on the internet. Apart from dedicated testing software, which needs to be installed on your computer, there are also online services available, that spare you the need to install such software.

One of the best online tests I found is speedtest.net which is not only easy to use, but also comes up with pretty reliable results. Basically all you have to do is to select a server next to your own location and start the test. Bear in mind, that the shortest physical connection is not always the fastest one on the internet. So you may need to try different servers and stick to the one which deliveres the best results.

Just in case you are interested in my results, here they are: