Osama’s Blog

Just read about it on xkcd’s blag…

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).

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 seem to live online more than offline…

• When I need any information I either type it in the top-right corner of my firefox browser (Google Search - ctrl+k), or type a URL starting with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ and appending what I want to read about, replacing spaces with underscores, and starting each word with a capital ….
• I can be contacted using email or google talk much easier than by phone, I may ignore or forget about missed calls on my mobile phone, but i’ll always read my email and respond to chats (I’ve been using Skype in this trip to egypt to call home, and I’m impressed by the quality - but my previous audio experiences sucked only because of the dial-up connections used at the time).
• I watch more videos online than TV, using Youtube, Google Video, Metacafe, Digg Videos, Joost and StumbleVideo.
• My main news sources are online, even though I get a free newspaper at work and I have satellite TV at home.
• I buy lots of stuff online … amazon, woot … and many more.

Today, I took a long walk in Cairo, Egypt.

I have a training course here, and I want to exercise by walking instead of using taxis for anything nearby.

I have my Garmin eTrex Venture Cx GPSr with me, and used both Google Earth, and Wikimapia to store waypoints for the training center as well as nearby restaurants, supermarkets, and computer shops.

Yesterday evening I walked to a McDonald’s close to my hotel, and found a supermarket on the way, Today I went to my training center and stopped on the way at chilli’s for lunch.

I was wandering around, and saw I was 2km NE of my Hotel, so I used “Find Waypoint” to navigate my way back… Walking around in a city you know nothing about with a GPSr is easy!

Do you speak Chinese? Arabic? English? French?

The internet is full of content that you may or may not understand, and google has found a solution to this problem, Google’s Translation Search is impressive.

What it does

You choose the language you want to read, and the language you want to search in, Google will translate your search query, and search for it, it will then translate the search results, as well as the sites themselves to your chosen language (it’s extremely difficult to explain it… just go there and you’ll understand)
I think the people who will get most benefit from this are:

1. People who don’t speak English

Many Arabs for example (this also applies to many others) do not speak (ok, I mean read) English, and most of the content online is in English, for example:

• Researchers (of all ages) …. A high-school teacher wants a report about the industrial revolution, there are a very few arabic books on that subjects (probably), and a student is online and does not have easy access to a library. She could use this to search English-language websites, and she will be able to read everything in Arabic…
• People who have hobbies and interests that are not that popular in their region, and for which there are no sites in their language.

2.People who speak English

This is the second group of people, Some possible uses are:

• News about an Italian calcio club in Italian.
• Reading what Arabs think about terrorism.
• Finding information about Chinese companies without English websites.

Current limitations

The limitations of this service are bearable (at least to me, I speak Arabic, English , and French) and this allows me to search in many more languages, but some people will not like these limitations:

• English is the base language, Google’s translation translates from and to English, you cannot translate between Arabic and Chinese for example.
• The quality of the translation is not that good, but most of the time you can understand what is written.

I just added adsense ads to this blog, what’s funny is that most of the ads are related to the other osama, they are mostly about planes and buildings. How can I tell google adsense that my name is irrelevant to ads? it’s in the domain name and titles.

I don’t want to change the domain name and/or title so maybe i’ll have to live with this, and maybe after a few days google’s algorithm will see that this is unrelated to 911.

Andy beal wrote an Article titled “Dear Google, You’re Giving Me a Headache.” To his surprise, they him the pain relief he had requested.

Andy Beal’s MarketingPilgrim.com

Since the announcement on Digg.com things went skyrocketing on a Piet Nutbey’s writely invite page. there are tons of invitations to give away at

http://pnut.kicks-ass.org/gsheet/