Osama’s Blog

Just read about it on xkcd’s blag…

Clay Shirky talks about all the wasted time watching tv and doing “nothing” … youtube shows it as a multipart video, so I link to the site where I saw it on, blip.tv, I hate their embedded player, it seems to mess up my wordpress  theme (cannot seem to keep the closing embed and object html tags)..

Google just launched a preview release of App Engine, I was lucky to be able to try it.

As Google describe it, “Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications, Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches..”

I’ve been learning Python the last few months, so I followed the tutorial and created an application. It’s currently limited to 3 applications, and I used-up one (you currently cannot delete applications).

I just added my books to librarything, I already had a CSV file created with a barcode scanner, so I Just imported it…

If you don’t understand French, Google’s translation tools could be helpful.

“Le Monde 2″ : Les catastrophes climatiques de 2007 en images

Google’s newly added translation bots are amazing, I’ve been using them for a few days now, and they’re much faster, simpler, and easier to use than opening language tools in your browser.

Supported language pairs are: ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en, zh2en. Always append @bot.talk.google.com to get the bot’s address.

Google’s statistical machine translation is getting better … it currently gives better translations than when I first tried it, still not perfect but usable.

I’m addicted to ProjectEuler.net … you solve math problems by any means possible, then you will have access to the problem’s forum thread where users share insight on the problems and some even post code (some are Assembly Language wizards that solve a complicated problem in just a few CPU instructions).

The site describes itself as:

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

I use several tools to solve the problem

• Pen and Paper
• My Brain
• Research problem using Google
• Maple
• Delphi
• Perl
• Erlang
• … more?

When a user interface is so intuitive, that even a one-year-old can use it.

PhillRyu.com - The Power of Good UI Design

(yes, this is about the iphone)

The stupidest piece of software ever… I’m only linking to it to decrease its’ Google pagerank : 3D Mailbox.