French Riviera the weather between various locations. Strong winds such as the Mistral, a cold dry wind from the northwest or from the east, are another characteristic, particularly in the winter. Nice and the Alpes-Maritimes département are sheltered by the Alps. The winds are usually gentle, from the sea to the land, though sometimes the mistral blows strongly from the northwest, or, turned by the mountains, from the east. In 1956 a mistral from the northwest reached at Nice Airport. Sometimes, in summer, the sirocco brings high temperatures and reddish desert sand from the Sahara. (See Winds of Provence.) Rain can be
Zephyr (protocol) Zephyr (protocol) Created at MIT, as part of Project Athena, Zephyr was designed as an instant messaging protocol and application-suite with a heavy Unix background. Using the "do one thing, do it well" philosophy of Unix, it was made up of several separate programs working together to make a complete messaging system. Zephyr and IRC are the first widely used IP-based instant-messaging systems. Zephyr is the invention of Ciarán Anthony DellaFera who was, at that time, an employee of Digital Equipment Corporation and a Visiting Research Scientist at Project Athena. The design originated as a solution to the "reverse Remote