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…
Larry Cannell says “I Hate Files“, and I agree with almost every point.
Files are a major nuisance, and until another practical solution is universally accepted, we will have to live with them.
Online-only solutions cannot work until connectivity is not an issue, until it becomes an extremely cheap commodity.
Until then, maybe a hybrid solution that uses client-side software with network-based distributed storage that does not rely on folder structures and filenames could be acceptable.
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
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)
Amateurs do incredible things, I think that people who don’t know what they’re doing are better innovators, they don’t have the baggage of knowing the official way to do it.
When Linus Torvalds started working on Linux, he was a student who knew nothing about operating systems.
When Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google, they created a computer cluster like no other, based on cheap PC motherboards, and built expecting and embracing hardware failure.
Have a look at this new technology, it allows to model faces in 3d from a single (2d) image.
Have a look at these security experts: