I was amazed at all the noise around the events surrounding the disapearance of flight AF 447.

Ok. Let me get this straight. I was about as curious as the next guy to understand what happened. So I looked around a bit, and eventually search for the #af447 hashtag on twitter.

About 30% of the posts were basically : don’t follow or click on any hyperlink proposed by @flightaf447 – because he is making money on the tragedy !

Now… Wait a minute !

A *load* of people are making money on this. News providers wouldn’t even exist if threadful things didn’t happen !

Granted, this particular individual probably isn’t offering any new information – mind it that ANY new information is probably out the door WAY before it appears on a mainstream news broadcast.

But now.. Everyone if focussing on that (and – shame on me – I’m meta-focussing)

And let’s put this into perspective. ~228 (presumably at the time of writing) lost their lives aboard a transportation mechanism – namely a scheduled passenger carrying air transport service.

People die in car crashes (no news here).. People die in wars (any *list* of Darfur casualties anyone ?). People die of diseases and people die of old age (again.. does any one have a list of casualties.. oh wait.. the passenger list is 6 billion people long !)

What I am getting to is :

- People focus on scam attempts (is it jealousy ? basically.. How come didn’t I think of it first !)

- People forget that scavenging is a lucrative business !

- People lose focus on numbers/proportions (yes.. 228 – or whatever the number – is sad business. But a WHOLE LOT more die everyday – and believe me – their families are in as much pain)

I made a couple enhancement tweaks to hercules today.

One of the instructions – MVCLE -a memory copy instruction – was taking an inordinate amount of time to perform what it is intended to do.

After a quick study of the code, it came out that not only wasn’t the code ‘optimal’, but it was also somewhat wrong.

A quick fix later, and that particular instruction is now up to 250x faster than it was before.

Nifty !

I’ve tried several of the wordpress themes offered here and there, but none that satisfies me. So maybe I should write my own.