One of the Leoville Town Square regulars, BEACHTechie, aka Sam, is a high school student in Virginia Beach, VA. He recently got busted by the school administration for blogging, of all things. They seem to think blogging from school is a violation of their acceptable use policies. Perhaps it is. Sammy will be blogging from home from now on. But it seems to me that instead of discouraging blogging they should encourage each student to create one. After all, most writing classes encourage their students to keep journals, and that's exactly what a blog is.

This is interesting Linux project, and I'm always keen on supercomputer news. On the other hand, this system will be used for developing weapons, which is not so good. This is preparing Linux for war?

• Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.

• The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.

• Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.

• Ours is less and less a free society.

My science background is in physics and applied mathematics. Since graduating I have worked for about 12 years in the field of computational science: supercomputers, applied mathematics, numerical analysis, programming, and mathematical software.

My name is printed on the cover of about 50 books. I have published over 250 articles in journals, newspapers and magazines. I have also organized about two dozen courses, some short 1-3 day courses, some longer full semester courses and seminars.

Currently I lead a multi-disciplinary group of 12 experts (half of them are doctorates). I also have a small career as a columnist for an IT magazine in Finland.

If you are interested in my background, check the CV in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. Or have a look at books written or edited by me and available in PDF format.

Blood: Journalistic ethics hold to an ideal of fairness and accuracy. I don't know of any personal weblogs that are trying to do anything like presenting a complete and balanced story. We need to distinguish between journalists doing personal weblogs and journalists doing weblogs for their publication. If I'm a journalist doing a weblog for my publication, do standards of fairness and accuracy apply? How much do I need to know about something before I put it up? I can't just put an e-mail I get up there, or can I?

The most useful thing in the aforementioned article was a link to Weblogs Compendium, another good central clearinghouse of blog information and resources, today featuring pointers to useful third-party services such as myMediaList (for adding lists of books, music, and other media to your blog or web page) and blogLinker (for managing a modular link list, much like blogrolling.com).Naturally, there is a Compediumblog as well.

Yesterday I discussed this with the editors of MikroPC. As expected, they were happy about the results. I heard that some IT magazines had lost as much as 30% of their readers. The reason for the success of MikroPC is not quite clear. I am in any case satisfied. It is good to be a columnist in a magazine finding new readers.